Beautiful Shadow (26 page)

     She regarded the novel as a nine-month-old foetus in a womb of literary creation and, as she worked, she read ‘cheap’ or pulp novels, analysing their fictional techniques. She admired them for their clear-cut narratives and simple style, but at the same time she also revelled in a sense of superiority, a knowledge that she, in fact, could do better. At the end of November, she wrote herself a list of stylistic pointers. When working she should remember to set the scene quickly and get straight to the point; she should write quickly and with ease, as too much effort would result in a tired style; describe only the feelings and viewpoint of the main characters; make sure the end result was entertaining, as this was the prime reason people picked up a novel; and always try to leave the reader begging for more.
³⁶

     In an old journal, which she later used as a scrapbook for recipes, she sketched out an experimental fragment of the book. Tucker, like Guy in the final version, is an architect, who has a loathing for his wife, Miriam, and a desire to marry his new girlfriend, while Bruno cannot bear his rich father. Although the basic premise is, roughly, the same as the published version, Highsmith’s writing is not nearly so accomplished. In this scene, Tucker recalls the previous night on the train when he had met Bruno, whose idea it was plot kill Miriam.

     ‘He saw her now, because of the talk last night with the fellow on the train. To murder her? . . . He saw Bruno’s gleeful face. “If I killed your wife, say –” A person like Bruno would do it. How simple everything would be if Miriam were dead!’
³⁷

     It is Tucker’s ambition to build a spectacular city of glass – he admires the work of Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright – but his vision is clouded by a ‘shadow’: Bruno, who haunts his every moment. This fascination with duality expressed itself in early titles such as ‘The Other Side of the Mirror’, ‘Back of the Mirror’, and ‘The Other’, and an empathy with Dostoevsky’s novels.

     Highsmith’s splintered point of view confused publishers, however. Her new agent, Margot Johnson of A & S Lyons, sent off Highsmith’s incomplete manuscript to Marion Chamberlain at Dodd, Mead & Company for an early assessment, but while she obviously had great enthusiasm for the book, the editor felt it still needed a great deal of work.

     ‘I think she has to make a choice and unless she does there will be a fatal flaw in the book,’ she wrote in a letter to Johnson in January 1948. ‘I think it either has to be Bruno’s story, clearcut and undeviating, or it has to be an “entertainment” of the [Graham] Greene school where the two young men are actors but the real meaning of the story lies in the spectator sport – a character who is involved by them but who is in the end free of them both.’
³⁸

     Marion Chamberlain advised her to ‘heighten’ Bruno and ‘shade down’ Tucker; if Highsmith did this the result would be a tragic novel, one which was ‘grim but moving’. The young writer, she concluded, was not, however, ready for a contract; what was more important was the reshaping and rethinking of the novel. Highsmith was disappointed, but not destroyed, by the rejection and she discussed her characters with her new friend, Lil Picard, who told her that Tucker was a somewhat insubstantial character compared to Bruno. ‘I think and think – of my uncle Herman, and also of Rolf,’ she wrote in her diary, trying to visualise Tucker’s appearance. ‘Yes, he becomes a darker shorter version of Rolf T[ietgens].’
³⁹
Highsmith started to rework the novel, but she realised the truth of the Dodd, Mead editor’s observation, ‘She has a bigger book on her hands than perhaps she conceived and it will take all she’s got.’
⁴⁰

Chapter 10

How I adore my Virginias

1945–1948

Highsmith’s long intellectual love affair with Dostoevsky began at the age of thirteen. ‘I was very impressed in my adolescence by
Crime and Punishment
,’ she said, ‘its theme, the justification that Raskolnikov tried to convince himself of, and his failure in this. I know morally this had a great effect on me.’
¹
In the summer of 1945, she scribbled a quote from Dostoevsky on the inside cover of her thirteenth cahier, ‘Oh, do not believe in the unity of men!’
²
She admired him for his rejection of conventional naturalism in favour of a more shocking psychological realism and there is no doubt that the nineteenth-century Russian author, particularly his novel
Crime and Punishment
, which she read once again in May 1947, had an enormous impact on her work. Indeed, after reading the novel, Highsmith wrote in her diary that Dostoevsky was her ‘master’. She later said that
Crime and Punishment
could be read as a story of suspense, an opinion shared by Thomas Mann, who wrote in his introduction to the short novels of Dostoevsky, published in America at the beginning of 1946, that the book was ‘the greatest detective novel of all time’.
³

     The parallels between
Crime and Punishment
– the story of how an impoverished student Raskolnikov comes to murder an old pawnbroker and her sister – and Highsmith’s first published novel,
Strangers on a Train
, are striking. Like Dostoevsky’s anti-hero, the two strangers on a train, Bruno and Guy, fantasise about the murders in their minds before carrying out the acts. Indeed, the psychological rehearsals for the killings are so fully imagined that they almost serve as substitutes for the actual murders. As Raskolnikov thinks himself into a state of near hysteria he asks himself, ‘If I feel so timid now, what will it be when I come to put my plan into execution?’
⁴
Similarly Bruno, while shadowing Guy’s wife, Miriam, through the surreally carnivalesque amusement park in Texas, runs through all the different ways he could kill her – taking hold of her head and pushing her under the water; stabbing her to death with his knife, his beloved ‘clean instrument’; clapping his hands over her mouth and snuffing out her life – before eventually deciding to strangle her. Guy, unable to sleep and eaten away by guilt, visualises how he would murder Bruno’s father, leaving a clue so as to incriminate his son: ‘he enacted the murder, and it soothed him like a drug’.
⁵
Of course, in typically Highsmithian fashion, the fantasy mutates into reality and the world of reason is tipped on its side.

     Whether conscious or not, Highsmith’s description of Bruno echoes Dostoevsky’s of Svidrigailov, the rich Russian degenerate. The wealthy psychopath from Long Island is a ‘tall blond young man’, with a ‘pallid, undersized face’, and skin as ‘smooth as a girl’s, even waxenly clear’,
⁶
while Svidrigailov is described as having blond hair, a face which ‘might almost have been taken for a mask; the complexion was too bright, the lips too ruddy, the beard too fair, the hair too thick, the eyes too blue, the gaze too rigid’.
⁷
Although Raskolnikov is disgusted by Svidrigailov, he is drawn towards him by a strange combination of love and hate. Hurrying to meet his alter-ego, Raskolnikov remarks that the figure concealed some hidden power that held sway over him, a feeling shared by Guy for Bruno, a symbol of his unconscious desires. ‘Hadn’t he known Bruno was like himself? Or why had he liked Bruno? He loved Bruno.’
⁸

     Like Raskolnikov, a law student, Guy, an architect, is a man representative of order, while Svidrigailov serves as an embodiment of disorder, as does Bruno. In fact, both novels can be read as fictionalised arguments which explore the battle between the conscious and the unconscious minds, the eternal conflict between Apollo and Dionysus.

     ‘I have my own idea of art, and it is this: what most people regard as fantastic and lacking in universality, I hold to be the utmost essence of truth,’ Highsmith wrote in her notebook, transcribing a passage from one of Dostoevsky’s letters.
⁹
Rather than serving as a caricature or stereotype, a flat signal for one aspect of human behaviour, Raskolnikov is an example of the contradictions in everyman – ‘One might almost say that there exist in him two natures, which alternately get the upper hand.’
¹⁰
Highsmith, who was equally as fascinated by dualism, explores the issue further in
Strangers on a Train
. Guy, archetype of reason and order and a reader of Plato and Sir Thomas Browne’s
Religio Medici
, initially views evil as an external force, something distinctly apart and outside of him. He rejects Bruno’s belief in the universality of criminal desires – that each of us harbours a potential murderer – but after killing Bruno’s father he realises the truth, that ‘love and hate . . . good and evil, lived side by side in the human heart’.
¹¹
Just as Svidrigailov exists in relation to Raskolnikov, so Bruno serves as Guy’s ‘cast-off self, what he thought he hated but perhaps in reality he loved’.
¹²

     In
Crime and Punishment
, Dostoevsky’s anti-rationalism is articulated by Razumikhin, who, while discussing his friend Raskolnikov’s article about the relationship between criminals and society, concludes that the living soul does not obey the laws of logic. Motivation is far from transparent; actions are often precipitated by a number of conflicting impulses. Both writers, instead of presenting the reader with a clear-cut, fully defined portrait of a particular character, suggest that while consciousness can be glimpsed through fiction, it cannot be explained. In one of her notebooks, Highsmith transcribed an insightful quote from Dostoevsky’s novel
The Idiot
on this very subject. ‘Don’t let us forget that the motives of human actions are usually infinitely more complex and varied than we are apt to explain them afterwards, and can rarely be defined with certainty. It is sometimes much better for a writer to content himself with a simple narrative of events.’
¹³
It is a neat summary of Highsmith’s literary method and, in addition, a wise piece of advice for any biographer.

     Taking her lead from the Russian novelist, Highsmith explored these ambiguities and contradictions, these paradoxes of human consciousness with skill and subtlety. For instance, in
Strangers on a Train
, when Bruno breaks into an apartment house in Astoria – just for the thrill of it – he takes a table model, a piece of coloured glass, a cigarette lighter. ‘I especially took what I didn’t want,’ he says.
¹⁴
At the end of the novel, Guy, after his confession to Owen, turns to Gerard, the detective who has heard his every word, and starts to speak, ‘saying something entirely different from what he had intended’.
¹⁵
The scene alludes to one in
Crime and Punishment
when Raskolnikov feels he has to unburden himself to Sonya. Like Guy, after his outburst, he realises ‘the event upset all his calculations, for it certainly was not
thus
that he had intended to confess his crime.’
¹⁶

     Although Highsmith’s fiction almost bristles at any attempt to slot it into a given category, if one was forced to impose an interpretative model on her work one could say that, like Dostoevsky, she was work-ing within the tradition of fantastic realism. Many of Dostoevsky’s writings on the subject echo Highsmith’s own; indeed both writers were heavily influenced by the work of Edgar Allan Poe. In an essay Dostoevsky wrote in 1861, he sets out the relationship between fantasy and realism in Poe’s fiction. ‘But in the tales of Poe you see all the details of the image or event presented to you with such great plasticity that in the end you are convinced of its possibility, or its reality although the event in question is either almost entirely impossible or has never yet occurred in this world.’
¹⁷
He analysed this further in a letter he sent to an aspiring writer in June of 1880. ‘The fantastic must be so close to the real that you
almost
have to believe in it . . . ’
¹⁸
Highsmith anchors her novels and stories in reality by listing a cloying number of details – clothes, physical appearance, food and wine, description of houses – the minutiae of life which carries the reader seamlessly over into the world of the uncanny. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his essay on the fantastic, describes such a technique as one of semiotic excess – ‘the innumerable signs that line the roads and that mean nothing’
¹⁹
– a method particularly suitable for describing, and critiquing, the modern world.