Beautiful Shadow (28 page)

     By the summer of 1947, after only a year together, their relationship had deteriorated to such an extent that when they quarrelled, Virginia attacked Pat with her fists. Virginia had thrown herself into a new relationship with a photographer, Sheila, a liaison which Highsmith found unbearable, and in July, the writer walked in to find the couple naked in bed together. Pat tried to turn Virginia against Sheila, but when this failed, she began to fantasise about killing her rival, and wrote a poem in her notebook, entitled ‘Murder fills my heart tonight’.
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She could not bear the thought of Virginia and Sheila together and the potent mixture of love, hate, envy, anger and frustration resulted in a long stretch of insomnia.

     On 23 October, at four in the morning, Pat sat up in bed, took hold of her cahier and recorded her anguish. ‘In the night, alone, awake after sleep, I am insane . . . I am without discretion, judgment, moral code. There is nothing I would not do, murder, destruction, vile sexual practises. I would also, however, read my Bible.’
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For the next few months, she kept Virginia alive in her mind and, to a certain extent, she worshipped the fantasy image just as much as she had loved the reality. She knew she would never forget her, precisely because, ‘I know her so little, my conception of her is absolute, unchangeable.’
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Yet the breakdown of their relationship that autumn forced her to question the state of her mental health and, in November, she wrote in her notebook about her worries. ‘I am troubled by a sense of being several people . . . Should not be at all surprised if I become a dangerous schizophrene in my middle years.’
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     In January 1948, as she cast her eye over the manuscript of the yet to be titled
Strangers on a Train
, Highsmith realised that the writing she had produced after the split from Virginia – seventy pages of the book – was weak and needed a thorough overhaul. ‘It is as if I’d had a broken leg, when I wrote them,’ she said.
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     Without women, she said, there would be ‘no tranquillity, no repose, no beauty in living’.
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She needed them in order to work, simply to exist. But the idea that a relationship should better one’s life was, she said, a falsity, noting that the act of love in the insect world often resulted in serious injury, if not death.

When Highsmith was at Barnard she spent a year studying zoology and throughout her life she felt a strong tenderness for animals, particularly cats and snails, both of which she kept as pets. She became so fascinated by the gastropods that she described her attraction for them in an imaginary interview which she conducted with herself. ‘How did you hit upon this strange pastime or hobby, Miss H?’ she asked. Her empathy for the creatures first manifested itself in 1946, she said, when she was walking past a fish market in New York and saw two snails, which were dark cream with brown stripes, locked in a bizarre embrace. She took the pair home with her, put them in a fish bowl and observed them mating, an activity she chose to describe in minute, almost scientific, detail. Later, during a radio interview in which she was asked why she kept snails as pets, she replied, ‘they give me a sort of tranquillity’.
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     In February 1947, she decided to write a story about the creatures, a blend of science and fantasy, but the result was judged by her agent to be ‘too repellent to show editors’.
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Nearly a quarter of a century later, Graham Greene would write of his admiration for the tale, ‘The Snail-Watcher’, in which a breeder of gastropods, Peter Knoppert, comes to a disgustingly sticky end. ‘Mr Knoppert has the same attitude to his snails,’ wrote Greene, ‘as Miss Highsmith to human beings.’
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While Highsmith explored dualism philosophically in her work, it is also true to say that on a more personal level she always felt torn between the aspirations of the mind and the irrational drives of the body. Her intellect expressed itself in her tendency towards monasticism, while her bodily instincts pushed her towards promiscuity and, during the summer and winter of 1947 at least, a desire to surround herself with a crowd of like-minded artists, writers and intellectuals – a little Bohemia. After working during the day – on her comic books, short stories and novel – she would launch herself into the vibrant social whirl of post-war Manhattan.

     Highsmith had first met Jane Bowles in late 1944, on her return from living in Taxco, but during the summer when Pat was breaking up with Virginia Kent Catherwood, the two writers began to see quite a lot more of one another. In her diaries she talks of their brief flirtation – at one point they had even planned on travelling to Africa together – but the relationship came to nothing. Highsmith, when contacted by Bowles’ biographer, Millicent Dillon, told nothing of this, mentioning only that she had once been to a party at the Bowles’ home on West 10th Street, in Greenwich Village, attended by various luminaries including John Gielgud, Jerome Robbins, and Oliver Smith, ‘everybody notable except me – I felt!’
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Another party at Jane Bowles’ apartment which she described in her diary, was held for Simone de Beauvoir and Dorothy Parker, but unfortunately the guests of honour failed to turn up. Highsmith did, however, receive a piece of writerly advice from Bowles, who told her not to plan too much; rather she should let her imagination carry her along and rework later.

     During this time, Highsmith also met the actress Stella Adler, the composer Marc Blitzstein, the writer and editor Leo Lerman, Bowden Broadwater, the third husband of Mary McCarthy, who worked at
The New Yorker
, and the German-born avant-garde artist Lil Picard, later known as ‘the Gertrude Stein of the New York art scene’ or ‘the grandmother of the hippies’. Lil supported her through the trauma of breaking up with Virginia, while the two women attended sketching classes and a wide range of exhibitions together, everything from the ‘La Licorne de Cluny’ tapestries at the Metropolitan Museum to work by Rafino Tamayo and Salvador Dali.

     ‘Pat was an inveterate gallery- and museum-goer and she seldom left home without a little three-by-five inch spiral booklet of blank pages which she filled on the spur of the moment or while taking in some especially pleasing sight,’ says Kingsley. ‘She believed that drawing, painting and music were among the noblest works – if not
the
noblest – works of man.’
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     Highsmith, five years out of Barnard, still had an insatiable hunger to learn more about both classical and contemporary culture. During late 1947 and early 1948, she attended Edith Piaf, Bach and Hindemith concerts, in addition to playing the piano at her parents’ new house in Hastings-on-Hudson; discussed existentialist drama with friends; saw one of the first productions of Tennessee Williams’ play,
A Streetcar Named Desire
; and enjoyed films of
Crime and Punishment
and Eugene O’Neill’s
Mourning Becomes Electra
, which she said was ‘the best movie I have seen in the USA. Three hours of unrelieved tragedy, one sees life, but through murders and suicides. That’s the way I want my book.’
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     At times, Highsmith felt exhausted by the seemingly endless round of gallery openings, film and theatrical productions and non-stop cocktail parties. However, at one such gathering, in February 1948, she met the writer Truman Capote who would play an important role in securing her place at Yaddo, the artists’ and writers’ colony in upstate New York. Highsmith had been sniffy about Capote’s work for some time, thinking him good at driving ‘brilliantly from one phrase to the other’
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but fundamentally flawed because of his inability to convey depth of character. Yet when she met him she was smitten. ‘I like to go out with little Truman,’ Highsmith wrote in her diary. ‘He is so attentive, and so famous!’
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She also found his carefree lightheartedness about his own homosexuality refreshing, regaling her with the anecdote that when he was fourteen he told his parents, ‘Everybody is interested in girls, only I, T.C., am interested in boys!’
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     Highsmith’s new friend was already something of a Manhattan celebrity and on 1 March she invited Capote to her apartment on East 56th Street. She knew that a recommendation from Truman – who had attended the institution in the summer of 1946, at the same time as Carson McCullers – would make an impression on the Yaddo selection committee. ‘He was in good with the people at Yaddo,’ recalled Highsmith, ‘and he said, “I’ll help you get in if you’ll sublet to me.” So the deal was struck.’
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Capote went on to finish
A Tree of Night
while staying in the apartment. But Pat also recognised that Capote’s influence was potentially corrupting. One Sunday, soon after meeting him, he phoned her and invited her to tea. ‘Now at that tea party was probably Irving Berlin and Bernstein, loads of people,’ she later told Craig Brown, ‘but I said I work on Sundays. I preferred to work. You can’t do both.’
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Highsmith sent off her application to Yaddo at the beginning of March. Her novel was only one third done and she felt she needed the ‘concentrated period of quiet such as Yaddo would provide’.
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She submitted part of the book, which she described as ‘a psychological one essentially, about two young men who exchange the task of doing a murder’,
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and examples of her published short stories, including ‘The Heroine’. References came courtesy of Ethel Sturtevant, Rosalind Constable, her agent Margot Johnson, who recommended her as ‘a serious young writer, who we believe to have a great deal of talent’,
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Mary Louise Aswell, the fiction editor at
Harper’s Bazaar
, and of course, Truman Capote.

     Highsmith’s submissions, although not considered especially literary, were recognised to have a certain power and, according to one reader on the Yaddo selection panel, were actually much better written than the fiction of authors working within a ‘higher’ tradition. ‘She
writes
better than most of our writers – not in the highest sense, of course, but just in the sense of movement, expertness, ease, and freedom,’ wrote the advisor, ‘and there is surely a very respectable place for such a writer in a time when even the best books, or some of them, are awkwardly written . . . But in any case my own vote would be Yes – unless there is a great deal more pressure than there seems to be from really
very
extraordinary people.’
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     Ten days after this report was written, Highsmith received the news that her application had been successful. She was thrilled. ‘Such a relief,’ she noted in her diary, ‘like a soldier, to have one’s life planned for the next 10–12 weeks!’
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Her grandmother, Willie Mae, was particularly impressed and she took the trouble to read the pamphlets sent by Yaddo. ‘How wide in range are her interests,’ Highsmith wrote about her grandmother, ‘how much
grander
a person is she than all her offspring.’
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     Pat regarded Yaddo as an opportunity to start life afresh, and so, before she made the journey upstate, she took the time to analyse her past mistakes. Highsmith, realised that her choice of partners was detrimental to her mental health and, to help herself understand her own motives, she sketched out a table, listing the most significant lovers by their initials, age, physique, colouring, personality type, duration of relationship, reason for the breakdown and the length of time she thought of them after the affair was over. Against each name, she added symbols, which when checked against the key, stand for, ‘End due to my lack of sympathy’, ‘End due to her lack of sympathy’, ‘Bad judgment on my part’, and ‘most advantageous’.

     This table, written on a scrap of paper which survives sandwiched between the pages of one of her notebooks, makes for fascinating reading; not only for what it tells us about her lovers, but for what it signifies about Highsmith herself. The very act of fashioning such a schematised grid, dissecting her relationships with almost mathematical preciseness, could be considered to betray a certain coldness of heart, a ruthlessness that negated her romantic nature. Rather, it seems like a desperate attempt to try and understand why she could never find lasting happiness, a question that tortured her for the rest of her life. The resulting self-analysis was a brutally honest, if perhaps Freudian-biased, indictment of her character, and she concluded that, ‘I lack sympathy, am impatient with that which attracted me, therefore unconscious masochism. Have resolved to do better, as well as change my type radically.’
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