Beautiful Shadow (29 page)

Chapter 11

Yaddo, shadow – shadow, Yaddo!

1948

In the front of a copy of
Strangers on a Train
that Highsmith donated to Yaddo, she inscribed the words, ‘To Yaddo – with profoundest gratitude for the summer of peace that let me write this book.’
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At the end of her life she would show her appreciation by making the artists’ and writers’ colony the sole beneficiary of her estate, granting them, in addition to a $3 million bequest, the promise of any future royalties. It was quite a gesture, considering that Highsmith had only ever spent two months there fifty years before.

     She arrived at Yaddo on 10 May 1948. No doubt the dark, sombre quality of the place, its bleakness and monastic atmosphere, appealed to her gothic imagination. It was said that Edgar Allan Poe composed part of his poem, ‘The Raven’, on the land which later became Yaddo and its history reads like the plot of a nineteenth-century sensation novel. In 1881, the site on which Yaddo now stands was bought by Wall Street financier Spencer Trask and his wife, Katrina. Trask’s father, Alanson, made a fortune manufacturing boots for the Union Army during the Civil War while Spencer invested in a number of projects, including the rebirth of the
New York Times
in the 1880s. He also put money into Thomas Edison’s incandescent lightbulb and his distribution grid for electricity in New York City; later he was the first president of what became Consolidated Edison and the General Electric Company.

     Spencer and Katrina lived in Brooklyn, but after the death of their five-year-old son, Alan, in 1880, they took a summer house in Saratoga Springs, upstate New York, a place they finally decided to make their permanent home. Soon after settling into the dilapidated villa surrounded by pine trees, which was originally built in the 1850s, the family held a meeting about what they should call their new home. According to family history, Katrina asked her daughter, Christina, what name she would like to give it. The family was still dressed in mourning clothes and Christina often heard her relatives speak about how their lives had been shadowed by the tragedy. So the little girl put her hands over her eyes, concentrated for a moment, and then said, ‘Now I know. Call it “Yaddo”, Mamma, for it makes poetry! Yaddo, shadow – shadow, Yaddo! It sounds like shadow, but it’s not going to be a shadow.’
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     Christina had unwittingly chosen an Old English word meaning ‘shimmer’. ‘She felt that the word (shadow) belonged to us,’ recalled Katrina Trask, ‘and yet, instinctively, she shrank from the association. Unconsciously, she gave us a prophecy for the years to come, for it grew less and less to mean shadow, until at last, in the radiance of the life here, it came to mean light.’
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     The Trasks’ lives continued to be beset by tragedy. Christina and her brother Spencer Jr died in 1888 after they contracted diphtheria from their mother. Katrina had been told that although she was due to die, her illness had passed beyond the point of contagion, and so she called for her two children to be brought to her so she could say her goodbyes. The doctors, however, had made a terrible mistake, and the children died within a few days of each other, while their mother survived. A year later, in 1889, their fourth child, Katrina, was born but she too died, twelve days after the delivery, due to birth complications. Then, in 1891, the Trasks’ house burnt down.

     The couple, however, refused to let themselves be destroyed by grief. They commissioned a new house, which was finished in 1893, complete with a Tiffany mosaic above the fireplace, emblazoned with the words, ‘
Flammis Invicta per Ignem Yaddo Resurgo ad Pacem
’ – ‘the flame unconquered by fire, Yaddo rises up again in peace’ – and in 1899, while walking in the pine forest, Katrina had a vision. Katrina’s account of the birth of the Yaddo dream makes for embarrassing reading, as it mixes mawkish melodrama with sham spirituality, but nevertheless her idea was a noble one. The corporation of Yaddo was formed in 1900 and the first residents arrived in 1926.

     ‘The vision of the future is clear to me,’ Katrina told her husband. Their home would be a refuge for writers and artists. ‘At Yaddo they will find the Sacred Fire, and light their torches at its flame. Look, Spencer! They are walking in the woods, wandering in the garden, sitting under the pine trees – men and women – creating, creating, creating!’
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     Today, walking around Yaddo is an unsettling experience. The mansion is a harsh, almost brutal building, packed with Victorian-style furniture and decorated with sentimental portraits of the Trasks in gilt frames. The pine trees that surround and guard the house cast long shadows, and the four lakes – each representing one of the Trask children who died – shimmer in the sunlight. The local rumour that the children drowned in the waters here is unfounded, but in this isolated 400-acre site it is easy to understand how such stories gained a foothold.

     For the two months Highsmith was at Yaddo she lived in the West House, on the first floor of a turreted building resembling something from a fairy tale, a few hundred yards away from the main house. On her first day, she was met by Yaddo’s executive director, Elizabeth Ames, who, according to Truman Capote, looked and behaved like something from a modern gothic novel. ‘She was a strange, creepy sort of woman, silent and sinister like Mrs Danvers in
Rebecca
,’ he said. ‘She was always going around spying, seeing who was working and not working and what everybody was up to.’
⁵

     Elizabeth Ames kept a close eye on Highsmith and, quite rightly, classified her as a ‘hard drinker’.
⁶
In the mornings, before she could start work, Highsmith felt the need to have a stiff drink, not to perk her up, but to reduce her energy levels, which veered towards the manic. ‘Until the period of my visit expired,’ wrote fellow resident Chester Himes, the black crime writer whose room was across the hall from Highsmith’s, ‘I was drunk every day.’
⁷
Other residents included the man who would later become her fiancé, the writer Marc Brandel, together with Irene Orgel, Flannery O’Connor, Paul Moor, Vivien Koch Macleod, Stanley Levine, Gail Kubik, W.S. Graham, Clifford Wright, Harold Shapero and his wife, Esther Geller Shapero; men and women Highsmith described as sociable and unpretentious. In a letter Highsmith wrote to Ronald Blythe in 1967, she described Flannery O’Connor as, ‘very quiet, stayed alone – while others of us were shockingly gregarious and unwriterlike. At that time, I fell between those two stools.’
⁸

     The problem was, Highsmith said in a letter to Kingsley, that after being cooped up in their rooms during the day, many of the residents were driven to walk into Saratoga Springs, two miles away, ‘with the energy of mating salmon’, in order to buy beers; the drinking was so excessive, she said, that they often suffered from two-day hangovers.
⁹
On her tenth day at Yaddo, the group went into town for cocktails at a local bar, where Highsmith had five or six Martinis, two Manhattans and nearly blacked out. ‘Mixing was the order – for a thrill,’ she said. ‘Marc soon succumbed, with carrot hair in his carrot soup.’
¹⁰

     Her daily regime, however, was a strict one, consisting of breakfast at 8 a.m. (half an hour later on Sundays), a packed lunch which she picked up in the mornings, and a working day which lasted until late afternoon. She often read the Bible in the mornings. The disciplined routine suited her perfectly, ‘people work 30 per cent better under those conditions,’ she said later.
¹¹
If the novel she was writing was a baby inside her then Yaddo was the ‘supreme hospital’,
¹²
the perfect place in which to give birth.

     Eight days after arriving, Highsmith read a piece in a magazine about the German-Swiss physicist Albert Einstein and was excited to learn that his scientific research echoed her own musings on the concept of duality. The lines she wrote in her diary echo those in chapter twenty-eight of
Strangers on a Train
, when Guy, just after committing a murder, thinks about the nature of man and the universe: ‘Perhaps God and the Devil danced hand in hand around every single electron!’
¹³
Although Highsmith was conscious of her novel’s underlying philosophical themes, she didn’t let them interrupt the quick flow of the narrative or deflect attention away from the suspense. At Yaddo, she asked the painter Clifford Wright if he knew how to hold a gun
¹⁴
– unfortunately he didn’t – and followed the case of Robert Murl Daniels, the twenty-four-year-old baby-faced murderer whose newspaper picture she pasted into her diary, next to the headline, ‘KILLER NABBED’. Under this she then wrote, ‘Bruno’, the name of her psychopathic killer. ‘Before I wrote
Strangers on a Train
,’ she said, ‘there was a photograph of this jolly boy . . . and he’d killed God knows, two, three, four people, absolutely joking and laughing with the police and it made an impression on me.’
¹⁵

     By 17 June, Pat thought she was nearing completion of another draft of the book. She could no longer think about its structure in a logical manner, and felt as if she was writing ‘like the blind’.
¹⁶
Fatigue left her feeling crushed and weak, and yet, at night, she was so full of energy she could not sleep. The novel, she knew, had been written so hectically and she still remained dissatisfied with her first chapter and its overall tone. ‘My book needs much relaxation on my part,’ she wrote, ‘a verification of all through the lens of meditation and reexperiencing.’
¹⁷
The process of creation, of writing at top speed, had its consequences and often, after a day at her desk, she felt like a ‘coiled spring’,
¹⁸
without a proper outlet for her sexual and emotional longings. Deliberately flouting Yaddo’s rules, she arranged to see a girlfriend who drove up to Saratoga Springs, from where they travelled on to Glen Falls and then Hastings. Their two nights together were, she said, blissful; the girl was like a leaf from India or the Pacific, and when she departed, Highsmith could still sense her presence. ‘I can feel our lips together,’ she wrote, ‘It frightens, delights and maddens me, because J. is not with me.’
¹⁹

     She also found herself growing closer to Marc Brandel, the twenty-nine-year-old son of the British novelist John Davys Beresford and whose real name was Marcus Beresford. Born in London on 28 March 1919, he was educated at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, and Westminster College, and in 1945 won early success with his first novel,
Rain Before Seven
– published in Britain as
The Ides of Summer
– followed by
The Rod and the Staff
, in 1947. One American critic commented of the latter work, ‘if they [readers] retain any sensitiveness to good writing, will know that here is a first-rate piece of fiction and a novelist with something to say’.
²⁰

     On 26 June, Pat and Marc walked down to the lake together and discussed homosexuality. She found his attitude incredibly tolerant and positive – it helped her feel more self-confident – and although she was open about her own sexuality, this didn’t stop him from proposing to her – four times. Marc left Yaddo on 28 June, but wrote to her the week after, declaring his love for her again and mooting the idea of a trip together. ‘He considers me very feminine,’ she wrote, ‘and that he likes me better etwas schwul [translated as: somewhat gay] because it excuses his peculiarities of temperament.’
²¹

     She continued to see him on her return to New York in July. As he was a published novelist, Pat valued his opinion about her writing and so she was pleased when he told her, near the end of August, that the 235 pages she had written were ‘very, very good’.
²²
She had a strong desire to make her relationship with Brandel work, but she also realised that she was only sexually attracted to women. ‘Marc always said that she was very beautiful, that was his first impression of her,’ says Brandel’s second wife Edith, who herself became a friend of Highsmith’s in later years. ‘He was very much in love with her at that time, but although they slept together, the next morning she would be very resentful, due to the fact she resented herself when she did it.’
²³