Beautiful Shadow (38 page)

     Highsmith was dismayed by the news of the imminent execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the Jewish couple accused of stealing the secrets of the atomic bomb, and she worried about America’s global reputation, one which was looking increasingly soiled. McCarthy’s continuing communist witchhunt was reaching near-hysteric levels – a phenomenon exposed in Arthur Miller’s 1953 play
The Crucible
– and in the same year librarians were ordered to remove books by ‘Communists, fellow travelers, and the like’. ‘The whole nation is protesting, some for humanitarian reasons, some because it would endanger our international prestige,’ Highsmith noted in her diary about the Rosenberg electrocution at Sing-Sing prison, New York. ‘Though how it could sink much lower with the present book burning of the Amerika Hauser I don’t see. D Hammett’s
Thin Man
, Howard Fast, Langston Hughes, were among those which were removed from libraries.’
²

     The Eisenhower years, post-Korean War, have been mythologised as an era of peace and prosperity, the ‘bountiful new world’
³
of
I Love Lucy
, bobby sox, cashmere-cardiganed preppies, drive-in movies, barbecues and convenience living. Between 1950 and 1958 the economy expanded with an annual growth rate of 4.7 per cent and living standards increased. It was the age of the baby boom – in 1940 the population of America was 130 million, by the mid-1950s the figure had risen to 165 million. The suburbs, which to many crystallised the essence of the fifties, expanded and consumers embarked on a frenzied spending spree. Yet the new uniformity of living was also symptomatic of the hollowness of the American dream. Columnist William Shannon observed that, ‘The Eisenhower years have been years of flabbiness and self-satisfaction and gross materialism’, while Norman Mailer dismissed the fifties as ‘one of the worst decades in the history of man.’
⁴

     In 1950, the social scientist and lawyer David Riesman published
The Lonely Crowd
, a controversial book that triggered a national debate into the changing nature of the American psyche, and a work which Highsmith read. Riesman, whose books analysed the place of the individual in a modern, increasingly media-driven society, believed that there were three types of man: the ‘tradition-directed’, those in pre-industrial communities, who inherited their values from their predecessors; the ‘inner-directed’, formed in the nineteenth-century capitalist boom, who relied on their consciences to shape their behaviour; and the ‘other-directed’, people living in a mass society like modern America, men and women whose beliefs were shaped by their peers or from the media. As Riesman saw it, man had moved from the inner to the other-directed and, as a result, had made a transition from industry and achievement to conformity and adjustment. What is common to all other-directed people, wrote Riesman, is that ‘their contemporaries are the source of direction for the individual – either those known to him or those with whom he is indirectly acquainted, through friends and through the mass media.’
⁵

     The problem was Americans were suffering from oversocialisation. ‘For centuries moralists had warned that people become unhappy when they get what they want – or think they want,’ writes historian John Patrick Diggins of the fifties. ‘Suburbia offered Americans the cleanliness and safety of a planned community, but nothing is more hopeless than planned happiness.’
⁶

     Highsmith’s novel
The Blunderer
explores just such an identity crisis, a hollowness situated at the heart of the American everyman. The novel takes as its central character Walter Stackhouse, a typical other-directed man. To the outside world, thirty-year-old Walter seems to have it all – a successful and highly paid wife, Clara, who is an estate agent, a house in Long Island given to his wife by her mother, a good job as a lawyer in Manhattan and an enviable lifestyle. Yet Walter feels alienated. ‘There were times, standing with a second highball in his hand on somebody’s lawn in Benedict,’ Highsmith wrote, ‘when Walter asked himself what he was doing there among those pleasant, smugly well-to-do and essentially boring people, what he was doing with his whole life.’
⁷
His marriage was unhappy, married as he was to a pleasure-denying woman with ‘acid in her voice’,
⁸
and his job at the large law firm in New York left him unstimulated. Walter dreams of setting up a law practice of his own in the West Forties, dealing with minor cases rejected by other offices, and he is highly conscious of the fact that he feels frustrated with the banality of his life. ‘At thirty, Walter had concluded that dissatisfaction was normal. He supposed life for most people was a falling slightly short of one ideal after another.’
⁹
In his spare time, Walter compiles a list of ‘unworthy friendships’, an analysis of the unequal relationships that existed between various pairs of men, a dynamic which Highsmith returned to again and again in her work. Most people, Walter believed, struck up a friendship with at least one person who was inferior to them, ‘because of certain needs and deficiencies that were either mirrored or complemented by the inferior friend.’
¹⁰

     Ironically, Walter himself is drawn into just such a relationship with Melchior Kimmel, whom he reads about in a newspaper under the headline, ‘woman found near tarrytown, n.y.’ The story relates how Kimmel’s wife, Helen, has been found stabbed and beaten at the bottom of a cliff, a case which Walter cannot get out of his mind. As his own relationship with Clara degenerates, he starts to imagine the details of the case, visualising the body in a clump of trees, with a long bloody gash running down its face. Like many of Highsmith’s heroes, Walter’s fantasy, his fictional recreation of the murder, his psychological rehearsal of the killing, is responsible for trapping him. Although he doesn’t murder Clara – she throws herself off a cliff, in circumstances which echo the Kimmel case – Walter’s obsession with Melchior brings about his downfall. By the end of the book, Walter, like one of Riesman’s lonely crowd, has been stripped of his individuality. ‘ “You became a living cipher,” Walter thought . . . Did a cipher have the capacity to love?’
¹¹
At the climax – as Kimmel stalks Stackhouse through Central Park – Walter is conscious of thinking of nothing, his identity reduced to a vacuum. There is, ultimately, only one logical conclusion – death. Kimmel jumps on him, brandishing a knife, and stabs him in the face – Walter hears the blade scrape across his teeth – and then in the throat. As the blood flows out of him, Walter loses the will to live. The scene, in which external events are juxtaposed against fragments of an imploding consciousness, is a masterly denouement to an utterly compelling novel.

By 26 August, Highsmith had written 100 pages of the novel which would become
The Blunderer
. However, she wrote the bulk of the book – which at this time she called ‘The Man on the Queue’ or ‘A Deadly Innocence’ – in Fort Worth, where she lived from the end of September 1953 until early January 1954. During this time she stayed first at the Coates Hotel, the apartment hotel owned by her uncle, Claude, and then at the house of her cousin, Millie Alford, on Ash Park Drive. The novel, she thought, was much more complex and sophisticated than
Strangers on a Train
, and consequently, a lot more difficult to write. However, her main motive was to make it a good read. ‘I only hope it is entertaining,’ she wrote to Kingsley, ‘as that is the prime purpose.’
¹²

     In an interview she gave to the local paper in Fort Worth, Highsmith said that the secret of her success was ‘plenty of quiet and afternoon beer’
¹³
and named her favourite American writers as Robert Penn Warren and William Faulkner. She wrote in a white heat – ‘writing,’ she said, ‘is no good for the health’
¹⁴
– purging herself of the emotions she associated with her unhappy relationship with Ellen, which had finally broken down in September. She was afraid that Ellen, who left New York for Europe, might try and commit suicide once again and the parallels between real life and the events she described in her novel continued to disturb her. ‘Perhaps life will outrace me yet. Just as it did about the sleeping pill episode, which is also in the book. Rather uncanny,’ she wrote to Kingsley.
¹⁵

     She felt deeply depressed – trivial incidents were enough to leave her feeling crushed and on the verge of tears – although she realised that, on the surface, she had little to feel melancholy about. This was, she surmised, because of ‘an obvious form of masochism’
¹⁶
and, in order to get through the day, she needed constant bolstering from friends and lovers. She found the people down in Texas too ‘surface-dwelling’ and, in order to concentrate on her book, often pretended to go to bed early so she could be alone.

     She finished the first draft of the novel in early November and on 9 November, decided on the title,
The Blunderer
. ‘C’est plus qu’un crime,’ she noted, describing Walter’s actions in the novel, ‘c’est une faute. (It’s more than just a crime, it’s a mistake (in the moral sense). Walter really is a Blunderer.’
¹⁷
She reworked and retyped the novel until she had written what she thought was a satisfactory ending, and she enclosed the final page in a letter she wrote to Kingsley on Christmas Eve.

     When not writing, she spent time with her family, went riding with her old friend Florence Brillhart, sketched, watched television (which she did not particularly care for), travelled into Dallas for lunch, played golf and frequently got drunk with her cousin, Millie, with whom she became particularly close. She had, since her Barnard days, been a heavy drinker, but by now her alcohol consumption – Martinis, gin, rye, Bourbon, wine – was becoming dangerously high and she continued to overdo it when she arrived back in New York, in early January 1954. On her first day back in the city she went to bed at four in the afternoon, with a bottle of gin, and then, while out at dinner with Ann Smith, went on to drink seven Martinis and two glasses of wine.

     ‘Last year nothing made sense,’ she said of 1953, ‘My attitude was, “Have another drink” . . . I spent my money like a drunken sailor.’
¹⁸
One of the most galling aspects of all this was the fact that she was aware of her actions and as such, she concluded, if she ran up huge debts she had nobody else to blame but herself. Highsmith’s tendency towards degeneracy – her excessive drinking, her sexual buccaneering – was tempered by her instinct to punish herself for her pleasures. ‘It does not matter that I have worked pretty hard, harder than many people, even,’ she wrote. ‘I have been imprudent, irreverent, false to myself, in fact’.
¹⁹

When
The Blunderer
was published in September 1954 – its dedication simply read, ‘For L.’, a reference to Highsmith’s latest muse. After Ellen – or rather during the dying days of their relationship – Highsmith embarked on another relationship with the aspiring actress, Lynn Roth, an ex-girlfriend of Ann Smith’s. Lynn was twenty-eight, slim, blonde, almost pixie-like. Such was the power that Lynn held over her that, twenty-five years later, Highsmith made a list of her characteristics and qualities, a description prompted by her love for another woman who reminded her of Lynn – the twenty-five-year-old actress and costume designer Tabea Blumenschein. She went on to compare the two women, noting down that she admired the girls’ artistic temperaments, their free spirits. Paraphrasing Proust, she said that fundamentally, when it came down to it, one’s ‘type’ did not change. ‘This is why one can say one is “always” in love with such a person, that the emotions do not change,’ she wrote.
²⁰

     Highsmith started dating Lynn in July 1953 – two weeks after Ellen’s suicide bid – and although the two women lived together, briefly, at Lynn’s apartment in Greenwich Village, by the spring of 1954 their affair had collapsed. Once again, Highsmith was forced to question why she had chosen yet another woman who was bad for her. The loss of Lynn Roth left her feeling disturbed to such an extent that she questioned her sanity. ‘I am becoming a little odd, personally,’ she said.
²¹
She also recorded in her notebook the fact that she had been told manic depression was one of the few types of mental illness which was ‘innate’ and as a result ‘nearly impossible to cure’.
²²
In order to prove that her mental state was, after all, still intact, she set herself a test: she sat in front of the radio and listened to the news, noting whether she could follow the broadcast. Of course, such an experiment was no real marker of sanity, but Highsmith needed something to boost her low spirits and she was pleased when she decided that she had ‘passed’.