Beautiful Shadow (40 page)

     His decision to kill the man he loves comes when he realises that he cannot take over Dickie’s identity. And after the murder – he bludgeons Dickie about the head with an oar in a boat off the coast of San Remo – Ripley’s talent for fictionality, for constant self-reinvention, comes into its own, with a series of elaborate twists and turns, disguises and fantasies. Like an author immersed in the world of his own creation, Tom loses whatever identity he ever had. ‘It was a good idea,’ Highsmith writes of Ripley, ‘to practice jumping into his own character again, because the time might come when he would need to in a matter of seconds, and it was strangely easy to forget the exact timbre of Tom Ripley’s voice.’
⁴²

     With an ear attuned to the rhythms and codas of his main character’s speech patterns, Ripley retypes a letter, written as Dickie, to Mr and Mrs Greenleaf, because there are too many commas in it, while after a few weeks living under the assumed identity of his dead friend, he finds it easier to write as if he were Dickie rather than himself. ‘The dull yards of Dickie’s prose came out more fluently now than Tom’s own letters ever had.’
⁴³

     When Ripley is forced to step back into his own self in the final chapter, he is, like a novelist who has fallen in love with his protagonist, utterly miserable. After all, being oneself again was so boring after the excitement and drama of pretending to be another. ‘He hated becoming Thomas Ripley again, hated being nobody . . . He hated going back to himself as he would have hated putting on a shabby suit of clothes, a grease-spotted, unpressed suit of clothes that had not been very good even when it was new.’
⁴⁴

     Ripley, with the reader’s active encouragement, gets away with two murders and, at the end of the book, instead of being caught or punished, he is let off scot-free, his last words being, ‘
Il meglio albergo
.
Il meglio
,
il meglio
!’ (‘The best hotel! The best, the best!’) Not only is the novel a radical celebration of amorality, but Ripley can also be seen as a metaphor for Highsmith’s creative, and quite transgressive, imagination at work.

     She herself realised the parallels between psychopaths and writers. ‘In regard to future writing about the so-called psychopath,’ she noted in 1949, ‘writing is only living pared away somewhat, and made more definite. The psychopath of a book is an average man living more clearly than the world permits him.’
⁴⁵

     She had experienced at first hand many of Ripley’s characteristics – splintered identity, insecurity, inferiority, obsession with an object of adoration, and the violence that springs from repression. Like her young anti-hero, she knew that in order to survive, it was necessary to prop oneself up with a psychological fantasy of one’s own making. ‘Happiness, for me, is a matter of imagination,’ she wrote in her notebook while writing
The Talented Mr Ripley
. ‘Existence is a matter of unconscious elimination of negative and pessimistic thinking. I mean, to survive at all. And this applies to everyone. We are all suicides under the skin, and under the surface of our lives.’
⁴⁶

In September 1954, Highsmith moved from the rented house in Massachusetts to New Mexico, settling in Santa Fe, ‘and I began writing the very next day,’ she said later. ‘It was one of those things. I didn’t care whether my suitcase was quite unpacked.’
⁴⁷

     Her companion was Ellen Hill, who had recently returned to America. From 1954 until 1962, Highsmith stopped keeping a diary because Ellen Hill had started to read it, so it is difficult to know exactly when and why she resumed her friendship with the older woman, but in a letter to a friend, Alex Szogyi, Pat revealed that her relationship with Ellen lasted four years in all. They spent two years in Europe together, 1951 and 1952, and two years in America, 1954 and 1955. ‘I spent about four years of my life with her (Ellen) and her lugubrious influence carried over much longer,’ she wrote.
⁴⁸

     For all the problems of the past, Pat still admired Ellen for her intellect and the two women often had the most stimulating conversations. ‘It was her challenging mind, often irritating, her point not always justified, that inspired the conversations generally,’ she wrote in her journal.
⁴⁹

     At the end of December, the couple, with Ellen’s French poodle, drove from Santa Fe to the border town of El Paso and down through Mexico, stopping in Hidalgo del Parral, awaking to see the mountains covered in snow. If Highsmith thought that her relationship with Ellen would improve second time around, she was mistaken. Their mutual friend Peggy Lewis remembers a fraught three weeks when she went to stay with the couple in Mexico.

     ‘They had arguments that were incredibly boring to listen to,’ she says. ‘They rowed about whether this person should come to dinner or that one. They took different sides about the people they liked and whether they were worth cultivating. I got the impression that Ellen went into a relationship for all the wrong reasons, because she thought it might benefit her one way or another. She would, I suppose, use people.’
⁵⁰

When Highsmith had finished
The Talented Mr Ripley
she sent a copy of the manuscript to her beloved grandmother, Willie Mae, in Fort Worth, because she was afraid the old woman might die before its publication late in 1955. On 5 February 1955, the eighty-eight-year-old woman collapsed, just outside the house in which Highsmith had been born.

     ‘She was outside working in her flower garden – she had flowers everywhere, it was a real pretty garden, complete with a fish pond – and she had an aneurysm,’ says Dan Coates. ‘She dropped dead right there, which was perfect because she didn’t linger or suffer and she was active until the very end. We’d kid her and say, “Grandma you’ve only got two more years to go and you’ll be ninety,” and she said, “Oh no, I’ve only got twelve to go and I’ll be a hundred.” ’
⁵¹

     Pat would have been particularly upset by her grandmother’s death. ‘I remember – she adored her grandmother,’ says Kingsley. ‘She said her heart turned over when she saw a pair of her grandmother’s slippers because they had taken the shape of her foot.’
⁵²

     The copy of the manuscript of the novel was lost in the weeks following Willie Mae’s death, an accident Highsmith blamed on her mother. ‘Unfortunately, my mother lost the manuscript,’ she said later. ‘Inexcusable. Inexcusable. I said to my mother, “How could this happen?” and she said, “Well, the negroes were sorting it out,” and I said, “The negroes were sorting out the . . . What are you
talking
about?” ’
⁵³

Good reviews greeted
The Talented Mr Ripley
when it was published in December 1955.
The New Yorker
found the novel’s hero was ‘one of the most repellent and fascinating characters’ of modern times, adding, tellingly, that Ripley ‘kills one young man, for whom he feels a strong homosexual attachment, to get his money, and then murders another with whom he is hardly acquainted at all, on the ground that he may know too much’.
⁵⁴
Highsmith, the anonymous reviewer concluded, told ‘this remarkably immoral story very engagingly indeed’.
⁵⁵
Connoisseur of detective fiction, Anthony Boucher, praised Highsmith for her ‘unusual insight into a particular type of criminal’. He described Ripley as a ‘three-dimensional portrait of what a criminal psychologist would call a “congenital psychopathic inferior” ’, and thought that the novel was a ‘more solid essay in the creation and analysis of character’ than
Strangers on a Train
and
The Blunderer
. It was ‘skilful’, he added, but perhaps ‘somewhat overlong’.
⁵⁶

     The novel went on to win numerous awards, including the Edgar Allan Poe Scroll presented in April 1956 by the Mystery Writers of America. A few years later, when the certificate became mildewed, Highsmith removed the glass to clean it, but before she hung it back on her bathroom wall, she scribbed in the words, ‘Mr Ripley and’ before her own name. She thought that he deserved the honour as much as her. And, in a way, he did. ‘I often had the feeling Ripley was writing it and I was merely typing,’ she said.
⁵⁷

Chapter 16

Each Man is in His Spectres power

1955–1958

Whenever Highsmith became weary of herself and her environment, she escaped into a rich, if slightly perverse, imaginative world. There she would create an alternative landscape inhabited by strange, irrational characters that represented various aspects of herself. Such was her state of mind in early 1955 when she started to think about her next novel. She found the process of fashioning a narrative satisfying. ‘My story can move fast, as I can’t, it can have a reasonable and perhaps perfect solution, as mine can’t,’ she said. ‘A solution that is somehow satisfying, as my personal solution never can be.’
¹

     She initially called her new novel, ‘The Dog in the Manger’ and although the book was eventually published, in 1957, as
Deep Water
, a title she originally recorded in her journal in 1950, the central theme – the vicious animosity between a husband, Vic, and his wife, Melinda – remained the same from the outset. Conveying an atmosphere of hatred was essential, she said, as she would focus on the ‘sniping, griping, ambushing,’ that can exist between people who are supposed to love one another, locked together in a ‘ballet of the wearing of the nerves’.
²

     Highsmith herself had experienced such a dance and, travelling with Ellen Hill to Acapulco at the end of April, she found herself repeating the same excruciatingly painful, but familiar, steps. She stayed in Acapulco for about a month, before moving on, still with Ellen, to Ajijic and Taxco in June, and then to Oaxaca and east Mexico a month later. She did not keep a diary of hate, like the one she penned as she crossed Europe and America with Ellen – she knew the older woman would, no doubt, be tempted to read it – but it’s clear from the entries in her notebooks that the experience was a sour one. Ellen continually complained about the noise of Pat’s typewriter
³
and it was plain that whatever kept them together could no longer be classified as love. Pat likened living with someone she did not love to wearing a pair of spectacles fitted with lenses which skewed one’s vision of the world. ‘An unbearable fate for an artist!’, she said.
⁴

     Just as she had drawn on their poisonous relationship to paint a picture of marital conflict in
The Blunderer
, so she looked to her own stifled emotional responses to create the character of Vic, a man driven mad by repression. ‘The moral of the story,’ she said of
Deep Water
, is how ‘repressed emotions can become schizophrenic.’
⁵
She stole Vic’s physical appearance directly from Ellen; like her he had ‘thick, crisp brown eyebrows that stood out over innocent blue eyes,’ with a middle-sized ‘mouth . . . firm, and usually drawn down at the right corner with a lopsided determination or with humour, depending on how one cared to take it’
⁶
and his blue eyes, ‘wide, intelligent, and unsurprisable’, gave no clue ‘as to what he was thinking or feeling’.
⁷

     Vic has not had sex since his wife, Melinda, started having affairs with other men three years before. However, he refuses to feel jealous of her extra-marital activities and sublimates his feelings in his work, as head of a small, and exclusive, publishing company, and in his hobbies – snail-breeding (one of Highsmith’s favourite pastimes). To his friends in the affluent suburb of Little Wesley, outside of New York, Vic appears to embody success and sophistication. But beneath his mask of respectability lurk very different emotions which represent the darker side of the American dream.