Beautiful Shadow (45 page)

     Although the Republican President linked the quintessence of America with religion – ‘Recognition of the Supreme Being is the first, most basic, expression of Americanism. Without God, there could be no American form of government, nor American way of life,’ he said in 1955 – the truth was very different. Perhaps a more insightful – and honest – assessment of the moral landscape came from Eisenhower’s opponent in the 1952 election, Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson: ‘Some of us worship in churches, some in synagogues, some on golf courses,’ he said. It was true that, in 1955, the weekly church attendance totalled 49 million adults – half the total adult population – yet a deep unease threatened to undermine the collective health of the nation. It was also true that America seemed to have been blessed with an unprecedented affluence, but could, as some observers suggested, this new celebration of materialism actually be the root cause of the nation’s malaise? A 1957 magazine survey, investigating the morals of the modern American, concluded that the average man or woman thought it acceptable they should carry on just as they liked so long as their behaviour was accepted by their neighbours.

     The notion that America’s increasing obsession with personal wealth had played its part in the disintegration of contemporary morality was explored by David M. Potter in his 1954 book,
People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character
. Borrowing from the work of Karen Horney, Potter stated that affluence was one of the central contributing factors of modern neurosis, and, in an observation that could act as a summary of Highsmith’s fictional obsessions, stated how, ‘aggressiveness [had] grown so pronounced that it cannot be reconciled with Christian brotherhood; desire for material goods so vigorously stimulated that it cannot be satisfied; and expectations of untrammelled freedom soaring so high that they cannot be squared with the multitude of responsibilities and restrictions that confine us all.’
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     It was no wonder that, although America was one of the richest nations on the planet, its inhabitants were amongst the most anxious, alienated from both the workplace and themselves. According to the sociologist C. Wright Mills, writing in 1951, it was necessary to analyse the American character in more psychological terms. ‘The problems that concern us most border on the psychiatric,’
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he wrote. ‘Internally, they [the American middle classes] are split, fragmented.’
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As we have seen, Highsmith – together with a number of other writers, artists and film-makers – had already taken on the task, documenting the heart of darkness in modern America. ‘Crime, in many ways,’ said Daniel Bell, whose work Highsmith read, ‘is a Coney Island mirror, caricaturing the morals and manners of a society,’
⁵
and by extension crime novels serve a similar purpose. In a piece for the
Radio Times
, to tie in with the BBC1 programme,
Omnibus File – Thrillers and Crime Fiction
in 1972, the author defined herself as a novelist who found crime ‘very good for illustrating moral points’.
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This preoccupation – her view of herself as a documenter of degeneracy – lasted throughout her life and in an interview she did with Neil Gordon in 1992, to coincide with the American publication of
Ripley Under Water
, she ‘spoke at great length about the decline of American culture, the horror of TV. She hated Reagan and Bush, but seemed rather to feel that we were getting what we deserved in them, given how irresponsible had been our own safeguarding of our culture.’
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     As her early novels reveal, Highsmith’s position on morality was far from straightforward. In
Strangers on a Train
, it is clear that an essentially ‘good’ man, Guy, has been corrupted by the evil influences of Bruno. At the climax of the novel, Guy confesses all to Owen Markman – the former lover of his dead wife, Miriam – and tries to engage him in a debate on individual moral responsibility only to be met by blank, drunken indifference and an apathetic response of ‘Live and let live.’ Although Guy has committed a murder, he chooses not to align himself with the hollow, unfeeling emptiness of Markman and when faced with news that his confession has been overheard by the detective, Gerard, says simply, ‘Take me.’ The ending, in a sense, is a conventional one – the law is finally imposed and the guilty are punished – in
The Blunderer
,
Deep Water
,
A Game for the Living
, and
This Sweet Sickness
, the transgressors are similarly brought to justice. Yet one gets the sense that order is imposed not because these characters inhabit a rational, God-governed universe, but because of the intervention of chance or circumstance. Indeed, the innocent are just as likely to be punished as the guilty – Walter is killed by Kimmel in
The Blunderer
before Kimmel is, in turn, trapped by the police – while the enforcers of the law often seem more morally corrupt than the criminals they are trying to entrap. At one point, Walter in
The Blunderer
views Kimmel – a wife-killer – to be angelic when compared to a ‘diabolic’ Corby, the detective.
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Not only that, but a certain amoral leakage occurs, spilling over from the personalities of Highsmith’s hollow men and infecting the reader with a skewed vision. ‘The effect is chilling,’ wrote one critic, ‘partly because it seems to Patricia Highsmith that eating breakfast, walking the dog, and committing murder have come to occupy the same moral space.’
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     By privileging the perspective of the abnormal and amoral, she both subverts the expectations of the genre and questions one of the central conventions of the Western tradition – the idea that art is supposed to be morally edifying. Highsmith describes murder with a certain
joie de vivre
, while it is clear that many of her killers – Bruno, Kimmel, Vic, and of course Ripley – relish the act of snuffing out another life. The intensity with which she wrote about the abnormal, amoral personality and, in
The Talented Mr Ripley
,
Deep Water
and
This Sweet Sickness
, the sheer totality of her vision – achieved by confining her point of view to the warped perspective of the central character in each of these books – naturally begs the question: What was Highsmith’s own relationship towards morality? Just where did she stand?

     Craig Brown remembers once discussing
Deep Water
with Highsmith and her astonishing reaction when he suggested that perhaps Vic was rather a weak and pathetic man before he embarked on his mission to murder his wife’s lovers. ‘She leapt to his defence,’ Brown remembers. ‘ “He’s mentally a bit odd, but at least he finally has a go. To impress on his wife that he’s not taking any more, he eliminates those boring lovers. At least he
has a go
. At least he
tries
.” Her vehemence quite took me aback. Her lack of enthusiasm for the victim set her at odds with her times.’
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     Otto Penzler of the Mysterious Press – who published five of her books in America between 1985 and 1988 – believes that one of the reasons Highsmith never became a big seller in the States during her lifetime was because of the amorality of her fiction. She was too dark for mass consumption. ‘There’s a certain repellent quality about them all in a way,’ he says of her novels. ‘Certainly the Ripley books are so amoral that a lot of people are simply uncomfortable, because they don’t have a guide post, they don’t have the author leading them along, saying, “Look here’s somebody you should really despise.” . . . You’re sort of at sea in her books, you don’t know who are the good guys and the bad guys because there are no nice people. Nobody’s nice, nobody’s good. There’s no one you can relate to and I think that’s disquieting for a lot of people.’
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H.R.F. Keating, the veteran crime author and president of the Detection Club, remembers that, ‘When Highsmith was invited to join the Detection Club one member was so outraged by the amorality of her books that they said, “If she’s in, I leave”.’
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     The late Julian Symons, the crime novelist, biographer, and former president of the Detection Club, remarked that although reader identification with a criminal perspective was far from new – E.W. Hornung’s portrayal of the nineteenth-century gentleman-burglar, Raffles, had prompted his brother-in-law, Conan Doyle to say, ‘You must not make the criminal a hero’
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– Highsmith’s novels went one step further. ‘Tom Ripley is the gentleman as occasional murderer, a difference expressive of the ethical gap between the late nineteenth century and late twentieth,’ he said.
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Symons believed that Highsmith’s novels were remarkable as they suggested ‘that a different and wholly personal code of morality should be substituted for the code of what society generally regards as important.’
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Indeed, Highsmith more or less stated as much in her 1966 book,
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
. ‘I find the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial, for neither life nor nature cares if justice is ever done or not.’
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In 1981, she elaborated on this when she told Diana Cooper-Clark of her fascination for amorality. ‘I suppose I find it an interesting contrast to stereotyped morality which is frequently hypocritical and phony. I also think that to mock lip-service morality and to have a character amoral, such as Ripley, is entertaining.’
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After all, if people found her work morally objectionable, they should realise that she was merely reflecting the reality of the modern world. ‘This is the way life is,’ she said, ‘and I read somewhere years ago that only 11 per cent of murders are solved. That is unfortunate, but lots of victims are not so important as the President of the United States. The police make a certain effort, and it may be a good effort, but frequently the case is dropped. And so I think, why shouldn’t I write about a few characters who go free?’
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She also told one interviewer that she aligned herself with the criminal perspective because of her own innate sense of strangeness, which she traced back to her family background. ‘It’s true, I understand nuts, kinky, kooky people,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand ordinary people. Housewives. Maybe it’s because I am not entirely normal! I myself have a criminal bent . . . I have a lurking liking for those who flout the law which I realise is despicable of me.’
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Although she found Clément’s
Plein Soleil
, which she saw in September 1961, while she was living in New Hope, ‘very beautiful to the eye and interesting for the intellect’,
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she was rather dismayed by the moralistic ending tacked on to the end of her story. The producers of the film – Robert and Raymond Hakim – told her that they would have preferred to highlight the homosexual subtext of the novel, but as they would have been refused permission by the authorities, there was little use attempting to tackle the issue. Later she would also voice her dismay that Ripley was captured, telling one interviewer that ‘it was a terrible concession to so-called public morality that the criminal had to be caught’.
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     It can’t be denied that Highsmith experienced a thrilling
frisson
when she encountered – at a safe distance, of course – amorality or violence. She loved reading about the psychology of killers, pasted newspaper reports about murderers into her notebooks, admitted that she found writing about psychopaths ‘easy’,
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and, in later life, enjoyed flicking through
A Colour Atlas of Forensic Pathology
, a veritable gore-fest of images containing, as she told one journalist, colour photographs of ‘car accidents, murders and rape cases: the really shocking images that don’t reach the public’.
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The writer and journalist Roger Clarke, who met Highsmith in 1982, believes that ‘the amorality [in Highsmith’s work] is genuine. Some writers, like Martin Amis, do a very good job of amorality, but the bottom line is Amis is probably not an amoral person. But I think Pat really was amoral. There was this strange blankness about her.’
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