Beautiful Shadow (47 page)

     She submitted the novel to Harper & Brothers early in 1961, but in February, Joan Kahn wrote to Highsmith’s agent, Patricia Schartle, telling her that although she thought the author’s writing was still ‘fine, the book escapes us’.
⁸
The main structural flaw, as she saw it, was Highsmith’s trio of characters – Rydal, Chester, and his wife, who at this stage was named Olga, but whom she would later call Colette. ‘The book makes sense only if there is a homosexual relationship between Rydal and Chester . . .’ wrote Joan. ‘We cannot like any of the characters, but more difficult, we cannot believe in them . . . it’s all so far in a dream now it makes no sense. If our worries make any sense I would like to see the novel salvaged – but I feel we cannot publish as it stands  . . .’
⁹

     Highsmith set about reworking the book almost immediately. She told her editor that she was ‘revising with a will’,
¹⁰
but privately she felt furious that she was being forced to rethink her characters. By mid-April, Highsmith resubmitted the novel, but still it failed to capture Joan Kahn’s imagination. In her assessment, the characters did not jump off the page. ‘It would need a major character revision to make the novel make sense,’ wrote Joan. ‘Perhaps you’d never want to do that  . . .’
¹¹

     Instead of trashing the novel, Highsmith said she would completely rethink the motivation of her characters and, at the same time, eliminate any suspicion of a homosexual relationship between the two men. Although she agreed to rework the book –
A Game for the Living
, she reasoned, had also ‘presented ghastly problems, too, but [they] were at last overcome’
¹²
– she confided to her French agent, Jenny Bradley, that such revisions were in her view ‘unreasonable’.
¹³

     Highsmith’s revisions on the book stretched into 1962, but still Joan Kahn wasn’t happy. A reader’s report submitted to Kahn, written on 28 May 1962, found that for all of Highsmith’s reworking, the writer had failed to improve the novel. In fact, they concluded, damningly, ‘There is a frightening sense of the neurotic about the author’s approach to and conception of character. There is no reason or motivation for their actions . . . A very unhealthy air hangs over it all and I finished it all with a strong feeling of revulsion.’
¹⁴

     As a result Kahn felt obliged to send the manuscript back to Patricia Schartle. ‘I’m very sorry, but I still don’t like
The Two Faces of January
,’ Kahn wrote to Highsmith on 6 June. ‘I don’t believe in any of the people – oh, dear. I couldn’t be sadder.’
¹⁵

     The book, after being rejected by Harper & Brothers, was eventually published by Doubleday in America and Heinemann in Britain in 1964. Ironically, it was the book’s ‘unhealthy air’ and Highsmith’s ‘frightening sense of the neurotic’, which actually attracted the attention of the critics. The writer Brigid Brophy, one of Highsmith’s greatest fans, claimed that, ‘Highsmith has superbly carried out Dickens’s task of making the crime story literature’.
¹⁶
She praised the novel for the ‘cold-crumpet clamminess’ of the characters and summed up the book as ‘a thriller chiefly in the sense that every good novel is . . . It is the story not so much of a chase as of moving, uneasily, on. Shifts of ground stand metaphor for shifts in relationship; psychology is beautifully interleaved with a gritty
genius loci
.’
¹⁷
Julian Symons, writing in the
Sunday Times
, lauded Highsmith for her subtle characterisation and her unremittingly bleak vision of modern life. ‘The book confirms the fact that Miss Highsmith has no rival in writing crime stories that show us a doom-laden world where human beings, all of them emotionally lame, deficient or perverse, are destroyed not by events but by each other.’
¹⁸
In 1965 the novel won the Crime Writers Association of England Silver Dagger Award for the best foreign crime novel of the previous year; she used the dagger she received to open her mail from then on.

     Rejection was something all aspiring writers must face as a reality of the profession, she said.

These little setbacks, amounting sometimes to thousands of dollars’ worth of time wasted, writers must learn to take like Spartans. A brief curse, perhaps, then tighten the belt a notch and on to something new – of course with enthusiasm, courage and optimism, because without these three elements, you cannot produce anything good.
¹⁹

While plotting
The Two Faces of January
Highsmith noted how she thought about basing the characters of the novel on certain aspects of herself. She particularly wanted to articulate the paradoxical, nihilistic elements of her personality, which she found best expressed in Dostoevsky’s
Notes from Underground
. ‘The ultra neurotic, which is myself. The Underground Man,’ she wrote in her cahier. ‘To hell with reader identification in the usual sense, or a sympathetic character.’
²⁰
The parallels between Highsmith’s novel and the nihilistic Russian text, written in 1864, are striking.

     Although the majority of Highsmith’s fiction addresses the transitoriness and unknowability of identity,
The Two Faces of January
takes the concept to its extreme, as each of its three main characters – Chester, Colette and Rydal – assume and disrobe new selves with alarming regularity. Chester MacFarland is at once ‘himself’, a rich American con-man on the run from the authorities, but also in the course of the novel adopts the personae of a range of men with different names, ages and backgrounds: Howard Cheever, Richard Donlevy, Louis Ferguson, William Chamberlain, Philip Jeffries Wedekind and Oliver Donaldson; his wife, Colette, was born Elizabeth, but changed her name on a whim at the age of fourteen, while Rydal Keener, the son of a sophisticated, but controlling Harvard professor, takes on a number of names, including Joey, French-born Pierre Winckel and the Italian Enrico Perassi. As the three characters flit between Athens and Crete, with later scenes between Chester and Rydal being acted out in France, they each undergo a quest for self-knowledge only to be met by a brain-numbing sense of anticlimax. Chester’s future self would be ‘something yet unknown’,
²¹
while Rydal, who at one point escapes from the police and finds himself without an assumed identity, declares that ‘he was free, as only a nameless person of his time could be free.’
²²

     The tone of the novel echoes the shrill, taunting voice of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, who warns that, no matter how hard one tries to ape the behaviour of others, ‘there is no way out for you, that you will never change into a different person’.
²³
Highsmith seems to have initially read the book, described by Colin Wilson as ‘the first major treatment of the Outsider theme in modern literature’
²⁴
in 1947, when she wrote in her notebook that she agreed with Dostoevsky’s narrator’s belief, ‘strip the personality and will will be found, not intellect’.
²⁵
Dostoevsky’s text self-consciously celebrates its own perverseness and ‘paradoxalist’ ambiguities, continually suggesting uncertainties only for them to be subsequently subverted. Yet, for all its slippery, enigmatic qualities it seems to posit a theory that reason, self-interest and logical thinking will always be undermined by chaos, desire and the unstoppable rush towards self-destruction.

     What else explains Rydal’s curiously perverse, self-destructive behaviour outlined in the opening pages of Highsmith’s novel, when he chooses to help Chester dispose of the Greek agent’s body in the cleaning cupboard of an Athenian hotel? ‘Rydal didn’t know why. It had been such a fast decision,’ Highsmith writes.
²⁶
Rydal is motivated by the irrational, by a desire to live out a fantasy both with Chester, who reminds him of his dead father, and Colette, who resembles a cousin he was accused of raping at the age of fifteen. But he recognises that what spurs him on is beyond explanation, as he writes to his brother. ‘ “I am using this man for my own inner purposes . . . A psychological purge by some sort of re-enactment that I don’t even understand yet is going on in me.” ’
²⁷
Highsmith, of course, was herself prone to similar elaborate psychodramas, in which she used friends, lovers, even strangers to play out certain patterns from her past; an urge articulated by Rydal in the novel. ‘He remembered Proust’s remark, that people do not grow emotionally. It was rather a frightening thought.’
²⁸

     The love-hate bond between the two male protagonists, a relationship which clearly worried Highsmith’s editors and which the writer described as a ‘game of shadowing’,
²⁹
also has a precedent in Dostoevsky’s text.

     Reality, consciousness and self-awareness, as expressed in
The Two Faces of January
, equal alienation, nausea and hellishness. When Chester, who spends most of the book staggering about in an alcohol-induced daze, contemplates his own real identity he feels distinctly uncomfortable. ‘It was he. It was awful.’
³⁰
Similarly, the narrator of
Notes from Underground
comments, ‘to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness . . . any consciousness at all is a sickness’.
³¹
Writing the book, Dostoevsky’s narrator concludes, was a form of ‘corrective punishment’.
³²
At times, such a motive could also be said to drive Highsmith herself.

New Hope, situated on the banks of the Delaware River in Bucks County, was an idyllic place in the late fifties, early sixties. ‘New Hope was a beautiful little town, with a very European look and almost a fairy-tale feel,’ says Peggy Lewis, who worked as the book review editor of the
Bucks County Life
and who was a friend of Highsmith’s from New York. ‘It was a very pleasant place to live, people felt very warm towards each other and we had street fairs once a year.’
³³
The area was also well known for its artistic connections. In the nineteenth century Bucks County, named after the English county of Buckinghamshire following William Penn’s settlement of the territory in 1680, acted as a haven for painters seduced by the sylvan charms of the countryside and during the 1930s and 1940s a wide range of literary figures, many from New York, bought properties in the region. Nathanael West, together with his brother-in-law S.J. Perelman, owned a converted farm in Erwinna; Dorothy Parker lived in Pipersville as did James A. Michener; Nobel Prize winner Pearl Buck resided in nearby Perkasie; in the early fifties Arthur Koestler bought an island in the Delaware River, near New Hope, and the town itself was home to the famous Bucks County Playhouse, opened in 1939. ‘In the glittering thirties and forties, so many nationally famous literary figures owned country homes in Bucks County,’ says biographer Dorothy Herrmann, ‘that the New York press dubbed the area ‘the Genius Belt’.
³⁴

     Running parallel to the writing – and rewriting – of
The Two Faces of January
, Highsmith busied herself by working on a clutch of short stories such as ‘Camera Finish’, published in
Cosmopolitan
in 1960 and ‘The Terrapin’, which a year after its publication in
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
in 1962 won a ‘Raven’ award from the Mystery Writers of America. She also dashed off regular book reviews for
Bucks County Life
– writing about subjects as diverse as America in the thirties, prehistoric Crete, and the anatomy of prisons – and thought about how she could develop an idea she had had for a second lesbian novel. In May 1960, she thought about writing a sequel to
The Price of Salt
, but as she couldn’t figure out how to introduce Therese into the narrative, she concluded that it would be better to think up a batch of new characters. Later in the year, in December, she jotted down her thoughts on a possible book written under her pseudonym of Claire Morgan. Each of the seven scenarios would outline one of her past relationships. ‘Possibly each story told from older and younger point of view,’ she said. ‘Complete new beginning & end of each.’
³⁵
Then in January 1961, she sketched the basis for an incomplete, unpublished novel to which she originally gave the working title, ‘Girls’ Book,’ before settling on
First Person Novel
.