Beautiful Shadow (53 page)

     She went on to recommend that aspiring writers keep a notebook in which to jot down thoughts or ideas, that they should trust in the power of the unconscious and that they shouldn’t force inspiration. In addition, it was important to avoid those who negated the creative process, sometimes people
per se
. ‘The plane of social intercourse,’ she said, ‘is not the plane of creation, not the plane on which creative ideas fly . . . This is a curious thing, because sometimes the very people we are attracted to or in love with act as effectively as rubber insulators to the spark of inspiration.’
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She devoted subsequent chapters to the suspense short story, the use of personal experience, the development of the story, plotting, the first and second draft and a detailed analysis of the problems she had encountered while trying to write
The Glass Cell
. She was, she said, constantly aware of the possibility of failure; it was, simply, an occupational hazard. ‘I have dwelt as much on my failures as successes here,’ she wrote, ‘because one can learn a lot from failures. By revealing my sometimes formidable losses of time and effort and the reasons, perhaps I can save other writers from suffering the same things.’
⁷

     Although she never particularly liked to discuss her work in interviews, she did expand on the points she had covered in
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
in a short piece she wrote for another book,
Whodunit? A Guide to Crime, Suspense and Spy Fiction
, edited by H.R.F. Keating. She had no hard and fast rules when writing a novel, she said; neither did she set out with a definite kind of reader in mind. Her ideas began ‘with a situation of surprise or coincidence, some unusual circumstances, and around this, and forward and backward, I create a narrative with a beginning and an end.’
⁸
She liked to write three or four hours a day and she often found it helpful to take regular breaks and do something manual and non-creative, such as washing the dishes. It was while she was in this state, she said, that her mind was able to make a creative leap. ‘Hard thought never did me very much good,’ she wrote. ‘I believe in letting one’s mind alone.’
⁹
In ideal conditions, she said, she could write 2,000 words a day, but in reality such circumstances only presented themselves every other day. She wished she could use the method adopted by one famous author who said that he bashed out the action parts of the story first, only going back to fill in details later. She, however, had to write everything down as she went along. ‘Maybe this is inevitable because of the subjective attitude I generally take: I describe what is in the head of the protagonist, psychopath or not, because what is in his or her head must explain as well as advance the story.’
¹⁰

     Ronald Blythe remembers how seriously Highsmith took her work. ‘She didn’t think of herself as a writer of detective fiction at all,’ he says, ‘but she liked the idea of suspense and she was fascinated by amorality. We used to talk about books and our work – how she had done seven pages or whatever that day and how I had done 700 words or so. Although her novels didn’t really appeal to me at first, they intrigued me and eventually I saw how they reflected her. She had a great memory for details and often she would write out bits of conversation we had had in her books. One did feel sometimes as if one was subject matter. It’s difficult to describe her in a way, except as an artist. She saw herself as a very serious writer.’
¹¹

     In March 1965, Highsmith felt so piqued that she wasn’t getting the respect she deserved from her French publishers, Calmann-Lévy, that she wrote to Robert Calmann-Lévy to tell him that she had signed a contract with a rival publishing house, Laffont. Money wasn’t so much an issue – as she said, ‘It is Laffont with prestige and Gallimard with money, & I prefer prestige.’
¹²
What annoyed Highsmith was the fact that Calmann-Lévy had released her books so slowly in France that she had ‘four novels, written in the last years, that are unpublished’.
¹³
The staff at Calmann-Lévy were so shocked by what they saw as her rather impulsive behaviour that editor Manès Sperber wrote a letter expressing his astonishment. Surely, he said, it would have been better to raise this matter with Calmann-Lévy first before she rushed into a contract with another publishing house? As it was, Calmann-Lévy had not even been given the opportunity to see the manuscripts of the two novels Highsmith thought they had rejected –
The Two Faces of January
and
The Glass Cell
. The problem, he outlined, was one of sales – the company could not publish all her novels in quick succession because, ‘the commercial reasons to do it were rather weak; on the other hand, it was extremely difficult to arouse the public attention your great talent deserves.’
¹⁴

     Highsmith wrote back, explaining how she did not make the decision lightly, but after the rejection, in America, of
The Two Faces of January
and
The Glass Cell
by Harper’s – books subsequently published by Doubleday – she felt compelled to take action. ‘As for Calmann-Lévy, I have felt for three years that I might as well have been dead as far as they are concerned,’ she wrote to Sperber.
¹⁵
Why had she not heard about the publication of
This Sweet Sickness
, which was, she said, ‘so well received in the United States and in England, chosen by Hitchcock for his hour TV programme, and now in the Perennial Library (pocketbook) of Harper & Row’?
¹⁶
After the heated exchange of letters, Calmann-Lévy offered to publish
This Sweet Sickness
as
Ce mal étrange
in 1966, agreeing to an increase in her advance from the usual $200 to $500, and continued to act as her French publisher after the expiry of Highsmith’s contract with Laffont – who would publish three of her books,
The Two Faces of January
,
The Glass Cell
, and
The Suspension of Mercy
. ‘I have always considered your novels not as crime-stories,’ wrote Sperber in a letter to Highsmith, ‘but as a peculiar kind of psychological fiction.’
¹⁷

Like the character of Sydney Bartleby in
A Suspension of Mercy
, Highsmith expressed a desire to write for television. ‘Would love to learn to write for TV,’ she told Peggy Lewis. ‘I now have a set, on the rental plan, which is what all the English do – and never buy one, as the models change too quickly,’
¹⁸
a line she used, in a slightly different form, in the first chapter of
A Suspension of Mercy
.

     One Sunday, in early May 1965, Highsmith was at home in Bridge Cottage, when she received a call from the BBC. Would she be able to give them a 250-word synopsis of a play by the next day? They had seen an old script of the story, which had originally started life as a synopsis for an eighty-page novella for American
Cosmopolitan
. The magazine turned it down, but Highsmith subsequently sold it to television in the USA and the BBC wanted to know whether it could be brought up to date. Mary Highsmith was staying with her daughter at the time, and so Highsmith locked herself in the study and in under two hours wrote an outline of the story she initially called ‘The Prowler’. ‘I got the assignment – L600 it was,’ she wrote to her stepfather later.
¹⁹
The deadline for submitting the play was 25 June, and although she admitted that it was ‘quite full of old-fashionedness and corn’,
²⁰
it was accepted. It was broadcast on BBC1 on 22 September as ‘The Cellar’, as part of
The Wednesday Thriller
series. From reading the script, however, it’s obvious that dialogue was not Highsmith’s forte. In fact, the play is populated by characters who are nothing more than murder mystery stereotypes, including an hysterical wife, Hilda, a duplicitous husband, George, and Peggy, an over-zealous mistress.

     Although Highsmith’s later experiments in screenwriting were equally unsuccessful, her aspirations did not go to waste, as her second Ripley novel,
Ripley Under Ground
, published in 1970, grew out of a play she had planned to write for television. She started work on the plotting of the screenplay, which she entitled ‘Derwatt Resurrected’, in July 1965, drawing inspiration from the death of her ex-lover, the painter Allela Cornell. ‘Ripley was not in it at all,’ she told Julian Jebb, who would later become a close friend, ‘but it had to do with a painter who had died. Actually something of the same thing happened in my own life, a great friend of mine died, age twenty-nine, a woman . . . I for one showed a portfolio of her work on 57th Street and they said, “It’s very good, but we’re really not interested in dead painters, there’s no use in having a show.” So that was the end of that. I never thought about it for fifteen years and then it occurred to me that with rather crooked fraud someone could continue painting in the same style.’
²¹
The problem with writing a play, she told an interviewer from
The Times
, was the fact that ‘It doesn’t form itself in my mind in the same way as a novel because there you can show what a person’s thinking without other people knowing.’
²²
In a novel she would not hesitate in shaping her characters according to her will, but, as she wrote in her notebook in March 1977 (after four months of trying, and once again failing, to write a television drama), when she was working on a script she always tended to see the characters as ‘living people whom I can’t touch, rearrange, change’.
²³

     On finishing the synopsis of ‘The Prowler’ or ‘The Cellar’, Highsmith unlocked her study to be met by her enraged mother whom she could hear ‘yacking’ outside the door. The relationship between the two women was already strained but the visit culminated in an attempt by Mary to attack her daughter with a coat hanger – ‘fortunately I looked over my shoulder on that occasion’.
²⁴
Highsmith called a local doctor, who prescribed sedatives for both women and after the six-day trip was over, she was left feeling emotionally exhausted. She was convinced her mother was suffering from manic-depression, while friends were less kind, simply labelling her as ‘mental – their word for insane’.
²⁵

     In March 1964, Mary had written her daughter a twenty-nine-page diatribe which Highsmith called an ‘insane blast . . . dredging up all the sludge of ancient time’,
²⁶
adding that her mother was ‘a bitter old woman with nothing else to do’.
²⁷
In the letter Mary articulated a whole range of issues which clearly bothered her, some dating back to the time when Highsmith was at Yaddo. ‘Then I learned to my horror you flatly lied about me to Mamma to the effect that I was jealous of you being at Yaddo,’ she said. ‘God how that information shook me . . . Ever since I ever looked at you I lived to serve you & give you all the things I never had & do everything I could for you & I’ve not changed one iota . . . Yes, I know why you burst in tears at the drop of a hat. It’s because you have to live with you and it’s your conscience. I’ve seen you drop a friend without a qualm – I hate to witness it but I hate lying more.’
²⁸
The letter, the first of many vituperative attacks on her daughter, left Highsmith feeling upset for several days after reading it. ‘I had to puncture this festering abscess,’ was Mary’s parting shot, ‘I’ve lost nothing because we cannot face the future without confronting the past. It was constantly between us. If it separates us completely – let it. I’ve lost nothing – because I had nothing.’
²⁹
In her diary, Highsmith tried to analyse her mother’s motives, believing them to spring from jealousy of her relationship with X. ‘She wants my attention, devotion, etc. hence is so jealous of the women in my life.’
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