Beautiful Shadow (54 page)

     Just as Mary’s attitude towards her daughter was sullied by the resentment she felt towards the women in Pat’s life, so the writer’s relationships with her lovers were constantly undermined by the damaged foundations that lay beneath her emotional attachment to her mother. At the end of 1964, Highsmith wrote a number of poems expressing her tortured inner life. She wrote of her complex feelings of love and hatred, expressing both the tenderness and the sadistic impulses that welled inside her. ‘Small wonder I would both kiss your feet/And imagine beating you cruelly.’
³¹
Two days later, she wrote another autobiographical poem charting the roots of her ambiguous feelings back to her childhood, when she had to stifle and repress the love she had felt for girls – ‘resentment was my second emotion’, she said.
³²
X had accused her of both loving and hating women, a contradictory response Highsmith accepted. In the new year, Highsmith wrote to Alex Szogyi about the problems in her new relationship, of her jealousy of X’s family and the fact that they had more contact with her than she did. Whenever the two women did manage to spend time together, she felt as though there was an atmosphere of ‘something snatched’,
³³
and, instead of being spontaneous and enjoyable, sex had become vulgar and embarrassing. ‘I have never been a sex fiend, it’s always been fun, the greatest pleasure, something one doesn’t think about for days, and then one does – but this is when things are calm, and one sleeps every night with the person one loves . . .’ she wrote to Alex. ‘I have accused her of teasing me and other things not pleasant . . . She accused me of inner violence (not physical).’
³⁴

     When Highsmith made a short trip to Paris in March 1965, X seemed to resent the fact that she had travelled with Daisy Winston, even though the writer explained that she had no longer felt any ‘emotional involvement’ for her old friend whatsoever.
³⁵
According to Highsmith, her lover threatened to cancel a holiday to Venice the two women had planned for May, a trip Pat had been looking forward to throughout the long, dreary winter. She was baffled as to how to progress. Eventually, however, the two women sorted out their problems, temporarily at least, and in mid-May they arrived in Venice. They stayed in a hotel close to the house where John Ruskin once lived and worked, and it was while in the watery city that Highsmith conceived the idea for the Venice-set novel,
Those Who Walk Away
. After ten days in Venice, she travelled alone to Rome, where she stayed with Ellen Hill for a week, and then to Positano to see her cat, Spider. In Positano, she met by accident the novelists Edna O’Brien and Brigid Brophy, but Highsmith, who loathed the ‘literary scene’, tried to keep her distance – she was, as she admitted to Kingsley, ‘not very sociable’.
³⁶

     Sir Michael Levey, former director of the National Gallery and Brophy’s widower, recalls the meeting and tells how, over time, he and his wife became friends of the writer. ‘I, in particular, was eager to convey my admiration to her. But I had no preconceived idea of the writer and barely realised it was she when our party was joined by a rather severe-seeming woman, looking neither young nor old, with a shock of untidy, straight, dark hair, and casually dressed in buff safari jacket, open shirt, khaki chinos and moccasins. Perhaps it was the moccasins that raised Red Indian associations. I came to think that there was something of the Red Indian about Pat’s appearance and even her manner, while the clothes she wore that evening became familiar, in my experience, as her unvarying uniform.

     ‘Although notably silent that evening, she appeared less shy than reserved, and by no means ill at ease sitting among strangers. Enthusiasm of the kind I wanted to convey seemed to cause her mild amusement, and she responded with a grunted yet not unfriendly, ‘Ugh, huh’, which I would later recognise as a typical Pat conversational response. She was far from intimidating, however, nor at all aloof. Rather, I had the impression of a personality quietly idiosyncratic and distinctly intriguing, whom one would like to know better.

     ‘I doubt whether she and Brigid talked much on that occasion. Each of them had, in her own way, the capacity – indeed, a preference – for silence in lieu of uttering social banalities . . . Nevertheless, I think that some sort of rapport must have been established between them . . . What Brigid enjoyed in Pat’s company – and, I would guess, vice versa – was especially the sharpness of mind and the sardonic, frequently deadpan humour . . . Although it would be rash to try to sum up a person one did not know well, I retain a very clear sense of Pat’s personality. Never getting close to it actually was, I would say, part of its spell. It embodied “cool”, though coolness might have been achieved only after considerable turmoil, emotional and otherwise. That is pure hypothesis, yet hints seemed to lurk, indicating if not earlier unhappiness then earlier vulnerability. By the time we met her, Pat appeared solitary but not lonely, profoundly self-contained but not at all self-assertive – always friendly, kind and notably courteous in behaviour, despite her inner reserve . . . She seldom, if ever, referred to her books, and it was hard to make much correlation between her and the writer of them, except that their protagonists are so often loners of some sort.’
³⁷

     Back in Suffolk, Highsmith spent the summer plotting
Those Who Walk Away
, writing it between October 1965 and March 1966. During this time she barely saw her married lover and the couple did not sleep together, sending Highsmith into another dark depression. ‘Some of my blackest days – I passed then,’ she later recalled, adding that she turned to her doctor for a prescription of barbiturates.
³⁸
In September, she travelled to Mallorca, where in Deya she met the poet Robert Graves, whom she described as having ‘an air of self-esteem and smugness’.
³⁹
She caught a boat from Palma to Barcelona, journeying on to Paris, and stopping briefly at Koestler’s house in Alpbach, Austria.

     In December, she had another dream about Lynn Roth – she had last dreamt about her ‘girl of magic’
⁴⁰
in August – in which her former lover was five-months pregnant. On seeing her waters break, Highsmith said that she was sorry as she wished the child could have been hers. ‘I wanted us to have one,’ she said.
⁴¹
In the same entry, she said that it was obvious she longed to have someone to love and feel the same way about her. ‘I have reached (again),’ she said, ‘a point of preferring to forget that the person I am supposed to love exists.’
⁴²

Highsmith’s passion for snail-breeding paid off when in January 1966
Nova
magazine bought her short story, ‘The Snail-Watcher’, for £70. The grotesque tale focuses on Peter Knoppert, whose passion for breeding the creatures results in his death. Trapped in his study, which has been colonised by snails, Knoppert uses a hose pipe to try and clear some space from the ceiling. A clutch of gastropods hits him on the head, he trips on the slimy floor, a sea of snails begin to crawl across and into him. As he cries for help, a creature slips into his mouth and then more slime their way across his eyes. Eventually he swallows one; he cannot breathe. The last thing he sees before losing consciousness is two snails making love on the rubber plant. ‘And right beside them, tiny snails as pure as dewdrops were emerging from a pit like an infinite army into their widening world.’
⁴³
In his introduction to the collection,
Eleven
, Graham Greene commented, ‘for pure physical horror, which is an emotion rarely evoked by Miss Highsmith, “The Snail-Watcher” would be hard to beat.’
⁴⁴

     Pat was still fascinated by the creatures she had first encountered in 1946 and she housed 300 snails in her back garden in Suffolk. According to those who knew her she became so fond of them she couldn’t travel without them.

     ‘After staying with her at her house in Suffolk, I met her the following week at a cocktail party in London,’ says Peter Thomson. ‘She walked in with this gigantic handbag, which she then opened with pride and which contained a hundred snails and an enormous head of lettuce. She absolutely adored the snails, they were her companions for the evening.’
⁴⁵

     Her editor at Doubleday, Larry Ashmead, recalls that when Highsmith moved to France in 1967, she told him that she smuggled her pet snails into the country under her breasts. ‘You couldn’t take live snails into France so she was sneaking them in under her breasts,’ he says. ‘And that wasn’t just on one trip – no, she kept going back and forth. She said that she would take six to ten of the creatures under each breast every time she went. And she wasn’t joking – she was very serious.’
⁴⁶

     On return from a trip to Paris, in March, where she was due to help publicise the French edition of
The Glass Cell
, she completed another horror story about snails, ‘The Quest for Blank Claveringi’ about a professor of zoology, Avery Clavering, who, searching for a giant snail on an uninhabited island, is overwhelmed by the creatures. ‘Our hero kills the male,’ she wrote in her notebook, ‘but is overcome by the female, who leaves his corpse disdainfully for her little ones to devour – this he realizes as he is being eaten alive . . .’
⁴⁷
The tale ends on a wonderfully macabre note, as Professor Clavering, running into the sea, fleeing a fast approaching giant snail, muses over his fate. ‘He was waist-deep when he stumbled, waist-deep but head under when the snail crashed down upon him, and he realized as the thousands of pairs of teeth began to gnaw at his back, that his fate was both to drown and to be chewed to death.’
⁴⁸

     In October 1969, Highsmith thought about the possibility of writing a third story about snails, this one focusing on an apocalyptic, post-nuclear world in which all life on the planet has been destroyed except for snails. A spaceship carrying the last 150 members of the human race arrives on the planet and they set out to destroy the gastropods, many of which have mutated – some creatures sport two heads or have grown to giant proportions, some possess remarkable intelligence, while others have developed cannibalistic habits. The battle between the snails and the humans is a fierce one – the creatures proceed to attack the men and eat them – but a few people manage to flee back into the spaceship and escape. Unknown to them, however, there is a small batch of snail eggs on board.

In April 1966, just as Pat’s relationship with X had started to improve, her familial situation began to worsen to such an extent that she took the extreme step of writing a harsh letter to her mother. Highsmith tried to make her mother believe that she harboured no resentment towards her even though Mary deserted her and left her with her grandmother in Texas when she was twelve; nor did she feel any bitterness about the sniping remark her mother had made when she was fourteen, to the effect that ‘Why don’t you straighten up and fly right?’ Yet the fact that Highsmith chose to highlight these incidents suggests the opposite, that she could not forgive her mother for what she had done. She told her mother that she was quite happy. She enjoyed her life and the rewards her writing brought her. ‘If you would get rid of your guilt, it would make things better . . .’ she wrote. ‘If there is anything in the above you would like me to elaborate on, or clarify, I’ll be glad to. With much love.’
⁴⁹
Highsmith left the letter unsigned.

     Later in the year, Mary and Stanley Highsmith, who had moved back to Fort Worth, were referred to a psychiatrist by their doctor. At issue, as their psychiatrist correctly diagnosed in a letter to Highsmith, was their ‘conflicted’ relationship with their daughter. It was a conflict which had still to reach its inevitable and ugly conclusion.

     In June, Highsmith joined a friend, Elizabeth, in Paris, from where they drove down to Marseille and took a boat to Tunis, settling in Hammamet, which she described as a ‘real Arab village’,
⁵⁰
and which would form the setting for her next novel,
The Tremor of Forgery
. ‘We walked in the native quarter,’ she wrote in her notebook, ‘white arches, dirt street, but all more reasonably clean.’
⁵¹
The extent to which an individual exists without the framing presence of his or her normal society had intrigued Highsmith back in 1954 when she wrote
The Talented Mr Ripley
, but as she travelled through Tunisia, she became increasingly interested in the contrast between the so-called ‘civilised’ culture of Europe and the anarchy and unknowability of Africa. She likened the continent to an obese woman, stripped of her clothes, lying fast asleep in a comfortable bed, indifferent to any approach. Tunisia certainly inspired her senses – she wrote a travel piece about it for the
New Statesman
– but on her return from the six-week trip she told a journalist that she would never go back. ‘I got fed up with it – the petty thieving and things. It’s said to be the most progressive part of Africa – which is a terrifying thought.’
⁵²