Beautiful Shadow (56 page)

     In Highsmith’s world – an environment like the cave of shadows portrayed by Plato – reality is insubstantial and constantly in flux. In
Those Who Walk Away
this is best illustrated by something as mundane as the protagonists’ attitude towards a scarf. On arriving in Venice, Ray passes a shop window displaying a floral-patterned, green, black and yellow scarf, which reminds him of his dead wife. Although she never possessed an item of clothing like it, he was sure she would have adored the scarf and so, on impulse, buys it. To Ray, the scarf acts as a talisman, as an associative aid to help conjure the memory of Peggy. But when his father-in-law sees it, he projects on to it his own feelings of loss and guilt – by taking hold of the scarf, which he believes Peggy once owned, he thinks he will hang on to a part of his dead daughter. The revelation, during his interrogation at the end of the novel, that Peggy never once held or wore it is all too much for Coleman. His vision of the truth, his interpretation of reality, crumbles.

     Similarly, Ray’s attitude towards love is revealed to be based on nothing more than fantasy, but at least it is an illusion of which he is aware. Towards the end of the novel, he realises that his affection for Elisabetta, a waitress in a coffee bar, is founded on a delicate, and fundamentally insubstantial, matrix of projected feelings. ‘Suddenly it seemed to him that love – erotic and romantic love – was nothing but a form or various forms of ego. Therefore the right thing to do was to direct one’s ego to recipients other than people, or to people from whom one expected nothing. Love could be pure, but pure only if it was unselfish . . . It was important that the objects of love be nothing but recipients, he thought again. Love was an outgoing thing, a gift that one should not expect to be returned. Stendhal must have said that, Proust certainly, using other words: a piece of wisdom his eyes had passed over in reading  . . .’
⁷¹

     Clearly autobiographical, the words could have been lifted straight out of one of Highsmith’s notebooks.

Chapter 22

This shimmery void

1967–1968

After the collapse of her latest relationship, Highsmith chose to leave England and move to the Île-de-France, the lush, forested countryside encircling Paris, defined by the eighteenth-century landscape painter Corot as the area bordered by the rivers Seine, Marne, Oise and Aisne, and a ‘royal fief
par excellence
’.
¹
Traditionally renowned as the birthplace of Gothic architecture – its cathedrals include Saint-Denis, Noyon, Laon, Senlis, Mantes, Soissons and Chartres – and the seat of the ancient French kingdom, it served as a pastoral paradise in which royalty and aristocracy built some of the most opulent palaces in the world: Versailles, Fontainebleau, Saint-Cloud, Meudon, Chantilly, Vincennes, Sceaux, Marly, Sevres and Malmaison. The Île-de-France was also famous for the quality of its light, described by one writer in 1929 as lending the ‘limpidity and delicacy of crystal to the song of the poet and the picture of the painter’.
²
Highsmith would move house four times over the course of the next thirteen years, yet she always chose to stay within a twenty-five-kilometre radius of Fontainebleau, at the southern edge of the Île-de-France, near to Nemours, with its medieval castle, and the fortified town of Moret-sur-Loing, where the impressionist painter Alfred Sisley had lived and worked, producing ‘glittering landscapes bathed in light’.
³

     Highsmith first had the idea of living in Fontainebleau in January 1967 during a driving tour with her friend Elizabeth. Together the two women drove from the French capital to Tours, from where Highsmith travelled by train to Montbazon en Touraine, where she was due to sit on a panel to judge the best short films at the Festival International du Court-Metrage. The jury comprised seven people, including Victor Vasarely, the Hungarian-born Op art painter; Slawomir Mrozek, the Polish playwright; the Japanese film star Keiko Kishi; Andrei Petrov, the Russian composer; the actor Guy Coté and the French novelist José Cabanis. The atmosphere of the occasion reminded her of Yaddo, she said, except for one important difference – a certain initial frostiness, which she put down to the fact that the other panellists were, like her, somewhat guarded, ‘more suspicious, more jealous of our (already gained) reputations’.
⁴
One lunch time, sandwiched between a table of yacking Tours’ women, a glass cage full of parakeets, and Vasarely and Cabanis talking, in French, about incomprehensible art theory, Highsmith felt like she wanted to scream. After being interviewed for television, Highsmith questioned, in her notebook, the validity of verbal expression, observing, ‘What a lot of nonsense, all this communicating! Foreign to most artists.’
⁵
From the film festival, Highsmith sent a card to Kate Levey, the daughter of Michael Levey and Brigid Brophy, on the back of which she had drawn a quick pen sketch of the jury members pretending to kill each other by firing bread pellets.

     In March, Elizabeth informed her friend that she had spotted a house she thought would be perfect for her – a two-bedroom, furnished property within a walled estate in Bois Fontaine – and, after going to see the house, Highsmith decided to take it. The rent would be the equivalent of $170 per month. ‘I look forward to a new life,’ she wrote to Alex Szogyi, ‘even though I am 46.’
⁶
The writer moved into 57 Rue Saint Merry in June, but on receipt of $26,000 from Columbia Pictures for the sale of the film rights of
Those Who Walk Away
(a movie which failed to materialise), Highsmith decided it would be better if she bought a house, costing $20,900, with Elizabeth in nearby Samois-sur-Seine, a charming village built of pale stone nestling next to the Seine.

     Highsmith moved to her new address at 20 Rue de Courbuisson in September. Her new home was a stone farmhouse with two doors, two bathrooms, and one kitchen. It was four minutes walk from the river, where one could swim. Elizabeth, who kept on her flat in Paris, and Pat were never anything more than just good friends but Highsmith was flattered that the fifty-nine-year-old woman she had known for nineteen years wanted to live with her. She should, however, have trusted her instincts when she wrote in a letter to Alex Szogyi, ‘I can never imagine that anyone can tolerate me.’
⁷
It was not an auspicious beginning. After lugging the furniture from eight rooms into one so as to paint and clean the house, Pat felt exhausted, ‘older than Methuselah’,
⁸
but instead of being praised by her friend for her efforts she was attacked. ‘You have a disorderly mind,’ Elizabeth barked at her. ‘The state of your room indicates a disorderly mind!’ Why, she wondered, had she chosen to align herself with yet another overly dominant woman? She admitted, as she wrote to Alex Szogyi, that she was ‘juvenile, self-centred, selfish, not mindful enough of work other people do for me, and in the last five years I can have a temper on occasion, especially when “Baited”.’
⁹
But surely she wasn’t to blame this time, was she? ‘I have a pattern of choosing people with whom I don’t feel comfortable,’ she continued in the same letter. ‘Maybe this is because I am attracted to perfectionists, people who boss me . . . (For goodness sake, don’t show this letter to a psychiatrist, for he would say, Highsmith is the nut!)’
¹⁰

     Pat and Elizabeth shared only the kitchen and living room – but even so, from the first day, they obviously found living together impossible. Rosalind Constable, who got back in touch with Pat in 1967 and to whom Highsmith dedicated
The Tremor of Forgery
‘as a small souvenir of a rather long friendship’
¹¹
, pleaded with her to wrestle herself free of the situation, even if she had to lose out financially. Did she, asked Rosalind, who visited Highsmith in October 1967 when Elizabeth was in New York, like to be bullied by small, fierce women? Weeks could pass by between Elizabeth’s visits, but nevertheless Pat found living in Samois physically and mentally depressing. Not only was she cold – the oil furnace which heated the house was on Elizabeth’s side of the house – but she felt like a shabby visitor messing up a stranger’s beautiful home. Her so-called friend had made her feel that the house ‘was not half mine, that my possessions were sordid, that I was hopelessly disorganized – by nature’,
¹²
and she hated the expense of living in France. She felt particularly outraged that a bottle of Johnny Walker Scotch cost her 35 francs.

As she endured yet more domestic difficulties, Highsmith tried to concentrate on writing her Tunisian novel,
The Tremor of Forgery
, which she started to plot in detail in January 1967 and which she completed and sent off to her publishers in February 1968. Graham Greene named the book as Highsmith’s finest, ‘and if I were to be asked what it is about I would reply, “Apprehension”.’
¹³
The unsettling nature of the prose is achieved not through sensational or violent action, but rather an uneasy sense that nothing is certain, that character, language and beliefs are equally fluid and subject to change. Like Camus’
L’Étranger
, Highsmith’s
The Tremor of Forgery
is an unnerving study in alienation, a work which should not be read as a work of crime fiction but as a serious, non-genre novel. The novel tells the story of thirty-four-year-old Howard Ingham, a divorced American writer who travels to Tunisia to wait for a film director, John Castlewood, with whom he is to work on a movie, only to hear that he has committed suicide. One night he awakens to see the door of his hotel bungalow open. Without thinking, he takes hold of his typewriter and throws it at a receding turbaned figure, who collapses on the terrace. Any evidence of the attack is cleared by hotel workers and although it is suspected that Ingham killed the Arab, nothing is certain; in fact we learn nothing more of the incident.

     Wrenched away from a familiar environment, Ingham feels he is gradually losing his bearings, and in the noisy surroundings of Melik’s, the local restaurant, he likens himself to a small, empty, silent room boxed in by the larger one of the outside world. To pass the time, he starts working on a novel, a book which he originally entitles
The Tremor of Forgery
, about a man, Dennison, who leads a double life and who, like the imaginative creations of Highsmith’s other writer-protagonists, such as Sydney Bartleby’s character of ‘The Whip,’ can be likened to Ripley. ‘His book was about a man with a double life, a man unaware of the amorality of the way he lived’.
¹⁴

     Like Highsmith herself, Ingham occupies a world confused by the constant intertwining of reality and fantasy, an environment in which it is difficult to decide what is fake and what is authentic. While in Sousse, Ingham notices the counterfeit Levi’s on sale in shop windows, complete with the tell-tale label, ‘ “This Is A Genuine Pair of Louise” . . . The forgers had given up.’
¹⁵
(Highsmith would explore the issue of forgery further in her next novel,
Ripley Under Ground
.) Just as Ingham’s loss of identity echoes Dennison’s, so his life begins to parallel the triangular scenario he had imagined in his synopsis for
Trio
, the film he intended to make with John Castlewood. The boundaries between the real and the created become even more uncertain in the days after the typewriter incident. The Arab boys employed by the hotel deny all knowledge of the attack and it becomes relegated to the realms of illusion. Living in an alien environment has washed all traces of his self away.

     The sojourn in Tunisia strips Ingham of his morals, breeds doubt and anxiety, even forces him to question the nature of his sexuality. North Africa was notorious for its blurring of masculine sexual identity, and in Tunisia, as Highsmith writes in the book, boys could be bought for sex for half a packet of cigarettes. In the early stages of plotting the novel, in January 1967, Highsmith visualised the central character as a recently divorced man who has an affair with an Arab boy, ‘because he reverts to childhood – consequent shame’,
¹⁶
but in the final version she toned this down to a mere frisson of temptation due to his nervousness about exactly what to do with a boy in bed, which was, as she writes in the book, (‘. . . Hardly a moral reason for chastity.) He [Ingham] was surrounded by a sea of Arabs who were still mysteries to him  . . .’
¹⁷