Beautiful Shadow (59 page)

1968–1969

Highsmith’s sequel to
The Talented Mr Ripley
had a long gestation. In 1958, three years after publication of the first Ripley book in America, she toyed with the possibility of a follow-up, which she thought she might call ‘The Alarming Return of Mr Ripley’, and although nothing came of it, her amoral hero refused to die. At first he found expression in her novels under an assumed identity, particularly the fictional creation of Bartleby’s ‘The Whip’ in
The Suspension of Mercy
and Ingham’s character of Dennison in
The Tremor of Forgery
. In July 1965, while planning the unfinished television play, ‘Derwatt Resurrected’, she made the first notes for what would shape itself into the plot of the second Ripley novel,
Ripley Under Ground
, published in 1970. At this early stage, the story centred on an artist, Derwatt, who committed suicide, and whose friends claim to have witnessed him rising, like Jesus, from the dead. Another plot line, one which she would expand to form the basic narrative of the Ripley sequel, focused on the attempts of the dead man’s friends to exploit his reputation for their own financial benefit. ‘Bernard thinks of forging some paintings,’ Highsmith wrote in her notebook, ‘and the others, with one eye closed at first, fall in with it.’
¹

     In February of the following year she thought about how she could meld together a daring narrative with philosophical inquiry, noting how such an approach would be perfect for the second Ripley novel, in which she imagined her favourite character at the age of twenty-eight and having secured an education. The result, she said, would be a ‘more intellectual and funnier’ novel than
The Talented Mr Ripley
.
²
By October of 1968, she felt she was ready to start work on plotting the book in detail. In her thirtieth cahier, she outlined her initial thoughts regarding an art forgery plot centring on the manufacture of paintings supposedly done by Derwatt, whose death Ripley and his associates have kept secret from the world. As she imagined it, Ripley would be living near a French town with a ‘nice old lady’ housekeeper and a wife, ‘who is frequently away from home, pursuing her own affairs, since Tom is not very ardent in bed’.
³
Indeed, Ripley ‘cares nothing sexually about his wife’.
⁴
By 5 November she had broken down the story into a series of key points, which she detailed in her notebook. Ripley’s comfortable world would be shattered by the news that his art fraud is about to be exposed by the grumblings of an American collector convinced his Derwatt is a forgery and the arrival of Chris Greenleaf, Dickie Greenleaf’s cousin. Point nine in the list expressed the theme of the book: ‘Tom persuades Chris that a falsification can be as aesthetically satisfying as an original. In fact the falsifier has in his own way developed his talents, starting on Derwatt’s principles, so that one cannot tell where the one begins, the other ends.’
⁵
Ripley, as Highsmith saw it, would be characterised by ‘constant schizophrenia. He is happiest playing the role of someone else.’
⁶

     By Boxing Day, Highsmith had written 160 pages of the novel in four weeks, which she described as her ‘normal speed’ of work,
⁷
but which seems remarkable even for a writer of her prolificacy and in fact she confessed to Barbara Ker-Seymer that she was working in a ‘manic’ state.
⁸
Her imagination was stimulated by the newspaper coverage of the Mary Bell case – from 6 December issue of the
Daily Mail
she cut out the story headlined ‘murder for pleasure’, pasting it into her notebook – and towards the end of year she dreamt up a number of ideas for increasingly violent and horrific short stories.

     ‘A man asks a father for his daughter’s hand, and receives it in a box – the left hand,’ she scribbled in her notebook on 15 November.
⁹
The first sentence of the final version of the tale, ‘The Hand,’ which would appear as the first story in her 1975 collection,
Little Tales of Misogyny
, differs remarkably little from the cahier entry: ‘A young man asked a father for his daughter’s hand, and received it in a box – her left hand.’
¹⁰
On 17 December she had the idea about a young boy who slaughters the staff of a house-of-horrors wax museum and arranges the bodies like a gory tableaux, a story published as ‘Woodrow Wilson’s Neck-tie’, in
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
in 1972 and anthologised in Highsmith’s 1979 collection,
Slowly, Slowly in the Wind
.

     After the mania of the previous month, at the end of December Highsmith fell into a depressingly debilitating fatigue. She had experienced a setback in plotting the second Ripley book, ‘it won’t move’, she said,
¹¹
and she remained so dissatisfied with her play
When the Sleep Ends
that, in December, she suffered what she believed to be a nervous breakdown. ‘I continued, barely, to get out of bed in the morning, exceedingly late,’ she wrote to Barbara Ker-Seymer in January 1969. ‘At least now I can say I’ve had a breakdown, and I used to be a bit in awe of people who had had one, not really knowing what it is. It’s a particularly hellish mental and physical discomfort – at the bottom of which is frustration.’
¹²
During a visit to London in January 1969, to publicise the launch of
The Tremor of Forgery
, journalists noted that Highsmith’s beauty had started to fade. A writer for the
Guardian
described her as sitting ‘hunched back in an armchair, the light falling sharply on dilapidated, almost Mexican features. She smokes untipped Gauloise down to the last quarter inch. She runs her hand through her straight, now greying hair, making her fringe stand on end . . .’
¹³
Highsmith thought the piece was ‘pretty stinking all round’
¹⁴
, yet even her close friends had to acknowledge the accuracy of its physical description. ‘Pat’s face barely reveals the beauty she once was,’ wrote Cynthia Koestler in her diary,
¹⁵
after seeing Highsmith in the flesh at the house in Montpelier Square, and then on television, as one of the guests on
Late Night Line-up
. ‘A. [Arthur] thought her v. good,’ she added, ‘inarticulate & because of that the honesty coming through.’
¹⁶

     Retreating from reality once more, Highsmith took refuge in another, hopeless romantic fantasy, by pretending to herself that she was in love with a Parisian friend, Jacqueline. In a poem she wrote about her feelings towards Jacqueline, entitled ‘Togetherness’, which she composed in early January 1969, Highsmith refers to the ‘completely false love,/Made of imagination’.
¹⁷
Love, as she had said many times before, was nothing more than illusion, so why not use it to one’s advantage?

     Preoccupied by health problems, driven to distraction by the protracted rewrites of
When the Sleep Ends
and slowed down by domestic difficulties, the Ripley sequel had to be put on hold until May. When finally she settled down to look at the 190 pages of the manuscript, she said that she had been ‘interrupted badly’, but she thought that when finished it would be a ‘nice book, a good one’.
¹⁸
By 28 June she had completed 210 pages of the novel and, after a trip to Salzburg, in July, she decided to set the climactic scene in the Austrian city. From Salzburg, Highsmith travelled to Koestler’s chalet in Alpbach, where the two writers watched the moon landing on television. ‘On the telly was a picture of ghostly figures moving around a ghostly American flag, throwing an elongated, narrow shadow,’
¹⁹
wrote Cynthia Koestler in her diary. At lunch Highsmith and Arthur Koestler discussed ideas for his new novel. ‘He found the clue he was searching for for a novel on the madness of man . . .’ Cynthia added.
²⁰

     Highsmith finished the second Ripley novel, which she decided to call
Ripley Under Ground
, on her return to Montmachoux in August, and was so pleased with it she wrote in her diary, ‘I am afraid to say how much I like it.’
²¹
She continued polishing and cutting the manuscript in October, when she decided she would dedicate it to her Polish neighbours, Agnes and Georges Barylski, ‘my friends of France, 77’, a reference to the region of Seine-et-Marne.
²²
When Hester Green, who worked for the London literary agency A.M. Heath which represented Highsmith’s American agent in Britain, visited Pat with a friend during the summer of 1972, the writer took her guests to meet the Barylskis. For most of her stay, Hester recalls, Highsmith had seemed to be in a state of inner torment, hardly relaxing for a moment. It was only when the author was with Agnes and Georges Barylski that she calmed down. ‘It was extraordinary how when Pat took us to meet these friends of hers – who seemed to us to be simple farming people – she was like a different person,’ says Hester. ‘She was totally at ease with them as she could never be with anyone in the literary world.’
²³

Six years have passed since the last time we saw Tom Ripley, stepping off a ferry to discover that he had not only escaped punishment for his crimes, but had inherited a considerable sum of money from Dickie Greenleaf as well. Now age thirty-one, he has reinvented himself as a wealthy man of leisure living in the French countryside. Married to Heloise Plisson, the twenty-five-year-old daughter of a French pharmaceutical millionaire, Ripley lives in the magnificent surroundings of ‘Belle Ombre’, a large two-storey building made from grey stone, sporting four turrets over four round upstairs rooms, ‘making the house look like a little castle’,
²⁴
located in the fictional village of Villeperce-sur-Seine, which Highsmith said was inspired by the countryside of the Île-de-France. ‘Ripley now lives in a village about 15 miles from here,’ said the writer in 1972, when she was living in Moncourt.
²⁵
Although Ripley has no need to earn a living – his allowance from Heloise’s father keeps the couple in style – he supplements his income with regular ‘fence’ jobs for Reeves Minot, an American living in Hamburg, and the profits which flow in from Derwatt Ltd, an art forgery business.

     The plot centres on Ripley’s increasingly desperate measures to maintain his reputation. The public believe the painter Derwatt to be living as a recluse in a remote Mexican village, but in fact he has committed suicide by drowning and his body has never been found. When an American art collector Thomas Murchison questions the authenticity of a forged Derwatt, Ripley disguises himself as the artist in order to convince him that he is still alive. When this scheme fails, he invites Murchison over to France where he kills him in his well-stocked wine cellar. Whereas in the first novel, Ripley seemed to be motivated by repressed sexual desire, a yearning to lose his identity and take on the personality of another and a vision of fashioning a better life for himself, it is clear that in this book his various machinations have had a corrupting influence on his personality. He is no longer a gauche, insecure young man, but of ‘mystic origin, a font of evil’,
²⁶
a quality highlighted by the review in the
Times Literary Supplement
, which described Tom’s murders as those of a ‘contented psychopath, as if Ripley’s real inheritance from Dickie Greenleaf was not normality but the confidence to nourish and exercise abnormality’.
²⁷

     In
The Talented Mr Ripley
, it was quite clear that Tom’s motivation was shaped by his own, albeit unacknowledged homosexuality, yet in the sequel his sexual identity is almost opaque. He may have married at twenty-eight, but the union is far from romantic. Highsmith tells us that, during the wedding service in the south of France, Ripley’s face turned an unsightly shade of green, while on his honeymoon in Spain, Tom felt like he couldn’t make love because of the noise of a parrot singing
Carmen
. Whenever he and Heloise do have sex it was a strangely disconnected experience, one in which Ripley viewed himself from a detached perspective, ‘as if he derived pleasure from something inanimate, unreal, from a body without an identity’.
²⁸
Indeed, he regards his wife not so much as person, but as an object, comparing her to one of his pictures which line the walls of ‘Belle Ombre’, and likening her skin to polished marble. Although critics have attacked Highsmith’s Ripley novels for their one-dimensional portrait of Heloise – one writer in the
New York Times
described the character as ‘zombielike’
²⁹
– it should be remembered that the books, while written in the third person, present the world through the perspective of the criminal-hero’s warped vision. Reading the books could be compared to viewing a Derwatt painting, as if one was ‘looking at the picture through someone else’s distorting eyeglasses’.
³⁰