Beautiful Shadow (61 page)

     Highsmith wrote most of these satirical, acid-drop stories during the first few months of 1969. ‘All the women,’ she said in a letter to Kingsley, ‘come to terrible, well-merited ends, need I say.’
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Written as transgressive fairy stories, the tales include Oona, the ‘jolly’ cavewoman used as the local easy lay by a tribe of men and killed by a jealous wife; the coquette bludgeoned to death by her lovers, who subsequently get away with her murder; and the middle-class housewife who attends a women’s lib protest to put forward her conservative views and who is killed by a blow to her temple by a tin of baked beans. By 10 March, she had written seven such stories.

     The issue of Highsmith’s misogyny still divides critics. In 1985, Kathleen Gregory Klein argued that ‘almost unconsciously Highsmith validates the concept of women as appropriate victims of murder or violence’,
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an idea questioned by Philippa Burton, whose statistical survey of her work suggests that the writer cast more men than women as victims.
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But what did those closest to the author think? Did Highsmith really hate women? ‘If she were a man I would have no doubt in saying that she was a misogynist,’ says her friend Barbara Roett. ‘The only aspect of sex she talked about to me was the feeling that she wasn’t a woman, and she didn’t quite understand what women were about.’
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This view is reinforced by the actress Heather Chasen, who first met Highsmith in the sixties. ‘Pat didn’t like women,’ she says. ‘I always thought she had a mind like a man and she really got on much better with men. Of course, she fancied women but I don’t think she really
liked
them.’
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In a letter Highsmith wrote to Ronald Blythe, she expressed the opinion that, in many ways, men were superior to women, in that they generally possessed, ‘a straight-forwardness, a sense of humor about sex, and a happy-go-lucky attitude sometimes toward sexual intercourse, for which I greatly admire them. Women can be so lugubrious and tedious about sex, always saving it – and for what and for whom?’
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     When Highsmith was questioned about her attitude towards women by the writer Bettina Berch in 1984, she confessed that she loathed the feminist movement, which she believed to be headed by harridans who were always ‘whining, always complaining about something’.
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A woman who married, became pregnant and then moaned about the drudgery of her life only had herself to blame, she said. ‘And she didn’t foresee that [if] she got married and had the two kids, she’d be stuck in this particular trap[?]’ Highsmith added. ‘So this is why women mainly bore me . . .’
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When feminists asked her whether she was discriminated against she would reply, ‘Not one bit . . . I had a job, age twenty-one, twenty-two, had a job in New York . . . never did I feel myself discriminated against. And I’m not going to have it poked down my throat. Because I never had it from men.’
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     The idea of women in a library appalled her, the thought that they could be menstruating at the same time as reading was disgusting, she said. The writer Michael Kerr – a friend of Charles Latimer’s – remembers Highsmith telling him, ‘that she preferred men in lots of ways. Women, she said, were dirty, physically dirty.’
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In the early 1940s, Highsmith wrote that she found her own sex to be ‘pitifully passive’,
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stating that, in their intellectual capacities, she admired and respected men over women. ‘A woman’s stupidity, absence of imagination, her childlike, retarded cruelty, cannot be equalled in the animal kingdom,’ she noted in 1942. ‘Men’s energies are naturally more constructive and therefore more healthy  . . .’
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     Her position on the issue was complicated by the feelings she had forced herself to repress as a young girl. In late 1964, in a poem she wrote to X, her married lover, she spoke of how she realised that the emotions she felt for her own sex had had to be stifled and, as a result, she grew up feeling bitter and resentful. In the poem she writes of the time when, age sixteen, she had seen a heterosexual couple walking hand in hand down the street and how envious she had felt. ‘Now you say I hate as well as love/Women, and you are quite right./They have the power to hurt me.’
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     Yet her ambivalent responses to her own sex – her idolatry of women and its concomitant enmity – were, Vivien De Bernardi believes, symptomatic of a larger misanthropy. ‘Kingsley told me – which I think is a perfect phrase – that Pat was an equal opportunity offender,’ says Vivien. ‘You name the group, she hated them. She said awful things about everything and everybody, but it wasn’t personal. It was just hot air coming out – she opened her mouth and out it came. It sounds bizarre, but although she said terrible things, she wasn’t really a nasty person.’
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     For all her contradictory feelings towards women, she did not intend her
Little Tales of Misogyny
to be taken as serious attacks on her sex; rather, she conceived them as satires whose purpose it was to entertain. While writing the stories – which won the Grand Prix de l’Humour Noir in 1977, a prize shared with the illustrator Roland Topor – she told Alex Szogyi, ‘frankly, I laugh myself – onto the floor, or such, the kind of laughter that makes tears at the same time . . . Thus I approach the real joy of a writer – or any other artist – amusing other people . . .’
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A few years later she confessed to Barbara Ker-Seymer that two of the stories, ‘The Breeder’ and ‘The Middle-class Housewife,’ were actually inspired by anecdotes told to her by her married lover, X. When Highsmith sent X the tales, her ex-lover was far from amused. ‘My misogyny she had always found one of my less endearing qualities,’ she wrote.
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Although Highsmith maintained that she found these stories absolutely hilarious, X hated them to such an extent that she told Pat it would be better if the collection was never published. ‘I consider it satire, not misogyny,’ was Highsmith’s response.
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     Highsmith had pondered the nature of her sexual self since she was a young girl, often describing herself as having a male identity. But in the spring of 1969, Highsmith’s not altogether serious view of herself as a man in a woman’s body was confirmed by the outside world when strangers started to mistake her for a member of the opposite sex. Even though she had long hair and wore a touch of lipstick and a necklace, waiters would stop Highsmith, in her white Levis, as she was entering the ladies’ and say, looking aghast, ‘Monsieur, not THAT door’. She blamed this on the fact that she had enormous feet and skinny thighs, but the experience was, quite clearly, an unnerving one. ‘This of course contributes to my current schizophrenia,’ she wrote to Barbara Ker-Seymer.
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     Plagued by another bout of insomnia – she had not been to sleep before 3 a.m. since November of the previous year – accompanied by loneliness and mania, she felt that she was going slightly mad. The bureaucracy of the French and what she saw as the unreliability of its people made her feel as if she was trapped within a Kafkaesque nightmare. During one interview with a French journalist she commented, ‘I feel like Alice in Wonderland here, it is a country where people break dates, lie . . . but I continue in this battle which I shall lose.’
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Her uncertain liaison with her Parisian friend, Jacqueline, was another destabilising influence and although she tried to remain detached, Highsmith let herself be drawn into another unfulfilling, one-sided relationship. ‘I am quite in love with her,’ she wrote to Alex Szogyi, ‘but as I think I said, I try to “keep my distance” for self-protection.’
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While visiting Jacqueline at her apartment in Paris, where Pat had gone for a round of interviews, the constant ringing of the telephone made Highsmith so tense that she stomped into the kitchen, ripped down a twelve-foot-long curtain and proceeded to throw it into the bath on the grounds that she thought it was filthy and needed cleaning. Jacqueline could not bear her friend’s eccentricities any longer. ‘Jacky was so furious,’ Highsmith wrote to Alex, ‘she pulled my hair and slapped my face . . . Yet she loves me very much, oddly. She made a speech that she does not want me to stay at the house again.’
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     In April, Pat channelled her feelings of disjointedness and fractured self-identity into the creation of a story about schizophrenia, which she would name ‘One is a Number You Can’t Divide’. The story centres on the experiences of a young woman, Evelyn, who sees no meaning in life. After breaking off her engagement with her boyfriend, she goes to see a psychiatrist without success, but on the way back from her appointment she meets a mysterious woman, who gives her a reason to carry on. Although ‘One is a Number You Can’t Divide’ was not published during her lifetime, the tale can be seen as an articulation of Highsmith’s deep anxieties and psychological conflicts, as well as her undying belief that she might find salvation through the love of another woman. Despite all the evidence to the contrary – her string of unhappy affairs and her inability to live intimately with another person – Highsmith forced herself to believe that one day she would find happiness. But, like many of her relationships, the source of her solace was illusory, its existence fragile and transitory. ‘My self-esteem has a duration of not more than twenty-four hours,’ she said.
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As soon as Highsmith cured her crushing fatigue – eating raw beef upped her energy levels overnight, she said – she started to suffer from a cyst in her throat, a swelling which felt as hard as a misplaced bone. In April, she travelled to London where the problem was diagnosed as a fibroid on her thyroid, necessitating a stay in hospital. She also thought she was beginning to show the first signs of the menopause, alongside what she assumed were symptoms of an ulcer, telling Barbara Ker-Seymer that she had ‘been living under ulcerous mental conditions since June 1967’.
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     While in London, bored and frustrated with her play,
When the Sleep Ends
, Highsmith informed Martin Tickner of her dissatisfaction and told him he could appoint another writer if he so wished, a move which effectively erased her from the project. She was also introduced to Shelagh Delaney, a meeting organised by Charles Latimer. Although Highsmith thought it had gone swimmingly, describing the author of
A Taste of Honey
as friendly, Charles remembers the occasion rather differently. ‘I thought it would be an interesting meeting but it was just a nightmare,’ he says. ‘They just didn’t get on, mainly because of Pat’s crippling shyness. It was excruciating.’
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     Keen to get rid of her house in Earl Soham, Highsmith had arranged for Daisy Winston to fly over from America to help her clean the cottage and get it into a saleable condition. Their four days’ work paid off and in May, Highsmith received an offer of £3,000, a price which she eventually reduced by £500. The same month she also put the house which she had shared with Elizabeth in Samois-sur-Seine up for auction.

     Back in Montmachoux – which she jokingly called Mount My Shoes – Highsmith received a letter from Daisy confessing her love. Unfortunately, Pat no longer found Daisy attractive; she also acknowledged that she was forever cursed to fall in love with women who were fundamentally bad for her. ‘My gambling, my vice, my lure, my evil, is a woman who is not exactly honest . . .’ she wrote in her notebook. ‘It is the same things with my writing, an attraction for the evil. Not by any means, that I can consider myself the “good” side of this picture.’
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     She confessed that her character was becoming ‘increasingly misanthropic . . . an old tendency, now becoming stronger with age’,
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and, at forty-eight, worried by recent health problems, she started to think about her own mortality. As she sorted through her desk, she realised that she had three boxes of carbon paper – enough, she said, to last her the rest of her life. The thought so utterly depressed her that she was tempted to throw one box away.

     After finishing
Ripley Under Ground
and hearing the news that a short-story collection,
The Snail-Watcher and Other Stories
, was due to be published by Doubleday in the summer of 1970 and in Britain by Heinemann under the title
Eleven
, she felt optimistic about her work. In June, she received a commission to write a feature on Billy Wilder’s film,
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
(which was published in
Queen
magazine in November) and news that she would be paid $10,800 for a film option on
A Suspension of Mercy
. She also received a $2,000 advance for the collection of stories, which went on to sell 4,000 copies in its first week on sale in America. She felt confident that Graham Greene would write an introduction to the short story book – she thought of Arthur Koestler as a replacement – yet in November she heard that Greene’s agent was demanding a fee of $500; Doubleday, her American publishers, were only prepared to pay $100, and so she decided to make up the difference.