Beautiful Shadow (69 page)

     People who fell in love at first sight, rushed home to their parents to tell them the good news and subsequently married were, she thought, retarded. Rather, a more honest appraisal of the nature of love positions it nearer to the horrors of mental illness. How else could you explain the fact that so many people were prepared to sacrifice the safety and cosiness of their lives for the thrill of a new romance? ‘ “I am sorry. I must have been mad,” ’ Highsmith writes, imagining the words of one such man afflicted by the ‘condition’, before she concludes, ‘ “Yes, that’s it.” ’
⁶⁰

Chapter 27

The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot

1973–1976

During the autumn of 1973, Highsmith worried about the state of her health. Not only was she experiencing strange tingling sensations in her arms, which she put down to heavy gardening, but she was also plagued by digestive problems. She knew that she smoked too much – around twenty-three cigarettes, usually Gauloises, a day – and ate too little; the only food she could stomach were eggs, milk, mince and macaroni cheese. Rather than drink wine, she preferred beer and whisky, polishing off a bottle of Scotch every four days. In November, after a four-day publicity visit to Zurich, where she stayed at the Hotel Europe in a room complete with a trouser press that she imagined could double as a torture device, she returned home from the trip feeling wretched. Before she went to bed she felt nauseous and in the morning she was doubled-up with abdominal cramps and diarrhoea. The nervous strain of appearing on television, public readings and interrogation by journalists had taken its toll and it would, she said, take three or four days before she calmed down.

     She was also apprehensive about a forthcoming medical examination in London. But after being checked over by a Wimpole Street heart specialist, in early December, she was told that she had nothing serious to worry about. Of course, if she wanted to prevent herself from suffering symptoms such as muscular pain in her calves after a brisk walk, she would have to give up smoking. Highsmith tried to cut her consumption down by half, but it was only a matter of time before she started smoking heavily again.

     Highsmith spent Christmas and the first few weeks of the new year with Charles Latimer and his partner, the concert pianist Michel Block, in the Vallée du Lot region of France. ‘I found her to be a tender soul hiding sometimes behind a gruff manner,’ says Michel. ‘She was quite shy and this translated often into an almost unfriendly attitude towards strangers. There was an almost “joyless” approach to life, or maybe “puritanical” is a better word, which was evident not only in the choice, for instance, of Moncourt, a dismal but expensive little hamlet . . . as her place of domicile in France, but the way her house looked inside – bare, severe, not overly comfortable. The same could be said of her large but sad (walled) garden. She loved to tinker in it and I remember how happy she looked burning leaves and sharing a beer and a cigarette with us afterwards – very much, “one of the boys”.

     ‘Her taste in women was unfortunate. I think she was both attracted and repelled by emotions and maybe because of this she never had a very happy love life: her women, at least the two lovers I met, were vivacious, temperamental, but ultimately unloving persons. Pat was a 100 per cent reliable, thoughtful and dependable friend. She was not your typical American expatriate. She was, in my opinion, an “exile”, or maybe she was “in exile”. Yet it was quite obvious to me she didn’t particularly like France or the French. I was interested to hear her speak French, which up to that moment I didn’t think she did; it was rather fluent, indifferent and most of the time, pleasantly incorrect. The reason she lived there I think is the same reason she had lived previously in Italy and the UK: she was admired and respected as a writer in Europe.’
¹

     Once back in Moncourt, she started work on a number of short stories, including ‘Hamsters vs Websters’, one of the tales gathered together in
The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder
. At the beginning of March she travelled to London for a number of engagements to help publicise
Ripley’s Game
. On 6 March, she attended a party at Bill Holden’s bookshop in Regent’s Park and then the next day, she gave a reading from
Little Tales of Misogyny
at a public house on the Fulham Road to raise money for the Writers’ Action Group, the organisation created in 1972 by Brigid Brophy, Michael Levey, Maureen Duffy, Lettice Cooper and Francis King to campaign for the Public Lending Right. While in London, she met the Conservative MP and
Spectator
writer, Patrick Cosgrave – the two lunched together at the House of Commons – who described his meeting with her in a piece for the magazine. ‘I found chatting to her last week, that Patricia Highsmith is still vaguely annoyed when her books are reviewed along with the crime fiction . . .’ said Cosgrave. ‘But there is something else about her work, which came over even more strongly in conversation than it does on the printed page. Miss Highsmith is an excellent hater.’
²

     Her novels, he added, were ‘probably the most consistently excellent body of work of its kind produced since the war’.
³
An interviewer from the
Guardian
, whom she also met in London, described Highsmith as being cool, ‘not in the nasty chilly sense but in the slow movements, the slightly separate air, the intensely dark yet not intense eyes, the easy politeness.’
⁴
Yet he failed, or chose not to describe, the novelist’s demeanour, one which signified an overwhelming sadness; in the photograph, Highsmith’s sloe-black eyes seem haunted and desperately sad, and her face, for all its deep lines, looks like that of a confused and lost child.

     In early 1974, the blurring of fantasy and reality again left her feeling disoriented. In February, she dreamt that Ellen Hill wrote to her, declaring her love, and that Rolf Tietgens had died, visions she assumed were true for a couple of days afterwards. If Highsmith believed that each of her books was a fictional representation of her own internal wrestlings then her next novel,
Edith’s Diary
, was one of her most personal dialogues yet, a work which explores the seductive, pain-relieving power of the imagination. ‘Today I have the alarming feeling that fantasy alone keeps me going . . .’ she wrote in her notebook just before starting to plot the book, an opinion she acknowledged she had voiced many times before.
⁵

Before Highsmith could embark on what many regard as one of her greatest novels, the writer received a letter from her cousin, Dan Coates, requesting her presence in Texas; it was obvious Mary could not cope alone. At the end of September, Highsmith flew to Fort Worth, where she saw at first hand the sordid condition of her mother’s house. There was so much rubbish in the Martha Lane property that Highsmith was forced to squeeze herself through the window in order to open the door. She was met by a shocking sight – a fridge full of rotting food, a sink breeding green slime, countless unwashed dishes, carpets covered in nearly a foot of newspapers and letters, cigarette butts, ashtrays and wigs lying in chaotic heaps throughout the rooms. Her mother resisted every move to clean up the house and when Highsmith picked up an old envelope and dropped it into a bin, Mary screamed at her to put it back where she found it.

     Although they managed to acquire a power of attorney form from a lawyer, Highsmith and Dan Coates realised it was hardly worth trying to present it to Mary, since she would no doubt have refused to sign it. During her time in Texas, Highsmith thought it best if she slept at her cousin’s ranch, twenty-five miles away. ‘Pat could not handle the fact that her mother was developing Alzheimer’s,’ says Don Coates. ‘I think she could not accept that this might happen to her too.’
⁶
‘I didn’t think Pat was very fair with Mary,’ says his brother, Dan. ‘What the hell difference does it make if something had pissed you off back when you were younger? I think Pat should have forgiven her mother and even if she did have to take some crap off Mary she should have come to visit. That was one aspect of her personality I didn’t agree with. But you can like the person without having to like everything they do.’
⁷

     After Fort Worth, Highsmith spent some time in New York, where she met up with her editor Bob Gottlieb, friends Rosalind Constable, Lil Picard, Alex Szogyi and Rose Martini – who with her addiction to the telephone and constant mantra of ‘Communication is everything’, inspired the short story ‘The Network’ – and cousin Millie Alford, who gave her a letter from her mother. This last surviving letter from Mary Highsmith, dated 31 September, served to sever communication between the two women for ever.

Well, you’ve done it – broken my heart – yet gave me a freedom I’ve not felt in many years. How sorry for you I am. That you could use the word to me that you used in describing the man you asked to adopt you. Many describe him as the finest man they have ever met – a gentle man. Better to you than your own blood father – wanted no man’s money. Only wanted the best for you. Stanley and I made a great mistake – giving you everything we could . . . It’s good you never had children – they’d be forever criticized and then never come up to your demands. You can think of no one but yourself . . . Don’t write – I shan’t.
⁸

She signed the letter, not ‘Mother’, but a frosty and formal ‘Mary Highsmith’.

     On 6 August 1975, Mary Highsmith went out to lunch to a nearby diner, forgetting to extinguish a cigarette she had left burning. While she was out, a fire started which soon engulfed the house, destroying all her clothes, the piano, the paintings on the walls, her daughter’s college diploma and her pet dog. Mary spent the remaining seventeen years of her life in a Fort Worth nursing home, where she slowly lost control of both her mind and body. Highsmith neither saw nor spoke to her mother again, but nevertheless her influence continued to shape her life and her work. ‘Pat’s mother was clearly the inspiration for some of her characters,’ says Phyllis Nagy. ‘Just because Pat didn’t generally write about women doesn’t mean her mother’s not there. I don’t think Pat was conscious of it, but her mother is there, in everything she wrote.’
⁹

Highsmith expressed the essence of
Edith’s Diary
– a book which she later described as ‘more like a novel than a thriller’
¹⁰
– in a one paragraph summary she jotted in her notebook on 12 August 1974. The novel would focus, she said, on a middle-aged woman, Edith, ‘a modern intellectual of considerable mental scope’.
¹¹
Depressed by the trivialities of the modern media age, particularly its pernicious effect on her good-for-nothing slob of a son, and saddened by the fact her husband has left her for a younger woman, Edith takes refuge in the world of her imagination as expressed in her diary. The novel, she wrote on 1 September, would, through its central character of Edith, express an overwhelming sense of lost hope – ‘Disappointment in husband, son, career (journalism), politics, her beautiful dream of America.’
¹²

     The book charts the life of Edith Howland, a writer, stretching over a period of twenty years, from 1955 – when, together with her journalist husband, Brett, and son, Cliffie, she moves from an apartment building in Grove Street, Manhattan, to a house in Brunswick Corner, a small town modelled on New Hope, in Pennsylvania – until after the Watergate scandal of 1974. In narrative terms, the novel is a simple one: it is the tale of the family’s transition from town to country; the introduction of Brett’s bedridden, invalided uncle, George, into the household; the breakdown of the marriage between Edith and Brett; Cliffie’s spiritual and intellectual paucity; the suggestion that Cliffie has murdered George with an overdose of codeine; Edith’s creation of a parallel, fictionalised life for herself and her family, her gradual mental disintegration and eventual accidental death. At the centre of the book is the repository of Edith’s fantasies – her diary – and just as the heroine uses the journal as a channel for her suppressed desires, a tool by which she can reshape and reconfigure her life, so Highsmith self-consciously exploits the novelistic form to explore the contradictions inherent in the written representation of reality. The idea of writing a novel told through diaries had first occurred to Highsmith in 1942 – ‘no form so fertile in introspective devices, in human interest in reading, in variation of reaction to one event’, she wrote
¹³
– and, as a compulsive recorder of her own life, she had firsthand knowledge of the process of transforming the chaos of experience into the ordered world of the written word. It is this gap – the black hole that stretches between empirical existence and its representation on the printed page – that Highsmith analysed in
Edith’s Diary
.