Beautiful Shadow (70 page)

     Highsmith highlights the theme on the first page, as Edith is introduced, wondering where to pack her diary. Her mind drifts back to the time when Brett and she had first spotted the house in Brunswick Corner, a date which she realises she never recorded in her journal, suggestive of the arbitrary nature of the recording process. Although Edith is thirty-five when the novel opens, the diary, which she had been given fifteen years before while a student at Bryn Mawr, is more than half empty. ‘She was rather glad she hadn’t filled the diary with trivia all these years,’ Highsmith writes.
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Edith seldom glanced through its pages yet she felt comforted by the fact of its existence simply because the diary functioned as an ordered, edited version of her reality. ‘Isn’t it safer, even wiser, to believe that life has no meaning at all?’ runs one of Edith’s diary entries, a sentiment reflective of Highsmith’s own view. ‘She’d felt better after getting that down on paper.’
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Edith’s subversive rewriting of her own biography begins after she discovers Cliffie – whom she hoped would go to Princeton – has been caught cheating in his college entrance exams. Instead of writing about her feelings of humiliation and disappointment, Edith takes hold of her Esterbrook pen and writes in her diary of his academic success. ‘The entry was a lie. But after all who was going to see it? And she felt better, having written it, felt less melancholic, almost cheerful, in fact.’
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     Like many of Highsmith’s characters, Edith is invested with a writerly imagination, able to invent detailed lives for her cast of characters, her make-believe dramatis personae; in her diary, Cliffie is an engineer specialising in hydraulics, splitting his time between Kuwait and his comfortable home near his old college, Princeton; he has a girlfriend, later his wife, Debbie; and a family. Elements of her existence which do not please her – Brett leaving her for another woman, his subsequent marriage and the birth of a child – are simply edited out of her alternative, and increasingly convincing, reality. ‘In her diary, Brett’s little daughter had no place, had not been mentioned . . . Brett had vanished like a shadow that never was, never had been.’
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Eventually, in 1969, Edith decides to kill Brett off, by imagining he had died in 1966, choosing to ignore the fact that he had been present at George’s funeral earlier that year – after all, she says to herself, her diary is nothing but a way of entertaining herself, and surely one was allowed a little poetic licence? When fantasy and reality clash – for instance when Edith is about to tell her aunt that she intended to use her savings to send Cliffie to Princeton – Edith experiences a psychological crisis, a warping of her perception, as if she had a few drinks too many. By the end of the novel, Edith is no longer sure what is real and what is fiction, amazed as she is to find an entry in her diary describing the sweaters she had knitted for Cliffie’s and Debbie’s imaginary children, an observation she could not remember having written. ‘And the curious thing was that the two sweaters existed, done in her spare time, and they lay in the bottom drawer of the chest of drawers in her bedroom. Now that was strange!’
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     As Highsmith planned the novel, she wrote how she would like Edith’s situation to suggest the poetry of T. S. Eliot, particularly ‘The Waste Land’ and ‘The Hollow Men’, expressive as it was of the spiritual drought of modern existence and the hell that exists between dream and reality. The poet’s influence also shows itself in one of Edith’s verses, a poem which was distributed at Highsmith’s own memorial service in March 1995. It opens with a description of the dawn, a few hours after her demise, the sunlight casting light upon the trees in her garden, ‘Unweeping for me on the morning of my death’; a poignant reminder of the indifference of nature to the passing away of an individual.

   
Edith’s Diary
, indeed a great deal of Highsmith’s writing, owes much to her reading of the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm. In the novel, Edith borrows one of Fromm’s books from the lending library and, in a conversation with a psychiatrist, she voices her preference for Fromm over the Austrian ethologist Lorenz. Highsmith had read and owned at least two of Fromm’s works,
The Art of Loving
, (selected as a birthday present by her mother and stepfather and inscribed with the words, ‘To Pat, Jan 19 ’67 from Mother and Stanley’; in retrospect perhaps an ironic choice given its title and their difficult relationship) and
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
. In the early stages of planning the novel, Highsmith wrote in her notebook: ‘Sadism for son . . . “Attempt to dominate” according to Fromm . . . Overstimulation due to TV . . .’
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Fromm, in
The Art of Loving
, defined a sadist as a man or woman who experiences a desperate need to escape his or her feeling of aloneness by ‘making another person part and parcel of himself’,
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behaviour manifested by many of Highsmith’s characters, including Ripley. Fromm believed, like Highsmith, that the source of anxiety was a sense of separateness, the realisation that one cannot escape the prison of the self. ‘The
absolute
failure to achieve this aim means insanity, because the panic of complete isolation can be overcome only by such a radical withdrawal from the world outside that the feeling of separation disappears – because the world outside, from which one is separated, has disappeared.’
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Each of Highsmith’s books captures the terrifyingly claustrophobic collapse of such a character, articulating the agonies of separation anxiety and the inevitable ensuing psychological crises.

     For
Edith’s Diary
, Highsmith originally planned having Cliffie torture the family’s fox terrier, behaviour Edith witnesses by spying through a keyhole, but changed this to his attempts to smother the pet cat. ‘In most social systems, including ours, even those on lower social levels can have control over somebody who is subject to their power,’ writes Fromm. ‘There are always children, wives or dogs available.’
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Cliffie’s sadism later manifests itself in his brutal treatment of his great uncle George – the suspected administration of an overdose – and his violent sexual fantasies, imagining having intercourse with a girl while he masturbates into a sock. ‘Cliffie made her scream, first with shock and pain, then with delight.’
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However, when presented with a real girl, Ruthie, a victim of a gang rape by ten boys, he had been unable to perform – he is impotent and after the collapse of his tentative relationship with Luce, he toys with the possibility of creating a lifesize doll of her for his own private enjoyment. Although he is forced to reject the idea – his mother would see it, he reasons, and it would be too difficult to make – he spins a fantasy image of the recently married Luce, whom he makes love to like David Kelsey did with his own living doll, Annabelle. ‘Her bastard husband could never give her the pleasure that he could. And Luce knew that.’
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Fromm argues that sadists are afraid of life and of love – they can only ‘love’ when they feel in a position of control, when they can control the object of their affections. ‘The core of sadism, common to all its manifestations, is the passion to have absolute and unrestricted control over a living being, whether an animal, a child, a man or a woman . . . The person who has complete control over another living being makes this being into his thing, his property, while he becomes the other being’s god.’
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     Dennis Gabor’s sociological and economic analysis,
The Mature Society
, which Highsmith read in September 1973, also shaped the novel. In a letter to Barbara Ker-Seymer, she wrote of her fascination for the work, ‘which I am reading like a Bible’, convinced as she was that it would influence her future work and her thinking.
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A sequel to Gabor’s 1963 book,
Inventing the Future
,
The Mature Society
outlines the reasons why post-war society is haunted by a sense of
Unbehagen
, or malaise. ‘Till now man has been up against Nature; from now on he will be up against his own nature,’ argues Gabor, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in December 1971.
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Poverty had, for the most part, been defeated, while advances in medicine had dramatically reduced illness rates. ‘There is no enemy left but man,’ he said.
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Science combined with a widespread spirit of nationalism had resulted in a situation where a Third World War could conceivably destroy civilisation, while an atmosphere of fear, brought about by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the spread of Russian influence in the Middle East, seemed to hang like a black cloud over the globe. ‘The conquest of Nature by rational man, who has created science and technology, has brought us face to face with the basic irrationality of man . . .’ he adds. ‘Irrational Man craves security, he will fight for it, but he despises it as soon as it is won’;
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a neat summary of Highsmith’s own beliefs. Gabor believed that the consumer society – suffering as it was from moral erosion – had to grow up and recognise its responsibilities. In order to do this it was worth remembering two simple aphorisms: ‘Man is wonderful in adversity, weak in comfort, affluence and security’, and ‘Man does not appreciate what he gets without an effort’.
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Edith’s Diary
can be read as a fictional reworking of Gabor’s analysis, an indictment of the immature society that is modern America. In the opening chapter, Edith dreams of a better life for her family, a calm existence away from the big city, where her son would have the space to ride a bicycle and the opportunity to grow up in a more ‘traditional’ America. But then she questions her views, realising that even these most basic of assumptions could no longer be relied upon. ‘Or was that true? Edith thought for a few seconds and decided it wasn’t necessarily true.’
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Edith positions herself as a left-leaning liberal, a woman who feels betrayed by her country and the mass media, someone for whom, unlike the unthinking majority, politics still matters. The American government, she believes, fosters an attitude of apathy so the public never question the political doublethink of the establishment system. The news media are so biased, Edith is convinced, that their hidden agenda, particularly when it comes to coverage of communism, results in nothing less than mass brainwashing. ‘
Reader’s Digest
has never failed to print one article per issue about the inefficiency of anything socialized, such as medicine,’ runs an entry from her diary.
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     It’s obvious Highsmith turned to her own notebooks as a direct source for some of Edith’s political views. In one of her cahiers for 1954, Highsmith wrote on the issue of propaganda and mind control, observing how only the Russians gave true reports of the Spanish Civil War; next to the entry is a scribbled note, in red pen, ‘Edith’s Diary?’
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, and indeed the comment finds expression in the novel. ‘It is still true from 1936 to 1939 the Communists (Russians) were the only people giving the correct interpretation of the Spanish Civil War . . .’
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Although others in Edith’s immediate circle concur with her belief that the Pentagon, by ordering the increasingly brutal and futile war in Vietnam, is nothing more than a ‘war-making and war-loving machine’,
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as she ages, Edith feels increasingly isolated by what her friends regard as her extreme views. Her article entitled ‘Why Not Recognize Red China?’ is rejected by
New Republic
, her editorials for her own newspaper,
The Bugle
, have to be censored and rewritten, while the only publications willing to publish her work are fringe titles such as
Shove It
and
Rolling Stone
. Even her close friend, Gert, finally distances herself from Edith because of what she believes are her authoritarian beliefs – Edith proposes to solve ‘ “this damned backwardness of the blacks” ’ by placing young black children in white, middle-class homes, a view Gert labels as ‘Aryan crap’.
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