Beautiful Shadow (71 page)

     Highsmith was quite clear in her intentions – as she told Ian Hamilton, she was interested in the ‘phoniness, some people would say half-assedness, of American foreign policy, leading to many mistakes.’
³⁷
In an interview with Susan Smith for the
International Herald Tribune
, Highsmith spoke of how she wanted to explore the souring of the American political dream. ‘A lot happened in those years in America that shook up even housewives. McCarthy is mentioned, Vietnam, Nixon. Edith’s ideas are partly mine.’
³⁸
Edith’s insanity is not only caused by her own familial disappointments, but by the fact she is living in a mad world. How is it possible, Highsmith asks, to live in a media-obsessed country where the Arab-Israeli War is reduced to the same level as a beauty contest in Florida; where Robert Kennedy is shot at the Democratic Nomination Convention; where Jackie Kennedy, once a symbol of hope, ends up marrying a shipping tycoon? America is no longer the idealistic nation of Thomas Paine, whose framed quotation from
The American Crisis
hangs over Edith’s desk, ‘These are the times that try men’s souls,’ it begins, the words which were read to General Washington’s troops on a wintry night in December 1776 before they launched themselves across the Delaware River. Instead it is a country soiled by the empty rhetoric of Nixon, the Watergate debacle and the shadow of the Vietnam War. ‘What a world! What an America!’ thinks Edith.
³⁹
Ultimately, Edith, in a spirit of defiance, resists attempts by her ex-husband and a psychiatrist to conform to society’s repressive pressures, accidentally falling to her death on her stairs by catching the heel of her shoe. Her death, Highsmith suggests, is symbolic of the death of America.

She thought of injustice, felt her personal sense of injustice combined now with the crazy, complex injustice of the Viet Nam situation – a country in which corruption, as everyone knew, was a way of life, normal. Tom Paine. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot . . . Her head struck hard, yet gracefully (she believed) on one of the bottom steps or the floor, and the light went out for her.
⁴⁰

     Surely part of what drives Edith mad is the terror of the domestic, the horror of the banal. Objects crowd the novel with a sinister excess, suggestive of a slow stifling of the female spirit. As Highsmith later told a journalist, Edith’s ‘profession as housewife slowly and dreadfully kills her’, while her intention was to describe with ‘absolute realism, every moment in the daily routine of a housewife’.
⁴¹
Although she strives for intellectual and metaphysical stimulation, Edith is forever anchored to the home by the sheer drudgery of existence – the household work, the cooking, the cleaning, her caring for George. ‘Breakfast time was chores, George’s tray with boiled egg and tea and orange juice before Edith could get at the more serious business of breakfast for four downstairs with the toaster popping up as often as possible . . . More soft boiled eggs and excellent cherry preserves.’
⁴²
Highsmith felt no need for the women’s movement – she thought the idea unbelievably patronising – yet the novel can be read as a feminist document focusing on the reductive effects of the traditional female domestic role.

     No doubt Highsmith also wrote the book as a hypothetical investigation, an extended fantasy of how her own life might have turned out had she married. Just as Ripley was, to a certain extent, an expression of Highsmith’s intellectual and cultural aspirations – her sense of freedom – so Edith can be seen as an embodiment of her greatest fears, a symbol of mental and spiritual suffocation. ‘Men can leave the house,’ she told Bettina Berch. ‘Ripley leaves the house . . . I don’t see women leaving the house . . . Edith leaves the house? What the hell, where’s she going? She can’t do anything except be a shop seller . . . I can’t really understand a woman getting stuck with marriage to begin with. Getting stuck with childbirth . . . I can’t imagine putting myself into a servant’s position. You have to marry a man who has quite a bit of money or you turn into a servant.’
⁴³

In June 1976, soon after sending the manuscript of
Edith’s Diary
to Knopf, Highsmith heard that it had been rejected. The publishers told her that the novel – which, according to Kingsley, ‘she considered . . . of all her books, a masterpiece’
⁴⁴
– did not fit into either the crime genre or work as a piece of straight fiction. Bob Gottlieb, according to Highsmith, wrote to her agent saying that ‘he could not see it as mystery or suspense, and that they could not sell it well as a straight novel.’
⁴⁵
Although the rejection must have hurt, she decided to show a brave face to the world. When asked by the broadcaster Robert Robinson about the book’s uncertain state – whether the novel should be marketed as a suspense or as a serious novel – Highsmith replied, ‘frankly I don’t care because I think it’s rather a nice book, I like it . . . I think it’s the publisher’s problem, not my problem.’
⁴⁶
(Highsmith would face another blow early in 1977 when a further attempt at television drama – a two-hour, four-episode screenplay commissioned by Thames Television – was rejected. ‘It’s just one of those things,’ she said, ‘just as some people can’t swim for some mysterious reason.’
⁴⁷
)

     Yet when
Edith’s Diary
was finally published – in May 1977 by Heinemann in Britain and later that year by Simon & Schuster in America – the reviews were, on the whole, glowing, commending her for her imaginative power and her vision of a disintegrating America. Neil Hepburn, writing in the
Listener
, observed how ‘her characters and their circumstances are transparently emblematic of the state of the Union, as well as of the union, in the horrible Vietnam years . . . the inheritance by the rootless and thoughtless of America the once-beautiful, the irrevocable passing of the patrician strain that, for all its shortcomings, carried within it the ideals of 1776. It is a very pessimistic view of America and, in Miss Highsmith’s wonderfully insinuating prose, a very convincing one.’
⁴⁸
Emma Tennant, in the
Times Literary Supplement
, called the novel a ‘masterpiece’, – it was, she believed, ‘much more frightening, and more extraordinary, than Miss Highsmith’s other books’ – and praised the writer for her unsettling representation of the everyday. Highsmith, she said, ‘nails the phantoms of our present anxieties and unease: the feeling that life has no point, the bright television jargon which teaches us to pray to gods we do not want, the fear of friends who are as quickly gone as the foam on the detergent, the loss of faith in caring’, and concluded that the novel was a sharp ‘indictment of modern society’.
⁴⁹
A reviewer in
The New Yorker
thought the book was Highsmith’s ‘strongest, her most imaginative, and by far her most substantial . . .
Edith’s Diary
is a work of extraordinary force and feeling’.
⁵⁰
Yet Michael Wood, in the
New York Review of Books
, argued that the novel was flawed because of its clumsy attempts to signpost historical events. ‘But the main fault of the book is really its ambition, its desire to be a portrait of Our Times.’
⁵¹
The problem, he added, was that the novel ‘only names political events . . . paints a sort of political border to this essentially private story’.
⁵²

The dedication at the beginning of
Edith’s Diary
reads ‘To Marion,’ a reference to Dominique Marion Aboudaram, Highsmith’s lover from 1975 until 1978. Marion, a Paris-based writer and translator, contacted Highsmith in December 1974, with the proposal of interviewing her for French
Cosmopolitan
, a piece which was not commissioned and never published. After the two women met, thirty-five-year-old Marion became obsessed with the novelist and one night in January 1975, after meeting her at a Tomi Ungerer exhibition, she followed the novelist to the Gare du Lyon and then back to her house in Moncourt.

     ‘She was not happy that I followed her,’ says Marion, ‘and she told me to give her a break. She was very nervous, hated to see people and liked to be alone in the world. But she took me into her house, where we talked about murder. That night she was wearing a red coat and I later called her my little red riding hood. I wanted to make love to her, but she told me to go back home. “I could be your mother,” she said, “I’m too old.” I went back home but later I phoned her and told her that I wanted her so badly. I travelled back to her house, but before we went to bed, she summoned me to the bathroom where I had to have a bath to wash off my perfume. It was Chanel, very elegant, but she said the smell made her sick.

     ‘Before I met her I had read all her books and found the novels fascinating. From reading her work I expected that she would be a cruel and lonely person and that was what I found. I’m a masochist, a real one, and she made me feel very ill at ease, ill at ease all the time. I was attracted to her because of her work, not because of the way she looked. In fact, I found her very ugly, terribly ugly. I know she had been lovely, I saw photographs of her when she was younger when she had a dark beauty, but when I met her the alcohol had spoilt everything. She was puffy, she was a mess, but I was crazy about her.

     ‘She was never unkind to me, she was never cold, but she was distant; I was passionately in love with her. I don’t think she loved me, although she said she did. I think she appreciated me as a person, she told me I had some very good qualities, but I was not at all her type of woman – she liked blondes.’
⁵³

     Highsmith informed Charles Latimer of the existence of her new lover in a letter she wrote on 15 February 1975, and described her in another note she sent him on 28 February, as ‘35 (meaning much too young for me), a bit nervous, plump, Jewish (with a mom in Paris who likes gambling and is an art dealer), impulsive, changeable.’
⁵⁴
The following month, Highsmith had started to compose poems for her, verses which Marion says illustrated the writer’s attitude towards romantic love.

     ‘I remember once when I told her I would not be able to see her for a month,’ says Marion, ‘she replied, “That’s marvellous, you’re going to turn us into poets.” She liked to think and write about people, but she did not particularly want to see them. Pat liked the idea of wanting somebody, writing poetry about someone. She used people to write. She’d change lovers for each book.

     ‘Almost every time before we started to make love, Pat held my hand and would say to me, “Tell me about your mother.” My mother was a very beautiful, elegant woman, with good legs, and I always wondered if Pat was more attracted to my mother than to me. I remember Pat made friends with this ugly girl who sold beer at the Gare du Lyon, and she invited her to her house. She liked people who were strangers, anonymous people, those whom she knew nothing about. She needed the idea of love and she liked falling in love but when it became slightly routine she destroyed it.

     ‘She did not eat much – only milk, oranges, popcorn and a little spoon of spaghetti – and because she refused to heat the house, she was always very cold. We made love a lot – the best love we made was at my place in Montmartre, where there were a lot of prostitutes on the streets and I think the proximity of prostitutes excited her. But we also used to make love in a little shack in her garden, where she had placed a little bed. She was obsessed by taxes and domestic problems and in her big house she was very boring, but when she came to the shack she was happy. Her garden was charming and she was like a child there, giving food to a frog and to the birds. She was like a little tomboy.’
⁵⁵

     For Marion’s thirty-sixth birthday on 21 July, Highsmith bought her lover a broom and on another occasion she gave her a vacuum cleaner. ‘She was obsessive about cleaning and would take several showers a day,’ says Marion. ‘As soon as she would come to my small apartment she would start sweeping and cleaning and every time I arrived at her country house she started to wash my clothes. She would give me a dressing gown and put all my clothes into the bath. My raincoat had been washed so many times it was ruined. She was also very stingy. Once, in the winter, when I asked for a radiator, she said, “Put a hot water bottle between your knees. I’m not going to pay for that.”