Beautiful Shadow (73 page)

     Ripley may have chosen Berlin for purely practical reasons – all its inhabitants seemed to be in disguise or playing some kind of role making it the perfect place for he and Frank to disappear – yet the couple certainly don’t hesitate when offered the chance to explore the wilder side of life, at the Glad Ass, a gay bar. ‘He [Ripley] saw the boy dancing with even more abandon than with the girl in Romy Haag’s,’ Highsmith writes.
¹³
Before the two journey out to the forest of Grunewald, Frank tells Ripley that he would never forget their last day together in Berlin – ‘The words of a lover, Tom thought,’
¹⁴
– and when the boy is kidnapped in the woods, Ripley views the act as a ‘rape’.
¹⁵
Ripley appreciates the ‘ “crazy fantasy” ’
¹⁶
of the gay bars, the fluidity of sexual identities, and experiences a frisson of delight when he dresses up in drag, complete with curly auburn-coloured wig and make-up. ‘The transformation in Tom’s lips amazed him. His upperlip had become thinner, the underlip fuller. He would hardly have recognized himself!’
¹⁷
The freedom of it all is exhilarating.

     No doubt one of the reasons why Frank feels compelled to commit suicide is the thought of having to part from Ripley, a man whom he believes ‘hung the
moon
’.
¹⁸
Although Frank’s behaviour could be seen as nothing more than hero worship, the frequent allusions to a more intimate relationship suggest that the real source of attraction which underlies the union is indisputably sexual. Ripley, said
New Statesman
reviewer Mark Todd, is clearly ‘impelled by a fascination with and desire to help the boy, and in this relationship the author’s romantic fascination is caught up, its sexual implication not openly stated but hinted at in small details’.
¹⁹
Craig Brown, in the
Times Literary Supplement
, commented on how Ripley felt responsibility and affection for his charge, while the ‘boy’s admiration borders on love . . . Here, past suggestions that they are two sides of the same character are made stronger by their shared history, their lack of antagonism.’
²⁰
The novel is far from a platform for Ripley’s coming out – after all, Tom is still married and there are no explicit suggestions of physical contact between him and Frank. Highsmith denied that the character was gay, but she did acknowledge the fact that he may have had latent homosexual longings. ‘I know what you mean,’ she told an interviewer in 1986 when she raised the question of Ripley’s homosexuality. ‘But he represses it all . . . most murderers have something odd about their sex lives . . . I think a man who’s happy with his partner sexually is simply not a murderer’.
²¹
The novel does seem to suggest a greater willingness on Highsmith’s part to address the issue of homosexuality in a less tangential manner than she had done in the past and as such it prefigures her later novels,
Found in the Street
and
Small g: A Summer Idyll
.

During the early stages of planning
The Boy who Followed Ripley
, Highsmith realised that she needed to find another strong location for the novel, part of which she wanted to set abroad. She flew to Berlin at the end of September 1976, finding the city a perfect geographical embodiment of Ripley’s ambiguous personality: artificial, self-reinventing, its identity constantly in flux, a place split by the splintering of capitalist-communist ideology after the erection of the Wall in 1961. As Tom informs Frank in
The Boy who Followed Ripley
, Berlin was situated only twenty miles away from 93,000 Soviet soldiers and occupied by American, French and English troops. ‘The city of Berlin was bizarre enough, artificial enough – at least in its political status – and so maybe its citizens attempted to outdo it sometimes in their dress and behaviour. It was also a way for Berliners to say, “
We exist!
” ’
²²

     On 22 September, Highsmith travelled into East Berlin by train, an excursion she described in her notebook – and one which she would rework into
The Boy who Followed Ripley
– observing that while the clothes appeared to be somewhat smarter than her trip three years before, the people themselves were ‘coarser, heavier, more working class’.
²³
In the evenings she attended readings by Allen Ginsberg and Susan Sontag and also saw two films made by the German experimental film-makers Ulrike Ottinger and Tabea Blumenschein. After dark, she and Tabea toured the nightclubs, including the transvestite disco bar ‘Romy Haag’, which would feature in
The Boy who Followed Ripley
.

     In Berlin, Highsmith shared a hotel with her old friend Lil Picard. Yet within hours of meeting, the two women had started to argue about politics. Lil informed the writer that she must not persist in calling the communists ‘bastards’, and then proceeded to attack her for being, in her view, a racist and a fascist. One of their arguments centred around Highsmith’s problems with Wim Wenders’ script for his 1977 film,
Der amerikanische Freund
, starring Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz, based on her novel,
Ripley’s Game
. Highsmith believed Wenders had transformed Ripley into a ‘hoodlum’, a word that Lil Picard objected to, believing that, ‘ “They don’t exist. They are made hoodlums by society”.’
²⁴
In fact, Highsmith was so angry with Wenders’ treatment, that she even proposed returning the money from the film rights to the production company. ‘What have they done to my Ripley, is my wail,’ she wrote to Ronald Blythe.
²⁵

     Wenders had initially tried to secure the rights to
Cry of the Owl
and
The Tremor of Forgery
, only to be told that each of them had already been optioned. Yet after visiting Pat, accompanied by the Austrian writer Peter Handke, in June 1974, he finally secured the rights to
Ripley’s Game
. ‘She was unbelievably gentle and observing,’ says Wenders. ‘I felt she could see right through me. You could have no secrets in front of her. Total honesty was the only way to deal with her.’
²⁶
His first impression of her was a sense of shyness. ‘In my memory I see her as somebody who was constantly trying to be invisible. She was also one of those people who are obviously used to being alone and have no problem with that. Solitude was around her like a halo. What I liked about her work was that I saw her in a straight line going from Dashiell Hammett over Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald into contemporary “crime fiction”, only that she was a woman and ventured far deeper into the souls of men than any of her male predecessors. Her novels are really all about truth, in a more existential way than just “right or wrong”. They are about little lies that lead to big disasters. As I am really obsessed with the idea of “truth” and “beauty” being identical notions, you can imagine I was attracted by Highsmith’s own preoccupations.’
²⁷

     The relationship between director and author was not an easy one, however. Highsmith believed Wenders had made her favourite hero ‘a little more common’.
²⁸
‘When she saw the film [for] the first time, she . . . was unhappy . . .’ says Wim. ‘She objected [to] my cast of Dennis Hopper, almost physically . . . We sat down for a while and just talked. Not that I could have convinced her. I left with a sad feeling, as I was very proud of the film, and so much in awe of Patricia Highsmith. The fact that she didn’t appreciate it, bugged me a lot.’
²⁹
A few months later, Highsmith wrote to Wenders to tell him that she had seen the film again and that she had changed her mind, informing the director, who subsequently framed the letter and hung it above his desk, that he had ‘come closer to the spirit of the book than any of the previous adaptations’.
³⁰
Yet she never could understand why the stetson-wearing Hopper had been chosen for Ripley. ‘Hopper,’ she grumbled to one interviewer in 1992, ‘is not my idea of Ripley.’
³¹

In Berlin, Highsmith had been impressed by Susan Sontag’s speech in which she outlined how she ‘personally did not belong to any group of writers nor would care to’,
³²
an opinion she shared and one which is reflected in her work. When Highsmith returned home she embarked on a process of self-analysis, assessing the sum of her achievements. Her goal was not the acquisition of wealth, neither was it the pursuit of fame. What was it then, she asked? ‘Just an abstract excellence really,’ she said.
³³
Another depression clouded her thoughts, caused, as she told Charles Latimer, by the niggling ‘loose ends in my life’.
³⁴
She was made anxious by her inability to start writing the new Ripley novel; by the question mark over a synopsis for a one-hour television drama,
The Adventuress
, which she was working on for Joseph Losey, a project which was never completed; by interruptions such as trips abroad to publicise her novels and interviews with journalists; and by commissions like the one she received from the
Radio Times
for a travel piece on Vienna, which she visited in February. (Interestingly, Highsmith chose to provide readers with only the sketchiest of details regarding Vienna, preferring instead to devote a substantial section of the feature to a description of the city’s Institute of Medical History, complete with its gory waxwork displays such as Siamese twins with misshapen faces and torsos, and the flayed bodies of women, some pregnant, some opened so as to show the workings of the internal organs. Her enthusiasm for the bloody spectacle of a blonde-haired woman lying in a glass case, the flesh of her stomach peeled back to reveal her insides, is unmistakable; she notes the ‘yards and yards of intestines [that] lie around the edge of the opening like ruffles’.
³⁵
As Highsmith wandered around the exhibits, she paused to sketch what she described as the ‘monsters’, before imagining what it would be like to walk into a room and discover a friend had been butchered. ‘Murderers often leave their victims thus, a fact not often reported in the newspapers,’ she said.
³⁶
) Such journalistic commissions, however, left her fatigued and on returning from Vienna she wrote to Ronald Blythe, telling him that what she needed was a period of ‘repose, or at least concentration’ so she could achieve the all-important ‘mental poise’ necessary for writing.
³⁷

     During the summer of 1977, Highsmith travelled to the Ticino – the Italian part of Switzerland which she would make her permanent home from 1982 – to see Ellen Hill, who lived in Cavigliano. No doubt inspired by Ellen, on 17 August she wrote dismissively in her notebook of the essential differences between the novelistic and the sociological approaches to life. ‘It is the very illogicity of people that interests me – out of which stories and plots are made,’ she wrote.
³⁸
Yet when Joan Juliet Buck interviewed her over the course of seven hours for a lengthy piece in the
Observer Magazine
, the journalist commented that their conversation seemed peppered with the sociologist’s views on economics and politics. In the piece, Buck observed that the 56-year-old Highsmith, ‘has the figure of an adolescent who has taken against food; standing slightly hunched in a striped sweater and cotton jeans, her dark hair cut in a blunt pageboy, she reminds me of a college girl. A college girl who would have chosen her future way of life in a fit of asceticism tempered only by cigarettes and a love for animals, and stuck to that choice.’
³⁹