Beautiful Shadow (77 page)

In April 1980, Highsmith flew to London to publicise
The Boy who Followed Ripley
. The journalist Sally Vincent, who interviewed Highsmith over lunch for a profile in the
Observer
, described her as a woman ‘clenched over herself, closed into herself’.
³⁶
The interview almost did not happen as there was a mix-up over the arrangements, and Vincent, nearly twenty minutes late, walked into the restaurant to find Highsmith nursing a paper bag from Boots containing a bottle of Dettol, one of many curious details scattered throughout the piece which contributed towards the journalist’s view of the author as an eccentric oddity. At lunch, during which Highsmith drank gin and water and ate a dish of grilled trout, she talked about how much she hated the human race, citing Ellen Hill’s favourite statistic that 98 per cent of the population were stupid, a figure she thought a trifle too high; her love of ironing; her fascination with Ripley; and her flirtation with a possible move to West Germany. She even took out her shabby-looking wallet to show the journalist the reason for the move: a Polaroid image of a heavily costumed, elaborately made-up figure, presumably Tabea. (In June 1979, while in Munich, Highsmith had told Tabea that she had loved her for the past eighteen months, a confession which had failed to elicit a response. She had likened her emotional attachment to an illness and she returned home feeling confused and upset. Carl Laszlo recalls Highsmith sitting with a group of people in a restaurant who were all talking about the nature of love when suddenly she said, ‘Love is not a passion, love is a sickness.’
³⁷
If so, it was an affliction which continued to plague her.)

     While in London Highsmith also took the trouble to consult doctors about her various physical problems. She had been experiencing pains in her right calf for nearly seven years and on examination by a Harley Street doctor, it was discovered that Highsmith was suffering from an occlusion of her right external iliac artery, together with atheromatous disease in the right superficial femoral artery. On 23 May, Highsmith underwent bypass surgery at the Fitzroy Nuffield Nursing Trust in Bryanston Square, where she stayed until 1 June.

     ‘I saw Pat just after she came out of hospital and she made me feel that it was an absolute nothing of an operation,’ says Patricia Losey, the widow of film director Joseph Losey. ‘Since then I’ve realised it was a big thing to go through, but she showed no self pity, none whatsoever. She was tremendously brave.’
³⁸

     Joseph Losey had expressed interest in adapting Highsmith’s novel
The Tremor of Forgery
in 1974, but although nothing had come of the project, the trio became friends. ‘When I first met her, which must have been in the seventies, while we were living in Paris, I was actually a touch scared of her,’ adds Patricia. ‘But then I remember when she came to our very tiny flat she brought with her some home-made jam. She was in some ways very practical and loved making jam, gardening, looking after her cats.

     ‘I also remember the note she wrote to me about Joe’s film,
King and Country
– telling me that she had to look away when the Dirk Bogarde character put the gun in his mouth. I thought that was quite interesting that she couldn’t look at that – she of all people. I have a feeling that maybe she would have looked if it had been real life rather than fiction. Although I never thought she was a happy person, she found her equilibrium, where she was able to live and function, and most importantly, write.’
³⁹

Chapter 30

People who knock on the door

1980–1982

That delicate equilibrium was threatened in July 1980, when, soon after returning home to Moncourt, Highsmith felt like she was about to suffer another nervous breakdown. ‘How can you lead a healthy life if it is dominated by an emotion of hatred and resentment?’ she asked herself.
¹
She was terrified that if she was forced to abandon her work, she would be left with nothing. ‘First and slowly comes the abandonment of the only thing that counts, work,’ she said. ‘This is the hell, the only potential cause of breakdown. Nervous breakdown is the same as flying a white flag of defeat.’
²
The following month she wrote a poem entitled ‘Ending It’, in which she imagined what it would be like to face death, and also had the idea for a story called ‘The Black House’ about a sinister, abandoned building which she said in her notebook was a ‘symbol of both death and sex’.
³
Steadfastly refusing to let herself collapse, Highsmith was determined to carry on writing, working on a new edition of
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
and a number of short stories which would be published in 1981 as
The Black House
, a collection of eleven tales exploring the perils of psychological aspiration.

     Whereas Timothy, the central character of ‘The Black House’, is punished for striving to prove the hollow truth which underlies a symbolic fantasy, the protagonists of the other ten stories in the collection, which Highsmith dedicated to Charles Latimer, suffer for their various reality-avoiding tactics. Highsmith documents a world in which people search for meaning in an essentially meaningless universe. Lacking the tools with which they can interpret experience, and devoid of belief systems which might help impose a structure on their lives, her protagonists grapple to find glimpses of significance in whatever comes to hand. Often external objects have the power to precipitate internal disruption. In ‘The Terrors of Basket-Weaving’, Diane, a thirty-eight-year-old press relations officer, finds an old basket on the beach near her weekend home in Massachusetts. Her ability to mend the basket – an activity which is usually considered therapeutic – disturbs her and she grows to feel that the object has unleashed some terrible force within her, a realisation that perhaps her identity is not quite so stable as she had once thought. ‘She felt rather that she was living with a great many people from the past, that they were in her brain or mind.’
⁴
Finally, Diane burns the basket, but its destruction does nothing to ease her anxiety.

     The hero of ‘The Kite’, a little boy named Walter, whose sister Elsie has recently died from pneumonia, invests his model kite with such intense emotion that it becomes a symbol for his yearning and his grief. His wish to write a poem about a kite which lifts him off the ground and carries him high up into the sky becomes a reality, his kite, emblazoned with Elsie’s name, functioning as a metonymical representation of the boy’s feelings for his sister. His imagination – literally – takes flight, but after enjoying a few moments of freedom, a helicopter entangles itself in the kite’s strings and Walter comes crashing back down to earth, cracking his skull as he lands. The style of the last sentence of the story mirrors the action, its rhythm imitating the cadence of falling. ‘Upside down, he struck a heavy branch that cracked his skull, then he slid the last few yards to the ground, limp.’
⁵

     Just as Highsmith dramatises the conflict between Walter’s creativity and the rather more pedestrian mind of his father in ‘The Kite’, so the other stories in the collection explore the dangerous dynamic that can exist when different value systems collide, an idea she would analyse in greater depth in her next novel,
People who Knock on the Door
. In ‘Not One of Us’ a closed circle of friends inflict a number of small cruelties on a man, Edmund Quasthoff, who is no longer considered part of the group. After losing his job and his wife, one night Edmund knocks back too many pills with too much booze and dies, a loss which prompts the group to realise the enormity of their actions. In ‘I Despise Your Life’, Ralph, a twenty-year-old, drug-taking Cornell drop-out and his respectable, wealthy father are forced to confront their differences after the son invites the older man to a raucous party.

     The stories in
The Black House
were, said Tom Sutcliffe, writing in the
Times Literary Supplement
, closer in theme to her novels than the ‘horrid frivolity’ of
The Animal
-
Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder
or the ‘sparse and hateful case histories’ in
Little Tales of Misogyny
.
⁶
The best tales in the collection, such as ‘Not One of Us’, which Highsmith thought a ‘good
New Yorker
bet’.
⁷
and ‘Something the Cat Dragged in’, which was originally published in Faber & Faber’s 1979 anthology
Verdict of Thirteen
, were ‘brilliant essays on the moral concerns of the longer works: fear and loathing, moral absolutism and culpability. They are located too in the same bleak territory of dissatisfied satiety and doubt, suburbs with swimming pools but no churches. It’s significant, in fact, that the nearest thing to virtue in the entire book is the expression of guilt. In such a world crime becomes a matter of personal taste.’
⁸
Although the collection was published in 1981 in Britain, readers in America had to wait a further seven years for
The Black House
. Writing in the
New York Times
in March 1988, John Gross explored Highsmith’s appeal: although only four or five of the stories featured a crime, the others were located, he said, ‘in a border zone of the macabre, the disturbing, the not quite accidental. What almost all of them have in common is a high degree of tension, and a seemingly impassive style that in fact plays insidiously on the reader’s nerves. As so often with Miss Highsmith, situations have a way of revealing the dark potentialities that normally stay suppressed.’
⁹

In October 1980, Highsmith started to work on
People who Knock on the Door
, which would be published in 1983 in the UK and 1985 in America. Her original plot focused on the conflict between a middle-aged man working as an advertising copywriter in Manhattan, who becomes a Born-Again Christian, and his seventeen-year-old son who impregnates his teenage girlfriend. Although Highsmith would change the profession of the father and the location of the action, the shape of the narrative would remain the same, a story which would explore the ensuing conflict between the fundamentalist and liberal belief systems. When she voiced the idea of analysing the rise of Christian fundamentalism, her friends were delighted. ‘I do hope you will persevere with the “born again” idea,’ wrote Charles Latimer to her in November. ‘It’s a great theme, and one that is timely, what with the last president [Jimmy Carter] (alas, still in the White House until January) professing to have been born again.’
¹⁰

     Christian fundamentalism in America has a long history, with some commentators tracing its roots back to seventeenth-century New England, when Cotton Mather articulated the belief that the New Englanders were God’s chosen people, taking over the land from what was once ‘the Devil’s territories’.
¹¹
The connections between Christian worship and capitalism had been well and truly forged by the mid-nineteenth century, when, in 1846, William Gilpin, governor of Colorado Territory, declared that the ultimate aim of America was the ‘industrial conquest of the world’, an ambition which could be attained through the twinned goals of the Christian religion and the generation of profit. Just over a century later – after the fundamentalists had successfully tapped into a spirit of American nationalism, associating communism with Satan and capitalism with God – the process reached its apotheosis in the televangelist movement. ‘Maybe your financial situation seems impossible,’ said fundamentalist broadcaster and author Jerry Falwell. ‘Put Jesus first in your stewardship and allow him to bless you financially.’
¹²
It’s no coincidence that Highsmith chose to make the fundamentalist father in
People who Knock on the Door
a salesman of insurance and retirement plan financial products; in her view both his religion and his profession were guilty of selling empty dreams.