Beautiful Shadow (83 page)

     During the spring she finished typing the final draft of
Found in the Street
and by 23 May the finished manuscript was ready to send off to the publishers. Alain Oulman enjoyed it tremendously, but had one major problem: he didn’t quite understand the relationship between Jack and Natalia. ‘When they are together, they don’t speak or act as if they were husband and wife, as if there existed a closeness, an intimacy between them, specially on her part in relation to him,’ he wrote. ‘Is that deliberate, and if so, why?’
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One of Highsmith’s Swiss friends had also remarked on the distance between the couple, but as Pat replied to Oulman, ‘That is the way I see Natalia, however. She would not show her emotions; and if anybody tried to get a tighter hold on her, she would run away.’
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     The novel had taken sixteen months of steady work and she felt in need of a break. In June she took a four-day trip to Amsterdam, but much of her time was taken up with publicity and on her return to Aurigeno, she took it upon herself to ‘relax’ by clearing out her library, culling sixty volumes from the mass of books in her upstairs reading room. ‘I’m still “on vacation” since end of May,’ she wrote to Marc Brandel in July, which she described as ‘a dazzling experience’.
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     Yet Highsmith was never completely at ease when not working, and she always strove for self-improvement, especially in her writing. In November 1984 she had heard that her friend Julian Jebb had committed suicide by taking an overdose. The news unnerved her; on reading the obituaries, Highsmith learnt that the director and producer had most likely died because of a deep dissatisfaction with his achievements. ‘Having reaching fifty,’ Highsmith wrote in a piece for the book,
A Dedicated Fan: Julian Jebb 1934
–1984, Jebb ‘had longed to do more important work, to be taken more seriously as a television director or producer, or both.’
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Perhaps, she surmised, Jebb had never been able to live up to the early success he found on graduating from Cambridge and working on a satirical show which had played in the West End. Exposure to success at such a precocious age was, she suggested, often a progenitor to tragedy. ‘Talent becomes not a gift to work on and develop,’ she concluded, ‘but a comet that has gone up and then falls to earth fast.’
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In a letter to Francis Wyndham she voiced the possibility that Jebb was a victim of ‘self-torture, as are a lot of us’.
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     There is little doubt that Highsmith was proud of her own achievements – a result, she believed, of discipline, hard work and sheer perseverance – but at the same time, like Jebb, she felt constantly dissatisfied. ‘The only thing that makes one feel happy and alive is trying for something that one cannot get,’ she wrote in her notebook in 1985.
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Highsmith heard the good news that Heinemann liked
Found in the Street
early in August 1985 and that her advance was to be upped from £3,000 to £5,000. Despite this, Diogenes Verlag believed that Highsmith deserved better and, after Heinemann had had the novel’s book jacket designed and printed, they sent out the manuscript to other London publishers for higher bids. Hamish Hamilton quickly offered an £8,000 advance, but Heinemann, distressed at the prospect of losing one of their star writers, served an injunction on Diogenes and Highsmith, ‘with a 3-day ultimatum – to stop trying to take my book away’.
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Two executives were dispatched from London to Highsmith’s home in Switzerland to try and persuade her not to change publishers, but she was left feeling unsettled by the whole affair. ‘All this makes me nervous,’ she wrote to Marc Brandel, ‘though it should not; and I’m sorry it’s so long drawn out.’
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By November, the affair had been sorted out, with Heinemann agreeing to Diogenes’ terms – a £12,000 advance, a £10,000 advertising campaign and no option on her next book. Although Heinemann had, in September, just published another collection of her short stories,
Mermaids on the Golf Course
, Diogenes took the attitude that she should have another English publisher for her next novel, ‘though I’ll keep in mind the fact that Heinemann would keep my books in print’.
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     Just before Christmas, Highsmith came down with what she thought was a bad case of intestinal flu – a cold combined with ‘nausea and all that’,
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a condition which lingered for five weeks. She had promised Heinemann to spend a week in London in early February 1986, promoting
Found in the Street
. Although Highsmith still felt ill she did not want to let down her British publishers. She arrived in London on 1 February, enduring a seemingly endless rounds of interviews; ‘they really laid it on,’ she said of the Heinemann publicity department. ‘Four a day, anyway.’
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     On 6 February, Heinemann hosted a celebratory dinner at the Chelsea Arts Club for the writer they had almost lost a few months before. Highsmith, described as a ‘small, hunched figure’
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by Craig Brown, also a guest at the dinner, sat between Gordon Burn, author of
Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son
about Peter Sutcliffe, the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, a book which Highsmith had reviewed for the
Times Literary Supplement
, and Julian Symons, the novelist and doyen of British crime writers. ‘The three could be seen chatting away about Sutcliffe, with Highsmith in the middle looking intense and alert,’ remembers Brown, ‘but as the evening wore on, the dining-room grew fuller and fuller of louder and louder people . . . As the noise of drunken braying grew, Highsmith . . . grew ever more silent, curling up like a snail. By the time the pudding came, she had stopped talking about Sutcliffe or about anything and her hands were placed firmly over her ears.’
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     Highsmith returned home to find her car encased in icy snow and, instead of employing someone to dig it out for her, proceeded to try and do it herself, ‘clad in Levis without heavy underwear’.
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She caught a cold, which developed into bronchitis, necessitating a course of antibiotics, but after she had recovered, the doctor advised her to have an X-ray of her chest at the hospital in Locarno. She had a shadow on her right lung. A diagnosis required further tests – more X-rays and a needle biopsy – which had to be sent off for analysis. While waiting for the results, Highsmith travelled to Paris to publicise
Found in the Street
, but she kept her anxieties to herself. ‘I said nothing of my troubles and angst to business colleagues or to friends while in France,’ she said.
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     On her return to Switzerland on 26 March, she made an appointment with her local doctor, who had arranged for the test results to be sent to him. ‘Pat asked me to take her along to get the results because she was afraid that if it was bad news she wouldn’t be able to drive, she would be too upset,’ recalls Vivien De Bernardi. ‘It was a Saturday morning and I picked her up at 10 a.m. After a hour we were called in to the doctor’s office and he told us that there would have to be an operation. The question was whether to have it in Locarno or London. Then the doctor’s phone rang and he disappeared for an hour and a half, dealing with an emergency. Meanwhile Pat took a flask out of her purse and there in the doctor’s office, drank down her whisky.’
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     The future looked bleak, but she took some comfort from the love and support of her friends – Vivien De Bernardi invited her to sleep at her house and Ellen Hill advised Highsmith to bypass doctors in Locarno in favour of seeking medical attention in London. Within a couple of days she had secured a private consultation at the Brompton Hospital. On 3 April, Highsmith was examined by John Batten – who observed her grey complexion in his notes – after which she underwent more tests, including X-rays and another biopsy. The results were rushed through and on 5 April, Batten approached the writer in hospital and asked her to sit down. The tests had, he said, revealed that there was a cancerous tumour in her right lung and that it would have to be removed. ‘This sounds like a death sentence to me, taken out or not,’ she wrote in her notebook, ‘as I’ve never heard of anyone surviving such, or anyway, not for long.’
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     On 10 April, Highsmith underwent surgery to remove the growth and she was left with a fourteen-inch scar running along her fifth rib and ending just under her right breast. It was, as she wrote to Marc Brandel, ‘One hell of an operation and I was scared, I don’t mind admitting.’
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Vivien De Bernardi, whom Highsmith described as a ‘gem’
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, sent flowers to the hospital, as did Daniel Keel and Roland Gant, her publisher at Heinemann, while Kingsley organised for a bottle of champagne to be delivered to her sick friend. She stayed in London for thirty-one days, returning home to Switzerland on 1 May, with orders to report back to the doctors in three months time. The waiting was interminable and she found it impossible to concentrate on her work. ‘The mental fear needs a thousand words to describe,’ she wrote in her notebook. ‘It is as though death is right there – suddenly – and yet one feels no pain.’
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     Highsmith, a smoker since the age of sixteen, had enjoyed what she was determined to be her last cigarette, just before she had stepped on to a plane in Zurich, bound for London. Although she loved smoking she knew that if she were to have any chance at all of surviving the cancer she would have to quit. ‘I was so impressed when she gave up smoking,’ says Jack Bond. ‘She was a chain smoker and she had to stop after her illness. But she did it.’
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     Although she did not feel like working on her novels or short stories, Highsmith bashed off letter after letter to her friends. ‘You must not think I had to use any discipline to stop smoking . . . it was fear alone that made me stop,’ she wrote to Patricia Losey. ‘Plain terror at being told I had to have an operation. I never wish to go through that again, so it is easy for me not to take a single puff, even though I like the smell, as I do of espresso, too.’
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     In the same letter, she also told Patricia how much she admired Gore Vidal with whom she had started to correspond. Although the two authors never met, he liked what he describes as ‘her fierce clarity’.
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They also shared a mistrust of Israel. On 22 May, Highsmith read a piece in the
International Herald Tribune
, reprinted from the
New York Times
, in which the commentator William Safire launched an assault on Vidal for opinions he had expressed in an essay for
The Nation
. ‘To make sure that nearly a third of the federal budget goes to the Pentagon and Israel it is necessary for the pro-Israel lobbyists to make common cause with the lunatic right,’ Vidal had written.
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Vidal, whose article also attacked Norman Podhoretz, the pro-Israeli editor of the neo-conservative magazine
Commentary
, went on to charge American citizens who supported Israel with dual loyalty, concluding, ‘I’ve got to tell you I don’t much like your country, which is Israel.’
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Highsmith agreed wholeheartedly and that night sat down to compose a letter to the
Tribune
outlining her support for Vidal. On 9 June, Highsmith wrote to Vidal to tell him that the letter published in that day’s
International Herald Tribune
under the name of Edgar S. Sallich of Brione, Switzerland, was, in fact, written by her. She took issue with Safire for calling Israel a democracy when, in her view, she thought it more of a theocracy, as it defined its borders by Old Testament names. ‘Therefore, the loyalty of U.S. citizens who are Jewish will be forever argued, to little avail,’ she wrote. ‘An American can be loyal to any religion, but CANNOT be loyal to a country other than America if he or she expects to continue being an American.’
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As to why she used a pseudonym, she wrote to Vidal, ‘I don’t care to use my own name too often, so I invent names. I could’ve said that many Jews in USA seem to like America as a safe berth and as a source of money for Israel. But would such a letter get printed?’
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