Beautiful Shadow (84 page)

Ever since the operation to remove the cancer from her lung, Highsmith had been dreading the return of the disease. On 11 July – three months after the lobectomy – she turned up at the Brompton Hospital in London for an X-ray. As she waited for the results, she consumed the contents of her hip flask, thinking the worst, but was relieved to hear that the cancer had not returned. During the consultation she was also told that the tumour was the glandular type, one which could have grown even if she had never smoked. ‘It is like a reprieve from death,’ she noted.
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Chapter 33

No end in sight

1986–1988

‘Pat was frightened that this may be the end of her life and she wasn’t planning to live in that summer vacation house in Aurigeno for ever,’ says Vivien De Bernardi. ‘If she was going to have a new home, now was the time.’
¹
Highsmith knew living in the adumbrated gloom of the mountains was no good for her health – ‘the climate here doesn’t suit me at all’, she said
²
– and her friends were appalled by the conditions she lived in. ‘She took me down to the cellar, which had mushrooms growing from the ceiling,’ says Christa Maerker. ‘It was really spooky.’
³
‘I couldn’t believe that she was living in that house in Aurigeno,’ says Jack Bond, ‘When I went to see her there it was damp, cold and dark, just awful.’
⁴

     Although she knew she wanted to move, she could not decide on a location. In February 1986, she flirted with relocating to Santa Fe or Mexico, but then, in June of that year she suddenly tried to pull out of selling her Moncourt house so she could move back to her old French village. The house by the canal, she remembered, was ‘very healthful to me’,
⁵
but even though she offered an extra 125,000 francs, her bid to buy out the purchaser failed. ‘This leaves me undecided about where to live,’ she wrote to Gore Vidal. ‘I find the Swiss winters tough to take and not good for me.’
⁶
In August, after attending the Locarno Film Festival – where she saw Stephen Frears’
My Beautiful Launderette
, which she described as ‘a brilliant comment on today’s London social picture’
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– she travelled to Moncourt and spent five days house-hunting in the area, but did not find the light, airy property of her dreams. She knew she could never live in a city as she found modern urban life too stressful. She thought Frankfurt, which she visited for the book fair in October, a ghost town, ‘all new chrome and glass . . . everyone was run ragged with voices, people and TV cameras in your face’,
⁸
while her trips to Washington DC, on 17 October, where she was invited to sit on a panel to discuss film noir, and New York later that month, left her feeling debilitated.

     On her return to Switzerland, architect Tobias Ammann contacted Highsmith to inform her that there was a plot of land available in Tegna, a small village seven kilometres from Locarno. As soon as she saw the site, a gloriously open and sunny spot overlooking the Centovalli, in November she knew it was for her. Building a house would be an expensive project – the land alone would cost her 490,000 SF – but she was passionate about creating a home tailored to suit her specific needs. She completed the deal to buy the land in April 1987 and worked closely with Ammann on the designs of ‘Casa Highsmith’ throughout the year.

     ‘The design of the house reflected her personality in some respects,’ says Ammann. ‘From the outside it looked quite stark and forbidding, but at the back it was glass and opened out over a beautiful valley. Similarly, she was always very distant and did not like to shake hands – she was fearful of the world and of people – but I’m sure once you got to know her she could be charming in her own way. After the house was built, she kept ringing me up complaining about little things that had to be done – this went on two years after it had been finished – but eventually I realised that she wanted the company. I always spoke to her in German, sometimes in Italian, which was not so good, and I would go over to the house about once a month, to drink whisky. I remember she always had a very good whisky for her guests, but she drank a cheaper one.’
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‘She lies now, certainly a hundred and ninety, some say two hundred and ten, and with no end in sight,’
¹⁰
runs the opening sentence of Highsmith’s short story, ‘No End in Sight’, published as one of the
Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes
. The story, which focuses on the life of Naomi Barton Markham, an unnaturally aged resident of the Old Homestead Nursing and Rest Home in southern Oklahoma, is a caustic character sketch of her senile mother, a resident of Fireside Lodge, Fort Worth. ‘What does it think about?’ Highsmith writes. ‘Does it go
gubbah-gubbah-gubbah
with toothless gums, as it did in babyhood, when it was also swathed at the loins in a diaper?’
¹¹
Naomi is spoon-fed three times a day (she flushed her false teeth down the toilet at least a century ago), has to have her diapers changed at least ten times every day and babbles on about imaginary characters.

     The story was written in September and October 1986, but its gestation had a long history. Highsmith remembered how, in 1961, she told her stepfather that her mother was slowly going insane, but he reacted with indifference. ‘My own mother goes on forever, thanks to antibiotics, blood transfusions and the paraphernalia that keeps the old alive these days,’ she wrote to Kingsley in February 1976. ‘Not that she is at all ill. Only cracked.’
¹²
While in the Fireside Lodge, Mary Highsmith was confined to a high chair during meal-times – otherwise she would wander around aimlessly swapping other residents’ false teeth and drinking all the orange juice – and used eight dozen diapers each month, an extra expense Highsmith resented. ‘She wants attention like an actress,’ Highsmith scribbled down the side of a letter from her cousin, Dan Coates, in February 1974. ‘There is no end and no hope.’
¹³

     The year before Highsmith wrote ‘No End in Sight’ she observed how her mother’s mental illness was inexorably connected with her own existence. ‘My mother would not have become semi-insane,’ she wrote in her notebook, ‘if I had not existed.’
¹⁴
Highsmith believed the source of her mother’s insanity was the painful realisation that she was a professional, marital and maternal failure; the same reasons which contributed to Naomi’s descent into madness.

     The parallels between the fictional and real-life stories are striking. Like Mary, the young Naomi was ‘blonde, slender, pert, not much intellectually, because she hadn’t gone to school after her mediocre highschool’.
¹⁵
In her early twenties, she marries a slightly older man, Eugene, who like Bernard Plangman, suggests she have an abortion so she can concentrate on her career – not as an artist, like Mary Highsmith, but as a dancer in vaudeville theatre. ‘Naomi tried hot baths plus gin,’ Highsmith writes in the story, ‘resulting in a red face for herself, much sweating, but no ensuing period.’
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After his wife fails to miscarry, Eugene pledges his love to her and suggests taking six months out from her career, but Naomi is adamant that she would rather seek a divorce. Naomi gives birth to their child – in the story Highsmith changes her sex, naming the child Stevey – but after only a few weeks she leaves the home of her parents to resume her career. When the child is nearly four years old, Naomi marries Doug, a man like Stanley Highsmith, ‘a simple but decent fellow’
¹⁷
, whom she then continually berates, ‘making their home life worse than rocky’.
¹⁸
Her child, Stevey, like Highsmith herself, is initially close to his grandmother, Sarah, who ‘raised him from birth to the age of four’
¹⁹
but, at ten, finds himself ‘in love with his mother’.
²⁰
Subsequently he grows up to realise that he ‘needed a mother, or a motherly type, according to Freud.’
²¹
After the death of his stepfather, Stevey discovers that his mother simply cannot cope with life and is forced to place her in a home, from where Naomi dashes off increasingly vituperative letters to her son – ‘Stevey knew his mother well enough to realise that she wanted to start an epistolary argument, back and forth.’
²²
In the story, Highsmith writes how the grotesquely old Naomi, kept alive by antibiotics and vitamins, will outlive everyone around her including her son. Stevey dies at the age of seventy-four – the same age Highsmith would be when she died in early February 1995. On the last night of his life, Stevey’s thoughts turn once again to his mother, who had been ‘a trial and tribulation to all around her, had made good men weep . . . And she lived on.’
²³

     In December 1990, Highsmith thought of a sequel to the story, provisionally entitled ‘The Tube’. The tale, which she outlined in her notebook but which she never wrote, would focus on an elderly, brain-dead woman who has been reduced to a tube, with food given at one end and expelled at the other. Although Mary Highsmith did not live so long as to fully realise the gerontological nightmare that is Naomi Barton Markham, she died only four years before her daughter. At 8.30 p.m. on 12 March 1991, Mary Highsmith ‘faded away’.
²⁴
She was ninety-five and had, noted Highsmith, ‘outlived all her friends’.
²⁵

Throughout 1987, Highsmith continued to jot down her dreams, visions which can be interpreted as fantasies of death and renewal: being stabbed in the street; ‘fathering’ a son with Lynn Roth, whom she had married and settled down with in Italy; observing the deep, self-inflicted razor-blade slashes on the wrists of a friend; watching her doctor take hold of a metal drill and extract a sample of bone marrow from her left fibula.

     Ever since the operation to remove the cancer from her lung, Highsmith, despite the twice-yearly check-ups declaring her fit and healthy, had become increasingly conscious that she might not have that long to live. As a result, she was determined to try and squeeze in as much experience as possible into the time left and, perhaps, reveal a little more of herself to those close to her. ‘Although she was not into verbal self-analysis, towards the end of her life, Pat did do a certain amount of reflection and talked a little bit about the past,’ says Vivien De Bernardi. ‘What amazes me, having known her in her last decade of her life, was how happy she seemed to have been in her twenties and thirties – or rather she had enjoyed periods of happiness, as you would never really call her happy. She suffered from depression all her life and my feeling is that she must always have been a difficult person. I don’t think people become difficult when they are seventy.’
²⁶

     In January and February, she worked on the last of the
Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes
. ‘President Buck Jones Rallies and Waves the Flag’ ends with the death of the leader of the free world and his first lady in a car accident, followed by total global apocalypse. ‘The rotating Earth had become entirely too saturated by radioactive atmosphere,’ Highsmith wrote, ‘which its gravitational force held fast. There seemed less wind or winds than normal, the last curse of all.’
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     In April, during a publicity tour for her Spanish publishers, Highsmith gave a speech in Lleida, Catalunya, where she talked about her career, outlining the reasons why she wrote, after which she placed herself open to the audience for questions. Did she read accounts of true-life crime? ‘I must say I’m attracted to the sinister aspects of many of the stories,’ she replied. How did her interest in painting influence her writing? Her favourite painters, she said, were Kokoschka, Munch, and Manet and, in her writing, she strove after visual realism in the description of certain scenes. ‘I do try to make my scenes, or the interior of houses, visually clear to a reader,’ she said. Should writers have political and social commitments outside their literary work? ‘If a writer (or painter) starts preaching, consciously, in his work, it is no longer a piece of art,’ Highsmith said. Yet, nevertheless, she had a range of political opinions and was willing to ‘boycott, and to be boycotted in return’. Was the dedication in the European editions of
People who Knock on the Door
, which reads, ‘To the courage of the Palestinian people and their leaders in the struggle to regain a part of their homeland. This book has nothing to do with their problem,’
²⁸
aimed at the PLO? ‘Yes, it is addressed to the leaders, singular or plural, of the Palestinian people, who must choose their own leaders,’ she replied. ‘If they choose the PLO, as 96 per cent seem to do at the time that I write this, then my dedication is to the PLO. It could be to another organisation next week – if the Palestinian people choose another leader.’
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