Beautiful Shadow (87 page)

In January 1988, after years of commercial and critical neglect in America, Highsmith finally received the kind of attention she deserved when Terrence Rafferty wrote a serious analysis of her work in
The New Yorker
to coincide with the US publication of
Found in the Street
. ‘These novels fill our heads with unsavory images, clammy bad dreams, unflattering reflections, confirmation of our direst fears, the annihilation of our comforts,’ wrote Rafferty. ‘And then – final humiliation – we discover that we’ve accepted, and felt weirdly stimulated by, this stripping of our identity, these awful desert hallucinations.’
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For all of Highsmith’s previous protestations of not caring about her reception in the States, she could not contain her joy at what she finally saw as an open-armed acceptance by the American literary community. ‘Did you happen to see the very good critique of my work in 4th Jan New Yorker?’ Highsmith wrote to Kingsley. ‘You can be sure my editors (and I) are quite happy with this.’
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But while a literary analysis such as Rafferty’s did great things for her reputation, it failed to bump up her sales:
Found in the Street
sold 40,000 copies in Germany, compared to a paltry 4,000 in the US.
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‘In Germany, she has been famous for so long, she is stopped in the street in Munich for autographs,’ Daniel Keel told the journalist Joan Dupont in 1988. ‘And when she goes to Spain, the Prime Minister invites her to dine. But in the U.S., her sales have been the worst in the world.’
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     Joan Dupont arrived in Aurigeno on 15 March and immediately noticed how Highsmith looked less haunted – but more cautious – than she did when she last interviewed her eleven years before. Dressed in jeans, open-necked shirt, lavender bandana, and white sneakers, the author’s face, observed Dupont, appeared ‘accustomed to its ghosts, more assured, but also more wary’.
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Dupont, in an attempt to address the question of Highsmith’s relative unpopularity in America, conjectured that readers in the United States were left cold by the writer’s amoral investigations into perverse behaviour and quoted Gary Fisketjon as saying that, although she was on the verge of a revival, ‘She’s had to wait 35 years for acceptance here.’
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Yet Dupont chose not to examine one of the main factors which skewed her reception in America – her controversial attitude towards the Middle East. ‘I do think her attitudes pro PLO did her in with a lot of Americans, including Gary Fisketjon who worried about it,’ says Joan. ‘She sounded off about it a lot, hated the Israelis, and maybe some Jews, thought Begin was the most evil man in the world. I chose not to repeat the ranting because it would have done her no good.’
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     Highsmith felt passionate about the complex issues surrounding the Arab-Israeli conflict and genuinely traumatised by the uprising in the Gaza Strip and West Bank which broke out in December 1987 and which continued to dominate the news in 1988. ‘I spent a lot of time composing letters I think may be useful to peace and stopping the deaths,’ she wrote in her diary on 28 February, ‘72 Palestinians so far dead, no Jews.’
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She felt motivated by a genuine sense of injustice and, as a member of Amnesty International, she felt compelled to ‘speak up and speak out’. She viewed the conflict as a David and Goliath battle, with her sympathies firmly on the side of the underdog. Yet the methods she chose to articulate her particular point of view were far from subtle. For instance, in February 1989, while on a publicity trip to Milan, she insisted on wearing her, ‘ “Palestine PLO check” sweater’ for the photo-shoots. ‘I was able in perhaps 4 out of 12 interviews, to express genuine USA opinion on Israeli atrocities in Gaza & West Bank,’ she wrote in her notebook,
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while the dedication in
Ripley Under Water
reads, ‘To the dead and the dying among the Intefada and the Kurds, to those who fight oppression in whatever land, and stand up not only to be counted but to be shot.’
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In addition she sent money to the Jewish Committee on the Middle East, an organisation which represented American Jews who supported Palestinian self-determination.

     In an unpublished essay Highsmith wrote about the Middle East conflict in August 1992, she outlined the historical background that had formulated her position. When Israel was created – in May 1948, while Highsmith was at Yaddo, writing
Strangers on the Train
– following the withdrawal of the British, she remembers feeling optimistic about its future. ‘How happy and cheerful we all were then, gentiles and Jews alike!’ she wrote. ‘A new state had been born, and was therefore to be welcomed into the community of democracies.’
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Yet soon after the state was formed – initially an area comprising of Jewish and Arab land, together with an internationally administered zone around Jerusalem – it was invaded by Arab forces, a move which in turn prompted Israeli troops to seize and gain control of three-quarters of Palestine. Highsmith was appalled at what she saw as Israeli brutality and insensitivity, remembering how some of her Palestinian friends were forced to flee their homeland. Since then, of course, the area has been the site of a series of complex, and increasingly violent, power struggles, yet from the beginning Highsmith aligned herself with other writers such as Gore Vidal, Alexander Cockburn, Noam Chomsky and Edward W. Said, who believed in Palestinian self-determination. In December 1994, Highsmith nominated a collection of Said’s essays and talks
, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination 1969
–1994, as her book of the year for the
Times Literary Supplement
, commenting that she thought him ‘both famous and ignored. His eloquence on the real issues makes America’s silence seem all the louder.’
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Highsmith agreed with Said’s opinion that the alliance between Zionism and the United States had resulted in the continued displacement of Palestinians. As a result, she felt forced to take a stand, no matter how small. After the election of Menachem Begin as Prime Minister in 1977, Highsmith would not allow her books to be published in Israel. ‘I’m sure the world couldn’t care less, but it shows that not every American refuses to see what’s happening,’ she said.
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In interviews she told journalists that she loathed Ariel Sharon and the Likud party, and that she found America’s support of the Israeli regime to be despicable.

     ‘Americans and the world know that America gives so lavishly to Israel,’ she wrote, ‘because the United States wanted Israel as a strong military bulwark against Soviet Russia during the Cold War. Now that the Cold War is over, America has cut none of its aid . . . What is an American tax-payer to make of the fact that the USA gives thirteen million dollars a day, still, to Israel without any request for repayment? . . . I blame my own country for the majority of injustices now being inflicted by the Israelis in what they consider Greater Israel . . . I blame [the] American government for the bad press permitted about the Arabs in the United States.’
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     Although the piece is an attempt by Highsmith to argue rationally about the Middle East conflict, in conversation her views were far from logical and coherent. ‘I agreed with her that the Palestinians should have a state of their own, but felt that her disparagement of Israel was sometimes unduly harsh,’ says Kingsley.
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Friends remember how Highsmith would recommend certain books on the subject. One of these was Douglas Reed’s
The Controversy of Zion
, which she first read in 1988. The book, published in 1978, is the work of a former London
Times
correspondent in central Europe, who died in South Africa in 1976 at the age of eighty-two. After leaving full-time employment in 1938 he turned to writing books, including a number of non-fiction bestsellers such as
Insanity Fair
and
Disgrace Abounding
. Yet there was one issue he wanted to address – the subject of Zionist nationalism – which he suspected would never be properly analysed in the British or American press, a media which, for the most part, censored any unfavourable comment. In his 1951 book,
Far and Wide
, Reed questioned the number of Jews who had perished in the Holocaust, believing the generally accepted figure of six million to be too high, but after its publication he was effectively silenced by the mainstream publishing industry and the manuscript of
The Controversy of Zion
was discovered sitting on the top of his wardrobe after his death. In it, Reed attempted to trace the links between fundamentalist Zionism and the modern political landscape, illustrating how the Jewish massacre at the Arab village of Deir Yasin on 9 April 1948 was motivated by a literal reading of ‘ “the Law” laid down in Deuteronomy . . . This was the most significant day in the history of Zionism.’
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Reed believed that a fundamentalist interpretation of the ancient texts of the Talmud and the Torah, a movement he described as ‘Talmudic chauvinism’, would result in catastrophe. ‘In our time, I judge, a barbaric superstition born in antiquity and nurtured through the ages by a semi-secret priesthood, has returned to plague us in the form of a political movement supported by great wealth in all capitals of the world.’
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     Highsmith wrote to Gore Vidal about Reed’s book in December 1989, telling him how she had recently bought three copies to send to friends. The Israelis did not ever want peace because, she believed, they were yearning for the next Holocaust and that they ‘love to be hated’.
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Yet, in her essay on the Middle East, she said that she still harboured a hope for peace. Although some of her views on the subject were, quite frankly, objectionable, ultimately all Highsmith was striving for was a more honest and balanced analysis of the situation. It was the responsibility of each individual, she said, to make his or her mind up on such a subject, a process which involved wrestling with a complex matrix of historical and cultural questions. ‘The important thing is to express one’s view, not to be a sheep, not to feel like a sheep,’ she had once said, ‘and not to allow one’s government (presumably elected) to believe that the people it is governing are a herd of sheep.’
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On 18 June 1988, Highsmith was given another opportunity to air her views – this time on murder – when she was invited to appear on Channel 4’s
After Dark
, a live and informal late-night show starting at 11.30 p.m. and which often stretched into the early hours. The subject under discussion was how to survive a murder, and the guests, in addition to Highsmith, included Lord Longford, the author and penal reformer; Georgina Lawton, the daughter of Ruth Ellis; June Patient, co-founder of Parents of Murdered Children, whose daughter was killed in 1976; David Howden, whose daughter was murdered in 1986; James Nelson, a minister in the Church of Scotland who had served nine years of a life sentence for the murder of his mother in 1969; Peter Whent, a detective superintendent with Essex police; and Sarah Boyle, a social worker and wife of the reformed criminal Jimmy Boyle. The debate was chaired by Professor Anthony Clare.

     Dressed in a blue suit and a red blouse, her neck covered by a cravat, Highsmith took special interest in the case of David Howden’s daughter who was discovered strangled in the family home in January 1986. Sitting next to Howden, Highsmith questioned the bereaved father in a near-clinical fashion. What kind of man was the murderer? Had he been watching the daughter? Was robbery part of the motive? Had she been raped? When Howden told of how he and a friend had had to go and clean up the room in which his daughter had been murdered, Highsmith was quick to respond. Just exactly what kind of stains had been left on the carpet? Throughout the programme, it’s obvious Highsmith found herself more comfortable in the role of the interviewer than interviewee. When asked direct questions, she tended either not to answer or she addressed the issue in such an oblique way as to shroud the essence of her thoughts in an impenetrable mist of vagueness. Yet Professor Clare did his best to pin her down. Had she met any real murderers? ‘You can meet them in Texas or Marseille . . . oh yes,’ she said nonchalantly. What was sin? ‘Sin is what somebody says it is,’ she said. Could she imagine the horror of murder? ‘The evil, yes . . .’ What did evil mean to her? ‘Abstractly – something bad or anti-social or wrong or also unhealthy.’ How would she describe an evil person? If they were ‘malicious or small-minded or back-biting,’ she replied. What about murderers? ‘Frankly, I’d call them sick if they were murderers, mentally sick.’ Central to the debate was the question of absolution – was it possible to forgive a murderer? Highsmith’s atheistic attitude stood in stark contrast to the strong Christianity of the Reverend James Nelson, who took the attitude that, ultimately, only God could forgive. ‘I’m not in such good touch with God as you,’ she said spikily. ‘When you say to me, “It’s only God [who can forgive],” how do I know God is going to even tell me?’
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