Beautiful Shadow (89 page)

     The party was a success, but after an hour and a half Vivien decided it was probably best if she and her husband left, as she knew of Pat’s limited endurance when it came to socialising in groups. She looked around for her friend, but she was nowhere to be seen. Finally, after walking through the length of the house, she found Pat locked in the bathroom. ‘She just couldn’t stand it – there were too many people, too much talking, she did not know what to say, how to act, what to do. It was just overwhelming for her.’
¹⁸

     During the spring, Highsmith wrote a number of essays and features: ‘Scene of the Crime’, about her inspiration for Ripley, for
Granta
; ‘Pleasures of the Wandering Mind’, for
Die Welt
; a piece about Cézanne for a Swiss publication and a new preface for
The Price of Salt
, for Naiad Press. At the end of May she started to write
Ripley Under Water
– the first draft would take her a year to complete – and she devoted time to overseeing the dramatisation of twelve of her short stories for television, a French-English venture produced by Vamp in Paris and Crossbow and HTV in Britain. In June, she travelled to London and Cardiff, where she met the actor Anthony Perkins who had been employed to introduce the unsettling tales, stories which included ‘Under a Dark Angel’s Eye’, starring Ian Richardson and Anna Massey; ‘Sauce for the Goose’, with Ian McShane and Gwen Taylor; ‘The Birds Poised to Fly’, with Paul Rhys; Jane Lapotaire in ‘A Curious Suicide’; and Edward Fox, Michael Horden and Bill Nighy in ‘The Cat Brought It In’, a reworking of ‘Something the Cat Dragged in’. The series was broadcast as
Les Cadavres Exquis de Patricia Highsmith
in France, starting in April 1990, and
Mistress of Suspense
in the UK, in May 1990 and at intervals throughout 1992.

     Although travel disturbed her health – when she returned from Britain she felt sick and was plagued by digestive problems – after finishing another batch of essays and book reviews, in September she flew to America for fifteen days, during which time she visited her cousin Dan and his wife Florine in Texas. ‘Now I should be working on a novel, but am not,’ she wrote to Christa Maerker, referring to the break in her writing of
Ripley Under Water
.
¹⁹
On returning from the States, she considered writing a short story entitled ‘The Pits’, about a town in Nevada which houses America’s misfits and losers, the ill, the mad and the disabled. Tourists are so intrigued by the modern-day freak show that they take regular helicopter rides over the area to look at the ever-increasing number of unfortunates, but eventually the city swells to such an extent that it spills out into the whole of America. The USA, in Highsmith’s apocalyptic imagination, had been transformed into one large, disease-ridden pit. Just as she had collected newspaper and magazine stories for
Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes
, so she continued to cut out snippets of news about political cover-ups, nuclear accidents and environmental disasters, gathering all the pieces of paper into a folder entitled ‘The Pits’. Another story which might have formed part of the collection was entitled, ‘Adventures of an Unwanted Fertilized Egg’, which she thought of in 1992. A fertilised egg in an artificial insemination laboratory is washed down the sink or toilet, but it survives in the sewer, feeding on the nutrients from human excrement, sick and blood, eventually growing limbs and body parts. Although the authorities try to shoot it, bullets make no discernible difference and the monster stalks the sewers, emerging to wreak havoc on towns and cities.

     Both stories, although only in note form, can be seen as powerful metaphors for the threat posed by those that have been marginalised and repressed by modern America. It’s also tempting to see them as representative of Highsmith’s anger against her own country, symbolic of the rage she felt towards an America whose foreign policy she abhorred and whose publishing industry had all but ignored and exiled her. ‘My publishers, Calmann-Lévy in France, and Bloomsbury and Heinemann [in London], they would stick with me through thick and thin,’ she told the writer Neil Gordon while on a publicity tour in 1992. ‘Here in America they say get out, we’re not interested in the story, we don’t care about the quality, we’re looking at what the last books sold.’
²⁰

At the beginning of February 1990, Highsmith scribbled in her cahier the outline of a story about death. The unwritten tale, which she provisionally entitled ‘Mr D’ or ‘Mr Death’, centres on a dying man, Joe, who, like the writer herself, belongs to EXIT. After meeting the figure whom he has appointed to administer the fatal sedative, Joe tells a friend that he doesn’t like the stranger. He finds another man, but again Joe feels uncomfortable and finally chooses the original figure. Highsmith envisaged the story as an expression of the struggle between the basic, animalistic drive for life and, when illness and old age has stripped an individual of all dignity, the logical desire for death, what Joe described as ‘the long sleep’.
²¹

     It was to be an ominous tale. In the middle of the month her cat Semyon had to be put down because of kidney failure, while at the end of March, Alain Oulman, her French editor and head of Calmann-Lévy, died from a heart attack at the age of sixty-one. The news, she said, ‘stunned’ her for several hours.
²²
She had last seen Oulman on 5 March, in Paris, as he had accompanied her to La Cinemathèque Française, where Highsmith received the honour of Officier dans l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres. As ever, Highsmith was self-effacingly modest about her own success and in an obituary of Oulman which she wrote for the
Guardian
, she took the trouble to praise her editor for his skill, patience and observation to detail, stressing that, at the award ceremony, it was ‘Alain who shaped my clumsy sentences into something graceful in French, which I read out to the Minister of Culture’.
²³

     While trying to finish the first draft of
Ripley Under Water
, which she wrote in intensive bouts over Christmas and Easter, she read Richard Ellmann’s biography of Oscar Wilde, a book which Ripley enjoys in the novel. On 21 April she wrote in her notebook words which would appear, in a slightly different form, in
Ripley Under Water
: ‘Something about Oscar’s life, reading it, was like a purge, man’s fate encapsulated; a man of goodwill, of talent, whose gifts to human pleasure remained considerable, had been attacked and brought low by the vindictiveness of
hoi polloi
, who had taken sadistic pleasure in watching Oscar brought low.’
²⁴
The following month Highsmith observed how Wilde produced some of his best work while with Lord Alfred Douglas, a man who was, for all intents and purposes, bad for him. Later in life, alone in Paris, Wilde tried to work, but with ‘not the same kind of pep and enthusiasm’.
²⁵
She was reminded, she said, of Proust’s remark on the joy which comes from falling back into the arms of someone who is bad for us. ‘Art is not always healthy,’ she said, ‘and why should it be?’
²⁶
Now that she was without a lover, did Highsmith look back to the times when she felt, by turns, tortured and inspired by her various muses?

     She was certainly forced to address the question when, in mid-June, she travelled to London to publicise
Carol
, the renamed
The Price of Salt
, which Bloomsbury was bringing out that October, after its publication in German by Diogenes. For years, Daniel Keel had asked Highsmith whether he could reissue the novel in German, as it had already been found pirated in Holland and, although she would have preferred it to be published under her old pseudonym, she was eventually persuaded to embrace it as her own. That did not mean, however, that Highsmith felt comfortable enough to talk about her sexuality in public. ‘Pat sent me a copy of the book and, I mean, nobody could have any doubts, could they?’ says Patricia Losey. ‘So she had a kind of coming out, didn’t she, even though she didn’t want to talk about it.’
²⁷
David Sexton of the
Sunday Correspondent
asked why she never returned to the subject of lesbianism after
The Price of Salt
? ‘An idea never came to me to do another such book,’ she replied.
²⁸
Had she had relationships with women, asked Janet Watts of the
Observer Magazine
? She refused to answer. Highsmith loathed such close questioning, but surely, with the release of
Carol
, she must have expected it? When Sarah Dunant travelled to Tegna to interview Highsmith for BBC2’s
The Late Show
, she put the question to her – why was she surprised by inquiries of a personal nature when the publication of
Carol
actually seemed to invite it? Highsmith did not understand. Surely the book functioned as a literary coming out, Dunant persisted? ‘I’ll pass that one to Mrs Grundy,’ Highsmith said, looking distinctly ruffled.
²⁹
‘As a fellow writer, I thought she handled it perfectly,’ says Dunant. ‘She chose to say only what she wanted to say and I had tremendous respect for that. However, I was torn because as a television presenter I thought she could deliver a bit more. She was incredibly tense and prickly and did not want to talk about what this book might have meant for her. I was struck by her house, which seemed, architecturally, to be like a fortress – I thought it was fascinating that she had come to live in Switzerland, a place of security and beauty, and chose to look in rather than out. I was also intrigued by the portrait of her as a young woman in the living room [the one painted by Allela Cornell], which was dazzling, yet also poignant as it contrasted so sharply with the stooped, elderly woman who seemed to guard herself so profoundly.’
³⁰

     Highsmith was dreading the reviews of
Carol
as she thought, nearly forty years after its original publication, people would find the novel soppy and sentimental. Critics, however, relished the concept of a ‘forgotten’ Highsmith novel, especially one which had lesbian romance at its core. Victoria Glendinning thought it was ‘intense and accomplished . . . It is a Cinderella story, written with verve and some neat malice.’
³¹
Craig Brown, writing in the
Sunday Times
, thought that the book was ‘as much part of the Highsmith vision as
Edith’s Diary
or
Deep Water
, and almost as chilling’.
³²
Susannah Clapp, writing in the
London Review of Books
, compared the book to a Highsmith novel of suspense, as it featured ‘pages of uneasy eventlessness punctuated by sudden alarm’.
³³
She praised Highsmith for her strong sense of place, the Hopper-like feel of certain locations, ‘at once sharp-edged and one-dimensional’,
³⁴
and the use of unsettling visual descriptions and metaphors. Clapp also positioned
Carol
in the larger context of Highsmith’s oeuvre, concluding, the novel ‘has the compulsion of a thriller; Highsmith’s thrillers have the lure of romance.’
³⁵

In August, Christa Maerker came to stay with Highsmith for a week. ‘Pat had agreed to write one of the “Impossible Interviews” for the radio station, Südwestfunk, which was running a series of short radio plays in which an author interviewed a person of their choice, but Pat misunderstood the assignment. The “impossible interview” had to be with somebody deceased, but Pat had chosen a living politician and she gladly accepted my proposal to help with the rewrite.’
³⁶
Once arriving at the house, Christa insisted on stocking up the fridge so that she felt free to be able to help herself to food and drinks. But while out shopping for groceries, Highsmith filled up the trolley with whisky and beer; the only food she picked out were a few oranges and a bunch of bananas. ‘Even though I had paid for the shopping, somehow the kitchen seemed to be off limits and so I went out and bought some biscuits,’ says Christa.
³⁷
One night, at two in the morning, Highsmith announced dinner. ‘She eventually came back from the kitchen with a small plate with what I thought was goulash, some brown sauce and some burnt pepperoni. I started to put a fork into a piece of meat and watched as it flew off the plate – it was a bone. The cat, Charlotte, must have had the meat and I was left with four pieces of bone. I wasn’t sure if Pat had done this so as to test me or that she simply did not know what she had cooked. Whenever she was invited out, Pat ordered and then only played with her food; after she died, one of her friends said that Pat had starved to death.’
³⁸