Nothing That Meets the Eye (55 page)

In “The Mightiest Mornings” (1945) several themes are superimposed. There is a rumor that the town's new arrival, Aaron Bentley, might be having forbidden relations with ten-year-old Freya, herself a social outsider. When the contempt from the town becomes tangible, Aaron and Freya retreat to an attitude of “arrogant innocence.” Aaron soon notices that the notion of guilt directed at him is actually taking root in him. In an almost masochistic form of acceptance, he internalizes the view that the muted majority has of the minority (himself) and he leaves the small town: Aaron imbibes a guilt that is not his and allows it to drive him into action. In the notebook draft, Bentley was sketched as an ambiguous man; in the final story, however, he becomes the early model of all Highsmith heroes who have less to fear from others than themselves.

Given the prevailing views of the era, it does not come as a surprise that the story was rejected several times, first by
The Atlantic Monthly
, then by
Mademoiselle
—an example of inspired writing that misses its target market. The present edition offers the first publication ever of “The Mightiest Mornings.” In any event, as far as we can see, Patricia Highsmith enjoyed working on it. “Read Proust,” she noted in her diary in November 1945. “And of course—my story.”

II

L
ike the stories in the first part of this collection, those in the “Middle and Later Stories” transcend the time in which they were written. It is difficult to fathom why Highsmith did not seek to publish them or what caused her reservations about her own work. Still, the stories managed to survive and were not among the roughly three hundred pages of short fiction that she destroyed after a process of meticulous inspection.

The
stories
in Part II are collected from the fifties, sixties, and seventies, the decades in which Patricia Highsmith earned a reputation in Europe as a “literary” suspense writer, a category that was highly unusual at the time. Any attempt at greater precision would only obfuscate matters, because she is essentially a writer who defies easy categorization. The texts that appear in the “Middle and Later Stories” encompass the entire range of Highsmith's writings—psychological narrative, prose farce, crime or suspense story, and ghost and animal story. Moreover, they might also have had a role in helping Patricia Highsmith cope with personal conflicts that unsettled her apparently serene secluded life. They can therefore be read on several levels: as literary narratives, as a testing ground for recurrent motifs in her writing, and sometimes even as encoded diaries, if we couple our readings of the texts with scrutiny of the documentary evidence—the author's diaries and notebooks—housed in the Swiss Literature Archives in Berne.

It is not very likely that Patricia Highsmith herself would have compiled and prepared for publication such a diverse volume spanning all these decades. However, the work is hardly a violation of her will; on the contrary,
Nothing That Meets the Eye
can be seen as a liberation—from the self-doubts assailing her as a writer and the conditions under which she earned her living. We may therefore feel justified today in rescuing undeservedly unknown or forgotten texts of considerable quality from the paper grave of her literary estate. Despite their consistent literary mastery, their central motif can be summed up in a single word:
failure.

For reasons that I am at a loss to explain in detail, “The Trouble with Mrs. Blynn” strikes me as the jewel of Part II. Readers might be puzzled to find it marked with the Highsmith tag. Nothing uncanny, odd, or abysmal occurs. There is neither quirk nor anomaly to marvel at. Certainly nothing on the order of a murder takes place. The story simply centers on a small, mean-spirited calculation that offers the reader a quick glimpse into the much greater and incorrigible mean-spiritedness of the world.

An old lady is dying. The house in which she lies, a small cottage on the English east coast, has been rented for only a few weeks. Likewise rented: a housekeeper and a nurse. This nurse, the widowed Mrs. Blynn, was herself a former resident of the house. Now, she is watching Mrs. Palmer die. Her steely eyes pass through the text as a leitmotif. Her gaze alights on everything that the dying woman has gathered around her, including an amethyst pin. In Highsmith's notebooks, we find the following exquisite, solemn statement, dated July 24, 1964: “The world widens when death comes near, all that lies in us is apparent—our lens has widened, and certainly it is too much for the average person.”

The notion that the world “widens” as death approaches and that everything presses to the surface so as to shock those who are not dying unfolds almost imperceptibly in the story. The pattern strikes us as natural as calm breathing. Quite likely the author experienced little difficulty in identifying with the old lady who lies down to die far from home. Patricia Highsmith herself, shortly after completing the first draft of the novel
The Glass Cell
in December 1963, moved from Italy to Aldeburgh in Suffolk, in the south of England, to be with a girlfriend. Visiting the place half a year earlier, she described the dreariness and the stormy climate of Aldeburgh in her diary: “It is hard to imagine anyone wintering here by choice, for Aldeburgh alone. For the people here, it is different: they are married to it and cannot get away.”

This inability to get away—because of disease or death—is exactly what underlies “The Trouble with Mrs. Blynn.” The motionless body and the widened lens focus the situation with complete clarity. Everything happens as it is bound to happen. As Highsmith's notebook reveals, Mrs. Palmer sees in the face of the nurse “a cosmic vision of life and of everything that went wrong with life. The nurse is like misfortune, a failure of understanding, a misreading of goodwill, the shutting of the heart” (November 22, 1963).

The pure, defenseless Mrs. Palmer is joined by another equally virtuous soul in the title story “Nothing That Meets the Eye,” which may have been written at about the same time. This character, however, is altogether different. Whereas Mrs. Palmer sinks into her cushions and shrinks in stature, Helene Sacher-Hartmann seems to bloom in the Austrian winter resort and to make the whole world fall at her feet. The aura she generates deludes everyone she meets. Helene, healthy and sociable, seeks out death with a determination that we might almost call cheery.

In
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
(1966), Patricia Highsmith uses this story to illustrate the question of how a writer can “feel the story emotionally.” She explains that it was difficult for her to project herself into the mind of a woman contemplating suicide because she herself had never been near the edge of suicide. “So I took the easy way out,” she writes laconically, “and did not explain her state of mind. (Never apologize, never explain, said an English diplomat, and a French writer, Baudelaire, said that the only good parts of a book are the explanations that are left out.)” Her strategy certainly worked. In the stories collected here there is no suicide that makes more sense than this one, although it is the only one that is neither explained nor justified.

The gallery of exceedingly Germanic names in “Nothing That Meets the Eye” (Helene Sacher-Hartmann, for example, and Gert and Hedwig von Böchlein, who are all lodgers at the Hotel Waldhaus in Alpenbach) may startle regular Highsmith readers. The writer was somewhat conversant in German, having learned the language in high school given her father's German heritage. On occasion, she even composed her diary entries in German. During her trip through Europe from 1951 to 1953, Highsmith wrote an additional story, “The Returnees,” which also has a strong overlay of German local color.

“The Returnees” chronicles the disintegration of a couple's relationship over the course of several years, with attention being paid to both partners, a feature uncommon in Patricia Highsmith's writing. Moreover, the story, with its postwar ambience and repeated suggestions of German anti-Semitism, is one of the rare examples of historical-political references in her books. The diaries reveal that the author met in Munich in December 1951 a Jewish friend of a friend, whose rapid financial ascent in the postwar era clearly provided the model for the figure of Esther Friedmann in “The Returnees.” Ten months after this encounter, in a Paris hotel room, Patricia Highsmith began to compose her “German story,” which she finished some three weeks later, on October 21, 1952.

It is striking how often the word “failure” occurs in the notes and plot sketches. Considering that most of the stories in the last half of the book revolve around the idea of a bungled and shattered life, they share a common outlook. Patricia Highsmith was a tough-minded writer who believed man capable of extraordinary evil, and she took a dim view of man's capacity for self-knowledge and self-improvement. Several of the stories included here, however, veer in the opposite direction. They are unexpectedly comforting, uncharacteristically Highsmith, the exceptions that prove the rule. Paradoxically, it is one of these stories, “Born Failure,” that features “failure” in its title.

Patricia Highsmith actually comes close to creating a parable in this story, written in 1953. Winthrop Hazlewood, a small-town retailer, has made pitifully little of his life. He toils away until late into the night to earn a meager income. His good-for-nothing brother robs him, all of his business ventures peter out, and his wares get ruined in a dank basement. Then he inherits one hundred thousand dollars, of which he is entitled to keep eighty thousand. All he has to do is pick up the money at his lawyer's office in New York. On the ferry that brings him home, his money stashed in his briefcase, Winthrop Hazlewood looks back. The phases of his life flash before his eyes, all marked by ignorance, ineptness, and bad luck, and it seems to him that his only success in his life is in tracking down failure with the sure touch of a divining rod. A merchant who has accomplished little (although he has a happy marriage, and his wife Rose does not find fault with him), Winthrop Hazlewood realizes that the theme that characterizes his existence is failure, in a way the suitable expression of his personality. He comes to believe that the money in his briefcase is almost obscene: “He didn't deserve it.” While he contemplates his new prosperity and the opportunities now open to him and Rose, tears well in his eyes. He reaches for his handkerchief, and in doing so inadvertently lets the briefcase slip overboard. It falls into the water with a soft thud and sinks.

The story does not conclude here. Nonetheless, this is a critical juncture that enables us to understand the author's deepest motivations. Highsmith was preoccupied with the theme of failure since her earliest recorded notes. Undated entries in her second notebook, which she kept from November 1939 to July 1940, broach an idea for a novel, namely the “story of a failure.” Failure, according to the young woman recording these notes, “inevitably” occurs more often than success. She then remarks: “A good man, thoughtful, sensitive, eternally optimistic at last sees himself honestly after middle age.” That, in a nutshell, is the portrait of Winthrop Hazlewood, who is capable of self-knowledge and assesses the circumstances of his existence without any self-deception.

I am not suggesting that the author's early reflections inexorably led to a story that she wrote a full twelve years afterward, but rather that “Born Failure” is the outcome of a similar concern. Her actual plan to write a novel about a failed artist did not materialize. On September 14, 1940, Patricia Highsmith wrote in her notebook that she was exasperated about the “vagueness” of her prose as soon as she prepared to put her ideas into words. She realized what the problem was: Since she was still young, and every depiction of an artist in one way or another contains a self-portrait within it, she simply could not project herself into the role of an aging artist looking back. On September 19, 1940, she gave up on the idea of the artist figure (“too weak and vague”) and determined that she needed to model her characters on real life. In the same note, she quotes her professor at Barnard College, Ethel Sturtevant, who advised her that the ability to create literary characters by invention comes “with experience.”

Regardless of how Patricia Highsmith gained her new self-awareness— her unambitious stepfather, for one, provided a dismal example from an early age—by the time she was thirty-two years old, she wrote a story about the failed Winthrop Hazlewood, depicting his trials and tribulations with precision and economy, and unexpectedly giving an upward turn to his destiny instead of racing it down into the abyss. Far from being mocked and detested, Hazlewood is celebrated and hoisted up onto the shoulders of several men in the cheering crowd. This moment is important. It is less about poetic justice in the conventional sense, and certainly not about the question of whether Hazlewood has truly “deserved” the love of his wife and the friendship and recognition of his neighbors. (Of course he has.) But haven't other Highsmith figures deserved more than they get? And if so, why do their paths so often lead downhill?

The turning point of “Born Failure,” where she must turn the story into a tragedy or a tale with a happy ending, is critical to our understanding of it. At this moment, readers' expectations need to be satisfied or disappointed, genre conventions fulfilled or violated, interpretations offered or withheld. In this case, the author opts for a finale that recalls fairy tales: The immense material loss no longer matters; it is nothing compared to the self-reflection that the hero has undergone. And the woman whose husband has just allowed eighty thousand dollars to slip through his fingers pronounces herself happier than ever. Something in Winthrop Hazlewood's life has apparently been fulfilled.

Likewise, several stories in this volume have what I might call an either/or situation, and they can just as easily conclude with positive or negative outcomes. One example is “A Bird in Hand,” an undated story to which neither the notebooks nor the diaries contain any reference. Placid, harmless Douglas McKenny enhances his meager income with chronic deceit. When a reporter gets wise to him, his very existence is threatened. Highsmith, however, gives a didactic twist to the story. McKenny makes people who have lost their parakeets happy by bringing them new birds and deluding them into thinking that the replacement birds are the ones that had taken wing. The fact that he amasses substantial monetary rewards for his efforts is beside the point. McKenny is friendly to his neighbors; he is a philanthropist of small gestures. “A Bird in Hand,” then, proves didactic in the sense that the basic decency of the man—coupled with his love of animals—greatly outweighs the significance of his deceit.