In the novel we can never be quite sure if Walter’s presentation of Clara is authentic and unbiased or informed by his prejudices. She falsely accuses him of infidelity with a pretty, sensuous music teacher, but, as if prompted by his wife’s censure, he later begins an affair with her. The implication is that Clara has become a bullying neurotic, forcing him to behave as badly as she alleges of him. Once more fact filters into fiction. Ellen had read Highsmith’s notebooks and discovered accounts of her liaisons with other women in Munich, Paris and New York. She knew what Highsmith was doing but in terms of the practicalities of their life together the mutual awareness that one partner was betraying the other lingered uncomfortably without being fully addressed. In the novel Clara becomes a vituperative, vengeful fictionalisation of Ellen, quite the opposite of the truth. Ellen knew that her partner was leading a double life, but she kept her feelings to herself, turned her unease inwards; all of which contributed to the gradual onset of mental instability. Highsmith recreates this for Clara, but as a strategy of aggression. She is intent on ruining Walter’s life for sins he has yet to commit, a complete reversal of the relationship between Highsmith and Ellen. Ellen suffered largely in silence; Highsmith cared very little.
Clara’s attempt at suicide by overdose is prompted by Walter’s demand that they divorce, and Ellen did the same following Highsmith’s declaration that their relationship was over. There is no evidence that Highsmith deliberately planned to bring her partner’s life to an end, but it is clear enough that she knew precisely the levels of stability beyond which Ellen’s precarious psychological state would be ruinously undermined. By the night that her partner tried to kill herself Highsmith had carefully marshalled and choreographed two related narratives. In the novel Walter fantasises about murdering his wife, while not seriously plotting to take her life. He is a middle-class lawyer who would be fully aware that murderers, particularly domestic murderers, rarely escaped arrest and prosecution. On the other hand, he is minutely alert to Clara’s disturbed mental state and how it might affect her behaviour. When Highsmith informed Ellen that they were finished for good and left the apartment, probably not expecting to see her alive again, Walter, in the novel, was wondering what to do next. While Ellen was in a coma Highsmith decided that Clara should attempt to kill herself, but shortly afterwards fact and fiction diverged. Clara’s overdose is presented as a form of emotional blackmail; knowing that she is likely to survive she causes Walter to seek reconciliation and, literally, forces him to take her back into his arms when he visits her in hospital. Highsmith did not of course go to see Ellen in hospital but the fact that she entered in her diary four weeks later that she had done so and embraced Ellen is more than sinister, because at this point she drafted the account in the novel of Walter visiting Clara in her hospital bed and reassuring her, untruthfully, that their marriage would endure.
The Blunderer is treated by consensus as Highsmith’s most gripping and imperfect novel. It works at several levels, but none seems joined by rationality or plausibility. First, we have Walter’s fascination with Melchior J. Kimmel, a middle-aged bookshop manager who everyone, incited by press reports and police bulletins, believes has murdered his wife. Walter visits Kimmel, and shortly afterwards Clara’s body is found at the foot of a cliff. We never learn whether she fell or jumped, or if Walter played some part in her death, which occurred during the rest-interval of her bus journey to visit her seriously ill mother. And here we should recall Highsmith’s cryptic notebook entry shortly after Ellen’s suicide attempt: ‘a major strike against me, with Ellen’s mother … I am escaping from hell.’ With Clara’s death, on the way to visit her mother, Walter is plunged into a special level of hell. He is perceived by the thoroughly weird police lieutenant Corby as Kimmel’s acolyte, someone who has taken lessons from the bookshop manager on how to commit murder. The Kimmel subplot is incongruous because while we could accept that Walter might have been guiltily distracted by overblown newspaper reports on this alleged wife-murderer, his involvement with him as an uninvited visitor to the shop, who orders a book simply to allow him to return and talk with Kimmel, is absurd. In his New York Times review of the novel (3 October 1954), Anthony Boucher observes that once Walter becomes preoccupied with Kimmel the novel ‘passes the point of no return as the author gropes for (and fails to find) a way out of the intricate situation she has set up’. Highsmith invented Kimmel when she had failed to unpack the puzzle of Walter and Clara’s marriage. She attempted to answer the question of who was the most to blame for their ill-suited relationship, and he becomes a nasty reflection of Walter, beset by private grotesqueries and quite capable of planning and carrying out murder without fear or conscience. Walter and Kimmel were two extremes, two versions of the same problem on how to deal with a ruined relationship: become a victim of its worst features or a killer of the person who had perpetrated them. They could have formed the basis for different novels, and putting them together in the same one was disastrous. To her credit, Highsmith rescues the book from utter calamity by bringing in Corby as the maniacal nemesis who seems determined to bring both Walter and Kimmel to justice. We look at the two men through Corby’s eyes and instead of seeing two characters who belong in different books we wonder if the policeman has detected an endemic propensity towards evil behaviour.
The novel is an extraordinary example of improvisational composition; it evolves and reshapes itself persistently, with its author continually attempting to make sense of her original idea, revising and extending it, and then taking a completely different route as if pursued by a narrative demon long released and no longer controlled. In the concluding section Kimmel stalks Walter across Central Park, eventually stabbing him to death. It is a masterly denouement because it combines for the reader a sense of terror with weary resignation. Even before Kimmel catches up with him Walter has lost the will to live, and in this regard, it epitomises Highsmith’s struggle with different aspects of herself when she wrote the book. There are few, if any, novels like it and aside from its aesthetic uniqueness we should look at its real-world origins, particularly Highsmith’s sense of herself as touched by aspects of Walter and Kimmel. She was unashamedly unfaithful but exchanged anything resembling guilt for resentment at Ellen having found out that she’d had affairs. Ellen’s quite reasonable requests that they spend more time in each other’s company becomes, in the novel, Clara’s campaign to isolate herself and Walter from anything like a normal social life. Highsmith did want Ellen dead, and like Walter she was not a murderer – at least in the sense that she would not fire a shot or deliver a blow – but she knew that her desertion of the drug-filled Ellen on 1 July was murder-by-proxy. Kimmel was her act of confession, if not contrition. Just after Clara’s attempt at suicide had been entered in the draft of the novel, she wrote in the diary that ‘the suicide and Ellen’s character in the book … I find very disturbing and too personal’ (14 August 1953).
7
Ripley
Shortly after Ellen’s recovery Highsmith began a relationship with the aspiring actress Lynn Roth, a petite blonde twenty-eight-year-old in whose Greenwich Village apartment the two women lived together for almost three months. They broke up in early 1954, prompting Highsmith to enter remarks in her notebooks that veer between self-recrimination, regrets that she had once more chosen a woman, Lynn, who was ‘bad for’ her, and the fear that she was suffering from some kind of mental illness, probably manic depression. Along with taking instruction from ‘how to’ books on mental health she listened to news broadcasts which focused on the Korean War Armistice, the mass hysteria regarding America’s infiltration by millions of communist sympathisers, prompted mainly by Senator McCarthy, and the controversy that endured following the execution of the Rosenbergs in June 1953 for sending secrets on nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union. With a mixture of relief and guilt she registered a general feeling of unconcern at these reports of national and global crisis.
Convinced that madness was, largel
y, for others she began to work on her most psychotic invention, as yet unnamed but eventually to become Thomas Ripley. As Highsmith later acknowledged, the plot for the first Ripley novel is borrowed from Henry James’s The Ambassadors (1903) in which Lambert Strether, a comfortably off, middle-aged Massachusetts man is asked by his fiancée, a wealthy widow, to go to Paris and persuade her son, Chad Newsome, to return to the security of bourgeois New England. According to Chad’s mother rumours were circulating that he had become bewitched by the louche decadence of Parisian culture and by one lascivious French woman in particular.
Highsmith had read the novel in 1940 and by the time she began Ripley’s version of Strether’s darkly comic odyssey she already had a new template for the American Abroad theme, based mainly on her own experiences in Europe during the previous five years. By implication she saw James’s book as an honest and prescient account of why well-off Americans were really attracted to Europe, and this had little to do with cultural enrichment. For Highsmith’s characters also, Europe is not so much a liberating environment as an excuse for excess and self-indulgence. The incomers who were sufficiently well off – and Dickie Greenleaf, Marge Sherwood and Freddie Miles fall into this category – filled in for the now often penurious gentry of the continent, bringing welcome supplies of dollars to the beautiful villages still suffering from the deprivations of the post-war decade.
Following the breakdown of her relationship with Lynn Roth, Highsmith rented a cottage in the rural community of Lenox, Massachusetts, a means of removing herself from recent events and concentrating on her new book. The cottage was part of the building occupied by the local undertaker who Highsmith befriended in her customarily ghoulish fashion. He had no fridge and she persuaded him to show her how he embalmed and more importantly preserved corpses that might otherwise decay before burial. He told her how he would replace as many internal organs as possible with dry sawdust. From this, she experimented with various plot twists on the novel-in-progress, involving Dickie and Tom fleeing from Trieste in coffins accompanied by an actual corpse stuffed with bags of opium. In one version Dickie’s father arrives unexpectedly, is killed, and is used as a container for the export of opium.
The novel was going everywhere and nowhere in particular, and it only found proper direction in September 1954 when Highsmith moved from Massachusetts to Santa Fe, New Mexico. She rented a Spanish-style villa and in less than a week was joined on this new journey south by an unlikely companion, Ellen Hill. No correspondence survives from the year they spent apart, and Highsmith entered nothing of her feelings about Ellen in her notebooks during this same period. Clearly they had been in contact and agreed to make another attempt at reviving their relationship. After Santa Fe they spent a few days in the border town of El Paso and went on through Mexico, Ellen driving, and stayed at several towns, including Hidalgo del Parral, which looked towards snow-covered mountains and reminded them of their time in Switzerland. Peggy Lewis, who knew both Ellen and Patricia, later told of how in Mexico City, where they headed after Hidalgo, they argued ceaselessly on largely inconsequential matters.
By spring 1955 they had broken up for good. Given that Highsmith ceased to keep journals during 1954 we know little of what actually happened between them during their final year together. But circumstances are tantalisingly suggestive. In the period between their first break-up and the Mexico reunion The Blunderer went to press, and it is evident that Highsmith did not envisage a re-run of their first disastrous relationship. She dedicated the novel ‘To L’, her lover Lynn Roth with whom she had lived in Greenwich Village when she completed it and who she regarded, optimistically, as a happier prospect for her future. Complimentary copies reached Highsmith in Mexico City where she was renting an apartment with Ellen, and she could hardly pretend that the new book did not exist. We have no exact record of Ellen’s impression of it, but we can surmise a great deal. The principal reason for Highsmith’s cessation of her notebook entries was the fact that Ellen had begun to read them. She was understandably disturbed to discover the enormous difference between her lover’s declarations to her and her private reflections on her character, especially her alleged deficiencies. How would she react to reading a version of this in the story of Walter and Clara? It was her first reading of the novel in which she found herself presented as a maliciously neurotic individual seemingly intent on ruining the life of a partner who had dedicated themselves to her. We might assume from their reconciliation that Ellen was not entirely aware of how Highsmith had behaved during the evening of her suicide attempt and subsequent comatose days in hospital. Insouciance would be a generous description, especially given that aside from showing no concern for the likelihood of Ellen’s recovery Highsmith indulged herself with a brief affair while she was unconscious. In the novel, the scenario is reversed, with Walter being turned into the victim of Clara’s threats to kill herself and her eventual success in doing so.
It was, for Ellen, bad enough to have lived with the memory of what actually happened when they were together during the first three-year period of their relationship, when Highsmith emerged as a liar and a sadist. Even worse was the discovery that she had rewritten all this with herself as the tormented sufferer and Ellen the perpetrator of her ills. It is hardly surprising that their second attempt at a relationship lasted only a year.
Emotionally, 1954–5 was a failure for both women but for Highsmith it forged the basis for her long-term reputation as a writer. The Talented Mr. Ripley, in its readable coherent form, without stuffed corpses, was completed during the first five months of Highsmith’s time with Ellen in Mexico.
Tom Ripley is one of the most fascinating exercises in autobiographical fiction ever produced. In all obvious respects he bears no resemblance to his creator, yet when we look closer at the two of them the parallels are extraordinary and bizarre. In New York Ripley is a confidence trickster, a man who makes a living by pretending to be someone he is not and extracting money from those who are credulous enough to believe his lies. Highsmith too had to lead a life of deceit, conducting relationships which, officially, would not be tolerated or spoken of, and producing books that were about stealth and concealment. In Europe, especially with Kathryn and Ellen, she could emerge from behind the curtained environments of America. It was not that the provinces of Germany, France, Italy and Spain were liberal, quite the opposite – most of the places she visited were still controlled by Roman Catholic orthodoxy. However, generally speaking the people who lived there were too preoccupied with making enough to keep themselves and their communities alive to concern themselves with what a pair of American women booked into the same apartment or hotel might get up to.
From all of this came Ripley. He is approached by the shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf to go out to Europe and bring back his son, Dickie, who seems determined to exist on family money as a harmless, dissolute bohemian in the village of Mongibello, a thinly disguised version of Positano, where Highsmith later claimed to have first seen the young man in swimming trunks strolling along the beach at dawn.
Throughout her time in Europe Highsmith felt uncomfortable, as if she had gate-crashed a party held by and for the elite. Similarly, Tom Ripley makes his way into Dickie and Marge’s life in Mongibello by aping the mannerisms of their class, the wealthy Ivy League-educated generation for whom Europe offered hedonism disguised as cultural revelation. The most striking episode in the novel follows the trip that Tom and Dickie make to Rome, in which the former feels that he has almost become a version of his new friend. They seem on effortlessly intimate terms, significant only to each other and insulated against the attentions and demands of the world at large. Tom even suggests that they treat this as a rehearsal for excursions across Europe, destinations and timeline unspecified. They will leave their previous existences behind and dedicate their time to the appreciation of the continent and each other.
The homoerotic overtones are at once self-evident and one-sided in that Tom has misread the nature o
f their friendship and succumbed to his own fantasy. This hits him suddenly and painfully once they return to Mongibello, and he follows Dickie when he visits Marge at her house. Marge and Dickie are close friends, and Tom assumes that their relationship involves nothing more than that, but when he sees Dickie kissing her passionately he is filled with ‘disgust’. After returning to Dickie’s place he throws some of Dickie’s art supplies into the yard, goes to the bedroom and tries on his clothes, attempts to imitate his voice and physical habits and enacts a scene which is a twisted fantasy of the one he has just witnessed. This time, he, as Dickie, kisses and embraces Marge and then strangles her to death. ‘You were interfering between Tom and me,’ he informs her imagined corpse. ‘But there is a bond between us!’ At that point Dickie enters the room, tells him to ‘get out’ of his outfit and thereafter Tom’s idyll descends gradually into a nightmare. Marge already resents Tom’s closeness to Dickie – one of the insinuations that he might be homosexual – and begins to accuse him of having made up things about his past, notably his class and standing in East Coast society. Tom and Dickie take time away from the village to travel and socialise in various fashionable parts of Italy and while Ripley gradually becomes closer to his friend, even emulating his mannerisms and speech habits, Dickie grows uncomfortable with this, and urges that they should spend time apart. Ripley responds by murdering the man he mythologises and secretly adores. Once more, Highsmith’s diary entries which equate failed relationships with death and murder manifest themselves in her fiction. Back in Rome Tom assumes Dickie’s life full-time, a twenty-four-hours-a-day version of the moment in his bedroom when he had tried on his clothes and imitated his voice.
Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires Page 12
