A friend of Dickie’s, Freddie Miles, comes close to exposing Tom as a fraud and murderer, only to also be killed by him. Miles visits the elegant apartment Tom claims to be ‘keeping’ for Dickie, learns from the concierge that Signor Greenleaf is the only resident, returns to the flat and has his skull smashed in by Ripley with a heavy glass ashtray.
It is a superb novel, eroding the boundaries between the popular genre of crime writing and the as yet unestablished field of gothic realism to be pioneered by Iris Murdoch. Most significantly it is morally unhinged, causing us to feel all manner of things about Ripley, depending on our inclinations. He is by far the most charismatic individual in the novel. Indeed, he is so well crafted that we begin to feel that the detached, entitled figures upon whom he revenges himself deserve what comes to them.
That Highsmith completed it at such speed – less than five months – when she was with Ellen in Mexico is not entirely surprising. Ellen enabled her to draw together what had previously been disparate threads of potential and conflicting stories. She was, for Highsmith, what Dickie is for Tom. Certainly, Ellen was an unapologetic lesbian, rather than a heterosexual who Tom believed might confirm his own repressed inclinations, but at the same time there was for Highsmith something about her that was unattainable. As many of Highsmith’s friends stated it was a ‘love–hate’ relationship – a mutable term – but in this case meaning that Highsmith loved the prospect of being with a woman who in truth she neither properly knew nor appreciated. When she wrote the book the muted antagonism between them drove the narrative forward, as did Highsmith’s memories from the country, the continent, in which the novel is set.
The French and Italian cities and villages she visited with her lovers, notably Kathryn and Ellen, made up the wonderful, unintendedly liberal environment that Tom saw as the future for himself and Dickie Greenleaf, and the idyll dates back to Highsmith’s diary entry the day after her plane landed in Paris in 1951 when she began her first year with Ellen. ‘This is the kind of evening (and life) of which I dreamed in college – in a very Scott Fitzgerald way: Europe, a girl, money, leisure, a car. Now I’ve had one night of it, after twelve years’ (23 August 1951). The Gatsby-style fantasy resurfaces for Tom Ripley who crosses the Atlantic first class, at the expense of Dickie’s father. He does not, cannot, predict that the price he must pay to share Dickie’s lifestyle involves murdering him.
But some time before she invented Ripley, Highsmith had a clear perception of something that would be central both to her state of mind and her fiction. ‘Frustration as a theme. One person, in love with another whom he cannot attain or be with’ (26 September 1949). At the time she began the draft of The Talented Mr. Ripley, Highsmith’s four most significant lovers had been Rosalind Constable, Ginnie Catherwood, Kathryn Cohen and Lynn Roth. Each of these women, by virtue of their beauty, cosmopolitanism, wealth or social standing, was what she was not. Her longest relationship had been with Ellen, but Ellen was different from the others. In some respects, she outranked and overstretched Highsmith intellectually – often the cause of their seemingly incessant arguments – and like Dickie she had moved seamlessly into the social and cultural fabric of Europe. Her multilingual abilities are due in part to her family legacy, her parents’ origins in Europe; she does not sound like a foreigner. Highsmith and Ripley are embarrassed by their competent but unsophisticated grasp of French and Italian and work hard at becoming more accomplished as natural speakers. In July 1954, shortly before she contacted Ellen to suggest they try again, she wrote, while at her cabin in Massachusetts, ‘I am always in love with the worthy and unworthy … and I wonder now if it is a giving or a taking’ (3 July 1954). She seemed to be weighing up her lovers in terms of their social standing, and assessing her collateral debt to them, or theirs to her. Wondering, perhaps, if she was once again to begin an affair with someone all too like herself.
In Peggy Lewis’s recollections of the arguments between Highsmith and Ellen in Mexico City they come across as versions of the same person, figures with so much in common that persistent close proximity will inevitably result in acrimony (Interview with Wilson, 14 December 1999). At this point Highsmith had got to the climactic chapters of the narrative, after Tom has murdered Ripley and adopted his identity in Rome. Tom, playing Dickie, does not argue with himself but a residual sense of guilt at what he has done and fear that he will be caught causes him to become disturbed. On one hand, he enjoys the fantasy made real; he has not only become part of Dickie’s set, he has replaced him. At the same time, he can never stop being Tom Ripley. At some point the dream must come to an end, either through his arrest or by his voluntary departure from it. And in this respect Highsmith’s relationship with Ellen played a crucial role in enabling her to complete the novel. She was drawing energy from a partnership which she knew was destined for disaster.
Tom neither plans nor takes pleasure in despatching Dickie but it gradually becomes clear to him that the act incorporates a blend of natural justice and destiny. What Dickie denied him in life – a form of unique togetherness – would be replaced in death by a sharing of their personalities. Highsmith had not clattered Ellen over the head with an oar but her callous disregard for her fate when she left the apartment on the evening of her suicide attempt came close to wishing her dead. For three days in 1953 Highsmith believed that Ellen had died from an overdose and even when she learned that she had survived she showed no sympathy for her condition or, more importantly, her state of mind. When she almost magically rekindled their relationship, it was as though she had, like Tom, brought her victim back to life. For Tom the dead Dickie, for whom in life he felt little genuine affection, enabled him to sustain a delusion; and for Highsmith the stomach-pumped, revived Ellen provided energy for a gruesome fictionalised projection of their relationship. If The Price of Salt was a transference of private fantasy into literature, The Talented Mr. Ripley put a ghastly twist on this exercise.
Ellen made no public comments on all of this, but we know that she read the manuscript and that their attempt at reconciliation collapsed shortly afterwards. She would have been appalled to find that following the reworking of her death in The Blunderer, Highsmith had repeated the exercise in her new novel. Ellen should be commended for her tolerance and indulgence in that she remained in regular contact with Highsmith until the author’s death, though there is no hint that they would ever be more than cautiously respected associates. One feels that, had he survived, Dickie Greenleaf would have been far less forgiving.
There is a story – and story it is, because no one but Highsmith can authenticate it – that once she had completed the manuscript, shortly before the break-up with Ellen, she posted it to Willie Mae Coates in Fort Worth, who died shortly afterwards, apparently of a stroke, on 5 February 1955. Why exactly she assumed her eighty-eight-year-old piously Christian grandmother would be entertained by an exercise in Grand Guignol homoeroticism remains a mystery but apparently the manuscript was lost at some point between its arrival and Willie Mae’s burial. Highsmith did not attend the funeral and later blamed her mother, who did, for conspiring with the ‘negroes’ to destroy the draft. ‘Inexcusable. Inexcusable. I said to my mother, “How could this happen?” She replied that “Well, the negroes were sorting it out,”’ and Highsmith replied, rather cryptically, ‘The negroes were sorting out the … what are you talking about?’ (The Times, Saturday Review, 28 September 1991). In all of the accounts I have seen there is an uncertainty about whether she sent ‘the manuscript’, ‘a manuscript’ or ‘a copy of the manuscript’ to Fort Worth and it is puzzling that no one has drawn attention to these potential anomalies. It would have been impossible for her to rewrite, from memory, another version of the novel in time for publication; it came out in December 1955. But the story that the single manuscript sent to Fort Worth disappeared persists. The mysteries surrounding this lost draft emerged when Highsmith gave interviews decades later on her most famous book. Once more we have to suspect that fiction
was for her some kind of magical potion, not simply a form of entertainment for others but a means of manipulating those aspects of her life that bored her or which she distrusted.
8
Marijane
The Talented Mr. Ripley won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel, one of the most prestigious prizes for crime-mystery novels, in early 1956. During December of the previous year the reviews in the mainstream American newspapers were excellent. Anthony Boucher in the New York Times Book Review praised Highsmith for her ‘three-dimensional portrait of what a criminal psychologist would call a “congenital psychopathic inferior”’. He was impressed that Tom Ripley could transform character traits that would normally sideline him as an undistinguished failure into calculatingly evil tendencies, without seeming a contradiction in terms. The anonymous reviewer in The New Yorker agreed, finding Ripley ‘one of the most repellent and fascinating characters’ in literature, who comes across ‘very engagingly indeed’. There was a general consensus that while the main character was vile and immoral Highsmith had somehow insulated him from the reader’s inclination to judge. He seemed to exist in a world of his own, cut off from the emotional and legal environment shared by everyone else, inside and outside the novel.
By March 1956 she had reactivated her cahiers, prompted by a new relationship. As usual she begins her account of things with bouts of unadulterated hyperbole. ‘The trust in the eyes of the girl who loves you. It is the most beautiful thing in the world’ (8 June 1956). Doris was an illustrator and copywriter for a prestigious advertising company on Madison Avenue. She was from decent middle-class stock in the Midwest, had a degree from Ohio State University and held a position with the McCann Erickson Agency, typically staffed only by men. In Manhattan advertising agencies, most female employees were secretaries or administrative workers – the TV series Mad Men provides a reasonably accurate account of sexism in such environments – and Doris had clearly proved herself through her ability to make money and win contracts. Wilson refers to her as someone who ‘cannot be named’ while Schenkar uses only her forename. Doris certainly existed. There were too many documented tracks between her and known figures and circumstances for us to doubt her presence. She lived with Lynn Roth, as an occasional lover, when Highsmith first met Lynn, and Ann Smith refers to her on record as an ex-girlfriend of hers. It is curious that Highsmith’s previous biographers treat her as a mystery given that her personal history is identical to that of Doris Sanders, with whom Highsmith produced the children’s book Miranda the Panda is on the Veranda, published in 1958 and written during the second year of their relationship. There is a photograph of Doris in the SLA archive, cigarette in hand, seated on a raised stool, sketching. She looks exquisitely composed, slim and almost beautiful and once more we find that Highsmith is mixing up sexual attraction with social advancement. Doris was Rosalind, Ginnie and Kathryn, revisited.
After she left Ellen, Highsmith returned to the modest apartment on East 56th Street in Manhattan she’d first occupied in 1942 when she came to the city fourteen years earlier. It seemed an act of contrition, given that the location had certainly not improved. She was pestered for days on end by gangs of teenagers who took control of the outdoor staircases, vandalising or stealing anything that was left unguarded.
Highsmith once left her largest suitcase on the landing but rather than steal it the vindictive youngsters daubed it with paint, as if they were telling her that while they did not want it she would never use it again. They played baseball in the street below her window, with a loud and raucous soundtrack just to ensure residents knew they were there. Highsmith was so affected that she wrote a short story called ‘The Barbarians’, later published in Eleven (1970), in which the tormented tenant drops a gigantic rock onto the head of one of the teenagers and kills him.
Highsmith relieved herself of this self-imposed purgatory by moving with Doris into a small house in the hamlet of Snedens Landing, part of Palisades, New York State, on the Hudson River and one of the most exclusive commuter enclaves for those who spent their working lives in the city. It was expensive and Doris, on a salary that went far beyond Highsmith’s irregular royalties and other incomings, covered the bulk of the rent. Once more the idyll became, for no evident reason, something else. ‘My dear God … teach me forbearance, patience, courage in the face of pain and disappointment … one day I shall take you by the throat and tear the windpipe and arteries out, though I go to hell for it,’ she wrote (29 June 1956).
She was commendably honest about the cause of her dissatisfaction. Things were too good. They had bought a new Ford convertible, again with the assistance of Doris’s salary, and during the spring and early summer Highsmith divided her time between writing and planting radishes, beans, peas and tomatoes in the spacious garden while Doris was working in the McCann Erickson offices. She wrote of ‘the danger of living without one’s normal diet of passion’. As usual she had become bored with monogamy, but ‘passion’ for Highsmith also involved the attraction of anything else that might disrupt domestic contentment, mostly the onset of mutual antagonism and arguments over inconsequential matters. ‘Things are so readily equalised, soothed, forgotten with a laugh’ (Cahier, 31 July 1956). Later that year she observed that happiness was not conducive to her particular brand of creativity. ‘My continuing troubles about my work. My writing, the themes I write on, do not permit me to express love…’ (21 October 1956).
She meant that in order to create the loveless, inherently evil figures who were now her speciality, she must exist in a collateral state of bitterness, anger and deception in the real world. She loved Doris, as much as she could love anyone, but their life of tranquil equanimity stifled her as a novelist. Shortly after she met Doris, she had begun A Game for the Living which would be published in 1958. It took her more than two years to complete because she was never happy with what she had undertaken. It is routinely referred to as her Mexican Novel, set in the country she had visited several times, and involves the unsteady friendship between the Mexican furniture repairman Ramon and Theo, a German expatriate intellectual, each of whom might be responsible for the rape, murder and mutilation of Leila; both have slept with her. Highsmith herself regarded it as her worst piece of fiction, with some justification. Eventually we do learn of the identity of the murderer but rather than being the shocking conclusion of the classic ‘whodunnit’ it strikes us more as the tapering-out off of a work that should be more accurately described as a ‘who cares’. We leave the narrative relieved of boredom but not particularly concerned with what has happened. Joan Kahn, her editor at Harper, returned the draft to her several times, on each occasion stating that the ending was disappointing and unconvincing.
Highsmith dutifully rewrote the conclusion four times and found herself also obliged to alter key parts of the preceding story to ensure that what occurred at the end was consistent with earlier insinuations and nuances. She was revising it backwards and becoming more and more contemptuous of the whole enterprise.
In spring 1957 she and Doris had driven south in their Ford convertible for three weeks in Mexico, principally in Acapulco and Mexico City. This was a reprise of her earlier inspirational protocols: travel with her current lover – perhaps in the expectation that the pressures of elsewhere would initiate friction – and visit locations that recalled previous private and emotional catastrophes. On this occasion Doris seemed oblivious to her provocations and an atmosphere of amiability prevailed. Highsmith wrote in her cahier, ‘Don’t know where I’m going … resulting in static effect’ (1 May 1957). She was referring both to her attempts to inject fractiousness into their relationship – Doris was able to outwit her with an abundance of patience and imperturbability – and to her consequential inability to energise her narrative with thorough nastiness. She returned from Mexico horribly disappointed in what she had hoped to achieve from the visit: they’d had a lovely time.
Another problem with A Game for the Living was that she had begun to
write it when she was having enormous difficulties completing an earlier novel. Deep Water (1957) is a particularly horrible and addictive piece of work. It tells of the sexless marriage between Vic and Melinda Van Allen, residents of the small, respectable Massachusetts town of Little Wesley, and was inspired, like its two predecessors, by Highsmith’s relationship with Ellen Hill. She was more than seventy pages into it when she and Hill broke up and once she had moved in with Doris at Snedens Landing she began to lose the energy to continue. Vic cares little about whether or not he continues his hopeless, loveless marriage, but he is too cowardly and conventional to seek a divorce. Instead he allows his wife to take as many lovers as she wishes. He takes credit for killing Malcolm McRae, one of her former lovers, only to present himself as a comic grotesque when the true killer is apprehended soon afterwards. Vic goes on to make use of his role as falsely accused murderer and assumes he’ll get away with drowning Melinda’s current lover in the pool of a neighbour’s house following a party. He does.
Vic is Ellen. Even his physical attributes correspond with Highsmith’s notebook descriptions of her: deep-blue eyes, thick brown eyebrows, a firm ‘lopsided’ mouth indicative of wry unvoiced opinions on life in general, but with a facial expression giving no clue as to ‘what he was thinking or feeling’. More significantly Highsmith reverses the roles between herself and Ellen, and Vic and Melinda to suit her rather biased view of their relationship.
Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires Page 13
