In fact Robert had, following a fight, left Greg unconscious, but when a badly decomposed body is found close by the police become suspicious and when Nickie informs them that he once threatened her with a weapon, are convinced of his guilt. Eventually Robert is informed by Ralph, Nickie’s new husband, that Greg is alive and has been working with Nickie to frame him for the killing. Robert then becomes the victim of a stalker, Greg, who spies on him at his home and takes shots at him with a handgun, eventually wounding him. Greg is arrested but released on bail and in a bizarre denouement he and Nickie go together to Robert’s home where Greg tries to knife him but instead kills Nickie. The conclusion is open-ended, with both Greg and Robert still alive but the latter once more being the police’s chief suspect. The predominant theme is that Robert – despite seeming a decent man – has in some way infected all others in the novel with a version of his temperamental peculiarities and condemned them to a fate similar to his.
The opening chapters are superbly disturbing. Once or twice a week Robert visits the garden of Jenny’s house and, without speaking to her, appears as though he wishes to possess her: ‘The girl had light-brown hair and was rather tall. That was about all he had been able to tell about her from a distance of sixty feet or so.’
Gradually, visit by visit, he moves closer, desperate to turn his distant impression into something almost intimate.
She was about five feet seven, with largish bones, good-sized feet and hands, and she might have been anything from twenty to twenty-five. Her face was smooth and clear, she never seemed to frown, and her light-brown hair hung down to her shoulders and was softly waved … Her mouth was wide and thin and usually had an expression of childlike seriousness about it, like her grey eyes. Her eyes were rather small. To Robert she was all of a piece, like a properly made statue. If her eyes were too small, they went with the rest of her, and the overall effect he thought beautiful.
Moving from sixty feet to ten he seems to delight in the amount of detail he can secure regarding her posture, her bone structure, the colour of her eyes and so on, and the most disturbing phrase involves him envisioning her as a ‘statue’, an object of aesthetic wonder, something that he could make his own, rather than a human being.
She does eventually invite him in but is divided between fascination and fear. The mantra for the book is Robert’s explanation to his therapist, ‘I have the definite feeling if everybody in the world didn’t keep watching to see what everybody else did, we’d all go berserk. Left on their own, people wouldn’t know how to live.’ In the novel, hardly anyone is left on their own – they are spied on by someone else – and most of them die.
The opening chapters, when Robert stalks Jenny, are eerily autobiographical. Highsmith, like Robert, would go back to the house she had shared with Marijane and, before knocking on the door, watch her from the garden or through the window in the kitchen. Just as significantly, she would reinvent their past in her own house on the other side of the village in her cahiers, not as the real Marijane but as someone she had invented. In just the same way, Robert was projecting his imagined sense of the actual Jenny onto his private fantasy world, based only on an image glimpsed through a window.
Highsmith did not leave New Hope until March 1962, though she had spent intermittent periods in New York during the previous year. While continuing with her occasional visits to Marijane on the other side of the village she began a relationship with Daisy Winston, who served in one local bar and sang in others, versions of Ella Logan and Marlene Dietrich being amongst her repertoire. Daisy was less than four feet six tall and suffered from nystagmus, which caused persistent involuntary eye movements. She did not have a history as a lesbian but seemed flattered by Highsmith’s attention. Highsmith had become known as one of the sophisticated group of writers and artists who had come to the area from New York City. Peggy Lewis, part of the same set, later confessed to puzzlement at what Highsmith ‘saw in’ Daisy, a euphemistic reference to the fact that she was not particularly attractive and, more importantly, was working class and had no evident interest in the arts. Notably, when Highsmith visited the houses of the local intellectual gentry, such as Glenway Wescott and his brother, Lloyd, she was accompanied by figures such as Peggy Lewis and, when they were on speaking terms, Marijane. She never brought Daisy with her.
Their affair was, however, more than a fling. During the next decade Highsmith would make use of Daisy as a general assistant when dealing with the practicalities of her life – in 1970 flying her out to England so that she could clean a house that she was about to put on the market. This was a curious thing to do given that local house-cleaners would have been cheaper than a return air ticket across the Atlantic. Perhaps she had asked Daisy to do the job for other reasons. In 1965 she had flown her over to Paris to do menial secretarial work, where, as Highsmith knew, she would feel completely out of her depth. Highsmith seems to be reminding her one-time lover, at some expense, that while she felt that Europe was her entitled domain, Daisy belonged in New Hope.
We can never be certain of Highsmith’s true feelings for Daisy, but the timing of their relatively brief encounter – Daisy’s only known lesbian affair – is intriguing. By 1961 Highsmith had already decided that her intermittent flirtations with Europe would become a full-time commitment. She was planning to move permanently to the region she felt was her true home and destiny, at least in terms of its standing as the birthplace of Western civilisation and its literary offshoots. Daisy was, perhaps, her goodbye note to ordinary America, the one into which she had been born.
9
‘So Much in Love’
When she took the flight to London in 1962 Highsmith was still revising a novel she had been working on for more than three years, The Two Faces of January (1964). Chester MacFarland, an alcoholic fraudster, is travelling with his young wife Colette in Greece, and wondering if his history of stock manipulation has been discovered by the US authorities. In Athens, a Greek policeman questions him in his hotel room and MacFarland accidentally kills his interrogator. Rydal Keener, a young American law graduate, slides into the plot and offers to help MacFarland and Colette by obtaining false passports for them and disposing of the policeman’s body. Colette and Keener, close in age and mutually attracted, infuriate MacFarland, who tries to kill his rival by dropping an ancient stone container on his head but misses and kills his wife instead. When interviewed by the police MacFarland accuses Keener of killing Colette and then hires a hitman to kill him, not realising that Keener has already paid the same man to dispose of MacFarland. MacFarland purchases another fake passport and heads for Paris, hoping eventually to return to America in disguise, but Keener reappears and blackmails him. MacFarland panics, takes the train for Lyon and then Marseille and, after his eventual arrest, is shot dead while trying to escape.
Highsmith’s editor, Joan Kahn, saw the first draft in 1961 and wrote to her new agent, Patricia Schartle, that while her client was still writing ‘fine’ books, this one ‘escapes us’. She continued, ‘we cannot like any of the characters, but more difficult, we cannot believe in them … it’s all so far in a dream now it makes no sense … we cannot publish it as it stands’ (Letter to Schartle, 21 February 1961). Highsmith rewrote it three times before Schartle could persuade Kahn to accept it, all during the period when she lived with Marijane, had an affair with Daisy and left America for Europe, but one should commend her agent’s skills as an advocate for this piece of fiction because, even when Highsmith had repaired its worst faults, it went into print more as a disturbing reflection of its author’s state of mind than as something even a fairly indulgent reader might appreciate.
Many of Highsmith’s characters continually mutate into versions of themselves that at first seem unlikely and implausible, but in The Two Faces of January disguise and obfuscation are afflictions rather than literary strategies. As a professional conman MacFarland can be expected to take on a variety of personae but rather than turning himself into someone e
lse as a matter of expediency, he becomes addicted to the arbitrary swapping of one name and personal history for another, just for the sake of it. The names and backgrounds of Howard Cheever, Louis Ferguson, Philip Jeffries Wedekind, William Chamberlain, Richard Donlevy and Oliver Donaldson all appear on his faked documents but MacFarland – if this is indeed his original surname – takes a particular interest in making up a fictional past not simply as a disguise but as if it had actually happened. Colette’s original name is Elizabeth, but she changed it at the age of fourteen: how and why? Don’t ask. Keener is from a solidly middle-class background, the son of an Ivy League academic, but he enjoys switching roles between the quasi-beatnik Joey, Enrico Perassi, an Italian with impeccable English, and the similarly bilingual Frenchman Pierre Winckel. Had the three of them had prior knowledge of their obsession with becoming other people then this might stand as some explanation for their unhealthy mutual attraction, but this is not even hinted at. Keener at one point confesses that MacFarland reminds him of his father, but it is left unclear as to whether he wishes to recreate, masochistically, his unsatisfactory past or improve upon it through MacFarland’s inclination to be different people in different circumstances.
The book received a good review in the New York Times as ‘an offbeat, provocative and absorbing suspense novel’ and the UK Crime Writers’ Association awarded it the prize for the best foreign crime novel of the year, 1964. Julian Symons in the Sunday Times praised it for showing ‘a doom-laden world where human beings, all of them emotionally lame, deficient or perverse, are destroyed not by events but by each other’. During this period practitioners and advocates of crime fiction were intent upon rescuing the genre from its status as a niche of popular low culture, easy to read and easy to write, feeding the appetites of the uneducated. Highsmith, particularly with novels such as The Two Faces of January, suited their cause, in the sense that she appeared willing to exchange the whodunnit formula for something more akin to Dostoevsky’s employment of acts such as killing, vengeance and judicial retribution as philosophical enigmas rather than forms of lurid entertainment.
But Highsmith confessed in her cahier that she had abandoned any interest in its effect on the reader. The novel was a private, introverted exercise, about ‘the ultra-neurotic, which is myself’, and she dismissed the considerations that are generally thought to inform the activity of writing: ‘to hell with [the] reader … or a sympathetic character’ (3 March 1961).
The parallels between what happens in the book and Highsmith’s life when she was writing and rewriting it are clear enough. Like its triumvirate of characters she was an inveterate deceiver, becoming for each of her lovers a convenient modification of the actual Patricia Highsmith, if such a person could be found. Looking back on her eighteen years of relationships we are reminded of MacFarland, a person known uncomfortably to himself but for others perpetually changeable. MacFarland’s various identities always overlap, never quite allowing a clean break from one to another. Similarly, Highsmith never broke off with one of her partners before ensuring that she had begun a relationship with the next. Whether she wished pain on them or on herself will remain a mystery but in the book MacFarland seems confused by his incapacity to stop hurting people.
Just as striking are the novel’s manic shifts in location, mainly between Greece, Italy and France. Highsmith was dividing up her personality and sending it on trips across the locations in Europe to which during the previous decade she had become addicted and, given what happened next, we should treat MacFarland as an alarming prophecy.
In March 1962 Highsmith advertised the New Hope house as a sublet; she was not as yet certain of whether she might need it again if Europe was a disappointment. She arrived in Paris via London in mid-May, stayed with acquaintances from her earlier visits and then flew to Rome where Ellen Hill was waiting for her at the airport. There is no record of which of them suggested this, but subsequent events make it clear that they had made plans for something more than a brief encounter. First, they took a train south and then boarded a ferry for Cagliari, Sardinia, staying for two weeks and then travelling back to the Italian mainland, to Naples, where they boarded a local train for Positano. The village, beautiful as ever and still unmolested by tourists, was for Highsmith a blend of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Dante’s Inferno: both a fantasy and the horrid punishment for making the fantasy real. And so it was that she and Ellen spent most of their waking hours howling abuse at each other, claiming to find reasons for why one was to blame for their state of mutual distress. In early July they were still together, travelling first to Rome, then Venice and next back to Paris, where Highsmith visited Oscar Wilde’s grave and recited parts of ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’. Ellen was nauseated and left for Germany. It is worth noting that shortly before she left New Hope for Europe Highsmith entered in her cahier an account of how she had dreamed of cleaving open the head of a lover with an axe. The victim is someone she has loved and now hates and is ten years older than her (22 December 1961).
No one seems clear about where she met the woman without a name – given the pseudonym ‘Caroline Besterman’ by Schenkar and referred to by Wilson as ‘X’ – but she is certainly real, despite the fact that she will for the foreseeable future remain anonymous. Others involved with Highsmith testify to her existence and Highsmith’s own travels, notebooks, and decisions on where to live during the next four years are determined largely by their relationship. Despite not knowing what she was called we have ample information on who she was and what she did. Apart from the second-hand circumstantial testimony Schenkar quotes directly from conversations with her, with her permission. Caroline (which is, I think, preferable to the Ian Fleming-style ‘X’) was, or perhaps still is, married to a wealthy businessman, and Highsmith likely met her in London shortly after Ellen had absented herself from their nightmarish tour of southern Europe. Caroline would be Highsmith’s final excursion into high-society affection and sexuality, a routine which began with Virginia Kent Catherwood. She was (similarly to Ellen) at least twelve years older than Highsmith, had a child and was a member of the English upper classes, living with her husband in a restored Georgian house in Kensington. Subsequent correspondence and entries in Highsmith’s notebooks indicate that while their first encounters in Europe were brief, they involved sex and had a long-term effect on both.
Highsmith returned to New Hope in September, as she had planned before setting out for Europe, but found herself unable even to attempt any work. The house had not been sublet, but she was now determined that it was part of her past and the two women exchanged letters daily, despite Highsmith’s fear that Caroline’s husband might see what they had written, which was unusual on her part. In the past she had gone out of her way to create shock and antipathy by various means: having brief affairs during her alleged commitments, making her presence known to the lovers, even the husbands of her partners, simply as a means of unsettling the emotional equilibrium of others.
Now, however, she seemed happy to defer to Caroline’s suggestions. Caroline wrote to her saying that she had made preliminary arrangements to spend time away from the family home in late September and October. We do not know if she offered her husband some spurious explanation for her absence but she was concerned about his discovery of Highsmith’s letters. He would eventually adopt a tolerant, liberal attitude towards the affair but the fact that the first few periods the women spent together were shrouded in subterfuge increased the sense of excitement for both of them.
They met in Paris and stayed together in a spacious suite in the luxurious Hotel Lutetia in the 6th arrondissement, an ornate fin de siècle building dating from 1910. It was a magnet for those who might have nothing more in common than their love for it. De Gaulle, when a young officer, spent his honeymoon there, on the recommendation of his army seniors. Gide, Joyce, Hemingway, Picasso and Matisse treated it as the place to drink, dine and stay when income allowed, and Highsmith recorded her feelings about their w
eek there together after she returned to New Hope in November. Over the previous two decades her notebook entries on new lovers – particularly those who embodied her fantasies of immediate social advancement – were often grandiloquent, but her comments on her honeymoon with Caroline achieved new levels of hyperbole. She writes of how at one point in the street, the two of them felt it impossible to wait until reaching the hotel before embracing and kissing so fiercely that one of Highsmith’s earrings was dislodged. It rolled down along the pavement but neither could be bothered to retrieve it and she describes what then occurred in the hotel as Caroline being ‘smelted by Vulcan’. Vulcan being, of course, the Roman god of fire and metalworking. Caroline ‘melts into my arms … smelted by Vulcan expressly for that purpose.’ ‘I am’, Highsmith adds, ‘so much in love – obviously … that I cannot see anything else … I am nearly sick… and must get hold of myself or crack up.’ Unlike all of her previous accounts of the beginning of passionate affairs she does not date entries. All we know is that they were made during approximately ten days in New Hope following her return from Paris.
During December 1962 Highsmith decided on two projects, whose connection is so obvious as to hardly merit explanation. She continued to write to Caroline and made it clear that, at least in her opinion, in order to last their relationship had to involve something more than fragmented, often random transatlantic encounters. She did not go so far as to ask her to leave her husband and son, but she offered to move to Europe permanently so that even though their periods together might involve stealth and concealment the two of them would at least become a regular feature of each other’s lives. Caroline agreed in principle, or at least offered no outright objection. Highsmith’s base would, once more, be Positano, where she had regularly rented a villa for almost twelve years, and in this respect her affirmation that she would detach herself from her past should be questioned. Southern Italy was closer to London than the US East Coast but in the early 1960s, even with the burgeoning opportunities of air travel, 1,300 miles was still a long way. For Highsmith, Positano was not quite somewhere else, but rather the unspoiled village on the Mediterranean to which she had exported her American past, in life and in fiction – particularly in The Talented Mr. Ripley. She was getting out, but not quite leaving.
Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires Page 15
