At precisely the time she made the decision to decamp to Europe Highsmith wrote to a New York-based criminal defence lawyer who was mentioned in John Bartlow Martin’s Break Down the Walls (1955). Martin was an outspoken campaigner for the reform of the criminal justice system of America which he saw as involving arbitrarily lengthy sentences handed out to those too poor to afford competent defence attorneys, ensuring that indigent whites were not too far behind African and Latin Americans as those likeliest to receive life imprisonment and the death penalty. Following advice from the lawyer she engineered a visit to Bucks County Jail in Doylestown near New Hope, and while she was not allowed to speak to convicts, she spent more than an hour viewing, from a distance, cell blocks and enclosed yards in which inmates were allowed limited opportunities for exercise and fresh air. Shortly afterwards she began work on The Glass Cell, involving Philip Carter, falsely accused and convicted of fraud and sentenced to ten years in prison. The novel is informed by her impressions of Bucks County Jail, Martin’s book, which focuses on the 1952 Michigan State Prison riots, and most significantly letters she exchanged with a prison inmate, location unknown, who had begun writing to her via her publisher in 1961 and offering vivid and detailed coverage of the day-to-day life of imprisonment, notably solitary confinement. Less conspicuously it was also influenced by the three most tumultuous years of Highsmith’s relationship with Caroline.
When she sailed for Europe in early February 1963, she had completed forty pages, mostly describing the soul-destroying boredom of Carter’s life. During a month at 15 via Monte, her regular rental in Positano, the manuscript progressed gradually in length but the narrative was going nowhere. Highsmith later admitted to some relief at further progress being postponed by a telegram from London. Caroline asked Highsmith to telephone her and during the call explained that her husband had guessed of their affair since its inception, kept quiet about it but had during the previous few days spoken to her directly of it. He had not, to his credit, demanded details of the relationship and had made it clear that he entirely respected Caroline’s decision regarding what would happen next. At no point did he make demands or suggest that, even if she continued to see Highsmith, the future of their marriage would be jeopardised, unless Caroline herself preferred a formal alteration in their circumstances. Even by the standards of the more laissez-faire members of the English gentry he seemed a paragon of tolerance, and there is no evidence that he had extra-marital affairs. Yet his forbearance created more problems than it solved, particularly for Highsmith.
Following the telephone conversation she took a train from Naples to Rome and from there flew to London. On the day she left she wrote that ‘the prison book is in my head, but however to get it on paper?’ When she arrived in London, she stayed in a hotel close to the Bestermans’ home in the West End and immediately found herself part of an impeccably dignified, almost genteel, ménage à trois. The Bestermans accompanied each other to dinner parties, art galleries, book launches and other events that formed the routine of the cultivated upper classes of the city. Caroline’s husband reassured her that so long as she did not make an exhibition of their affair – kissing Highsmith when they were with friends for example – he regarded her girlfriend as part of their world and imposed no restrictions on when, where and how long they spent in each other’s company. Sometimes the three of them met for cocktails and supper in the Besterman house.
This went against Highsmith’s predilection for subterfuge, deception and acrimony and as a distraction she asked her American agent to arrange promotional and media events. One took place in London’s most famous bookshop, Foyles, in Charing Cross Road, displaying copies of Strangers on a Train – then better known in Britain as Hitchcock’s film than as a book – and The Talented Mr. Ripley. She also promoted The Cry of the Owl, recently released in the UK. Francis Wyndham was a member of the London literary establishment. His maternal grandmother was a close friend of Oscar Wilde, his father a diplomat and scion of the aristocracy; educated at Oxford and a prize-winning novelist, Wyndham regularly contributed pieces to the country’s most exalted weeklies and broadsheets. He knew that Highsmith was a newsworthy figure and interviewed her for the BBC Home Service, following this with a lengthy piece on her for England’s most prestigious left-liberal weekly magazine, the New Statesman.
Within a few weeks Highsmith had made her presence felt in Britain as a writer, but this begs comparison with her other rather ambiguous role as a regular and welcome guest in the Besterman household who would often go for drinks or meals just with Caroline. In her notebooks she records feelings of melancholy and ennui that echo those of Carter in The Glass Cell. She only came up with the title for the novel after she’d completed it, and the notion of being both locked into something while seemingly able to free oneself from its restraints seems just as appropriate to her arrangement with the Bestermans.
Unable to continue further with the situation in London Highsmith persuaded Caroline to accompany her to Positano. Caroline’s husband, in his customarily insouciant manner, expressed no objections and the two women went south through France and Italy by train. In Positano Highsmith fell ill with a stomach infection which lasted only a few days but within a week Besterman was expressing her regrets at leaving London and less than a month after their departure she returned to her family home.
Alone in the villa Highsmith wrote that she frequently thought of killing herself. Her only distraction was the ‘prison book’, largely untouched since she had gone to London. She continued with it but while she reached more than a hundred pages quite easily nothing new seemed to have happened to Carter. His day-to-day existence was pointless and undeservedly grim and, in many ways, so was his creator’s.
Once more, in June, a telegram from Caroline arrived and following a telephone conversation Highsmith packed her bags and travelled by train for England. This time Caroline suggested that they spend time together outside London, in the Suffolk coastal village of Aldeburgh. The Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts had been founded in 1948 by the composer Benjamin Britten and mainly involved operatic performances but also included a more eclectic range of classical concerts with music by Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and others. There were, by 1963, poetry readings and short plays. It was the holiday season for cultivated, wealthy Londoners who hoped that the coast of East Anglia would allow them to enjoy fine wine and food, feel proud as the sponsors of high art and avoid the increasingly vulgar tourist-driven atmosphere of the capital in early summer.
Highsmith and Caroline were, during the Festival, reassured that the region had become a minor province of good taste whose residents, permanent and occasional, remained largely indifferent to what each other got up to. And based on this Highsmith made one of the most important decisions of her life. She returned to Positano and a week later arranged to rent an apartment in Rome, at 38 via dei Vecchiarelli, apparently because she could no longer tolerate the atmosphere of the Positano villa which she now saw as the talisman for the failure of her relationships. Ellen was living in Rome and though Highsmith might have considered making contact she chose instead to stay in the apartment or visited well-heated cafés and bars. Autumn was becoming colder than usual, even in the centre of Italy, and it seems likely that she chose the city as a physical and emotional staging post for a choice she had made but had not yet acted upon. She made contacts with letting agents whose details she had gathered when staying with Caroline in Suffolk, and in November 1963 became the tenant of a modestly attractive eighteenth-century house in King Street, Aldeburgh.
Three days before she moved in she received a letter from her editor at Harpers, Joan Kahn, on why they could not publish the novel in its present form. ‘Carter before prison we know too little. Carter after prison is certainly a man in a mess [which] … probably existed before … and not enough to make us care’ (13 November 1963). Highsmith was suddenly alert to the similarities between the London arrangement and Kahn’s presentation of Carte
r as a figure without a discernible past or future. When she met Caroline it seemed to be a moment of liberating transformation but soon, not least because of her husband’s indulgence, trapped her in a louche social drama. Now, even if only at weekends, she could have Caroline to herself, and it was at this point that she began a radical rewrite of the second part of the novel after Carter is freed. Unfortunately he, like his author, treated release as a licence for irresponsibility.
Aside from the lively weeks of the Festival the region was growing more and more attractive for Londoners who wished for an affordable retreat from the capital. In 1963 the nearby Sizewell B atomic power station was still at an early stage of construction, causing property prices to fall but not, as yet, imposing its daunting ugliness on the landscape. Nuclear power was, despite itself, creating an affordable idyll for bohemians just a two-hour drive from the West End.
Caroline drove herself to the King Street house every weekend and at the end of April 1964 Highsmith seemed to think that their new arrangement, in which her lover had become a regular commuter, offered an indication of permanence. She bought a house in Earl Soham, a quaint village around twenty miles inland from the coast. Bridge Cottage was originally two seventeenth-century workers’ cottages, now knocked together with garden space at the front and rear and a small stream in the back garden. Caroline loved the setting, continuing to visit at weekends but refusing to agree to anything more permanent. Highsmith felt she had given up her past for a perfunctory, irregular arrangement designed to suit Caroline’s conventional family life and soon afterwards she began to exhibit aspects of her temperament that ranged from outlandishness to derangement.
10
Eccentricity
Highsmith lived in Earl Soham for a little over three years before moving to France in 1967. By that time, her sexual relationship with Caroline was over for good, though the two of them would meet up intermittently over the subsequent three decades, replicating the peculiar arrangement she would continue to have with Ellen Hill. Both of her ex-lovers responded amicably to prompts and invitations from Highsmith, usually to find that they had involved themselves in her exercises in masochism. Highsmith was never entirely offensive to Ellen or Caroline, but she seemed to take some pleasure in offering them a glimpse into aspects of her abundantly strange condition perhaps to indicate the part they had played in its formation. But she did not reserve such displays of peculiarity for just the two of them.
From the beginning of their affair, Caroline and Highsmith seemed to exist in different universes. In the interviews that she did with Schenkar, Caroline comes across as wearily insouciant, resigned to never having understood her erstwhile lover. All she seems able to recall are her outward mannerisms and idiosyncrasies, her habits in company and her style of dress. Typically:
[She was] very exotic, the kind of person to whom you would immediately be drawn in a room. And she was still very much in control of her look [in the 1970s], always well dressed, her hair was well cut … Pat always had a certain style, comme les garçons … The first time I met her, she was in a yellow sailcloth skirt and tight top and she did rather look like a sailor, there was a dash to her … She always liked to change her clothes and get nicely ready for supper. She always had beads and a bracelet, her things were well cut and elegant. (Interview with Schenkar, 6 Nov 2003)
Her account is made up almost exclusively of detail that might have been picked up from a secure distance, as if Highsmith was someone to whom she’d been briefly introduced and thereafter observed with interest from the other side of the room. She seems to have decided to preserve Highsmith as a sketch, leaving out any disclosure of what might be behind her taste in clothes and singular habits. She was, observes Caroline, ‘awkward in company [and] handled cigarettes very badly – she looked as though she were mending roads with them, stubbing out her Gauloises ungracefully…’ Privately, Caroline knew what lay beneath the surface but she had chosen to say nothing of it which, when we become better acquainted with Highsmith, is understandable. Compare Caroline’s comments with Highsmith’s entry in her cahier following her return to New Hope after their first passionate fling in London.
Beauty, perfection, completion – all achieved and seen. Death is the next territory, one step to the left. I don’t want to see [her] anymore, to feel or experience anymore … Pleasure has already killed me … I am the drunken bee wandered into your household [where they had kissed]. You may with courage eject me through the window; or by accident step on me. Be assured, I’ll feel no pain. (5 December 1962)
Evidently, she saw the relationship as disastrous before it had properly begun but she would, within a month, alter everything about her life for it. She would emigrate for the sake of an affair that she already equated with ‘Death … the next territory’. Five months later, while still captivated by Caroline and the prospect of a serious relationship, she wrote that ‘I have imagined killing myself, strangely, more strongly now than with anyone else I have ever known’ (Diary, 3 May 1963).
What occurred soon after this extraordinary entry was both its continuation and explanation. The privately maniacal Highsmith of the notebooks would soon be unmasked to those she knew.
In March 1964 Highsmith’s mother sent her a twenty-nine-page letter laying out, in her opinion, her daughter’s history and character: a compulsive perennial liar, a sadist (her malice directed only in part towards Mary and Stanley), immune from the emotional pain she caused for others, and, worst of all, a sexual pervert. Mary, as a person of liberal disposition, was tolerant of gays and lesbians but she accused her daughter of marshalling her sexual inclinations as a weapon for unhappiness. For Highsmith it felt as though her curious love–hate relationship with her mother had returned with a vengeance and a week later this sense of the past as her nemesis turned into an exercise in black comedy. Mary would follow her vituperative letter by visiting her daughter in person.
Via her various contacts in the London literary establishment Highsmith had sometimes been invited to book launches and to cocktail parties and dinners hosted by figures in publishing. Charles Latimer, for example, was head of sales at Heinemann, had a cottage near Earl Soham and often played host to Highsmith in his mews house in the West End. Barbara Ker-Seymer – a well-connected society figure and arts photographer since the 1930s – regularly provided her with a spare bedroom in the chic Regency house in Islington she shared with her partner, Barbara Roett. Ker-Seymer later disclosed to Schenkar that knowing Highsmith was like walking from ‘grass to glass’. She would at first seem a benign, harmlessly enigmatic figure, but once upset by a statement or suggestion would become especially malicious. ‘Quarrelling with Pat … would be like quarrelling with a dog with rabies. You could get bitten.’ Latimer recalls enjoying her company while being perplexed by her sudden shifts between helpless anxiety regarding her love life and reputation as a writer and her taste for loutish humour. One day she brought to his office a week-old edition of Le Monde which contained a typographical error that had escaped the attention of the French copyeditors. ‘Look at this!’ she announced. ‘Graham Greene has written my biography, Travels with My Cunt.’ Latimer too found this amusing but was dismayed by Highsmith’s insistence on referring to it every time they met for the subsequent few months.
Highsmith was once doing a radio interview at BBC Broadcasting House while staying in London at the Kensington home of a friend of Ker-Seymer’s, to whom Schenkar awards the pseudonym of Camilla Butterfield. When Highsmith was at the interview Butterfield took a phone call for her from a woman who did not introduce herself but who sounded as though she was auditioning for Gone with the Wind. Butterfield had heard from Highsmith unflattering stories about her mother and guessed the identity of the caller while remaining puzzled by how Mary knew where her daughter was staying, let alone how she had obtained the number. When Highsmith returned from Broadcasting House Butterfield tried to lighten the situation. ‘Brace yourself,’ she said. ‘The deep south has arrived.�
� According to Butterfield, ‘Pat fainted right on the doorstep … It was incredible and it was more than a faint. Her legs just gave way. She just crumpled into a heap on top of herself, like a doll…’ (Butterfield to Schenkar, 17 December 2003). Mary had flown in from New York without warning and taken a taxi to the Cavendish Hotel, which Highsmith had referred to often in her letters. It had achieved minor fame for its mention in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest but was, in 1964, as Mary’s taxi driver informed her on their arrival, a bombsite. Seemingly, Highsmith had provoked her mother with reports on her affection for a hotel enjoyed by another celebrated homosexual writer, without mentioning that it no longer existed.
The Butterfields had arranged to go to the theatre and Highsmith asked them if they would allow her to use their house as an interim stay-over before she drove her mother to Earl Soham. They agreed to do so but when they arrived back it seemed as if their living quarters had been visited by well-mannered vandals. Pieces of furniture were upside down or at bizarre angles to each other, sandwiches – origin unclear – had been bitten into but left uneaten at various places around the room, some glasses contained mixtures of alcohol of various types from the Butterfield cabinet, others were standing next to them, empty, ashtrays contained liquids and fragmented foodstuffs while cigarette ends floated in what was left of the brown liquids of coffee cups. It was, recalled Camilla, the apparent site of a mild skirmish but with no object broken or moderately damaged. She told Schenkar that before she left Highsmith and her mother in their sitting room ‘the air quivered’ and that once in the taxi her husband had commented that ‘you look like you’ve been through an earthquake.’
Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires Page 16
