Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires

by Richard Bradford

  Highsmith drove her mother to Earl Soham but closed her house to incomers for the subsequent week. She telephoned her general practitioner, Dr Auld, stating that both she and her mother required sedation, given that Mary had threatened to strangle her with a coat hanger, and that she was contemplating murder as a defence. Others who knew her in the area recalled that her strangeness went much further than her tense relationship with Mary. Highsmith wrote to her cousin Dan that her mother had gone mad, and that she had gathered together all of her ongoing writings and locked them in a wardrobe, certain that Mary was intent on burning them.

  Highsmith’s eccentric habits were not limited to the human world. Her fascination with snails dated back to the mid-1940s when she had spent an hour watching two try to mate. She read copiously on their lifestyle and breeding habits and in England attempted to recreate a snail colony in her back garden. Peter Thomson, an artist she’d met in the late 1950s, visited her in Suffolk and was horrified to find that not only did she breed snails outside the house but she also kept around a hundred in her handbag, permanently. He assumed that she had decided to protect a selection of them from the potential ravages of the East Anglian climate, at least until he met with her again at a dinner party in central London. Highsmith, according to Thomson, ‘walked in with this [same] gigantic handbag, which she then opened with pride and which contained a hundred snails and an enormous head of lettuce’. She announced that ‘they were [my] companions for the evening’.

  Three years later when she was moving from England to France she proudly confided in her Doubleday editor, Larry Ashmead, that she had carefully selected a number of her most prized slimy pets and secreted them beneath her bra in the hope that they would breed and provide her with as copious a flock as in Earl Soham, though she also confessed that the French habit of eating them seemed to her to border on cannibalism. In 1966 the short story ‘The Snail Watcher’ was published in Nova magazine, whose protagonist Peter Knoppert has an obsession with gastropods – he fills his apartment with them from floor to ceiling – which results in them destroying him. They gradually block his means of contacting the outside world and staying alive, swamping his eyes, throat, nose and ears. A year later she wrote ‘The Quest for Blank Claveringi’, involving Professor Clavering of the University of California, whose quest for the legendary giant snails of a remote Pacific island ends with him meeting a fate similar to Knoppert’s.

  Her snail fixation was both a private idiosyncrasy and a public embarrassment, which she turned into grotesqueries reminiscent of Poe, but the autobiographical element of the stories is even more disturbing than that. Knoppert and Clavering at first treat snails as a zoological interest, respectively an eccentric hobby and an academic specialism, but other factors intrude on scientific impartiality. Feelings that we would usually associate with human-to-human interactions – affection, eroticism, voyeurism, even love – begin to cause their attachment to snails to become something like a clandestine love affair. Each man senses that they are indulging a perversion and are addicted to it all the more for that. Knoppert, like Highsmith, begins to treat snails as creatures with private, even sensual existences when he witnesses two of them having sex. When the eggs hatch, ‘Mr Knoppert was as happy as the father of a new child.’ On his first encounter with a giant snail, Clavering exclaims, ‘“You are magnificent” … in a soft awestruck voice’. Unlike its tiny counterparts the fifteen-foot snail makes Clavering feel slightly inferior, to his evident delight. ‘It was pleasant to think he could skip nimbly about, comparatively speaking, observing the snail from all angles.’ But he finds that the enormous creature can outrun him. It gnaws at him with its 20,000 teeth and the story closes with him facing a choice between drowning himself and being ripped apart.

  Both pieces echo Highsmith’s notebook entries on her first year with Caroline. The fact that the two of them, like Knoppert, Clavering and their snails, are entering a relationship that much of the rest of the world would treat as unacceptable increases Highsmith’s love for the Englishwoman almost immeasurably. There is little doubt that Caroline meant more to her than any of her other lovers, at least if we accept her notebook entries as authentic. Yet the depth of her attraction to this woman whom she knew would be only occasionally available to her caused her, even in the first weeks, to treat love as the equivalent of suicide, or at least the weary acceptance of annihilation. The short stories on the snails were Highsmith’s exploration of the nature of lesbianism and same-sex love. It was a secret experience – passionate, confidential, and seen from the outside in the same way that ‘normal’ people would judge others who formed a seemingly special feeling for snails. Similarly, in her novels, she projected her grotesque character defects, especially involving those to whom she declared love, into stories of murder. None of her killers acts out of malice or vengeance, let alone greed, but each shares a sense of being unable to explain why they have behaved as they have. And so did Highsmith. She invented terrible inexplicable acts in her fiction as a means of displacing – avoiding – a private world that was becoming ever more bizarre with each passing year.

  One of her closest friends in Earl Soham was Ronald Blythe, roughly her age but in other respects a figure who might have felt more at home in England at the turn of the nineteenth century or in a novel by Barbara Pym. He loved churches, vernacular rural architecture and an idyll of the English countryside unpolluted by motor cars. His most famous book, Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (1969), came out shortly after Highsmith left the region but he had been working on it since the mid-1960s and spoke to her of what it meant to him. It is based on interviews he conducted with local residents who told him of stories passed on to them by their relatives and ancestors. It is a partly fictionalised study of Aldeburgh going back over two centuries, based on legend, myth and recollections preserved in the local community.

  Aside from both being writers, Highsmith and Blythe had absolutely nothing in common. He was a lay reader for the Church of England and eventually lay canon at St Edmundsbury Cathedral in Bury St Edmunds. He never once dated a woman and was effectively an unordained, largely celibate clergyman in the Anglican High Church, drinking only small amounts of ale in the local pubs and dry sherry with friends. During this same period Highsmith was partaking of her private stock of gin from breakfast onwards. Nonetheless, they met regularly for afternoon tea. Disclaiming the use of cars, he always cycled to her house, often with biscuits and cakes. One night, when he stayed for supper, he noticed that the glass bowl of the light fitting above the dining table was filling with water from a leak through the ceiling. Highsmith told him to ignore it, but he took it upon himself to go upstairs to free up the jammed ballcock in the lavatory. Following his return, she treated him with a mixture of contempt and disdain, seemingly because he had disobeyed her instructions but just as likely, as he later reflected, because when drunk, which she was, she became infuriated by good sense in others. Blythe’s account to Wilson of their more intimate associations shifts between innocence and incomprehension. ‘We weren’t lovers,’ he declares, ‘but we did sleep together once or twice.’ By them not being ‘lovers’ we can assume he means that they did not have a lasting relationship, but they did have sex. ‘Sex with her was like being made love to by a boy. Her hands were very masculine and she was very hipless like an adolescent boy. She wasn’t at all repelled by the male body, she was intrigued by it’ (Wilson, p.255).

  She had seduced a (possibly gay) man who preferred quiet celibacy and whose world was made up of English rural idylls and quaint religiosity. As fiction, the story would have come across as improbable yet strangely alluring: Blythe was another human version of her snails.

  On one of the few occasions that Caroline went out with Highsmith to a social event in Earl Soham it was clear to her that her lover had alienated herself from the conventions of social discourse. They had been invited to a local hotel, to a drinks party attended by local bohemians who for financial and other reaso
ns had decided to decamp from London. Caroline recalled that Highsmith ‘was given so much leeway – and had it been anyone else she would have been thrown out the door. It wasn’t sympathy, exactly, it was some sort of feeling that she must somehow have got something wrong with her. But no, you couldn’t do anything…’ (Interview with Schenkar, 6 November 2003). Again, Caroline seems more to be commenting on someone beyond her reach than describing her ex-lover. In the hotel Highsmith had decided to sit alone in the hall and the owner of the premises was approached by a member of the party, a psychiatrist who, after studying Highsmith for a few moments, advised the landlady that ‘You do know you have a psychopath in the hall.’ Caroline adds that ‘I remember Pat sitting there with a hard, baffled look on her face. She was lost; these people were all very sure of themselves. A heavy, a really heavy look, full of hatred.’

  The journalist Bettina Berch interviewed Highsmith almost twenty years later and observed that by the early 1980s her sense of detachment from the rest of the world had become even more pronounced. She was against feminism not because she objected to it on ideological or even personal grounds. She regarded it simply as something inexplicable from which she was happy to be alienated: ‘it was symptomatic of the fact that she lived in her own self-created world’. She adds that ‘I remember spending about an hour with her trying to explain how to use an ATM card.’ Highsmith didn’t have one but felt she needed to include some reference to them in a novel to be set in the present day, when most people used them routinely. ‘I think the last time she had really been in the world was probably back in the fifties’ (Interview between Wilson and Berch, 19 May 1999). Berch corrected herself, adding that she had caused time to stand still. She ‘would talk about [Ripley] like he was a person who was very close to her … He was very real to her.’

  It is clear enough from Caroline Besterman’s accounts of Highsmith towards the end of their relationship that, for her at least, the woman she thought she’d fallen in love with during their first encounters in London and Paris didn’t really exist. Highsmith had briefly allowed herself out of what Berch refers to as her ‘own self-created world’ but when some friction between this and the life led by others, Caroline included, became apparent she would retreat again into a universe of her own. This explained the figure in the hall of the hotel, ‘lost … a hard, baffled look on her face…’

  This brings us to one of the most significant novels of Highsmith’s career. It received

  mixed reviews and subsequent commentators have classed it politely as yet another of her non-Ripley curiosities. A Suspension of Mercy (1965) was written during her years at Earl Soham and is probably the most openly confessional of her works.

  The main character is Sydney Bartleby, an American novelist living in rural Suffolk, struggling to repair the damaged relationship with his English wife Alicia, working to complete his seemingly hopeless novel and collaborating with his writing partner, the Englishman Alex, to sell a crime serial to a recently established British commercial TV network. Sydney is Highsmith, Alicia is Caroline and Alex is Richard Ingham, a school teacher and aspiring writer who lived nearby. Highsmith felt more comfortable with Ingham than with the London expatriates from whom she’d fled to the hall of the hotel. When they met, he had published nothing; she was effectively his mentor. They worked together on a screenplay for a television thriller called It’s a Deal, which would be rejected by the BBC and ITV. I will not trouble you with the plot of this, except to say that it is a close replica of what happens in the novel and, as we shall see, the novel is a thinly disguised version of key aspects of Highsmith’s life during and shortly before the period in which she wrote it. While Ingham was fully aware of the problems the two of them struggled with day by day as they rewrote drafts of It’s a Deal in an attempt to make the show credible and saleable, he did not know that he featured in another project, Highsmith’s novel, which also incorporated aspects of her life with which she felt dissatisfied and which she thought she might improve by rewriting it.

  In the novel Alicia suggests that their marriage might benefit from a trial separation. Sydney agrees and after she leaves, he attempts to turn his marital problems into a means of energising his directionless novel. As an abandoned husband he puts himself into the mind of a fictional character who wishes to dispose of his wife, imagining each scenario precisely: the morning after Alicia leaves, he carries rolled-up carpet out to his car, wondering if his neighbours will connect this curious spectacle with the unexplained absence of Alicia. They do and he becomes a suspect, her potential murderer. All the time Alicia has been living with her extra-marital lover, Edward Tilbury, in Brighton. As with most of Highsmith’s novels the ensuing narrative twists are arbitrary and often far-fetched, but to simplify things: Tilbury dies, at the hand of Sydney, and Alicia seems to have killed herself by leaping from a cliff. Sydney is cleared of involvement in Tilbury and Alicia’s deaths, but at the close he considers recording what actually occurred in a private notebook: ‘the notebook was, after all, the safest place in which to write it’ – just as his author might have put it in her cahier or diary.

  Sydney’s notebook is all that allows him to disentangle the life he lives from the one he invents and during the period she wrote the novel, so it was for Highsmith. From the beginning of her time with Caroline she recorded in her notebook that it was a suicidal enterprise, while keeping alive the fantasy of something different, glorious and lasting for Caroline herself. Multi-layered novels within novels have become something of a commonplace, particularly following the rise of modernism, but there is none quite like this. It is a confession and a retreat from the truth, a self-referential literary artefact and an admission that invention will always override fact, a love affair with the opportunities of fantasy and a contrite expression of loathing for escapism. It reflects Highsmith’s mental condition far more astutely than anything else she wrote and most of all it is a tortuous re-enactment in literature of her affair with Caroline.

  For her, the thing that made the relationship so electrifying also destroyed it. From the moment they met they would become more and more like figures in the multi-layered novel that would commemorate their time together. Like Sydney, Highsmith shifted between states of disclosure and subterfuge, her private world with Caroline and the one the two of them shared with figures they encountered on the street, at parties, in hotels and restaurants. Caroline’s husband witnessed this, but he too was their partner in their drama of private sensations, hints and concealment. He indulged their secret affair but despite his liberalism connived in it as something that should be kept from others. In Earl Soham Highsmith’s friends and neighbours, including Blythe and Ingham, witnessed Caroline’s arrivals and departures, but never knew for certain what the ‘friendship’ between the two women actually involved.

  When Sydney moves the carpet to his car only he knows that the roll is empty. But his neighbour Mrs Lilybanks allows herself to speculate on what might be inside, given that she has taken note of Alicia’s recent absence. Throughout the book characters protect their private worlds by inventing others and seem obsessed with spinning truth into a web of deception, and eventually their masquerade collapses tragically. Sydney is cleared of any criminal offences, but we leave him at the close of the novel as a character hollowed out, having lost all he thought he loved and all he hoped to become.

  11

  France

  Highsmith and Caroline separated for good in October 1966, though which of them instigated the break-up is unclear. All we know, from third-party accounts, is that following one of their routine arguments they spent the night in separate bedrooms in the Earl Soham house. Caroline left very early next morning, never to return.

  During the previous year their time together was made up of a catalogue of disasters. In May 1965 Highsmith suggested that as a means of reigniting what had first drawn them to one another they should take a long holiday in various parts of continental Europe. Given the proposed destinati
ons and their previous resonances, and Highsmith’s profession, this was the equivalent of the murderer revisiting the scenes of the crime.

  Their first stop was Paris where things had begun for them three years earlier, but the city had also been the source of distress for Caroline in March, seven weeks before they were due to arrive. Highsmith had flown there for a long weekend with her ex-lover Daisy Winston, one-time Midwestern waitress and bar-room singer, who had never previously left the United States. Highsmith paid for her flight across the Atlantic and cautiously allowed details of the excursion to reach Caroline, stating on her return that ‘she had no emotional involvement’ with Daisy while offering no other motive for seeing her. As Caroline knew, Daisy had no interest in literature or the arts and it would have seemed as though Highsmith had planned the assignation as an act of arbitrary provocation.

  Nonetheless their May holiday went ahead and after a few days in Paris they took the train through eastern France and Provence to Italy and a room in a comfortable though not grand hotel in Venice on the same street as La Calcina, Ruskin’s home during the 1870s. We have no record of whether their relationship was improved by their time in the city. All we know is that Highsmith explained to Caroline that she had contacted Peggy Guggenheim, her ‘old friend’, to arrange a meeting with drinks but had been ‘snubbed’ by the society matriarch. Previously Highsmith had, as with others, impressed Caroline with stories of her legendary past, Guggenheim included, but whether she had indeed snubbed the author or failed to respond to a message from someone she did not know remains open to question.