What happened next certainly involved real visitors from the past. The subsequent part of their trip was supposed to involve a visit to Positano, to which Highsmith had introduced Caroline briefly in 1963. Before they left England, Caroline knew that this coastal village, Highsmith’s creative and emotional Bethlehem, would feature prominently in their itinerary. She held her peace on how well, or otherwise, their time there might affect their relationship, at least until shortly before their departure from Venice, when Highsmith disclosed to her that a third person would be staying in their villa: Ellen Blumenthal Hill. Highsmith had in the past informed her of her affair with Ellen but this sudden announcement, without explanation, seemed to Caroline further evidence that her partner was by parts sadistic and mentally unstable.
Caroline packed her bags and returned to London. Highsmith went to Rome where she stayed with Ellen for a week and then travelled south to Positano alone, for no other reason than she felt it proper to pay a brief tribute to the site of her numerous catastrophes, and the birthplace of Tom Ripley. He too would soon return to her life.
That Caroline put up with her for a further eighteen months testifies to something commendable. It might be tolerance, or possibly pity for a woman she thought she loved but who had become a dreadful inversion of their first encounter.
At a dinner party in London hosted and attended by writers, artists and wealthy cultural philanthropists, Caroline watched as her lover embarrassed and mortified everyone present. As she fell forward over the candles on the table her long dark hair caught fire and there followed a quintessentially English spectacle of charity and good manners. Guests closest to her did their best to prevent her from going up in flames while the rest behaved as though nothing had happened, reserving their observations for later. Highsmith was outrageously drunk. At another prestigious event, also attended by Caroline, Highsmith opened her handbag and released onto the table around thirty of her beloved snails, which left silky stains across the expensive linen tablecloth as they crept away. Fellow diners pretended not to notice while Caroline was confirmed in her suspicion that her lover was unusual, to say the least. While Caroline belonged in the same privileged circle as the other guests she could not, like them, regard Highsmith as an acceptable eccentric because she had privately experienced her less amusing, often brutal, inclinations.
Highsmith wrote Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction in little more than six months and it appeared in 1966. It falls into the category of a ‘how to’ book, whose sales are boosted by the reputation of an author with a proven record of success in the field. For an aspiring crime writer, it offers little more than could be gleaned from reading the more impressive novels of the genre, but more perversely it can be read as a classic case of the criminal covering her tracks and creating what amounts to a convincing alibi. It is autobiographical in that she refers to how she came up with ideas for her more celebrated novels and in every instance she tells blatant lies.
She claims that all elements of her fiction, from characterisation through overarching themes to the storyline, are formed from an alchemical imaginative source, entirely unpolluted by external factors, particularly her experiences in the real world. For example, she affirms that actual relationships or our perception of social interactions based on watching people or listening to their conversation should be excluded from the creative process. ‘The plane of social intercourse … is not the plane of creation, not the plane in which creative ideas fly…’ The wannabe crime novelist might begin to wonder that if observation of the actual world is an unsuitable source for good fiction writing, then where might inspiration be found? Compared with Highsmith, adherents of Wordsworthian visionary purism sound like reactionaries. Her model of literary creativity sounds ludicrous because she does not believe it. She continues: ‘[S]ometimes the very people we are attracted to act as effectively as the rubber insulators to the spark of inspiration.’ As we have seen the people to whom she was attracted or with whom she claimed to have fallen in love were the only inspiration for much of her fiction. Why cover this up? Perhaps because she felt uneasy about transforming the pain that was an inevitable outcome of her relationships into suspense stories. Who would admit that their success as a crime writer was based on their career as an emotional vandal?
The timing of this hastily prepared note of denial is significant. It followed A Suspension of Mercy, her most autobiographical novel, in which she comes close to confessing to the destruction of her life with Caroline, and shortly after she completed it she began Those Who Walk Away (1967). In fact, she put together a synopsis of the plot and some drafts of dialogue and narrative during her eleven-day stay in Venice with Caroline.
The two principal characters are Ray Garrett, whose wife, Peggy, has committed suicide a few days before the story begins, and Ed Coleman, Ray’s father-in-law, who is convinced that Ray has murdered his daughter and spends much of the novel seeking vengeance in several attempts to kill him. The plot is meandering and inconclusive in that the two men are involved in a struggle over the true cause of Peggy’s death and which of them bears most responsibility for it: Ray did not actually kill her but feels responsible for causing her suicide while Ed sets aside circumstantial evidence to bring himself some kind of venomous satisfaction in not allowing Ray to survive while his daughter is lost. Some reviewers treated it as an Iris Murdoch-style novel of ideas where murder does not create a prurient thrill for the reader but rather induces philosophical reflections on existence and morality. In truth, it was another example of Highsmith spinning out her private sense of guilt and bitterness into a genre that perfectly accommodated it, in which people were caught in a seemingly perpetual web of fear and avoidance: once more crime fiction was her self-administered talking cure. Ray and Ed chase each other across Europe. Neither is certain of whether one or the other is responsible for the destruction of the person they both loved and the only certainty is that what they have lost can never be returned to them. Their pursuit of each other takes them through each of the locations visited by Highsmith and Caroline during the trip through Europe that effectively ended their relationship.
It is not a coincidence that Ray’s wife shares her first name with the woman who had possibly snubbed Highsmith in Venice when she hoped to impress Caroline with her cultural associations. Peggy Garrett and Peggy Guggenheim seem to inflict a fair degree of pain through their absences. Just as intriguing is Ray’s rather guilty but uncontrollable obsession with Inez in Venice, a waitress of simple and unpretentious character. Hello again Daisy Winston, who at Highsmith’s instigation had almost ruined her relationship with Caroline shortly before it reached its eventual cessation.
It is a book by parts dreadful and compelling. If we did not know of its autobiographical links it would forever be a novel that is infuriatingly directionless. But because we do it becomes a blend of a flawed artwork and a cry for help. The prose is pretentious, with Ray and Ed regularly citing passages from Plato and Proust and speculating on what caused the likes of Bosch and Cézanne to paint as they did. It is as though Highsmith is apologising to Caroline for her grandstanding public philistinism, her embarrassing behaviour at numerous events and dinners, and offering her the woman she once thought she knew, who would talk easily about books and with whom she would spend afternoons in art galleries. In 1968 she entered in her cahier that ‘It is obvious that my falling in love is not love, but a necessity of having to attach myself to someone… Perhaps a great source of shipwreck in the past has been to expect a physical relationship (7 August 1968). Madeleine Harmsworth, with whom she later had a relationship, who knew nothing of her private notebooks, offered a shrewd echo of the cahier entry based on her time with Highsmith. ‘She was an extremely unbalanced person, extremely hostile and misanthropic and totally incapable of any kind of relationship, not just intimate ones. I felt sorry for her, because it wasn’t her fault. There was something in her early days or whatever that made her incapable. She drove everybody away…’
(Interview with Wilson, 12 August, 2000).
The end of Caroline meant also the end of England and in December 1966 Highsmith took the first of her trips to the areas around Paris to look at properties. She began a proper search in January, sharing a car with Elizabeth Lyne, who had retired from designing for Hattie Carnegie and was now renting an apartment in Paris’s fashionable 6th arrondissement. It was not a random encounter. In early summer 1966, before her disastrous travels with Caroline, she had made contact with Elizabeth and the two of them had taken a short holiday in Tunisia. They had also met before that and Highsmith’s reintroduction to her old acquaintance is curious given that their most memorable evening in New York involved her making a pass at the older woman and Elizabeth treating her with amused disdain.
Highsmith had visited North Africa before her various excursions through Europe, mostly Morocco, but the visit to Tunisia was a puzzling choice for both women, especially since Elizabeth, a resident of Paris, was under no illusions about the state of the country since it had gained independence from France ten years before, in 1956. It was a corrupt dictatorship with police turning a blind eye to one of the major tourist industries of the capital: young Arab men and boys selling themselves to or being pimped out to men from Europe and America. This had gone on for some time when the country was a colony of France and had now become a vile extension of colonialism in the tourist industry. Mexico had provided Highsmith with a glimpse into the contrast between Americas, North and South, which emphasised how the United States had sanitised its own past as an imperial outpost, but Tunis involved something far more grotesque, as if the colonised had extended their range of oppressors far beyond France. For some reason, it had become the accepted custom for young men to defecate in the women’s lavatories in restaurants used by Westerners and make a point of not flushing the toilets. Perhaps a bizarre variation on the Islamic notion of women as not being allowed independence, even when they went to the loo? Who knows? Their luggage was burgled, they were blatantly overcharged for their rooms and meals and even when they sought refuge in a villa beyond the hotel their complaints about the faulty plumbing and electricity were treated with indifference by the owners. For Highsmith, the most unsettling spectacle was of impoverished boys as young as twelve, along with their mature counterparts, displaying themselves on the streets and offering themselves for sex with visiting Western men. The underground culture of lesbianism, particularly in New York, had been necessarily discreet and because of that it provided for its members a kind of clubbable hospitality. Now she encountered the opposite of what gay exclusion could involve: sex for money and mutual contempt. The experience of Tunisia would provide her with material for The Tremor of Forgery (1969) which she would write in her new French home.
Elizabeth had given Highsmith a guided tour of the wooded countryside surrounding Paris, France’s version of the English home counties, introducing her to villages that seemed unchanged for centuries despite their proximity to the capital. They took notes and in March Elizabeth sent her details of a charming 200-year-old two-bedroom furnished property to rent on the walled estate in Bois Fontaine. She moved in in June but stayed only three months. The antique appeal of the cottage belied the discomfort of no central heating, draughty chimneys, broken electrical fittings and a lavatory that flushed directly into a shallow septic tank.
Highsmith had recently received $29,000 from Columbia Pictures for the film rights to Those Who Walk Away and used around half of this to co-purchase 20 rue de Courbuisson, in Samois-sur-Seine with Elizabeth. It was a converted … farmhouse only a few minutes’ walk from the river, where an artificial sandy beach, constructed by the commune, served local bathers. The building was an improvement on her rented house. Samois-sur-Seine was the town to which the jazz musician Django Reinhardt retired in the early fifties. Earlier it had been a magnet for impressionist painters such as Signac and Guillaumin and its only other claim to fame was its mention in Anne Desclos’s notorious sadistic-pornographic novel Histoire d’O (Story of O, 1954), as the site of the fictional mansion run by Anne-Marie, a lesbian dominatrix.
Elizabeth kept her Paris apartment but shared the Samois house with Highsmith for periods of up to five days. The question of why the two women decided to almost cohabit will remain unanswered. It is implied from those who knew Elizabeth that she was attracted to the notion of a second home in the countryside, within commuting distance of the capital. Yet each of them was aware of their incompatibilities well before they bought the house. Elizabeth had conditioned herself to a regime of order and regularity; she enjoyed food and drink but neither to excess. A lifestyle that was determinedly erratic and slovenly was Highsmith’s preference: unwashed glasses, cups and plates juxtaposed with disordered items of clothing. The contrast was hardly noticeable, often the cause of amusement, when they had taken holidays but in Samois it created problems. Their respective bedrooms – the house had two, generously sized – allowed them a degree of autonomy but they shared, day by day, the sitting room, the kitchen/dining room and crucially the bathroom.
Highsmith wrote to her friend Alex Szogyi (undated; in the Bern archive), reporting that Elizabeth accused her that ‘the state of your room indicate[s] a disorderly mind!’ She was, allegedly, ‘juvenile, self-centred, selfish, not mindful enough of work other people do for me, and in the last five years I have had a temper on occasion, especially when “Baited”.’ Elizabeth’s longest period away was during her visit to New York in late summer 1967. In her absence Highsmith invited her ex-lover Rosalind Constable to Samois, who found that the woman she once thought she knew had become a recluse who seemed unable to decide on whom she loathed the most: herself or those who criticised her. She was, Rosalind noted, drinking from morning until she retired to bed.
By April 1968 Highsmith had found another house, in the village of Montmachoux, some twenty miles away. She made an offer on it and asked Elizabeth to agree to selling the Samois property and halving between them the amount received. The issue resulted in a costly court case, because Elizabeth felt she had been forced into the sale without her consent and also because she regarded the fifty-fifty division as a disproportionate outcome of what each had paid. The case rolled on for two years in total costing both of them in lawyers’ fees more than they could have hoped to have gained from the sale. Nonetheless, Highsmith used her other savings, mainly from the sale of film rights, to purchase the house in Montmachoux before the Samois sale was settled. ‘I shall be living alone, thank God,’ she wrote to Barbara Ker-Seymer (17 May 1968). The Montmachoux house was tiny but it suited her increasing perception of the outside world as unwelcome. She would live in it for longer than anywhere else.
Throughout these months of moves she was working on the draft of The Tremor of Forgery. The original thoughts for the book had come from her impressions of Tunisia when she and Elizabeth had gone there in 1966 but while she was struggling to forge a narrative from her impressions of the place – mostly revulsion – something devastating occurred involving the Muslim states of North Africa and the Middle East. The Six-Day War took place in June 1967, a conflict in which Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq, with minor assistance from Lebanon, attempted to destroy Israel. Most of the Arab nations had been supplied with weapons from the Soviet Union but even though their forces outnumbered those of Israel they were driven back in less than a week and Israeli forces occupied land previously designated as Arab/Palestinian. It was a conflict which, by its electrifying brevity, diverted the attention of the world’s media and political class from the war in Vietnam.
Highsmith was fascinated and once the war was over, she made use of accounts of what had occurred, alongside polemical articles on the moral standing of the various nations involved, in a rewriting of the draft. In the original Ingham, recently divorced, visits Tunis supposedly to write a piece on North Africa. In reality he is bisexual and is following rumours that Arab boys as young as twelve can be bought for sex for as little as a pack of cigarettes. He shar
es a surname with Highsmith’s Suffolk neighbour Richard, also a writer. We have no record of Richard’s feelings on this but had the novel appeared in its first draft we should assume he would not have been pleased.
After the Six-Day War Highsmith, while not entirely dispensing with sex in the novel, focuses far more on politics. The Western visitors to Tunisia hear of the war via European and US news media, mostly the radio. Jensen, a Dane, takes over from the original Ingham as the homosexual character, in the country to buy cheap sex from the young indigenous population. We learn of Jensen’s opinions on Arabs when his dog disappears and he expresses contempt for the idea of his pet’s ‘bones being in this goddamn sand’, as if the memory of their mutual affection is spoilt by North Africa being his pet’s resting place. ‘Am I glad the Jews beat the shit out them!’ he observes. Francis Adams, another character, is an American conservative but rather than supporting the state of Israel, he rails against it as an example of undeserving nationhood. In his view it is a country with no moral compass, which judges its actions only in terms of its own interests: ‘the hallmark of Nazi Germany, and for which Nazi Germany at last went to her doom’. An oft-repeated mantra for antisemites who deny that they are antisemitic is that Israel has become a replica of the regime that carried out the Holocaust. Those who campaigned first against the foundation of Israel and later against its occupation of Arab/Palestinian territory – following its victories in the Six-Day War and, in 1973, the Yom Kippur War – were, in the West, aligned with radically left-wing parties and causes that were united in treating Israel as an instrument of US-sponsored capitalist-neocolonialist expansion.
Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires Page 18
