Adams is an unapologetic advocate of this anti-Israel stance but he is also a vociferous supporter of the Vietnam War as an extension of the American way (notably God, democracy, freedom of speech, etc.) which seems weirdly inconsistent with his perception of Israel as a form of Nazism reborn. It was, as he was aware, then the only democracy in the Middle East. Ingham, privately, is repulsed by Adams’ opinion on Vietnam. He sees it as a means of ‘introducing the Vietnamese to the capitalist system in the form of a brothel industry, and to the American class system by making Negroes pay higher for their lays’. Add to this Ingham’s killing of an Arab teenager who seems to have broken into his rooms. He batters him over the head with his typewriter. Perhaps this is Highsmith’s only honest moment in the book. An instrument of writing becomes the cause of fatal violence. The attack is unplanned, confused, motiveless, but in the description Highsmith excluded from her description of Ingham’s state of mind any hint of guilty, erotic pleasure; a notable revision of the first draft.
We might, just, treat The Tremor of Forgery as a novel of ideas: ideas in conflict with instinct, ideas incompatible with each other and ideas that could assist a world beset by tensions which resisted resolutions. But we would be deceiving ourselves. It is, rather, a reflection of an author who was not intellectually resourceful enough to make up her mind about what she observed and reconcile her confusion with what, privately, she felt.
Within two years of writing the novel she would reveal herself to be a racist, and antisemitic, and utterly confused on her opinions regarding Vietnam. Jensen, Adams and Ingham are versions of their creator, each at odds with the other and each uncertain about what they actually feel about major issues – apart from sex.
On 5 January 1970 she admitted in her cahier a hatred of black people, which she acknowledged was at odds with her ‘social democrat’ inclinations. In June 1969 she wrote to Alex Szogyi of how she abhorred the introduction of studies involving the history, even writings, of black Americans into the degree curriculums of the more radical American universities. These, she contended, ignored a few uncomfortable facts such as the absence of a written language among their pre-Americanised antecedents (save for some scribbling by the Zulus, apparently) and the fact that their own chieftains were very helpful in herding the slaves onto the boats (Letter to Szogyi, 25 June 1969). In a letter to Ronald Blythe she commented that blacks and Latinos ‘enter college without high school diplomas now, and when they take one look at those books … they say to themselves cripes, I’ll never make it … so they attack the professors and so on and so on. It’s a hell of a way to cover up lack of brains’ (16 August 1970). She wrote to Barbara Ker-Seymer that soon a common spectacle in New York would be ‘coons hanging from 50th story windows, plugging their neighbours (other coons) before taking the lift downstairs to fleece their pockets’ (9 May 1971).
In her cahiers Jews became the equivalent of African Americans, an inferior race that had somehow come to exert power in global politics, just as blacks seemed to her to have taken over the nation that had once enslaved them. A mild example is her observation that Jewish men give thanks in daily prayer that they were not born women. ‘The rest of us give thanks that we were not born Jews … If the Jews are God’s chosen people – that is all one needs to know about God’ (Cahier, 5 June 1971). Included in her observations are comments on how American lives were being wasted in an attempt to rescue a racially inferior people from communism, in Vietnam.
Her erratic, scatter-gun prejudices and political biases might appear symptomatic of an individual on the brink of a nervous breakdown, but look back to The Tremor of Forgery and witness how she used fiction as a buttress against mental imbalance. The states of loathing against others that crowded into her own mind and threatened her ability to make sense of the world were shared out between Jensen, Adams and Ingham. Each was, in their own way, slightly mad and despairingly unpleasant. Imagine them as features of the same person and you have a recipe for something extraordinarily foul. As always, Highsmith used her novel as a means of projecting into her characters elements of herself that privately she found difficult to bear. In her September 1970 diary she paraphrased Oscar Wilde: ‘Work [writing] never seems to me a reality, but a way of getting rid of reality.’
While she was still in the Samois-sur-Seine house Highsmith was visited by a young journalist who had been sent to do an interview for Queen, a society magazine that at the time served the appetites of the London-based gentry, with hedonism disguised as radical social insight. Madeleine Harmsworth was twenty-six when she met Highsmith, and was a scion of the famous Harmsworth family, which owned many of the most profitable newspapers in Fleet Street. Their aristocratic titles – Northcliffe and Rothermere, usually Viscounts and Lords – were bestowed by politicians who had bought favours from their news media outlets, and Madeleine’s relatives had used their influence to find her a position at Queen. The Highsmith interview would be her first big break, an exchange with one of the most puzzling, controversial crime writers in America and Britain who had inexplicably exiled herself to rural France. Madeleine later stated to Wilson that she felt it ‘flattering’ to be allowed into Highsmith’s company, indeed her home, confessed that she was ‘young and impressionable’ and anxious about the nature of her encounter with a literary celebrity. She found herself surprised that halfway through their predictable question-and-answer session on writing, its inspiration and significance, Highsmith paused, stared at her and asked if she would care to stay the night, for sex. ‘I wasn’t averse to trying a bit of bisexuality,’ she recalled, and she stayed in Samois for four days.
Their relationship lasted for around eighteen months, until early 1969, by which time Madeleine, originally thrilled by the prospect of an affair with a writer she idolised, recognised that Highsmith suffered from something close to bipolar disorder, or at least a simplified version of it: a split personality aggravated by alcoholism. Madeleine only realised that Highsmith drank constantly when she saw her, openly, pouring a generous shot of gin into a glass at breakfast time. Unlike other drunks she had come across Highsmith exhibited none of the more conspicuous indicators of the condition: physical imbalance, slurred speech and so on. Instead she appeared to Madeleine to regard drink as the fuel for behaviour that was deplorable yet measured and calculated. ‘It seemed to me as if she had to ape feelings and behaviour, like Ripley. Of course, sometimes having no sense of social behaviour can be charming, but in her it was alarming’ (Interview with Wilson, 23 August 2000).
At a dinner party in Highsmith’s house in France, attended by Alex Szogyi and his long-term partner, Philip Thompson, Madeleine and Thompson seemed to discover in each other shared interests in all manner of things – social, cultural, political and amusingly inconsequential. They made each other laugh and outwardly at least, this appeared to be a man and woman going through the routines of mutual attraction. Except that everyone present knew that Thompson was gay. Nonetheless, Highsmith played out a pantomime of insulting Thompson for attempting to seduce her partner which concluded in her bringing down from the wall her two ‘Confederate’ swords and challenging him to a duel to the death. Most regarded the episode as a joke but both Thompson and Madeleine recalled that, throughout, Highsmith displayed a level of virulence that was far from comedic.
Ker-Seymer recalled that once at a party in her London house in early 1968 Highsmith interrupted the conversation to ask if she could use the telephone. She then dialled a number which as Ker-Seymer saw was a random sequence of digits and pretended to hold a conversation with the dial tone. She was, apparently, calling another lover and making excuses for her absence because of her regrettable but unavoidable arrangement with Madeleine. In her interview with Wilson Madeleine offered one of the shrewdest assessments of Highsmith’s twisted personality.
If she hadn’t had her work, she would have been sent to an insane asylum or an alcoholic’s home … It took a while for me to figure this out, but all those strange characters
haunting other people, and thinking and writing about them – they were her. She was her writing.
In Madeleine’s view This Sweet Sickness is the novel ‘which most closely represents her’ with its story of a man creating an alternate identity as a means of escaping his true self. Madeleine also commented that her lover was ‘like Ripley’ and shortly after the two of them broke up Highsmith resurrected her most famous literary psychopath.
12
Animals and Us
Peter Huber, a retired teacher, introduced himself to Highsmith in 1974 at a week-long series of seminars held in Holstein, Switzerland. Other writers present included Michael Frayn, and Stanley Middleton, who had won the Booker Prize that year for Holiday. In attendance were schoolteachers, academics and those who held to the questionable maxim that creative ambition could be realised by listening to advice from writers. Huber had published nothing and never hoped to do so, but for some reason he and Highsmith struck up an immediate friendship, began to exchange letters and remained in contact for the rest of her life. He did not fall into any of the categories that usually ensured a lasting friendship with her, fraught or otherwise: he was not part of the literary establishment, neither moneyed nor of moderately gentrified background, and expressed no conspicuous interest in sex. Some explanation for their long-term association comes from an exchange between Huber and Ellen Hill at least ten years later. ‘What do you see in Pat’s books?’ asked Hill. She was surprised by his reply, which amounted to puzzlement at why such a question might be posed at all (Interview between Huber and Schenkar, 18 April 2003). As Hill suspected, Huber was an unquestioning devotee of Highsmith’s work, certain of its importance but disinclined to ask if it deserved its ranking. It is likely that when they first met Highsmith too discerned this same feature in him: an idolater reluctant to tarnish the thing he adored by asking why or if it was any good.
Hill, when she met Huber, their single encounter, no longer had any great affection for Highsmith, but there is no evidence that her enquiry on what he thought of her books was driven by private antipathy. A few years later she spoke with the artist Dédé Moser, who said she admired This Sweet Sickness. Hill replied that ‘[she] rewrote this thing so many times!’, meaning not that she had studiously revised drafts of this book, but rather that Highsmith was capable only of reformulating versions of the same model in all of her work, time and again (Interview between Schenkar and Moser, 2 August 2004). Even Kate Kingsley Skattebol, her devoted friend from Barnard onwards, confessed that she either gave up on Highsmith’s books after several pages or, based on such regular disappointments, didn’t attempt to read them at all. She never admitted this to Highsmith, preferring to accept public acclaim as a guarantee of her qualities without wondering why she herself did not like her work. Towards the end of her life Highsmith became a magnet for journalists and interviewers – Lorna Sage, Craig Brown, Ian Hamilton and Melvyn Bragg amongst others – and the characteristic feature of their exchanges and articles is a sense of evaluative apathy. These scrutineers are, in their own way, fascinated by why she was prompted to concoct such weird stories but respectfully unquestioning of whether they qualify as good books. Craig Brown called Deep Water ‘the book of a lifetime’ but the description is facile. She seems to deserve their attention because of her curiosity value, as a figure seemingly addicted to the macabre, rather than her merits as a writer.
This question of her literary abilities, or otherwise, is significant at this stage as 1970 was for Highsmith a turning point. Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley launched her, and some of her other books in the 1950s and 1960s deserve interest as examples of private disturbance distilled into modernisations of Poe. After that, however, she drifted between works of genius and (arguably) some of the most dreadful pieces of suspense fiction ever to go into print. Ripley Under Ground (1970) was begun when Highsmith was in the middle of her relationship with Madeleine. It received mixed reviews, mostly positive, but what its assessors seemed to ignore or tolerate, in my opinion, is the fact that its plot is arbitrarily tortuous. It does not use difficulty as an intellectual or moral challenge but rather as an act of bloody-mindedness.
Ripley, now in his thirties, is living on an estate in France, Belle Ombre, with his wealthy heiress wife Héloïse Plisson. Aside from Héloïse’s money he has inherited much of Dickie Greenleaf’s estate, having forged Greenleaf’s will to make himself the recipient. One might assume from this that he would be content with the outcome of his previous dreadful behaviour, murder included. But no. He becomes involved in the forgery and sale of works by the painter Derwatt who had committed suicide more than a year earlier. So, here is a brief version of what happens next: Ripley, at various points, pretends to be someone else – an activity his debut novel has prepared him for – commits murder, fakes suicide, burns and buries bodies, and at the close seems content to be in bed with Héloïse; which is odd since prior to this he has shown no sexual interest in his wife. The police note that people tend to die following encounters with him but have no evidence to follow up on this eerie observation.
Throughout the book Ripley’s behaviour seems by equal degrees motiveless and implausible. For example, he does not really need to murder the American collector Thomas Murchison, who suspects that one of his Derwatts is a forgery. Even if it is proved to be a fake, he has no evidence that Ripley is behind the scam. Ripley does so not because he fears that he might be exposed nor even because he is psychotically addicted to killing. He is not a character at all, at least in the customary sense of a fictional creation who shares characteristics with figures in the real world, even the worst and most bizarre. With one exception: he is a projection of his creator, who shares his nihilistic hopelessness. He is an autobiographical instrument, the activating feature of a series of novels that appear to be driven by a double maxim: that life is inconsequential and representing it in literature is a fruitless endeavour.
I do not wish to present Highsmith as a crime-fiction version of Samuel Beckett. Beckett’s work is an extended quarrel with the assumed purpose and mannerisms of literature. He wanted to dismantle the assumption that by writing about life we could reframe and make sense of it. Highsmith’s books, particularly her later ones, are possessed of a selfish disregard for anything but themselves.
There is in Ripley Under Ground an episode in which Tufts, the Derwatt forger, tries to kill Ripley by hitting him over the head with a shovel and, thinking he has succeeded, buries his unconscious victim in a shallow grave (from which he escapes). Ripley has already killed the art dealer Murchison and after entertaining his widow at Belle Ombre begins to suspect, for no obvious reason, that Tufts is contemplating suicide and pursues him through Paris, Greece and Salzburg – though it is unclear as to whether he wants to prevent him from killing himself or assist him. Ripley finally locates Tufts in Salzburg, where Tufts thinks that Ripley is a ghost, believing he killed him in France. Tufts flees from the spectre and leaps from a cliff to his death. Ludicrous would be a generous estimation of this plotline. At every point logic, believability and common sense are excluded from the mindset of the characters and the narrative that contains them.
The Times’s anonymous review presented the novel as a self-consciously literary exploration of the relationship between aesthetics and existentialism. ‘By her hypnotic art she puts the suspense story into a toweringly high place in the hierarchy of fiction’ (21 January 1971). But he or she would say that, wouldn’t they. Literary experimentalism was in 1970 still sacred and protected territory, Highsmith already had a reputation as a radical in a popular genre, crime writing, so she could do no wrong.
When Highsmith produced Ripley Under Ground it seemed she knew that its predecessor and her reputation would guarantee promotion and esteem. However, when she wrote passages such as that in which Ripley is buried alive by Tufts and then pursues him across Europe, reappearing to him as a ghost, one has the impression that she was laughing behind her hand. That she knew it was in
ane but she did not care because she was also aware that her prestige, if only as an enigma, protected her from critical abuse.
The novel is significant to the extent that it is Highsmith’s private note of confession; private to the extent that even her most intimate friends would be unlikely to recognise Ripley as her admission of self-loathing. When he has sex with Héloïse, often reluctantly, he regards her as ‘inanimate, unreal … a body without an identity’, and he treats everyone else, irrespective of whether or not he kills them, with a resolute lack of compassion. Tom Ripley lives in a world occupied exclusively by Tom Ripley. Outside it there are individuals he can pretend to treat with affection or respect but for whom he reserves lazy contempt. His only interest is in faking things: paintings and feelings. He persistently evades any confrontation with reality and he is an exquisite portrait of his creator.
Vivien De Bernardi reported a conversation she had with Kingsley Kate Skattebol. ‘Kingsley told me – which I think is a perfect phrase – that Pat was an equal opportunity offender … You name the group, she hated them. She saw awful things about everything and everybody, but it wasn’t personal. It sounds bizarre but although she said terrible things, she wasn’t really a nasty person’ (Interview with Wilson, 23 July 1999). This raises the question of how it is possible for someone to be offensive to everyone while not being a ‘nasty person’? Like Ripley she was capable of behaving in a way that caused others distress, in his case sometimes their loss of life, but avoided feelings of contrition because she had no reciprocal notion of the effect of her actions. Sadists obtain pleasure from hurting others, while violent, prejudiced or abusive people (or indeed career criminals) have the capacity to remain aware that they have inflicted pain. Highsmith and Ripley fall into the rare category of neither enjoying the distress they cause nor being able to acknowledge that they have caused it. In a 1970 cahier she reflected on how the tensions and bitterness of her early family life had affected her permanently as an adult. ‘I learned to live with a grievous and murderous hatred very early on. And learned to stifle also my more positive emotions’ (12 January, 1970).
Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires Page 19
