While she was writing Ripley Under Ground, she reflected on why her books were failing to sell in paperback in America. Her US agent, Patricia Schartle Myrer, wrote to her and suggested politely that perhaps her fiction was ‘too subtle’, shorthand for too difficult to read by people with an appetite for standard crime fiction. Highsmith did not reply directly but entered a private reflection in her cahier. ‘Perhaps it is because I don’t like anyone’ (28 January 1967). She meant that her own immutable misanthropic condition informed her work. Later in her cahier she concluded that the vast majority of human beings were ‘morons’. ‘How about training them as casual servants, people who empty ashtrays, polish brass, make beds, wash dishes and generally go about picking up?’ Occupying the ‘morons’ with menial tasks would not, however, stop them breeding and as a solution to overpopulation by the lower orders she recommended infant genocide. The babies of the ‘morons’ should be ‘killed early, like puppies or kittens’ (3 February 1968; 11 March 1968).
She does not describe the kind of people who belong in the non-moronic natural aristocracy, those who would be served by individuals deemed unworthy of doing anything else. But when she recorded these thoughts privately, she was sharing them with her creation, Tom Ripley, who behaved not so much as a part of some kind of elite but more as its only member, immune from the regulations, let alone the moral inhibitions, observed by the rest of humanity. She was well into the novel when she wrote: ‘the moral is: stay alone. Any idea of any close relationship should be imaginary, like any story I am writing. This way no harm can be done to me or to any person’ (23 June 1969). The phrases seem oblique and ambiguous, except if we treat the words as written both by Highsmith and by Ripley. Throughout the novel Ripley behaves as if he is the narrator of a story in which other, mostly unfortunate, figures are involved, but from which he can detach himself. He avoids ‘any close relationship’; even his marriage is an emotionless performance, or as Highsmith puts it, ‘only imaginary’. ‘No harm can be done to him’ because in his ‘imaginary’ world he can forever escape the consequences of his actions, and although he can do actual ‘harm’ to ‘any person’, he is remote from their suffering. Ripley was Highsmith but more importantly he was her protection against a potential nervous breakdown.
On the page, in the book, he is soulless, a man with no moral compass, but he is also possessed of almost supernatural strength of character and ingenuity. He knows, and we know, that he will never be caught, brought to justice and exposed as the twisted maniac that he actually is. So long as he lived on in her books, he provided Highsmith with a security blanket against her actual personality. While she wrote the book, she behaved in a manner that was, to say the least, bizarre; as if she had become a real version of Ripley, murders excluded.
In February 1970 Highsmith flew to New York and spent three weeks in the city, staying at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan, magnet for numerous high-ranking literary guests (ranging from Mark Twain through Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg and Thomas Wolfe, to Dylan Thomas, who died there). She was declaring herself as one of the first team, and during her stay she visited parts of the city and its outskirts that had marked out the narrative of her life from Barnard through to her successes with Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Then she went south to Fort Worth to spend time with her mother Mary and stepfather Stanley. The disastrous week there opened with a buffet party which her parents arranged to celebrate her fame as a writer, the first formal acknowledgement by the family of her status. A local preacher asked if The Price of Salt was by her and not its pseudonymous author. He was not accusing her of anything but her reaction is recorded in a letter written to her by Stanley after her return to France: ‘… you started wrecking the kitchen, throwing a big container of milk all over the place and breaking the louvred door, like a mad woman!’ (23 August 1970). During the twelve months following her arrival in America and her return to Europe Highsmith bombarded Mary with letters so abusive that Stanley accused her of deliberately attempting to cause her mother to have a nervous breakdown.
Soon after Willie Mae, her grandmother, died in 1955 Highsmith, with no legal grounding, claimed that she was the rightful heir to the family home. This contradicted the fact that Willie Mae had specified in her will that it should go to Mary and her brother Claude. Highsmith was fully aware of this and her demand was specifically designed to cause distress to all involved. She was consistent in her leech-like demands. In November 1970 Stanley died from the side effects of Parkinson’s disease. Highsmith did not send a note of condolence to her mother and the virulence of her letters to her after Stanley’s death increased considerably, including claims that she had rights to the estate. Mary consulted a doctor and spoke confidentially to several of her friends who knew her daughter, on the question of why Patricia had subjected her to ‘inhumane treatment’. She wrote to her daughter reporting that the doctor said that in his view if Patricia had stayed ‘three more days’ in Fort Worth ‘I would be dead’.
In her cahier of 20 December 1971, she reflected on Mary’s personality. ‘My mother is the type who fires a shotgun and then wonders why some of the birds are killed, others wounded, and the rest scared. “Why don’t the birds come back?’’ I came back several times…’ There is no record of Mary having ever used a shotgun and Highsmith’s analogy of her hatred as the equivalent of randomly killing, wounding and frightening birds is prescient. As is Highsmith’s remark in her 1968 cahier that the children of the ‘low-life general population’ should be ‘killed early, like puppies or kittens’ because throughout the late 1960s and 1970s Highsmith’s sense of the boundary between the animal world and the human began to blur alarmingly.
In A Dog’s Ransom (1972) Lisa, a black poodle owned by a wealthy Manhattanite couple, Ed Reynolds, an advertising executive, and his wife Greta, is kidnapped and one thousand dollars is demanded for the dog’s return. Ed and Greta send the money to a place specified by the kidnapper without realising that their pet is dead, her head smashed in with a rock shortly after her abduction. The kidnapper/dog-murderer is Kenneth Rowajinski, unemployed, slightly physically disabled and referred to on several occasions as ‘the Pole’, and Clarence Duhamell is his nemesis. Duhamell is a police detective, educated at Cornell, who treats his job with a mixture of distaste and hopelessness. He is, supposedly, duty bound to uphold values of decency and order in a city that he sees as riven with venality and corruption, especially within its police department. A righteous liberal despairing of what his country has become – as a student he campaigned against the Vietnam War – he is the quintessence of the moderately left-leaning conscience of Western democracy. Which is fine, except that it does not explain why he becomes obsessively concerned with the plight of a middle-class couple whose beloved poodle has been kidnapped.
Eventually he tracks down Rowajinski and kills him for no other reason, it appears, than that the dog-murderer deserves it: it is also implied that ‘low-life’ second-generation Eastern European immigrants are the sorts who have undermined the American ideal. As she was drafting the book, she wrote to Alex Szogyi and Ronald Blythe regularly about her dilemmas. Specifically, she was uncertain of whether it should become a political polemic with Duhamell as her means of delineating the contradictions and hypocrisies faced by those who lived in – and felt they should support – the country which saw itself as the principal defender of the free world. She admitted to Blythe that she would not resolve the dilemma (Highsmith to Blythe, 16 August 1971), indicating that while this was indeed the direction the project seemed to be taking, she was temperamentally averse to literature as a form of virtue-signalling.
Some of the early drafts were too bizarre and grotesque for her to have let them come to fruition. First of all, Highsmith has Duhamell concentrate exclusively on finding and rescuing the dog and only later feels that he should bring the kidnapper to justice. He appears to share the Reynolds’ sense of Lisa as the equivalent of a
human child. The Reynolds had lost their daughter in a car crash but would they really involve themselves in the emotional trauma of the first draft – played down in the revision – in the unlikely hope that their pet will be returned? Had Lisa become an emotional replacement for their late daughter? Perhaps, but in the first draft Highsmith presents Ed as having a far more intimate relationship with Lisa: he has sex with her. This is left out of the finished version, but there are parallels between Highsmith’s description of Ed’s sensations when he has sex with the dog and Duhamell’s at the close of the printed draft. Duhamell, despairing of his fellow officers, takes out his anger on a passing drunk by knocking him unconscious. ‘The act exhilarated Clarence,’ writes Highsmith, as does his subsequent killing of ‘the Pole’, for which he feels no guilt or remorse. When he sees the report of it on the TV all that registers for him is his loss of appetite for his mother’s apple pie.
There are residual hints at the novel being about the social decay of America, New York City in particular, but this was a ruse: beneath the surface is something far more privately grotesque, something that, as we shall see, Highsmith revealed in her own behaviour.
Snails were her favourite creatures mainly, as she disclosed to Ellen Hill, because they seemed to undermine, in her view, the anthropomorphic delusion that animals share any of our characteristics. She was attracted to them initially when she saw two of them copulating, apparently without emotion, pleasure or even of any evident notion of what was happening between them, and this is echoed in the early draft of A Dog’s Ransom. Her cahier of 17 July 1971, just as she was completing A Dog’s Ransom, is quite horrifying. She begins by observing that in France it is thought proper that humans should butcher, sell and eat horsemeat while this same foodstuff is cooked and fed to pets in French households, specifically dogs and cats. In other circumstances, she adds, it is thought improper for humans to eat the same meat as animals, so why are horses an exception, especially given their exalted status in art and culture? Here we are reminded of her original plan for Ed’s attachment to his pet to go beyond affection. Sex is not involved but a similar question is raised: are the rules on the relationship between different species arbitrary? Next in the cahier she reflects on how, in her view at least, the conventions of butchery, cooking and eating reflect and raise questions about our sense of ourselves as the superior species. She notes that we are particularly attracted to the consumption of parts of animals that, for us, are the most private, intimate and sacred, notably the testicles of bulls and other animals. We seem not to concern ourselves with the dignity of bulls and sheep, she comments, so perhaps we should compensate our fellow mammals by feeding them the foetuses of aborted babies. ‘After all it [foetal matter] is protein, [which] is becoming increasingly scarce as the world’s population increases.’
There are numerous stories of how pets (particularly dogs) and their owners bond emotionally in a manner that equals relationships between humans. Ed and Lisa obviously fall into this category: he is happy to pay any amount for her return – evidenced when Rowajinski demands more money – just as would a husband with a wife or a father a daughter. So, Highsmith, at least in the original draft, poses the moral question of why such a loving relationship should not also involve a physical one. In the cahier and the novel, she constantly questions standard conceptions of the moral seniority of human beings.
Barbara Ker-Seymer and her partner Barbara Roett visited Highsmith in Montcourt, her third and final French house on the Seine, in 1971, when she was completing A Dog’s Ransom. Roett noted her curious engrossment with animals. Usually her diet involved the standard American blue-collar combination of cereal, bread, bacon and eggs but she did her best to provide her guests with dishes put together from local market produce. Roett was surprised by her account of how a year earlier she had found a way of alleviating thyroid problems and fatigue by consuming raw beef. Roett assumed that she had acquired a taste for the quintessentially haute cuisine dish of steak tartare involving the highest quality fillet of beef mixed with onions, capers and other seasonings. But no, Highsmith explained, she had eaten standard cuts of beef from the local butcher as they came, seemingly proud of being able to consume raw meat with the same untroubled relish as dogs and cats.
Roett also recalls that one afternoon when she and Ker-Seymer were chatting in a spare bedroom they were startled by a thud on the wooden floor. Highsmith had battered a large rat to death in the garden and introduced the corpse to her friends by throwing it through the open window. None of the women remarked on the gesture but the two guests agreed that it resembled the tendency of domestic cats to triumph in the killing of rodents by bringing them to their owner.
Highsmith had a cat, and, as recalled by Roett, Ker-Seymer and Skattebol’s daughter, Winifer, who was visiting France for two weeks, she treated the animal with a mixture of close tactile affection and disdain, often forgetting to feed it and leaving it to fend for itself. The most disturbing account comes from Roett and Ker-Seymer.
Roett states that ‘Pat really did love animals’, but admits that she and Ker-Seymer were perplexed, horrified, by her regular habit of placing the animal in a hessian sack and swinging it around the room. Roett said to her, ‘You’re going to make that poor thing dizzy’, and that evidently was her intention. On releasing it she would watch, fascinated, as the cat staggered in a daze around the room. Highsmith repeated this bizarre ritual daily and only once confided in her guests that she enjoyed being drunk so much that it seemed unfair to deny her pet a similarly disorientating experience. Roett later reflected, ‘She didn’t know how to be gentle with it and that was something she really cared about’ (Interview with Wilson, 5 May 1999). Clearly Highsmith’s friend remained confused by the bizarre conflict between the author’s self-evident love for the animal and her inclination to cause it distress. Roett continues, ‘It was hard to gauge her normal behaviour, because she was never normal around people.’ Essentially, her inability to appreciate that she was harming the cat showed Roett something of her lack of feeling for humans, too. Her anthropomorphism was neither discriminating nor condescending, indicating as she did that if animals deserved a share of our love for each other, then it should come with a flavour of man’s inhumanity to man.
In her cahier of 25 August 1971, just as she completed the novel, she imagines a character who is oblivious to the foulness of existence, who indeed takes pleasure in existing alongside, often eating, human detritus: the foulest of waste, emptied toilets and bedpans, nappies, hysterectomies, aborted foetuses. ‘I need a character obsessed with all this … I’ve got one, myself.’ Perhaps her obsessive concern for animals was conversely related to her loathing for human beings, or at least herself as an example of the species.
While writing A Dog’s Ransom she was also completing short stories that would make up the 1975 collection The Animal Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder. She had been working on some of these since 1967 and the consistency of the project reflects her general opinion on the relationship between humans and animals. In each story an animal, representing their species, assumes the role of the unjustly repressed and takes revenge on their oppressor, members of the human race. Battery chickens peck to death the owner of the farm in scenes resonant of Hitchcock’s The Birds; Ming the cat kills his owner’s lover because he has intruded upon their special relationship; Baron, an aged poodle, devises a way of getting rid of his owner’s boyfriend; a goat gains sadistic revenge for his mistreatment by the owner of an amusement park; and even a cockroach, that most derided creature, gets its own back on humans seemingly determined to exterminate his species.
Throughout, the stories bring us back to the question raised in A Dog’s Ransom: if we compare humans with animals can we come any closer to a sense of the purpose of our existence? In each of the short stories the answer is profoundly unambiguous: we as a species are inherently flawed and inferior to animals.
Everyone who knew Highsmith in her later years has st
ories to tell of her love of animals. In December 1970, the local stray cat in the village had had its tail docked and, in her cahier (13 July 1970), she plots a detective investigation, seeking out the perpetrator and purchasing a shotgun – a relatively easy task in France – and shooting them. When she was sharing a house in Samois-sur-Seine with Elizabeth Lyne, she wrote regularly to Ronald Blythe of how her cat was her protection against Elizabeth’s aggression and animosity. ‘There are perhaps more brains in those tiny heads than we think.’ Kate Kingsley Skattebol commented that ‘As for animals in general, she saw them as individual personalities, often better behaved and with more dignity and honesty than humans’ (Letter to Wilson, 13 February 2002).
The problem with the collection and Highsmith’s inspiration for it is that each of the protagonists is, aside from its physical characteristics, a human being. The goat, the cat, the monkey, even the cockroach are, in terms of their emotional registers and their linguistic, intellectual and moral compasses, indisputably reflections of us. They also display the most regrettable aspects of the human condition: an inclination towards malice, a desire and ability to do harm to others. Highsmith didn’t love animals. She was obsessed with them as destined to lose out in a world controlled by humans, and she blinded herself to the fact that if the roles were reversed all non-humans, from the cockroach to the hen, have an extraordinary potential for pitiless brutality. The premise of the stories is self-contradictory: in order to take revenge on us animals have to acquire precisely the same distasteful qualities – notably the capacity to kill without emotion – that cause us to be horrible to them. Marghanita Laski in her review in the Listener stated that it seemed to her that the collection had less to do with pity for animals than ‘distaste for men’ and much later her carer in Switzerland, Bruno Sager, observed that her affection for everything from spiders to cats was due to her sense of alienation from the rest of humanity. ‘For her human beings were strange – she thought she would never understand them…’ (Interview with Wilson, 25 September, 1999).
Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires Page 20
