Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires

by Richard Bradford

  When she completed A Dog’s Ransom in late 1971she was suffering a period of depression, made worse by bouts of flu, lethargy brought on by alcohol abuse and a particularly lengthy, painful case of toothache. Her outlook on life was not beatific and this probably contributed to the formation of Ripley, in his third novel, as a loathsome misanthrope. In the midst of this on 20–21 January 1972 she wrote to Ronald Blythe on how her ex-lover Daisy Winston seemed to be striving for a sense of purpose. Highsmith had already reached her own conclusions on this. ‘She cannot realise that life is about nothing.’

  Vivien De Bernardi recalls that Highsmith once said that if she came upon a kitten and a baby, both starving, she would feed the former. Her neighbour in France, the painter Gudrun Mueller, told of how they once accompanied her to the local vet, because a cat, having been hit by a car, was terminally injured and needed to be put down. Mueller reported that Highsmith almost fainted with despair. She later told the writer Neil Gordon that ‘it affected me very much because it was much more important than a member of my family who might die of old age … I had the power to do it [order the cat’s death] … It’s terrifying to have that power. I don’t go to jail for it, [but] the cat is dead … They have a great right, these animals’ (Interview between Gordon and Wilson, 9 November 2001). Horrified at the prospect of being able to end the life of this harmless creature, or at least to allow the vet to do so, she seems to turn her distress against human beings, ostensibly those closest to her, who in her opinion are more deserving of the same fate.

  In July 1973 she visited Germany, partly to visit individuals who were promoting her work in the country but also to compare the parts of it worst affected by the war with Munich, where she’d lived, and which had been far less seriously damaged than urban areas in the north. First, she stayed for a week in Hamburg with her German translator, Anne Uhde, and then went on, alone, to Berlin, where she obtained details on how to enter the East. In her cahier (19 July 1973) she records the delay at Checkpoint Charlie, the dreary yet unforgiving appearance of the Wall and a city, like its people, deprived of soul and character. Not once, however, does she comment on the regime that presides over this or on global politics as a whole. The cause of the divide between West and East is conspicuously absent from her account of leaving the democratic West for a world of totalitarianism. Even left-leaning observers would have noticed that much of East Berlin in 1973 was poorly repaired, with buildings ruined by carpet bombings still inhabited. The two halves of the city seemed to be in different universes. But it is only when she visits the Tiergarten that she begins to pick up on acts of cruel iniquity. She wonders how those who run the place would feel were they were ‘forced to defecate and make love in the presence of spectators [their captors] who laugh, point and stare’.

  She was not, however, referring to the dehumanising treatment of the general population in the East by the Stasi. She was in the city zoo, which caused her, briefly, to empathise with the captives of a quasi-police state. For her, the animals behind the wire suffered far more than the citizens imprisoned by the Wall. There are clear parallels between Highsmith’s individual dilemmas and their manifestation in her next Ripley novel. He slaughters other characters in a particularly cruel manner, ensuring that pain and humiliation are overtures to death. He exists in an emotional vacuum, without anything close to guilt or remorse, let alone compassion, and he is his creator’s means of seeking revenge upon those who share her state, which disgusted her: being human.

  13

  ‘It’s Good You Never Had Children’

  Shortly before A Dog’s Ransom went to press Highsmith began work on the third Ripley novel, Ripley’s Game (1974). The esteemed German director Wim Wenders adapted it for a film in 1977, a considerable achievement given that the book surpassed its predecessor as a masterpiece of incoherence and implausibility. Ripley, still in Belle Ombre with Héloïse, is approached by his occasional fence, the minor criminal Reeves Minot, who offers him $96,000 to kill two men in Germany. The question of why exactly Minot feels that Ripley is a suitable hitman is left unanswered, and we have to ask also why Minot assumes that his offer will convince this immensely wealthy man to potentially ruin his life by killing people.

  Ripley declines and recommends to Minot Jonathan Trevanny, an indigent British picture framer suffering from leukaemia, as his replacement. Trevanny has insulted Ripley at a party in Fontainebleau and Ripley feels it appropriate that this decrepit figure should be approached by criminals and offered money to resolve his own financial and medical problems. It is, perhaps, an act of twisted philanthropy, though we should note that while Trevanny’s illness is serious Ripley persuades him by various means that he has no more than six months to live, ensuring that he will take on the contract killings to provide money for his wife and child following his imminent demise.

  The mild slur delivered by Trevanny is not convincing as the motivation for Ripley’s subsequent behaviour. Rather, he seems to relish his status of manipulator and choreographer of events, as if he has taken control of the novel in which he appears. Trevanny successfully shoots dead his first victim and then, through a mixture of fear and remorse, decides that after the second he will commit suicide, certain that Minot will have transferred the money to his wife. Ripley has followed him onto the train where he is due to execute the mafioso, Marcangelo, and takes on the task himself. Once more, Ripley seems to be monitoring the direction of the narrative, ensuring that events he has set in motion do not shift quite beyond his control. Minot has provided Trevanny with two weapons, a handgun and a garrotte, and he chooses the former as the one which will lessen his proximity and contact with his victim. Ripley, however, makes a point of using the garrotte, executing Marcangelo in the humiliating, confined space of the lavatory.

  Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) was released just as Highsmith began her novel and its influence is tangible. The film was revolutionary in that nothing had come close to its brutally realist representation of organised crime. Particularly memorable and shocking are the director’s set pieces depicting the ways in which members of Italian-American gangster organisations, the Mafia, dispose of their enemies and the traitors in their own families. Shootings involve heads and torsos being shredded by bullets and garrotting is a particular favourite reserved for those who have betrayed their own, given that it involves extreme pain and indignity. Highsmith’s episode in the train lavatory carries the discernible influence of Mario Puzo (the original Godfather novelist) and Coppola. The victim’s death is described in excruciating detail, including the choking and gurgling sound that comes as his vocal cords are paralysed and he tries unsuccessfully to draw air into his contracting throat. His eyes bulge, his swollen tongue protrudes from his mouth and in a final attempt to draw in breath he expels his bottom set of false teeth which clatter onto the metal floor. Ripley picks them up, drops them into the lavatory bowl and presses the foot-pedal to expel them from the train. Then, ‘He wiped his fingers with disgust on Marcangelo’s padded shoulder.’ When the corridor appears to be clear he opens the door and despatches Marcangelo’s body at a point several kilometres beyond the final resting place of his false teeth. After returning to his seat he orders a bowl of goulash and a glass of chilled Carlsbad beer.

  Between Germany and Belle Ombre four more mafiosi are disposed of and though the descriptions of each death are a little more economical than Marcangelo’s, Highsmith allows sufficient space for us to note Ripley’s appreciation of the inflicting of pain. One is bashed over the head with a log and then sent to oblivion as the steel butt of a rifle noisily shatters his skull and releases blood in all directions. ‘Mind the rug with that blood!’ Ripley tells Trevanny as they move the body. Watching the bodies of two more gangsters being incinerated in their car Ripley relaxes by whistling a marching song from the Napoleonic Wars. Then with the precision of a butcher he smashes a hammer through the forehead and into the frontal lobe of his next victim, ‘straightforward and tr
ue, as if he had been an ox in a slaughterhouse’. During their final exchange with the mafiosi Trevanny is shot, seriously injured and dies in Ripley’s car as Ripley attempts to drive him to hospital. Throughout, Trevanny is presented not so much as Ripley’s accomplice but as his unwitting and rather feckless apprentice, drawn into a catalogue of nightmarish events that causes him to wish for suicide. Ripley’s victims are themselves part of a world in which murder is common currency, so we are hardly expected to sympathise with them, though the pleasure that he takes in causing their deaths to be as inhumane and painful as possible has nothing to do with the exigencies of gangsterism. The question remains as to why Ripley feels it appropriate to subject the villains and Trevanny to several weeks of unceasing torment. This version of Ripley was born out of the book that immediately preceded him, A Dog’s Ransom, and the one that Highsmith was preparing while Ripley’s Game progressed, The Animal Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder. He kills like an animal, without conscience, but his theatrical sadism is uniquely human.

  Virtually everyone who met her during the early 1970s could testify to Highsmith’s loathing of France. The French were, in her view, insular, systematically corrupt and selfish, and wedded to an administrative system that outranked any other in the world in its addiction to utterly pointless bureaucratic regulations. Her house in Montcourt, her final residence in France, struck everyone who visited it as a recipe for depression. It spoke of a decent heritage, minor gentry, but those who built it in the eighteenth century seemed more concerned with the costive retention of fireside heat than with sunshine. The beamed ceilings were low and the windows admitted little light. Its back garden was spacious enough, but it too carried the atmosphere of a prison yard; a ten-foot-high stone wall sealed it off from the rest of the landscape. In 1977 the journalist Joan Juliet Buck visited to do an interview: ‘It is an austere place: lived in but empty at the same time.’

  It was from here that she projected Ripley into the spacious, beautifully sunlit Belle Ombre chateau. During the autumn and winter of 1973 Highsmith suffered from an eclectic malady of conditions: pains in her arms, which friends said might be due to angina, but she dismissed as the results of digging in the garden, persistent nausea, abdominal cramps and diarrhoea, plus bouts of dizziness and a severe, painful hardening of her calves after long walks. In December she was recommended to a heart specialist in Wimpole Street, London, who advised she would have to alter her lifestyle if she hoped to live beyond her mid-fifties. She had been candid about her habits. She despised fruit and vegetables, preferring fatty bacon and occasionally eggs to bulk out her intake of alcohol. Aside from gin and beer she now consumed a bottle of Scotch every three or four days. Even though nannyish advice from physicians and the state was moderate compared with today it was evident to all, Highsmith’s friends and medical advisers included, that she had chosen a route to oblivion. In 1973 most people smoked cigarettes but Highsmith’s determination to get through forty a day of the most famously tar-ridden brand, Gauloises, seemed a loud refutation of instructions on what might or might not be good for you.

  In the New Year, she accepted an invitation from her friend, the publisher Charles Latimer, to stay with him and his partner, the concert pianist Michel Block, in their country house in the Lot, southwest France. The region in summer could be as hot as the Mediterranean but even in midwinter it provided blue skies and icy sunshine. Unlike the Mediterranean coast, Paris and parts of the Loire Valley it was not, in the 1970s, an area well known to non-French holidaymakers and very few of its beautiful sandstone manor houses and small chateaux had been bought by northern Europeans or Americans. It is a superbly attractive area largely unchanged over the previous century. But, to Latimer and Block’s surprise, their guest seemed oblivious to her surroundings. Irrespective of their opinions on the nation as a whole few people would fail to find the Lot physically captivating, but Highsmith could not be persuaded to leave the house. ‘She was not your typical American expatriate. She was, in my opinion, an “exile”, or maybe she was “in exile”’ (Letter from Block to Wilson, 7 May 2002). Block recalled that almost ten years later he, Highsmith and Latimer stopped for petrol when driving through the Pennsylvania countryside. She got out of the car, gazed at the forested hills speckled with small white-painted houses and churches, and began to weep uncontrollably. He comments to Wilson, ‘I really think Pat sacrificed her “every day” life to her reputation to be an artist … I think she would have been much happier living in the States.’ At the beginning of her career Europe proved exotic and irresistible but by the time she had established herself the country of her birth seemed to have taken an obtuse form of revenge for her affair with the Old World.

  Larry Ashmead, her US editor at Doubleday, suggests that she felt let down by her American audience. ‘Her books were invariably well received in the US … often in important journals and by important critics … but the core audience was consistently small … She didn’t appeal to the mass market because her books were dark, often terrifying and the reader had to pay careful attention.’ Gary Fisketjon, who dealt with her for Knopf: ‘She defied categorisation’, in that she was not mainstream crime-suspense but the moral-philosophical aspect of her work – ‘a cynicism about human transactions’ – wasn’t ‘particularly user-friendly’. Hard-boiled crime fiction of the kind practised by Hammett, Chandler and Cain was born in America in the 1930s and lived on there with the likes of John D. MacDonald and Joseph Wambaugh. Some associated her with the genre but most in the serious magazines and journals found that Highsmith lacked, or avoided, the inclination to turn bad behaviour into a credible and entertaining narrative.

  Her Heinemann editor Roger Smith found that her avoidance of the vulgarised tradition of the bestseller appealed to the British and European taste for fiction, even suspense fiction, as a platform for philosophical speculation. In America she was an enigma and curiosity, an outsider, but in Europe, for the same reason, she became something of an intellectual celebrity. She preferred the intellectual celebrity but by the time that Block and Latimer invited her to the Lot she was beginning to regret exchanging her home for acclaim. She was delighted when in 1967 Daniel Keel, founder of the Swiss publisher Diogenes Verlag, offered to deal with her rights for continental Europe and the rest of the world beyond America and the UK. To shift genre, it felt to her as if she had traded in the coarse extravagance of Hollywood for the high-art contexts of Szabó, Godard, Herzog and Fellini, despite the fact that the Europeans did not make much money.

  At the end of summer 1974 America called her back, specifically with a letter from her cousin Dan Coates who reported that her mother, now living permanently in Fort Worth, was incapable of looking after herself. According to Coates she lived on uncooked food, from tins; refused, or was unable, to clean a house or herself; and often appeared to be incoherent. When she arrived in Fort Worth Highsmith found the situation to be even worse than Dan had described it. The door was locked and blocked with heavy furniture and after she broke in through a window to the kitchen she retched at the smell. The sink was full of unwashed pots, uneaten food – in tins, parcels and on plates – covered every surface, and the fridge had become an incubator for rot and decay, with various forms of cheese, meat and vegetables turned green, some nurturing insects. Mary, upstairs, had not washed or taken a bath for some time and although she recognised her daughter she seemed to resent her intrusion. According to her neighbours and local shopkeepers Mary veered between periods of normality and bouts of distraction and forgetfulness but they saw this as no more than one might expect of a woman in her seventies. Highsmith and Dan Coates, who knew her better, suspected a condition more unsettling than age and tried to acquire power of attorney. They failed but Mary was clear enough of mind to gather her contempt for her daughter’s act into a letter.

  Well you’ve done it – broken my heart – yet gave me freedom I’ve not felt in many years. How sorry for you I am … Stanley and I made a great mistake – giving you
everything we could … It’s good you never had children – they’d be forever criticised and then never come up to your demands. You can think of no one but yourself … Don’t write – I shan’t. (30 September 1974)

  The manner of the letter seems to belie Highsmith and Coates’s view that Mary was becoming incapable, mentally, of looking after herself. Throughout it reads as the case for the prosecution, laid out meticulously and convincingly. It was the last letter she would write to her daughter and it is the only one that is not signed off with some familiar such as ‘Mother’ or ‘Mom’. This time she signed herself off as ‘Mary Highsmith’ with no valediction, ‘sincerely’, ‘faithfully’ or otherwise.

  The cool composure exhibited in the letter would prove temporary. Neighbours noticed that lights remained on during the night and that sometimes doors were left swinging on their hinges while she was out shopping. On 6 August 1975 she went for coffee in the local diner and it is thought she left her cigarette burning in the ashtray at home. The house was burnt almost to the ground, all of her clothes and furniture destroyed, and her pet dog was killed. It might well have been an accident, but her doctor advised Coates that she was effectively incapable of looking after herself. She spent the subsequent sixteen years, until her death, in a Fort Worth nursing home, gradually beset by what appeared to be Alzheimer’s.