Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires

by Richard Bradford

  Meanwhile Arthur’s younger brother, Robbie, recovers from what seems to be a terminal illness and their father Richard, convinced that his period of dedicated prayer saved him, becomes committed to fundamentalism and creationism. He also, however, has an affair with and impregnates Irene, a born-again ex-prostitute and fellow member of Richard’s church.

  Heinemann accepted it for publication in the UK, though several on the editorial board expressed their reservations, and it did not come out in America until 1985, having been rejected by three publishers. Ashmead, the editor to whom she had first spoken of it when she arrived in America, thought it was unpublishable, by anyone.

  Clearly the novel was intended as a literary polemic, with religious fundamentalism as its principal target but for a number of reasons it goes horribly wrong. Richard’s shift towards extreme religiosity might have been based on what Highsmith had encountered in Bloomington. Preachers regularly reported on examples of individuals who had been ‘born again’ because they apportioned some life-changing event to the direct intervention of the Almighty. But in the novel the tension between the newly evangelistic Richard and Arthur plays out as a contrast between robotic abstractions rather than human beings who add interest to life and fiction. Highsmith obviously expects the reader to identify more with Arthur than with his father – Arthur embodies imperatives such as the desire for freedom of thought, for example – but as a literary character he is two-dimensional and fails to prompt anything close to sympathy.

  Highsmith was exploring a genre, specifically the novel of ideas, that she had previously attempted and failed to master, and as we move towards the close of the novel, we become aware of her being drawn towards her natural home. Robbie discovers that his father has impregnated Irene but instead of confronting him with evidence of his hypocrisy he shoots and kills him. The act is described by Highsmith in a manner that reflects her sense of relief at no longer having to deal with the commonplaces of life.

  His [Richard’s] jaw and neck were red with blood, as was the top part of his striped shirt … the front part of his father’s throat looked torn away and also part of his jaw. Blood flowed into the green carpet. Spatters of blood on his father’s desk caught Arthur’s eye as he straightened … Now Arthur noticed that his father’s blue trousers were damp between the legs.

  As each grisly detail is laid out, clause after clause, one can almost hear Highsmith exhaling, ‘I’m back!’ She even implies that Arthur is quietly complicit in the murder as he privately savours details of the blood on the desk and the humiliating urine stains on Richard’s trousers.

  The conclusion is bizarre. Without even a token display of grief for Richard, Arthur and his brother visit their neighbour Norma for a party, alcohol included. Arthur revives his relationship with Maggie and heads for Columbia and Lois, the mother, sells the house to move east and escape the claustrophobic religiosity of the area. It is as though the death of Richard has provided an escape route for the rest of them and as they, and we, leave Chalmerston, Highsmith delivers a grotesque coda. Irene’s baby, presumably Richard’s, will be brought up with the fundamentalist church and, we are left to assume, become the heir to his worst characteristics by virtue of genetic inheritance and brainwashing.

  Reading the novel is illuminating, at least if we look behind the words on the page to the state of mind of the woman who wrote them. For around 80 per cent of the book she is uncomfortable with what she is doing but once the real Highsmith takes over – the inventor of murderous psychopaths with no apparent moral compass – a strange mixture of excitement and contentment informs the prose and what is left of the story.

  Before People Who Knock on the Door was published in Britain Highsmith was already two chapters into her next novel, Found in the Street. The books are very different except both grew out of Highsmith’s research visit to America in early 1981. Before flying to Indiana she had spent several days wandering around Greenwich Village and other parts of New York where she had lived in the 1940s and early 1950s. She took notes on the appearance of buildings in which she or her friends had lived, tried to remember if, say, doors were painted differently, and effectively attempted to recreate her earlier life. She walked the same streets she’d once taken to and from college and work, took meals, coffees and drinks in cafés and bars she recalled, or at least those that still existed. Alongside her notes she drew maps and she used this topography of her twenties as the setting for the characters of her novel. Buffie Johnson, who Highsmith knew almost four decades earlier, was socially well connected and cultivated the image of a self-supporting bohemian, despite her affluent family background. She was a widely acclaimed painter who owned an apartment in Greene Street, and Elsie Tyler, the magnet for all the male characters in Found in the Street, moves there shortly before the novel closes.

  Ralph Linderman is a perverted, reclusive, antisemitic racist who is obsessed with protecting Elsie from the debauched city. Jack Sutherland, a successful thirty-year-old graphic artist, is married with a wife and daughter and he too is fascinated by her. Highsmith wrote to Barbara Ker-Seymer that ‘half the characters in it are gay or half-gay’ (16 September 1984), meaning that Linderman and Sutherland fixate upon Elsie not only because she is elusive and beautiful but because a woman such as her would reassure them of their heterosexuality. Before either can turn their speculations into tangible proof, one way or another, Elsie is murdered.

  Many reviewers found the book fascinating, but a number were puzzled by it being caught in a time warp. Supposedly it occurs in the present day, the mid-1980s, but in terms of atmosphere – the way people socialise, use bars, etc., and the particulars of behaviour and conversational idiom – it seems to take us back at least thirty years. Highsmith began it within a year of her return from America. It was her memoir-in-fiction, a an echo of the time in which, for most of the people she knew, sexuality was by varying degrees hidden and fluid. And once more we are back to the morbid trope of her twenties and thirties: love was coterminous with a kind of murder.

  It is intriguing that all but one of the characters in the novel are housed in buildings adjacent to or facing the ones she recorded in her notes or on the map as once lived in by her friends, lovers, parents – even herself. It is as if she wanted to present her fictional inventions as neighbours of the people and places of her remembered life, individuals and events that echoed her past but were not exact representations of it, with the exception of Buffie Johnson and Elsie Tyler, who share a floor in the same building. There are other similarities between them: both are ethereally beautiful, and rather enigmatic in that those who know them compete for an intimate knowledge of their true selves. Buffie spun her sphinx-like persona from her growing reputation as a painter who seemed impossible to classify, shifting between abstract modernism and more conservative representational works, while Elsie bewitched people, men especially, by seeming to possess magical qualities that belied her ordinary background. She supported herself as a waitress while pursuing her career as a model. Buffie told Schenkar the story of when she first met Highsmith:

  I was aware from her attention that she wanted to become my friend. When I was about to leave she asked if she could see me again and I said yes. But when I gave her my telephone number I noticed she didn’t write it down. I mentioned this and she laughed saying ‘I’ll remember.’ To my surprise, she did and I was impressed by this trick of memory. (Johnson to Schenkar, November 2001)

  Johnson goes on to state that Highsmith was keen to know her better not as a social climber but to see if they were both lesbians. Buffie was heterosexual, but for some, sexuality is nuanced and open to interpretation. In the novel Highsmith divides her memories of herself, specifically her fascination with Buffie, between Ralph and Jack. For both of them the most beautiful woman they’ve ever seen is not so much sexually alluring as an experiment in self-obsession. And so it was with Highsmith and Buffie. When they first met in 1941, Highsmith had wanted to have sex with women but was confuse
d by the nature of her desires, caught between what she had been told she ought to be and what she suspected she might be. Buffie herself did not offer her an answer to this question, at least not directly. However, it was through her Highsmith met her first serious lover, Rosalind Constable.

  What occurred afterwards, with her many affairs with women, is now a matter of record. Though she never had sex with her Buffie had shown her, albeit inadvertently, who and what she was. The two women did not meet again and in the novel Elsie is murdered before she can answer questions for Jack and Ralph that are almost identical to those faced by their author in 1941. Perhaps Highsmith was admitting that even when we think we know who we are we might be deceiving ourselves.

  After she completed the novel Highsmith would never again have sex or an affair with a woman. It seemed to be her goodbye note from the life that had effectively begun when she met Buffie in 1941 and that now had become a kind of limbo. For the remainder of her time in Switzerland she met and socialised regularly with Ellen Hill, who lived less than an hour’s drive from the Aurigeno home and the house she later built for herself. Their original relationship was the most complex and painful of Highsmith’s life and for the next ten years, until her death, the two women lived out a pantomime version of the affair: sexless, without any pretence to affection or mutual respect but with an apparent addiction to mutual fractiousness.

  When they met for meals or journeys through the country that was imprinted on each as a memorial to something that might have been, Ellen continually remonstrated with Highsmith on everything from her sloppy habits of dress to her ability to find stashes of alcohol at virtually all times of the day. Monique Buffet remarked that ‘Pat knew it would be hell on earth living near Ellen Hill, but she went ahead and did it anyway.’ Christa Maerker, the film-maker who knew both women, recalled that at a railway station Highsmith, self-parodically, proclaimed ‘let’s have some coffee’, ordered beer for herself instead and was shouted at by Ellen in the manner of a governess: ‘Pat, not in the morning!’

  The parallels between her seemingly masochistic attachment to Ellen and Found in the Street are striking. In both she revisits her past without a hint of nostalgia but with a blend of contrition and self-loathing.

  In April 1987 Highsmith travelled to Lleida in Catalonia to attend a literary conference. She was the principal interviewee and had agreed in advance to respond to questions on all aspects of her career. In reply to an enquiry on whether or not writers should indicate their political opinions outside their work, or more importantly, in it, she replied that ‘If a writer, or painter, starts preaching, consciously, in his work, it is no longer a piece of art.’ While she did not refer to People Who Knock on the Door, we might read this as an involuntary explanation of the book’s flaws. Clearly she had researched it and begun writing it as a political polemic and soon realised that she could not realise her objective.

  She went on to admit that she did hold political opinions but avoided the interviewer’s query on their nature, stating vaguely that she was willing to ‘boycott and be boycotted in return’. There was a detectable murmur in the audience because at the time political boycotts were directed primarily at three countries. There was the embargo on the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics led by Jimmy Carter’s US administration in protest against the Soviet Union’s violations of human rights, and the longer-term political and economic boycott of the South African apartheid regime. Less prominent was the campaign mounted by a number of Western intellectuals, academics and writers that Israel should be boycotted for its treatment of the Palestinians, which was implemented officially only by member states of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and the Arab League.

  One member of the audience read out the dedication of Found in the Street published only six months earlier. ‘To the courage of the Palestinian people and their leaders in the struggle to regain a part of their homeland. This book has nothing to do with their problem.’ The second sentence is presumably an assurance to the reader who comes first to the dedication that the novel will not involve or address itself to affairs in the Middle East. Her interviewer asked if her statement was a personal message to organisations dedicated to attacks on Israel, specifically the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). She answered that ‘Yes, it is addressed to the leaders, singular or plural, of the Palestinian people, who must choose their own leaders … If they choose the PLO, as 96 per cent do as I state this, then my dedication is to the PLO’ (Record of Lleida interview, 26 April 1987).

  The interview was not widely reported at the time, but it was Highsmith’s first public declaration of her political opinions and affiliations. Indeed, even among her conversational exchanges and correspondence there is little evidence of anything close to consistency in terms of who or what she supported. As we have seen she had no affection for Reagan, but she was aggrieved more by the spectacle of a B-movie actor who cultivated the votes of religious fundamentalists and blue-collar Midwesterners rather than by anything the president claimed to profess. At the same time, she wrote to Barbara Ker-Seymer in 1987 expressing her praise for Reagan’s ally Margaret Thatcher. Ker-Seymer assumed initially that they shared a begrudging admiration for her as the first woman to rise to prominence in Western politics, but Highsmith corrected her and stressed that she supported Thatcher because of her tax-cutting policy, irrespective of the ideology behind it. The actor and director Nicolas Kent confessed that ‘I could never work out Pat’s politics’, and Bettina Berch expanded, ‘Although she was, later, anti-Bush, she could just as well come out thinking some right-wing ideologue cool because he happened to say something that struck her fancy’ (Wilson, p.374).

  One factor that went against her erratic and faddish attitudes was her long-term antisemitism. In 1963 she was invited by Caroline Besterman to a dinner party in London hosted by a married couple, one a medical professional, the other an academic, whose families had moved to Britain from Central Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. The wife was Jewish, but secular, and hardly ever drew attention to her ethnic background. Nonetheless, Highsmith spent the evening seemingly intent on provoking an argument. Those present succeeded in turning the conversation elsewhere until there was an uncomfortable lull when Highsmith slapped the table, turned to her hosts and announced, ‘I’m sick of the Jews!’

  In 1988, ten months after the Catalonia conference, she wrote in her diary that she had ‘spent a lot of time composing letters I think may be useful to peace and stopping the deaths … 72 Palestinians so far dead, no Jews’ (28 February 1988). This might seem a commendable enterprise, an attempt to urge reconciliation rather than a specific attack on Israel and Jews. However, she leaves out the fact that since the mid-1960s the letters she had composed and sent to mostly left-leaning mainstream newspapers in America, Britain, France and Germany were signed by more than forty different individuals, none of which was ‘Patricia Highsmith’: her particular favourites were Edgar S. Sallich of Locarno, the Americans Isabel Little, Maria L. Leone, Janet Tamagni, Eddie Stefano and Elaine Dutweiler, and the London-based Englishwoman Phyllis Cutler. Each condemned Israel for its annexing of land from Palestinians and its policies following the wars of the late 1960s and early 1970s with neighbouring Arab states. Her pseudonymous letter writers shared the opinion that the only equitable solution was the abolition of Israel.

  In a rare instance of speaking for herself she stated in an interview with Ian Hamilton in 1977 that ‘I think the Jewish lobby, on the Middle East, is pulling Congress around by the nose … these little Congressmen are afraid of losing their jobs, frankly, if they don’t send money and arms to Israel … I don’t know why America supports a country that is behaving like that.’ This sounds like a candid condemnation of Israeli policy, but it should not be seen as Highsmith joining the public debate.

  Ten years later she wrote to Gore Vidal, expressing her support for him in an embittered exchange that had erupted between Vidal and two pro-Israel writers, William Safire and Norman Podh
oretz, both Jewish. She asked Vidal to read a recently published letter in the International Herald Tribune condemning supporters of Israel as either Americans who wanted a colonial outpost in the oil-rich regions of the Middle East or Europeans who were attempting to salve their conscience for the Holocaust, at the expense of the Palestinians. She also confessed that while she had written it, it was signed by Edgar S. Sallich of Switzerland. There is no record of a reply from Vidal. She had stated in her letter to him that ‘I don’t care to use my own name too often, so I invent names. I could have said that many Jews in the USA seem to like America as a safe berth and source of money for Israel. But would such a letter get printed?’ (Letter from Highsmith to Vidal, 9 June 1986). She also asked him not to disclose to the media that she had written to him.

  In 1992 she wrote an essay which laid out how, in her view, the recent history of the Middle East had led to the present conflict and the injustices being meted out the Palestinians. She treats the two major conflicts between Israel and neighbouring Arab states – the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars – as part of the Cold War played out by proxy nations. The Arabs were backed and armed by the Soviet Union, she argues, while Israel could make use of far more deadly and efficient air power and armour supplied by America. Israel triumphed in both instances and enabled the US to continue to treat it as its ally, or military outpost, in the eastern Mediterranean and within the oil-rich regions of the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. In return, the US expressed no objection to what amounted to Israel’s colonisation of the West Bank, Jerusalem and other areas from which Arab troops had retreated.

  Americans and the world know that America gives too lavishly to Israel … because the United States wanted Israel as a strong military bulwark in the Cold War. Now that the Cold War is over, America has cut none of its aid … I blame my own country for the majority of injustices now being inflicted on what they consider Greater Israel.