Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires

by Richard Bradford

  As a military historian, Highsmith’s expertise is flawed. Few would dispute that during both wars the Israelis had often come close to defeat. Indeed during the Yom Kippur conflict it seemed at the opening that Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian forces were making irreversible inroads into territories declared as parts of the state of Israel in 1948. She was not, however, making use of impartial accounts to back up her version of events. During the essay she quotes from, amongst others, Vidal, Alexander Cockburn, Noam Chomsky and Edward Said and it is clear that her view is a cut-and-paste version of their polemics arguing that Israel was a US colonial outpost established both as an anti-Soviet airbase and as a means of bullying the countries on which the West depended for much of its oil. She pledged her support for each of these thinkers and writers and the essay is clearly her first detailed statement of allegiance, or it would have been, had she not decided to place it in an unmarked file and not attempted to get it into print.

  The topic of the Israel–Palestine conflict has, especially in Western democracies, provided some individuals with the opportunity to divide themselves between their private and public personae. Those with a visceral loathing for Jews can disguise this in the media as a measured opinion on the politics of injustice. The British Labour Party has presented a recent example, with a large number of members, some of them MPs, carelessly expressing on social media a contempt for Jews, alongside quasi-Nazi sympathies and doubts about the nature and magnitude of the Holocaust. Those exposed claimed that their statements had been read ‘out of context’, and in defence directed their accusers to their publicly expressed opinions on a fair solution to the problems in the Middle East.

  Fortunately for Highsmith, social media did not come into being until the late 1990s, but there is conclusive evidence that she cautiously divided her comments on Jews between recorded statements that might be acceptable as part of a broader discourse and her far more disturbing private inclinations. In her public statements she expressed sympathy for the Palestinians, while in conversations and correspondence – the equivalent of social media, which some foolishly regard as guaranteeing confidentiality or anonymity – she disclosed the true nature of her feelings: she hated Jews and wanted Israel to be destroyed. In 1989 on a publicity trip to Italy she sometimes wore a ‘“Palestine PLO check” sweater’, which indicated support for the organisation whose then leader, Yasser Arafat, was known worldwide for his distinctive keffiyeh headdress. By the end of the eighties this had become an enormously popular fashion accessory for those who wanted to display some connection with radical chic, most of whom had little or no interest or knowledge of affairs in the Middle East. She recorded in her notebook that she had spoken in several interviews in Italy on US involvement in the region but there are no surviving records of such statements in the media. All of which places her within the cadre of left-leaning artists, intellectuals and celebrities for whom support for the seemingly oppressed or dispossessed was at the time a public obligation, and therefore something that hardly made them conspicuous. This was the manifest version of Highsmith; the real one was more unsettling.

  Her friends became distressed and disturbed by what she said to them. During the 1970s she became an outspoken fan of the author Douglas Reed, at least in the sense that she recommended him enthusiastically to virtually all of her acquaintances. She never mentioned him in public. Before the Second World War Reed had worked for The Times and resigned because of, in his opinion, misrepresentations of Nazism in the press. After 1945 he became one of the most prominent Holocaust deniers in the West, writing in his book Far and Wide that ‘Jewish losses’ during the conflict were ‘irresponsibly inflated’ and come nowhere close to the six million claimed in the years after the liberation of the concentration camps: ‘No proof can be given,’ he declared. From 1948 he lived in South Africa, claiming that the indigenous population of the country were intellectually and morally incapable of governing themselves. His enduring legacy is The Controversy of Zion, completed in 1956 but rejected by all publishers until after his death and brought out in 1978 by Bloomfield Press. In it he repeated his statement that details of the Holocaust were largely fraudulent and went on to claim that the false narrative of the Nazi Final Solution had been invented by Jews themselves and that the creation of Israel was symptomatic of a ‘semi-secret priesthood’ of Zionism set upon controlling the world by infiltrating all of the centres of trading and finance outside the communist bloc.

  In December 1989 Highsmith wrote to Vidal, recommending the book to him, and stating that she had sent three copies to her closest friends praising it as a source of ‘enlightenment’. To Vidal she wrote that their lying about the Holocaust was evidence that Jews ‘love to be hated’ and that they enjoyed being targets by Palestinian activists, notably at the Munich Olympics of 1972, because they could present this as a ‘second Holocaust’. In her view ‘Holocaust’ was a misnomer. It should be renamed either as ‘Holocaust Inc.’ in recognition of its role as a means of generating income for Israel in particular and Jewry in general, or ‘Semicaust’ given that the Nazis had managed to exterminate less than half of the Jews on earth, which disappointed Highsmith greatly. Again, Vidal did not reply to her. Kate Kingsley Skattebol had received one of the Reed volumes and later admitted that it reflected something in her friend that appalled her utterly.

  Shortly after she finished her unpublished essay on Israel and Judaism in 1992 she flew to America, first to visit her cousins the Coates in Texas and then to stay for four days with Marijane Meaker, her lover from the 1960s, in Meaker’s pretty colonial-style house in East Hampton, New York. Later in interviews and in her own memoir Meaker said that the experience was bizarre, as if she had been visited by a grotesque apparition. Some of Highsmith’s more tolerable idiosyncrasies persisted but these had been edged aside by something quite horrible.

  When they went for coffee in a local restaurant, she noted that America had become far more multi-racial since she had lived in the country permanently in the early fifties. The majority of the customers in the diner were African American and Highsmith remarked that there were probably so many present because of their ‘animal-like’ breeding habits, that black men became physically ill if they did not have sex ‘many times a month’ and were in any event too ‘feckless and stupid to realise that unprotected intercourse led to pregnancy’. Worse still, apparently, was the tendency for blacks, men and women, to be improvident with money; hence their poverty-stricken condition was a burden upon the state.

  This was a rehearsal for her principal rant, involving ‘Yids’ who she blamed for inciting virtually all forms of post-Cold War discord as part of a plot for global domination, though she did not offer a detailed explanation of how they would bring this about. According to Meaker her contempt for Israel was virulent and personal rather than based on anything resembling rational political opinion. She even avoided using the term ‘Israel’. Preferring to refer to the region as Palestine and citizens of the 1948 state as ‘Jews’ rather than ‘Israelis’, she seemed, like many pro-Palestinian activists, to have already abolished Israel, in her mind at least. She berated Meaker for maintaining friendships with New York ‘Yids’ and even treated Jews as being responsible for the disappearance of ham sandwiches from business-class menus on transatlantic flights. This was, she contended, further evidence of the ‘Yiddish’ objective of world control. Meaker was disturbed particularly by Highsmith’s confession that she enjoyed living in the Ticino region of Switzerland because it seemed like a realisation of the Final Solution: Jews, according to Highsmith, neither existed there nor were spoken of by Swiss residents. Meaker asked her, ‘Do you live in some little Nazi coven?’ (Meaker, pp.183–98).

  Eighteen months earlier Highsmith had submitted a screenplay for a series running on German state radio called ‘Impossible Interviews’. As the title indicated, a figure from the present day, usually a writer or intellectual, would create a fictional dialogue between themselves and, typically, someone
from history. Highsmith chose to speak with a present-day figure, Yitzhak Shamir, then prime minister of Israel. She tried to rectify the anomaly by making it clear during the conversation that Shamir, and most other Israelis, were intent on using the past as a means of advancing their local and global interests. According to her every time they provoked the Palestinians to act against them, they could claim this as a perpetuation of the Holocaust and raise money, mostly from America, to fund their own plans to expand. Christa Maerker and the production editor at the radio station, who had suggested the project, were appalled by what they read and more importantly astonished that Highsmith might assume that a German radio network would broadcast what amounted to a pro-Nazi drama in 1990.

  Highsmith knew they would reject it, but it was part of the weird exchange between her execrable true self and the one that the media and the publishing industry thought they knew and found acceptable. The screenplay confirmed for Maerker a suspicion that she had nurtured since her visit to Highsmith in Switzerland. Five years earlier Maerker and others at dinner with Highsmith had become involved in an acrimonious exchange on Nazism, antisemitism and the creation of Israel. In the middle of the dinner Highsmith rolled up the sleeve of her sweater, slowly inscribed a number on her forearm with a ballpoint pen, and then laughed. She was mocking the experience of concentration-camp inmates and inviting her guests to condemn her. Instead, according to Maerker, they left the house.

  Phyllis Nagy, who had known Highsmith since the mid-1980s, tells of how in 1990, shortly after the screenplay had been rejected by German radio, she played host to her during a week-long visit to New York. Nagy, twenty-eight and already earning a considerable reputation as a theatre director in the US, arranged an evening out in the city and asked Highsmith if she could bring along a woman, a poet, with whom she’d gone to college. Highsmith said she would be pleased to meet the young woman, known only as ‘Barbara’. By this time Highsmith’s obsessive concern with and loathing for Judaism was common knowledge among her friends and acquaintances, though no one spoke of it in the presence of the media. Nonetheless, Nagy felt it wise to warn her friend of what she was about to encounter. Both women were from left-leaning backgrounds and had come to generally regard manifestations of political extremism, racism included, as grotesque curiosities rather than as serious threats to the new liberal consensus. ‘That’s all right,’ said Barbara, ‘you don’t have to mention that I’m Jewish.’

  Highsmith had requested they meet at the door of the Duchess, a Manhattan lesbian club, now renamed, which she remembered from the late 1940s when its status and the activities of its clientele were clandestine. Her nostalgic exercise in time travel would take a further twist when Nagy and Barbara arrived to find that Highsmith too was accompanied by a college friend, Kate Kingsley Skattebol. The age difference between the two couples was more than forty years, which was accentuated once they entered the club whose clientele were mostly in their twenties. Nagy commented that their two companions looked both puzzled and out of place, as if they were pensioners who had wandered into a college discotheque. Skattebol broke the silence by commenting on the number and muscularity of black women on the dance floor. Highsmith agreed and added, once they reached the bar, ‘Well at least we made it through THAT!’ referring to the heaving crowd of well-built African Americans. She looked around and declared that ‘Well, there certainly are a lot of blacks in here … [but] at least there are not a lot of Jews around.’ Her three companions were initially silenced by her implication that physically Jews were as easily recognisable as African Americans, but Barbara chose what she thought was a telling rejoinder, stating, ‘Excuse me, but I’m a Jew.’ Highsmith turned to her, stared her up and down and observed, ‘Well, you don’t LOOK like one’ (Interview between Schenkar and Nagy, 26 June 2002).

  Some might take this as Highsmith’s attempt to lighten the mood, coming across as a version of Wilde’s Lady Bracknell, the mistress of involuntary irony. But given our knowledge of her unremitting antisemitism from her school years onwards this seems a little too charitable. Stereotypical representations of Jews in Western culture from the thirteenth century onwards emphasised supposedly defining racial characteristic such as large hooked noses, curly hair – often red – and a swarthy complexion. These supposedly genetic physical characteristics were usually accompanied by indications of reprehensible activity that meant Jews were fully deserving of their status as scapegoats for the worst ills of society. The visual stereotypes would thus be shown as practising various forms of greed and usury. When Highsmith informed Barbara that she did not ‘LOOK’ Jewish she was also telling her that she was lucky in being able to disguise the ‘innately vile’ features of her race, which beneath the surface she might share.

  We cannot ignore the fact that three of the women to whom she declared her undying love, notably Ellen Hill and Marion Aboudaram, were Jewish. Even after their relationship was over Highsmith maintained an addictive, masochistic attachment to Ellen which lasted almost until the end of her life. With Marion she showed an unusual interest in her anatomy, particularly her bone-structure physiognomy, hair distribution on her legs and arms, and the survival of her mother in Paris during the Nazi occupation. Was this due to some twisted form of prurience? More likely, I suspect, was that Highsmith as the foul antisemite was in part an invention. Like Ripley she shifted between a personality that was seemingly charming and another presence that was utterly ghastly. Highsmith knew that those closest to her were appalled by her views and her expressions of them, which is why she continued to do so.

  16

  Those Who Walk Away

  Ripley Under Water (1991) was the fifth and final novel of the so-called Ripliad and indeed the last full-length work of fiction to go into print during Highsmith’s lifetime.

  The plot is another variation on an enduring theme. Ripley’s quasi-aristocratic existence near Fontainebleau is once more disturbed by outsiders variously obsessed with him or intent on exacting a form of vengeance – this time, a thoroughly unappealing American couple, Janice and David Pritchard. The latter claims to have knowledge of Ripley’s involvement in the death of Dickie Greenleaf, whom he murdered in The Talented Mr. Ripley, and more recently of his responsibility for the disappearance of the art collector Thomas Murchison (Ripley Under Ground). Pritchard photographs Ripley’s house and arranges for local canals to be dredged for Murchison’s corpse. He finds a skeleton which he leaves outside Ripley’s front door and which Ripley then dumps in a pond adjacent to the Pritchards’ house. In an attempt to drag it out with a garden rake the Pritchards fall into the water and drown.

  One might suspect that such a brief synopsis does an injustice to the nuances and complexities of the work, but no. It is as ponderous and fatiguing as it sounds. It seems that Highsmith was making a rather despairing attempt to keep Ripley alive for another excursion into the gruesome and sadomasochistic, but her notes for the first draft suggest that she initially considered this to be his final outing. In her notebook she writes that ‘He escapes into another person … A form of schizophrenia’, and in the draft she sometimes has him refer to himself in the third person, as though he had become two people simultaneously, one watching the other. At various stages in the early planning of the novel she looked at how Ripley might slip into an irreversible state of insanity, sometimes participating with the Pritchards in acts of violent sadomasochism, even involving ritual murder. Had she proceeded with these scenarios it would have meant the end of Ripley but obviously she changed her mind.

  In 1986, a year before she began her notes for the novel, Highsmith had an operation in the Royal Brompton Hospital in London to remove a cancerous tumour from her lung. Later, X-rays showed that the original growth had disappeared and had not spread to other tissues. This was her third near-death experience, following two bypass operations for severe cardiovascular disease. Perhaps she felt it appropriate to export her own precarious state to her most long-standing creation and there is evidence
that she wondered if she, and he, might survive for a while yet.

  Shortly after her X-ray she was informed by the architect Tobias Ammann that a site had become available in the southern Swiss village of Tegna, surrounded by mountains and overlooking the Centovalli valley. Planning permission was available and she calculated that the cost of the land, design fees (she would use Ammann) and prices for labour and material would come to around half a million Swiss francs, roughly the amount she would obtain from the sale of the Montcourt and Aurigeno houses, plus some withdrawals from her American savings account. By the time she completed Ripley Under Water, with her anti-hero returning to his manor without being pursued by the police, she was settled into her own recently constructed version of Belle Ombre. Aside from being retreats from the outside world the two residences had absolutely nothing in common. Ammann was a devotee of the Le Corbusier concretist-modernist school but with a passion for even more impersonal brutalism. His plan for Highsmith was a masterpiece of architectural inhumanity, something that might provoke debate as an ‘installation’ but which none of the debaters would choose to live in. It can best be described as characterless, and from the outside it reminds one more of a Second World War bunker than a domestic residence.

  Her Swiss publisher, Daniel Keel, drove to the house regularly from Zurich, Vivien De Bernardi was an occasional guest, Kate Kingsley Skattebol tried as often as she could to cross the Atlantic to stay with her old friend and the Hubers lived close by. Ellen Hill drove or took a train to Tegna every two weeks when the house was being finished. Soon after moving in Highsmith invited a number of her closest neighbours to a drinks party but after that she became politely reclusive, conversing with locals when she met them in shops or on the street but retreating to the fortress-style house whenever she could.