No Moral Compass

During the first year of lockdown I decided to read the entire canon of Patricia Highsmith. I’d read The Talented Mr Ripley, but I wanted to see what the less famous novels were like. I would not, however, recommend this blanket immersion; at least not if you value a good night’s sleep. Highsmith’s books have a way of creeping up on you, especially when read sequentially, and gradually demolishing your faith in human nature.

There is no moral compass in a Highsmith novel; there isn’t even a moral windsock. The reader is tossed into the Highsmith universe, where neither good nor evil necessarily triumph, where there is rarely any redemption for anyone, and the only lesson to be learned from life is that nothing is true except ‘the fatigue of life and the eternal disappointment’. This line comes from the mind of David Kelsey, the protagonist of This Sweet Sickness (1960), Patricia Highsmith’s sixth novel, and he reaches this bleak conclusion while standing on a win­dow ledge, having got himself into a right old mess. Having read all twenty-two of Highsmith’s novels, this was the one I immediately wanted to reread. Why? Perhaps it struck a chord. The premise is something everyone has experienced: the pain of chasing a former lover who has moved on. Of course, this being a Highsmith story, the doomed lover cannot simply sit around crying into his whisky and boring his friends. Oh no. David Kelsey takes the chasing of an ex-lover to scary levels of self-deception and what would today be categorized as stalking. Annabelle is his ex-girlfriend, now happily married to Gerald Delaney. To David’s mind, however, she has sold herself short and deserves a better man, in other words David. How can he win her back and give her the life she deserves? He refers to this quest as ‘The Situation’ and it dominates his entire waking life (and also his dreams, which are not for the faint-hearted). David lives a double life. He spends the week in a boarding-house in Froudsberg, a fictional small town in New York State. Every Friday, he tells the residents that he’s off to spend the weekend with his sick mother in a nursing home. But he actually goes to a remote country house he’s bought under the name of William Neumeister. As soon as David arrives at his country house, he mixes two dry martinis, one for him and one for Annabelle – who is happily drink­ing Frascati with her husband 100 miles away. And so begins a wretched, lonely weekend, brightened only by the possibility that, when he gets back to Froudsberg on Monday, there might be a letter from Annabelle – which there usually isn’t. Highsmith uses the letters between the two characters to portray their respective states of mind. Annabelle’s are breezy, chatty and non-committal (and there are very few of them), while his are urgent, desperate and pleading (and there are lots of them). Hers end with things like ‘This letter is so long already and I’ve got tons of sandwiches to make for a picnic tomorrow!’ David’s end with things like ‘If you go, believe me that you are in my thoughts day and night and always. I will love you as long as I live.’ The appeal of this book, as with most Highsmith novels, is that the reader is given the opportunity to sympathize with the central character, though only at first. We’ve all, like David, projected our emotional needs on to someone who is not equipped to fulfil them for whatever reason. Some of us have also played the waiting game, hopelessly believing that the object of our desire’s current relation­ship will fizzle out and the great reunion will take place. We may even innocently dream of the day when true love will triumph. What most of us don’t do, however, is drive to the ex-lover’s house at midnight and demand to see them, pushing aside their spouse and smashing up the furniture. David’s increasingly desperate measures lead him into acts that soon become criminal. His alter ego William Neumeister is his better self, and the coun­try house, lovingly fitted out with the finest furnishings, becomes the symbol of all that he is capable of. ‘He whistled as he crossed the living room. There was something like a pleasant, huge cloud in his brain, a weightless blue-gray cloud, the colour of Annabelle’s eyes. No troubles, no worries could get in. It was William Neumeister’s cloud.’ As long as David, inhabiting the imaginary persona of Neumeister, floats about in his Taj Mahal of adoration, occasionally kissing pho­tos of Annabelle placed in every room, he is safe from reality. But as soon as anyone tries to puncture the illusion, all hell breaks loose. David has a couple of friends who seem to get on his nerves even at the best of times, and the minute either of them tries to talk some sense into him, he rejects their advice:

‘I said you don’t want a girl you can have, you want a girl who doesn’t want you. It’s a neurotic symptom,’ Wes said cheerfully, rocking on his heels with his hands in his pockets. ‘I’m thinking of your welfare. I’m trying to give you some good advice. I don’t care who she is.’ David’s reply shows that he is already a long way from wise counsel: ‘We’re going to be married in a very few months, maybe less than that, and anybody who says anything different just doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’

Annabelle certainly thinks differently. She’s just had a baby with Gerald, but even this news doesn’t dampen David’s resolve. He dis­misses the child’s existence, breezily declaring that he and Annabelle can have another one. In fact David’s feelings towards her are so delusional that he shares his plans with her as if she too is desperate for them to be together. Annabelle’s patience begins to wear thin and we get the impression she is only indulging David to keep him from doing anything rash (not knowing that he already has). David reaches boiling point about a third of the way into the novel, when he tries to secure Annabelle for himself and in doing so presses William Neumeister into service. The crime he commits leads to an investigation by the police, which David handles by making phone calls to them as Neumeister, then appearing as David in face-to-face interviews. And so his double life becomes a juggling game, as he switches from one identity to the other, though unlike Jekyll and Hyde neither David nor Neumeister is the good guy. Soon he is hopping between various locations in New York State, trying to maintain all the spinning plates he has set in motion under both identities. His mental collapse comes to a head during a startling scene at a New York restaurant where, with only $8 in his pocket, he orders an expensive meal for two, even though he is alone. To bewildered looks from the waiters, he chats to an imaginary Annabelle in the empty chair next to him:

‘You’re looking especially pretty tonight. Had you really rather go to a movie than go dancing somewhere?’ She demurred. She would decide after dinner. The full red skirt of her dress, crimson as fresh blood, lay on the bench seat between them and touched the dark blue material of David’s trousers.

This Sweet Sickness is one of Highsmith’s most accomplished works. Her own tumultuous relationships with unsuitable or unavailable women played a large part in its writing. ‘Give me fantasies any day!’ she once wrote in a diary. ‘Fantasies of making love to an attractive friend who is unavailable . . .’ During the writing of This Sweet Sickness she was fantasizing about an affair with Mary Ronin and by the time she had completed half the novel, the affair had become a reality. Both women were in relationships with other women at the time. Many secret meetings and passionate letters later, the affair came to an abrupt end, leaving Highsmith to travel alone to Europe, bitter and disappointed. Many of her friends commented that, had she not found an outlet in writing, Highsmith would have ended up either in prison or in a mental institution. She wrote the sort of letters that David writes to Annabelle, often to married women. And as for the split personality, Highsmith often signed autographs in the name of Tom Ripley, the favourite of her fictional creations. She was a fan of Dostoevsky, and there are echoes of Crime and Punishment in This Sweet Sickness, as well as Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square. But in both those works, one has the sense that the writer is using fiction to explore the deranged descent of a madman, whereas in Highsmith’s case, it is more likely that she was exploring her own demons.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 73 © Gustav Temple 2022