Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith by Andrew Wilson

Author:Andrew Wilson [Wilson, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Hewer Text UK Ltd http://www.hewertext.com
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published: 2008-12-07T05:00:00+00:00

Like the character of Sydney Bartleby in A Suspension of Mercy, Highsmith expressed a desire to write for television. ‘Would love to learn to write for TV,’ she told Peggy Lewis. ‘I now have a set, on the rental plan, which is what all the English do – and never buy one, as the models change too quickly,’18 a line she used, in a slightly different form, in the first chapter of A Suspension of Mercy.

One Sunday, in early May 1965, Highsmith was at home in Bridge Cottage, when she received a call from the BBC. Would she be able to give them a 250-word synopsis of a play by the next day? They had seen an old script of the story, which had originally started life as a synopsis for an eighty-page novella for American Cosmopolitan. The magazine turned it down, but Highsmith subsequently sold it to television in the USA and the BBC wanted to know whether it could be brought up to date. Mary Highsmith was staying with her daughter at the time, and so Highsmith locked herself in the study and in under two hours wrote an outline of the story she initially called ‘The Prowler’. ‘I got the assignment – L600 it was,’ she wrote to her stepfather later.19 The deadline for submitting the play was 25 June, and although she admitted that it was ‘quite full of old-fashionedness and corn’,20 it was accepted. It was broadcast on BBC1 on 22 September as ‘The Cellar’, as part of The Wednesday Thriller series. From reading the script, however, it’s obvious that dialogue was not Highsmith’s forte. In fact, the play is populated by characters who are nothing more than murder mystery stereotypes, including an hysterical wife, Hilda, a duplicitous husband, George, and Peggy, an over-zealous mistress.

Although Highsmith’s later experiments in screenwriting were equally unsuccessful, her aspirations did not go to waste, as her second Ripley novel, Ripley Under Ground, published in 1970, grew out of a play she had planned to write for television. She started work on the plotting of the screenplay, which she entitled ‘Derwatt Resurrected’, in July 1965, drawing inspiration from the death of her ex-lover, the painter Allela Cornell. ‘Ripley was not in it at all,’ she told Julian Jebb, who would later become a close friend, ‘but it had to do with a painter who had died. Actually something of the same thing happened in my own life, a great friend of mine died, age twenty-nine, a woman . . . I for one showed a portfolio of her work on 57th Street and they said, “It’s very good, but we’re really not interested in dead painters, there’s no use in having a show.” So that was the end of that. I never thought about it for fifteen years and then it occurred to me that with rather crooked fraud someone could continue painting in the same style.’21 The problem with writing a play, she told an interviewer from The Times,

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