Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires by Richard Bradford

Author:Richard Bradford
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448217915
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

9

‘So Much in Love’

When she took the flight to London in 1962 Highsmith was still revising a novel she had been working on for more than three years, The Two Faces of January (1964). Chester MacFarland, an alcoholic fraudster, is travelling with his young wife Colette in Greece, and wondering if his history of stock manipulation has been discovered by the US authorities. In Athens, a Greek policeman questions him in his hotel room and MacFarland accidentally kills his interrogator. Rydal Keener, a young American law graduate, slides into the plot and offers to help MacFarland and Colette by obtaining false passports for them and disposing of the policeman’s body. Colette and Keener, close in age and mutually attracted, infuriate MacFarland, who tries to kill his rival by dropping an ancient stone container on his head but misses and kills his wife instead. When interviewed by the police MacFarland accuses Keener of killing Colette and then hires a hitman to kill him, not realising that Keener has already paid the same man to dispose of MacFarland. MacFarland purchases another fake passport and heads for Paris, hoping eventually to return to America in disguise, but Keener reappears and blackmails him. MacFarland panics, takes the train for Lyon and then Marseille and, after his eventual arrest, is shot dead while trying to escape.

Highsmith’s editor, Joan Kahn, saw the first draft in 1961 and wrote to her new agent, Patricia Schartle, that while her client was still writing ‘fine’ books, this one ‘escapes us’. She continued, ‘we cannot like any of the characters, but more difficult, we cannot believe in them … it’s all so far in a dream now it makes no sense … we cannot publish it as it stands’ (Letter to Schartle, 21 February 1961). Highsmith rewrote it three times before Schartle could persuade Kahn to accept it, all during the period when she lived with Marijane, had an affair with Daisy and left America for Europe, but one should commend her agent’s skills as an advocate for this piece of fiction because, even when Highsmith had repaired its worst faults, it went into print more as a disturbing reflection of its author’s state of mind than as something even a fairly indulgent reader might appreciate.

Many of Highsmith’s characters continually mutate into versions of themselves that at first seem unlikely and implausible, but in The Two Faces of January disguise and obfuscation are afflictions rather than literary strategies. As a professional conman MacFarland can be expected to take on a variety of personae but rather than turning himself into someone else as a matter of expediency, he becomes addicted to the arbitrary swapping of one name and personal history for another, just for the sake of it. The names and backgrounds of Howard Cheever, Louis Ferguson, Philip Jeffries Wedekind, William Chamberlain, Richard Donlevy and Oliver Donaldson all appear on his faked documents but MacFarland – if this is indeed his original surname – takes a particular interest in making up a fictional past not simply as a disguise but as if it had actually happened.

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