THERE WERE TWO DEAD MOLES in the wood, beached a few yards from one another, blood still wet on their noses. I’m on the verge of starting a new book, flinging the windows open, encouraging a breeze. Starting is like dowsing, like trying to find an unmarked path. I keep going away, keen to steer clear of my house. Marazion, Budleigh, Aldeburgh: seaside towns, marooned in time. In Lyme Regis I unzipped the top pocket of my suitcase and found a forgotten Penguin, slightly bent. Ripley Under Ground by Patricia Highsmith, the second in a loose quintet written between 1955 and 1991.
The only one I’d read before was The Talented Mr Ripley, which charts the transformation of Tom Ripley from awkward arriviste to murderer, imposter, bon viveur, dispatching the playboy Dickie Greenleaf and stepping gleefully into his well-made shoes. What’s so great about authenticity anyway, when you can bag the life you deserve? Why not wriggle into a richer self – il meglio, il meglio! – even if it means dispatching the original with a blow to the head and shunting his bleeding corpse into the sea?
In Ripley Under Ground, Highsmith refines her unsettling take on fakes and fraudulence, relocating operations to the art world. Tom – smoother now, gleaming with wealth – has been busily masterminding the production and sale of forged paintings by an artist, Philip Derwatt, whose suicide he’s concealed. Composed in fleshy, muddy reds and browns, Derwatts are characterised by multiple outlines (an effect I imagine as something like early Auerbachs, though Highsmith was apparently inspired by the Vermeer forger Han van Meegeren). Like Tom, the paintings are lifelike at a distance, coming disconcertingly to pieces at close range. His favourite is, of course, one of the many forgeries. ‘It was the restless (even in a chair), doubting, troubled mood of it which pleased Tom; that and the fact that it was a phoney. It had a place of honour in his house.’
I love these books, which play on the communal terror of being exposed while still taking pleasure in the artistry of the fraud. Tom isn’t just concealing murders; he’s hiding the ugly, unsophisticated boy he once was; the frightened face he used to wince at in the mirror. The things he buries are forever rising to the surface, misdeeds returning like waterlogged corpses. No wonder you root for him. Who wouldn’t like to outrun their ugliest self, the gauche, the ignorant, the tacky? Who hasn’t copied or adopted, who isn’t frankly two-faced? ‘I have long been lucky enough to feel real,’ Maggie Nelson says in The Argonauts, but in Highsmith’s world realness is rarely a steady state.
Tom wants to pass as rich, but he also wants to punish them with his forgeries, to mock their discernment, to sabotage their sophistication. It’s terrifying, the capacity of things to betray us. When I first moved to a city where the fear of vulgarity was acute, I took to carrying around a blatantly fake Prada bag. ‘I want to be at least as alive as the vulgar,’ Frank O’Hara says in ‘My Heart’, though sometimes it’s a case of being less dead than the tasteful.
Highsmith bestowed on Tom her own loves and frustrations: dahlias, harpsichords, the IRS. A lesbian and an alcoholic, she understood how it felt to have to construct false selves. Once you strip away the veneer of plot, the best book of the Ripliad, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, is plainly the story of a closeted gay man on a spree in Cold War Berlin, the brutally divided city. In drag at Der Hump, Tom abruptly queers the issue of the fake. His habit of switching selves comes into focus as a high-stakes game of passing. Constantly serving realness of one kind or another, a fabricator and fabulist, he pulls the rug out on reality. The dodgy art, the artful dodge, making things up from out of the air.