The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  Enthralled with the idea of herself as mentor (she continued to cherish some unsettling ideas about the education of the young), Pat wanted to improve her friend Tabea Blumenschein’s English vocabulary by purchasing a “German-English, English-German dictionary from Foyles, Schoeffler-Weis”51—as she described the tome two weeks later in a letter to Chris Petit’s editor at Time Out, a letter which suggested that her new friend, the engaging Mr. Petit, was perhaps an imposter and almost certainly a thief—and she wanted Chris to take the dictionary to Berlin and deliver it to Tabea. It was “quite clear” to Chris that Pat was “too mean to pay the postage.”

  It was a very large dictionary.

  “I…had to not take half my luggage in order to take this dictionary. It was an extremely heavy dictionary. Extremely heavy…And it was pretty clear at the end of the interview that she’d very nicely signed my book but this was the price I was going to have to pay.”52

  So Chris Petit “lugged” the dictionary to Berlin and saw the producer he was supposed to see. And during the meeting, the subject of the dictionary came up somehow, and—that little Highsmithian coincidence again—the producer, who had worked with Wim Wenders on his Highsmith film, The American Friend, said: “Oh I’m seeing Tabea next week and you can leave the dictionary with me.” And that’s what Chris Petit did, putting an end to the matter. Or so he thought. Then he “went back to London and forgot all about it.”

  Until, that is, a call came from his editor at Time Out. The editor, says Chris Petit, got directly to the point.

  “He’d had this strange letter from Highsmith, accusing me of being an impersonator, an imposter…Because I told her that I’d promised to deliver the dictionary for her and it had never turned up [at Tabea’s]…She was, she said, confused as to whether I’d had anything to do with Time Out or whether I’d made that up…. God knows what lengths she was going to go to.”

  But as a close and admiring reader of Highsmith for many years, Chris Petit thought he did know what lengths Pat was going to go with her bland, insinuating little letter to his editor about “Christopher Pettit [sic], who interviewed me (with tape) Tuesday April 4…and seemed happy to do me this favour. The problem is, the dictionary has not arrived. Forgive me for being puzzled…. My London friends were unable to find him in the book.”53

  Still, Petit has been puzzling “for years” about that parenthetical phrase “(with tape).” “I always thought that was the most damning aside,” he says, “the implication being that the interview was probably bogus but I had been prepared to trick myself up with a tape recorder to fool her into believing I was a journalist.”54

  Writing an accusatory letter to an editor after an interview is an unusual thing to do, even for a writer like Pat whose short stories and novels drip with poison pens.* (But she did it again when David Streitfeld interviewed her for The Washington Post. See: “The Cake That Was Shaped Like a Coffin: Part 1.”)55 Petit thinks there was a “certain glee, perhaps even malice, at the thought of causing trouble. I think it’s pretty clear she thought I had run off with, dumped, or lost the dictionary and hadn’t owned up. I remember the editor at the time thinking the letter odd.

  “I don’t suppose he’d had another like it.

  “And the source of [her] confusion,” says Petit, “can actually be found in Strangers on a Train.”56

  When Pat signed Chris Petit’s first edition of Strangers on a Train at their little tête-à-tête in Islington, she made what was for her an unlikely error. Despite his giving her the correct spelling, and despite her own careful orthography, she misspelled Petit’s name, adding an extra t to make it “Pettit.” (Perhaps it was a likely error after all: doubling was one of Pat’s deeper instincts.) That was how she wrote his name in her notebook; that was how she spelled it in the agitated letters she sent to her London friends and in the letter she sent to the editor of Time Out about his employee, the newly criminalized Mr. Petit. Or rather, Mr. Petit’s newly criminalized double, “Mr. Pettit.”

  Pat’s methods of inquiry, under her normal operating modes (suspicion and doubt), were circumlocuitous at best. If she could help it, she never approached anything directly. Chris Petit wondered why she didn’t simply call Time Out magazine. “It was pretty easy to establish that I worked there.” Instead, “she had all her English friends scouring the phone book under the wrong spelling when they could have looked me up on the Time Out masthead. If she hadn’t spelt my name wrong she could have saved herself a lot of trouble!”

  Six days after this little rent in the fabric of their relations occurred, the matter had been set to rights and Pat was convinced that Christopher Petit wasn’t an imposter. Everything was calm again in Highsmith Country. “I think she kind of lost interest when she discovered there was no dark mystery to the fate of the dictionary,” says Chris Petit.57

  “Anyway all is cleared up now,” Pat writes cheerily to Petit,58 thanking him for his call to her in France which explained the source of her confusion: her own bad spelling and Tabea’s failure to keep her appointment with the producer who was holding the dictionary for her. And she invites Chris Petit to give her a ring when she’s next in London. (He did so and had an unnerving beer with Pat and Tabea; Pat had forgotten he was coming, and she and Tabea were “resting” together in bed in television director Julian Jebb’s borrowed flat.) And then, palpably playing with fire, Pat and Chris start exchanging letters about the possibility of his optioning a certain novel of hers for film; a novel whose title could easily be the rubric for their recent, racking relations: The Tremor of Forgery.

  In her subsequent letters to Petit, Pat, as she usually was with young professionals, was chatty, forthcoming, supportive, and determined to get her money’s worth out of the exchange. Remarking that Tabea had counted up his numerous film reviews, Pat cannily promoted one of her young protégées to another one:

  I wonder if your strenuous film-viewing activities will get you to the Edinburgh Festival? I hope so, as Madame X is being shown there, and Tabea Blumenschein and her partner Ulrike Ottinger are invited…I hope Time-Out can give it a mention, at least.59

  And so the surface ripples closed gently over the deep waters of Pat’s suspicions. But for six anxious days, Patricia Highsmith, awash in her overwhelming feelings for a much younger woman, nervous because she’d admitted her authorship of The Price of Salt, gamely attempting to keep her life in line by a small but significant act of forgery in her cahier, and occupied with what she automatically assumed were the criminal pursuits of her new friend, the young journalist Chris Petit, snapped right back to her default emotional position; the position which had long since determined her vision of how she confronted the world:

  As an island of honesty in a sea of swindlers.

  As a woman who always expected to be cheated.

  As a writer who believed that everyone had something to hide.

  Pat gave Therese in The Price of Salt and Howard Ingham in The Tremor of Forgery the suspicion on which this operating principle was founded: “All adults have secrets.” And all her murderers and escape artists live out its most extreme version. At moments of intolerable stress, they evacuate their identities, split off into Alter Egos, and re-create their personalities accordingly.

  Here is David Kelsey, the romantic psychopath with the double identity in This Sweet Sickness, Pat’s 1962 novel about the other love that dare not speak its name, summing himself up: “Call me Bill,” David said.60

  And Tom Ripley, in The Boy Who Followed Ripley, costumed and made up as a woman and about to rescue a boy for whom he has an obvious attraction: “Don’t call me Tom.”61

  And the affectless Ray Garrett, in Those Who Walk Away, hiding from himself and plagiarizing Sartre: “I’m not Ray Garrett tonight. I haven’t been for days…. Perhaps identity, like hell, was merely other people.”62

  In Highsmith Country, everyone—including the author—is a forger.

  • 4 •

  A Simple Act of Forgery
/>
  Part 2

  Sixteen years before her spring break in the bars at the Berlin Film Festival with Tabea Blumenschein, Pat made another kind of pilgrimage to another European country—and it produced another act of forgery. She was still the official resident of a house on Sugan Road in New Hope, Pennsylvania (see “Les Girls: Part 8”), still travelling restlessly between countries, and still a month or so away from having her lifeline permanently crossed by a meeting with Caroline Besterman in London. Now she was in Paris to pay homage to the writer—himself a connoisseur of forgery and counterfeit—whose books she’d been reading since she was seventeen years old.

  On 12 July 1962 Pat emerged from a lengthy ride on the Paris metro and entered a large gate set in a stone wall so long she couldn’t see the end of it. She kept her eyes on her size 9½ shoes as they walked her up and over the hilly streets, “cobbled with huge, irregular stones,” of France’s largest literary gathering ground: the Père Lachaise Cemetery in “the 20th Arrondissement of eastern Paris.”

  “These stones,” she imagined with the kind of satisfaction that only thoughts of death could bring her, “must make a grim, loud noise when metal wheels of carts, carrying bodies, go over them!”1

  It wasn’t only Pat Highsmith who had to watch her feet on the cobblestones of Père Lachaise. Every writer who makes the pilgrimage there—and every writer does; Père Lachaise is the Dead Letter Office of Literary Aspirations—ends up with her eyes on the ground and “not,” as Pat carefully noted in her cahier, “on the names on the vaults and tombs.” Part of the secret pleasure in wandering the streets of this city of the dead is the perpendicularity of the visitor’s position in relation to that of the defunct writers she is visiting; and no one strolling the cemetery wants to stumble on a stone and fall upon a grave. Pat, who would kill quite a few of her characters with nasty fictional falls, understood very well how the smallest irregularity in a rock could make the difference between life and death.

  Paris is hot and bright this July day, perfect weather for cemetery walking. Fleecy clouds are chasing each other across an enormous expanse of Cézanne-blue sky, but Pat, who has a goal in mind, is not much interested in the atmosphere. She is carrying her bolsa, one of those large woven bags she brought back from her five months in Mexico in the early 1940s and never threw away. In it, she packs a three-by-five-inch spiral “travelling” notebook, along with something to drink and something to smoke. These are the props of her creative life and she is never without them: a notebook, a fountain pen, a lit cigarette, a bottle—and her tenebrous imagination.

  Because the only thing Pat likes more than a good list is a good map, she is very much at home here. The moment she walked through the gate, she was handed—without charge; this was 1962—a map of the cemetery. And she needs it: Père Lachaise is the largest burial ground in Paris. It has its own “real roads,” its own prominently posted dead celebrity lists, and the map Pat is looking at shows the neat segments into which the cemetery’s 105-acre plot is partitioned. But as she walks past the graves of Bizet, Balzac, and Alfred de Musset (and bypasses entirely the graves of Chopin, Sarah Bernhardt, and Isadora Duncan), “the only name which interested” her on the map was “Oscar Wilde’s.” She finally “reached [his grave] after nearly a mile of walking among time-darkened rectangular vaults.”

  “I came upon Oscar’s [monument]—a large nearly square rectangle of granite with a large Egyptian figure in headdress, flying horizontally. Only his name on the front in large letters. On the back is engraved his birth and death dates, his achievements at school, data of the Newdigate Poetry prize at the age of 24, and then those great and most fitting lines.”

  To an outsider artist—an outsider everything—like Pat Highsmith, the lines inscribed on Oscar’s marble headstone (from his poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”) seem to be written for her alone. “And alien tears will fill for him pity’s long-broken urn…. his mourners will be outcast men.”

  “My eyes fill with tears,” she writes, and then corrects herself in her notebook: “(filled).” She doesn’t want her future readers to think she is composing these words as she weeps at Oscar’s grave. Nor she does she want them to feel she is conjugating the tense of her experience to harmonize the chronology of her notebook—something she has done many times before and will do many times again. This moment is too important, too authentic, to counterfeit. (But, still, she never takes her eyes off her audience.)

  “Such tears,” she writes, meaning her own, “are brief and deep, like a stab wound,” and her mind flashes to her own fear of obscurity as she “remember[s] well the various accounts of [Oscar’s] lonely, pauper’s funeral to which nearly nobody came.” Pat needn’t have worried. Her memorial service in Switzerland will have a full house and a German television crew to record it.

  And then—perhaps it’s an early appearance by the little fiend from Satan’s Inner Circle who visited her in the preceding chapter—something rather odd happens; something which cuts another key to the complicated lock guarding the Highsmith imagination. The hypervigilant Pat misses a detail, mistakes a date, fastens on a wrong impression, and then creates a counterfeit description from her string of errors. It’s the kind of mistake she will make more and more as her imagination, never really at home in Europe, is distanced by decades from the only place and time she ever knew well: New York City in the 1940s and 1950s. This is the modus operandi she will apply to Christopher Petit in May of 1978 when she misspells the young journalist’s last name and then—improvising madly—turns him into a felon and a forger.

  Although her tears for Oscar’s fate are deeply felt, Pat has always cast a cold eye on life and death. And so, as she weeps, she can’t stop herself from criticizing Oscar’s funerary architecture. This is a most inappropriate monument, she thinks, for the tomb of a writer whose meditations on forgery and counterfeit, seductive portrayal of criminals, and long, unlovely martyrdom for homosexuality have moved her since she was a teenager. But Pat’s critique of Oscar’s grave rests squarely on the error she has just made; the result of a faulty application of the talent she is widely supposed to have mastered: close observation of detail.

  Pat’s mistake is to imagine that the sculpture surmounting Oscar’s grave, Jacob Epstein’s famous funerary monument of a winged Egyptian erected in the belle epoque, in 1909, is an art deco construction of the “mid-Twenties.” What’s more, she judges “the Egyptian motif not at all appropriate” for Oscar Wilde. Thus, as well as getting the sculpture’s style and epoch all wrong, she fails to understand the suitability of a pharaonic figure for the tomb of a writer whose delusions of grandeur were as outsized as those of Ozymandias; a writer who composed his own Egyptian-influenced poem called “The Sphinx” and who gave the sobriquet “Sphinx” to one of his dearest friends, Ada Leverson, grandmother of Francis Wyndham, the author and critic who will shortly give Pat’s work its first and most intelligent written introduction in England.

  And—was it her famous reluctance to see or speak in public anything that had to do with sex?—Pat also managed to miss the winged Egyptian’s most salient feature: the mutilation of its marble genitalia. Jacob Epstein, the sculptor, had been criticized before for his “undue attention” to the sexual characteristics of his statues, and the prominent genitalia of this one had been hacked away by industrious lycée students in the half century since the monument was put in place. When Janet Flanner made her own pilgrimage to Père Lachaise in the early 1920s to place a single black iris on Oscar’s tomb, Epstein’s statue had already been emasculated.2 Even today, almost five decades after Pat’s visit, the winged Egyptian is still without its principal part.

  And so Pat Highsmith—inspired observer of minute detail, serious fan of all things Wildean, compulsive collector of dates and times in her cahiers—mistook every single thing she saw at the tomb of Oscar Wilde: the style, the substance, the suitability, the context, even the epoch.

  But at the graveside, the wheel of Pat’s imaginatio
n was already spinning her errors of understanding into fictional gold. Because she didn’t like what she had just misidentified as the “Art Deco Egyptian motif” of Oscar’s art nouveau Egyptian monument, she began to search her mind for a suitable replacement, for the kind of tomb she might have created for the King of Counterfeit.

  And inspiration came to her.

  Oscar’s funerary monument, Pat decided, “should have been a Greek boy.”

  • 5 •

  La Mamma

  Part 1

  I am married to my mother.

  I shall never wed another.

  —Patricia Highsmith, 1940

  Momma Mia, what is mine on earth?

  Tell me, of all things, that I pass by.

  What must I wrest, and what is mine by birth,

  And of all mothers here, whose child am I?

  —Patricia Highsmith, 1941

  Have a great desire to write sometime of a young girl putting her mother (guardian, aunt) to bed, agreeing to all her proposals…nicely pouring her cup of warm milk, promising never to speak to her young man again, and then, with a smile, the girl plunges the scissors into her mother’s bosom, and turns them.

  —Patricia Highsmith, 1942

  Pat’s owl’s eye for detail—however she used it—was matched only by her proofreader’s instinct for orthography and punctuation. There are just a handful of uncorrected errors in her manuscript files, which, says Anna von Planta, her editor at Diogenes Verlag, in a phrase Pat would have loved, are “so massive that when spread out they are 150 feet in length.”1 Pat liked to look at language in its simplest form before she fell asleep, so every night she read her dictionary for half an hour. (“As a novelist, I can say…the dictionary is the most entertaining book I have ever read.”)2 And she kept endless lists of words and phrases in four or five languages and queried her publishers relentlessly about misprints and wrong facts.3 “It is hard to believe so many errors could occur in such few lines,” she reproved the staff at Who’s Who.4 “This minuscule erratum will probably catch the eye of only one out of every three hundred and sixty-five Ellery Queen Magazine readers,” she wrote to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.5