Phillip Lloyd Powell was Daisy’s best friend in New Hope.
“Daisy was so much fun when she was young, big as a minute, four foot something; such a cute little thing, very witty…and she’d sing at the Canal House, imitating Ella Logan and Marlene Dietrich. Daisy had a thing called nystigma, it was an eye-movement problem, and she couldn’t drive, she couldn’t type…. I think Pat would be attracted to people who had something abnormal about them…. Daisy [was a] go-between between Pat and her mother, a gofer…but bitching all the way.”2
Daisy joined the long line of small, ferocious women (the approximate size and temperament of Willie Mae Stewart Coates) who crowd the lists of Pat’s friends and lovers. Peggy Lewis, who thought Pat had a “brilliant future” in front of her, had a hard time imagining what Pat saw in Daisy. But Peggy’s eldest daughter remembered Daisy’s protective nature: how she’d fished her out of a canal once when she’d fallen in, and escorted her from her school bus past a threatening snake.3 Daisy’s custodial qualities alone would have recommended her to Pat.
Three months into her affair with Daisy, Pat went with Peggy Lewis to meet one of Bucks County’s homosexual gentry, the novelist Glenway Wescott, whose elegant and disturbing novella, The Pilgrim Hawk (1940), is one of the jewels of American expatriate fiction. Peggy and Pat went to Wescott’s younger brother’s house first by mistake, and Pat was impressed by Lloyd Wescott’s wife, the philanthropist and publisher Barbara Harrison.
Taking advantage of their error, Peggy and Pat looked at the “marvellous paintings collected by…Barbara to whom K[atherine Anne] Porter dedicated A Ship of Fools.” And then the two women went to Glenway Wescott’s house, on the grounds of the same estate, and Pat talked to Wescott for “perhaps 45 minutes.” What they discussed was the journals of Virginia Woolf.4 Three years later, Pat wrote a letter to Wescott from her cottage in Suffolk. But by then, Pat was writing to everyone.
Like any artist in conflict with her blood relatives, Pat was always happy to be an ami de maison, able, to the end of her life, to enjoy other families more than her own. The list of her adopted families and the ways she joined herself to them is as various as are their opinions of her. In New Hope, it was the Lewises and the Ferreses who were her sounding boards. In Montmachoux, she depended upon Agnes and Georges Barylski, the Polish gleaners who brought her eggs and did her favors. In Moncourt she had her next-door neighbors Desmond and Mary Ryan, and in Paris, she got on so well with Marion Aboudaram’s mother, Mme Aboudaram, that Marion used to wonder if perhaps Pat didn’t prefer her mother to her.5 In Aurigeno, Pat had her neighbor Ingeborg Moelich to shop for her, and she eagerly followed the letters coming from her friend Charles Latimer about his intricate family problems, waiting breathlessly for “the big showdown with his greedy sister.”6
In 1968, living miserably alongside Elizabeth Lyne in their house of double trouble in Samois-sur-Seine, Pat immersed herself in the life drama of a relative who had spent some years in an orphanage as a child (adoption, false or real, was a serious theme in the Coates family). The relative told Pat how she had to travel to New York to retrieve her runaway daughter from the protective care “of a Negro waiter named Ron” on the Lower East Side. (“Maybe you even know him!” Pat wrote a little nuttily to Lil Picard in New York.)7
Pat was delighted by her relative’s nine-page letter (“not a line of which is boring”), she was fascinated to see how the “plot” of this actual family drama would work out, and she was anxious to commend the woman’s young daughter, who was being heckled by her stepfather, into Lil Picard’s care. “If you can find someone old enough to be your grandmother also on your side—that’s something!”8 It was the old Coates/Highsmith family soap opera all over again (Pat, meanwhile, was following English radio’s longest-running soap opera, The Archers, with strict attention),9 and she was doing her best to bring this version of it to the old conclusion.10
None of her pleasure in her acquaintance with cousin Ruby, however, stopped Pat from submitting Ruby’s name along with the names of eight of her other cousins to her French lawyer in 1976 to ensure that if any of them dared to contest her latest will, they would already be on a list “eliminating” them from inheriting anything at all.11
Pat’s friend and neighbor in France in the 1970s, Frédérique Chambrelent, had worked in haute couture for Molyneux (where she had watched Natalie Barney, Romaine Brooks, and Janet Flanner come in for fittings), and was, when she met Pat, a publicity representative, a journalist, and a friend of the great French actresses Arletty and Edwige Feuillère. Pat used to enjoy coming to tea with Chambrelent’s mother at her country house in Vaudoué, twenty kilometers from Pat’s house in Moncourt. Pat came “every weekend for two or three years” and would query Frédérique Chambrelent closely about her niece, Bénédicte, who was attending Columbia University, Pat’s alma mater. “She was very interested in Bénédicte’s news”—and also very kind to Bénédicte. Pat helped Chambrelent in her garden, and, with a friend, Frédérique Chambrelent painted Pat’s workroom in Moncourt for her and visited Pat there regularly. Chambrelent remembers that there was something very wrong with Pat’s chocolate point Siamese cat: “The cat chased its tail all the time. It went in circles.”12
Although Pat drank enough to horrify both Frédérique Chambrelent and Serge Matta (brother of the painter Roberto Matta and a friend of Pat’s translator neighbor, Janine Hérisson), she was always perfectly behaved with Chambrelent’s mother, imbibing only tea with Mme Chambrelent and comporting herself properly. But when there wasn’t a tea party, Pat would stay the whole day in Vaudoué, drinking whiskey (Frédérique Chambrelent says that Pat kept a bottle in her purse “like a sailor”: Pat reminded everyone of a sailor), and then she would drive herself back home drunk, although she always “held on to her dignity. Pat had her rules, her rigidities, she could be very bourgeoise,” as well as having “a really charming side.” But she was “like a prehistoric animal.” And Chambrelent refused to listen to Pat’s disquisitions on “the blacks and the Jews.” “Enough is enough,” she would say to Pat.13
Frédérique Chambrelent wanted to introduce Pat to her friend the renowned French film and theater actress Edwige Feuillère. “I thought Edwige could make a scenario from one of Pat’s works, the short story of the two sisters who lived together [“Quiet Night”], and Patricia said: ‘Elle est trop snob pour moi.’ She refused to meet her because she was too shy…. Pat was very timid, very shy, it was pathological.” But in every other way—except in speaking about her own family or her lovers (Chambrelent met Pat’s young lover Monique Buffet, but Pat introduced Monique as one of her “agents”)—Pat became an ami de maison: with regular visits, frequent notes, and interested enquiries about Chambrelent’s family.14
“I found her very intelligent,” says Frédérique Chambrelent. “But how strange she was. How strange she was.”15
Desmond Ryan,16 the Anglo-Irish journalist who was Pat’s neighbor in Moncourt throughout the 1970s, brought the translators Henri Robillot (translator of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow) and Janine Hérisson, who would translate Pat’s novels A Dog’s Ransom and Ripley’s Game for Calmann-Lévy, to meet Pat in the house in Montmachoux, where her Portuguese neighbors gave her “the occasion to make many racist remarks.” Robillot and Hérisson lived nearby in the Forest of Fontainebleau and knew, through their translations, something about the United States. Pat envied their house, a bohemian dwelling of considerable charm, which she compared unfavorably to her own faux-bourgeois style.
Pat was charmed by Janine Hérisson (Henri Robillot offered the opinion that Pat was perhaps a little too charmed), and sent her some very amiable letters, but Mlle Hérisson resisted the kind of “adoption” Pat sought. She found Pat’s “racist remarks” uncomfortable to be around.
“When I first met Patricia and I asked her why she left the United States she said it was because of the Negro Problem. And I understood her to mean that it was because of the way Negroes were treated
in the United States. But that’s not what she meant at all. She meant it was because of the way Negroes were demanding their rights.”17
One afternoon, Pat, the noise of her Portuguese neighbors nagging at her nerves, drove over from Montmachoux to visit Hérisson and Robillot. They got to talking about the American Civil War—one of Pat’s “subjects”—and M. Robillot told Pat that he had a Spencer automatic rifle from 1865, the kind that helped secure the North’s victory at Gettysburg. Pat wanted to see and hold the gun. She took it in her hands, raised it, assumed the posture of a shooter, and, pretending to pull the trigger and reload between hits, began to shout: “Fire one Portuguese! Fire two Portuguese!”
At the “third ‘Portuguese,’” says M. Robillot, “we stopped her, astonished at her homicidal furor.”18
All of Pat’s house moves and most of her travels—to New Hope, to Suffolk, to Samois-sur-Seine, to Moncourt, to Aurigeno, and finally to Tegna, as well as her visits to Positano, to Marseille, to Tunis, and to Tangier—were assisted by helpful people she’d known for some time. Mary Highsmith’s friend, the cartoonist Jeannot (Jean David), housed Pat in Marseille; Caroline Besterman helped her in Aldeburgh and Earl Soham; Elizabeth Lyne found her houses in Bois Fontaine and Samois-sur-Seine and accompanied her to Tunis; Pat’s lover at the time “negotiated the Montmachoux house”19 Desmond and Mary Ryan were responsible for directing her to the house next door to them in Moncourt; and Ellen Blumenthal Hill persuaded Pat to move to Switzerland, picked out the house in Aurigeno for her, and supervised its renovation. And it was Peter Huber who alerted Pat to the property adjoining his wife’s family house in Tegna on which Pat constructed her final home. Pat’s social “isolation” had distinctly social limits; despite her protestations, she always had a kind of “family” nearby.
And so it was Peggy Lewis’s bohemian mother-in-law, Edna Lewis, with whom Pat had attended some Ethical Culture meetings in New York, whose art school in Positano was a base for Pat’s passages through Positano. Pat had first gone to Positano during her twenty-day idyll with Kathryn Hamill Cohen in September of 1949, and she returned there with Ellen Hill in 1952 and 1962. But whenever she was alone in Positano, she knew that Edna Lewis’s art school was a ready-made social frame. And in that lovely hill village, says Edna’s granddaughter, “Any attractive man—never mind his sexual proclivities—would be let into [Edna’s] art school for free. She loved attractive men.”20 Much of the company Edna Lewis had around her was male and homosexual—just the kind of company Pat liked.
Larry Kramer, the playwright, novelist, and AIDS activist, remembers meeting Pat in Positano in 1963, just after she’d left New Hope, and the United States for good. Pat, in love “as never before” with Caroline Besterman, was on her roundabout way to join Caroline in England, and Kramer was a young man working for Columbia Pictures in London and staying, by chance, at the good hotel in Positano from whose balcony early one morning in 1952 Pat had first conjured up the idea of Tom Ripley.
“Well, I didn’t know much about anything then,” says Larry Kramer.
I was sent to Columbia [Pictures] UK from Columbia America to be a story editor, to find stories for the movies we were making. The UK was the biggest company going. Hollywood was dead, Roma had been the fifties, this was the sixties and it belonged to England. I don’t know why I went to a travel agent but for some reason he said go to Positano. It’s on the Amalfi Coast; you fly to Rome or Naples and then you take a very winding drive along the Amalfi Coast. It’s all built on the side of a hill, and it’s beautiful. It had a very lively bunch of people too….
There was one great hotel: it was called the Miramare, and I stayed there. It was bliss. You look out over the bay all the time. You sit on the toilet and look out over the bay. You take a bath and look out over the bay. Beautiful.
There was a woman there called Edna Lewis…. She was an American who ran an art school there. She must have had a little money and she gave parties and she heard about everyone in town who was vaguely interesting and I guess somehow I met her and, you know, I was in the movie business so she invited me to a party. I guess that’s how I met Pat…. Pat was lively and we had nice conversations. I was in awe of her because I knew who she was….
I knew she was obviously a lesbian, but we didn’t talk about that. We didn’t talk about my being gay. Everybody was nervous about being gay then. I suspect I liked her because I respected her writing…. I was under thirty and sorta shy still, and not connected to any bigger time that she belonged to.21
In early 1971, when Pat was living in her house on the Loing Canal (the Impressionist painter Alfred Sisley’s favorite subject) in Moncourt, Larry Kramer, back in America and “not liking it much” (although he told Pat that the United States was “exciting creatively” and that she “might find a lot to write about” there), wrote an admiring letter to Pat:
“I finally obtained a copy of your book on Plotting & Writing Suspense Fiction etc. and wanted to write and tell you how excellent I thought it was. It may be one of the very best books I’ve ever read on writing—how about that? It’s just filled with tremendous insights backed up with good common sense…. Congratulations—and I shall tout it.”22
Pat, Larry Kramer says, initiated their correspondence. “She was intimidating, so I wouldn’t have made the attempt to be the aggressor.”23 And it’s true that Pat was keenly interested in pursuing “movie money” for her novels and that Columbia owned a Highsmith “property” or two. In early August of 1963 Pat went to a party and met again, as she put it in her diary, “Larry Kramer of Columbia in London,” who “discussed the difficulties of Deep Water script.”24 Six months later, she wrote to Kramer about Deep Water and made a note of what he said: “my characters were increasingly psychopath & difficult for movies.”25
It was Pat’s Venice novel, though, Those Who Walk Away, which finally got her the kind of money from Columbia Pictures that would make a difference in her life. (Columbia never filmed the novel, and Pat wrote that the novel was “not even a very good book…dammit” she thought Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Neue Zürcher Zeitung serialized it “because the Germans love to read about Venice.”)26 In June of 1967 Pat, newly separated from Caroline Besterman, had just rented the house Elizabeth Lyne picked out for her near the Forest of Fontainbleau in Bois Fontaine at 57 rue St. Merry, when Columbia paid Pat twenty-eight thousand dollars for Those Who Walk Away. (Seven years later, Pat had Jonathan Trevanny, the “pawn” in her 1974 novel Ripley’s Game, murdered on the rue St. Merry.)
So only three months after moving to Bois Fontaine, Pat decided to buy the ill-fated stone farmhouse (the shape of the garden was already reminding her of a “tombstone”) at 20 rue de Courbuisson in Samois-sur-Seine with her old friend Mme Lyne—and to use her Columbia movie money to pay her share. By 1969, after she and Mme Lyne managed to re-create the very worst of Pat’s needs for domination, submission, and conflict—irretrievably ruining their friendship and producing more disobliging comments about Jews from Pat—Pat moved herself from Samois-sur-Seine to a house in Montmachoux, where she was, if possible, even more uncomfortable. Montmachoux was the place where the ten children of her flanking Portuguese neighbors were quickly driving her mad: “I have never understood Catholics and never will.”27 On the other hand, she was writing to Lil Picard that she’d “sold two films last month: Deep Water and The Story-Teller…. it gives me a score of 8 out of 12 books sold to films.”28 Pat was keeping herself sane in the way she knew how: by keeping another list.
In April of 1961, Pat, raking the ashes of her now-dead romance with Marijane Meaker with the idea of turning them into a novel, revealed just why she tended to avoid writers as lovers: “The story of M.J. [Marijane] and myself. Off to a crippled start. The brain washing. The rivalry between two in the same profession. The desperate efforts of one to best the other; and the other’s efforts to preserve the relationship, at any cost.”29
As her ideas for this novel developed, Pat saw herse
lf as “the heroine,” whose “charm” is “her naivete and good will…. She might be tempted by a younger person to leave…her vicious friend. But she cannot even see it for a time.” But then, Pat thought: “There is not much use in going on with details until I have a strong story on which to hang this.”30
Two months later, Pat broke out in German measles, spending her nights scratching twice as much as she was sleeping. But, as always, she “found the fever beneficial to the imagination” and arrived at an ending for the novel she was writing about the unlucky Peeping Tom. It was the ending in which, with obvious satisfaction and Grand Guignol splashings of gore, she stabbed Marijane Meaker’s fictional double to death. Pat had been calling her book The Fruit Tramp until her editor, Joan Kahn, wisely changed its title to The Cry of the Owl (1962).31 Harking back to her trip to New Jersey in 1950 to spy on the real-life heroine of The Price of Salt, Pat gave Robert Forester, the reluctant, gentle stalker who brings catastrophe to everyone, both her habits of surveillance and a vengeful pursuer. She also gave him some of her ambivalent sexual feelings (he’s just as hesitant to sleep with the opposite sex as Walter Stackhouse in The Blunderer, David Neumeister in This Sweet Sickness, and Vic Van Allen in Deep Water), more than a few of her talents, her embarrassments and her depressions, and at least one of her physical traits: a growth on his cheek. (Pat had a small sebaceous cyst on her left cheek, visible in some photographs.) She made the girl in the novel a little like one of her early loves, Joan S., who had married and was still the source of some wishful thinking on Pat’s part. Pat called the character Louise at first, changed her name to Jenny Thierolf, and had her commit a dreamy kind of suicide for love of Robert Forester.
The Talented Miss Highsmith Page 52
