The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  Like Pat herself—who would come to prefer the photographs of women she desired to the women themselves—Robert Forester prefers to spy on Jenny Thierolf through a window that frames her like a picture. When Forester sees her outside the frame, his “pleasure or satisfaction in seeing her more closely now was no greater than when he had looked at her through the window, and he foresaw that getting to know her even slightly would be to diminish her and what she stood for to him—happiness and calmness and the absence of any kind of strain.”32

  The Cry of the Owl is Pat’s most spectral novel, perhaps because Robert Forester is a man who wishes harm to no one, but whose “innocent” act of voyeurism brings death and misfortune to everyone—even, of course, to a dog. (Pat shot the dog in this book.) Pat told Kingsley: “I am writing something out of my system.”33

  Pat also told Kingsley of a misfortune averted: twenty-four of her writer’s cahiers—Pat thought they’d been “lost round about the time of my grandmother’s death in 1955”—were found in storage in Long Island with a friend of her ex-lover Maggie, just before Pat set sail in the spring of 1963 on her way out of the United States and into Caroline Besterman’s arms.34 Before she embarked, she gave her desk to Alex Szogyi in Manhattan (who kept it lovingly all his life). She also left Alex with the task of disposing of her piano.

  In Positano, Pat, vibrant with love and galvanized with purpose, continued to work on The Glass Cell, the novel of unjust imprisonment (the crime comes after the punishment in this complicated pavane of odd pairs of Alter Egos and yet another orphaned criminal-hero) that she’d begun in New Hope after fruitfully corresponding with an imprisoned convict. She worked six days a week and wrote eight pages a day. Without a radio or a record player, she provided her own entertainment: whittling things from wood in the evenings and painting pictures on Sundays. She also made another will (falling in love made her think of death again), writing to Kingsley that she’d left “half my worldly estate, what it will be at my demise to my mother, half to an English friend.”35 A codicil to this will made Kingsley her official “Literary Executor.”36

  The “English friend” to whom Pat had left half her estate was Caroline Besterman. In the three decades left of her life, Pat was to make many more wills. But she never again mentioned a lover in any of them.

  • 25 •

  Les Girls

  Part 9

  Before Pat and Elizabeth Lyne’s twenty-year friendship foundered and broke apart on the house with the double doors and separate wings they bought together in Samois-sur-Seine in 1968 (most of the houses Pat bought or wrote about were divided like the two halves of a brain: her brain), they took a trip to Tunisia in 1966 that was to prove an inspiration for Pat’s work. Pat began the cahier in which she wrote about this trip on a familiar note.

  “My self-esteem has a duration of not more than twenty-four hours.”1

  Restive and angry in the Suffolk countryside in her double cottage at Earl Soham, Pat was also bored and in her usual state of aggravated ambivalence. She was smoking cigarette after cigarette, irrigating herself with coffee, and reaching too often and too early for the alcohol. She had been taking notes on “The English Social Situation,” which she decided was comprised of warfare (“‘the classes’ all pulling against each other”),2 niggardliness (“Nothing lavish here, keep it miserly. It’s no more than you deserve”),3 and the deliberate intent to deprive her of pleasure (“Any pleasures, rewards, minor vices? Just name it. England will scotch it”).4

  But she avoided addressing by name what was really blighting her mind: the dissolution of her relationship with Caroline Besterman in the bitter solvent of her jealousy. She could only limn the matter in a neutral writing voice: “The affair with the married woman [in which] one is not satisfied with taking second place emotionally or even sharing equally, or even being preferred emotionally to the other person.”5

  Naturally drawn to the triangle in relationships, Pat was once again caught up in a geometry she couldn’t tolerate.

  If only she’d gone to London more often.

  After the 1940s in Manhattan, the decade in which Pat had coincided tangentially, but not unsuccessfully, with her epoch (i.e., her work in the new medium of the comics, her story “The Heroine” published in Harper’s Bazaar, her novel Strangers on a Train bought by Alfred Hitchcock), she seems to have operated outside the defining characteristics of any era. Just as she always lived in and wrote about Highsmith Country, her times and her customs were also always her own. Part of this had to do with her intractable and unclubbable nature, and part of it had to do with her refusal to live in cities—the places where “epochs” and “eras” are invented, manufactured, and marketed. During the 1950s, for instance, the Beat writers, all of whom were her contemporaries (and each one of whom was a superb self-publicist), escaped her notice entirely. But she had been “on the road” as often and at the same time as they had—and she had taken far more coherent notes on her experiences than any of them.

  In the 1960s, the Beatles and “Swinging London” get no mention in any Highsmith cahier. She never paid attention to rock ’n’ roll until her attraction for much younger women took her into the bars where, late in life, she was forced to dance a little and to make other touching forays into “having fun.” Even then, her appreciation for the contemporary music she heard went only as far as a single song from a Lou Reed album—and only because it reminded her of her German girfriend. Aside from classical music—“Bach for minor crises. Mozart for major ones” is how she put it in 1966—Pat loved best to listen to songs from the musical comedies created in the era she understood best: the era of the great Broadway musicals of the 1940s and early 1950s.

  Pat wasn’t too old to ride the crest of any decade’s wave; she was simply too odd, too censorious, and too much herself, or, as she might have put it, too much “her selves.” She had her own fish to fry and her own snails to tend, and she was still keeping three hundred of the little molluscs in glass terraria at Bridge Cottage in Earl Soham.

  Although London went on swinging without Pat, her heavy drinking and fellow feeling for homosexual males might have found her a seat on a barstool in many of the boîtes of Fitzrovia or the public houses of Soho. In Soho, the Coach and Horses, the French, or, best of all, the Colony Room at 41 Dean Street, with its permanent stench and poisonous green walls, would have been a fine place for Pat to drink in public, if, that is, she hadn’t disapproved so much of alcoholics. The Colony welcomed a nonpareil collection of truly armigerous drunken writers—the spectacular drunk Daniel Farson, the dressed-like-a-lady drunk Sandy Fawkes, the suited, caned, and supplied-with-dark-glasses drunk Julian Maclaren-Ross, et al.—with whom she might have found some rough comfort. If, that is, she hadn’t disapproved as much of other writers as she did of alcoholics. The Colony’s owner, Muriel Belcher, a foul-mouthed lesbian and brilliant mixologist of artistic and social misfits, had adopted the painter Francis Bacon as a “daughter,” paying him a stipend and allowing him to drink for free so long as he hauled in rich customers. Michael Andrews’s famous 1962 painting, The Colony Room, painted the year before Pat moved to Suffolk, features eight of Muriel Belcher’s Colony Room regulars, including the painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, their muse and model Henrietta Moraes (later Maggi Hambling’s muse and model), and Muriel Belcher herself with her Cuban lover Carmel.

  Francis Bacon was the painter Pat would come to admire most. She loved the tryptich of Bacon’s heroin-addicted lover throwing up in a toilet (so true to life, she thought), and in Tegna she kept a postcard reproduction of Bacon’s Study Number 6 propped up on her desk. (This is Bacon’s brilliant and horrifying reworking of Velázquez’s painting of Pope Innocent X: in Bacon’s version, the pope is screaming.) She both wanted and feared to meet Bacon, but never did; she thought the experience would be “shattering.” Unfashionably, it was Pat’s editor and publishing director from Heinemann who had to guide her towards Muriel Belcher’s Colony Room—and Pat went
there just the once. Janice Robertson, Pat’s editor at Heinemann, recalled the occasion.

  “I was out with [Pat and with] Roland Gant, who was a quite lovely editorial director and a friend and an admirer of Pat’s. And we had had quite a drunken lunch. And we went into Muriel’s. And Muriel’s was open in the afternoon which was very racy to me. And when we came out, there was an injured pigeon in the gutter and Pat was totally concerned about this pigeon and couldn’t be dragged away.”

  Pat, who didn’t want to leave the curb until something could be done for the dying pigeon, was more interested in the bird than in the bar patrons at Muriel’s. The society of the Colony Room would be one of the many roads Pat didn’t take.

  In the spring of 1965, Pat travelled with Caroline Besterman to Venice for a few days. It was Pat’s first vacation in nineteen months, but it wasn’t her best one. And it was far from satisfactory for Caroline, who, with obvious restraint, summarized it thusly: “Venice could have been better.” When the two women had gone to Rome together, Pat had ignored Caroline’s sensitivities; it made for bad feelings all around. On this trip, Pat brought with her to Venice a portable typewriter (supplied by the BBC) along with a BBC deadline for a television script, The Cellar. The work and the deadline must have added to Caroline’s sense that Venice could indeed have been “better.”

  Pat’s notes on Venice are marbled with her horror at the cost of everything (she wrote down all the prices) and at the presumption of waiters and bag carriers who actually expected to be tipped. As usual, she described the trip as though she’d taken it alone, which may have been how she felt. Attempting to renew her acquaintance with the woman the Venetians had dubbed “the Last Duchess,” Pat called Peggy Guggenheim, who was “cool by telephone.” Guggenheim didn’t invite Pat for a drink at her palazzo on the Grand Canal, and she dismissed Pat’s invitation for a drink at Harry’s Bar.6

  Pat—“on duty” as always during her ten days in Venice—made good use of her vigilance. From October 1965 to March 1966, she wrote a draft of Those Who Walk Away, her Venetian novel of incessant and often pointless pursuit, and of real and counterfeit attempts at murder and self-erasure. Her first narrative intention for it sounds like something from Sunset Blvd.—“A suspense novel from the point of view of the corpse”7—and she did begin it with a corpse of sorts. Never one to forget a slight, Pat gave Peggy Guggenheim’s first name to the young wife whose suicide, predating the book’s action, supplies the motive for murder for the pair of Highsmith males who run from—and after—each other in Those Who Walk Away.8

  The dead woman’s husband, Ray Garrett, is pursued by Ed Coleman, the vengeful painter who was her father.9 Ray starts a game of hide-and-seek with his potential murderer, pursuing his own death by following Ed to Venice after Ed tries to shoot him in Rome. In prose as flat as a roller-rink floor, Ray seems to seek what Gerald, the “hero” of Pat’s disappeared manuscript The Traffic of Jacob’s Ladder, was looking for; what, in fact, all Highsmith hero-criminals are looking for: oblivion through the dissolution of their burden of identity.

  Just like wrestlers unable to leave the mat, Ray Garrett and his father-in-law try out different holds and postures on each other, different ways of winning and losing, different means of being brutal and being passive. But there is no death in Venice, and Ray and Ed are both caught in the mantrap Highsmith’s imagination first sprang in Strangers on a Train: the mantrap that comes alive in Guy Haines’s most “horrible” idea:

  Guy had a horrible, an utterly horrible thought all at once, that he might ensnare Owen in the same trap that Bruno had used for him, that Owen in turn would capture another stranger who would capture another, and so on in infinite progression of the trapped and the hunted.10

  Guy’s image of an infinity of entrapments is like Jean Genet’s definition of “reality”: two mirrors facing each other. But Patricia Highsmith, always a little more frightening than any of her characters, imagined a “reality” that was built around the whole of the hunt: the trapped, the trapper, and the terrible necessity of the pursuit itself. Someone as caught up as Pat was with pursuit, someone as much in thrall to the chase, could never settle her feelings on one side of the “hunt” or the other, could never finally choose the hunter over the hunted. Hence the perpetual ambivalence that allowed her to course with the hounds and run with the hares. That is why the “hunt” in her work so often turns on a dime—as it did in her first commercially published story, “Uncertain Treasure,” when the pursuer becomes the pursued, and vice versa. The constant shifting of roles was a compellingly disruptive premise for her fictions—and a cruelly exhausting one in her life.

  Those Who Walk Away was Daniel Keel’s introduction to publishing the work of Patricia Highsmith. Rowohlt had been Pat’s German-language publisher, but Keel was willing to bring out Those Who Walk Away in hardback in 1967 and, later on, to add Pat’s work to his prestigious “yellow and black” series. So her German agent, Rainer Heumann, gave Keel the rights to Those Who Walk Away, and Pat, who had been in a paperback “ghetto” and had no serious reputation in Germany, was launched in the more respectable hardback form in both Switzerland and Germany by Diogenes Verlag. Keel’s only previous association with Pat had been sitting in a movie theater in Zurich when he was twenty-two years old, anxiously waiting for the credits of Strangers on a Train to roll so he could see the name of the “genius” who had written the novel from which this “masterpiece” was made. When he saw the name Patricia Highsmith it stuck with him. “I met her in the cinema,” he says. And that, in the middle of Pat’s present misery, was a piece of good luck.

  Although her love affair was going badly, and, as a consequence, she was loathing England, Pat had the support of her enthusiastic editor at William Heinemann in London. Janice Robertson, who left Heinemann in 1972 “after losing the battle for Angela Carter,” found Pat “very easy to work with.”

  “I think everybody at Heinemann found Pat easy. She was very liked, almost loved at Heinemann. I was with Heinemann for thirteen years; I think I worked with Pat, at a guess, between eight and ten years.

  “We always worked from typescript, hand-typed by Pat on a not very good typewriter. She never cleaned the keys. She was meticulous, so one didn’t edit with Pat as with others. One didn’t move the chapter, or cut this paragraph or alter this character. Because she was meticulous, she welcomed little things: you can’t catch a train from that station to that place, etc. And she was always extremely good; even if she rejected what you said, there was never any aggravation about it.

  “…There wasn’t an occasion to disagree. We all admired her very much and we were all very pleased to publish her.”11

  Because the “years [were] beginning to swim into each other” and because she was no longer keeping a diary, Pat, in 1967, the year Those Who Walk Away was published, used her cahier to tot up her growing “case” against Caroline Besterman: “During the entire first draft of [Those Who Walk Away] I barely saw [Caroline] once, certainly did not sleep with her.” And she helpfully added directions for future judges of her case: “But—as the reader will see…”12 She wrote that Caroline was “continually harping on drinking”—Pat’s drinking—especially after Pat “fell down some narrow stairs en route to the bathroom in the dark.” When Pat remembered that Caroline had also fallen down some stairs, she stooped to infantile malice: “Ha ha!” she wrote triumphantly. At the time, Pat had just received a lunchtime lecture from Caroline on the “instability of my character.” She was able to discount this talking-to because Caroline had “polished off every morsel on her plate.” Eating was still high on Pat’s list of avoidable sins.

  Although she desperately wished otherwise, Pat’s troubles with Caroline Besterman were as much a result of the condition she’d noted in her cahier (six months before meeting Caroline) as all her other troubles were: “Until around thirty I was essentially like a glacier or like stone. I suppose I was ‘protecting’ myself. It was certainly tied up with the fac
t I had to conceal the most important emotional drives of myself completely.

  “This is the tragedy of the conscience-stricken young homosexual, that he not only conceals his sex objectives, but conceals his humanity and natural warmth of heart as well.”13

  Meanwhile, at Bridge Cottage (or “back at the ranch,” the phrase which Pat, a mock Texan in her locutions, invariably used about any house she owned, just as she used “turning loose,” a term taken from calf roping, for letting go of her emotional ties), Pat kept herself busy in the ways she knew how: writing, first and foremost. Having hired a television set, she began what she called “a religious television play, based on the effect of a friend (Jesus) upon a group of people.”14 The script would eventually turn into her novel Ripley Under Ground, with Derwatt the suicided artist, like Pat’s dead former lover Allela Cornell, sacrosanct and alive in the memory of his friends—but turned to a perverse use by Tom Ripley.* She conceived and wrote her “second snail story,” “The Quest for Blank Claveringi” (published in Eleven by Heinemann in 1970 and in altered form as “The Snails” in the Saturday Evening Post).15 She drew and sketched as she had always done, and thought up little inventions: “The Gallery of Bad Art,” “a sweating thermometer,” and some odd new shapes for “lampshades.” The inspiration for her pièce de résistance—a “strychnined lipstick”—must have been a real thrill for a writer to whom the impulse to murder women came so naturally.

  Still brooding, Pat returned to some favorite subjects. She pondered the education of children (this was the moment when she decided that American orphanages should be emptied in order to supply the Peace Corps with eight-year-old ambassadors)16 and philosophized endlessly and lugubriously about love. When she’d had enough of this, she turned to her old panacea—travel—and went to North Africa with Elizabeth Lyne.