The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  Pat travelled to Paris in June of 1966 to pick up Mme Lyne, now retired from designing for Hattie Carnegie to an apartment in the Boulevard Raspail in Paris’s Sixth Arrondissement. The two women drove to Marseille, stopping on the way to visit one of Pat’s odd, obsessive French fans: a married man who had Pat sign eight of her books and gave her a rare chance to observe French family life. From Marseille, the two women took a boat to Tunis.

  Pat’s first impression of North Africa was simpler and nobler than the one she finally settled on. “Africa—A splendid place for thinking. One feels naked, standing alone against a white wall. Problems become simplified, one’s directions clear. Is this because the land is so different from Europe, the people so different from one’s own…. Africa does not even turn over in her sleep by way of entertaining tourists. It is like a great, fat, half asleep woman in a comfortable bed—naked herself, indifferent to any approach.”17

  Pat soon changed her mind about Africa’s “simplicity.” Everywhere she looked she began to notice something familiar: the sight of people trying to cheat her. On Mme Lyne and Pat’s arrival in Tunis, Pat had an “altercation” with a porter and an argument about the bill at the hotel desk where the two women were booked. Pat’s luggage was confiscated until the bill was settled. In Hammamet, the town in which she and Mme Lyne moved into a bungalow hotel, Pat began to compile complaints against the locals: “Hammamet—of five people of whom we expected slight help—all have let us down here. They take names and telephone numbers, make promises, and do not follow through. This is a mysterious form of ego-building in the East…. tomorrow doesn’t matter, and out of sight is out of mind. It must be a curious god they have.”18

  In Sidi Bou Said, at a “bar-restaurant” to which she applied the term “clip-joint,” Pat noticed “a curious Freudian item”: male employess who left their unflushed excrement in the women’s bathroom. “A curious card to leave,” she thought, keeping one eye peeled for other desecrations. Back in her bungalow hotel in Hammamet, she had plenty of violations to report: the plumbing and the filthy quarters in which the unsatisfactory boy servants were housed were some of them.

  She started to compare Arabs, unfavorably, to the entire “peasant” population of Mexico, finding what she’d been looking for all along: deceit and chicanery. “The Mexican peasant is naïve compared to the Arab. The Mexicans have had tourism about fifty or forty years, the Arab for hundreds. The Arab is a trader, essentially, a crook.”19

  The conditions at her bungalow hotel—one large room shared with Mme Lyne in which Pat also had to write, the bad hotel repair service, and the uncertain mail delivery—were destabilizing her. Unable to shelter herself from upsetting circumstances, she found a tortoiseshell kitten and tried to protect it from the feet of careless workers. “At noon I could be a nervous wreck if I were self-indulgent. (A beetle just fell from the ceiling onto my notebook.)”20

  Pat was finally disturbed enough to begin taking notes for the novel that would become The Tremor of Forgery: her attempt to envisage what could happen to a writer, Howard Ingham, when he finds himself in unfamiliar climes, without the support of his customs or his language. This had been Pat’s own situation from the moment she left the New World for good, moved to Suffolk, and took Highsmith Country with her. It is the situation of many creative expatriates: strangers in a strange land, living in the museum of their imaginations. In The Tremor of Forgery, Pat made Africa a province of Highsmith Country. “The element of terror—anxiety—is important. Perhaps overconsciousness of details—by which an individual tries to fix his place, from which he tries to gain security and confidence, but without success. It is the element of security, that is forever missing; the meaning and importance of life that is missing.”21

  Pat took many of the details of her daily life and irritations in Hammamet—the American-made cash register in a restaurant, the filth and evasiveness of the boy servants in her bungalow hotel, the fish complet she was always eating for dinner, her growing contempt for Arabs—and put them into the notes for her novel. The borders between the novel’s life and her own stayed porous even after she had returned from North Africa and started travelling again. In her cahier notes she sent Howard Ingham to Denmark, and in the novel she created Ingham’s friend Jensen, the homosexual painter, as a Dane chiefly because three months after she’d returned from Tunisia she had to travel to Copenhagen on book business.

  Pat’s notes and her novel continued to bear the weight of her special experiences as an exile from America: the divisions and confusions of her political understanding drained into characters who represented a vaguely muddled Left (Howard Ingham) and a seriously proselytizing Right (Francis Adams). Howard Ingham’s probable return to his former wife at the end of the novel (“never had any woman had such a physical hold over him”)22 was Pat’s own wish: she linked the absent, idealized character of Howard’s divorced wife Lotte to Ginnie Catherwood—although it was Lynn Roth of whom she’d been dreaming. As late as 1967 Pat was having deep dreams of union, of “fathering” a child with Lynn—“I so often think of Lynn, the joy of my life, and for a time I was the joy of hers”—and she was reprising in imagination the brief, secret rencontre she’d had with Roth in New Hope six years ago: “How beautiful when she came for her birthday November 23, 1961, invited herself for two nights (of joy for me), and on the third—by gentle persuasion.”

  When Howard Ingham commits what is undoubtedly murder by throwing his typewriter at the head of a “thieving Arab” (it is Pat’s Olympia Deluxe typewriter, right down to its distinctive brown color), his creator’s pleasure in the act is all too palpable: her concern is for the damaged typewriter and not for the dead Arab. Although Pat wished to write Ingham as “a decent (that is, honest) writer…[s]o the psychopathic is quite out,” she also wanted to allow him freedom from the problem of “self-esteem” that plagued her daily: “A period comes when H. stops trying to maintain identity or morale. Then his ‘animal’ or primitive side frightens him. But he senses the freedom of having no self-respect to worry about.”23

  The Tremor of Forgery, by a writer most critics were discussing as godless and gripless when it came to morality, is a profoundly American (and therefore inescapably moral) consideration of those cultural crossings at which ethics start to founder and violent acts, such as murder, become meaningless. Pat’s Methodist grandmother would have understood very well the motive for her metaphors.

  When Pat and Elizabeth Lyne left Tunisia, they sailed to Naples, went on to Austria, and then, in August, Pat returned by herself to Suffolk. In September Pat was on the road again—to Nice, this time, to meet with the film director Raoul Lévy, who wanted to collaborate with her on a script for her novel Deep Water. When she returned to Earl Soham, there was a final, painful scene with Caroline Besterman in mid-October. Pat heaved Caroline’s valise at the second bedroom, into which Caroline had withdrawn in a “huff” at Pat’s lateness in coming to bed. (Pat doesn’t say why she was late.) Caroline went back to London the next afternoon with Pat’s imprecation that she was “finished with her” echoing throughout Bridge Cottage—and Pat was left shaken to her shoes, the golden bowl of her hopes for love with a married woman in pieces around her. It had been her longest continuous relationship.

  Pat’s first reaction was desperation: “The very worst time of my entire life.”24 Then she had the sebaceous cyst which had been on her cheek for the last ten years surgically removed—as though cutting out this growth might rid her of other things, too. Her second reaction was to work more, and she started to write the film script for Deep Water. She wrote it between waves of panic and insomnia—she knew that dialogue and dramaturgy weren’t her forte—and finished it in a month. Then she wrote a condensation of Those Who Walk Away for Cosmopolitan magazine, a task she also completed in a month.25

  Her third and fourth reactions to her devastation were to invite an ex-lover to visit her and to plan for more travel. Daisy Winston came over from New Hope to Earl Soham
for a welcome two weeks in December, although practical Pat was sorry to find that Daisy no longer attracted her sexually. It would have been a solution of sorts. After Daisy left, Pat went to Copenhagen for the Danish publication of The Glass Cell by Grafisk Ferlag. The trip plunged her into gloom—she gave a bad speech during it—but the crush she later developed on a woman she met in Copenhagen was a pleasant distraction. Gudrun reminded Pat of her old friend Betty, from her Fire Island days.26

  On New Year’s Eve of 1966, Raoul Lévy, the erstwhile film director of Deep Water, shot himself dead in St-Tropez. He still owed Pat money for the script she’d written for him in October and November, and her gelid commentary on his death reflects her feelings about his debt: “Alas I never liked him, and obviously he did not like himself.” Still, murder worked its usual magic on her, and she couldn’t help speculating about where Lévy might have killed himself, although his demise did not ameliorate for one moment the fact that he still owed her twelve thousand dollars. “He never signed the contract nor paid me anything, and all I know is he was very pleased with the first 44 pages.”27 Seeing Lévy in September of 1966 in Nice, where he’d intended to set Deep Water, did bring Pat one lasting benefit. She’d gone from Nice to Cagnessur-Mer to visit Annie Duveen, and it was at Duveen’s house where she met Barbara Ker-Seymer and Barbara Roett for the first time.

  In January of 1967 Pat, still looking for escape, accepted an invitation to sit on a jury judging short films at an international film festival in Montbazon, in the Touraine region of France. She drove from Paris to Tours, accompanied once again by Elizabeth Lyne—her need of old friends was obvious—and then she went on alone to Montbazon, where, amongst the French-Canadian, Japanese, Russian, Hungarian, and French panellists, the only member of the film jury she took a shine to was Slawomir Mroek, the Polish playwright. He was as “surprised as I am at being here”—and he was “shy” and “silent.” Pat couldn’t bear the intellectual talk, the pretentious theorizing about film, or the competition. “What a lot of nonsense, all this communicating!” she wrote in her cahier, adding, “The atmosphere reminds me of Yaddo, but the ice will not be broken in the same way (and perhaps I am to blame, as much, too) because we are mostly older, more suspicious, more jealous of our (already gained) reputations.”28

  Pat had nothing to say about the festival films themselves, but the trip to France prepared her for her next big mistake: her three-month stay in the rented house on the estate in Fontainebleau—found for her by Elizabeth Lyne—and then her fatal move to Samois-sur-Seine in yet another double house which she and Mme Lyne would purchase together. But France was looking so much better to Pat than a loverless England, and the lack of self-esteem with which she began her twenty-eighth cahier was assuaged by the idea that someone actually wanted to share a home with her.

  For the present, though, back at Bridge Cottage in Earl Soham in March of 1967, Pat was writing an article with a title that perfectly expressed her mood: “Writer’s Block, Failure, and Depression.”29

  • 26 •

  Les Girls

  Part 10

  In her late forties, Pat began to rehearse the idea that photographs of women might be less damaging to her fantasies than the women themselves, and that her fantasies were more satisfying to her than any actual love life.

  By November of 1969, Pat had a long list of personal failures to add up. There was her awful, protracted battle with Elizabeth Lyne in Samois-sur-Seine over their common house and property, and the bitter end of their twenty-year friendship. There was her “betrayal” by her inconstant French lover, Jacqui—the finish of her hopes for love with yet another woman who was “bad for her.” There was the fact that her new neighbors on either side of her new house in Montmachoux were exuberant Portuguese Catholic families who made her want to kill. (“It gives me more terror, really, than any crime story ever did, to know that I have people left and right of me who believe in hell.”)1

  From the middle of her personal chaos, Pat wrote to Alex Szogyi in New York:

  I am in love with the girl called Anne Meacham, whose picture appeared in MD magazine, as she is an actress in T[ennessee] Williams play IN THE BAR OF A TOKYO HOTEL. I have not seen such a face since I fell in love with Lynn Roth…. Do you know her? I would love to see her, just to say ‘You look wonderful,’ and then faint, or disappear…. If you know Miss Meacham, will you say I have lost my heart to her.2

  Pat kept the torn-out photograph of Anne Meacham*—whom she never met, refused to meet by Alex Szogyi’s account—for the rest of her life.3 It is in her archives now, along with another arresting image clipped from a periodical: a photograph of Judy Holliday, looking entirely at ease in male attire and a stylish boy’s haircut. The Holliday photograph is a still from Adam’s Rib (George Cukor’s brilliant comic film about the war between the sexes) depicting a scene in which a lawyer (played by Katharine Hepburn), trying to make a feminist point, asks a jury to look at the accused (played by Judy Holliday) as though she were a man. And briefly, before the jury’s eyes, Judy Holliday turns into a man: haircut, suit, and attitude. Pat saw Adam’s Rib in New York at the end of January 1950, with Elizabeth Lyne. Judy was “excellent” in the film, Pat thought.4 She was right.

  When Pat was sickening with love (literally) for the young German actress Tabea Blumenschein at the Berlin Film Festival in 1978, she made a little verse about her rules of attraction. It was more an admission about her feeling for photographs and disguise than about her feelings for the girl:

  I fell in love not with flesh and blood,

  But with a picture:

  The sailor cap

  The crazy moustache…5

  Two weeks later, in a letter to Alex Szogyi, she explained how she’d met Tabea both in person and in the film made by Tabea’s lover, Ulrike Ottinger, which starred Tabea.

  “I fell in love with their film called ‘The Infatuation of the Blue Sailors,’ in which everyone’s sex was reversed. T. played a sailor…. I have never even shaken hands with Tabea, I think. I look at her as a kind of ‘picture.’ It is very strange. I have the feeling that if I ever embraced her, she would fall to pieces…. I am afraid of getting a heart attack.”6

  By 1980, Pat was writing in her cahier: “It seems truly best to be in love with someone we cannot touch and do not profoundly know. One is always in love with an idea or an ideal.”7 And for the rest of that decade and into the early 1990s, Pat, says a friend, “carried around an accordion-pleated photo folder—many men have them—of young blond German girls dressed à la The Night Porter. [She told her amused friend]: “I send them books, I try to improve their minds.”8

  Like Isabel Crane, the young woman in her short story “The Romantic,” the death of whose invalid mother should have freed her to pursue her dreams of “real love,” Pat chose to cling more and more to her fantasy life, preferring, as Isabel Crane finally did, her fantasies to whatever her “real” life could offer. Pat wrote “The Romantic” in 1984—or more likely she rewrote it then, because it has the mark of her 1940s Manhattan style. She completed the story by shutting the door on Isabel’s Crane’s sexual life, shortly after the door had been shut on her own.

  Pat showed her photos of girls to everyone—even, in one unsettling instance (and between swigs of gin), to a journalist she didn’t know during the course of an interview for a London paper.9 Francis Wyndham remembers Pat displaying pictures of a “German girlfriend” (it was Tabea, but this was long after Pat’s relations with Tabea had ceased) to him and Julian Jebb in London, “and she rather sort of boasted. It was so sweet, it was like a sailor on leave with a girlfriend back home. It was endearing in her.”10

  Julian Jebb, journalist, television producer, and the grandson of Hilaire Belloc, made friends with Pat when he went to film her during her unfortunate performance as president of the film jury at the Berlin Film Festival in 1978. (See “A Simple Act of Forgery: Part 1.” Six years later, Pat and Francis Wyndham were exchanging letters about Jebb’s sui
cide.)11 In Berlin, Jebb had been as interested in the heavily made-up Turkish child prostitutes of Kreuzberg as Pat was, and he photographed her amongst the fish tanks in the basement aquarium at the Tiergarten for a BBC documentary that was never completed. Jebb’s next-best-known work—perhaps not unrelated to his interest in Pat—was a spoof-documentary about Dame Edna Everage, featuring Barry Humphries dressed up in his elaborate drag as Dame Edna. It was Julian Jebb who loaned Pat his apartment in Chelsea for a London tryst with Tabea Blumenschein.

  While Tabea and Pat were staying in Jebb’s flat, they went out one night drinking at the Gateways. There, Pat was approached by a young Austrian woman, Linda, who had recognized Pat’s face from publicity photographs. Linda and Pat struck up a conversation, and Linda drove Pat and Tabea back to Jebb’s apartment. They invited her in for a drink. Tabea, she thought, was “rather beautiful” she had “some grace to her,” and Pat wanted Linda to speak German with Tabea because Pat’s own German was so awkward. Linda noticed a film poster with Tabea’s picture on it and a whole sketchbook full of Pat’s drawings of Tabea in the flat.

  As Linda and Tabea were chatting in German, Pat kept making more fast sketches of Tabea, trying to get her down on paper. When Pat went to the bathroom, Linda asked Tabea: “But what do you see in her, she’s so much older?” Linda “found it rather strange because Tabea was so very young…. [Still, I had the sense that] Tabea was somehow attracted by Patricia, though what she said to me was: ‘You know, Patricia is buying me clothes, she’s inviting me, and I let her.’ The impression she wanted to give me, and she was without shame about it, was that she was in it for what she could get.” Later, Pat told Linda that “Tabea was a fan and had written to her first.”12 (Tabea herself thinks Pat first took an interest in her because Pat wanted to sell her books to film and Tabea was in film.)13 Perhaps Tabea and Pat were both playing a little with the truth. And perhaps Pat was remembering the furious remark Lil Picard had “bitterly hurled” at her in 1949: that she’d better get someone to keep her in Europe (she did: Ellen Hill) because, after fifty, she would have “to buy” her lovers.14 In any event, Tabea was Pat’s last real erotic obsession—and her last experience of the kind of misery her interpretation of Courtly Love required.