If it did nothing else, Pat’s short, fantastical affair with Tabea Blumenschein seems to have persuaded her sophisticated friend Barbara Ker-Seymer of something. Ker-Seymer wrote to her own long-term lover Barbara Roett about it.
“I have been inundated with letters from Pat. She seems to feel I am the only person who truly ‘understands’ Tabea and her feelings for her. What interests me is that Pat does seem to have a heart after all. I always thought she was completely without one.”15
In October of 1992, Pat, on a trip to North America that included a stay with Dan and Florine Coates at Box Canyon Ranch in Weatherford, Texas, a reading at the Harbourfront festival in Toronto, and some appearances in Manhattan for Ripley Under Water, made a three-day visit to Marijane Meaker in East Hampton, New York. It was the first time the two women had seen each other in twenty-seven years, although they had begun to correspond two or three years before. Pat initiated this exchange, even as she was telling other people that Marijane had written to her first. To Marijane’s house in East Hampton, Pat brought pictures of her own “very severe-appearing, fort-like house” in Tegna and of a “smiling, pretty” German girl (Tabea again), which she seemed anxious to show off.
“‘If I had to choose between the girl and the house, I’d choose the house,’ Pat said,” after passing the photos to a roomful of Marijane’s friends and colleagues. The women laughed along with her.16 By now, Pat had travelled a long way from her youthful dreams of romantic love. Real estate and the pressing question of what she should do with her money were to be the major excitements and irritations of her last years.
According to Marijane Meaker, their three-day visit was marked by Pat’s constant drinking and what was, by now, her stock parade of prejudices. Like a vaudeville Nazi, Pat reacted to every ethnic minority she saw. The sight of black people eating in a local restaurant—something she said she wasn’t accustomed to in her small Swiss village—set her off on a series of remarks about blacks: how they were incapable of figuring out that sexual intercourse leads to pregnancy; how improvident they were with money; how black men got physically ill if they didn’t have intercourse “many times a month.” Jews brought on a stronger reaction, and with a compulsion that continued to be personal and uncontrollable rather than political and rational, she inveighed constantly against the State of Israel and against the “Jews,” never referring to the citizens of Israel as “Israelis.”
“The yids,” Pat told Marijane, were responsible for banning the ham sandwiches she used to enjoy so much on first-class airplane flights. She inquired of her hostess if “your Jewish friends dance the holly, holly cost?” The picture she painted of racial attitudes in the Ticino, the canton of Switzerland she’d lived in since she moved to Switzerland in the early 1980s, was so extreme that Meaker just had to ask: “Do you live in some little Nazi coven?”17
Two years before Pat’s visit to Meaker, in August of 1990, a similar outburst from Pat had occurred. Only this time, uncharacteristically, Pat tried to publish her prejudices. Christa Maerker, the German writer and filmmaker who had suggested Pat for the jury of the Berlin Film Festival in 1978, tells the story:
“There was a series on German radio called Impossible Interviews, which the German station [Südwestrundfunk] had taken from an original Italian idea, where very famous writers did twenty-minute radio plays. You were allowed to interview in imagination anyone who is dead. I think Pat was declaring poverty at the time so I suggested she write one. ‘It’s not much money,’ I said, ‘but it’s very fast. You can write it in no time. A person you think you know very well.’
“Pat interviewed [in imagination] somebody in Israel who was still alive at the time. [It was Yitzhak Shamir.] Out of her came something so ghastly that it could be a Nazi text.”
What Pat wrote was an eleven-page “radio play” with two characters and one line of action: Patricia Highsmith interrogating a highly caricatured Yitzhak Shamir—at that time prime minister of Israel—about the future of his country. Even allowing for Pat’s loathing of Shamir’s policies and militant Zionist background, it is an irrational work, poisoned by ethnic prejudices. It reads like a lost chapter from that toxic anthology of anti-Semitic canards, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the fact that Pat thought that the Germans—the only people in Europe who have grappled seriously with the ethical history of their country—would be receptive to broadcasting her “interview” is another example of how disconnected she was from anything except the ends of her own nerves.
Pat’s unwavering line throughout her script is that the “Jews”—she makes an exception for Amos Oz, whom she suggests will soon be murdered by Shamir’s government—are desperate to provoke another Holocaust because of the Holocaust’s invaluable fund-raising properties for Israel. Pat’s last comments to Shamir, in her role of Interviewer, are: “You seem to be courting another Holocaust…. as you might say, we’ll hold back Holocaust Number Two out of sheer anti-semitism.”18
The commissioning editor at the radio station was horrified by what Pat had produced, and Christa Maerker—still, she says, unable to accept the fact that Pat could actually mean this “disgusting text”—went to talk to the radio station about it. “And the head of the radio station said, ‘Good grief! What did you do to me!’ It was like [Wolf] Donner and the [Berlin] Film Festival. ‘If I publish this, Patricia Highsmith will be dead in Europe.’
“And I said, ‘She must have misunderstood me. If I talk to her she could rewrite it.’ And he said: ‘Do what you please.’ So I called Pat and said, ‘Would you like me to come and help you retype it?’ Lying, instead of saying, ‘How dare you write something like this!’ I think I always lied to her; I didn’t want to disturb her by such primitive notions as my offended sensibility. It’s a motherly instinct.”
Pat thought Christa’s coming to help “type” the document would be a “wonderful idea,” so Christa went to Pat’s new house in Tegna a week before the opening of the Locarno Film Festival, which, anyway, she always attended in her capacity as a film journalist. When Christa rang the bell, Pat “opened the door and walked away without a word,” vanishing into her bedroom to putter around. Christa stood “like a good girl with my suitcase” until Pat came out again and showed her to her room in the guest wing, which, because the house, with its inevitable double wings, was shaped like a U, was as far as possible from Pat’s own bedroom.
“While I was looking at cassettes [French telefilms of Pat’s short stories] I put some lotion on my arm because I sunburned it hanging out the window while I was driving to Tegna, and, out of the blue—she was able to do this without you hearing her—Pat was standing next to me. You didn’t hear her coming. And she said: ‘My cat hates your perfume!’
“So I thought, poor Charlotte. And THEN I thought, wait a minute, that cat can’t talk. WHO hates my perfume? Pat does. So I said, ‘I’m terribly sorry’ and went into the guest room and took a shower. And then, suddenly, she’s outside the shower door, saying sternly: ‘We have to save water.’
“I should have left the next minute.
“Whenever I said, ‘Let’s talk about the radio play,’ she’d say,’ Where’s Charlotte, where’s Charlotte?’ The cat had something evil, I thought. If the Hubers had not been there, I would not have been able to bear it. I had promised to come and help her and I insisted on doing it. Of course, we never ever touched the radio play, we never talked about it.”
But Pat, in her own provocative way, had already tried to raise one of the subjects of this “interview” with Christa Maerker—from an opposite angle, some years before she wrote the radio version. When Maerker visited Pat in her Aurigeno house in the mid-1980s, she discovered that sometime during their first evening Pat had taken a ballpoint pen and printed a line of numbers on her arm, numbers that were meant to suggest something obvious to a citizen of Germany who had lived through the Second World War.
“I was too shocked to talk about it. Why the numbers on her arm? She wanted to see ho
w a ‘Nazi’ descendant would respond to [a concentration camp number]…. I always thought she was testing me, not just me, but anybody to find out how they react to extreme situations.”
When Christa Maerker finally left Pat’s house in Tegna she “sang all the way to Locarno. It was as though I left a jail…. When I went to my hotel, there was a hand-delivered letter from Pat…. She’d written to thank me for being such a good guest…. She was aware of how horribly she behaved…. In the end…I couldn’t honestly understand; I’d started to read her short stories and got into the emotions in them and I was unable to judge anything anymore.”19
A late-life friend of Pat, a young writer in New York at the time she first met Pat, described another unforgettable encounter, as funny as it was awful, during which Pat’s ethnic views were once again on parade. On one of Pat’s trips to New York from Switzerland—Pat’s friend thinks it was in 1990*—Pat asked if they could meet at the lesbian bar Pat had liked to go to when she was younger. The bar was the Duchess, a decades-old lesbian establishment in Sheridan Square, in the heart of Greenwich Village, which had just reopened as the Duchess 2. It was now, unbeknownst to Pat, “basically a black butch bar.”
Pat wanted to bring “an old college chum” with her (it turned out to be Kingsley).
“So I said, ‘Fine, I’d like to bring my friend Barbara.’ Who was a poet and an admirer of some of Pat’s work. And Pat said that was fine.”
“And I said to Barbara, who was a Jew, ‘Now look, I’ve told you about Pat, about how she talks.’ And she said, ‘That’s all right, you don’t have to mention that I’m Jewish.’ But I warned her that there was hardly a conversation that went by without Pat mentioning Jews; it was an obsession. Pat took the subway to Sheridan Square—I didn’t know at that time that Pat was too cheap to take a cab—and I thought the friend would be some lesbian friend from college and there was Kingsley! This elderly heterosexual lady with a purse. And I thought, ‘Good Lord, what a strange pair to take into the Duchess 2!’ But go we did.
“You have to fight though this long narrow bar, a crowd of mostly black women, to get to the postage-stamp-sized tables in the rear. And we finally make it and Pat is very silent and she’s arranging herself, and she says, ‘Well at least we made it through THAT!’ And I thought I’m not even going to TRY to imagine what she means by that. And there’s Kingsley sort of looking around, and we ordered some drinks.
“And Pat said, ‘Well yes, this is quite a BIT different from when I used to go here.’ And there are these big musclely black girls bumping and grinding on the tiny dance floor.
“And Kingsley says, ‘I’ve never been to a place quite like this.’ And then Pat said, sipping at her drink, ‘Well, there certainly are a lot of blacks in here.’ And I said, ‘Yes, it tends to be frequented by mostly black women.’ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘at least there are not a lot of Jews around.’ With that Barbara looked at her and said: ‘Excuse me, but I’m a Jew.’ And Pat, not missing a beat, shot back, ‘Well, you don’t LOOK like one.’
“I don’t know how we made it through the evening. Barbara just went back to her drink. Kingsley was completely out of it….
“For someone who was very perceptive, Pat misread an awful lot of signs. And so she’d test the waters a great deal, ‘Well, you know the Holocaust’…
“I was convinced it was personal, I thought her father might be a Jew. I wondered who the Jew was, who set her off.”20
Thirty years before, in 1957, Pat had been thinking quite different thoughts about the Jews: “This afternoon I awakened from a nap, thought suddenly of the German atrocities against the Jewish people, and had a strange feeling that it hadn’t happened, that it was impossible—and then—knowing it had happened—that it was more horrible, more bestial than the most eloquent describer has yet said.”21
And in 1959, during the year she was singing in the Presbyterian church choir in Palisades, New York, Pat’s understanding of what good relations on Earth required was still intact. “All the misery on the earth is caused by the indifference of the better off toward those with less. Not only in economics, but in personal misfortunes—so much easier to bear, if there are friends or strangers who show that they care what happens. With this, there is no bitterness, no cursing against God, no resentful attacks against one’s fellowman. No revolutions.”22
But by the 1980s, Pat had moved as far from her early ideals of World Peace as she had from her youthful dreams of Courtly Love. The hopes she’d been giving voice to in her thirties came from a—by now—mostly unrecognizable Patricia Highsmith.
• 27 •
Les Girls
Part 11
Pat’s nights were often more emotionally telling than her days, and many of the love-dreams she recorded were deep fantasies of killing or being murdered or maimed by Mother Mary, or committing unspeakable acts in Mary’s presence, in Mary’s stead, or in Mary’s bed. Occasionally, Mary did the dream murders for Pat, as in a night dream of 1984 in which Mary, “in Lady Macbeth murderous mood,” beheaded Pat’s young German lover, Tabea Blumenschein, and then “coated the head with transparent wax, thoroughly.”1 (Even asleep, Pat could produce devilish details; that “thoroughly” is masterful.)
At night—especially at night—Pat had trouble separating her psyche from her mother’s. And sometimes she thickened the nocturnal brew with a grandmother figure and a plot point borrowed from her favorite Dostoyevsky novel, Crime and Punishment—as she did in this winter dream of 1961:
A dream: that I murdered an old lady with an axe, this was just before Christmas. The murder was motiveless. The police went directly to me and charged me…. the bulk of it was my imagining my friends…thinking P.H.! Could it be! How shocking and horrible!! Because the very next day, before Christmas, the story was in all the newspapers. It was…a deep fear that I might some day do this. In a fit of drunkenness or anger. But the victim in my dream was unknown to me.2
Many of Pat’s dreams were infused with guilt, shame, fear of exposure, and feelings at war with each other. “Just as there is no jealousy without love, there is no hate without fear and mistrust,” Pat had written in college. “Emotions run in pairs—like smoke and fire.”3 But her own emotions ran in pairs that contradicted each other.
In most Highsmith fictions, the attractions and repulsions of love—the moment when an urgent embrace becomes an overwhelming desire to strangle—are twisted up in the braid of character. Love and hatred pull together, pull each other apart, and share the same nervous system. This crosscutting of love and hatred—the critic Susannah Clapp calls it “an extraordinary loop of abhorrence and attraction” 4—which kept the young Pat so busy recording her high school crushes and aversions, wreaked a predictable havoc on her love life. Most of her adult sexual affairs, in flesh or in fantasy, were electrified by violent and contradictory feelings: their landscapes look like war zones. Many of her lovers emerged from these couplings telling tales more closely associated with bombed-out buildings than with burning desires.
Pat herself felt blasted by love, annihilated by it—“It is just like firing a pistol in my face,” she said of her love for Caroline Besterman5—and the higher she built her love castles, the harder they fell on her, always.
In 1963, newly in love with Caroline, Pat, tempting the Fates (who must have licked their lips in awful anticipation), set down in her cahier these ecstatic phrases: “Up, pipers! I am in love with a most wonderful woman. I am saved. Look me up in ten or twenty years, and see.”6
I did look her up.
Ten years later, alone in her house by the Loing Canal in Moncourt, Pat was making it her painful duty to add to the list of Major Flaws she had uncovered in the character of that “most wonderful woman,” the former love of her life, Caroline Besterman. And she was taking notes for a collection of stories whose bitter inspiration was her separation from Caroline. Pat gave the collection a provisional title: Further Tales of Misogyny (with stories named “The Fully-Licensed Whore,
or the Wife,” “The Prude,” “The Gossip,” “The Mother-in-Law,” “The Breeder,” “The Middle-Class Housewife”).7 It was a continuation of a series of stories about women she’d begun in 1969 after she and Caroline had broken up. In 1977, the entire collection was published as Little Tales of Misogyny.
Each “tale” in Misogyny indulges Pat’s mania for classification by exploring the horrors of a certain “type” of woman. Together, these poisonous little pills constitute as enraged an assault on the female gender as the one launched in 1558 by the Scots Calvinist preacher John Knox in his jeremiad The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.8
Little Tales of Misogyny was first brought out—this was no coincidence; Pat was exercised on the subject—during the decade in which the Second Wave of Feminism, the International Women’s Movement, had begun its attack on the world’s patriarchal structures. Misogyny’s reviews were mixed, to put it mildly. But it was praised in England, and in France it won Pat and her inspired illustrator, Roland Topor, an important award in 1977: Le Grand Prix de l’Humeur Noir.
When she was twenty-two, Pat had written this in her cahier: “Basically, the reason I don’t like men homosexuals is because we…disagree. Women, not men, are the most exciting and wonderful creations on the earth—and masculine homosexuals are mistaken and wrong!”9
Three decades and many painfully ended love affairs with women later, Pat seems to have changed her mind.
The Talented Miss Highsmith Page 55
