The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  Switzerland, anyway, had become the elephants’ graveyard of Pat’s amatory hopes, barring the odd attempt to beguile an ex-lover into bed by letter or a half-acknowledged crush on a local pizzeria owner. And Pat’s work suffered as only work inspired by love or love’s fantasies could do. Still, there had never been room in Highsmith Country for love amongst the middle-aged—or even for love affairs which could be extended into a believable future. No Highsmith novel imagines a sexual affair as anything but a union of people in their teens, twenties, or thirties. Even the “lift” ending, as Pat called it, of The Price of Salt cannot get Therese Belivet and Carol Aird beyond an “excited wave” and across the crowded hotel barroom into each other’s arms.

  By the end of 1989, it was not only love that was missing from Pat’s life. She was having to remind herself to do the other things that used to come naturally to her: “I must put more variation in my life, such as drawing & carpentering,” she wrote in her diary.8 Drawing and carpentering had always been part of her creative day—but her days were no longer so creative. By the end of 1991, she was writing: “Typical of this year that there has been no time for anything like a diary.”9 Nineteen ninety-one was the year Mary Highsmith died.

  The twenty-third of May 1992 was “[a]nother non-workday (2nd) as I re-think my book Small g. It’s an interesting plot.” Small g (1995), the posthumously published novel that was another kind of exception, allows a forty-five-year-old man (an obvious stand-in for the aging Pat) to have limitless sexual connections with teenage boys as well as a possible affair with a thirty-eight-year-old married policeman. But after this short entry there is no more about Small g in Pat’s diary, just the constant brain chatter of her responsibilities, her “current problem[s]”: “3 legal things—my will, my house—have to be arranged, lest I die in my sleep with unfinished matter still unfinished…. I tell myself I do ever better keeping the questions, the unresolved at bay, while I summon the creative part of my brain. Would it were so.”10

  Pat was ill (see “The Cake That Was Shaped Like a Coffin, Parts 3, 5, 6, and 7”), she was aging fast, and “the creative part of her brain” was caught up in a very uncreative conversation with the details of sustaining her busy career. The “success” she yearned for had overtaken the solid daily pleasures of making art. And love was no longer the subject of her conversations with herself.

  By the time Pat had moved herself to Switzerland, she scarcely resembled the sexual adventurer she had been in youth or the improbable domestic partner she tried to be in middle age. Years of alcoholism, inadequate nourishment, and emotional turmoil had eroded much that would have been recognizable about her to her early companions. (The stomach is now understood by gastroneurologists to be a “second brain”—it uses some of the same neurotransmitters as the “first brain” and has its own controlling “enteric nervous system”—and Pat’s stomach had been badly unsettled for decades.)11 Pat’s neighbor Vivien says that she “loved sharing books with [Pat]. We exchanged books all the time and I valued her opinion.”12 But it was not Pat’s books they exchanged, nor was it Pat’s writing they spoke about directly. It was always someone else’s.

  In a way, in Switzerland, Pat had become someone else. Many of her least attractive qualities were intensified in the high-security cell of her Swiss solitudes. Abdication from a love life and long separation from her mother—first by distance, then by the deliberate tamping down of her emotions, and then by Mary’s death on 12 March 1991—finished the job. When Pat wasn’t vilifying Mary in letters (and even when she was), she was continuing to make anxious enquiries about the “restraining chair” to which Mary was tied in her nursing home, about Mary’s behavior in the halls, her fits of cursing, her state of mind. In her own way, Pat stayed attached to this central piece of furniture in her Romance Room, but the boiling hatred and burning love that had characterized their relations were things of the past. So, too, was Pat’s best work.

  Although she was surrounded by helpful neighbors in Switzerland and backed by a publisher most American writers could only dream about, Pat’s separation from the kind of people who knew her history—the kind of people who had shared her history—was almost complete. Alone in a crowd of concerned Swiss friends with whom she could never discuss her personal life, Pat Highsmith presents a painful picture of emotional isolation. She had, in the most reduced sense of the word, made herself peerless.

  Without the pleasures and pains of her love affairs with women—not to mention the absence of the central drama of her relationship with her mother—Pat had nothing to push against except her own psychological borders, which continued to harden in self-defense. Never one to move towards people in the first place (Pat is often characterized as “taking a step back” when meeting anyone, although her cousins say she never shrank from kissing them, and several living lovers attest to the warmth of her physical demonstrations), she avoided physical contact with people in Switzerland, as she had only sometimes done in Moncourt. Bert Diener and Julia Diener-Diethelm, her attentive next-door neighbors in Tegna, say they had to be careful not to offer their hands to her when they saw her.13

  Although Pat claimed she preferred to lead a “boring life,” her friend Kingsley described just how “boring” Pat herself had become in her last few years in Switzerland and how “disloyal,” she, Kingsley, felt to be thinking such a thing about her oldest friend.14

  If Pat could do without the literary approval of friends, she needed and wanted praise from established sources. She was so anxious about an article about her that was to appear in The New York Times in June of 1988 that a young friend working at the Times sneaked out an advance copy to her in Switzerland. But Pat wrote to Kingsley that she hadn’t “the guts to face it.”15

  Further evidence of how much her work’s reception meant to her is in Marion Aboudaram’s account of Pat’s terrible distress after a party at Mary McCarthy’s apartment on the rue de Rennes in Paris. McCarthy, queen of American expatriate literary society in Paris, accidentally let Pat know that she had never heard of Pat’s adored Tom Ripley—or of his adventures. “Is he a pop singer?” McCarthy inquired innocently of Pat. “Pat,” says Marion Aboudaram, “was very hurt and humiliated. And when she came home [to my apartment] she was absolutely drunk. She banged her head on the wall like mad. I had to give her warm milk with bread inside it and still she banged and banged and banged her head. She had a great complex about Mary McCarthy.”16

  In 1953, Pat had written to Kingsley about Mary McCarthy: “In a coolly intellectual way, I like her, and in her way, she is unrivaled.”17 For years, while she was living in France, Pat kept up a correspondence with Mary McCarthy, seeing McCarthy and her fourth husband, James, more frequently than she ever admitted. As usual, it was Pat who initiated the correspondence, writing to McCarthy in the fall of 1972 from Moncourt to remind her that they’d met at Rosalind Constable’s years ago, that she hoped they could meet “again,” and that if McCarthy didn’t “like the company of other writers, I understand.”18

  The correspondence—about twenty letters from each woman—is marked on McCarthy’s side by unfailing graciousness and on Pat’s by a certain professional truckling, by polite requests for information, and by long rants about what was becoming her obsession with the taxes levied on Americans living abroad. Pat tried to interest McCarthy in joining tax pressure groups (McCarthy was already far more politically engaged than Pat, writing in Paris in favor of the work of the radical lesbian feminist novelist Monique Wittig and supporting many international causes; and, unlike Pat, McCarthy did her own taxes); and Pat brought Ellen Hill to meet her. McCarthy had worked with Ellen’s best friend, Lily Marx, Karl Marx’s niece.

  Mary McCarthy and Pat wrote to each other about Janet Flanner’s memorial service in Paris; McCarthy recommended her new French agent, Mary Kling, to Pat19 (Pat, in one of her agent-changing fits in the 1970s, had already met with Kling, who gave Pat the impression that she was “swamped with clients”);20 and then she t
ried to bring Pat together with the other person whose friendship they shared, Ernst Hauser, the journalist Pat had met on her boat trip to Texas when she was seventeen. But when Pat moved to Switzerland, the correspondence with Mary McCarthy thinned, then petered out in 1984.

  There is nothing in Pat’s letters to McCarthy to indicate anything but polite pleasure in her company (“Really, your apartment was an oasis—of civilisation, after the Salon du Livre”) and professional interest in her work (“I thought your article on the novel excellent, in NY Review of Books”).21 And there is nothing to reveal Pat’s terrible despair on that October evening in 1977 when Mary McCarthy, with the best of intentions, had confused the talented Mr. Ripley with a rock ’n’ roll star.22

  A year later, Pat sent Mary McCarthy a copy of Edith’s Diary. McCarthy included something about the novel in an article she was writing for The Observer in London. The Observer editor cut the reference, and McCarthy, very nicely, sent Pat her apologies and a copy of her original article. Pat didn’t keep it. In fact Pat, who continued to archive everything (except her comics work and the cartoons she sent to The New Yorker) kept only one of McCarthy’s letters—so perhaps Marion Aboudaram was right about Pat’s “Mary McCarthy complex.”23

  Marion and Pat never discussed serious subjects, and “certainly,” says Marion, they never discussed books or authors. “She never told me what she thought about my two novels; we never had literary conversations; she never discussed any writer.

  “I think I was very good company for her. But there was no poetry between us, there was no romance. I had a lot of beautiful girls in my life but Pat was more fascinating than the beauties….

  “I had a kind of paranoia after her, I wanted to kill myself. And yet, I have nothing to reproach her with. She was just herself, but I was too sensitive for her. And the effect was terrible. Thank God I got away.”24

  Pat also took a recessive literary line with her very last girlfriend, Monique Buffet. Monique was a shy, blond, attractive twenty-seven-year-old French teacher of English who arrived at Pat’s house in Moncourt in the summer of 1977, in the company of one of Pat’s English fans, Val. Although Pat’s relations with Tabea Blumenschein make a more dramatic story (that of an aging writer reenacting a lesbian version of The Blue Angel), and Marion Aboudaram’s accounts of Pat are more revealing, it was in this last love affair with Monique Buffet that Pat finally allowed herself to enjoy the comforts of easy loving.

  Of her first visit to Pat, Monique says: “I was petrified…. I didn’t say one word. Pat was doing most of the speaking. She kept getting up and going to the kitchen and coming back. After that I knew why (to drink alcohol), but I didn’t know then…. And she went in the kitchen and came back, went in the kitchen, came back, it was a bit of a tennis match.

  “…The first time, I don’t even know if Pat saw me, but the second time [we saw Pat, in July of 1978] she was very attentive to me and left Val alone…and when we left, she asked for my address and phone number and the day after, she called me.

  “And the day after that, I had a letter. That’s how it started. Pat wanted to go to Paris and to the Katmandou…. Pat said, ‘Why not give the old clip joint [Katmandou] another try.’”25

  In the 1970s, Katmandou was Paris’s legendary, luxury lesbian bar, operating on the rue du Vieux Columbier near the Place St-Sulpice. It was run, improbably, by a former teacher of high school history from the provinces: the very theatrical Elula Perrin, who was assisted by her business partner and ex-lover, a levelheaded Corsican named Aimée. One of the coat-check girls at Katmandou was more or less for sale; a single drink cost an astounding ninety francs (the price of dinner in a good restaurant in Paris in the 1970s); the bar and the dance floor were frequented by well-known female movie stars, top models, and successful women writers; and the “royal seats” up front were often filled with the Arab princesses who made Katmandou a necessary stop on their way back to the Emirates.*

  Pat and Monique arrived at Katmandou at about one o’clock on the morning of 19 August—this was early evening for a lesbian bar in Paris—and Maryem, the regular doorperson, stopped them at the threshold, saying that the downstairs salle was packed; there were no places left. They thanked her, told each other, “Never mind, we’ll go to Le Jeu de Dames” (a lesbian bar on the rue Montpensier), and turned away into the street. Suddenly, Elula Perrin, Katmandou’s patronne, came dashing out of the bar, calling loudly out to them in the night: “No no no, WE’VE GOT PLACES!”

  Elula had recognized Pat from all the way at the back of her long, narrow establishment—celebrity spotting was one of Elula’s talents—and she personally conducted Pat and Monique back inside and sat them down right in the middle of the (empty-at-the-early-hour-of-1:00 A.M.) “royale” section.

  About twenty minutes after they’d ordered their first drinks, Elula came over, “all smiles,” and seated herself next to Pat, asking her politely if she was, indeed, who she seemed to be. Pat ignored the question, so Monique replied to it. Pat was using Monique as an interpreter, and Elula’s next remark, “C’est dans ces moments-là que l’on regrette de ne pas avoir toujours avec soi son livre de chevet’” [“It’s in moments like this that one regrets not always having with one one’s favorite book”]—implying that she wished she had one of her favorite Highsmith books with her to be autographed—didn’t go down well. “Eventually, Pat replied by a vague smile and something like: ‘UGH.’” Elula, who had recently published a book herself, was not yet discouraged: “Vous savez que nous sommes presque—à mon humble niveau—devenues collègues.” [“You know that we have almost—at my humble level—become colleagues.”]…And Pat grumbled: “So I’ve heard.”

  Finally Elula gave up, and Pat and Monique went on to Le Jeu de Dames, a far more proletarian establishment.

  “And, THERE [says Monique] it was a completely different Pat (probably a bit drunker too, but not only that). She was all over the place…coming back every 5 or 10 minutes with ‘a new girl for me.’ We ended with about 10 or 15 girls at our table AND SHE PAID THE DRINKS FOR ALL OF THEM…. She was recognized too, but she was having a great time, laughing, joking, and even dancing. At one point, she went up to the DJ’s cabin to ask for ‘slows.’”26

  Shipwrecked by the rupture of her mostly fantasy affair with twenty-five-year-old Tabea Blumenschein in the summer of 1978, Pat recognized in twenty-seven-year-old Monique Buffet a lifeline and grabbed it, determined, as always, to get on with her work. As she had done with Tabea in Berlin, Pat plunged with Monique into the lesbian bar culture in Paris. Her habit of bringing back “girls” to the table echoes Barbara Roett’s description of her behavior in London.

  “Pat was a real innocent with women, the way men can be taken in by a waitress or a starlet…. She used to bring [these girls] round…like Tabea Blumenschein, just so dying to be a starlet…. And then she’d sit like an animal who had brought its prey back to Ba and me and laid it at our feet.”27

  Monique ended by “rescuing” the fifty-seven-year-old Pat from her long dry spell (long for Pat; it was two or three months) of being unable to work on her “4th Ripley novel,” The Boy Who Followed Ripley. Pat’s coup de foudre for Tabea Blumenschein in Berlin had opened up a grand canyon of need, and the kindness and calmness and casualness of Monique Buffet helped hoist Pat back up over the edge of the abyss. In July of 1978, two weeks before she began to see Monique, Pat was still writing to Ellen Hill to emphasize how “[m]y depression continues.” Pat wrote this phrase twice after explaining how Edith’s Diary had been optioned by a German film company, how Simone de Beauvoir wanted to meet her, how a Russian actress wanted to do a film on “my way of looking at life,” etc. etc.28

  Nothing made any difference to Pat’s blasted sensibilities until the relationship with Monique began to take hold and stabilize her work. Pat’s gratitude to Monique for this lifesaving service was repeated like a mantra in almost every letter she wrote, along with her fears that the young woman would cease to be
“kind” (i.e., sexual) with her.

  Pat’s vulnerability in the initial flare of this correspondence was seconded only by her ruthlessness. She was still a writer stuck on “p. 56” of a book she desperately wanted to finish. Her feelings for Monique Buffet—like the photos of Monique which she fetishized, blowing them up, commenting on their detail, and pinning them to her desk—were arranged in ways to stimulate her imagination.

  “You are a girl who allows me to dream,” Pat wrote to Monique. She meant, of course, that Monique was a girl who allowed her to write. And the rather practical fantasies she wove around this kind young blond woman—already in the first blush of a relationship with another woman and still trying to handle the onslaught that was Pat Highsmith with delicacy and courtesy—allowed her to continue her work.

  That work—the manuscript of The Boy Who Followed Ripley—shows ample evidence of Pat’s terrible state of mind while she was writing it. It is scribbled over, crossed out, interleaved, and stuffed with substitute pages like no other manuscript in her archives. The completed novel forks off in several directions, betraying the anxiety of a writer who knows she has made a false start—several false starts, in fact—and can’t find her way home.29

  Perhaps some of Pat’s confusion rested on the fact that she had two muses for young Frank Pierson, the boy who follows Tom Ripley. She began by bringing Frank to many of the milieux she’d visited with Tabea Blumenschein in Berlin, meanwhile giving Ripley her Socratic (and other) feelings about Tabea and, later on, about Monique. But she ended by bestowing on Frank some of Monique’s moral scruples and at least one of her tastes—a Lou Reed record that Monique had loaned to Pat.