The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  Pat and Arthur Koestler in Alpnach on her visit to the Koestlers in the summer of 1969. Pat and Koestler had an interesting history. (Swiss Literary Archives)

  Pat, wearing her trademark Levi 501 jeans, in Montmachoux in 1973 with George and Agnes Baryliski, the gleaners to whom she dedicated Ripley Under Ground. (Swiss Literary Archives)

  Pat at her rolltop desk in Moncourt with some creative aids: a cigarette, an ashtray, and her coffee-colored 1956 Olympia Deluxe typewriter.

  Novelist Marion Aboudaram, Pat’s lover in France from 1975 to 1978. Pat made suggestions for Marion’s translation of Rita May Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, then left her for Tabea Blumenschein. (Collection Marion Aboudaram)

  Tabea Blumenschein disguised as a girl. (Swiss Literary Archives)

  Tabea Blumenschein disguised as a boy. (Swiss Literary Archives)

  Pat and Monique Buffet in Pat’s garden in Moncourt. Monique “saved” Pat’s novel The Boy Who Followed Ripley; it is dedicated to her. (Collection Monique Buffet)

  Pat, Monique Buffet, and Frédérique Chambrelent at a fashion event at Maxim’s organized by Chambrelent. At Pat’s request, Monique is pretending to be her agent. (Collection Monique Buffet)

  Pat happily tranquillized by Francis Wyndham’s cat. Wyndham’s 1963 article in New Statesman gave her work its first and best introduction in England. (Collection Francis Wyndham)

  Pat in 1980 at Diogenes Verlag in Zurich, conferring with Daniel Keel (center) and Gerd Haffmans. (Collection Diogenes Archive)

  Ruda Brandel Dauphin introduces Douglas Fairbanks Jr. to Pat at the American Film Festival in Deauville in September 1987. Pat spent two evenings there draped over the piano in the bar of the Normandy Hotel, singing Cole Porter songs. (Collection Ruda Brandel Dauphin)

  Pat—who gleefully suggested this ominous pose in front of her sharpened instruments—photographed by Richard Schroeder in Tegna, Switzerland, in 1990. (Collection Richard Schroeder)

  Pat and her friend Jeanne Moreau, on Pat’s last publicity trip to Paris in 1994. (Swiss Literary Archives)

  The Fortress of Solitude. Pat standing guard over the back side of Casa Highsmith/ Highsmith Haus in Tegna, during its construction in 1988–89. (Swiss Literary Archives)

  As late as the fall of 1992—Pat’s brief sexual relationship with Monique Buffet had been over for eleven or twelve years by then—Pat was still writing to Monique self-deprecatingly about her work. Concerning Ripley Under Water, she cautioned: “Never mind my new book, the Ripley. It is all right, but nothing great.”1 The fact that Pat was correct in her appraisal is almost beside the point.

  Francis Wyndham, who remarks that almost every story he tells about Pat “has a cat in it,” recalled one story that didn’t. He had said to Pat about a book of hers, “‘That belongs on my Highsmith shelf.’ And she was very annoyed: ‘I haven’t GOT a shelf,’ she said. She didn’t like me treating her with that sort of reverence, putting all her books together. She sent out a signal: treat me as an artisan.”2

  Pat’s intellectual uncertainties were such that she liked to cite “authorities” to back up her assertions, and for much of the rest of her life the irrefutable Ellen Hill was one of her “most referenced authorities.”3 Joan Juliet Buck noted in a 1977 article for The Observer Magazine that Pat was constantly quoting Hill’s opinions to give substance to her own.4 Pat’s ambivalences required an anchor to steady them—and Ellen’s anchor was made of the heaviest metal.

  To be sure, Ellen’s overbearing behavior at dinner parties, restaurants, and private homes was matched—overmatched, in fact—by Pat’s own comportment at the table. On a too-quiet evening, Pat was perfectly capable of leaning over a candle to set her hair on fire5 or of hauling a clutch of snails out of her handbag and encouraging them to “leave silvery trails on the mahogany.”6 The smell of burning hair and the sight of snails were just the things to put her tablemates off their food.

  Caroline Besterman remembers an evening when she and Pat were both guests at a gracious dinner party given by a married couple, one of whom was Jewish. During a lull in the conversation, Pat looked up from her plate and suddenly erupted with a line from the awful internal drama she had been rehearsing: “‘I’m sick of the Jews!’

  “It just came straight out of her mouth,” said Caroline Besterman, “and there was a silence, and then people went on talking as though it never happened. They ignored it.”7

  Christa Maerker, who felt “protective and motherly of Pat,” recalls a painful luncheon in the 1980s at the Locarno Film Festival when Pat “attacked a cigarette machine in a restaurant…. She jumped up from the table, very aggressively, and went over to it and started hitting it and kicking it with her feet and yelling. And everybody was highly embarrassed. There was music downstairs in a disco and she thought the cigarette machine was making it; she thought it was a jukebox.”8

  And Philip Thompson, Alex Szogyi’s longtime partner, had a disquieting experience at a dinner party in Pat’s house in Moncourt in the 1970s. Alex and Philip were visiting Pat in France, and Pat, unusually, was cooking a real home-style Southern meal for them with chicken and biscuits, gravy, and mashed potatoes. She hated cooking, said Alex, and when she did cook it was “sort of”—he paused politely to find the right term; he was a food writer—“Texan.” The other guests at Pat’s house, all women, were speaking French with Alex. Philip, who didn’t speak French and who, anyway, had a rather tetchy relationship with Pat, was listening uncomfortably to the conversation, trying to catch a word here and there. Finally, Philip went into the kitchen and said to Pat, “Gee I wish they would speak English, I can’t understand a word.” And Pat turned on him immediately. “What a pity,” she retorted coldly.

  That, Philip thought, was when the trouble began.

  Also present at the dinner party was a “charming young journalist from London”—Madeleine Harmsworth—and Philip and Madeleine began talking and getting along wonderfully, and Pat didn’t much like that, Philip felt. At some point during the evening, Pat’s “Confederate” swords were taken down from the wall, and Philip and Pat posed for a picture “en garde,” which, Philip thought, was quite symbolic of their relationship.

  At the end of the evening, and after eating the dinner Pat had prepared, Philip Thompson became violently ill. He was the only person at the dinner party who did so, and it’s a measure of the uneasy possibilities Pat’s character could evoke for her friends that it crossed the minds of both Alex and Philip that Pat might have had something to do with Philip’s illness, that she might have “poisoned” Philip: put something in the food on his plate to make him sick. Alex, enormously sympathetic to Pat in every respect and unreservedly complimentary of her work, said he was worried about this. Alex and Philip laughed about it, but ever after they continued to refer to that dinner party in Moncourt as “the night of the poisoning.”9

  While Pat’s social depredations continued to be suppressed by embarrassed friends or ignored by shell-shocked hosts, Ellen Hill’s rudenesses were remarked upon and tallied up: mostly by Pat’s friends and principally in the context of her bullying relationship with Pat.

  But what Pat’s friends always failed to understand was that Ellen was providing Pat with the painful contradictions she craved: sexual admiration (when Ellen learned that Kingsley Skattebol was not a lesbian and had never had an affair with Pat, she said to Kingsley: “Too bad, she was a wonderful lover”);10 sexual rejection (in Mallorca, six months into their relationship, Pat and Ellen were sleeping in separate beds and avoiding kissing each other good night); and the psychological domination Pat had identified as so essential to her psyche at the age of twenty: “I cannot imagine a domination without love, nor a love without domination.”11

  Of course, Ellen’s behavior infuriated Pat. Humiliation as a technique has a very short shelf life even in the best circumstances (i.e., when it is welcomed by its object). Granted that Pat was excited by the idea of being humiliated, she could have done with a great deal less of
it from Ellen Blumenthal Hill.

  Monique Buffet, watching Pat and Ellen together in Moncourt twenty-five years after their affair was over, found their relationship hilarious. “The sight of Pat and Ellen together, Pat complaining about Ellen all the time, was enough to make you die laughing. Pat was like a little sullen girl with Ellen but she did what Ellen said. Ellen was very nice to me, she was funny, a great woman, but the way she ordered Pat around was extraordinary.”12

  Five years after that, Bettina Berch saw Pat and Ellen together in Aurigeno in a more subdued dialogue. “They were pretending that they were very neutral acquaintances, like this is my best friend here, or something. You could tell in some sort of subliminal way that they had been lovers; every now and then there was the little nickname—Ellen called Pat ‘Teacup’…and the formality slipped.”13

  “Teacup” suggests that Ellen understood something about Pat’s fragilities. But Pat’s jabs at Ellen’s nagging and her compulsive cataloguing of Ellen’s faults (there are long, long lists devoted to Ellen Hill’s Serious Flaws in Pat’s notebooks) continued for decades after the end of their affair. In the end, Pat’s friendship with Ellen Hill provided her with the kind of emotional contact she could best sustain with an ex-lover: intense irritation.

  Only one of Pat’s short relationships in Europe had anything like the kind of creative consequences that Ellen Hill’s rough loving had provided. Pat and “Jacqui” had an intermittent affair in Montmachoux and Paris in 1968 and 1969. It was punctuated by some exciting physical fights brought on by Pat’s increasingly obsessional behavior: “I pulled down a very tall curtain of the kitchen [in Jacqui’s apartment], because it was utterly, unspeakably filthy, stuck it in the tub and washed it. Jacky was so furious, she pulled my hair and slapped my face.”14

  Pat liked to think of herself as singed by Jacqui (or Jacky, as the woman herself sometimes liked to spell her name), and noted that Jacqui had cancelled seven dates with her in a row—always a shortcut to Pat’s heart. “Jacky is a fire I walk into,”15 she wrote to Alex Szogyi proudly. And Pat told Alex that she had borrowed Jacqui’s “foul tempers (but nothing else) for Heloise [Plisson],” Tom Ripley’s richly inattentive, spoiled French wife.16 But Pat was being coy; she would borrow quite a bit more from Jacqui than her “foul tempers” for Heloise. She imported Jacqui’s désinvolture, her blond beauty (the “gold” lights in Heloise’s hair remind Tom of money), her love of long absences on cruise ships with female companions, and her amorality. But Pat gave Tom and Heloise a much cooler relationship than she’d had with Jacqui, a relationship that, despite its improbability, would last.

  After the shock of her parting with Tabea Blumenschein in 1978, Pat continued, with long intermittences on Tabea’s part, to correspond with Tabea, whose chaotic further adventures are told in a number of the charmingly illustrated letters she sent to Pat. (Pat had most of Tabea’s letters thrown into the garbage when she was preparing her archives for eternity.) In her cahiers, uncharitably, Pat went on criticizing Tabea’s housing and money troubles; “failure” was still a sin for Pat, and Tabea hadn’t fulfilled her expectations of becoming a movie star or a famous costume designer.

  Early in 1988 Pat started to think about writing a story called “The Suicide of the Moth”—“Further adventures of T.B. whose balloon ruptured somehow around 1984. Prior to then she was going upward…. ‘Was she too mighty?’ Yes, sure of herself, of the red carpet, of admirers, lovers. When she wrote me after 2½ yr. lapse, she had lost apartment. Was living on Gov’t. charity, alone, jobless.”17

  Still, Pat continued to pull out her accordion-pleated billfold of photos of Tabea and Monique Buffet and to flash it around to friends, like an aging Edwardian gentleman showing naughty postcards of his chorus girl favorites. Pat and Tabea didn’t meet, but Pat saw Monique for the last time when she went to Paris on book business in 1988. Pat was staying at the Hotel Edward VII, and she and Monique went out to dinner at a nearby Chinese restaurant.

  No doubt it was the same Chinese restaurant at which Pat, on future visits, dined with the French writer and literary critic Josyane Savigneau and, later still, met with her new accountant, Marylin Scowden. Pat never did like to change venues once she’d gotten used to them. The night they met, Pat proudly showed off the plans for her “Casa Highsmith,” her last house in Tegna, to Monique—something she did with everyone now. And she claimed responsibility for the house’s double-pronged design, too, never mentioning that she had an architect, Tobias Amman.

  At dinner that night was the first time Monique had ever seen Pat obviously drunk. It was also the first time, says Monique, that she had ever felt “ashamed” of her. Pat was “making a fool of herself” in the restaurant, behaving badly to the waitstaff, but not to Monique. Pat asked Monique to spend the night. Monique refused. They continued to write to each other. And Monique, like Buffie Johnson and so many of the old friends Pat was inviting to Switzerland, found excuses for not visiting Pat in her forbidding new house.18 The day after it happened, Monique heard the news of Pat’s death, casually, between courses and cigarettes, in a bistro in the Boulevard St-Germain. She was dumbstruck.

  In early 1989, Pat had written to Kingsley: “I am sick of [Ellen’s] scolding and all around domineering, and have bid a polite adieu.”19 But even at the very end of their friendship, Ellen Hill’s authority was still looming large enough for Pat to have a “vivid dream in which Ellen Hill had been elected president of the United States.” Ellen’s dream-elevation to America’s highest office produced in Pat “an atmosphere of hope and change,” and her immediate response to it was typical—and it was funny, too, given her auslander prejudices, although Pat herself didn’t see the humor in it. But when Pat woke up with the image of the newly presidential Ellen in her head, her most pressing thought was that Ellen Hill must be “the first person not born in USA to be elected President.”20

  In Pat’s short story “Two Disagreeable Pigeons” (published posthumously in 2002, but outlined in 1973 after she’d settled into Moncourt), an eponymous pair of London pigeons, Maud and Claud21—observed humorously and maliciously—are “simply mates, for two or three years now, loyal in a way, though at the bottom of their little pigeon hearts they detested each other.” Their regular Highsmith-colored day features persistent bird battering by vicious humans and the pigeons’ own coordinated attack on a baby in a pram. Maud and Claud peck the infant’s eye out and flutter away unrepentant and unpunished.

  At day’s end, Maud, the female pigeon, remembers how her mate Claud snatched half a peanut out of her beak and cheated her out of a meal, and how “she couldn’t count on him for anything, not even to guard the nest where there was an egg.” She wonders: “Why did she live with him? Why did she, or they, live here… Why?” And then she settles down to sleep next to Claud in their nook in a wall in Trafalgar Square, “exhausted by her discontent.”22

  Aside from Tom Ripley’s unconvincing marriage to Heloise Plisson (Heloise is often absent enjoying herself on a cruise ship with a female friend; Tom is usually out having flirtatious fun with the boys); or Edgar and Hortense, the “truly in love” snails of Deep Water whose lengthy copulations are observed so tenderly by the psychopath-in-residence, Vic Van Allen; or Jack and Natalia Sutherland, the young couple in Found in the Street whose marriage is frankly enlivened by their mutual attraction to the same underage girl, the history of Maud and Claud, the two disagreeable pigeons united by hard living and even harder feelings, is the sole portrait of lasting conjugal relations to appear in any Highsmith fiction. And it’s an accurate portrait, too, of the only union imaginable in Highsmith Country: bleak, untrusting, and undependable.

  We might say, as Richard Ellmann said of Oscar Wilde, that Highsmith’s fiction is a record of her feelings of love in that it excludes them so thoroughly. But it would be closer to the experience of Highsmith Country to acknowledge that Pat’s work records her feelings of love by reversing them as faithfully as she did in life. Love, like no oth
er emotion, brought out her ambivalence—and with it the awful rage that glares out so painfully from some of her later photographs.

  Many of the murders in her novels can usefully be thought of as counters on her abacus of love. They substitute for love, they are instigated by love, they replace or react or add up to love. The murderers may change from draft to draft in her manuscripts, and so may the victims, but murder itself continues to be the categorical imperative, the one act which must take place in her work. And murder, in a Highsmith fiction, is almost always love’s partner—while love itself is usually murder’s victim. Only in The Price of Salt—a novel where the murder is confined to the metaphors—is love allowed to live on.

  Pat’s own defeats in the Love Wars were mostly self-defeats. Her doubts about her gender couldn’t have helped. At the age of twelve she was already assessing herself: “I am a walking perpetual example of…a boy in a girl’s body.”23 In her twenties, she was haunted by what a New Orleans fortune-teller had said to Mother Mary: “You have a boy,” the fortune-teller began and then stopped. “No, you have a girl—but she was meant to be a boy.” After Elizabeth Lyne had teased Pat about having her period, Pat wrote in her diary: “I can’t help my other hormones, can I?”24 And, having used the word “woman” about herself in a letter to her friend Ronald Blythe, she quickly corrected herself: “if I can call myself that.”25

  Although she took all the women whose names appear in the crowded diaries of her long, hot summers of 1944 and 1953 as lovers, Pat found it impossible to stay with any of them. Nor did she stay with any of the Virginias, the Jeans, the Jeannes, the Joans, the Anns, the Annes, the Ellens, the Katherines, Kathryns, Catherines or Carolines, the Diones, the Sheilas, the Helens, the Marions, the Lynns, the Moniques, the Marias, the Mickeys, the Billies or the Marys, et al., who had, at one time or another, been so achingly available to her.