The Talented Miss Highsmith
Page 61
But even if she was unable to sustain her long relationship with Ellen Hill (so good for her work, so bad for her living) or her equally long relationship with the married Caroline Besterman (the last “adult love” of her life), Pat did manage to keep the resentments and furies of these failed love affairs alive and well for decades, as hot and bright—almost—as love itself.
• 31 •
The Real Romance of Objects
Part 1
Possessions are nine tenths of my life.
—Patricia Highsmith, 1945
Finally she said, “Do you want to see my cellar?” And there were three of them. One for cheese—there was no cheese. And one for jambon—no jambon. It was a Highsmith cellar—probably cadavres.
—Josyane Savigneau, in conversation with the author
And then she wanted me to see her cellar which went on forever. It was a Hitchcock cellar.
“Can’t we go upstairs?” I said.
—Daniel Keel, in conversation with the author
At midnight she said, “Come on, let’s go down to the cellar”…and it was terrifying. And you knew if you screamed, no one in the world would hear you, just the rats.
—Christa Maerker, in conversation with the author
In the three levels of dark cellars under her high, narrow stone house in Aurigeno, the light-deprived seventeenth-century Swiss village to which she moved after the French fiscal authority, the douane, raided her house in Moncourt, France, Pat Highsmith kept, to borrow a phrase from one of her short stories, “nothing that meets the eye.”
Strictly speaking, however, there were a few objects tucked away in the first of her cellars, objects no Highsmith house was ever without: “a long trestle table…brown paper and string…saws, nails, screwdrivers, chisels, sandpaper,” as well as hammers, rasps and awls1—the whole panoply of pointed, edged, angled, blunted, and sharpened instruments Pat used for the precise brutalities of her furniture making. Since 1933, when she was twelve and the only girl in the woodworking class at her junior high school in Fort Worth, Pat had been ripping raw materials apart and putting them back together again to make something new. It wasn’t, she thought, all that different from what she did every day at her desk.
But in the penumbral cellars beneath her workroom, just where you might expect a writer obsessed by secrets, lies, and the rusty hinges of guilt to hide some of her best evidence, Pat stored nothing that belonged to her. Only a “neighbor’s bicycle” (spotted by a sharp-eyed French journalist), leaned against a cellar wall, declining in the Stygian gloom.2
Still, like a magician who makes a great show of pulling something out of a top hat and then suddenly displays the hat’s empty crown, Pat liked the drama of flaunting these hollow, shadowy, scary spaces before her guests. Many a nervous visitor followed her past her worktable and down into the dark.
Was there, Highsmith’s guests couldn’t help but wonder, something those bare spaces might be concealing? Something like the corpse of the American art collector Tom Ripley had so casually dispatched (with a bottle of vintage Bordeaux) in his own black cellar at Belle Ombre in Ripley Under Ground?3 Pat must have known how uneasy she was making her visitors—and still she continued to lead them down those cellar stairs and into the gloom.
Cellars, anyway, were never really where she stored the things in which she invested her feelings. She preferred to keep her meaningful objects under her eyes or close at hand, hiding their significance (as she hid so much else) in plain sight.
“I am superstitious about the influence of mental attitudes,” Pat wrote. “Therefore I am superstitious about the objects…with which I surround myself which in turn create my mental attitude. It is, in terms of actions, if one acts upon it, a really strong superstition.” 4
And she was very particular about the placement of her things. Kingsley, who was one of Pat’s major sources of mailed objects and materials for nearly half a century,5 recalls that “Pat was a bit like…do you remember a play called Craig’s Wife?* About a woman who, if you removed a matchbox an inch away from where she had left it, she would go berserk. Pat had a kind of fetish about placing things. When she couldn’t locate something, she’d get quite upset. I moved an ashtray once on her table in Tegna, and she very rapidly swept it back into its proper position. She didn’t say anything, but she glowered.”6
Something similar happened shortly after Pat moved to Bucks County with Marijane Meaker—“probably the fall of ’60,” says Meaker. Pat, who had been “complaining [that] her desk was so small,” was soon the recipient of a surprise gift: Marijane’s own large desk, which Pat had “always envied.” Pat “clapped her hands with delight” and then, at dinner “she began to cry. She said it was so sweet of me but she could not give up writing at her small desk. She hadn’t known how to tell me.”7
Meaker wrote about the desk incident to Mary Highsmith (who had her own, well-bevelled reasons for keeping in touch with Pat’s girlfriends), using it “to explain how [Pat] often was mysterious to me…[and making it an] example of the varied signals she sent out.”8
Pat’s behavior with the objects she owned continued to puzzle friends and lovers for decades; her “varied signals” seemed to be part of her own special binary code. Like a transmitting device left behind on the (bi)polar permafrost, she went on emitting contradictory messages for decades. Not until the very end of her life—when she had aged and iced and set herself down in Switzerland, a terrain as unfamiliar to her as real permafrost might have been (but she loved the “order” and “cleanliness” of it)—did she relax what Julian Symons called her “anacondan grip” and “turn loose of” some of her deep psychological divisions. Along with them went the distinctive double-mindedness that had always marked her writing. It was a serious artistic loss.
Josyane Savigneau, the French critic, writer, and eventual editor of Le Monde des livres in Paris, first went to interview Pat in her house in Aurigeno with a photographer early in 1987. Pat, Savigneau noticed, spoke a pure, old-fashioned American, “completely preserved by her exile.” She was “like a cat who might reach out and suddenly scratch,” and she “was terrified we would break something or move something; we were like barbarians to her.” Savigneau, “already paralyzed with respect for her,” was trying to be as delicate as possible with Pat, but “when the photographer started shooting, Pat became terrified; her sense of space was entirely invaded…. ‘Be careful,’ she kept saying.’ Be careful. BE CAREFUL!!’”9
Phyllis Nagy, who met Pat in late 1987 in New York (see “The Cake That Was Shaped Like a Coffin: Part 5”), visited her in the spring of 1989 soon after Pat moved from Aurigeno to Tegna. Phyllis noticed that Pat’s bookcases were filled with all the editions of her own published works and with nothing else. “Not another book by another writer was on display,” says Nagy, and Pat was in no hurry to unpack the rest of her library.10
“Pat,” says Nagy, “was very capricious, easily offended, very touchy about all the things in her house. If you didn’t compliment something she liked, she’d hold it against you.”11 Nagy found this attitude surprisingly “feminine.” Pat stopped corresponding with Nagy for “almost a year” when Phyllis failed to praise some of her paintings (and wrote to Kingsley that “Phyllis is without a doubt the most un-visual person I’ve ever encountered”).12 When they resumed corresponding, Pat was as forthcoming as ever.
Because Pat never strayed far from her own psyche in creating, destroying, or accumulating—“My stories are another form of telling what I wish to do,” she remarked genially to an interviewer (who failed to flee the room, proving he didn’t understand her meaning)13—she invested all her possessions with her long history of emotional advance and violent retreat, and with her deepest spiritual yearnings. With a brutality that cut through her natural reticence, Pat was perfectly capable of taking back certain objects she had given away, especially if she thought she might regret her “loss” later on.
In the heady New York summer of 1941 (Pat
was twenty; the world and the relationship were new), her friend-and-something-more, the talented, well-connected, generous painter Buffie Johnson, “gave me a small green polo belt last night from Paris…. I started to give her my bracelet. I put it on her. But thinking about it…I made her give it back.”14
But this is mild. A livelier attempt at repossession began soon after Stanley Highsmith’s death in 1972, when Pat, newly settled in her Moncourt house, waged a fiercely fought four-year struggle in letters with her mother for custody of the “Hamilton Watch” and “watch chain” which she, Pat, had inexplicably given to Stanley Highsmith at the ages of twelve (watch) and twenty-one (chain). Or perhaps—Pat varied her stories—she was thirteen and twenty-two when she gave these gifts to Stanley.
In lengthy letters to Mary Highsmith, to her cousin, Dan; to her father, Jay B Plangman; and to Nini Wills, a friend of Mary, about the Hamilton watch and chain—objects whose long absence from Pat’s sight had endowed with vibrant emotional drama—Pat wrote fetishistically graphic descriptions of both objects. She detailed their every scratch, curve, and surface, and her letters show how deeply and poignantly she invested her “earned objects” with her history and her desire, her sorrow and her rage, and her brokenhearted and perpetual sense of loss.
In an attempt to win Mary’s friend Nini Wills over to her side of the Hamilton watch story—Pat still loved to tattle on Mary—Pat allowed herself to exercise a few of the compulsions with which she usually responded to any disturbance: numeration, classification, and substitution. Writing to Nini Wills on 9 March 1972, Pat mixed up her money and her memory, put a number to every single thing she did, and—unsuccessfully—tried to replace her mother with a pocket watch:
And if you will forgive me for saying so, I am sorry to part with the watch and chain, which I chose for aesthetic value…when I had more taste than money…. I cut the grass for my Grampa Daniel Coates 24 times at 50 cents a whack, and so I arrived at $12.00 which bought the watch back in 1933. The watch cheered me up during a miserable year, when I missed my mother…. I had thought to remain with my mother, aged 12, when we had just come from New York to Texas, to be free, alone, happy with my Grandmother Coates…. I was in a very depressed state, but the watch was something to work for, something to achieve….
…I think even [my mother] has a dim idea of what spiritual sustenance this small object of beauty gave me, during the saddest year of my life.15
Nini Wills said to Mary Highsmith about the letter: “My God, no wonder she has that grim tight mouth in that newspaper picture. Boy, she went back to the embryo and scraped the womb, wouldn’t you say?”16
And Pat—fifteen years later, still brooding over the Hamilton watch but now hoping to turn the incident into a fiction about “the sick and cruel types who prey upon the elderly and the feeble-minded”—decided on no evidence at all that it was “[l]ikely [Nini Wills’s] son got the famous pocket watch.”17
Countering Pat’s watch-and-chain sallies from France with a few forays of her own from Texas, Mary Highsmith, whose sense-memory for objects was exactly like her daughter’s, began to agitate for the return of Pat’s “teething ring.” Pat fended her mother off with a storm of logic, a tidal wave of accusation, and a Baedeker of the teething ring’s travels since Mary had deposited it in London with Pat’s ex-lover Kathryn Hamill Cohen “in Sept. 1959.”18 And then Pat added another skirmish to the watch-and-chain war: now, she wrote, she also wanted “Stanley’s cufflinks,” which had been “promised” to her. (This was a splendid but entirely futile diversionary tactic on Pat’s part.)
Mary eventually won the watch-and-chain battle—that is, she didn’t give them back to Pat—but it is difficult to say whether she prevailed through native cunning or whether the matter had merely slipped her failing mind.
Far more than cuff links, watches, and teething rings were involved in this last struggle for love and possession between the two Highsmith women. Like the emotional sleight-of-hand artists and serious drama queens they both were, Pat and Mary managed to substitute small items for large emotions, and to replace their disappointed love for each other with titanic quarrels. They went right on doing so for the rest of their lives.
During the same school year in which Pat acquired the Hamilton watch (1933–34)—the year Mary had gone back to Stanley in New York and Pat took up working with wood and sharpened instruments—the twelve-year-old Pat made another purchase. Somewhere in Fort Worth, Pat said, she picked up two “Confederate swords” (that’s how she always described them)—and they are still in her archives: large, heavy, and absolutely lethal looking. The swords were an unusual acquisition for a twelve-year-old girl—but Pat was an unusual twelve-year-old.
Pat’s swords might have been brandished south of the Mason-Dixon Line during the Civil War (still enshrined in memory by the Coates family who lost sons, brothers, and slaves to it), but they were certainly forged in Massachusetts: in Chicopee and Springfield, according to the inscriptions on their blades. Pat kept them in the classic crossed, duelling position on the walls of every house she ever occupied. It was not until the end of Mary Highsmith’s life—but without mentioning Mary’s decline and death as a motive—that Pat at last uncrossed her swords and displayed them, aligned and pointing in the same direction, on her wall in Tegna.
Kingsley Skattebol remembers that Pat told her more than one story about how she got the swords. One time, Pat said they belonged to one of her “Confederate uncles” another time, she said she bought them in an antiques store. And on a trip to New Hampshire with Mary and Stanley in July of 1937 when she was sixteen, a trip on which she managed to lose the “garnet ring which I chose & paid for myself” (Pat always had bad luck with rings), Pat wrote in her high school journal: “I buy second sword.”19
No matter where Pat got her swords (or what stories she told about how she got them), she preferred to believe that she brought them back with her as souvenirs of her miserable year in Texas in 1933–34—the year she never forgave her mother for. Reading between her lines, Pat returned to her parents’ cobbled-together marriage and cramped apartment in New York as double-minded as she was ever to be, with an offering of peace in one hand (the Hamilton watch for Stanley) and an instrument of war (a duelling sword or two) in the other. The other thing she brought with her to New York was less tangible, although her feeling for it lasted just as long as her feeling for her swords. It was her grandmother’s good-bye kiss “wet on my upper lip, and I let it stay, dreading the inevitable time when the wind would dry it, and the coolness would be gone.”20
If Pat’s arrival in New York from Texas in 1934 had occurred six or seven decades later, the unhappy preteen might have found herself enshrined in the collective family nightmare that is American social history. The profile Pat created of herself as a miserable child in Fort Worth in 1933–34 is very close to the tabloid image of terror that haunts America now: an adolescent misfit, depressed, enraged, seething with images of destruction, and armed to the teeth. But Pat was a born writer; she waited. And so she was able to take her most efficient revenge in fiction.
In 1980, as a token of her warm feelings for her editor at Calmann-Lévy in Paris, Alain Oulman, Pat gave him a small table she had made out of wood. M. Oulman, nephew of Calmann-Lévy founder Robert Calmann and the “Pitou” of his long, affectionate correspondence with Pat, was the person who had done more for Pat’s reputation, career, and domestic comfort in France than anyone else. He dealt with the notoriously slow French telephone company for her, he helped her with her more difficult houseguests, and he counselled her through her long, “tough” negotiations with Diogenes for world representation.21 And it was Alain Oulman who introduced Pat to her neighbor in the country, Colette de Jouvenel, daughter of Colette. De Jouvenel appeared with her Siamese cat at a dinner party to which Oulman had invited Pat, she became Pat’s friendly neighbor and warm correspondent, and she had the good sense to bring her own lunch in a basket whenever she visited Pat in Moncourt.<
br />
At this same dinner party, Oulman also introduced Pat to James Baldwin. “Baldwin was an interesting pain in the ass, much as I had expected,” Pat complained to Alex Szogyi22—and wrote that she didn’t need to be told by Jimmy Baldwin, although she was told, that “all us whiteys…shall soon be murdered.”23
Alain Oulman patiently shepherded Pat’s visiting ex-lovers to and fro, and gave her, according to Calmann-Lévy’s publicity representative Claire Cauvin, the most extraordinary support at book festivals and on book tours. He was, says Cauvin, “always by her side.”24 Pat herself wrote regularly of the many times she went to Oulman for advice and consent. A Jew like so many of her honorary counsellors, Oulman continued to serve as Pat’s sounding board.
Nonetheless, Pat—who said she didn’t know how she managed this, but seemed to manage it anyway—found the “courage” to ask Alain Oulman to return the small handmade table she’d given to him. She was justified in doing so, she wrote guiltily, because she felt she had merely “lent” him the table.25 In fact, she’d given the table as a gift to Oulman and then just couldn’t bear to be parted from it. Oulman returned the “loan” graciously.
Pat felt even more intensely about a drawing she’d given to Caroline Besterman during their long affair. “If I’d come to London now, I’d have asked for that drawing back. I mean it.”26