Pat’s relationship to one of the most important “objects” in her life is best expressed in her response to the first love letter she got from Caroline. She wrote that it made her feel like a “millionaire.” Pat’s friends, lovers, and associates rock with laughter (when they’re not writhing with less comfortable reactions) when they describe the role money played in her life. Stories of Pat pocketing tips left by other people at restaurant tables, refusing loans to starving friends (but giving money to more affluent ones), shortchanging an impoverished neighbor in Aurigeno, and driving sixty miles for a cheaper plate of spaghetti are set pieces in the oral histories of most of the people who knew her.
Even Pat’s very last will (she drafted too many wills for an accurate count) was delayed because she didn’t want to pay a lawyer to copy it over.27 It was the will in which she effectively disinherited her oldest friend, Kingsley Skattebol, who, for fifty years and through many testaments, had been promised the executorship of Pat’s literary estate. Pat replaced Kingsley with Daniel Keel, of Diogenes Verlag, her “vermittler,” as she called him. It was a sensible decision: Keel is a great figure in European publishing, and Pat’s estate was going to be administered from Switzerland, while Kingsley lived in New York. But Pat, as usual, had another motive in mind. For years, she had expressed increasing disapproval of her own goddaughter, Kingsley’s daughter, and she told several people that she didn’t want the girl to get her hands on the money.
Although the thought of dispensing cold cash could sometimes drive Pat to Olympian acts of avoidance, check writing was another matter.
Marion Aboudaram’s three-year affair with Pat in Moncourt (see “A Simple Act of Forgery: Part 1” and “Les Girls: Part 2”) depended on her willingness to travel from Paris, because Pat rarely came into the city. Marion was working in an art gallery in Paris for low wages at the time she was seeing Pat, living on lentils and pasta in an unheated flat on the rue Germain Pillon, then one of the seediest streets in Montmartre, now as chic as the rest of that mythic quartier. Pat had already let Marion know that she wasn’t going to be suckered into buying her a radiator for her unheated apartment. At this time, says Marion, “Pat’s will [Pat was on about her fifteenth version of it] and her taxes ate her mind. That’s all she would talk about.”28
One middle of the night, when Pat and Marion were in bed together, Pat, undoubtedly under duress, finally cracked.
“I’m fed up [with your poverty]!” she said to Marion. “I’m going to give you ten thousand francs!” Despite the lateness of the hour, Marion responded with great presence of mind. “Get up immediately and sign that check!” she told Pat. And Pat did it. She got up out of bed and made out a check to Marion Aboudaram at two o’clock in the morning for ten thousand francs. And then Pat did something even stranger: instead of handing the check to Marion, she put it in Marion’s purse.
Pat knew perfectly well she’d hate herself in the morning for having given Marion money. (Another woman might have prided herself on assisting a lover.) Still, Pat liked to think of herself as an honorable woman (she continued to have recurring daydreams of returning a found wallet—an act whose awful implications she would explore in Found in the Street), which was why she put the ten-thousand-franc check into Marion’s purse instead of leaving it on the bedside stand. It was like a deposit in Marion’s bank account: a gift Pat wouldn’t be able to take back after she’d changed her mind.
Pat’s respect for private property amounted to a principle, and her special feeling for purses and wallets keeps cropping up on her gift lists—a gift-wrapped handbag for Mary Highsmith was in the boot of her English Volkswagen when the car was stolen from the Montereau train station—and in her accusations: she liked to insinuate that lovers were rifling her purse. Pat did a little purse rifling herself, apologizing to Monique Buffet in writing for going through her book bag when she was absent. “If it had contained (what????) something more personal, I’d never have done it,” Pat wrote nervously to Monique.29 And Pat had once looked into Mary Ronin’s purse, when Mary went out of a room, to see if the new wallet she’d just given to Mary was “thin enough for her handbag.” That was her excuse, anyway, and, just like the lovers who read her cahiers or diaries without permission and were horrified at what they’d read, Pat saw something she didn’t want to see when she opened Mary’s wallet.
Tabea Blumenschein’s lightning, then lingering, tour through Pat’s emotional and imaginative life (see “A Simple Act of Forgery: Part 1”)—Pat left Marion Aboudaram for Blumenschein, and the “aftershocks” of Blumenschein’s dropping her after four weeks went on for “about four years”—inspired the stricken Pat to an eruption of mostly bad love poetry. One rueful little stanza, more shapely than anything that preceded or followed it, expresses just what Pat’s “objects” might be substituting for and why those substitutions were so necessary.
If I were only a good poet
Able to distill all this into
A clear and beautiful little sphere
Like a gem one could see through, polished,
Something to keep, small in my pocket,
Something to look at
That wouldn’t hurt.30
It was only at the very end of her life that Patricia Highsmith began to let go of some of the things that meant something to her. A friend says: “In the year before she died—she described all her treatments in detail so she knew she was dying [but would never admit it]—she would send me bits of her life, objects: an ashtray from the famous lesbian bar in Paris in the twenties…a little brick from Tennessee Williams’s house in Key West that she had [Charles] Latimer steal, and she sent me a little silver locket that one of her girls had given her. And then she started sending me her books in early signed editions…. When she started sending these gifts, that’s when I knew that she was going to go.”31
And, in July of 1994, seven months before she died—again without ever saying she was mortally ill—Pat wrote to her “brother Dan’s” wife, Florine, offering her and her son Don the most precious of her family possessions: “a quilt made by Grandma…. I like to see these things passed on…. the four nearly life-sized photographs of Gideon Coates and his wife, a Penn. And of Dr. Oscar Wilkinson Stewart and wife, a Deckard or Deckerd…the only things I asked Grandma for as inheritance.”32 (It was Pat’s great-great-grandmother who was a Deckerd; Oscar’s wife, Pat’s great-grandmother, was a Pope.)
For someone so conscious of objects, so careful with money, so good with her hands, and so given to listing her assets, Pat had unusual problems with her possessions. The physical world seemed to retreat before her efforts to stage-manage it. Too many times, she arrived at destinations ahead of her luggage or her typewriter—as she did on her first foreign trip, to Taxco, Mexico, in 1943 and on several different visits to Europe. Or she found herself departing before expected items arrived, as she did in Paris, in 1951. In Switzerland, something as simple as shopping for grocery items seemed to a neighbor to be beyond Pat’s capacities.33 But some of Pat’s “helplessness” was cultivated—and she always managed to surround herself with people who were quick to offer assistance.
The accordion Pat bought from her first trip to Italy in 1948 (entrepreneurial as ever, she hoped to resell it in New York) stuck to her like glue for months and months; even with paid advertisements in the papers she couldn’t get rid of it. And despite her obsessive attention to her cahiers, she left them with friends during one of her travels, then forgot where they were for a while. They eventually turned up in a house on Long Island, but the original manuscript of The Talented Mr. Ripley disappeared into the aether in Fort Worth after grandmother Willie Mae died, and almost all traces of her unpublished manuscript, The Traffic of Jacob’s Ladder, are gone as well.
Of that lost manuscript, Kingsley Skattebol, the last person alive who read and still remembers it, writes: “if Mrs. Dalloway can be called a meditation on past intentions and what time has and has not done to the people who cherished them: th
is was the crux of Pat’s lost novel The Traffic of Jacob’s Ladder, unlike anything else in her oeuvre before or since.”34
But when Kingsley and her then-beau Lars Skattebol first read the work in 1953—Pat was calling it “Book #3” then or The Sleepless Night—they attacked it (see “Les Girls: Part 2”), irritating Pat no end. And the last ten pages of The Traffic of Jacob’s Ladder—all that remain of the novel in Pat’s archives—support the critique: they are awkwardly written in the standard Highsmith formula of two men, Gerald and Oscar, obsessed with each other, latently homosexual, etc., etc. At the end, Oscar is dead in a hotel room, and Gerald, like all Highsmith characters, wants only to get lost: “like Oscar he could vanish into nowhere in Paris, too, if he chose, and no one could find him, if he only threw his passport and his papers into the Seine, the envelope Oscar had addressed to him, and the money.”35 The manuscript of Jacob’s Ladder was roundly criticized and then rejected by the publishers who saw it, and perhaps that was why it, too, got “lost.” Perhaps, also, these remaining ten pages are from an early draft and the book was better than this remnant.
Pat’s beloved 1956 Olympia typewriter had its wear-and-tear problems (six to eight pages of fiction and five furiously typed letters a day took their toll) although she was to tell an interviewer—stressing the typewriter’s German origins and her identification with it—that it “never needed a repair.”36 When she found an abandoned typewriter by her “garbage bins” in Aurigeno, she stalked the typewriter case for several days—circling it in indecision, unable to believe that she could get something that meant so much to her for nothing—before swooping guiltily down on it. “I expect a mysterious knock on the door: Have you taken the typewriter left below?, etc? but so far no one has knocked.”37 Pat could never accept anything without having first earned it, worked for it—this was part of her Calvinist ethic—but she also enjoyed the complicated, criminal feelings that getting something for nothing afforded her.
On a publicity trip to receive the Prix Littéraire at the American Film Festival in Deauville in September of 1987, Pat thought she had left the only ring she ever wore (it was also the only ring she ever kept)—the circle of gold given to her by Ellen Hill in 1953 when their relations were at a nadir—on top of a piano in the bar at the Normandy Hotel and was “depressed for four days.” When her part-time femme de ménage found the ring on the rug beside her bed in Aurigeno, Pat’s spirits soared. She was also cheered by the thought that the housekeeper was actually earning her salary.
“People don’t like losing things—of sentimental value,” she wrote about the ring in an odd, alcohol-wreathed letter to the piano player of her Normandy Hotel weekend, a Mr. Abe Janssens, on whose piano she thought she’d left the ring. Unbidden, Pat decided to confide this feeling (and quite a few other sentiments) to what must have been a very surprised Mr. Janssens a couple of weeks after returning to Aurigeno from the film festival at Deauville. Happily lit up with drink during the two-day cocktail hour that she’d made of her short residency at the festival, Pat had draped herself over Janssens’s piano in the hotel bar for two nostalgic September evenings of Cole Porter sing-alongs.* This cavalcade of the classic American songbook would have reminded her of one of the happier aspects of her parents’ apartment on Grove Street in Greenwich Village, that it was on a street of famous piano bars. Pat loved piano bars.
Pat’s acquaintance with the piano player Janssens was limited to the length of the sets he played—he kept calling her by the wrong name—and, in a phrase only she could have used, Pat wrote to him that she “couldn’t pick him out of a line-up” if she had to.38 A man who didn’t know her name, someone she couldn’t have recognized under police lights, was the perfect repository for her inebriated, confessional, and very nostalgic letter. But Pat needed to use the subject of her ring to launch the communication. It was something like the way her fictional killers use “trophies” from their victims to keep the connections alive.
Pat’s car troubles were of a simpler nature. Because of her many travels, and because her houses were always rural or suburban, she had to drive to train stations and airports to get to where she wanted to go. Once there, she tended to leave her vehicles parked, and those vehicles—worse luck—tended to get stolen. One of her cars was taken in New Hope in 1962, and two of them were taken in France. She said that the theft of her English Volkswagen in 1969 from the parking lot “near the Montereau railway station” hastened “my rapid progress toward persecution complex,” although “[t]his somewhat risky theft is a pleasure to me compared to sneaky, cowardly thefts.”39 She was thinking of the two lovers she suspected of rifling her purse.
In Switzerland, Pat’s luck with automobiles didn’t much change. There was a bad accident in her Aurigeno neighbor Ingeborg Moelich’s car on the way back from their visit to the Bayreuth Festival—for which her friend Charles Latimer (who insisted on being driven out of the way) bore some moral responsibility. It provoked an ungenerous response from Pat, who was not going to be cheated out of her feeling of total innocence in the matter—even though her map reading had probably contributed to the accident. Finally Pat, whose own driving was distracted when sober and deeply inattentive when drinking (she flunked her English driving test twice in Suffolk and then flunked the French driving test three times after she’d moved to Moncourt in 1969),40 managed an unusual way to reenact the title of her first novel, Strangers on a Train. At a small railway crossing near her home, she ran straight into a locomotive with her car.41
In November of 1952, after a year of trailing Ellen Hill around Europe—their wearisome cycle of fighting, separating, loving, and separating again was well established by then—Pat wrote in her twenty-first cahier:
“Care of Mrs. Somebody.” I am always “Care of Mrs. Somebody.” Or “Mr. Somebody.” I have never a home. I wander from New York, to Paris, to London, to Venice, Munich, Salzburg, and Rome, without a real address. My letters arrive by the grace of God and Mr. or Mrs. Somebody.
Someday, perhaps, I shall have a house built of rock, a house with a name—Hanley-on-the-Lake, Bedford on the River, West Hills, or plain Sunny Vale. Something. So even without my own name on the envelope letters will reach me, because I and only I shall be living there. But that can never make up for these years of standing in line at American Express offices from Opera to Haymarket, Naples to Munich. Can never make up for the tragic, melancholic, humiliating mornings when one has gone with hope for a letter, and turned away empty handed, empty hearted. 42
Pat spent her adult life the way all wandering expatriates do: leaving things here, storing them there, asking people to look after what she left behind. She added her own twist to the tale, however, often accusing the unhappy caretakers of her goods and chattels of cheating her of her possessions—or of using them without permission. She abandoned her possessions and then she felt abandoned by them, making use of her retreats from them to produce or to justify certain emotions which were necessary to her writing. Her policy with women was much the same.
Pat’s complaint that it was Mary Highsmith who lost the manuscript of The Talented Mr. Ripley was a useful one for a writer who wanted to contrast her mother unfavorably with her grandmother. Pat also complained that she had been cheated out of Willie Mae’s house by Mother Mary—when Willie Mae’s will clearly left the house to Mary and her brother Claude. Pat accused her ex-lover Tex of driving her car without permission in New Hope (she’d left the car in Tex’s care), and then worried that the local mechanic was also making free with it (she demanded an odometer reading) and that the sublettor of her house in Pennsylvania was unreliable (“everything is out of hand, my car, my house).” And she hated everyone who ever sublet her East Fifty-sixth Street apartment (and touched her possessions), except for Truman Capote.
The mostly imagined chaos in Pat’s arrangements in New Hope in 1963 made the idea of remaining in Suffolk—where she had gone to be near Caroline Besterman—easier for her. Her unvoiced accusations against tw
o of her lovers for rifling her purse for money when she wasn’t looking were also put to practical use: they allowed her to distance herself from unfulfilling relations with women she had fetishized and objectified, just as she fetishized and objectified her favorite possessions. Her despairing responses to these women had the effect of casting Pat as a kind of object herself: the bucket in the well of loneliness.
Late one night in June of 1984, Pat, so depressed in her sunless stone farmhouse in Aurigeno, Switzerland, that she hadn’t been able to read a book for the last “two and ¼ years,” 43 opened a bottle of cheap beer, lit up a Gauloise jaune, and sat down to give her hopeful houseguest, a young social scientist teaching at Barnard College named Bettina Berch, an unusually direct piece of her mind on the subject of women.
Bettina Berch and Pat, who had been corresponding for a while, had already missed a couple of opportunities to meet each other in New York. At the last missed meeting place—a bookstore reading Pat was doing in Manhattan—Bettina had left for Pat “a small bottle of the best scotch I could find. The pint size, because part of the beauty of the present was the bottle.” Pat was delighted with her gift: “I shall keep refilling it,” she wrote. “And,” says Bettina, “she did keep refilling it.” Bettina’s visit to Aurigeno was their first face-to-face encounter, and it lasted for several days.44
Pat was well-disposed towards Bettina Berch (“sawed-off Russian-Jewish name,” Pat wrote to Kingsley, noting, as she always did, if a person she liked was a Jew; “quite decent, left-wing”)45 despite the fact that Bettina had expressed the desire to write Pat’s biography and was, as Ellen Hill darkly suspected, “an ardent feminist.” 46 Ellen Hill, says Bettina, was still quite “territorial” about Pat, thirty years after their love affair had ended.
Always hungry for news of the States, Pat began by pumping Bettina Berch for the kinds of facts she could use in her fictions. Although she continued to set many of her novels in the United States, Pat was by now woefully out of touch with the textures, tastes, locutions, and even the products of her native country. Don Swaim, her perceptive radio interviewer in New York at WCBS in 1987, noted that Pat was giving the word “story”—i.e., the floor of a building—its English spelling and had referred to shopping carts as “trolleys.” Pat admitted to him that she was confusing the English term “coffee white” with the American term “coffee regular.” 47
The Talented Miss Highsmith Page 62
