The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  It was in the 1970s—the first full decade she’d spent outside the United States—when Pat began to make errors of American fact and understanding in her novels, errors like having Edith Howland of Edith’s Diary bring a bottle of rye, one of Pat’s favorite bottle drinks of the 1940s, to a neighbor’s dinner party. (By 1977, when Edith’s Diary was published, rye had not been produced in the United States for at least twenty years.) Pat had to write to her still-radical friend Lil Picard to ask her for names of the leftish magazines Edith Howland would be reading and sending articles to; in Indiana, she watched American television for a week to pick up pointers about religious extremists for People Who Knock on the Door; and she wrote to ask Kingsley to do crucial research on New York police procedures for A Dog’s Ransom.

  Pat always knew what she needed for her work, but because her experience of America was now that of an expatriate—and more or less limited to the International Herald Tribune, the occasional Time and Newsweek magazine, and the National Lampoon (she was a subscriber for a while, she told Lil Picard)—she was out of touch with the large and small shifts of custom and conversation which make all the difference in fiction. Her short story “I Despise Your Life” (first published in her collection The Black House in 1981) is an attempt to dramatize embattled father-son relations in the context of hip young wasters who are drugging, dancing, and living in a loft in SoHo; and whatever measures she took to ensure its accuracy were a terrible failure. The slang is decades out of date, the dialogue is unrecognizable, and not one element, including the money-based relations between the father and son, carries any more authenticity than a superficial article criticizing “the youth of today” in a supermarket tabloid. Bettina Berch, who had lengthy conversations with Pat, says: “Newsweek is what she based her opinion on and that’s not what I consider political analysis.” 48

  During Bettina’s visit, Pat was trying to work up a mid-1980s Manhattan atmosphere for her novel Found in the Street, but she had lost Manhattan as a subject. She lost it, imaginatively, in the way that Raymond Chandler said he’d “lost Los Angeles” when he moved to La Jolla. By now, her personal experiences of American places and times, the impressions and details and behaviors she’d gathered on her nighttime prowlings of Manhattan and on her lengthy boat, train, and car journeys to Texas, New Orleans, Mexico, and Maine in the 1940s and 1950s, were no longer alive enough in her mind to be made into fiction. Sunk in depression in her rock-rimmed canton in Switzerland and too far—temporally and physically—from what she was writing about, Pat was reduced to asking Bettina Berch for the Village Voice newspaper and a map of New York.49 But Pat always asked everybody for maps.

  Bettina and Pat had already discussed in their letters some of the themes Pat liked to walk her wits around, and Pat, straining for a topic that might appeal to a feminist guest, searched her memory to produce some slight evidence of the social injustices suffered by women. She herself had suffered none, she said firmly, and expressed a special disgust for feminists. On her part, Bettina patiently tried to explain to the long-exiled Pat some of the mysteries of the New America—like how to use a bank card to get money out of a wall. Pat, says Bettina, was “very funny about it. That was one of those moments of displaced humor, sitting at the other end of the world, explaining how to put in a PIN code in an ATM machine in Manhattan. What Pat eventually described doesn’t do anything wrong although it doesn’t incorporate any of these details.”50

  Pat’s secondhand research usually managed to produce a halo of strangeness around her already strange fictions, an atmospheric dislocation which a writer who gets her experience firsthand would find almost impossible to achieve. But further strangeness in her work wasn’t what Pat was after. She was just, as Bettina Berch says, “doing her research” her way, long distance. Her imagination simply couldn’t leave America alone.

  As she sometimes did when she thought she’d been remiss as a hostess (by the 1970s and 1980s, Pat was quite lax in the hostess department, and worse was to follow), Pat wrote to Bettina Berch in New York when the visit was over to apologize for her “nervousness.”51 And—a sure proof of Pat’s affection—on the big, square, gilt-edged mirror in her last house in Tegna, Pat actually stuck up a snapshot of Bettina Berch cradling her infant daughter. It’s the only picture of a mother and daughter ever to grace a house inhabited by Patricia Highsmith.

  In the lengthy, taped conversation which unrolled that June night in Aurigeno between the two Barnard graduates, Pat, touchy about being questioned, tired because the conversation went on until one in the morning, and worried about her sick cat who “wasn’t getting any better,”52 allowed herself to be drawn into a few clarifying statements about women, statements which recall her work in the comics as well as her serious fictional work.

  It’s hard for me to see women (as a whole) standing on their own feet. I still see them as sort of in relationship to a man…. Which is very curious because my mother was very (as women go even now), she was definitely rather brave. She had a career since the age of twenty, and when…she wanted to divorce my father she did. And my father offered money and so on, you know, for the doctor when I was born, at least. [There was no doctor; Mary Coates was “midwived” by an upstairs neighbor.] My mother said “no thanks.” So I had in my childhood the image of a rather strong independent woman—and yet I don’t see them that way. I see them as a bunch of pushovers, for the most part. I see them as whining, to tell you the truth. Especially this feminist thing—whining, always complaining about something. Instead of doing something….

  Men can leave the house. Ripley leaves his house. He’s got a wife there, plus a servant. I don’t see women leaving the house.* Maybe it’s just a quirk of mine, or something wrong in me.53

  Whatever objections Pat had to her comic book writing in the 1940s, the fact that comic books concentrated on the feats of male heroes wasn’t one of them.54

  After twenty-seven years of silence, Pat initiated a correspondence with Marijane Meaker (telling everyone that Meaker had written to her first) in October of 1988 by writing to ask if “you might have a missing 3 pages from my family papers, which you were interested in…. they were of Civil War years…so you can imagine how I miss these.”55 It was an odd way to approach a former lover—especially because Meaker says she had no memory of the papers and no memory whatsoever of being interested in them. Pat seemed to be more comfortable reaching out to Marijane through feelings she could attach to objects or activities.

  Josyane Savigneau had a similar experience with Pat at their first meeting in Aurigeno. Pat kept offering her things: “‘Do you want something to drink…do you want something to eat?’” Savigneau says. “She couldn’t just say, do you want to stay a little longer…. She couldn’t say just sit down and stay—because it was clear that she liked me—and so she always had to propose an activity.”56

  Fear of loss, instigated by a world of people and objects out of her control, was a constant theme in Pat’s life. It put its unmistakable patina on much of her work—that long, slow crawl over the surface of things that can be counted, described, and handled—and it underscored all her professional transactions. The letters in which her prevailing sense of loss attaches itself to the details of contracts and business proposals would run to several stupefying volumes. The files of her literary agents—particularly Patricia Schartle Myrer of McIntosh & Otis in New York, and Mme Jenny Bradley of the William Bradley Agency in Paris—show that they bore up as graciously as they could under the constant epistolary batteries launched by their profit-and-loss-minded client.

  Pat’s relentless demands on Patricia Schartle Myrer to reduce commissions for negotiating European sales of her work were reluctantly agreed to by Mrs. Myrer. But when Pat unilaterally decided in 1979 to deal with all her agents separately and to confine McIntosh & Otis to her American sales rather than having them take care of her international business as per contract, Mrs. Myrer, after “twenty years” of representing Pat, had had enough. �
��Since you clearly feel that you have been cheated on commissions by two of the world’s most reputable agents, I am not willing to continue to represent your work,” Mrs. Myrer wrote to Pat in August of 1979. “It has, of course, come to my attention from many sources that you have reported the downright libel that McIntosh & Otis and Heath [A. M. Heath, Pat’s London agents] charge you an unfair commission.”57

  Pat made equally extravagant claims (and cast equal blame) on almost every other literary agent who ever worked with her. Eventually she left them all (or, as in the case of Mrs. Myrer, they left her) for her supportive and highly profitable arrangement with Daniel Keel and Diogenes Verlag. But not without seven months of fully armed negotiations by Pat with Diogenes for the terms she wanted.

  Pat’s intense focus on money and objects—like her conviction that every love affair was doomed to go down in flames—became a self-fulfilling prophecy. What she feared most was what she most attracted. In two or three novels—one of them is The Talented Mr. Ripley—Pat describes the power of one pair of eyes to attract another, and she makes Tom look away so as not to pull towards him the gaze of the person he is covertly watching. By the terms of her own belief, with her mind so obsessively fixed on money and taxes, she could hardly avoid attracting the unwelcome attentions of the two French government services devoted to finance: the dreaded fisc and the French customs office, the douane. And in March of 1980, in Moncourt, France, that is exactly what happened.

  • 32 •

  The Real Romance of Objects

  Part 2

  The sudden intrusion of the French customs office, the douane, into the occasional peace and relative calm of Pat Highsmith’s workroom in Moncourt, France, on the twenty-sixth of March 1980 was both a long-awaited and an already-imagined nightmare.

  Pat had always railed against her taxes in England, France, and the United States, and she had a long history of sheltered taxes (Tomes Ltd., the company she formed in London, protected her earnings there); financial redistributions (some untraceable doings in Puerto Rico and the Bahamas,1 a proliferation of bank accounts and investments in several countries, as well as some casual currency smuggling: “Have just last week discovered an outlet for the barred franc—via Canada through a friend”);2 and royalty checks arriving in business envelopes from foreign sources. Any one of these activities would have caught the attention of French tax officials; keeping foreign bank accounts, for instance, was illegal for foreign residents like Pat. All of them together were like a cluster of signposts pointing the authorities in the direction of an investigation.

  Samuel Okoshken, Pat’s tax lawyer and accountant in Paris in the 1970s and 1980s, explained what he knew of her tax situation. “She received envelopes from [Diogenes Verlag in] Switzerland and [the douane] thought anything with a Swiss address was proof positive of some malfeasance…. Maybe there were things she didn’t tell me. [Author’s note: there were.] If she had secret stuff, I obviously didn’t know about it. But I had no reason to believe that she was not up-front. I felt she was completely okay, and she felt that too. But she was so offended by the French government and what they had done to her that she decided to leave.”3

  The official French inquiries into her finances were enough to give Pat—so prone, herself, to feeling guilty and to making accusations—an excuse for the drastic act of moving to Switzerland. Pat took the investigation as an accusation, just as any French citizen would. But the douane’s raid was only an excuse for her to move and not a reason. The reasons for her removal were two (mistaken) assumptions: first, that she could save tax money by living in Switzerland for six months of the year, and second, that she didn’t want to live in a country which suspected everyone of being “a slight crook.” (This, of course, was Pat’s own view of most of the people she met.) A fortnight before the douane raided her house, Pat, under Ellen Hill’s direction, had already picked out another house for herself to buy in Aurigeno, Switzerland.

  Since 1979 and before, Pat had been given large and small warning signs of tax troubles in France. For years, she’d been complaining of spending too much of her time filling out tax forms. Two months before the raid, she’d written to Monique Buffet: “I think I told you the French fisc is desperate to get their hands on 60% of my global income for past many years, and are asking me where I was physically when I wrote this and that.” 4

  Her attempts to lighten her French taxes ran the usual expatriate’s gamut (“My accountant has 3 ideas, all of which I can do from home, by way of my NOT having to go to Switzerland”),5 but an escape to Switzerland was still very much on her mind. Ellen Hill, to whom Pat continued to turn for opinions and ideas, lived in Cavigliano. And Pat, having quarrelled with her other literary representatives, was in the middle of six or seven months of what she called her “tough” negotiations with Diogenes Verlag in Zurich to be her world representatives. Still, she had the satisfaction of beating the douane to the punch; they knocked on her door five days after she’d come back from her house-buying expedition to Switzerland.

  Of the taxes Pat complained of so persistently—“most people would smile at the news of [103,000 francs in royalties], but I hit my head and say ‘Oh Jesus!’…it all goes for taxes”6—Samuel Okoshken says: “She paid a good bit, but she had a lot of American income that was treated favorably under the treaty. I think she got a pretty fair deal.”7 Pat felt differently. Cursing her tax bracket and lamenting the loss of “the fruits of her labor”—while never failing to brag about her large income to her young lover Monique Buffet—Pat wrote: “Sat. I signed a check for $31,302 (dollars) to USA tax people…. It’s the second-biggest check I ever signed in my life.”8

  In January of 1980, three months before the Moncourt raid, Pat had written proudly to Monique: “the French taxman was amazed that I have declared all my earnings, and no doubt about that. This means I am not considered a ‘tax fraud.’” Whatever her inner feelings were (and her insistence that she wasn’t “considered a ‘tax fraud’” probably meant she felt like one), innocence in the eyes of others, a sense of her moral uprightness acknowledged, meant a great deal to her. Samuel Okoshken thought she was “trying to undo what [the douane] had done” by moving to Switzerland.9 In this, Pat resembles the Coateses of her mother’s family, whose sense of propriety was so great that they added that extra e to their surname—changing it from Coats to Coates—so that no one would ever confuse them with their orthographical doubles, the other Alabama Coats family: that low-down bunch of horse thieves who went out and got themselves hanged. Pat was always ready to add a metaphorical e to whatever name she was giving to her activities.

  Pat’s often-quoted remark that she was so “honest” that she “trembled before customs inspectors” was made some time before the French customs inspectors (the douane) actually came to her. Like almost everything else she fed to the press, this remark was a misdirection. People who bear what she once called “a lighter burden of guilt” (her idea of innocence) don’t tremble before customs inspectors. No one understood this better than Pat, who deliberately titled her 1969 novel The Tremor of Forgery (about the man who is writing a Highsmith-like novel on a Highsmith-like typewriter in the same hotel where Highsmith actually stayed in Tunisia) because “forgers’ hands usually trembled very slightly at the beginning and end of their false signatures.”10

  If Pat trembled before customs inspectors, it was probably because of the objects she was trying to slip, untaxed and/or unconfiscated, across French, English, Italian, and Swiss borders. Live snails lugged across borders were only the most exotic in her long history of transporting undetected and/or undertaxed chattel.

  Like all expatriates, Pat had only to leave her native country to begin to crave its goods and services. The post offices in every hamlet, mountain village, and rural retreat Pat had ever lived in were besieged with the Levi’s and western belts Pat requested from her cousin Dan in Texas (“The size is fine…. But I still would not mind some time a plain dark brown, no colors, no c
olors on the buckle…. I do not like color decorations.”)11 and the jackets, vests, and pants she mail-ordered herself from Brooks Brothers in New York. Homemade cookies, favorite shirts, and slightly too small shoes (Pat’s feet were getting larger)—all respectively baked, bought, boxed, and shipped by Mary Highsmith from New York, from Florida, and from Texas for her daughter—followed Pat all over Europe. Daisy Winston sent Campbell’s soups and chili peppers and more shoes from New Hope; while cat doors, Fritos for Pat’s cat Semyon, diligent background research on Manhattan police procedure, crucial books like Menninger’s The Human Mind, and the special, “dirtcheap” Columbia University notebooks Pat used as cahiers, were faithfully posted from New York by Kingsley Skattebol for forty years.

  A sample order from Pat to Kingsley on 9 July 1973: “The point is, I need three more cahiers, these spiral notebooks—which measure 7 inches by 8¼—have faintly greenish paper, emblazoned with Columbia on the front cover, stating that they contain 80 sheets also…. Price 33c [that was the 1942 price], but I am sure those days are gone forever, and they are now 75c.”12

  The lavender floor wax to which Tom Ripley and his creator were so attached was mailed to Pat by the two Barbaras from Islington. But her peanut butter (at the end of her life, she lived mostly on beer and peanut butter),13 also ordered from England because it was cheaper, was an American brand. (Alabama, Pat’s ancestral state, is one of the United States’ largest producers of peanuts.) She counselled everyone to mark each parcel sent to her as being worth “under $10” to avoid customs taxes. If she was paying the postage herself, cash on delivery, she insisted that the packages be sent to her by the cheapest possible surface mail.