The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  In the harsh glow of hindsight, the douane’s descent upon the House of Highsmith in March of 1980 looks less like a personally directed tax raid and more like yet another expression of Pat’s lifelong struggles with income streams, owned objects, and demanding governments. It was also, of course, something more than a metaphor. It was an assault on her property and her privacy—and the stuff of her very worst nightmare.

  On the morning of 26 March 1980,* the French douane staged a quiet “invasion” of the house on the rue de la Boissière. Two “lurking” French tax officers and one policeman “knocked on my door, proceeded to rifle my papers, and went off with USA bankbook, all current business papers (letters which I need). These creeps are after foreign bank accounts which of course I have declared.”14

  “The French are preying on me, because I am an easy mark, a soldier standing up in the field, not protected by a trench…. Ellen Hill…asked me if the douane had seized my passport, and I ran upstairs to see, and told her that they had not…. She has been through the Hitler period…. she knows what this is, so I really do listen to what she says.”15

  It was a clarifying moment for a writer whose worldview could charitably be described as paranoid. The raid brought together most of Pat’s fears and many of her intolerances, and it proved to her, once again, that she was correct in her inclinations, justified in her prejudices, and arrayed alone against the world: that little island of virtue floating in a sea of swindlers we saw in “A Simple Act of Forgery.” Two days after the raid, Pat was thinking that “[m]y phone is probably now tapped” and was watching her language in telephone conversations.16

  Ellen Hill’s analysis of the raid made Pat think of the “Hitler period,” which, naturally, made her think of the Jews—never far from her thoughts by now. She managed, indirectly, to implicate two Jews in the raid in her letters: her amiable accountant, Samuel Okoshken (“my accountant is really to blame for this”)17 and the only French inspector whose name she mentioned: a Monsieur “Roger Cohen,” who reminded her “twice…that it was not allowed to have a foreign bank account.” Her response to the French government was more general: an execration of all things French and, again indirectly, a phrasing of her problem with the government in terms of the Israeli-Arab situation. She was, she said when the French government wanted to honor her, “not accepting the Crystal Stopper” [symbol of the award the French government wanted to give her]…just like Sadat refused to appear with Begin.”18 Whenever Pat was feeling threatened, her mind fell naturally into this comparison.

  Whatever she was thinking privately, Pat continued to consult with Samuel Okoshken for years, even encouraging him in his own hopes to become a writer and providing a jacket quote for one of his novelist friends. He has fond memories of her: “I could see,” he says, “the young girl she had been.”19 She made her complaints to everyone but Okoshken himself about the way her tax matters were handled. As luck would have it, her last lover in France, Monique Buffet, was acquainted with Okoshken’s then-secretary—and Pat was “terrified” that “information” (of what kind, she never told Monique) would make its way to Okoshken via the secretary gossip circuit.20

  Despite the depopulating nature of the curses Pat called down upon the French government, there seemed to be enough officials left in high places in France to nominate Patricia Highsmith for several honors. Characteristically, she accepted every distinction the French had to offer, including, in 1990, the Officier des arts et des lettres. Paul Bowles, in quite a characteristic mood himself, wrote to Pat wondering if it really would be “fun to receive the order of Officier des Arts et Lettres?” It was a rhetorical question, and naturally, he answered it himself. He didn’t think it would, he wrote.21

  The tax inspectors remained in Pat’s study for several hours that March day in 1980. They seemed to her to be uncommonly thorough, staying on until one o’clock.22 They opened her desk drawers, they fingered her possessions, and they laid their hands on her Olympia typewriter. Horrified at this breaching of her boundaries, Pat felt—any writer would feel—that her writing room was being violated by the douane’s presence and polluted by its searches. The place where she worked was sacred to her, and nearly twenty years before she had written about “the strange power that work has to transform a room, any room, into something very special for a writer who has worked there, sweated and cursed and maybe known a few minutes of triumph and satisfaction there.”23

  Pat always preferred to carry out the physical exertions of the writing room in secret. “It is the lonely nature of writing that these strong memories and emotions cannot be shared with anyone,” she advised the readers of Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction.24 Pat’s bed was in her writing room, and its exposure to the eyes of the tax inspectors would have been especially painful to her. Her feeling for privacy, her horror at being revealed in ways she couldn’t control, went right down to her cells.

  Oddly, or not so oddly, since novelists often write their lives before living them, Pat had already imagined something like this invasion in Edith’s Diary, written in the very house, in the very room, which the douane had just defiled. In the novel, Edith’s ex-husband, Brett, has brought in a psychiatrist to evaluate Edith, whose irregular behavior has attracted the attention of everyone around her. The two men walk, uninvited, into Edith’s workroom, where her diary lies open on a table. “‘Get out! Both of you!’…She realized that her teeth were bared, that she was panting. ‘You might have given me some notice! I think this is simply awful!’ She heard her own voice shrieking, as if the voice belonged to someone else.”25

  After the French inspectors left her bedroom, Pat, “still in shock,”26 telephoned to Ellen Hill in Cavigliano for help. In her most martial mode, Ellen told Pat to pack her bags immediately and get out of the country right away. That’s when Pat remembered that Ellen Hill had been through the “Hitler period” and must know what she was talking about.27

  And then, with another of those ritualized actions with which she met life’s daily disorders, Pat started right in to wash her troubles away. What she was accustomed to doing twenty times a day to her hands, and twice a day to her body, she now did to everything the tax inspectors had touched.28 She cleaned and recleaned her typewriter and she washed and wiped down her desk, trying to dissolve in water and cleaning solution her profound sense of violation. And it was not only the violation she was removing. She was scrubbing away at that soiling feeling of guilt—as palpable to her as spilled ink on her desk or the heavy hands of the intruders on her papers—which overcame her every single time she was accused of something.

  In her obsessive and prophetic way, Pat had always tended to see the world in terms of dirt and detritus. “We throw out as much as we take in,” she wrote irritatedly in 1971.29 To her love of bathroom humor and toilet jokes, she added a fixation with recycling “the eternal waste products of existence.”30

  Kingsley remarks that this fixation extended to Pat’s “compost pile,” for which she would “save everything” and which she would “visit” all the time.31 Pat liked the look of decomposition. In her second summer in Moncourt, the summer of 1971, Pat had been pondering the possibility of writing a novel called Garbage. It would have to do, she reckoned, with “the human concern from birth until death with washing diapers, flushing toilets, bedpans, and then what to do with the corpse. Not to mention all the orange peels and whiskey bottles…the dust, the emptying of Hoover bags, the blowing of snot and soot into Kleenexes, the abortions, the hysterectomies.”

  But how should she begin a novel with such an unpromising subject? Pat didn’t have to look beyond her mirror. “I need a character obsessed with all this. I’ve got one, myself.”32

  And now, as in some awful fairy tale in reverse, the douane’s mephitic touch had turned the golden tools of her “workroom” into “garbage.”

  Pat wouldn’t go near the office of the douane to retrieve her confiscated goods, but she had, as usual, an obliging neighbor to do the necessary. �
��Mary Ryan fetched my xeroxed papers for my accountant from the Douane. I consider them filthy.”33 Pat was now “writing 3 pages a day instead of 5 or 8 [of The Boy Who Followed Ripley], but if I didn’t make this effort, I’d be down the drain. Finished.”34 Profoundly upset, Pat knew what she needed. She needed to work. And so she marshalled her forces and soldiered on.

  Until the last possible moment, Pat Highsmith held off making her final will. She had, however, made quite a few penultimate testaments over the years, whose revoked clauses at the end of her life left her friends with many an unpleasant surprise. Marylin Scowden, Pat’s last accountant, felt so protective of her that she worked for Pat outside her own firm so she wouldn’t have to charge her. “I knew she needed more than tax service; she needed someone to talk to, and…I couldn’t charge her for all that,” Scowden says. But in December of 1995, two months before Pat died, Scowden put her professional foot down. “I said we have to put things in order and I knew she was very reluctant to tell one person everything. I knew I had some pieces [of the puzzle of Pat’s estate] but not everything. I had even advised her to give away everything beforehand to avoid taxes….

  “‘I’m sorry,’” she said to me, you may think I’m very stingy but I’m just too afraid to do that.

  “It was really heart-wrenching to hear that admission from her, that fear of not having money. She was ashamed to admit it to me. Both of us were surprised that she admitted it…. She never made comments like that.”35

  As soon as Pat started making good money—much earlier than she tended to let on to friends and interviewers (“oddly, I keep earning quite sufficient money [and] am now cynical, fairly rich…lonely, depressed, and totally pessimistic,” she wrote in her diary of January of 1970)36—her “house fever” kicked in. She began to burden herself with more houses than she could ever live in, in more countries than she could ever like. In 1969, she wrote her “Brother Dan” from Montmachoux that she was “house-poor…a condition you’re doubtless familiar with, as it turns up in the South.

  “I have neither sold nor rented my house in Suffolk (England), still own half a house in Samois-sur-Seine, 20 miles from here; plus owning this house.”37

  Rosalind Constable, resuming relations with Pat by letter in 1967, suggested none too delicately that Pat’s problems with houses and co-owners were self-inflicted: “It does make me furious however to see you so successful and so miserable…. [L]ife is too short…to be spent in terror and tears.”38

  While living in Montmachoux in 1968, Pat was struggling with three unwieldy properties: Bridge Cottage in Sussex (she had more bills than she was willing to pay), her half share of the house in Samois-sur-Seine (where she was in serious litigation with Elizabeth Lyne over charges), and the house in Montmachoux, where, eventually, she found herself flanked by two large Portuguese families, one of whom shared a “common wall” with her. Pat, whose extreme sensitivities converted all sound into “noise” and for whom the word “family” would have been enough to spoil any house purchase, was driven to her usual assessment of family life and those who partake of it. “The Portuguese—it is like a pot of boiling soup next door, every vegetable leaping out of the pot and screaming—probably for privacy. Sometimes it sounds like a pigpen with boiling water being poured over it, scalding off the skins.”39

  By July of 1969, she was entertaining, not for the first time, pleasant thoughts of infanticide. They were curbed only by her respect for “personal property.”

  “I can easily bear cold, loneliness, hunger and toothache, but I cannot bear noise, heat, interruptions, or other people.

  “Some people who actually own the babies kill them because of their noise. How much harder it is for people who do not own the babies.” 40

  “I am really very sorry you are so unhappy,” wrote Rosalind Constable again, and wondered why Pat didn’t just check into the Chelsea Hotel in New York for the winter.41 “You seem to have plenty of money,” Rosalind wrote.42 Indeed, as Pat’s finances swelled, her problems seemed to multiply. The number of her bank accounts, lawyers, notaires, accountants, literary agents, limited companies, and offshore investments (that shadowy attempt to put money in Puerto Rico, a secret scheme to invest in railroad cars in the United States, etc.)43 were legion, and it is unlikely that the full extent of their complications will ever be known. (See “The Cake That Was Shaped Like a Coffin: Part 7.”)

  Through it all, Pat managed to find fault with most of the arrangements made to handle her growing fortunes (sometimes with good reason)—and with most of the people attached to those arrangements. And her constant complaint, broadcast hundreds of times in hundreds of letters and conversations, was that she had no time left to work.

  In truth, in one way or the other, Patricia Highsmith managed to foul every nest she ever occupied and curse every country she ever inhabited. She was comfortable only when she was uncomfortable. Discomfort—the condition with which she was most at home and least at ease—was a productive state for her; it usually kept her writing. And Pat’s most serious criticisms were reserved for the United States, the country she had abandoned before it could reject her, and the country which—abandoned by her—then did reject her. (Her relations with the United States were always those of a disappointed lover—or, more accurately, those of an enraged daughter.)

  Late and painful proofs of this rejection arrived in terms she understood too well. In 1983, People Who Knock on the Door, her disjointed novel about the depredations of the Christian Right (it contains a precise portrait of the making of a fascist in the character of the younger son) was turned down by three American publishers, leaving her without an editor in the United States. “It is a flat book,” she wrote modestly and accurately to Bettina Berch, “but popular in France, Germany and E. Germany.” 44 At the end of her life, her last novel, Small g, was regretfully rejected by her editor, friend, and admirer at Knopf, Gary Fisketjon, and she was left without an American publisher at her death. And when she offered her archives to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, she received a letter (opened in the presence of her publisher Daniel Keel and his wife, Anna) suggesting the sum of twenty-five thousand dollars for her papers.

  “The price of a used car,” Pat said bitterly, and refused to let Texas have her literary bones.45

  Still, Pat continued her forays to the United States, scouting material for her novels. The Greenwich Village of her youth was her literary stalking ground, just as it had been her sexual stalking ground all those years ago, and she was still taking notes on the streets she had roamed as a young woman. Alex Szogyi and Philip Thompson, who lived in Greenwich Village, remembered how Pat used to call them from Europe and ask about the features of certain buildings and the addresses of favorite places in the West Village and if this building was still there and what the name of that restaurant was.46 Pat kept her imagination of the Village as alive as she could, and she also kept a fertile eye on the rest of the United States. A visit to Michel Block and Charles Latimer in Bloomington, Indiana, in January of 1981, shortly before she moved into her stone house in Aurigeno, produced a “germ” and a character—a sweetly alcoholic next-door neighbor—for People Who Knock on the Door.

  Tentatively and rather covertly—never saying that this was what she was doing—Pat used these trips to the United States to survey the American countryside for possible places to live—California, New Mexico, Long Island, and Pennsylvania were places she considered—in terrains where she had previously stayed or worked or more or less enjoyed herself. But she could never make up her mind to actually settle on a property and acquire it. Michel Block, Charles Latimer’s lover for many years, told his last companion, Robert Lumpkin, that Pat, sitting in the back of his car, had wept silent, bitter tears at the beauty of the Pennsylvania countryside they were driving through—a beauty which, practically speaking, was denied her only because she continued to refuse it, continued to choose to exile herself.47 In Europe, Pat was a bona fide literary star; in
the United States, she was a blur on the book horizon, an oddity, a cult favorite. Superman in Europe, Clark Kent at home, is how her old comics colleagues might have put it.

  “The reason she lived [in Europe was because] she was admired and respected as a writer in Europe,” Block told a previous biographer after Pat’s death.48 “I really think Pat sacrificed her everyday life to her reputation as an artist…. she would have been much happier living in the United States.” 49 Michel Block was a reliable witness, a man who was sensitive to the nuances of other artists’ feelings. A consummately talented concert pianist whose own concert career never measured up to his gifts, he was another one of those Jewish expatriates to whom Pat seemed to be drawn. Block took his unusual piano phrasing from the rhythmic flexibilities of the great French chanteuse Barbara—and his rubatos are like no one else’s: as moody and cloudy as an April in Paris. Pat, who used to visit Michel Block and Charles Latimer in their country house in the Lot region of France during the 1970s, gave to Ripley her preference for Block’s version of the “Rondeña” from The Iberia Suite by Isaac Albéniz (great-grandfather of Cécilia Sarkozy, former wife of the current president of France). And Block’s version of the “Rondeña” was one of the special records Pat chose as a favorite for her appearance in April of 1979 on BBC Radio’s prestigious interview program Desert Island Discs.

  When it came to countries, Switzerland alone seems to have escaped Pat’s maledictions—although it did not come in for a great deal of praise. In a paragraph in which she had already equated “seriousness” with “depression” Pat wrote: “Above all, I like the seriousness of the people…. Didn’t Nietzsche like die Schweiz after all?”50 She seems, partly, to have been curbing her tongue in favor of her ambivalent application for Swiss citizenship. She was nervous about a planned interview with the magazine Linea d’ombra: “for something too extreme the Swiss could oust me. This could go for extreme left or extreme right, and maybe I’m guilty of both.”51 (She was always guilty of both.) Four years later, a visit from two former neighbors in France pushed her to another kind of extremity.