The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  In 1990, Barbara Skelton, Pat’s new friend from the Île-de-France, and Mary Ryan, Pat’s longtime next-door neighbor in Moncourt, made the long drive to Tegna to see the Casa Highsmith. Mary, who had been “hugging a bottle of gin” all the way to Switzerland, landed on her back in Pat’s driveway when she tried to get out of Skelton’s car.

  “Whereupon Pat’s pent-up years of scorn poured out in venemous abuse while standing over Mary like a gauleiter with a whip. ‘What will the neighbors think! People just don’t behave like that here. This is a very puritanical country. Suppose one of the neighbors saw you lying in my drive drunk! I risk having my Swiss citizenship annulled.’ It was all said with sadistic contempt, and set the tone of the visit.”52

  Withal, Pat’s attempts to keep her cash and possessions under her control and out of the hands of native and foreign tax officials by moving to Switzerland backfired in large and small ways. Although Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, where Pat spent eight crucial weeks nearly fifty years before her death, finally did inherit about three million dollars and her literary royalties, Swiss and American taxes got the lion’s share of her holdings. (See “The Cake That Was Shaped Like a Coffin: Part 7.”) Still, a few weeks before her death, at the instigation of Daisy Winston, Pat sent a check for either one thousand or two thousand dollars (there are two accounts of this) to the New Hope–Solebury Library, in New Hope, Pennsylvania, where Daisy still lived. The librarian’s first gesture was a graceful one: Highsmith novels were bought with the money. But Pat’s closest friends, many of whom were in financial trouble, got just what Pat put in her cellars in Aurigeno: nothing at all.

  And Pat, whether she wanted to or not, also effectively disinherited Charlotte, her last cat. Charlotte was another of Pat’s “barn” cats—the cats who always gave her opportunities to make derogatory references to their breeding. There were no provisions made for Charlotte in Pat’s last will (or outside the will, either) and after Pat died, Charlotte spent some time with Marylin Scowden in Geneva (under the bed, says Scowden; Charlotte was terrified of Scowden’s cat and of everything else), and then went on to the De Bernardis in Tegna, where she lived, cosseted and loved, to the great age of nineteen—longer than any of Pat’s other cats. But Charlotte never became a sociable cat. Perhaps that was because Charlotte, like her longtime human companion Patricia Highsmith, had never really been socialized.

  Many of the remaining objects Pat kept in her house are small enough to hold in the hand. They radiate significance; they are the lares and penates of a writer whose walled-up emotional life found much of its meaning in things. As an artist who harvested her final, practical style from the details of daily living, every single object Pat possessed meant the world to her; meant a world to her—and they meant just as much as she aged and her work began to thin down to what was more or less in front of her.

  In most of her mid- and late-life novels, Highsmith treats people and their possessions in the same deadeningly objective way. Her often unlovely prose puts one flat foot in front of the other, levelling every action with the same even tread, dumping her burden of observations and/or her aggressions directly onto the page. The result is a mass of seemingly commonplace material, each individual item of which is stripped of the adjectives and images which graced such works as The Price of Salt, This Sweet Sickness, The Blunderer, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and The Cry of the Owl. She gives as much attention to the things in her later fictions as she gives to the characters who handle them or look at them or think about them.

  In her earlier works, her objects are merely fetishized, like the glass of milk in The Price of Salt or like Dickie Greenleaf’s two rings, which Tom rips from Dickie’s murdered fingers and keeps as trophies. One of these rings is a “large rectangular green stone set in gold,”53 and it is also an insider joke. Pat knew, from reading Frank Harris’s scurrilous and entertaining books about Oscar Wilde, that Oscar always wore a “great green scarab ring.”

  In her later works, the push broom of Pat’s paragraphs sweeps the detritus of daily life before it, stopping, from time to time, to pick up the odd, controlling comma, then advances relentlessly onwards, trailing strings of objects or mundane actions or simple thoughts in an accumulation of detail as dispassionate as that found in most pornographies.

  The novel Pat was writing when the douane swooped down on her in Moncourt, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, offers salient examples of the author at work with her push broom. In this book, she allows Ripley, in his Balzacian way, to handle the abstract details and practical calculations of the problem that harried her all the way to Switzerland: income tax preparation. (Tom started his crime career by impersonating an income tax official who extorts checks—he doesn’t cash them—from his terrified “clients.”) The following passage, inconceivable in anything other than a fiction written by Pat Highsmith, sounds like a business letter from a tax consultant whose fantasy life has been made conspicuous by dreams of larceny. Excruciating to read, it was doubtless a joy for her to write.

  Tom went back to his room, where he had set himself the boring task of spending one hour, by the clock, on his monthly income and expenses for his accountant…. Heloise’s income or allowance from her father was given her in cash, so was not liable for income tax on the Ripley bill. Tom’s Derwatt company income—maybe ten thousand francs a month or close to two thousand dollars if the dollar was strong enough—came also under the table in the form of Swiss franc cheques, this money being filtered almost entirely through Perugia where the Derwatt Art Academy was, though some came from the Buckmaster Gallery sales too. Tom’s ten per cent of Derwatt profits derived also from Derwatt-labelled art supplies, from easels to erasers, but it was easier to smuggle money from northern Italy into Switzerland than to get it from London to Villeperce. Then there was the income from Dickie Greenleaf’s bequest to Tom, which had risen to about eighteen hundred dollars a month from the original three or four hundred years ago. On this, curiously enough, Tom did pay full USA income tax, considerable because it was capital gains.54

  And the passage goes on, with riveting dullness, for much, much longer, bringing in stocks, U.S. Treasury bonds, the differences in declaring income for the French and American governments, the separate worksheets required, etc., etc., as Tom calculates his ill-gotten gains on his “efficient-looking pale green graph paper, income above, output below.”55

  Who else but Pat Highsmith would insert an instructional manual for income tax evasion into a novel? But this kind of brain chatter was a large part of her life, and by now she couldn’t be much bothered to transform it. So she put her financial anxieties, uncooked, into her fiction—and she let Tom Ripley deal with them.

  “Possessions are nine tenths of my life,” Pat had written in 1945.56 The difference, now, was that she had so many more possessions to deal with.

  • 33 •

  The Real Romance of Objects

  Part 3

  As is the way of the world, every remaining object Pat Highsmith kept under her eyes and out of her cellars is now kept entirely out of sight in someone else’s cellar: the enormous, climatically controlled cellar of the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern, Switzerland. The Highsmith Archives are on the lowest of the seven custodial levels in the national archives’ large white Bauhaus building, and they belong to the people of Switzerland.

  The building housing the Swiss Literary Archives looks like the original structure from which Pat’s white block of a house in Tegna might be an abbreviated quotation. There is something official about both structures: they resemble large and small editions of municipal monuments, although the archive building is beautiful in its severity, and Pat’s house in Tegna is merely…severe. But the apparently windowless Casa Highsmith is more fortified, even, than the large, light, extravagantly windowed literary archives. And like its first owner, the Tegna house has no obvious windows, is divided into two sections, and looks inward upon itself. But from above, light streams into the Casa
Highsmith, and out in back—where no public eyes can pry—it overlooks a garden and sky and trees.

  “Hitler’s bunker,” said a friend at first sight of the Casa Highsmith’s blind front. Pat laughed grimly.1

  Like all of Pat’s houses, the cellars of the Swiss Literary Archives are fiendishly cold, kept at temperatures which prolong the life of acid-impregnated papers. Every single thing Pat had in her house at the time of her death—barring the special trinkets distributed to friends and neighbors after her death and the furniture she bought or made—is there, boxed and catalogued, for as long as the world lasts. An enthusiastic archivist of her own effects, Pat would have appreciated the archives’ filing system.

  In carefully numbered acid-free boxes, long flat drawers, and library shelves, all of Pat’s earthly remains—except what she sometimes seemed to value the most, her money—sit in that cold cellar in Bern. Bern is the capital of Switzerland, a verdant, fragrant mountain city of breathtaking views and shadowy arcades which Pat seems to have visited only by letter. The city is encircled by an azure blue, ice-cold, glacier-fed river, the River Aare. It is as dangerous as it is beautiful, with a current so swift that every five meters a handrail is riveted into its banks so that swimmers in trouble can hold on and try to catch their breath. Many swimmers do indeed plunge into the Aare—but not all of them come out alive. And that is another detail about the Swiss capital of Bern that Pat Highsmith would have appreciated.

  The Highsmith possessions in the Swiss Literary Archives have all survived their owner’s turbulent life, transiting tastes, and long expatriation. They contain, as nothing else does, what Janet Flanner once called “the specific invisible remains” of Pat’s long relationship with them.

  So here they are for you to see. Or rather, here it is: a sizeable sampling of Patricia Highsmith’s goods and chattels in the form of a list, Pat’s preferred method of organizing her life. The order of the list is simply the order in which the objects came before my eyes. Wherever necessary, I’ve added interpretative notes, but for the most part the list is descriptive: a catalogue raisonné of Patricia Highsmith’s hidden history of possessions.

  By now, you will be able to work out for yourself most of the meanings contained in her things.

  Objects

  A coffee-colored Olympia De Luxe portable typewriter, manufactured in 1956, with a standard QUERTYUIOP American keyboard, an easy action (I tried it, repeatedly), and an E key whose identifying letter has been worn away long ago by heavy use. Four little rubber feet. Its hardshell, whale gray case has the curves and swells of a Slipstream trailer and has travelled everywhere: it is covered with stickers from airlines and foreign countries. Two addresses are affixed: 77 Moncourt and Tegna. The name Patricia Highsmith is attached to both addresses. This is the typewriter Pat used for most of her work from 1956 onwards.

  A box of Caran d’Ache pencils.

  Assorted pens. An eraser.

  A Swiss Army knife. With attachments.

  A dagger.

  Some straight pins.

  Food tins and jam jars, rinsed and cleaned, for pencils and pens.

  A very sharp letter opener, bladed.

  A Wite-Out pencil.

  A recorder. (She used to play this, delicately wiping off the mouthpiece when she handed it to guests to try, and wiping the mouthpiece again when she took it back.)

  The prescription for her regular glasses: +3 (right eye), +2½ (left eye).

  A pair of reading glasses: yellow with black tops or “eyebrows.” Quite dandyish.

  A medallion from the French government: Ordre des arts et des lettres.

  The 1964 Critics Award from the Crimewriters’ Association.

  Another recorder.

  Trivets of straw that hold little seashells.

  A wooden head, whose face is frozen in an expression of horror and sorrow. Approximately ten inches high with a wooden base. It seems to be the head of a male, but it looks uncannily like the long-faced portrait Allela Cornell painted of the twenty-three-year-old Pat Highsmith. Pat gave this little wood sculpture to Rosalind Constable, and Rosalind, at the end of her life, sent it back to Pat so that, as Rosalind wrote in her letter, prospective biographers “can see what you do with your left hand.”

  Little decorated boxes.

  A paperweight: the small, very heavy head of a longhorn cow skull, cast in bronze by her second cousin, Dan Walton Coates, a western artist of note, in his spare time, in 1991.

  A papier-mâché cat’s-head box (the head lifts off) which holds Swiss coins. Inscribed: “The Cat Who Followed Pat by J & L.” Given by Linda and her friend Joëlle, the same set of friends who gave Pat a fancy address book and painted her kitchen in Moncourt.

  Two large, old, heavy house keys from her Aurigeno house, marked “Ornamental, lock now changed. Main Back Door.”

  Many odd little animal totems.

  A goat’s bell.

  A very large pair of binoculars.

  A large gilt-edged mirror, with photos and postcards Scotch-taped to the sides of the glass; amongst them, a postcard of Colette in drag, a postcard of a panel from the Bayeux Unicorn Tapestry, and a photo of Bettina Berch with her newborn daughter.

  A double magnifying glass.

  A cheap pencil sharpener.

  Another knife.

  Two long, very heavy swords. These are the “Confederate swords” Pat said she bought in Texas during the year she was left with her grandmother in Fort Worth while Mary went back with Stanley to New York. She kept them in the crossed, dueling position on the walls of each of her houses. As Mary Highsmith was dying—and without mentioning Mary’s death as a motive—Pat finally uncrossed them. The swords were forged in Massachusetts: one in Chicopee and the other in Springfield.

  A lethal-looking carving knife and fork set, large enough to dismember a buffalo.

  An empty bullet casing made into a pen.

  Many little cat figurines and toys.

  Inkwells.

  Coupons for stamps and mixed change from many European countries in another inkwell.

  A box of buttons and stones.

  A gigantic nineteenth-century stereograph, carved, detailed, and very difficult to use. It is accompanied by dozens of stiff cardboards imprinted with the double photographic images which convert into three dimensions when viewed through the stereograph.

  A cork bulletin board.

  Reproductions of David Hockney drawings.

  An Al Fatah pin.

  A blackboard with the names “B. Skelton” [Barbara Skelton, her neighbor in France] and “Millie”[Millie Alford, the cousin with whom she had a short involvement and a long friendship] printed in chalk. At one point in her life, Pat kept blackboards in both her kitchen and her workroom, so she could make lists of what she had to do on them.

  A laser copy, framed in plastic, of a photograph of her former lover Natica Waterbury, grinning and alone in a boat on a lake.

  The painting of the twenty-three-year-old Pat Highsmith by Allela Cornell. Pat’s huge hands are wrapped around her body and she has the look of a woman already weighted down by her future. Pat hung this painting in every house she ever lived in.

  Two objects which Pat’s Swiss neighbors the Dieners took as mementos:

  A lace snail encased in fiberglass and given to Pat on her sixty-sixth birthday.

  An artistic deck of cards which can be arranged into a complete visual landscape. The landscape can be changed by moving the cards. Printed in Leipzig.

  And one object that was given to me: A bleached and mended pair of Pat’s iconic Levi-Strauss 501 jeans. She wore them all through the 1970s in Moncourt, and they still hold the shape of her body.

  Library

  Pat’s library is another matter. The books that remain suggest the collection of a woman whose serious reading stopped at the college literature level. It is the library of someone who had a good classical education—and decided not to pursue it. Not much seems to have been added since her days as a s
tudent at Barnard, and many of the newer volumes are works by friends and colleagues (sent by publishers), copies of books she had been asked to review (also sent by publishers), or books by Pat herself in various languages and editions. The range of books attests to her insularity: she lived much of her adult life in Europe, but there are almost no books in any of the several continental European languages she practiced in her cahiers and diaries.

  Here are some of the books left in her personal library, in some cases listed by title, in others by author.

  The Personality of Cats

  Erich Fromm

  History of the Arabs

  Grimm’s Fairy Tales

  Edward Said

  Colin Wilson

  Snobbery with Violence

  Bob Son of Battle, 1901 edition (a heroic dog story)

  G. K. Chesterton

  Daylight and Nightmare

  Brigid Brophy

  Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown (Pat had this book in English because Marion Aboudaram was its French translator and Pat helped her a bit with the translation; it’s a picaresque lesbian novel.)

  Paul Bowles

  Bitter Fame: a biography of Sylvia Plath, with crucial points bracketed by Pat; e.g., the fact that Plath used to leave the house without money in her pocket is marked with a word that expressed Pat’s feelings on the subject: “Horrors!” She also marked approvingly anything that favored Ted Hughes.