The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  The trees end by destabilizing the world, and a “land mass, big as a continent” (it’s the continent of North America) drops “into the dark blue waters.”

  A vein of pure, vengeful nastiness—an underappreciated literary quality, but a literary quality nonetheless—runs through much of the work Pat did in Europe. By the end of 1976 in Moncourt, when she had begun to take notes on her “4th Ripley” (The Boy Who Followed Ripley), her confidence was “flitting sideways, like a bird, out of sight now.” She was finding concentration difficult, she had started too many projects, and her life was “but a kind of darkness full of dark and empty shadows.” She couldn’t wait for clarity of mind because “to have patience [would be] to erase all pride, satisfaction in a day’s work.” And the fair manuscript copy of The Boy Who Followed Ripley bears witness to her near-crippling indecisiveness: interleaved, crossed out, and overwritten, it is her most anxious manuscript.

  In the first difficult phase of writing the novel (before the spring of 1978 provided her with the other difficulty of Tabea Blumenschein), it was money, again, and taxes, again, that were making her feel futile—once again. She kept on working because she had to, stabilizing herself with a plot for her novel that was concerned with money and vengeance. (Her other title for the book was Ripley and the Money Boy.) It was another prescient work: in The Boy Who Followed Ripley Pat imagined a relationship for Tom Ripley with a very young admirer. Within the next year and a half, she would have two such relationships herself. The first, with Tabea Blumenschein, prevented her from working on the novel, while the second, with Monique Buffet, allowed her to finish it. Highsmith’s life and work would always give the appearance of a balancing act.

  Pat’s initial notes for The Boy Who Followed Ripley center on young Frank, who, attracted by Ripley’s dubious reputation, has run away from his family to see Ripley after pushing his “great uncle over a terrace wall” in America. (Pat later changed the victim to Frank’s grandfather, then to his father.) “Tom smells out the boy’s terror of possessing money, also fascination.” Frank—and he is anything but frank at first—is the heir to a great food fortune (there’s a whiff of Pat’s discomfort with food in this), and “so strong” is Frank’s “adherence to Tom” (the Whitmanic adjective is Pat’s) that Tom’s wife, Heloise, suspects young Frank of being a “tapette,” a “fairy.” Ripley, Pat noted from bitter personal experience, “cannot really win with H[eloise] because if he intrudes on her privacy it is too much, & if he doesn’t, it is a sign of indifference.”53

  In the early days of 1977, Pat was also brooding about (but not reading) Dostoyevsky’s efforts to “reconcile God’s will with God’s indifference” and calling it “rubbish.” Money and taxes were now at the center of her thoughts. “Artists, writers and some filmmakers,” she wrote with asperity, “like Ingmar Bergman—end up as they started…writing for love, working for love, not money because taxes take almost all the money. A strange cycle.”54 By the end of 1977, she was writing that Christ (still a touchstone for her and the only divinity with whom she never argued) was lucky “not to be able to see this unchristian, uncharitable and dishonest Catholic community in which I live.”

  Once again, Pat had decided that she was surrounded by thieving enemies and—a slight variation—that her friends were crooks as well. She described her next-door neighbor Desmond Ryan as a petty criminal—“an alcoholic adulterer, now pilfering firewood bought by me to give to the poor”—and she would later curse him roundly to Barbara Skelton, one of whose husbands, the millionaire physicist Derek Jackson, had been “an old school chum” of Ryan.55 Everyone, she thought with the kind of satisfaction that familiarity brings, was cheating her. Pat was settling comfortably into one of her oldest themes.

  Expatriatism and the loverless wilderness into which she finally wandered in Switzerland did nothing to alter this view, and napalm-shooting trees, murderous ferrets, and killer ponds were not the only vengeful organisms in the Highsmith stories to come: the author, too, was beginning to wreak a near-biblical vengeance on all the milieux she’d abandoned (and by which she felt abandoned) in America. By 1977, Pat had chronicled the very American Edith Howland’s slow slippage into insanity in Edith’s Diary, accompanying it with Edith’s confused but condign jeremiads about America and the war in Vietnam. (Edith’s political “thinking” is that of a thinly sourced article; her ideas are mostly superficial summaries.) Pat was entering a long period of focusing her talents on broader targets than those which lurked in the hearts of men.

  • 36 •

  The Cake that was Shaped Like a Coffin

  Part 3

  Before she moved to peaceful, pristine, orderly Switzerland, Pat had never been tempted to make the decline and fall of the earth a focus of her artistic attention. Nor had she summoned up the world’s decay in anything more substantial than a halo of implication around the protagonists of her novels (like Edith Howland’s poisoned suburban family in Edith’s Diary or the brutal effects of Howard Ingham’s identity-dissolving holiday in Hammamet in The Tremor of Forgery), or explored it in anything more serious than a few caricatural short stories. But Pat’s thirty-sixth notebook, which bridges her life in Aurigeno, Switzerland, from August of 1983 to August of 1988, explodes in a series of apocalyptic horrors. Most of the keime in this journal—those creative “germs” which inspired and infected her work—are viral, carcinogenic, and irradiated.

  She imagined (and then crossed the notebook entry out) a “small country in East Africa, composed of blacks and Spanish mixed,” where “[c]ruelty to the elderly provokes laughter” and [n]urses, p[hilanthropists]—all murdered and raped.”1 Another crossed-out entry: “Begin story with stuck elevator which has 20 corpses in it, putrefying.”2 Another idea: “A contagious E. Coli germ gets loose. Devastating diarrhea…abandonment of beaches, hotels, resorts…Eels triumph on the beaches, eating even the corpses of…swimmers. Mercury poisoning…a pretty girl swimmer swallows a morsel of human excrement.”3 Another entry: a story called “Mass Unemployment,” which details a series of disasters in which the “survivors of the human race have fled to Switzerland,” where they hope to live in unpolluted air. “But even Switzerland has been bombed.” 4

  At the end of 1984, two years after Michael Jackson’s revolutionary album Thriller appeared, Pat beamed her laser briefly on the idea of writing Michael Jackson into a short story. She saw something metastasizing in Jackson, something she recognized and understood and was drawn to. She began—shrewdly, for the limited amount of information she had about him—to parse Jackson’s character. Like so many other of her subjects now, her brief re-creation of Michael Jackson returned her to the motive of money.

  “A type like Michael Jackson, [ambiguously gendered,] in love with himself. Sterling image to the public. Schizo finally. He talks to himself as he dresses. He becomes two persons within himself. Friends are aware of this—but the boy is a money-maker.”5

  Along with the odd note for a novel about murder-minded protagonists who kill, steal, and/or exchange guilts for love, and the occasional plot summary about toxic relations in a small circle of people, Pat, from her rocky perch in Switzerland, continued to widen her scope at the expense of its depth: her imagination was indicting worldwide institutions (like the Catholic Church) in her short story “Pope Sixtus VI—about which the Catholic convert Graham Greene (who, according to Muriel Spark, “wasn’t happy if he wasn’t sinning”)6 wrote Pat an approving letter. In other short stories such as “Nabuti: Warm Welcome to a UN Committee,” or her crude parody of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, “President Buck Jones Rallies and Waves the Flag,” she was destroying whole civilizations.

  Pat had already published the rancorous results of her move to Switzerland in Found in the Street (1985), a novel which upsets the premises of her other inverted Manhattan fairy tale, The Price of Salt. This time, the lovely young ingenue to whom everyone is attracted (and who spices up the marriage of Jack and Natalia, the young couple living in Highsmith
’s old apartment building in Grove Street) comes to Manhattan to “try her luck” and is brutally murdered in front of what appears to be Buffie Johnson’s loft building on Greene Street. (See “Patricia Highsmith’s New York.”) And the net in which every character is ambiguously snared is the paranoid consciousness of the crank and failure, Ralph Linderman: very much a product of the same Pat Highsmith who, forty-odd years before, had created the single-room occupant with the withered ear, Archie, in her first published story, “Uncertain Treasure.” (The novelist Anita Brookner, in a Spectator review of Found in the Street, called Linderman “a nuisance and a bore. In the country of the laid-back he is an intruder.”)7 Single men in single rooms would always be a Highsmith speciality.

  Ralph’s honorable return of a wallet (as we have seen, Pat yearned to return a wallet herself; it was the ultimate proof of honesty required by her criminal mind) and his judgement of Manhattan as a sinful city plagued by irritating minorities and sexual deviants enjoying themselves, is the ostinato of Found in the Street. Pat left out of the novel the ugly little ethnic dictionary she’d made up for Ralph, but she still allowed him to use a repugnant epithet for Jews and to imagine black Americans as apes swinging from trees.

  But the fact that Ralph Linderman is both the “moral center” of the book (all his puritanical predictions of disaster come true) and an obsessive nutcase who misinterprets things attests strongly to his creator’s still-active, still-generative, still-productive ambivalence. Amongst the other things this novel “finds in the street” is a female murderer who is also a “butch dyke” and a far more caricatural depiction of lesbianism than the one which irritated Pat so much in Marc Brandel’s 1950 novel, The Choice. Sisterhood had never been a Highsmith theme.

  Like all of Pat’s writings set in America in the 1970s and 1980s, Found in the Street was subject to her misunderstandings of the culture she’d left behind. The food and drink in the novel are from 1960s New York, not 1980s Manhattan; her re-creation of the habits of hip young couples in Greenwich Village is unrecognizable; and the social scenes into which she inserts her characters seem to be dramatized by someone who has been observing Manhattan from another galaxy, not to mention another epoch. Pat’s French editor, Alain Oulman, politely found the relationship between the young couple, Jack and Natalia, unbelievable—“they don’t speak or act as if they were husband and wife,” he wrote Pat—and he was correct: they are difficult to believe in.8

  Still, Pat divided some of her own personal quirks between Jack and Natalia: Jack, who is working on something like a graphic novel, has, like Pat, a tendency to prefer pictures of women to the women themselves, while Natalia has secret affairs with women and loves to mark passages in books the way Pat marked them, with little brackets. And Pat gave to the crackpot Ralph Linderman more than a few of her own ethnic prejudices: proof, perhaps, that her artistic self was more “advanced” than the self which harbored the prejudices. Oddly—this would always be a Highsmith trademark—the novel’s social disjunctures and cross-cultural misunderstandings add another layer of creepy fascination to what is already a decidedly creepy work.

  It was the American publication of Found in the Street in January of 1988 that prompted Terrence Rafferty’s lucid, praiseful consideration of Patricia Highsmith’s work (he called it “peerlessly disturbing—not great cathartic nightmares but banal bad dreams that keep us restless and thrashing for the rest of the night[,]” and characterized her prose as “blunt and straightforward as a strip search”) in The New Yorker that same month.9 The article seems to have given Pat, who as late as 1969 was still having her stories and poems and cartoons rejected from The New Yorker, the most pleasure she’d gotten out of a piece of journalism since Francis Wyndham’s unparalleled survey of her work (part of his long review of The Cry of the Owl) for English readers in 1963. Wyndham had written:

  Her peculiar brand of horror comes less from the inevitability of disaster, than from the ease with which it might have been avoided. The evil of her agents is answered by the impotence of her patients—this is not the attraction of opposites, but in some subtle way the call of like to like. When they finally clash in climactic catastrophe, the reader’s sense of satisfaction may derive from sources as dark as those which motivate Patricia Highsmith’s destroyers and their fascinated victims.10

  Nine years after Wyndham’s piece appeared, Julian Symons, doyen of British crime writers, biographer of his interesting older brother A. J. A. Symons (Pat liked and, of course, identified with the subject of A. J. A. Symons’s innovative biography, the effortlessly eccentric Baron Corvo), and a critic who regularly championed and occasionally chastised Pat’s novels in print, extended the public awareness of her duality.

  “There are no more genuine agonies in modern literature than those endured by the couples in her books who are locked together in a dislike and even hatred that often strangely contains love.”11

  Symons understood how necessary “violence” was to Pat: “the threat or actuality of it produces her best writing.”12

  Two months after Terrence Rafferty’s piece was published, the American journalist Joan Dupont travelled from Paris to Aurigeno to interview Pat, sympathetically, for The New York Times—editing out Pat’s more intemperate comments about Israel, to Pat’s irritation. But neither Rafferty’s essay nor Dupont’s article helped Pat’s new novel in the United States: Found in the Street sold fewer than five thousand copies.

  After Found in the Street, Pat’s next letter to the world from Switzerland was a collection of short stories written in the cartoonish spirit of her early comics work: Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes (1987). Pat never lost her interest in cartoons and even sent some cartoon ideas to Gary Trudeau for his nationally syndicated Doonesbury strip while she was living in Aurigeno. She also sent Trudeau a copy of Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes, thinking that these stories would be prime material for a political cartoonist.13 And they would have been: each story in Catastrophes is as distorted by repulsion as an expressionist caricature.

  Most of the Catastrophes collection could also have found its way into that strangest of American pulp magazines, Weird Tales (see “Alter Ego, Part 1”)—especially the oddest story, “The Mysterious Cemetery.” Inspired by Pat’s friend Anne Morneweg’s bout with breast cancer and the blackly humorous way Morneweg recounted her experience to Pat,14 “The Mysterious Cemetery” tells the story of a secret cemetery near a hospital which is infected with metastasizing growths, growths which come from the bodies of the hospital’s illegally experimented-on cancer patients, who are buried in the cemetery grounds. The growths propagate and burgeon, and Pat likens them to “a man-made wreckage of his own soul, to an insane tinkering with nature, such as that which had resulted in the accursed atomic bomb.”15 She imagines that the strange blooms will become cult objects, revered artifacts—enlivening the work of artists, scientists, and writers.

  “The Mysterious Cemetery” could have been the Highsmith version of a bitter “environmental” dialectic, but the contrapuntal voice, the antiphon of the dialectic, is missing. And so the tale, like all the tales in Catastrophes, remains another exhibit in the Highsmith Museum of Contemporary Maladies. The same impulse—the impulse to attack—had inspired Little Tales of Misogyny, but the Misogyny tales (although Pat cast the women in them as “types”) are more bitter and more personal: they are directed against women, in some cases against specific, living women. The Catastrophes tales are directed against the entire world.

  After a publicity trip to Manhattan in late October of 1987 (see “The Cake That Was Shaped Like a Coffin: Part 5”), Pat flew from New York to London to promote Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes. Aside from the usual round of interviews and meetings with friends and colleagues (she invited a young writer, who had just accompanied her on a publicity junket to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn and was flying to London herself, to a luncheon “at which Patricia Losey arrived with her husband’s ashes [film dir
ector Joseph Losey] in an urn”),16 Pat made an unusual appearance on the BBC2 television program Cover to Cover, presented by the Australian poet and novelist Jill Neville. Other Cover to Cover panellists included the biographer Victoria Glendinning, the young actor Jack Klaff, and Kenneth Williams, farceur, review artist, and caustic star of the Carry On films. Kenneth Williams’s mordant diaries make Pat’s own complaint-filled journals seem like chronicles of unrestrained joy.

  Three books were on Cover to Cover’s agenda for the evening, and Pat’s collection of short stories came second, to be followed by Richard Ellmann’s biography of Oscar Wilde, a work which later appeared on Tom Ripley’s own reading list. Pat didn’t get around to reading the Ellmann book until April of 1990; she really wasn’t reading anything in Aurigeno. But when she finally did read it, she joined Oscar in her mind with her favorite spiritual hero—“Oscar’s story reminds me of that of Christ”—and then coerced his destructive relationship with Bosie into a parable about her own life: “Art is not always healthy,” she wrote, “and why should it be?”17

  Panellist Jack Klaff’s memory of the taping of Cover to Cover was “very strong.”

  There was this legendary writer, not only having a book up for review, Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes, but she was actually going to be there…. I suppose we were all expecting crime stories and stuff like that and then we got these rather socially conscious stories. When a writer of that stature writes something like that, you pay attention, even if the stories are slightly confused.