The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  My impression [of Patricia] was, well, she was quite sunken into herself…. She had a sort of molelike or badgerlike aspect. She was perched at the end of the table, she was hunched over, her eyes were sad, even before she started…. She looked like a person who spent her life just writing.

  Kenneth Williams, at the far end of the on-set table, was

  sitting ramrod straight, arms folded, legs crossed, couldn’t wait for the Ellmann bio of Wilde…. I think he had two months to go before he died. He was not in a good mood, not feeling well, and he went into makeup not in a good state. And [Pat] had made this huge fuss over Kenneth Williams in makeup; everyone got the impression that she adored the films, the stage work; there was this huge buildup for him to return the compliment. And he just carpetbombed her. He said what a load of crap the book was…. I’m not sure if he actually said the book should be chucked on the rubbish bin, but he did say how much he’d enjoyed The Talented Mr. “this” and Strangers on the “that,” and it was clear that he absolutely loathed this book….*

  But with enormous respect for her dignity, and in the most polite way possible, she didn’t really betray any reactions…. She simply responded to what he had to say…. She said perhaps Mr. Williams means this and means that…. If the author is present, they usually defend themselves. She didn’t do that, she simply took it on the chin. Perhaps she was awed by this man…. We’d all been polite about the book, in some cases enthusiastic, but Kenneth Williams felt it was up to him to say what he said. It was hugely uncomfortable….

  Well, they edited the show very, very strongly; they cut out a lot of Williams’s stronger comments.18

  In fact, Victoria Glendinning’s praise of Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes is what comes through most prominently in the edited version of the broadcast. Glendinning compared it to Animal Farm and described it, accurately, as dealing with “the psychopathology of the entire world.” But Pat’s personal dignity comes through just as forcefully. Even her embarrassed demeanor couldn’t hide the quiet distinction of her responses.

  Thus, it was from Switzerland where Pat launched her last creative reversal of values. She began, unconsciously as always, to rechannel the Calvinist-influenced, world-correcting thinking of her grandmother Willie Mae (as well as those cranky little human-improvement theories she’d begun to confect in Moncourt in the 1970s, like the course designed for “ten year olds” to be given “on life’s problems,” a course she felt sure “would be very popular among children”)19 into an imagined destruction of the planet Earth, a planet she now saw as poisoned and choking on its own refuse.

  There are no suggestions for world betterment in Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes—this was, after all, a chronicle of decay—but Pat’s writing, both good and bad (and in its final phases unhelpfully sourced by the exhaustion of her inner resources and her second and third-hand knowledge of social conditions) was still marked by an eerie ability to predict the future. The instability, the fractured consciousness, the murderously repressed rages she was accustomed to detailing in relationships and psychologies, she now projected onto whole societies and grand institutions. In her own way, and in her own voice, Pat was abandoning the particular for the general, “turning loose” of psychology in favor of cosmology. It had interesting consequences for her work.

  One of those consequences seems to be the growing social “relevance” of Pat’s later and less satisfactory writings. Amongst the reasons this late work continues to signify is that the “facts” of contemporary life have now begun to imitate her “fictions.” The planet, in its rapid decay, is finally catching up with Patricia Highsmith’s imagination.

  In 1987, in a notebook entry she never developed into a story, Pat returned for a moment to a double view of Mother Mary, rewriting her early relationship with her mother into something resolute, and casting herself, as she did in another story she wrote about her mother, “No End in Sight,” in the role of a son. Picking up the stitch of her suspicions that Mary’s friend and former neighbor in Fort Worth had a son who was pilfering things from Mary (see “The Real Romance of Objects: Part 1”), Pat imagined a teenage homosexual, a thief, whose mother “mocks him for effeminacy.” The mother negotiates the will of their “dotty female neighbor,” then tries to get her son to murder the old woman, to push her down the stairs. The boy rebels and murders his mother instead because in a “brief moment of confidence, spontaneity, [the dotty neighbor who] has spoken to the boy as if she has known all along that he was homosexual, asks him about a young man with whom the boy is in love. This opens the gates of love, of humanity, for the boy.”20 Splitting Mother Mary into two characters—both the evil mother and the dotty neighbor—was a momentary relief from Pat’s usual characterization of Mary as the Bitch from Hell’s Inner Precincts. But Pat never wrote these notes into a story.

  Instead—increasingly irritated at having to contribute $1,100 a month towards Mary’s care at the Fireside Lodge in Fort Worth—Pat moved Mary into the entirely unforgiving neigborhood of “No End in Sight,” a story she included in Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes.

  In Gulliver’s Travels, Lemuel Gulliver is thrilled to hear of a race of humans, the Struldbruggs, who cannot die. He is less thrilled when he learns that they continue to age and to live “without relish or appetite.” (“At 90 they lose their teeth and hair…. In talking they forget the common appellation of their nearest friends and relations.”) Naomi Barton Markham, the main character of “No End in Sight” (“a hundred and ninety, some say two hundred and ten, with no end in sight”), whose faithful son Stevey died “a hundred and ten years ago” is a Struldbrugg to the life. A Struldbrugg in a rest home in Oklahoma.

  Although Pat wasn’t reading Jonathan Swift, her inner Swift could always be ignited by thoughts of Mother Mary and the money that she, Pat, was “wasting” on her, and this story is vibrant with a daughter’s resentments and repulsions, disguised as those of a son’s. Pat is the self-acknowledged “son” of “No End in Sight,” just as she was the “son” in the story she called “Under a Dark Angel’s Eye” (published in The Black House) about the nefarious dealings of the rest home and the community to which an unloved mother has been consigned. In “No End in Sight,” Pat focused her resentments on her current obsession, repeating ad infinitum that Naomi Barton Markham was a lifeless “tube” into which money was being ceaselessly funnelled at the Old Homestead Nursing and Rest Home.*

  Into the story Pat also slipped a sly reference to an Atwater-Kent radio—the company owned by her old lover Ginnie Kent Catherwood’s father—and added a little true-life crime vignette taken from Mary’s increasingly grim days at the Fireside Lodge. To curb her wandering, Mary was often strapped into an adult high chair at the lodge. When she wasn’t strapped down, she used to creep into the rooms of other residents, remove their sets of false teeth, and hide them in blankets in her room.21 Naomi Barton Markham does the same thing.

  Pat makes a great deal of Naomi’s bodily functions and dysfunctions and how costly they are: “Those wet, nasty, stinking diapers!” Although practically insensate, Naomi is characterized as sly and cunning, and the attendants at the rest home hate her (“She’s a horror!”). Pat gives to Naomi Mary Highsmith’s pregnancy history with a malicious twist: in “No End in Sight,” it is Naomi who wants a miscarriage more than her first husband does. (The opposite was true in the Plangman marriage.) Naomi divorces her first husband, gives birth to her son, leaves him with her mother, and goes off to Chicago to pursue a vaudeville career. And then she lives on forever in the rest home, “insane,” writes Pat, and disturbing the staff by talking “in a somewhat Southern accent.” “You’ll finish us all, Naomi,” Pat ends the story, “you’ll bury us all…. How does this incubus feel, lying on its back with a rubber ring under the rump to avoid bedsores?”22

  “No End in Sight” is entirely fueled by physical disgust (the opposite of physical passion) and by hatred (the opposite of love). And Pat wrote it
in the single-sided, artistically “unbalanced” state to which she’d reverted in her own “black house” in Aurigeno.

  Whatever she told herself about it, Mary’s long-livedness, the wandering of her wits, her sinking into near speechlessness and, finally, into immobility, were a constant source of pain and rage to Pat. That same sense of confusion of “selves” between the mother and daughter—the psychological twinning of Pat and Mary which breached the borders of their bodies and their desires and led Mary to impersonate Pat for some French journalists in a hotel lobby in Paris in 1959 and rendered Pat unable to work when her mother was angry or ill or poor—lived on in Pat, in an exhausted state, long after Mary had lost most of her memory. In 1985, Pat wrote to Kingsley that Mary was “worse” since her hip operation last March and that “[a]ll this simply depresses me…and it plays havoc with one’s concentration.”23

  The last time Pat had seen her mother in Texas (it was at the end of September 1974), Mary had been having one of her “bad” days and hadn’t, Pat said aggrievedly, “looked” at her own daughter; she’d watched television instead. Pat, on this visit, was still intent on getting that “Hamilton watch” from Mary (see “The Real Romance of Objects: Part 1”), and she was deeply distressed at the “total disorder” in which she’d found Mary’s house: “dishes from days back in the kitchen sink, old newspapers, letters, envelopes on the living-room floor, the fat dog full of fleas, the oven full of half-finished plates of food.” Back in Manhattan, where Pat stopped on her way to Moncourt, her cousin Millie Alford had given her a letter from Mary, a letter with which Mary ended the lifelong volley of love and damage she and her daughter had continued for so long. Mary’s letter scumbles the line between mother and daughter, lays claim to the same feelings Pat had about her, and reads like a message from a heartbroken lover, full of the dashes Mary always used to catch her breath between emotions.

  “Well, you’ve done it—broken my heart—yet gave me a freedom I’ve not felt in years…. That you could use the word to me that you used in describing the man you asked to adopt you…It’s good you never had children—they’d be forever criticized and then never come up to your demands. You can think of no one but yourself…. Don’t write—I shan’t.”24

  Pat’s identification with Mary’s mental state was serious enough to push her into writing letters blaming Mary for her own dementia. She was so exercised on the subject that she lashed out at friends who were advising “kindness” to the afflicted or the ill.

  When Caroline Besterman expressed the thought that comatose people should be kept alive because their dreams might be so pleasant, Pat got angry all over again. When Christa Maerker wrote to tell Pat that she had moved in with her own much-loved, very ill mother in order to care for her, Pat wrote back “an incredibly nasty letter…about how crazy it is to take care of your mother.” The letter was so belligerent that Christa didn’t communicate with Pat for “several years” after she received it.25

  In March of 1987, Jeva Cralick, the lively, levelheaded fashion illustrator who had been Mary Highsmith’s closest friend in New York and “a full-fledged member of the Highsmith clan…since Pat was 5 or 6,”26 and who had kept up an affectionate correspondence with Pat for decades, wrote to Dan and Florine Coates in Weatherford, Texas, from her apartment in Brooklyn about Mary’s deteriorating condition—and about what it might mean for Pat.

  “We know what a vibrant, gifted, articulate person Mary was. And how proud she was of Pat and how much she loved Pat—Pat will never know or choose to remember—but she must sense how much she has inherited from Mary. Well Pat is Pat.”27

  And that’s how the laissez-faire Coates family says they used to explain Pat’s increasingly armigerous letters about her mother. “Well, that’s Pat” became their standard response to nearly everything Pat said or did.

  • 37 •

  The Cake that was Shaped Like a Coffin

  Part 4

  By January of 1988, after five years in Aurigeno, Pat was once again handing her problems over to Thomas Ripley in the notes she was taking for Ripley’s final appearance in a novel. (Perhaps Terrence Rafferty’s favorable New Yorker article had something to do with Ripley’s reappearance.) Tom Ripley—that master of escape—was now beginning to escape “into another person. A form of schizophrenia…Tom feel[s] that he is…touching madness, experiencing it, as he could not do in the presence of Mme Annette [his devoted housekeeper] and Heloise.” Like Pat, Ripley was turning outwards, brooding on the “variety of horror that man has invented for himself, against himself: Chains, whips, sadism—yes, in marriages, the nagging defiling wives, the wife-beaters. The animal torturers. Tom felt that this destructive rage in man…seemed to equal the beauty of architecture, painting, music…. It was like a dramatic balance,” Pat wrote. The balance she had been able to maintain in her work (and, more precariously, in her life) was now, without love to counter it, heavily weighted in favor of decay and destruction. Tom was merely keeping pace with his creator’s feelings.

  Certainly a spur to finishing Ripley Under Water—she’d put the manuscript aside for a while—was the journey Pat finally decided to take to visit Buffie Johnson in Morocco in mid-August of 1988. Pat, who had long since started a correspondence with Buffie and had visited her in her East Forty-third Street apartment and again in her Greene Street loft in New York, knew that Buffie had inherited the lease of Jane Bowles’s apartment in the Immeuble Itesa in Tangier (on the floor beneath Paul Bowles’s apartment) from Maurice Grosser, the lover of the composer Virgil Thompson. The idea of remeeting Paul Bowles figured into Pat’s travel plans, and Buffie had initially suspected that Bowles was Pat’s chief reason for coming. He wasn’t. But Bowles did become her chief reason for enjoying the trip.

  Paul Bowles was just the man to interest Pat: a homosexual widower from a milieu she’d known in Manhattan whose exquisitely glacial style and continuing expatriatism had given him a kind of international cachet—although style was never the royal road to Pat’s affections. Pat had been in light correspondence (twenty letters) with Bowles’s friend Gore Vidal since 1978, making her first note to Vidal a modest request to send “a comment” for the Lippincott publication of The Boy Who Followed Ripley in New York. (“If you say a flat no, I shall understand…. But you might even like the book,” she’d written shyly and boldly to Vidal.)1

  When Pat returned to Switzerland from her trip to Tangier, she and Paul Bowles developed a gossipy, mutually admiring habit of writing letters to each other (Pat had thirty-six letters from Bowles), much focused on Buffie Johnson, but also dragging in the usual writers’ complaints about translations, money, expatriatism, the selling of archives, and the total treachery of publishers. The correspondence was sparked by Pat’s sending two of her books to Paul when she got back to Aurigeno and by an article she wrote about meeting him. And Bowles admired Pat’s writing: he told her that even on the third reading of Strangers on a Train he’d forgotten and was again “shocked and disappointed” by the fact that the hero was apprehended. “It’s such a good novel,” he wrote.2

  It is worth noting that Pat’s collection of affirming quotes from well-known male writers did her a power of good. The quotation Gore Vidal sent to the Atlantic Monthly Press in 1988, ten years after she’d first written him3 (“One of our greatest modernist writers,” he’d written)—a quotation for which she’d asked Vidal—and the quotation from Graham Greene’s introduction to a collection of her short stories (“the poet of apprehension” was Greene’s phrase)—an introduction for which she’d paid Greene—are reproduced more frequently than anything else that has been written about her work.

  But no one quotes the entirely spontaneous comment made by Arthur Koestler to Cyril Connolly in a 1965 interview in the London Sunday Times on the occasion of Koestler’s sixtieth birthday. Koestler said: “Patricia Highsmith is in a very high class.” And Connolly responded: “I don’t know about her.” “Don’t you?” said Koestler. “There is a joy waiting for y
ou.” 4

  Practical as always, Pat got a commission from the Sunday Times to write an article about Tangier before she left Aurigeno (the article was rejected, but from it she salvaged the much shorter piece about Bowles which she finally published in Le Monde), and full of enthusiasm, she flew to the exotic North African port “where,” as Buffie Johnson later said, “intrigue was a way of life,” and Pat “wanted to see everything in Morocco.” Buffie wasn’t in her fifth-floor flat when Pat arrived—she’d gone out for a yoga class—so Pat ascertained from the concierge the number of Paul Bowles’s apartment and went up to the sixth floor to knock on his door. She found Paul in bed, eating and tended to by his protégé Mohammed Mrabet. When Buffie returned, Pat was “ensconced in Paul’s apartment drinking scotch.”

  Buffie and Pat were at odds about what to see and do in Tangier. Buffie said that all “that was normal” for her was “new” to Pat; Pat was interested in everything in Tangier except the prehistoric ruins—the only thing Buffie hadn’t explored in her five summers in Tangier. Buffie’s flat, in a building solidly constructed by the French, had a large living room and two bedrooms, one of which, the room Pat was sleeping in, Buffie had turned into a painting studio. Buffie was not happy to give up her work as Pat lingered for almost two weeks in the bedroom. Pat, unbothered, was amusing herself by using her window like the frame of a painting: “The view of the Medina, or Old City from my breezy window would be a joy for Bracque—and it looks already like a horizontal Klee composition—chalky-white squares of houses of varying sizes with tiny dark squares of windows in them, the scene topped by what looks like a water tower.”5