The book did give Pat an excuse to make her trip to Tangier to see Buffie Johnson. She needed the Tangier location for her novel, and by then she probably needed the contact with an old friend. Pat had alienated so many people that the two Barbaras in Islington were worried, telling Heather Chasen to start writing to Pat again because they thought she had pushed everyone away.12 Alex Szogyi, the (gay, Jewish) college professor in New York with whom Pat had one of her longest, happiest friendships and frankest correspondences, was cut out of her life in what Alex said was Pat’s irritation at his blossoming friendship with Jeanne Moreau—to whom Pat had introduced him.13 Szogyi, who had nothing but admiration for Pat, thought because she complained to him so much about her girlfriends that she was “a failed heterosexual.”14 But Pat was also, in her own way, a “failed homosexual”—except in her fiction, where she was anything she wanted to be.
Pat had confided her “dear desk” to Alex when she’d left the United States in 1963; she’d allowed him to work up her horoscope in 1973 (see illustration), “referring to [the] horoscope with increasing interest” in several letters as its predictions seemed to her to come true; and, in the dazed aftermath of her first tryst with Tabea Blumenschein in London in 1978, she’d asked Alex to analyze Tabea’s handwriting for her.15 Alex provided the kind of handwriting analysis that also flattered Pat for her choice: Tabea, he wrote, was “a big personality. I imagine she doesn’t suffer fools gladly…. A superior lady, indeed.”16 Pat cared for Alex so much that she wrote to Lil Picard: “[E]veryone adores him…. I am so fond of him, it is almost worth moving to NY for, just to see him once a week!”17 (Meeting once a week was Pat’s idea of intimate friendship.) Now, Pat had cut both Alex Szogyi and Lil Picard out of her life.
The people Pat spent time with in Switzerland, aside from Ellen Hill and her publisher Daniel Keel, were new acquaintances. They were kind, cultured, unbelievably helpful, and very fond of Pat, but there was nothing to tie them to the rich set of associations governing her past—the fons et origo of her writing—and she never invited them into the secrets of her life. Her move to Tegna, in December of 1988, even though it suffused her life with some badly needed light, did not settle her restless spirit. After thinking about it for five or six months, she purchased a raw piece of meadowland in Tegna in April of 1987, paying too much for it, everyone said, at a price of 490,000 Swiss francs. The land overlooked the beautiful Centrovalli, and there was a little river just beyond the bottom of the property. She’d heard about the property from Peter Huber,18 who, with his wife’s sister’s family, the Dieners, alternated the occupancy of an adjoining vacation house.
“I just told her [about the land],” Huber says, “because I thought it was so outrageously expensive. We were offered it ten or fifteen years [before] for thirty thousand Swiss francs and then we were offered it for five hundred thousand. And do you know what Pat said? I’ll take it. Just like that. She was desperate.”19
Even as her house was being constructed, Pat was worrying about the “numerous Huber family” next door, but she consoled herself that her neighbors would use the house only seventy days a year.20 But when the Hubers were there, Pat drifted over every night just as she had done with the Ryans in Moncourt: “The moment,” says Huber, “we switched on our lights in the evening.”
Along with everything else Pat took from Aurigeno to Tegna was a pile of firewood she’d already carted from Moncourt to Aurigeno. “But,” says Peter Huber, “it wasn’t even firewood, it was construction-site wood, covered with plaster, scrapwood with rusty nails…. I made a fire with a lot of newspapers. [Pat had invited him to do so.] There were a few little flames coming up from it and she took the big [piece of wood] she’d decided to sacrifice for this occasion and she knocked it on the stone. And I said, ‘Pat, don’t, you’re extinguishing it!’ And she gave me a very pained look.”21
After that, there were very few fires in the fireplace at Casa Highsmith; Pat had, after all, paid “good money” for the wood and she wasn’t going to “waste” it. Fire, like food, was one of the life-affirming comforts Pat spent her later years rejecting. The impoverished young writer who wanted a fireplace so badly in 1943 that she’d painted a perfect trompe l’oeil fireplace on the wall of her cheap studio apartment on East Fifty-sixth Street was now a well-known author in possession of a real fireplace in an expensively designed house—and she simply couldn’t allow herself to enjoy it. The counterfeit fireplace of her tiny Manhattan flat would have suited her better.
By spring of 1991, Pat was already looking for an escape from her new house, writing to Kingsley in New York to ask if she wanted to join forces and buy a flat in London. “My house here is pleasant, but also boring at times, only socially, but that’s bad enough…. So to have a flat big enough in London, to be able to go there—it is a nice pipedream…. But I thought I’d sound you out.”22
It was Kingsley’s dream to live in London too; she had worked there as a television producer for CBS News and she was yearning to return. But she was out of a job now, and out of funds, and she wrote to Pat that she could only afford to be a tenant. Pat said she didn’t want to be a landlord—and that was the end of the matter.
A month later, Pat’s ideas for a novel included one about a man who “wishes he could take a pill to stop falling in love.”23 After another year in Tegna, Pat, expanding a little in this brighter, lighter house (its back, as opposed to its forbidding front, was open to the light), returned superficially to love and death and sketched an idea for a young person “in extremis of love affair plus job crisis [who] thinks of suicide by stepping out window onto a ledge.” Then she began her initial framing of Small g: A Summer Idyll, her last novel, set in the “gay-friendly” Jakob’s Bierstube-Restaurant bar in Zurich (the small g is the designation gay guidebooks use to indicate that the clientele is “mixed” gay and straight) and based partially on a forty-five-year-old man she’d met in Zurich, “R,” a friend of Frieda Sommer. In Pat’s first version of the plot, “R” likes to fake robbery/murder for his teenage lover by “being bloody-faced in bed when the boy comes in with his key.” When he enters the teenager’s flat and “finds him bloody-faced, in bed,” he thinks the boy is pretending and then there’s a “[h]orrible scene” when he realizes his lover is actually dead.24
The light flooding into the back of Casa Highsmith and slipping in through its high window slits was apparently doing something for Pat; she was feeling her way back to impersonation again, to imagining the counterfeiting of a crime. For Pat Highsmith, still looking at the world upside down, being able to counterfeit meant something like being able to be authentic. “Faking it” was how she approached being “herself.” The rapprochement didn’t last.
In November of 1985, Pat had sent her old fiancé, Marc Brandel, now living in Santa Monica, California, a check for eight thousand dollars to encourage him in his development of a film script of her novel The Blunderer. In one of the many tangled exchanges Pat had with agents, studios, producers, and her publisher, Diogenes, about the film rights for her novels, she’d put Brandel’s name forward for the film adaptation of The Blunderer after she’d signed a film contract for the book with an English producer in New York at the end of 1983. In 1956, Brandel had adapted The Talented Mr. Ripley for a one-hour television broadcast by Studio One (the longest-running—from 1948 to 1958—and most significant anthology drama series in U.S. television history), and Marc and Pat began a correspondence after seeing each other “for a day” in Moncourt in 1979. Marc had nothing but fond words for Pat, and when the deal with the film producer collapsed, Pat sent Marc her personal check so he could continue to work on the script. They had a strict understanding that she would be paid back if a film deal didn’t materialize or if Marc got money directly from another interested producer.
The “charming, young, polite, talented” film director Kathryn Bigelow (Pat’s description), whom Pat had met at the Locarno Film Festival in 1981 (Bigelow lived on Grove Street in Greenwich Vil
lage, which added to Pat’s interest) and who was “mad” about The Blunderer, had also written a script from the novel, entirely on speculation. Bigelow’s script came to “naught,” Pat wrote, but in April of 1990, Pat, who had also been corresponding with Joseph Losey’s widow, Patricia, about producing The Blunderer, was so interested in Bigelow’s “success” with the film Blue Steel that she was pressing Kingsley to find Bigelow’s current address.25
Contrary to her reputation, Pat often tried to involve herself in both the publicity and the behind-the-scenes-maneuvering for her work’s promotion and production. (“Would you like to review A Dog’s Ransom for the NY Times Book Review?” she’d written to Alex Szogyi in one of many suggestions she would make. “I could put in a word with my editor Bob Gottlieb.”)26 Her early and enthusiastic endorsement of the ways in which authors can promote their own careers (the cultivation of translators, the regular writing of letters, etc.) had been published for all the world to see in her covert artistic autobiography, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction.
Not unexpectedly, the check for eight thousand dollars Pat sent to Marc Brandel caused some trouble. Pat was unhappy that Marc’s agent cashed it (he wanted his 10 percent right away), and by January of 1987 Marc was apologizing for their “misunderstanding” over her advance and promising to return the money if anyone bought the screenplay.27
The Brandel screenplay was never produced, but a candid passage in a letter Marc wrote in response to something Pat asked about his children (Pat queried everyone about their offspring) shows that her attraction to Marc Brandel at Yaddo in 1948 was probably more appropriate than it seemed. He’d never wanted a son, he wrote, and was greatly relieved to have produced only girls. He almost believed that if he had produced a son he would have “liked him to be gay.”28
When Pat went back to Moncourt to look for another property to buy in the summer of 1986—Aurigeno was already wearing on her badly—she failed to find anything she liked as much as the house she had finally sold in a flurry of agonized ambivalence. While in the Île-de-France, she managed to offend her former neighbor, the temperamental Barbara Skelton, with a question about the French language. Skelton snapped back that Pat’s French was “abominable.” Pat reflected bitterly (and enviously) on Skelton’s ability to “prove that she’s living in England when she’s in France, and vice versa, thus avoiding any income tax whatsoever.” And then Pat added the category of “tax cheat” to a list of things she didn’t like, making the personal political once again.29
In early April of 1986, Pat had an appointment in London with a physician on Harley Street, John Batten, for an X-ray and an opinion. The appointment had been secured on very short notice by Caroline Besterman after a desperate call from Pat. Pat’s faithful neighbor in Aurigeno, Ingeborg Moelich, drove her all the way to the Zurich airport from Aurigeno, and Pat was admitted to the Brompton Hospital for a biopsy of her right lung: a cancerous tumor was suspected.
Pat spent the night in the hospital, and just as she was leaving, her doctor hurried up to her, said he’d had the tumor biopsy “rushed through,” and asked Pat to sit down. She noticed—Pat never stopped noticing—that he glanced away for an instant before speaking to her: “We think it should be taken out and we hope you’ll agree.” “This sounds like a death sentence to me,” Pat wrote, “as I’ve never heard of anyone surviving such, or anyway, not for long.” She agreed to the operation, was taken into a room with five men, one of whom was Mr. Paveth, “who operated on Princess Margaret for (nearly) the same thing.” He “sank strong finger ends” into the base of her neck. Roland Gant, her publisher from Heinemann, came from the office to fetch her. They went straight out to his car and drank boilermakers.
Pat had been “feeling awful” in Aurigeno since December of 1985. She’d suffered through a perpetual round of colds and intestinal flu, while a struggle between Diogenes and Heinemann over Found in the Street (Diogenes wanted more advance money “and threatened to break the contract,” while Heinemann was “hiring lawyers”) had forced her to go to London for “business” and upset her nerves. When she got back to Switzerland, in the dead of winter, “without heavy underwear” and wearing her usual jeans, she shoveled snow off her car and saddled herself with a heavy case of bronchitis. During her second checkup for it, her doctor in Locarno suggested a lung X-ray “because you smoke.” A spot on her right lung was detected, a needle biopsy was done, and before the results were obtained, Pat went off to Paris for six days to do publicity for the Calmann-Lévy publication of Found in the Street. Oddly enough, considering her ingrained habit of complaining, Pat never mentioned a word of her medical “troubles and Angst” to her friends and colleagues in Paris. The matter was so serious that she kept it to herself.
On her return to the Ticino, the doctor in Locarno told Pat that the biopsy results were “inconclusive” and that “something else would have to be done.” Ellen Hill, still firmly ensconced as Inspector General of Pat’s life, gave Pat her marching orders: “Don’t waste time with Locarno; go to London.”
And that’s when Pat called Caroline Besterman for help.
And so, as Pat wrote in her thirty-seventh cahier long after the fact, she had her operation in London on 10 April 1986 and was released the next week, with the doctors saying—“maybe genuinely,” she noted suspiciously—that she had made “fast progress.” She came away with a fourteen-inch-long scar along her fifth rib, and after “31 days in London,” she went back home to Aurigeno. She made a little list of the friends who sent things to her hospital room, and after the operation “the months [were] somewhat Angst-filled also, as I did not know whether or not the cancer would recur.” She’d stopped smoking while waiting for the other shoe to drop, and that didn’t help her angst. And she was resting, dutifully, an hour after lunch. But she was “quite unable to do any creative work, though in my house there is always quite enough else to do. The mental fear needs a thousand words to describe. [But Pat did not provide them.] It is as though death is right there—suddenly—and yet one feels no pain, one is talking in a calm voice to friends & doctors.”
By 12 July, three months after her operation, Pat was back in London, and accompanied by Caroline Besterman, she went to Brompton Hospital to be X-rayed again by Mr. Paveth and Dr. Batten. They kept her waiting as they examined the film for ten anxious minutes during which she “nearly” finished the contents of the little glass flask—her present from Bettina Berch—in her handbag. She could hear Caroline Besterman’s voice calling for her; she answered Caroline, and, like the ghost she must have felt herself to be by now, she was not heard. The nurse finally told her to come out of the dressing room, and she and Caroline crossed the road to Mr. Paveth’s consulting rooms, where the X-ray was hanging high on the wall with a light behind it.
“Paveth says, Perfect, in a calm voice, a word I never expected to hear. It is like a reprieve from death.”
And then Mr. Paveth told her that her tumor was glandular and could have occurred whether she smoked or not. Pat was so happy that when she spotted Dr. Batten’s registrar (he was from Australia, so naturally she called him Sydney) she said “Hello Sydney,” and extended her hand to this stranger in “good cheer.”30
Under circumstances that would have surprised her Swiss neighbors—life and death was one of them—Pat Highsmith was still happy to shake someone’s hand.
The year after her operation, in the autumn of 1987, Pat’s enthusiastic editor Gary Fisketjon, who had published or republished nine of Pat’s books at Atlantic Monthly Press,31 helped to arrange a jaunt for her to New York for Atlantic’s publication of Found in the Street. “I was putting out whatever Highsmith novels were available and trying to get something going for her in the U.S.,” he says. “It worked marginally well, not as well as I had hoped.”
Fisketjon and Pat had a jocular relationship, brokered by Anne-Elizabeth Suter, Diogenes’s representative in New York, who was “terrific to deal with and very fond of Pat,” says Fisketjon. (S
uter, like so many of Pat’s agents, tried to protect Pat from the rejections she was receiving for her short stories and succeeded only in making Pat angry.)32 Pat and Gary Fisketjon were both Civil War buffs, they liked to raise a glass together, and Pat, still fascinated by the relations between parents and children, continued to inquire after Fisketjon’s infant son and to send cards and drawings for the child’s birthday, which almost always arrived, says Fisketjon, “exactly on the day and she never missed a lick.” (Meanwhile, her birthday greetings to her own goddaughter usually consisted in apologies from her “evil fairy godmother” for having forgotten her birthday.) Gary Fisketjon and Pat met very rarely.
“I was very fond of her,” says Fisketjon. “It was very easy; there was never any kind of difficulty…. We spent a lot of time in restaurants, but drinking and smoking was the main event, not eating.” He took her to the restaurant Odeon in SoHo in New York, when it was still “of the moment” and she was “very interested to register downtown bohemia. It sort of lit her up.” Pat, in return, favored Fisketjon with one of her intricate little plans for social improvement. She had been insisting that the “homeless” in New York “weren’t homeless” at all, they were “living in hotels.” And Fisketjon was trying to explain to Pat the horrors of the single-room occupancy hotels the city used to warehouse its homeless. “And she had this peculiar concept whereby you could solve the homeless situation because, she figured, most of these people come from Africa where you can have many wives. So if bigamy were legalized, people wouldn’t run off all the time leaving these women and children bereft and homeless.”33
Along with her appearances in New York for Found in the Street, Pat, who had avoided going to the funerals of her entire family, got a little cemetery experience. A supplement of The New York Times, “The World of New York,” wanted to commission a walking tour of the famous old Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Ruth Rendell had been the editor’s first choice to write the article (Pat didn’t know this), but Rendell wasn’t in New York, and Pat was. Pat said she’d love to do it, and asked to have someone accompany her. The editors thought it would be nice to send someone who knew her work, and so Phyllis Nagy, a fledgling playwright working as a researcher for the Times, went along for the ride. Pat had been living outside the United States for more than twenty-five years by now, and this is how she struck the young researcher.
The Talented Miss Highsmith Page 72
