The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  1964. The Two Faces of January is finally published by Doubleday in the United States and Heinemann in the UK in 1965. The Two Faces of January wins the Crime Writers Association of England’s Silver Dagger Award for best foreign crime novel of 1964. Julian Symons is president of the awards committee and becomes another of her British champions, as does the novelist and political activist Brigid Brophy. Pat adds the Silver Dagger (it’s an actual dagger) to her growing collection of sharpened instruments.

  1965. Pat starts to make notes for the novel which becomes Ripley Under Ground, published in 1970. The idea for the central figure, the dead artist Derwatt, came to her in 1952 when, sojourning on the Riviera with Ellen Hill, she wrote down a memory of Allela Cornell’s studio on Washington Square, with “Allela like Christ, returned to be a painter. Who could be in her presence without being suffused with joy and contentment…? I should at some time like to do a story permeated with this paradisical atmosphere of the life creative and creating in her studio, destroyed in the fleshly suicide (so was X [Christ] a suicide) but living on always in the hearts of people who knew her” (Cahier 21, 4/5/52).

  May: Pat goes to Venice with Caroline Besterman: “my first vacation in nineteen months.” She does many drawings and is snubbed by Peggy Guggenheim, who refuses her invitation to Harry’s Bar. Pat never wastes a trip, and she doesn’t waste this one, later telling Mike Sundell, director of Yaddo, that she plotted Those Who Walk Away from her Venice maps. From October 1965 to March 1966 she writes Those Who Walk Away, her Venice novel of endless, topographically accurate, and paranoid pursuits.

  November: She begins to think of Ripley Under Ground as a television play: Derwatt Resurrected. “A religious television play, based on the effect of a friend (Jesus) upon a group of people. The Jesus figure dies, some what of a suicide, whereupon his influence grows.” Her thoughts about Jesus Christ, always present, are finding creative forms.

  1966. She writes a “ghost story” at the suggestion of Caroline Besterman, “The Yuma Baby,” and one of her snail stories, “The Quest for Blank Claveringi.” She makes some tables out of wood.

  June: Pat drives to Marseille with her old friend the designer Elizabeth Lyne. They take a boat to Tunis, where they put up at a hotel in Hammamet for a few weeks, then sail to Naples and go overland to Alpnach, Austria. Pat’s notes from the Tunisian part of her trip go into The Tremor of Forgery—as do her feelings about the Arab population’s “petty thieving.”

  August: Caroline Besterman joins Pat for five days in Paris.

  September: At Anne Duveen’s house in Cagnes-sur-Mer, Pat meets, for the first time, the former photographer Barbara Ker-Seymer and her companion, Barbara Roett. Pat is in the South of France because the film director Raoul Lévy wants her to collaborate on his screenplay of Deep Water. She finishes the script, but Lévy shoots himself dead on New Year’s Eve and the film is never made. Pat returns to Earl Soham.

  October: Pat and Caroline separate; Pat calls this “the very worst time of my entire life.” Pat continues to refer to the relationship in her cahiers (but not in her fiction) for most of the rest of her life.

  Pat makes notes about writing a more “intellectual and funnier” Ripley. Claude Autant-Lara makes a film of The Blunderer, Le Meurtrier. Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction is published in the United States.

  1967. January: Pat begins the year with an indictment of Caroline Besterman’s behavior—and moves to the Île-de-France. Over the next several years, she rents a house near Fontainebleau, then buys a house in Samois-sur-Seine with her old friend from New York the designer and painter Elizabeth Lyne, then rents another house in Montmachoux. Her cotenancy with Mme Lyne is not a success. Pat thought Lyne had “what was known as a Man’s Mind.” Instead she finds her like “Every Woman.” Their arguments about co-ownership end up in a court of law.

  Pat begins The Tremor of Forgery, based on her trip to Tunisia with Mme Lyne. Originally planning to give her “hero,” the divorced writer Howard Ingham (who is writing a book called The Tremor of Forgery), an affair with an Arab boy, she is instead content to deracinate him in other ways. He kills an intruding Arab with his typewriter and dissembles the act. Ingham’s divorced wife—who never appears in the book—is based on the remnants of Pat’s feelings for Ginnie Catherwood and Lynn Roth. The book is finished in February of 1968. Set during the Israeli-Arab Six-Day War, it is pervaded by contradictory political sentiments. Rolf Tietgens tells her that the politics of Tremor “is the weakest part of the book.”

  1967. Daniel Keel, cofounder of Diogenes Verlag in Zurich, takes over from Rowohlt as Pat’s principal German publisher with his German-language publication of Those Who Walk Away. Keel, who saw Hitchcock’s film of Strangers on a Train as a young man and stayed in the theater until he could identify the author’s name on the credits, will include Pat’s work in his renowned “black and yellow” crime series in 1974. After seven months of what Pat called “tough” bargaining between Pat and Keel (1979–80), Daniel Keel becomes Highsmith’s world representative as well as her principal publisher. At the end of her life, Pat appoints him as her literary executor. Keel and Diogenes Verlag are responsible for much of Pat’s fame and a large part of her fortune.

  1968. March: In Paris, Pat dines with Janet Flanner and lunches with Nathalie Sarraute, with whom she debates the “femininity” of Colette. (Pat doesn’t think Colette is feminine.) “[Sarraute] was absolutely charming and wrote a wonderful inscription” in the Sarraute novel, which, typically, Pat borrowed from Elizabeth Lyne. Pat begins a yearlong affair with a young journalist, Madeleine Harmsworth, who comes to Samois-sur-Seine to interview her for Queen magazine.

  April: Pat buys a house in Montmachoux and moves from Samois-sur-Seine. 25 April–6 May: she stays with Barbara Ker-Seymer and Barbara Roett in North London, returning to France in time to be outraged by the student revolution of May 1968.

  20 June: She moves to Montmachoux and works on a play for a London producer called When the Sleep Ends. She is writing the lead role for her friend the actress Heather Chasen. Chasen later remarks that Pat was unable to write dialogue, and anyway, the character Pat was creating for her was a “perfect bitch.” The play is never produced.

  1968. October: Pat begins to take notes for the book that will become Ripley Under Ground, centering the plot on the “Christ-like” dead painter Derwatt (for whom Allela Cornell provides the inspiration), and the international forgery business that a now-married Ripley (he turns “green” with terror at his wedding) murders to protect. She is also inspired by Hans van Meegeren, the man who fooled Hermann Göring with his forgeries of Vermeer. She falls in love with “Jacqui,” a Parisian, who perpetually disappoints her. Pat borrows some of Jacqui’s traits for Heloise Plisson, Tom Ripley’s wife in Ripley Under Ground.

  1969. Madeleine Harmsworth breaks off with Pat. July: Pat visits Arthur and Cynthia Koestler in Alpnach.

  1970. February: Thinking of moving back to the States, Pat flies to New York and travels to Fort Worth, where her battles with Mother Mary result in letters like this one from Mary: “My doctors say if you had stayed 3 more days I would be dead.”

  March: Pat goes to Santa Fe to stay with Rosalind Constable for a couple of weeks, finishing her corrections on the manuscript of Ripley Under Ground.

  May: She starts to write A Dog’s Ransom, reviving her interest in poison-pen letters. She gives the dog in question, a poodle, the name of Ellen Hill’s poodle (Tina) and kills it off. She gives Greta Reynolds, one of the fictional Tina’s owners, some of Lil Picard’s traits. A Dog’s Ransom is her jeremiad against a “corrupt” and “corrupting” New York; its confusions are a result of the fact that her chief contact with the United States is limited to daily readings of the International Herald Tribune. She concentrates the story on an idealistic young policeman who becomes infected by the venality he hopes to fight. Pat didn’t know any policemen, and she was relying on Kingsley Skattebol’s research on New York police procedure. The
novel is interpreted in Europe as an expression of Pat’s ability to find the surreal in the real and is highly praised.

  Summer: Doubleday publishes her story collection The Snail-Watcher and Other Stories: she pays four hundred dollars of Graham Greene’s five-hundred-dollar fee to write the introduction. She isn’t completely pleased with what Greene writes: “A trifle hectic the prose, but not bad, I suppose.”

  1970. October: Throughout her sojourn in France, Pat has been supported in every way by her editor at Calmann-Lévy, Alain Oulman, with whom she has a warm friendship and an extensive correspondence. He introduces her to both James Baldwin and Colette de Jouvenel, daughter of the writer Colette. Colette de Jouvenel and Pat are neighbors in the Île-de-France and share an interest in cats as well as in Jouvenel’s mother.

  14 November: She moves to a hameau in Moncourt, buying a house at 21 rue de la Boissière, next door to two Anglo-Irish journalists she knows and likes, Desmond and Mary Ryan. As usual, proximity diminishes her liking. She meets many interesting people through the Ryans, including Isabella Rawsthorne, Francis Bacon’s muse.

  1971. March: Pat’s almost thirteen-year-old goddaughter, her college friend Kingsley’s daughter, comes for a fortnight to stay with Pat in Moncourt and to travel. Pat takes her to London but does not prove to be a sympathetic hostess, remarking in a letter to Ronald Blythe that her goddaughter is five feet three inches and 138 pounds, and that she fears for the cases in the British Museum when the girl leans on them. Pat regularly refers to herself in letters to the girl as “evil fairy godmother,” “old witch,” and “delinquent godmother.”

  June: Barbara Ker-Seymer and Barbara Roett visit Moncourt and have the usual experience of many Highsmith guests: if they want to eat, they have to buy the food. On another visit, Pat throws a dead rat up from the garden through their bedroom window: her idea of a joke.

  1971. Fall: Pat leaves Doubleday, publishers of her last five books in the United States, when her editor, Larry Ashmead, turns down A Dog’s Ransom—which is then accepted by Knopf. Her editor at Knopf, Bob Gottlieb, suggests revisions, as does her editor at Heinemann, Janice Robertson. Pat is not pleased to make revisions.

  November: She is taking notes for the book that will become Ripley’s Game. One of her early ideas is that Tom should carry out a series of revenge murders for a sixty-year-old writer (Pat is fifty). She calls this idea “A dialogue with myself.”

  1972. January: She continues developing Ripley’s Game and begins to note down some ideas for the collection of short stories that will become The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder.

  September: Stanley Highsmith dies. Pat asks for—and receives—his autopsy report. Pat and Mary begin their long correspondence about the watch and chain Pat gave to Stanley when she was twelve or thirteen. Pat wants it back. She doesn’t get it.

  1973. 26 May: “I’d love to meet Francis Bacon some time. I would imagine he is a very ‘disturbing’ type, in the sense that the mentally deranged can be disturbing. I may be quite wrong. He is probably well organized on the surface. Artists react to such temperaments at once—a sensation I have always described as ‘shattering.’”

  “Shattering” is the word Pat uses most often to describe the effect Mother Mary has on her. In her house in Tegna, Pat keeps a postcard of Francis Bacon’s Study Number 6—it is one of his screaming popes—on her desk.

  1974. Film director Joseph Losey is interested in adapting Pat’s novel The Tremor of Forgery. The project comes to nothing, but cordial relations develop between Pat and Losey and his writer-producer wife, Patricia.

  28 June: Wim Wenders and Peter Handke come to see Pat in Moncourt. They bring a gift from Jeanne Moreau (whom Pat met when Moreau was starring in a Handke play in Paris): an igneous ball on a pedestal “black and clear.” Handke says to Pat: “When I start any of your books, I have the feeling that you love life, that you want to live.” Pat’s comment in her Cahier 33: “That’s very nice!” (Ten years later, in November of 1984, Pat writes to her German translator, Anne Uhde: “By the way, I find Peter Handke’s prose writings quite boring much of the time”—and then goes on to say that Ellen Hill thinks his plays are brilliant.) Wim Wenders says that it is Handke who introduced Pat to the European custom of having your publisher for an agent. Pat hands over to Wenders a manuscript of the book she has just finished, Ripley’s Game, and he is eager to make it into a film.

  August: The germ of Edith’s Diary: Pat plans a book about “a modern intellectual” who is so disappointed in her family and “her beautiful dream of America” that she creates a better world in her diary. (This leaves the “truthfulness” of Pat’s own diaries open to some interesting questions.) Edith, undeveloped as an “intellectual” character, goes mad as her diary develops a saner, far more bourgeois world than the one she inhabits. Pat takes the son of a former lover as a model for Cliffie, Edith’s criminal and psychologically puzzling son (another of Pat’s “literary” revenges), and writes to Lil Picard for political positions for the increasingly crackpot Edith. “Edith’s ideas are partly mine,” Pat says. Edith is pulled to her death down a flight of stairs (one of Pat’s own recurring nightmares) by the weight of the bust of her son she has been sculpting. Pat gives to Edith her preferred quotation from Thomas Paine: a reminder of the plaque featuring Paine on Grove Street, a block from where the Highsmith family lived in Manhattan in 1940–42.

  September: Pat goes to Fort Worth, to find Mother Mary’s house in terrible disorder and Mary deteriorating. “What terrifies me is the insanity, the knowledge that it will only get worse. She doesn’t eat properly. Food is rotting…the dog has the mange…[the visit] is ‘shattering.’”

  Pat stops in New York, where she stays with women friends. “Overall impression: extroversion, constant stimulation, causing ‘resentment’ or ‘reaction’ such as, ‘I’m holing up this weekend,’ or ‘I’ll hang onto my little handful of friends.’ Neither of these phrases uttered of course. Variety—no doubt, in New York. One is flung from the best in the arts, to the worst of humanity.” As usual she haunts Greenwich Village, finding Jane Street still “quite lovely” and Eighth Street “a dump and a slum. What a shame! I remember it aglow with pretty shops” (Cahier 33). She meets with Robert Gottlieb, who will edit her at Knopf.

  December: Marion Aboudaram, a novelist and translator from Paris, contacts Pat for an interview in Moncourt (for which Aboudaram has not been commissioned and which never transpires: Marion just wants to meet Pat).

  1975. January: Marion and Pat become lovers. Pat works on Edith’s Diary.

  April: She goes to Stockholm on a publicity tour, noting, as always, the amount of alcohol on offer. Another note in her cahier: “7/27/75—~60 milligrams to 100 milli-litres, permitted alcohol content for drivers of cars. U.K.”

  “A day to remember—perhaps. On 6 August, my mother accidentally set her Texas house on fire—with a left cigarette.” The place is gutted, the dog dies, and Mary is installed in a care facility, the Fireside Lodge, by her helpful nephew Dan Coates. Pat stays away, but pays for part of Mary’s care.

  September: Pat, along with Michael Frayn and Stanley Middleton, is invited by the Swiss Association of Teachers of English in Hölstein, Switzerland, to speak at a weeklong series of seminars. She discusses The Glass Cell—“its origins and difficulties”—and meets Peter Huber and Frieda Sommer. The former will become her neighbor in Tegna; the latter, one of her executors.

  Jay Bernard Plangman, Pat’s father, who has maintained a friendship with Mary Highsmith, offering to give her driving lessons, dies in Fort Worth, Texas. Pat does not return for her father’s funeral.

  1976. June. Edith’s Diary is rejected by Knopf.

  1977. Wim Wenders makes a film of Ripley’s Game, Der Amerikanishe freund (The American Friend), scripted by Peter Handke. It stars Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz and features seven film directors in minor roles. “What have they done to my Ripley is my wail,” Pat writes to Ronald Blythe. Wenders says Pat
ultimately told him she liked the film. Little Tales of Misogyny wins the Grand Prix de l’Humeur Noir in Paris for Pat and her illustrator, Roland Topor. Hans Geissendörfer makes a film of The Glass Cell, Die gläserne Zelle. Pat likes it.

  May: Edith’s Diary is published by Heinemann in London and, later in the year, by Simon & Schuster in New York.

  Claude Miller makes a film of This Sweet Sickness, Dites-lui que je l’aime (with Gérard Depardieu and Miou-Miou). Pat doesn’t like it.