The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  Belle Ombre, a play adapted from two Highsmith short stories—“When the Fleet Was In at Mobile” and “The Terrapin”—is produced by Francis Lacombrade at Théâtre de l’Épicerie, in Paris.

  1978. Pat is elected president of the jury at the Berlin Film Festival, another unhappy public experience. Committee work is not her forte and she didn’t really want the job. She remeets actress and costume designer Tabea Blumenschein and film director Ulrike Ottinger in Berlin.

  Spring: Pat falls in love with Tabea Blumenschein. It is a short relationship and Pat is devastated by its end; it is as though she met her own youthful self in a mirror and then lost her. She and Tabea exchange letters for some years, meet infrequently, then fall into silence. The violence of her feelings for Tabea will affect Pat for several years.

  August: Begins an affair of a few months with a young French teacher of English, Monique Buffet—it is the last affair of Pat’s life. It produces many letters, good relations, and a satisfying friendship, and allows Pat to finish the novel that was interrupted by her breakup with Tabea, The Boy Who Followed Ripley. She dedicates the book to Monique.

  1979. Slowly, Slowly in the Wind (Leise, leise im Wind), a collection of reliably perverse tales, is published in England by Heinemann and in Zurich by Diogenes.

  1980. 26 March: The French fiscal authority, the douane, raids Pat’s house in Moncourt, looking for evidence of tax evasion. She is profoundly disturbed by the intrusion. Pat gives this raid as her reason for buying a house in Aurigeno, Switzerland, but, at Ellen Hill’s direction, she had picked out a house in Aurigeno before the douane raided her. Pat works on a new edition of Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction for St. Martin’s Press and begins some stories that will appear in the collection The Black House (published in 1981 in the UK and 1988 in the United States.)

  October: She begins to work on People Who Knock on the Door, published in 1983 in the UK and in 1985 in the United States.

  1981. January: She travels to the United States to look at the question of Christian fundamentalism as a subject for People Who Knock on the Door. She goes to New York, where she sees Larry Ashmead, now at Simon & Schuster, and then goes on to Indianapolis, where she stays with her friends the concert pianist Michel Block and Charles Latimer, ex–advertising director at Heinemann. She watches televangelists on their television for a week, researching her novel at one remove. She travels to Fort Worth and Los Angeles. The entire trip takes three weeks.

  February: She moves to Aurigeno, Switzerland—but just barely. French tax law requires that she spend six months out of the country and six months in it, and that’s what she does, shuttling between Moncourt and Aurigeno for several years, ambivalent as to whether or not she should sell the house in Moncourt. She advertises the Moncourt house in The New York Review of Books for one hundred thousand dollars, reduces the price to seventy-five thousand dollars, and receives tentative interest in buying it from Peter Handke, Hedli MacNeice (her neighbor in Moncourt and the ex-wife of poet Louis MacNeice), and a “nice bachelor.” In her absences, she doesn’t heat the house sufficiently and the radiators burst.

  1983. People Who Knock on the Door published in the UK. The Black House, a collection of short stories, and People Who Knock on the Door rejected by Harper & Row. She is without a publisher in the United States for two years.

  April: She travels to Paris to publicize People Who Knock on the Door. The filmmaker and journalist Christa Maerker visits her in Aurigeno; Pat coolly points out to Maerker the local railway crossing where she has recently driven her car into a train.

  June: Pat starts to plot out Found in the Street, a novel which takes place in her old Greenwich Village neighborhood. She gives two of her protagonists her old address on Grove Street, and her heroine is murdered at Buffie Johnson’s address on Greene Street. The precipitating event in her story is a returned wallet—Pat had always dreamt of returning a wallet—and “Half the characters,” she writes to her longtime correspondent Barbara Ker-Seymer, “are gay or half-gay.” (Pat never did get the opportunity to return a wallet, but in Paris, in 1952, her own lost wallet was returned. She wasn’t particularly grateful.) The heroine is a young girl who inspires dreams of love in all the major characters—but only the male protagonist’s wife gets to sleep with her. In this work, Pat’s rendering of the Manhattan ambiance of the early 1980s is based on some interesting cross-cultural misunderstandings.

  Naiad Press, the lesbian publishing company in Florida founded by Barbara Grier and Donna McBride, buys the rights to reprint The Price of Salt. In spring of 1989 Pat writes a new preface for Naiad’s edition of The Price of Salt.

  November: She flies to New York to do more “research” for Found in the Street, stays in East Hampton, and sojourns in Greenwich Village at the venerable Hotel Earle (now the Washington Square Hotel). Her stay inspires the cockroach story in Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes. She meets both Otto Penzler, founder of the Mysterious Press, who tells her he wants to publish her books, and Anne-Elizabeth Suter, who represents Diogenes’s writers in the United States.

  1984. June: Bettina Berch, who teaches at Barnard College, visits Pat in Aurigeno and conducts a revealing interview with her.

  October: Pat goes to Istanbul to write a travel piece about the Orient Express; it’s another of her pleasurable experiences with trains. She doesn’t travel now unless she is paid—or unless she can make use of her travels in a book or an article.

  1985. People Who Knock on the Door published by Simon & Schuster in the United States. After 1985, Highsmith is without a trade publisher in the United States. It is Otto Penzler who takes up the publishing burden with his Mysterious Press, and he publishes six Highsmith titles between 1985 and 1988. He admires her work but finds her behavior odious.

  May: Marc Brandel visits her in Aurigeno with his third wife to discuss his scripting of her novel The Blunderer for an English film company. In 1956, Brandel had adapted The Talented Mr. Ripley for New York television’s Studio One. She advances him eight thousand dollars of her own money to write the script. The film is never made.

  In March, she lists “Twenty Things I Like” and “Twenty Things I Do Not Like” for Diogenes Verlag. Amongst the things she doesn’t like: “A TV set in my house,” “People who believe that some god or other really has control over everything but is not exercising that control just now,” “Fascists,” and “petty thieves and well-to-do housebreakers who specialize in silverware.” Her likes include: “Swiss army knives,” “Things made of leather,” “Making anything out of wood,” “Fountain pens with real points,” “Kafka’s writing,” and “Being alone.” In May, she answers the Proust Questionnaire for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (10 May 1985 “Fragebogen”): she says that her best quality is “perseverance,” her biggest fault is “indecision,” she likes “intelligence” in women, her favorite color is still “yellow,” and, at the moment, the painters she likes are “Munch” and “Balthus.” (In March, her favorite painter was “Kokoschka.”) She quotes Noël Coward: “Work is more fun than play.”

  “The only thing that makes one feel happy and alive is trying for something that one cannot get” (Cahier 36, 5 August 1985).

  September: Mermaids on the Golf Course published by Heinemann.

  1986. February: Found in the Street published by Heinemann and by Calmann-Lévy in Paris.

  10 April: She is successfully operated on for a cancerous tumor in her lung at Brompton Hospital in London. “You must not think I had to use any discipline to stop smoking,” she writes to Patricia Losey (with whose husband, Joseph Losey, she had been in discussion about a film) on 12 June 1986, “it was fear alone that made me stop.”

  June: She finally sells the house at 21 rue de la Boissière in Moncourt: she has owned it longer than any other house, sixteen years. The day she sells it, she tries, unsuccessfully, to buy it back for 125,000 francs more than she was paid for it. In August, she goes back to Moncourt to look for another house to b
uy; she fails to find anything suitable.

  She sends the first of many letters to the International Herald Tribune criticizing Israel. Most of these letters are written under one of at least forty pseudonyms; this one is signed Edgar S. Sallich and is published on 9 July. She returns to the Brompton Hospital in London for an examination in July and is told that there is no recurrence of her cancer and that her tumor was glandular and unrelated to smoking. She lights up immediately.

  1987. Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes is published in the UK. Her most political book. Much of the satire in the stories is awkward (vide: “President Buck Jones Rallies and Waves the Flag”), though prescient in its analysis. One of the stories, “No End in Sight,” is a revolted meditation on Mary Highsmith’s condition at the Fireside Lodge, her nursing home in Fort Worth. In the story, Pat gives Mary a son, who she says is herself. Pat wants to write an even more revolted sequel to “No End in Sight” called “The Tube.” She never gets around to it.

  April: Peter Huber tells her of the land for sale adjacent to the house he and his wife share with Bert Diener and Julia Diener-Diethelm. She buys it and works with the architect, Tobias Amman, who renovated her Aurigeno house, to design “Casa Highsmith”: a white, seemingly windowless block of a house, divided into two “lobes,” whose seclusions and divisions suit her imagination. She calls it “a strong house.” It is a variation on the old Coates boardinghouse in Fort Worth, whose design she consults while constructing it. She signs a contract with the Atlantic Monthly Press to publish her books in America. Gary Fisketjon becomes her editor.

  Claude Chabrol writes and directs a French film adaption of The Cry of the Owl, Le Cri du hibou (starring Christophe Malavoy, Mathilda May, Virginie Thévenet, Jacques Penot).

  Pat changes her English publisher from Heinemann to Bloomsbury.

  29 October: Pat appears in genial form on New York Book Beat, Donald Swaim’s CBS radio interview program for authors. She has come to publicize Atlantic Monthly’s publication of Found in the Street, and she makes some (for her) revealing statements.

  1988. January: “Ripley touches madness,” Pat writes in a cahier. Pat starts taking notes for her fifth Ripley book, Ripley Under Water. It becomes the last and most awkwardly plotted of the Ripleys, drawn from her fascination with sadomasochistic relations, and from her trip to Tangier to visit Buffie Johnson (and Paul Bowles). Ripley again laughs inappropriately at the double death of the “odd couple” who irritate him, and he once again tosses incriminating evidence into the Loing Canal, the canal which bordered Pat’s best-loved house in Moncourt.

  August: Pat goes to visit Buffie Johnson in Tangier, where Buffie is living and painting in Jane Bowles’s apartment at the Immeuble Itesa just beneath Paul Bowles’s apartment. Pat takes extensive notes on life in Tangier which she will use for Ripley Under Water and befriends Paul, whom she knew slightly from her New York years. Paul Bowles and Pat begin a correspondence. The ideas for story and novel titles at the end of her cahier become more bitter: Sweet Smell of Death, King of the Garbage, The Bearer of Bad Tidings, Bright Murder, Dull Knife—and the bilingual jokes get worse: Creepy School (Crepuscule), A Fete Worse Than Death.

  September: Pat receives the Prix litteraire from the American Film Festival in Deauville, France.

  December: Pat moves to her new house in Tegna.

  1990. Pat is made an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France.

  1991. 12 March: Mary Highsmith dies at ninety-five.

  1992. January: Little Tales of Misogyny performed as a theater piece by the Companya Teatre de Barcelona.

  Spring: Pat visits Peter Ustinov’s house in Rolle for a double interview with German Vogue. She begins to consult with an American accountant in Geneva about a subject never far from her mind: her double taxation problem. She starts to write Small g: A Summer Idyll.

  October: Pat travels to the United States on a publicity junket for Ripley Under Water, published by Knopf. She reads at Rizzoli’s bookstore in New York and meets the chairman of the Yaddo board to discuss the possible donation of her house in Tegna as an artists’ retreat. She is dissuaded from this idea—it is impractical—and she begins to think of other ways she might endow Yaddo. She goes to Box Canyon Ranch in Weatherford, Texas, to visit Dan and Florine Coates, then travels to Toronto to read at the Harbourfront festival on 18 October. Having initiated a correspondence with Marijane Meaker after twenty-seven years of silence, Pat spends three days at Meaker’s house in East Hampton. The visit does not go well.

  1993. July: She is diagnosed as seriously anemic and told to stop drinking. She does so—cold turkey—for three weeks.

  1994. Fall: She makes a last, promotional trip to Paris accompanied by a Swiss neighbor; there she meets her new editor at Calmann-Lévy, Patrice Hoffman.

  1995. 4 February: Pat dies in the hospital at Locarno of two competing diseases, aplastic anemia and cancer, and she dies an American citizen. The last friend she speaks to in the hospital is her American accountant, Marylin Scowden, on the evening of 3 February. Six weeks before her death, Pat changed her will, appointing Daniel Keel, already her publisher and international representative, as her literary executor; he replaces Kingsley Skattebol. Her assets and royalties are left to Yaddo. Her notebooks and diaries are found in a linen closet. 6 February: She is cremated at the cemetery in Bellinzona.

  11 March: A memorial service for Pat, organized by Daniel Keel and filmed for German television, is conducted in the Catholic church at Tegna. Highsmith publishers from all over Europe fly in and join her friends in paying their respects. No editor from America comes; she no longer has a publisher in America. Pat’s ashes are interred in the church’s columbarium.

  February: Small g: A Summer Idyll is published posthumously. Its most implausible plot point—a gay man is falsely told by his doctor that he has AIDS to frighten him into safe sexual practices—is taken from life: Pat’s friend Frieda Sommer, who researched the book’s Zurich details, has a friend on whom the character of Rikki Markwalder is vaguely based. The novel is like a classic comic book version of all previous Highsmith themes—but with attempts to be “current” it strains towards inclusion and modernity. Even the dog in the novel—dogs in Highsmith fictions usually get kidnapped or shot—is a charming poodle who has a happy life. Pat’s old friend from Florence in 1952, Brian Glanville, writes in European Magazine that he wishes the book “had not appeared.” Josyane Savigneau, another friend, is more charitable in Le Monde: she says the book might be thought of as a kind of testament, “disturbed however by the evident wish for a happy end” (Le Monde, 17 February 1995).

  1996. Pat’s papers are sold to the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern, Switzerland, where they become one of the library’s largest holdings.

  The settlement of her estate takes eight years.

  Appendix 2

  Patricia Highsmith’s New York

  From 1927 to 1960, with short intermissions, Patricia Highsmith and her parents kept apartments in New York City. Pat was schooled in New York, she started her cahiers and diaries there, and she began both her “secret” career as a scriptwriter for comic books and her public career as a writer of fiction in Manhattan.

  Wherever she lived in the world, Pat continued to set many of her novels and stories in New York or in small, imaginary suburban towns—in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and New York State—just a railway ride away from the city. New York was a kind of terminal for these fictions, and her imagination went out from it and returned to it again and again.

  This map shows some of the “real” addresses in Pat Highsmith’s city life and some of the “fictional” addresses that feature in her work. Often enough the two coincide, especially when Pat had murder on her mind.

  FACT

  1. Manhattan: The Highsmiths’ first Manhattan apartment on West 103rd Street.

  2. Astoria, Queens: The Highsmith apartments on Twenty-first Road and Twenty-eighth Street.

  3. H
ell Gate Railway Bridge; Wards Island: the largest mental hospital in the United States; Rikers Island: the largest prison in New York State. These two landmarks are in the waters just beyond Pat’s first childhood apartments in Astoria.

  4. The Highsmith apartment at One Bank Street in Greenwich Village (on the site of an apartment building formerly occupied by Willa Cather).

  5. Julia Richman High School at 327 East Sixty-seventh Street.

  6. The Highsmith apartment at 48 Grove Street. The radical political philosopher Sidney Hook was a neighbor here; John Wilkes Booth is said to have plotted the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in the Federal mansion across the street.

  7. Marie’s Crisis Café: The piano bar on Grove Street at whose site Tom Paine died, it is a block from the Highsmith apartment at 48 Grove and next to the building where the murder that inspired the film On the Waterfront took place. Pat loved piano bars and musical comedy; she followed the Revuers—Judy Holliday, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green—in all their Greenwich Village venues.

  8. Pat’s summer sublet on Morton Street in 1940. “I consider my experience in Morton Street, my contact with various people there, quite invaluable.”

  9. Barnard College, Pat’s “ivory tower,” 1938–42.

  10. Mary and Stanley Highsmith’s apartment on East Fifty-seventh Street.

  11. Pat’s apartment at 353 East Fifty-sixth Street.

  12. Sangor-Pines Comics Shop, 10 West Forty-fifth Street.

  13. Timely comics (later Marvel Comics), Empire State Building.