The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  66. CWA KKS, 31 Aug. 2005. It was a very late-life tattoo, and how Pat came by it is unknown. Pat’s last three lovers, Marion Aboudaram, Tabea Blumenschein, and Monique Buffet, all say she had no tattoo when they knew her. Kingsley Skattebol caught sight of it in Tegna once when Pat’s watchband moved to reveal it.

  67. Cahier 13, 8/30/45.

  68. Ibid.

  69. Michael Haederle, interview with PH, Houston Chronicle, Feb. 3, 1991.

  70. Diary 8, Dec. 22, 1947.

  71. Cahier 25, 7/8/58.

  72. Cahier 28, 9/12/65.

  73. Cahier 5, 4/12/41.

  74. Cahier 16, 10/4/47.

  75. Cahier 17, 5/14/48.

  76. Pat’s notation in Cahier 21 on 4/2/52 is one of many examples: “And Ellen telling me gleefully, gleefully, with a smile that spreads over her whole little face, that she likes going to bed with me more than with anyone she has ever known before…. Ah women.”

  77. Cahier 18, 10/21/49.

  78. Ibid., 10/24/49.

  79. Diary 10, Mar. 15, 1950; Mar. 28, 1949.

  80. PH letter to KKS, 5 Mar. 1958: “I have joined the very small Presbyterian choir out here in Palisades. Only trouble is I can be heard when I sing.”

  81. CWA KKS, 20 May 2002.

  82. PH on Don Swaim’s radio show, Book Notes, 29 Oct. 1987.

  83. Diary 8, 22/6/1947.

  84. Cahier 17, June 30, 1948.

  85. “Between Jane Austen and Philby”, PH, typed on ms: “Sept. 1968 written for ‘Vogue, London.” June 1968. MS.

  86. Cahier 15, 3/8/47

  87. CWA M. Knet, 6 Nov. 2002.

  88. Cahier 27, Dec. 5, 1962.

  3. A Simple Act of Forgery: Part 1

  1. Pat’s London hostess informed her by note that a writer from Harper’s Bazaar wanted her comments on the man “who has just knifed the Poussin in the National Gallery.” In a postscript, the hostess, a worldly woman quoting a former Highsmith comment, recommended that Pat tell the journalist to “stuff it.”

  2. Cahier 35, 3/18/81.

  3. PH, The Boy Who Followed Ripley (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 183.

  4. PH letter to Alex Szogyi, 15 Mar. 1969.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Cahier 32, 5/8/72.

  7. Diary 4, 7/20/43.

  8. Cahier 2, 2/40.

  9. “You can easily see / Upon closer enquiry / There are things in this book / That belong in a diary / But there’re things in my diary / (Where you’ll never look) / That with proper deletions / might go in this book” (Cahier 2, 7/13/40)

  10. CWA Dan Walton Coates, 22 Nov. 2003.

  11. Gore Vidal, Palimpsest (London: Penguin Books, 1995) p. 5.

  12. CWA Tabea Blumenschein, 15 June 2003.

  13. Diary 16, 20 Aug. 1969.

  14. Draft letters, pseudonymous political correspondence of PH.

  15. CWA Christa Maerker, 21 July 2004.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Cahier 34, 3/22/78.

  18. CWA David Streiff, 20 Jan. 2001.

  19. PH letter to Lil Picard, 20 Aug. 1970 (UIL).

  20. CWA Christa Maerker, 21 July 2004.

  21. CWA Susannah Clapp, 2 Jan. 2003.

  22. CWA Caroline Besterman, 19 Dec. 2003.

  23. CWA Marion Aboudaram, 23 Sept. 2002.

  24. CWA Linda Ladurner, 10 May 2003.

  25. PH letter to Lil Picard, 11 June 1969 (UIL).

  26. Ibid.

  27. CWA Susannah Clapp, 2 Jan. 2003.

  28. Ibid.

  29. Gerald Peary, “Patricia Highsmith,” Sight and Sound 75, no. 2 (Spring 1988): pp. 104–5

  30. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1990), p.. 57.

  31. PH letter to KKS, 14 Mar. 1968. Sarraute, who loved Americans and gave Highsmith a warm welcome, said that Colette was too feminine for her; Highsmith bravely defended Colette’s virility.

  32. Cahier 34, 12–18 June 1979.

  33. CWA Tabea Blumenschein, 15 June 2003.

  34. PH, The Boy Who Followed Ripley (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 90.

  35. PH, Edith’s Diary, p. 251.

  36. Cahier 34, Mar. 22, 1978.

  37. Cahier 12, Apr. 4, 1945.

  38. Cahier 3, 2/10/41; Cahier, 3, 4/12/41.

  39. CWA Tabea Blumenschein, 15 June 2003.

  40. CWA Marion Aboudaram, 23 Sept. 2002.

  41. Cahier 34, Apr. 11, 1978.

  42. Duncan Fallowell, “The Talented Miss Highsmith,” Sunday Times Telegraph Magazine, 20 Feb. 2000 (interview with PH conducted in 1987).

  43. CWA Barbara Roett, 18 May 2003.

  44. Alain Oulman letters to PH, 23 May and 25 Sept. 1985 (CLA).

  45. CWA Susannah Clapp, 2 Jan. 2003.

  46. PH, The Price of Salt (Tallahassee, FL: Naiad Press, 1993), p. 21.

  47. Ibid., Afterword (no pagination in this edition for the Afterword).

  48. Cahier 20, 10/20/50. “Now, now, now, to fall in love with my book—this same day I have decided not to publish it, not for an indefinite length of time. But I shall continue to work on it for some weeks to come, to polish and perfect it. I shall fall in love with it now, in a different way from the way I loved it before. This love is endless, disinterested, unselfish, impersonal even (P. of S.).”

  49. Cahier 34, 4/4/78.

  50. Ibid.

  51. PH letter to Christopher Petit, 19 Apr. 1978 (Collection Christopher Petit).

  52. CWA Christopher Petit, 9 Jan. 2004.

  53. PH letter to Christopher Petit, 19 Apr. 1978.

  54. Christopher Petit letter to the author, 29 Jan. 2004 (Collection Christopher Petit).

  55. Pat did this again in March of 1989, when she complained in a letter to the Washington Post that the writer David Streitfeld didn’t mention her “resentment” against Israel in the interview he did with her.

  56. Christopher Petit letter to the author, 29 Jan. 2004.

  57. Ibid.

  58. PH letter to Christopher Petit, 25 Apr. 1978 (Collection Christopher Petit).

  59. PH letter to Christopher Petit, 8 Aug. 1978 (Collection Christopher Petit).

  60. PH, This Sweet Sickness (New York: Norton, 2002), p. 238.

  61. PH, The Boy Who Followed Ripley (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 178.

  62. PH, Those Who Walk Away (London, Hamlyn, 1985), p. 117.

  4. A Simple Act of Forgery: Part 2

  1. Cahier 28, 12/7/62. Every subsequent quotation in this chapter, unless otherwise noted, comes from Pat’s notebook entry of 12 July.

  2. Joan Schenkar, Truly Wilde (London: Virago, 2000), p. 240.

  5. La Mamma: Part 1

  1. Anna von Planta, “Notes on Stories” in PH, Nothing That Meets the Eye (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), p. 451.

  2. Cahier 31, 6/5/71.

  3. CWA Janice Robertson, 22 June 2003.

  4. PH letter to Curt Johnson, editor of Who’s Who, undated.

  5. PH letter to EQQM, Jan. 5, 1962 (CURB).

  6. CWA Janice Robertson, 22 June 2003.

  7. Barbara Skelton, “Patricia Highsmith at Home,” London Magazine, 1995.

  8. Cahier 18, 6/13/49.

  9. CWA Dan Walton Coates, 22 Nov. 2003.

  10. MCH letter to PH, Jan. 1965.

  11. CWA Tommy Tune, 14 Jan. 2003.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Ibid.

  15. JBP letter to PH, undated.

  16. JBP letter to PH, undated.

  17. CWA Dan Walton Coates, 22 Nov. 2003.

  18. JBP letter to PH, undated.

  19. On 24 Oct. 1971, in Cahier 31, Pat wrote: “My mother told me she saw my father first in a photograph in a Ft Worth photographer’s window and—sought (somehow) his acquaintance. It occurs to me I have preferred people who sought me out, essentially, rather than those I had to make an effort for. I mean my emotional fascination lingered…far longer for those who made the first advances to me.”

  20. On 9 Apr. 1978, in Cahier 34, Pat wrote a love poem to her last coup de co
eur, the twenty-five-year old actress Tabea Blumenschein: “I fell in love not with flesh and blood / But with a picture….”

  21. PH letter to JBP, 15 July 1971

  22. JBP letter to PH, 30 July 1971.

  23. CWA Dan Walton Coates, 22 Nov. 2003. Dan Coates, who said that Coates family members still wear Judson cowboy boots, was wearing a pair of Judson boots himself when he spoke with me.

  24. Joan Dupont “The Poet of Apprehension,” Village Voice, 30 May 1995.

  25. CWA Don Coates, 14 Apr. 2002.

  26. CWA Dan Walton Coates, 22 Nov. 2003.

  27. PH letter to MCH, 12 Apr. 1966.

  28. MCH letter to DOC, 1965, undated.

  29. PH letter to DOC, 13 May 1977.

  30. PH letter to DOC, 12 Dec. 1974.

  31. PH letter to JBP, 27 Mar. 1972.

  32. MCH letter to PH, undated.

  33. CWA Camilla Butterfield, 6 Nov. 2003.

  34. CWA Marijane Meaker, 1 Feb. 2004.

  35. Cahier 36, 5/28/85.

  36. PH letter to DOC, 11 Nov. 1986.

  37. MCH letter to PH, “Tuesday AM” (no date).

  38. MCH letter to PH, 1 Jan. 1965.

  39. Ibid.

  40. Ibid.

  6. La Mamma: Part 2

  1. Bettina Berch, unpublished interview with PH, 1984 (Collection Bettina Berch).

  2. MCH letter to PH, “Tuesday AM” (no date).

  3. Coates and Highsmith family home movies shot in Texas and New York State, 1930s–1950s.

  4. In later life, Pat was to become obsessed by the Stewart genealogy although, with all her travelling, she never managed to visit either of the Stewart countries of orgin: Scotland and Ireland. One of the Stewart cousins Pat corresponded with at the end of her life was a state trooper with a passion for the works of Tom Clancy and Len Deighton. “I get the reading from both my Mother and Father,” he wrote to Pat, adding that he “was really tired of seeing death.” Mary Highsmith, with Pat’s same interest in family genealogy, had already corresponded with his parents.

  5. Masonic Lodge No. 158, Winchester, Tennessee: entries for William Stewart.

  6. Stewart family history compiled by Samuel Smith Stewart, 1935.

  7. Marshall Wingfield, General A. P. Stewart, His Life and Letters (Memphis, TN: West Tennessee Historical Society, 1954), pp. 204–5.

  8. Obituary: “Mrs. D.C. Coates, 88, to Be Buried Today,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 7 Feb. 1955.

  9. Wingfield, General A. P. Stewart, pp. 204–5.

  10. CWA Don Coates, 7 Sept. 2002.

  11. CWA Don Coates, 22 Aug. 2003.

  12. Houston Chronicle, “Fisher Dye Works Owner Does Pictures on Paper by Embroidery,” 7 Aug. 1955. “He often watched his mother, the late Mrs. Willie Mae Coates, as she embroidered an old picture of the family homestead in Coates Bend, Alabama. So about six years ago he decided to try the art himself.”

  13. Joan Dupont, “The Mysterious Patricia Highsmith,” Paris Metro, 9 Nov. 1977.

  14. CWA Don Coates, 22 Aug. 2003.

  15. Ibid.

  16. CWA Dan Walton Coates, 22 Nov. 2003.

  17. Ibid.

  18. CWA Don Coates, 22 Aug. 2003.

  19. PH letter to SH, 29 Aug. 1970.

  20. Eugene Walter letter to PH, 14 Sept. 1992.

  21. MCH letter to PH, undated.

  22. MCH letter to PH, undated.

  23. Diary 12, 23 Jan. 1953.

  24. MCH letter to PH, undated.

  25. Cahier 36, 28/5/85.

  26. Cahier 9, PH transcription of high school notebooks, Apr. 27, 1938. “Mother warns me about letters to Cralick & Marj.”

  27. CWA Annabelle Potin, 24 Mar. 2007.

  28. MCH letter to PH, undated.

  29. Cahier 16, 7/5/47.

  30. CWA Don Coates, 11 May 2002.

  31. CWA Don Coates, 14 Apr. 2002.

  32. CWA Dan Walton Coates, 22 Nov. 2003.

  33. An “orphan” who still has parents is Judith Thurman’s useful description throughout her biography of Colette, Secrets of the Flesh (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999).

  34. CWA Don Coates, 22 Aug. 2003.

  35. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (Boston: The Writer, 1966), p. 20.

  36. Ibid.

  37. CWA Dan Walton Coates, 22 Nov. 2003.

  38. PH, “An American Book Bag,” circa 1974, 6 carbon pages, publication unknown.

  39. MCH letter to PH, undated.

  7. La Mamma; Part 3

  1. Cahier 1, 2/7/39.

  2. CWA Dan Walton Coates, 22 Nov. 2003.

  3. “Slimming Sickness,” London Sunday Times, 9 Feb. 1969.

  4. Cahier 9, PH transcription of high school notebooks, Dec. 14, 1937.

  5. Ibid., Feb. 1938.

  6. Cahier 9, PH transcription of high school notebooks, Feb.–Mar. 1938.

  7. Ibid.

  8. The Book Programme, BBC2, 11 Nov. 1976.

  9. PH letter to SH, 29 Aug. 1970.

  10. Cahier 20, 7/27/51.

  11. CWA Dan Walton Coates, 22 Nov. 2003.

  12. Ibid.

  13. MCH letter to PH, 26 Nov. 1970.

  14. Cahier 3, 1/30/41.

  15. PH letter to MCH, 9 Apr. 1971.

  16. CWA Don Coates, 20 Apr. 2002.

  17. MCH letter to PH, May, no year, presumably 1971.

  18. MCH letter to PH, undated.

  19. Diary 2, 11 June 1942.

  20. Cahier 31, 1/12/70.

  21. Diary 12, Dec. 25, 1952.

  22. Ibid. Jan. 27, 1953.

  23. Ibid. Jan-Feb. 1953.

  24. Ibid. Jan. 13, 1953.

  25. Ibid. Jan. 23, 1953.

  26. Ibid.

  8. La Mamma: Part 4

  1. CWA Marijane Meaker, 1 Feb. 2003.

  2. Karl Augustus Menninger, The Human Mind (New York: Knopf, 1930), p. ix.

  3. Ibid., p. 5.

  4. PH, “A Try at Freedom,” undated, unpublished.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Pupil’s record card for PH, 1930–33, New York State Dept. of Education (P.S. 122, Queens, New York).

  7. PH, “A Try at Freedom.”

  8. Ibid.

  9. Ibid.

  10. PH letter to Karl Menninger, 8 Apr. 1989.

  11. Janet Watts, “Love and Highsmith,” Observer Magazine, 9 Sept. 1990.

  12. CWA Janine Hérisson, 29 Oct. 2002.

  13. PH, “Christmases—Mine or Anybody’s,” marked “sent to Granta 23 March 1990.”

  14. Cahier 13, 3/4/46.

  15. Jeva Cralick letter to PH, undated.

  16. CWA Vivien De Bernardi, 15 Aug. 2002.

  17. CWA Peter Hyun, 26 Apr. 2008.

  18. Ned Rorem letter to the author, 10 Jan. 2008.

  19. PH, “E. 57th St. Tomboy,” Saturday Review, 1 Apr. 1950.

  20. Karl Menninger letter to PH, 17 Mar. 1989.

  21. Cahier 4, 8/29/40.

  22. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, p. 22.

  23. Ibid., p. 16.

  24. Cahier 31, 1/2/70.

  25. Cahier 10, Jan. 5, 1940.

  26. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, p. 3.

  27. Ibid.

  28. PH letter to BKS, 22 Feb. 1972.

  29. Paul Ingendaay, Afterword, Nothing That Meets the Eye (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), p. 442.

  30. CWA Vivien De Bernardi, 15 Aug. 2002.

  31. PH, “Between Jane Austen and Philby,” Vogue, September 1968.

  32. Ibid.

  33. Diary 10, May 16, 1950.

  34. PH, “Between Jane Austen and Philby.”

  35. “PH, “Some Christmases—Mine or Anybody’s.”

  36. Ibid.

  37. Ibid.

  38. Cahier 2, 7/8/40.

  39. Ibid.

  40. Cahier 17, 3/8/48.

  41. Ibid.

  42. PH, The South Bank Show, Episode 125, 14 Nov. 1982.

  43. PH letter to DOC, Montmachoux, 26 Dec. 1968.

  44. Cahier 19, 4/2/50.

  45. Ibid.
/>
  46. Cahier 13, 9/20/45.

  47. Cassette tape recorded by DOC and sent to PH in Moncourt, Aug. 1975.

  48. PH letter to DOC, 31 Aug. 1976.

  49. PH letter to Bettina Berch 2 July, 1983.

  9. Greek Games

  1. PH, “A Try at Freedom.”

  2. Cahier 9, PH transcription of high school notebooks, Aug. 1938.

  3. Ibid., 1937.

  4. Ibid., Aug. 7, 1939.

  5. Ibid., 1938.

  6. Ibid., Sept. 1937.

  7. Ibid., Feb. 2, 1938.

  8. Ibid., Feb. 4, 1938.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Ibid., Sept.–Oct. 1938.

  11. Ibid., Sept. 1937.

  12. PH, “A Try at Freedom.”

  13. PH to Joan Dupont, quoted in a letter to KKS, 14 Mar. 1988.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Programme, Barnard College Greek Games, 1939 (BCA).

  16. BCA.

  17. Archives, Julia Richman High School.

  18. Cahier 36, 29/12/83.

  19. Ted Solotaroff, ed., Alfred Kazin’s America (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), p. 45.

  20. Cahier 36, 29/12/83.

  21. CWA Alice Gershon Lassally, 22 Feb. 2003.

  22. CWA Helen Kandel Hyman, 16 Feb. 2003.

  23. CWA Alice Gershon Lassally, 22 Feb. 2003.

  24. CWA Helen Kandel Hyman, 16 Feb. 2003.

  25. Ibid.

  26. CWA Alice Gershon Lassally, 22 Feb. 2003.

  27. CWA Rita Rohner Semel, 18 Feb. 2003.

  28. “A Minute on the Death of Miss Ethel G. Sturtevant,” presented at the Faculty Meeting at Barnard College by Professor Cabell Greet, 28 Oct. 1968.

  29. Cahier 6, 4/24/42.

  30. Diary 1, Jan. 1–17, 1940.

  31. Diary 8, 4/8/47.

  32. Cahier 3, 1/6/41.

  33. Cahier 24, 24/5/57.

  34. CWA KKS.

  35. Cahier 5, 9/16/41.

  36. Cahier 6, 12/17/41.

  37. PH, The Price of Salt, p. 221.

  38. Cahier 6, 12/17/41.

  39. Ibid.

  40. Ibid.

  41. Cahier 12, 11/12/44.

  42. “Thrillers and Crime Fiction,” interview with PH, 3 Dec. 1972, BBCTV.

  43. Cahier, 1 Feb. 1938.

  44. Cahier 24, 2/7/56.

  45. Cahier 1, Aug. 1939.

  46. Craig Little, “Interview with PH,” Publishers Weekly, 2 Nov. 1992.

  47. Diary 1, 1941.

  48. Cahier 18, 8/20/49.

  49. Ibid.

  50. Cahier 9, PH transcription of high school notebooks, 1935.

  51. Cahier 18, 11/5/48.

  52. Ibid., 7/29/49.

  53. CWA Caroline Besterman, 19 Dec. 2003.

  54. Cahier 4, 9/19/40.

  55. Cahier 24, 1/5/56.