The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

2. PH, Afterword, The Price of Salt.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Diary 10, June 1950: “Pray God, she never troubled to look up my name. (After the Xmas card.)”

  6. Ibid.

  7. Ibid.

  8. PH, Carol (London: Bloomsbury, 1990), p. 260.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Cahier 26, 6/18/61. “As usual, I have found the fever beneficial to the imagination, and found an ending for my book.”

  12. Diary 10, Dec. 23, 1949.

  13. PH, The Dove Descending, unpublished manuscript.

  14. PH, The First Person Novel, unpublished manuscript.

  15. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, p. 143.

  16. Cahier 26, 1/21/61.

  17. She also used the first-person narrative in two short stories about animals: “Chorus Girl’s Absolutely Final Performance”—the story made her weep—and “Notes from a Respectable Cockroach.”

  18. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, p. 89.

  19. Diary 10, Oct. 24, 1950.

  20. Ibid., Jan. 19, 1951.

  21. And she used the name Senn in her very last novel, Small g, the novel that is both a summary and a parody of her career. Senn is, conveniently, a Swiss name, and for Small g it was used for Thomas Senn, a sturdy blond Zurich detective. By 1995, Pat had come a long way from obsessive love.

  22. Cahier 18, 12/9/48.

  23. Ibid., 12/9/48.

  24. Ibid., 9/9/48.

  25. Priscilla Senn Kennedy letter to the author, quoting Kathleen Senn’s deceased cousin, 14 Feb. 2009.

  26. “[S]omething of a fairytale, something of a castle” was Pat’s comment on Mrs. Senn’s Murray Avenue house on her second trip to Ridgewood, New Jersey, to spy on Mrs. Senn.

  27. PH, The Price of Salt (New York: Bantam Books, 1958), p. 197.

  28. Ibid., p. 174.

  29. Ibid., p. 136.

  30. Cahier 19, June 28, 1950. Written the day before another finishing touch was put on the novel.

  31. André Gide, The Counterfeiters, trans. Dorothy Bussy (New York: Vintage Books 1973), p. 123.

  32. Diary 10, Dec. 10, 1949.

  33. Property listings in the Ridgewood, New Jersey, property directory, in 1940: Book: 8052, p. 533. Block: 1811, Lot: 21.02. According to the property directory, the address became North Murray Avenue in 1952 (Ridgewood Public Library).

  34. Diary 10, Sunday, Jan. 21, 1951.

  35. Ibid., June 5, 1950.

  36. Ibid., June 8, 1950.

  37. Ibid., June 30, 1950.

  38. Ibid.

  39. Ibid., June 12, 1950.

  40. Ibid., July 1950.

  41. Ibid., July 2, 1950.

  42. Ibid.

  43. Ibid., Oct. 24, 1950.

  44. Cahier 19, 6/6/50.

  45. Diary 10, May 17, 1950.

  46. Ibid., Oct. 17, 1950.

  47. Ibid., Oct. 27, 1950.

  48. Ibid., Sept. 6, 1950.

  49. Cahier 13, 8/27/45.

  50. Diary 1952–54, Feb. 25, 1953 (Trieste). Dan Walton Coates, eldest son of Pat’s “brother Dan,” who spent time as a boy with Pat at Willie Mae’s house in Fort Worth whenever Pat passed through Texas, remembered something about Pat’s teeth that alarmed him. He thought it was tied in with her “artistic” temperament and how she felt that she had to suppress her good looks. But first he wanted to talk about the fun he’d had with Pat. When Pat was young, Dan said, she was “very upbeat and she’d cuss like a sailor and of course I liked to cuss even as a kid so we’d talk out of Grandma’s hearing because she would not have had THAT. We had a lot of fun in the early years.”

  Both Pat and Mary Highsmith helped young Dan with his artwork—he grew up to be an investment advisor, a rancher, and a painter and sculptor of western subjects—and Mary, Dan said, was “the most patient thing” with him. “A lot of Pat’s things were still at Grandma’s, her sketchbooks and so forth,” and so most of Dan’s conversations with Pat centered on art. Pat and Mary would buy him sketchbooks and critique his work seriously, as though he were already an artist, and Dan retained a shining memory of Pat’s beauty, which, during “these early years, was drop-dead gorgeous. Dark dark eyes, that raven dark hair in a pageboy and golly she just looked great.” It was his memory of Pat’s stunning looks in the 1940s that made his next experience of her so shocking.

  “Well, she went to Europe and it may have been five years, ten years later—I’m not worth a darn on dates—and I’ll swear to God I couldn’t believe it. She looked like the wrath of God…. Come to find out, for some reason only known to Pat, she had filed her teeth. They were all jagged-looking and from that point on her dental problems got worse” (CWA Dan Walton Coates, 22 Nov. 2003).

  51. PH letter to KKS, 25 Jan. 1974.

  52. Cahier 19, 12/19/49.

  53. PH letter to KKS, 3 Oct. 1988.

  54. PH letter to KKS, 20 Aug. 1970.

  55. Ibid.

  56. CWA Caroline Besterman, 6 Nov. 2003.

  57. Cahier 20, 8/13/51.

  58. Cahier 19, 12/19/49.

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

  60. Diary 11, Sept. 24, 1951.

  61. Diary 10, Aug. 22–Sept. 6, 1950.

  62. Ibid., Oct. 29, 1950.

  63. CWA Jean-Étienne Cohen-Séat, 26 June 2007.

  64. Diary 10, Oct. 29, 1950.

  65. Ibid., Oct. 21, 1950.

  66. Ibid., Nov., 1950.

  67. Ibid., Nov. 1, 1950.

  68. Ibid. 10, Nov. 8, 1950.

  69. Ibid., Nov. 11, 1950.

  70. Ibid., Dec. 1950.

  71. Ibid., Dec. 1950.

  72. Ibid., Dec. 1950.

  73. Ibid., New Year’s Eve, 1950.

  74. Cahier 19, 7/1/50.

  75. Cahier 16, 9/7/47.

  76. Diary 10, Oct. 11, 1950.

  77. Time, 13 Jan. 1941.

  78. Ibid.

  79. PH letter to KKS, 19 Apr. 1964.

  80. Cahier 16, 9/4/47.

  81. PH letter to Virginia Kent Catherwood, 6 Sept. 1947.

  82. Diary 9, Jan. 4, 1948.

  83. PH letter to KKS, 22 Mar. 1952.

  84. In her diary for 1968 Pat wrote of Ginnie Catherwood: “She is Lotte in The Tremor of Forgery—the woman whom my hero will always love.”

  85. “The Private Life and Times of Prince David Mdivani,” on Glamour Girls of the Silver Screen Web site, www.glamourgirlsofthesilverscreen.com.

  18. Les Girls: Part 2

  1. Cahier 18, 6/19/49.

  2. Diary 8, June 26, 1949.

  3. Ibid., July 1, 1949.

  4. Ibid., July 27, 1950.

  5. Cahier 19, 12/12/49.

  6. Cahier 19, 2/27/50.

  7. Cahier 24, 11/17/57.

  8. CWA Caroline Besterman, 19 Dec. 2003.

  9. CWA Barbara Roett, 18 May 2003.

  10. Diary 11, Oct. 14, 1951.

  11. CWA Joan Dupont, 7 Nov. 2002.

  12. PH letter to Alex Szogyi, 27 Aug. 1977.

  13. CWA Marion Aboudaram, 2 Oct. 2002.

  14. PH letter to BKS, 16 Apr. 1968.

  15. Ibid., 10 Feb. 1969.

  16. PH letter to Alex Szogyi, 18 Feb. 1969.

  17. Ibid., 4 Nov. 1968.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Cahier 17, 2/29/48.

  20. Cahier 19, 8/11/50.

  21. Diary 10, Oct. 13, 1950.

  22. Ibid.

  23. Ibid., Oct. 15–16, 1950.

  24. Ibid., Oct. 13–14, 1950.

  25. PH, Strangers on a Train, p. 26.

  26. CWA Marijane Meaker, 17 Apr. 2002.

  27. Cahier 20, 9/14/51.

  28. Cahier 23, 6/13/55.

  29. Cahier 23, 11/11/54.

  30. Diary 11, Sept. 4, 1951.

  31. Diary 12, May 24, 1953.

  32. Ibid.

  33. Diary 4, Aug. 8, 1943.

  34. Rolf Tietgens letter to PH, 7 Aug. 1968.

  35. Ibid., 12 Mar. 1969.

  36. Ibid., 2
2 Feb. 1969.

  37. Dorothy Wheelock Edson letter to the author, 26 June 2004.

  38. Ibid., 14 June 2004.

  39. Diary 10, July 17, 1950.

  40. Diary 11, June 5, 1951.

  41. PH letter to Lil Picard, 2 June 1971 (UIL).

  42. PH letter to Ellen Blumenthal Hill, 8 July 1978 (UIL).

  43. Lil Picard letter to PH, 21 Oct. 1970.

  44. Diary 9, 5/10/47.

  45. PH letter to BKS, 12 Apr. 1972.

  46. Diary 12, insert, May 29, 1953.

  47. Diary 12, June 1, 1953.

  48. Ibid., May 23–29, 1953.

  49. Ibid., June 1953.

  50. Ibid., June 15, 1953.

  51. Ibid., May 24, 1953.

  52. Ibid., June 17, 1953.

  53. PH letter to KKS, 14 June 1952.

  54. Ibid.

  55. Cahier 22, 6/18/53.

  56. Diary 12, June 24, 1953.

  57. Willis Goldbeck, entry in Internet Movie Database, www.IMDb.com.

  58. Diary 12, Dec. 24, 1952.

  59. PH letter to KKS, 15 Dec. 1952.

  60. Patricia Schartle had been the first woman editor in chief in American book-publishing history (introduction by Brian Garfield to Second International Congress of Crime Writers, Mar. 15, 1978).

  61. Diary 12, June 24–28, 1953.

  62. Ibid., July 1, 1953.

  63. Ibid.

  64. Ibid.

  65. Cahier 23, 6/12/55.

  66. Ibid. “I stopped writing my diary nearly a year ago—but for the very good reason that I knew somebody was reading it (E.B.H. alas).”

  67. PH letter to Monique Buffet, 8 Apr. 1988 (Collection Monique Buffet).

  68. Diary 12, July 3, 1953.

  69. Ibid., July 4, 1953.

  70. Diary 11, Sept. 7, 1951.

  71. In the same vein, Pat was indulgent about Buffie Johnson’s long-researched book Lady of the Beasts: The Goddess and Her Sacred Animals (1988), corresponding with Buffie at length about the work. Keeping whatever private thoughts she had on the subject to herself, Pat loyally sent a review of it to Le Monde in Paris.

  72. Cahier 20, 10/17/51.

  73. Diary 11, 7/19/51.

  74. PH letter to KKS, 14 June 1952.

  75. Diary 11, Sept. 2, 1951.

  76. Ibid., Mar. 3, 1952.

  77. Ibid., Aug. 23, 1951. Subsequent quotations by PH about her private life are from Diaries 11 and 12.

  78. PH, review of Meg, Saturday Review, 1 Apr. 1950.

  79. Diary 11, Apr. 23, 1951.

  80. Ibid., May 1, 1951.

  81. Ibid., May 3, 1951.

  82. Ibid., Apr. 28, 1951.

  83. Ibid., May 7, 1951.

  84. Ibid., May 9–12, 1951.

  85. Ibid., June 6–24, 1951.

  86. Ibid., June 18, 1951.

  87. PH letter to Djuna Barnes, 1 Jan. 1959 (UML).

  88. Djuna Barnes letter to PH, 6 Jan. 1959 (UML).

  89. Diary 11, Oct. 1, 1951.

  90. Ibid., July 3, 1951.

  91. Ibid., July 23–27, 1951.

  92. Ibid., July 29, 1951.

  93. Don Swaim, Book Notes, Oct. 1987.

  94. Diary 11, Aug. 29, 1951.

  95. Ibid., Aug. 23, 1951.

  19. Les Girls: Part 3

  1. Cahier 20, 9/8/51.

  2. PH letter to KKS, 13 Aug. 1952.

  3. Diary 11, 1/11/51.

  4. CWA H. M. Qualunque, 3 Aug. 2004.

  5. Cahier 31, 4/18/71.

  6. CWA H. M. Qualunque, 3 Aug. 2004.

  7. Diary 8, 12/13/47.

  8. CWA H. M. Qualunque, 3 Aug. 2004.

  9. Ibid.

  10. CWA Peter Huber, 20 Apr. 2003.

  11. Ibid.

  12. Diary 11, Sept. 4, 1951.

  13. PH, The Blunderer, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 23.

  14. Diary 12, July 9, 1952. “Man’s Best Friend” was published posthumously in a much later version with a different ending.

  15. Diary 11, Nov. 16, 1951.

  16. PH letter to Alex Szogyi, Sept. 24–25, 1969.

  17. PH letter to BKS, 2 June 1972.

  18. CWA Bettina Berch, 10 Aug. 2003.

  19. CWA Christa Maerker, 3 Aug. 2006.

  20. Diary 11, Sept. 4, 1951.

  21. Ibid., Sept. 9, 1951.

  22. Ibid., Sept. 14, 1951.

  23. Cahier 16, 11/13/47.

  24. Diary 11, Dec. 3, 1951.

  25. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1990), p. 81.

  26. Diary 11, Sept. 30, 1951.

  27. Gerald Peary, interview in Toronto with PH, www.geraldpeary.com., 1988.

  28. Diary 11, Oct. 22, 1951.

  29. Ibid.

  30. Ibid., Oct. 28, 1951.

  31. Ibid., Oct. 25, 1951.

  32. Ibid., Nov. 5, 1951.

  33. Ibid., Dec. 3, 1951.

  34. Ibid., Jan. 11, 1952.

  35. PH letter to KKS, 5 Jan. 1967.

  36. W. H. Auden letter to PH, dated “Mar 23” and pasted in her Scrapbook no. 1, 1950–61.

  37. PH, “Scene of the Crime,” Granta 29 (Winter 1989). Also published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 24 Aug. 1991.

  38. Cahier 21, Dec. 2, 1952.

  39. Andrew Wilson, Beautiful Shadow (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), p. 182.

  40. Diary 12, Dec. 5, 1952.

  41. Ibid., Nov. 27, 1952.

  42. Ibid., Dec. 1, 1952.

  43. Ibid., Dec. 5, 1952.

  44. Ibid., Dec. 17, 1952.

  45. Cahier 21, 12/2/52.

  46. Ibid.

  47. Diary 12, Jan. 19, 1953.

  48. Ibid., Dec. 25, 1952.

  49. Ibid., Jan. 23, 1953.

  50. Cahier 22, Keime, entries from 1952–53.

  51. Diary 12, Feb. 12, 1953.

  52. Cahier 22, 2/15/53.

  53. Diary 12, Jan. 27, 1953

  54. Ibid., Feb., various dates, 1953.

  55. Cahier 21, 10/28/52.

  56. Cahier 22, 2/14/53.

  57. Diary 12, July 15–16, 1953.

  20. Les Girls: Part 4

  1. Diary 12, July and Aug., various dates, 1953.

  2. Ibid., Aug. 6–7, 1953.

  3. Ibid., June 8, 1953.

  4. Ibid., Aug. 20, 1953.

  5. PH, The Blunderer (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 189.

  6. Ibid., p. 16.

  7. Ibid., pp. 99, 93–94.

  8. PH letter to Alex Szogyi, 17 Aug. 1965.

  9. PH, The Blunderer, p. 97.

  10. Ibid., p. 167.

  11. Ibid., p. 97.

  12. Ibid., p. 188.

  13. Ibid., p. 148.

  14. Paul Ingendaay, Afterword to Nothing That Meets the Eye (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), p. 446.

  15. Cahier 23, 8/21/55.

  16. Diary 12, Aug. 26 and 31, 1953.

  17. Cahier 22, 10/27/53.

  18. PH letters to KKS, 27 Oct. and 24 Dec. 1953.

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

  20. CWA Annebelle Potin, 24 Mar. 2007.

  21. Diary 12, Mar. 16, 1954.

  22. Cahier 23, 4/14/54.

  23. PH letter to Lil Picard, 20 Dec. 1967 (UIL).

  24. Cahier 23, 4/22/54.

  25. Ibid.

  26. Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Viking Press, 1957).

  21. Les Girls: Part 5

  1. PH letter to KKS, 23 Mar. 1953.

  2. PH, The Talented Mr. Ripley, p. 174.

  3. Fort Worth Star-Telegram, archives for 1931 (FWPL).

  4. Cahier 23, 4/24/54.

  5. “Man ‘Buried’ as Fire Victim Seized as Murder Suspect,” New York Herald Tribune, 16 Apr. 1954.

  6. Cahier 6, 2/23/42.

  7. PH letter to Rosalind Constable, 15 Jan. 1968.

  8. Ibid.

  9. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1990), p. 76.

  10. Ibid., p. 75.

  11. No one ever mentions Willa Cather’s wonde
rful short story “Paul’s Case” (1906) in connection with The Talented Mr. Ripley; it is perhaps time to do so. Pat admired Cather, lived for two years with her parents in a building on the site of Cather’s old Greenwich Village residence on Bank Street, and would certainly have known “Paul’s Case” as one the few overtly American examples of a doubtfully sexed protagonist. There is something of the stagestruck Paul in Ripley and in his effeminacy, compulsive lying, felonious instincts, love of fine costume, and loathing of the low condition of his family. But Paul finishes, like Anna Kerenina, under the wheels of a train, while Tom Ripley ends up in the best hotel in Athens.

  12. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, p. 140.

  13. Ibid., p. 123.

  14. Patricia Highsmith: Leben und Werk, eds. Franz Cavigelli, Fritz Senn, and Anna von Planta (Zurich: Diogenes, 1996). Peter Handke: “Die Privaten Weltkriege der Patricia Highsmith,” pp. 169–180 (trans. Anna von Planta).

  15. CWA Judith Conklin Peters, 1 June 2002.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Ibid.

  18. Cahier 23, 6/13/54.

  19. Ibid.

  20. Ibid., 5/27/55.

  21. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, p. 74.

  22. CWA Ned Roche, 24 May 2002.

  23. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, p. 75.

  24. PH, The Talented Mr. Ripley, p. 131.

  25. Ibid., pp. 137–38.

  26. Diary 8, May 12, 1947.

  27. Cahier 23, 10/1/54.

  28. Cahier 23, 3/7/54.

  29. Cahier 24, 9/29/57.

  30. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, p. 50.

  31. Cahier 26, 8/19/60.

  32. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, p. 76.

  33. Lisa Maria Hogeland, Afterword to In a Lonely Place, by Dorothy B. Hughes (New York: Feminist Press, 2003), p. 240.

  34. Antonia Fraser, “The Unsuitable Suitor in the Lake,” Spectator, June 2003.

  35. Patricia Schartle Myrer letter to the author, 17 Feb. 2003.

  36. Dorothy B. Hughes letter to Joan Kahn, Dec. 1958 (CURB).

  37. Don Swaim, Book Notes, Oct. 1987.

  38. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, p. 75.

  39. Pat added Ripley’s name to a letter to Barbara Ker-Seymer and did the same in a book dedication to Charles Latimer.

  40. Cahier 23, 5/3/54.

  41. Ibid., 11/19/54.

  42. Duhamel was the name of one of PH’s French translators.

  43. PH letter to KKS, 6 May 1970.

  44. CWA Dan Walton Coates, 11 May 2002.

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

  46. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, pp. 23–24.

  47. Cahier 23, 12/28/54.

  48. Ibid., “New Year’s Eve,” 1954.

  49. Cahier 26, 8/30/61.

  50. Cahier 23, 12/6/55.

  51. Ibid., 6/26/55.