The Talented Miss Highsmith
Page 87
52. Ibid., 7/3/54.
53. Diary 10, Jan. 6, 1951.
22. Les Girls: Part 6
1. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, pp. 20–21.
2. Cahier 24, 2/29/56.
3. Ibid., 1/28/56.
4. Ibid., 1/13/56.
5. “Books in Brief,” The New Yorker, 14 Jan. 1956, p. 100.
6. “Criminals at Large,” Anthony Boucher, New York Times Book Review, 25 Dec. 1955.
7. Cahier 24, 3/28/56.
8. Ibid., 4/13/56.
9. Ibid., 6/8/56.
10. Ibid., 6/17/56.
11. Ibid., 5/29/56.
12. PH letter to KKS, 23 Sept. 1956.
13. Ibid., 4 June 1956.
14. Cahier 24, 7/31/56.
15. Cahier 23, 6/4/55.
16. Cahier 24, 10/21/56.
17. Ibid., 11/23/56.
18. Ibid., 11/27/56.
19. PH letter to Joan Kahn, 14/9/59 (CURB).
20. Cahier 24, 3/7/57.
21. Ibid., 5/1/57.
22. Ibid., 5/22/57.
23. Ibid., 1/15/57.
24. Ibid., front cover.
25. PH letter to KKS, 24/9/53.
26. Cahier 24, 8/27/57.
27. Ibid., 9/30/57.
28. Ibid., 1/3/58 and 1/16/58.
29. Ibid., 1/3/58.
30. Cahier 23, 9/28/55.
31. Cahier 24, 5/19/57.
32. Ibid.
23. Les Girls: Part 7
1. Pat’s and Marijane’s agent, Patricia Schartle Myrer, described Marijane as “star-struck” by Pat in a letter to the author, 17 Feb. 2003.
2. Marijane Meaker interviewed by Terry Gross, Fresh Air, NPR, 12 July 2003.
3. CWA Marijane Meaker, 1 Feb. 2003.
4. Diary 11, July 27, 1951.
5. Liz Smith, Natural Blonde (New York: Hyperion, 2000), p. 258.
6. CWA Megan Terry, 29 Oct. 2006.
7. CWA Jean Rosenthal, 30 Oct. 2002.
8. CWA Megan Terry, 29 Oct. 2006.
9. Marijane Meaker, Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s, p. 1.
10. Ibid., p. 2.
11. Cahier 25, 9/28/59.
12. CWA Marijane Meaker, 1 Feb. 2003.
13. Marion Meade, Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (New York: Penguin, 1989), p. 266.
14. CWA Marijane Meaker, 1 Feb. 2003.
15. Ibid., 1 Feb. and 12 Nov. 2003.
16. Cahier 3, 7/7/40.
17. Ibid., 1/10/40.
18. MCH letter to Marijane Meaker, “Friday AM 11th” (Collection Marijane Meaker).
19. Ibid.
20. CWA Marijane Meaker, 1 Feb. 2003.
21. Cahier 26, 12/1/61.
22. Ibid., 3/23/61. “She denied having asked me, when I was replacing a hammer in the rack last night, ‘Do you want to hit me, Pat?’ I said of course not and hung up the hammer.”
23. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, pp. 11–12.
24. Joan Kahn letter to Patricia Schartle, 21 Feb. 1961 (CURB).
25. Cahier 26, 3/3/61.
26. Ibid., 3/14/61.
27. Ibid., 3/22/61.
28. Ibid.
29. Meaker, Highsmith; a theme of the book.
30. Cahier 26, 3/22/61.
31. Meaker, Highsmith, pp. 20, 166. Meaker is quoting Polly Cameron on Pat’s drinking.
32. Cahier 26, 3/22/61.
33. CWA Marijane Meaker, 1 Feb. 2003.
34. Cahier 27, 12/28/64.
It was no doubt a tragedy that I saw
“Forbidden” written like a word in red paint,
“Stop,” and could read it, when I was six,
A tragedy that at sixteen and eighteen,
Love still a new gift to me, ungiven because untaken,
A tragedy that I would have given this best that I had,
Better than precious stones I read about in books.
It’s perhaps a tragedy I had to swallow my precious stone
At sixteen, watching careless boys and girls
Walking hand in hand down public streets,
As indifferent to what people thought of them
As they were to their own sensations, walking the next day with someone else.
MY envy turned to hatred
And the hatred to contempt….
35. Meaker, Highsmith, p. 179.
36. Diary 10, Nov. 24, 1950.
37. CWA Vivien De Bernardi, 15 Aug. 2002.
24. Les Girls: Part 8
1. CWA Phillip Lloyd Powell, 13 Feb. 2003.
2. Ibid.
3. CWA Nora Ellen Lewis, 14 Feb. 2006.
4. Diary 13, Sunday, 16 Sept. 1962.
5. CWA Marion Aboudaram, 23 Sept. 2002.
6. PH letter to KKS, 30 Mar. 1988.
7. PH letter to Lil Picard, 23 Jan. 1968 (UIL).
8. Diary 15, Jan. 23., 1968.
9. CWA Linda Ladurner, 10 May 2003.
10. PH letter to Lil Picard, 23 Jan. 1968 (UIL).
11. PH letter to KKS, 11 Feb. 1976.
12. CWA Frédérique Chambrelent, 19 May 2003.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Anthony Cronin, one of Samuel Beckett’s biographers, writes of a boisterous, bibulous Desmond Ryan, on a night out with Samuel Beckett and Ralph Cusack in 1947, hurling ecclesiastical chair after ecclesiastical chair down the hundreds of steps which descend from the front of Paris’s second-best-known church, Sacre Coeur.
17. CWA Janine Hérisson, 29 Oct. 2002.
18. Henri Robillot letter to the author, 29/10/02.
19. PH letter to MCH, 3 May 1968.
20. CWA Nora Ellen Lewis, 14 Feb. 2006.
21. CWA Larry Kramer, 14 June 2006.
22. Larry Kramer letter to PH, 10 Feb. 1971.
23. CWA Larry Kramer, 14 Feb. 2006.
24. Diary 15, Aug. 11, 1963.
25. Ibid., Jan. 31, 1964.
26. PH letter to Lil Picard, 11 June 1969 (UIL).
27. Ibid., 8 July 1969 (UIL).
28. Ibid.
29. Cahier 26, 3/4/61.
30. Ibid., 9/4/61.
31. Ibid., 6/16/61.
32. PH, The Cry of the Owl (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989), p. 27.
33. PH letter to KKS, 6 Feb. 1963.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., 3 May 1963.
36. Ibid., 4 June, 1964.
25. Les Girls: Part 9
1. Cahier 28, 12/15/64.
2. Ibid., 3/3/65.
3. Ibid., 4/23/65.
4. Ibid., 7/12/65.
5. Ibid., 8/5/65.
6. Ibid., 1/15/67.
7. Ibid., 4/12/65.
8. Ibid., 4/12/67.
9. Most of the character names in Those Who Walk Away, like most character names in other Highsmith fictions, are unconvincing as names: they sound like bad aliases. Whether they’re the product of an imagination which spent quite a bit of time inventing for the comics, where similarly incredible proper names abound, or whether they are merely the result of Pat’s tin ear for intonation, is impossible to determine. If we contrast, for example, the name Odile Masarati, the woman in the Highsmith short story “The Cruellest Month” who is proud to be physically scarred in her pursuit of a Graham Greene–like author, with any of the names on Vladimir Nabokov’s pitch-perfect list of Lolita’s little classmates in the novel Lolita, the difference between a fictional name that sounds real and one that sounds false becomes obvious. Pat did pluck one surname for Those Who Walk Away from her grandmother Willie Mae’s family history: she made the unseen Mallorcan landlord of Ray and Peggy Garret a Deckkard.
10. PH, Strangers on a Train, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 270.
11. CWA Janice Robertson, 22 June 2003.
12. Cahier 28, 1/15/67.
13. Cahier 26, 2/3/62.
14. Cahier 28, 7/11/65.
15. Ibid., 2/7/66.
16. Ibid., 3/30/66.
17. Ibid., 7/13/66.
18. Ibid., 7/7/66.
20. Ibid., 7/19/66.
21. Ibid., 7/21/66.
22. PH, The Tremor of Forgery, p. 87.
23. Cahier 28, 1/27/67.
24. Ibid., 1/16/67.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., 1/2/67.
28. Cahier 29, 1/27/67.
29. Cahier 28, 3/28/67.
26. Les Girls: Part 10
1. PH letter to Alex Szogyi, 14 Nov. 1969.
2. Ibid.
3. CWA Barbara Roett, 18 May 2003.
4. Diary 10, Jan. 27, 1950.
5. Cahier 34, 4/9/78.
6. PH letter to Alex Szogyi, 24 Apr. 1978.
7. Cahier 35, 8/24/80.
8. CWA Phyllis Nagy, 26 June 2002.
9. Sally Vincent, “Wave from Afar,” Observer, 27 Apr. 1980.
10. CWA Francis Wyndham, 20 Dec. 2003.
11. Francis Wyndham letter to PH, 4 Nov. 1984.
12. CWA Linda Ladurner, 10 May 2003.
13. CWA Tabea Blumenschein, 15 June 2003.
14. Diary 9, 27 Jan. 1949.
15. BKS letter to Barbara Roett, 8 June 1978 (TGA).
16. Meaker, Highsmith, pp. 189, 190.
17. Ibid., pp 183–98.
18. PH, unpublished “Impossible Interview” with Yitzhak Shamir, 1990.
19. CWA Christa Maerker, 21 July 2004.
20. CWA Phyllis Nagy, 26 June 2002.
21. Cahier 24, 9/30/57.
22. Cahier 25, 11/19/59.
27. Les Girls: Part 11
1. Cahier 36, 4/3/84.
2. Cahier 26, 12/22/61.
3. Cahier 4, 9/15/40.
4. CWA Susannah Clapp, 2 Jan. 2004.
5. Cahier 26, 8/25/62.
6. Cahier 27, 1/19/63.
7. Cahier 32, 6/17/73.
8. Ibid.
9. Cahier 9, 9/29/43.
10. Joyce Carol Oates, “Dark Laughter,” New York Review of Books, 15 Nov. 2001; also in Oates, Uncensored: Views & (Re)views (New York: Ecco, 2005), p. 44. Nothing That Meets the Eye, a second posthumous collection of Highsmith stories written between 1938 and 1989, is not a collection Highsmith herself would have approved. The stories appeared in such publications as Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Woman’s Home Companion, Cosmopolitan, Today’s Woman, and Home and Food. In a letter to Kingsley Skattebol on 27 September 1994, four months before she died, Pat strongly objected to the publication of her early work: “What I am against—since you’re my lit. exec.—is publishing inferior products of mine…. My point is, it’s scraping the bottom of the barrel, just to make a few francs…. I decided today to refuse to publish (or work on) such a book, and so wrote to v. Planta.”
11. PH letter to Alex Szogyi, 10–11 Mar. 1969.
12. CWA Daniel Keel, 12 Apr. 2003.
13. Ibid.
14. CWA KKS, 12 Sept. 2003.
15. CWA Marion Aboudaram, 21 Sept. 2002.
16. Descriptions of Pat’s laughter come from Vivien De Bernardi, Charles Latimer, Joan Dupont.
17. Patricia Schartle Myrer letter to the author, 17 Feb. 2003.
18. PH letter to Alain Oulman, 18 Sept. 1982 (CLA).
19. CWA Jonathan Kent, 18 Nov. 2003.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. CWA Peter and Anita Huber-Speck, 18 Apr. 2003.
23. PH letter to BKS, 11 Sept. 1973.
24. Cahier 23, 5/2/54.
25. Cahier 21, 11/30/51.
26. CWA Barbara Roett, 18 May 2003.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. CWA Marion Aboudaram, 21 Sept. 2002.
30. Ibid., 23 Sept. 2002.
31. Ibid., 25 Sept. 2002.
32. Ibid., 23 Sept. 2002.
33. Ibid., 25 Sept. 2002.
34. Ibid., 23 Oct. 2002.
35. Francis Wyndham, “Miss Highsmith,” New Statesman, 30 May 1963.
36. CWA Francis Wyndham, 20 Dec. 2003.
37. Ibid.
38. Cahier 13, 9/6/45.
39. CWA Peter Huber, 22 Apr. 2003.
40. Peter Handke, “Die Privaten Weltkriege der Patricia Highsmith,” pp. 169–180.
41. CWA Barbara Roett, 18 May 2003.
42. PH letter to KKS, 26 Oct. 1953.
43. Cahier 15, 4/16/47.
28. Les Girls: Part 12
1. Cahier 32, 10/20/73.
2. Juliette Ryan letter to the author, 8 Nov. 2002.
3. PH, Deep Water (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), p. 84.
4. CWA Juliette Ryan, 6 Nov. 2002.
5. Judith Freeman, The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007).
6. PH, Introduction to The World of Raymond Chandler, edited by Miriam Gross (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977).
7. Ibid., p. 5.
8. Ibid., p. 2.
9. Raymond Chandler letter to Carl Brandt, 11 Dec. 1950, Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, edited by Frank MacShane (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981), p. 247.
10. PH, Introduction to The World of Raymond Chandler, p. 3.
11. Edward Burra letter to BKS, autumn 1971 (TGA).
12. CWA Noëlle Loriot, 5 July 2002.
13. All direct quotations, unless otherwise cited, come from Noëlle Loriot, “Trois Jours avec Patricia Highsmith,” L’Express, 8 June 1979.
14. CWA Noëlle Loriot, 5 July 2002.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
29. Les Girls: Part 13
1. PH letter to KKS, 14 Mar. 1968.
2. CWA Peter Huber, 18 Apr. 2003.
3. CWA DéDé Moser, 2 Aug. 2004.
4. A partial list of people close to Pat who fall into one of the several categories of not caring for Pat’s work—or not reading it: Kingsley Skattebol, Ellen Hill, Caroline Besterman, Peter Huber and Anita Huber-Speck (with reservations), Vivien De Bernardi, Monique Buffet, Marion Aboudaram (with reservations), Tabea Blumenschein, and Barbara Ker-Seymer.
5. Barbara Skelton, “Patricia Highsmith at Home,” London Magazine, Aug.–Sept. 1995.
6. CWA Vivien De Bernardi, 15 Aug. 2003.
7. Ibid.
8. Diary 17, Dec. 24, 1989.
9. Ibid., Nov. 15, 1991.
10. Ibid., May 23, 1992.
11. Mary Ford, “This Is Your Second Brain,” Sunday Telegraph, 4 Sept. 2005.
12. CWA Vivien De Bernardi, 15 Aug. 2003.
13. CWA Bert Diener and Julia Diener-Diethelm, 1 Apr. 2003.
14. CWA KKS, 6 Jan. 2003.
15. PH letter to KKS, 14 June 1988.
16. CWA Marion Aboudaram, 24 Sept. 2002.
17. PH letter to KKS, 23 Mar. 1953.
18. PH letter to Mary McCarthy, 3 Oct. 1972 (VCL).
19. Mary Kling remembers “two or three lunches [with Pat]—and I knew if she wanted to be my client I couldn’t refuse her, but…she wasn’t conversable.”
20. PH letter to Mary McCarthy, 9 Sept. 1983 (VCL).
21. Ibid., 16 May 1983 (VCL).
22. Ibid., 10 Oct. 1977 (VCL).
23. Mary McCarthy Archives (VCL).
24. CWA Marion Aboudaram, 23 Sept. 2002.
25. CWA Monique Buffet, 7 Apr. 2003.
26. MB letter to the author, 27 Sept. 2004.
27. CWA Barbara Roett, 18 May 2003.
28. PH letter to Ellen Hill, 10 July 1978.
29. PH, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, manuscript.
30. CWA Monique Buffet, 7 Apr. 2003.
31. CWA Tabea Blumenschein, 15 June 2003.
32. Diary 6, 11/14/44.
33. CWA Phyllis Nagy, 13 Oct. 2002.
34. PH letter to Monique Buffet, 13 Aug. 1978 (Collection Monique Buffet).
35. Ibid., 23 Aug. 1978 (Collection Monique Buffet).
36. Ibid., 27 Sept. 1978 (Collection Monique Buffet).
37. PH letter to MB, 19 Nov. 1978.
38. CWA Barbara Roett, 18 May 2003.
39. Meaker, Highsmith, p. 48.
40. PH letter t
o Mr. Reichardt, 4 Nov. 1970.
41. PH letter to KKS, 16 Mar. 1971.
42. Muriel Spark telegram to PH, 1968.
43. CWA Muriel Spark, 24 May 2005.
44. Muriel Spark, A Far Cry from Kensington (New York: New Directions, 1988), pp. 93–94.
45. Cahier 26, 7/3/60.
46. PH letter to MB, Sept. 13, 1978 (Collection Monique Buffet).
47. CWA Monique Buffet, 21 June 2003.
48. Ibid., 7 Apr. 2003.
49. PH letter to MB, 6 Sept. 1978 (Collection Monique Buffet).
50. PH letter to Alex Szogyi, 18 Feb. 1969.
30. Les Girls: Part 14
1. PH letter to MB, 24 Sept. 1992 (Collection Monique Buffet).
2. CWA Francis Wyndham, 20 Dec. 2003.
3. Meaker, Highsmith, p. 60.
4. Joan Juliet Buck, “A Terrifying Talent,” Observer Magazine, 20 Nov. 1977.
5. Andrew Wilson, Beautiful Shadow (New York: Bloomsbury, 2003). p. 286.
6. Francis King, “Angry Old Woman,” Oldie, 6 Jan. 2004.
7. CWA Caroline Besterman, 6 Nov. 2003.
8. CWA Christa Maerker, 21 July 2004.
9. CWA Alex Szogyi and Philip Thompson, 9 Dec. 2002.
10. CWA KKS, 19 Apr. 2005.
11. Cahier 3, 4/12/41.
12. CWA MB, 7 Apr. 2003.
13. CWA Bettina Berch, 10 Aug. 2003.
14. PH letter to Alex Szogyi, 31 Mar. 1969.
15. Ibid., 4 Nov. 1968.
16. Ibid., 23 Aug. 1970.
17. Cahier 36, 2/8/88.
18. CWA Monique Buffet, 5 Dec. 2003.
19. PH letter to KKS, 6 Feb. 1989.
20. Cahier 36, 18/5/88.
21. One of Pat’s uncles, Mother Mary’s brother, was named Claude, and he and Mary were coexecutors of Willie Mae Coates’s estate, the disposition of which had left Pat feeling cheated. (She hadn’t been cheated, but she didn’t forget the incident, either.)
22. PH, “Two Disagreeable Pigeons,” in Nothing That Meets the Eye (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002).
23. Cahier 19, 7/22/50.
24. Diary 10, Jan. 4, 1950.
25. PH letter to Ronald Blythe, 26 Nov. 1966 (Collection Ronald Blythe).
31. The Real Romance of Objects: Part 1
1. PH, “The View from My Window,” draft article dated 1980.
2. CWA Josyane Savigneau, 1 July 2002.
3. Ripley Under Ground (1970) features a cellar in which one man is murdered and another man mimics suicide. Of the enormous cellar in her house in Tegna, Pat wrote to her architect: “The guests can go in the cellar.” Nothing good happens underground in the Highsmith imagination.
4. Cahier 23, 5/6/55.
5. PH letter to KKS, 27 Oct. 1953.
6. CWA KKS, 12 June 2004.
7. Marijane Meaker letter to the author, 7 Nov. 2003.
8. Ibid. Mary responded to Meaker with a tsunami from Texas: five closely typed single-spaced pages setting out (1) Pat’s terrible treatment of Mary on several continents; (2) a long list of the older women Mary held responsible for influencing/corrupting Pat; (3) Mary’s own formerly glorified circumstances including her “Filipino house boy (“He was small, slight, attractive and graceful as a ballet dancer and made an effort to please me in every way”); and (4) a self-assessment: “I too am an extrovert and have never met a stranger.” Mary—so much like her daughter—had no trouble in emptying the contents of her mind onto a page when she was exercised on a subject: