According to her recollection she rose early, at around six in the morning, walked to the balcony of their hotel room and ‘noticed a solitary young man in shorts and sandals with a towel flung over his shoulder, making his way along the beach … There was an air of pensiveness about him, maybe unease. And why was he alone? … Had he quarrelled with someone? What was on his mind?’ She adds that she never saw him again and she did not mention him in her cahier. This is puzzling given that her cahiers and diaries are made up of everything that struck her as even faintly extraordinary. It would not be until the mid-1950s that Positano became a destination for discriminating tourists, prompted by John Steinbeck’s Harper’s Bazaar article of 1953. Steinbeck emphasised the contrast between the beauty of the place – very few of the buildings seemed less than two centuries old – and its desolate state. The old palazzi and bourgeois villas were empty and the population appeared to be made up of poverty-stricken middle-aged fishermen and small traders, with the exception of those who worked in its two hotels. The young man who Highsmith saw on the beach, returning from his swim at dawn, was evidently an outsider, if he existed at all.
In 1989, when Highsmith did the piece for Granta (‘The Scene of the Crime,’ vol. 29, winter 1989), Ripley had become for her the equivalent of Conan Doyle’s Holmes, even Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the figure who defined her as a writer. By making him real, albeit elusive and mysterious, she was also increasing the saleability of the works in which he appeared as a murderous psychopath. Highsmith had visited Positano twice before she took Ellen. Whether or not we believe her story that the man on the beach appeared to her on this occasion is immaterial when we consider that he did so, according to her, at the time she was sharing a bedroom with a figure who she would also treat as deranged and malicious and who, like Ripley, would be with her in various forms for the remainder of her life.
Highsmith did not tell Ellen that they were repeating in exact detail the journey which she had taken with Kathryn three years before. Had she done so her partner would likely have been mortified. It was a peculiar exercise and it continued in the same manner. Highsmith and Kathryn had left Positano for Sicily, where they’d become lovers, and the relationship had ended in Naples. With Ellen, Highsmith went straight to Naples and Ellen took the train from the city back to Munich. They had not separated but for both it seemed that a brief period apart was the wisest option. To see off Ellen from the same railway station in Naples where she had said goodbye to Kathryn hints at the ghoulish, particularly since Ellen knew nothing of her involvement in this ritual.
Highsmith then went to Forio, on the island of Ischia, a few miles from the mainland but classified as part of the administrative region of Naples. Panza, Forio’s only town, was similar to Positano in that it was made up of exquisite Renaissance manor houses either abandoned or occupied only in the summer by wealthy families from Rome or northern Italy. In 1952 its most distinguished non-Italian resident was W.H. Auden. How Highsmith learned of Auden’s address and how he knew anything of her (she had only one novel in print in her own name at the time) remains a mystery but she tells of her encounter with him in a letter to Skattebol in 1967. ‘I was prepared to talk of poetry … and all he spoke of was the cheaper prices of things here’ (5 January 1967). Again, one has to ask why she did not enter anything in her notebooks of her meeting with probably the most celebrated poet in the English-speaking world. He was, she told Skattebol, ‘barefoot’, generally distracted and tended by a ‘young Italian pansy’. This account was fifteen years after the alleged meeting, and as with her Granta article on the mysterious figure who inspired Ripley, we have to wonder how much of her past she recollected and how much she laundered. There is no firm evidence that she actually visited Auden. All that we have is a letter from him on his appreciation of Strangers on a Train, written during the mid-1950s (there is no exact date), praising her characterisation of Bruno, less so of Guy. Nothing in the letter indicates that they had actually met; indeed, he seems to be corresponding with a stranger.
Why would she have distorted facts? Auden was much older than Dickie Greenleaf but they belonged to the same tribe, figures who saw art as their vocation – in Greenleaf’s case as a dilettante – and both regarded the villages of the Amalfi coast as their studios. When she visited Auden (if she visited Auden) it was as if she were the equivalent of Tom Ripley, the man who wanted to belong to the elite of writers and upper-class triflers who felt that such delightful locations were part of their entitlement. By the time she wrote of the man walking on the beach and of her encounter with Auden, Patricia Highsmith and Tom Ripley were inseparable, both for her devoted readers and in her own mind. The writer and academic Bettina Berch interviewed her in the 1980s and later commented to Wilson that ‘she would talk about him [Ripley] like he was a person very close to her … She’d defend him and think about what he would say about a certain situation. He was very real to her’ (Interview between Berch and Wilson, 18 May 1999).
Highsmith returned to Munich in August and in September the couple moved to Paris where Ellen had begun a job with the Tolstoy Foundation, a charitable organisation founded by the Russian writer’s daughter. Originally it was politically unaligned, helping displaced persons from all parts of Central and Eastern Europe, but by 1952 it had committed itself to assisting individuals in Russia and the newly established Soviet bloc who wished to move to the liberal democracies of the West. There is no evidence in Highsmith’s notebooks or elsewhere of her opinions on her partner’s philanthropic inclinations. All that seemed to concern Ellen was her desire to keep their apartment at 83 rue de l’Université clean, the fact that Highsmith’s loud typing kept her awake until after midnight, and her dog. According to Highsmith her lover woke her in the early hours of 10 September and attacked her with her fists, and followed this with an interrogation on their future as a couple. ‘It is worse than being married,’ Highsmith wrote (Diary, 10 September 1952).
In early November there was another violent exchange. Highsmith wrote in her diary that she ‘struck at’ Ellen ‘to ward her off’, adding that ‘By Christ, I do believe she is insane’ (6 November 1952).
Three days later Ellen left for Geneva to offer advice on the establishment of a Tolstoy Foundation office in the city and while she was away Highsmith bought a plane ticket to Florence, date and departure time specified on the document. On Ellen’s return they talked again about their future and Highsmith told her partner nothing of the fact that she had already arranged to leave and to effectively terminate the relationship. She flew to Florence but within a few days found that she could not bear to be separated from Ellen, telephoned her and arranged to meet at a hotel in Geneva, equidistant between their locations and convenient for Ellen’s continued meetings in the city regarding the Tolstoy Foundation. No entries in Highsmith’s notebooks tell of the nature of what occurred but it is evident from the circumstances that they were in some way reconciled. They took a train back to their Paris apartment and within a week Ellen agreed to take an unpaid furlough from her job to see if another bout of travelling might offer some remedy to their problems.
That Highsmith suggested this and Ellen with reluctance agreed is evident from entries in the notebooks. Our knowledge of their sometimes apparently violent exchanges is based on the descriptions of events and feelings and transcriptions of dialogue entered in the diaries and cahiers. Ellen never spoke or wrote of these and aside from Highsmith’s own records of her all we know of what she was really like comes from observations made much later by the author’s friends. We never feel that these figures knew her properly as a person but rather formed an impression of her based on what Highsmith had told them. We can rely on some largely indisputable facts regarding her background and education and her professional life in America and Europe, and from these we can extrapolate a perception of someone of considerable intellectual ability, capable of meeting the rigid demands of an academic community. More importantly, we form an image of a woman disposed to
placing her talents at the service of organisations which offered shelter and stability for displaced individuals in a continent fragmented by war, inhumanity and Cold War polarisation.
It is difficult to reconcile what we know of her with the horrid, possessive bully of Highsmith’s private records. When making the entries during the early 1950s Highsmith was ambitious enough, but not sufficiently presumptuous to imagine that post mortem fame would turn them into a treasure trove for biographers and scholars. More significant was the almost simultaneous relationship between her private narrative of events and individuals and the one she hoped to sell to a publisher. We will probably never learn the truth about Ellen’s character but it is clear from Highsmith’s accounts that her lover had become the model for an experiment in mutually destructive uncertainty and disingenuousness. Highsmith seems able to fall in and out of love with Ellen on a daily basis and to perceive her just as regularly as magical and satanic. She also reports that Ellen was something of a chameleon, persistently disclosing and disguising features of her personality. We can only take Highsmith’s word for this but more intriguing is the similarity between the two people recorded in the notebooks and two others whose equally troubled relationship, involving attraction and contempt, deception and disclosure, was unfolding simultaneously in another narrative: Tom Ripley and Dickie Greenleaf.
Before Highsmith set off for Florence by plane, she reported that Ellen had pleaded with her to stay, threatening suicide if she left. Nothing came of it but according to Highsmith’s account this was a prelude to what would happen next. When they made an attempt at reconciliation, with Ellen taking leave from her job, they again drove through northern Italy but this time decided to go further towards the Balkans, to Trieste, which like Berlin was a region divided between opposed occupying forces. It is, in terms of architectural charm, comparable with Venice, though Highsmith found it dull and depressing. True, they arrived in midwinter, in January, and while the city is not blessed with the temperate climate of the south-western Mediterranean it did not suffer winters comparable with those of Paris, Munich or Switzerland. Some would say it surpasses any other European city in terms of the eclectic style of its buildings and its cultural legacies. Perhaps, in truth, her distaste for the beautiful city was due to the fact that the Tolstoy Foundation was, during their stay, establishing an office there. It was the crossroads of Latin, Slavic and Germanic cultures and had become a magnet for desperate individuals from each.
They stayed there for four months, and while it was possible that Ellen would have continued in employment with the Tolstoy Foundation for longer than that, a variety of factors caused them to leave. Highsmith confessed in her diaries to feeling humiliated because she earned less than Ellen. She had occasional advances, especially as the rights to Strangers on a Train sold for translation into various languages, but she did not, like Ellen, have a regular salary. She tried to write some pulp fiction, which was rejected, and applied for a job teaching English, for which she was turned down. She told Ellen that the relationship was over, or so her notebooks record, without offering a reason for its imminent termination. There is no record of which of them persuaded the other that an accord might be possible but events show that they agreed on a stay of execution. They took the train to Genoa, sailed to Gibraltar and, after a while in Spain, boarded a liner to New York, renting a Manhattan apartment for $150 a month for two months.
By June their relationship had once more come close to collapse. Ellen complained that Highsmith was too interested in socialising with people she’d known in the city before she left for Europe. As Wilson puts it, ‘Ellen’s jealousy reached monstrous proportions – she could not understand why Pat didn’t want to spend every evening with her. During one argument about a party – Highsmith wanted to go along, Ellen, as usual, forbade her – Ellen became so angry she ripped her lover’s shirt from her back’ (p.184). At the beginning of July Highsmith decided she could not take things any more and stated that they must separate. By Highsmith’s account Ellen shrieked back at her that she would not allow them to part, drank several very large Martinis, held up a bottle of Veronal (a barbiturate then openly sold as sleeping tablets) and threatened to take all of them, a fatal dose. Before Highsmith left the apartment that evening, Ellen, sitting naked on the bed, told her ‘I love you very much’ and washed down eight of the tablets with another Martini. Highsmith left, and proceeded to find a pay phone, call Kate Kingsley Skattebol, her friend from college, and her husband, Lars Skattebol, and arrange to meet them at a restaurant for dinner.
Showing admirable concern, she also called Jim Dobrochek, a Czech painter, who Ellen was due to meet for a drink that same evening. Evidently, she informed Dobrochek that Ellen would not be able to make it, though she did not give the reason as her ongoing attempt to commit suicide.
After ending the evening at the apartment of ‘Jean P.’ (surname not specified in the diaries), where she ate two hamburgers and told Jean of the ‘sad story of tonight and Ellen’, Highsmith returned to the apartment at around 2 a.m. She was unable to wake Ellen who seemed to be in a coma and she found a note in the typewriter which stated that ‘I should have done this twenty years ago’ and absolved Highsmith of blame. She telephoned a doctor who was unable to revive her but tried to pump her stomach of the remaining drugs. Ellen was taken to the Bellevue Hospital at 4.30 a.m. and given a less than fifty-fifty chance of survival.
During the weeks before Ellen’s suicide attempt, Highsmith had had brief affairs with three other women, notably Jean P., with whom she had flown to Santa Fe for two days in late June, taking Ellen’s car to the airport. On the afternoon of 1 July, at three o’clock, four hours before Ellen would take an overdose, she had met up with Ann Smith (previously Clark), her lover from the time she was seeing Marc Brandel, for drinks in a New York cocktail bar. According to her diary, she arranged with Ann for a threesome involving Jean P., at Ann’s house on Fire Island, roughly an hour’s drive from New York City.
Highsmith does not in her notebooks suggest that Ellen learned of this or therefore that it contributed to her self-destructive state of mind. She does, however, admit that when Ellen first threatened to kill herself, a year earlier, she had looked through Highsmith’s diary entries on their relationship.
Highsmith spent the night of 1 July with Jean P., and visited Bellevue the following day where Ellen was unconscious and still, according to the doctors, showing no signs of a likely recovery. Margot Johnson, her agent, offered her a room in her apartment as did Rosalind Constable, now installed with her new lover, Claude. Instead she drove Ellen’s car to Ann’s Fire Island house and it was only on 4 July, three days after the overdose, that she found out that Ellen had regained consciousness.
Within a few days Highsmith had borrowed an apartment from a friend of Jean P. who was away on a long vacation. Of the events surrounding Ellen’s period in hospital the diary tells various stories. In one entry, made on 7 August, Highsmith reports that roughly a month beforehand she had returned to the hospital immediately on learning of Ellen’s recovery and held her in her arms – but this is impossible given that she was at Fire Island when she first heard that Ellen had regained consciousness and she did not return to New York City until after Ellen had been discharged.
Much earlier, on 3 July, when Ellen had been in hospital for two days, she wrote of how Ellen’s friend Jim Dobrochek, who Ellen was due to meet the night she tried to kill herself, had been the one who had made regular visits to the hospital and reported to Highsmith on the likelihood of her recovery. After learning from Jim, by phone at Fire Island, that Ellen was conscious she makes no further references to her in her diary. It is odd, then, that she tells four weeks later of a kind of tragic reunion at Ellen’s bedside in the hospital.
One entry on Jim is intriguing. Before she set off for Fire Island Highsmith remained in regular contact with him.
Jim had been walking the streets all night. Told me over AM coffee Ellen mistreated him
on his arrival here … buttonholed him at the pier and said: Don’t ever tell a soul that I am Jewish! I had not known before that she was totally Jewish, from that tight, sophisticated, brittle German Jewish set of pre-Hitler Berlin. (3 July 1953)
Highsmith had known for some time that her lover was called Ellen Blumenthal Hill and that, aside from gaining a British passport, the surname Hill had enabled her to distance herself from her father’s Jewish background. So Highsmith was lying to herself. What is striking however is her statement that she did not know Ellen was ‘totally’ Jewish, from the ‘tight, sophisticated, brittle German Jewish set’, the integrated, middle-class intellectual Jews of cosmopolitan Germany that the Nazis took particular satisfaction in persecuting. The next part of the entry is even more disturbing: ‘[This] is a major strike against me, with Ellen’s mother … I am escaping from hell.’ Highsmith had not met Ellen’s mother and knew little about her but she did know that the matrilineal line was the guarantee of Jewishness. It is impossible to believe that one of two intelligent individuals in a long-term relationship was unaware that the other was Jewish, but in her notebooks Highsmith confirmed her special, visceral brand of antisemitism. She could rationalise her sense of what Judaism meant but now her Jewish lover was seemingly close to death something much nastier rose to the surface. Dobrochek confirmed for her what she might only have suspected, that Ellen was incontrovertibly, ‘totally’, Jewish – a ‘hell’ from which she could now escape.
The plot of The Blunderer can be reappraised with the story of Highsmith’s relationship with Ellen at the time she was writing it in mind. Walter Stackhouse’s feelings for his wife Clara are brilliantly nuanced, in that we sense that he has, prior to the present-day setting of the novel, developed a gradual hatred for her. The reason for this is never fully explained but Highsmith drops sufficient clues for us to assume that she had alienated their friends and in other ways created for the two of them a world closed off from the rest of society and dominated by her preoccupation with pettiness and her paranoid responses to inconsequential issues. So far, we have a perfect replica of Ellen Hill, or at least the woman represented in Highsmith’s notebook accounts.
Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires Page 11
