Highsmith eulogised the close of their affair with a poem, to herself, which includes the lines:
I realise that any sorrow I may know
Will come from ‘wanting’,
Desiring what I cannot have…
The statement that she only now ‘realises’ that sorrow comes from wanting what she cannot have is absurd in that she had experienced this on numerous occasions over the previous three decades. She was not so much confessing to amnesia as admitting to herself that she was addicted to the experience she describes. It is intriguing that nothing resembling this, either in verse or prose, records her feelings about Marion, either when they met or when the affair collapsed. Even in her letters to her she prefers an endearingly rude transparency over affection. Evidently, she enjoyed her years with her greatly but something vital was lacking: pain.
Highsmith met Monique Buffet when Val (who prefers not to disclose her surname), a London-based journalist, visited Montcourt in August 1977 and asked if she could bring a friend, an English teacher who lived in Paris. Monique was twenty-seven, blonde, petite and pretty, and she stated to Schenkar that all she recalls of this first encounter was that she was ‘petrified … I didn’t say one word.’ Nonetheless just before she and Val left Highsmith asked Monique for her telephone number and address. She contacted her nine months later shortly after she had broken up with Tabea, they agreed to meet in Paris a week after that, and immediately became lovers.
Apart from her relative youth Monique differed from Marion and Tabea considerably. Before they met, she was in awe of Highsmith as a writer, though not a dedicated fan, and she described herself to Wilson as androgynous, bisexual, happier with women than men, not overly promiscuous, and unexceptional in terms of her lifestyle. For Highsmith, this seemed an invitation to turn her, despite herself, into a hybrid of Marion and Tabea. Their second date, for example, Highsmith proposed ‘Why not give the old clip joint … a try.’
Following the Revolution, the French Penal Code was adopted in 1791 and contained a clause decriminalising homosexual acts. The law has remained largely unchanged since then, save for a discriminatory law that existed between 1960 and 1980 called the Mirguet amendment, and at various points when reactionary and church-affiliated bodies have done their best to make it socially unacceptable to be openly gay. The worst period was during the Nazi occupation where gays effectively had to go underground to avoid being singled out and sent to concentration camps. Later the Mirguet amendment ruled against public displays of homosexuality, most obviously sexual acts, but did not criminalise what people chose to do indoors or in private clubs. France was the European country where gay life was most tolerated, especially within the more liberal cosmopolitan districts. So, although the Katmandou had since the 1950s cultivated a louche, even debauched image, it was free to do so, markedly unlike the clubs in New York where she had met Marijane Meaker. Indeed the club, on the rue du Vieux-Colombier, profited financially not as a hiding place but rather as a hangout where customers would pay vastly inflated drinks prices as the cost of celebrity. Lesbianism was its trademark but being gay was not a necessity for women who wanted to display their independence by mixing with those of the same gender and excluding others. There was even a row of seats next to the dance floor known as the ‘royale’ section, given that it was often occupied by princesses from oil-rich Arabian states who wanted to enjoy evenings doing as they wished before returning to the patriarchal regimes of their Muslim homelands.
Highsmith proudly introduced Monique to the club as her guest, only to be told by the girl who checked coats that the place was packed. The author, disappointed, said they could repair to a rather less salubrious gay club less than half a kilometre away but as they left one of the co-owners, Elula Perrin, charged outside and ran after them down the road shouting, ‘Pat Highsmith! No, no, no – we’ve got places!’ Elula ushered them back in and ordered one of her waitresses to bribe two occupants of the ‘royale’ seats to make room for a prestigious client and her guest. Highsmith was delighted and her new girlfriend was suitably impressed. It was the beginning of her attempt to build a fantasy as lover and benefactor. According to Monique, ‘She wanted to offer me everything – a flat in Paris, a car, trips around the world – but I never accepted anything from her’ (Wilson, p.370).
The affair lasted around two years, until Highsmith bought a house in Switzerland and divided her time between the two countries, but the two women corresponded regularly until Highsmith’s death and met on several occasions.
Shortly before she met Monique, Highsmith was just over fifty pages into her next Ripley novel, The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980). It was not that she was uncertain of where to take the narrative – there was nothing resembling a story, not even an opening. Highsmith had absolutely no idea of what she would do next with her most enduring literary creation, but as her brief encounter with Monique became an affair she began to see why she had come upon the only element of the opening part of the draft that hinted at a theme.
A boy, specifically a teenager, would be involved and as she looked more closely at her own experiences over the previous three years, Billy, whose real name is Frank, became a more clearly defined literary presence. He is American, sixteen but precocious – he could have passed himself off as a twenty-year-old – and he arrives without warning in the village adjoining Ripley’s house, contacts Ripley and asks for a job. His true motive soon becomes clear in that he has read of Ripley in the international press as a figure of wealth and esteem who was suspected of gaining his position by unvirtuous and allegedly criminal means. He eventually admits to Ripley that he has murdered his father, a wealthy industrialist, and has come to Europe, to Ripley, in the hope of finding fake identity documents and continuing his life underground as someone else. He is a youthful version of Ripley and there are even physical and temperamental similarities.
It is an intriguing scenario, especially since Highsmith had all but exhausted new variations on what her long-serving creation might do next. Now, he is faced with something that goes against his Machiavellian ability to control what occurs in his life. He is confronted by an embodiment of his past and for a while at least is not sure how to react. The inspiration came from two similar visitations experienced by Highsmith, first with Marion and more recently with Monique. Marion’s arrival, like Frank’s, involved subterfuge – first with her invention of a contract to do an interview for Cosmopolitan, followed by her pursuit of Highsmith from Paris by train to arrive, spectre-like, on her doorstep. Something similar occurred with Monique, brought to Highsmith’s house by Val as a shy dumbfounded enigma who would soon become the elemental feature of the author’s life. Both women, along with Tabea, saw Highsmith from a distance much as Frank does with Ripley. Like others with an interest in literature they saw her as both eminent and inscrutable and aside from her reputation as a writer they had heard from the underground circles in which they mixed with other women that her non-conformist inclinations went beyond her work. It never becomes apparent either to Ripley or the reader why exactly Frank killed his father but it is implied that Frank knows something of Ripley’s past and hopes to learn how to create a new identity for himself. Frank is kidnapped in Germany, rescued by Ripley and after his return to America commits suicide, perhaps out of a sense of repentance. Or not. Highsmith appears to have given up completely on all conventional notions of motive. Instead the book seems to be a case of disorderly fiction jumbled with aspects of autobiography.
Highsmith saw in each of her three recent lovers versions of herself from three decades earlier: compulsive and unaffiliated (Tabea), unselfishly hedonistic (Marion) and a woman who was by degrees compassionate and apprehensive (Monique). What stays in the mind from The Boy Who Followed Ripley is a fatherly affection shown by Ripley towards Frank and the gradual sense of two men drawn together by a homoerotic mutual attraction despite, or perhaps because of, their age difference. The more striking scenes occur in a gay bar in Berlin, of the s
ort where Highsmith provoked the attention of others: a conventionally dressed middle-aged woman enjoying the attention of a well-known punk actress and film-maker of the city, less than half her age.
15
‘I’m Sick of the Jews!’
On 15 January 1980 Highsmith was working alone in the Montcourt house, leaning over her typewriter, when she began to notice that the paper on her desk and the machine itself was spotted with blood. She was puzzled because she had not, as far as she knew, injured herself but within a few minutes she found that the spots were the prelude to a flood. A neighbour phoned the local doctor who claimed he had more serious cases to deal with but the more helpful local sapeurs-pompiers, the part-time fire service, rushed her to Nemours hospital. It seemed for several days as if the effusive loss of blood from her nose would be impossible to control. The hospital specialised in the treatment of children, and young patients who were mobile were kept away from her bed for fear that they would be traumatised from something that looked like a battlefield dressing station. Transfusions kept her alive until it was found that for seven years, following the discovery of several clots in her legs, she had been overdosing on blood-thinning drugs. The clots had been cured but her overuse of the medicines and the principal cause of her thrombosis, excess alcohol, were diagnosed as the reason for her massive bleeding.
The hospital remedied the problem and prescribed a new regime of drugs, but in March she was again admitted for more detailed examinations. She was found to have seriously narrowed arteries in her femur at the top of her leg and in her iliac region in her lower stomach. A month later in London she booked herself into a private hospital for bypass surgery to normalise the blood flow in both parts of her body. She was advised that the operation was urgent, given that she was in imminent danger of suffering a heart attack.
On the night she was admitted to the hospital she made a note that she would later enter in her cahier: ‘How appropriate, to be bleeding in two places.’ When the nosebleed began she had been putting together records of her income from publications over the previous few years and typing up a comprehensive account for the French tax authorities. Since 1974 the Giscard d’Estaing presidency had been desperately attempting to resolve the economic crisis brought about by the increase in the price of oil from the Gulf states. Major corporations were badly hit but tax on average incomes and various forms of wealth tax levied on individuals had also been increased by between 15 and 20 per cent. By 1979 tax inspectors had been encouraged to act like policemen involved in criminal investigations, especially with expatriate French residents who might be receiving income from abroad and hold accounts in more generously taxed states. This was the other ‘nosebleed’. Tax officials had visited her house and sent her demands on what they expected her to declare and the interest that would be imposed on unpaid taxes.
In early March 1980 she was told that a warrant was soon to be issued by the impôts, the tax office, to allow officials to enter her house and seize all available documents for inspection. Two days later she took a train to Bern and then local transport to the canton of Ticino and eventually the tiny village of Aurigeno. It was not a random gesture. She had contacted Ellen Hill who was now living near Ticino and asked her to find a suitable house in the region. She stayed only two days and put a deposit on a property that had an asking price of $90,000 and needed slight refurbishment. It was a stone house built in 1682 with low ceilings, small windows and one-metre-thick walls as security against the freezing winters. Ten days later, after she had returned to France, the Montcourt house was raided by two tax officers and a policeman. They seized all available documents, even her chequebook, to look at how potential outgoings corresponded with her records, and she described the incursion to her friend Christa Maerker as ‘Nazi Style’. She was told that as a French resident, though not a citizen, she was forbidden from having an overseas bank account and in October 1980 informed threateningly that if she agreed to pay a fine of 10,000 francs further investigations would be suspended, for the time being.
She planned to avoid the most stringent French tax laws by becoming a non-permanent resident. Those permanently resident in the country, including expatriates, were forbidden from keeping bank accounts abroad as a means of securing their savings in countries with lower tax rates than France; i.e. virtually everywhere. Highsmith hoped to make use of a potential loophole whereby persons who lived outside France for at least 180 days a year were exempt from the status of permanent residents. She had obviously been taking uninformed advice, as six months after she bought the Aurigeno house the tax penalty on expatriate residents was overturned. Two years later she sold Montcourt and left for Aurigeno for good.
In January 1981 she flew from Paris to New York and lunched with Larry Ashmead, who as editor at Simon & Schuster had bought Edith’s Diary and was now with Lippincott & Cromwell, who had brought out The Boy Who Followed Ripley. She said she was there to do research for her forthcoming novel. Specifically, she wanted to pick up on the mood of her native country, which had elected a right-wing Republican, ex-Hollywood actor to the presidency two months earlier. Highsmith arrived roughly at the time of Ronald Reagan’s presidential inauguration, though this might have been a coincidence. For much of her life her interest in politics had been random and quixotic. She gave the impression that she cultivated radical opinions – right or left – for the sake of it, as a means of provoking a response, while in truth holding no sincere commitment to anything. Even her now notorious antisemitism, which became more conspicuous during the 1980s, was more a brand of gesture politics than a reflection of a heartfelt contempt for Judaism.
She was astute in her reading of the America that had brought Reagan to the White House. The press had presented him as a kind of B-movie John Wayne, the man who would restore a 7th Cavalry pride to an America humiliated in Vietnam and not prepared to back down against the Soviet bloc. He was the tough-guy opposite of his predecessor Jimmy Carter, who favoured liberal social policies and seemed to be shifting the country towards a European-style welfare state. Highsmith suspected that one of the reasons for his victory had been overlooked in press coverage: evangelicalism in particular, and religious fundamentalism in general.
From New York she flew to Indianapolis, the state capital of Indiana, where she stayed with her friends from the Lot, Charles Latimer and Michel Block. The largest single Christian denomination in the state was Roman Catholicism, represented mostly by second-generation immigrants from Western and Central Europe, but the Catholic Church, though conservative by its nature, did not significantly influence local politics. Far more outspoken were clergymen from the various groups that owed allegiance to the Puritan settlements of the East Coast in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Baptists, Methodists, extreme Lutherans, Presbyterians and Evangelical Protestants. Many supported figures such as Robert Grant and Jerry Falwell who had through the 1970s campaigned to roll back the attempts by the Supreme Court to turn the US into a more secular state. They wanted federal laws that made prayers and Bible readings compulsory in state schools and they campaigned against the legalisation of same-sex activity, abortion and the abolition of the death penalty.
Reagan, following his political advisers, promoted all of these issues on the assumption that the Midwestern states would swing radically towards a restoration of social conservatism. He and they were proved right and Highsmith spent several months in disguise, posing as someone visiting relatives, talking to people in Bloomington, Indiana, attending church services and afterwards making notes. She found that even if right-wing politicians such as Reagan did not openly invoke scripture, voters in Bible Belt states would recognise parallels between his promises and what they had heard from the pulpit.
In February she flew back to Europe and went straight to her Aurigeno house which, in her absence, Ellen Hill had redecorated and furnished tastefully though not extravagantly. There were two bedrooms upstairs and rooms with sofas and chairs on the ground floor, and a wr
iting desk. Within a week of her arrival she began People Who Knock on the Door (1983), based on her impression of how the Moral Majority – a blanket term for the alliance between right-wing politics and Christian fundamentalism – now controlled the destiny of America.
As in some of her previous novels this one was patently her attempt to unshackle herself from the classification as a ‘genre’ writer – suspense, crime, thriller, whodunnit or whatever – and once more she had difficulty in overcoming an addiction.
Chalmerston, the setting, is Bloomington thinly disguised, and the plot is concerned with the Alderman family. Arthur, the elder son, embodies the ambitions of the new America of his generation. He plans to go to Columbia University, New York, and become part of the liberated culture of the East Coast. Indeed, the novel opens with him reflecting on his afternoon of sex with his girlfriend Maggie Brewster as, in part, an act of rebellion against the hidebound religiosity of his hometown. Maggie eventually becomes pregnant and the parties involved – the two of them and their families – enter a conflict between the moral question of whether sex outside marriage is a sin, and expediency, principally the opportunity for an abortion.
Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires Page 23
