Irma Andina and Ingeborg Lüscher lived in the village and recalled the contrast between the figure they knew of from newspaper accounts and media appearances and their new neighbour. The real Highsmith was inoffensive and polite but always seemed determined to flee back to her house, never shook hands or looked you in the eye, and as Lüscher put it, ‘didn’t know how to react; she didn’t like to breathe other people’s air’ (Wilson, p.437). Lüscher vividly recalls Ellen Hill as ‘not only full of poison for Pat, but full of poison for the whole world’. Peter Huber said that ‘one day Ellen arrived and dashed in like a rugby player … Pat told her to leave. She did not want anything to do with her’ (Wilson, p.428). As far as we know that was the last time they met.
By the end of 1993 it was clear from Highsmith’s various health problems that it would be unsafe for her to continue to live alone. Bruno Sager’s daughter worked for Highsmith’s publisher, Diogenes Verlag, in Zurich and Daniel Keel recommended Sager to Highsmith as a full-time carer. He was recently divorced and had worked for local theatres and orchestras. Sager stayed with and looked after Highsmith for six months and his later accounts of the experience carry an air of tragedy and very black comedy. He cleaned the house, did the shopping and cooking and took care of the garden. When he arrived it was wildly overgrown, except for the lawn which had been burnt brown during the previous hot summer. It took some time for him to persuade her to let him water it. She was making complaints against the local water company because of, in her view, its extortionate billings. She was, he observed, extremely mean but he did not complain about being paid only 400 Swiss francs a month. He had already decided that at the close of his time with Highsmith he would join a monastery, though he insisted that there was no connection between the two. When she died, eighteen months later, her estate came to more than three million dollars.
Sager also looked after the only other resident, Charlotte, a wild orange-coloured cat who spent much of her time outside, and Highsmith instructed him on the upkeep of her now diminished colony of snails in the garden and demanded that when he cleaned the house he must be careful not to harm spiders and to transport them safely into the open. He professed not to be surprised by what most would see as bizarre eccentricities. There were two bedrooms – he used one and Highsmith the other – and they shared the large sitting room where there was a television. Her favourite TV programme, he reported, was the British soap opera EastEnders, of which he knew nothing.
There was only one telephone – ‘she refused to pay for another’ according to Sager – and Highsmith used it at least every other week to speak with Kate Kingsley Skattebol, ‘her best friend’, as Sager put it. At first Highsmith was cold and distant but eventually she talked with him about art, literature and politics. ‘Her politics,’ he reported, ‘were very extreme, based on certain prejudices, not on analysis.’ The most extreme element involved Jews and Israel, and she told him of how Jews had discriminated against her, notably her current US publisher Otto Penzler who, she insisted, had censored her by dropping the pro-Palestinian dedication to People Who Knock on the Door. In truth, her agent had asked Penzler to delete it for fear that it might damage sales in America. Sager told of how she would list all of the figures in publishing who had conspired against her: ‘She was vicious. “Oh, he’s a Jew, you know, he’s a Jew,” she would say about them’ (Interview between Sager and Schenkar, 7 June 2003).
When speaking of his time with Highsmith Sager comes across as a meditative figure, willing neither to judge nor be shocked. He reflected that while she had no time for organised religion of any kind he felt ‘She was not an atheist, not at all.’ He was not ordained, and he certainly did not attempt to coerce Highsmith towards anything close to faith, but he served her during the period before her illness worsened irreparably as a kind of secular priest. When he left, he was replaced by a young woman, again recommended by the Keels, who was so terrified by her employer that she refused to leave her bedroom when Highsmith was out of hers. She left in less than two weeks. After that Highsmith willed herself to open her door to neighbours, notably the Lüschers and Hubers, who happily helped her with the basics of existence.
While Sager was with her, her novel Small g: a Summer Idyll (1995) was accepted by Bloomsbury. It is set in contemporary Zurich, focuses on the seedy Jakob’s Bierstube-Restaurant and involves a variety of figures who pass through it, including: Rickie, a middle-aged graphic designer; Teddie, an aspiring journalist; Dorrie, a freelance window dresser; Renate, a ‘club-footed’ couturier; and Luisa, Renate’s apprentice and tenant. Sometimes the plot is reminiscent of a Restoration comedy, or the more recent variation on the genre, the Whitehall Farces. Characters often become confused about their own sexual orientation or more frequently misinterpret someone else’s or misjudge their behaviour in terms of whether they are, or are not, mutually attracted. But to Highsmith’s credit she achieves a wonderful balance between the almost comedic and an adventurous brand of realism. Among the confusion there is a message: that we are comfortable with our gender and sexuality when all is fluid and uncertain. Also, we detect within it traces of all aspects of the life and experiences of the author, from her clandestine existence in the 1940s in New York onwards. She was offered her largest-ever advance by Bloomsbury – £20,000 – and while it was initially rejected by Knopf for the US, the publicity campaign in Europe was impressive. In November 1994 she was invited to stay in the Ritz Paris, ostensibly to speak at the thirtieth anniversary celebration of Le Nouvel Observateur, but when she arrived, she found that everyone involved in publishing and in the media wanted to talk only to her about her forthcoming novel, rumoured to be the most ground-breaking work so far on contemporary sexuality and most specifically on the AIDS epidemic, which features in the plot. Within six weeks of her death the novel had sold 50,000 copies in France alone.
The Paris visit would be the last time she was to leave the Tegna house voluntarily. When Sager first arrived, she appeared to him to be seriously underweight and after his departure she lost a further fifteen kilos. She regularly coughed up blood and the cause for this horrible affliction was a combination of her returned lung cancer and aplastic anaemia, which causes the body to fail to produce blood cells in sufficient numbers. She knew her condition was terminal and at various times in 1994 made arrangements to leave the bulk of her financial estate to the Yaddo community where she had written her first novel, Strangers on a Train. Her Swiss publisher, Diogenes Verlag, was already dealing with many of her financial and legal affairs; she appointed them as her literary executors and instructed Keel to sell her papers and correspondence to the Swiss Literary Archive in Bern, which agreed to pay her 150,000 Swiss francs. This was not paid until after her death and on 1 February 1995 she signed the final version of her will, including a statement that the Bern proceeds should also go to Yaddo.
Bert Diener and Julia Diener-Diethelm lived in Zurich and were only distant friends of Highsmith. Nonetheless it was to them that she made a telephone call on the evening of 2 February asking if they would come to Tegna to drive her to the hospital in Locarno. They did not hesitate and on the following day she was visited in hospital by her accountant Marylin Scowden, who would be the last person to see her alive. She died shortly before 6.30 a.m. on 4 February at the age of seventy-four, before the medical staff did their customary rounds.
Her cremation in Bellinzona was followed by a memorial service in the church in Tegna where her ashes were interred. Notably Ellen Hill did not attend the service. Following the completion of Small g she made entries on the closing page of her final cahier on the possible title of her next book. It would, yet again, involve Ripley. There are no details on the plot, only possible titles, and all but one of these is crossed out: Ripley’s Luck.
Acknowledgements
Firstly, I wish to express my thanks to Andrew Wilson and Joan Schenkar for their fine achievements in their biographies of Patricia Highsmith, details of which will be found in ‘Suggested Furt
her Reading’.
The editorial advice provided by Patrick Taylor and Claire Browne has been invaluable, and thanks are due to Jayne Parsons who set it all in motion. To Dai Howells: diolch yn fawr.
Lisa Verner at Ulster University has, as usual, done a great job.
Dr Amy Burns made it possible.
PRIMARY SOURCES
FICTION
Novels (Us Publication Details)
Strangers on a Train (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950)
The Price of Salt (as Claire Morgan; New York: Coward-McCann, 1952)
The Blunderer (New York: Coward-McCann, 1954)
The Talented Mr. Ripley (New York: Coward-McCann, 1955)
Deep Water (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957)
A Game for the Living (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958)
This Sweet Sickness (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960)
The Cry of the Owl (New York: Harper & Row, 1962)
The Two Faces of January (New York: Doubleday, 1964)
The Glass Cell (New York: Doubleday, 1964)
The Story-Teller (UK title: A Suspension of Mercy; New York: Doubleday, 1965)
Those Who Walk Away (New York: Doubleday, 1967)
The Tremor of Forgery (New York: Doubleday, 1969)
Ripley Under Ground (New York: Doubleday, 1970)
A Dog’s Ransom (New York: Knopf, 1972)
Ripley’s Game (New York: Knopf, 1974)
Edith’s Diary (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977)
The Boy Who Followed Ripley (New York: Lippincott & Crowell, 1980)
People Who Knock on the Door (New York: Otto Penzler Books, 1985)
Found in the Street (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987)
Ripley Under Water (New York: Knopf, 1991)
Small g: a Summer Idyll (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004)
Short Story Collections (Us Publication Details)
The Snail-Watcher and Other Stories (UK title: Eleven; New York: Doubleday, 1970)
Slowly, Slowly in the Wind (New York: Otto Penzler Books, 1979)
The Animal Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder (New York: Otto Penzler Books, 1986)
Little Tales of Misogyny (New York: Otto Penzler Books, 1986)
The Black House (New York: Otto Penzler Books, 1988)
Mermaids on the Golf Course (New York: Otto Penzler Books, 1988)
Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987)
The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001)
Nothing That Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories of Patricia Highsmith (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002)
Non-Fiction
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (Boston: The Writer, Inc., 1966)
Children’s Literature
Miranda the Panda is on the Veranda (Doris Sanders, illustrations by PH; New York: Coward-McCann, 1958)
Other
All uncited quotations above from correspondence, notebooks, diaries and cahiers come from the Patricia Highsmith Papers, Swiss Literary Archives (SLA), Bern, Switzerland.
Suggested Further Reading
Atallah, Naim. ‘The Oldie Interview. Patricia Highsmith’. The Oldie, 3 September 1993.
Birch, Helen. ‘Patricia Highsmith.’ City Limits, 20–27 March 1986.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Lesbian and Bisexual Fiction Writers. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1997.
Blythe, Ronald. Akenfield. Portrait of an English Village. London: Allen Lane, 1969.
Bradford, Richard. Crime Fiction: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Brandel, Marc. The Choice. New York: Dial Press, 1950.
Brown, Craig. ‘Packing a Sapphic punch.’ [On the publication of Carol under Highsmith’s name.] Sunday Times, 14 October 1990.
—. ‘The Hitman and Her.’ The Times Saturday Review, 28 September 1991.
Broyard, Anatole. Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir. New York: Vintage, 1997.
Buck, Joan Juliet. ‘A Terrifying Talent’. Observer Magazine, 20 November 1977.
Calder, Liz. ‘Patricia Highsmith’. The Oldie, March, 1995.
Campbell, James. ‘Murder, She (Usually) Wrote.’ New York Times, 27 October 2002.
Carter, Hannah. ‘Queens of Crime’. The Guardian, 1 May 1968.
Clapp, Susannah. ‘Lovers on a Train.’ [On the publication of Carol under Highsmith’s name.] London Review of Books, 10 January 1991.
—. ‘The Simple Art of Murder.’ The New Yorker, 20 December 1999.
Clarke, Gerald. Capote: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.
Connolly, Cyril. Enemies of Promise. London: Andre Deutsch, 1988.
Cooper-Clark, Diana. ‘Patricia Highsmith – Interview’. The Armchair Detective, Vol. 14, no. 4, 1981.
Dupont, Joan. ‘The Poet of Apprehension.’ Village Voice, 30 May 1995.
—. ‘Criminal Pursuits.’ New York Times Magazine, 12 June 1988.
Eisner, Will. The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005.
Fallowell, Duncan. ‘The Talented Miss Highsmith.’ Sunday Times Magazine, 20 February 2000.
Flanner, Janet. Darlinghissima: Letters to a Friend. Edited by Natalia Danesi Murray. New York: Random House, 1985.
—. Paris Was Yesterday. New York: Penguin, 1979.
Foster, Jeanette Howard. Sex Variant Women in Literature. Baltimore: Diana Press, 1975.
Garber, Margery. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Glendenning, Victoria. ‘Forbidden love story comes out.’ [On the publication of Carol under Highsmith’s name.] The Times, 11 October 1990.
Gowrie, Grey. ‘Why her place is secure.’ Daily Telegraph, 11 March 1995.
Greene, Graham. ‘Foreword’, Eleven. London: Heinemann, 1970.
Guggenheim, Peggy. Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict. New York: Universe, 1987.
Guinard, Mavis. ‘Patricia Highsmith: Alone With Ripley’. International Herald Tribune, 17–18 August 1991.
Hamilton, Ian. ‘Patricia Highsmith.’ New Review, August 1977.
Harrison, Russell. Patricia Highsmith (United States Authors Series). New York: Twayne, 1997.
Herbert, Rosemary (ed). Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Hughes, Dorothy B. In a Lonely Place. New York: Feminist Press, 2003.
Jamison, Kay Redfield. Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. New York: Free Press, 1993.
Jones, Gerard. Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book. New York, Basic, 2004.
Laski, Marghanita. ‘Long Crimes, Short Crimes’. Listener,20 November 1975.
Meade, Marion. Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? New York: Penguin,
1989.
Meaker, Marijane. Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2003.
Menninger, Karl. The Human Mind. Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing, 1930.
Mitchell, Margaretta K. Ruth Bernhard: Between Art & Life. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000.
Osbourne, Lawrence. The Poisoned Embrace: A Brief History of Sexual Pessimism. New York: Vintage, 1994.
Packer, Vin [Marijane Meaker]. Intimate Victims. New York: Manor Books, 1963.
Plimpton, George. Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career. New York: Nan A. Talese, 1997.
Robb, Graham. Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003.
Rzepka, C.J. and Horsley, Lee (eds). A Companion to Crime Fiction. Chichester: Wiley/Blackwell, 2010; includes chapter by Brian Nicol on ‘Patricia Highsmith’.
Sanders, Marion K. Dorothy Thompson: A Legend in Her Time. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973.
Schenkar, Joan. The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith. Ne
w York: Picador, 2009
Skelton, Barbara. ‘Patricia Highsmith at Home.’ London Magazine, August/September 1995.
Steranko, James. Steranko History of Comics. Reading, PA: Supergraphics, 1972.
—. Steranko History of Comics 2. Reading, PA: Supergraphics, 1972.
Symons, Julian. The Modern Crime Story. Edinburgh: The Tragara Press, 1980.
Thurman, Judith. Secrets of the Flesh. New York: Knopf, 1999.
Tolkin, Michael. ‘In Memory of Patricia Highsmith.’ Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 1995.
Torres, Tereska. Women’s Barracks. New York: Feminist Press, 2005.
Vidal, Gore. Palimpsest. London: Penguin, 1995.
—. United States (Essays 1952–1992). London: Abacus, 1993.
Watts, Janet. ‘Love and Highsmith.’ Observer Magazine, 9 September 1990.
Wertham, Frederic. Seduction of the Innocent. New York: Rinehart, 1954.
—. A Sign for Cain. London: Robert Hale, 1966.
Wilson, Andrew. Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith. London:
Bloomsbury, 2003.
Wineapple, Brenda. Genet: A Biography of Janet Flanner. New York: Ticknor &
Fields, 1989.
Wolff, Charlotte, M.D. Love Between Women. New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1971.
Yronwode, Catherine, and Trina Robbins. Women and the Comics. Forestville, CA: Eclipse Books, 1985.
Index
Abbott, Berenice here
Aboudaram, Marion here, here, here, here, here
Acapulco here, here
African Americans here, here, here, here, here, here
Air France here
Alabama here, here
Aldeburgh, Suffolk here
Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts here, here
Alsace here
American Civil War here, here
Ames, Elizabeth here
Ammann, Tobias here
Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires Page 26
