The Talented Miss Highsmith (3 page)

The single bed with the striped bedspread, the one she sleeps in when she sleeps alone (which she mostly does these days), is in this small room as well, at a right angle to her desk. A chocolate-point Siamese cat is curled up on it. A radio, a box of tissues, and a bottle of Vicks Vapo-Rub are on a simple stand beside the bed. An old bluish Persian carpet, frayed here and there, is on the floor. There is a roof window just above her eye level—an old-fashioned
tabatière
—which opens onto the courtyard.

As usual, her desk faces a wall.

It is 5:22 in the morning.

As she bends her head over her typewriter, the exposed nape of her neck, usually concealed with a scarf or a turtleneck sweater—“I have no neck,” she remarked flatly to an interviewer—shows signs of a dowager's bulge. Her shoulder-length hair, still coiffed in the classic pageboy she went to Barnard with in 1938, falls forward over her face. “Coiffed” is not quite the word for it; Highsmith harbors a lifelong “dislike of being groomed” by professionals, calling it “a curious way to regain morale—having
other
people administer” to you. She pushes her pageboy back with her thumbs—first one side, then the other—and tosses her head slightly in the characteristic gesture that settles her hair. In grooming, as in everything else, Patricia Highsmith prefers to do it herself.

The marmoreal beauty of her youth, abundantly attested to by friends, lovers, family, employers, photographers, and, in a pinch, by the writer herself, is almost gone. Years of drinking, depression, and inadequately extinguished internal fires have ravaged it. The difference between the youthful, coruscatingly seductive Pat Highsmith of her early photographs and the almost-fifty-three-year-old writer who sits typing in front of us now is striking; she looks like another person.

Still, she is capable of radiating the kind of magnetism that draws attention in a room, with her bowed-down head and her piercing dark-eyed glance darting up and out from under the fringe of hair—assessing you, says one young friend, “with the shrewdness of a homicide cop for evidence of wrongdoing.”
¹²
Her eyes are pouched like an owl's (a constant comparison among journalists—they know she likes owls); the oval of her face is disturbed by dewlaps; the skin is shirred and ruched. She looks dissipated, but alert. The fires are banked, but they could break out at any moment.

Like a description she gives of Mr. Ripley, she is “on the edge of [her] chair, if [she] is sitting at all.”
¹³
Except when she's at her desk.

Her arms (they appear to be turned out a little at the elbows even in her long-sleeved shirt) are busy with the peculiar, pistonlike motion of her typing. Home movies reveal that they are genetic copies of the capable arms of her grandmother Willie Mae Coates. Her hands—many of the Coates side of the family have these hands—are enormous: square, powerful, and as large as her head. They are gnarled and nicked from her woodworking and her gardening. “Worker's hands,” says one friend.
¹⁴
“Butcher's hands, strangler's hands,” ventures a neighbor.
¹⁵
Her thumbs are extraordinary: huge curved digits, bent out naturally at what appear to be unnatural angles to the rest of her fingers.
¹⁶

As she types, her bottom lip relaxes out over her chin in what her friend, the acidulous memoirist Barbara Skelton, will later call a “rather louche” overhang.
¹⁷
Pat is not conscious of this lapse in controlling her lip, something she has felt compelled to do ever since a prospective lover described her mouth as “passionate.” Her writing at this hour is the result of an extended bout of insomnia—she suffers from it more and more—and she is just now finishing up the six or seven or eight pages which are her usual day's work.

Outside, just beyond the door in the stone wall at the end of her garden, the Loing Canal, a commercial waterway connected in some mysterious way with the river Seine, flows steadily on. The Loing, broad enough for barges but narrow enough for neighborliness, flows through her imagination as well. It is in this body of water where she will have Tom Ripley deposit some of his most incriminating bodies of evidence. Again, nothing that she can make use of is overlooked.

A practical woman when it comes to necessary transactions, Pat has been unusually adept at getting a handsome return on her social investments. At every move and remove, and with a minimum expenditure of effort, she manages to gather around her a little society of helpful, admiring, understanding people, recruited for the purpose of providing that increasingly well-known writer Patricia Highsmith with just enough human contact (and enough help with the shopping, the sewing, the moving, the gardening, the house painting, etc.) to continue her work in relative comfort.

And as she moves and then moves again (Moncourt is her fourth house in France in two and a half years, all of them near Fontainebleau and friends in the Île-de-France), she goes on making more friends and more acquaintances, telling each of them less about her inner life and less about her past. And she continues to keep in touch with many of these friends, past and present, by a steady stream of letters and postcards filled with the most mundane details of her daily life and with invitations to come and stay; invitations, her correspondents quickly learn, best honored in the breach. Pat likes to invite people to visit, but is not often pleased to see them arrive. Her correspondence—always the preferred method of contact—is enormous.

If Pat is a recluse, she is the most
social
recluse in literary history.

Pat's to-ing and fro-ing—her moves and removes have been quite as extreme and various as her moods—has been going on for some thirty years now. In her lifelong quest for perfect silence and eternal peace (conditions which are always overturned by her unquiet self and its need for “madness and irregularity…which,” she writes, “is also necessary to me and necessary to my creation”),
¹⁸
Pat has been a restless self-exile from New York, from Pennsylvania, from America, from Italy, from England—from everywhere, really.

Through it all, she has remained an extraordinarily productive creator. The hardworking “Little Engine That Could”
^*
is what she most resembles. And that is how she thinks of herself: as someone who gets the job done against the odds.

“Address to younger writers, who think older writers like me are so famous and so different. We are no different at all, we are just the same as other writers, only we work harder.”
¹⁹

Her little train of daily accomplishments, freighted with book themes, articles, short-story beginnings, observations, descriptions—an idea a minute, in fact—chugs steadily between the twin terminals of her self-regard and her depressions, and keeps her very busy filling up its cars. And
still
she is afraid of not doing enough. Punctuating every interview she gives to the press with complaints about how her valuable time is slipping away, she usually manages to suggest that the most horrible waste of time is the interview she is giving
right now
. Even when she was in college, in the year she wished she could see Shakespeare “in his study,” Pat was terrified of “losing” time: “Six months to fill this notebook? Good heavens, can I be burning out!? Have I shot my bolt!?”
²⁰

How the Texas-born, New York–reared Mary Patricia Highsmith ended up in a
hameau
in suburban France (a country whose language she generally refuses to speak), calculating the number of blows it would take to kill small children and—her version of fair-mindedness—counting the ways in which tiny tots could murder adults, has as much to do with the rupture of a cross-Channel love affair as it does with the ordinary propensities of her imagination. So let us move periods (we'll go back eight years) and change venues (to England), to visit Pat at a time when her hope, if not her mood, was higher, and when she was still full of feelings for the central figure in her life. Which, as it happens, is not the woman with whom she says she is in love.

Part 2

It is late April, still the cruellest month, in 1965. And it is London, still “swinging”—but not for everyone.

London is certainly not swinging for Patricia Highsmith, the attractive, fiercely ambitious, and, in Europe at least, seriously regarded forty-four-year-old American “suspense” writer whose alabaster skin and almond eyes have only just begun to show the signs of her drinking and her disappointments. She has driven down to North London—she has some business with the BBC
¹
—from her rural residence in Suffolk, Bridge Cottage in Earl Soham, having passed the winter holidays of 1964–65 in her usual festive spirits.

“The holidays here exhaust one, creeping through closed windows like a poisonous gas,” Pat writes from Suffolk, sounding just like a Highsmith character. Never one to greet the New Year with anything like enthusiasm (“Happy New Year…I
hate
the phrase”),
²
she complains steadily of the English weather, the English temperament, and the “dreary” English pubs with their “dangerous dart-games.”
³
She is—this has only darkened her mood—deep in the dying stages of an English love affair.

The object of Pat's affections is a vibrantly attractive, classically cultured, solidly married Londoner—we'll call her Caroline Besterman
^*
—and she is the most profound attachment of Pat's adult life. Pat's first meeting with Caroline in London in the summer of 1962 left her love-struck as never before. The honeymoon the two women managed to steal in France that autumn set the seal on their love affair. Pat flew over to Paris from New York to scoop Caroline shyly off the boat train from London and spend a delerious long week with her in a hotel in the Sixth arrondissement, a week Pat described in scorching terms. “She…melts into my arms as if she were smelted by Vulcan expressly for that purpose. I can make love happily to her all night long.”
⁴

Some of this love affair was conducted in public. Pat, whose late-life neighbors in Switzerland saw her shudder away from the touch of other people, even to the extent of refusing formal handshakes, felt free enough on the streets of Paris in late 1962 to embrace Caroline Besterman so passionately that her own earring flew off and rolled out of sight down the Boulevard St-Germain.
⁵

“‘Can I kiss you in some doorway?,'” Pat asked, deferentially.

“‘Never mind the doorway,'” said Caroline.
⁶

When they could bear to leave their bed, the two women dined and drank
à la française,
paid a visit to Baudelaire's tomb and Notre Dame, went to the ceremonies for the Prix Goncourt (Pat was a little surprised to see a woman win),
⁷
and met several times with Pat's French translator, Jean Rosenthal, who gave her clear advice about French publishing houses. Pat, trying to hide her new relationship from Rosenthal and his wife, travelled with Caroline out to a small studio in St. Cloud where they saw a soundless preview of
Le Meurtrier,
Claude Autant-Lara's film of Pat's novel
The Blunderer
. Caroline found the lead actor, Maurice Ronet, “very attractive” and Pat thought the film “very intense, quite faithful to the book.”
⁸
Their long week together was a rare combination of business, culture, and pleasure.

On her way back to the States, the enraptured Pat made a quick stop in London, where Caroline booked her a room at Oscar Wilde's last London hotel, the Cadogan. Pat paid a secret visit to Caroline's marital home, kissed her “in several rooms, though not in every one of them!” and celebrated by playing songs from the cast album of
Pal Joey
before taking a taxi to the airport. Pat was followed as far as the gate by Caroline—and accompanied onto the plane by the bottle of Gordon's gin she kept in the large woven Mexican bag she always carried with her: her
bolsa
.
⁹

Back in her house in New Hope, Pennsylvania, in November, Pat finds that all terms are inadequate to her feelings. And that all feelings are inadequate to her situation:

Love, as usual, makes Pat think of death, of murder. And thoughts of death, also as usual, force her into a decision.

“But there is no use in making any further effort to live without her. I cannot. And in all my 41 years, I have never said or written this about anyone else before.”
¹¹

So, although Pat was correcting the proofs of her much-rewritten novel
The Two Faces of January,
and had been hoping “to do a short story & make a beginning on paper of the prison novel [
The Prisoner,
later
The Glass Cell
]” she'd been imagining since September of 1962, she “cleared [her] complicated decks,”
¹²
left her possessions and her rented house in New Hope, where she'd been living since 1960, and, in early 1963, crossed the wine-dark seas and settled in Earl Soham in Suffolk (after moving from Paris to Positano into the house she'd rented the summer before, and thence to Aldeburgh; despite her reference to Emily Dickinson's “drunken bee,” the “beeline” was never part of Pat Highsmith's approach to travel) in what had been two country cottages, now “knocked together” as one dwelling: Bridge Cottage.

The double structure of Bridge Cottage suits Pat's psychology just as much as the ambiguities of this love affair with Caroline Besterman, someone else's wife, suit her temperament.

As her feelings for Caroline sink into familiar acrimony (Pat has a fetching habit of falling for women because they are married, then berating them for being attached to their husbands), Pat spends the Suffolk winter of 1964–65 holed up in her “brick-floored” study; freezing, brooding, and trying hard to understand her new country.
¹³
“England is brilliant at describing its own shortcomings, very slow at doing anything about them.”
¹⁴
She is also making “Notes on Suspense” for a book she is writing for a Boston publisher.

“Suspense writers, present and future: Remember you are in good company. Dostoyevsky, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe…there are hacks in every kind of literary field…. Aim at being a genius.”
¹⁵

She saws wood to warm herself instead of firing up her stoves—“I become more Scrooge-like with age,” she confesses
¹⁶
—and she does not take her mother's practical advice about the excellent insulating properties of old newspapers.
¹⁷

“I see little of my friend [Caroline Besterman]…,” Pat writes to her college chum in New York, Kingsley Skattebol, in January of 1965. “It is hard to bear when I sit alone in the country 98% of the time.”
¹⁸
Kingsley is one of Pat's oldest friends, but she has never been told that Pat and Caroline Besterman are lovers, and she will not learn this interesting fact until after Pat's death.
¹⁹
Pat likes to partition her confidences, imagine herself as emotionally neglected (a satisfying habit since childhood), and calculate the percentages of her unhappiness.

Actually, Pat is having a much better time in Earl Soham than she lets on. She has made fast friends with her obliging neighbor, the writer Ronald Blythe, who is working on his soon-to-be-acclaimed book about Suffolk,
Akenfield,
when he first meets her. Ronald Blythe invites Pat into his circle of artistic and literary males. Amongst them is James Hamilton-Paterson, future author of
Gerontius
and
Cooking with Fernet-Branca
. Hamilton-Paterson once walked out of a room after Pat had erupted in a “brief burst of tears.”
²⁰
“I don't blame him,” wrote Pat, who would certainly have done the same thing herself; “give him my love.”
²¹

Ronald Blythe and Pat see each other regularly; he, “cycling to Earl Soham to have supper with her, or she, coming to see me in her Volkswagen.” They go on day trips together to scout out old churches and unfamiliar pubs, they cook for each other (Pat always “left stuff on her plate, smoked between courses, and didn't much like food”), and—dedicated writers both—they communicate by letter between visits, even though they live only four miles apart.

“She was a great ranter,” Ronald Blythe says. And there is certainly “a great deal” of ranting about Caroline Besterman in Pat's early letters to him, while her conversation was “full of hatred for her mother and wild goings on.” But Pat never ranted at Blythe or even quarrelled with him—perhaps because he never challenged her. “She had beautiful manners,” he thinks, “lovely manners…and I got used to her excessive language.”
²²

But there are sharp drops into strangeness in their friendship. Cycling home from a visit to Pat, Ronald Blythe—then a warden of his village church, now a canon of the cathedral—was once “overcome by a kind of terrible darkness. I felt quite ill, as though I'd been in the presence of something awful…. And then the next time we saw each other she said that, well, some things about her, I wasn't to worry about them.
She knew
[what I'd been feeling]…. It never happened again[,] but I had just felt awful in her presence.”
²³

And on “one or two occasions,” Pat breached the boundaries of their friendship with “a faint, physical exploration…Her attitude was a kind of trespass on my body, rather like a man examining me…. I couldn't understand it really, [but] it was of no importance whatsoever.”
^*
They were never, says Dr. Blythe, lovers in any conventional sense; this was something else. Something, quite possibly, to do with Pat's rather clinical interest in the male anatomy and in what she once identified as “the thrill of domination.”
²⁴

Ordinarily, though, Pat is “very close and affectionate and warm and touching. [Our] relationship was almost entirely about writing…. We didn't have anyone near we could talk to about writing [and so] we talked by the hour about our work…. I took all my friends to see her.”
²⁵

The Suffolk solitude Pat complains of in her letters (and describes self-pityingly in her notebooks, her cahiers) is far more populous and social than she cares to admit. And so, as she chats for hours on end about her work to her fellow writer Ronald Blythe, she is also inserting into her little handbook-in-progress for suspense writers,
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
(1965), this resonant antipathy:

“I cannot think of anything worse or more dangerous than to discuss my work with another writer. It would give me an uncomfortably naked feeling.”

Like most writers, what Pat really likes to set down in her notebooks are the things that disturb her, the daily and historic irritations rasping away at her nerves. Because of this, her meticulous self-archiving—at the end of her life, there will be eight thousand pages of notebooks and diaries—can be deceptive. The areas of Pat's life which do not bother her often go unrecorded.

Taking Patricia Highsmith at her “word” will always be a complicated business.

Just now, Pat has come to London to stay for a few days with Barbara Ker-Seymer—the impeccably well-connected, once-bohemian portrait photographer and close friend of most of London's twenties and thirties Café Society—and Ker-Seymer's lover, the enterprising Barbara Roett.

The Barbaras live together in a charming crescent street in Islington with a house on one side of the crescent's curve and a studio
en face
. They prefer to have Pat stay with them because, as Barbara Roett says, “if she were only visiting us, it was hell.” When Pat came to London “it was for a binge, [she liked] to chat and tirade around the house until quite late…whereas we wanted to go to bed at a reasonable time.”
²⁶
It was much easier to give Pat keys of her own.

“Quarrelling with Pat,” says Barbara Roett, “would be like quarrelling with a dog with rabies. You could get bitten. But it wasn't the fear of being bitten, it was the fear of knowing better…. When I understood her…I felt a compassion for her. I thought she was isolated from love in a simple way: Love your parents.”
²⁷

 

On the other side of London, in a leafy part of Kensington, in a lovely old house with steps that curve like a castle staircase from the walk in its front yard to the top of the house's final floor, lives another friend of Pat Highsmith. Let us call her Camilla Butterfield.
^*
Camilla Butterfield's house is filled with books and comfortable corners, woodcuts are on the walls, and out in back there is a fragrant, well-tended garden whose green shade gives a slightly aquarium cast to the ground floor.

Pat has just lunched at Mrs. Butterfield's, leaving her white English Volkswagen parked in the drive while she goes off to do her business at the BBC. She intends to return, pick the car up, and head back to the two Barbaras' house in Islington, where she will once again spend the night.