The Talented Miss Highsmith (64 page)

Although she desperately wished otherwise, Pat's troubles with Caroline Besterman were as much a result of the condition she'd noted in her cahier (six months before meeting Caroline) as all her other troubles were: “Until around thirty I was essentially like a glacier or like stone. I suppose I was ‘protecting' myself. It was certainly tied up with the fact I had to conceal the most important emotional drives of myself completely.

“This is the tragedy of the conscience-stricken young homosexual, that he not only conceals his sex objectives, but conceals his humanity and natural warmth of heart as well.”
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Meanwhile, at Bridge Cottage (or “back at the ranch,” the phrase which Pat, a mock Texan in her locutions, invariably used about any house she owned, just as she used “turning loose,” a term taken from calf roping, for letting go of her emotional ties), Pat kept herself busy in the ways she knew how: writing, first and foremost. Having hired a television set, she began what she called “a religious television play, based on the effect of a friend (Jesus) upon a group of people.”
¹⁴
The script would eventually turn into her novel
Ripley Under Ground
, with Derwatt the suicided artist, like Pat's dead former lover Allela Cornell, sacrosanct and alive in the memory of his friends—but turned to a perverse use by Tom Ripley.
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She conceived and wrote her “second snail story,” “The Quest for Blank Claveringi” (published in
Eleven
by Heinemann in 1970 and in altered form as “The Snails” in the
Saturday Evening Post
).
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She drew and sketched as she had always done, and thought up little inventions: “The Gallery of Bad Art,” “a sweating thermometer,” and some odd new shapes for “lampshades.” The inspiration for her pièce de résistance—a “strychnined lipstick”—must have been a real thrill for a writer to whom the impulse to murder women came so naturally.

Still brooding, Pat returned to some favorite subjects. She pondered the education of children (this was the moment when she decided that American orphanages should be emptied in order to supply the Peace Corps with eight-year-old ambassadors)
¹⁶
and philosophized endlessly and lugubriously about love. When she'd had enough of this, she turned to her old panacea—travel—and went to North Africa with Elizabeth Lyne.

Pat travelled to Paris in June of 1966 to pick up Mme Lyne, now retired from designing for Hattie Carnegie to an apartment in the Boulevard Raspail in Paris's Sixth Arrondissement. The two women drove to Marseille, stopping on the way to visit one of Pat's odd, obsessive French fans: a married man who had Pat sign eight of her books and gave her a rare chance to observe French family life. From Marseille, the two women took a boat to Tunis.

Pat's first impression of North Africa was simpler and nobler than the one she finally settled on. “Africa—A splendid place for thinking. One feels naked, standing alone against a white wall. Problems become simplified, one's directions clear. Is this because the land is so different from Europe, the people so different from one's own…. Africa does not even turn over in her sleep by way of entertaining tourists. It is like a great, fat, half asleep woman in a comfortable bed—naked herself, indifferent to any approach.”
¹⁷

Pat soon changed her mind about Africa's “simplicity.” Everywhere she looked she began to notice something familiar: the sight of people trying to cheat her. On Mme Lyne and Pat's arrival in Tunis, Pat had an “altercation” with a porter and an argument about the bill at the hotel desk where the two women were booked. Pat's luggage was confiscated until the bill was settled. In Hammamet, the town in which she and Mme Lyne moved into a bungalow hotel, Pat began to compile complaints against the locals: “Hammamet—of five people of whom we expected slight help—all have let us down here. They take names and telephone numbers, make promises, and do not follow through. This is a mysterious form of ego-building in the East…. tomorrow doesn't matter, and out of sight is out of mind. It must be a curious god they have.”
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In Sidi Bou Said, at a “bar-restaurant” to which she applied the term “clip-joint,” Pat noticed “a curious Freudian item”: male employess who left their unflushed excrement in the women's bathroom. “A curious card to leave,” she thought, keeping one eye peeled for other desecrations. Back in her bungalow hotel in Hammamet, she had plenty of violations to report: the plumbing and the filthy quarters in which the unsatisfactory boy servants were housed were some of them.

She started to compare Arabs, unfavorably, to the entire “peasant” population of Mexico, finding what she'd been looking for all along: deceit and chicanery. “The Mexican peasant is naïve compared to the Arab. The Mexicans have had tourism about fifty or forty years, the Arab for hundreds. The Arab is a trader, essentially, a crook.”
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The conditions at her bungalow hotel—one large room shared with Mme Lyne in which Pat also had to write, the bad hotel repair service, and the uncertain mail delivery—were destabilizing her. Unable to shelter herself from upsetting circumstances, she found a tortoiseshell kitten and tried to protect it from the feet of careless workers. “At noon I could be a nervous wreck if I were self-indulgent. (A beetle just fell from the ceiling onto my notebook.)”
²⁰

Pat was finally disturbed enough to begin taking notes for the novel that would become
The Tremor of Forgery:
her attempt to envisage what could happen to a writer, Howard Ingham, when he finds himself in unfamiliar climes, without the support of his customs or his language. This had been Pat's own situation from the moment she left the New World for good, moved to Suffolk, and took Highsmith Country with her. It is the situation of many creative expatriates: strangers in a strange land, living in the museum of their imaginations. In
The Tremor of Forgery,
Pat made Africa a province of Highsmith Country. “The element of terror—anxiety—is important. Perhaps
overconsciousness of details
—by which an individual tries to fix his place, from which he tries to gain security and confidence, but without success. It is the element of security, that is forever missing; the meaning and importance of life that is missing.”
²¹

Pat took many of the details of her daily life and irritations in Hammamet—the American-made cash register in a restaurant, the filth and evasiveness of the boy servants in her bungalow hotel, the fish
complet
she was always eating for dinner, her growing contempt for Arabs—and put them into the notes for her novel. The borders between the novel's life and her own stayed porous even after she had returned from North Africa and started travelling again. In her cahier notes she sent Howard Ingham to Denmark, and in the novel she created Ingham's friend Jensen, the homosexual painter, as a Dane chiefly because three months after she'd returned from Tunisia she had to travel to Copenhagen on book business.

Pat's notes and her novel continued to bear the weight of her special experiences as an exile from America: the divisions and confusions of her political understanding drained into characters who represented a vaguely muddled Left (Howard Ingham) and a seriously proselytizing Right (Francis Adams). Howard Ingham's probable return to his former wife at the end of the novel (“never had any woman had such a physical hold over him”)
²²
was Pat's own wish: she linked the absent, idealized character of Howard's divorced wife Lotte to Ginnie Catherwood—although it was Lynn Roth of whom she'd been dreaming. As late as 1967 Pat was having deep dreams of union, of “fathering” a child with Lynn—“I so often think of Lynn, the joy of my life, and for a time I was the joy of hers”—and she was reprising in imagination the brief, secret
rencontre
she'd had with Roth in New Hope six years ago: “How beautiful when she came for her birthday November 23, 1961, invited herself for two nights (of joy for me), and on the third—by gentle persuasion.”

When Howard Ingham commits what is undoubtedly murder by throwing his typewriter at the head of a “thieving Arab” (it is Pat's Olympia Deluxe typewriter, right down to its distinctive brown color), his creator's pleasure in the act is all too palpable: her concern is for the damaged typewriter and not for the dead Arab. Although Pat wished to write Ingham as “a decent (that is, honest) writer…[s]o the psychopathic is quite out,” she also wanted to allow him freedom from the problem of “self-esteem” that plagued her daily: “A period comes when H. stops trying to maintain identity or morale. Then his ‘animal' or primitive side frightens him. But he senses the freedom of having no self-respect to worry about.”
²³

The Tremor of Forgery,
by a writer most critics were discussing as godless and gripless when it came to morality, is a profoundly American (and therefore inescapably moral) consideration of those cultural crossings at which ethics start to founder and violent acts, such as murder, become meaningless. Pat's Methodist grandmother would have understood very well the motive for her metaphors.

When Pat and Elizabeth Lyne left Tunisia, they sailed to Naples, went on to Austria, and then, in August, Pat returned by herself to Suffolk. In September Pat was on the road again—to Nice, this time, to meet with the film director Raoul Lévy, who wanted to collaborate with her on a script for her novel
Deep Water
. When she returned to Earl Soham, there was a final, painful scene with Caroline Besterman in mid-October. Pat heaved Caroline's valise at the second bedroom, into which Caroline had withdrawn in a “huff” at Pat's lateness in coming to bed. (Pat doesn't say why she was late.) Caroline went back to London the next afternoon with Pat's imprecation that she was “finished with her” echoing throughout Bridge Cottage—and Pat was left shaken to her shoes, the golden bowl of her hopes for love with a married woman in pieces around her. It had been her longest continuous relationship.

Pat's first reaction was desperation: “The very worst time of my entire life.”
²⁴
Then she had the sebaceous cyst which had been on her cheek for the last ten years surgically removed—as though cutting out this growth might rid her of other things, too. Her second reaction was to work more, and she started to write the film script for
Deep Water.
She wrote it between waves of panic and insomnia—she knew that dialogue and dramaturgy weren't her forte—and finished it in a month. Then she wrote a condensation of
Those Who Walk Away
for
Cosmopolitan
magazine, a task she also completed in a month.
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Her third and fourth reactions to her devastation were to invite an ex-lover to visit her and to plan for more travel. Daisy Winston came over from New Hope to Earl Soham for a welcome two weeks in December, although practical Pat was sorry to find that Daisy no longer attracted her sexually. It would have been a solution of sorts. After Daisy left, Pat went to Copenhagen for the Danish publication of
The Glass Cell
by Grafisk Ferlag. The trip plunged her into gloom—she gave a bad speech during it—but the crush she later developed on a woman she met in Copenhagen was a pleasant distraction. Gudrun reminded Pat of her old friend Betty, from her Fire Island days.
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On New Year's Eve of 1966, Raoul Lévy, the erstwhile film director of
Deep Water,
shot himself dead in St-Tropez. He still owed Pat money for the script she'd written for him in October and November, and her gelid commentary on his death reflects her feelings about his debt: “Alas I never liked him, and obviously he did not like himself.” Still, murder worked its usual magic on her, and she couldn't help speculating about where Lévy might have killed himself, although his demise did not ameliorate for one moment the fact that he still owed her twelve thousand dollars. “He never signed the contract nor paid me anything, and all I know is he was very pleased with the first 44 pages.”
²⁷
Seeing Lévy in September of 1966 in Nice, where he'd intended to set
Deep Water,
did bring Pat one lasting benefit. She'd gone from Nice to Cagnessur-Mer to visit Annie Duveen, and it was at Duveen's house where she met Barbara Ker-Seymer and Barbara Roett for the first time.

In January of 1967 Pat, still looking for escape, accepted an invitation to sit on a jury judging short films at an international film festival in Montbazon, in the Touraine region of France. She drove from Paris to Tours, accompanied once again by Elizabeth Lyne—her need of old friends was obvious—and then she went on alone to Montbazon, where, amongst the French-Canadian, Japanese, Russian, Hungarian, and French panellists, the only member of the film jury she took a shine to was Slawomir Mro
ek, the Polish playwright. He was as “surprised as I am at being here”—and he was “shy” and “silent.” Pat couldn't bear the intellectual talk, the pretentious theorizing about film, or the competition. “What a lot of nonsense, all this communicating!” she wrote in her cahier, adding, “The atmosphere reminds me of Yaddo, but the ice will not be broken in the same way (and perhaps I am to blame, as much, too) because we are mostly older, more suspicious, more jealous of our (already gained) reputations.”
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