The Talented Miss Highsmith (66 page)

Pat thought Christa's coming to help “type” the document would be a “wonderful idea,” so Christa went to Pat's new house in Tegna a week before the opening of the Locarno Film Festival, which, anyway, she always attended in her capacity as a film journalist. When Christa rang the bell, Pat “opened the door and walked away without a word,” vanishing into her bedroom to putter around. Christa stood “like a good girl with my suitcase” until Pat came out again and showed her to her room in the guest wing, which, because the house, with its inevitable double wings, was shaped like a U, was as far as possible from Pat's own bedroom.

“While I was looking at cassettes [French telefilms of Pat's short stories] I put some lotion on my arm because I sunburned it hanging out the window while I was driving to Tegna, and, out of the blue—she was able to do this without you hearing her—Pat was standing next to me. You didn't hear her coming. And she said: ‘My cat hates your perfume!'

“So I thought, poor Charlotte. And
THEN
I thought, wait a minute, that cat can't talk.
WHO
hates my perfume? Pat does. So I said, ‘I'm terribly sorry' and went into the guest room and took a shower. And then, suddenly, she's outside the shower door, saying sternly: ‘We have to save water.'

“I should have left the next minute.

“Whenever I said, ‘Let's talk about the radio play,' she'd say,' Where's Charlotte, where's Charlotte?' The cat had something evil, I thought. If the Hubers had not been there, I would not have been able to bear it. I had promised to come and help her and I insisted on doing it. Of course, we never ever touched the radio play, we never talked about it.”

But Pat, in her own provocative way, had already tried to raise one of the subjects of this “interview” with Christa Maerker—from an opposite angle, some years before she wrote the radio version. When Maerker visited Pat in her Aurigeno house in the mid-1980s, she discovered that sometime during their first evening Pat had taken a ballpoint pen and printed a line of numbers on her arm, numbers that were meant to suggest something obvious to a citizen of Germany who had lived through the Second World War.

“I was too shocked to talk about it. Why the numbers on her arm? She wanted to see how a ‘Nazi' descendant would respond to [a concentration camp number]…. I always thought she was testing me, not just me, but anybody to find out how they react to extreme situations.”

When Christa Maerker finally left Pat's house in Tegna she “sang all the way to Locarno. It was as though I left a jail…. When I went to my hotel, there was a hand-delivered letter from Pat…. She'd written to thank me for being such a good guest…. She was aware of how horribly she behaved…. In the end…I couldn't honestly understand; I'd started to read her short stories and got into the emotions in them and I was unable to judge anything anymore.”
¹⁹

A late-life friend of Pat, a young writer in New York at the time she first met Pat, described another unforgettable encounter, as funny as it was awful, during which Pat's ethnic views were once again on parade. On one of Pat's trips to New York from Switzerland—Pat's friend thinks it was in 1990
^*
—Pat asked if they could meet at the lesbian bar Pat had liked to go to when she was younger. The bar was the Duchess, a decades-old lesbian establishment in Sheridan Square, in the heart of Greenwich Village, which had just reopened as the Duchess 2. It was now, unbeknownst to Pat, “basically a black butch bar.”

Pat wanted to bring “an old college chum” with her (it turned out to be Kingsley).

“So I said, ‘Fine, I'd like to bring my friend Barbara.' Who was a poet and an admirer of some of Pat's work. And Pat said that was fine.”

“And I said to Barbara, who was a Jew, ‘Now look, I've told you about Pat, about how she talks.' And she said, ‘That's all right, you don't have to mention that I'm Jewish.' But I warned her that there was hardly a conversation that went by without Pat mentioning Jews; it was an obsession. Pat took the subway to Sheridan Square—I didn't know at that time that Pat was too cheap to take a cab—and I thought the friend would be some lesbian friend from college and there was Kingsley! This elderly heterosexual lady with a purse. And I thought, ‘Good Lord, what a strange pair to take into the Duchess 2!' But go we did.

“You have to fight though this long narrow bar, a crowd of mostly black women, to get to the postage-stamp-sized tables in the rear. And we finally make it and Pat is very silent and she's arranging herself, and she says, ‘Well at least we made it through
THAT
!' And I thought I'm not even going to
TRY
to imagine what she means by that. And there's Kingsley sort of looking around, and we ordered some drinks.

“And Pat said, ‘Well yes, this is quite a
BIT
different from when I used to go here.' And there are these big musclely black girls bumping and grinding on the tiny dance floor.

“And Kingsley says, ‘I've never been to a place quite like this.' And then Pat said, sipping at her drink, ‘Well, there certainly are a lot of blacks in here.' And I said, ‘Yes, it tends to be frequented by mostly black women.' ‘Well,' she said, ‘at least there are not a lot of Jews around.' With that Barbara looked at her and said: ‘Excuse me, but I'm a Jew.' And Pat, not missing a beat, shot back, ‘Well, you don't
LOOK
like one.'

“I don't know how we made it through the evening. Barbara just went back to her drink. Kingsley was completely out of it….

“For someone who was very perceptive, Pat misread an awful lot of signs. And so she'd test the waters a great deal, ‘Well, you know the Holocaust'…

“I was convinced it was personal, I thought her father might be a Jew. I wondered who the Jew was, who set her off.”
²⁰

Thirty years before, in 1957, Pat had been thinking quite different thoughts about the Jews: “This afternoon I awakened from a nap, thought suddenly of the German atrocities against the Jewish people, and had a strange feeling that it hadn't happened, that it was impossible—and then—knowing it had happened—that it was more horrible, more bestial than the most eloquent describer has yet said.”
²¹

And in 1959, during the year she was singing in the Presbyterian church choir in Palisades, New York, Pat's understanding of what good relations on Earth required was still intact. “All the misery on the earth is caused by the indifference of the better off toward those with less. Not only in economics, but in personal misfortunes—so much easier to bear, if there are friends or strangers who show that they care what happens. With this, there is no bitterness, no cursing against God, no resentful attacks against one's fellowman. No revolutions.”
²²

But by the 1980s, Pat had moved as far from her early ideals of World Peace as she had from her youthful dreams of Courtly Love. The hopes she'd been giving voice to in her thirties came from a—by now—mostly unrecognizable Patricia Highsmith.

Part 11

Pat's nights were often more emotionally telling than her days, and many of the love-dreams she recorded were deep fantasies of killing or being murdered or maimed by Mother Mary, or committing unspeakable acts in Mary's presence, in Mary's stead, or in Mary's bed. Occasionally, Mary did the dream murders
for
Pat, as in a night dream of 1984 in which Mary, “in Lady Macbeth murderous mood,” beheaded Pat's young German lover, Tabea Blumenschein, and then “coated the head with transparent wax, thoroughly.”
¹
(Even asleep, Pat could produce devilish details; that “thoroughly” is masterful.)

At night—
especially
at night—Pat had trouble separating her psyche from her mother's. And sometimes she thickened the nocturnal brew with a grandmother figure and a plot point borrowed from her favorite Dostoyevsky novel,
Crime and Punishment
—as she did in this winter dream of 1961:

Many of Pat's dreams were infused with guilt, shame, fear of exposure, and feelings at war with each other. “Just as there is no jealousy without love, there is no hate without fear and mistrust,” Pat had written in college. “Emotions run in pairs—like smoke and fire.”
³
But her own emotions ran in pairs that contradicted each other.

In most Highsmith fictions, the attractions and repulsions of love—the moment when an urgent embrace becomes an overwhelming desire to strangle—are twisted up in the braid of character. Love and hatred pull together, pull each other apart, and share the same nervous system. This crosscutting of love and hatred—the critic Susannah Clapp calls it “an extraordinary loop of abhorrence and attraction”
⁴
—which kept the young Pat so busy recording her high school crushes and aversions, wreaked a predictable havoc on her love life. Most of her adult sexual affairs, in flesh or in fantasy, were electrified by violent and contradictory feelings: their landscapes look like war zones. Many of her lovers emerged from these couplings telling tales more closely associated with bombed-out buildings than with burning desires.

Pat herself felt blasted by love, annihilated by it—“It is just like firing a pistol in my face,” she said of her love for Caroline Besterman
⁵
—and the higher she built her love castles, the harder they fell on her, always.

In 1963, newly in love with Caroline, Pat, tempting the Fates (who must have licked their lips in awful anticipation), set down in her cahier these ecstatic phrases: “Up, pipers! I am in love with a most wonderful woman. I am saved. Look me up in ten or twenty years, and see.”
⁶

I did look her up.

Ten years later, alone in her house by the Loing Canal in Moncourt, Pat was making it her painful duty to add to the list of Major Flaws she had uncovered in the character of that “most wonderful woman,” the former love of her life, Caroline Besterman. And she was taking notes for a collection of stories whose bitter inspiration was her separation from Caroline. Pat gave the collection a provisional title:
Further Tales of Misogyny
(with stories named “The Fully-Licensed Whore, or the Wife,” “The Prude,” “The Gossip,” “The Mother-in-Law,” “The Breeder,” “The Middle-Class Housewife”).
⁷
It was a continuation of a series of stories about women she'd begun in 1969 after she and Caroline had broken up. In 1977, the entire collection was published as
Little Tales of Misogyny
.

Each “tale” in
Misogyny
indulges Pat's mania for classification by exploring the horrors of a certain “type” of woman. Together, these poisonous little pills constitute as enraged an assault on the female gender as the one launched in 1558 by the Scots Calvinist preacher John Knox in his jeremiad
The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.
⁸

Little Tales of Misogyny
was first brought out—this was no coincidence; Pat was exercised on the subject—during the decade in which the Second Wave of Feminism, the International Women's Movement, had begun its attack on the world's patriarchal structures.
Misogyny
's reviews were mixed, to put it mildly. But it was praised in England, and in France it won Pat and her inspired illustrator, Roland Topor, an important award in 1977: Le Grand Prix de l'Humeur Noir.

When she was twenty-two, Pat had written this in her cahier: “Basically, the reason I don't like men homosexuals is because we…disagree.
Women
, not men, are the most exciting and wonderful creations on the earth—and masculine homosexuals are mistaken and wrong!”
⁹

Three decades and many painfully ended love affairs with women later, Pat seems to have changed her mind.

In a long article in
The New York Review of Books
on Highsmith in 2001, Joyce Carol Oates detected a “gleeful” tone in a posthumous publication of the stories in
Little Tales of Misogyny
“which Highsmith may have intended as satires of female types, savage in the way of Rabelais or Swift.” But, continued Ms. Oates, “these sadistic sketches [are] heavy-handed in sarcasm and virtually devoid of literary significance….

“Highsmith seems to have had little patience, had perhaps little natural skill, for the short story…. there is no subtext, only surface; it's as if she conceived of the form as basically a gimmick…set to explode in the reader's face in its final lines.”
¹⁰

Like some of her more gruesome tales—“Woodrow Wilson's Necktie” and the genuinely terrifying “The Yuma Baby,” aka “The Empty Birdhouse”
^*
—the stories in
Little Tales of Misogyny
kept Pat in fits of helpless laughter as she was writing and reading them. “I laugh myself onto the floor…. Thus I approach the real joy of a writer…amusing other people,” she wrote happily to Alex Szogyi in 1969 about “Woodrow Wilson's Necktie,”
¹¹
a story in which an assistant in a wax museum busies himself with murdering the customers and then arranges them in waxy poses on the museum premises. “Woodrow Wilson's Necktie” has many implications—but none of them are funny.
^*

Still, with
Little Tales of Misogyny,
it was herself Pat was amusing first—and for strictly private reasons.

Daniel Keel, who first published
Little Tales of Misogyny
in German with Roland Topor's expressive illustrations (Pat had suggested Edward Gorey or David Hockney as illustrators), says that Pat had “
galgen
[gallows] humor and it's the humor of someone who is going to be hanged.

“It comes to my mind that she didn't understand irony—and I like irony like pepper and salt in a conversation. She was too literal for irony. She was too mistrustful for irony—she was irritated at ironic comments and she would say: ‘Do you really mean that? What do you mean?'…There are several floors you have to be on for irony.”
¹²

One of the
Misogyny
stories, Keel says, presented a “recognizable” portrait of a woman who was “a very good friend of [Keel and his wife, Anna].

“I told Pat: ‘Do you know [this woman] so well that you can portray her in these details?' Pat didn't care; she wanted it published. She could have said if it's a friend of yours, I'll cut it out, but she didn't.”
¹³

Even Kingsley Skattebol says that “broad and crude” is as “good a characterization as any” of Pat's sense of humor.
¹⁴

Marion Aboudaram thought that Pat did have “a sense of humor, she could be funny” but her humor was colloquial. It was like some of Pat's fictional work, pitched rather lower than it should have been. “She had no class, but she had distinction,” says Marion, making an interesting distinction herself.
¹⁵

There had always been something strange about Pat Highsmith's sense of humor. Its physical expression—her laughter—escaped from her like a rough beast bursting the bars of its cage. Friends and acquaintances have to search their vocabularies to find terms extreme enough to describe the sound of Pat's laughter: it was a “hoot,” a “chortle,” a “guffaw,” “thigh-slapping,” “a scream,” “loud and uncontrolled,” “reckless”
¹⁶
—and, as in the novels of Dostoyevsky (and as in Pat's own fictions), it often came in situations in which other people would have recoiled in horror or collapsed in tears.

Her agent for almost two decades, Patricia Schartle Myrer, writes:

Jonathan Kent, the British actor and director who says he was “formed” in childhood by seeing Alain Delon in
Purple Noon
(the French film version of
The Talented Mr. Ripley
) and then by reading everything Highsmith ever wrote, visited Pat at her house in Aurigeno in December of 1982, three months after he appeared as Ripley on the British television program
The South Bank Show
. He and Pat had done the show together—it was devoted to Pat's work—and Pat was so pleased by his performance that she wrote to her French editor, Alain Oulman, that Jonathan Kent was “the best Ripley I have seen since Alain Delon.”
¹⁸

Kent, who was especially sensitive to Pat's own sensitivities, says that the story of their meeting published in a previous biography—that before Kent had been introduced to Pat she had caught him secretly “stalking” her on their director's orders, backed him angrily up against a wall, and put her hands around his throat—is “not at all the way it occurred. The real, plain truth is that we met first and we set up the shots and she knew I would be trailing her. She didn't back me up against a wall; she would
never
have done that.”
¹⁹

Pat and Jonathan Kent occupied adjoining suites at the Savoy Hotel during the filming of
The South Bank Show,
and Kent says that he “could have gone on
Mastermind,
on
The $64,000 Question,
about her; I could have majored in her.” And Pat “loved” Jonathan's encyclopedic knowledge of her work, “as much,” he says, “as you could ever tell if Pat loved anything. You know, she'd sneak sly looks at you out of the corner of her eye and she would laugh.”
²⁰

For the benefit of such a guest—a handsome young male actor who had just played Ripley to her great satisfaction and who told her he was “formed” by her work—Pat was unusually accommodating. (Perhaps the fact that his surname—Kent—echoed the maiden name of her one of her muses, Virginia Kent Catherwood, had something to do with Pat's reception.) She picked up some chicken nuggets for lunch at the local Kentucky Fried Chicken equivalent—her idea of a feast—and jacked the house heat up so high that one of her cats “sucked all the fur off its tail.” Kent's room was so hot that he had to sleep with his windows wide open to the Swiss winter, and he could hear the BBC World Service playing in Pat's room—she slept, as always when without a lover, in her workroom—in the early hours of the morning.

Undisturbed by her habits and feeling quite close to Pat—“I found her completely restful to be with,” he says—Kent wanted to offer her something from his own history: a family story, “something I was rather saddened by.” So he told her something about his maternal grandmother, who had Alzheimer's “and didn't know who anybody was.” One day, his mother took a bunch of daffodils to the old lady. She thought they “were an army coming to get her” and promptly ate their heads off. When Kent related the story to Pat, “she screamed with laughter.

“She made me tell it twice more. And then we went out to lunch with Ellen Hill and she made me tell it again. And every time I told it she screamed with laughter. She had a very odd sense of humor. But I didn't mind because I liked her so much.”
²¹

Peter Huber, Pat's next-door neighbor in Tegna and the friend who was initially responsible for her move there, repeated the little joke that was Pat's favorite when she was living in her last house in Switzerland. It is called “The Japanese Wife Joke.” Pat told it over and over, Huber says, and it sent her into gales of “helpless laughter.” It goes like this:

“A Japanese gentleman invited his boss to his home. He instructed his wife exactly how to conduct the evening. And it was a lovely evening, the food was good, the conversation interesting, all went well. When the boss left, the wife made a deep bow before him and at that moment, her self-control escaped her: she broke wind. And everyone went on smiling and ignored the accident.