The Talented Miss Highsmith (67 page)

“When the husband came back into the house after seeing the boss off, he smiled at his wife, took out a sword, and cut her head off.

“She liked that joke so much,” said Peter Huber. “That's why I'm telling it to you.”
²²

Caroline Besterman loathed
Little Tales of Misogyny
and said plainly to Pat that publishing the stories would be a mistake. Pat noted coolly that Caroline had always found “my misogyny…one of my less endearing qualities.”
²³
Like Djuna Barnes, Pat was capable of writing both “for” and “against” women; but unlike Barnes, who started out with the physical revulsions of
The Book of Repulsive Women
(1915) and then went on to publish her own harrowing lesbian love story in
Nightwood
(1936), Pat began with the more or less romantically balanced power plays of
The Price of Salt
(1952) and went on to the corrosive loathings of
Little Tales of Misogyny
(1977).

Eight years before she'd met Caroline, in her amorous spring and summer of 1954 in New York City, Pat had been in a more accepting mood: “The three women I have loved most intensely in my life have been the only ones of all my amours who were definitely ‘bad for me.' J[oan] S[,] G[inny] C[atherwood], E[llen] H[ill].”
²⁴

The reason these women were “bad” for Pat—it is plain to see in what she wrote in her diary after falling in love with Ellen Hill—was also the reason they were “good” for her: her love for them continued to be partnered by murderous rage and ideas of death. “This ferocious strife between people in love, this clash of arms between the placing of a clock upon the bed-table…two people in love…bewildered as modern armies fighting with each other.”
²⁵

In Barbara Ker-Seymer's house in Islington in 1968, to which, says Barbara Roett, Pat had brought Madeleine Harmsworth, the young journalist who had come to interview Pat in Montmachoux and stayed on to become a lover, “Pat would come in, dial something on the phone, and we'd hear the answer-phone saying, ‘So and so isn't in, would you please leave a message,' and she'd have a long, made-up conversation with the person and then she'd close the door. And then she'd open it and suddenly say, ‘You can stuff it!'…Madeleine was there as her guest, [and] Pat's idea of interesting her was to be as dismissive as possible and to…telephone supposed lovers which she didn't have.”
²⁶

Ker-Seymer remained “amused” by Pat, perhaps because most of her friends from the 1920s—friends like Nancy Cunard, Brian Howard, and Dolly Wilde (with whom Ker-Seymer used to waltz around Dolly's parlor flat to the strains of a gramophone)—could have matched Pat's eccentric behavior with no effort at all.
²⁷
But even those notorious hell-raisers would never have thought to do what Pat did when the two Barbaras arrived in Moncourt for a visit in the early 1970s.

“We were given a lovely bedroom and we opened some French windows to the garden and Barbara [Ker-Seymer] gave out a piercing scream. And when I ran in there was a dead rat that had been thrown in the window. This was Pat's idea of a joke. So I threw it back out, narrowly missing her. That's how strange she was.”
²⁸

Pat's frequent greeting to the novelist Marion Aboudaram (Marion's two novels were written under her two first names, Dominique Marion), her lover after Madeleine Harmsworth, would be judged an unusual welcome from anyone. Marion was the woman to whom Pat had dedicated
Edith's Diary
(“Pat,” says Marion, “couldn't think of anyone to dedicate
Edith
to and so I said why don't you dedicate it to me?”),
²⁹
and she took the suburban train from Paris to Moncourt every weekend to be with Pat from 1976 to 1978. Pat used to meet Marion at the door and then brusquely strip her of her clothes. Not for sexual purposes, Marion says, but for a kind of complicated, cleansing-by-hand ritual that seemed to be wreathed in anger, guilt, and expiation.

“She washed my clothes all the time. When I came in she took off my raincoat, my trousers, I found myself in a bathing suit and she put the clothes in the bathtub and washed them. She did not even have a washing machine. And she washed her hands all the time and she took two showers a day.”
³⁰

“I should have just stayed one month with Pat. We were together three years—it's ridiculous—but just on weekends. But she phoned me every day, she wrote to me every day, very boring letters…. The price of the char, the price of carrots, that's all she ever talked about.”
³¹

For presents, Pat gave Marion a broom and a vacuum cleaner, but not the radiator Marion had hoped to get for her unheated studio in Montmartre. “‘Put a hot water bottle between your legs,' Pat said. ‘That's what I used to do in New York.'” But Marion also remembered how relaxed Pat could be, drinking and smoking and lounging in her garden shed, and how Pat made a tiny wooden boat for the little frog in her backyard to sail on. “Dorothy,” Pat called the frog charmingly as she set the amphibian asail on its new craft—although Dorothy's response to suddenly becoming the pilot of a small boat remains unrecorded.

“We laughed a lot,” Marion says, “but underneath it, I was anxious because she was such an alcoholic. She used to say to me, ‘Poor dear, you're married to an alcoholic.'”
³²
And while Pat's written invitations to Marion were humorous, they were also as literal as her other letters. Pat wrote: “Bring your ass and your typewriter but especially your ass.”
³³

Marion is still laughing about one invitation she received from Pat. “I'm Jewish and you know I hate Germany because of that. [Pat knew this.] And the only place Pat ever invited me to go was Germany! Her translator in Hamburg, a nice old lady [Anne Uhde], invited Pat, and Pat invited me.

“Germany! The
only
place in three years Pat ever suggested we go together! And Pat cried and cried but of course I wouldn't go.”
³⁴

Francis Wyndham, himself a writer of perceptive fiction, whose brilliant review of
The Cry of the Owl
in the
New Statesman
in 1963 included the first serious analysis of Highsmith's work in the United Kingdom
^*
(he dispensed with the idea that Highsmith was a crime writer; “[g]uilt is her theme,” he wrote),
³⁵
says he always found Pat “companionable” and “comfortable” to be with, “without a writer's ego and without a writer's front.”
³⁶
But he remembered an anomalous evening when he and Pat went to dinner with one of his colleagues at the
Sunday Times,
a “totally heterosexual” woman, and “Pat did something I've seen sometimes with male gays, a kind of aggression towards the woman. And M. didn't care, but in the end I was rather embarrassed…. And then I suddenly realized it was an attraction on Pat's part. It wasn't obvious. It was some kind of aggression towards somebody she'd quite like to get off with. Maybe she'd tried and M. hadn't responded and I hadn't noticed.”
³⁷

Even Pat's love for her cats—often counted as her longest and most successful emotional connection—could bristle with aggression.

At twenty-four, alone in her East Fifty-sixth Street Manhattan studio in September of 1945 with a cat in full estrus, Pat coolly set down in her cahier her violent response to living with an animal in heat.

And Peter Huber remembers that in the late 1980s and 1990s in Tegna “Pat's routine way of showing affection to her cats was holding the back of her fist in front of the animals' noses (at a distance of about ten inches).”
³⁹

A visit to Moncourt in 1974 by the German filmmaker Wim Wenders and the Austrian writer Peter Handke resulted in a penetrating article by Handke about Pat. It ends with this vignette:

And in Moncourt in the summer of 1971, the two Barbaras from Islington watched in disbelief as Pat, who, as Barbara Roett says, “was really concerned about her cat,” picked up her chocolate point Siamese Semyon (the same cat Frédérique Chambrelent saw obsessively chasing its tail whenever she came to visit), and “put it in a tea cloth, this poor crazed, terrified animal. And she swung it round and round the room. And I said: ‘Pat, put that cat down!' And she said, ‘Na-ow, he loves it.'

“That was her way, her hack-handed way, like a small boy, of showing notice to an animal…. She was isolated to a really appalling degree.”
⁴¹

In a letter written to Kingsley in October of 1953 when she was still trailing Ellen Hill around Europe, Pat provided a rationale for her
douleurs d'amour.
It is only a rationale (and not a reason), but it shows how historically and psychologically alert Pat could be to the collisions caused by her crisscrossed desires—and how fatalistically she always gave in to them. (
Criss Cross
was one of her first titles for
Strangers on a Train
.)

“The horrible flaw in my make-up is that I never cared for the artistic type like myself, so that sooner or later…there is a shipwreck. A fundamental incompatibility.”
⁴²

Pat Highsmith really did live her love life—and most of the rest of her life as well—upside down (“sideways” was another explanation she offered in 1947 in her perfectly pitched “Dialogue Between My Mother and Myself”: “sideways is the only way the world can be looked at in true perspective”)
⁴³
and doubled over with ambivalence. She was usually unhappier about being happy than she was about being unhappy.

Put it another way: even when Highsmith was desperately unhappy, she wasn't all that unhappy about
being
unhappy—as long as she could write about it.

Part 12

In the fall of 1973, a month before she turned her mind to listing those small crimes for “Little Tots” (see “
How to Begin: Part 1
”), Pat was in London visiting Caroline Besterman, about whom she was still entertaining some rather complicated fantasies and resentments. She distracted herself with alternate futures: the hope that “one can be happy (and happier) alone” and the illusion that “I would be a fool not to be patient for another year in view of the fact that I've sunk eleven years into this.”
¹

Once again Pat was keeping another list (and checking it twice) of Caroline's imagined “campaign” against her of more than a decade ago (when they were still lovers) and she noted, matter-of-factly, that Caroline was “now without a buffer state” her borders were undefended. And Pat was enlisting support from old friends like Arthur Koestler in this long-past love affair's long-lost battles. For Pat, Mars would
always
be in bed with Venus—and making war was the natural concomitant to making love.

When she wrote out her list for “Little Tots” in the middle of November 1973, Pat had just returned from a four-day sojourn at the Hotel Europa in Zurich (the hotel matchbooks are in her desk drawer), making publicity appearances for her Swiss publisher, Diogenes Verlag. In Zurich, she signed books; read from her newly published collection of short stories,
The Snail-Watcher,
in English and German; and lunched several times at the Kronenhalle, where James Joyce used to eat—noting with characteristic precision that Joyce's personal waitress, Emma, was still there, but was now “on part-time duty.”

It always takes her “3 or 4 days to quiet down” from a publicity tour—about as long as it takes her to quiet down from receiving a letter from Mother Mary. And she's nervous, too, because she expects to go back to London in December for a medical test. One of the reasons she made that little list of unobtrusive ways in which children could murder their parents was because it helped to settle her nerves.

Here in Moncourt, in the
hameau
, her isolation is feverishly populated: filled with the writing of gossipy letters, the unexpected ringing of the telephone, the ultimately unwelcome (though usually invited) visitors, and the society of her next-door neighbors, the Anglo-Irish writer-translator couple Desmond and Mary Ryan, with whom she spends so much time socializing—and about whom she will later spend so much time complaining. The Ryans' daughter Juliette, who grew up with Pat next door, still lives in her parents' house. Juliette Ryan always found Pat “very intelligent…a great woman.” Pat, she said, finally got “fed up” with keeping snails as pets (she'd been travelling with her snails since the 1940s) and “let them loose in the garden, and somehow, many ended in our garden.”

And so, to this day, descendants of Patricia Highsmith's original snails are busily reproducing themselves in a
hameau
in suburban France. And whenever Juliette Ryan finds a “Highsmith snail” in her garden she throws it back over the wall onto “Pat's property.”
²
But Pat would probably have told her not to bother. In one of the tenderest fictional evocations of lovemaking Pat Highsmith ever wrote (characteristically, the scene takes place between the two snails in
Deep Water,
a novel of extreme psychological violence), the book's central psychopath, Vic Van Allen, hovering over his mating snails Edgar and Hortense, remembers “the sentence in one of Henri Fabre's books about snails crossing garden walls to find their mates, and though Vic had never verified it by his own experiment, he felt it must be so.”
³

The legend, much circulated by French, English, and German journalists (with serious support from Pat), that Pat is a “recluse” in Moncourt because she lives privately, is nonsense. Juliette Ryan remembers:

“Pat would come over just about every night to drink when she finished her workday and she'd stay and stay and stay. And since she wasn't interested in eating, it was difficult [to] get rid of her…. I remember the ballet that would ensue when my father would try to escort her to the door. If he got too close, she'd lag back, and he'd have to go a bit forward. It took them quite a bit of time to get Pat to the door every evening.”
⁴

It was in her upstairs workroom in Moncourt where Pat wrote a revealing essay about another novelist, a novelist who moved house even more than she did (thirty-five times in the Los Angeles area alone)
⁵
and who was, for a few well-paid weeks, part of the intricate Hitchcock machine that produced the brilliant film of
Strangers on a Train.
Pat's essay on Raymond Chandler—“A Galahad in L.A.” (published as the introduction to
The World of Raymond Chandler
)
⁶
—was written in the year
Edith's Diary
appeared, 1977. Pat had just read Frank MacShane's biography of Chandler, and it focused her mind on Chandler's life and on what, as a home-schooled Freudian, she did and did not share with him by way of artistic impulse. It was Chandler's childhood in a matriarchal household, his sense of dislocation, his addiction to alcohol, and his chivalrous, intense, and nonmonogamous marriage to an older woman that gave Pat the helping hand she needed to clamber up over the slippery subject Raymond Chandler proved himself to be. “
Strangers on a Train
gave Chandler fits during his Hollywood script writing period,” Pat wrote, “and from his grave Chandler has given me tit for tat.”
⁷

Pat's own obsessive mining of her childhood left her surprised that Chandler didn't “make use of the formidable emotional material at his disposal. But just how formidable or important real events are is a matter of how important a writer cares to make them.” Pat wrote as though writers had a choice in the matter of calling up “real emotional events.” She herself had very little.

Despite her professed lack of interest in style, Pat revelled in Chandler's. His often lyrical, always outré similes delighted her into repeating one: “He reeled back as if I had hung a week-old mackerel under his nose.”
⁸
It was the compromise he had to strike on style that made Chandler so miserable while he was working on the script for
Strangers on a Train
—work from which Alfred Hitchcock fired him, replacing him with Czenzi Ormonde. Chandler wrote to his agent, Carl Brandt, that any “positive style” in a Hitchcock script “must be obliterated or changed until it is quite innocuous.”
⁹
By which he meant that Alfred Hitchcock's was the only style allowed in a Hitchcock film.

Although Pat acknowledged that Chandler “found his first success in writing tough, popular pulp magazine stories, and his books were outgrowths of this formula fiction,” she neglected to mention that she, too, had been published in the very same “best of the pulps,”
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
.
¹⁰
As always, she buried her biographical references deep in her prose, comparing Chandler's writing with the flat, vivid paintings of Edward Burra, the eccentric, wonderfully talented watercolorist she'd met at Barbara Ker-Seymer's house in London. (Burra seems to have done his best to avoid Ker-Seymer's house when Pat was there; a drinker himself, he was ruffled by her extravagant imbibing.)
¹¹
And comparing it again to the uncompromising black lines of the paintings of Fernand Léger, whose cocktail party she'd been so thrilled to attend with Buffie Johnson in the summer of 1941, Pat slyly inserted her life in her writing in ways that Chandler never did.

In June of 1979, a year after Pat had finished her article on Chandler (and had had her delicate balance overturned by Tabea Blumenschein—and then partially restored by Monique Buffet), a fifteen-page article featuring Highsmith in her Moncourt house was published in a major French magazine,
L'Express
. The article, “Three Days with Patricia Highsmith” by the French novelist and journalist Noëlle Loriot, was advertised rather grandly: “For three days Patricia Highsmith renounced her solitude to receive Noëlle Loriot at her home.” The piece is a nuanced and perceptive portrait of Pat in her favorite house, necessarily concealing more than it reveals. The three-day stay with Pat Highsmith proved to be very heavy going for Mlle Loriot.

“To discuss Patricia Highsmith,” Noëlle Loriot said to me, “it is necessary to talk about her alcoholism and her lesbianism. The two go together…. I think she drank because she could not fully express her lesbianism and was ashamed of it.” Loriot, who had been introduced to Pat by a mutual friend some years before she wrote her article, had watched Pat, on the first weekend she'd moved to Moncourt, stare with incomprehension at a bidet. Although Pat had been visiting France since 1949 and had already lived in three houses near Fontainebleau and Nemours, she seemed to have no idea what a bidet was for. Because of this, Loriot concluded privately—it was a very French deduction—that Pat had never slept with a man. Loriot also had the impression that Pat had been a lover of Judy Holliday. Of her three days in Moncourt with Pat, Loriot says:

Noëlle Loriot, like so many other Highsmith guests, spent most of her time in Pat's house going hungry. But because she had come to stay in February, she froze to death as well as starved. Pat kept the house at 16 degrees centigrade (60.8 degrees Fahrenheit) and served one light meal a day. “I kept taking her to bistros and restaurants [to get food and keep warm, Loriot said.] Her physique was frightening; she never ate.” Loriot attributed, as any French person might, Pat's lack of humor to her
“côté allemagne,”
her German blood. “At the end of three days, I couldn't stand it anymore—and neither could she!” But, says Loriot, Pat had “a physical dignity” which she kept even when
“morte-ivrogne,”
dead drunk. And she thought Pat had very successfully “pulled the wool” over the eyes of the French and the Germans, because so much of her writing was flat. The French verb for “pulling the wool” over people's eyes is
bluffer
, to bluff. “Pat bluffed everyone,” Loriot said.
¹²

In a more truthful world, a “reclusive” author who allows a journalist to stay at her house for three whole days probing her life and work for a national magazine might, for starters, have her status as a “recluse” reassessed. Recluses don't open their homes to members of the press—nor do they wish to see their names in national magazines. But such is the world of publicity that this long, illustrated piece in a popular French magazine about the solitary Patricia Highsmith (all too ready to talk about the unpublishable parts of her private life, it turned out, but very reluctant to talk about her writing) only enhanced Pat's reputation for solitude and privacy. Pat's usual economies with the truth and sly withholdings of information didn't help.

Pat refused to admit that she ever saw or corresponded with Mary McCarthy in Paris (she was doing both); she said she knew nothing of Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes was one of the inspirations of her youth, she was rereading Holmes stories in Moncourt, and she'd gone to London in April of 1969 to do a feature piece for
Queen
magazine on Billy Wilder's film
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
); she said that suspense didn't interest her (she'd written a book on the subject—admittedly, never really explaining it). Her characters had nothing to do with her, she insisted; she merely observed them “as if they were snails.” (This was Pat's biggest bluff.)
¹³

She invented nothing, she told Noëlle Loriot. “I read newspapers”—here she was telling the truth—“from the first to the last line: they are what inspire me. A newspaper is an anthology of cruel stories.” And then she repeated her usual explanation for her characters. She preferred men for their actions. “Women always return to the house.” Just as Pat herself always did.

“Believe me,” Pat said, unbelievably, after a long list of the usual complaints about Mother Mary, “I am completely objective concerning my mother.”

She had chosen France, she went on, because “the French are less boring than the English and more serious than the Italians…. I tried the English countryside: deadly.” And she insisted that she visited her neighbors the Ryans only once a week.
Very
briefly. And sometimes the Ryan daughter, back from Oxford, would visit her. “We speak often,” Pat said grandly and vaguely of her conversations with Juliette Ryan, “of my childhood.”

Noëlle Loriot could not print Pat's revelations about her lovers nor what she herself was feeling: that Pat was not a “sympathetic woman,” that “she was not natural with women, for her it was a punishment to make love,” that she was “a sick woman.” Loriot had already written in a review in
L'Express
that the style of
Edith's Diary
was not commensurate with its insights. “
Edith's Diary,
for me, was her chef d'oeuvre but [Pat] knew that it was badly written.” After Jean-François Joselin (another French journalist Pat knew) had contradicted, in
Le Nouvel Observateur,
Loriot's opinion about the awkward style of
Edith's Diary
, Pat had said to Noëlle Loriot: “You were right.”
¹⁴