The Talented Miss Highsmith (7 page)

Of course, Pat had her mother's Christian Science to combat (evil, Mary Baker Eddy wrote, is only a form of ignorance), and she did so with frequent and convoluted disquisitions on Jesus, with whom, just like her early idol Dostoyevsky, she tended to identify. Later on, a kind of ensorcelled and ecstatic union with a long list of female lovers was her closest approach to religious communion—and much of the inspiration for her writing. (“With the complete opening of the heart in love of another person, there is surely an opening directly to God.”)
⁸⁶

The last person to share a house with her shortly before her death (he was on his way to a monastery and taking care of Pat Highsmith was his six-month preparation for monastic life) thought she was seeking some kind of spiritual life, but couldn't face the “cage” of religion. Religion was one of the two subjects he had to stop discussing with her.

But I am getting ahead of her story.

All through the 1970s, at her house in the hamlet of Moncourt (the house she loved the best and the one she kept the longest), Pat had a near neighbor, a Czechoslovakian émigré who occasionally did odd jobs for her. Monsieur Knet was exactly the kind of self-made man Pat liked to trade small talk with. He used to return home from his night job in the early-morning hours and note the lighted roof window in Pat's upstairs bedroom—the only light visible at that hour in the
hameau
—and the sound of her venerable Olympia portable typewriter clickety-clacking across the courtyard.

And that is how Monsieur Knet remembered Patricia to me: a sharply syncopated sound in the night, a rectangle of eery illumination, a woman sitting at her desk, writing, he said, “frightful things dripping with blood.”

But then he remembered one more thing: “But if she so much as scratched her finger, there would be a
terrible
drama.”
⁸⁷

Typing away in the attic of her favorite of all the temporary houses she hopes to make permanent, the top of her head framed by the high, lighted window in her writing room so that she appears to her neighbor as a mostly missing portrait nailed up to the night sky, Patricia Highsmith steadily pilots her old German typewriter into the early hours of a cool French dawn…. It's as good an introduction as any to the life of this profoundly complicated writer who, despite all her restless travels, made her most rewarding journeys seated at her desk in what she called an “appointment kept on the edge of a chair.”
⁸⁸

It scarcely needs saying that “the edge of a chair” is where people usually perch when they expect to receive bad news.

Patricia Highsmith's news
is
disturbing—perhaps it was even more disturbing for her than it is for her readers—and she always went to the ends of her nerves to get it. But there is nothing like taking that journey with her (nothing like it in the
world,
in fact) for illuminating the resemblances between what your imagination has been concealing from you and the pitiless exposures of her dark and dangerous art.

And here that journey must continue.

I wish you a
bon voyage
.

Part 1

In the simple act of forgery—by no means her first or her last—committed in her thirty-fourth writer's notebook in the spring of 1978, Patricia Highsmith pretended that it was April, that she was in London, and that she was making sketchy notes on an interview she had just completed with “one of the very few journalists I've ever liked!”

Well, the first part was true enough.

Pat
had
been in North London on 4 April, recuperating from her official duties at the Berlin Film Festival, alarming her friends with her behavior, and entertaining impolite thoughts about a journalist. Not the amiable young man she says she has just spoken to, but the intrusive woman who called to ask her opinion on the “man who [had just] knifed the Poussin in the National Gallery.”
¹

Disobliging behavior to members of the press—her little exercise in homeland defense—is nothing new for Pat Highsmith, who usually prefers to secure her borders
before
she is invited to explore them by pushy journalists. On the long list of loathing she gleefully compiled during her thirty-five years of self-exile from the United States, “circling vultures” (her term for members of the press who want to write her biography) vies for pride of place with Women Who Remind Her of Her Mother. “Journalists,” she wrote scornfully. “I prefer prostitutes, who sell only their bodies, not their minds.”
²
Every lengthy interview she has ever given to a journalist—and despite her reputation for reclusiveness, she has given many—has been marked by evasion, misdirection, and what could politely be construed as a distinct economy with the truth.

Of course, there are regular exceptions to Pat's personal hate parade. She is pleased to have articles by the journalists and authors she respects (like Francis Wyndham, Noëlle Loriot, Julian Symons, and Josyane Savigneau) form the public perception of her work. And women who behave like her mother, Mary (not to mention Mother Mary herself), have been the bliss and bale of her life as a lover.

But here she is in the scented spring of 1978 writing that she's in London, in April, in conversation with a journalist she likes, when in fact it's May, and she's back in her house in suburban France; alone with her disturbing emotions (love again, the feeling she most often confuses with murder or self-extinction) and enclosed in her customary habitat: a cone of watchful darkness.

What's more, she is poised on the edge of some very characteristic trouble with her new friend, the likeable journalist. It's the kind of trouble that only an imagination as concentrated, as detailed, and as eccentric as Patricia Highsmith's can produce.

Why Pat was forging entries in her notebooks, and what the slow roiling of her emotions was about to provide for a hapless member of the press, are important keys to the imagination of an author whose own character is as difficult to “undo” as the famous set of double-nested Bramah locks which forced the great Harry Houdini—an artist only sightly more obsessed with escape than Patricia Highsmith—into an unbecoming act of forgery himself.
^*

On 22 March, thirteen days before her trip to London, Pat began a fortnight's stay in Berlin as a jury member of the 1978 Berlin Film Festival. In what might have reminded her of her own partitioned imagination, the ten-foot-high depression-gray Berlin Wall, fancifully garnished with barbed wire, still divided this city on whose kinkier qualities the fifty-seven-year-old Pat had been taking desultory notes since August of 1976. Because she cast the net of her obsessions over everything she looked at, the Berlin of Pat's cahier seems to be the setting for a Highsmith novel: it teams with people in disguise, violent inexplicable acts, and sudden odd affinities.

A “sturdy macho girl” in a lesbian bar pokes Pat in the ribs, declares she's “not too soft,” then smashes her glass of vodka on the floor. Pat rather admires this gesture. She has been frequenting gay, lesbian, and transvestite bars like the Ax-Bax, Romy Haag, and Pour Ellen to save her “heart from the boring bourgeois” she is “otherwise surrounded by” at the film festival. She receives these small aggressions from her barmate as friendly overtures. Possibly she is influenced by the fact that the sturdy girl has already paid for her vodka.

A few snapshots from Pat's infrequent visits to Germany (this was her fourth) live on in her archives. In two or three of them, she is grinning and appears to be almost at ease. She
is
almost at ease—or in some vague relationship to that condition—and this anomaly is due to the presence of the other figures in the photos: a troupe of transvestites who have dolled themselves up for the camera in sequins, feathers, and more makeup than most people manage to apply in a year. Pat feels right at home with them.

“No wonder Berliners liked disguises!” she writes in the book that she will set partially in Berlin,
The Boy Who Followed Ripley
. “One could feel free, and in a sense like
oneself
in a disguise.”
³

In public (private is another matter), Pat still tends to wear beautifully starched and ironed clothing—shirts, vests, and pants—which she still mail-orders from Brooks Brothers in the United States. She slips her feet into men's black loafers whenever she can and accessorizes her “look” with what could be mistaken for her own version of transvestism: a scarf, a necklace, a bracelet, even a trace of lipstick.

In a photograph taken in the early 1940s in New York City by her friend the great photographer Ruth Bernhard, Pat looks attractively and impenetrably thoughtful. In other photographs from the same era by another friend, Rolf Tietgens, she seems to be provocatively and abstractedly
garçonne.
Interpreted in her twenties in very different ways by two photographers who were competing for her attentions, Pat still manages not to give away a great deal.

Photographs of Patricia Highsmith at fifty-seven, however, are more likely to arrest than to attract. Her posture, as always, is braced against embarrassment, but her face seems to be involved in a furious rebellion against her oxford collars and her preppy, perfectly turned-back cuffs. Her eyes are heavily pouched now, the parabola of the jaw is swollen, and the provocative pout of her mouth in adolescence has given way to the pendulous lower lip of middle age. The ivory of her skin is creased, stained, and lined by her heavy drinking and smoking and—even worse for her complexion—by the violent ideas which have worked their way through her imagination. A thicket of bangs provides the cover through which she still looks up and out at the world with a remarkably sharp regard.

At twenty, as Gabrielle Chanel famously said, you have the face you were born with. At fifty, you have the face you have earned.

In Paris restaurants, where French waiters are uncomfortably good at reading gender code, Pat is sometimes directed to the men's lavatory.

“Now, matter of fact, I am addressed as M'sieur so often it is quite disconcerting. Granted long hair doesn't do much to make one look more feminine these days, I should think a touch of lipstick and a necklace would. No. I am halted from going into ladies' rooms. ‘Not that door M'sieur!' It's enough to drive one mad.”
⁴

Pat thought that waiters stopped her “because I have big feet and skinny thighs.”
⁵
She had to think something.

Certainly, there is room to speculate about who the “real” cross-dresser is in those photographs of Pat and her merry band of transvestites from the Fatherland. For the moment, it is enough to remember that Pat's letters to her mother were filled with lists of clothing as specifically described as the costumes in her novels.

“People,” Pat notes, ever-hopeful on her nights out in Berlin that a quick change means a new life, “carry two changes of clothing for the evening.” She likes “the unreality of the city…,” its “end of the world quality,” the fact that it is “artifically maintained and is in danger of being abandoned.” Berlin in 1978 is definitely Highsmith Country.

But Pat was not writing her Berlin notes when she was in Berlin. She wrote up her notes—they continued to be the skeleton of every fiction she devised—when she was back at her house in Moncourt, after her short detour through London. She was weeks away from what she appeared to be writing about with such immediacy.

“A pity,” she writes, confessing to her forgery like the good Dostoyevskyan she is, that “I didn't keep a diary all those thirteen days.”

For the past forty years, chronological notation has been Patricia Highsmith's lifeline; the increasingly fraying strand she follows compulsively through the
un
chronological labyrinth she has made of her life. She began taking notes on herself, her ideas, and her surroundings at the age of fifteen or sixteen (she says twelve, but those notes are lost) when she was living with her family in Manhattan and acknowledging her unconventional emotions and the even more unconventional ways she found to accommodate them. Her obsessive intelligence quickly codified the note taking into two categories: her writer's notebooks, to which she gives the slightly elevated term “cahiers” and which she uses as a seedbed for her fictions; and her personal “diaries,” the “journals” to which she confides the often extreme details of her intimate life.

The cahiers never vary, either in shape or form: they are always Columbia University or New York University notebooks (or notebooks identical in size to these) with firm boards, wire rolls to bind them, and lined pages. And, starting with Cahier 26, they always begin with a front-cover list of the places she has travelled to and they always end with an inside-the-back-cover list of the book titles she is considering. They are further divided into rigidly subtitled and heavily cultivated creative territories: “People and Places,” “Keime” (German for “germs,” a fertile term she lifted from Henry James), daily notes, favorite quotes, lengthy ideas for longer fictions, as well as “Notes on an Ever-Present Subject”: the rubric for her persistent musings on her own and everyone else's homosexuality. Pat conscientiously maintained these categories in all her cahiers throughout her entire writing life.

Sometimes Pat rehearses the motives for her prolixity in the cahiers, and sometimes she simply tries to deduce her motives from her actions. “But there must be a certain core of self-respect in a person who continuously keeps a diary. Maybe he doesn't intend to look back, but someone else might, even if the diary is in code.”
⁶

Code is the word for it. From her very first entries, Pat flogged herself into double duty by keeping her notebooks and diaries in five languages: serviceable English (or, rather, good American) in the main, but also ungainly French, bad Italian, awkward German, and a sprinkling of more or less strangled Spanish. (“I am so ambitious that I must telescope 2 separate ambitions—writing a diary and learning a language.”)
⁷
Regularly, she mixes up which materials should go in which book (notebook or diary)—and then apologizes with the guilt of someone who feels her impulses to be so unruly that she just
has
to corral them into the proper category.

Days, months, and years after she has filled up the pages of her cahiers and diaries, she continues to insert marginal comments, underlinings, and exclamation points. These remarkings and rereadings—from the vantage point of a self-critical present or an embittered future—ensure that Pat's longest and most crucial conversations are always with herself: “This doesn't get any point across. And furthermore it's
weak
!”
⁸

Occasionally, Pat the Part-Time Librarian takes up the pen and starts to cross-reference the material in the notebooks with the material in her diaries.
⁹
She doesn't want future readers of any of these confessional works to miss a trick or overlook an implication. And because she's practical about what her imagination produces, and also because waste of any kind makes her angry, she likes to remind herself that there is yet plenty of useful material for fiction to be mined from these little life-books.

Still, any writer who keeps eight thousand pages of notebooks and diaries in five languages—four of which she has never mastered—and, what's more, keeps them in a hand as difficult to decipher as a physician's scrawl on a prescription pad, really does raise the question of just how much she wants people to know about what is
in
this mountain of pages she left behind. Pat's family in Fort Worth used to labor over the “hieroglyphics” in her letters home, and even then, said her cousin Dan Walton Coates, they “couldn't ever tell if she was saying that she was coming home on the seventeenth or leaving on the seventeenth!”
¹⁰

Moreover, because Pat is committed to the principle that nothing is as it seems to be, and because she cannot allow herself to vacate her lifelong habit of keeping the chronological time (even when she is interrupting the chronological clock), she does just what her fictional characters do when
their
“real” relations to the exterior world start to crumble.

She fakes it. She forges the dates and the places—long after she has lived through the times and the experiences—to make it appear that she has not turned her detailed, daily-kept notations into records which are more like memoirs than like chronicles. Gore Vidal, Pat's fellow expatriate and occasional correspondent, makes a lucid distinction: a memoir, he writes, is “how one remembers one's own life.”
¹¹
Memory is not history.

For now, it is useful to note that a writer—especially a writer like Patricia Highsmith who is working in what she swears to you is her most explicit manner—can't always be taken at her word.