The Talented Miss Highsmith (74 page)

Pat liked to think of herself as singed by Jacqui (or Jacky, as the woman herself sometimes liked to spell her name), and noted that Jacqui had cancelled seven dates with her in a row—always a shortcut to Pat's heart. “Jacky is a fire I walk into,”
¹⁵
she wrote to Alex Szogyi proudly. And Pat told Alex that she had borrowed Jacqui's “foul tempers (but nothing else) for Heloise [Plisson],” Tom Ripley's richly inattentive, spoiled French wife.
¹⁶
But Pat was being coy; she would borrow quite a bit more from Jacqui than her “foul tempers” for Heloise. She imported Jacqui's
désinvolture
, her blond beauty (the “gold” lights in Heloise's hair remind Tom of money), her love of long absences on cruise ships with female companions, and her amorality. But Pat gave Tom and Heloise a much cooler relationship than she'd had with Jacqui, a relationship that, despite its improbability, would
last
.

After the shock of her parting with Tabea Blumenschein in 1978, Pat continued, with long intermittences on Tabea's part, to correspond with Tabea, whose chaotic further adventures are told in a number of the charmingly illustrated letters she sent to Pat. (Pat had most of Tabea's letters thrown into the garbage when she was preparing her archives for eternity.) In her cahiers, uncharitably, Pat went on criticizing Tabea's housing and money troubles; “failure” was still a sin for Pat, and Tabea hadn't fulfilled her expectations of becoming a movie star or a famous costume designer.

Early in 1988 Pat started to think about writing a story called “The Suicide of the Moth”—“Further adventures of T.B. whose balloon ruptured somehow around 1984. Prior to then she was going upward…. ‘Was she too mighty?' Yes, sure of herself, of the red carpet, of admirers, lovers. When she wrote me after 2½ yr. lapse, she had lost apartment. Was living on Gov't. charity, alone, jobless.”
¹⁷

Still, Pat continued to pull out her accordion-pleated billfold of photos of Tabea and Monique Buffet and to flash it around to friends, like an aging Edwardian gentleman showing naughty postcards of his chorus girl favorites. Pat and Tabea didn't meet, but Pat saw Monique for the last time when she went to Paris on book business in 1988. Pat was staying at the Hotel Edward VII, and she and Monique went out to dinner at a nearby Chinese restaurant.

No doubt it was the same Chinese restaurant at which Pat, on future visits, dined with the French writer and literary critic Josyane Savigneau and, later still, met with her new accountant, Marylin Scowden. Pat never did like to change venues once she'd gotten used to them. The night they met, Pat proudly showed off the plans for her “Casa Highsmith,” her last house in Tegna, to Monique—something she did with everyone now. And she claimed responsibility for the house's double-pronged design, too, never mentioning that she had an architect, Tobias Amman.

At dinner that night was the first time Monique had ever seen Pat obviously drunk. It was also the first time, says Monique, that she had ever felt “ashamed” of her. Pat was “making a fool of herself” in the restaurant, behaving badly to the waitstaff, but not to Monique. Pat asked Monique to spend the night. Monique refused. They continued to write to each other. And Monique, like Buffie Johnson and so many of the old friends Pat was inviting to Switzerland, found excuses for not visiting Pat in her forbidding new house.
¹⁸
The day after it happened, Monique heard the news of Pat's death, casually, between courses and cigarettes, in a bistro in the Boulevard St-Germain. She was dumbstruck.

In early 1989, Pat had written to Kingsley: “I am sick of [Ellen's] scolding and all around domineering, and have bid a polite adieu.”
¹⁹
But even at the very end of their friendship, Ellen Hill's authority was still looming large enough for Pat to have a “vivid dream in which Ellen Hill had been elected president of the United States.” Ellen's dream-elevation to America's highest office produced in Pat “an atmosphere of hope and change,” and her immediate response to it was typical—and it was funny, too, given her auslander prejudices, although Pat herself didn't see the humor in it. But when Pat woke up with the image of the newly presidential Ellen in her head, her most pressing thought was that Ellen Hill must be “the first person not born in USA to be elected President.”
²⁰

 

In Pat's short story “Two Disagreeable Pigeons” (published posthumously in 2002, but outlined in 1973 after she'd settled into Moncourt), an eponymous pair of London pigeons, Maud and Claud
²¹
—observed humorously and maliciously—are “simply mates, for two or three years now, loyal in a way, though at the bottom of their little pigeon hearts they detested each other.” Their regular Highsmith-colored day features persistent bird battering by vicious humans and the pigeons' own coordinated attack on a baby in a pram. Maud and Claud peck the infant's eye out and flutter away unrepentant and unpunished.

At day's end, Maud, the female pigeon, remembers how her mate Claud snatched half a peanut out of her beak and cheated her out of a meal, and how “she couldn't count on him for anything, not even to guard the nest where there was an egg.” She wonders: “Why did she live with him? Why did she, or they, live
here…
Why?” And then she settles down to sleep next to Claud in their nook in a wall in Trafalgar Square, “exhausted by her discontent.”
²²

Aside from Tom Ripley's unconvincing marriage to Heloise Plisson (Heloise is often absent enjoying herself on a cruise ship with a female friend; Tom is usually out having flirtatious fun with the boys); or Edgar and Hortense, the “truly in love” snails of
Deep Water
whose lengthy copulations are observed so tenderly by the psychopath-in-residence, Vic Van Allen; or Jack and Natalia Sutherland, the young couple in
Found in the Street
whose marriage is frankly enlivened by their mutual attraction to the same underage girl, the history of Maud and Claud, the two disagreeable pigeons united by hard living and even harder feelings, is the sole portrait of lasting conjugal relations to appear in any Highsmith fiction. And it's an accurate portrait, too, of the only union imaginable in Highsmith Country: bleak, untrusting, and undependable.

We might say, as Richard Ellmann said of Oscar Wilde, that Highsmith's fiction is a record of her feelings of love in that it excludes them so thoroughly. But it would be closer to the experience of Highsmith Country to acknowledge that Pat's work records her feelings of love by reversing them as faithfully as she did in life. Love, like no other emotion, brought out her ambivalence—and with it the awful rage that glares out so painfully from some of her later photographs.

Many of the murders in her novels can usefully be thought of as counters on her abacus of love. They substitute for love, they are instigated by love, they replace or react or add up to love. The murderers may change from draft to draft in her manuscripts, and so may the victims, but murder itself continues to be the categorical imperative, the one act which must take place in her work. And murder, in a Highsmith fiction, is almost always love's partner—while love itself is usually murder's victim. Only in
The Price of Salt
—a novel where the murder is confined to the metaphors—is love allowed to live on.

Pat's own defeats in the Love Wars were mostly self-defeats. Her doubts about her gender couldn't have helped. At the age of twelve she was already assessing herself: “I am a walking perpetual example of…a boy in a girl's body.”
²³
In her twenties, she was haunted by what a New Orleans fortune-teller had said to Mother Mary: “You have a boy,” the fortune-teller began and then stopped. “No, you have a girl—but she was meant to be a boy.” After Elizabeth Lyne had teased Pat about having her period, Pat wrote in her diary: “I can't help my other hormones, can I?”
²⁴
And, having used the word “woman” about herself in a letter to her friend Ronald Blythe, she quickly corrected herself: “if I can call myself that.”
²⁵

Although she took all the women whose names appear in the crowded diaries of her long, hot summers of 1944 and 1953 as lovers, Pat found it impossible to stay with any of them. Nor did she stay with any of the Virginias, the Jeans, the Jeannes, the Joans, the Anns, the Annes, the Ellens, the Katherines, Kathryns, Catherines or Carolines, the Diones, the Sheilas, the Helens, the Marions, the Lynns, the Moniques, the Marias, the Mickeys, the Billies or the Marys,
et al.
, who had, at one time or another, been so achingly available to her.

But even if she was unable to sustain her long relationship with Ellen Hill (so good for her work, so bad for her living) or her equally long relationship with the married Caroline Besterman (the last “adult love” of her life), Pat did manage to keep the resentments and furies of these failed love affairs alive and well for decades, as hot and bright—almost—as love itself.

Part 1

In the three levels of dark cellars under her high, narrow stone house in Aurigeno, the light-deprived seventeenth-century Swiss village to which she moved after the French fiscal authority, the
douane,
raided her house in Moncourt, France, Pat Highsmith kept, to borrow a phrase from one of her short stories, “nothing that meets the eye.”

Strictly speaking, however, there
were
a few objects tucked away in the first of her cellars, objects no Highsmith house was ever without: “a long trestle table…brown paper and string…saws, nails, screwdrivers, chisels, sandpaper,” as well as hammers, rasps and awls
¹
—the whole panoply of pointed, edged, angled, blunted, and sharpened instruments Pat used for the precise brutalities of her furniture making. Since 1933, when she was twelve and the only girl in the woodworking class at her junior high school in Fort Worth, Pat had been ripping raw materials apart and putting them back together again to make something new. It wasn't, she thought, all that different from what she did every day at her desk.

But in the penumbral cellars beneath her workroom, just where you might expect a writer obsessed by secrets, lies, and the rusty hinges of guilt to hide some of her best evidence, Pat stored nothing that belonged to her. Only a “neighbor's bicycle” (spotted by a sharp-eyed French journalist), leaned against a cellar wall, declining in the Stygian gloom.
²

Still, like a magician who makes a great show of pulling something out of a top hat and then suddenly displays the hat's empty crown, Pat liked the drama of flaunting these hollow, shadowy, scary spaces before her guests. Many a nervous visitor followed her past her worktable and down into the dark.

Was there, Highsmith's guests couldn't help but wonder, something those bare spaces might be concealing? Something like the corpse of the American art collector Tom Ripley had so casually dispatched (with a bottle of vintage Bordeaux) in his
own
black cellar at Belle Ombre in
Ripley Under Ground
?
³
Pat must have known how uneasy she was making her visitors—and still she continued to lead them down those cellar stairs and into the gloom.

Cellars, anyway, were never really where she stored the things in which she invested her feelings. She preferred to keep her meaningful objects under her eyes or close at hand, hiding their significance (as she hid so much else) in plain sight.

“I am superstitious about the influence of mental attitudes,” Pat wrote. “Therefore I am superstitious about the objects…with which I surround myself which in turn create my mental attitude. It is, in terms of actions, if one acts upon it, a really strong superstition.”
⁴

And she was very particular about the placement of her things. Kingsley, who was one of Pat's major sources of mailed objects and materials for nearly half a century,
⁵
recalls that “Pat was a bit like…do you remember a play called
Craig's Wife
?
^*
About a woman who, if you removed a matchbox an inch away from where she had left it, she would go berserk. Pat had a kind of fetish about placing things. When she couldn't locate something, she'd get quite upset. I moved an ashtray once on her table in Tegna, and she very rapidly swept it back into its proper position. She didn't say anything, but she glowered.”
⁶

Something similar happened shortly after Pat moved to Bucks County with Marijane Meaker—“probably the fall of '60,” says Meaker. Pat, who had been “complaining [that] her desk was so small,” was soon the recipient of a surprise gift: Marijane's own large desk, which Pat had “always envied.” Pat “clapped her hands with delight” and then, at dinner “she began to cry. She said it was so sweet of me but she could not give up writing at her small desk. She hadn't known how to tell me.”
⁷

Meaker wrote about the desk incident to Mary Highsmith (who had her own, well-bevelled reasons for keeping in touch with Pat's girlfriends), using it “to explain how [Pat] often was mysterious to me…[and making it an] example of the varied signals she sent out.”
⁸

Pat's behavior with the objects she owned continued to puzzle friends and lovers for decades; her “varied signals” seemed to be part of her own special binary code. Like a transmitting device left behind on the (bi)polar permafrost, she went on emitting contradictory messages for decades. Not until the very end of her life—when she had aged and iced and set herself down in Switzerland, a terrain as unfamiliar to her as real permafrost might have been (but she loved the “order” and “cleanliness” of it)—did she relax what Julian Symons called her “anacondan grip” and “turn loose of” some of her deep psychological divisions. Along with them went the distinctive double-mindedness that had always marked her writing. It was a serious artistic loss.

Josyane Savigneau, the French critic, writer, and eventual editor of
Le Monde des livres
in Paris, first went to interview Pat in her house in Aurigeno with a photographer early in 1987. Pat, Savigneau noticed, spoke a pure, old-fashioned American, “completely preserved by her exile.” She was “like a cat who might reach out and suddenly scratch,” and she “was terrified we would break something or move something; we were like barbarians to her.” Savigneau, “already paralyzed with respect for her,” was trying to be as delicate as possible with Pat, but “when the photographer started shooting, Pat became terrified; her sense of space was entirely invaded…. ‘Be careful,' she kept saying.' Be careful. BE CAREFUL!!'”
⁹

Phyllis Nagy, who met Pat in late 1987 in New York (see “
The Cake That Was Shaped Like a Coffin: Part 5
”), visited her in the spring of 1989 soon after Pat moved from Aurigeno to Tegna. Phyllis noticed that Pat's bookcases were filled with all the editions of her own published works and with nothing else. “Not another book by another writer was on display,” says Nagy, and Pat was in no hurry to unpack the rest of her library.
¹⁰

“Pat,” says Nagy, “was very capricious, easily offended, very touchy about all the things in her house. If you didn't compliment something she liked, she'd hold it against you.”
¹¹
Nagy found this attitude surprisingly “feminine.” Pat stopped corresponding with Nagy for “almost a year” when Phyllis failed to praise some of her paintings (and wrote to Kingsley that “Phyllis is without a doubt the most un-visual person I've ever encountered”).
¹²
When they resumed corresponding, Pat was as forthcoming as ever.

Because Pat never strayed far from her own psyche in creating, destroying, or accumulating—“My stories are another form of telling what I wish to do,” she remarked genially to an interviewer (who failed to flee the room, proving he didn't understand her meaning)
¹³
—she invested all her possessions with her long history of emotional advance and violent retreat, and with her deepest spiritual yearnings. With a brutality that cut through her natural reticence, Pat was perfectly capable of taking back certain objects she had given away, especially if she thought she might regret her “loss” later on.

In the heady New York summer of 1941 (Pat was twenty; the world and the relationship were new), her friend-and-something-more, the talented, well-connected, generous painter Buffie Johnson, “gave me a small green polo belt last night from Paris…. I started to give her my bracelet. I put it on her. But thinking about it…I made her give it back.”
¹⁴

But this is mild. A livelier attempt at repossession began soon after Stanley Highsmith's death in 1972, when Pat, newly settled in her Moncourt house, waged a fiercely fought four-year struggle in letters with her mother for custody of the “Hamilton Watch” and “watch chain” which she, Pat, had inexplicably given to Stanley Highsmith at the ages of twelve (watch) and twenty-one (chain). Or perhaps—Pat varied her stories—she was thirteen and twenty-two when she gave these gifts to Stanley.

In lengthy letters to Mary Highsmith, to her cousin, Dan; to her father, Jay B Plangman; and to Nini Wills, a friend of Mary, about the Hamilton watch and chain—objects whose long absence from Pat's sight had endowed with vibrant emotional drama—Pat wrote fetishistically graphic descriptions of both objects. She detailed their every scratch, curve, and surface, and her letters show how deeply and poignantly she invested her “earned objects” with her history and her desire, her sorrow and her rage, and her brokenhearted and perpetual sense of loss.

In an attempt to win Mary's friend Nini Wills over to
her
side of the Hamilton watch story—Pat still loved to tattle on Mary—Pat allowed herself to exercise a few of the compulsions with which she usually responded to any disturbance: numeration, classification, and substitution. Writing to Nini Wills on 9 March 1972, Pat mixed up her money and her memory, put a number to every single thing she did, and—unsuccessfully—tried to replace her mother with a pocket watch:

Nini Wills said to Mary Highsmith about the letter: “My God, no wonder she has that grim tight mouth in that newspaper picture. Boy, she went back to the embryo and scraped the womb, wouldn't you say?”
¹⁶

And Pat—fifteen years later, still brooding over the Hamilton watch but now hoping to turn the incident into a fiction about “the sick and cruel types who prey upon the elderly and the feeble-minded”—decided on no evidence at all that it was “[l]ikely [Nini Wills's] son got the famous pocket watch.”
¹⁷

Countering Pat's watch-and-chain sallies from France with a few forays of her own from Texas, Mary Highsmith, whose sense-memory for objects was exactly like her daughter's, began to agitate for the return of Pat's “teething ring.” Pat fended her mother off with a storm of logic, a tidal wave of accusation, and a Baedeker of the teething ring's travels since Mary had deposited it in London with Pat's ex-lover Kathryn Hamill Cohen “in Sept. 1959.”
¹⁸
And then Pat added another skirmish to the watch-and-chain war: now, she wrote, she also wanted “Stanley's cufflinks,” which had been “promised” to her. (This was a splendid but entirely futile diversionary tactic on Pat's part.)

Mary eventually won the watch-and-chain battle—that is, she didn't give them back to Pat—but it is difficult to say whether she prevailed through native cunning or whether the matter had merely slipped her failing mind.

Far more than cuff links, watches, and teething rings were involved in this last struggle for love and possession between the two Highsmith women. Like the emotional sleight-of-hand artists and serious drama queens they both were, Pat and Mary managed to substitute small items for large emotions, and to replace their disappointed love for each other with titanic quarrels. They went right on doing so for the rest of their lives.

During the same school year in which Pat acquired the Hamilton watch (1933–34)—the year Mary had gone back to Stanley in New York and Pat took up working with wood and sharpened instruments—the twelve-year-old Pat made another purchase. Somewhere in Fort Worth, Pat said, she picked up two “Confederate swords” (that's how she always described them)—and they are still in her archives: large, heavy, and absolutely lethal looking. The swords were an unusual acquisition for a twelve-year-old girl—but Pat was an unusual twelve-year-old.

Pat's swords might have been brandished south of the Mason-Dixon Line during the Civil War (still enshrined in memory by the Coates family who lost sons, brothers, and slaves to it), but they were certainly forged in Massachusetts: in Chicopee and Springfield, according to the inscriptions on their blades. Pat kept them in the classic crossed, duelling position on the walls of every house she ever occupied. It was not until the end of Mary Highsmith's life—but without mentioning Mary's decline and death as a motive—that Pat at last uncrossed her swords and displayed them, aligned and pointing in the same direction, on her wall in Tegna.

Kingsley Skattebol remembers that Pat told her more than one story about how she got the swords. One time, Pat said they belonged to one of her “Confederate uncles” another time, she said she bought them in an antiques store. And on a trip to New Hampshire with Mary and Stanley in July of 1937 when she was sixteen, a trip on which she managed to lose the “garnet ring which I chose & paid for myself” (Pat always had bad luck with rings), Pat wrote in her high school journal: “I buy second sword.”
¹⁹

No matter where Pat got her swords (or what stories she told about how she got them), she preferred to believe that she brought them back with her as souvenirs of her miserable year in Texas in 1933–34—the year she
never
forgave her mother for. Reading between her lines, Pat returned to her parents' cobbled-together marriage and cramped apartment in New York as double-minded as she was ever to be, with an offering of peace in one hand (the Hamilton watch for Stanley) and an instrument of war (a duelling sword or two) in the other. The other thing she brought with her to New York was less tangible, although her feeling for it lasted just as long as her feeling for her swords. It was her grandmother's good-bye kiss “wet on my upper lip, and I let it stay, dreading the inevitable time when the wind would dry it, and the coolness would be gone.”
²⁰