The Talented Miss Highsmith (83 page)

Pat wrote to everyone about the Koestlers' suicides, but she wrote most fully to her sympathetic German translator, Anne Uhde. Murder—self-murder in this case—always fired up Pat's imagination, and as she was writing her description to Uhde she couldn't help re-creating the scene of the “crime,” altering it rather prudishly to suit her taste and echoing in a backhanded way her own short tale of horror and gore, “Woodrow Wilson's Necktie.”

A year later the Koestlers' suicides were still on Pat's mind, and now she was blaming both of them: “Cynthia was a willing, clinging vine…. Arthur would never have tied himself up with a woman who had any ambition, will, even strong personality of her own.”
³⁹

The lack of light in Aurigeno was draining Pat; the jagged mountain—the mountain view from her Aurigeno house is so exaggerated as to almost induce vertigo—was minatory. Worse, all the stone houses in Aurigeno have roofs which are sharply peaked, so the village itself looks like a miniature mountain range. Even in summer the steep walk to Pat's house up the solid stone walk was slippery, and the house's barred windows were forbidding. Pat wrote that the mountain produced “a depressing effect, a feeling of being closed in, with consequent emphasis on self-sufficiency, tendency to smugness, maybe alcoholism in the types prone to it…. I notice among outsiders like me who live here, that a great deal of time is spent in relating real or imaginary slights, insults, neglects, attitudes, to any friend or ally that will listen. Maybe it is because the community is small and little new blood comes in. Or does Ticino make people nervous?”

“Nothing's alive”? Self-sufficient characters drinking alone in dark houses and brooding over “imaginary slights, insults, neglects”? A “depressing effect, a feeling of being closed in,” a terrain that makes people “nervous”? We are in Highsmith Country again, the only country on earth with a permanent population of one. But for its sole begetter, living in Highsmith Country was less comfortable than imagining it. In the shadows, immured in granite, Pat was beginning to let go of much of what had defined her in the past. The woman who in her teens and twenties had insisted that reading was her major “drug” stopped reading in Aurigeno for more than two years. She continued to saw and hammer away in her workroom, but for the first time she had no garden, and nothing bloomed for her but the sprouts from an occasional avocado pit skewered by a toothpick and suspended over a glass of water. The house itself was not—as almost every one of her other dwellings had been—anywhere near the sight or the sound of water. She had, in every sense, set herself in stone.

Every few days Pat turned on her portable Grundig radio to “restore her sanity” with a little classical music. “I realise that I may be reaching the point at which I think everyone is a bit cracked but me. What are people saying about me behind my back? Could I face it if I knew?”
⁴⁰

She began to give herself little sanity tests again. Could she follow the sense of this World Service broadcast? She could. But her mood lightened only with travel or with new acquaintances—and then not for very long.

One of Pat's new acquaintances was David Streiff, who had recently taken over the directorship of the Locarno Film Festival and was busily raising its profile. Streiff wrote to Pat, offering her an “Honor Card”—a free pass to the festival, which he also offered to other notables in the area like Luise Rainer, the film actress Pat had met in New York in 1948 at Leo Lerman's Sunday salon. Pat was “proud to have the Honor Card,” pleased to be singled out, and, of course, delighted not to have to pay for her tickets.
⁴¹
She never much liked the films.

In the blistering August heat of 1983, during the running of the Locarno Film Festival, David Streiff invited Pat to the Grand Hotel in Locarno. “She didn't want the menu, but she wanted a pizza,” he says, “which they had to bring back from some other place, and even then, she only ate the tomatoes.” Whenever they dined together after that, they went mostly to Tegna to Pat's favorite little restaurant next to the cemetery, and Pat would always order spaghetti. And Streiff always paid for the meals.

“The ritual was I came to her house, we drank something there, I beer, she whiskey, we went by car, her broken-down car, to the restaurant. I accepted the fact that she only took a few spoonfuls and the rest went into this famous plastic bag [for] the cats…and then she took me back to Locarno…. She was not a very good driver, absentminded, not practical [but] she always found her way back and she sent a postcard or a call so I knew she got back alive…. She'd drive back with [a bottle of scotch] in her car.”
⁴²

She remained, he says, consistent in “character”—that is, dominating—but revealed more of herself to him as their relations progressed. They always spoke in “American,” and Pat, never happy to come to a settled opinion about anything by herself, made use of Streiff's expertise in film, sending him the Diogenes film contracts for her books to look over. From her comments on the films she saw, Streiff doesn't think Pat knew what was “good or bad vis-à-vis her own work in films.” They had “an easy contact” because he, too, is gay, and she seemed, he says, “kind of proud” that she'd made some sort of “contribution” with
The Price of Salt,
but she never discussed her relations or her fantasies—all she had left, by then, of her love life—with him. Except, of course, for the obligatory complaints about Ellen Hill.
⁴³

“I felt enriched, I was proud to be in touch with such a famous writer and to be close to her,” says David Streiff. And Pat, too, was proud: she used to tell people that Streiff took the trouble to visit her when she moved to Tegna. A few weeks before her death, Pat, prompted by Daniel Keel, telephoned Streiff, who was by then the director of the Swiss Federal Office of Culture, to ask about placing her manuscripts and personal papers at the Swiss Literary Archives. The day Streiff sat down to discuss the terms of acceptance with Daniel Keel was the day Pat died, 4 February 1995.
⁴⁴

In 1991, when Streiff retired from the Locarno Film Festival, a television documentary was made about him. Pat was asked to appear in it, and, judging from the film outtakes, she gave her usual performance before a camera as the mute and rebellious heroine of a hostage video. She managed to indicate that she “didn't know David Streiff very well” and then, taking offence at a question, abruptly refused to go on being filmed.
⁴⁵

In her thirtieth cahier, shortly after separating from Caroline Besterman in 1968, Pat had written: “To live alone, to feel occasional depression. Much of the difficulty is from
not
having another person around for whom one puts on a slight show—dressing nicely, presenting a pleasant expression. The trick, the sometimes difficult trick is to maintain one's morale without the other person, the mirror.”
⁴⁶

In Switzerland, Pat had found a supportive publisher and world representative in Daniel Keel and Diogenes, a German-speaking public eager for her work, and not one single person, really, for whom she could perform her “self.” The “difficult trick” she spoke of—that of maintaining her morale without the presence of another like-minded person (well, perhaps not exactly “another person” Pat's definition of “the other” is also Narcissus's, i.e., a “mirror”)—was something she never mastered.

Settled in her stone house in Aurigeno in the world's most pristine country (and continuing to remark on how “clean” Switzerland was), Pat just naturally found her mind turning to images of cancer, toxic waste, the effects of radiation, poison, rape, torture, and the horrors of nuclear war.

Not that her imagination hadn't turned to these entertainments before. Even in her first novel,
Strangers on a Train,
the architect Guy Haines, in a series of thoughts that leads to the inevitable conclusion (“There's also a person exactly the opposite of you, like the unseen part of you, somewhere in the world, and he waits in ambush”),
⁴⁷
starts with the notion that the “splitting of the atom was the only true destruction, the breaking of the universal law of oneness…. Perhaps God and the Devil danced hand in hand around every single electron!”
⁴⁸
And
The Price of Salt,
with its references to bomb shelters and young physicists, is as casually shadowed by the atom bomb as any American novel of the 1950s: an era when all North American schoolchildren were subject to special drills during which (to the sound of a buzzer/bell like the alarm in Samuel Beckett's play
Happy Days
) they learned to dive under their desks to take shelter from the shower of splitting atoms that—any minute now—would be coming their way from Moscow.

Pat's notebooks in France throughout the 1970s wince at the world's wastage, and are punctuated by her eccentric plans for improving life on earth. The story collections which resulted from her comparatively happy occupancy of the house by the Loing Canal at 22 rue de la Boissière in Moncourt (
Little Tales of Misogyny
[1974],
The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder
[1975],
Slowly, Slowly in the Wind
[1979],
The Black House
[1981 in England, 1988 in the United States]) had already begun to throb with both a personal, character-based malice and with the kind of disasters that destroy small ecologies and little institutions: a vengeful pond, killer ferrets, abusive parents, a subtly toxic network of liberal friends, and a skyscraper permanently infested with pests.

“The Terrors of Basket-Weaving,” the best story in
The Black House
and one of Pat's more evocative tales, extends the situation of a middle-class, well-employed, childless-by-choice press relations officer into something larger: a study of the dangers of creation itself. Diane Clarke, with puzzling precision and inexplicable historical accuracy, repairs a damaged basket she finds on a beach with an ability she didn't know she had. She is increasingly frightened by this “hidden talent” which she cannot explain. “What she felt was most certainly not guilt, though it was similarly troubling and unpleasant…. Diane felt she had lost herself.”
⁴⁹
Soon, she asks for a leave of absence from work, and is feeling “as if a lot of other people were inside me besides myself.”
⁵⁰
She ends by destroying the basket, and is “no happier” after doing so. “For a week, she realized, she had grasped something, and then she had deliberately thrown it away.”
⁵¹
The act of creation has permanently disturbed her life, just as “The Terrors of Basket-Weaving” permanently disturbs our idea of what “making something” means to an artist.

“Please Don't Shoot the Trees,” a story written in 1976–77 and included in
Slowly, Slowly in the Wind,
is another example of the way Pat's mind was beginning to turn from the cracks in character to the crises in the cosmos. It is marked by its sneering tone, its prairie-flat prose, its comic book science—but also by its deeply discomfiting prescience. Nature, Pat imagined in her notes, “revolts—at its rape, at its reversed rivers and cut down trees—and erupts in volcanoes, collapses in earthquakes, everywhere gobbling, burning, crushing people.”
⁵²
The United States has been partitioned into “big fortresses,” the great cities are “unsupervised prisons of the poor and the black…. New York and San Francisco [are] dirty words,” and all the trees are shooting out inflammable sap—something like napalm—at the human inhabitants of earth.

The trees end by destabilizing the world, and a “land mass, big as a continent” (it's the continent of North America) drops “into the dark blue waters.”

A vein of pure, vengeful nastiness—an underappreciated literary quality, but a literary quality nonetheless—runs through much of the work Pat did in Europe. By the end of 1976 in Moncourt, when she had begun to take notes on her “4th Ripley” (
The Boy Who Followed Ripley
), her confidence was “flitting sideways, like a bird, out of sight now.” She was finding concentration difficult, she had started too many projects, and her life was “but a kind of darkness full of dark and empty shadows.” She couldn't wait for clarity of mind because “to have patience [would be] to erase all pride, satisfaction in a day's work.” And the fair manuscript copy of
The Boy Who Followed Ripley
bears witness to her near-crippling indecisiveness: interleaved, crossed out, and overwritten, it is her most anxious manuscript.

In the first difficult phase of writing the novel (before the spring of 1978 provided her with the other difficulty of Tabea Blumenschein), it was money, again, and taxes, again, that were making her feel futile—once again. She kept on working because she
had
to, stabilizing herself with a plot for her novel that was concerned with money and vengeance. (Her other title for the book was
Ripley and the Money Boy
.) It was another prescient work: in
The Boy Who Followed Ripley
Pat imagined a relationship for Tom Ripley with a very young admirer. Within the next year and a half, she would have two such relationships herself. The first, with Tabea Blumenschein, prevented her from working on the novel, while the second, with Monique Buffet, allowed her to finish it. Highsmith's life and work would always give the appearance of a balancing act.