The Talented Miss Highsmith (86 page)

After three hours of Pat wanting to know his ideas of how he would write and film
The Tremor of Forgery,
Goedel was exhausted. He'd had too many unaccustomed morning beers; he was drunk, and he was happy to leave. It was, he says, “too much.”

When Goedel had finished his script and sent it to Pat, a letter came from Pat saying it was fine, she liked it; then three days later, another letter came saying she had showed it to a friend of hers, the woman thought the script was horrible, and Pat was withdrawing permission. They went back and forth for two years, and he thinks she was waiting for a more famous director to make the film. She was: at the end of 1988, the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar had expressed interest in buying the book for a feature film.
¹⁵
Pat, who had to be told who Almodóvar was, quickly decided that she liked him.

Goedel, still anxious to make his film, tracked Pat down at the Bayreuth Festival in the summer of 1989. He met her in her hotel for a quarter of an hour. It was an old, small, dark hotel, they met in the lobby, and this second meeting was a repetition of the first meeting. Pat was dressed appropriately but in somber colors, the room was dark, and she was again evasive: “Oh, I don't know, something to think about, I'm thinking about it…”, etc., etc. The script in its current form was making her angry, she wrote to Monique Buffet; she didn't really want to give the film rights to him.

While he waited out several months without any news, Goedel got a German producer involved, they had a meeting with Daniel Keel, and Goedel was advanced on to his third and final meeting with Patricia, who had by now moved into her house in Tegna.

The house appeared to Goedel as it appeared to everyone: windowless. But then he saw that the windows were high up between the walls and the ceiling so that light could come in but no gaze could intrude. The feeling of the house was very different from their last two meeting places—white walls and ceilings and a much lighter atmosphere. Pat herself, however, was the same, her manner unchanged. They were there for an hour or so and Pat kept saying: “I have to speak to Daniel about this.” And Daniel Keel had said: “I have to speak to Patricia about this.” The German producer didn't do well with Pat because he refused to drink beer in the morning.

Finally, Goedel got a call from Diogenes saying that Pat had agreed to his film, but only for the TV rights, not as a feature film. (In fact, it was Daniel Keel's idea.) Goedel was unhappy at the evaporation of his hopes for a feature film but decided to go ahead with a television film anyway. Pat had many suggestions for his new teleplay and she presented them in her typical list form: 1, 2, 3, 4. “They were very detailed and they were good,” he says.

When Goedel went to Tunis to film his script, he kept looking for a bungalow hotel in which to set the action, and in Hammamet he finally found one that was closed. When he contacted the owners, it turned out that he had found the very place where Patricia had stayed with Elizabeth Lyne in the summer of 1966 when she was taking her notes for
The Tremor of Forgery
. Goedel was amazed: Pat's descriptions in the book had been so accurate that he'd been able, unconsciously, to select the exact place she had described. The owners remembered Pat, as did the owner of the restaurant in Hammamet—Ashua (Melik's in
The Tremor of Forgery
)—where she and Mme Lyne as well as the protagonist of
The Tremor of Forgery,
Howard Ingham, had gone every night for dinner during their stay in Hammamet.

When Pat finally saw Goedel's television film in the summer of 1993, she sent him a perfectly characteristic postcard. She objected, she wrote, to Howard Ingham's belt and shoes.
¹⁶
They were wrong for him. But she had never liked Goedel's decision to change Ingham's profession from writer to archaeologist, and—a recurrent theme in her letters to other people—she hated the fact that Goedel was using her title,
The Tremor of Forgery
(his final title was
Trip to Tunis
), for the film after she had asked him not to.

Part 5

Although Pat was revisiting all her old themes in Switzerland, her notes and her published fictions continued to favor only half of her customary double obsession with love and murder. (It wasn't the love half.) Now her notes were without many of the references she had used to anchor herself to her American past. And her “nightlife” was confined to the theater of dreams she was staging for herself as she slept. Many of these dreams, fueled by fears for her health and apprehensions about the medical operations she was beginning to have, were taking place on or near railway stations. They had more violence and less sex in them than ever. Here are a few of them:

Pat is with two women on a train, and she's suddenly stabbed by an attacker. She rushes to board a boat. She recites to her two women companions the statistics of how much deeper the stab wound would have had to be to penetrate her lung, and says she feels no pain.
¹

She's dining in a restaurant with Tanja Howarth, her Diogenes agent in London, and Howarth returns from the ladies' room with one of her wrists slashed and bleeding.
²

Pat sees a “Spanish type young man” who stares her straight in the face and says: “I have no heart.” She looks hard at his chest and sees that in place of his heart is only “an X-form of crossing blood vessels.” His heart has been crossed out.
³

Pat runs into Tabea Blumenschein on a railway train “disguised as an 18 yr. old male tough” who is “fond” of a very young male urchin. The urchin confronts Pat holding a shield “in a hostile manner.” Pat has to “hit at the fingers of his right hand several times, till they are bleeding, and he is staggering, before he drops the shield and is defeated. It is a close thing.” She exits this dream down a jagged metal staircase which has a section missing.
⁴

Pat is in a “busy hotel” and wants to ring up a girl whose name she can't remember, a most attractive girl who has invited her to lie down with her on a bed and rest. But Pat has to “take care” of some journalists first and watches a clock creeping towards some sort of deadline with the girl. She misses the deadline, she misses the girl, and she still can't remember the girl's name: “I feel a loss and am unhappy.”
⁵

And it is here in Switzerland where Pat had her graphic dream about Mother Mary “in Lady Macbeth murderous mood,” cutting off Tabea Blumenschein's head and coating it “thoroughly” with transparent wax.
⁶

The double identity—so crucial to all Pat's work and to all the characters who inhabited her—was collapsing into a single self. Sex and love, God and the Devil dancing hand and hand around that electron in
Strangers on a Train,
were no longer present to balance out her inclination to violence. She began, visibly, to shrink; the hunch in her shoulders and the dowager's hump on her back were remarked on by many people. Her references to the sex lives of others coarsened: she seemed furious that her attentive friend Ingeborg Moelich's “artistic, angelic-looking” daughter had a long-term boyfriend, referring to the man vulgarly and often as the young woman's “latest lay.”
⁷
Her “5th Ripley” book, the final Ripley,
Ripley Under Water,
finished in 1990—a sour, thin, but still recognizably Ripleyan effort—was focused, she hoped, more graphically on the power relations that had always fascinated her. “Ripley Under Water is my S&M novel,” she wrote to Kingsley in September of 1990.

In her letter to Kingsley, Pat also included some unconsciously funny advice to her goddaughter, Kingsley's daughter, gleaned from Pat's own, more or less S&M history of pursuing women: “Tell her: ‘Men like to do their own chasing. Not only like it, they do it—or else!'”
⁸
“It's okay to give them the eye, slightly, but due to Elby's genuine interest in Their Work, her interest becomes too heavy.”
⁹
Pat's advice to the lovelorn was usually offered from the male chauvinist's point of view. By now, it was a view many male chauvinists would have been embarrassed to own up to.

Despite what Pat wrote to Kingsley (and said to Peter Huber, who says she queried him as a literature professor and a Freudian about sadomasochism),
Ripley Under Water
makes only the vaguest intimations of marital abuse between the Pritchards, the two unappealing married strangers who shadow Ripley with the intent of exposing him. Pat was still moving sideways, allusively, and with evident embarrassment. Although she was under the impression that she had directly taken on the fetish of sadomasochism in the novel,
Ripley Under Water
is more (and more characteristically) a matter of the class challenge that the ill-dressed, badly equipped, and unattractive David Pritchard flings at Thomas Ripley's assumed identity as a gentleman of the manor.

Pritchard, rather like Don Wilson, the bad crime novelist in
Deep Water
who enviously dogs the trust-funded Vic Van Allen, takes an instant dislike to Ripley in an airport because of Ripley's beautiful clothes. He determines to expose him as the murderer of Murchison (the art collector Ripley murdered with a bottle of vintage Bordeaux in
Ripley Under Ground
) and calls Ripley a “snob crook” to his face. Ripley, who kicks Pritchard in the crotch (Pat demurely referred to it as Pritchard's “middle”), despises Pritchard's crass self-presentation, his clothes, and his furniture. In an ending which reads like an unintentional parody, Pritchard and his wife drown in the shallow pond behind their house after being interrupted in an S&M romp. Ripley laughs happily as he listens to their cries for help.

From Aurigeno in 1987, Pat, never comfortable with the way her work was treated on film, had written about her initial displeasure with Wim Wenders's Ripley film,
The American Friend
: “I was so-so happy with the Wenders film, and I did not like the ending with Ripley laughing at a burning car. Wenders quite changed Ripley into a modern no-boundary pot-smoking type as you saw.”
¹⁰

Now, in 1990, Pat's “own” Ripley was laughing uncontrollably as he listened to his enemies drown noisily in their pond. But Pat had been a fan of inappropriate laughter ever since she'd written “Quiet Night” at Barnard, and then, in the summer of 1948 while working on
Strangers on a Train
at Yaddo, had pasted a newspaper picture of the grinning young killer Robert Murl Daniels in her seventeenth cahier and written the name “Bruno” beneath it. Like their author, many of Pat's protagonists were guilty of a grin in the wrong place or a giggle at a bad moment. “Hurrah for maniacal laughter,” Pat had written in 1970. “People who don't like it label it empty.
Tant pis.
”
¹¹
Tom Ripley's intense absorption of whatever was obsessing Pat would always make him something of a cracked mirror for his creator's urges. As Pat's own inner wars began to exhaust her, as she was drawn more and more to the surface of her psychology, Ripley, too, began to dwindle to a kind of shorthand notation for the complex and fascinating character she had launched in
The Talented Mr. Ripley
. But Ripley manages to remain Ripleyan still. Even in his feeblest and most uncongenial appearance,
Ripley Under Water,
he compels us to prefer him to the unstylish forces of justice.

The book did give Pat an excuse to make her trip to Tangier to see Buffie Johnson. She needed the Tangier location for her novel, and by then she probably needed the contact with an old friend. Pat had alienated so many people that the two Barbaras in Islington were worried, telling Heather Chasen to start writing to Pat again because they thought she had pushed everyone away.
¹²
Alex Szogyi, the (gay, Jewish) college professor in New York with whom Pat had one of her longest, happiest friendships and frankest correspondences, was cut out of her life in what Alex said was Pat's irritation at his blossoming friendship with Jeanne Moreau—to whom Pat had introduced him.
¹³
Szogyi, who had nothing but admiration for Pat, thought because she complained to him so much about her girlfriends that she was “a failed heterosexual.”
¹⁴
But Pat was also, in her own way, a “failed homosexual”—except in her fiction, where she was anything she wanted to be.

Pat had confided her “dear desk” to Alex when she'd left the United States in 1963; she'd allowed him to work up her horoscope in 1973 (see
illustration
), “referring to [the] horoscope with increasing interest” in several letters as its predictions seemed to her to come true; and, in the dazed aftermath of her first tryst with Tabea Blumenschein in London in 1978, she'd asked Alex to analyze Tabea's handwriting for her.
¹⁵
Alex provided the kind of handwriting analysis that also flattered Pat for her choice: Tabea, he wrote, was “a big personality. I imagine she doesn't suffer fools gladly…. A superior lady, indeed.”
¹⁶
Pat cared for Alex so much that she wrote to Lil Picard: “[E]veryone adores him…. I am so fond of him, it is almost worth moving to NY for, just to see him once a week!”
¹⁷
(Meeting once a week was Pat's idea of intimate friendship.) Now, Pat had cut both Alex Szogyi
and
Lil Picard out of her life.

 

The people Pat spent time with in Switzerland, aside from Ellen Hill and her publisher Daniel Keel, were new acquaintances. They were kind, cultured, unbelievably helpful, and very fond of Pat, but there was nothing to tie them to the rich set of associations governing her past—the
fons et origo
of her writing—and she never invited them into the secrets of her life. Her move to Tegna, in December of 1988, even though it suffused her life with some badly needed light, did not settle her restless spirit. After thinking about it for five or six months, she purchased a raw piece of meadowland in Tegna in April of 1987, paying too much for it, everyone said, at a price of 490,000 Swiss francs. The land overlooked the beautiful Centrovalli, and there was a little river just beyond the bottom of the property. She'd heard about the property from Peter Huber,
¹⁸
who, with his wife's sister's family, the Dieners, alternated the occupancy of an adjoining vacation house.

“I just told her [about the land],” Huber says, “because I thought it was so outrageously expensive. We were offered it ten or fifteen years [before] for thirty thousand Swiss francs and then we were offered it for five hundred thousand. And do you know what Pat said? I'll take it. Just like that. She was desperate.”
¹⁹

Even as her house was being constructed, Pat was worrying about the “numerous Huber family” next door, but she consoled herself that her neighbors would use the house only seventy days a year.
²⁰
But when the Hubers were there, Pat drifted over every night just as she had done with the Ryans in Moncourt: “The moment,” says Huber, “we switched on our lights in the evening.”

Along with everything else Pat took from Aurigeno to Tegna was a pile of firewood she'd already carted from Moncourt to Aurigeno. “But,” says Peter Huber, “it wasn't even firewood, it was construction-site wood, covered with plaster, scrapwood with rusty nails…. I made a fire with a lot of newspapers. [Pat had invited him to do so.] There were a few little flames coming up from it and she took the big [piece of wood] she'd decided to sacrifice for this occasion and she knocked it on the stone. And I said, ‘Pat, don't, you're extinguishing it!' And she gave me a very pained look.”
²¹

After that, there were very few fires in the fireplace at Casa Highsmith; Pat had, after all, paid “good money” for the wood and she wasn't going to “waste” it. Fire, like food, was one of the life-affirming comforts Pat spent her later years rejecting. The impoverished young writer who wanted a fireplace so badly in 1943 that she'd painted a perfect trompe l'oeil fireplace on the wall of her cheap studio apartment on East Fifty-sixth Street was now a well-known author in possession of a real fireplace in an expensively designed house—and she simply couldn't allow herself to enjoy it. The counterfeit fireplace of her tiny Manhattan flat would have suited her better.

By spring of 1991, Pat was already looking for an escape from her new house, writing to Kingsley in New York to ask if she wanted to join forces and buy a flat in London. “My house here is pleasant, but also boring at times, only socially, but that's bad enough…. So to have a flat big enough in London, to be able to go there—it is a nice pipedream…. But I thought I'd sound you out.”
²²

It was Kingsley's dream to live in London too; she had worked there as a television producer for CBS News and she was yearning to return. But she was out of a job now, and out of funds, and she wrote to Pat that she could only afford to be a tenant. Pat said she didn't want to be a landlord—and that was the end of the matter.

A month later, Pat's ideas for a novel included one about a man who “wishes he could take a pill to stop falling in love.”
²³
After another year in Tegna, Pat, expanding a little in this brighter, lighter house (its back, as opposed to its forbidding front, was open to the light), returned superficially to love and death and sketched an idea for a young person “in extremis of love affair plus job crisis [who] thinks of suicide by stepping out window onto a ledge.” Then she began her initial framing of
Small g: A Summer Idyll
, her last novel, set in the “gay-friendly” Jakob's Bierstube-Restaurant bar in Zurich (the small
g
is the designation gay guidebooks use to indicate that the clientele is “mixed” gay and straight) and based partially on a forty-five-year-old man she'd met in Zurich, “R,” a friend of Frieda Sommer. In Pat's first version of the plot, “R” likes to fake robbery/murder for his teenage lover by “being bloody-faced in bed when the boy comes in with his key.” When he enters the teenager's flat and “finds him bloody-faced, in bed,” he thinks the boy is pretending and then there's a “[h]orrible scene” when he realizes his lover is actually dead.
²⁴