The Talented Miss Highsmith (120 page)

 

^*
Pat had a specific memory of this evening, written in a letter to her friend Ronald Blythe from Moncourt, 9–11 April 1971: “I went to the “Gateways” with younger Barbara Roett, on a Monday night when it was swinging. I saw a pretty girl…and when she began to speak, it was Cockney, and I had a hard time in all that noise (juke-box) even getting her name. It was G[eorge] B[ernard] S[haw] all over again, and Pygmalion” (Collection Ronald Blythe).

 

^*
Arthur Koestler's bust was removed from the University of Edinburgh, where his archives are located, when charges of serial rape were laid against him by his latest biographer.

 

^*
Small g
is not quite the sweet-natured book it has seemed to be to many critics. The club-footed dominatrix at the center of
Small g
's black mischief falls to her death in one of those Highsmith murders which is not quite a murder: the result of a scheme carried out by the merry band of pranksters who despise her.

 

^*
There are also nude photographs of Pat in which, aside from her small breasts, she always appeared to be androgynous. One of those photographs—the only one showing Pat's full body—has been torn in half at the waist so that her genitalia and lower body are missing. It's an unsettling remnant.

 

^*
Lil Picard (1899–1994) was a recognized figure in Manhattan's East Village and in European art circles, known in both New York and Berlin for her performance art.

 

^*
A previous biography has mistakenly set this dream in June of 1952 in Florence. Pat dreamt it in New York in 1953—more horribly, and more appropriately, because it came just a few days before a near catastrophe overtook Ellen Hill.

 

^*
This wouldn't be the only time Pat fell in love with a Jew who was concealing her origins. Daisy Winston, the headstrong, witty little firebrand with the irreproachably anglicized name and the “Righter-than-Right” political attitudes and social prejudices (including anti-Semitism), who was Pat's lover in New Hope in 1961–62, shocked all her friends in Pennsylvania after her death. When Daisy's friends saw her birth certificate, they discovered a secret she'd managed to keep from everyone. Daisy Winston, too, was a Jew.

 

^*
H. M. Qualunque is a pseudonym.

 

^*
See the painful injuries, maimings, kidnappings, and sudden deaths of dogs in
This Sweet Sickness, The Glass Cell, The Tremor of Forgery, The Cry of the Owl, Deep Water,
and
A Dog's Ransom
. Only in
The Blunderer
does the dog survive unscathed; still, the animal remains in perpetual mourning, and Pat had the satisfaction of killing off Ellen herself in that book. And only in her last novel,
Small g,
does the dog prosper, but by the time Pat wrote
Small g
all her deep feelings had begun to relax—to the detriment of her writing.

 

^*
She did the same thing with the name of the writer/killer in her Suffolk novel,
A Suspension of Mercy
(1965), Sydney Smith Bartleby. The narrator tells us that Sydney is named after the English writer and clergyman Sydney Smith, but Sydney himself makes the “Bartleby the Scrivener” joke about his last name.

 

^*
On 4 November 1970, in a cautious interview by mail, Pat wrote: “Tom Ripley is my favorite character in my books…because he is easy, for me, to write about. Therefore I could say that
The Talented Mr. Ripley,
my first novel about him, is my favorite novel.”

 

^*
The Berkshire Hills in western Massachusetts are also home to Austen Riggs, one of the most respected and expensive private mental institutions in the United States. Pat had some exchanges with a psychiatrist there—although it is no longer possible to determine if the exchanges were personal or professional. But the local librarian, Judith Conklin Peters, had the impression that Pat was an outpatient at Austen Riggs.

 

^*
In
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction,
Pat wrote that she started
This Sweet Sickness
as the story of an insurance fraud.
    “I wanted to have my criminal-hero set himself up in a different house with a different name, a house into which he could move when his real self was presumably dead and gone. But the idea did not come to life. One day the second one appeared—in this case a far better motive than I had thought of until then, a love motive.”
    For Pat, love trumped criminal fraud, but love was also inextricable from the ultimate act of defrauding another human: murder.

 

^*
Pat was once again walking in the footsteps of the legendary literary agent Bessie Marbury and her decorator lover Elsie de Wolfe. Before making Sutton Place fashionable, Bessie Marbury and Elsie de Wolfe lived in a town house at 56 Irving Place.

 

^*
It was here in Pennsylvania that Spider Highsmith, the “serious” black cat to whom Pat would dedicate
The Glass Cell,
started the travels which eventually landed him with Muriel Spark in Italy.

 

^*
In the early 1970s, Nicole Stéphane, daughter of a Rothschild, magical actress in
Les Enfants Terribles,
and a film producer herself, telephoned Pat's Paris agent, Jenny Bradley, to say she was “really interested” in producing
Ripley Under Ground
but wanted to see a French translation before committing herself. Nothing came of her interest.

 

^*
Anne Meacham (1926–2006), was a friend of Tennessee Williams and a notable interpreter of his work on stage. She also appeared in Eva Le Gallienne's 1964 production of
The Seagull
.

 

^*
Nineteen ninety was also the year Pat received a letter from a man in Bradford, England, enclosing a picture of his paternal grandfather, Henry Highsmith, a black man born in South Carolina. The Bradford man wondered whether he and Pat were related. Pat's answer made it clear that Stanley Highsmith was not only not her blood relative but that he had no black or “Red Indian” blood.

 

^*
Pat said she had to rewrite “The Yuma Baby” because the first version was depressing her. The second version—a horror story for any other reader—kept Pat laughing happily as she wrote.

 

^*
By contrast, Pat's reading and writing of “Chorus Girl's Absolutely Final Performance” in 1973, a short fiction in
The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder
, her book of stories about the suffering (and revenge) of animals, provoked an opposite response: “I wrote…Chorus Girl's Absolutely Final Performance, which is my elephant story [and] I had to read the thing five times, 5th time being proof-reading, and everytime tears were coming down my cheeks, so I hope it does not affect every reader like this” (PH letter to Barbara Ker-Seymer, 3 June 1973).

 

^*
Maurice Richardson wrote first about Pat's work in
The Observer
in 1957.

 

^*
The site of the fabled Katmandou is now the home of another luxury operation for women: the French handbag store Longchamp.

 

^*
Craig's Wife,
by George Kelly, Grace Kelly's uncle. When it was made into a film in 1936 by Hollywood's only openly lesbian director, Dorothy Arzner, it became a protofeminist drama.

 

^*
She also wrote a wistful letter to Monique Buffet when she arrived on 7 September saying that Deauville looked “charming” and “romantic.” “I've never been in love here. Bette Davis is at Hotel Royale and I hope I meet her, even if briefly, I have the highest respect for her.” Pat did meet Davis, briefly, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was introduced to her by Marc Brandel's second wife, who was one of the festival organizers (see
illustration
).

 

^*
As a woman who wrote in her own bedroom, gardened in her own yard, and made furniture in her own workroom, Pat, by this time, was quite reticent about “leaving the house” herself. In late middle age she did so only for reasons of professional, medical, or sexual urgency.

 

^*
Pat misdated the raid in her cahier as “10 March 1980,” a sure sign of distress.

 

^*
Penzler had Pat's novel
Found in the Street
already in type with a dust jacket designed when Pat refused to allow him to publish the book.

 

^*
Handke brought her a present from Jeanne Moreau: an igneous ball on a pedestal, “black and clear.”

 

^*
Despite her fierce desire to hang on to her money (and all those “political” letters sent pseudonymously to newspapers so she wouldn't attract the Swiss government's attention), it would not have been “out of character” for Pat to pull out of her application for Swiss citizenship at the last possible moment. She had already tried to reverse the sale of her Moncourt house; ambivalent behavior was a Highsmith way of life.

 

^*
Both Kenneth Williams's and Pat's diaries confirm the fact that Pat was thrilled to meet Williams and took no umbrage at his criticism: “screaming gay, but v. pleasant” is how she described him later, and Williams wrote that she strode across the greenroom and “greeted me with outstretched hand” and that he couldn't believe she actually knew his acting work.

 

^*
Every single person conversant with Pat in the last part of her life recounts her constant complaints about having to pay to “keep her mother alive.” In fact, with Mary's and Stanley's government pensions, Pat was responsible for only half the bill at the Fireside Lodge, the private nursing home in Fort Worth to which Mary had been consigned. Pat's “share” began at about $7,800 a year—more, she said, than she spent on herself—and went up to about $13,000 a year. But Pat's “brother Dan” admitted to his sons at the end of his life that Pat had been irregular in her payments for Mary's care; Dan himself was sometimes left to pay some of the bills.

 

^*
Pat's cahiers and diaries were found neatly stored in her linen closet. Another case of life following art: Pat had made Edith Howland of
Edith's Diary
hide her diary where she kept her linens.

 

^*
Even the “last” Highsmith will wasn't going to be the last one. There were further revisions envisaged, but Pat didn't live to make them.

 

^*
More than five million dollars today—but it's quite likely that Pat was worth twice this amount.

 

^*
Pat was a card-carrying member of EXIT, the Swiss-based euthanasia society, and a great recommender of euthanasia—for other people. Even in her terminal illness she doesn't seem to have considered for one moment exercising the privileges of her EXIT membership.

 

^*
As early as 1948, the young Pat was prudently dividing her small cash reserves between two Manhattan banks.

 

^*
The “Bizarro World” of the Superman comics is a cube-shaped planet called Htrae (“Earth” spelled backwards) where doppelgängers of Superman, Lois Lane, and other characters featured in the Superman stories live lives exactly opposite to the lives of their earthly originals. They hate beauty, love ugliness, and criminalize the desire for perfection. Everything is backwards in the Bizarro World, just as it is in Highsmith Country.