The Talented Miss Highsmith (5 page)

“I don't think my books should be in prison libraries,” Pat Highsmith wrote circumspectly in 1966. They probably shouldn't be in bedroom libraries, either; no Highsmith fiction qualifies as a book before bedtime. Her work belongs way down at the bottom of the Sandman's bag where all the bad dreams are kept. While quite literally preserving her own life, her writing quite figuratively endangers ours. It's a hard job, but only Patricia Highsmith could manage it in exactly this way.

Highsmith was an amazingly fecund creator. She had, she wrote in a grating and characteristically unpleasant comparison, “ideas as often as rats have orgasms” and they came to her in many forms. Aside from her scores of published works, she left 250 unpublished manuscripts of varying length, thirty-eight writer's notebooks (or “cahiers,” as she rather grandly called them, using a term from a language she couldn't really speak), and at least eighteen diaries. She drew, she sketched, she made sculpture. She hand-crafted furniture and carved out little statues. Her notebooks and diaries are punctuated with charts, symbols, line drawings, and thumbnail sketches. She pasted up her own Christmas and birthday cards and decorated the covers of all fourteen of her fat press books with cutouts and lettering of her own devising. At the end of her life, she tried oil-painting lessons, but quarrelled with her teacher. The teacher said that Pat had her own way of doing things.

“I dabble in all the arts,” Pat wrote in a 1961 quatrain, “And make a mess of each. / I'm a person of many parts, / With a goal beyond my reach.
⁵⁰

She couldn't
not
make art—but she often preferred to practice it as a craft: i.e., the kind of art that comes out of daily life and goes back into it as something useful. She made her own mailbox in Fontainebleau,
⁵¹
and she rifled dumps for odd objects to incorporate into indoor mobiles and outdoor assemblages.
⁵²
She insisted that furniture making and digging a garden gave her as much pleasure as writing.

But it was the writing that was essential to her. She lived to write and she literally wrote, as we shall see, for her life. There is no imagining her life without her work. You have to see it to believe it (the preceding chapter is a faithful portrayal of Pat at her desk), and you have to believe it to understand its life-sustaining importance to her.

After one or two unpublished starts—
The Click of the Shutting
and
The Dove Descending
are the interesting ones—Highsmith simply leapt full blown into the set of styles and modalities which she would continue to employ until she aged and iced and became too removed from her sources—and too ill—to do her best work. Or any work at all. And if she couldn't do her work, there was really not much reason to go on. Her last writer's notebook, Cahier 38, titled and prepared by her for use when she was dying of two competing diseases, is very eloquently blank.

“There is no depression for a writer but a return to the Self”,
⁵³
Pat wrote in 1960 (and again, in slightly altered form, in
Ripley Under Ground
in 1970), neatly separating her “Self” from her work. And no writer has more successfully concealed the ways in which her art and her life transfused each other's material than the talented Miss Highsmith. The Patricia Highsmith who did the writing and the Pat Highsmith who lived the life, like Terrible Twins arising from the vapors of her youthful obsession with both sides of her complicated parentage (“Deep in my heart stands a silver sword with two edges,” she declared at twenty-four),
⁵⁴
stalked each other for more than fifty years, forging out of their deep and necessary doubling a very profitable partnership.

In thirty volumes of horrific novels and uncannily unpleasant short stories, and in eight thousand obsessively notated pages of notebooks and diaries, the two Highsmiths rehearsed the same primary wounds and repeated the same compulsive themes, passing them back and forth with a dexterous flick of the writer's wrist and (as Henry James once said of an expatriate American life
he
was writing) a slight rotation of aspects.
⁵⁵
Only illness and the last big move of her life to Switzerland were able to dissolve Highsmith's long-enduring doubles act.

Doubled, too, were the problems of her nationality. Pat was as American as rattlesnake venom—and never more so than in her valiant attempts to master in exile that uniquely American vocation (Benjamin Franklin invented it for
Poor Richard's Almanack
, Scott Fitzgerald adapted it for
The Great Gatsby
) of self-help. Many of the obsessive little lists and charts she devoted herself to making are all about strenuous self-improvement and serious self-betterment. As hard (almost) on herself as she was on everyone else, Pat would list and compare what she considered to be her own failing traits or the failing traits of others; she would contrast these traits with her goals or with her romantic ideals; and she would resolve to do much, much better.

At the end of one riveting chart plotted out in 1945 when she was twenty-four—it rates her women lovers by category and character trait—she writes:

And then she adds, typically: “From the two most advantageous, I fled, was false.”
⁵⁷

Gary Fisketjon, Pat's editor at Atlantic Monthly Press and Knopf in New York, who met her infrequently, drank with her socially, and found her “terrific company,” felt that Pat was like a “child of 10 or 11” who has been told she had to “grow up on her own.” “Keeping lists like that,” he thinks, “is the way a child figures out how to live in an alien world.”
⁵⁸

Larry Ashmead, the legendary American editor who supervised her novels at Doubleday, Simon & Schuster, and Lippincott, caught Pat in a distinctly performative mood one night in the late 1960s when he telephoned her in London and invited her to dinner.

“And she said to me, ‘Remember, no romance.' I recall that very clearly. She was very gruff. And I said: ‘Of
course
not, we're just meeting for the first time.'

“She was very talkative at dinner and she was drinking, which was par for the course…. She had bought this house in France and she wanted to take her [pet] snails there, and she couldn't take them because there's a gastronomic law: no transportation of live snails into France. But she was slowly smuggling them in. Every time she went, she would put some under her breasts and take them in that way. And, as I was eating my steak tartare, she was telling me this story and I wanted to say something about the state of her breasts. But I thought that would be too ‘romantic,' so I didn't.”
^*
59

Otto Penzler, who published seven of Pat's books under his Mysterious Press imprimatur in Manhattan during the 1980s and remains “a great fan” of her work, had a series of exchanges with her which were so dire that he concluded it must be her character that was preventing her books from selling in the United States.

“She was a horrible human being. I think people somehow feel it. They don't know why they know it, but they don't like Pat…. Who wants to identify with a character in a Highsmith story?…[T]hese are mean-spirited people, they have no humanity, no spirit of shared experience, they're otherworldly in a way.”
⁶⁰

Otto Penzler is correct. Highsmith Country
is
another world. And Patricia Highsmith was its only begettor.

In 1967, when Pat's American agent, Patricia Schartle (later Patricia Schartle Myrer), reported that the reason editors said her paperbacks weren't selling in the States was that they were “too subtle” and that there was “no one likeable in the book,” Pat's response was: “Perhaps it is because I don't like anyone. My last books may be about animals.”
⁶¹
One of them—
The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder
(1975)—was.

A libertarian
au fond
(but a libertarian who preferred countries where there was an established “peasant class” and who was regularly enraged by the “liberties” other people were entitled to), Pat believed with all her heart that people ought to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and “stand on their own two feet.” Just as she had always done, just as her enterprising family had always done. She had the Calvinist worldview and tried her best to refuse the theology that went with it. Count Alexis de Tocqueville, whose
Democracy in America
she read in preparation for writing
The Talented Mr. Ripley
one long, hot summer in western Massachusetts, noted similar leanings in the citizens of North America during his travels across that continent in 1835. He thought—correctly, it turns out—that such traits would lead to isolationism.

But it was her lifelong lovers' quarrel with her “mother-country” (that's what she called it) and the lifelong self-exile that quarrel produced which were the most significant signs of Pat Highsmith's Americanism. American artists, flinging bitter indictments of their native land over their shoulders, have always refugeed to Europe for cultural development, political shelter, and artistic support. The youthful Pat shared this pleasant dream of a self-liberating European continent. It's a dream usually entertained by Romantics in love with displacement and the favorable rate of currency exchange whose imaginations have been colonized by European novels long before their actual selves have had to rub up against the realities of European life.

At twenty-six Pat wrote:

“My most persistent obsession—that America is fatally (from my point, an artist's point of view) off the road of the true reality, that the Europeans have it precisely.”
⁶²

But Pat Highsmith does not slip comfortably into
any
convenient categories, and her European expatriatism was unlike that of any other American artist: it did not contribute to her “development.”

Although her fictions include many serious critiques of the American society she left behind, her unusual way of living—the constant moves (early on, she began the compulsive, roving patterns that were to govern the rest of her life; her mother said she was “born restless”), the protections her solitudes and her obsessions required, the insularities of her own nature—encouraged her to archive, conserve, and concentrate the social maladies and personal biases she brought with her when she first arrived in Europe. Many of these maladies festered away untreated in the high-security cell of her long exile, and her later life was disfigured by open, ugly expressions of the racial and ethnic prejudices which found their first form in her high school notebooks. For the most part, her fictional work—the work she allowed to be published—escaped the infection.

Principally, it was anti-Semitism that clawed her, although it is difficult to label as an anti-Semite someone who threatened to leave her entire fortune to the Intifada. (Palestinians are Semites too.) “Jew-hater” is really the proper term for what Patricia Highsmith was. When she wasn't calling the Holocaust “Holocaust, Inc.,” she was referring to it as the “semicaust”—apparently because it had destroyed only half of world Jewry. And she was none too fond of Blacks, Italians, Portuguese, Latinos, Catholics, Koreans, East Indians, “Red Indians,” small, dark children, or, if you look closely at her work (we will), Arabs, either.

Naturally, given the deep divisions and strange attractors in her nature, Pat's Jew-hating came partnered with quite a bit of what might be mistaken for its opposite. She had serious love affairs and long, close friendships with many Jews. Jews were her principal employers, her frequent publishers, and they numbered amongst her most consistent supporters. None of this was accidental.

In 1942, the year she graduated from Barnard College, Fate (apparently disguised as a Borscht Belt comedian) made Pat the editorial assistant to a certain Mr. Ben-Zion Goldberg at FFF Publications in Manhattan, a publishing company that provided topical articles to the Jewish press. And so, in her first long-term paying job, Pat Highsmith, scribbling anti-Semitisms in her notebook, also found herself scribbling away on such subjects as Jewish homemaking, Jewish art, and Jewish culture for
The Jewish Family Year Book
—an employment she entirely neglected to mention in the article “My First Job” she wrote for
The Oldie
magazine in 1993.
⁶³

Pat seemed to admire Hannah Arendt—she cited Arendt's residency in Tegna for having made that region “famous”
⁶⁴
—but she read Arendt's
Anti-Semitism: Part One of the Origins of Totalitarianism
in conjunction with Adolf Hitler's
Mein Kampf
as though the two works were of equal argument. In the same high school notebook in which she used a repellent epithet for her Jewish classmates, she also recorded her pleasure in a growing friendship with Judy Tuvim—the precocious, fifteen-year-old Jewish Proustian who grew up to become the brilliant, Oscar-winning comic actress Judy Holliday. (This is the place to put a persistent biographical rumor to rest: Pat Highsmith and Judy Holliday were never lovers. It was Judy's best friend Pat was after.)

Judy's mother, Helen Tuvim, offered Pat free piano lessons at the Henry Street Settlement House on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Pat, fiercely disparaging Mrs. Tuvim and her family in her notebook (it was the generous quantities of food served in the Tuvim household—such a
Jewish
trait—that drew the semi-anorectic teenager's scalding commentary),
⁶⁵
gladly took up the offer of instruction. Pat Highsmith was constitutionally incapable of single-mindedness. She also played the piano rather badly.