The Talented Miss Highsmith (58 page)

But it was Pat who was sitting all alone in a house “up in Massachusetts.”
The Talented Mr. Ripley
began—as Pat always put it—to “write itself” after she left Manhattan. Homeless now, and for the moment between all her messy, simultaneous, collusive, and faintly criminal relationships, Pat had plenty of interior material with which to occupy herself. In Manhattan, she had already begun to work on her novel
Deep Water
—those last battles with Ellen Hill had been as inspiring as ever—and she was liberally distributing her tastes and tendencies over its resident psychopath, Vic Van Allen.

Still, this “Third Suspense Novel” about Ripley was pressing on her imagination. As though in preparation for launching something unusual she decided to spend the summer where so many of America's classic authors—Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Dickinson, Edith Wharton—had lived and worked: western Massachusetts.
^*
Pat's chief reason for moving to the township of Lenox was probably the same one that led her to New York's Upper East Side: snobbery. Lenox, Massachusetts, was a very good summer address.

The old Tappan estate in Lenox where Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote his
Tanglewood Tales
had been donated for public use by the Tappan family; the site was then named after Hawthorne's “Tanglewood,” and the Boston Symphony Orchestra made Tanglewood its summer home from 1937 onwards, attracting to its concerts the old-money families and the theater people who had always summered in the beautiful Berkshire Hills. Tom Ripley, like Pat Highsmith, was an ardent pursuer of the dream of success, and Lenox, with its long literary history, its large summer estates, its familiarity with society, celebrities, and royalty (at one point three princesses lived in Lenox, two of them at the old Curtiss Hotel), was an appropriate place to embody that dream—reversed, of course—in a novel.
¹⁵

Judith Conklin Peters, an eighty-eight-year-old retired librarian when I met her in 2002, was one of Lenox's unofficial historians. Legally blind, she knew Lenox so well that she was able to give me an extended physical tour of the village, liberally illustrated with lively local anecdotes. For forty years, Mrs. Peters had been the assistant librarian at the Lenox Municipal Library. The library, in the former courthouse, had been bought and donated to the village of Lenox by one of the Schermerhorn women who summered in western Massachusetts. There were fifty thousand to seventy thousand books in the building by mid-century, and it was maintained by wealthy summer people “like a private home with beautiful furniture and an adjacent reading garden.” And that was how Pat Highsmith had been able to borrow the uncommon works she'd wanted to read when she was beginning to write
Ripley
—an 1835 edition of Alexis de Tocqueville's
Democracy in America
and an Italian grammar book amongst them—from a library in a country village whose population was no more than five thousand people.
¹⁶

Judy Peters was the assistant librarian at in the Lenox Library in the summer of 1954, the summer Pat lived in Lenox. She “remembered distinctly” the “businesslike” thirty-three-year-old writer coming in to borrow books. “A woman of medium height, rather slight with dark hair. Very much on her own, not interested in consulting with the librarians and very businesslike about what she wanted. She came in, got what she wanted and left. She didn't socialize, unlike the other visitors to the library.”
¹⁷

Mrs. Peters thought Pat must have begun her stay in Lenox at a boardinghouse called Garden Gables because that's where all the “interesting people” stayed. Garden Gables was owned by a brilliant, cultured woman from Czechoslovakia who also ran a gift shop. All her boarders, said Mrs. Peters, were just like her. The other guesthouse in town was run by a demanding German woman; and all her boarders were just like her, too. But Pat, depleted in everything but the resolve to write, seems to have started out in a boardinghouse in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, close to Lenox, briefly renting a tiny, cheap room from a nice woman who made her “uncomfortable, through pity” and whose house boasted “the worst coffee in the entire town.”
¹⁸

One day, Pat apparently dropped by Ed Roche's funeral parlor in Lenox, which was just across the street from Garden Gables. Mr. Roche, like all the other undertakers in the area, lived near his work and dabbled in real estate both above and below ground.
¹⁹
He had a cottage for rent—it was probably “the Beachwood cottage” says his son—just outside Lenox. Pat struck a deal with Ed Roche for a summer rental.

“I began,” Pat wrote in
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
, “
The Talented Mr. Ripley
in what I thought was a splendid mood, a perfect pace. I had taken a cottage in Massachusetts in the country near Lenox, and I spent the first three weeks there reading books from the excellent privately maintained library in Lenox…. My landlord, who lived not far away, was an undertaker, very voluble about his profession.”

Pat had been “toying with” having Ripley escort a corpse filled with opium from Trieste to Rome. At one point, the corpse was to be Herbert Greenleaf, Dickie's father, murdered by Tom. This elaborate nonsense was reduced to an awkward suggestion for a corpse-smuggling caper by Tom to Dickie—scornfully rejected by Dickie—in the final version of
The Talented Mr. Ripley
. In another set of notes, Pat has Tom push Herbert Greenleaf over a cliff in Positano with Dickie's consent, and then Dickie, unwittingly, pushes Tom over the same cliff during a fight. Tom, of course, survives. Pat thriftily re-created her cliff idea twenty-five years later for
The Boy Who Followed Ripley,
when “the boy,” young Frank, pushes his father's wheelchair over a cliff in Maine into the sea. Pat's concentrated interests and rigid conservations ensured that she made use of every fertile idea, while her compulsion to commit fictional murder allowed her to change her victim, her murderer, and her plot in any novel without the slightest sense of artistic self-betrayal. (She would do the same thing in
The Glass Cell
and
A Game for the Living
.) It was the murder, and its attendant psychological disturbances, that mattered most to her. Still, she would always disapprove of crimes that weren't passionate: you could never accuse Pat Highsmith of being a
cold
hearted killer.

“One crime I consider so despicable, I should never write about it, and that is robbery. To me, it is worse than murder, and for this irrational opinion I have a rational explanation: robbery is passionless and motiveless, except for the motive of greed.”
²⁰

While she was still “toying with” the idea of using an opium-filled corpse in her novel, Pat queried her landlord about the hidden details of his trade. He used to stuff his corpses with “sawdust” is what she said the undertaker told her, “bluntly and matter-of-factly.” You cut a “tree-shaped” incision in the chest, you prepare the body, and then you fill it with sawdust. Sawdust made sense in New England, where old forests and old mills were still plentiful. But Pat, always fascinated by the precisions of every profession, wanted to see that tree-shaped incision for herself. Mr. Roche “drew the line” at that.
²¹

Ned Roche, now the director of his father's funeral business in Lenox, was troubled about these supposed revelations by his father. “My father was very protective about the business. He wouldn't have talked to anyone from outside.” But on reflection he thought his father might have been as frank as that with Patricia: “He didn't mince words.”
²²
However it happened, Pat got the information and then didn't use it. Instead, she began “thinking myself inside the skin of such a character [Ripley],” and so, she said, her “prose became more self-assured than it logically should have been.” She had already decided that her “relaxed mood was not the one for Mr. Ripley” and had promptly scrapped her first seventy-five pages. She was now “mentally as well as physically sitting on the edge of my chair, because that is the kind of young man Ripley is—a young man on the edge of his chair, if he is sitting down at all.”
²³

Here was a writer using something like an actor's exercise to enter the mind and body of a character. Pat prepared herself for Ripley by assuming Ripley's attitudes and positions—they were never very far from her own—and she started Ripley off as a failed actor who couldn't bear rejection and whose best performance piece was a reenactment of Eleanor Roosevelt doing her “My Day” column for the newspapers. So when Tom began playing the role of Dickie Greenleaf, the first thing he reached for was stage makeup.

“Tom had at first amused himself with an eyebrow pencil…and a little touch of putty at the end of his nose…but he abandoned these as too likely to be noticed. The main thing about impersonation, Tom thought, was to maintain the mood and temperament of the person…and to assume the facial expressions that went with them. The rest just fell into place.”
²⁴

Tom had “an audience made up of the entire world…. he was himself and yet not himself. He felt blameless and free, despite the fact that he consciously controlled every move he made…. He had even produced a painting in Dickie's manner.”
²⁵
Tom also found that writing letters in Dickie's “dull” style was easier than writing letters in his own. His approach to life would always be that of an actor playing a role.

And there it is—the other reason Pat was always falling in love with actresses and models like Lynn Roth, Kathryn Hamill Cohen, Chloe Sprague, Anne Meacham, Tabea Blumenschein, et al. Impersonation, the substitution of one identity for another, the forgery of personality and the fluidity of character, were all native states for Patricia Highsmith. She used them over and over in her work, and she was alive and flutteringly responsive to their presence in other people. (But one reason Ellen Hill was able to “anchor” Pat for so long was her absolute immobility of character.)

As a youthful reader of Oscar Wilde, Pat had long since absorbed Oscar's first published notice of his fascination with crime and the counterfeiting of identity: the essay “Pen, Pencil and Poison” (1889) about the forger Wainewright who poisoned others, and about the “marvellous boy” Chatterton, who forged medieval poetry and drama and poisoned himself. Moreover, much of what Pat thought and felt about the volatility of identity is what she would have been hearing from the young actors she knew—all of them studying “the creation of character” on Bank Street in Greenwich Village at HB Studios or farther uptown with the great star of the Yiddish and American theaters Stella Adler, who brought the only
real
news back from Stanislavsky and whom Pat continued to meet at cocktail parties and find “most beautiful and charming.”
²⁶

And so Pat, who had imagined Ripley as a failed actor, gave him some very actorly exercises.

“It was a good idea to practice jumping into his own character again, because the time might come when he would need to in a matter of seconds, and it was strangely easy to forget the exact timbre of Ripley's voice.”

Life for Pat was always a matter of entering into another character: “Happiness,” she wrote, “is a matter of imagination…. We are all suicides under the skin.”
²⁷
And much as she jibed at Mother Mary for the “positive thinking” and jibbed at practicing her Christian Science faith, she adopted something very like it when, writing
Ripley,
she tried to project herself into a more uplifted condition. “Existence,” she thought, “is a matter of unconscious elimination of negative and pessimistic thinking.”

Continuing to fantasize about her thwarted love for Lynn Roth, Pat kept herself going in Lenox “with various kinds of dope: books, written and read, dreams, hopes, crossword puzzles…and simply routine. If I were to relax and become human, I should not be able to bear my life.”
²⁸

Pat's inner theater, those intense personal dramas she was always staging for herself, was much more interesting to her than the world around her. “While you are writing a book,” she noted, “you must carry around your own stage full of characters with their emotional changes. You have no room for another stage.”
²⁹
Pat was almost
always
writing a book, and, like the cast lists of Jacobean tragedies, her inner dramas contained too many characters. “‘You have no idea,'” she wrote in
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
, “‘how many characters ring my doorbell and come to me every day, and I absolutely need them for my existence.'”
³⁰

In her cottage in the woods in Lenox, Massachusetts, Pat, like her protagonist Ripley, was both giving a performance and watching the show; turning herself into a theater of one. In 1960, Pat would make a little theory about the only depression for a writer being in a “return to the Self.”
³¹
Now, she was making up a Ripley who “hated going back to himself as he would have hated putting on a shabby suit of clothes, a grease-spotted, unpressed suit of clothes that had not been very good even when new.” Clothes would always make the man for Pat Highsmith. “No book,” she said, “was easier for me to write, and I often had the feeling Ripley was writing it and I was merely typing.”
³²

But Pat wasn't the only woman writer at work on psychopathic males. Long before she was revising
Strangers on a Train
at Yaddo and carefully clipping from a newspaper the photograph of the sneering young Ohio murderer Robert Murl Daniels (one of her prototypes for the psychopathic Charles Bruno), other American women “suspense” novelists had already created compellingly psychopathic males in their own novels. Amongst them was the Yale Younger Poet for 1931, Dorothy B. Hughes (1904–93), with her serial rapist and literal lady-killer Dix Steele in
In a Lonely Place
(1947); and Elizabeth Sanxay Holding (1889–1955) with her woman-hating, self-deceiving, alcoholic murderer, Jacob Duff, in
The Innocent Mrs. Duff
(1946).