The Talented Miss Highsmith (59 page)

Dorothy Hughes was regularly touted as a “latter-day Dostoyevsky”—the same compliment the same critics would pay to Pat's work.
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And the celebrated English biographer and Highsmith fan Antonia Fraser has marked a Highsmith connection to Elizabeth Sanxay Holding's novel
The Blank Wall
(1947): “[I]t is a brilliant psychological thriller with twists and turns, both morally and amorally, worthy of the great Patricia Highsmith herself.”
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But because Pat's “popular” reading went mostly unmentioned in her cahiers, it is impossible to know if she ever read Dorothy Hughes and Elizabeth Sanxay Holding, or if, having read them, she paid any attention to them. Patricia Schartle Myrer, Pat's agent for twenty years, says that Pat never showed interest in other writers unless they were hugely famous or conveniently dead.
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Still, Pat never forgot a grudge, and so she had good reason to remember Dorothy Hughes. In 1958, Dorothy Hughes wrote a polite reponse to a request from Joan Kahn to furnish a jacket quote for the Harper & Brothers publication of Pat's much-reworked Mexican novel,
A Game for the Living:
“I shall have to confess abjectly that I have an enormous blind spot where Patricia Highsmith is concerned. I don't like her writings, and I particularly did not like what (to me) was her lack of empathy to the Mexican nationals in this [novel].”
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The novels of both Hughes and Sanxay Holding contain strongly feminist critiques of the violent behavior of their male murderers, but Pat, always a contrarian when it came to being a “woman” writer, had different sympathies: “I go along, usually, with the [male] murderer…. I can't identify with anyone else.”
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While she was staying in Positano in 1963, Pat hung her “slightly mildewed” Edgar Allan Poe Scroll—it was the Mystery Writers of America Award conferred upon
The Talented Mr. Ripley
in April of 1956—in her bathroom because she thought all her awards looked “less pompous” there. When she took it out of its frame to scrape away the mildew, she added three words to it. Those words turned her award into a declaration of partnership.

“When I removed the glass to clean and dry it, I lettered ‘Mr. Ripley and' before my own name since I think Ripley himself should have received the award.”
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Pat couldn't bear any tampering with Tom Ripley's “image,” and she was pained by Wim Wenders's choice of Dennis Hopper to play Ripley in his loose film adaptation of
Ripley's Game
,
The American Friend
. On rare occasions, she would add Ripley's name to the valedictory of her letters or the dedications of her books, a tip of the Highsmith hat to her partnership with her own particular devil.
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And although Ripley was always her favorite “character,” her French editor Alain Oulman was disturbed by the fact that she occasionally spoke of Ripley as though he were “real,” or at least susceptible to insult. But Pat could usually be counted upon to unsettle her friends.

At summer's end, in the beginning of September 1954, Pat, ready for another round in the love ring, got back together again with Ellen Hill, who had returned from her travels abroad. Pat had a novel to finish, and Ellen's goading presence was just the inspiration she needed. She had already provided the reason why: “[T]he functioning, positive artist wants to live with a ‘bad influence,' that is a negative, critical, bourgeois, uncreative, cramping woman, for the plain purpose of fighting against her. She represents, and right across the breakfast table, all the artist is fighting against anyway, plus what the homosexual is—of course fighting against—unartistic personalities and the narrow view of life.”
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Now, in one of her quirkier descriptions, Pat made another attempt to explain what Ellen really meant to her. It was anything but a direct compliment, but it was a compliment all the same. And it was the compliment Pat would continue to pay to Ellen for the next thirty-five years.

“If I shall ever pay tribute to Ellen Hill in words, the most important thing I shall say is that with her, I often had fascinating and valuable conversations between the breaking of a dinner plate and the bathing of a dog…. Of no other woman can I say this…. It was her challenging mind often irritating, her point not always justified, that inspired the conversations generally, however.”
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And so Pat and Ellen set out again on one of their long, quarrelsome journeys by car, this time to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Ellen had by now replaced Henry the dachshund with Tina the French poodle, but Pat had stopped keeping her diaries (Ellen had peeked at them again), and there is no evidence that Pat got on any better with Tina than she did with the clever, vengeful Henry. Three years later, Pat amiably included Tina in her dedication of
Deep Water
to Ellen. But in 1970, when Pat was feeling particularly alienated from her home country (she hated Nixon, loathed the civil rights movement, and, although against the war in Vietnam, she was agitated by the protests the war had engendered), she started to write
A Dog's Ransom,
a shambolic novel which begins with a poison pen letter and ends with the thorough corruption of Clarence Duhamel, a New York policeman of high morals, good education, and Pat's own reading habits.
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But Pat had never met a New York cop, knew nothing about the workings of a police precinct, and had to ask Kingsley, long distance, to do the police research for her.
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And in this new novel, Pat couldn't resist kidnapping and murdering a poodle, a poodle she couldn't help naming after Ellen's poodle, Tina.

The day after they arrived in Santa Fe, Pat, possessed by her book and without bothering to fully unpack her suitcase, began to write.
Ripley
was to take her only six months, and she finished the manuscript before the end of the year. She sent the original copy (the original is missing from her archives, as are original manuscripts for
The Blunderer, The Cry of the Owl, This Sweet Sickness, The Two Faces of January
, and
A Game for the Living
) to her grandmother in Fort Worth. But two weeks after Pat's thirty-fourth birthday, on 5 February 1955, Willie Mae Stewart Coates, eighty-eight years old and still in possession of the manuscript of
The Talented Mr. Ripley
, fell dead of an aneurysm while working in her garden. Pat, travelling in Mexico with Ellen at the time, was near enough to Texas to go to Willie Mae's funeral. But she didn't go, just as she didn't go to her father's, her stepfather's, or her mother's funeral. Perhaps the news didn't reach her in Mexico in time; perhaps she simply couldn't face a family funeral.

Willie Mae died as she had lived—busy and productive in her own house. A few months before her death, she was up on a ladder painting a twelve-foot-high ceiling. She fell from the ladder, breaking some ribs, and made her lodgers swear not to tell her family what had happened. Even before he learned the truth, her great-grandson Don remembers thinking that Willie Mae—despite the fact that she had always maintained a severely upright Victorian posture—was looking
especially
erect with her secretly taped-up ribs.
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Pat's initial mourning for Willie Mae quickly combusted into rage. She decided to blame Mary for the loss of the manuscript of
The Talented Mr. Ripley
, which had disappeared in the confusion following Willie Mae's death. Willie Mae's boardinghouse and its contents were sold to the owners of the Judson Boot Factory, who tore it down to build a parking lot, and Mary told Pat that “the Negroes” (presumably the people living in the boardinghouse's back-shacks) had done the packing up of the house and somehow her manuscript had been lost. Dan Walton Coates bought back his great-grandparents' “bedroom suite” from Judson Boots, but didn't come in time to save from the wrecker's ball those vividly decorated closet panels Pat had painted for Willie Mae in the mid-1940s.
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Pat's secondary mourning for Willie Mae—the kind that produces tears—didn't come until years later, but it, too, was triggered by an object. When Pat glanced down at one of her own worn-out shoes—it had taken the shape of her foot—she suddenly saw “the shape, or expression, of my grandmother's foot [and] I shed the first real tears for my grandmother.”
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Ellen and Pat's car trip from New York to Santa Fe, where they spent three months, along with their travels through Mexico were as unstructured as all their wanderings through Europe; but the movement was productive for Pat. Her notes for
Deep Water
proliferated, and whole passages in her cahier became part of the finished novel. The more intolerable her personal experiences with Ellen were (she called Santa Fe
“l'enfer”
in her notebook—and leaves us to imagine why), the more elevated her creative life. Mexico, too, was inspiring to her—although without the intense enthusiasms produced by her first trip there in 1944. But Pat's higher body temperatures had always favorably affected her writing, and perhaps the extremes of climate and society in Mexico, with the natural colors of the mountain villages and plateaus haloed by the feverish yellow light, affected her imagination as creatively as illness did.

As Pat and Ellen drove from Ciudad Juarez to Mexico City and all the way down to Acapulco, Pat kept a continuous chronicle of their travels—written, with her usual thriftiness, to be reshaped into an article for a magazine like the one which continued to reject her,
The New Yorker.
(Pat calls Ellen “my companion” in her notes, and excludes all sexual and most emotional commentary.) Some of her liveliest descriptions are the result of this running reportage, and the disparity between her situation and that of the Mexican locals was continually on her mind. Unlike her
haute bourgeois
view of Europe, however, all she saw in Mexico was “unjust poverty.” But poverty never evoked much of a sympathetic reaction from Pat, and in Hidalgo del Parral, she found “[t]he populace is shockingly poverty-stricken” and wrote that their “frank rags” could “produce fear in the onlooker.”
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In Mexico City, Pat and Ellen checked into the Majestic Hotel, the only hotel that would take a dog. The bellboys were drunk by 8:00
P.M.
on New Year's Eve, and the two women were taken to see the house of the former mayor of New York William O'Dwyer. O'Dwyer was a man who intermittently interested Pat as a subject: she was certainly interested in his beautiful second wife, Sloan Simpson, a John Powers model from Texas, a darling of jetset society, and a close friend of Pat's future lover Daisy Winston. (Claustrophobia would be a reasonable response to lesbian circles on the eastern seaboard of the United States in the 1950s.) O'Dwyer was more or less an unindicted criminal, residing (after some putatively shady doings in New York) in Mexican exile or, as Pat put it, “in plain hiding,” in the “plush San Angel residential section,” which Pat and Ellen entered through an iron gate “like those of Sing Sing Prison (where O'Dwyer ought to be).”
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In 1961, Pat finally managed to meet Mayor O'Dwyer in his apartment on the Upper East Side of New York. And the first thing she noticed about him were his shoes: “Short, common feet in common black shoes suggest the feet of an ordinary policeman, walking his beat.” Pat was remembering, rather scornfully, that William O'Dwyer had started his political career as a cop walking the beat in Brooklyn.
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In Taxco with Ellen, Pat remarked that the Santa Prisca bells were “never accurate,” and then, with particular precision, described the braying of a donkey: “It starts out with a honking, squeaking sound, like a bucket being hauled up by a rusty crank, progresses to the agonized E-E-E-aw—
E-E-E
-aw! which winds down to a very melancholy, sobbing line of onck-onck-onck—as if that donkey's world had come to an end.”
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To Puebla and Oaxaca and Acapulco and Cuernavaca the two women went, with Pat continuing to keep her amusing, impersonal travel diary, just as she had in Switzerland in 1953. In June of 1955, somewhere on their journey—perhaps they were in Santa Fe again, because two days later they were back on the road between Santa Fe and Tulsa, Oklahoma, on their way to New York—Pat made this note under the
Keime
category in her twenty-third cahier. It was the first of her several expressions of interest over the years in the subject of returning a wallet. “A man (or a girl) who finds a wallet in New York with considerable money in it, plus the address. He has lost so many wallets of his own, he takes pleasure in returning this with every stamp intact. An adventure begins…. The hero or heroine thus walks into a murder story.”
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And so, Pat's long and troubled association with Ellen Blumenthal Hill produced yet another inspiration. From this
keime
, thirty years later, would come
Found in the Street,
Pat's Manhattan novel of a found wallet and the fatal consequences attending its discovery.

By the end of 1955, Pat and Ellen had finally gone their not-entirely-separate ways. “I am always in love,” Pat had written in July of 1954, from the safety of her solitary cabin in Massachusetts, “with the worthy and the unworthy…and I wonder now is it a giving or a taking? Before, it was obviously a taking, because I needed merely the emotion, if nothing else.”
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Pat's lover in France twenty-five years later, the novelist and translator Marion Aboudaram, said nearly the same thing, and she said it without rancor: Pat made ruthless use of the women she loved and of the emotions generated by her tangled relationships with them. Without a woman lover, as Pat wrote in her diary shortly after meeting Ellen Hill, “I cannot even develop as a writer any farther, or sometimes, even exist.”
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