The Talented Miss Highsmith (62 page)

Marijane, meanwhile, was even more suspicious than Pat. Pat noted grimly that “M.J.” caught her with a hammer in her hand and asked if she was thinking of hitting her with it.
²²

The notes Pat took on her affair with Marijane Meaker are free of romanticism. They provide sketches of violent arguments, defensive analyses of motives, and deadpan descriptions of short-term reconciliations enhanced by lovemaking and disabled by recrimination. As usual, Pat chose to record what was wrong and not what was right in her life. Also as usual, she set down her thoughts according to her lights: the lights of someone defending herself against what she felt was an assault.

Desperate to return to Europe, as desperate as she was to return to the United States the last time she was
in
Europe (“I admire the common virtues of the Europeans more than I admire the common virtues of the Americans”), and focused on her perpetually unsuccessful revision of the Mexican novel she'd begun while living with Doris,
A Game for the Living,
Pat was hiding her morning drinking and a few other clandestine activities from Meaker. Since coming back from Europe in February of 1960, Pat had also been working on
The Two Faces of January,
a novel with a trio of dubious characters set in Greece. Two of those characters were a murkily attached male duo: Rydal, a “footloose” young American whom Pat described emphatically as “not a beatnik,” and Chester, a middle-aged con man who reminds Rydal of his father. Chester's wife, Olga/Colette, is more or less there to be killed—and she is: by accident and by her husband, who is trying to kill Rydal.

Pat conjured up
The Two Faces of January
out of her feeling of being “slightly rooked by a middle-aged man” with “a highly aristocratic but weak face” when she was in Europe with Doris. A visit to the Palace of Knossos and a “musty old hotel” in Athens were further inspirations.
²³
The first title she gave to
The Two Faces of January
was
The Power of Negative Thinking
—a title she thriftily bestowed on the fictional work of her fictional author, Howard Ingham, in her novel
The Tremor of Forgery.
The title was a clue to her mood.

Her editor Joan Kahn's response to the first completed version of
The Two Faces of January
wouldn't have lightened Pat's mood. Kahn called Pat's bluff. “The book,” Kahn wrote to Pat's agent, Patricia Schartle, “makes sense only if there is a homosexual relationship between Rydal and Chester…. We cannot like any of the characters, but more difficult, we cannot believe in them.”
²⁴
A couple of days after she received Kahn's letter, Pat made a note in her cahier: “The ultra-neurotic, which is myself. The Underground Man. To hell with reader identification in the usual sense, or a sympathetic character.”
²⁵
Pat was taking Kahn's rejection like a real writer—which is to say she was taking it personally—and Kahn would reject, in all, three revisions of
The Two Faces of January
. The novel was finally published by Doubleday in New York and Heinemann in London, where it won the Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger for 1965, thus providing Pat with yet another knife: the silver dagger that came with the award. Pat said, no doubt with the sour smile the French call
un sourire jaune,
that she used the dagger to open all her letters.

As was her habit, Pat described herself as the “victim” in her love affair with Marijane Meaker. She couldn't understand why Marijane “attempted to…punish me”
²⁶
she was “terrified of [Marijane's] temper” she felt that “the insults from her have gone beyond bounds.”
²⁷
“The morning was the worst. The worst of any verbal conflict to date. M.J. keeps me on the defensive, by wild attacks…e.g. accusing me the night before of having whined, of having said that I have the worst of it, in regard to housing.”
²⁸

Pat and Marijane broke up so often, and Pat moved in and out of the house so many times, that they had to change moving companies a couple of times to avoid embarrassment. Pat finally rented—and kept—an apartment and then another house on South Sugan Road in New Hope. And she and Marijane continued to see each other and continued to argue.
²⁹
It was an old pattern by now for Pat, and even the mutual accusations were getting old. Pat wrote down the most familiar of them.

“‘You're trying to defend yourself with what's left of your logical mind, because gin has got it [said Marijane]. You can't make it with Marijane Meaker. I threw you out, Pat, because you're a common drunk.'”

“I said, ‘Hang on to it. It's all you've got.'”
³⁰

Pat's drinking
was
heavy. So heavy that her friend Polly Cameron said her drinks were named for the activities they fueled: “Walking Drinks,” “Talking Drinks,” “Cooking Drinks,” “Dressing Drinks,” “Argument Drinks,” “Sleepless Night Drinks,” “Planting Drinks,” etc.
³¹
And just as she used to complain to other people about Mother Mary, Pat now complained constantly to Al and Betty Ferres about Marijane Meaker. Her theme was that “the mainspring of our difficulties is M.J.'s jealousy of me.”
³²

Meaker says that Pat provided “the great epiphany in my work because I was always worried about [repeating the theme of] folie à deux…and Pat said: ‘That's your bone; sharpen it. That's your bone, make it better.'”
³³
When they fell in love, Marijane Meaker, six years younger than Pat, was writing crime novels and lesbian reportage for pulp publishers under a flock of pseudonyms (Vin Packer and Ann Aldrich were two of them). Meaker wanted to break into the prestigious “hardback” market, while Pat was already a “hardback” writer with a fancy French award (the 1957
Roman policier
for
The Talented Mr. Ripley
), two American distinctions (the Crime Writers of America designations for both
Strangers on a Train
and
Ripley
), and a Hollywood film (Hitchcock's
Strangers on a Train
) under her writer's belt.

Pat slipped something else under that belt, too, when she helped herself to a writer's revenge on Marijane Meaker—by no means her last literary revenge on a woman. “[R]esentment was my second emotion,” Pat would later write in response to Caroline Besterman's analysis of her problems with women.

And in
The Cry of The Owl
(1962), the novel Pat wrote after she and Meaker broke up, Pat managed to murder Marijane “accidentally” with a knife in the character of Nickie: the scheming, taunting, lying painter of many pseudonyms and psychotically jealous ex-wife of the novel's unlucky hero, Robert Forester.

Marijane Meaker's own fictional revenge was as direct as Pat's. In her post-Pat novel,
Intimate Victims
(1962), she had the character she called Harvey Plangman, an obsessively self-improving, list-making, small-time grifter, battered to death with his own hammer.

“Harvey,” Meaker wrote forty years later, “was in no way like Pat. I probably just wanted to kill her off, too, so I chose Plangman for the victim's name.”
³⁵
But Harvey Plangman is
very
like Pat: he's a catalogue of her most Balzacian qualities. He slips German words into his sentences, just as Pat did, and he imitates her compulsive list making, her obsession with dress, and the deep social insecurities which ran under her attraction to “quality.”

In fact, the abject Harvey Plangman is as clear a portrayal of certain “male” aspects of Patricia Highsmith as Jill Hillside is of her “female” aspects. Jill Hillside is the ambivalent, sweetly depressed, sexually absent lesbian character in Marc Brandel's own post-Pat novel,
The Choice
(1950).

Of
The Choice,
Pat had written in her diary: “I am Jill Hillside, & there down to the last detail of cigarette holder, hands, levis etc. & a screamingly funny breakfast scene: identical with our own…. I suppose it's all over town. I am called a dike.”
³⁶

Pat, who was as versatile in her self-presentations (when she wanted to be) as her hero-criminal Tom Ripley, contained many characters. Jill Hillside and Harvey Plangman were only two of them. As one of her late-life Swiss neighbors observed with some surprise: “Whenever I talk about Pat, I never say the same thing twice.”
³⁷

Part 8

Because New Hope was a charming little country town of artisans and craftspeople, endowed with a “magical aura” and its own mythologies, Pat stayed on in New Hope after she and Marijane had called their very last moving company. “New Hope was fabulous from the Thirties to the Sixties,” said longtime resident furniture maker and designer Phillip Lloyd Powell, “and then it went the way of all tourist places.”
¹
And New Hope was a relaxed place for women to meet and match: Odette's (still in existence) was the restaurant/bar/nightclub where Pat was to pick up at least one lover after she and Marijane Meaker split up. Expedient as always, Pat made advances to the waitress, Daisy Winston.

Phillip Lloyd Powell was Daisy's best friend in New Hope.

“Daisy was so much fun when she was young, big as a minute, four foot something; such a cute little thing, very witty…and she'd sing at the Canal House, imitating Ella Logan and Marlene Dietrich. Daisy had a thing called nystigma, it was an eye-movement problem, and she couldn't drive, she couldn't type…. I think Pat would be attracted to people who had something abnormal about them…. Daisy [was a] go-between between Pat and her mother, a gofer…but bitching all the way.”
²

Daisy joined the long line of small, ferocious women (the approximate size and temperament of Willie Mae Stewart Coates) who crowd the lists of Pat's friends and lovers. Peggy Lewis, who thought Pat had a “brilliant future” in front of her, had a hard time imagining what Pat saw in Daisy. But Peggy's eldest daughter remembered Daisy's protective nature: how she'd fished her out of a canal once when she'd fallen in, and escorted her from her school bus past a threatening snake.
³
Daisy's custodial qualities alone would have recommended her to Pat.

Three months into her affair with Daisy, Pat went with Peggy Lewis to meet one of Bucks County's homosexual gentry, the novelist Glenway Wescott, whose elegant and disturbing novella,
The Pilgrim Hawk
(1940), is one of the jewels of American expatriate fiction. Peggy and Pat went to Wescott's younger brother's house first by mistake, and Pat was impressed by Lloyd Wescott's wife, the philanthropist and publisher Barbara Harrison.

Taking advantage of their error, Peggy and Pat looked at the “marvellous paintings collected by…Barbara to whom K[atherine Anne] Porter dedicated
A Ship of Fools
.” And then the two women went to Glenway Wescott's house, on the grounds of the same estate, and Pat talked to Wescott for “perhaps 45 minutes.” What they discussed was the journals of Virginia Woolf.
⁴
Three years later, Pat wrote a letter to Wescott from her cottage in Suffolk. But by then, Pat was writing to everyone.

Like any artist in conflict with her blood relatives, Pat was always happy to be an
ami de maison
, able, to the end of her life, to enjoy other families more than her own. The list of her adopted families and the ways she joined herself to them is as various as are their opinions of her. In New Hope, it was the Lewises and the Ferreses who were her sounding boards. In Montmachoux, she depended upon Agnes and Georges Barylski, the Polish gleaners who brought her eggs and did her favors. In Moncourt she had her next-door neighbors Desmond and Mary Ryan, and in Paris, she got on so well with Marion Aboudaram's mother, Mme Aboudaram, that Marion used to wonder if perhaps Pat didn't prefer her mother to her.
⁵
In Aurigeno, Pat had her neighbor Ingeborg Moelich to shop for her, and she eagerly followed the letters coming from her friend Charles Latimer about his intricate family problems, waiting breathlessly for “the big showdown with his greedy sister.”
⁶

In 1968, living miserably alongside Elizabeth Lyne in their house of double trouble in Samois-sur-Seine, Pat immersed herself in the life drama of a relative who had spent some years in an orphanage as a child (adoption, false or real, was a serious theme in the Coates family). The relative told Pat how she had to travel to New York to retrieve her runaway daughter from the protective care “of a Negro waiter named Ron” on the Lower East Side. (“Maybe you even know him!” Pat wrote a little nuttily to Lil Picard in New York.)
⁷

Pat was delighted by her relative's nine-page letter (“not a line of which is boring”), she was fascinated to see how the “plot” of this actual family drama would work out, and she was anxious to commend the woman's young daughter, who was being heckled by her stepfather, into Lil Picard's care. “If you can find someone old enough to be your grandmother
also
on your side—that's something!”
⁸
It was the old Coates/Highsmith family soap opera all over again (Pat, meanwhile, was following English radio's longest-running soap opera,
The Archers,
with strict attention),
⁹
and she was doing her best to bring this version of it to the old conclusion.
¹⁰

None of her pleasure in her acquaintance with cousin Ruby, however, stopped Pat from submitting Ruby's name along with the names of eight of her other cousins to her French lawyer in 1976 to ensure that if any of them dared to contest her latest will, they would already be on a list “eliminating” them from inheriting anything at all.
¹¹

Pat's friend and neighbor in France in the 1970s, Frédérique Chambrelent, had worked in haute couture for Molyneux (where she had watched Natalie Barney, Romaine Brooks, and Janet Flanner come in for fittings), and was, when she met Pat, a publicity representative, a journalist, and a friend of the great French actresses Arletty and Edwige Feuillère. Pat used to enjoy coming to tea with Chambrelent's mother at her country house in Vaudoué, twenty kilometers from Pat's house in Moncourt. Pat came “every weekend for two or three years” and would query Frédérique Chambrelent closely about her niece, Bénédicte, who was attending Columbia University, Pat's alma mater. “She was very interested in Bénédicte's news”—and also very kind to Bénédicte. Pat helped Chambrelent in her garden, and, with a friend, Frédérique Chambrelent painted Pat's workroom in Moncourt for her and visited Pat there regularly. Chambrelent remembers that there was something very wrong with Pat's chocolate point Siamese cat: “The cat chased its tail all the time. It went in circles.”
¹²

Although Pat drank enough to horrify both Frédérique Chambrelent and Serge Matta (brother of the painter Roberto Matta and a friend of Pat's translator neighbor, Janine Hérisson), she was always perfectly behaved with Chambrelent's mother, imbibing only tea with Mme Chambrelent and comporting herself properly. But when there wasn't a tea party, Pat would stay the whole day in Vaudoué, drinking whiskey (Frédérique Chambrelent says that Pat kept a bottle in her purse “like a sailor”: Pat reminded
everyone
of a sailor), and then she would drive herself back home drunk, although she always “held on to her dignity. Pat had her rules, her rigidities, she could be very
bourgeoise,
” as well as having “a really charming side.” But she was “like a prehistoric animal.” And Chambrelent refused to listen to Pat's disquisitions on “the blacks and the Jews.” “Enough is enough,” she would say to Pat.
¹³

Frédérique Chambrelent wanted to introduce Pat to her friend the renowned French film and theater actress Edwige Feuillère. “I thought Edwige could make a scenario from one of Pat's works, the short story of the two sisters who lived together [“Quiet Night”], and Patricia said:
‘Elle est trop snob pour moi.'
She refused to meet her because she was too shy…. Pat was very timid, very shy, it was pathological.” But in every other way—except in speaking about her own family or her lovers (Chambrelent met Pat's young lover Monique Buffet, but Pat introduced Monique as one of her “agents”)—Pat became an
ami de maison
: with regular visits, frequent notes, and interested enquiries about Chambrelent's family.
¹⁴

“I found her very intelligent,” says Frédérique Chambrelent. “But how strange she was. How strange she was.”
¹⁵

Desmond Ryan,
¹⁶
the Anglo-Irish journalist who was Pat's neighbor in Moncourt throughout the 1970s, brought the translators Henri Robillot (translator of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow) and Janine Hérisson, who would translate Pat's novels
A Dog's Ransom
and
Ripley's Game
for Calmann-Lévy, to meet Pat in the house in Montmachoux, where her Portuguese neighbors gave her “the occasion to make many racist remarks.” Robillot and Hérisson lived nearby in the Forest of Fontainebleau and knew, through their translations, something about the United States. Pat envied their house, a bohemian dwelling of considerable charm, which she compared unfavorably to her own faux-bourgeois style.

Pat was charmed by Janine Hérisson (Henri Robillot offered the opinion that Pat was perhaps a little
too
charmed), and sent her some very amiable letters, but Mlle Hérisson resisted the kind of “adoption” Pat sought. She found Pat's “racist remarks” uncomfortable to be around.

“When I first met Patricia and I asked her why she left the United States she said it was because of the Negro Problem. And I understood her to mean that it was because of the way Negroes were treated in the United States. But that's not what she meant at all. She meant it was because of the way Negroes were demanding their rights.”
¹⁷

One afternoon, Pat, the noise of her Portuguese neighbors nagging at her nerves, drove over from Montmachoux to visit Hérisson and Robillot. They got to talking about the American Civil War—one of Pat's “subjects”—and M. Robillot told Pat that he had a Spencer automatic rifle from 1865, the kind that helped secure the North's victory at Gettysburg. Pat wanted to see and hold the gun. She took it in her hands, raised it, assumed the posture of a shooter, and, pretending to pull the trigger and reload between hits, began to shout: “Fire one Portuguese! Fire two Portuguese!”

At the “third ‘Portuguese,'” says M. Robillot, “we stopped her, astonished at her homicidal furor.”
¹⁸

All of Pat's house moves and most of her travels—to New Hope, to Suffolk, to Samois-sur-Seine, to Moncourt, to Aurigeno, and finally to Tegna, as well as her visits to Positano, to Marseille, to Tunis, and to Tangier—were assisted by helpful people she'd known for some time. Mary Highsmith's friend, the cartoonist Jeannot (Jean David), housed Pat in Marseille; Caroline Besterman helped her in Aldeburgh and Earl Soham; Elizabeth Lyne found her houses in Bois Fontaine and Samois-sur-Seine and accompanied her to Tunis; Pat's lover at the time “negotiated the Montmachoux house”
¹⁹
Desmond and Mary Ryan were responsible for directing her to the house next door to them in Moncourt; and Ellen Blumenthal Hill persuaded Pat to move to Switzerland, picked out the house in Aurigeno for her, and supervised its renovation. And it was Peter Huber who alerted Pat to the property adjoining his wife's family house in Tegna on which Pat constructed her final home. Pat's social “isolation” had distinctly social limits; despite her protestations, she always had a kind of “family” nearby.

And so it was Peggy Lewis's bohemian mother-in-law, Edna Lewis, with whom Pat had attended some Ethical Culture meetings in New York, whose art school in Positano was a base for Pat's passages through Positano. Pat had first gone to Positano during her twenty-day idyll with Kathryn Hamill Cohen in September of 1949, and she returned there with Ellen Hill in 1952 and 1962. But whenever she was alone in Positano, she knew that Edna Lewis's art school was a ready-made social frame. And in that lovely hill village, says Edna's granddaughter, “Any attractive man—never mind his sexual proclivities—would be let into [Edna's] art school for free. She loved attractive men.”
²⁰
Much of the company Edna Lewis had around her was male and homosexual—just the kind of company Pat liked.

Larry Kramer, the playwright, novelist, and AIDS activist, remembers meeting Pat in Positano in 1963, just after she'd left New Hope, and the United States for good. Pat, in love “as never before” with Caroline Besterman, was on her roundabout way to join Caroline in England, and Kramer was a young man working for Columbia Pictures in London and staying, by chance, at the good hotel in Positano from whose balcony early one morning in 1952 Pat had first conjured up the idea of Tom Ripley.

“Well, I didn't know much about anything then,” says Larry Kramer.