The Talented Miss Highsmith (68 page)

Loriot was reduced to telling Pat that if
Edith's Diary
had been written by a man, “one couldn't have failed to reproach him with misogyny.” “What contempt for women!” she said about other women characters in Pat's work. Pat preferred to define her motives to Loriot vis-à-vis her women characters as an inability to respect them because they were dependent on men. That was accurate enough.

Loriot's editor at
L'Express
chose to publish old film stills and old photographs of Truman Capote and Carson McCullers to accompany the article—Pat hadn't seen or corresponded with either Capote or McCullers since the 1940s—and a very old photo of Mary McCarthy (whom Pat didn't admit to knowing in France). Pat, herself, didn't offer up any present-day colleagues to eke out her commentary, and she really didn't want to be photographed. She wanted to use photographs of herself at twenty—photographs so beautiful, said Mlle Loriot, that they reminded her of Simone Signoret, who was born in the same year as Pat and who displayed, Loriot thought, “the same fatalism when it came to the damage that tobacco and drink could wreak upon her.”

Pat, says Loriot, “knew she was no longer photogenic,” and so Loriot “had an idea, a good idea, which was to photograph the photo of Pat at twenty and use that.” But the editor of
L'Express
looked at the photographs of the twenty-year-old Pat and said: “We can't do this, absolutely not. She's unrecognizable. It's another woman entirely.”
¹⁵

And Pat, who took many showers a day while Noëlle Loriot was there, said one more thing to her journalist guest, something she had never said publicly before. Sigmund Freud would have been thrilled by Pat's remark—but it was really just another instance of the old Highsmith sleight of hand.

What Pat said was this:

“Whenever I touch paper money or coins before sitting down to write, I have to wash my hands in order not to ‘contaminate' my work.”
¹⁶

Part 13

Exceptional in so many ways, Pat added one more exception to her list. She preferred to surround her writing with a cordon sanitaire of light negativity. Many of her friends didn't care for her work—and if they did, she made it clear that she was uncomfortable with their approval. Of the admiration of her young lover Madeleine Harmsworth, who “refused to call me Pat—saying it would be like calling Dickens Charlie, or Shakespeare Willie,” Pat wrote: “I do not wish to be so celebrated.”
¹

Some of Pat's more literary friends are still divided between the two classic ways of not liking her writing: one is to admire
Strangers on a Train
and
The Talented Mr. Ripley
and nothing else; the other is to prefer her short stories to her novels.

When Ellen Hill, whose disapprobation undoubtedly added an extra frisson to her relationship with Pat, met Peter Huber for the first time, she took him aside and asked him seriously: “What do you see in Pat's books?” When he told her, she gave him her first-edition copy of
The Tremor of Forgery,
the one Pat had wistfully inscribed: “For Ellen / Maybe you will like this one better than most. / Love, Pat.”
²
When DéDé Moser, a painter friend of Ellen in the Ticino, read
This Sweet Sickness,
she thought it was a “wonderful” novel, but “[w]hen I praised it to Ellen, she said: ‘I told Patricia when this book came out: You rewrote this thing so many times! I could have finished it in one night!' She did not have a high opinion of Patricia's books.”
³

Some of Pat's lovers and many of her friends, including Kingsley Skattebol (who saves her admiration for Pat's short stories), say they either did not read Pat's books or did not care for the books they had read.
⁴
Barbara Skelton, memoirist, novelist, and Cyril Connolly's ex-wife, confirmed this interesting attitude in an article in the
London Magazine
: “The odd thing was that most of Pat's friends never read her books.”
⁵

Vivien De Bernardi, another late-life friend who didn't care for Pat's work, lived near Pat in the Ticino. An American-born children's educational therapist working with Down syndrome children, Vivien was the wife of a Swiss banker when Pat wrote to her with typical modesty (and at Ellen Hill's behest) in 1981 that she, Pat, was a “free-lance writer,” “almost always at home,”
⁶
and looking for comments on the child in her story “The Button.” “The Button” portrays a father's horror at having a “handicapped” child, the murder he commits to relieve his feelings, and the button trophy he takes away from that murder. Unaware of Pat's work or reputation when she received her letter, De Bernardi told Pat forthrightly that she thought the child in “The Button” “was presented totally unrealistically…but the anguish of the father was incredibly real and powerful, so something in the story rang true.”
⁷

Pat and Vivien became neighborly friends—perhaps because of Vivien's soothing demeanor and well-ordered household, but perhaps, too, given Pat's turn of mind, because of Vivien's initial critique of “The Button” and disinterest in Pat's novels. Pat's own “buttons” in Switzerland, the ones De Bernardi says she did not “dare to press” for fear of setting off long “rants,” were: “sex, Jews, blacks, and money.”

Although Vivien De Bernardi was one of those friends who thought Pat “honest and direct,” Pat never said a word to her neighbor about her love affairs or sexual preferences. Certainly all Pat's Swiss neighbors knew she was lesbian—those trim oxford shirts and pressed boy's jeans were a dead giveaway in suburban Switzerland—but they never broached the subject unless, like Bee Loggenberg, the wealthy South African who accompanied Pat on her last publicity trip to Paris in the fall of 1994, they, themselves, were gay. Pat was aware of what her neighbors assumed, but she ignored it. Hiding in plain sight had always been her style.

Switzerland, anyway, had become the elephants' graveyard of Pat's amatory hopes, barring the odd attempt to beguile an ex-lover into bed by letter or a half-acknowledged crush on a local pizzeria owner. And Pat's work suffered as only work inspired by love or love's fantasies could do. Still, there had never been room in Highsmith Country for love amongst the middle-aged—or even for love affairs which could be extended into a believable future. No Highsmith novel imagines a sexual affair as anything but a union of people in their teens, twenties, or thirties. Even the “lift” ending, as Pat called it, of
The Price of Salt
cannot get Therese Belivet and Carol Aird beyond an “excited wave” and across the crowded hotel barroom into each other's arms.

By the end of 1989, it was not only love that was missing from Pat's life. She was having to remind herself to do the other things that used to come naturally to her: “I must put more variation in my life, such as drawing & carpentering,” she wrote in her diary.
⁸
Drawing and carpentering had always been part of her creative day—but her days were no longer so creative. By the end of 1991, she was writing: “Typical of this year that there has been no time for anything like a diary.”
⁹
Nineteen ninety-one was the year Mary Highsmith died.

The twenty-third of May 1992 was “[a]nother non-workday (2nd) as I re-think my book
Small g
. It's an interesting plot.”
Small g
(1995), the posthumously published novel that was another kind of exception, allows a forty-five-year-old man (an obvious stand-in for the aging Pat) to have limitless sexual connections with teenage boys as well as a possible affair with a thirty-eight-year-old married policeman. But after this short entry there is no more about
Small g
in Pat's diary, just the constant brain chatter of her responsibilities, her “current problem[s]”: “3 legal things—my will, my house—have to be arranged, lest I die in my sleep with unfinished matter still unfinished…. I tell myself I do ever better keeping the questions, the unresolved at bay, while I summon the creative part of my brain. Would it were so.”
¹⁰

Pat was ill (see “
The Cake That Was Shaped Like a Coffin, Parts 3
,
5
,
6
, and
7
”), she was aging fast, and “the creative part of her brain” was caught up in a very uncreative conversation with the details of sustaining her busy career. The “success” she yearned for had overtaken the solid daily pleasures of making art. And love was no longer the subject of her conversations with herself.

By the time Pat had moved herself to Switzerland, she scarcely resembled the sexual adventurer she had been in youth or the improbable domestic partner she tried to be in middle age. Years of alcoholism, inadequate nourishment, and emotional turmoil had eroded much that would have been recognizable about her to her early companions. (The stomach is now understood by gastroneurologists to be a “second brain”—it uses some of the same neurotransmitters as the “first brain” and has its own controlling “enteric nervous system”—and Pat's stomach had been badly unsettled for decades.)
¹¹
Pat's neighbor Vivien says that she “loved sharing books with [Pat]. We exchanged books all the time and I valued her opinion.”
¹²
But it was not
Pat's
books they exchanged, nor was it Pat's writing they spoke about directly. It was always someone else's.

In a way, in Switzerland, Pat had
become
someone else. Many of her least attractive qualities were intensified in the high-security cell of her Swiss solitudes. Abdication from a love life and long separation from her mother—first by distance, then by the deliberate tamping down of her emotions, and then by Mary's death on 12 March 1991—finished the job. When Pat wasn't vilifying Mary in letters (and even when she was), she was continuing to make anxious enquiries about the “restraining chair” to which Mary was tied in her nursing home, about Mary's behavior in the halls, her fits of cursing, her state of mind. In her own way, Pat stayed attached to this central piece of furniture in her Romance Room, but the boiling hatred and burning love that had characterized their relations were things of the past. So, too, was Pat's best work.

Although she was surrounded by helpful neighbors in Switzerland and backed by a publisher most American writers could only dream about, Pat's separation from the kind of people who knew her history—the kind of people who had
shared
her history—was almost complete. Alone in a crowd of concerned Swiss friends with whom she could never discuss her personal life, Pat Highsmith presents a painful picture of emotional isolation. She had, in the most reduced sense of the word, made herself peerless.

Without the pleasures and pains of her love affairs with women—not to mention the absence of the central drama of her relationship with her mother—Pat had nothing to push against except her own psychological borders, which continued to harden in self-defense. Never one to move towards people in the first place (Pat is often characterized as “taking a step back” when meeting anyone, although her cousins say she never shrank from kissing them, and several living lovers attest to the warmth of her physical demonstrations), she avoided physical contact with people in Switzerland, as she had only sometimes done in Moncourt. Bert Diener and Julia Diener-Diethelm, her attentive next-door neighbors in Tegna, say they had to be careful not to offer their hands to her when they saw her.
¹³

Although Pat claimed she preferred to lead a “boring life,” her friend Kingsley described just how “boring” Pat herself had become in her last few years in Switzerland and how “disloyal,” she, Kingsley, felt to be thinking such a thing about her oldest friend.
¹⁴

If Pat could do without the literary approval of friends, she needed and wanted praise from established sources. She was so anxious about an article about her that was to appear in
The New York Times
in June of 1988 that a young friend working at the
Times
sneaked out an advance copy to her in Switzerland. But Pat wrote to Kingsley that she hadn't “the guts to face it.”
¹⁵

Further evidence of how much her work's reception meant to her is in Marion Aboudaram's account of Pat's terrible distress after a party at Mary McCarthy's apartment on the rue de Rennes in Paris. McCarthy, queen of American expatriate literary society in Paris, accidentally let Pat know that she had never heard of Pat's adored Tom Ripley—or of his adventures. “Is he a pop singer?” McCarthy inquired innocently of Pat. “Pat,” says Marion Aboudaram, “was very hurt and humiliated. And when she came home [to my apartment] she was absolutely drunk. She banged her head on the wall like mad. I had to give her warm milk with bread inside it and still she banged and banged and banged her head. She had a great complex about Mary McCarthy.”
¹⁶

In 1953, Pat had written to Kingsley about Mary McCarthy: “In a coolly intellectual way, I like her, and in her way, she is unrivaled.”
¹⁷
For years, while she was living in France, Pat kept up a correspondence with Mary McCarthy, seeing McCarthy and her fourth husband, James, more frequently than she ever admitted. As usual, it was Pat who initiated the correspondence, writing to McCarthy in the fall of 1972 from Moncourt to remind her that they'd met at Rosalind Constable's years ago, that she hoped they could meet “again,” and that if McCarthy didn't “like the company of other writers, I understand.”
¹⁸

The correspondence—about twenty letters from each woman—is marked on McCarthy's side by unfailing graciousness and on Pat's by a certain professional truckling, by polite requests for information, and by long rants about what was becoming her obsession with the taxes levied on Americans living abroad. Pat tried to interest McCarthy in joining tax pressure groups (McCarthy was already far more politically engaged than Pat, writing in Paris in favor of the work of the radical lesbian feminist novelist Monique Wittig and supporting many international causes; and, unlike Pat, McCarthy did her own taxes); and Pat brought Ellen Hill to meet her. McCarthy had worked with Ellen's best friend, Lily Marx, Karl Marx's niece.

Mary McCarthy and Pat wrote to each other about Janet Flanner's memorial service in Paris; McCarthy recommended her new French agent, Mary Kling, to Pat
¹⁹
(Pat, in one of her agent-changing fits in the 1970s, had already met with Kling, who gave Pat the impression that she was “swamped with clients”);
²⁰
and then she tried to bring Pat together with the other person whose friendship they shared, Ernst Hauser, the journalist Pat had met on her boat trip to Texas when she was seventeen. But when Pat moved to Switzerland, the correspondence with Mary McCarthy thinned, then petered out in 1984.

There is nothing in Pat's letters to McCarthy to indicate anything but polite pleasure in her company (“Really, your apartment was an oasis—of civilisation, after the Salon du Livre”) and professional interest in her work (“I thought your article on the novel excellent, in NY Review of Books”).
²¹
And there is nothing to reveal Pat's terrible despair on that October evening in 1977 when Mary McCarthy, with the best of intentions, had confused the talented Mr. Ripley with a rock 'n' roll star.
²²

A year later, Pat sent Mary McCarthy a copy of
Edith's Diary.
McCarthy included something about the novel in an article she was writing for
The Observer
in London.
The Observer
editor cut the reference, and McCarthy, very nicely, sent Pat her apologies and a copy of her original article. Pat didn't keep it. In fact Pat, who continued to archive everything (except her comics work and the cartoons she sent to
The New Yorker
) kept only one of McCarthy's letters—so perhaps Marion Aboudaram was right about Pat's “Mary McCarthy complex.”
²³