The Talented Miss Highsmith (70 page)

To M.B.

To Monique (lots of Moniques in the world)

To M?B (I do not know your middle name)

To Monique Buffet (I anticipate a no on this already.)

I don't want or like dedications in principle.

No.

Pat took her book dedications seriously. Her books—perhaps more than the books of many other authors—were her life. Her dedications often coincided with a high point in her relations with (or her feelings of nostalgia for) her dedicatees. Not all her books are dedicated, but their dedicatees include five men (two of whom were related to her), one married couple, twenty-one women (and the companion dog of one of them), a political movement, and her cat Spider.
The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder
was inscribed to her cousin Dan Coates. Pat mentions his home, Box Canyon Ranch, and his home state and hers, Texas, in the dedication. Dan, of course, was the most present male figure of her childhood, just as her father, Jay B Plangman, to whom
A Dog's Ransom
is dedicated, was the most absent. The collection of short stories originally published as
The Snail-Watcher
was consigned to Alex Szogyi, with whom she had a long, warm friendship and a frank correspondence.
The Two Faces of January
was inscribed to Rolf Tietgens, who sometimes seems to be Pat's male homosexual twin—the twin who
didn't,
as Pat and Ripley did, “get away with it.” The collection of stories called
The Black House
is dedicated to Charles Latimer, the transplanted Canadian she'd met in the 1960s when he worked for her London publisher, Heinemann. He “thought she was a genius”
³⁸
she responded by temporarily making him one of her executors.

But the preponderance of Pat's books are dedicated to women. Aside from the “false” dedication of
The Price of Salt
—a book full of misdirections (including the pseudonym it was written under), designed to hide the emotional biography Pat had buried in it, and dedicated to three people Pat said she'd made up, “Edna, Jordy, and Jeff”—her book dedications constitute an index to the life of her heart.

Two books were dedicated to Mary Highsmith, and she is the only dedicatee to receive this distinction.
This Sweet Sickness,
written with another Mary in mind—Mary Ronin—was still assigned to the original Mary, and
Miranda the Panda Is on the Veranda,
the book of nonsense rhymes and illustrations Pat and Doris concocted in 1958 (a book which made Janet Flanner “wince” with aesthetic disgust as she thumbed through it),
³⁹
is also dedicated to Mary. It is Pat's silliest book, and she was responsible only for the artwork. The inscription on
Edith's Diary
—requested by Marion Aboudaram—simply reads “Marion.”

Strangers on a Train,
although dedicated in manuscript to “all the Virginias” and slyly changed to “all the Virginians” in the first paperbook version (a recent paperback edition has restored “the Virginias”), went undedicated in its hardcover publication—as did
The Talented Mr. Ripley,
the book Pat certainly thought of as dedicated to herself. After all, when she gave Ripley a middle initial, it was her own. Tom signs himself in three different novels as “Thomas P. Ripley.”
P
was for Phelps—but it was also for Patricia and undoubtedly for Plangman, too.

A Game for the Living
(1958) was principally dedicated to Ethel Sturtevant, “my friend and teacher,” although Pat thriftily threw in another set of nurturers (Dorothy Hargreaves and Mary McCurdy), whom she cited “for their empathy and for their house.” Ethel Sturtevant was Pat's unfailing source of praise and succor—she compared Pat mistily to Edith Wharton in a letter—when she was her literature professor at Barnard College, and she continued to champion Pat until she died.
The Cry of the Owl
went to “D.W.,” Daisy Winston, Pat's outspoken ex-lover and friend from New Hope, Pennsylvania, one of the few people to whom Pat gave a sizeable sum of money—a five-thousand-dollar check—when it was most needed.

The Glass Cell
(1964) was assigned to Pat's beloved cat Spider, who, three years after the book was published, was conveyed into the hands of the British novelist Muriel Spark—with a little help from Pat's cat-loving Southern friend, Eugene Walter, and some serial obstructions from a Roman landlady. In 1970, Pat listed Muriel Spark along with Iris Murdoch, Kingsley Amis, and Graham Greene as the four British writers she liked “although,” she added candidly, “I am not a great reader of anything.”
⁴⁰
In 1971, Pat wrote to her friend Kingsley that “reading Muriel Spark's brilliant
Memento Mori
[made me feel inadequate:] I am appalled at my obtuseness in grubbing over my novel for seven months.”
⁴¹

Dame Muriel Spark explained to me how Spider Highsmith had come to live with her:

Spider, whom Pat had left in Positano when she went to live in Suffolk, made the train trip from Positano to Rome all by himself. In 1968, Muriel Spark sent Pat a telegram which Pat kept all her life: “Spider is safe with me forever. He is greatly loved. Healthy and youthful. All best.”
⁴²

“[Patricia and I] had a correspondence,” said Muriel Spark, “and I wrote to her when he died, of course. We were
devastated
when he died.

“He was the most
wonderful
cat: black—perhaps partly Siamese—with enormous green eyes. And very intelligent. You could tell he had been a writer's cat. He would sit by me, seriously, as I wrote, while all my other cats filtered away.

“He brought,” Dame Muriel said, “a bit of Patricia Highsmith with him.”
⁴³

In her 1988 novel,
A Far Cry from Kensington,
Muriel Spark has the narrator explain the importance of a companion cat to a writer. The passage sounds very much like the description she provided of the cat she'd inherited from Patricia Highsmith. “For concentration you need a cat…. And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give you back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence is enough.”
⁴⁴

Pat dedicated
Deep Water
to “E.B.H. and Tina”—Ellen Blumenthal Hill and Ellen's poodle, Tina.
The Blunderer
was inscribed “For L.”—a reference to Lynn Roth, whose short, sharp love affair with Pat had left a lasting impression of “type.” The hardback edition of another work went, under disguised initials, to Caroline Besterman, and a paperback edition of
A Suspension of Mercy
was inscribed in the early 1990s to “Betty, Margot, Ann and all the old gang”—the lesbian friends she used to consort with on Fire Island and with whom she'd once again begun corresponding.
Those Who Walk Away
was dedicated to Lil Picard, “one of my more inspiring friends,” and
The Tremor of Forgery
was offered to Rosalind Constable.
Ripley Under Ground
(1970) was dedicated to Agnes and Georges Barylski, the Polish gleaners who lived in a trailer 150 yards from Pat's house in Montmachoux. Although Pat privately referred to the Barylskis as “peasants” (and preferred countries “in which there is an acknowledged peasant class”),
⁴⁵
she thought they were “the only “honest people” she'd met in France. They cared for her cats whenever she travelled and had once paid her “in advance” for a kerosene heater she'd sold to them—an act of faith which thoroughly impressed her.