The Talented Miss Highsmith (73 page)

Pat happily tranquillized by Francis Wyndham's cat. Wyndham's 1963 article in
New Statesman
gave her work its first and best introduction in England. (
Collection Francis Wyndham
)

 

Pat in 1980 at Diogenes Verlag in Zurich, conferring with Daniel Keel (center) and Gerd Haffmans. (
Collection Diogenes Archive
)

 

Ruda Brandel Dauphin introduces Douglas Fairbanks Jr. to Pat at the American Film Festival in Deauville in September 1987. Pat spent two evenings there draped over the piano in the bar of the Normandy Hotel, singing Cole Porter songs. (
Collection Ruda Brandel Dauphin
)

 

Pat—who gleefully suggested this ominous pose in front of her sharpened
instruments—photographed by Richard Schroeder in Tegna, Switzerland, in 1990. (
Collection Richard Schroeder
)

 

Pat and her friend Jeanne Moreau, on Pat's last publicity trip to Paris in 1994. (
Swiss Literary Archives
)

 

The Fortress of Solitude. Pat standing guard over the back side of Casa Highsmith/
Highsmith Haus in Tegna, during its construction in 1988–89. (
Swiss Literary Archives
)

 

As late as the fall of 1992—Pat's brief sexual relationship with Monique Buffet had been over for eleven or twelve years by then—Pat was still writing to Monique self-deprecatingly about her work. Concerning
Ripley Under Water,
she cautioned: “Never mind my new book, the Ripley. It is all right, but nothing great.”
¹
The fact that Pat was correct in her appraisal is almost beside the point.

Francis Wyndham, who remarks that almost every story he tells about Pat “has a cat in it,” recalled one story that didn't. He had said to Pat about a book of hers, “‘That belongs on my Highsmith shelf.' And she was very annoyed: ‘I haven't GOT a shelf,' she said. She didn't like me treating her with that sort of reverence, putting all her books together. She sent out a signal: treat me as an artisan.”
²

Pat's intellectual uncertainties were such that she liked to cite “authorities” to back up her assertions, and for much of the rest of her life the irrefutable Ellen Hill was one of her “most referenced authorities.”
³
Joan Juliet Buck noted in a 1977 article for
The Observer Magazine
that Pat was constantly quoting Hill's opinions to give substance to her own.
⁴
Pat's ambivalences required an anchor to steady them—and Ellen's anchor was made of the heaviest metal.

To be sure, Ellen's overbearing behavior at dinner parties, restaurants, and private homes was matched—overmatched, in fact—by Pat's own comportment at the table. On a too-quiet evening, Pat was perfectly capable of leaning over a candle to set her hair on fire
⁵
or of hauling a clutch of snails out of her handbag and encouraging them to “leave silvery trails on the mahogany.”
⁶
The smell of burning hair and the sight of snails were just the things to put her tablemates off their food.

Caroline Besterman remembers an evening when she and Pat were both guests at a gracious dinner party given by a married couple, one of whom was Jewish. During a lull in the conversation, Pat looked up from her plate and suddenly erupted with a line from the awful internal drama she had been rehearsing: “‘I'm sick of the Jews!'

“It just came straight out of her mouth,” said Caroline Besterman, “and there was a silence, and then people went on talking as though it never happened. They ignored it.”
⁷

Christa Maerker, who felt “protective and motherly of Pat,” recalls a painful luncheon in the 1980s at the Locarno Film Festival when Pat “attacked a cigarette machine in a restaurant…. She jumped up from the table, very aggressively, and went over to it and started hitting it and kicking it with her feet and yelling. And everybody was highly embarrassed. There was music downstairs in a disco and she thought the cigarette machine was making it; she thought it was a jukebox.”
⁸

And Philip Thompson, Alex Szogyi's longtime partner, had a disquieting experience at a dinner party in Pat's house in Moncourt in the 1970s. Alex and Philip were visiting Pat in France, and Pat, unusually, was cooking a real home-style Southern meal for them with chicken and biscuits, gravy, and mashed potatoes. She hated cooking, said Alex, and when she did cook it was “sort of”—he paused politely to find the right term; he was a food writer—“Texan.” The other guests at Pat's house, all women, were speaking French with Alex. Philip, who didn't speak French and who, anyway, had a rather tetchy relationship with Pat, was listening uncomfortably to the conversation, trying to catch a word here and there. Finally, Philip went into the kitchen and said to Pat, “Gee I wish they would speak English, I can't understand a word.” And Pat turned on him immediately. “What a pity,” she retorted coldly.

That, Philip thought, was when the trouble began.

Also present at the dinner party was a “charming young journalist from London”—Madeleine Harmsworth—and Philip and Madeleine began talking and getting along wonderfully, and Pat didn't much like that, Philip felt. At some point during the evening, Pat's “Confederate” swords were taken down from the wall, and Philip and Pat posed for a picture
“en garde,”
which, Philip thought, was quite symbolic of their relationship.

At the end of the evening, and after eating the dinner Pat had prepared, Philip Thompson became violently ill. He was the only person at the dinner party who did so, and it's a measure of the uneasy possibilities Pat's character could evoke for her friends that it crossed the minds of both Alex and Philip that Pat might have had something to do with Philip's illness, that she might have “poisoned” Philip: put something in the food on his plate to make him sick. Alex, enormously sympathetic to Pat in every respect and unreservedly complimentary of her work, said he was worried about this. Alex and Philip laughed about it, but ever after they continued to refer to that dinner party in Moncourt as “the night of the poisoning.”
⁹

While Pat's social depredations continued to be suppressed by embarrassed friends or ignored by shell-shocked hosts, Ellen Hill's rudenesses were remarked upon and tallied up: mostly by Pat's friends and principally in the context of her bullying relationship with Pat.

But what Pat's friends always failed to understand was that Ellen was providing Pat with the painful contradictions she craved: sexual admiration (when Ellen learned that Kingsley Skattebol was not a lesbian and had never had an affair with Pat, she said to Kingsley: “Too bad, she was a wonderful lover”);
¹⁰
sexual rejection (in Mallorca, six months into their relationship, Pat and Ellen were sleeping in separate beds and avoiding kissing each other good night); and the psychological domination Pat had identified as so essential to her psyche at the age of twenty: “I cannot imagine a domination without love, nor a love without domination.”
¹¹

Of
course,
Ellen's behavior infuriated Pat. Humiliation as a technique has a very short shelf life even in the best circumstances (i.e., when it is welcomed by its object). Granted that Pat was excited by the idea of being humiliated, she could have done with a great deal less of it from Ellen Blumenthal Hill.

Monique Buffet, watching Pat and Ellen together in Moncourt twenty-five years after their affair was over, found their relationship hilarious. “The sight of Pat and Ellen together, Pat complaining about Ellen all the time, was enough to make you die laughing. Pat was like a little sullen girl with Ellen but she did what Ellen said. Ellen was very nice to me, she was funny, a great woman, but the way she ordered Pat around was extraordinary.”
¹²

Five years after that, Bettina Berch saw Pat and Ellen together in Aurigeno in a more subdued dialogue. “They were pretending that they were very neutral acquaintances, like this is my best friend here, or something. You could tell in some sort of subliminal way that they had been lovers; every now and then there was the little nickname—Ellen called Pat ‘Teacup'…and the formality slipped.”
¹³

“Teacup” suggests that Ellen understood something about Pat's fragilities. But Pat's jabs at Ellen's nagging and her compulsive cataloguing of Ellen's faults (there are long, long lists devoted to Ellen Hill's Serious Flaws in Pat's notebooks) continued for decades after the end of their affair. In the end, Pat's friendship with Ellen Hill provided her with the kind of emotional contact she could best sustain with an ex-lover: intense irritation.

Only one of Pat's short relationships in Europe had anything like the kind of creative consequences that Ellen Hill's rough loving had provided. Pat and “Jacqui” had an intermittent affair in Montmachoux and Paris in 1968 and 1969. It was punctuated by some exciting physical fights brought on by Pat's increasingly obsessional behavior: “I pulled down a very tall curtain of the kitchen [in Jacqui's apartment], because it was utterly, unspeakably filthy, stuck it in the tub and washed it. Jacky was so furious, she pulled my hair and slapped my face.”
¹⁴