The Talented Miss Highsmith (75 page)

If Pat's arrival in New York from Texas in 1934 had occurred six or seven decades later, the unhappy preteen might have found herself enshrined in the collective family nightmare that is American social history. The profile Pat created of herself as a miserable child in Fort Worth in 1933–34 is very close to the tabloid image of terror that haunts America now: an adolescent misfit, depressed, enraged, seething with images of destruction, and armed to the teeth. But Pat was a born writer; she waited. And so she was able to take her most efficient revenge in fiction.

In 1980, as a token of her warm feelings for her editor at Calmann-Lévy in Paris, Alain Oulman, Pat gave him a small table she had made out of wood. M. Oulman, nephew of Calmann-Lévy founder Robert Calmann and the “Pitou” of his long, affectionate correspondence with Pat, was the person who had done more for Pat's reputation, career, and domestic comfort in France than anyone else. He dealt with the notoriously slow French telephone company for her, he helped her with her more difficult houseguests, and he counselled her through her long, “tough” negotiations with Diogenes for world representation.
²¹
And it was Alain Oulman who introduced Pat to her neighbor in the country, Colette de Jouvenel, daughter of Colette. De Jouvenel appeared with her Siamese cat at a dinner party to which Oulman had invited Pat, she became Pat's friendly neighbor and warm correspondent, and she had the good sense to bring her own lunch in a basket whenever she visited Pat in Moncourt.

At this same dinner party, Oulman also introduced Pat to James Baldwin. “Baldwin was an interesting pain in the ass, much as I had expected,” Pat complained to Alex Szogyi
²²
—and wrote that she didn't need to be told by Jimmy Baldwin, although she
was
told, that “all us whiteys…shall soon be murdered.”
²³

Alain Oulman patiently shepherded Pat's visiting ex-lovers to and fro, and gave her, according to Calmann-Lévy's publicity representative Claire Cauvin, the most extraordinary support at book festivals and on book tours. He was, says Cauvin, “always by her side.”
²⁴
Pat herself wrote regularly of the many times she went to Oulman for advice and consent. A Jew like so many of her honorary counsellors, Oulman continued to serve as Pat's sounding board.

Nonetheless, Pat—who said she didn't know how she managed this, but seemed to manage it anyway—found the “courage” to ask Alain Oulman to return the small handmade table she'd given to him. She was justified in doing so, she wrote guiltily, because she felt she had merely “lent” him the table.
²⁵
In fact, she'd given the table as a gift to Oulman and then just couldn't bear to be parted from it. Oulman returned the “loan” graciously.

Pat felt even more intensely about a drawing she'd given to Caroline Besterman during their long affair. “If I'd come to London now, I'd have asked for that drawing back. I mean it.”
²⁶

Pat's relationship to one of the most important “objects” in her life is best expressed in her response to the first love letter she got from Caroline. She wrote that it made her feel like a “millionaire.” Pat's friends, lovers, and associates rock with laughter (when they're not writhing with less comfortable reactions) when they describe the role money played in her life. Stories of Pat pocketing tips left by other people at restaurant tables, refusing loans to starving friends (but giving money to more affluent ones), shortchanging an impoverished neighbor in Aurigeno, and driving sixty miles for a cheaper plate of spaghetti are set pieces in the oral histories of most of the people who knew her.

Even Pat's very last will (she drafted too many wills for an accurate count) was delayed because she didn't want to pay a lawyer to copy it over.
²⁷
It was the will in which she effectively disinherited her oldest friend, Kingsley Skattebol, who, for fifty years and through many testaments, had been promised the executorship of Pat's literary estate. Pat replaced Kingsley with Daniel Keel, of Diogenes Verlag, her
“vermittler,”
as she called him. It was a sensible decision: Keel is a great figure in European publishing, and Pat's estate was going to be administered from Switzerland, while Kingsley lived in New York. But Pat, as usual, had another motive in mind. For years, she had expressed increasing disapproval of her own goddaughter, Kingsley's daughter, and she told several people that she didn't want the girl to get her hands on the money.

Although the thought of dispensing cold cash could sometimes drive Pat to Olympian acts of avoidance, check writing was another matter.

Marion Aboudaram's three-year affair with Pat in Moncourt (see “
A Simple Act of Forgery: Part 1
” and “
Les Girls: Part 2
”) depended on her willingness to travel from Paris, because Pat rarely came into the city. Marion was working in an art gallery in Paris for low wages at the time she was seeing Pat, living on lentils and pasta in an unheated flat on the rue Germain Pillon, then one of the seediest streets in Montmartre, now as chic as the rest of that mythic quartier. Pat had already let Marion know that she wasn't going to be suckered into buying her a radiator for her unheated apartment. At this time, says Marion, “Pat's will [Pat was on about her fifteenth version of it] and her taxes ate her mind. That's all she would talk about.”
²⁸

One middle of the night, when Pat and Marion were in bed together, Pat, undoubtedly under duress, finally cracked.

“I'm fed up [with your poverty]!” she said to Marion. “I'm going to give you ten thousand francs!” Despite the lateness of the hour, Marion responded with great presence of mind. “Get up immediately and sign that check!” she told Pat. And Pat did it. She got up out of bed and made out a check to Marion Aboudaram at two o'clock in the morning for ten thousand francs. And then Pat did something even stranger: instead of handing the check to Marion, she put it in Marion's purse.

Pat knew perfectly well she'd hate herself in the morning for having given Marion money. (Another woman might have prided herself on assisting a lover.) Still, Pat liked to think of herself as an honorable woman (she continued to have recurring daydreams of returning a found wallet—an act whose awful implications she would explore in
Found in the Street
), which was why she put the ten-thousand-franc check into Marion's purse instead of leaving it on the bedside stand. It was like a deposit in Marion's bank account: a gift Pat wouldn't be able to take back after she'd changed her mind.

Pat's respect for private property amounted to a principle, and her special feeling for purses and wallets keeps cropping up on her gift lists—a gift-wrapped handbag for Mary Highsmith was in the boot of her English Volkswagen when the car was stolen from the Montereau train station—and in her accusations: she liked to insinuate that lovers were rifling her purse. Pat did a little purse rifling herself, apologizing to Monique Buffet
in writing
for going through her book bag when she was absent. “If it had contained (what????) something more personal, I'd never have done it,” Pat wrote nervously to Monique.
²⁹
And Pat had once looked into Mary Ronin's purse, when Mary went out of a room, to see if the new wallet she'd just given to Mary was “thin enough for her handbag.” That was her excuse, anyway, and, just like the lovers who read her cahiers or diaries without permission and were horrified at what they'd read, Pat saw something she didn't want to see when she opened Mary's wallet.

Tabea Blumenschein's lightning, then lingering, tour through Pat's emotional and imaginative life (see “
A Simple Act of Forgery: Part 1
”)—Pat left Marion Aboudaram for Blumenschein, and the “aftershocks” of Blumenschein's dropping
her
after four weeks went on for “about four years”—inspired the stricken Pat to an eruption of mostly bad love poetry. One rueful little stanza, more shapely than anything that preceded or followed it, expresses just what Pat's “objects” might be substituting for and why those substitutions were so necessary.

It was only at the very end of her life that Patricia Highsmith began to let go of some of the things that meant something to her. A friend says: “In the year before she died—she described all her treatments in detail so she knew she was dying [but would never admit it]—she would send me bits of her life, objects: an ashtray from the famous lesbian bar in Paris in the twenties…a little brick from Tennessee Williams's house in Key West that she had [Charles] Latimer steal, and she sent me a little silver locket that one of her girls had given her. And then she started sending me her books in early signed editions…. When she started sending these gifts, that's when I knew that she was going to go.”
³¹

And, in July of 1994, seven months before she died—again without ever saying she was mortally ill—Pat wrote to her “brother Dan's” wife, Florine, offering her and her son Don the most precious of her family possessions: “a quilt made by Grandma…. I like to see these things passed on…. the four nearly life-sized photographs of Gideon Coates and his wife, a Penn. And of Dr. Oscar Wilkinson Stewart and wife, a Deckard or Deckerd…the only things I asked Grandma for as inheritance.”
³²
(It was Pat's great-great-grandmother who was a Deckerd; Oscar's wife, Pat's great-grandmother, was a Pope.)

 

For someone so conscious of objects, so careful with money, so good with her hands, and so given to listing her assets, Pat had unusual problems with her possessions. The physical world seemed to retreat before her efforts to stage-manage it. Too many times, she arrived at destinations ahead of her luggage or her typewriter—as she did on her first foreign trip, to Taxco, Mexico, in 1943 and on several different visits to Europe. Or she found herself departing before expected items arrived, as she did in Paris, in 1951. In Switzerland, something as simple as shopping for grocery items seemed to a neighbor to be beyond Pat's capacities.
³³
But some of Pat's “helplessness” was cultivated—and she always managed to surround herself with people who were quick to offer assistance.

The accordion Pat bought from her first trip to Italy in 1948 (entrepreneurial as ever, she hoped to resell it in New York) stuck to her like glue for months and months; even with paid advertisements in the papers she couldn't get rid of it. And despite her obsessive attention to her cahiers, she left them with friends during one of her travels, then forgot where they were for a while. They eventually turned up in a house on Long Island, but the original manuscript of
The Talented Mr. Ripley
disappeared into the aether in Fort Worth after grandmother Willie Mae died, and almost all traces of her unpublished manuscript,
The Traffic of Jacob's Ladder,
are gone as well.

Of that lost manuscript, Kingsley Skattebol, the last person alive who read and still remembers it, writes: “if
Mrs. Dalloway
can be called a meditation on past intentions and what time has and has not done to the people who cherished them: this was the crux of Pat's lost novel
The Traffic of Jacob's Ladder,
unlike anything else in her oeuvre before or since.”
³⁴

But when Kingsley and her then-beau Lars Skattebol first read the work in 1953—Pat was calling it “Book #3” then or
The Sleepless Night
—they attacked it (see “
Les Girls: Part 2
”), irritating Pat no end. And the last ten pages of
The Traffic of Jacob's Ladder
—all that remain of the novel in Pat's archives—support the critique: they are awkwardly written in the standard Highsmith formula of two men, Gerald and Oscar, obsessed with each other, latently homosexual, etc., etc. At the end, Oscar is dead in a hotel room, and Gerald, like all Highsmith characters, wants only to get lost: “like Oscar he could vanish into nowhere in Paris, too, if he chose, and no one could find him, if he only threw his passport and his papers into the Seine, the envelope Oscar had addressed to him, and the money.”
³⁵
The manuscript of
Jacob's Ladder
was roundly criticized and then rejected by the publishers who saw it, and perhaps that was why it, too, got “lost.” Perhaps, also, these remaining ten pages are from an early draft and the book was better than this remnant.

Pat's beloved 1956 Olympia typewriter had its wear-and-tear problems (six to eight pages of fiction and five furiously typed letters a day took their toll) although she was to tell an interviewer—stressing the typewriter's German origins and her identification with it—that it “never needed a repair.”
³⁶
When she found an abandoned typewriter by her “garbage bins” in Aurigeno, she stalked the typewriter case for several days—circling it in indecision, unable to believe that she could get something that meant so much to her for nothing—before swooping guiltily down on it. “I expect a mysterious knock on the door: Have you taken the typewriter left below?, etc? but so far no one has knocked.”
³⁷
Pat could never accept anything without having first earned it,
worked
for it—this was part of her Calvinist ethic—but she also enjoyed the complicated, criminal feelings that getting something for nothing afforded her.