The Talented Miss Highsmith (76 page)

On a publicity trip to receive the Prix Littéraire at the American Film Festival in Deauville in September of 1987, Pat thought she had left the only ring she ever wore (it was also the only ring she ever kept)—the circle of gold given to her by Ellen Hill in 1953 when their relations were at a nadir—on top of a piano in the bar at the Normandy Hotel and was “depressed for four days.” When her part-time
femme de ménage
found the ring on the rug beside her bed in Aurigeno, Pat's spirits soared. She was also cheered by the thought that the housekeeper was actually earning her salary.

“People don't like losing things—of sentimental value,” she wrote about the ring in an odd, alcohol-wreathed letter to the piano player of her Normandy Hotel weekend, a Mr. Abe Janssens, on whose piano she thought she'd left the ring. Unbidden, Pat decided to confide this feeling (and quite a few other sentiments) to what must have been a very surprised Mr. Janssens a couple of weeks after returning to Aurigeno from the film festival at Deauville. Happily lit up with drink during the two-day cocktail hour that she'd made of her short residency at the festival, Pat had draped herself over Janssens's piano in the hotel bar for two nostalgic September evenings of Cole Porter sing-alongs.
^*
This cavalcade of the classic American songbook would have reminded her of one of the happier aspects of her parents' apartment on Grove Street in Greenwich Village, that it was on a street of famous piano bars. Pat loved piano bars.

Pat's acquaintance with the piano player Janssens was limited to the length of the sets he played—he kept calling her by the wrong name—and, in a phrase only she could have used, Pat wrote to him that she “couldn't pick him out of a line-up” if she had to.
³⁸
A man who didn't know her name, someone she couldn't have recognized under police lights, was the perfect repository for her inebriated, confessional, and very nostalgic letter. But Pat needed to use the subject of her ring to launch the communication. It was something like the way her fictional killers use “trophies” from their victims to keep the connections alive.

Pat's car troubles were of a simpler nature. Because of her many travels, and because her houses were always rural or suburban, she had to drive to train stations and airports to get to where she wanted to go. Once there, she tended to leave her vehicles parked, and those vehicles—worse luck—tended to get stolen. One of her cars was taken in New Hope in 1962, and two of them were taken in France. She said that the theft of her English Volkswagen in 1969 from the parking lot “near the Montereau railway station” hastened “my rapid progress toward persecution complex,” although “[t]his somewhat risky theft is a pleasure to me compared to sneaky, cowardly thefts.”
³⁹
She was thinking of the two lovers she suspected of rifling her purse.

In Switzerland, Pat's luck with automobiles didn't much change. There was a bad accident in her Aurigeno neighbor Ingeborg Moelich's car on the way back from their visit to the Bayreuth Festival—for which her friend Charles Latimer (who insisted on being driven out of the way) bore some moral responsibility. It provoked an ungenerous response from Pat, who was not going to be cheated out of her feeling of total innocence in the matter—even though her map reading had probably contributed to the accident. Finally Pat, whose own driving was distracted when sober and deeply inattentive when drinking (she flunked her English driving test twice in Suffolk and then flunked the French driving test three times after she'd moved to Moncourt in 1969),
⁴⁰
managed an unusual way to reenact the title of her first novel,
Strangers on a Train
. At a small railway crossing near her home, she ran straight into a locomotive with her car.
⁴¹

In November of 1952, after a year of trailing Ellen Hill around Europe—their wearisome cycle of fighting, separating, loving, and separating again was well established by then—Pat wrote in her twenty-first cahier:

Pat spent her adult life the way all wandering expatriates do: leaving things here, storing them there, asking people to look after what she left behind. She added her own twist to the tale, however, often accusing the unhappy caretakers of her goods and chattels of cheating her of her possessions—or of using them without permission. She abandoned her possessions and then she felt abandoned by them, making use of her retreats from them to produce or to justify certain emotions which were necessary to her writing. Her policy with women was much the same.

Pat's complaint that it was Mary Highsmith who lost the manuscript of
The Talented Mr. Ripley
was a useful one for a writer who wanted to contrast her mother unfavorably with her grandmother. Pat also complained that she had been cheated out of Willie Mae's house by Mother Mary—when Willie Mae's will clearly left the house to Mary and her brother Claude. Pat accused her ex-lover Tex of driving her car without permission in New Hope (she'd left the car in Tex's care), and then worried that the local mechanic was also making free with it (she demanded an odometer reading) and that the sublettor of her house in Pennsylvania was unreliable (“everything is out of hand, my car, my house).” And she hated everyone who ever sublet her East Fifty-sixth Street apartment (and touched her possessions), except for Truman Capote.

The mostly imagined chaos in Pat's arrangements in New Hope in 1963 made the idea of remaining in Suffolk—where she had gone to be near Caroline Besterman—easier for her. Her unvoiced accusations against two of her lovers for rifling her purse for money when she wasn't looking were also put to practical use: they allowed her to distance herself from unfulfilling relations with women she had fetishized and objectified, just as she fetishized and objectified her favorite possessions. Her despairing responses to these women had the effect of casting Pat as a kind of object herself: the bucket in the well of loneliness.

Late one night in June of 1984, Pat, so depressed in her sunless stone farmhouse in Aurigeno, Switzerland, that she hadn't been able to read a book for the last “two and ¼ years,”
⁴³
opened a bottle of cheap beer, lit up a Gauloise
jaune,
and sat down to give her hopeful houseguest, a young social scientist teaching at Barnard College named Bettina Berch, an unusually direct piece of her mind on the subject of women.

Bettina Berch and Pat, who had been corresponding for a while, had already missed a couple of opportunities to meet each other in New York. At the last missed meeting place—a bookstore reading Pat was doing in Manhattan—Bettina had left for Pat “a small bottle of the best scotch I could find. The pint size, because part of the beauty of the present was the bottle.” Pat was delighted with her gift: “I shall keep refilling it,” she wrote. “And,” says Bettina, “she did keep refilling it.” Bettina's visit to Aurigeno was their first face-to-face encounter, and it lasted for several days.
⁴⁴

Pat was well-disposed towards Bettina Berch (“sawed-off Russian-Jewish name,” Pat wrote to Kingsley, noting, as she always did, if a person she liked was a Jew; “quite decent, left-wing”)
⁴⁵
despite the fact that Bettina had expressed the desire to write Pat's biography and was, as Ellen Hill darkly suspected, “an ardent feminist.”
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Ellen Hill, says Bettina, was still quite “territorial” about Pat, thirty years after their love affair had ended.

Always hungry for news of the States, Pat began by pumping Bettina Berch for the kinds of facts she could use in her fictions. Although she continued to set many of her novels in the United States, Pat was by now woefully out of touch with the textures, tastes, locutions, and even the products of her native country. Don Swaim, her perceptive radio interviewer in New York at WCBS in 1987, noted that Pat was giving the word “story”—i.e., the floor of a building—its English spelling and had referred to shopping carts as “trolleys.” Pat admitted to him that she was confusing the English term “coffee white” with the American term “coffee regular.”
⁴⁷

It was in the 1970s—the first full decade she'd spent outside the United States—when Pat began to make errors of American fact and understanding in her novels, errors like having Edith Howland of
Edith's Diary
bring a bottle of rye, one of Pat's favorite bottle drinks of the 1940s, to a neighbor's dinner party. (By 1977, when
Edith's Diary
was published, rye had not been produced in the United States for at least twenty years.) Pat had to write to her still-radical friend Lil Picard to ask her for names of the leftish magazines Edith Howland would be reading and sending articles to; in Indiana, she watched American television for a week to pick up pointers about religious extremists for
People Who Knock on the Door
; and she wrote to ask Kingsley to do crucial research on New York police procedures for
A Dog's Ransom.

Pat always knew what she needed for her work, but because her experience of America was now that of an expatriate—and more or less limited to the
International Herald Tribune
, the occasional
Time
and
Newsweek
magazine, and the
National Lampoon
(she was a subscriber for a while, she told Lil Picard)—she was out of touch with the large and small shifts of custom and conversation which make all the difference in fiction. Her short story “I Despise Your Life” (first published in her collection
The Black House
in 1981) is an attempt to dramatize embattled father-son relations in the context of hip young wasters who are drugging, dancing, and living in a loft in SoHo; and whatever measures she took to ensure its accuracy were a terrible failure. The slang is decades out of date, the dialogue is unrecognizable, and not one element, including the money-based relations between the father and son, carries any more authenticity than a superficial article criticizing “the youth of today” in a supermarket tabloid. Bettina Berch, who had lengthy conversations with Pat, says: “
Newsweek
is what she based her opinion on and that's not what I consider political analysis.”
⁴⁸

During Bettina's visit, Pat was trying to work up a mid-1980s Manhattan atmosphere for her novel
Found in the Street,
but she had lost Manhattan as a subject. She lost it, imaginatively, in the way that Raymond Chandler said he'd “lost Los Angeles” when he moved to La Jolla. By now, her personal experiences of American places and times, the impressions and details and behaviors she'd gathered on her nighttime prowlings of Manhattan and on her lengthy boat, train, and car journeys to Texas, New Orleans, Mexico, and Maine in the 1940s and 1950s, were no longer alive enough in her mind to be made into fiction. Sunk in depression in her rock-rimmed canton in Switzerland and too far—temporally and physically—from what she was writing about, Pat was reduced to asking Bettina Berch for the
Village Voice
newspaper and a map of New York.
⁴⁹
But Pat always asked everybody for maps.

Bettina and Pat had already discussed in their letters some of the themes Pat liked to walk her wits around, and Pat, straining for a topic that might appeal to a feminist guest, searched her memory to produce some slight evidence of the social injustices suffered by women. She herself had suffered none, she said firmly, and expressed a special disgust for feminists. On her part, Bettina patiently tried to explain to the long-exiled Pat some of the mysteries of the New America—like how to use a bank card to get money out of a wall. Pat, says Bettina, was “very funny about it. That was one of those moments of displaced humor, sitting at the other end of the world, explaining how to put in a PIN code in an ATM machine in Manhattan. What Pat eventually described doesn't do anything wrong although it doesn't incorporate any of these details.”
⁵⁰

Pat's secondhand research usually managed to produce a halo of strangeness around her already strange fictions, an atmospheric dislocation which a writer who gets her experience firsthand would find almost impossible to achieve. But further strangeness in her work wasn't what Pat was after. She was just, as Bettina Berch says, “doing her research”
her
way, long distance. Her imagination simply couldn't leave America alone.

As she sometimes did when she thought she'd been remiss as a hostess (by the 1970s and 1980s, Pat was quite lax in the hostess department, and worse was to follow), Pat wrote to Bettina Berch in New York when the visit was over to apologize for her “nervousness.”
⁵¹
And—a sure proof of Pat's affection—on the big, square, gilt-edged mirror in her last house in Tegna, Pat actually stuck up a snapshot of Bettina Berch cradling her infant daughter. It's the only picture of a mother and daughter ever to grace a house inhabited by Patricia Highsmith.