The Talented Miss Highsmith (79 page)

When it came to countries, Switzerland alone seems to have escaped Pat's maledictions—although it did not come in for a great deal of praise. In a paragraph in which she had already equated “seriousness” with “depression” Pat wrote: “Above all, I like the seriousness of the people…. Didn't Nietzsche like
die Schweiz
after all?”
⁵⁰
She seems, partly, to have been curbing her tongue in favor of her ambivalent application for Swiss citizenship. She was nervous about a planned interview with the magazine
Linea d'ombra
: “for something too extreme the Swiss could oust me. This could go for extreme left or extreme right, and maybe I'm guilty of both.”
⁵¹
(She was
always
guilty of both.) Four years later, a visit from two former neighbors in France pushed her to another kind of extremity.

In 1990, Barbara Skelton, Pat's new friend from the Île-de-France, and Mary Ryan, Pat's longtime next-door neighbor in Moncourt, made the long drive to Tegna to see the Casa Highsmith. Mary, who had been “hugging a bottle of gin” all the way to Switzerland, landed on her back in Pat's driveway when she tried to get out of Skelton's car.

“Whereupon Pat's pent-up years of scorn poured out in venemous abuse while standing over Mary like a gauleiter with a whip. ‘What will the neighbors think! People just don't behave like that here. This is a very puritanical country. Suppose one of the neighbors saw you lying in my drive drunk! I risk having my Swiss citizenship annulled.' It was all said with sadistic contempt, and set the tone of the visit.”
⁵²

Withal, Pat's attempts to keep her cash and possessions under her control and out of the hands of native and foreign tax officials by moving to Switzerland backfired in large and small ways. Although Yaddo, the artists' colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, where Pat spent eight crucial weeks nearly fifty years before her death, finally did inherit about three million dollars and her literary royalties, Swiss and American taxes got the lion's share of her holdings. (See “
The Cake That Was Shaped Like a Coffin: Part 7.
”) Still, a few weeks before her death, at the instigation of Daisy Winston, Pat sent a check for either one thousand or two thousand dollars (there are two accounts of this) to the New Hope–Solebury Library, in New Hope, Pennsylvania, where Daisy still lived. The librarian's first gesture was a graceful one: Highsmith novels were bought with the money. But Pat's closest friends, many of whom were in financial trouble, got just what Pat put in her cellars in Aurigeno: nothing at all.

And Pat, whether she wanted to or not, also effectively disinherited Charlotte, her last cat. Charlotte was another of Pat's “barn” cats—the cats who always gave her opportunities to make derogatory references to their breeding. There were no provisions made for Charlotte in Pat's last will (or outside the will, either) and after Pat died, Charlotte spent some time with Marylin Scowden in Geneva (under the bed, says Scowden; Charlotte was terrified of Scowden's cat and of everything else), and then went on to the De Bernardis in Tegna, where she lived, cosseted and loved, to the great age of nineteen—longer than any of Pat's other cats. But Charlotte never became a sociable cat. Perhaps that was because Charlotte, like her longtime human companion Patricia Highsmith, had never really been socialized.

Many of the remaining objects Pat kept in her house are small enough to hold in the hand. They radiate significance; they are the
lares
and
penates
of a writer whose walled-up emotional life found much of its meaning in things. As an artist who harvested her final, practical style from the details of daily living, every single object Pat possessed meant the world to her; meant
a
world to her—and they meant just as much as she aged and her work began to thin down to what was more or less in front of her.

In most of her mid- and late-life novels, Highsmith treats people and their possessions in the same deadeningly objective way. Her often unlovely prose puts one flat foot in front of the other, levelling every action with the same even tread, dumping her burden of observations and/or her aggressions directly onto the page. The result is a mass of seemingly commonplace material, each individual item of which is stripped of the adjectives and images which graced such works as
The Price of Salt, This Sweet Sickness, The Blunderer, The Talented Mr. Ripley,
and
The Cry of the Owl
. She gives as much attention to the things in her later fictions as she gives to the characters who handle them or look at them or think about them.

In her earlier works, her objects are merely fetishized, like the glass of milk in
The Price of Salt
or like Dickie Greenleaf's two rings, which Tom rips from Dickie's murdered fingers and keeps as trophies. One of these rings is a “large rectangular green stone set in gold,”
⁵³
and it is also an insider joke. Pat knew, from reading Frank Harris's scurrilous and entertaining books about Oscar Wilde, that Oscar always wore a “great green scarab ring.”

In her later works, the push broom of Pat's paragraphs sweeps the detritus of daily life before it, stopping, from time to time, to pick up the odd, controlling comma, then advances relentlessly onwards, trailing strings of objects or mundane actions or simple thoughts in an accumulation of detail as dispassionate as that found in most pornographies.

The novel Pat was writing when the
douane
swooped down on her in Moncourt,
The Boy Who Followed Ripley,
offers salient examples of the author at work with her push broom. In this book, she allows Ripley, in his Balzacian way, to handle the abstract details and practical calculations of the problem that harried her all the way to Switzerland: income tax preparation. (Tom started his crime career by impersonating an income tax official who extorts checks—he doesn't cash them—from his terrified “clients.”) The following passage, inconceivable in anything other than a fiction written by Pat Highsmith, sounds like a business letter from a tax consultant whose fantasy life has been made conspicuous by dreams of larceny. Excruciating to read, it was doubtless a joy for her to write.

And the passage goes on, with riveting dullness, for much, much longer, bringing in stocks, U.S. Treasury bonds, the differences in declaring income for the French and American governments, the separate worksheets required, etc., etc., as Tom calculates his ill-gotten gains on his “efficient-looking pale green graph paper, income above, output below.”
⁵⁵

Who else but Pat Highsmith would insert an instructional manual for income tax evasion into a novel? But this kind of brain chatter was a large part of her life, and by now she couldn't be much bothered to transform it. So she put her financial anxieties, uncooked, into her fiction—and she let Tom Ripley deal with them.

“Possessions are nine tenths of my life,” Pat had written in 1945.
⁵⁶
The difference, now, was that she had so many more possessions to deal with.

Part 3

As is the way of the world, every remaining object Pat Highsmith kept under her eyes and out of her cellars is now kept entirely out of sight in someone else's cellar: the enormous, climatically controlled cellar of the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern, Switzerland. The Highsmith Archives are on the lowest of the seven custodial levels in the national archives' large white Bauhaus building, and they belong to the people of Switzerland.

The building housing the Swiss Literary Archives looks like the original structure from which Pat's white block of a house in Tegna might be an abbreviated quotation. There is something official about both structures: they resemble large and small editions of municipal monuments, although the archive building is beautiful in its severity, and Pat's house in Tegna is merely…severe. But the apparently windowless Casa Highsmith is more fortified, even, than the large, light, extravagantly windowed literary archives. And like its first owner, the Tegna house has no obvious windows, is divided into two sections, and looks inward upon itself. But from above, light streams into the Casa Highsmith, and out in back—where no public eyes can pry—it overlooks a garden and sky and trees.

“Hitler's bunker,” said a friend at first sight of the Casa Highsmith's blind front. Pat laughed grimly.
¹

Like all of Pat's houses, the cellars of the Swiss Literary Archives are fiendishly cold, kept at temperatures which prolong the life of acid-impregnated papers. Every single thing Pat had in her house at the time of her death—barring the special trinkets distributed to friends and neighbors after her death and the furniture she bought or made—is there, boxed and catalogued, for as long as the world lasts. An enthusiastic archivist of her own effects, Pat would have appreciated the archives' filing system.

In carefully numbered acid-free boxes, long flat drawers, and library shelves, all of Pat's earthly remains—except what she sometimes seemed to value the most, her money—sit in that cold cellar in Bern. Bern is the capital of Switzerland, a verdant, fragrant mountain city of breathtaking views and shadowy arcades which Pat seems to have visited only by letter. The city is encircled by an azure blue, ice-cold, glacier-fed river, the River Aare. It is as dangerous as it is beautiful, with a current so swift that every five meters a handrail is riveted into its banks so that swimmers in trouble can hold on and try to catch their breath. Many swimmers do indeed plunge into the Aare—but not all of them come out alive. And that is another detail about the Swiss capital of Bern that Pat Highsmith would have appreciated.

The Highsmith possessions in the Swiss Literary Archives have all survived their owner's turbulent life, transiting tastes, and long expatriation. They contain, as nothing else does, what Janet Flanner once called “the specific invisible remains” of Pat's long relationship with them.

So here they are for you to see. Or rather, here
it
is: a sizeable sampling of Patricia Highsmith's goods and chattels in the form of a list, Pat's preferred method of organizing her life. The order of the list is simply the order in which the objects came before my eyes. Wherever necessary, I've added interpretative notes, but for the most part the list is descriptive: a catalogue raisonné of Patricia Highsmith's hidden history of possessions.

By now, you will be able to work out for yourself most of the meanings contained in her things.

Objects

A coffee-colored
Olympia De Luxe portable typewriter,
manufactured in 1956, with a standard QUERTYUIOP American keyboard, an easy action (I tried it, repeatedly), and an E key whose identifying letter has been worn away long ago by heavy use. Four little rubber feet. Its hardshell, whale gray case has the curves and swells of a Slipstream trailer and has travelled everywhere: it is covered with stickers from airlines and foreign countries. Two addresses are affixed: 77 Moncourt and Tegna. The name Patricia Highsmith is attached to both addresses. This is the typewriter Pat used for most of her work from 1956 onwards.

Library

Pat's library is another matter. The books that remain suggest the collection of a woman whose serious reading stopped at the college literature level. It is the library of someone who had a good classical education—and decided not to pursue it. Not much seems to have been added since her days as a student at Barnard, and many of the newer volumes are works by friends and colleagues (sent by publishers), copies of books she had been asked to review (also sent by publishers), or books by Pat herself in various languages and editions. The range of books attests to her insularity: she lived much of her adult life in Europe, but there are almost no books in any of the several continental European languages she practiced in her cahiers and diaries.

Here are some of the books left in her personal library, in some cases listed by title, in others by author.

 

 

Other Authors and Titles

 

Books in the Guest Wing