The Talented Miss Highsmith (81 page)

Part 2

Pat's move to what would be her last house in Switzerland—the fortress-like Casa Highsmith, whose planning and design made her so happy and whose building and expense caused her so many nervous moments—took a long time and went through many stages. “I can't stand any more strain from Tegna house…. The land itself is tough to deal with, all sandy & stony,”
¹
she wrote, and sent her architect, Tobias Amman, questions, complaints, and demands for repairs for at least two years after the house was completed.
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Like much else that happened to Pat in the second part of her life, the impetus to go to Switzerland seems to have come from Ellen Blumenthal Hill.

In early January of 1953, Pat and Ellen, rolling through Switzerland on their automobile trip from Paris to Trieste, stopped over in Zurich. They were on the first leg of the journey whose domestic horrors Pat would satirize in the short story she called “Hell on Wheels.” As usual, the notes Pat was taking in her cahier were doing double duty: she was shaping them into a sunny little tourist article aimed at the newspaper market (her notes are marked “
Neue Zürcher Zeitung,
‘Magnet Zurich'”) about the glories of “fair Helvetia.” She portrayed herself as travelling alone and very cheerful about it.

Oddly for Pat's later reputation as a woman who ate practically nothing, her initial notes on Switzerland are all about food: the “huge portions in restaurants…enough liver and onions…to feed a couple of husky men” the “hot rich milk” of Zurich; the “best coffee” she'd had since Italy; a lunch at Möven Pick during which “I nearly killed myself sampling about five items” and where “I can imagine I'm right back in America [because] the waitress even speaks English with an American accent.” She praised the rich provender in the “Self-Service Market” by the Storchen Hotel: “All those endless shelves of cans & cellophane wrapped cookies, breakfast foods, cheeses, delicatessen, meats, fresh vegetables, cigarettes and candy, are not only like America but—(I whisper it gently)—even better.”
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Food and also clothes were Pat's focus because this was the trip in which Switzerland revealed itself to be the only country in Europe that could fit Highsmith's big feet with the right-sized shoes. As for the other clothes, she wrote, the clothes she was buying in Zurich in January of 1953, they were not only cheaper than clothes in Paris but they, too, “fit my American figure.”
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The ways in which Pat, in 1953, lingered over her fulsome accounts of what seems to have been just ordinary good Zurich food are like the semierotic fantasies of a woman who has been starving for a long time. And her descriptions of the countryside between Basel and Zurich—“delightful farm villages, happy, healthy looking children, stronger bigger horses than those of Eastern France…the vine-like trees that are trained to grow horizontally, supporting the house corners like living arms”—made a paradise of what she later complained was a car trip that drove her crazy.
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This trip did something other than drive her crazy, however. It gave her a line of travel into her future.

Here is how Pat began her Swiss notes in 1953: “Whenever I get desperately homesick, but still not desperately enough to spend several hundred dollars getting back to America, I go to Switzerland…. And in fact it was that astonishingly self-confident statement in the Swiss tourist bureau ad in the Paris
Herald Tribune
—‘The only country in Europe where all your hosts speak English'—that gave me the final push to come.”
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And here is how she ended her notes: “As long as there's a Switzerland, I don't know when I'll get around to going home again.”
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Switzerland reminded Pat Highsmith of the United States. Principally, it was the fact that she could find English speakers there: Pat resolutely refrained, as much as possible, from speaking the language of any country she lived in if that language wasn't English. Wherever she lived, she remained oblivious to local holidays, customs, and newspapers, reserving her reading for the
International Herald Tribune
and her understanding for the fluctuations of currency exchange and the prices of goods and postal services. But it was also the abundance of produce (Switzerland, ostensibly “neutral” during the Second World War, was not subject to the vastations visited on the other countries Pat had passed through), the plenitude, the richness of the countryside, and the cleanliness of the cities that attracted her. Throughout the 1980s Pat would continue to contrast Zurich with the filthy and crime-ridden Manhattan.

Above all, there was the famous orderliness of Switzerland, and order was a necessity for an author whose first written lines of fiction, set down when she was fourteen, began with two shoes neatly aligned beside a bed. Certainly, the idea of a country outside the battle lines drawn by the rest of the world, a country in a state of so-called neutrality, had the greatest appeal for a woman who said she couldn't bear conflict, who yearned for world peace, and who was so often painfully and chaotically at war, divided against herself.

Although it was her love affairs which drove her from pillar to post and from the United States to Europe, the main reason Pat went to Switzerland was because of the emotion that was slowly replacing love in her life: the desire to hang on to her money. The French law forbidding foreign residents in France from keeping their money in other countries—Pat left France because of it—was rescinded just after Pat moved herself to Aurigeno. She wrote to Monique Buffet that she wouldn't have gone if she'd known about it.
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But the fact that her literary affairs were concentrated in Switzerland—Daniel Keel and his publishing company, Diogenes, were now her world representatives and were making a great deal of money for her—was crucial to her move.

Daniel Keel doesn't think he “ever quarrelled with Pat,” and he came to understand and appreciate her in a humorous and balanced way. (When I told him that the most frequent sentence I heard about Pat was “She wasn't nice,” he replied: “That's quite an understatement.” When I mentioned that Pat had written three hundred unusually kind letters to her last lover, he responded: “They'll ruin her reputation.”) “She could be very hard,” he says, “with her voice, or with an answer or a question. ‘Don't sit there!' she would say…. She could be nervous and unpleasant…but only in a quite superficial way, just about a certain deal or event, or a check she didn't like, or a title [of a book].” When Keel published
Found in the Street
in German, he called it, in German,
Elsie's Love of Life
. It was a phrase he'd found in the book. Pat didn't like the title change, but she accepted it. And a book which had sold sparsely in the United States became a bestseller in Switzerland.

In fact, Pat never complained in writing or in conversation about Daniel Keel. When she was cavilling about the details of some transaction—and there were serious confusions in the selling and reselling of the Ripley film rights that went on and on and cost Diogenes, Pat, and the producer Robert Hakim time and money and angst—she always displaced her anger onto the company or the company's lawyer. Given her tendency for finding fault, her complaints about Diogenes were remarkably controlled. Keel, in his turn, treated her like royalty.

It was during a visit to Moncourt by Wim Wenders and Peter Handke in 1974
^*
that Pat was first introduced to the picturesque European custom of authors being represented by their publishers, a custom as unthinkable in the United States as appearing in court without a lawyer. Wim Wenders had come to negotiate for a Highsmith novel to adapt to film—and, as he describes it, he arrived at her house with an already well-developed obsession for her work.

During her meeting with Peter Handke and Wenders, Pat had been fascinated when Handke explained the European practice of editors representing authors. The idea might have been at the back of her mind one late evening in the summer of 1979 as she sat on a stool in Daniel Keel's living room in Zurich, finding bitter fault with her sales, with her American agent (Patricia Schartle Myrer had just dropped Pat for her behind-the-scenes machinations over international commissions), and with most of her publishers. She was, says Keel, “very unhappy,” and so he suggested that he should telephone her current German-language representative in Zurich, Rainer Heumann, while she was still sitting there and talk to him about representing her more fully.

“He's already your German agent,” Keel said; “he handles things beautifully…. He'll be transported with joy [or words to that effect] if he can manage your world rights.”

So Daniel Keel picked up the telephone and called Mr. Heumann—now it was almost midnight and Pat was sitting at his elbow—and Heumann “shouted” back at him: “Are you mad?! I don't want her
or
her world rights! She's much too difficult and don't you ever wake me up at midnight again!”

Heumann, Keel says, “was afraid of her difficult nature,” and Keel had to struggle to keep the agent's response from leaking out of the telephone. And so Daniel Keel offered to take over the world agenting for Pat, and the whole business of Diogenes becoming Pat's world representative was the result of “an accident,” an accident whose final terms Pat negotiated for just as toughly as Diogenes over the next seven months. She sought constant counsel from Alain Oulman, and, anxious to preserve her ability to deal directly with Calmann-Lévy, she sent back at least one contract to Diogenes unsigned. Finally, the papers were signed in March of 1980, the month the
douane
invaded her house in Moncourt.
¹⁰

Marianne Liggenstorfer met Pat when she came to work in the foreign rights department at Diogenes in 1981. Pat took a distinct shine to her new rights representative, and although Marianne says she was unaware of any special feeling from her author, Pat was soon asking for Marianne Liggenstorfer whenever she telephoned Diogenes from Aurigeno. Liggenstorfer was trying to reorganize the complicated Highsmith backlist, centralizing and reselling her works to only one publisher in each country. “We always tried to get the best offers for her and then she'd say how expensive the house was, and would it be possible to get more money.”
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An exceptionally patient woman, Marianne Liggenstorfer says she always took her cues from Pat's own behavior: “It was very indirect; she didn't exactly give me orders…. It was very important when dealing with Pat that you were not too fast with her. She needed a lot of time to get used to you and be comfortable.”
¹²

Marianne accompanied Pat on two separate publicity junkets to Spain, at the behest of Pat's Spanish publisher: once they went to Barcelona, and then they travelled to the film festival at San Sebastian, where Pat was the guest of honor in an homage to
Plein Soleil
, René Clément's film version of
The Talented Mr. Ripley
. They stayed for about ten days each time, and although Pat “could blow up and calm down twenty times a day,” they enjoyed themselves. Pat drew all the time on both trips: “She'd go into her room, sit at the window, and she'd sketch.” She drank beer continually, and, says Marianne carefully, “when she drank a little more than usual, she was sometimes laughing very strangely, a stifled laugh, not very loud.” That was Pat having her own special kind of fun. At the festival, Pat answered a lot of questions amiably, and then, fascinated as always by a group of transvestites in the hotel hall, sat in the bar watching, and drinking, and talking about them.
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