The Talented Miss Highsmith (87 page)

The light flooding into the back of Casa Highsmith and slipping in through its high window slits was apparently doing something for Pat; she was feeling her way back to impersonation again, to imagining the counterfeiting of a crime. For Pat Highsmith, still looking at the world upside down, being able to counterfeit meant something like being able to be authentic. “Faking it” was how she approached being “herself.” The rapprochement didn't last.

 

In November of 1985, Pat had sent her old fiancé, Marc Brandel, now living in Santa Monica, California, a check for eight thousand dollars to encourage him in his development of a film script of her novel
The Blunderer
. In one of the many tangled exchanges Pat had with agents, studios, producers, and her publisher, Diogenes, about the film rights for her novels, she'd put Brandel's name forward for the film adaptation of
The Blunderer
after she'd signed a film contract for the book with an English producer in New York at the end of 1983. In 1956, Brandel had adapted
The Talented Mr. Ripley
for a one-hour television broadcast by
Studio One
(the longest-running—from 1948 to 1958—and most significant anthology drama series in U.S. television history), and Marc and Pat began a correspondence after seeing each other “for a day” in Moncourt in 1979. Marc had nothing but fond words for Pat, and when the deal with the film producer collapsed, Pat sent Marc her personal check so he could continue to work on the script. They had a strict understanding that she would be paid back if a film deal didn't materialize or if Marc got money directly from another interested producer.

The “charming, young, polite, talented” film director Kathryn Bigelow (Pat's description), whom Pat had met at the Locarno Film Festival in 1981 (Bigelow lived on Grove Street in Greenwich Village, which added to Pat's interest) and who was “mad” about
The Blunderer,
had also written a script from the novel, entirely on speculation. Bigelow's script came to “naught,” Pat wrote, but in April of 1990, Pat, who had also been corresponding with Joseph Losey's widow, Patricia, about producing
The Blunderer,
was so interested in Bigelow's “success” with the film
Blue Steel
that she was pressing Kingsley to find Bigelow's current address.
²⁵

Contrary to her reputation, Pat often tried to involve herself in both the publicity and the behind-the-scenes-maneuvering for her work's promotion and production. (“Would you like to review
A Dog's Ransom
for the NY Times Book Review?” she'd written to Alex Szogyi in one of many suggestions she would make. “I could put in a word with my editor Bob Gottlieb.”)
²⁶
Her early and enthusiastic endorsement of the ways in which authors can promote their own careers (the cultivation of translators, the regular writing of letters, etc.) had been published for all the world to see in her covert artistic autobiography,
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction.

Not unexpectedly, the check for eight thousand dollars Pat sent to Marc Brandel caused some trouble. Pat was unhappy that Marc's agent cashed it (he wanted his 10 percent right away), and by January of 1987 Marc was apologizing for their “misunderstanding” over her advance and promising to return the money if anyone bought the screenplay.
²⁷

The Brandel screenplay was never produced, but a candid passage in a letter Marc wrote in response to something Pat asked about his children (Pat queried everyone about their offspring) shows that her attraction to Marc Brandel at Yaddo in 1948 was probably more appropriate than it seemed. He'd never wanted a son, he wrote, and was greatly relieved to have produced only girls. He almost believed that if he
had
produced a son he would have “liked him to be gay.”
²⁸

When Pat went back to Moncourt to look for another property to buy in the summer of 1986—Aurigeno was already wearing on her badly—she failed to find anything she liked as much as the house she had finally sold in a flurry of agonized ambivalence. While in the Île-de-France, she managed to offend her former neighbor, the temperamental Barbara Skelton, with a question about the French language. Skelton snapped back that Pat's French was “abominable.” Pat reflected bitterly (and enviously) on Skelton's ability to “prove that she's living in England when she's in France, and vice versa, thus avoiding any income tax whatsoever.” And then Pat added the category of “tax cheat” to a list of things she didn't like, making the personal political once again.
²⁹

 

In early April of 1986, Pat had an appointment in London with a physician on Harley Street, John Batten, for an X-ray and an opinion. The appointment had been secured on very short notice by Caroline Besterman after a desperate call from Pat. Pat's faithful neighbor in Aurigeno, Ingeborg Moelich, drove her all the way to the Zurich airport from Aurigeno, and Pat was admitted to the Brompton Hospital for a biopsy of her right lung: a cancerous tumor was suspected.

Pat spent the night in the hospital, and just as she was leaving, her doctor hurried up to her, said he'd had the tumor biopsy “rushed through,” and asked Pat to sit down. She noticed—Pat never stopped noticing—that he glanced away for an instant before speaking to her: “We think it should be taken out and we hope you'll agree.” “This sounds like a death sentence to me,” Pat wrote, “as I've never heard of anyone surviving such, or anyway, not for long.” She agreed to the operation, was taken into a room with five men, one of whom was Mr. Paveth, “who operated on Princess Margaret for (nearly) the same thing.” He “sank strong finger ends” into the base of her neck. Roland Gant, her publisher from Heinemann, came from the office to fetch her. They went straight out to his car and drank boilermakers.

Pat had been “feeling awful” in Aurigeno since December of 1985. She'd suffered through a perpetual round of colds and intestinal flu, while a struggle between Diogenes and Heinemann over
Found in the Street
(Diogenes wanted more advance money “and threatened to break the contract,” while Heinemann was “hiring lawyers”) had forced her to go to London for “business” and upset her nerves. When she got back to Switzerland, in the dead of winter, “without heavy underwear” and wearing her usual jeans, she shoveled snow off her car and saddled herself with a heavy case of bronchitis. During her second checkup for it, her doctor in Locarno suggested a lung X-ray “because you smoke.” A spot on her right lung was detected, a needle biopsy was done, and before the results were obtained, Pat went off to Paris for six days to do publicity for the Calmann-Lévy publication of
Found in the Street
. Oddly enough, considering her ingrained habit of complaining, Pat never mentioned a word of her medical “troubles and
Angst
” to her friends and colleagues in Paris. The matter was so serious that she kept it to herself.

On her return to the Ticino, the doctor in Locarno told Pat that the biopsy results were “inconclusive” and that “something else would have to be done.” Ellen Hill, still firmly ensconced as Inspector General of Pat's life, gave Pat her marching orders: “Don't waste time with Locarno; go to London.”

And that's when Pat called Caroline Besterman for help.

And so, as Pat wrote in her thirty-seventh cahier long after the fact, she had her operation in London on 10 April 1986 and was released the next week, with the doctors saying—“maybe genuinely,” she noted suspiciously—that she had made “fast progress.” She came away with a fourteen-inch-long scar along her fifth rib, and after “31 days in London,” she went back home to Aurigeno. She made a little list of the friends who sent things to her hospital room, and after the operation “the months [were] somewhat
Angst
-filled also, as I did not know whether or not the cancer would recur.” She'd stopped smoking while waiting for the other shoe to drop, and that didn't help her angst. And she was resting, dutifully, an hour after lunch. But she was “quite unable to do any creative work, though in my house there is always quite enough else to do. The mental fear needs a thousand words to describe. [But Pat did not provide them.] It is as though death is right there—suddenly—and yet one feels no pain, one is talking in a calm voice to friends & doctors.”

By 12 July, three months after her operation, Pat was back in London, and accompanied by Caroline Besterman, she went to Brompton Hospital to be X-rayed again by Mr. Paveth and Dr. Batten. They kept her waiting as they examined the film for ten anxious minutes during which she “nearly” finished the contents of the little glass flask—her present from Bettina Berch—in her handbag. She could hear Caroline Besterman's voice calling for her; she answered Caroline, and, like the ghost she must have felt herself to be by now, she was not heard. The nurse finally told her to come out of the dressing room, and she and Caroline crossed the road to Mr. Paveth's consulting rooms, where the X-ray was hanging high on the wall with a light behind it.

“Paveth says, Perfect, in a calm voice, a word I never expected to hear. It is like a reprieve from death.”

And then Mr. Paveth told her that her tumor was glandular and could have occurred whether she smoked or not. Pat was so happy that when she spotted Dr. Batten's registrar (he was from Australia, so naturally she called him Sydney) she said “Hello Sydney,” and extended her hand to this stranger in “good cheer.”
³⁰

Under circumstances that would have surprised her Swiss neighbors—life and death was one of them—Pat Highsmith was still happy to shake someone's hand.

 

The year after her operation, in the autumn of 1987, Pat's enthusiastic editor Gary Fisketjon, who had published or republished nine of Pat's books at Atlantic Monthly Press,
³¹
helped to arrange a jaunt for her to New York for Atlantic's publication of
Found in the Street.
“I was putting out whatever Highsmith novels were available and trying to get something going for her in the U.S.,” he says. “It worked marginally well, not as well as I had hoped.”

Fisketjon and Pat had a jocular relationship, brokered by Anne-Elizabeth Suter, Diogenes's representative in New York, who was “terrific to deal with and very fond of Pat,” says Fisketjon. (Suter, like so many of Pat's agents, tried to protect Pat from the rejections she was receiving for her short stories and succeeded only in making Pat angry.)
³²
Pat and Gary Fisketjon were both Civil War buffs, they liked to raise a glass together, and Pat, still fascinated by the relations between parents and children, continued to inquire after Fisketjon's infant son and to send cards and drawings for the child's birthday, which almost always arrived, says Fisketjon, “exactly on the day and she never missed a lick.” (Meanwhile, her birthday greetings to her own goddaughter usually consisted in apologies from her “evil fairy godmother” for having forgotten her birthday.) Gary Fisketjon and Pat met very rarely.

“I was very fond of her,” says Fisketjon. “It was very easy; there was never any kind of difficulty…. We spent a lot of time in restaurants, but drinking and smoking was the main event, not eating.” He took her to the restaurant Odeon in SoHo in New York, when it was still “of the moment” and she was “very interested to register downtown bohemia. It sort of lit her up.” Pat, in return, favored Fisketjon with one of her intricate little plans for social improvement. She had been insisting that the “homeless” in New York “weren't homeless” at all, they were “living in hotels.” And Fisketjon was trying to explain to Pat the horrors of the single-room occupancy hotels the city used to warehouse its homeless. “And she had this peculiar concept whereby you could solve the homeless situation because, she figured, most of these people come from Africa where you can have many wives. So if bigamy were legalized, people wouldn't run off all the time leaving these women and children bereft and homeless.”
³³

Along with her appearances in New York for
Found in the Street,
Pat, who had avoided going to the funerals of her entire family, got a little cemetery experience. A supplement of
The New York Times
, “The World of New York,” wanted to commission a walking tour of the famous old Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Ruth Rendell had been the editor's first choice to write the article (Pat didn't know this), but Rendell wasn't in New York, and Pat was. Pat said she'd love to do it, and asked to have someone accompany her. The editors thought it would be nice to send someone who knew her work, and so Phyllis Nagy, a fledgling playwright working as a researcher for the
Times,
went along for the ride. Pat had been living outside the United States for more than twenty-five years by now, and this is how she struck the young researcher.