The Talented Miss Highsmith (89 page)

In 1976, Pat was on her second trip to Berlin. There she would hear (without much comprehension) Allen Ginsberg declaim his poems and Susan Sontag wade through a thirty-page paper about her recent trip to China. Out of this evening, Pat carried away with approval only Sontag's firm declaration that she didn't and wouldn't belong to any writers' group.
²⁴
(Sontag later succeeded Hortense Calisher as president of PEN American Center, the most influential “writers' group” in the United States: so much for promises.) Pat and Lil Picard were staying in the same Berlin hotel and this gave them the opportunity to irritate each other. Pat kept calling the Communists “bastards” and Lil kept calling Pat a “racist” and a “fascist.” They even managed to argue over Wim Wenders's script for
The American Friend
: Pat thought he'd created Ripley as a “hoodlum” Lil dutifully reminded Pat that “hoodlums [are made] by society.”
²⁵
The next year, 1977, the year Pat broke off with Lil, was the year Pat's interest in the Middle East began to assume an attitude best characterized as obsessive. But Lil was still on Pat's mind after she had moved to Tegna.

Pat wrote to Kingsley in March of 1991 describing Lil as “another volcano with which/whom I've parted company.” But Pat had been close enough to Lil to respond with surprising warmth and enthusiasm to Lil's idea of having Pat collaborate on a book about Lil's life. Despite the fact that Pat was eager to take the project on and wrote to Lil several times about it, Lil seems never to have sent the autobiographical tapes she said she was making. And so Pat, in 1991, reaching out from her unrooted present in Switzerland, asked Kingsley: “Could you look in phone book and see if Lil Picard is still at 40 W. 10th or maybe 40 E. 10th?” Lil was still residing at 40 East Ninth Street, but Pat's memory was only one block off and she was apparently thinking of writing to Lil again. Lil lived on until 1994, dying, like Mary Highsmith, at the age of ninety-five.

Rosalind Constable tracked Pat down herself in 1967 and restarted their correspondence. She continued to write to Pat for the next two and a half decades about all the well-travelled, high-living, artistic lesbians whose acquaintance they shared. “You seem to have Natica [Waterbury] on your mind. [A]ny news of Natica that is more than a week old is probably out of date…. I am totally fascinated by her, but I think she is sheer destruction,” Rosalind wrote in 1968.
²⁶
And Rosalind had much more to say.

“I'm so glad you told Janet [Flanner] about my article, as I'm afraid she'd given me up as a bad job. I was terribly drunk last time I saw her, and I'm so sorry, as I admire her more than any other woman in the world. If I ever see her again I'll probably be drunk again. You know how misfortunes like that dog one…. Mercedes de Acosta, I am very sorry to tell you, died about a year ago.”
²⁷

“I have a slight hangover from a dinner party I gave last night: Janet [Flanner] and Natalia [Danesi Murray], Sybille Bedford, Eyre de Lanux [artist, writer, furniture designer, famous beauty, and the reputed model for the eponymous character in Tennessee Williams's novel
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
], Maria Vogt, etc. A delicious dinner that took me two days to prepare, and vintage wine, or rather two wines, for Sybille, who is a
Chevelier du Tastevin
. It was a good party.”
²⁸

Rosalind continued to advise Pat on the long, winding road of Pat's feelings for Caroline Besterman. Pat was thinking of approaching Caroline again as a lover, years after their relationship had ended.

It is worth noting that in the penultimate entry of the last notebook in which she took any notes—Cahier 37—Pat was still trying to puzzle out Caroline Besterman's character. On New Year's Eve of 1992, thirty years after she had fallen violently in love with Caroline, Pat wrote “a final note”—it was a bitter one—about Caroline Besterman. It was the last extended notebook entry Pat ever made. And the final entry she made in her last diary—the ultimate sentence of Diary 18—was also a kind of harking back to an early theme. “The oddball Swiss,” Pat wrote, “enamored of locomotives.”
³⁰

Rosalind Constable also wrote to Pat to announce the painter and gallerist Betty Parsons's stroke; she wrote to say that, no, she really didn't think Natica Waterbury looked like Greta Garbo (Pat thought everyone she was attracted to, including Mother Mary, looked like Greta Garbo); she wrote that Natasha von Hoershelman had visited with “her mistress” Eyre de Lanux, and soon after that “her wife,” Katherine Hamill, died. (This was a different Katherine Hamill from the Kathryn Hamill Cohen Pat fell in love with in 1949.) Eyre, said Rosalind, was now “88 and pretty frail.”
³¹

As Pat's political statements got more intemperate and more frequent, Rosalind responded gently: “You seem much more interested in world affairs than I remember you being.”
³²

In 1992, from her home in New Mexico, Rosalind finally sent Pat the little wooden sculpture Pat had given her in the 1940s in the first flush of love and heroine worship. (See “
The Real Romance of Objects: Part 2
.”) “In case you wonder why I am parting with it and also, in the foreseeable future, airmailing all my collection of your drawings, it is because I am putting my house in order. I expect one day soon, if not already, somebody is going to write a life of you, and these evidences of what you do with your left hand might come in handy.”
³³

This circle of mostly lesbian women—far-flung themselves now, and doing their best to keep in touch and look after each other as they settled into the reduced pleasures and greater indignities of old age—was really the only “club” Patricia Highsmith had ever belonged to. But her ties to it were ambivalent, and she always kept her membership card close to her chest.

Part 7

People are drawn to closure, and demand it (usually in vain) of both art and life. And so the stories about Pat Highsmith's death, her cremation, and her memorial service in the Catholic church in Tegna—as well as the halo of blurred memories evoked by these events—tend to have an obituarial tinge. They are gentle stories, curtain tales, and they put a softly rendered end to the sundered psychologies and murderous passions, the bad motives and good intentions, and the infernal filiation of paradoxes, hesitations, cruelties, seductions, successes, prejudices, and surprising kindnesses that made up the character of the talented Miss Highsmith. Pat's former publisher Otto Penzler was the exception amongst her editors to give an unambiguously unfavorable opinion of the dead, but there was one other exception as well: the distinguished American editor and man of letters who leaned over me in a Paris bookstore and whispered, feelingly and off the record, “I
loathed
her.”

Soon after Pat's death, Barbara Skelton, that tempestuous femme fatale who had been Pat's neighbor in the Île-de-France, “was visited by a small owl of intense beauty, its eyes sparkling with wisdom.” The owl came down the chimney of Skelton's stone house in the Seine-et-Marne and perched on her windowsill, staying for two days. Skelton thought the owl had something to do with Pat and that it was bringing a message to her: “Have no fear! This is my afterlife and ergo, it's not so bad, is it!”
¹

Daniel Keel chose a poignant and spare little poem about a flowering tree taken from
Edith's Diary
to print in the program for Pat's memorial service, and he read out another poem written by Pat—somewhat uncharacteristically celebrating the efforts of underdogs (successful underdogs like van Gogh, however)—during the service itself. The critic Peter Ruedi, in his funeral oration, laid to rest the distinction without a difference that had dogged Pat's work since
Strangers on a Train
was published in 1950: “So let us waste not another word on the ridiculous differentiation between the crime-thriller and literature. It is one which never troubled her readers, but merely those people who would try to pull the wool over their eyes and tell them that black was white.” And then he quoted the great literary philosopher Walter Benjamin's description of Robert Walser's work as the “most appropriate thing that can be said about the finest of [Highsmith's] characters: ‘They emerge, out of the night, where it is at its blackest, a Venetian night if you like, a night lit by feeble lanterns of hope, with something of a festive sparkle in their eyes, but distraught and so sad as to make you weep.'”
²

Tanja Howarth, Pat's former Diogenes' representative in London, in an attempt to “get close to Pat” after her death, spent a terribly disturbed night at the Storchen Hotel in Zurich where Pat used to stay. Her room—it was the room Pat always took and it was referred to by the hotel staff as belonging to “the lady with the typewriter”—was haunted, Howarth was sure, by the spirit of a disgruntled Highsmith, who was not at all pleased with this postmortem attempt at intimacy. But Howarth also tells a story about how, during the memorial service in Tegna, the little train to Domodosilla passed right alongside the churchyard and all the young “strangers on the train” waved cheerily to all the friends, fans, and dignitaries who were assembled to honor Pat.
³

 

The day of Pat's memorial service, 11 March 1995, was “a glorious day, cold and crisp, the sort of day where you wonder: Would I like to be buried on a day like this? Blue skies and crisp weather suited Pat so much better.”
⁴

The little church in Tegna was filled: local people from the village had gathered, and Daniel Keel made sure that publishers, editors, and journalists flew in from all over Europe. It was, said one mourner, “a big hoopla,”
⁵
with Pat's publishers from Italy, Switzerland, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany all represented, but not the United States, where Pat's last American editor, Gary Fisketjon, “after tearing my hair out about it,” had finally rejected
Small g: A Summer Idyll
in July of 1994. “It was a trifle of a trifle,” he says regretfully. “[C]areless and left-handed…to publish [it] would be to set us back years.”
⁶
Pat wrote him back, saying that she didn't take the rejection “personally.” But she reminded him—since Fisketjon was now at Knopf and Pat was still counting—that this was, by the way, her “second rejection” by Knopf.
⁷

Peter Huber—it was his memorial tribute—sported the red vest Pat had bought him from L.L. Bean to wear on 1 August, the Swiss national day—“Very red,” he says, “the national color of Switzerland.”
⁸
Pat had also bought a twin of the vest for herself, just as she had kept her double of Daniel Keel's coat. Doubling was the theme of her life, as it had been the theme of her work.

The only ex-lover who might have come to Pat's memorial service—the only one who had been invited—was Ellen Blumenthal Hill, and she had refused to come, telling the journalist Joan Dupont that she'd had “trouble with Miss Highsmith” in the last years. Daniel Keel, who organized the service, and Pat's local friends in the Ticino who had done some of the inviting, knew next to nothing of Pat's past life. Kingsley Skattebol, Pat's last connection with her American past and her oldest friend, had also been kept out of many of Pat's affairs and affections: she had never met most of the women friends and ex-lovers Pat was corresponding with now, and she knew only the pieces of Pat's life which touched upon her own—and even some aspects of these came as a surprise to her after Pat's death. The biggest surprise, says Kingsley, was that Pat had been a member of the Young Communists when they were at Barnard College together. Kingsley had never suspected it.

“Pat and I were on the same wavelength but not in the same orbit,” says Kingsley. A starry-eyed sixteen-year-old freshman when she met the rather superior nineteen-year-old upperclasswoman that was Pat Highsmith at Barnard College in 1940, Kingsley “knew right away Pat was brilliant.” Sixty-odd years later, she was still counting Pat as “the most important relationship of my life.”
⁹

The results of Pat's silence about her past were all too visible at her memorial: the writer who had spent so much of her life dying for love (metaphorically) and also killing for it (symbolically) had neither family members nor old lovers at her memorial service in Tegna. None of the women Pat had loved and hated in the United States, in France, in England, or in Germany were there to remember her. It was Kingsley, Pat's platonic friend for fifty-five years, who carried the urn with Pat's ashes in a processional to the columbarium. It seemed to Bert Diener a “breathtaking [act], the maximum you could experience as a human being. She was walking in a trance, sort of floating.” Tanja Howarth thought Kingsley looked like a “Greenham Common woman,” wrapped up in her big anorak, and watched her “put the urn in the anorak and zip it up. It was like carrying a baby and she was sobbing as she carried it to the cemetery and put it in the little niche.” Kingsley, who says that with Pat as her friend she “needed no other,” thinks that she was perhaps weeping silently, but not openly, as she took up the urn for the solemn procession and that her walk to the columbarium “was, in any case, one of the worst moments of my life.”
¹⁰

There
was
someone at the church who was weeping openly for Pat, however, and that person was an alien in the crowd, a stranger. Uninvited, he had placed a framed photograph of Pat cradling one of her cats into the niche where her urn was being sealed up. When asked, he said no, he'd never met Patricia Highsmith, but he had “read all her books.”
That's
why he was weeping.
¹¹
Three decades before her death, Pat, an alien and a stranger to almost everything herself, had made a similar pilgrimage. Standing in front of Oscar Wilde's grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery on a bright July day in 1962, her eyes welling with tears, she'd read “those great and most biting lines” inscribed on Oscar's monument: “And alien tears will fill for him / Pity's long-broken urn / For his mourners will be outcast men / And outcasts always mourn.”
¹²
Liz Calder, Pat's publisher from Bloomsbury who had taken the train from Zurich with Tanja Howarth, handed out English-language copies of Pat's last novel, the posthumously published
Small g: A Summer Idyll.
And so everyone went home with a memorial program and “with something that was Pat.”

Daniel Keel, with an eye to posterity, had arranged to have the ceremony filmed for German television—just as he had invited a documentary filmmaker, Philippe Kohly, into Pat's house before it was dismantled. There were cables uncoiling everywhere in the small church, and, says one guest, “the television people ran all over everything like rats. The urn stood on a plain refectory table and I was convinced they were going to knock it over with their cables. And I thought that would be just like Pat, her ashes splattered everywhere. But it didn't happen.” Frieda Sommer, one of Pat's executors and another of her “good eggs,” the woman who had done much of the Zurich research for
Small g,
was the most visibly struck by Pat's death. Tanja Howarth, curious about the burial arrangements, asked some pertinent questions of the local officials about just how you get yourself a niche in a wall in a Swiss columbarium. The responses they gave sound like a paraphrase of Pat's lifelong problems with her possessions.

“You have to be a great member of the community” is what Howarth says she was told, “and you have to pay a lot of money and of course the urn behind yours has to be taken out, so you're displacing someone. They can't drill into the mountain forever.”
¹³

No information is currently available as to whether or not Patricia Highsmith's urn occupies a space that had previously been the resting place of a good Swiss citizen. But there is something appropriate in raising the possibility of such a substitution. The switching of one urn for another is a
keime
of which Pat would have made gleeful artistic use; urn burial (with a twist) is a fine subject for a Highsmith short story.

Just as good a subject for a Highsmith story would have been the little comedy of official errors that transpired shortly after Pat died. Bert Diener, in the house next door, was the recipient of the 6:30
A.M.
telephone call on Saturday, the fourth of February, that announced Pat's death. When the owner of a Swiss house expires, the house's contents must be assessed and certified for tax purposes, and the dwelling is immediately sealed up with sealing wax—like a letter that will never be sent. So Diener-Diethelm called the “Syndical” early in the morning to report Pat's death, thereby provoking an “incident” with the local authorities, who found they couldn't shut up the house with Marylin Scowden, Pat's accountant, staying in it. Two of the three officials wanted to lock Scowden out. “Local politics,” says Bert Diener, “they thought in this house was a lot of money and riches beyond imagination.”
¹⁴

 

Pat Highsmith's life was full of repetitions, and this last little contretemps over property and possession seems to be another one, reprising the
douane
's disturbing raid on her house in Moncourt fifteen years before. But this time, as though to confirm the Marxian formulation, history came back as farce and not as tragedy and the Casa Highsmith resisted the invasion as though it were still inhabited by the spirit of its owner. Wherever the officials tried to put their sealing wax, which was, apparently, the wrong kind of wax—on the walls, on the lintels, on the doors themselves—it wouldn't stick; the substance slid sloppily down towards the floor. In the end, says Diener, they “just gave up.” They put the things they judged valuable—eccentric choices including Pat's many-volumed, leather-bound edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
—into one room and hung “some sort of official ribbon on the door handle.”
¹⁵
And that was that.
^*

Except, of course, that it wasn't. It took eight long years to settle the estate of Mary Patricia Highsmith, which—with its twists and turns of tax laws and unexpected surcharges, its fiduciary blind alleys, its unknown investments in various countries and odd trusts in several currencies, its “alien” signatory who had simply been unable do the “sensible” thing and give up her estate to Yaddo before she died—turned out to be just as eccentric as its namesake.
^*

Pat did manage to keep everyone in the dark about how much money she had. When she invited her neighbor Vivien De Bernardi to be a financial administrator of her estate (Vivien's husband, Renata, was a banker), Vivien had “no idea” what Pat's innocent request would entail.

“‘Would you be my executor? I have an account with ten thousand dollars, is this enough?' And then,” says Vivien, “later I find out she had six million Swiss francs!
^*
Everyone got just a little glimpse through the window. Pat never gave everyone the full picture.”

Donald Rice, the tax attorney and Yaddo board chairman who spent a long time “guiding” Pat on her bequest to Yaddo, says: “I did know how much money Pat had—but what to believe and where it was, was yet another issue.”

It was Pat who launched the typically complicated exchanges she would have with Yaddo in the last three years of her life, exchanges which provided her with the kind of fun she liked best, the kind that turns everything upside down. Pat had written to Yaddo's then-director, Myra Sklarew, wondering if Yaddo would accept the testamentary gift of her new house in Tegna as a kind of “Yaddo in Switzerland.” Then, “little by little,” says Sklarew, “she began to send checks to Yaddo in torn envelopes.”
¹⁶
Myra Sklarew passed Pat's suggestion on to Don Rice, with whom, by 1992, Pat was having intense conversations about financial matters, and Rice saw that the Tegna house wouldn't do as a colony: it was too small, too eccentric, and there was no money to maintain it. When Mike Sundell took over the Yaddo directorship, he got in touch with Pat in 1993 as a matter of courtesy. On the alert, she told him “curtly that she was ‘not going to increase her contribution to Yaddo.'” Sundell responded that “she was being quite generous already,” and, by the way, he and his wife, the art historian Nina Sundell, would be in Italy during that summer and could he take her to lunch. Pat was “agreeable” to being taken to lunch.
¹⁷