The Talented Miss Highsmith (92 page)

But
Small g
, Hoffman felt, was an exception: “She had been sick for so long.”

When the novel was published in France the month after Pat's death, it sold fifty thousand copies “because,” says Hoffman, “it was Highsmith, the myth. She had incredible reviews; there must have been fifty articles and none of them was negative…. She benefitted even from her death.”

The best part about the novel for Hoffman was that “it brought me the good fortune of meeting Highsmith before she died.” He was with Pat “two times at the Ritz bar and then…in discussion for an hour or an hour and a half.” And he was in her room for half an hour before the journalists came. Pat “was continually spitting into a handkerchief,” and he marvelled at her determination.

“Dying, she came for her publicity…. She seemed totally exhausted, but she had a way of looking that was very direct, a judging eye, an inquisitor. It was very impressive…. [S]he sized me up so acutely. She was a fascinating woman, like a snake fascinating her prey.”
⁵⁰

It was Pat's last public performance as a writer.

But on the inside back cover of the last notebook in which she made entries, Cahier 37, Pat left the ghost of a hint for a future performance she was thinking about. Still playing with oppositions, still imagining a life for the character who had meant so much to her since he'd walked into her imagination on a beach in Positano all those years ago, Pat wrote down two new titles for a novel about the talented Mr. Ripley. One of those titles was
Ripley's Luck.
The other one was
Ripley and the Voices of the Dead
. It was the second title that Pat crossed out.

Part 8

The “first mysterious check” from Pat to Yaddo—nearly thirty thousand dollars—arrived from her Swiss bank without her name on it in July of 1994. The letter sent by the bank said simply “on behalf of our client.” The client wasn't named. The second one—a check for three hundred thousand dollars—came from the same place five months later with the same message, “on behalf of our client,” and Mike Sundell had to look at the number several times to reassure himself that he wasn't adding a few zeros to it in his mind. He and Don Rice figured out that it must have come from Pat and arranged a conference call with her in Tegna as soon as they could. Pat acknowledged the check, but didn't want to talk about it over the phone with Mike Sundell. “She thought she was getting money to Yaddo that she could avoid being taxed on. It was all very mysterious and foolish, really, but she was perfectly happy to talk about it later.”
¹

When Sundell consulted with Pat about how to use the money, they decided that half of it should go into an annual fellowship at Yaddo for young novelists, and “she got the idea in her head that her birth name should be used. And so it's called the Patricia Highsmith-Plangman Residency at Yaddo. Pat thought her father would have liked that.”
²

But Pat's machinations in life were rarely as successful as they were in art, and in the past she had often found herself hoist on her own petard. And so it is not surprising that Donald Rice was left with a curious feeling about Pat's estate: a lingering afterimage of other secrets hiding behind the secrets Pat revealed. In one way or another, it is an impression by which everyone who knew Patricia Highsmith is haunted.

Rice's sense was that the people responsible for administering Pat's estate

Even former friends who were angry with her and current friends who had been sorely tested knew the sack of sorrows Pat woke up to every day. They were as moved by her physical fragility—just skin and bone at the end—as they were pained by the way she'd wrapped up her psychological fragility in anger and glazed it with alcohol. Marylin Scowden says, “The hurt person is what I remember, my heart goes out to her still. I think she must always have been in pain.” Anna Keel remembers Pat's
“fou rire,”
her wild laughter, like that of a “twelve-year-old child who couldn't stop giggling,” and thinks that although “she could be unjust with people in life, she was never unjust in her books.” (I, on the other hand, find Highsmith's pursuit of personal vengeance in her work—a kind of literary vigilantism—one of her more beguiling traits.) Daniel Keel recalls Pat blushing like a child if you intimated she was doing something wrong. She was
pudique,
he says—and firmly believes in her “genius,” the kind of genius that coerces her readers into the world of her fictions: “She's one of the rare authors of whom I have read every single word.”
⁴

Most of Pat's Swiss neighbors—as long as they didn't get too close (and Bert Diener, who had been in the airlines business, used his knowledge of human spatial limitations on airplanes in his dealings with Pat)—say they found something touching about Patricia, a “sort of yearning for affection even though she wasn't open to it.”
⁵
They were attached to her, they made great exceptions for her, they prized their association with her, and her mysteriousness continued to intrigue as much as it frustrated. “I'm still missing Pat and thinking about her and figuring her out,” says her neighbor Vivien De Bernardi; while Bert Diener and Julia Diener-Diethelm, whose discretion Pat appreciated so much that it was to them in Zurich, and not to her much nearer neighbors in the Ticino, that she'd telephoned in distress three days before her death (they packed their bags and drove straight down to help her into the hospital), say simply: “We really loved her.”
⁶

But the longer Pat is dead, the more her Swiss, French, and German friends reflect on what was going on under the behavior they had observed so silently. Success, of course, provides its own hedge against honest response, and Pat's
réclame
in Europe was as much an element in the way her worst behavior remained unchallenged as it was an alluring “fact” that drew people to her. Anne Morneweg, who first met Pat at the Berlin Film Festival in 1978, who was a guest at her houses in Moncourt, Aurigeno, and Tegna, and for whom Pat “was a very pleasant, very beloved friend,” says: “We were all cowards about her anti-Semitism. We didn't speak with her about it [because] we were
siderés,
flabbergasted, by it. We put it down to the fact that she was older and sick. It didn't show so much earlier.”
⁷
Pat managed to keep most of her later friends (and many of her earlier ones) in separate compartments, as though she'd filed them in the pigeonholes of her big rolltop desk. There would never be any danger of consensus.

Marylin Scowden, left alone in Pat's house just after Pat's death with Pat's cat Charlotte, who wouldn't stop crying—“I felt it was possible the cat knew,” Scowden says—was under the impression that Pat had
no
friends. “Hardly any. But I was AMAZED at the number of people who assembled. Within an hour [after her death was announced] there were about eight people [most of whom barely knew each other]. I was amazed at how she had done that, kept everyone apart like that.”
⁸

But separation had often been Pat's modus operandi with her friends; it was her daisy chain of lovers she used to want to introduce to one another. Like her favorite hero-criminal, Tom Ripley, and like Carol and Therese, the fugitive couple of her only lesbian novel, Patricia Highsmith got away with a hell of a lot.

Still, no one could say Pat hadn't tried to do her best in what mattered to her most. To make sure of it, she put herself on trial at the end of every working day.

“It is impossible for me to live from day to day without putting myself to a judgement—of some kind. How well have I done? What did I mean to accomplish today?”
⁹

She spent her life writing through those “awful dawns,” through the bad binges, the “shattering” psychological states, the self-punishing, hope-dashing, heartbreaking love affairs. Her incessant moves from house to house and from country to country and her insistent, restless travels did not stop her; she took what she needed and turned her experience to good use in her work. She kept her central wound—that terrible certainty that she was cursed at birth and was, really, nobody's child—stubbornly intact (she could not have done otherwise), and she found a fountain of inspiration in it, although not beauty or peace, for a very long time. With it, she managed to create a Bizarro World
^*
of inverted values and unstable psychological states which exceeded even her own instabilities. She did her job.

Perhaps, working as doggedly as she had worked all her life, Patricia Highsmith did more than her job. She wrote five or six of the more unsettling long fictions of the twentieth century. Anyone who has read even one of these novels with close attention has taken out citizenship papers in Highsmith Country and been provided with a passport that can never be revoked. The works are indelibly odd:
Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Blunderer, The Cry of the Owl, Deep Water,
and
This Sweet Sickness
are my own favorites. Pat herself would have added
Edith's Diary
and
The Tremor of Forgery
to the list—and then changed her mind the following week. But in all her long fictions and in her best short works, there is always something wounding, something disorienting, and something that doesn't meet the eye—something deeply damaging to the reader. Few authors have been so willing to bite the hand that buys them.

Even to the very end of her life, Pat was uncertain as to what her own last name really was. Did Stanley Highsmith's illegitimacy entitle him or his adopted daughter to the name Highsmith? Did she legally change her name at twenty-five from the right one—Plangman—to the wrong one, the name she wasn't entitled to but had been using since she was in school in New York City—Highsmith? No one seemed to know, and the Swiss lawyers she wrote to at the end of her life were unable, apparently, to disentangle the matter for her. She'd voiced the hope that Yaddo might use some of her legacy to put up a plaque inscribed with her double surname: Patricia Highsmith-Plangman. But it is not the policy of Yaddo to put up plaques, and her urn burial in Tegna is marked only with the name she made famous: Patricia Highsmith. Is Patricia buried under a pseudonym? Given the body and blood and meaning of her work, it's an idea with definite appeal.

And there is one more thing. In death, Pat Highsmith appears to have been delivered from the slow dissolve of her powers in the last decade of her life and restored once again to her most vibrant state: that volatile ambivalence which allowed all her violent and contradictary emotions to meet and mate and ignite into art.

In the little Catholic church in Tegna, Switzerland, close by the railroad tracks to Domadosilla and festooned with all the colorful symbols of orthodox Catholic faith (faded frescoes, cherubim on the wing, a profusion of flickering candles, and a large statue of the Madonna), the niche in the columbarium where Pat's ashes are walled up is piled high with the
yahrzeit
pebbles left by her Jewish admirers. After half a lifetime of refusing religion (and holding up Jesus Christ as her spiritual and social model), of ranting against “the Jews” (and sleeping with them, too), of bitterly rejecting one country after another (and desperately seeking to make a home in each of them), Pat is suspended once again between the poles of opposite passions: interred in a sanctified Catholic space, visited by the children of Sarah and Abraham, and attached in the most final way to the country of which she had never managed—quite—to become a citizen.

It is possible to imagine (but only in the language spoken in Highsmith Country) that Patricia Highsmith has ended up in a kind of equipoise.
Her
kind of equipoise: the kind that makes for inspired writing.

Any moment now she might hitch up her chair to the big rolltop desk, pluck a smouldering Galoise
jaune
from the edge of an ashtray for one last, inspirational drag, then raise those huge hands over the keyboard of the coffee-colored Olympia typewriter and begin to strike the keys with a sound like little pistol shots; busy, as always, with her daily work—the work of a serious writer about to add a new terror to the world.

 

When Pat was twenty-six years old and still alight with a hundred new ideas a day, still attracting lovers like a magnet, still writing for the comics, still having the time of her life in a Manhattan where the American Dream was still vibrantly alive, she picked up her pen in the early hours of the last day of December 1947 and condensed her hopes for the coming year into a single sentence. She called this little challenge—for that's what it was, a youthful fist raised in the face of Fortune—“My New Year's Toast.” She could as easily have called it “My Epitaph.”