The Talented Miss Highsmith (96 page)

 

1970.
October: Throughout her sojourn in France, Pat has been supported in every way by her editor at Calmann-Lévy, Alain Oulman, with whom she has a warm friendship and an extensive correspondence. He introduces her to both James Baldwin and Colette de Jouvenel, daughter of the writer Colette. Colette de Jouvenel and Pat are neighbors in the Île-de-France and share an interest in cats as well as in Jouvenel's mother.
    14 November: She moves to a
hameau
in Moncourt, buying a house at 21 rue de la Boissière, next door to two Anglo-Irish journalists she knows and likes, Desmond and Mary Ryan. As usual, proximity diminishes her liking. She meets many interesting people through the Ryans, including Isabella Rawsthorne, Francis Bacon's muse.

 

1971.
March: Pat's almost thirteen-year-old goddaughter, her college friend Kingsley's daughter, comes for a fortnight to stay with Pat in Moncourt and to travel. Pat takes her to London but does not prove to be a sympathetic hostess, remarking in a letter to Ronald Blythe that her goddaughter is five feet three inches and 138 pounds, and that she fears for the cases in the British Museum when the girl leans on them. Pat regularly refers to herself in letters to the girl as “evil fairy godmother,” “old witch,” and “delinquent godmother.”
    June: Barbara Ker-Seymer and Barbara Roett visit Moncourt and have the usual experience of many Highsmith guests: if they want to eat, they have to buy the food. On another visit, Pat throws a dead rat up from the garden through their bedroom window: her idea of a joke.

 

1971.
Fall: Pat leaves Doubleday, publishers of her last five books in the United States, when her editor, Larry Ashmead, turns down
A Dog's Ransom
—which is then accepted by Knopf. Her editor at Knopf, Bob Gottlieb, suggests revisions, as does her editor at Heinemann, Janice Robertson. Pat is not pleased to make revisions.
    November: She is taking notes for the book that will become
Ripley's Game.
One of her early ideas is that Tom should carry out a series of revenge murders for a sixty-year-old writer (Pat is fifty). She calls this idea “A dialogue with myself.”

 

1972.
January: She continues developing
Ripley's Game
and begins to note down some ideas for the collection of short stories that will become
The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder.
    September: Stanley Highsmith dies. Pat asks for—and receives—his autopsy report. Pat and Mary begin their long correspondence about the watch and chain Pat gave to Stanley when she was twelve or thirteen. Pat wants it back. She doesn't get it.

 

1973.
26 May: “I'd love to meet Francis Bacon some time. I would imagine he is a very ‘disturbing' type, in the sense that the mentally deranged can be disturbing. I may be quite wrong. He is probably well organized on the surface. Artists react to such temperaments at once—a sensation I have always described as ‘shattering.'”
    “Shattering” is the word Pat uses most often to describe the effect Mother Mary has on her. In her house in Tegna, Pat keeps a postcard of Francis Bacon's
Study Number 6
—it is one of his screaming popes—on her desk.

 

1974.
Film director Joseph Losey is interested in adapting Pat's novel
The Tremor of Forgery.
The project comes to nothing, but cordial relations develop between Pat and Losey and his writer-producer wife, Patricia.
    28 June: Wim Wenders and Peter Handke come to see Pat in Moncourt. They bring a gift from Jeanne Moreau (whom Pat met when Moreau was starring in a Handke play in Paris): an igneous ball on a pedestal “black and clear.” Handke says to Pat: “When I start any of your books, I have the feeling that you love life, that you want to live.” Pat's comment in her Cahier 33: “That's very nice!” (Ten years later, in November of 1984, Pat writes to her German translator, Anne Uhde: “By the way, I find Peter Handke's prose writings quite boring much of the time”—and then goes on to say that Ellen Hill thinks his plays are brilliant.) Wim Wenders says that it is Handke who introduced Pat to the European custom of having your publisher for an agent. Pat hands over to Wenders a manuscript of the book she has just finished,
Ripley's Game,
and he is eager to make it into a film.
    August: The germ of
Edith's Diary
: Pat plans a book about “a modern intellectual” who is so disappointed in her family and “her beautiful dream of America” that she creates a better world in her diary. (This leaves the “truthfulness” of Pat's own diaries open to some interesting questions.) Edith, undeveloped as an “intellectual” character, goes mad as her diary develops a saner, far more bourgeois world than the one she inhabits. Pat takes the son of a former lover as a model for Cliffie, Edith's criminal and psychologically puzzling son (another of Pat's “literary” revenges), and writes to Lil Picard for political positions for the increasingly crackpot Edith. “Edith's ideas are partly mine,” Pat says. Edith is pulled to her death down a flight of stairs (one of Pat's own recurring nightmares) by the weight of the bust of her son she has been sculpting. Pat gives to Edith her preferred quotation from Thomas Paine: a reminder of the plaque featuring Paine on Grove Street, a block from where the Highsmith family lived in Manhattan in 1940–42.
    September: Pat goes to Fort Worth, to find Mother Mary's house in terrible disorder and Mary deteriorating. “What terrifies me is the insanity, the knowledge that it will only get worse. She doesn't eat properly. Food is rotting…the dog has the mange…[the visit] is ‘shattering.'”
    Pat stops in New York, where she stays with women friends. “Overall impression: extroversion, constant stimulation, causing ‘resentment' or ‘reaction' such as, ‘I'm holing up this weekend,' or ‘I'll hang onto my little handful of friends.' Neither of these phrases uttered of course. Variety—no doubt, in New York. One is flung from the best in the arts, to the worst of humanity.” As usual she haunts Greenwich Village, finding Jane Street still “quite lovely” and Eighth Street “a dump and a slum. What a shame! I remember it aglow with pretty shops” (Cahier 33). She meets with Robert Gottlieb, who will edit her at Knopf.
    December: Marion Aboudaram, a novelist and translator from Paris, contacts Pat for an interview in Moncourt (for which Aboudaram has not been commissioned and which never transpires: Marion just wants to meet Pat).

 

1975.
January: Marion and Pat become lovers. Pat works on
Edith's Diary.
    April: She goes to Stockholm on a publicity tour, noting, as always, the amount of alcohol on offer. Another note in her cahier: “7/27/75—~60 milligrams to 100 milli-litres, permitted alcohol content for drivers of cars. U.K.”
    “A day to remember—perhaps. On 6 August, my mother accidentally set her Texas house on fire—with a left cigarette.” The place is gutted, the dog dies, and Mary is installed in a care facility, the Fireside Lodge, by her helpful nephew Dan Coates. Pat stays away, but pays for part of Mary's care.
    September: Pat, along with Michael Frayn and Stanley Middleton, is invited by the Swiss Association of Teachers of English in Hölstein, Switzerland, to speak at a weeklong series of seminars. She discusses
The Glass Cell
—“its origins and difficulties”—and meets Peter Huber and Frieda Sommer. The former will become her neighbor in Tegna; the latter, one of her executors.
    Jay Bernard Plangman, Pat's father, who has maintained a friendship with Mary Highsmith, offering to give her driving lessons, dies in Fort Worth, Texas. Pat does not return for her father's funeral.

 

1976.
June.
Edith's Diary
is rejected by Knopf.

 

1977.
Wim Wenders makes a film of
Ripley's Game, Der Amerikanishe freund
(
The American Friend
), scripted by Peter Handke. It stars Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz and features seven film directors in minor roles. “What have they done to my Ripley is my wail,” Pat writes to Ronald Blythe. Wenders says Pat ultimately told him she liked the film.
Little Tales of Misogyny
wins the Grand Prix de l'Humeur Noir in Paris for Pat and her illustrator, Roland Topor. Hans Geissendörfer makes a film of
The Glass Cell
,
Die gläserne Zelle
. Pat likes it.
    May:
Edith's Diary
is published by Heinemann in London and, later in the year, by Simon & Schuster in New York.
    Claude Miller makes a film of
This Sweet Sickness, Dites-lui que je l'aime
(with Gérard Depardieu and Miou-Miou). Pat doesn't like it.
   
Belle Ombre
, a play adapted from two Highsmith short stories—“When the Fleet Was In at Mobile” and “The Terrapin”—is produced by Francis Lacombrade at Théâtre de l'Épicerie, in Paris.

 

1978.
Pat is elected president of the jury at the Berlin Film Festival, another unhappy public experience. Committee work is not her forte and she didn't really want the job. She remeets actress and costume designer Tabea Blumenschein and film director Ulrike Ottinger in Berlin.
    Spring: Pat falls in love with Tabea Blumenschein. It is a short relationship and Pat is devastated by its end; it is as though she met her own youthful self in a mirror and then lost her. She and Tabea exchange letters for some years, meet infrequently, then fall into silence. The violence of her feelings for Tabea will affect Pat for several years.
    August: Begins an affair of a few months with a young French teacher of English, Monique Buffet—it is the last affair of Pat's life. It produces many letters, good relations, and a satisfying friendship, and allows Pat to finish the novel that was interrupted by her breakup with Tabea,
The Boy Who Followed Ripley
. She dedicates the book to Monique.

 

1979.
Slowly
,
Slowly in the Wind (Leise, leise im Wind)
, a collection of reliably perverse tales, is published in England by Heinemann and in Zurich by Diogenes.

 

1980.
26 March: The French fiscal authority, the
douane
, raids Pat's house in Moncourt, looking for evidence of tax evasion. She is profoundly disturbed by the intrusion. Pat gives this raid as her reason for buying a house in Aurigeno, Switzerland, but, at Ellen Hill's direction, she had picked out a house in Aurigeno
before
the
douane
raided her. Pat works on a new edition of
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
for St. Martin's Press and begins some stories that will appear in the collection
The Black House
(published in 1981 in the UK and 1988 in the United States.)
    October: She begins to work on
People Who Knock on the Door,
published in 1983 in the UK and in 1985 in the United States.

 

1981.
January: She travels to the United States to look at the question of Christian fundamentalism as a subject for
People Who Knock on the Door
. She goes to New York, where she sees Larry Ashmead, now at Simon & Schuster, and then goes on to Indianapolis, where she stays with her friends the concert pianist Michel Block and Charles Latimer, ex–advertising director at Heinemann. She watches televangelists on their television for a week, researching her novel at one remove. She travels to Fort Worth and Los Angeles. The entire trip takes three weeks.
    February: She moves to Aurigeno, Switzerland—but just barely. French tax law requires that she spend six months out of the country and six months in it, and that's what she does, shuttling between Moncourt and Aurigeno for several years, ambivalent as to whether or not she should sell the house in Moncourt. She advertises the Moncourt house in
The New York Review of Books
for one hundred thousand dollars, reduces the price to seventy-five thousand dollars, and receives tentative interest in buying it from Peter Handke, Hedli MacNeice (her neighbor in Moncourt and the ex-wife of poet Louis MacNeice), and a “nice bachelor.” In her absences, she doesn't heat the house sufficiently and the radiators burst.

 

1983.
People Who Knock on the Door
published in the UK.
The Black House
, a collection of short stories, and
People Who Knock on the Door
rejected by Harper & Row. She is without a publisher in the United States for two years.
    April: She travels to Paris to publicize
People Who Knock on the Door
. The filmmaker and journalist Christa Maerker visits her in Aurigeno; Pat coolly points out to Maerker the local railway crossing where she has recently driven her car into a train.
    June: Pat starts to plot out
Found in the Street,
a novel which takes place in her old Greenwich Village neighborhood. She gives two of her protagonists her old address on Grove Street, and her heroine is murdered at Buffie Johnson's address on Greene Street. The precipitating event in her story is a returned wallet—Pat had always dreamt of returning a wallet—and “Half the characters,” she writes to her longtime correspondent Barbara Ker-Seymer, “are gay or half-gay.” (Pat never did get the opportunity to return a wallet, but in Paris, in 1952, her own lost wallet was returned. She wasn't particularly grateful.) The heroine is a young girl who inspires dreams of love in all the major characters—but only the male protagonist's wife gets to sleep with her. In this work, Pat's rendering of the Manhattan ambiance of the early 1980s is based on some interesting cross-cultural misunderstandings.
    Naiad Press, the lesbian publishing company in Florida founded by Barbara Grier and Donna McBride, buys the rights to reprint
The Price of Salt.
In spring of 1989 Pat writes a new preface for Naiad's edition of
The Price of Salt.
    November: She flies to New York to do more “research” for
Found in the Street,
stays in East Hampton, and sojourns in Greenwich Village at the venerable Hotel Earle (now the Washington Square Hotel). Her stay inspires the cockroach story in
Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes.
She meets both Otto Penzler, founder of the Mysterious Press, who tells her he wants to publish her books, and Anne-Elizabeth Suter, who represents Diogenes's writers in the United States.