The Talented Miss Highsmith (97 page)

 

1984.
June: Bettina Berch, who teaches at Barnard College, visits Pat in Aurigeno and conducts a revealing interview with her.
    October: Pat goes to Istanbul to write a travel piece about the Orient Express; it's another of her pleasurable experiences with trains. She doesn't travel now unless she is paid—or unless she can make use of her travels in a book or an article.

 

1985.
People Who Knock on the Door
published by Simon & Schuster in the United States. After 1985, Highsmith is without a trade publisher in the United States. It is Otto Penzler who takes up the publishing burden with his Mysterious Press, and he publishes six Highsmith titles between 1985 and 1988. He admires her work but finds her behavior odious.
    May: Marc Brandel visits her in Aurigeno with his third wife to discuss his scripting of her novel
The Blunderer
for an English film company. In 1956, Brandel had adapted
The Talented Mr. Ripley
for New York television's
Studio One
. She advances him eight thousand dollars of her own money to write the script. The film is never made.
    In March, she lists “Twenty Things I Like” and “Twenty Things I Do Not Like” for Diogenes Verlag. Amongst the things she doesn't like: “A TV set in my house,” “People who believe that some god or other really has control over everything but is not exercising that control just now,” “Fascists,” and “petty thieves and well-to-do housebreakers who specialize in silverware.” Her likes include: “Swiss army knives,” “Things made of leather,” “Making anything out of wood,” “Fountain pens with real points,” “Kafka's writing,” and “Being alone.” In May, she answers the Proust Questionnaire for the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
(10 May 1985
“Fragebogen”
): she says that her best quality is “perseverance,” her biggest fault is “indecision,” she likes “intelligence” in women, her favorite color is still “yellow,” and, at the moment, the painters she likes are “Munch” and “Balthus.” (In March, her favorite painter was “Kokoschka.”) She quotes Noël Coward: “Work is more fun than play.”
    “The only thing that makes one feel happy and alive is trying for something that one cannot get” (Cahier 36, 5 August 1985).
    September:
Mermaids on the Golf Course
published by Heinemann.

 

1986.
February:
Found in the Street
published by Heinemann and by Calmann-Lévy in Paris.
    10 April: She is successfully operated on for a cancerous tumor in her lung at Brompton Hospital in London. “You must not think I had to use any discipline to stop smoking,” she writes to Patricia Losey (with whose husband, Joseph Losey, she had been in discussion about a film) on 12 June 1986, “it was fear alone that made me stop.”
    June: She finally sells the house at 21 rue de la Boissière in Moncourt: she has owned it longer than any other house, sixteen years. The day she sells it, she tries, unsuccessfully, to buy it back for 125,000 francs more than she was paid for it. In August, she goes back to Moncourt to look for another house to buy; she fails to find anything suitable.
    She sends the first of many letters to the
International Herald Tribune
criticizing Israel. Most of these letters are written under one of at least forty pseudonyms; this one is signed Edgar S. Sallich and is published on 9 July. She returns to the Brompton Hospital in London for an examination in July and is told that there is no recurrence of her cancer and that her tumor was glandular and unrelated to smoking. She lights up immediately.

 

1987.
Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes
is published in the UK. Her most political book. Much of the satire in the stories is awkward (vide: “President Buck Jones Rallies and Waves the Flag”), though prescient in its analysis. One of the stories, “No End in Sight,” is a revolted meditation on Mary Highsmith's condition at the Fireside Lodge, her nursing home in Fort Worth. In the story, Pat gives Mary a son, who she says is herself. Pat wants to write an even more revolted sequel to “No End in Sight” called “The Tube.” She never gets around to it.
    April: Peter Huber tells her of the land for sale adjacent to the house he and his wife share with Bert Diener and Julia Diener-Diethelm. She buys it and works with the architect, Tobias Amman, who renovated her Aurigeno house, to design “Casa Highsmith”: a white, seemingly windowless block of a house, divided into two “lobes,” whose seclusions and divisions suit her imagination. She calls it “a strong house.” It is a variation on the old Coates boardinghouse in Fort Worth, whose design she consults while constructing it. She signs a contract with the Atlantic Monthly Press to publish her books in America. Gary Fisketjon becomes her editor.
    Claude Chabrol writes and directs a French film adaption of
The Cry of the Owl
,
Le Cri du hibou
(starring Christophe Malavoy, Mathilda May, Virginie Thévenet, Jacques Penot).
    Pat changes her English publisher from Heinemann to Bloomsbury.
    29 October: Pat appears in genial form on
New York Book Beat,
Donald Swaim's CBS radio interview program for authors. She has come to publicize Atlantic Monthly's publication of
Found in the Street,
and she makes some (for her) revealing statements.

 

1988.
January: “Ripley touches madness,” Pat writes in a cahier. Pat starts taking notes for her fifth Ripley book,
Ripley Under Water.
It becomes the last and most awkwardly plotted of the Ripleys, drawn from her fascination with sadomasochistic relations, and from her trip to Tangier to visit Buffie Johnson (and Paul Bowles). Ripley again laughs inappropriately at the double death of the “odd couple” who irritate him, and he once again tosses incriminating evidence into the Loing Canal, the canal which bordered Pat's best-loved house in Moncourt.
    August: Pat goes to visit Buffie Johnson in Tangier, where Buffie is living and painting in Jane Bowles's apartment at the Immeuble Itesa just beneath Paul Bowles's apartment. Pat takes extensive notes on life in Tangier which she will use for
Ripley Under Water
and befriends Paul, whom she knew slightly from her New York years. Paul Bowles and Pat begin a correspondence. The ideas for story and novel titles at the end of her cahier become more bitter:
Sweet Smell of Death, King of the Garbage, The Bearer of Bad Tidings, Bright Murder, Dull Knife
—and the bilingual jokes get worse:
Creepy School (Crepuscule), A Fete Worse Than Death.
   
September: Pat receives the Prix litteraire from the American Film Festival in Deauville, France.
    December: Pat moves to her new house in Tegna.

 

1990.
Pat is made an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France.

 

1991.
12 March: Mary Highsmith dies at ninety-five.

 

1992.
January:
Little Tales of Misogyny
performed as a theater piece by the Companya Teatre de Barcelona.
    Spring: Pat visits Peter Ustinov's house in Rolle for a double interview with German
Vogue
. She begins to consult with an American accountant in Geneva about a subject never far from her mind: her double taxation problem. She starts to write
Small g: A Summer Idyll
.
    October: Pat travels to the United States on a publicity junket for
Ripley Under Water,
published by Knopf. She reads at Rizzoli's bookstore in New York and meets the chairman of the Yaddo board to discuss the possible donation of her house in Tegna as an artists' retreat. She is dissuaded from this idea—it is impractical—and she begins to think of other ways she might endow Yaddo. She goes to Box Canyon Ranch in Weatherford, Texas, to visit Dan and Florine Coates, then travels to Toronto to read at the Harbourfront festival on 18 October. Having initiated a correspondence with Marijane Meaker after twenty-seven years of silence, Pat spends three days at Meaker's house in East Hampton. The visit does not go well.

 

1993.
July: She is diagnosed as seriously anemic and told to stop drinking. She does so—cold turkey—for three weeks.

 

1994.
Fall: She makes a last, promotional trip to Paris accompanied by a Swiss neighbor; there she meets her new editor at Calmann-Lévy, Patrice Hoffman.

 

1995.
4 February: Pat dies in the hospital at Locarno of two competing diseases, aplastic anemia and cancer, and she dies an American citizen. The last friend she speaks to in the hospital is her American accountant, Marylin Scowden, on the evening of 3 February. Six weeks before her death, Pat changed her will, appointing Daniel Keel, already her publisher and international representative, as her literary executor; he replaces Kingsley Skattebol. Her assets and royalties are left to Yaddo. Her notebooks and diaries are found in a linen closet. 6 February: She is cremated at the cemetery in Bellinzona.
    11 March: A memorial service for Pat, organized by Daniel Keel and filmed for German television, is conducted in the Catholic church at Tegna. Highsmith publishers from all over Europe fly in and join her friends in paying their respects. No editor from America comes; she no longer has a publisher in America. Pat's ashes are interred in the church's columbarium.
    February:
Small g: A Summer Idyll
is published posthumously. Its most implausible plot point—a gay man is falsely told by his doctor that he has AIDS to frighten him into safe sexual practices—is taken from life: Pat's friend Frieda Sommer, who researched the book's Zurich details, has a friend on whom the character of Rikki Markwalder is vaguely based. The novel is like a classic comic book version of all previous Highsmith themes—but with attempts to be “current” it strains towards inclusion and modernity. Even the dog in the novel—dogs in Highsmith fictions usually get kidnapped or shot—is a charming poodle who has a happy life. Pat's old friend from Florence in 1952, Brian Glanville, writes in
European Magazine
that he wishes the book “had not appeared.” Josyane Savigneau, another friend, is more charitable in
Le Monde
: she says the book might be thought of as a kind of testament, “disturbed however by the evident wish for a happy end” (
Le Monde
, 17 February 1995).

 

1996.
Pat's papers are sold to the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern, Switzerland, where they become one of the library's largest holdings.
    The settlement of her estate takes eight years.

 

 

From 1927 to 1960, with short intermissions, Patricia Highsmith and her parents kept apartments in New York City. Pat was schooled in New York, she started her cahiers and diaries there, and she began both her “secret” career as a scriptwriter for comic books and her public career as a writer of fiction in Manhattan.

Wherever she lived in the world, Pat continued to set many of her novels and stories in New York or in small, imaginary suburban towns—in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and New York State—just a railway ride away from the city. New York was a kind of terminal for these fictions, and her imagination went out from it and returned to it again and again.

This map shows some of the “real” addresses in Pat Highsmith's city life and some of the “fictional” addresses that feature in her work. Often enough the two coincide, especially when Pat had murder on her mind.

FACT

 

1.
Manhattan: The Highsmiths' first Manhattan apartment on West 103rd Street.

2.
Astoria, Queens: The Highsmith apartments on Twenty-first Road and Twenty-eighth Street.

3.
Hell Gate Railway Bridge; Wards Island: the largest mental hospital in the United States; Rikers Island: the largest prison in New York State. These two landmarks are in the waters just beyond Pat's first childhood apartments in Astoria.

 

 

4.
The Highsmith apartment at One Bank Street in Greenwich Village (on the site of an apartment building formerly occupied by Willa Cather).

5.
Julia Richman High School at 327 East Sixty-seventh Street.

6.
The Highsmith apartment at 48 Grove Street. The radical political philosopher Sidney Hook was a neighbor here; John Wilkes Booth is said to have plotted the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in the Federal mansion across the street.

7.
Marie's Crisis Café: The piano bar on Grove Street at whose site Tom Paine died, it is a block from the Highsmith apartment at 48 Grove and next to the building where the murder that inspired the film
On the Waterfront
took place. Pat loved piano bars and musical comedy; she followed the Revuers—Judy Holliday, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green—in all their Greenwich Village venues.

8.
Pat's summer sublet on Morton Street in 1940. “I consider my experience in Morton Street, my contact with various people there, quite invaluable.”

9.
Barnard College, Pat's “ivory tower,” 1938–42.

10.
Mary and Stanley Highsmith's apartment on East Fifty-seventh Street.

11.
Pat's apartment at 353 East Fifty-sixth Street.

12.
Sangor-Pines Comics Shop, 10 West Forty-fifth Street.

13.
Timely comics (later Marvel Comics), Empire State Building.

14.
Café Nicholson on East Fifty-eighth Street.

15.
Pat's apartment at 75 Irving Place.

16.
Village hangouts: The Jumble Shop, the Prohibition era tearoom at 176 MacDougal Street, and the lesbian bar L's (or El's) at 116 MacDougal Street.

17.
Henry Street Settlement House: Where Pat took piano lessons from Judy [Tuvim] Holliday's mother.

18.
Brooks Brothers, Madison Avenue at Forty-fourth Street, Pat's preferred place to buy shirts and vests.

19.
Art galleries: Christopher Fourth: the Village art gallery belonging to Pat's friends in Manhattan and New Hope, Peggy and Michael Lewis. The Midtown Galleries where Betty Parsons worked; the Betty Parsons Gallery opened in 1946.

20.
Train and bus stations: Pennsylvania Station: The old Penn Station, modelled on the Baths of Caraculla; Grand Central Terminal; Port Authority Bus Terminal.

21.
Caso's Drugstore: Corner of Third Avenue and Sixty-eighth Street, “where I used to go at sixteen and fifteen, when I went to high school a block from here…. And the crises I have known here, the faces I looked for, and saw, or missed, the afternoons metamorphosed by some overwhelming event that happened in school that day, days that twisted one's life around completely and permanently, I remember them.”

22.
The Hotel Earle: corner of Waverly Place and Washington Square (now the Washington Square Hotel); Pat stayed here and so did Mary Highsmith.

23.
The Chelsea Hotel: Pat stayed here several times in the 1960s when she was taking notes on her old Greenwich Village haunts.

24.
Kingsley Skattebol, Pat's friend from Barnard, had an apartment on West Eleventh Street.

25.
Buffie Johnson, Pat's old friend, owned a loft building at 102 Greene Street.

26.
Bloomingdale's department store: Pat, in real life, met Kathleen Senn here while she was working in the toy department and living on East Fifty-sixth Street.

27.
The East Village and East Ninth Street: Respectively, the artistic domain and home of writer and performance artist Lil Picard, Pat's longtime friend.

28.
Gracie Square: The Upper East Side address where Pat visited the painter Fanny Myers [Brennan], who, like Cleo in
The Talented Mr. Ripley
, painted miniscule landscapes.

FICTION

A.
Strangers on a Train
: Guy Haines's apartment on West Fifty-third Street which Charles Bruno, his Alter Ego, haunts.

B.
Found in the Street
: Ralph Linderman's apartment on Bleecker Street Pat makes two geographical errors in
Found in the Street
: she gives Ralph a job at an arcade on Eighth Avenue in the West Eighties. Eighth Avenue becomes Central Park West at Fifty-ninth Street, and the arcades themselves would have been in the West Forties.
   
Found in the Street
: Natalia and Jack Sutherland's apartment on Grove Street.
   
Found in the Street
: Elsie Tyler shares an apartment on Minetta Lane and works in a coffee shop on Seventh Avenue South. She is photographed at the Chelsea Hotel.
   
Found in the Street
: The Armstrongs' apartment on West Eleventh Street. (Kingsley Skattebol had an apartment at West Eleventh Street.)
   
Found in the Street:
Elsie Tyler's apartment on Greene Street, where she is murdered. (Buffie Johnson owned a loft building at 102 Greene Street.)

C.
The Blunderer
: West Forty-fourth Street: Walter Stackhouse's law office, around the corner from the Sangor-Pines office.
   
The Blunderer
: Central Park, where Walter Stackhouse mistakes a stranger for Melchior Kimmel, kills him, and is himself murdered by Kimmel.

D.
The Talented Mr. Ripley
: East Fifty-first Street between Second and Third avenues is where Tom Ripley shares a dingy brownstone apartment with Bob, “a window dresser.” He receives extorted checks there under the name George McAlpin. Previously Ripley lived in a brownstone on East Forty-fifth Street with a man who likes to shelter young men.
   
The Talented Mr. Ripley
: Park Avenue: home of Dickie Greenleaf's parents, Herbert and Emily.
   
The Talented Mr. Ripley
: Gracie Square: Ripley's friend, Cleo Dobelle, who paints pictures so small they can be viewed only through a magnifying glass, lives at this Upper East Side address.
   
The Talented Mr. Ripley
: Brooks Brothers: Tom Ripley buys clothes for Dickie Greenleaf and himself here.

E.
This Sweet Sickness
: Romeo Salta's Restaurant on West Fifty-sixth Street where David Kelsey, in the character of his Alter Ego, William Neumeister, appears with his imaginary girlfriend Annabelle and insists on “Two orders of everything, please.” The owner of Salta's later sent Pat a case of wine in New Hope to thank her.
   
This Sweet Sickness
: 410 Riverside Drive, the apartment from which David Kelsey/William Neumeister jumps to his death (near Barnard College in Morningside Heights).
   
This Sweet Sickness
: Brooks Brothers: Kelsey/Neumeister wants to shop here, but can't.

F.
The Price of Salt
: Frankenberg's department store (Bloomingdale's in real life) at Fifty-ninth Street and Lexington Avenue, where Therese meets Carole, while working in the toy department.
   
The Price of Salt
: East Sixty-third Street is where Therese lives; it is also where Pat rented her first room after graduating from Barnard College.
   
The Price of Salt
: Frankenburg's department store (Bloomingdale's in real life). Pat has a salesgirl steal Therese's steak from the cloakroom—“Wolves, she had thought, wolves, stealing a bloody bag of meat”—just as someone stole her own steak while she was working at Bloomingdale's in December of 1948.

G.
Edith's Diary
: Edith Howland's apartment on Grove Street, where Cliffie tries to suffocate the family cat.

H.
The Cry of the Owl
: The apartment on East Eighty-second Street where Nickie Jurgen, Robert Forester's pathological ex-wife, lives with her new husband. She hides Robert's opponent, Greg Wyncoop, in a shabby hotel “off Fourth Avenue.” Fourth Avenue is also where Carol, at the end of
The Price of Salt,
gets a job in a furniture store.

I.
The Tremor of Forgery
: Howard Ingham's apartment on “Fourth Street near Washington Square” where John Castlewood, the director of the film Howard is writing, kills himself.

J.
Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt, The Cry of the Owl, This Sweet Sickness,
etc.: all novels in which the Holland Tunnel, the George Washington Bridge, the Port Authority Bus Station, and New York's two train stations are featured.

K.
“The Terrapin”: Victor, who murders his artist mother (and is given Pat's childhood preferences in books), lives with his mother on Riverside Drive (on the Upper West Side, where the Highsmiths first lived in Manhattan), then on Third Avenue, in the vicinity of Mary and Stanley Highsmith's last New York apartment.

L.
A Dog's Ransom
: Riverside Park, where Tina the poodle is kidnapped and killed. The dog's owners, Greta and Ed, live nearby on West 106th Street.
   
A Dog's Ransom
: 103rd Street and West End Avenue, where Kenneth Rowajinski, the poison-pen writer and dog killer, lives. It is the site of the Highsmiths' first apartment in New York. York Avenue in the East Sixties: the ransom dropoff for the dog is near Pat's first rented room in the East Sixties, and near the Julia Richman High School on East Sixty-seventh Street.
   
A Dog's Ransom
: Astoria: Clarence Duhamel, the good cop, is brought up in Astoria, reading the authors Pat read: Krafft-Ebing, Freud, Dostoyevsky, and Proust. He also has Pat's home subway stop, Ditmars—which she misspells in the novel. MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village is where he stays with his girlfriend.
   
A Dog's Ransom
: Morton Street: the location of the apartment to which the dognapper Kenneth Rowajinski is released from Bellevue Hospital. He is killed there.

M.
The Click of the Shutting
: Gregory Bullick lives in a Greenwich Village loft with his father. His subway stop is Pat's home stop when she was his age and living on Grove Street: the Christopher Street station at Sheridan Square.

N.
“Blow It” (from
The Black House
): Jane Street, Harry Rowe's apartment in Greenwich Village where he separately entertains the two women he can't decide to marry.

O.
“The Baby Spoon” (from
Slowly, Slowly in the Wind
): Faculty housing near Columbia University (Pat's alma mater) where Claude Lamm, the pompous professor, is murdered by his former student, Winston, who steals his wife's baby spoon. “Claude suspected that Winston had a vaguely homosexual attachment to him, and Claude had heard that homosexuals were apt to take something from someone they cared for.” Winston lives in a “genuine garret at the top of a brownstone in the West Seventies.”

P.
“The Romantic” (from
Mermaids on the Golf Course
): West Fifty-fifth Street: location of the apartment where Isabel Crane takes care of her invalid mother.

Q.
“The Network” (from
Slowly, Slowly in the Wind
): “Seventh Avenue and 53rd Street” along with “West 11th Street, Gramercy Park, even Yorkville”—all of them considered “hearts of the city” by a network of friends in Manhattan portrayed by Pat as part of the great scamming racket that is New York. The “East Village” is a place where blacks “cut your fingers off if they can't get the rings off” easily.