Whenever I get desperately homesick, but still not desperately enough to spend several hundred dollars getting back to America, I go to Switzerland.
In Zürich, walking down Bahnhofstrasse, or lunching at the Möven-Pick, I can imagine I’m right back in America. The waitress at the Mövenpick who speaks English with an American accent. And in fact it was that astoundingly self-confident advertisement in the Swiss tourist bureau and in the Paris Herald Tribune – ‘the only country in Europe where all your hosts speak English’ – that gave me the final push to come. Ah, that luscious Grade A milk of Switzerland! Those hamburger steaks served with a bottle of California-made ketchup! And a hotel room with a free cake of soap on the basin! And the central heating that really functions! And the taxicabs that I can actually get into without fracturing a skull! Just like America! And after all, the taxis are American cars.5
In Zürich they stayed at the Hotel Zum Storchen, near the Coop, about which Highsmith waxed lyrical:
But what eases my homesickness quicker than anything else is to visit a big Cooperative Self-Service market, like the one on the square near the Storchen Hotel. All those endless shelves of cans, cellophane-wrapped cookies, breakfast foods, cheeses, delicatessen meats, fresh vegetables, cigarettes and candy are not only like America but – (I whisper it gently) – even better. You have a bigger variety of breads and cookies than we have. Every and better cheeses, infinitely more types of cigarettes to choose from. Obviously Switzerland has adopted a lot of new ideas from America, but there are some that Switzerland has improved upon – like the de luxe type of sandwich shop that the Mövenpick is.6
Highsmith’s four novels at mid-century – Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt, The Blunderer and The Talented Mr Ripley – fizz with the Fifties. She took trouble with verisimilitude: a Pullman interior’s ‘unlighted cigar that still gyrated conversationally in a bony hand behind one of the seat backs’7; the pre-Christmas rush of a New York department store where the section manager ‘was dragging dolls from the stock shelves and seating them, splay legged, on the glass counters’.8 She captures the gloss of American diners, luncheonettes and soda fountains. Her fleeing lovers in The Price of Salt, pursued by an undercover detective, anticipate the road trip in Lolita and pre-date the Beats. She renders an American city hotel in the lean prose of pulp fiction:
She wandered across the lobby, looked through the glass into the barber shop where a couple of men were getting shaves. A black man was shining shoes. A tall man with a cigar and a broad-brimmed hat, with Western boots, walked by her. She would remember this lobby, too, forever, the people, the old-fashioned-looking woodwork at the base of the registration desk, and the man in the dark overcoat who looked at her over the top of his newspaper, and slumped in his chair and went on reading beside the black and cream-colored marble column.9
The Swiss notebook from 1952–53 gives us a rough draft of Highsmith’s cool style, her characteristic way of looking. Here she describes a pre-theatre dinner in Zürich:
I order a calf’s liver in one of the sturdy little Weinstübli of Zürich. In America a piece about the size of my palm would appear – and out comes a large platter with enough liver and onions, string beans and Bratkartoffeln to feed a couple of husky men. And I should mention that the price is little more than half what I would pay in a comparable place in New York or Paris too. Applesauce afterward? By all means. Then comes a soup bowl full of it, and a couple of delicious cookies with it besides. Considering that Swiss-sized breakfast I ate in the hotel the same morning, including about half a liter of hot rich milk, and the Mövenpick lunch when I nearly killed myself sampling about five items, it seems impossible to finish all the apple sauce – but I do. Indirectly the hearty appetite of the other people in the Stübli inspires me. I have been watching a man demolish a Schweinskotelette about the size of his head, while the woman at the table on the left, after a heaped plate of hors d’oeuvres, is now tackling a plate of half a chicken, noodles. This crucial diet, I suspect, probably makes for the famous stolid character of the Swiss people. The Americans drink too much, anyway. I note that the average Swiss drinks Apfelsaft or beer with his food.10
Highsmith fancied herself a gourmet, but she was a picky eater. What we’re witnessing here are the stirrings of her Europhilia, which would lead to decades of exile in France and, eventually, Switzerland. In the second week of January 1953 the pair had moved to the Kulm Hotel in St Moritz. Highsmith noted ‘the staid couples swathed to the neck in racoon rugs’ heading to their hotels or to Handsellmann’s Konditorei, and the ‘hot chocolate, lebkuchen biscuits and obscure martinis’.11
She was a hungry girl.
After four stormy months in Trieste, they sailed back to the conditioned air of Eisenhower’s America. ‘It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs,’12 as another female American writer put it. Ellen Hill, always high-strung, attempted suicide in New York. Highsmith retreated to her birthplace in Fort Worth and wrote The Blunderer, one of her best books.
She began writing The Talented Mr. Ripley in Lenox, Massachusetts. Central to the novel’s reworking of Henry James’s The Ambassadors is the lure of Europe for young Americans, the freedoms of la dolce vita during the McCarthy years. Ripley’s frenetic motoring around the Med, shedding his own identity and assuming that of the wealthy, debonair Dicky Greenleaf, has its parallel in Highsmith’s high living with Ellen Hill – meals and wheels, Swiss grand hotels, all the food you could eat. Ripley sails to Europe first class, paid for by the father of the man he will kill. His last words in the novel are ‘Il meglio albergo. Il meglio, il meglio!’ – ‘The best hotel! The best, the best!’
By the time Highsmith returned to live in Switzerland in the early 1980s, the best was behind her. Her later books can be hit and miss, but she was rich from the movie rights. At one point the BBC was considering a $100,000 deal to adapt the Ripley novels as a television series. The famous cool style had begun to wear thin, to become plain speaking in the Texan manner. Alcohol had hardened her gamine looks. French tax inspectors and Mitterrand’s socialists had her scurrying to Switzerland’s Italian-speaking Ticino. Here she lived out the last thirteen years of her life in miserly wealth, poor health and alcoholism.
She bought a tall stone house in the hamlet of Aurigeno in the Valle Maggia, behind Locarno. On a sunny day the deep cleft can be sparkling and magical, but for much of the year it is lightless and forbidding. In a late story about a land dispute between a local priest and a farmer, ‘A Long Walk from Hell’, she described her situation: ‘a land of mountains that block the sun, a land of granite outcroppings, of trees that cling to the slanting hillsides, but nevertheless grow straight up’.13
She intended to divide her time between homes in France (two of them, as well as a cottage in Sussex, England) and Switzerland, to comply with favourable tax arrangements. In 1988, she wrote to an old lover, Marijane Meaker:
When you make a lot of money you get suspicious. Did I tell you that Bloomsbury liked my latest Ripley so much they gave me an advance that in American money comes to about $115,000? I never got that much for a book. You know, in the U.S. no one really recognises me, but in Europe I’m often recognised and treated like a celebrity.14
Aurigeno had 105 inhabitants at the time of Highsmith’s arrival in 1981. Ticino villages had fed emigration to California during the nineteenth century. Ticinese farmers, initially attracted by the Gold Rush, began supplying dairy products to San Francisco. As Switzerland prospered, the canton’s valleys and lakeshore sheltered second homes, wealthy foreigners and artists. Golo Mann and Max Frisch had houses up the valley. The Locarno film festival brought a sprinkling of Tinseltown. ‘The Ticino is also a mysterious place,’ wrote Highsmith, ‘composed of a lot of granite said to have a magnetic effect, draining one’s energy.’15
Her house had been built with Ticino’s traditional grey granite in 1680. ‘People come to the Ticino for the light,’ said her editor Daniel Keel, ‘and
she put herself into the darkest, most cramped house, no room, no quality of life; she didn’t give her guests anything, but she didn’t give herself anything either. It was the most uncomfortable house in the world with the mountains right up against it, which cut out even the two hours of sunlight a day the town got.’16
Even Highsmith disliked it:
I had the feeling of living in a submarine. The submarine is my house … The walls are a meter thick at least. The lower cellar’s two rooms are like dungeons with arched ceilings lined with round stones the size of oranges and grapefruit. Four pieces of granite project from the walls of each dungeon to hold lengths of red chestnut wood, now sagging with time. These crosspieces were to keep cheese and hams out of reach of mice and rats. I have never seen a rat or a mouse here, but once I found a snake in the second cellar.17
She had always been interested in houses. Guy, the protagonist of Strangers on a Train, is a prize-winning architect. Ripley plays lord of the manor in modernist swank in France. Highsmith was drawn to the clean spare lines of the Bauhaus. Her own houses, however, were singularly uncomfortable and badly chosen.
The village sits on one side (the side with less sun in winter, as it happens) of the Valle Maggia, and has two main streets parallel to each other, paved but one-lane, causing cars to move slowly. There is no bakery or butcher, but a small grocery shop exists for staples. One trattoria serves as bar-café, and provides hot meals if you get there on time to meet their chef’s hours. There’s wine, of course. Everyone drinks wine here and also grappa. A village man sells his home-made grappa for twenty-five francs per liter, and very good it is, either neat or tossed into a cup of espresso.18
Patricia Highsmith with cat in Palisades, New York, 1958.
Highsmith was self-taught in German and peppered her speech with phrases to the point of irritation. ‘Pat grabbed at any opportunity to speak German,’ recalls Marijane Meaker, who thought it was ‘a melancholy affection for the father she never really knew’.19 A neighbour in Switzerland ‘thought that German was Pat’s best language – and it was bad’.20
Her former agent, Schartle Myrer, had this to say about Highsmith’s antipathy for America and her put-on Europhilia:
She was totally secretive about her past – I asked a few questions about Texas, which she refused to answer. She really didn’t want anyone to know about her American origins and always avoided it. She tried to assume a superior European view even in that first meeting [1959], which was rather pathetic. Highsmith had absolutely no grace – poor woman, she thought having an espresso machine made her sophisticated.21
After six years in Aurigeno, Highsmith moved a few kilometres down the valley to a modern house in Tegna, commissioned from architect Tobias Amman. On her first trip through Switzerland in January 1953 she had written:
Someday, perhaps, I shall have a house built of rock, a house with a name – Hanley-on-the-Lake, Bedford on the River, West Hills, or plain Sunny Vale. Something. So even without my own name on the envelope letters will reach me, because I and only I shall be living there. But that can never make up for these years of standing in line at American Express offices from Opera to Haymarket, Naples to Munich.22
Casa Highsmith has a functional foursquare look, with the ‘French windows’ she repeatedly notes as a marker of class. She showed photos of it to Marijane Meaker, saying ‘I designed it myself, which I hope qualifies me as an artist, since I don’t have my sketchbooks with me. I had help from a prominent architect whose name probably isn’t familiar here.’ Meaker thought the ‘windows seemed like lookout slits in the side of an old fort’.23 They faced a garden where Highsmith liked to potter – as does Ripley. In a radio interview she mentions planting American corn and fraises des bois or wild strawberries. Her go-to coffee-table book was A Color Atlas of Forensic Pathology. Her few visitors were eager to leave.
One of them was Australian writer Robert Dessaix, whose narrator is coming to terms with an AIDS diagnosis:
I thought she might have interesting things to say about death, having described it from every conceivable angle. … ‘Be under the clock in the main square at one,’ Patricia Highsmith had said to me on the telephone in a kind of diffident drawl …
It was an oddly suburban sort of house in concrete brick, not at all the sort of house I’d thought Patricia Highsmith would choose to live in. It had nothing of the tasteful charm, for instance, of Tom Ripley’s ‘Belle Ombre’ about it, although she must have been much wealthier than she’d made Ripley out to be. Then again, her novels are often very suburban (in a sense), cluttered with the details of ordinary lives in ordinary settings. And she herself – what was my mother’s phrase? – did not take much trouble with herself. Long, grey-brown hair, a brownish cardigan – the boutiques and salons of Locarno were clearly not her stamping-ground. Owlish is the word that comes to mind, perhaps because of the slightly hooded eyes.24
In a letter to editor Liz Calder at Bloomsbury, Highsmith described her routine: ‘When I get up in the morning, I first of all make the coffee and then I say to my cat, we’re going to have a great day.’ Highsmith’s day, in point of fact, began with a shot of vodka from the fridge. She marked the bottle so she could keep track of her drinking. Then she made the coffee. Meaker describes the moment in 1963 when she realised Highsmith was an alcoholic:
By now she was apparently drinking all day, beginning with breakfast. By evening, she was sullen, quiet, looking most unhappy when she appeared for dinner in the usual shined shoes, pressed trousers, blazer, white shirt, and ascot.25
When she ate, it was the comfort dishes of Fort Worth, Texas: American bacon, fried eggs and cereal. ‘She would never eat,’ reported one of her lovers, ‘she would cook lapin à la crème for her two Siamese cats, but would not touch it herself.’26 A favourite supper was corned beef hash with an egg on top. Another guest recalls ‘being absolutely starving and looking in the fridge and all there was was peanut butter and vodka. I hardly saw her eat.’27
At the Giardinetto Pizzeria in Tegna, she nursed a pash on the proprietor. She made sorties to nearby Locarno and Ascona. The covers of the Columbia University cahiers record hectic travels to film festivals and writers’ junkets. Six films had been adapted from her books and there were options for more. The roster of directors and stars is impressive: Alfred Hitchcock, Claude Miller, Claude Chabrol, Wim Wenders, Alain Delon, Gérard Dépardieu and Denis Hopper. Twenty years after her death, films based on her work are still being produced.
Wenders described how his film The American Friend came about:
And then she pulled this fat typewritten manuscript out of the drawer of her writing table and gave it to me. (Well, it must have been a copy.) And she said: ‘Even my agent hasn’t read this one yet. So I’m certain the rights are not sold yet. Maybe you want to read it.’ Did I want to read it!? The title said: Ripley’s Game. I had finished it before I was home in Munich on the train. And I wrote to her: ‘Yes, absolutely. I want to acquire the rights to make a film after this novel!’ And it became The American Friend. My first working title was: Framed. Did I know that she was Texan? Sure. I knew she was from Fort Worth.28
Her anti-Semitism and bigotry had become entrenched with the years. In the 1960s, Highsmith used the terms ‘nigro’ and ‘nigger’ with impunity, granting ‘Negro’ only ironically. She thought being a Texan gave her special licence in race matters. This descendant of antebellum slave owners from Gadsden, Alabama harboured no particular empathy for the plight of African Americans. In November 1961, when Martin Luther King, Jr was leading protests against segregated lunch counters and restrooms in Georgia department stores, Highsmith was grumbling about Northerners not understanding ‘the colored’. She disparaged Lorraine Hansberry, the first female playwright to make it to Broadway with A Raisin in the Sun. Hansberry was black, and a closet lesbian. Writing to Kingsley in 1969, Highsmith didn’t hold back:
I regret to say I have now joined the batch of Whites (I hardly dare spell it with a c
apital) who have sort of had enough of the Blacks. Soul Food. Black Studies. What are they going to teach, is the question (sic) of my friend Alex Szogyi, Professor of Romance Languages at Hunter College. More money they want. The mind boggles. Or it buggers the imagination. Now the Blacks are trying blackmail, I learn. And some of my best friends, and some of my closest relatives in Texas, call me a nigger-lover. It is indeed difficult to live.29
In 1988 Highsmith, a member of Amnesty International, taxed her old friend Kingsley with sending a copy of Mein Kampf to Switzerland. She had borrowed Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Anti-Semitism, ‘which should provide a sane balance for Hitler’.30
Meeting her old lover again in 1992, after a gap of twenty-eight years, Meaker was appalled by the virulence of Highsmith’s racism:
‘Do you live in some little Nazi coven?’
‘I’m not surrounded by neo-Nazis, just easy-going Ticinese, old Italian families, and new families of workers. I notice the products from Israel are shunned in the supermarkets, and the Jaffa orange juice disappeared this year. People say, why should I buy something from that country? And when they know I’m an American they ask me why America gives these people so much money. Everyone knows Israel imprisons without habeas corpus, throws families who are not terrorists out of their houses at gunpoint … that Jew editor Otto Penzler removed my dedication To the Palestinian people from People Who Knock on the Door without a by-your-leave request? Penguin and European countries left it in!’31
‘Lean, louche and androgynous’ – Highsmith photographed by Rolf Tietgens in 1942
The Swiss Literary Archives contain a cache of Highsmith’s pseudonymous letters to newspapers railing against minorities of every stripe. Other letters are addressed to US President Jimmy Carter, US Secretary of State James A. Baker III or Senator Bob Dole. They reveal a mind much exercised by the Israeli-Palestinian problem, but also careful to protect its sanctuary in Switzerland and hoping to acquire citizenship. Highsmith used a revolving set of pseudonyms: Eddie Stefano, Janet Tamagni, Prissila Appleby, A Proudfoot Grasshopper. At one point she upbraids Vice President Dan Quayle on his spelling mistakes, calling them Quayle droppings – ‘I liked his about “wishing he’d studied Latin harder, so he could talk with the folks in S. America.”’
The Gilded Chalet Page 19