Highsmith was cavalier about her lesbianism. She had friendships with gay men and multiple botched affairs with women. Characters in her fiction are often androgynous, sexually smudged or just plain oddball. From her Barnard days she was sexually driven and promiscuous, although chase seems to have been all; she had the only child’s unwillingness to share. In her youth she had been highly attractive to men and women alike. Photographer Rolf Tietgens, a dalliance in 1942, confessed that he was attracted to her because ‘you are a boy, you know’. Terry Castle tells us ‘just how dizzyingly attractive she was as a young woman. Lean, louche, androgynous, with jet-black hair, a foppish forelock, and full, pouting lips: a real Texas Cherubino … a boyish, flirty, compulsive seductress – a sort of sapphic Dennis the Menace.’32
Ronald Blythe, remarking astutely that she desired women but didn’t like them, described a night with Highsmith in the early 1960s:
We would sleep in the same room and talk; she needed some kind of closeness. We weren’t lovers, but we did sleep together once or twice. We talked about gay love and the unsatisfactory nature of some of our romantic friendships – she knew all about my sex life … sex with her was like being made love to by a boy. Her hands were very masculine and big and she was hipless like an adolescent boy.33
In a short 1989 essay ‘Of Time and the Country Life’, Highsmith appreciates the different rhythms of the Ticino and is clear-eyed about the effect on women:
In the small towns in this area, it is not the done thing for women to congregate in the local bar or café at 9 p.m., women presumably always having something to do at that time, and at home too. In brief, the married woman with children in the Tessin countryside is at the beck and call of husband and all the children, possibly even the elderly in-laws, round the clock. She is car-driver, cook, shopper, house-cleaner, seamstress, hostess, nurse.34
She wrote every day at her trusty, much-travelled 1956 Olympia Deluxe typewriter. On Desert Island Discs she described her writing day in a cagey, cool voice, completely diffident, its Texan inflections tempered by European swagger: eight typewritten pages per day, mostly written in the afternoon over four or five hours. She needed three drafts to get it right:
I don’t write very smoothly in first draft … I write action passages fast, but what comes after might need a mood change. I retype my books two and a half times. I like retyping for neatness and polish, not style. Style does not interest me in the least – emotion is worth more than the intellect.
Her chosen desert island book was Moby-Dick. All parsimony and industry, she reminds me of the Scotch-Irish on her mother’s side, the Stewarts. On her father’s side she was Prussian – no levity there either. This didn’t prevent her from noting similar qualities in the Swiss: ‘Ah, the tidy, thrifty, law-abiding Swiss! Uptight! Why else did the Swiss have the highest drug-abuse rate per capita in the drug-abusing world – meaning the world?’35
Small g: A Summer Idyll (1995) remains Highsmith’s only completed novel set in Switzerland, published posthumously. The title refers to a neighbourhood bar in Zürich with the designation ‘partly gay clientele’, or ‘gay at night’.
She wrote Small g during the last two years of her life when she was sick, drinking and smoking heavily as usual. It begins with a fatal mugging and ends with the funeral of a closeted lesbian. The protagonist is a forty-five-year-old commercial illustrator (as were Highsmith’s parents) improbably named Rickie Markwalder. He likes them young: ‘He was a nice old uncle to them, ready to lend a hundred francs and forget about it. To listen to someone’s troubles, pour another drink, offer a bed in a crisis.’36
The novel follows a coterie of barflies and milliners in a district behind the train station in Zürich. Highsmith had always enjoyed depicting soaks and ne’er-do-wells. In Strangers on a Train the double crime surfaces after the two protagonists tie one on over highballs. The Talented Mr. Ripley opens in Raoul’s on Fifth Avenue, with a gin and tonic, and quickly moves on to brandy. Highsmith’s characters are usually a little cranked up before the reader gets to them. At the end of her life, Highsmith’s intake was a finger or two of vodka to get going, Dewar’s Scotch during the day and a steady intake of Pilsner Urquell. Terry Castle unsparingly described Highsmith in her later years: ‘she typically manages to look both petrified and pickled, like an alcoholic basilisk.’37
Highsmith makes a number of passing references to drugs, specifically to Platzspitz Park, or Needle Park, where Zürich authorities tolerated open-air drug dealing and shooting-up until 1992.
The park had become such a slum really, a dealer’s paradise, a public toilet too, that the police had been ordered to clear them all out, take the addicts by busloads back to their homes, often in small towns. But a great many of them had made their way back to Zürich for their drugs, and they were still hanging around, nearly three hundred of them daily drifting in Zürich’s streets, according to a recent news bulletin that Rickie remembered. Street hold-ups, muggings at knifepoint, had come back, Rickie knew. Not to mention that he could see a few almost any time of the day or night in the St. Jakob’s church area, sleeping in a nook somewhere, or sitting on the pavement propped against the building, too far gone to stand up to beg.38
Performance artist Tabea Blumenschein in the summer of punk
Small g reflects Zürich’s dark side, but also Highsmith’s own take on it. One of her last infatuations was with Berlin performance artist Tabea Blumenschein, thirty years Highsmith’s junior. Tabea sported spiky blonde hair, a sailor’s cap and a moustache. She could play a Gauleiter with a whip. ‘I have just bought Tabea a flick knife, not allowed in Berlin, and got it to her via Hamburg TV crew Friday,’ wrote Highsmith. It was the second half of the 1970s in Berlin; David Bowie was making his three classic albums at Hansa by the Wall. Tabea took Highsmith to lesbian discos and gave her the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers and Lou Reed’s Transformer. Not to be outdone, she bought Tabea a Stiff Little Fingers album.
What attracted Highsmith to the figure of the con man in fiction was her own early exclusion. The Fort Worth lesbian writer of genre fiction was never quite welcomed into the high-end locales she aspired to: Washington Square, Snedens Landing on the Hudson River, Aldburgh in Suffolk, posh French Fontainebleau, Switzerland’s Riviera. Her characters ape expensive social polish rather than achievement. They murder for it.
She thought that living abroad ‘sharpens perspective. You see the class differences in America when you live in England.’39 In a brief piece about foreigners living in Switzerland she was characteristically impersonal and disingenuously shallow:
I have now lived in the Ticino for a few years, a region which may be less formal than Zürich or Berne areas, but still the pavements and gutters of Locarno are not littered with discarded paper cups, broken bottles and empty cigarette packets …
The dark marble floor shines, unlittered. It is like a well-cared-for living room, in fact.
Switzerland is something like a club. Perhaps not everyone would want to join, but for those who like order and the quiet life, Switzerland is the place to be.40
She had finally been admitted to club class.
Her editor Daniel Keel visited her a few months before her death in February 1995. She had asked for chocolate cake, which he picked up from Sprüngli in Zürich’s Bahnhof. Their work done, Highsmith opened the box and both of them stared at the cake. It was coffin-shaped. Keel was mortified, and knew that she knew. A macabre moment, typical of her work.41
Still seeking Swiss citizenship, in the last few weeks she decided to leave her papers to the Swiss Literary Archive in Bern. Three days before she died, she continued to fiddle with her will. She died alone in the hospital in Locarno.
Up the road from her house, and across the train tracks from Highsmith’s final resting place, another writer of a different calibre also found a kind of refuge in Tegna. Hannah Arendt summered there for many years. The great witness to Nazi evil has a memorial seat in the Barbatè guesthouse gar
den, facing the lovely tropical trees and Highsmith’s forbidding blockhouse in the valley. I sometimes conjure a conversation between these two writers, these mistresses to the banality of evil – one a right-wing Texan lesbian who disliked Jews, the other a German-Jewish philosopher. I’m not sure they would see eye to eye.
Highsmith’s ashes are immured in the columbarium of the little Catholic cemetery in Tegna. She hated Catholics. Friends and admirers, many of them Jews belonging to the New York publishing world, the post-war cinema world, packed the church. They brought flowers. Highsmith hated flowers. She was a great hater. They came to remember an anti-Semite of long standing. This mean-spirited, tight-wad crime writer bequeathed her millions to Yaddo writers’ colony in upstate New York, where over forty years before she had written her first novel, Strangers on a Train. Rumour has it that millions are gathering dust and compound interest in the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands. This ‘jaded, butch, Scotch-soaked lady novelist’,42 whom nobody much liked, was laid to rest.
11
TRUFFLES MISSING FROM THE BONBON BOX
Dürrenmatt’s detectives
Still from the first 1958 Spanish-Swiss-German film adaptation of Dürrenmatt’s The Pledge
Rundown aristocrats, arteriosclerotic politicians (unless still in office), debilitated millionaires, schizophrenic writers, manic-depressive industrialists, and so on, in short, the entire mentally disturbed elite of half the Western world.
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
The yummy mummies behind me on the bleachers of the indoor pool on Lake Neuchâtel were rooting for their kids. It was a swimming competition of the Swiss Group of International Schools on a Saturday afternoon in mid-November. I was the stroke judge, keeping an eye out for flutter kicks and false starts. But my mind wasn’t on the job. The evening ploughed ahead, relay after relay, and an expensive dinner date was in the offing. They always get their pound of flesh, these private international schools. I’ve spent a lifetime working in them. You can talk all the pedagogical puffery you want, but when it comes down to it we’re lackeys for hire in capitalism’s late flourish. Nineteenth-century Swiss nannies kept the royal houses of Europe and Russia on the go with hot water bottles, broth and needlework. The royals have gone and in their place are Citibank, Novartis and sundry middle-eastern nabobs. Heated perfumes in the tepid air: Gold Coast princesses, embassy chattel, tiger moms and Russian babes.
Beyond the plate glass of the pool lay the lake. Lights twinkled on its northern shore and a late ferry cruised to port. The western lakes of Switzerland – Lake Neuchâtel and Lake Biel – are more muted and subtle in their scenery than the more frequented Lake Lucerne, Lake Geneva and the two either side of Interlaken. The dramatic landscape is toned down. La Tène was out there in the darkness, the early Celtic settlement three thousand years old – Iron Age. They could flutter kick all they wanted. In the long time of history the SGIS swim meet was just a chlorine blot on the landscape.
Dinner was at La Maison du Prussien, a boutique hotel and restaurant tucked away at the bottom of the Gorge du Vauseyon just outside Neuchâtel. I’d checked into my room earlier. It took me three spins around interlocking roundabouts to find the turn-off down to the Seyon river, tumbling with November floodwater to the lake. The hotel owes its name to the Prussians making yet another foray for Lebensraum in these parts.
Frederick William III of Prussia once ruled the Principality of Neuchâtel. It was restored to him in 1815 after Napoleon the Corsican had tried to nick it. It was as a principality that Neuchâtel joined the Swiss Confederation in that year. La Maison du Prussien, built five storeys high to catch the light in 1797, was one of a number of mills, sawmills and fabriques d’Indienne – cotton mills – along the deep gorge. It became a brewery, a bakery and a straw-hat manufactory in short order. Now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, it serves excellent champagne and an inventive truffle-themed menu. The spacious old-world rooms are named after former millers; mine was called Meunier Abraham. It seemed a pity to spoil the décor with a pile of orange exercise books, each with a Romeo and Juliet essay waiting to be marked. I was tempted to throw them out the window into the millrace below. Trains clattered above at regular intervals, setting off a murder of crows in the sketchy trees.
Swiss architect Mario Botta’s Centre Dürrenmatt above Neuchâtel
In the mid-nineteenth century, Neuchâtel republicans successfully revolted against Prussian rule and sent Fritz packing. By one of those strange ironies of monarchical rule, the line of primogeniture ran through the principality of Monaco. The heir to Neuchâtel’s princely lands is the Irish historian and scion of the Guinness family, Patrick Guinness of Leixlip Castle. I lived in Leixlip as an undergraduate and remember gazing down on the castle from the top of the 66 bus, hoping to spot Mick Jagger or David Bowie. The brewery baron was known for hob-nobbing with rock aristocracy. Celts have always been resident around the lake. We might consider it our lost homeland. Those Prussians are just blow-ins compared to the Irish. This is what I was thinking poolside, as Speedos did their lengths. I whiled away the afternoon looking across at lost ancestral lands.
The La Tène archaeological site is situated on the northwest shore where the short River Thielle flows into the lake. The river was good for fishing and now forms the cantonal boundary between Bern and Neuchâtel, but is also one of those curious language boundaries – a shibboleth. West of the lakes the language is French; on the eastern shores German is the lingua franca, so to speak. You might think the French speakers would be Catholic and the German-speakers Reformist. You’d be wrong – it’s more complicated than that.
Two and a half thousand years ago, on this swampy neck of land between the lakes, La Tène culture prospered. Post house remains in orderly rows have been preserved underwater. The wealth of gold, bronze and ironwork artefacts, with their distinctive convoluted designs, is what characterises the period. I learned about it in art class at school. You can draw a direct line from La Tène to the illuminations of early Irish manuscripts to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to the gold Celtic squiggles on our school blazers. Convoluted, but direct.
Just up the lakeshore from the swimming pool is the Laténium museum. It’s built down into the mud, descending four floors through history to the early lakeside settlement and its trove of metalwork. Lakes define Switzerland because you have to get across and around them. They act as barriers – to religion and to language. The Jura Mountains rise on the western flank of Lakes Biel and Neuchâtel, marking the boundary of Burgundian culture. Pre-Roman, pre-Allemanic, pre-Prussian, pre-Napoleonic; the oldest mountains on the European landmass. The museum houses the preserved skeletons of boats lifted from the lakebed where long ago they plied the current.
Early next morning I was the only guest downstairs in my hotel. I like these tinkly Swiss breakfast rooms in the off season: you can collect your thoughts. I read Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Inspector Barlach Mysteries right through breakfast and then went up to my room and graded those Romeo and Juliet essays in short order. Checking out, I asked about the Dürrenmatt house. He lived for much of his life above Neuchâtel and his fictional crimes have a habit of taking place in the hinterland. I felt like a spot of literary gumshoe. When I cleared the town, I climbed through the trees, past a botanical garden, parked in a clearing and walked down to the house, now a museum. Dürrenmatt did well on Broadway: celebrity architect, stunning view of the lake from his panoramic terrace, coffee shop cum bookshop.
Film noir: Dürrenmatt’s The Judge and His Hangman in a 1961 BBC production
Dürrenmatt was the son of a village pastor from Konolfingen in the Emmental region, in the canton of Bern. Perhaps he got his moral curmudgeon quality from his father. I imagine Swiss pastors as the epitome of moral probity. Dürrenmatt is one of two twentieth-century Swiss writers whose work puts their country under the microscope; the other is Max Frisch. They often get confused: Frisch became tired being asked for Dürrenmatt’s autograph by air ho
stesses on his many transatlantic plane journeys. Dürrenmatt was born in 1921, Frisch in 1911. Both were witness to Switzerland’s wartime and post-war prosperity. Both are known abroad as dramatists. But Dürrenmatt’s talent is polymorphous – at home on stage, in literary fiction, in genre-bending detective stories. He liked to take his country to task, a literary pastor thumping the pulpit, and so he has an ambiguous relationship with Swiss readers.
Barlach is Dürrenmatt’s fictional Detective Inspector of Bern City Police. A sick, hard-drinking veteran of the machinery of Swiss justice, he is a good man in a labyrinth, a thorn in the side of his less scrupulous superiors. The Judge and His Hangman (1950) sees the inspector attempting to get to the bottom of a policeman’s murder in the hills above Lake Biel. The who-done-it involves business interests, crooked politicians and equally crooked cops. In Suspicion (1951) a former concentration camp doctor, practising in a Zürich clinic for the wealthy, describes Barlach as a ‘sad knight without fear or blemish, who set out to fight evil with the power of the spirit’.1 In both short novels Barlach tilts at the windmills of Swiss vested interests:
And there’s a whole heap of crimes no one pays any attention to, because they are more esthetic than those blatant murders that get written up in the newspapers, but it all amounts to the same if you care to take a close look and exercise a little imagination.2
The Gilded Chalet Page 20