The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  One reason her work is so often characterized as “amoral” is that the moral disorder that love created in her life always made its way into her novels. But even though crime was always on her mind (like Edgar Wallace’s enigmatic detector, JG Reeder, she saw evil everywhere), and even though murder was her absolute necessity, Pat’s self-hating, self-torturing “hero-criminals” make her—if indeed they make her anything at all—much more of a “punishment novelist” than a “crime novelist.”

  A party girl in her Manhattan youth despite her extreme shyness, and very attractive to men as well as seductive to women, Pat had a preference for bowling over both halves of a female couple (another kind of doubling) and extending her charms to their extracurricular lovers as well. In middle age, she began to operate directly on families—including, as it happens, her own. One or two rebelliously feminist ideas came to her while she was forcing herself to sleep with Marc Brandel, the English novelist she was trying to persuade herself to marry. (“I do not feel…that going to bed with him will ever be anything to anticipate with unbridled delight.” “Oh, the unfairness of this sexual business to women!”)79

  In the context of her usual thoughts about women, Pat’s “feminist” notions couldn’t be funnier.

  Surprisingly—she is often surprising—Pat Highsmith sang in a church choir as late as the age of thirty-seven, joking that the “only trouble is I can be heard when I sing.”80 Joking aside, she makes many references to God—and many more references to Jesus—throughout her cahiers and diaries. Kingsley Skattebol, her oldest friend from school, thinks Pat wasn’t a “God-fearing person, but a God-reverencing one” and that “she attributed to God the custody of her unconscious.”81

  Pat’s strong Southern Calvinist family background and stern moral underpinnings have eluded the notice of previous biographers. Her family’s religious history included prominent preachers, interesting apostasies, and a tradition of opposed and opposing religious communities. Much like her overlooked work in the comics, her involvement with religious tenets was another critical part of a life concealed in plain sight. It was responsible for her lifelong preoccupation with Jesus Christ and, to a large extent, for the Big Chill at the center of her work: the one she defined so aptly as “the presence of the absence of guilt.”82

  God was a long argument Pat seemed to be having with herself, and it was an argument she eventually lost. “If I happen to think that I can be a happier person for believing in God, then I shall believe,” she wrote pugnaciously in June of 1940, at an age when most college students are flirting with atheism. (Even her religiosity had a practical side.) By 1947, she was more serious about God and more regular about noting her attendance at His services. “Today yes, no church. I miss it. If I don’t go to God for a couple of hours (on Sundays), I like to listen to holy music or words.”83 At twenty-eight, she was still proclaiming God’s central importance:

  A certain calm is essential in order to live, relief from anxiety. I myself can never have this without belief in the power of God which is greater than man and all the power in the universe.84

  Twenty years later, having given up on church, Pat, still thinking about what it meant to be a “religious person,” provided a perfect description of herself. “It is not in the nature of truly religious people to join anything,” she wrote in an inadvertently revealing little essay, “Between Jane Austen and Philby,” in 1968. “The religious person is ascetic and lives alone…. Anyway, if one has enough sense of guilt, it is not necessary to belong to a church.”85 No one could explain Highsmith more clearly than Patricia Highsmith—especially if she thought she was writing about someone other than Patricia Highsmith.

  Of course, Pat had her mother’s Christian Science to combat (evil, Mary Baker Eddy wrote, is only a form of ignorance), and she did so with frequent and convoluted disquisitions on Jesus, with whom, just like her early idol Dostoyevsky, she tended to identify. Later on, a kind of ensorcelled and ecstatic union with a long list of female lovers was her closest approach to religious communion—and much of the inspiration for her writing. (“With the complete opening of the heart in love of another person, there is surely an opening directly to God.”)86

  The last person to share a house with her shortly before her death (he was on his way to a monastery and taking care of Pat Highsmith was his six-month preparation for monastic life) thought she was seeking some kind of spiritual life, but couldn’t face the “cage” of religion. Religion was one of the two subjects he had to stop discussing with her.

  But I am getting ahead of her story.

  All through the 1970s, at her house in the hamlet of Moncourt (the house she loved the best and the one she kept the longest), Pat had a near neighbor, a Czechoslovakian émigré who occasionally did odd jobs for her. Monsieur Knet was exactly the kind of self-made man Pat liked to trade small talk with. He used to return home from his night job in the early-morning hours and note the lighted roof window in Pat’s upstairs bedroom—the only light visible at that hour in the hameau—and the sound of her venerable Olympia portable typewriter clickety-clacking across the courtyard.

  And that is how Monsieur Knet remembered Patricia to me: a sharply syncopated sound in the night, a rectangle of eery illumination, a woman sitting at her desk, writing, he said, “frightful things dripping with blood.”

  But then he remembered one more thing: “But if she so much as scratched her finger, there would be a terrible drama.”87

  Typing away in the attic of her favorite of all the temporary houses she hopes to make permanent, the top of her head framed by the high, lighted window in her writing room so that she appears to her neighbor as a mostly missing portrait nailed up to the night sky, Patricia Highsmith steadily pilots her old German typewriter into the early hours of a cool French dawn…. It’s as good an introduction as any to the life of this profoundly complicated writer who, despite all her restless travels, made her most rewarding journeys seated at her desk in what she called an “appointment kept on the edge of a chair.”88

  It scarcely needs saying that “the edge of a chair” is where people usually perch when they expect to receive bad news.

  Patricia Highsmith’s news is disturbing—perhaps it was even more disturbing for her than it is for her readers—and she always went to the ends of her nerves to get it. But there is nothing like taking that journey with her (nothing like it in the world, in fact) for illuminating the resemblances between what your imagination has been concealing from you and the pitiless exposures of her dark and dangerous art.

  And here that journey must continue.

  I wish you a bon voyage.

  • 3 •

  A Simple Act of Forgery

  Part 1

  “One usually pays more dearly for the false than for the true, mademoiselle,” Lucien said.

  —“The Great Cardhouse”

  It was a phony though. That was why Tom preferred it.

  —The Boy Who Followed Ripley

  Honesty, for me, is usually the worst policy imaginable.

  —Patricia Highsmith, 1960

  In the simple act of forgery—by no means her first or her last—committed in her thirty-fourth writer’s notebook in the spring of 1978, Patricia Highsmith pretended that it was April, that she was in London, and that she was making sketchy notes on an interview she had just completed with “one of the very few journalists I’ve ever liked!”

  Well, the first part was true enough.

  Pat had been in North London on 4 April, recuperating from her official duties at the Berlin Film Festival, alarming her friends with her behavior, and entertaining impolite thoughts about a journalist. Not the amiable young man she says she has just spoken to, but the intrusive woman who called to ask her opinion on the “man who [had just] knifed the Poussin in the National Gallery.”1

  Disobliging behavior to members of the press—her little exercise in homeland defense—is nothing new for Pat Highsmith, who usually prefers to secure her borders
before she is invited to explore them by pushy journalists. On the long list of loathing she gleefully compiled during her thirty-five years of self-exile from the United States, “circling vultures” (her term for members of the press who want to write her biography) vies for pride of place with Women Who Remind Her of Her Mother. “Journalists,” she wrote scornfully. “I prefer prostitutes, who sell only their bodies, not their minds.”2 Every lengthy interview she has ever given to a journalist—and despite her reputation for reclusiveness, she has given many—has been marked by evasion, misdirection, and what could politely be construed as a distinct economy with the truth.

  Of course, there are regular exceptions to Pat’s personal hate parade. She is pleased to have articles by the journalists and authors she respects (like Francis Wyndham, Noëlle Loriot, Julian Symons, and Josyane Savigneau) form the public perception of her work. And women who behave like her mother, Mary (not to mention Mother Mary herself), have been the bliss and bale of her life as a lover.

  But here she is in the scented spring of 1978 writing that she’s in London, in April, in conversation with a journalist she likes, when in fact it’s May, and she’s back in her house in suburban France; alone with her disturbing emotions (love again, the feeling she most often confuses with murder or self-extinction) and enclosed in her customary habitat: a cone of watchful darkness.

  What’s more, she is poised on the edge of some very characteristic trouble with her new friend, the likeable journalist. It’s the kind of trouble that only an imagination as concentrated, as detailed, and as eccentric as Patricia Highsmith’s can produce.

  Why Pat was forging entries in her notebooks, and what the slow roiling of her emotions was about to provide for a hapless member of the press, are important keys to the imagination of an author whose own character is as difficult to “undo” as the famous set of double-nested Bramah locks which forced the great Harry Houdini—an artist only sightly more obsessed with escape than Patricia Highsmith—into an unbecoming act of forgery himself.*

  On 22 March, thirteen days before her trip to London, Pat began a fortnight’s stay in Berlin as a jury member of the 1978 Berlin Film Festival. In what might have reminded her of her own partitioned imagination, the ten-foot-high depression-gray Berlin Wall, fancifully garnished with barbed wire, still divided this city on whose kinkier qualities the fifty-seven-year-old Pat had been taking desultory notes since August of 1976. Because she cast the net of her obsessions over everything she looked at, the Berlin of Pat’s cahier seems to be the setting for a Highsmith novel: it teams with people in disguise, violent inexplicable acts, and sudden odd affinities.

  A “sturdy macho girl” in a lesbian bar pokes Pat in the ribs, declares she’s “not too soft,” then smashes her glass of vodka on the floor. Pat rather admires this gesture. She has been frequenting gay, lesbian, and transvestite bars like the Ax-Bax, Romy Haag, and Pour Ellen to save her “heart from the boring bourgeois” she is “otherwise surrounded by” at the film festival. She receives these small aggressions from her barmate as friendly overtures. Possibly she is influenced by the fact that the sturdy girl has already paid for her vodka.

  A few snapshots from Pat’s infrequent visits to Germany (this was her fourth) live on in her archives. In two or three of them, she is grinning and appears to be almost at ease. She is almost at ease—or in some vague relationship to that condition—and this anomaly is due to the presence of the other figures in the photos: a troupe of transvestites who have dolled themselves up for the camera in sequins, feathers, and more makeup than most people manage to apply in a year. Pat feels right at home with them.

  “No wonder Berliners liked disguises!” she writes in the book that she will set partially in Berlin, The Boy Who Followed Ripley. “One could feel free, and in a sense like oneself in a disguise.”3

  In public (private is another matter), Pat still tends to wear beautifully starched and ironed clothing—shirts, vests, and pants—which she still mail-orders from Brooks Brothers in the United States. She slips her feet into men’s black loafers whenever she can and accessorizes her “look” with what could be mistaken for her own version of transvestism: a scarf, a necklace, a bracelet, even a trace of lipstick.

  In a photograph taken in the early 1940s in New York City by her friend the great photographer Ruth Bernhard, Pat looks attractively and impenetrably thoughtful. In other photographs from the same era by another friend, Rolf Tietgens, she seems to be provocatively and abstractedly garçonne. Interpreted in her twenties in very different ways by two photographers who were competing for her attentions, Pat still manages not to give away a great deal.

  Photographs of Patricia Highsmith at fifty-seven, however, are more likely to arrest than to attract. Her posture, as always, is braced against embarrassment, but her face seems to be involved in a furious rebellion against her oxford collars and her preppy, perfectly turned-back cuffs. Her eyes are heavily pouched now, the parabola of the jaw is swollen, and the provocative pout of her mouth in adolescence has given way to the pendulous lower lip of middle age. The ivory of her skin is creased, stained, and lined by her heavy drinking and smoking and—even worse for her complexion—by the violent ideas which have worked their way through her imagination. A thicket of bangs provides the cover through which she still looks up and out at the world with a remarkably sharp regard.

  At twenty, as Gabrielle Chanel famously said, you have the face you were born with. At fifty, you have the face you have earned.

  In Paris restaurants, where French waiters are uncomfortably good at reading gender code, Pat is sometimes directed to the men’s lavatory.

  “Now, matter of fact, I am addressed as M’sieur so often it is quite disconcerting. Granted long hair doesn’t do much to make one look more feminine these days, I should think a touch of lipstick and a necklace would. No. I am halted from going into ladies’ rooms. ‘Not that door M’sieur!’ It’s enough to drive one mad.” 4

  Pat thought that waiters stopped her “because I have big feet and skinny thighs.”5 She had to think something.

  Certainly, there is room to speculate about who the “real” cross-dresser is in those photographs of Pat and her merry band of transvestites from the Fatherland. For the moment, it is enough to remember that Pat’s letters to her mother were filled with lists of clothing as specifically described as the costumes in her novels.

  “People,” Pat notes, ever-hopeful on her nights out in Berlin that a quick change means a new life, “carry two changes of clothing for the evening.” She likes “the unreality of the city…,” its “end of the world quality,” the fact that it is “artifically maintained and is in danger of being abandoned.” Berlin in 1978 is definitely Highsmith Country.

  But Pat was not writing her Berlin notes when she was in Berlin. She wrote up her notes—they continued to be the skeleton of every fiction she devised—when she was back at her house in Moncourt, after her short detour through London. She was weeks away from what she appeared to be writing about with such immediacy.

  “A pity,” she writes, confessing to her forgery like the good Dostoyevskyan she is, that “I didn’t keep a diary all those thirteen days.”

  For the past forty years, chronological notation has been Patricia Highsmith’s lifeline; the increasingly fraying strand she follows compulsively through the unchronological labyrinth she has made of her life. She began taking notes on herself, her ideas, and her surroundings at the age of fifteen or sixteen (she says twelve, but those notes are lost) when she was living with her family in Manhattan and acknowledging her unconventional emotions and the even more unconventional ways she found to accommodate them. Her obsessive intelligence quickly codified the note taking into two categories: her writer’s notebooks, to which she gives the slightly elevated term “cahiers” and which she uses as a seedbed for her fictions; and her personal “diaries,” the “journals” to which she confides the often extreme details of her intimate life.

  The cahiers neve
r vary, either in shape or form: they are always Columbia University or New York University notebooks (or notebooks identical in size to these) with firm boards, wire rolls to bind them, and lined pages. And, starting with Cahier 26, they always begin with a front-cover list of the places she has travelled to and they always end with an inside-the-back-cover list of the book titles she is considering. They are further divided into rigidly subtitled and heavily cultivated creative territories: “People and Places,” “Keime” (German for “germs,” a fertile term she lifted from Henry James), daily notes, favorite quotes, lengthy ideas for longer fictions, as well as “Notes on an Ever-Present Subject”: the rubric for her persistent musings on her own and everyone else’s homosexuality. Pat conscientiously maintained these categories in all her cahiers throughout her entire writing life.

  Sometimes Pat rehearses the motives for her prolixity in the cahiers, and sometimes she simply tries to deduce her motives from her actions. “But there must be a certain core of self-respect in a person who continuously keeps a diary. Maybe he doesn’t intend to look back, but someone else might, even if the diary is in code.”6

  Code is the word for it. From her very first entries, Pat flogged herself into double duty by keeping her notebooks and diaries in five languages: serviceable English (or, rather, good American) in the main, but also ungainly French, bad Italian, awkward German, and a sprinkling of more or less strangled Spanish. (“I am so ambitious that I must telescope 2 separate ambitions—writing a diary and learning a language.”)7 Regularly, she mixes up which materials should go in which book (notebook or diary)—and then apologizes with the guilt of someone who feels her impulses to be so unruly that she just has to corral them into the proper category.