The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  Days, months, and years after she has filled up the pages of her cahiers and diaries, she continues to insert marginal comments, underlinings, and exclamation points. These remarkings and rereadings—from the vantage point of a self-critical present or an embittered future—ensure that Pat’s longest and most crucial conversations are always with herself: “This doesn’t get any point across. And furthermore it’s weak!”8

  Occasionally, Pat the Part-Time Librarian takes up the pen and starts to cross-reference the material in the notebooks with the material in her diaries.9 She doesn’t want future readers of any of these confessional works to miss a trick or overlook an implication. And because she’s practical about what her imagination produces, and also because waste of any kind makes her angry, she likes to remind herself that there is yet plenty of useful material for fiction to be mined from these little life-books.

  Still, any writer who keeps eight thousand pages of notebooks and diaries in five languages—four of which she has never mastered—and, what’s more, keeps them in a hand as difficult to decipher as a physician’s scrawl on a prescription pad, really does raise the question of just how much she wants people to know about what is in this mountain of pages she left behind. Pat’s family in Fort Worth used to labor over the “hieroglyphics” in her letters home, and even then, said her cousin Dan Walton Coates, they “couldn’t ever tell if she was saying that she was coming home on the seventeenth or leaving on the seventeenth!”10

  Moreover, because Pat is committed to the principle that nothing is as it seems to be, and because she cannot allow herself to vacate her lifelong habit of keeping the chronological time (even when she is interrupting the chronological clock), she does just what her fictional characters do when their “real” relations to the exterior world start to crumble.

  She fakes it. She forges the dates and the places—long after she has lived through the times and the experiences—to make it appear that she has not turned her detailed, daily-kept notations into records which are more like memoirs than like chronicles. Gore Vidal, Pat’s fellow expatriate and occasional correspondent, makes a lucid distinction: a memoir, he writes, is “how one remembers one’s own life.”11 Memory is not history.

  For now, it is useful to note that a writer—especially a writer like Patricia Highsmith who is working in what she swears to you is her most explicit manner—can’t always be taken at her word.

  What has been engaging Pat about Berlin—aside from the link with her own shadowy Germanic paternal origins and the possibility of lucrative film and television contracts there12—is what interests her about everything: “the element of disguise,” the possibility of impersonation, of transformation, of forgery. But forgery, like the other shortcuts to transformation (murder, robbery, theft of identity, etc.) which occupy her imagination, has always been her favorite crime and strongest principle.* Nestling just under the surface of her second Ripley novel, Ripley Under Ground (1970), is a convincing aesthetic argument in favor of forged art (Ripley prefers Bernard Tufts’s forged Derwatt painting to any original) and impersonated lives (Ripley himself impersonates the long-dead artist Derwatt). “I am afraid to say how much I like it,” Pat wrote when she finished the manuscript.13 One of her inspirations for the forgery business at the center of this book (Derwatt Ltd.) was the Dutch artist Hans van Meegeren’s successful counterfeiting of several Vermeer paintings during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Amongst van Meegeren’s happy customers was Hitler’s deputy, Herman Göring. Pat liked van Meegeren’s style.

  For a long time, Pat has been thinking about what she calls her “4th Ripley”—The Boy Who Followed Ripley—a novel which will once again depend on forgery, the counterfeiting of identity, and even on the appearance of a youthful “copy” of Tom Ripley himself: sixteen-year-old Frank Pierson. By 1978, the year Pat is getting ready to finish this novel by slipping Ripley into a frilly party frock and designer heels and handing him a large handbag, forgery is as reflexive a reaction for her as it is for her characters.

  Very soon now, Pat will start generating dozens of false names and fake identities—not one of which is meant for life in a Highsmith novel or short story. She creates these characters all through the 1980s and early 1990s in Switzerland, encourages them to write letters of “political opinion,” and then mails their urgent messages off (signature and handwriting disguised) to newspapers, journals, politicians, and state officials. It’s the same old Highsmith hand doing what it does best: counterfeiting identity. But in this case, Pat counterfeits with a purpose. She wants her forgeries to express her unrelenting hatred of the State of Israel.

  Over the years, Pat managed to ventriloquize letters for at least thirty-eight “politically concerned” characters. “Edgar S. Sallich” from Locarno, “Isabel Little,” “Maria L. Leone,” “Janet Tamagni,” “Eddie Stefano,” “Elaine Dutweiler,” and “Phyllis Cutler” were among her most prolific pseudonyms, but Pat kept all her mouthpieces reasonably busy. Still, no one who reads the heat-seeking little missives these characters produced—and no one who counts up the myriad false names Pat needed to produce them—could ever imagine that her motives in this matter were entirely (or even predominantly) “political.”14

  Pat’s arrival in Berlin on 22 March 1978 for the Berlin Film Festival was slightly shadowed by the fact that she failed to recognize Christa Maerker, the helpful friend who had come to pick her up at the airport. Pat and Christa, a German journalist and filmmaker, were introduced to each other on Pat’s last trip to Berlin. They got on “incredibly well and laughed through the evening,” then continued their friendship by correspondence when Pat went back to France. Christa was so impressed by Pat that she recommended her for the Berlin Film Festival jury; and the festival director “was thrilled” by the idea.15

  But when Christa met Pat at the Berlin airport and tried to hug her, Pat, without a flicker of recognition, “became like a piece of wood,” leaned down, and whispered in her ear: “Please help me, I want to meet Christa Maerker.” “Still in a state of awe” about Pat’s work, Christa refused to believe Pat was drunk. But she noticed that when they reached the hotel Pat’s only request was for a bottle of scotch.16

  Thirteen tumultuous days later when the festival was over, Pat had filched from her hotel room a blue and white bath mat embossed with two words and a date—“Hotel Palace…1973.” The mat was meant to be a souvenir of a newly kindled Berlin romance, but thirty years on it looks more like a symbol of the rituals she was using to control her anxieties: rigorous washing, the replacement of feelings with objects, and a compulsion to number her desires.17

  Although Pat is only a working rumor in her native United States, she has been invited to this festival because of her European celebrity. Despite paralyzing shyness, she accepted the invitation because she is both professional about her work and alert to its perquisites, which sometimes include expenses-paid junkets to good hotels (like this one) in cities (like Berlin) where a writer (like herself) can gather useful material for a new novel.

  When the festival showings begin, Pat finds that she is busier than she wants to be, trying to keep up with the (rather relaxed) twenty-three-film viewing schedule. She asks her translator friend, Anne Morneweg, to accompany her to the German-language films so she won’t miss any of the dialogue.

  Predictably, Pat is unhappy at the festival—looking, as she has always looked in public, “uncomfortable with the proceedings,” any proceedings. David Streiff, the director of the Locarno Film Festival, spotted Pat sitting “alone in a restaurant—a cheap and uncomfortable beer place right between the Zoo Palast and the Aeroflot offices. She impressed me strongly, through the strength and solitude she expressed—or better: the visible will to be left alone which she transmitted to everybody around.”18

  Pat has reasons for her discomfort. She is being obliged to watch scenes of a sexual nature on film, while her usual preference is to cover her eyes during film sex and keep them open for film violence. When her irr
epressible friend the seventy-five-year-old performance artist Lil Picard wrote to her from New York to praise some erotic films, Pat’s reponse was characteristic: “I don’t think I would enjoy these sex films. I have never seen any and have no curiosity about them. Maybe something is the matter with me. Of course a lot is the matter with me. But I have never enjoyed on the screen watching people petting or making love.”19

  Worse, even, than having to watch sex on film was Pat’s selection as president of the Berlin Film Festival jury. It was a terrible idea.

  Short on famous figures for the job of jury president, the festival elevated Pat to the office over her own objections—or so she wrote. She “tried to push [the honor off] on “Angelopoulos or Sergio Leone, but [had no] success.” She was modest enough to know that her film experience was insufficient to the occasion and canny enough to realize that even a “presidency” was too democratic an office for her to enjoy. She said later that her “simplest suggestions were thwarted,” but working with—or even in—a group of people was well outside Pat’s capacities. Very soon, the other jurors were unhappier with her presidency than she was. The reports filtering out from the committee meetings were not good: “She was usually half asleep, she never took notes, she never participated, she never took over the discussions, and [she even tried to change] the format by appointing someone else.” The director of the festival was forced to conclude, politely and privately: “We made a tremendous mistake.”20

  And then, all of a sudden, just as it does in a Highsmith novel, something completely different broke into Pat’s Berlin experience. Something—as the writer and critic Susannah Clapp said about another feature of Pat’s fiction—that seemed to make its appearance from “another world.”21

  Imagine—let’s have some fun with this—that an otherwise idle little devil, engaged by Hell’s Upper Management to plant crippling suspicions into the minds of working writers, has applied itself directly to the Problem of Patricia Highsmith. Perhaps this junior demon is something like the diminutive black figure with the harrowing laugh whose antic presence creates such havoc in Pat’s early satire, The Straightforward Lie. Or perhaps it resembles the small, dark creature of her anxieties—the “Yuma baby”—which featured in her only attempt to write a “ghost” story: the brilliantly creepy “The Empty Birdhouse” (aka “The Yuma Baby,” written in September of 1966), a story prompted by Caroline Besterman’s admiration for the supernatural tales of M. R. James.22

  And let us further imagine that Hell’s concentration on Pat Highsmith has produced something like the deranged little details of a typical Highsmith anecdote; the very elements which obsess her in her cahiers and diaries. “The chance meeting,” “the slightly tainted exchange of favors,” “the semisuppressed confession,” “the poison pen letter”—all of which, in their confusion of bad motive and good intention, could easily have been imported from anything Patricia Highsmith ever wrote.

  In fact, this is exactly what happened to Pat at the Berlin Film Festival of 1978—without, perhaps, the active participation of Hell’s Executive Committee. And the complication of events that produced this tangle of woe demonstrates just how closely Pat’s life could resemble her work—and just how responsible she was for that resemblance.

  Sometime during her thirteen-day residence at the film festival, Pat Highsmith was “stopped in the street” by a stranger, a young Highsmith fan named Christopher Petit. (He was also a friend of David Streiff.) He was and is an English writer and journalist and he had, he says, been “watching her for several days.” “My behavior with her,” says Chris Petit, “was kind of uncharacteristic. [Accosting her on the street] is not something I normally would have done.”

  Chris Petit is not the first or last Highsmith fan to find himself behaving “uncharacteristically” in Pat’s presence. Both Pat’s work and life exerted a sublunary pull on friends, fans, and lovers, who, against their better judgment, sometimes caught themselves acting just like characters in a Highsmith novel.

  Pat’s lover in 1960–61, Marijane Meaker, was so driven by jealousy of a rival that she had to be talked out of committing a mail fraud that would have redirected all Pat’s mail to her own apartment for inspection. Undeterred, Meaker busily steamed open Pat’s letters when they lived together in Pennsylvania and took some secret peeks at Pat’s cahiers. Ellen Blumenthal Hill, Pat’s longtime partner in the kind of bad behavior obsessive love can inspire, found Pat’s diaries irresistible reading (until, that is, she read what Pat wrote about her); and Pat had to lock her teenage journals away from Mother Mary’s prying eyes.

  Marion Aboudaram, Pat’s current lover in Paris, first introduced herself to Pat with a straightforward lie. She said she had an assignment to interview Pat for Cosmopolitan magazine. But Marion had no assignment. “Cosmo didn’t ask me,” she says. “I decided it was a way to meet her.”23

  A young friend of Pat—the kind of friend who painted Pat’s kitchen for free and went out to Moncourt to turn over the engine of Pat’s “awful metallic blue Simca” so the battery wouldn’t die when Pat was away (Pat managed to find many such friends)—was given a key to Pat’s house so she could use it in Pat’s absence. One time, when Pat was gone, the young woman opened the door to a photographer who was obsessed by Pat’s work, and the photographer took secret pictures of Pat’s personal possessions and of all the rooms in her house.24

  (Because the existence of these photographs is a violation of privacy, and because I took information from them for this book, I can now add my own name to the list of people inspired to behave badly by Patricia Highsmith.)

  A fervid fan of Pat’s novels in Paris, “an orphan of 21 who lives with his aunt” (he strongly identified with all the orphaned males in Pat’s work), was allowed to meet Pat in 1969. He immediately drove her mad: “He is so neurotic himself, it makes me feel almost normal,” she wrote to Lil Picard. “He gushes at me, praises me, until I want to scream.”25 Still, this fan, who knew all about cats, was allowed to select a seal-point Siamese kitten for Pat, and he and his aunt sometimes looked after Pat’s cats on her trips away. One night—the circumstances were complicated and involved a fight with her current lover, Jacqui—Pat ended up sleeping in the aunt’s bed, where, for once, Pat herself was on the receiving end of an unwelcome sexual advance.26

  The list of aberrant activities by people under the sway of Patricia Highsmith—one way or another—is long and varied. Although on a good day her personal appeal was considerable, Pat did not have the kind of celebrity or, by now, the sort of looks which usually magnetize such antics. What the antics expose is the power of Pat’s work “to breed about her the world she created in her novels.”27 Pat conferred what all powerful writers confer upon their “friends and acquaintances: the vocabulary to describe life in [her] terms.”28 The related irony—that readers of Highsmith’s prose then imposed their Highsmith-inflected lives back upon her—caused Pat no end of trouble.

  But she wasn’t troubled by her new acquaintance in Berlin, the journalist Christopher Petit. Quite the opposite.

  In one of those numerical calculations she could never quite resist, Pat immediately reckoned that Petit had to be “about 28” years old. Her numbers were good: he was exactly twenty-eight, and he turned out to be the film critic for the London publication Time Out. In the kind of unlikely coincidence usually found in a Highsmith work, Chris Petit’s own first film would be produced by Wim Wenders, the man who had just directed The American Friend, a film adaptation of two of Highsmith’s Ripley books: Ripley’s Game and Ripley Under Ground. (“He mingled two books for American Friend,” Pat said tartly of Wenders’s adaptation.)29

  Like the chance encounters in her stories, Highsmith’s meeting with this young journalist was familiar in its ordinariness. But it was also the kind of meeting with which she liked to ignite the spiralling paranoias of her murdering “hero-criminals.”

  Compliments were offered by Chris Petit. Miss Highsmith was “one of the two or three a
uthors who mattered to him.” A favor was asked: he’d like to do an interview with her for Time Out. Perhaps, because Pat was canny about such things and intent on receiving good value for her investments, there was a little probing of mutual intentions on Pat’s part before the interview was actually granted. But she did grant an interview to Christopher Petit—and rather easily, too. She would be in London briefly, she told him, after the festival ended. He could see her there.

  Pat was usually eager for publicity—her letters to editors are full of helpful suggestions for her kind of public relations, the kind that don’t get too close and ruin a writer’s workday—and she kept tabs on everything her publishers and agents did and didn’t do for her. But, like the title of one of her short stories, this encounter with the young journalist produced “nothing that meets the eye”—for now. For now, it was just one of those serendipitous meetings between hopeful youth and middle-aged achievement that punctuate the career of every successful writer.

  So Pat gave Chris Petit a number where she could be reached in North London (it was at the two Barbaras’ studio in Islington), and that was that. It was a leisurely beginning to a complicated episode—just the way she said she liked to start her novels.

  “I am inclined to write books with slow, even tranquil beginnings, in which the reader becomes thoroughly acquainted with the hero-criminal and the people around him.”30

  Meanwhile, the film festival was in full swing and so were Pat’s most volatile feelings. Like Colette—whose work Pat once “defended” against an “attack” by the illustrious French writer Nathalie Sarraute during a Paris luncheon (Sarraute had maintained that Colette was too “feminine” for her; the much-younger Highsmith gathered the courage to disagree)31—Pat was still capable of the premonitory strike, of writing her own life before it happened. In the plots she has been notating for her “4th Ripley,” Tom is deeply and ambiguously attached to an attractively wealthy teenage boy. And Pat Highsmith, at fifty-seven years of age in the city of Berlin, has just been “bowled…over…knocked…mentally on the floor” by a twenty-five-year-old girl: an up-and-comer on Berlin’s avant-garde art circuit who enjoys slipping into male drag.