In a long article in The New York Review of Books on Highsmith in 2001, Joyce Carol Oates detected a “gleeful” tone in a posthumous publication of the stories in Little Tales of Misogyny “which Highsmith may have intended as satires of female types, savage in the way of Rabelais or Swift.” But, continued Ms. Oates, “these sadistic sketches [are] heavy-handed in sarcasm and virtually devoid of literary significance….
“Highsmith seems to have had little patience, had perhaps little natural skill, for the short story…. there is no subtext, only surface; it’s as if she conceived of the form as basically a gimmick…set to explode in the reader’s face in its final lines.”10
Like some of her more gruesome tales—“Woodrow Wilson’s Necktie” and the genuinely terrifying “The Yuma Baby,” aka “The Empty Birdhouse”*—the stories in Little Tales of Misogyny kept Pat in fits of helpless laughter as she was writing and reading them. “I laugh myself onto the floor…. Thus I approach the real joy of a writer…amusing other people,” she wrote happily to Alex Szogyi in 1969 about “Woodrow Wilson’s Necktie,”11 a story in which an assistant in a wax museum busies himself with murdering the customers and then arranges them in waxy poses on the museum premises. “Woodrow Wilson’s Necktie” has many implications—but none of them are funny.*
Still, with Little Tales of Misogyny, it was herself Pat was amusing first—and for strictly private reasons.
Daniel Keel, who first published Little Tales of Misogyny in German with Roland Topor’s expressive illustrations (Pat had suggested Edward Gorey or David Hockney as illustrators), says that Pat had “galgen [gallows] humor and it’s the humor of someone who is going to be hanged.
“It comes to my mind that she didn’t understand irony—and I like irony like pepper and salt in a conversation. She was too literal for irony. She was too mistrustful for irony—she was irritated at ironic comments and she would say: ‘Do you really mean that? What do you mean?’…There are several floors you have to be on for irony.”12
One of the Misogyny stories, Keel says, presented a “recognizable” portrait of a woman who was “a very good friend of [Keel and his wife, Anna].
“I told Pat: ‘Do you know [this woman] so well that you can portray her in these details?’ Pat didn’t care; she wanted it published. She could have said if it’s a friend of yours, I’ll cut it out, but she didn’t.”13
Even Kingsley Skattebol says that “broad and crude” is as “good a characterization as any” of Pat’s sense of humor.14
Marion Aboudaram thought that Pat did have “a sense of humor, she could be funny” but her humor was colloquial. It was like some of Pat’s fictional work, pitched rather lower than it should have been. “She had no class, but she had distinction,” says Marion, making an interesting distinction herself.15
There had always been something strange about Pat Highsmith’s sense of humor. Its physical expression—her laughter—escaped from her like a rough beast bursting the bars of its cage. Friends and acquaintances have to search their vocabularies to find terms extreme enough to describe the sound of Pat’s laughter: it was a “hoot,” a “chortle,” a “guffaw,” “thigh-slapping,” “a scream,” “loud and uncontrolled,” “reckless”16—and, as in the novels of Dostoyevsky (and as in Pat’s own fictions), it often came in situations in which other people would have recoiled in horror or collapsed in tears.
Her agent for almost two decades, Patricia Schartle Myrer, writes:
The only time I ever heard Highsmith laugh was when we were passing one of those huge posters by subway stations: this one of a couple of children out of a concentration camp. Some creep had even further degraded the children by gouging their eyes out. Highsmith burst into laughter. There was a very dark side that undoubtedly gave an edge to her writing but it lacked humanity.17
Jonathan Kent, the British actor and director who says he was “formed” in childhood by seeing Alain Delon in Purple Noon (the French film version of The Talented Mr. Ripley) and then by reading everything Highsmith ever wrote, visited Pat at her house in Aurigeno in December of 1982, three months after he appeared as Ripley on the British television program The South Bank Show. He and Pat had done the show together—it was devoted to Pat’s work—and Pat was so pleased by his performance that she wrote to her French editor, Alain Oulman, that Jonathan Kent was “the best Ripley I have seen since Alain Delon.”18
Kent, who was especially sensitive to Pat’s own sensitivities, says that the story of their meeting published in a previous biography—that before Kent had been introduced to Pat she had caught him secretly “stalking” her on their director’s orders, backed him angrily up against a wall, and put her hands around his throat—is “not at all the way it occurred. The real, plain truth is that we met first and we set up the shots and she knew I would be trailing her. She didn’t back me up against a wall; she would never have done that.”19
Pat and Jonathan Kent occupied adjoining suites at the Savoy Hotel during the filming of The South Bank Show, and Kent says that he “could have gone on Mastermind, on The $64,000 Question, about her; I could have majored in her.” And Pat “loved” Jonathan’s encyclopedic knowledge of her work, “as much,” he says, “as you could ever tell if Pat loved anything. You know, she’d sneak sly looks at you out of the corner of her eye and she would laugh.”20
For the benefit of such a guest—a handsome young male actor who had just played Ripley to her great satisfaction and who told her he was “formed” by her work—Pat was unusually accommodating. (Perhaps the fact that his surname—Kent—echoed the maiden name of her one of her muses, Virginia Kent Catherwood, had something to do with Pat’s reception.) She picked up some chicken nuggets for lunch at the local Kentucky Fried Chicken equivalent—her idea of a feast—and jacked the house heat up so high that one of her cats “sucked all the fur off its tail.” Kent’s room was so hot that he had to sleep with his windows wide open to the Swiss winter, and he could hear the BBC World Service playing in Pat’s room—she slept, as always when without a lover, in her workroom—in the early hours of the morning.
Undisturbed by her habits and feeling quite close to Pat—“I found her completely restful to be with,” he says—Kent wanted to offer her something from his own history: a family story, “something I was rather saddened by.” So he told her something about his maternal grandmother, who had Alzheimer’s “and didn’t know who anybody was.” One day, his mother took a bunch of daffodils to the old lady. She thought they “were an army coming to get her” and promptly ate their heads off. When Kent related the story to Pat, “she screamed with laughter.
“She made me tell it twice more. And then we went out to lunch with Ellen Hill and she made me tell it again. And every time I told it she screamed with laughter. She had a very odd sense of humor. But I didn’t mind because I liked her so much.”21
Peter Huber, Pat’s next-door neighbor in Tegna and the friend who was initially responsible for her move there, repeated the little joke that was Pat’s favorite when she was living in her last house in Switzerland. It is called “The Japanese Wife Joke.” Pat told it over and over, Huber says, and it sent her into gales of “helpless laughter.” It goes like this:
“A Japanese gentleman invited his boss to his home. He instructed his wife exactly how to conduct the evening. And it was a lovely evening, the food was good, the conversation interesting, all went well. When the boss left, the wife made a deep bow before him and at that moment, her self-control escaped her: she broke wind. And everyone went on smiling and ignored the accident.
“When the husband came back into the house after seeing the boss off, he smiled at his wife, took out a sword, and cut her head off.
“She liked that joke so much,” said Peter Huber. “That’s why I’m telling it to you.”22
Caroline Besterman loathed Little Tales of Misogyny and said plainly to Pat that publishing the stories would be a mistake. Pat noted coolly that Caroline had always found “my misogyny…o
ne of my less endearing qualities.”23 Like Djuna Barnes, Pat was capable of writing both “for” and “against” women; but unlike Barnes, who started out with the physical revulsions of The Book of Repulsive Women (1915) and then went on to publish her own harrowing lesbian love story in Nightwood (1936), Pat began with the more or less romantically balanced power plays of The Price of Salt (1952) and went on to the corrosive loathings of Little Tales of Misogyny (1977).
Eight years before she’d met Caroline, in her amorous spring and summer of 1954 in New York City, Pat had been in a more accepting mood: “The three women I have loved most intensely in my life have been the only ones of all my amours who were definitely ‘bad for me.’ J[oan] S[,] G[inny] C[atherwood], E[llen] H[ill].”24
The reason these women were “bad” for Pat—it is plain to see in what she wrote in her diary after falling in love with Ellen Hill—was also the reason they were “good” for her: her love for them continued to be partnered by murderous rage and ideas of death. “This ferocious strife between people in love, this clash of arms between the placing of a clock upon the bed-table…two people in love…bewildered as modern armies fighting with each other.”25
In Barbara Ker-Seymer’s house in Islington in 1968, to which, says Barbara Roett, Pat had brought Madeleine Harmsworth, the young journalist who had come to interview Pat in Montmachoux and stayed on to become a lover, “Pat would come in, dial something on the phone, and we’d hear the answer-phone saying, ‘So and so isn’t in, would you please leave a message,’ and she’d have a long, made-up conversation with the person and then she’d close the door. And then she’d open it and suddenly say, ‘You can stuff it!’…Madeleine was there as her guest, [and] Pat’s idea of interesting her was to be as dismissive as possible and to…telephone supposed lovers which she didn’t have.”26
Ker-Seymer remained “amused” by Pat, perhaps because most of her friends from the 1920s—friends like Nancy Cunard, Brian Howard, and Dolly Wilde (with whom Ker-Seymer used to waltz around Dolly’s parlor flat to the strains of a gramophone)—could have matched Pat’s eccentric behavior with no effort at all.27 But even those notorious hell-raisers would never have thought to do what Pat did when the two Barbaras arrived in Moncourt for a visit in the early 1970s.
“We were given a lovely bedroom and we opened some French windows to the garden and Barbara [Ker-Seymer] gave out a piercing scream. And when I ran in there was a dead rat that had been thrown in the window. This was Pat’s idea of a joke. So I threw it back out, narrowly missing her. That’s how strange she was.”28
Pat’s frequent greeting to the novelist Marion Aboudaram (Marion’s two novels were written under her two first names, Dominique Marion), her lover after Madeleine Harmsworth, would be judged an unusual welcome from anyone. Marion was the woman to whom Pat had dedicated Edith’s Diary (“Pat,” says Marion, “couldn’t think of anyone to dedicate Edith to and so I said why don’t you dedicate it to me?”),29 and she took the suburban train from Paris to Moncourt every weekend to be with Pat from 1976 to 1978. Pat used to meet Marion at the door and then brusquely strip her of her clothes. Not for sexual purposes, Marion says, but for a kind of complicated, cleansing-by-hand ritual that seemed to be wreathed in anger, guilt, and expiation.
“She washed my clothes all the time. When I came in she took off my raincoat, my trousers, I found myself in a bathing suit and she put the clothes in the bathtub and washed them. She did not even have a washing machine. And she washed her hands all the time and she took two showers a day.”30
“I should have just stayed one month with Pat. We were together three years—it’s ridiculous—but just on weekends. But she phoned me every day, she wrote to me every day, very boring letters…. The price of the char, the price of carrots, that’s all she ever talked about.”31
For presents, Pat gave Marion a broom and a vacuum cleaner, but not the radiator Marion had hoped to get for her unheated studio in Montmartre. “‘Put a hot water bottle between your legs,’ Pat said. ‘That’s what I used to do in New York.’” But Marion also remembered how relaxed Pat could be, drinking and smoking and lounging in her garden shed, and how Pat made a tiny wooden boat for the little frog in her backyard to sail on. “Dorothy,” Pat called the frog charmingly as she set the amphibian asail on its new craft—although Dorothy’s response to suddenly becoming the pilot of a small boat remains unrecorded.
“We laughed a lot,” Marion says, “but underneath it, I was anxious because she was such an alcoholic. She used to say to me, ‘Poor dear, you’re married to an alcoholic.’”32 And while Pat’s written invitations to Marion were humorous, they were also as literal as her other letters. Pat wrote: “Bring your ass and your typewriter but especially your ass.”33
Marion is still laughing about one invitation she received from Pat. “I’m Jewish and you know I hate Germany because of that. [Pat knew this.] And the only place Pat ever invited me to go was Germany! Her translator in Hamburg, a nice old lady [Anne Uhde], invited Pat, and Pat invited me.
“Germany! The only place in three years Pat ever suggested we go together! And Pat cried and cried but of course I wouldn’t go.”34
Francis Wyndham, himself a writer of perceptive fiction, whose brilliant review of The Cry of the Owl in the New Statesman in 1963 included the first serious analysis of Highsmith’s work in the United Kingdom* (he dispensed with the idea that Highsmith was a crime writer; “[g]uilt is her theme,” he wrote),35 says he always found Pat “companionable” and “comfortable” to be with, “without a writer’s ego and without a writer’s front.”36 But he remembered an anomalous evening when he and Pat went to dinner with one of his colleagues at the Sunday Times, a “totally heterosexual” woman, and “Pat did something I’ve seen sometimes with male gays, a kind of aggression towards the woman. And M. didn’t care, but in the end I was rather embarrassed…. And then I suddenly realized it was an attraction on Pat’s part. It wasn’t obvious. It was some kind of aggression towards somebody she’d quite like to get off with. Maybe she’d tried and M. hadn’t responded and I hadn’t noticed.”37
Even Pat’s love for her cats—often counted as her longest and most successful emotional connection—could bristle with aggression.
At twenty-four, alone in her East Fifty-sixth Street Manhattan studio in September of 1945 with a cat in full estrus, Pat coolly set down in her cahier her violent response to living with an animal in heat.
The contortions themselves, the rolling on the floor, the oddly arched back while the legs are gathered tautly beneath, are enough to make the owner gape, not recognizing her at all…wails, bellows, growls…The writer cannot concentrate in daytime….
One is reminded of the aggression of the female but this is so obvious it need not be dwelt on….
Interesting to see how soon masochism sets in. In a fit of temper, one may throw her half across a room, slam her on the floor, half throttle her, and she maintains the same expression of stolid, uncomprehending blind obedience to nature’s will.38
And Peter Huber remembers that in the late 1980s and 1990s in Tegna “Pat’s routine way of showing affection to her cats was holding the back of her fist in front of the animals’ noses (at a distance of about ten inches).”39
A visit to Moncourt in 1974 by the German filmmaker Wim Wenders and the Austrian writer Peter Handke resulted in a penetrating article by Handke about Pat. It ends with this vignette:
A picture of her: One dismal afternoon (“dusk came quickly” is a recurrent phrase in almost all her novels), detained too long, hunched in her large, very cold Moncourt living-room, she starts to walk up and down, hands clasped behind her, stretching only when she has to sneeze occasionally, and at one point she grabs the whining cat by the neck and (as if suffocated by the presence of a stranger) almost wringing it, only to carefully set the creature down somewhere else.40
And in Moncourt in the summer of 1971, the two Barbaras from Islington watched in disbelief as Pat, who, as Barbara Roe
tt says, “was really concerned about her cat,” picked up her chocolate point Siamese Semyon (the same cat Frédérique Chambrelent saw obsessively chasing its tail whenever she came to visit), and “put it in a tea cloth, this poor crazed, terrified animal. And she swung it round and round the room. And I said: ‘Pat, put that cat down!’ And she said, ‘Na-ow, he loves it.’
“That was her way, her hack-handed way, like a small boy, of showing notice to an animal…. She was isolated to a really appalling degree.” 41
In a letter written to Kingsley in October of 1953 when she was still trailing Ellen Hill around Europe, Pat provided a rationale for her douleurs d’amour. It is only a rationale (and not a reason), but it shows how historically and psychologically alert Pat could be to the collisions caused by her crisscrossed desires—and how fatalistically she always gave in to them. (Criss Cross was one of her first titles for Strangers on a Train.)
“The horrible flaw in my make-up is that I never cared for the artistic type like myself, so that sooner or later…there is a shipwreck. A fundamental incompatibility.” 42
Pat Highsmith really did live her love life—and most of the rest of her life as well—upside down (“sideways” was another explanation she offered in 1947 in her perfectly pitched “Dialogue Between My Mother and Myself”: “sideways is the only way the world can be looked at in true perspective”)43 and doubled over with ambivalence. She was usually unhappier about being happy than she was about being unhappy.
Put it another way: even when Highsmith was desperately unhappy, she wasn’t all that unhappy about being unhappy—as long as she could write about it.
• 28 •
Les Girls
Part 12
In the fall of 1973, a month before she turned her mind to listing those small crimes for “Little Tots” (see “How to Begin: Part 1”), Pat was in London visiting Caroline Besterman, about whom she was still entertaining some rather complicated fantasies and resentments. She distracted herself with alternate futures: the hope that “one can be happy (and happier) alone” and the illusion that “I would be a fool not to be patient for another year in view of the fact that I’ve sunk eleven years into this.”1
The Talented Miss Highsmith Page 56