Once again Pat was keeping another list (and checking it twice) of Caroline’s imagined “campaign” against her of more than a decade ago (when they were still lovers) and she noted, matter-of-factly, that Caroline was “now without a buffer state” her borders were undefended. And Pat was enlisting support from old friends like Arthur Koestler in this long-past love affair’s long-lost battles. For Pat, Mars would always be in bed with Venus—and making war was the natural concomitant to making love.
When she wrote out her list for “Little Tots” in the middle of November 1973, Pat had just returned from a four-day sojourn at the Hotel Europa in Zurich (the hotel matchbooks are in her desk drawer), making publicity appearances for her Swiss publisher, Diogenes Verlag. In Zurich, she signed books; read from her newly published collection of short stories, The Snail-Watcher, in English and German; and lunched several times at the Kronenhalle, where James Joyce used to eat—noting with characteristic precision that Joyce’s personal waitress, Emma, was still there, but was now “on part-time duty.”
It always takes her “3 or 4 days to quiet down” from a publicity tour—about as long as it takes her to quiet down from receiving a letter from Mother Mary. And she’s nervous, too, because she expects to go back to London in December for a medical test. One of the reasons she made that little list of unobtrusive ways in which children could murder their parents was because it helped to settle her nerves.
Here in Moncourt, in the hameau, her isolation is feverishly populated: filled with the writing of gossipy letters, the unexpected ringing of the telephone, the ultimately unwelcome (though usually invited) visitors, and the society of her next-door neighbors, the Anglo-Irish writer-translator couple Desmond and Mary Ryan, with whom she spends so much time socializing—and about whom she will later spend so much time complaining. The Ryans’ daughter Juliette, who grew up with Pat next door, still lives in her parents’ house. Juliette Ryan always found Pat “very intelligent…a great woman.” Pat, she said, finally got “fed up” with keeping snails as pets (she’d been travelling with her snails since the 1940s) and “let them loose in the garden, and somehow, many ended in our garden.”
And so, to this day, descendants of Patricia Highsmith’s original snails are busily reproducing themselves in a hameau in suburban France. And whenever Juliette Ryan finds a “Highsmith snail” in her garden she throws it back over the wall onto “Pat’s property.”2 But Pat would probably have told her not to bother. In one of the tenderest fictional evocations of lovemaking Pat Highsmith ever wrote (characteristically, the scene takes place between the two snails in Deep Water, a novel of extreme psychological violence), the book’s central psychopath, Vic Van Allen, hovering over his mating snails Edgar and Hortense, remembers “the sentence in one of Henri Fabre’s books about snails crossing garden walls to find their mates, and though Vic had never verified it by his own experiment, he felt it must be so.”3
The legend, much circulated by French, English, and German journalists (with serious support from Pat), that Pat is a “recluse” in Moncourt because she lives privately, is nonsense. Juliette Ryan remembers:
“Pat would come over just about every night to drink when she finished her workday and she’d stay and stay and stay. And since she wasn’t interested in eating, it was difficult [to] get rid of her…. I remember the ballet that would ensue when my father would try to escort her to the door. If he got too close, she’d lag back, and he’d have to go a bit forward. It took them quite a bit of time to get Pat to the door every evening.” 4
It was in her upstairs workroom in Moncourt where Pat wrote a revealing essay about another novelist, a novelist who moved house even more than she did (thirty-five times in the Los Angeles area alone)5 and who was, for a few well-paid weeks, part of the intricate Hitchcock machine that produced the brilliant film of Strangers on a Train. Pat’s essay on Raymond Chandler—“A Galahad in L.A.” (published as the introduction to The World of Raymond Chandler)6—was written in the year Edith’s Diary appeared, 1977. Pat had just read Frank MacShane’s biography of Chandler, and it focused her mind on Chandler’s life and on what, as a home-schooled Freudian, she did and did not share with him by way of artistic impulse. It was Chandler’s childhood in a matriarchal household, his sense of dislocation, his addiction to alcohol, and his chivalrous, intense, and nonmonogamous marriage to an older woman that gave Pat the helping hand she needed to clamber up over the slippery subject Raymond Chandler proved himself to be. “Strangers on a Train gave Chandler fits during his Hollywood script writing period,” Pat wrote, “and from his grave Chandler has given me tit for tat.”7
Pat’s own obsessive mining of her childhood left her surprised that Chandler didn’t “make use of the formidable emotional material at his disposal. But just how formidable or important real events are is a matter of how important a writer cares to make them.” Pat wrote as though writers had a choice in the matter of calling up “real emotional events.” She herself had very little.
Despite her professed lack of interest in style, Pat revelled in Chandler’s. His often lyrical, always outré similes delighted her into repeating one: “He reeled back as if I had hung a week-old mackerel under his nose.”8 It was the compromise he had to strike on style that made Chandler so miserable while he was working on the script for Strangers on a Train—work from which Alfred Hitchcock fired him, replacing him with Czenzi Ormonde. Chandler wrote to his agent, Carl Brandt, that any “positive style” in a Hitchcock script “must be obliterated or changed until it is quite innocuous.”9 By which he meant that Alfred Hitchcock’s was the only style allowed in a Hitchcock film.
Although Pat acknowledged that Chandler “found his first success in writing tough, popular pulp magazine stories, and his books were outgrowths of this formula fiction,” she neglected to mention that she, too, had been published in the very same “best of the pulps,” Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.10 As always, she buried her biographical references deep in her prose, comparing Chandler’s writing with the flat, vivid paintings of Edward Burra, the eccentric, wonderfully talented watercolorist she’d met at Barbara Ker-Seymer’s house in London. (Burra seems to have done his best to avoid Ker-Seymer’s house when Pat was there; a drinker himself, he was ruffled by her extravagant imbibing.)11 And comparing it again to the uncompromising black lines of the paintings of Fernand Léger, whose cocktail party she’d been so thrilled to attend with Buffie Johnson in the summer of 1941, Pat slyly inserted her life in her writing in ways that Chandler never did.
In June of 1979, a year after Pat had finished her article on Chandler (and had had her delicate balance overturned by Tabea Blumenschein—and then partially restored by Monique Buffet), a fifteen-page article featuring Highsmith in her Moncourt house was published in a major French magazine, L’Express. The article, “Three Days with Patricia Highsmith” by the French novelist and journalist Noëlle Loriot, was advertised rather grandly: “For three days Patricia Highsmith renounced her solitude to receive Noëlle Loriot at her home.” The piece is a nuanced and perceptive portrait of Pat in her favorite house, necessarily concealing more than it reveals. The three-day stay with Pat Highsmith proved to be very heavy going for Mlle Loriot.
“To discuss Patricia Highsmith,” Noëlle Loriot said to me, “it is necessary to talk about her alcoholism and her lesbianism. The two go together…. I think she drank because she could not fully express her lesbianism and was ashamed of it.” Loriot, who had been introduced to Pat by a mutual friend some years before she wrote her article, had watched Pat, on the first weekend she’d moved to Moncourt, stare with incomprehension at a bidet. Although Pat had been visiting France since 1949 and had already lived in three houses near Fontainebleau and Nemours, she seemed to have no idea what a bidet was for. Because of this, Loriot concluded privately—it was a very French deduction—that Pat had never slept with a man. Loriot also had the impression that Pat had been a lover of Judy Holliday. Of her three days in Moncourt with Pat, Lori
ot says:
She was incredibly difficult to interview; she didn’t want to be taped, she didn’t want me to take notes. I used to take notes after I’d gone to my room at night. I tried to get her to talk about her work, but she was only interested in talking about lesbians and homosexuals and she showed me a picture of a very young German lover [Tabea again] en travéstie.
Noëlle Loriot, like so many other Highsmith guests, spent most of her time in Pat’s house going hungry. But because she had come to stay in February, she froze to death as well as starved. Pat kept the house at 16 degrees centigrade (60.8 degrees Fahrenheit) and served one light meal a day. “I kept taking her to bistros and restaurants [to get food and keep warm, Loriot said.] Her physique was frightening; she never ate.” Loriot attributed, as any French person might, Pat’s lack of humor to her “côté allemagne,” her German blood. “At the end of three days, I couldn’t stand it anymore—and neither could she!” But, says Loriot, Pat had “a physical dignity” which she kept even when “morte-ivrogne,” dead drunk. And she thought Pat had very successfully “pulled the wool” over the eyes of the French and the Germans, because so much of her writing was flat. The French verb for “pulling the wool” over people’s eyes is bluffer, to bluff. “Pat bluffed everyone,” Loriot said.12
In a more truthful world, a “reclusive” author who allows a journalist to stay at her house for three whole days probing her life and work for a national magazine might, for starters, have her status as a “recluse” reassessed. Recluses don’t open their homes to members of the press—nor do they wish to see their names in national magazines. But such is the world of publicity that this long, illustrated piece in a popular French magazine about the solitary Patricia Highsmith (all too ready to talk about the unpublishable parts of her private life, it turned out, but very reluctant to talk about her writing) only enhanced Pat’s reputation for solitude and privacy. Pat’s usual economies with the truth and sly withholdings of information didn’t help.
Pat refused to admit that she ever saw or corresponded with Mary McCarthy in Paris (she was doing both); she said she knew nothing of Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes was one of the inspirations of her youth, she was rereading Holmes stories in Moncourt, and she’d gone to London in April of 1969 to do a feature piece for Queen magazine on Billy Wilder’s film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes); she said that suspense didn’t interest her (she’d written a book on the subject—admittedly, never really explaining it). Her characters had nothing to do with her, she insisted; she merely observed them “as if they were snails.” (This was Pat’s biggest bluff.)13
She invented nothing, she told Noëlle Loriot. “I read newspapers”—here she was telling the truth—“from the first to the last line: they are what inspire me. A newspaper is an anthology of cruel stories.” And then she repeated her usual explanation for her characters. She preferred men for their actions. “Women always return to the house.” Just as Pat herself always did.
“Believe me,” Pat said, unbelievably, after a long list of the usual complaints about Mother Mary, “I am completely objective concerning my mother.”
She had chosen France, she went on, because “the French are less boring than the English and more serious than the Italians…. I tried the English countryside: deadly.” And she insisted that she visited her neighbors the Ryans only once a week. Very briefly. And sometimes the Ryan daughter, back from Oxford, would visit her. “We speak often,” Pat said grandly and vaguely of her conversations with Juliette Ryan, “of my childhood.”
Noëlle Loriot could not print Pat’s revelations about her lovers nor what she herself was feeling: that Pat was not a “sympathetic woman,” that “she was not natural with women, for her it was a punishment to make love,” that she was “a sick woman.” Loriot had already written in a review in L’Express that the style of Edith’s Diary was not commensurate with its insights. “Edith’s Diary, for me, was her chef d’oeuvre but [Pat] knew that it was badly written.” After Jean-François Joselin (another French journalist Pat knew) had contradicted, in Le Nouvel Observateur, Loriot’s opinion about the awkward style of Edith’s Diary, Pat had said to Noëlle Loriot: “You were right.”14
Loriot was reduced to telling Pat that if Edith’s Diary had been written by a man, “one couldn’t have failed to reproach him with misogyny.” “What contempt for women!” she said about other women characters in Pat’s work. Pat preferred to define her motives to Loriot vis-à-vis her women characters as an inability to respect them because they were dependent on men. That was accurate enough.
Loriot’s editor at L’Express chose to publish old film stills and old photographs of Truman Capote and Carson McCullers to accompany the article—Pat hadn’t seen or corresponded with either Capote or McCullers since the 1940s—and a very old photo of Mary McCarthy (whom Pat didn’t admit to knowing in France). Pat, herself, didn’t offer up any present-day colleagues to eke out her commentary, and she really didn’t want to be photographed. She wanted to use photographs of herself at twenty—photographs so beautiful, said Mlle Loriot, that they reminded her of Simone Signoret, who was born in the same year as Pat and who displayed, Loriot thought, “the same fatalism when it came to the damage that tobacco and drink could wreak upon her.”
Pat, says Loriot, “knew she was no longer photogenic,” and so Loriot “had an idea, a good idea, which was to photograph the photo of Pat at twenty and use that.” But the editor of L’Express looked at the photographs of the twenty-year-old Pat and said: “We can’t do this, absolutely not. She’s unrecognizable. It’s another woman entirely.”15
And Pat, who took many showers a day while Noëlle Loriot was there, said one more thing to her journalist guest, something she had never said publicly before. Sigmund Freud would have been thrilled by Pat’s remark—but it was really just another instance of the old Highsmith sleight of hand.
What Pat said was this:
“Whenever I touch paper money or coins before sitting down to write, I have to wash my hands in order not to ‘contaminate’ my work.”16
• 29 •
Les Girls
Part 13
Exceptional in so many ways, Pat added one more exception to her list. She preferred to surround her writing with a cordon sanitaire of light negativity. Many of her friends didn’t care for her work—and if they did, she made it clear that she was uncomfortable with their approval. Of the admiration of her young lover Madeleine Harmsworth, who “refused to call me Pat—saying it would be like calling Dickens Charlie, or Shakespeare Willie,” Pat wrote: “I do not wish to be so celebrated.”1
Some of Pat’s more literary friends are still divided between the two classic ways of not liking her writing: one is to admire Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley and nothing else; the other is to prefer her short stories to her novels.
When Ellen Hill, whose disapprobation undoubtedly added an extra frisson to her relationship with Pat, met Peter Huber for the first time, she took him aside and asked him seriously: “What do you see in Pat’s books?” When he told her, she gave him her first-edition copy of The Tremor of Forgery, the one Pat had wistfully inscribed: “For Ellen / Maybe you will like this one better than most. / Love, Pat.”2 When DéDé Moser, a painter friend of Ellen in the Ticino, read This Sweet Sickness, she thought it was a “wonderful” novel, but “[w]hen I praised it to Ellen, she said: ‘I told Patricia when this book came out: You rewrote this thing so many times! I could have finished it in one night!’ She did not have a high opinion of Patricia’s books.”3
Some of Pat’s lovers and many of her friends, including Kingsley Skattebol (who saves her admiration for Pat’s short stories), say they either did not read Pat’s books or did not care for the books they had read.4 Barbara Skelton, memoirist, novelist, and Cyril Connolly’s ex-wife, confirmed this interesting attitude in an article in the London Magazine: “The odd thing was that most of Pat’s friends never read her books.”5
Vivien De
Bernardi, another late-life friend who didn’t care for Pat’s work, lived near Pat in the Ticino. An American-born children’s educational therapist working with Down syndrome children, Vivien was the wife of a Swiss banker when Pat wrote to her with typical modesty (and at Ellen Hill’s behest) in 1981 that she, Pat, was a “free-lance writer,” “almost always at home,”6 and looking for comments on the child in her story “The Button.” “The Button” portrays a father’s horror at having a “handicapped” child, the murder he commits to relieve his feelings, and the button trophy he takes away from that murder. Unaware of Pat’s work or reputation when she received her letter, De Bernardi told Pat forthrightly that she thought the child in “The Button” “was presented totally unrealistically…but the anguish of the father was incredibly real and powerful, so something in the story rang true.”7
Pat and Vivien became neighborly friends—perhaps because of Vivien’s soothing demeanor and well-ordered household, but perhaps, too, given Pat’s turn of mind, because of Vivien’s initial critique of “The Button” and disinterest in Pat’s novels. Pat’s own “buttons” in Switzerland, the ones De Bernardi says she did not “dare to press” for fear of setting off long “rants,” were: “sex, Jews, blacks, and money.”
Although Vivien De Bernardi was one of those friends who thought Pat “honest and direct,” Pat never said a word to her neighbor about her love affairs or sexual preferences. Certainly all Pat’s Swiss neighbors knew she was lesbian—those trim oxford shirts and pressed boy’s jeans were a dead giveaway in suburban Switzerland—but they never broached the subject unless, like Bee Loggenberg, the wealthy South African who accompanied Pat on her last publicity trip to Paris in the fall of 1994, they, themselves, were gay. Pat was aware of what her neighbors assumed, but she ignored it. Hiding in plain sight had always been her style.
The Talented Miss Highsmith Page 57