It was typical of Pat’s cross-referencing (and of her ability to superimpose the image of one woman on another, to replace one woman with another) that the song she particularly relished on the Lou Reed record she borrowed from Monique was the one called “Make Up.” Makeup, maquillage, was Tabea Blumenschein’s speciality. Pat used some of Lou Reed’s lyrics from “Make Up” in The Boy Who Followed Ripley.
With the inspiration of Monique Buffet’s company, Pat managed to finish The Boy Who Followed Ripley. Along with it, she fashioned what was probably her most unambiguous relationship. The more than three hundred letters she wrote to Monique over the course of their friendship are phrased with as much generosity as Pat could summon. Perhaps that is why, alone of all Pat’s living lovers, Monique Buffet’s memories of Pat are unmixed. Pat, she says, was always “an angel” to her, “patient,” “generous,” and infinitely “kind.” Pat even cooked for Monique regularly—a fact that would come as a stunning surprise to any of the hapless guests who had visited Patricia Highsmith in the freezing, unprovendered, uncomfortable houses of her older age.
And it was real French lunches Pat cooked, too. Every time Monique visited Moncourt, Pat made a côte de boeuf or a lapin and a salade, and she had a fresh bottle of good wine waiting. And although she wouldn’t eat a bite herself, Pat always set the table nicely for two.30 When she felt like it—which was almost never—Patricia Highsmith could perfectly well play the solicitous hostess.
Pat’s younger lovers and her younger late-life acquaintances portray a very different person from the semidisoriented and manipulatively helpless woman who emerges from the descriptions of her older French and Swiss neighbors. Pat reminded Tabea Blumenschein of “Gertrude Stein”: she says Pat was a very capable “millionaire businesswoman.”31 Pat’s early adventurous lover, Natica Waterbury, felt the same way, and Pat wrote in her diary for 1944 that Natica “often says I am a businessman.”32 Phyllis Nagy says of Pat: “She never ever ever projected an air of helplessness with me. She projected an air of complete control.”33
Over and over, Pat implied in her letters to Monique that she didn’t want the young woman to take her seriously as a writer, and that she was hoping to blunt the complicated instruments of self-torture by which she had always harrowed up her own feelings: terminal seriousness, murderous jealousy, a compulsive focus on time, and a need for love that was so intense that it consumed itself and destroyed its object. Like paranoia and like her writing, too, love was an organizing principle for Patricia.
So it was a sweet, if somewhat manic, re-creation of herself that Pat rehearsed in these letters to Monique. She invented a writing voice (much edited) which was adolescent in its expression and which, in the end, provided a rather threadbare concealment of her needs. Although Monique came to love Pat, Monique was in love with another woman and not “in love” with Pat. And Pat herself wasn’t “in love” with Monique either—at least, not in the old, destructive way. Pat had her triangle again, but this time it didn’t destroy her.
And so Pat began to imitate in life the self she was inventing in these letters—they were her most benign forgery—just as Oscar Wilde always said life should do with art.
She wrote to Monique in this (unrecognizable) way:
I am also too serious, but am really trying hard to correct it!34
If you happen to be late, I shall not mind waiting for you.35
Please don’t be alarmed by my (perhaps) numerous letters…. Please take it easy—and realize I am not putting pressure (I trust!) and I am not the jealous, neurotic type…. I really think life should be enjoyed.36
Pat’s letter to Monique asking permission to dedicate to her The Boy Who Followed Ripley—the book whose life she felt Monique had saved—is entirely charming, with its characteristic modesties, its nutty numeric precisions, and its protective retreats into multiple choices.
19 Nov. 1978
Dearest Monique,
I enclose a little book you will not have to read. I got it because the colours remind me of you. You see I am not always thinking about bed….
I would like to dedicate my new Ripley to you, and offer the following suggestions. Please check one, as they say on exams:
To M.
To M.B.
To Monique (lots of Moniques in the world)
To M?B (I do not know your middle name)
To Monique Buffet (I anticipate a no on this already.)
I don’t want or like dedications in principle.
No.
This is because you were such an inspiration on—literally 5/6ths, or last 250 pages of this 300 page book.37
Pat took her book dedications seriously. Her books—perhaps more than the books of many other authors—were her life. Her dedications often coincided with a high point in her relations with (or her feelings of nostalgia for) her dedicatees. Not all her books are dedicated, but their dedicatees include five men (two of whom were related to her), one married couple, twenty-one women (and the companion dog of one of them), a political movement, and her cat Spider. The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder was inscribed to her cousin Dan Coates. Pat mentions his home, Box Canyon Ranch, and his home state and hers, Texas, in the dedication. Dan, of course, was the most present male figure of her childhood, just as her father, Jay B Plangman, to whom A Dog’s Ransom is dedicated, was the most absent. The collection of short stories originally published as The Snail-Watcher was consigned to Alex Szogyi, with whom she had a long, warm friendship and a frank correspondence. The Two Faces of January was inscribed to Rolf Tietgens, who sometimes seems to be Pat’s male homosexual twin—the twin who didn’t, as Pat and Ripley did, “get away with it.” The collection of stories called The Black House is dedicated to Charles Latimer, the transplanted Canadian she’d met in the 1960s when he worked for her London publisher, Heinemann. He “thought she was a genius”38 she responded by temporarily making him one of her executors.
But the preponderance of Pat’s books are dedicated to women. Aside from the “false” dedication of The Price of Salt—a book full of misdirections (including the pseudonym it was written under), designed to hide the emotional biography Pat had buried in it, and dedicated to three people Pat said she’d made up, “Edna, Jordy, and Jeff”—her book dedications constitute an index to the life of her heart.
Two books were dedicated to Mary Highsmith, and she is the only dedicatee to receive this distinction. This Sweet Sickness, written with another Mary in mind—Mary Ronin—was still assigned to the original Mary, and Miranda the Panda Is on the Veranda, the book of nonsense rhymes and illustrations Pat and Doris concocted in 1958 (a book which made Janet Flanner “wince” with aesthetic disgust as she thumbed through it),39 is also dedicated to Mary. It is Pat’s silliest book, and she was responsible only for the artwork. The inscription on Edith’s Diary—requested by Marion Aboudaram—simply reads “Marion.”
Strangers on a Train, although dedicated in manuscript to “all the Virginias” and slyly changed to “all the Virginians” in the first paperbook version (a recent paperback edition has restored “the Virginias”), went undedicated in its hardcover publication—as did The Talented Mr. Ripley, the book Pat certainly thought of as dedicated to herself. After all, when she gave Ripley a middle initial, it was her own. Tom signs himself in three different novels as “Thomas P. Ripley.” P was for Phelps—but it was also for Patricia and undoubtedly for Plangman, too.
A Game for the Living (1958) was principally dedicated to Ethel Sturtevant, “my friend and teacher,” although Pat thriftily threw in another set of nurturers (Dorothy Hargreaves and Mary McCurdy), whom she cited “for their empathy and for their house.” Ethel Sturtevant was Pat’s unfailing source of praise and succor—she compared Pat mistily to Edith Wharton in a letter—when she was her literature professor at Barnard College, and she continued to champion Pat until she died. The Cry of the Owl went to “D.W.,” Daisy Winston, Pat’s outspoken ex-lover and friend from New Hope, Pennsylvania, one o
f the few people to whom Pat gave a sizeable sum of money—a five-thousand-dollar check—when it was most needed.
The Glass Cell (1964) was assigned to Pat’s beloved cat Spider, who, three years after the book was published, was conveyed into the hands of the British novelist Muriel Spark—with a little help from Pat’s cat-loving Southern friend, Eugene Walter, and some serial obstructions from a Roman landlady. In 1970, Pat listed Muriel Spark along with Iris Murdoch, Kingsley Amis, and Graham Greene as the four British writers she liked “although,” she added candidly, “I am not a great reader of anything.” 40 In 1971, Pat wrote to her friend Kingsley that “reading Muriel Spark’s brilliant Memento Mori [made me feel inadequate:] I am appalled at my obtuseness in grubbing over my novel for seven months.” 41
Dame Muriel Spark explained to me how Spider Highsmith had come to live with her:
I got the cat from mutual friends in Rome. I’m a fan of Patricia Highsmith—those unexpected reversals, that anti-hero. We never met, unfortunately. She couldn’t take Spider with her to England. Someone was supposed to care for him and found she couldn’t, and it was supposed to be a temporary arrangement. But after I got to know him I couldn’t let him go.
Spider, whom Pat had left in Positano when she went to live in Suffolk, made the train trip from Positano to Rome all by himself. In 1968, Muriel Spark sent Pat a telegram which Pat kept all her life: “Spider is safe with me forever. He is greatly loved. Healthy and youthful. All best.” 42
“[Patricia and I] had a correspondence,” said Muriel Spark, “and I wrote to her when he died, of course. We were devastated when he died.
“He was the most wonderful cat: black—perhaps partly Siamese—with enormous green eyes. And very intelligent. You could tell he had been a writer’s cat. He would sit by me, seriously, as I wrote, while all my other cats filtered away.
“He brought,” Dame Muriel said, “a bit of Patricia Highsmith with him.” 43
In her 1988 novel, A Far Cry from Kensington, Muriel Spark has the narrator explain the importance of a companion cat to a writer. The passage sounds very much like the description she provided of the cat she’d inherited from Patricia Highsmith. “For concentration you need a cat…. And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give you back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence is enough.” 44
Pat dedicated Deep Water to “E.B.H. and Tina”—Ellen Blumenthal Hill and Ellen’s poodle, Tina. The Blunderer was inscribed “For L.”—a reference to Lynn Roth, whose short, sharp love affair with Pat had left a lasting impression of “type.” The hardback edition of another work went, under disguised initials, to Caroline Besterman, and a paperback edition of A Suspension of Mercy was inscribed in the early 1990s to “Betty, Margot, Ann and all the old gang”—the lesbian friends she used to consort with on Fire Island and with whom she’d once again begun corresponding. Those Who Walk Away was dedicated to Lil Picard, “one of my more inspiring friends,” and The Tremor of Forgery was offered to Rosalind Constable. Ripley Under Ground (1970) was dedicated to Agnes and Georges Barylski, the Polish gleaners who lived in a trailer 150 yards from Pat’s house in Montmachoux. Although Pat privately referred to the Barylskis as “peasants” (and preferred countries “in which there is an acknowledged peasant class”),45 she thought they were “the only “honest people” she’d met in France. They cared for her cats whenever she travelled and had once paid her “in advance” for a kerosene heater she’d sold to them—an act of faith which thoroughly impressed her.
Found in the Street was dedicated to faithful Kingsley Skattebol, who had lived for years in the mise-en-scène of that novel, Greenwich Village: first on West Eleventh Street and then at One Christopher Street. Small g, Pat’s posthumous novel, was inscribed to “my friend Frieda Sommer”—another of Pat’s “good eggs”: a woman from Zurich prone to crushes on prominent women, who did Pat many favors and who was responsible for much of the Zurich research for Small g. Pat eventually made Frieda Sommer one of the trustees of her final will. Only Ripley Under Water (1991) was not inscribed to an individual but to the “dead and dying among the Intifadeh and the Kurds.” It was a dedication with which Pat hoped to make a point and raise some hackles. In the end, the hackles she raised were mostly her own.
Meanwhile, at the end of the 1970s, sweetness, a little light, and fun fun fun were the themes of Pat’s letters to Monique Buffet. But because this was, after all, Patricia Highsmith writing letters to a young lover, some imp of the perverse was bound to make a cameo appearance, and occasionally, through Pat’s shiny filter of “fun,” the little imp showed up. “Just so you will destroy this letter, I shall add, that I love lying on top of you (if I do not weigh too much) and kissing your neck. Don’t you think your father would enjoy this letter?” 46
In the meantime, Monique, struggling with two relationships, did not emerge unscathed. She thinks that the seven cysts she had to have removed from her eyes during the time she was intimate with Pat (Pat, typically, did a drawing of her treating one) were a “somatisation” of her feelings about their situation. Pat, she said, never forced her to make love although she could be tacitly very insistent—and Monique made love with Pat because she wanted to. Still, every time she did so she “felt bad.” Monique was newly in love with another woman, and seeing Pat was like “walking a tightrope” for her.47
For Monique, Pat “had the stigmata of alcoholism,” but she also “had a great charm, incredibly piercing eyes like an Indian, her voice was lovely, she had a very soft voice…. She looked directly at me…up through her hair with her head down. [And] she was so tender and so attentive and so affectionate that you forgot that she looked butch.” 48
Pat could still attract, could still, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, act out of a softer part of herself and try to re-create some of the fun she’d had when she was Monique’s age. In this affair she was playing down both her feelings and her reputation.
“PLEASE do not consider me a heavyweight, or an intellectual, or a good writer, or anything serious like that. With you it is nice to have fun, and I want you to have fun also, with me or anyone else.” 49
And so Pat’s relations with Monique Buffet provided a partial resolution of the perpetual “romantic” problem she had described clearly, clausally, and with a great deal of psychological sourcing to Alex Szogyi in 1969:
I may not be capable of [love]…. I want something romantic, perhaps not definite. If I have the steady thing, I reject it; this has happened over and over—rather I made it happen. I repeat the pattern of mother’s semi-rejection of me. Her “abandonment” of me to my grandmother, when I was aged 12, when my mother took me to Texas, with a promise she would divorce my stepfather…but within a couple of weeks, my stepfather came from New York and took her away, back to New York, and I was left for a dismal year—going to school with kids two and three years older than I—in Texas…. I never got over it. Thus I seek out women who will hurt me in a similar manner, and avoid the women who are—good eggs.50
• 30 •
Les Girls
Part 14
Allela Cornell drawing for dollars near her studio in Greenwich Village. During their short affair, Allela painted a prophetic portrait of Pat. (Swiss Literary Archives)
Pat on the Circle Line, the boat that goes around Manhattan, in the 1940s. Shipping out to anywhere was what she loved best. (Swiss Literary Archives)
THE “JEANNOT” ALBUM: Jean David (“Jeannot”), a French cartoonist from Marseille who was a friend of Mary and Pat Highsmith since the 1930s, kept these unique photographs—never before published—of Pat and Mary on album pages, which he decorated to represent their lives. The pen notes on the photographs are by Pat, suggesting that it was she who sent them to Jeannot. (Collection Annebelle Potin)
West House at Yaddo. It was on the floorboards
of West House porch that Flannery O’Connor, to Pat’s everlasting disgust, said she saw an image of the radiant face of Jesus. (Collection the Corporation of Yaddo; photographer Joseph Levy)
Marc Brandel, Pat’s “fiancé” of the late 1940s, on the beach in Provincetown in 1955, the year before he adapted The Talented Mr. Ripley for American television’s Studio One. (Collection Ruta Brandel Dauphin)
Kathleen Wiggins Senn, the married woman whose two-minute meeting with Pat in Bloomingdale’s department store in 1948 sparked Pat’s most personal novel, The Price of Salt. (Collection Priscilla Senn Kennedy)
Kathleen Wiggins, unmarried and flying a plane. (Collection Priscilla Senn Kennedy)
Pat in France with Sylvia David and her husband, the political cartoonist Jean David (Jeannot). Pat’s desire to be an “ami de maison” wasn’t always an innocent one. (Collection Annebelle Potin)
Pat and her favorite cat, Spider Highsmith, the dedicatee of The Glass Cell. Muriel Spark, who adopted Spider, remarked: “He brought a bit of Patricia Highsmith with him.” (Collection Ogden Kruger)
Ellen Blumenthal Hill in the bed Pat has just left to take this photograph. Ellen’s four-year affair and thirty-odd-year friendship with Pat added new terrors to the word relationship—and brought new inspiration to Pat’s work. (Swiss Literary Archives)
Dame Sybil Thorndike and Heather Chasen in Call Me Jacky, Enid Bagnold’s play about a homicidal alcoholic lesbian. Chasen, who played the title role, based her costume and some of her characterization on her friend Patricia Highsmith. (Collection Heather Chasen)
The Talented Miss Highsmith Page 59