The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  Perhaps her insistence in Switzerland, a decade and a half later when she really was dying, on sending her final visitor out of her hospital room—it is Pat Highsmith’s last reported act—was what she had meant by being “better prepared.” But as the longtime companion and close observer of many felines, Pat would also have known that when a country cat is mortally ill, it begins its instinctive transit out of life by going off into the woods to die alone.

  The contrast between the happy little Swiss travel piece Pat was working on in her notebook in 1953—overflowing with praise and pleasure and local color—and the glum, grim, grayed-out notes she took when she actually moved to Switzerland in the early 1980s (to the house in Aurigeno which Ellen Hill, with the assistance of architect Tobias Amman, had picked out for her) is marked. Pat hadn’t had so much peace and quiet since she’d left her double cottage in Earl Soham in 1968—and its effect on her was that her inspirational flame burned low and her depression was awful. She experienced “some of the blackest moments of my life, when for fifteen minutes at a time, I would feel that I’d got myself into a trap, and an unhappy one.”

  Part of the problem was the lack of light. The seventeenth-century stone summerhouse Ellen had chosen for Pat sat in the Maggia Valley in the deep shadow of the Dunzio Mountain; in the winter the house got sunlight for perhaps two hours a day. The windows of the house were small (and some of them were barred), and the walls were a good half meter thick, so that even when the sun was out the house was dark and cool.

  Daniel Keel says: “People come to the Ticino for the light, and she put herself into the darkest, most cramped house, no room, no quality of life; she didn’t give her guests anything, but she didn’t give herself anything either. It was the most uncomfortable house in the world with the mountains right up against it, which cut out even the two hours of sunlight a day the town got.”26

  “This is where I write,” Pat told Keel, showing him her desk corner. Her desk, as usual, faced the wall and was accompanied by the “most uncomfortable chair” in the house.27

  In an odd—a very odd—article entitled “Winter in the Ticino” (the canton in which both Aurigeno and Tegna are located), Pat wrote that in Aurigeno she chose to fraternize only with Germans or Swiss Germans, even though she was living in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. She described her house as a “submarine”—but a submarine set in stone and not in water—and evoked the peculiar mineral emanations from the heavy concentrations of granite in the mountains, concentrations which produced a “magnetic effect” said to drain you of your life’s energy. Pat seemed to like this idea and to accept it fatalistically: “How can one escape the density of rock?”28

  Although Pat began her residency in Aurigeno by giving a cocktail party on her terrace on the day before the opening of the Locarno Film Festival (one guest’s report on the hors d’oeuvres: “Boiled eggs, cut in half, mayonnaise out of the tube, the food was quite terrible and unattractive; whoever did it was not exactly an aesthete in food matters”),29 her description of her social life was bleak. “There is only one American, a retired widow, in the region and she lives in Ascona.” (That was Ellen Blumenthal Hill.) “I recently met an Englishman,” she continued, as though she’d been bird-watching and had spotted a rare specimen. She “happen[ed] to like the quiet,” she wrote, but the village appeared to be “without inhabitants.” (Counting Highsmith, the population was 106.) She was a submariner living in a ghost town.30

  There was a weekly “or so” dinner party in Aurigeno in which wine and food seemed to play a central role. “Food is important here,” a friend said to her, “because there’s nothing else that’s very amusing.” These weekly dinners engendered heated political arguments until “2 in the morning,” conducted by guests “made happy on wine.”31 (Were they unhappy without it?) Once again, Pat found someone to do favors and errands for her—a kind and considerably overburdened neighbor in the village, Ingeborg Moelich, a former opera singer, who had a car but very little money, and who was not, say neighbors, adequately recompensed for her efforts. She shopped for Pat, she did some sewing and some laundry, as well as many driving errands. And she continued, faithfully, to stop by Pat’s house in Tegna during Pat’s last illness. It was Ingeborg Moelich who drove Pat, leaning heavily on Julia Diener-Diethelm in the backseat of Moelich’s car, on her very last ride to the hospital in Locarno in early February of 1995.

  Pat also befriended the one man in the village who had fought for Germany during the Second World War, a grouchy old gentleman to whom no one else spoke. She found the elderly soldier from Hitler’s army quite interesting. But when the man died, Pat, like any good New Yorker, immediately began to speculate on the possibilities of buying his house, situated on the steep stone grade just above hers.32

  Someone said to her: “Nothing’s alive. Have you noticed that?” She had.33

  And so, in the way of a woman with a turbulent imagination who spends time alone in a dark house talking to herself, Pat, once again, began to dream up little inventions to lighten her days. She thought about a “Minivac—small hand-held vacuum cleaner…to dust the tops of books in bookcase.”34 But this was nine years after her native land had produced the ubiquitous Dust-Buster hand vacuum with its myriad irritating attachments: Pat was out of touch with the material facts of her home country. Ditto for her idea for the “small wringer…for kitchen, in order to extract liver paste from tube which has been in fridge”—a device she felt would be a welcome addition to any home.35 Her thumbs, arthritic by now, couldn’t squeeze the paste out of chilled food tubes, and she was putting the tubes on the floor and using her feet on them. But once again Pat had been preempted in her invention: it was already being manufactured in America to extract the very last drops out of stubborn toothpaste tubes.

  On 1 March 1983, shortly after Pat made her initial move to Aurigeno, Arthur Koestler, whom Pat had known for thirty-five years and who was by now dying of leukemia and disabled by Parkinson’s disease, killed himself in his London home. His wife, Cynthia, joined him in what was apparently a suicide pact. Pat hadn’t seen Koestler since 2 May 1978 when she’d brought Tabea Blumenschein over to the Koestlers’ London town house to show her off. Tabea had been worried because she hadn’t read any of Koestler’s work, but Pat quickly relieved her of her doubts: “Never mind, my dear, the last thing writers want to talk about is their work.”36 Pat was at Peter Huber’s house in Zurich when she got the news about Koestler, and she was alone a day later when she found out that Koestler’s wife was also dead. Pat was furious: “My first thought was that he had gently persuaded her; my emotion plain anger.”37

  Pat wrote to everyone about the Koestlers’ suicides, but she wrote most fully to her sympathetic German translator, Anne Uhde. Murder—self-murder in this case—always fired up Pat’s imagination, and as she was writing her description to Uhde she couldn’t help re-creating the scene of the “crime,” altering it rather prudishly to suit her taste and echoing in a backhanded way her own short tale of horror and gore, “Woodrow Wilson’s Necktie.”

  Yes, the news about Koestler knocked me for a loop, I must say…. I felt upset, angry…. I am sorry mainly about Cynthia.

  I know their sitting room very well indeed, and know the armchairs they always took, so I can imagine the scene. They probably took the pills after a pleasant dinner together. I know exactly where they had to leave the note to the maid, saying, “Don’t go upstairs. Call the police at…” So I keep thinking about that living room, and—absurdly—thinking they should have done it lying on two different beds, dressed of course, as if they had fallen asleep reading a newspaper. I feel that some waxworks is going to show them exactly in that room (this is the first time such an idea crossed my mind), and it will be Mme Tussaud’s, London, and I do not not wish to see it. I see, frankly, no reason for Cynthia to have died, and I’ve the feeling, maybe wrong, that K. persuaded her.38

  A year later the Koestlers’ suicides were still on Pat’s mind, and
now she was blaming both of them: “Cynthia was a willing, clinging vine…. Arthur would never have tied himself up with a woman who had any ambition, will, even strong personality of her own.”39

  The lack of light in Aurigeno was draining Pat; the jagged mountain—the mountain view from her Aurigeno house is so exaggerated as to almost induce vertigo—was minatory. Worse, all the stone houses in Aurigeno have roofs which are sharply peaked, so the village itself looks like a miniature mountain range. Even in summer the steep walk to Pat’s house up the solid stone walk was slippery, and the house’s barred windows were forbidding. Pat wrote that the mountain produced “a depressing effect, a feeling of being closed in, with consequent emphasis on self-sufficiency, tendency to smugness, maybe alcoholism in the types prone to it…. I notice among outsiders like me who live here, that a great deal of time is spent in relating real or imaginary slights, insults, neglects, attitudes, to any friend or ally that will listen. Maybe it is because the community is small and little new blood comes in. Or does Ticino make people nervous?”

  “Nothing’s alive”? Self-sufficient characters drinking alone in dark houses and brooding over “imaginary slights, insults, neglects”? A “depressing effect, a feeling of being closed in,” a terrain that makes people “nervous”? We are in Highsmith Country again, the only country on earth with a permanent population of one. But for its sole begetter, living in Highsmith Country was less comfortable than imagining it. In the shadows, immured in granite, Pat was beginning to let go of much of what had defined her in the past. The woman who in her teens and twenties had insisted that reading was her major “drug” stopped reading in Aurigeno for more than two years. She continued to saw and hammer away in her workroom, but for the first time she had no garden, and nothing bloomed for her but the sprouts from an occasional avocado pit skewered by a toothpick and suspended over a glass of water. The house itself was not—as almost every one of her other dwellings had been—anywhere near the sight or the sound of water. She had, in every sense, set herself in stone.

  Every few days Pat turned on her portable Grundig radio to “restore her sanity” with a little classical music. “I realise that I may be reaching the point at which I think everyone is a bit cracked but me. What are people saying about me behind my back? Could I face it if I knew?” 40

  She began to give herself little sanity tests again. Could she follow the sense of this World Service broadcast? She could. But her mood lightened only with travel or with new acquaintances—and then not for very long.

  One of Pat’s new acquaintances was David Streiff, who had recently taken over the directorship of the Locarno Film Festival and was busily raising its profile. Streiff wrote to Pat, offering her an “Honor Card”—a free pass to the festival, which he also offered to other notables in the area like Luise Rainer, the film actress Pat had met in New York in 1948 at Leo Lerman’s Sunday salon. Pat was “proud to have the Honor Card,” pleased to be singled out, and, of course, delighted not to have to pay for her tickets.41 She never much liked the films.

  In the blistering August heat of 1983, during the running of the Locarno Film Festival, David Streiff invited Pat to the Grand Hotel in Locarno. “She didn’t want the menu, but she wanted a pizza,” he says, “which they had to bring back from some other place, and even then, she only ate the tomatoes.” Whenever they dined together after that, they went mostly to Tegna to Pat’s favorite little restaurant next to the cemetery, and Pat would always order spaghetti. And Streiff always paid for the meals.

  “The ritual was I came to her house, we drank something there, I beer, she whiskey, we went by car, her broken-down car, to the restaurant. I accepted the fact that she only took a few spoonfuls and the rest went into this famous plastic bag [for] the cats…and then she took me back to Locarno…. She was not a very good driver, absentminded, not practical [but] she always found her way back and she sent a postcard or a call so I knew she got back alive…. She’d drive back with [a bottle of scotch] in her car.” 42

  She remained, he says, consistent in “character”—that is, dominating—but revealed more of herself to him as their relations progressed. They always spoke in “American,” and Pat, never happy to come to a settled opinion about anything by herself, made use of Streiff’s expertise in film, sending him the Diogenes film contracts for her books to look over. From her comments on the films she saw, Streiff doesn’t think Pat knew what was “good or bad vis-à-vis her own work in films.” They had “an easy contact” because he, too, is gay, and she seemed, he says, “kind of proud” that she’d made some sort of “contribution” with The Price of Salt, but she never discussed her relations or her fantasies—all she had left, by then, of her love life—with him. Except, of course, for the obligatory complaints about Ellen Hill.43

  “I felt enriched, I was proud to be in touch with such a famous writer and to be close to her,” says David Streiff. And Pat, too, was proud: she used to tell people that Streiff took the trouble to visit her when she moved to Tegna. A few weeks before her death, Pat, prompted by Daniel Keel, telephoned Streiff, who was by then the director of the Swiss Federal Office of Culture, to ask about placing her manuscripts and personal papers at the Swiss Literary Archives. The day Streiff sat down to discuss the terms of acceptance with Daniel Keel was the day Pat died, 4 February 1995.44

  In 1991, when Streiff retired from the Locarno Film Festival, a television documentary was made about him. Pat was asked to appear in it, and, judging from the film outtakes, she gave her usual performance before a camera as the mute and rebellious heroine of a hostage video. She managed to indicate that she “didn’t know David Streiff very well” and then, taking offence at a question, abruptly refused to go on being filmed.45

  In her thirtieth cahier, shortly after separating from Caroline Besterman in 1968, Pat had written: “To live alone, to feel occasional depression. Much of the difficulty is from not having another person around for whom one puts on a slight show—dressing nicely, presenting a pleasant expression. The trick, the sometimes difficult trick is to maintain one’s morale without the other person, the mirror.” 46

  In Switzerland, Pat had found a supportive publisher and world representative in Daniel Keel and Diogenes, a German-speaking public eager for her work, and not one single person, really, for whom she could perform her “self.” The “difficult trick” she spoke of—that of maintaining her morale without the presence of another like-minded person (well, perhaps not exactly “another person” Pat’s definition of “the other” is also Narcissus’s, i.e., a “mirror”)—was something she never mastered.

  Settled in her stone house in Aurigeno in the world’s most pristine country (and continuing to remark on how “clean” Switzerland was), Pat just naturally found her mind turning to images of cancer, toxic waste, the effects of radiation, poison, rape, torture, and the horrors of nuclear war.

  Not that her imagination hadn’t turned to these entertainments before. Even in her first novel, Strangers on a Train, the architect Guy Haines, in a series of thoughts that leads to the inevitable conclusion (“There’s also a person exactly the opposite of you, like the unseen part of you, somewhere in the world, and he waits in ambush”),47 starts with the notion that the “splitting of the atom was the only true destruction, the breaking of the universal law of oneness…. Perhaps God and the Devil danced hand in hand around every single electron!” 48 And The Price of Salt, with its references to bomb shelters and young physicists, is as casually shadowed by the atom bomb as any American novel of the 1950s: an era when all North American schoolchildren were subject to special drills during which (to the sound of a buzzer/bell like the alarm in Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days) they learned to dive under their desks to take shelter from the shower of splitting atoms that—any minute now—would be coming their way from Moscow.

  Pat’s notebooks in France throughout the 1970s wince at the world’s wastage, and are punctuated by her eccentric plans for improving life on earth. The st
ory collections which resulted from her comparatively happy occupancy of the house by the Loing Canal at 22 rue de la Boissière in Moncourt (Little Tales of Misogyny [1974], The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder [1975], Slowly, Slowly in the Wind [1979], The Black House [1981 in England, 1988 in the United States]) had already begun to throb with both a personal, character-based malice and with the kind of disasters that destroy small ecologies and little institutions: a vengeful pond, killer ferrets, abusive parents, a subtly toxic network of liberal friends, and a skyscraper permanently infested with pests.

  “The Terrors of Basket-Weaving,” the best story in The Black House and one of Pat’s more evocative tales, extends the situation of a middle-class, well-employed, childless-by-choice press relations officer into something larger: a study of the dangers of creation itself. Diane Clarke, with puzzling precision and inexplicable historical accuracy, repairs a damaged basket she finds on a beach with an ability she didn’t know she had. She is increasingly frightened by this “hidden talent” which she cannot explain. “What she felt was most certainly not guilt, though it was similarly troubling and unpleasant…. Diane felt she had lost herself.” 49 Soon, she asks for a leave of absence from work, and is feeling “as if a lot of other people were inside me besides myself.”50 She ends by destroying the basket, and is “no happier” after doing so. “For a week, she realized, she had grasped something, and then she had deliberately thrown it away.”51 The act of creation has permanently disturbed her life, just as “The Terrors of Basket-Weaving” permanently disturbs our idea of what “making something” means to an artist.

  “Please Don’t Shoot the Trees,” a story written in 1976–77 and included in Slowly, Slowly in the Wind, is another example of the way Pat’s mind was beginning to turn from the cracks in character to the crises in the cosmos. It is marked by its sneering tone, its prairie-flat prose, its comic book science—but also by its deeply discomfiting prescience. Nature, Pat imagined in her notes, “revolts—at its rape, at its reversed rivers and cut down trees—and erupts in volcanoes, collapses in earthquakes, everywhere gobbling, burning, crushing people.”52 The United States has been partitioned into “big fortresses,” the great cities are “unsupervised prisons of the poor and the black…. New York and San Francisco [are] dirty words,” and all the trees are shooting out inflammable sap—something like napalm—at the human inhabitants of earth.