The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  Buffie dutifully took Pat sightseeing, and on the third day after Pat’s arrival, Pat and Buffie were chauffeured to Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton’s palatial house for a private tour. Pat, whose observation was sharpened by the foreignness of Tangier (and by the parts of it that reminded her of Hammamet), recorded that the walls of the Hutton house were composed of “squares of white stone, about 6 × 6 inches, hand-carved with filigree, all identical. It is said that 1,000 workmen worked here at the same time.” She noted that Miss Hutton had her initials—“B.H.”—tiled into the bottom of the swimming pool; then they went on to visit financier Malcolm Forbes’s Museum of Toy Soldiers. Pat drank cocktails at the El Minzah Hotel (and spent a lot of time looking for places where she could drink beer), and noted that the water supply in Tangier was cut off at 3:00 P.M. every day and that the city and its services had decayed considerably “since the French left”—all observations that would turn up in Ripley Under Water, along with the Bay of Tangier, the weather, and bits of local color like this description of a café that Pat tucked into her cahier: “Home notes: La Haffa, the Hole, on the ocean, a tea-café, arcades, where one can smoke kif, recline on mats, be semi-private. Stone steps downward, and mind how you go.”6

  Pat couldn’t look at a flight of stairs without imagining someone falling down them.

  During the time Pat was staying with Buffie, Paul Bowles, whose apartment was a favorite stop for writers passing through Tangier, was visited by the novelist and critic Edmund White, who had come to interview Paul for Vogue magazine and to gather information for his acclaimed biography of Jean Genet. White carried away with him a fleeting impression of Pat.

  Patricia, Edmund White remembered, “was perfectly pleasant, although bloated, naturally,” from what he assumed to be “alcohol”—and she was “not entirely sober.” Paul Bowles was as “elegant” as always, but “out of it” because he smoked kif from morning till night.7 Withdrawal had always been Bowles’s style, and in his essay about Bowles, White quoted Jane Bowles’s description of her husband: “There’s a disconnection. Even if he’s on the same floor, he’s in a different room.”8 Gavin Lambert, the British-born screenwriter, novelist, and biographer, a close friend of Bowles who was then living in Tangier, was much in evidence: he dropped in on Buffie and Pat, and went to dinner with them. And he told Paul Bowles some stories about Buffie’s second husband which Bowles relayed to a very interested Pat.

  Buffie, nervously preparing for the publication of her book about goddess history, thought Pat “had by then the look of someone no longer enjoying life.” She said she’d never accepted Pat’s invitations to visit her in Moncourt (she’d known Pat’s next-door neighbor Desmond Ryan from London) or in Switzerland (where she’d lived while meeting with Carl Jung) because “over the years I felt Pat had grown increasingly detached and though I did not understand why, I began to feel uncomfortable in her company.” “Pat,” she also said, “tried very hard to be a good houseguest,” but the gift of good guesthood just wasn’t in her personality.

  Meanwhile Pat, fixing on Buffie’s apparent self-absorption, had a few complaints of her own. When she got back to Aurigeno, she wrote in her notebook: “What am I to make of B.J.?…I was slowly but surely disturbed by her. She is slow in reacting, speaking, obsessed by pill-taking; walk-taking, self…But she is not over the self absorption; what Merck [the Merck Manual] mentions as syndrome of Alzheimer’s.”9

  The trip to Tangier—one of many escapes she was to make from Aurigeno—did its job, and in the two weeks before she went off to Hamburg, Pat took copious notes which she used in her “5th [and final] Ripley”: Ripley Under Water. Later, her notes would include, as they often did for other Ripley novels,10 the kind of music that might inspire Ripley in his crimes: “Rachmaninof’s 3rd Piano Concerto. Exuberantly beautiful and strong. Not so sad as #2. Tom would like the 3rd.”11 She also wrote to Kingsley, asking her to find another copy of Karl Menninger’s book The Human Mind, with its case histories of deviation. She could use it, she thought, for Ripley Under Water, and she told Kingsley that she still found Menninger, the Freudian popularizer of her youth, “more inspiring to me than Jung.” Pat had just had an earful of Carl Jung from Buffie Johnson.12

  Shortly after she returned from Tangier, Pat was visited by a young German filmmaker, Peter Goedel, who wanted to make a film of The Tremor of Forgery. Goedel had the usual years-long, complicated correspondence with both Pat and Diogenes about acquiring the rights to make a feature film of the novel. He got something less than he bargained for—and something more, too.

  When Goedel first called Diogenes about The Tremor of Forgery, he was instructed to send a précis of his intentions and told that the important thing was what Highsmith would think of his proposal. After his proposal was submitted, he was informed that Patricia wanted to meet him personally, and he was given the means to contact her. He dialed her number in Aurigeno nervously and Pat gave him directions to her house. “She never gave an address but just said things like: there’s an old fountain in the center of town and to the left of it is an old farmhouse and there’s a little green door in the farmhouse and if you knock I’ll open it.”13

  “It was like a fairy tale,” says Goedel, and, like a character in a fairy tale, he was to have three meetings with Patricia Highsmith. This first meeting, at her house in Aurigeno, was the longest one. Her green door was very small indeed, and when Pat opened it Goedel saw a woman dressed in dark clothes, with a little osteoporotic hump on her back, and a cat threading the space between her feet. The house was very dark with small windows, “kind of a mess, really,” with her sculptures and work tools scattered hither and yon. Goedel felt as though he were entering “the house of a witch.”

  It was ten o’clock in the morning when he arrived, and there were many empty beer bottles around, big ones—bottles that had once contained the cheap Swiss beer Kalenda. (Whichever state, province, or country Pat lived in, she always managed to find and consume its cheapest native beer.) Pat asked Goedel what he wanted to drink. “Coffee,” he said, and thought right away that he’d made a mistake. So he finished the coffee quickly and asked for a beer and she was very happy to drink beer with him at ten in the morning. It seemed to “put her at her ease.”

  They had a “great conversation,” Goedel says, although Pat never spoke about herself but rather about the trip she’d taken to Tangier “to see Paul Bowles [she didn’t mention Buffie Johnson],” by whom she was “very impressed.” She had photos of the trip and of Paul Bowles and showed them proudly. In 1990, she would take them out again, along with Paul’s letters, to show to Richard Schroeder, the French photographer who managed to capture Pat in a pose of terrifying hostility in front of a wall hung with her saws and hammers. But it was Pat herself who had gleefully suggested the setting.14

  Pat’s force field of self-protection was very strong, says Peter Goedel. She was interested only in the matter before them: what he intended to do with her novel. She sat hunched over, balled up, with one leg crossed over the other, her body in a defensive position, looking up at him from her lowered head through her hair and eyebrows. “She absolutely fixed you with her gaze, you couldn’t avoid it, you were trapped in it,” says Goeddel.

  After three hours of Pat wanting to know his ideas of how he would write and film The Tremor of Forgery, Goedel was exhausted. He’d had too many unaccustomed morning beers; he was drunk, and he was happy to leave. It was, he says, “too much.”

  When Goedel had finished his script and sent it to Pat, a letter came from Pat saying it was fine, she liked it; then three days later, another letter came saying she had showed it to a friend of hers, the woman thought the script was horrible, and Pat was withdrawing permission. They went back and forth for two years, and he thinks she was waiting for a more famous director to make the film. She was: at the end of 1988, the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar had expressed interest in buying the book for a feature film.15 Pat, who had to be told who Almodóvar wa
s, quickly decided that she liked him.

  Goedel, still anxious to make his film, tracked Pat down at the Bayreuth Festival in the summer of 1989. He met her in her hotel for a quarter of an hour. It was an old, small, dark hotel, they met in the lobby, and this second meeting was a repetition of the first meeting. Pat was dressed appropriately but in somber colors, the room was dark, and she was again evasive: “Oh, I don’t know, something to think about, I’m thinking about it…”, etc., etc. The script in its current form was making her angry, she wrote to Monique Buffet; she didn’t really want to give the film rights to him.

  While he waited out several months without any news, Goedel got a German producer involved, they had a meeting with Daniel Keel, and Goedel was advanced on to his third and final meeting with Patricia, who had by now moved into her house in Tegna.

  The house appeared to Goedel as it appeared to everyone: windowless. But then he saw that the windows were high up between the walls and the ceiling so that light could come in but no gaze could intrude. The feeling of the house was very different from their last two meeting places—white walls and ceilings and a much lighter atmosphere. Pat herself, however, was the same, her manner unchanged. They were there for an hour or so and Pat kept saying: “I have to speak to Daniel about this.” And Daniel Keel had said: “I have to speak to Patricia about this.” The German producer didn’t do well with Pat because he refused to drink beer in the morning.

  Finally, Goedel got a call from Diogenes saying that Pat had agreed to his film, but only for the TV rights, not as a feature film. (In fact, it was Daniel Keel’s idea.) Goedel was unhappy at the evaporation of his hopes for a feature film but decided to go ahead with a television film anyway. Pat had many suggestions for his new teleplay and she presented them in her typical list form: 1, 2, 3, 4. “They were very detailed and they were good,” he says.

  When Goedel went to Tunis to film his script, he kept looking for a bungalow hotel in which to set the action, and in Hammamet he finally found one that was closed. When he contacted the owners, it turned out that he had found the very place where Patricia had stayed with Elizabeth Lyne in the summer of 1966 when she was taking her notes for The Tremor of Forgery. Goedel was amazed: Pat’s descriptions in the book had been so accurate that he’d been able, unconsciously, to select the exact place she had described. The owners remembered Pat, as did the owner of the restaurant in Hammamet—Ashua (Melik’s in The Tremor of Forgery)—where she and Mme Lyne as well as the protagonist of The Tremor of Forgery, Howard Ingham, had gone every night for dinner during their stay in Hammamet.

  When Pat finally saw Goedel’s television film in the summer of 1993, she sent him a perfectly characteristic postcard. She objected, she wrote, to Howard Ingham’s belt and shoes.16 They were wrong for him. But she had never liked Goedel’s decision to change Ingham’s profession from writer to archaeologist, and—a recurrent theme in her letters to other people—she hated the fact that Goedel was using her title, The Tremor of Forgery (his final title was Trip to Tunis), for the film after she had asked him not to.

  • 38 •

  The Cake that was Shaped Like a Coffin

  Part 5

  Although Pat was revisiting all her old themes in Switzerland, her notes and her published fictions continued to favor only half of her customary double obsession with love and murder. (It wasn’t the love half.) Now her notes were without many of the references she had used to anchor herself to her American past. And her “nightlife” was confined to the theater of dreams she was staging for herself as she slept. Many of these dreams, fueled by fears for her health and apprehensions about the medical operations she was beginning to have, were taking place on or near railway stations. They had more violence and less sex in them than ever. Here are a few of them:

  Pat is with two women on a train, and she’s suddenly stabbed by an attacker. She rushes to board a boat. She recites to her two women companions the statistics of how much deeper the stab wound would have had to be to penetrate her lung, and says she feels no pain.1

  She’s dining in a restaurant with Tanja Howarth, her Diogenes agent in London, and Howarth returns from the ladies’ room with one of her wrists slashed and bleeding.2

  Pat sees a “Spanish type young man” who stares her straight in the face and says: “I have no heart.” She looks hard at his chest and sees that in place of his heart is only “an X-form of crossing blood vessels.” His heart has been crossed out.3

  Pat runs into Tabea Blumenschein on a railway train “disguised as an 18 yr. old male tough” who is “fond” of a very young male urchin. The urchin confronts Pat holding a shield “in a hostile manner.” Pat has to “hit at the fingers of his right hand several times, till they are bleeding, and he is staggering, before he drops the shield and is defeated. It is a close thing.” She exits this dream down a jagged metal staircase which has a section missing.4

  Pat is in a “busy hotel” and wants to ring up a girl whose name she can’t remember, a most attractive girl who has invited her to lie down with her on a bed and rest. But Pat has to “take care” of some journalists first and watches a clock creeping towards some sort of deadline with the girl. She misses the deadline, she misses the girl, and she still can’t remember the girl’s name: “I feel a loss and am unhappy.”5

  And it is here in Switzerland where Pat had her graphic dream about Mother Mary “in Lady Macbeth murderous mood,” cutting off Tabea Blumenschein’s head and coating it “thoroughly” with transparent wax.6

  The double identity—so crucial to all Pat’s work and to all the characters who inhabited her—was collapsing into a single self. Sex and love, God and the Devil dancing hand and hand around that electron in Strangers on a Train, were no longer present to balance out her inclination to violence. She began, visibly, to shrink; the hunch in her shoulders and the dowager’s hump on her back were remarked on by many people. Her references to the sex lives of others coarsened: she seemed furious that her attentive friend Ingeborg Moelich’s “artistic, angelic-looking” daughter had a long-term boyfriend, referring to the man vulgarly and often as the young woman’s “latest lay.”7 Her “5th Ripley” book, the final Ripley, Ripley Under Water, finished in 1990—a sour, thin, but still recognizably Ripleyan effort—was focused, she hoped, more graphically on the power relations that had always fascinated her. “Ripley Under Water is my S&M novel,” she wrote to Kingsley in September of 1990.

  In her letter to Kingsley, Pat also included some unconsciously funny advice to her goddaughter, Kingsley’s daughter, gleaned from Pat’s own, more or less S&M history of pursuing women: “Tell her: ‘Men like to do their own chasing. Not only like it, they do it—or else!’”8 “It’s okay to give them the eye, slightly, but due to Elby’s genuine interest in Their Work, her interest becomes too heavy.”9 Pat’s advice to the lovelorn was usually offered from the male chauvinist’s point of view. By now, it was a view many male chauvinists would have been embarrassed to own up to.

  Despite what Pat wrote to Kingsley (and said to Peter Huber, who says she queried him as a literature professor and a Freudian about sadomasochism), Ripley Under Water makes only the vaguest intimations of marital abuse between the Pritchards, the two unappealing married strangers who shadow Ripley with the intent of exposing him. Pat was still moving sideways, allusively, and with evident embarrassment. Although she was under the impression that she had directly taken on the fetish of sadomasochism in the novel, Ripley Under Water is more (and more characteristically) a matter of the class challenge that the ill-dressed, badly equipped, and unattractive David Pritchard flings at Thomas Ripley’s assumed identity as a gentleman of the manor.

  Pritchard, rather like Don Wilson, the bad crime novelist in Deep Water who enviously dogs the trust-funded Vic Van Allen, takes an instant dislike to Ripley in an airport because of Ripley’s beautiful clothes. He determines to expose him as the murderer of Murchison (the art collector Ripley murdered with a bottle of vintage Bordeaux in Ripley
Under Ground) and calls Ripley a “snob crook” to his face. Ripley, who kicks Pritchard in the crotch (Pat demurely referred to it as Pritchard’s “middle”), despises Pritchard’s crass self-presentation, his clothes, and his furniture. In an ending which reads like an unintentional parody, Pritchard and his wife drown in the shallow pond behind their house after being interrupted in an S&M romp. Ripley laughs happily as he listens to their cries for help.

  From Aurigeno in 1987, Pat, never comfortable with the way her work was treated on film, had written about her initial displeasure with Wim Wenders’s Ripley film, The American Friend: “I was so-so happy with the Wenders film, and I did not like the ending with Ripley laughing at a burning car. Wenders quite changed Ripley into a modern no-boundary pot-smoking type as you saw.”10

  Now, in 1990, Pat’s “own” Ripley was laughing uncontrollably as he listened to his enemies drown noisily in their pond. But Pat had been a fan of inappropriate laughter ever since she’d written “Quiet Night” at Barnard, and then, in the summer of 1948 while working on Strangers on a Train at Yaddo, had pasted a newspaper picture of the grinning young killer Robert Murl Daniels in her seventeenth cahier and written the name “Bruno” beneath it. Like their author, many of Pat’s protagonists were guilty of a grin in the wrong place or a giggle at a bad moment. “Hurrah for maniacal laughter,” Pat had written in 1970. “People who don’t like it label it empty. Tant pis.”11 Tom Ripley’s intense absorption of whatever was obsessing Pat would always make him something of a cracked mirror for his creator’s urges. As Pat’s own inner wars began to exhaust her, as she was drawn more and more to the surface of her psychology, Ripley, too, began to dwindle to a kind of shorthand notation for the complex and fascinating character she had launched in The Talented Mr. Ripley. But Ripley manages to remain Ripleyan still. Even in his feeblest and most uncongenial appearance, Ripley Under Water, he compels us to prefer him to the unstylish forces of justice.