The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  Pat had, first of all, aplastic anemia, which meant that her bone marrow had “gone to sleep” it wasn’t producing the “haemoglobin and thrombocytes” her blood needed to regenerate itself. (She continued to hope her bone marrow would “wake up” and “swing back into action.”)40 Second, a lung and one of her adrenal glands were pocked and pitted with small, presumptively cancerous, tumors, too tiny to be surgically removed. And the modern poisons medical science was prescribing as treatment for the tumors—chemotherapy and radiation—couldn’t be used without further endangering her degraded bone marrow. It was the classic Highsmith theme made flesh: the Alter Ego, the Evil Twin, the inner civil war. “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,” Patricia had written in Strangers on a Train. Suddenly, something very like that ambush had just been sprung on its author.

  Pat’s work and life had always been the product of an irreconcilably divided mind, and now her dying was to be the result of two incompatibly treatable diseases. It was a finish she could have written for herself, as grotesquely ironic as it was appallingly suitable.

  While she was in Basel, Pat had been given a short, intensive course of drugs to prevent her body from attacking its own bone marrow and to stimulate the production of new blood cells. Then she was returned home to Tegna, where her kind neighbors alternated in driving her to Locarno for the transfusions her condition required, and a young nurse came to her house twice a week to test her blood. What she couldn’t bear was the wasting of her days, and she wrote to Bettina Berch that she felt leashed to the hospital “as if I were a dog” and that her illness had “cost me more time than I care to think about.” 41

  By the spring of 1994, it was obvious that Pat shouldn’t continue living alone in the house; she needed regular chauffeuring to her blood treatments and some kind of surveillance at home. Naturally, she wasn’t willing to pay for it. Bruno Sager, who had been an orchestra and theater consultant in Zurich but was now between jobs and newly divorced, had a daughter who worked for Diogenes. And so it was through Diogenes that Sager was suggested as a possible companion for Patricia Highsmith as her health declined. Sager came to the Casa Highsmith at the end of May, successfully passed whatever laser, radar, and X-ray tests Pat applied to him—“when she knew I was sent by Diogenes and that I knew Daniel Keel, that was reference enough,” he says—and moved into one part of the pitchfork-shaped Casa Highsmith sometime between the seventh and the tenth of June 1994, while Pat went on occupying the other part: her part. Pat paid Sager 400 Swiss francs (less than $225) a month; but he didn’t come for the money. After six months with Pat, he left to join a monastery.

  “No,” said Bruno Sager, smiling, “she didn’t drive me into the monastery.” He was already a religious man, thinking about joining a monastery before he met Pat; Pat knew this, and the Highsmith house was Sager’s preparation for spiritual seclusion. She told him that she wasn’t used to living with anyone, that it might be difficult. She had two or three phones in the house, but only one line: “she wouldn’t pay for another one.” The first night he was there, Pat cooked a “huge piece of roast beef” to “welcome” him, but she left it “two hours too long in the oven,” and then, he says, “for the next week, it was my duty to finish that roast beef.” After that, Sager, “a passionate cook,” did most of the cooking. And Pat ate a little.

  Sager also did the shopping for the house as well, and Pat made him advance his own money for all the groceries, scrutinizing every bill carefully to make sure he’d bought the best bargains.

  Their conversation was limited to small talk, to music—about which they could agree—and to family matters—his family matters, since Pat, as always, was fascinated by other people’s families. When his daughter and then his son came to dinner, Pat was “a perfect hostess.” She didn’t have many visitors: Ingeborg Moelich, a “sunny person,” came by often, the Hubers were intermittently next door, the Keels came a couple of times from Zurich, and Vivien De Bernardi was a very occasional visitor. Pat had no guests to stay overnight in the house during the time Sager was there, but she had frequent telephone conversations with Kingsley, whom she described as “my best friend.” Sager couldn’t discuss politics with Pat because “her politics were very extreme, based on certain prejudices, not on analysis.” He found that he couldn’t discuss religion either, but from their conversations, he concluded that Pat “was one of these persons searching for some kind of god or soul but she never could stand the cages of Catholicism or any of the other religions. She was not an atheist, not at all.” 42

  About all her editors, except for Daniel Keel, “she was vicious. ‘Oh, he’s a Jew, you know, he’s a Jew,’ she would say about them.” And she put up a huge fence to screen out her dog-owning Italian neighbors on the other side of her house.

  Sometimes, Sager says, Pat would walk “around the house with a ferocious look on her face.” When he first came to Casa Highsmith, he thought she must always be angry, but later on, he thought simply: “If she’s not conscious, this is how her face looks.” But there were moments when her “young face came through, when her youth came through. Maybe when she was watching the videos of her novels. Then, like a flower, she could open.” 43

  They got on well, Sager says, and he “felt fond of her.”

  “I didn’t want to be her servant…. I was living with her, I did more than I had to, but I was enjoying myself, I had my pleasures in doing a good job—and I did it for myself as well.” 44

  It was probably the best way to live with Pat.

  When Sager arrived in June, “the garden was a terrible mess, it was never mowed, she wouldn’t employ a gardener—too expensive.” So on the Monday after he settled in, he started to do the gardening. It wasn’t part of his job description; he just did it. Eventually he was even able to persuade Pat to allow him to water the dead lawn, brown as a hall carpet by now because she hadn’t wanted to pay the water bill. But when she saw the lawn turn green under his care, she agreed to a little lawn care. She still loved the snails in her garden, allowing herself to be photographed with them for a magazine feature one day when Charlotte, the cat, who was supposed to be the companion animal in the article, intuited two hours before the photographers arrived that they were coming—and ran away for four days. And Pat liked the many little spiders crawling about in her house, always asking Sager to carry them outside, rather than kill them.

  But she didn’t seem to care much for Charlotte, her unpedigreed, orange “barn cat” and last living animal companion. Charlotte continued to remind Pat of a “dog.”

  “She wasn’t affectionate with the cat. But she wanted always to know where she was: ‘Did you feed the cat?’ She wasn’t very nice to Charlotte but the cat was still important to her. Like a family member, I imagine, with whom perhaps she didn’t get on very well, but she was still concerned with her welfare.” 45

  Sager gave Pat notice that he’d been accepted to a monastery about a month before he left. In the meantime, Anna Keel had found “a young Spanish girl of good family” (the parents were doctors; the girl was twenty) to go and stay with Pat after Sager had gone. It wasn’t a happy idea. The girl was in Pat’s house for two weeks, from about 6 December to just before Christmas. She told Anna Keel that she was too scared to leave her room—scared, perhaps, that Pat might have had designs on her. The girl left Pat’s house before Christmas “for vacation”—and she never came back.46

  When Bruno Sager had first arrived at Casa Highsmith, Pat didn’t tell him what was wrong with her. It seemed to him that she “didn’t look sick, she just looked very fragile” she was “a string bean.” By his last month in the house, November 1994, Pat was looking “extremely unwell.” 47 When he heard about her death, his first thought was that if he’d stayed a little longer, she might have lived a little longer. He came from his monastery in March to go to her memorial service.

  Pat was weak, she was terribly tire
d, but still she travelled to Paris in November of 1994 for three days (the twenty-third to the twenty-fifth) for a celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of Le Nouvel Observateur (she had been one of the authors asked to describe an “ordinary day” in an April 1994 issue devoted to prominent people) and to do some prepublication interviews for Small g. She asked a part-time neighbor in Tegna, a wealthy, gay male from South Africa, Bee Loggenberg—a man she enjoyed, “flamboyant” and “funny,” says Sager—to accompany her as minder. But when Jean-Étienne Cohen-Séat of Calmann-Lévy invited her to come back to Paris in 1995 for the official publication of Small g, she wrote to him regretfully that she hesitated “to make plans” now because she “hadn’t the strength I had a year ago.” 48 A year ago, she’d only thought she was dying.

  Pat was put up in comfort at the Paris Ritz, in her favorite room at the back of the hotel. And it was there that her new editor at Calmann-Lévy, Patrice Hoffman, first met her. He was, he says, beyond excitement to be meeting this woman who “was a myth in the company.” By late 1993, Hoffman had received the final version of Small g, and he and François Rossot—“a great translator”—sat down to read it carefully.

  I was so honored as a young editor to have this manuscript, but then when I saw it…To tell you the truth, we were rather disappointed by Small g. There was an ambiance bizarre like the ambiance in the best Highsmith books. In this she succeeded, but in nothing else…. I could sense a number of themes hiding behind this book [but] they just didn’t hang together…. [S]he kept her troubled characters, all this was interesting, but the dramaturgy was bad and the dialogue was worse. We worked for almost a year on the translation, François has a très belle plume, we tried to cut the redundancies and to raise the level of the dialogue. Much was trimmed, much was elevated, [François] did a parallel work…. Of course, I wondered if any other of her other [translated] books had been “improved.” 49

  But Small g, Hoffman felt, was an exception: “She had been sick for so long.”

  When the novel was published in France the month after Pat’s death, it sold fifty thousand copies “because,” says Hoffman, “it was Highsmith, the myth. She had incredible reviews; there must have been fifty articles and none of them was negative…. She benefitted even from her death.”

  The best part about the novel for Hoffman was that “it brought me the good fortune of meeting Highsmith before she died.” He was with Pat “two times at the Ritz bar and then…in discussion for an hour or an hour and a half.” And he was in her room for half an hour before the journalists came. Pat “was continually spitting into a handkerchief,” and he marvelled at her determination.

  “Dying, she came for her publicity…. She seemed totally exhausted, but she had a way of looking that was very direct, a judging eye, an inquisitor. It was very impressive…. [S]he sized me up so acutely. She was a fascinating woman, like a snake fascinating her prey.”50

  It was Pat’s last public performance as a writer.

  But on the inside back cover of the last notebook in which she made entries, Cahier 37, Pat left the ghost of a hint for a future performance she was thinking about. Still playing with oppositions, still imagining a life for the character who had meant so much to her since he’d walked into her imagination on a beach in Positano all those years ago, Pat wrote down two new titles for a novel about the talented Mr. Ripley. One of those titles was Ripley’s Luck. The other one was Ripley and the Voices of the Dead. It was the second title that Pat crossed out.

  • 41 •

  The Cake that was Shaped Like a Coffin

  Part 8

  The “first mysterious check” from Pat to Yaddo—nearly thirty thousand dollars—arrived from her Swiss bank without her name on it in July of 1994. The letter sent by the bank said simply “on behalf of our client.” The client wasn’t named. The second one—a check for three hundred thousand dollars—came from the same place five months later with the same message, “on behalf of our client,” and Mike Sundell had to look at the number several times to reassure himself that he wasn’t adding a few zeros to it in his mind. He and Don Rice figured out that it must have come from Pat and arranged a conference call with her in Tegna as soon as they could. Pat acknowledged the check, but didn’t want to talk about it over the phone with Mike Sundell. “She thought she was getting money to Yaddo that she could avoid being taxed on. It was all very mysterious and foolish, really, but she was perfectly happy to talk about it later.”1

  When Sundell consulted with Pat about how to use the money, they decided that half of it should go into an annual fellowship at Yaddo for young novelists, and “she got the idea in her head that her birth name should be used. And so it’s called the Patricia Highsmith-Plangman Residency at Yaddo. Pat thought her father would have liked that.”2

  But Pat’s machinations in life were rarely as successful as they were in art, and in the past she had often found herself hoist on her own petard. And so it is not surprising that Donald Rice was left with a curious feeling about Pat’s estate: a lingering afterimage of other secrets hiding behind the secrets Pat revealed. In one way or another, it is an impression by which everyone who knew Patricia Highsmith is haunted.

  Rice’s sense was that the people responsible for administering Pat’s estate

  to this day, do not know whether we know all the [bank] accounts she may have had…. [M]y friend Mr. Volcker [Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, a law partner of Donald Rice] has been very actively involved in dealing with claims of Holocaust victims and we’ve learned a tremendous amount about the Swiss banking system. There is no law of escheat in the Swiss provinces. [When account holders die, Swiss banks] just take the unclaimed accounts into their capital. So I have no idea whether we or anyone knows the full extent. I don’t think Pat would have dealt with just one bank.*

  And the irony to me in all this—and this is a point I made to Pat on many occasions—she was a great shopper for legal and accounting advice. And the various machinations she might have been thinking of when administered by honest people were not going to be able to accomplish the tax avoidance she had hoped for [by moving to Switzerland]…. In Switzerland she was subject to substantial estate taxes. Whereas by living in the U.S. and temporarily sojourning in Switzerland, without being domiciled in Switzerland, there would have been no taxes to pay.

  None.3

  Even former friends who were angry with her and current friends who had been sorely tested knew the sack of sorrows Pat woke up to every day. They were as moved by her physical fragility—just skin and bone at the end—as they were pained by the way she’d wrapped up her psychological fragility in anger and glazed it with alcohol. Marylin Scowden says, “The hurt person is what I remember, my heart goes out to her still. I think she must always have been in pain.” Anna Keel remembers Pat’s “fou rire,” her wild laughter, like that of a “twelve-year-old child who couldn’t stop giggling,” and thinks that although “she could be unjust with people in life, she was never unjust in her books.” (I, on the other hand, find Highsmith’s pursuit of personal vengeance in her work—a kind of literary vigilantism—one of her more beguiling traits.) Daniel Keel recalls Pat blushing like a child if you intimated she was doing something wrong. She was pudique, he says—and firmly believes in her “genius,” the kind of genius that coerces her readers into the world of her fictions: “She’s one of the rare authors of whom I have read every single word.” 4

  Most of Pat’s Swiss neighbors—as long as they didn’t get too close (and Bert Diener, who had been in the airlines business, used his knowledge of human spatial limitations on airplanes in his dealings with Pat)—say they found something touching about Patricia, a “sort of yearning for affection even though she wasn’t open to it.”5 They were attached to her, they made great exceptions for her, they prized their association with her, and her mysteriousness continued to intrigue as much as it frustrated. “I’m still missing Pat and thinking about her and figuring he
r out,” says her neighbor Vivien De Bernardi; while Bert Diener and Julia Diener-Diethelm, whose discretion Pat appreciated so much that it was to them in Zurich, and not to her much nearer neighbors in the Ticino, that she’d telephoned in distress three days before her death (they packed their bags and drove straight down to help her into the hospital), say simply: “We really loved her.”6

  But the longer Pat is dead, the more her Swiss, French, and German friends reflect on what was going on under the behavior they had observed so silently. Success, of course, provides its own hedge against honest response, and Pat’s réclame in Europe was as much an element in the way her worst behavior remained unchallenged as it was an alluring “fact” that drew people to her. Anne Morneweg, who first met Pat at the Berlin Film Festival in 1978, who was a guest at her houses in Moncourt, Aurigeno, and Tegna, and for whom Pat “was a very pleasant, very beloved friend,” says: “We were all cowards about her anti-Semitism. We didn’t speak with her about it [because] we were siderés, flabbergasted, by it. We put it down to the fact that she was older and sick. It didn’t show so much earlier.”7 Pat managed to keep most of her later friends (and many of her earlier ones) in separate compartments, as though she’d filed them in the pigeonholes of her big rolltop desk. There would never be any danger of consensus.

  Marylin Scowden, left alone in Pat’s house just after Pat’s death with Pat’s cat Charlotte, who wouldn’t stop crying—“I felt it was possible the cat knew,” Scowden says—was under the impression that Pat had no friends. “Hardly any. But I was AMAZED at the number of people who assembled. Within an hour [after her death was announced] there were about eight people [most of whom barely knew each other]. I was amazed at how she had done that, kept everyone apart like that.”8