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Les Girls

Part 5

Pat once said that Ripley was a name she saw on a sign advertising men’s apparel on the Henry Hudson Parkway. And this is true: in the 1940s and 1950s, Ripley’s was a men’s clothing store in Manhattan on Fifth Avenue. But it is also false: a convenient billboard wasn’t the only origin of Tom Ripley’s name.

“Comics,” Pat wrote to Kingsley in March of 1953, one year before she started imagining Tom Ripley, “I was determined when I started, were not going to influence my writing. I still believe they haven’t. On the contrary, I might have benefitted more than I did from their stupid but tight plotting.”¹ Unwilling to acknowledge influences from popular culture, but always ready to confess to anything that ruffled the surface of her intentions, Pat hid the origin of Ripley’s name in one of her favorite places—her work. She put it into The Talented Mr. Ripley and allowed Ripley himself to give the secret away, casually, as a play on a phrase that every newspaper reader in America would know.^*

Tom Ripley has already murdered Dickie Greenleaf and slipped providentially into Dickie’s name and identity. He is in Rome and is on the verge of being prosecuted for having murdered “himself”: i.e., the Italian police are now looking for the “missing” Tom Ripley, and they suspect “Dickie Greenleaf” of being his possible murderer. Dickie’s “girlfriend” Marge has come to Rome from their village of Mongibello to look for Dickie, and she accosts Tom (who, actor that he is, has to switch back to impersonating his own character of “Tom Ripley”) just as Tom, in his role of “Dickie Greenleaf,” is trying to leave for Sicily. Tom tries to put Marge off with a quickly improvised lie.

“He laughed, his own unmistakable laugh that Marge knew well. ‘The thing is, I’m expecting somebody any minute. It’s a business interview. About a job. Believe it or not, old believe-it-or-not Ripley’s trying to put himself to work.’”²

Ripley’s Believe It or Not was (and still is) a renowned cartoon, a comics panel, created by Robert Ripley—an incredible figure himself: part commercial artist, part anthropologist, part real-life Superhero—for the New York Globe newspaper in 1918. Each illustrated panel of Ripley’s Believe It or Not tells in a dramatic sentence or two the story of a fantastic but true oddity, culled from a faraway place (or from the New York Public Library on Forty-second Street, where Robert Ripley had a researcher working full-time); and the cartoon itself was eventually syndicated to many American newspapers. By 1936, Robert Ripley was voted the most popular figure in the United States, eighty million Americans a year were reading Ripley’s Believe It or Not, and the phrase “believe it or not” had embedded itself in American household vernacular where it stayed right up through the 1960s. For a country still powered by the American Dream, Robert Ripley’s illustrated course in miracles was virtually required reading.

In 1931 Ripley’s Believe It or Not was syndicated in its “comics panel” form to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the newspaper Pat’s grandfather, father, and stepfather had all worked for, the paper Pat herself starting reading when she was still a four-year-old in drop-seat overalls in Fort Worth. An avid newspaper reader all her life, not to mention a dedicated clipper of articles, Pat would have seen the Ripley cartoon on her many trips back to Fort Worth.³ During the four months she spent in Fort Worth just before she began to write The Talented Mr. Ripley, she was reading the Fort Worth Star-Telegram every day, complaining about its “biased” news coverage, and giving an interview to one of its reporters.⁴

Although the Republican-leaning newspaper Pat read in New York, the New York Herald Tribune, didn’t run the Ripley cartoon, it did make its own contribution to The Talented Mr. Ripley. In the middle of April 1953, Pat cut out an article from the Herald Tribune about a “substitute” murder and pasted it in her cahier. A man from St. Louis, the article said, was presumed dead when “his” burned body was found—and then promptly arrested for murder when someone saw him downing a beer after his own “funeral.”⁵

“Believe it…or not” is how Americans would have introduced this story of corpse-substitution to each other in conversation, inflecting the phrase ironically, like a quotation. Which, of course, is what it was: a quotation from a popular phrase in common parlance and countrywide distribution. Pat invoked this phrase when, joining it with the memory of a big billboard on the Henry Hudson Parkway and the love for newspapers which she associated with her earliest attempts to read, she took her favorite character’s surname from a source that had already provided her with so much unacknowledged inspiration: the comics.

Thomas Phelps Ripley, alive and kicking, would have made a fine subject for a Robert Ripley cartoon himself. “Believe it or not,” a petty grifter with homosexual “attachments” (Ripley is taken up in New York by a man who likes to “sponsor” young men, a character modeled on Myron Sanft, the man at whose Manhattan house Pat had her one and only meeting with Gore Vidal in the 1940s) and a latent talent for impersonation is chosen by a rich man to be the “ambassador” who will bring his prodigal son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from Europe. Instead of discharging his commission, Ripley, disappointed in his Alter Ego–like feelings for Dickie Greenleaf, murders Dickie and Dickie’s best friend, assumes Dickie’s identity and characteristics (and in the process forgets how to “play” himself), and then forges his way into inheriting both Dickie’s trust fund and Dickie’s superior attitude.

It’s a large part of Ripley’s indistinct charm and unadmitted sexuality that he begins his career by preferring to imitate the boy rather than being, in Noël Coward’s phrase, “mad about the boy”—and Ripley’s is the response of an actor preparing for his most rewarding role. The miraculous American “best” would only be just good enough for Tom Ripley from now on. And it’s an appropriate goal, too, for the American antihero whose name found its way into Pat Highsmith’s most American novel by the most American of means: advertising and a comic strip.

The American novel itself—apostrophized during this time as “the Great American Novel”—was a renewed subject for discussion in mid-twentieth-century American literary life. Many American writers were thinking about expressing the “soul” of their country in a, or in the, “Great American Novel.” (Although it would be a synaesthetic Russian aristocrat, Vladimir Nabokov, who did it most brilliantly in 1955 in his succès de scandale, Lolita.) Pat Highsmith, whose conversations about art were usually with herself, was no exception: she talked the subject over quite a bit in her notebooks for many years.

Leviathan! I should like to call my first book. It should be long and deep and wide and high. Thick and rich, too, like America….

I should have that peculiar early twentieth century spirit that moved our politicians and our people strangely…. I should have the dignity below all of us we never find ourselves. I should answer the question why America chooses to dwell on the surface [and] leave[s] the depths unexplored and vacant, stately chambers and halls of America, awaiting occupancy.⁶

Pat told Rosalind Constable, who approved her idea, that “the protagonist of the great American novel might not be on American soil.”⁷ Rosalind’s response was: “Do you want to write it?”⁸ But by the time she had this exchange with Rosalind in 1968, Pat had long since finished her version of the Great American Novel.

Like Henry James, whose The Ambassadors she was partly spoofing, Pat took her best thematic shot—it was an inadvertent one—at a great American novel by setting The Talented Mr. Ripley mostly in Europe. And she seemed to think better of Ripley the character than she did of Ripley the novel. “Good books write themselves, and this can be said from a small but successful book like Ripley to longer and greater works of literature,” she wrote modestly.⁹ Ripley, she thought, was popular because of the “insolence and audacity” of Ripley himself.¹⁰ She gave Ripley all the credit for the book’s success.¹¹

Pat was often modest, utilitarian, and bluntly practical in discussing her writing, e.g.: “I always say to…publishers who contemplate a reprint [of A Game for the Living], ‘This is my worst book, so please think twice before you buy it.’”¹² But for all her carpenter’s explanations in Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction of the practical ways to put a suspense novel together—the careful consulting of “germs,” the diagrams of falling and rising actions, the economical use of leftover scraps of emotional memory, the constant employment of builder’s tropes (“one has often to dovetail the difficulties so they fit and lock”)¹³—she was never able to judge her own writing very well. Thus, after 1970, The Talented Mr. Ripley does not usually appear on the short roster of works she tentatively ranked as her best.^* That roster, anyway, was composed of novels and short stories which couldn’t be cramped into the “suspense” category, and her changeable choices for favorites—like Edith’s Diary or The Tremor of Forgery—were often dictated by how the books had been reviewed or talked about in the press.

Pat’s often rough and unadorned prose (never more baldly so than in her little handbook on writing, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction) has not made it easy for her to be recognized outside the broadly based “suspense” or “crime writers” genre. In much of her work, the sentences plod along with the dull insistence of a headache. At her best, the metaphors incandesce with her obsessions, but at her worst she has to be read in what Roland Barthes called (in a discussion of the differences in reading nineteenth-century novels and “modern” novels) “two times,” two tempos, two separate reading speeds: one for her flat-footed prose style and the other for the wholly unsettling ground those flat feet are covering. The Austrian writer Peter Handke, a serious Highsmith fan, wrote that when reading Highsmith he felt himself to be “under the protection of a great writer” but he also felt that her “handicraft” was “a means of draining all attention away from the sentences and towards the odd and yet…unstylish…actions of the characters.”¹⁴

Still, a claim to one of the small allotments in the real estate of the Great American Novel must be made for The Talented Mr. Ripley—and it rests on the instability of Tom Ripley’s character (so like his creator’s) as well as on the Darwinian cruelty (so like his native country’s economic system) with which his narrative unfolds. Thomas P. Ripley has been observed by an author who is as ruthless—and as ruthlessly attached to the American Dream—as he is. When Pat Highsmith gave life to Ripley, she was exposing the black backside of her country’s Zeitgeist.

Pat always thought a lot about what it meant to be an American (and had just finished reading Tocqueville on the subject when she began to write Ripley). And she thought even more about what it meant to be an American in exile. But she had something less theoretical in mind than investigating the meanings of either of these categories while she was writing The Talented Mr. Ripley. “I did not turn loose of my main idea, which was of two young men with a certain resemblance—not much—one of whom kills the other and assumes his identity.” Once she’d settled on Tom’s traits, she found that his story unrolled in front of her like a well-paved road.

Pat began taking notes for Ripley (she was calling it “the Third Suspense Novel”) at the end of March 1954. She was making up a “young American, half homosexual, an indifferent painter” with a little income and the kind of innocuous look that would make him a good front for a smuggling gang. “At first, a harmless attractive-to-some, repellent-to-others kind of young man, he becomes a murderer, a killer for pleasure…. Like Bruno, he must never be quite queer—merely capable of playing the part…. His name should be Clifford, or David, Or Matthew…. Or Richard Greenleaf—the boy in the beach in Positano.” Appropriately, Pat began by conflating the identities of Tom and Dickie, starting with a description of both of them and attaching Dickie’s name to it.

And then, suddenly, her notes take off. She finds the name “Tom,” and the first thing she does is to dress Tom up in careful clothes—“costuming” would always be a crucial element for this daughter of a fashion illustrator—and then slip him into the grifting business: “bulldozing American tax payers into paying extra money for ‘miscalculations.’” All at once, Dickie Greenleaf’s Alter Ego clicks into place in two paragraphs of notes.

Tom…is the other, a perpetually frightened looking, vaguely handsome young man, who at the same time has the most ordinary forgettable face in the world. He resembles a well brought up, mediocre young man, who had received a number of sound whippings in his youth and had decided long ago that it would be better to conform.

But the exterior…was quite misleading. With the same half terrified, polite expression, he could swindle a thousand dollars out of his old Aunt Martha, who badly needed her capital, sitting there all alone in her house up in Massachusetts.

But it was Pat who was sitting all alone in a house “up in Massachusetts.” The Talented Mr. Ripley began—as Pat always put it—to “write itself” after she left Manhattan. Homeless now, and for the moment between all her messy, simultaneous, collusive, and faintly criminal relationships, Pat had plenty of interior material with which to occupy herself. In Manhattan, she had already begun to work on her novel Deep Water—those last battles with Ellen Hill had been as inspiring as ever—and she was liberally distributing her tastes and tendencies over its resident psychopath, Vic Van Allen.

Still, this “Third Suspense Novel” about Ripley was pressing on her imagination. As though in preparation for launching something unusual she decided to spend the summer where so many of America’s classic authors—Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Dickinson, Edith Wharton—had lived and worked: western Massachusetts.^* Pat’s chief reason for moving to the township of Lenox was probably the same one that led her to New York’s Upper East Side: snobbery. Lenox, Massachusetts, was a very good summer address.

The old Tappan estate in Lenox where Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote his Tanglewood Tales had been donated for public use by the Tappan family; the site was then named after Hawthorne’s “Tanglewood,” and the Boston Symphony Orchestra made Tanglewood its summer home from 1937 onwards, attracting to its concerts the old-money families and the theater people who had always summered in the beautiful Berkshire Hills. Tom Ripley, like Pat Highsmith, was an ardent pursuer of the dream of success, and Lenox, with its long literary history, its large summer estates, its familiarity with society, celebrities, and royalty (at one point three princesses lived in Lenox, two of them at the old Curtiss Hotel), was an appropriate place to embody that dream—reversed, of course—in a novel.¹⁵

Judith Conklin Peters, an eighty-eight-year-old retired librarian when I met her in 2002, was one of Lenox’s unofficial historians. Legally blind, she knew Lenox so well that she was able to give me an extended physical tour of the village, liberally illustrated with lively local anecdotes. For forty years, Mrs. Peters had been the assistant librarian at the Lenox Municipal Library. The library, in the former courthouse, had been bought and donated to the village of Lenox by one of the Schermerhorn women who summered in western Massachusetts. There were fifty thousand to seventy thousand books in the building by mid-century, and it was maintained by wealthy summer people “like a private home with beautiful furniture and an adjacent reading garden.” And that was how Pat Highsmith had been able to borrow the uncommon works she’d wanted to read when she was beginning to write Ripley—an 1835 edition of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and an Italian grammar book amongst them—from a library in a country village whose population was no more than five thousand people.¹⁶

Judy Peters was the assistant librarian at in the Lenox Library in the summer of 1954, the summer Pat lived in Lenox. She “remembered distinctly” the “businesslike” thirty-three-year-old writer coming in to borrow books. “A woman of medium height, rather slight with dark hair. Very much on her own, not interested in consulting with the librarians and very businesslike about what she wanted. She came in, got what she wanted and left. She didn’t socialize, unlike the other visitors to the library.”¹⁷

Mrs. Peters thought Pat must have begun her stay in Lenox at a boardinghouse called Garden Gables because that’s where all the “interesting people” stayed. Garden Gables was owned by a brilliant, cultured woman from Czechoslovakia who also ran a gift shop. All her boarders, said Mrs. Peters, were just like her. The other guesthouse in town was run by a demanding German woman; and all her boarders were just like her, too. But Pat, depleted in everything but the resolve to write, seems to have started out in a boardinghouse in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, close to Lenox, briefly renting a tiny, cheap room from a nice woman who made her “uncomfortable, through pity” and whose house boasted “the worst coffee in the entire town.”¹⁸

One day, Pat apparently dropped by Ed Roche’s funeral parlor in Lenox, which was just across the street from Garden Gables. Mr. Roche, like all the other undertakers in the area, lived near his work and dabbled in real estate both above and below ground.¹⁹ He had a cottage for rent—it was probably “the Beachwood cottage” says his son—just outside Lenox. Pat struck a deal with Ed Roche for a summer rental.

“I began,” Pat wrote in Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, “The Talented Mr. Ripley in what I thought was a splendid mood, a perfect pace. I had taken a cottage in Massachusetts in the country near Lenox, and I spent the first three weeks there reading books from the excellent privately maintained library in Lenox…. My landlord, who lived not far away, was an undertaker, very voluble about his profession.”

Pat had been “toying with” having Ripley escort a corpse filled with opium from Trieste to Rome. At one point, the corpse was to be Herbert Greenleaf, Dickie’s father, murdered by Tom. This elaborate nonsense was reduced to an awkward suggestion for a corpse-smuggling caper by Tom to Dickie—scornfully rejected by Dickie—in the final version of The Talented Mr. Ripley. In another set of notes, Pat has Tom push Herbert Greenleaf over a cliff in Positano with Dickie’s consent, and then Dickie, unwittingly, pushes Tom over the same cliff during a fight. Tom, of course, survives. Pat thriftily re-created her cliff idea twenty-five years later for The Boy Who Followed Ripley, when “the boy,” young Frank, pushes his father’s wheelchair over a cliff in Maine into the sea. Pat’s concentrated interests and rigid conservations ensured that she made use of every fertile idea, while her compulsion to commit fictional murder allowed her to change her victim, her murderer, and her plot in any novel without the slightest sense of artistic self-betrayal. (She would do the same thing in The Glass Cell and A Game for the Living.) It was the murder, and its attendant psychological disturbances, that mattered most to her. Still, she would always disapprove of crimes that weren’t passionate: you could never accuse Pat Highsmith of being a coldhearted killer.

“One crime I consider so despicable, I should never write about it, and that is robbery. To me, it is worse than murder, and for this irrational opinion I have a rational explanation: robbery is passionless and motiveless, except for the motive of greed.”²⁰

While she was still “toying with” the idea of using an opium-filled corpse in her novel, Pat queried her landlord about the hidden details of his trade. He used to stuff his corpses with “sawdust” is what she said the undertaker told her, “bluntly and matter-of-factly.” You cut a “tree-shaped” incision in the chest, you prepare the body, and then you fill it with sawdust. Sawdust made sense in New England, where old forests and old mills were still plentiful. But Pat, always fascinated by the precisions of every profession, wanted to see that tree-shaped incision for herself. Mr. Roche “drew the line” at that.²¹

Ned Roche, now the director of his father’s funeral business in Lenox, was troubled about these supposed revelations by his father. “My father was very protective about the business. He wouldn’t have talked to anyone from outside.” But on reflection he thought his father might have been as frank as that with Patricia: “He didn’t mince words.”²² However it happened, Pat got the information and then didn’t use it. Instead, she began “thinking myself inside the skin of such a character [Ripley],” and so, she said, her “prose became more self-assured than it logically should have been.” She had already decided that her “relaxed mood was not the one for Mr. Ripley” and had promptly scrapped her first seventy-five pages. She was now “mentally as well as physically sitting on the edge of my chair, because that is the kind of young man Ripley is—a young man on the edge of his chair, if he is sitting down at all.”²³

Here was a writer using something like an actor’s exercise to enter the mind and body of a character. Pat prepared herself for Ripley by assuming Ripley’s attitudes and positions—they were never very far from her own—and she started Ripley off as a failed actor who couldn’t bear rejection and whose best performance piece was a reenactment of Eleanor Roosevelt doing her “My Day” column for the newspapers. So when Tom began playing the role of Dickie Greenleaf, the first thing he reached for was stage makeup.

“Tom had at first amused himself with an eyebrow pencil…and a little touch of putty at the end of his nose…but he abandoned these as too likely to be noticed. The main thing about impersonation, Tom thought, was to maintain the mood and temperament of the person…and to assume the facial expressions that went with them. The rest just fell into place.”²⁴

Tom had “an audience made up of the entire world…. he was himself and yet not himself. He felt blameless and free, despite the fact that he consciously controlled every move he made…. He had even produced a painting in Dickie’s manner.”²⁵ Tom also found that writing letters in Dickie’s “dull” style was easier than writing letters in his own. His approach to life would always be that of an actor playing a role.

And there it is—the other reason Pat was always falling in love with actresses and models like Lynn Roth, Kathryn Hamill Cohen, Chloe Sprague, Anne Meacham, Tabea Blumenschein, et al. Impersonation, the substitution of one identity for another, the forgery of personality and the fluidity of character, were all native states for Patricia Highsmith. She used them over and over in her work, and she was alive and flutteringly responsive to their presence in other people. (But one reason Ellen Hill was able to “anchor” Pat for so long was her absolute immobility of character.)

As a youthful reader of Oscar Wilde, Pat had long since absorbed Oscar’s first published notice of his fascination with crime and the counterfeiting of identity: the essay “Pen, Pencil and Poison” (1889) about the forger Wainewright who poisoned others, and about the “marvellous boy” Chatterton, who forged medieval poetry and drama and poisoned himself. Moreover, much of what Pat thought and felt about the volatility of identity is what she would have been hearing from the young actors she knew—all of them studying “the creation of character” on Bank Street in Greenwich Village at HB Studios or farther uptown with the great star of the Yiddish and American theaters Stella Adler, who brought the only real news back from Stanislavsky and whom Pat continued to meet at cocktail parties and find “most beautiful and charming.”²⁶

And so Pat, who had imagined Ripley as a failed actor, gave him some very actorly exercises.

“It was a good idea to practice jumping into his own character again, because the time might come when he would need to in a matter of seconds, and it was strangely easy to forget the exact timbre of Ripley’s voice.”

Life for Pat was always a matter of entering into another character: “Happiness,” she wrote, “is a matter of imagination…. We are all suicides under the skin.”²⁷ And much as she jibed at Mother Mary for the “positive thinking” and jibbed at practicing her Christian Science faith, she adopted something very like it when, writing Ripley, she tried to project herself into a more uplifted condition. “Existence,” she thought, “is a matter of unconscious elimination of negative and pessimistic thinking.”

Continuing to fantasize about her thwarted love for Lynn Roth, Pat kept herself going in Lenox “with various kinds of dope: books, written and read, dreams, hopes, crossword puzzles…and simply routine. If I were to relax and become human, I should not be able to bear my life.”²⁸

Pat’s inner theater, those intense personal dramas she was always staging for herself, was much more interesting to her than the world around her. “While you are writing a book,” she noted, “you must carry around your own stage full of characters with their emotional changes. You have no room for another stage.”²⁹ Pat was almost always writing a book, and, like the cast lists of Jacobean tragedies, her inner dramas contained too many characters. “‘You have no idea,’” she wrote in Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, “‘how many characters ring my doorbell and come to me every day, and I absolutely need them for my existence.’”³⁰

In her cottage in the woods in Lenox, Massachusetts, Pat, like her protagonist Ripley, was both giving a performance and watching the show; turning herself into a theater of one. In 1960, Pat would make a little theory about the only depression for a writer being in a “return to the Self.”³¹ Now, she was making up a Ripley who “hated going back to himself as he would have hated putting on a shabby suit of clothes, a grease-spotted, unpressed suit of clothes that had not been very good even when new.” Clothes would always make the man for Pat Highsmith. “No book,” she said, “was easier for me to write, and I often had the feeling Ripley was writing it and I was merely typing.”³²

But Pat wasn’t the only woman writer at work on psychopathic males. Long before she was revising Strangers on a Train at Yaddo and carefully clipping from a newspaper the photograph of the sneering young Ohio murderer Robert Murl Daniels (one of her prototypes for the psychopathic Charles Bruno), other American women “suspense” novelists had already created compellingly psychopathic males in their own novels. Amongst them was the Yale Younger Poet for 1931, Dorothy B. Hughes (1904–93), with her serial rapist and literal lady-killer Dix Steele in In a Lonely Place (1947); and Elizabeth Sanxay Holding (1889–1955) with her woman-hating, self-deceiving, alcoholic murderer, Jacob Duff, in The Innocent Mrs. Duff (1946).

Dorothy Hughes was regularly touted as a “latter-day Dostoyevsky”—the same compliment the same critics would pay to Pat’s work.³³ And the celebrated English biographer and Highsmith fan Antonia Fraser has marked a Highsmith connection to Elizabeth Sanxay Holding’s novel The Blank Wall (1947): “[I]t is a brilliant psychological thriller with twists and turns, both morally and amorally, worthy of the great Patricia Highsmith herself.”³⁴ But because Pat’s “popular” reading went mostly unmentioned in her cahiers, it is impossible to know if she ever read Dorothy Hughes and Elizabeth Sanxay Holding, or if, having read them, she paid any attention to them. Patricia Schartle Myrer, Pat’s agent for twenty years, says that Pat never showed interest in other writers unless they were hugely famous or conveniently dead.³⁵

Still, Pat never forgot a grudge, and so she had good reason to remember Dorothy Hughes. In 1958, Dorothy Hughes wrote a polite reponse to a request from Joan Kahn to furnish a jacket quote for the Harper & Brothers publication of Pat’s much-reworked Mexican novel, A Game for the Living: “I shall have to confess abjectly that I have an enormous blind spot where Patricia Highsmith is concerned. I don’t like her writings, and I particularly did not like what (to me) was her lack of empathy to the Mexican nationals in this [novel].”³⁶

The novels of both Hughes and Sanxay Holding contain strongly feminist critiques of the violent behavior of their male murderers, but Pat, always a contrarian when it came to being a “woman” writer, had different sympathies: “I go along, usually, with the [male] murderer…. I can’t identify with anyone else.”³⁷

While she was staying in Positano in 1963, Pat hung her “slightly mildewed” Edgar Allan Poe Scroll—it was the Mystery Writers of America Award conferred upon The Talented Mr. Ripley in April of 1956—in her bathroom because she thought all her awards looked “less pompous” there. When she took it out of its frame to scrape away the mildew, she added three words to it. Those words turned her award into a declaration of partnership.

“When I removed the glass to clean and dry it, I lettered ‘Mr. Ripley and’ before my own name since I think Ripley himself should have received the award.”³⁸

Pat couldn’t bear any tampering with Tom Ripley’s “image,” and she was pained by Wim Wenders’s choice of Dennis Hopper to play Ripley in his loose film adaptation of Ripley’s Game, The American Friend. On rare occasions, she would add Ripley’s name to the valedictory of her letters or the dedications of her books, a tip of the Highsmith hat to her partnership with her own particular devil.³⁹ And although Ripley was always her favorite “character,” her French editor Alain Oulman was disturbed by the fact that she occasionally spoke of Ripley as though he were “real,” or at least susceptible to insult. But Pat could usually be counted upon to unsettle her friends.

At summer’s end, in the beginning of September 1954, Pat, ready for another round in the love ring, got back together again with Ellen Hill, who had returned from her travels abroad. Pat had a novel to finish, and Ellen’s goading presence was just the inspiration she needed. She had already provided the reason why: “[T]he functioning, positive artist wants to live with a ‘bad influence,’ that is a negative, critical, bourgeois, uncreative, cramping woman, for the plain purpose of fighting against her. She represents, and right across the breakfast table, all the artist is fighting against anyway, plus what the homosexual is—of course fighting against—unartistic personalities and the narrow view of life.” ⁴⁰

Now, in one of her quirkier descriptions, Pat made another attempt to explain what Ellen really meant to her. It was anything but a direct compliment, but it was a compliment all the same. And it was the compliment Pat would continue to pay to Ellen for the next thirty-five years.

“If I shall ever pay tribute to Ellen Hill in words, the most important thing I shall say is that with her, I often had fascinating and valuable conversations between the breaking of a dinner plate and the bathing of a dog…. Of no other woman can I say this…. It was her challenging mind often irritating, her point not always justified, that inspired the conversations generally, however.” ⁴¹

And so Pat and Ellen set out again on one of their long, quarrelsome journeys by car, this time to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Ellen had by now replaced Henry the dachshund with Tina the French poodle, but Pat had stopped keeping her diaries (Ellen had peeked at them again), and there is no evidence that Pat got on any better with Tina than she did with the clever, vengeful Henry. Three years later, Pat amiably included Tina in her dedication of Deep Water to Ellen. But in 1970, when Pat was feeling particularly alienated from her home country (she hated Nixon, loathed the civil rights movement, and, although against the war in Vietnam, she was agitated by the protests the war had engendered), she started to write A Dog’s Ransom, a shambolic novel which begins with a poison pen letter and ends with the thorough corruption of Clarence Duhamel, a New York policeman of high morals, good education, and Pat’s own reading habits.⁴² But Pat had never met a New York cop, knew nothing about the workings of a police precinct, and had to ask Kingsley, long distance, to do the police research for her.⁴³ And in this new novel, Pat couldn’t resist kidnapping and murdering a poodle, a poodle she couldn’t help naming after Ellen’s poodle, Tina.

The day after they arrived in Santa Fe, Pat, possessed by her book and without bothering to fully unpack her suitcase, began to write. Ripley was to take her only six months, and she finished the manuscript before the end of the year. She sent the original copy (the original is missing from her archives, as are original manuscripts for The Blunderer, The Cry of the Owl, This Sweet Sickness, The Two Faces of January, and A Game for the Living) to her grandmother in Fort Worth. But two weeks after Pat’s thirty-fourth birthday, on 5 February 1955, Willie Mae Stewart Coates, eighty-eight years old and still in possession of the manuscript of The Talented Mr. Ripley, fell dead of an aneurysm while working in her garden. Pat, travelling in Mexico with Ellen at the time, was near enough to Texas to go to Willie Mae’s funeral. But she didn’t go, just as she didn’t go to her father’s, her stepfather’s, or her mother’s funeral. Perhaps the news didn’t reach her in Mexico in time; perhaps she simply couldn’t face a family funeral.

Willie Mae died as she had lived—busy and productive in her own house. A few months before her death, she was up on a ladder painting a twelve-foot-high ceiling. She fell from the ladder, breaking some ribs, and made her lodgers swear not to tell her family what had happened. Even before he learned the truth, her great-grandson Don remembers thinking that Willie Mae—despite the fact that she had always maintained a severely upright Victorian posture—was looking especially erect with her secretly taped-up ribs.⁴⁴

Pat’s initial mourning for Willie Mae quickly combusted into rage. She decided to blame Mary for the loss of the manuscript of The Talented Mr. Ripley, which had disappeared in the confusion following Willie Mae’s death. Willie Mae’s boardinghouse and its contents were sold to the owners of the Judson Boot Factory, who tore it down to build a parking lot, and Mary told Pat that “the Negroes” (presumably the people living in the boardinghouse’s back-shacks) had done the packing up of the house and somehow her manuscript had been lost. Dan Walton Coates bought back his great-grandparents’ “bedroom suite” from Judson Boots, but didn’t come in time to save from the wrecker’s ball those vividly decorated closet panels Pat had painted for Willie Mae in the mid-1940s.⁴⁵

Pat’s secondary mourning for Willie Mae—the kind that produces tears—didn’t come until years later, but it, too, was triggered by an object. When Pat glanced down at one of her own worn-out shoes—it had taken the shape of her foot—she suddenly saw “the shape, or expression, of my grandmother’s foot [and] I shed the first real tears for my grandmother.” ⁴⁶

Ellen and Pat’s car trip from New York to Santa Fe, where they spent three months, along with their travels through Mexico were as unstructured as all their wanderings through Europe; but the movement was productive for Pat. Her notes for Deep Waterproliferated, and whole passages in her cahier became part of the finished novel. The more intolerable her personal experiences with Ellen were (she called Santa Fe “l’enfer” in her notebook—and leaves us to imagine why), the more elevated her creative life. Mexico, too, was inspiring to her—although without the intense enthusiasms produced by her first trip there in 1944. But Pat’s higher body temperatures had always favorably affected her writing, and perhaps the extremes of climate and society in Mexico, with the natural colors of the mountain villages and plateaus haloed by the feverish yellow light, affected her imagination as creatively as illness did.

As Pat and Ellen drove from Ciudad Juarez to Mexico City and all the way down to Acapulco, Pat kept a continuous chronicle of their travels—written, with her usual thriftiness, to be reshaped into an article for a magazine like the one which continued to reject her, The New Yorker. (Pat calls Ellen “my companion” in her notes, and excludes all sexual and most emotional commentary.) Some of her liveliest descriptions are the result of this running reportage, and the disparity between her situation and that of the Mexican locals was continually on her mind. Unlike her haute bourgeois view of Europe, however, all she saw in Mexico was “unjust poverty.” But poverty never evoked much of a sympathetic reaction from Pat, and in Hidalgo del Parral, she found “[t]he populace is shockingly poverty-stricken” and wrote that their “frank rags” could “produce fear in the onlooker.” ⁴⁷

In Mexico City, Pat and Ellen checked into the Majestic Hotel, the only hotel that would take a dog. The bellboys were drunk by 8:00 P.M. on New Year’s Eve, and the two women were taken to see the house of the former mayor of New York William O’Dwyer. O’Dwyer was a man who intermittently interested Pat as a subject: she was certainly interested in his beautiful second wife, Sloan Simpson, a John Powers model from Texas, a darling of jetset society, and a close friend of Pat’s future lover Daisy Winston. (Claustrophobia would be a reasonable response to lesbian circles on the eastern seaboard of the United States in the 1950s.) O’Dwyer was more or less an unindicted criminal, residing (after some putatively shady doings in New York) in Mexican exile or, as Pat put it, “in plain hiding,” in the “plush San Angel residential section,” which Pat and Ellen entered through an iron gate “like those of Sing Sing Prison (where O’Dwyer ought to be).” ⁴⁸

In 1961, Pat finally managed to meet Mayor O’Dwyer in his apartment on the Upper East Side of New York. And the first thing she noticed about him were his shoes: “Short, common feet in common black shoes suggest the feet of an ordinary policeman, walking his beat.” Pat was remembering, rather scornfully, that William O’Dwyer had started his political career as a cop walking the beat in Brooklyn.⁴⁹

In Taxco with Ellen, Pat remarked that the Santa Prisca bells were “never accurate,” and then, with particular precision, described the braying of a donkey: “It starts out with a honking, squeaking sound, like a bucket being hauled up by a rusty crank, progresses to the agonized E-E-E-aw—E-E-E-aw! which winds down to a very melancholy, sobbing line of onck-onck-onck—as if that donkey’s world had come to an end.”⁵⁰

To Puebla and Oaxaca and Acapulco and Cuernavaca the two women went, with Pat continuing to keep her amusing, impersonal travel diary, just as she had in Switzerland in 1953. In June of 1955, somewhere on their journey—perhaps they were in Santa Fe again, because two days later they were back on the road between Santa Fe and Tulsa, Oklahoma, on their way to New York—Pat made this note under the Keime category in her twenty-third cahier. It was the first of her several expressions of interest over the years in the subject of returning a wallet. “A man (or a girl) who finds a wallet in New York with considerable money in it, plus the address. He has lost so many wallets of his own, he takes pleasure in returning this with every stamp intact. An adventure begins…. The hero or heroine thus walks into a murder story.”⁵¹

And so, Pat’s long and troubled association with Ellen Blumenthal Hill produced yet another inspiration. From this keime, thirty years later, would come Found in the Street, Pat’s Manhattan novel of a found wallet and the fatal consequences attending its discovery.

By the end of 1955, Pat and Ellen had finally gone their not-entirely-separate ways. “I am always in love,” Pat had written in July of 1954, from the safety of her solitary cabin in Massachusetts, “with the worthy and the unworthy…and I wonder now is it a giving or a taking? Before, it was obviously a taking, because I needed merely the emotion, if nothing else.”⁵² Pat’s lover in France twenty-five years later, the novelist and translator Marion Aboudaram, said nearly the same thing, and she said it without rancor: Pat made ruthless use of the women she loved and of the emotions generated by her tangled relationships with them. Without a woman lover, as Pat wrote in her diary shortly after meeting Ellen Hill, “I cannot even develop as a writer any farther, or sometimes, even exist.”⁵³

Pat managed to keep her affair with Ellen Hill going for more than four years, thereby keeping her all-important Muse’s Chair occupied—even if uncomfortably so. Her attachment to this special piece of furniture in her Romance Room would go right on creating art and trouble for her for much of the rest of her life.