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Les Girls

Part 13

Exceptional in so many ways, Pat added one more exception to her list. She preferred to surround her writing with a cordon sanitaire of light negativity. Many of her friends didn’t care for her work—and if they did, she made it clear that she was uncomfortable with their approval. Of the admiration of her young lover Madeleine Harmsworth, who “refused to call me Pat—saying it would be like calling Dickens Charlie, or Shakespeare Willie,” Pat wrote: “I do not wish to be so celebrated.”¹

Some of Pat’s more literary friends are still divided between the two classic ways of not liking her writing: one is to admire Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley and nothing else; the other is to prefer her short stories to her novels.

When Ellen Hill, whose disapprobation undoubtedly added an extra frisson to her relationship with Pat, met Peter Huber for the first time, she took him aside and asked him seriously: “What do you see in Pat’s books?” When he told her, she gave him her first-edition copy of The Tremor of Forgery, the one Pat had wistfully inscribed: “For Ellen / Maybe you will like this one better than most. / Love, Pat.”² When DéDé Moser, a painter friend of Ellen in the Ticino, read This Sweet Sickness, she thought it was a “wonderful” novel, but “[w]hen I praised it to Ellen, she said: ‘I told Patricia when this book came out: You rewrote this thing so many times! I could have finished it in one night!’ She did not have a high opinion of Patricia’s books.”³

Some of Pat’s lovers and many of her friends, including Kingsley Skattebol (who saves her admiration for Pat’s short stories), say they either did not read Pat’s books or did not care for the books they had read.⁴ Barbara Skelton, memoirist, novelist, and Cyril Connolly’s ex-wife, confirmed this interesting attitude in an article in the London Magazine: “The odd thing was that most of Pat’s friends never read her books.”⁵

Vivien De Bernardi, another late-life friend who didn’t care for Pat’s work, lived near Pat in the Ticino. An American-born children’s educational therapist working with Down syndrome children, Vivien was the wife of a Swiss banker when Pat wrote to her with typical modesty (and at Ellen Hill’s behest) in 1981 that she, Pat, was a “free-lance writer,” “almost always at home,”⁶ and looking for comments on the child in her story “The Button.” “The Button” portrays a father’s horror at having a “handicapped” child, the murder he commits to relieve his feelings, and the button trophy he takes away from that murder. Unaware of Pat’s work or reputation when she received her letter, De Bernardi told Pat forthrightly that she thought the child in “The Button” “was presented totally unrealistically…but the anguish of the father was incredibly real and powerful, so something in the story rang true.”⁷

Pat and Vivien became neighborly friends—perhaps because of Vivien’s soothing demeanor and well-ordered household, but perhaps, too, given Pat’s turn of mind, because of Vivien’s initial critique of “The Button” and disinterest in Pat’s novels. Pat’s own “buttons” in Switzerland, the ones De Bernardi says she did not “dare to press” for fear of setting off long “rants,” were: “sex, Jews, blacks, and money.”

Although Vivien De Bernardi was one of those friends who thought Pat “honest and direct,” Pat never said a word to her neighbor about her love affairs or sexual preferences. Certainly all Pat’s Swiss neighbors knew she was lesbian—those trim oxford shirts and pressed boy’s jeans were a dead giveaway in suburban Switzerland—but they never broached the subject unless, like Bee Loggenberg, the wealthy South African who accompanied Pat on her last publicity trip to Paris in the fall of 1994, they, themselves, were gay. Pat was aware of what her neighbors assumed, but she ignored it. Hiding in plain sight had always been her style.

Switzerland, anyway, had become the elephants’ graveyard of Pat’s amatory hopes, barring the odd attempt to beguile an ex-lover into bed by letter or a half-acknowledged crush on a local pizzeria owner. And Pat’s work suffered as only work inspired by love or love’s fantasies could do. Still, there had never been room in Highsmith Country for love amongst the middle-aged—or even for love affairs which could be extended into a believable future. No Highsmith novel imagines a sexual affair as anything but a union of people in their teens, twenties, or thirties. Even the “lift” ending, as Pat called it, of The Price of Salt cannot get Therese Belivet and Carol Aird beyond an “excited wave” and across the crowded hotel barroom into each other’s arms.

By the end of 1989, it was not only love that was missing from Pat’s life. She was having to remind herself to do the other things that used to come naturally to her: “I must put more variation in my life, such as drawing & carpentering,” she wrote in her diary.⁸Drawing and carpentering had always been part of her creative day—but her days were no longer so creative. By the end of 1991, she was writing: “Typical of this year that there has been no time for anything like a diary.”⁹ Nineteen ninety-one was the year Mary Highsmith died.

The twenty-third of May 1992 was “[a]nother non-workday (2nd) as I re-think my book Small g. It’s an interesting plot.” Small g (1995), the posthumously published novel that was another kind of exception, allows a forty-five-year-old man (an obvious stand-in for the aging Pat) to have limitless sexual connections with teenage boys as well as a possible affair with a thirty-eight-year-old married policeman. But after this short entry there is no more about Small g in Pat’s diary, just the constant brain chatter of her responsibilities, her “current problem[s]”: “3 legal things—my will, my house—have to be arranged, lest I die in my sleep with unfinished matter still unfinished…. I tell myself I do ever better keeping the questions, the unresolved at bay, while I summon the creative part of my brain. Would it were so.”¹⁰

Pat was ill (see “The Cake That Was Shaped Like a Coffin, Parts 3, 5, 6, and 7”), she was aging fast, and “the creative part of her brain” was caught up in a very uncreative conversation with the details of sustaining her busy career. The “success” she yearned for had overtaken the solid daily pleasures of making art. And love was no longer the subject of her conversations with herself.

By the time Pat had moved herself to Switzerland, she scarcely resembled the sexual adventurer she had been in youth or the improbable domestic partner she tried to be in middle age. Years of alcoholism, inadequate nourishment, and emotional turmoil had eroded much that would have been recognizable about her to her early companions. (The stomach is now understood by gastroneurologists to be a “second brain”—it uses some of the same neurotransmitters as the “first brain” and has its own controlling “enteric nervous system”—and Pat’s stomach had been badly unsettled for decades.)¹¹ Pat’s neighbor Vivien says that she “loved sharing books with [Pat]. We exchanged books all the time and I valued her opinion.”¹² But it was not Pat’s books they exchanged, nor was it Pat’s writing they spoke about directly. It was always someone else’s.

In a way, in Switzerland, Pat had become someone else. Many of her least attractive qualities were intensified in the high-security cell of her Swiss solitudes. Abdication from a love life and long separation from her mother—first by distance, then by the deliberate tamping down of her emotions, and then by Mary’s death on 12 March 1991—finished the job. When Pat wasn’t vilifying Mary in letters (and even when she was), she was continuing to make anxious enquiries about the “restraining chair” to which Mary was tied in her nursing home, about Mary’s behavior in the halls, her fits of cursing, her state of mind. In her own way, Pat stayed attached to this central piece of furniture in her Romance Room, but the boiling hatred and burning love that had characterized their relations were things of the past. So, too, was Pat’s best work.

Although she was surrounded by helpful neighbors in Switzerland and backed by a publisher most American writers could only dream about, Pat’s separation from the kind of people who knew her history—the kind of people who had shared her history—was almost complete. Alone in a crowd of concerned Swiss friends with whom she could never discuss her personal life, Pat Highsmith presents a painful picture of emotional isolation. She had, in the most reduced sense of the word, made herself peerless.

Without the pleasures and pains of her love affairs with women—not to mention the absence of the central drama of her relationship with her mother—Pat had nothing to push against except her own psychological borders, which continued to harden in self-defense. Never one to move towards people in the first place (Pat is often characterized as “taking a step back” when meeting anyone, although her cousins say she never shrank from kissing them, and several living lovers attest to the warmth of her physical demonstrations), she avoided physical contact with people in Switzerland, as she had only sometimes done in Moncourt. Bert Diener and Julia Diener-Diethelm, her attentive next-door neighbors in Tegna, say they had to be careful not to offer their hands to her when they saw her.¹³

Although Pat claimed she preferred to lead a “boring life,” her friend Kingsley described just how “boring” Pat herself had become in her last few years in Switzerland and how “disloyal,” she, Kingsley, felt to be thinking such a thing about her oldest friend.¹⁴

If Pat could do without the literary approval of friends, she needed and wanted praise from established sources. She was so anxious about an article about her that was to appear in The New York Times in June of 1988 that a young friend working at the Timessneaked out an advance copy to her in Switzerland. But Pat wrote to Kingsley that she hadn’t “the guts to face it.”¹⁵

Further evidence of how much her work’s reception meant to her is in Marion Aboudaram’s account of Pat’s terrible distress after a party at Mary McCarthy’s apartment on the rue de Rennes in Paris. McCarthy, queen of American expatriate literary society in Paris, accidentally let Pat know that she had never heard of Pat’s adored Tom Ripley—or of his adventures. “Is he a pop singer?” McCarthy inquired innocently of Pat. “Pat,” says Marion Aboudaram, “was very hurt and humiliated. And when she came home [to my apartment] she was absolutely drunk. She banged her head on the wall like mad. I had to give her warm milk with bread inside it and still she banged and banged and banged her head. She had a great complex about Mary McCarthy.”¹⁶

In 1953, Pat had written to Kingsley about Mary McCarthy: “In a coolly intellectual way, I like her, and in her way, she is unrivaled.”¹⁷ For years, while she was living in France, Pat kept up a correspondence with Mary McCarthy, seeing McCarthy and her fourth husband, James, more frequently than she ever admitted. As usual, it was Pat who initiated the correspondence, writing to McCarthy in the fall of 1972 from Moncourt to remind her that they’d met at Rosalind Constable’s years ago, that she hoped they could meet “again,” and that if McCarthy didn’t “like the company of other writers, I understand.”¹⁸

The correspondence—about twenty letters from each woman—is marked on McCarthy’s side by unfailing graciousness and on Pat’s by a certain professional truckling, by polite requests for information, and by long rants about what was becoming her obsession with the taxes levied on Americans living abroad. Pat tried to interest McCarthy in joining tax pressure groups (McCarthy was already far more politically engaged than Pat, writing in Paris in favor of the work of the radical lesbian feminist novelist Monique Wittig and supporting many international causes; and, unlike Pat, McCarthy did her own taxes); and Pat brought Ellen Hill to meet her. McCarthy had worked with Ellen’s best friend, Lily Marx, Karl Marx’s niece.

Mary McCarthy and Pat wrote to each other about Janet Flanner’s memorial service in Paris; McCarthy recommended her new French agent, Mary Kling, to Pat¹⁹ (Pat, in one of her agent-changing fits in the 1970s, had already met with Kling, who gave Pat the impression that she was “swamped with clients”);²⁰ and then she tried to bring Pat together with the other person whose friendship they shared, Ernst Hauser, the journalist Pat had met on her boat trip to Texas when she was seventeen. But when Pat moved to Switzerland, the correspondence with Mary McCarthy thinned, then petered out in 1984.

There is nothing in Pat’s letters to McCarthy to indicate anything but polite pleasure in her company (“Really, your apartment was an oasis—of civilisation, after the Salon du Livre”) and professional interest in her work (“I thought your article on the novel excellent, in NY Review of Books”).²¹ And there is nothing to reveal Pat’s terrible despair on that October evening in 1977 when Mary McCarthy, with the best of intentions, had confused the talented Mr. Ripley with a rock ’n’ roll star.²²

A year later, Pat sent Mary McCarthy a copy of Edith’s Diary. McCarthy included something about the novel in an article she was writing for The Observer in London. The Observer editor cut the reference, and McCarthy, very nicely, sent Pat her apologies and a copy of her original article. Pat didn’t keep it. In fact Pat, who continued to archive everything (except her comics work and the cartoons she sent to The New Yorker) kept only one of McCarthy’s letters—so perhaps Marion Aboudaram was right about Pat’s “Mary McCarthy complex.”²³

Marion and Pat never discussed serious subjects, and “certainly,” says Marion, they never discussed books or authors. “She never told me what she thought about my two novels; we never had literary conversations; she never discussed any writer.

“I think I was very good company for her. But there was no poetry between us, there was no romance. I had a lot of beautiful girls in my life but Pat was more fascinating than the beauties….

“I had a kind of paranoia after her, I wanted to kill myself. And yet, I have nothing to reproach her with. She was just herself, but I was too sensitive for her. And the effect was terrible. Thank God I got away.”²⁴

Pat also took a recessive literary line with her very last girlfriend, Monique Buffet. Monique was a shy, blond, attractive twenty-seven-year-old French teacher of English who arrived at Pat’s house in Moncourt in the summer of 1977, in the company of one of Pat’s English fans, Val. Although Pat’s relations with Tabea Blumenschein make a more dramatic story (that of an aging writer reenacting a lesbian version of The Blue Angel), and Marion Aboudaram’s accounts of Pat are more revealing, it was in this last love affair with Monique Buffet that Pat finally allowed herself to enjoy the comforts of easy loving.

Of her first visit to Pat, Monique says: “I was petrified…. I didn’t say one word. Pat was doing most of the speaking. She kept getting up and going to the kitchen and coming back. After that I knew why (to drink alcohol), but I didn’t know then…. And she went in the kitchen and came back, went in the kitchen, came back, it was a bit of a tennis match.

“…The first time, I don’t even know if Pat saw me, but the second time [we saw Pat, in July of 1978] she was very attentive to me and left Val alone…and when we left, she asked for my address and phone number and the day after, she called me.

“And the day after that, I had a letter. That’s how it started. Pat wanted to go to Paris and to the Katmandou…. Pat said, ‘Why not give the old clip joint [Katmandou] another try.’”²⁵

In the 1970s, Katmandou was Paris’s legendary, luxury lesbian bar, operating on the rue du Vieux Columbier near the Place St-Sulpice. It was run, improbably, by a former teacher of high school history from the provinces: the very theatrical Elula Perrin, who was assisted by her business partner and ex-lover, a levelheaded Corsican named Aimée. One of the coat-check girls at Katmandou was more or less for sale; a single drink cost an astounding ninety francs (the price of dinner in a good restaurant in Paris in the 1970s); the bar and the dance floor were frequented by well-known female movie stars, top models, and successful women writers; and the “royal seats” up front were often filled with the Arab princesses who made Katmandou a necessary stop on their way back to the Emirates.^*

Pat and Monique arrived at Katmandou at about one o’clock on the morning of 19 August—this was early evening for a lesbian bar in Paris—and Maryem, the regular doorperson, stopped them at the threshold, saying that the downstairs salle was packed; there were no places left. They thanked her, told each other, “Never mind, we’ll go to Le Jeu de Dames” (a lesbian bar on the rue Montpensier), and turned away into the street. Suddenly, Elula Perrin, Katmandou’s patronne, came dashing out of the bar, calling loudly out to them in the night: “No no no, WE’VE GOT PLACES!”

Elula had recognized Pat from all the way at the back of her long, narrow establishment—celebrity spotting was one of Elula’s talents—and she personally conducted Pat and Monique back inside and sat them down right in the middle of the (empty-at-the-early-hour-of-1:00 A.M.) “royale” section.

About twenty minutes after they’d ordered their first drinks, Elula came over, “all smiles,” and seated herself next to Pat, asking her politely if she was, indeed, who she seemed to be. Pat ignored the question, so Monique replied to it. Pat was using Monique as an interpreter, and Elula’s next remark, “C’est dans ces moments-là que l’on regrette de ne pas avoir toujours avec soi son livre de chevet’” [“It’s in moments like this that one regrets not always having with one one’s favorite book”]—implying that she wished she had one of her favorite Highsmith books with her to be autographed—didn’t go down well. “Eventually, Pat replied by a vague smile and something like: ‘UGH.’” Elula, who had recently published a book herself, was not yet discouraged: “Vous savez que nous sommes presque—à mon humble niveau—devenues collègues.” [“You know that we have almost—at my humble level—become colleagues.”]…And Pat grumbled: “So I’ve heard.”

Finally Elula gave up, and Pat and Monique went on to Le Jeu de Dames, a far more proletarian establishment.

“And, THERE [says Monique] it was a completely different Pat (probably a bit drunker too, but not only that). She was all over the place…coming back every 5 or 10 minutes with ‘a new girl for me.’ We ended with about 10 or 15 girls at our table AND SHE PAID THE DRINKS FOR ALL OF THEM…. She was recognized too, but she was having a great time, laughing, joking, and even dancing. At one point, she went up to the DJ’s cabin to ask for ‘slows.’”²⁶

Shipwrecked by the rupture of her mostly fantasy affair with twenty-five-year-old Tabea Blumenschein in the summer of 1978, Pat recognized in twenty-seven-year-old Monique Buffet a lifeline and grabbed it, determined, as always, to get on with her work. As she had done with Tabea in Berlin, Pat plunged with Monique into the lesbian bar culture in Paris. Her habit of bringing back “girls” to the table echoes Barbara Roett’s description of her behavior in London.

“Pat was a real innocent with women, the way men can be taken in by a waitress or a starlet…. She used to bring [these girls] round…like Tabea Blumenschein, just so dying to be a starlet…. And then she’d sit like an animal who had brought its prey back to Ba and me and laid it at our feet.”²⁷

Monique ended by “rescuing” the fifty-seven-year-old Pat from her long dry spell (long for Pat; it was two or three months) of being unable to work on her “4th Ripley novel,” The Boy Who Followed Ripley. Pat’s coup de foudre for Tabea Blumenschein in Berlin had opened up a grand canyon of need, and the kindness and calmness and casualness of Monique Buffet helped hoist Pat back up over the edge of the abyss. In July of 1978, two weeks before she began to see Monique, Pat was still writing to Ellen Hill to emphasize how “[m]y depression continues.” Pat wrote this phrase twice after explaining how Edith’s Diary had been optioned by a German film company, how Simone de Beauvoir wanted to meet her, how a Russian actress wanted to do a film on “my way of looking at life,” etc. etc.²⁸

Nothing made any difference to Pat’s blasted sensibilities until the relationship with Monique began to take hold and stabilize her work. Pat’s gratitude to Monique for this lifesaving service was repeated like a mantra in almost every letter she wrote, along with her fears that the young woman would cease to be “kind” (i.e., sexual) with her.

Pat’s vulnerability in the initial flare of this correspondence was seconded only by her ruthlessness. She was still a writer stuck on “p. 56” of a book she desperately wanted to finish. Her feelings for Monique Buffet—like the photos of Monique which she fetishized, blowing them up, commenting on their detail, and pinning them to her desk—were arranged in ways to stimulate her imagination.

“You are a girl who allows me to dream,” Pat wrote to Monique. She meant, of course, that Monique was a girl who allowed her to write. And the rather practical fantasies she wove around this kind young blond woman—already in the first blush of a relationship with another woman and still trying to handle the onslaught that was Pat Highsmith with delicacy and courtesy—allowed her to continue her work.

That work—the manuscript of The Boy Who Followed Ripley—shows ample evidence of Pat’s terrible state of mind while she was writing it. It is scribbled over, crossed out, interleaved, and stuffed with substitute pages like no other manuscript in her archives. The completed novel forks off in several directions, betraying the anxiety of a writer who knows she has made a false start—several false starts, in fact—and can’t find her way home.²⁹

Perhaps some of Pat’s confusion rested on the fact that she had two muses for young Frank Pierson, the boy who follows Tom Ripley. She began by bringing Frank to many of the milieux she’d visited with Tabea Blumenschein in Berlin, meanwhile giving Ripley her Socratic (and other) feelings about Tabea and, later on, about Monique. But she ended by bestowing on Frank some of Monique’s moral scruples and at least one of her tastes—a Lou Reed record that Monique had loaned to Pat.

It was typical of Pat’s cross-referencing (and of her ability to superimpose the image of one woman on another, to replace one woman with another) that the song she particularly relished on the Lou Reed record she borrowed from Monique was the one called “Make Up.” Makeup, maquillage, was Tabea Blumenschein’s speciality. Pat used some of Lou Reed’s lyrics from “Make Up” in The Boy Who Followed Ripley.

With the inspiration of Monique Buffet’s company, Pat managed to finish The Boy Who Followed Ripley. Along with it, she fashioned what was probably her most unambiguous relationship. The more than three hundred letters she wrote to Monique over the course of their friendship are phrased with as much generosity as Pat could summon. Perhaps that is why, alone of all Pat’s living lovers, Monique Buffet’s memories of Pat are unmixed. Pat, she says, was always “an angel” to her, “patient,” “generous,” and infinitely “kind.” Pat even cooked for Monique regularly—a fact that would come as a stunning surprise to any of the hapless guests who had visited Patricia Highsmith in the freezing, unprovendered, uncomfortable houses of her older age.

And it was real French lunches Pat cooked, too. Every time Monique visited Moncourt, Pat made a côte de boeuf or a lapin and a salade, and she had a fresh bottle of good wine waiting. And although she wouldn’t eat a bite herself, Pat always set the table nicely for two.³⁰When she felt like it—which was almost never—Patricia Highsmith could perfectly well play the solicitous hostess.

Pat’s younger lovers and her younger late-life acquaintances portray a very different person from the semidisoriented and manipulatively helpless woman who emerges from the descriptions of her older French and Swiss neighbors. Pat reminded Tabea Blumenschein of “Gertrude Stein”: she says Pat was a very capable “millionaire businesswoman.”³¹ Pat’s early adventurous lover, Natica Waterbury, felt the same way, and Pat wrote in her diary for 1944 that Natica “often says I am a businessman.”³² Phyllis Nagy says of Pat: “She never ever ever projected an air of helplessness with me. She projected an air of complete control.”³³

Over and over, Pat implied in her letters to Monique that she didn’t want the young woman to take her seriously as a writer, and that she was hoping to blunt the complicated instruments of self-torture by which she had always harrowed up her own feelings: terminal seriousness, murderous jealousy, a compulsive focus on time, and a need for love that was so intense that it consumed itself and destroyed its object. Like paranoia and like her writing, too, love was an organizing principle for Patricia.

So it was a sweet, if somewhat manic, re-creation of herself that Pat rehearsed in these letters to Monique. She invented a writing voice (much edited) which was adolescent in its expression and which, in the end, provided a rather threadbare concealment of her needs. Although Monique came to love Pat, Monique was in love with another woman and not “in love” with Pat. And Pat herself wasn’t “in love” with Monique either—at least, not in the old, destructive way. Pat had her triangle again, but this time it didn’t destroy her.

And so Pat began to imitate in life the self she was inventing in these letters—they were her most benign forgery—just as Oscar Wilde always said life should do with art.

She wrote to Monique in this (unrecognizable) way:

I am also too serious, but am really trying hard to correct it!³⁴

If you happen to be late, I shall not mind waiting for you.³⁵

Please don’t be alarmed by my (perhaps) numerous letters…. Please take it easy—and realize I am not putting pressure (I trust!) and I am not the jealous, neurotic type…. I really think life should be enjoyed.³⁶

Pat’s letter to Monique asking permission to dedicate to her The Boy Who Followed Ripley—the book whose life she felt Monique had saved—is entirely charming, with its characteristic modesties, its nutty numeric precisions, and its protective retreats into multiple choices.

19 Nov. 1978

Dearest Monique,

I enclose a little book you will not have to read. I got it because the colours remind me of you. You see I am not always thinking about bed….

I would like to dedicate my new Ripley to you, and offer the following suggestions. Please check one, as they say on exams:

 To M.

 To M.B.

 To Monique (lots of Moniques in the world)

 To M?B (I do not know your middle name)

 To Monique Buffet (I anticipate a no on this already.)

 I don’t want or like dedications in principle.

 No.

This is because you were such an inspiration on—literally 5/6ths, or last 250 pages of this 300 page book.³⁷

Pat took her book dedications seriously. Her books—perhaps more than the books of many other authors—were her life. Her dedications often coincided with a high point in her relations with (or her feelings of nostalgia for) her dedicatees. Not all her books are dedicated, but their dedicatees include five men (two of whom were related to her), one married couple, twenty-one women (and the companion dog of one of them), a political movement, and her cat Spider. The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder was inscribed to her cousin Dan Coates. Pat mentions his home, Box Canyon Ranch, and his home state and hers, Texas, in the dedication. Dan, of course, was the most present male figure of her childhood, just as her father, Jay B Plangman, to whom A Dog’s Ransom is dedicated, was the most absent. The collection of short stories originally published as The Snail-Watcher was consigned to Alex Szogyi, with whom she had a long, warm friendship and a frank correspondence. The Two Faces of January was inscribed to Rolf Tietgens, who sometimes seems to be Pat’s male homosexual twin—the twin who didn’t, as Pat and Ripley did, “get away with it.” The collection of stories called The Black House is dedicated to Charles Latimer, the transplanted Canadian she’d met in the 1960s when he worked for her London publisher, Heinemann. He “thought she was a genius”³⁸ she responded by temporarily making him one of her executors.

But the preponderance of Pat’s books are dedicated to women. Aside from the “false” dedication of The Price of Salt—a book full of misdirections (including the pseudonym it was written under), designed to hide the emotional biography Pat had buried in it, and dedicated to three people Pat said she’d made up, “Edna, Jordy, and Jeff”—her book dedications constitute an index to the life of her heart.

Two books were dedicated to Mary Highsmith, and she is the only dedicatee to receive this distinction. This Sweet Sickness, written with another Mary in mind—Mary Ronin—was still assigned to the original Mary, and Miranda the Panda Is on the Veranda, the book of nonsense rhymes and illustrations Pat and Doris concocted in 1958 (a book which made Janet Flanner “wince” with aesthetic disgust as she thumbed through it),³⁹ is also dedicated to Mary. It is Pat’s silliest book, and she was responsible only for the artwork. The inscription on Edith’s Diary—requested by Marion Aboudaram—simply reads “Marion.”

Strangers on a Train, although dedicated in manuscript to “all the Virginias” and slyly changed to “all the Virginians” in the first paperbook version (a recent paperback edition has restored “the Virginias”), went undedicated in its hardcover publication—as did The Talented Mr. Ripley, the book Pat certainly thought of as dedicated to herself. After all, when she gave Ripley a middle initial, it was her own. Tom signs himself in three different novels as “Thomas P. Ripley.” P was for Phelps—but it was also for Patricia and undoubtedly for Plangman, too.

A Game for the Living (1958) was principally dedicated to Ethel Sturtevant, “my friend and teacher,” although Pat thriftily threw in another set of nurturers (Dorothy Hargreaves and Mary McCurdy), whom she cited “for their empathy and for their house.” Ethel Sturtevant was Pat’s unfailing source of praise and succor—she compared Pat mistily to Edith Wharton in a letter—when she was her literature professor at Barnard College, and she continued to champion Pat until she died. The Cry of the Owl went to “D.W.,” Daisy Winston, Pat’s outspoken ex-lover and friend from New Hope, Pennsylvania, one of the few people to whom Pat gave a sizeable sum of money—a five-thousand-dollar check—when it was most needed.

The Glass Cell (1964) was assigned to Pat’s beloved cat Spider, who, three years after the book was published, was conveyed into the hands of the British novelist Muriel Spark—with a little help from Pat’s cat-loving Southern friend, Eugene Walter, and some serial obstructions from a Roman landlady. In 1970, Pat listed Muriel Spark along with Iris Murdoch, Kingsley Amis, and Graham Greene as the four British writers she liked “although,” she added candidly, “I am not a great reader of anything.” ⁴⁰ In 1971, Pat wrote to her friend Kingsley that “reading Muriel Spark’s brilliant Memento Mori [made me feel inadequate:] I am appalled at my obtuseness in grubbing over my novel for seven months.” ⁴¹

Dame Muriel Spark explained to me how Spider Highsmith had come to live with her:

I got the cat from mutual friends in Rome. I’m a fan of Patricia Highsmith—those unexpected reversals, that anti-hero. We never met, unfortunately. She couldn’t take Spider with her to England. Someone was supposed to care for him and found she couldn’t, and it was supposed to be a temporary arrangement. But after I got to know him I couldn’t let him go.

Spider, whom Pat had left in Positano when she went to live in Suffolk, made the train trip from Positano to Rome all by himself. In 1968, Muriel Spark sent Pat a telegram which Pat kept all her life: “Spider is safe with me forever. He is greatly loved. Healthy and youthful. All best.” ⁴²

“[Patricia and I] had a correspondence,” said Muriel Spark, “and I wrote to her when he died, of course. We were devastated when he died.

“He was the most wonderful cat: black—perhaps partly Siamese—with enormous green eyes. And very intelligent. You could tell he had been a writer’s cat. He would sit by me, seriously, as I wrote, while all my other cats filtered away.

“He brought,” Dame Muriel said, “a bit of Patricia Highsmith with him.” ⁴³

In her 1988 novel, A Far Cry from Kensington, Muriel Spark has the narrator explain the importance of a companion cat to a writer. The passage sounds very much like the description she provided of the cat she’d inherited from Patricia Highsmith. “For concentration you need a cat…. And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give you back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence is enough.” ⁴⁴

Pat dedicated Deep Water to “E.B.H. and Tina”—Ellen Blumenthal Hill and Ellen’s poodle, Tina. The Blunderer was inscribed “For L.”—a reference to Lynn Roth, whose short, sharp love affair with Pat had left a lasting impression of “type.” The hardback edition of another work went, under disguised initials, to Caroline Besterman, and a paperback edition of A Suspension of Mercy was inscribed in the early 1990s to “Betty, Margot, Ann and all the old gang”—the lesbian friends she used to consort with on Fire Island and with whom she’d once again begun corresponding. Those Who Walk Away was dedicated to Lil Picard, “one of my more inspiring friends,” and The Tremor of Forgery was offered to Rosalind Constable. Ripley Under Ground (1970) was dedicated to Agnes and Georges Barylski, the Polish gleaners who lived in a trailer 150 yards from Pat’s house in Montmachoux. Although Pat privately referred to the Barylskis as “peasants” (and preferred countries “in which there is an acknowledged peasant class”),⁴⁵ she thought they were “the only “honest people” she’d met in France. They cared for her cats whenever she travelled and had once paid her “in advance” for a kerosene heater she’d sold to them—an act of faith which thoroughly impressed her.

Found in the Street was dedicated to faithful Kingsley Skattebol, who had lived for years in the mise-en-scène of that novel, Greenwich Village: first on West Eleventh Street and then at One Christopher Street. Small g, Pat’s posthumous novel, was inscribed to “my friend Frieda Sommer”—another of Pat’s “good eggs”: a woman from Zurich prone to crushes on prominent women, who did Pat many favors and who was responsible for much of the Zurich research for Small g. Pat eventually made Frieda Sommer one of the trustees of her final will. Only Ripley Under Water (1991) was not inscribed to an individual but to the “dead and dying among the Intifadeh and the Kurds.” It was a dedication with which Pat hoped to make a point and raise some hackles. In the end, the hackles she raised were mostly her own.

Meanwhile, at the end of the 1970s, sweetness, a little light, and fun fun fun were the themes of Pat’s letters to Monique Buffet. But because this was, after all, Patricia Highsmith writing letters to a young lover, some imp of the perverse was bound to make a cameo appearance, and occasionally, through Pat’s shiny filter of “fun,” the little imp showed up. “Just so you will destroy this letter, I shall add, that I love lying on top of you (if I do not weigh too much) and kissing your neck. Don’t you think your father would enjoy this letter?” ⁴⁶

In the meantime, Monique, struggling with two relationships, did not emerge unscathed. She thinks that the seven cysts she had to have removed from her eyes during the time she was intimate with Pat (Pat, typically, did a drawing of her treating one) were a “somatisation” of her feelings about their situation. Pat, she said, never forced her to make love although she could be tacitly very insistent—and Monique made love with Pat because she wanted to. Still, every time she did so she “felt bad.” Monique was newly in love with another woman, and seeing Pat was like “walking a tightrope” for her.⁴⁷

For Monique, Pat “had the stigmata of alcoholism,” but she also “had a great charm, incredibly piercing eyes like an Indian, her voice was lovely, she had a very soft voice…. She looked directly at me…up through her hair with her head down. [And] she was so tender and so attentive and so affectionate that you forgot that she looked butch.” ⁴⁸

Pat could still attract, could still, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, act out of a softer part of herself and try to re-create some of the fun she’d had when she was Monique’s age. In this affair she was playing down both her feelings and her reputation.

“PLEASE do not consider me a heavyweight, or an intellectual, or a good writer, or anything serious like that. With you it is nice to have fun, and I want you to have fun also, with me or anyone else.” ⁴⁹

And so Pat’s relations with Monique Buffet provided a partial resolution of the perpetual “romantic” problem she had described clearly, clausally, and with a great deal of psychological sourcing to Alex Szogyi in 1969:

I may not be capable of [love]…. I want something romantic, perhaps not definite. If I have the steady thing, I reject it; this has happened over and over—rather I made it happen. I repeat the pattern of mother’s semi-rejection of me. Her “abandonment” of me to my grandmother, when I was aged 12, when my mother took me to Texas, with a promise she would divorce my stepfather…but within a couple of weeks, my stepfather came from New York and took her away, back to New York, and I was left for a dismal year—going to school with kids two and three years older than I—in Texas…. I never got over it. Thus I seek out women who will hurt me in a similar manner, and avoid the women who are—good eggs.⁵⁰