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The Real Romance of Objects

Part 1

Possessions are nine tenths of my life.

—Patricia Highsmith, 1945

Finally she said, “Do you want to see my cellar?” And there were three of them. One for cheese—there was no cheese. And one for jambon—no jambon. It was a Highsmith cellar—probably cadavres.

—Josyane Savigneau, in conversation with the author

And then she wanted me to see her cellar which went on forever. It was a Hitchcock cellar.

“Can’t we go upstairs?” I said.

—Daniel Keel, in conversation with the author

At midnight she said, “Come on, let’s go down to the cellar”…and it was terrifying. And you knew if you screamed, no one in the world would hear you, just the rats.

—Christa Maerker, in conversation with the author

In the three levels of dark cellars under her high, narrow stone house in Aurigeno, the light-deprived seventeenth-century Swiss village to which she moved after the French fiscal authority, the douane, raided her house in Moncourt, France, Pat Highsmith kept, to borrow a phrase from one of her short stories, “nothing that meets the eye.”

Strictly speaking, however, there were a few objects tucked away in the first of her cellars, objects no Highsmith house was ever without: “a long trestle table…brown paper and string…saws, nails, screwdrivers, chisels, sandpaper,” as well as hammers, rasps and awls¹—the whole panoply of pointed, edged, angled, blunted, and sharpened instruments Pat used for the precise brutalities of her furniture making. Since 1933, when she was twelve and the only girl in the woodworking class at her junior high school in Fort Worth, Pat had been ripping raw materials apart and putting them back together again to make something new. It wasn’t, she thought, all that different from what she did every day at her desk.

But in the penumbral cellars beneath her workroom, just where you might expect a writer obsessed by secrets, lies, and the rusty hinges of guilt to hide some of her best evidence, Pat stored nothing that belonged to her. Only a “neighbor’s bicycle” (spotted by a sharp-eyed French journalist), leaned against a cellar wall, declining in the Stygian gloom.²

Still, like a magician who makes a great show of pulling something out of a top hat and then suddenly displays the hat’s empty crown, Pat liked the drama of flaunting these hollow, shadowy, scary spaces before her guests. Many a nervous visitor followed her past her worktable and down into the dark.

Was there, Highsmith’s guests couldn’t help but wonder, something those bare spaces might be concealing? Something like the corpse of the American art collector Tom Ripley had so casually dispatched (with a bottle of vintage Bordeaux) in his own black cellar at Belle Ombre in Ripley Under Ground?³ Pat must have known how uneasy she was making her visitors—and still she continued to lead them down those cellar stairs and into the gloom.

Cellars, anyway, were never really where she stored the things in which she invested her feelings. She preferred to keep her meaningful objects under her eyes or close at hand, hiding their significance (as she hid so much else) in plain sight.

“I am superstitious about the influence of mental attitudes,” Pat wrote. “Therefore I am superstitious about the objects…with which I surround myself which in turn create my mental attitude. It is, in terms of actions, if one acts upon it, a really strong superstition.” ⁴

And she was very particular about the placement of her things. Kingsley, who was one of Pat’s major sources of mailed objects and materials for nearly half a century,⁵ recalls that “Pat was a bit like…do you remember a play called Craig’s Wife?^* About a woman who, if you removed a matchbox an inch away from where she had left it, she would go berserk. Pat had a kind of fetish about placing things. When she couldn’t locate something, she’d get quite upset. I moved an ashtray once on her table in Tegna, and she very rapidly swept it back into its proper position. She didn’t say anything, but she glowered.”⁶

Something similar happened shortly after Pat moved to Bucks County with Marijane Meaker—“probably the fall of ’60,” says Meaker. Pat, who had been “complaining [that] her desk was so small,” was soon the recipient of a surprise gift: Marijane’s own large desk, which Pat had “always envied.” Pat “clapped her hands with delight” and then, at dinner “she began to cry. She said it was so sweet of me but she could not give up writing at her small desk. She hadn’t known how to tell me.”⁷

Meaker wrote about the desk incident to Mary Highsmith (who had her own, well-bevelled reasons for keeping in touch with Pat’s girlfriends), using it “to explain how [Pat] often was mysterious to me…[and making it an] example of the varied signals she sent out.”⁸

Pat’s behavior with the objects she owned continued to puzzle friends and lovers for decades; her “varied signals” seemed to be part of her own special binary code. Like a transmitting device left behind on the (bi)polar permafrost, she went on emitting contradictory messages for decades. Not until the very end of her life—when she had aged and iced and set herself down in Switzerland, a terrain as unfamiliar to her as real permafrost might have been (but she loved the “order” and “cleanliness” of it)—did she relax what Julian Symons called her “anacondan grip” and “turn loose of” some of her deep psychological divisions. Along with them went the distinctive double-mindedness that had always marked her writing. It was a serious artistic loss.

Josyane Savigneau, the French critic, writer, and eventual editor of Le Monde des livres in Paris, first went to interview Pat in her house in Aurigeno with a photographer early in 1987. Pat, Savigneau noticed, spoke a pure, old-fashioned American, “completely preserved by her exile.” She was “like a cat who might reach out and suddenly scratch,” and she “was terrified we would break something or move something; we were like barbarians to her.” Savigneau, “already paralyzed with respect for her,” was trying to be as delicate as possible with Pat, but “when the photographer started shooting, Pat became terrified; her sense of space was entirely invaded…. ‘Be careful,’ she kept saying.’ Be careful. BE CAREFUL!!’”⁹

Phyllis Nagy, who met Pat in late 1987 in New York (see “The Cake That Was Shaped Like a Coffin: Part 5”), visited her in the spring of 1989 soon after Pat moved from Aurigeno to Tegna. Phyllis noticed that Pat’s bookcases were filled with all the editions of her own published works and with nothing else. “Not another book by another writer was on display,” says Nagy, and Pat was in no hurry to unpack the rest of her library.¹⁰

“Pat,” says Nagy, “was very capricious, easily offended, very touchy about all the things in her house. If you didn’t compliment something she liked, she’d hold it against you.”¹¹ Nagy found this attitude surprisingly “feminine.” Pat stopped corresponding with Nagy for “almost a year” when Phyllis failed to praise some of her paintings (and wrote to Kingsley that “Phyllis is without a doubt the most un-visual person I’ve ever encountered”).¹² When they resumed corresponding, Pat was as forthcoming as ever.

Because Pat never strayed far from her own psyche in creating, destroying, or accumulating—“My stories are another form of telling what I wish to do,” she remarked genially to an interviewer (who failed to flee the room, proving he didn’t understand her meaning)¹³—she invested all her possessions with her long history of emotional advance and violent retreat, and with her deepest spiritual yearnings. With a brutality that cut through her natural reticence, Pat was perfectly capable of taking back certain objects she had given away, especially if she thought she might regret her “loss” later on.

In the heady New York summer of 1941 (Pat was twenty; the world and the relationship were new), her friend-and-something-more, the talented, well-connected, generous painter Buffie Johnson, “gave me a small green polo belt last night from Paris…. I started to give her my bracelet. I put it on her. But thinking about it…I made her give it back.”¹⁴

But this is mild. A livelier attempt at repossession began soon after Stanley Highsmith’s death in 1972, when Pat, newly settled in her Moncourt house, waged a fiercely fought four-year struggle in letters with her mother for custody of the “Hamilton Watch” and “watch chain” which she, Pat, had inexplicably given to Stanley Highsmith at the ages of twelve (watch) and twenty-one (chain). Or perhaps—Pat varied her stories—she was thirteen and twenty-two when she gave these gifts to Stanley.

In lengthy letters to Mary Highsmith, to her cousin, Dan; to her father, Jay B Plangman; and to Nini Wills, a friend of Mary, about the Hamilton watch and chain—objects whose long absence from Pat’s sight had endowed with vibrant emotional drama—Pat wrote fetishistically graphic descriptions of both objects. She detailed their every scratch, curve, and surface, and her letters show how deeply and poignantly she invested her “earned objects” with her history and her desire, her sorrow and her rage, and her brokenhearted and perpetual sense of loss.

In an attempt to win Mary’s friend Nini Wills over to her side of the Hamilton watch story—Pat still loved to tattle on Mary—Pat allowed herself to exercise a few of the compulsions with which she usually responded to any disturbance: numeration, classification, and substitution. Writing to Nini Wills on 9 March 1972, Pat mixed up her money and her memory, put a number to every single thing she did, and—unsuccessfully—tried to replace her mother with a pocket watch:

And if you will forgive me for saying so, I am sorry to part with the watch and chain, which I chose for aesthetic value…when I had more taste than money…. I cut the grass for my Grampa Daniel Coates 24 times at 50 cents a whack, and so I arrived at $12.00 which bought the watch back in 1933. The watch cheered me up during a miserable year, when I missed my mother…. I had thought to remain with my mother, aged 12, when we had just come from New York to Texas, to be free, alone, happy with my Grandmother Coates…. I was in a very depressed state, but the watch was something to work for, something to achieve….

…I think even [my mother] has a dim idea of what spiritual sustenance this small object of beauty gave me, during the saddest year of my life.¹⁵

Nini Wills said to Mary Highsmith about the letter: “My God, no wonder she has that grim tight mouth in that newspaper picture. Boy, she went back to the embryo and scraped the womb, wouldn’t you say?”¹⁶

And Pat—fifteen years later, still brooding over the Hamilton watch but now hoping to turn the incident into a fiction about “the sick and cruel types who prey upon the elderly and the feeble-minded”—decided on no evidence at all that it was “[l]ikely [Nini Wills’s] son got the famous pocket watch.”¹⁷

Countering Pat’s watch-and-chain sallies from France with a few forays of her own from Texas, Mary Highsmith, whose sense-memory for objects was exactly like her daughter’s, began to agitate for the return of Pat’s “teething ring.” Pat fended her mother off with a storm of logic, a tidal wave of accusation, and a Baedeker of the teething ring’s travels since Mary had deposited it in London with Pat’s ex-lover Kathryn Hamill Cohen “in Sept. 1959.”¹⁸ And then Pat added another skirmish to the watch-and-chain war: now, she wrote, she also wanted “Stanley’s cufflinks,” which had been “promised” to her. (This was a splendid but entirely futile diversionary tactic on Pat’s part.)

Mary eventually won the watch-and-chain battle—that is, she didn’t give them back to Pat—but it is difficult to say whether she prevailed through native cunning or whether the matter had merely slipped her failing mind.

Far more than cuff links, watches, and teething rings were involved in this last struggle for love and possession between the two Highsmith women. Like the emotional sleight-of-hand artists and serious drama queens they both were, Pat and Mary managed to substitute small items for large emotions, and to replace their disappointed love for each other with titanic quarrels. They went right on doing so for the rest of their lives.

During the same school year in which Pat acquired the Hamilton watch (1933–34)—the year Mary had gone back to Stanley in New York and Pat took up working with wood and sharpened instruments—the twelve-year-old Pat made another purchase. Somewhere in Fort Worth, Pat said, she picked up two “Confederate swords” (that’s how she always described them)—and they are still in her archives: large, heavy, and absolutely lethal looking. The swords were an unusual acquisition for a twelve-year-old girl—but Pat was an unusual twelve-year-old.

Pat’s swords might have been brandished south of the Mason-Dixon Line during the Civil War (still enshrined in memory by the Coates family who lost sons, brothers, and slaves to it), but they were certainly forged in Massachusetts: in Chicopee and Springfield, according to the inscriptions on their blades. Pat kept them in the classic crossed, duelling position on the walls of every house she ever occupied. It was not until the end of Mary Highsmith’s life—but without mentioning Mary’s decline and death as a motive—that Pat at last uncrossed her swords and displayed them, aligned and pointing in the same direction, on her wall in Tegna.

Kingsley Skattebol remembers that Pat told her more than one story about how she got the swords. One time, Pat said they belonged to one of her “Confederate uncles” another time, she said she bought them in an antiques store. And on a trip to New Hampshire with Mary and Stanley in July of 1937 when she was sixteen, a trip on which she managed to lose the “garnet ring which I chose & paid for myself” (Pat always had bad luck with rings), Pat wrote in her high school journal: “I buy second sword.”¹⁹

No matter where Pat got her swords (or what stories she told about how she got them), she preferred to believe that she brought them back with her as souvenirs of her miserable year in Texas in 1933–34—the year she never forgave her mother for. Reading between her lines, Pat returned to her parents’ cobbled-together marriage and cramped apartment in New York as double-minded as she was ever to be, with an offering of peace in one hand (the Hamilton watch for Stanley) and an instrument of war (a duelling sword or two) in the other. The other thing she brought with her to New York was less tangible, although her feeling for it lasted just as long as her feeling for her swords. It was her grandmother’s good-bye kiss “wet on my upper lip, and I let it stay, dreading the inevitable time when the wind would dry it, and the coolness would be gone.”²⁰

If Pat’s arrival in New York from Texas in 1934 had occurred six or seven decades later, the unhappy preteen might have found herself enshrined in the collective family nightmare that is American social history. The profile Pat created of herself as a miserable child in Fort Worth in 1933–34 is very close to the tabloid image of terror that haunts America now: an adolescent misfit, depressed, enraged, seething with images of destruction, and armed to the teeth. But Pat was a born writer; she waited. And so she was able to take her most efficient revenge in fiction.

In 1980, as a token of her warm feelings for her editor at Calmann-Lévy in Paris, Alain Oulman, Pat gave him a small table she had made out of wood. M. Oulman, nephew of Calmann-Lévy founder Robert Calmann and the “Pitou” of his long, affectionate correspondence with Pat, was the person who had done more for Pat’s reputation, career, and domestic comfort in France than anyone else. He dealt with the notoriously slow French telephone company for her, he helped her with her more difficult houseguests, and he counselled her through her long, “tough” negotiations with Diogenes for world representation.²¹ And it was Alain Oulman who introduced Pat to her neighbor in the country, Colette de Jouvenel, daughter of Colette. De Jouvenel appeared with her Siamese cat at a dinner party to which Oulman had invited Pat, she became Pat’s friendly neighbor and warm correspondent, and she had the good sense to bring her own lunch in a basket whenever she visited Pat in Moncourt.

At this same dinner party, Oulman also introduced Pat to James Baldwin. “Baldwin was an interesting pain in the ass, much as I had expected,” Pat complained to Alex Szogyi²²—and wrote that she didn’t need to be told by Jimmy Baldwin, although she wastold, that “all us whiteys…shall soon be murdered.”²³

Alain Oulman patiently shepherded Pat’s visiting ex-lovers to and fro, and gave her, according to Calmann-Lévy’s publicity representative Claire Cauvin, the most extraordinary support at book festivals and on book tours. He was, says Cauvin, “always by her side.”²⁴ Pat herself wrote regularly of the many times she went to Oulman for advice and consent. A Jew like so many of her honorary counsellors, Oulman continued to serve as Pat’s sounding board.

Nonetheless, Pat—who said she didn’t know how she managed this, but seemed to manage it anyway—found the “courage” to ask Alain Oulman to return the small handmade table she’d given to him. She was justified in doing so, she wrote guiltily, because she felt she had merely “lent” him the table.²⁵ In fact, she’d given the table as a gift to Oulman and then just couldn’t bear to be parted from it. Oulman returned the “loan” graciously.

Pat felt even more intensely about a drawing she’d given to Caroline Besterman during their long affair. “If I’d come to London now, I’d have asked for that drawing back. I mean it.”²⁶

Pat’s relationship to one of the most important “objects” in her life is best expressed in her response to the first love letter she got from Caroline. She wrote that it made her feel like a “millionaire.” Pat’s friends, lovers, and associates rock with laughter (when they’re not writhing with less comfortable reactions) when they describe the role money played in her life. Stories of Pat pocketing tips left by other people at restaurant tables, refusing loans to starving friends (but giving money to more affluent ones), shortchanging an impoverished neighbor in Aurigeno, and driving sixty miles for a cheaper plate of spaghetti are set pieces in the oral histories of most of the people who knew her.

Even Pat’s very last will (she drafted too many wills for an accurate count) was delayed because she didn’t want to pay a lawyer to copy it over.²⁷ It was the will in which she effectively disinherited her oldest friend, Kingsley Skattebol, who, for fifty years and through many testaments, had been promised the executorship of Pat’s literary estate. Pat replaced Kingsley with Daniel Keel, of Diogenes Verlag, her “vermittler,” as she called him. It was a sensible decision: Keel is a great figure in European publishing, and Pat’s estate was going to be administered from Switzerland, while Kingsley lived in New York. But Pat, as usual, had another motive in mind. For years, she had expressed increasing disapproval of her own goddaughter, Kingsley’s daughter, and she told several people that she didn’t want the girl to get her hands on the money.

Although the thought of dispensing cold cash could sometimes drive Pat to Olympian acts of avoidance, check writing was another matter.

Marion Aboudaram’s three-year affair with Pat in Moncourt (see “A Simple Act of Forgery: Part 1” and “Les Girls: Part 2”) depended on her willingness to travel from Paris, because Pat rarely came into the city. Marion was working in an art gallery in Paris for low wages at the time she was seeing Pat, living on lentils and pasta in an unheated flat on the rue Germain Pillon, then one of the seediest streets in Montmartre, now as chic as the rest of that mythic quartier. Pat had already let Marion know that she wasn’t going to be suckered into buying her a radiator for her unheated apartment. At this time, says Marion, “Pat’s will [Pat was on about her fifteenth version of it] and her taxes ate her mind. That’s all she would talk about.”²⁸

One middle of the night, when Pat and Marion were in bed together, Pat, undoubtedly under duress, finally cracked.

“I’m fed up [with your poverty]!” she said to Marion. “I’m going to give you ten thousand francs!” Despite the lateness of the hour, Marion responded with great presence of mind. “Get up immediately and sign that check!” she told Pat. And Pat did it. She got up out of bed and made out a check to Marion Aboudaram at two o’clock in the morning for ten thousand francs. And then Pat did something even stranger: instead of handing the check to Marion, she put it in Marion’s purse.

Pat knew perfectly well she’d hate herself in the morning for having given Marion money. (Another woman might have prided herself on assisting a lover.) Still, Pat liked to think of herself as an honorable woman (she continued to have recurring daydreams of returning a found wallet—an act whose awful implications she would explore in Found in the Street), which was why she put the ten-thousand-franc check into Marion’s purse instead of leaving it on the bedside stand. It was like a deposit in Marion’s bank account: a gift Pat wouldn’t be able to take back after she’d changed her mind.

Pat’s respect for private property amounted to a principle, and her special feeling for purses and wallets keeps cropping up on her gift lists—a gift-wrapped handbag for Mary Highsmith was in the boot of her English Volkswagen when the car was stolen from the Montereau train station—and in her accusations: she liked to insinuate that lovers were rifling her purse. Pat did a little purse rifling herself, apologizing to Monique Buffet in writing for going through her book bag when she was absent. “If it had contained (what????) something more personal, I’d never have done it,” Pat wrote nervously to Monique.²⁹ And Pat had once looked into Mary Ronin’s purse, when Mary went out of a room, to see if the new wallet she’d just given to Mary was “thin enough for her handbag.” That was her excuse, anyway, and, just like the lovers who read her cahiers or diaries without permission and were horrified at what they’d read, Pat saw something she didn’t want to see when she opened Mary’s wallet.

Tabea Blumenschein’s lightning, then lingering, tour through Pat’s emotional and imaginative life (see “A Simple Act of Forgery: Part 1”)—Pat left Marion Aboudaram for Blumenschein, and the “aftershocks” of Blumenschein’s dropping her after four weeks went on for “about four years”—inspired the stricken Pat to an eruption of mostly bad love poetry. One rueful little stanza, more shapely than anything that preceded or followed it, expresses just what Pat’s “objects” might be substituting for and why those substitutions were so necessary.

If I were only a good poet

Able to distill all this into

A clear and beautiful little sphere

Like a gem one could see through, polished,

Something to keep, small in my pocket,

Something to look at

That wouldn’t hurt.³⁰

It was only at the very end of her life that Patricia Highsmith began to let go of some of the things that meant something to her. A friend says: “In the year before she died—she described all her treatments in detail so she knew she was dying [but would never admit it]—she would send me bits of her life, objects: an ashtray from the famous lesbian bar in Paris in the twenties…a little brick from Tennessee Williams’s house in Key West that she had [Charles] Latimer steal, and she sent me a little silver locket that one of her girls had given her. And then she started sending me her books in early signed editions…. When she started sending these gifts, that’s when I knew that she was going to go.”³¹

And, in July of 1994, seven months before she died—again without ever saying she was mortally ill—Pat wrote to her “brother Dan’s” wife, Florine, offering her and her son Don the most precious of her family possessions: “a quilt made by Grandma…. I like to see these things passed on…. the four nearly life-sized photographs of Gideon Coates and his wife, a Penn. And of Dr. Oscar Wilkinson Stewart and wife, a Deckard or Deckerd…the only things I asked Grandma for as inheritance.”³² (It was Pat’s great-great-grandmother who was a Deckerd; Oscar’s wife, Pat’s great-grandmother, was a Pope.)

For someone so conscious of objects, so careful with money, so good with her hands, and so given to listing her assets, Pat had unusual problems with her possessions. The physical world seemed to retreat before her efforts to stage-manage it. Too many times, she arrived at destinations ahead of her luggage or her typewriter—as she did on her first foreign trip, to Taxco, Mexico, in 1943 and on several different visits to Europe. Or she found herself departing before expected items arrived, as she did in Paris, in 1951. In Switzerland, something as simple as shopping for grocery items seemed to a neighbor to be beyond Pat’s capacities.³³ But some of Pat’s “helplessness” was cultivated—and she always managed to surround herself with people who were quick to offer assistance.

The accordion Pat bought from her first trip to Italy in 1948 (entrepreneurial as ever, she hoped to resell it in New York) stuck to her like glue for months and months; even with paid advertisements in the papers she couldn’t get rid of it. And despite her obsessive attention to her cahiers, she left them with friends during one of her travels, then forgot where they were for a while. They eventually turned up in a house on Long Island, but the original manuscript of The Talented Mr. Ripley disappeared into the aether in Fort Worth after grandmother Willie Mae died, and almost all traces of her unpublished manuscript, The Traffic of Jacob’s Ladder, are gone as well.

Of that lost manuscript, Kingsley Skattebol, the last person alive who read and still remembers it, writes: “if Mrs. Dalloway can be called a meditation on past intentions and what time has and has not done to the people who cherished them: this was the crux of Pat’s lost novel The Traffic of Jacob’s Ladder, unlike anything else in her oeuvre before or since.”³⁴

But when Kingsley and her then-beau Lars Skattebol first read the work in 1953—Pat was calling it “Book #3” then or The Sleepless Night—they attacked it (see “Les Girls: Part 2”), irritating Pat no end. And the last ten pages of The Traffic of Jacob’s Ladder—all that remain of the novel in Pat’s archives—support the critique: they are awkwardly written in the standard Highsmith formula of two men, Gerald and Oscar, obsessed with each other, latently homosexual, etc., etc. At the end, Oscar is dead in a hotel room, and Gerald, like all Highsmith characters, wants only to get lost: “like Oscar he could vanish into nowhere in Paris, too, if he chose, and no one could find him, if he only threw his passport and his papers into the Seine, the envelope Oscar had addressed to him, and the money.”³⁵ The manuscript of Jacob’s Ladder was roundly criticized and then rejected by the publishers who saw it, and perhaps that was why it, too, got “lost.” Perhaps, also, these remaining ten pages are from an early draft and the book was better than this remnant.

Pat’s beloved 1956 Olympia typewriter had its wear-and-tear problems (six to eight pages of fiction and five furiously typed letters a day took their toll) although she was to tell an interviewer—stressing the typewriter’s German origins and her identification with it—that it “never needed a repair.”³⁶ When she found an abandoned typewriter by her “garbage bins” in Aurigeno, she stalked the typewriter case for several days—circling it in indecision, unable to believe that she could get something that meant so much to her for nothing—before swooping guiltily down on it. “I expect a mysterious knock on the door: Have you taken the typewriter left below?, etc? but so far no one has knocked.”³⁷ Pat could never accept anything without having first earned it, worked for it—this was part of her Calvinist ethic—but she also enjoyed the complicated, criminal feelings that getting something for nothing afforded her.

On a publicity trip to receive the Prix Littéraire at the American Film Festival in Deauville in September of 1987, Pat thought she had left the only ring she ever wore (it was also the only ring she ever kept)—the circle of gold given to her by Ellen Hill in 1953 when their relations were at a nadir—on top of a piano in the bar at the Normandy Hotel and was “depressed for four days.” When her part-time femme de ménage found the ring on the rug beside her bed in Aurigeno, Pat’s spirits soared. She was also cheered by the thought that the housekeeper was actually earning her salary.

“People don’t like losing things—of sentimental value,” she wrote about the ring in an odd, alcohol-wreathed letter to the piano player of her Normandy Hotel weekend, a Mr. Abe Janssens, on whose piano she thought she’d left the ring. Unbidden, Pat decided to confide this feeling (and quite a few other sentiments) to what must have been a very surprised Mr. Janssens a couple of weeks after returning to Aurigeno from the film festival at Deauville. Happily lit up with drink during the two-day cocktail hour that she’d made of her short residency at the festival, Pat had draped herself over Janssens’s piano in the hotel bar for two nostalgic September evenings of Cole Porter sing-alongs.^* This cavalcade of the classic American songbook would have reminded her of one of the happier aspects of her parents’ apartment on Grove Street in Greenwich Village, that it was on a street of famous piano bars. Pat loved piano bars.

Pat’s acquaintance with the piano player Janssens was limited to the length of the sets he played—he kept calling her by the wrong name—and, in a phrase only she could have used, Pat wrote to him that she “couldn’t pick him out of a line-up” if she had to.³⁸ A man who didn’t know her name, someone she couldn’t have recognized under police lights, was the perfect repository for her inebriated, confessional, and very nostalgic letter. But Pat needed to use the subject of her ring to launch the communication. It was something like the way her fictional killers use “trophies” from their victims to keep the connections alive.

Pat’s car troubles were of a simpler nature. Because of her many travels, and because her houses were always rural or suburban, she had to drive to train stations and airports to get to where she wanted to go. Once there, she tended to leave her vehicles parked, and those vehicles—worse luck—tended to get stolen. One of her cars was taken in New Hope in 1962, and two of them were taken in France. She said that the theft of her English Volkswagen in 1969 from the parking lot “near the Montereau railway station” hastened “my rapid progress toward persecution complex,” although “[t]his somewhat risky theft is a pleasure to me compared to sneaky, cowardly thefts.”³⁹ She was thinking of the two lovers she suspected of rifling her purse.

In Switzerland, Pat’s luck with automobiles didn’t much change. There was a bad accident in her Aurigeno neighbor Ingeborg Moelich’s car on the way back from their visit to the Bayreuth Festival—for which her friend Charles Latimer (who insisted on being driven out of the way) bore some moral responsibility. It provoked an ungenerous response from Pat, who was not going to be cheated out of her feeling of total innocence in the matter—even though her map reading had probably contributed to the accident. Finally Pat, whose own driving was distracted when sober and deeply inattentive when drinking (she flunked her English driving test twice in Suffolk and then flunked the French driving test three times after she’d moved to Moncourt in 1969),⁴⁰ managed an unusual way to reenact the title of her first novel, Strangers on a Train. At a small railway crossing near her home, she ran straight into a locomotive with her car.⁴¹

In November of 1952, after a year of trailing Ellen Hill around Europe—their wearisome cycle of fighting, separating, loving, and separating again was well established by then—Pat wrote in her twenty-first cahier:

“Care of Mrs. Somebody.” I am always “Care of Mrs. Somebody.” Or “Mr. Somebody.” I have never a home. I wander from New York, to Paris, to London, to Venice, Munich, Salzburg, and Rome, without a real address. My letters arrive by the grace of God and Mr. or Mrs. Somebody.

Someday, perhaps, I shall have a house built of rock, a house with a name—Hanley-on-the-Lake, Bedford on the River, West Hills, or plain Sunny Vale. Something. So even without my own name on the envelope letters will reach me, because I and only I shall be living there. But that can never make up for these years of standing in line at American Express offices from Opera to Haymarket, Naples to Munich. Can never make up for the tragic, melancholic, humiliating mornings when one has gone with hope for a letter, and turned away empty handed, empty hearted. ⁴²

Pat spent her adult life the way all wandering expatriates do: leaving things here, storing them there, asking people to look after what she left behind. She added her own twist to the tale, however, often accusing the unhappy caretakers of her goods and chattels of cheating her of her possessions—or of using them without permission. She abandoned her possessions and then she felt abandoned by them, making use of her retreats from them to produce or to justify certain emotions which were necessary to her writing. Her policy with women was much the same.

Pat’s complaint that it was Mary Highsmith who lost the manuscript of The Talented Mr. Ripley was a useful one for a writer who wanted to contrast her mother unfavorably with her grandmother. Pat also complained that she had been cheated out of Willie Mae’s house by Mother Mary—when Willie Mae’s will clearly left the house to Mary and her brother Claude. Pat accused her ex-lover Tex of driving her car without permission in New Hope (she’d left the car in Tex’s care), and then worried that the local mechanic was also making free with it (she demanded an odometer reading) and that the sublettor of her house in Pennsylvania was unreliable (“everything is out of hand, my car, my house).” And she hated everyone who ever sublet her East Fifty-sixth Street apartment (and touched her possessions), except for Truman Capote.

The mostly imagined chaos in Pat’s arrangements in New Hope in 1963 made the idea of remaining in Suffolk—where she had gone to be near Caroline Besterman—easier for her. Her unvoiced accusations against two of her lovers for rifling her purse for money when she wasn’t looking were also put to practical use: they allowed her to distance herself from unfulfilling relations with women she had fetishized and objectified, just as she fetishized and objectified her favorite possessions. Her despairing responses to these women had the effect of casting Pat as a kind of object herself: the bucket in the well of loneliness.

Late one night in June of 1984, Pat, so depressed in her sunless stone farmhouse in Aurigeno, Switzerland, that she hadn’t been able to read a book for the last “two and ¼ years,” ⁴³ opened a bottle of cheap beer, lit up a Gauloise jaune, and sat down to give her hopeful houseguest, a young social scientist teaching at Barnard College named Bettina Berch, an unusually direct piece of her mind on the subject of women.

Bettina Berch and Pat, who had been corresponding for a while, had already missed a couple of opportunities to meet each other in New York. At the last missed meeting place—a bookstore reading Pat was doing in Manhattan—Bettina had left for Pat “a small bottle of the best scotch I could find. The pint size, because part of the beauty of the present was the bottle.” Pat was delighted with her gift: “I shall keep refilling it,” she wrote. “And,” says Bettina, “she did keep refilling it.” Bettina’s visit to Aurigeno was their first face-to-face encounter, and it lasted for several days.⁴⁴

Pat was well-disposed towards Bettina Berch (“sawed-off Russian-Jewish name,” Pat wrote to Kingsley, noting, as she always did, if a person she liked was a Jew; “quite decent, left-wing”)⁴⁵ despite the fact that Bettina had expressed the desire to write Pat’s biography and was, as Ellen Hill darkly suspected, “an ardent feminist.” ⁴⁶ Ellen Hill, says Bettina, was still quite “territorial” about Pat, thirty years after their love affair had ended.

Always hungry for news of the States, Pat began by pumping Bettina Berch for the kinds of facts she could use in her fictions. Although she continued to set many of her novels in the United States, Pat was by now woefully out of touch with the textures, tastes, locutions, and even the products of her native country. Don Swaim, her perceptive radio interviewer in New York at WCBS in 1987, noted that Pat was giving the word “story”—i.e., the floor of a building—its English spelling and had referred to shopping carts as “trolleys.” Pat admitted to him that she was confusing the English term “coffee white” with the American term “coffee regular.” ⁴⁷

It was in the 1970s—the first full decade she’d spent outside the United States—when Pat began to make errors of American fact and understanding in her novels, errors like having Edith Howland of Edith’s Diary bring a bottle of rye, one of Pat’s favorite bottle drinks of the 1940s, to a neighbor’s dinner party. (By 1977, when Edith’s Diary was published, rye had not been produced in the United States for at least twenty years.) Pat had to write to her still-radical friend Lil Picard to ask her for names of the leftish magazines Edith Howland would be reading and sending articles to; in Indiana, she watched American television for a week to pick up pointers about religious extremists for People Who Knock on the Door; and she wrote to ask Kingsley to do crucial research on New York police procedures for A Dog’s Ransom.

Pat always knew what she needed for her work, but because her experience of America was now that of an expatriate—and more or less limited to the International Herald Tribune, the occasional Time and Newsweek magazine, and the National Lampoon (she was a subscriber for a while, she told Lil Picard)—she was out of touch with the large and small shifts of custom and conversation which make all the difference in fiction. Her short story “I Despise Your Life” (first published in her collection The Black House in 1981) is an attempt to dramatize embattled father-son relations in the context of hip young wasters who are drugging, dancing, and living in a loft in SoHo; and whatever measures she took to ensure its accuracy were a terrible failure. The slang is decades out of date, the dialogue is unrecognizable, and not one element, including the money-based relations between the father and son, carries any more authenticity than a superficial article criticizing “the youth of today” in a supermarket tabloid. Bettina Berch, who had lengthy conversations with Pat, says: “Newsweek is what she based her opinion on and that’s not what I consider political analysis.” ⁴⁸

During Bettina’s visit, Pat was trying to work up a mid-1980s Manhattan atmosphere for her novel Found in the Street, but she had lost Manhattan as a subject. She lost it, imaginatively, in the way that Raymond Chandler said he’d “lost Los Angeles” when he moved to La Jolla. By now, her personal experiences of American places and times, the impressions and details and behaviors she’d gathered on her nighttime prowlings of Manhattan and on her lengthy boat, train, and car journeys to Texas, New Orleans, Mexico, and Maine in the 1940s and 1950s, were no longer alive enough in her mind to be made into fiction. Sunk in depression in her rock-rimmed canton in Switzerland and too far—temporally and physically—from what she was writing about, Pat was reduced to asking Bettina Berch for the Village Voice newspaper and a map of New York.⁴⁹ But Pat always asked everybody for maps.

Bettina and Pat had already discussed in their letters some of the themes Pat liked to walk her wits around, and Pat, straining for a topic that might appeal to a feminist guest, searched her memory to produce some slight evidence of the social injustices suffered by women. She herself had suffered none, she said firmly, and expressed a special disgust for feminists. On her part, Bettina patiently tried to explain to the long-exiled Pat some of the mysteries of the New America—like how to use a bank card to get money out of a wall. Pat, says Bettina, was “very funny about it. That was one of those moments of displaced humor, sitting at the other end of the world, explaining how to put in a PIN code in an ATM machine in Manhattan. What Pat eventually described doesn’t do anything wrong although it doesn’t incorporate any of these details.”⁵⁰

Pat’s secondhand research usually managed to produce a halo of strangeness around her already strange fictions, an atmospheric dislocation which a writer who gets her experience firsthand would find almost impossible to achieve. But further strangeness in her work wasn’t what Pat was after. She was just, as Bettina Berch says, “doing her research” her way, long distance. Her imagination simply couldn’t leave America alone.

As she sometimes did when she thought she’d been remiss as a hostess (by the 1970s and 1980s, Pat was quite lax in the hostess department, and worse was to follow), Pat wrote to Bettina Berch in New York when the visit was over to apologize for her “nervousness.”⁵¹ And—a sure proof of Pat’s affection—on the big, square, gilt-edged mirror in her last house in Tegna, Pat actually stuck up a snapshot of Bettina Berch cradling her infant daughter. It’s the only picture of a mother and daughter ever to grace a house inhabited by Patricia Highsmith.

In the lengthy, taped conversation which unrolled that June night in Aurigeno between the two Barnard graduates, Pat, touchy about being questioned, tired because the conversation went on until one in the morning, and worried about her sick cat who “wasn’t getting any better,”⁵² allowed herself to be drawn into a few clarifying statements about women, statements which recall her work in the comics as well as her serious fictional work.

It’s hard for me to see women (as a whole) standing on their own feet. I still see them as sort of in relationship to a man…. Which is very curious because my mother was very (as women go even now), she was definitely rather brave. She had a career since the age of twenty, and when…she wanted to divorce my father she did. And my father offered money and so on, you know, for the doctor when I was born, at least. [There was no doctor; Mary Coates was “midwived” by an upstairs neighbor.] My mother said “no thanks.” So I had in my childhood the image of a rather strong independent woman—and yet I don’t see them that way. I see them as a bunch of pushovers, for the most part. I see them as whining, to tell you the truth. Especially this feminist thing—whining, always complaining about something. Instead of doing something….

Men can leave the house. Ripley leaves his house. He’s got a wife there, plus a servant. I don’t see women leaving the house.^* Maybe it’s just a quirk of mine, or something wrong in me.⁵³

Whatever objections Pat had to her comic book writing in the 1940s, the fact that comic books concentrated on the feats of male heroes wasn’t one of them.⁵⁴

After twenty-seven years of silence, Pat initiated a correspondence with Marijane Meaker (telling everyone that Meaker had written to her first) in October of 1988 by writing to ask if “you might have a missing 3 pages from my family papers, which you were interested in…. they were of Civil War years…so you can imagine how I miss these.”⁵⁵ It was an odd way to approach a former lover—especially because Meaker says she had no memory of the papers and no memory whatsoever of being interested in them. Pat seemed to be more comfortable reaching out to Marijane through feelings she could attach to objects or activities.

Josyane Savigneau had a similar experience with Pat at their first meeting in Aurigeno. Pat kept offering her things: “‘Do you want something to drink…do you want something to eat?’” Savigneau says. “She couldn’t just say, do you want to stay a little longer…. She couldn’t say just sit down and stay—because it was clear that she liked me—and so she always had to propose an activity.”⁵⁶

Fear of loss, instigated by a world of people and objects out of her control, was a constant theme in Pat’s life. It put its unmistakable patina on much of her work—that long, slow crawl over the surface of things that can be counted, described, and handled—and it underscored all her professional transactions. The letters in which her prevailing sense of loss attaches itself to the details of contracts and business proposals would run to several stupefying volumes. The files of her literary agents—particularly Patricia Schartle Myrer of McIntosh & Otis in New York, and Mme Jenny Bradley of the William Bradley Agency in Paris—show that they bore up as graciously as they could under the constant epistolary batteries launched by their profit-and-loss-minded client.

Pat’s relentless demands on Patricia Schartle Myrer to reduce commissions for negotiating European sales of her work were reluctantly agreed to by Mrs. Myrer. But when Pat unilaterally decided in 1979 to deal with all her agents separately and to confine McIntosh & Otis to her American sales rather than having them take care of her international business as per contract, Mrs. Myrer, after “twenty years” of representing Pat, had had enough. “Since you clearly feel that you have been cheated on commissions by two of the world’s most reputable agents, I am not willing to continue to represent your work,” Mrs. Myrer wrote to Pat in August of 1979. “It has, of course, come to my attention from many sources that you have reported the downright libel that McIntosh & Otis and Heath [A. M. Heath, Pat’s London agents] charge you an unfair commission.”⁵⁷

Pat made equally extravagant claims (and cast equal blame) on almost every other literary agent who ever worked with her. Eventually she left them all (or, as in the case of Mrs. Myrer, they left her) for her supportive and highly profitable arrangement with Daniel Keel and Diogenes Verlag. But not without seven months of fully armed negotiations by Pat with Diogenes for the terms she wanted.

Pat’s intense focus on money and objects—like her conviction that every love affair was doomed to go down in flames—became a self-fulfilling prophecy. What she feared most was what she most attracted. In two or three novels—one of them is The Talented Mr. Ripley—Pat describes the power of one pair of eyes to attract another, and she makes Tom look away so as not to pull towards him the gaze of the person he is covertly watching. By the terms of her own belief, with her mind so obsessively fixed on money and taxes, she could hardly avoid attracting the unwelcome attentions of the two French government services devoted to finance: the dreaded fisc and the French customs office, the douane. And in March of 1980, in Moncourt, France, that is exactly what happened.