• 32 •
Part 2
The sudden intrusion of the French customs office, the douane, into the occasional peace and relative calm of Pat Highsmith’s workroom in Moncourt, France, on the twenty-sixth of March 1980 was both a long-awaited and an already-imagined nightmare.
Pat had always railed against her taxes in England, France, and the United States, and she had a long history of sheltered taxes (Tomes Ltd., the company she formed in London, protected her earnings there); financial redistributions (some untraceable doings in Puerto Rico and the Bahamas,1 a proliferation of bank accounts and investments in several countries, as well as some casual currency smuggling: “Have just last week discovered an outlet for the barred franc—via Canada through a friend”);2 and royalty checks arriving in business envelopes from foreign sources. Any one of these activities would have caught the attention of French tax officials; keeping foreign bank accounts, for instance, was illegal for foreign residents like Pat. All of them together were like a cluster of signposts pointing the authorities in the direction of an investigation.
Samuel Okoshken, Pat’s tax lawyer and accountant in Paris in the 1970s and 1980s, explained what he knew of her tax situation. “She received envelopes from [Diogenes Verlag in] Switzerland and [the douane] thought anything with a Swiss address was proof positive of some malfeasance…. Maybe there were things she didn’t tell me. [Author’s note: there were.] If she had secret stuff, I obviously didn’t know about it. But I had no reason to believe that she was not up-front. I felt she was completely okay, and she felt that too. But she was so offended by the French government and what they had done to her that she decided to leave.”3
The official French inquiries into her finances were enough to give Pat—so prone, herself, to feeling guilty and to making accusations—an excuse for the drastic act of moving to Switzerland. Pat took the investigation as an accusation, just as any French citizen would. But the douane’s raid was only an excuse for her to move and not a reason. The reasons for her removal were two (mistaken) assumptions: first, that she could save tax money by living in Switzerland for six months of the year, and second, that she didn’t want to live in a country which suspected everyone of being “a slight crook.” (This, of course, was Pat’s own view of most of the people she met.) A fortnight before the douane raided her house, Pat, under Ellen Hill’s direction, had already picked out another house for herself to buy in Aurigeno, Switzerland.
Since 1979 and before, Pat had been given large and small warning signs of tax troubles in France. For years, she’d been complaining of spending too much of her time filling out tax forms. Two months before the raid, she’d written to Monique Buffet: “I think I told you the French fisc is desperate to get their hands on 60% of my global income for past many years, and are asking me where I was physically when I wrote this and that.” 4
Her attempts to lighten her French taxes ran the usual expatriate’s gamut (“My accountant has 3 ideas, all of which I can do from home, by way of my NOT having to go to Switzerland”),5 but an escape to Switzerland was still very much on her mind. Ellen Hill, to whom Pat continued to turn for opinions and ideas, lived in Cavigliano. And Pat, having quarrelled with her other literary representatives, was in the middle of six or seven months of what she called her “tough” negotiations with Diogenes Verlag in Zurich to be her world representatives. Still, she had the satisfaction of beating the douane to the punch; they knocked on her door five days after she’d come back from her house-buying expedition to Switzerland.
Of the taxes Pat complained of so persistently—“most people would smile at the news of [103,000 francs in royalties], but I hit my head and say ‘Oh Jesus!’…it all goes for taxes”6—Samuel Okoshken says: “She paid a good bit, but she had a lot of American income that was treated favorably under the treaty. I think she got a pretty fair deal.”7 Pat felt differently. Cursing her tax bracket and lamenting the loss of “the fruits of her labor”—while never failing to brag about her large income to her young lover Monique Buffet—Pat wrote: “Sat. I signed a check for $31,302 (dollars) to USA tax people…. It’s the second-biggest check I ever signed in my life.”8
In January of 1980, three months before the Moncourt raid, Pat had written proudly to Monique: “the French taxman was amazed that I have declared all my earnings, and no doubt about that. This means I am not considered a ‘tax fraud.’” Whatever her inner feelings were (and her insistence that she wasn’t “considered a ‘tax fraud’” probably meant she felt like one), innocence in the eyes of others, a sense of her moral uprightness acknowledged, meant a great deal to her. Samuel Okoshken thought she was “trying to undo what [the douane] had done” by moving to Switzerland.9 In this, Pat resembles the Coateses of her mother’s family, whose sense of propriety was so great that they added that extra e to their surname—changing it from Coats to Coates—so that no one would ever confuse them with their orthographical doubles, the other Alabama Coats family: that low-down bunch of horse thieves who went out and got themselves hanged. Pat was always ready to add a metaphorical e to whatever name she was giving to her activities.
Pat’s often-quoted remark that she was so “honest” that she “trembled before customs inspectors” was made some time before the French customs inspectors (the douane) actually came to her. Like almost everything else she fed to the press, this remark was a misdirection. People who bear what she once called “a lighter burden of guilt” (her idea of innocence) don’t tremble before customs inspectors. No one understood this better than Pat, who deliberately titled her 1969 novel The Tremor of Forgery (about the man who is writing a Highsmith-like novel on a Highsmith-like typewriter in the same hotel where Highsmith actually stayed in Tunisia) because “forgers’ hands usually trembled very slightly at the beginning and end of their false signatures.”10
If Pat trembled before customs inspectors, it was probably because of the objects she was trying to slip, untaxed and/or unconfiscated, across French, English, Italian, and Swiss borders. Live snails lugged across borders were only the most exotic in her long history of transporting undetected and/or undertaxed chattel.
Like all expatriates, Pat had only to leave her native country to begin to crave its goods and services. The post offices in every hamlet, mountain village, and rural retreat Pat had ever lived in were besieged with the Levi’s and western belts Pat requested from her cousin Dan in Texas (“The size is fine…. But I still would not mind some time a plain dark brown, no colors, no colors on the buckle…. I do not like color decorations.”)11 and the jackets, vests, and pants she mail-ordered herself from Brooks Brothers in New York. Homemade cookies, favorite shirts, and slightly too small shoes (Pat’s feet were getting larger)—all respectively baked, bought, boxed, and shipped by Mary Highsmith from New York, from Florida, and from Texas for her daughter—followed Pat all over Europe. Daisy Winston sent Campbell’s soups and chili peppers and more shoes from New Hope; while cat doors, Fritos for Pat’s cat Semyon, diligent background research on Manhattan police procedure, crucial books like Menninger’s The Human Mind, and the special, “dirtcheap” Columbia University notebooks Pat used as cahiers, were faithfully posted from New York by Kingsley Skattebol for forty years.
A sample order from Pat to Kingsley on 9 July 1973: “The point is, I need three more cahiers, these spiral notebooks—which measure 7 inches by 8¼—have faintly greenish paper, emblazoned with Columbia on the front cover, stating that they contain 80 sheets also…. Price 33c [that was the 1942 price], but I am sure those days are gone forever, and they are now 75c.”12
The lavender floor wax to which Tom Ripley and his creator were so attached was mailed to Pat by the two Barbaras from Islington. But her peanut butter (at the end of her life, she lived mostly on beer and peanut butter),13 also ordered from England because it was cheaper, was an American brand. (Alabama, Pat’s ancestral state, is one of the United States’ largest producers of peanuts.) She counselled everyone to mark each parcel sent to her as being worth “under $10” to avoid customs taxes. If she was paying the postage herself, cash on delivery, she insisted that the packages be sent to her by the cheapest possible surface mail.
In the harsh glow of hindsight, the douane’s descent upon the House of Highsmith in March of 1980 looks less like a personally directed tax raid and more like yet another expression of Pat’s lifelong struggles with income streams, owned objects, and demanding governments. It was also, of course, something more than a metaphor. It was an assault on her property and her privacy—and the stuff of her very worst nightmare.
On the morning of 26 March 1980,* the French douane staged a quiet “invasion” of the house on the rue de la Boissière. Two “lurking” French tax officers and one policeman “knocked on my door, proceeded to rifle my papers, and went off with USA bankbook, all current business papers (letters which I need). These creeps are after foreign bank accounts which of course I have declared.”14
“The French are preying on me, because I am an easy mark, a soldier standing up in the field, not protected by a trench…. Ellen Hill…asked me if the douane had seized my passport, and I ran upstairs to see, and told her that they had not…. She has been through the Hitler period…. she knows what this is, so I really do listen to what she says.”15
It was a clarifying moment for a writer whose worldview could charitably be described as paranoid. The raid brought together most of Pat’s fears and many of her intolerances, and it proved to her, once again, that she was correct in her inclinations, justified in her prejudices, and arrayed alone against the world: that little island of virtue floating in a sea of swindlers we saw in “A Simple Act of Forgery.” Two days after the raid, Pat was thinking that “[m]y phone is probably now tapped” and was watching her language in telephone conversations.16
Ellen Hill’s analysis of the raid made Pat think of the “Hitler period,” which, naturally, made her think of the Jews—never far from her thoughts by now. She managed, indirectly, to implicate two Jews in the raid in her letters: her amiable accountant, Samuel Okoshken (“my accountant is really to blame for this”)17 and the only French inspector whose name she mentioned: a Monsieur “Roger Cohen,” who reminded her “twice…that it was not allowed to have a foreign bank account.” Her response to the French government was more general: an execration of all things French and, again indirectly, a phrasing of her problem with the government in terms of the Israeli-Arab situation. She was, she said when the French government wanted to honor her, “not accepting the Crystal Stopper” [symbol of the award the French government wanted to give her]…just like Sadat refused to appear with Begin.”18 Whenever Pat was feeling threatened, her mind fell naturally into this comparison.
Whatever she was thinking privately, Pat continued to consult with Samuel Okoshken for years, even encouraging him in his own hopes to become a writer and providing a jacket quote for one of his novelist friends. He has fond memories of her: “I could see,” he says, “the young girl she had been.”19 She made her complaints to everyone but Okoshken himself about the way her tax matters were handled. As luck would have it, her last lover in France, Monique Buffet, was acquainted with Okoshken’s then-secretary—and Pat was “terrified” that “information” (of what kind, she never told Monique) would make its way to Okoshken via the secretary gossip circuit.20
Despite the depopulating nature of the curses Pat called down upon the French government, there seemed to be enough officials left in high places in France to nominate Patricia Highsmith for several honors. Characteristically, she accepted every distinction the French had to offer, including, in 1990, the Officier des arts et des lettres. Paul Bowles, in quite a characteristic mood himself, wrote to Pat wondering if it really would be “fun to receive the order of Officier des Arts et Lettres?” It was a rhetorical question, and naturally, he answered it himself. He didn’t think it would, he wrote.21
The tax inspectors remained in Pat’s study for several hours that March day in 1980. They seemed to her to be uncommonly thorough, staying on until one o’clock.22 They opened her desk drawers, they fingered her possessions, and they laid their hands on her Olympia typewriter. Horrified at this breaching of her boundaries, Pat felt—any writer would feel—that her writing room was being violated by the douane’s presence and polluted by its searches. The place where she worked was sacred to her, and nearly twenty years before she had written about “the strange power that work has to transform a room, any room, into something very special for a writer who has worked there, sweated and cursed and maybe known a few minutes of triumph and satisfaction there.”23
Pat always preferred to carry out the physical exertions of the writing room in secret. “It is the lonely nature of writing that these strong memories and emotions cannot be shared with anyone,” she advised the readers of Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction.24Pat’s bed was in her writing room, and its exposure to the eyes of the tax inspectors would have been especially painful to her. Her feeling for privacy, her horror at being revealed in ways she couldn’t control, went right down to her cells.
Oddly, or not so oddly, since novelists often write their lives before living them, Pat had already imagined something like this invasion in Edith’s Diary, written in the very house, in the very room, which the douane had just defiled. In the novel, Edith’s ex-husband, Brett, has brought in a psychiatrist to evaluate Edith, whose irregular behavior has attracted the attention of everyone around her. The two men walk, uninvited, into Edith’s workroom, where her diary lies open on a table. “‘Get out! Both of you!’…She realized that her teeth were bared, that she was panting. ‘You might have given me some notice! I think this is simply awful!’ She heard her own voice shrieking, as if the voice belonged to someone else.”25
After the French inspectors left her bedroom, Pat, “still in shock,”26 telephoned to Ellen Hill in Cavigliano for help. In her most martial mode, Ellen told Pat to pack her bags immediately and get out of the country right away. That’s when Pat remembered that Ellen Hill had been through the “Hitler period” and must know what she was talking about.27
And then, with another of those ritualized actions with which she met life’s daily disorders, Pat started right in to wash her troubles away. What she was accustomed to doing twenty times a day to her hands, and twice a day to her body, she now did to everything the tax inspectors had touched.28 She cleaned and recleaned her typewriter and she washed and wiped down her desk, trying to dissolve in water and cleaning solution her profound sense of violation. And it was not only the violation she was removing. She was scrubbing away at that soiling feeling of guilt—as palpable to her as spilled ink on her desk or the heavy hands of the intruders on her papers—which overcame her every single time she was accused of something.
In her obsessive and prophetic way, Pat had always tended to see the world in terms of dirt and detritus. “We throw out as much as we take in,” she wrote irritatedly in 1971.29 To her love of bathroom humor and toilet jokes, she added a fixation with recycling “the eternal waste products of existence.”30
Kingsley remarks that this fixation extended to Pat’s “compost pile,” for which she would “save everything” and which she would “visit” all the time.31 Pat liked the look of decomposition. In her second summer in Moncourt, the summer of 1971, Pat had been pondering the possibility of writing a novel called Garbage. It would have to do, she reckoned, with “the human concern from birth until death with washing diapers, flushing toilets, bedpans, and then what to do with the corpse. Not to mention all the orange peels and whiskey bottles…the dust, the emptying of Hoover bags, the blowing of snot and soot into Kleenexes, the abortions, the hysterectomies.”
But how should she begin a novel with such an unpromising subject? Pat didn’t have to look beyond her mirror. “I need a character obsessed with all this. I’ve got one, myself.”32
And now, as in some awful fairy tale in reverse, the douane’s mephitic touch had turned the golden tools of her “workroom” into “garbage.”
Pat wouldn’t go near the office of the douane to retrieve her confiscated goods, but she had, as usual, an obliging neighbor to do the necessary. “Mary Ryan fetched my xeroxed papers for my accountant from the Douane. I consider them filthy.”33 Pat was now “writing 3 pages a day instead of 5 or 8 [of The Boy Who Followed Ripley], but if I didn’t make this effort, I’d be down the drain. Finished.”34 Profoundly upset, Pat knew what she needed. She needed to work. And so she marshalled her forces and soldiered on.
Until the last possible moment, Pat Highsmith held off making her final will. She had, however, made quite a few penultimate testaments over the years, whose revoked clauses at the end of her life left her friends with many an unpleasant surprise. Marylin Scowden, Pat’s last accountant, felt so protective of her that she worked for Pat outside her own firm so she wouldn’t have to charge her. “I knew she needed more than tax service; she needed someone to talk to, and…I couldn’t charge her for all that,” Scowden says. But in December of 1995, two months before Pat died, Scowden put her professional foot down. “I said we have to put things in order and I knew she was very reluctant to tell one person everything. I knew I had some pieces [of the puzzle of Pat’s estate] but not everything. I had even advised her to give away everything beforehand to avoid taxes….
“‘I’m sorry,’” she said to me, you may think I’m very stingy but I’m just too afraid to do that.
“It was really heart-wrenching to hear that admission from her, that fear of not having money. She was ashamed to admit it to me. Both of us were surprised that she admitted it…. She never made comments like that.”35
As soon as Pat started making good money—much earlier than she tended to let on to friends and interviewers (“oddly, I keep earning quite sufficient money [and] am now cynical, fairly rich…lonely, depressed, and totally pessimistic,” she wrote in her diary of January of 1970)36—her “house fever” kicked in. She began to burden herself with more houses than she could ever live in, in more countries than she could ever like. In 1969, she wrote her “Brother Dan” from Montmachoux that she was “house-poor…a condition you’re doubtless familiar with, as it turns up in the South.
“I have neither sold nor rented my house in Suffolk (England), still own half a house in Samois-sur-Seine, 20 miles from here; plus owning this house.”37
Rosalind Constable, resuming relations with Pat by letter in 1967, suggested none too delicately that Pat’s problems with houses and co-owners were self-inflicted: “It does make me furious however to see you so successful and so miserable…. [L]ife is too short…to be spent in terror and tears.”38
While living in Montmachoux in 1968, Pat was struggling with three unwieldy properties: Bridge Cottage in Sussex (she had more bills than she was willing to pay), her half share of the house in Samois-sur-Seine (where she was in serious litigation with Elizabeth Lyne over charges), and the house in Montmachoux, where, eventually, she found herself flanked by two large Portuguese families, one of whom shared a “common wall” with her. Pat, whose extreme sensitivities converted all sound into “noise” and for whom the word “family” would have been enough to spoil any house purchase, was driven to her usual assessment of family life and those who partake of it. “The Portuguese—it is like a pot of boiling soup next door, every vegetable leaping out of the pot and screaming—probably for privacy. Sometimes it sounds like a pigpen with boiling water being poured over it, scalding off the skins.”39
By July of 1969, she was entertaining, not for the first time, pleasant thoughts of infanticide. They were curbed only by her respect for “personal property.”
“I can easily bear cold, loneliness, hunger and toothache, but I cannot bear noise, heat, interruptions, or other people.
“Some people who actually own the babies kill them because of their noise. How much harder it is for people who do not own the babies.” 40
“I am really very sorry you are so unhappy,” wrote Rosalind Constable again, and wondered why Pat didn’t just check into the Chelsea Hotel in New York for the winter.41 “You seem to have plenty of money,” Rosalind wrote.42 Indeed, as Pat’s finances swelled, her problems seemed to multiply. The number of her bank accounts, lawyers, notaires, accountants, literary agents, limited companies, and offshore investments (that shadowy attempt to put money in Puerto Rico, a secret scheme to invest in railroad cars in the United States, etc.)43 were legion, and it is unlikely that the full extent of their complications will ever be known. (See “The Cake That Was Shaped Like a Coffin: Part 7.”)
Through it all, Pat managed to find fault with most of the arrangements made to handle her growing fortunes (sometimes with good reason)—and with most of the people attached to those arrangements. And her constant complaint, broadcast hundreds of times in hundreds of letters and conversations, was that she had no time left to work.
In truth, in one way or the other, Patricia Highsmith managed to foul every nest she ever occupied and curse every country she ever inhabited. She was comfortable only when she was uncomfortable. Discomfort—the condition with which she was most at home and least at ease—was a productive state for her; it usually kept her writing. And Pat’s most serious criticisms were reserved for the United States, the country she had abandoned before it could reject her, and the country which—abandoned by her—then did reject her. (Her relations with the United States were always those of a disappointed lover—or, more accurately, those of an enraged daughter.)
Late and painful proofs of this rejection arrived in terms she understood too well. In 1983, People Who Knock on the Door, her disjointed novel about the depredations of the Christian Right (it contains a precise portrait of the making of a fascist in the character of the younger son) was turned down by three American publishers, leaving her without an editor in the United States. “It is a flat book,” she wrote modestly and accurately to Bettina Berch, “but popular in France, Germany and E. Germany.” 44 At the end of her life, her last novel, Small g, was regretfully rejected by her editor, friend, and admirer at Knopf, Gary Fisketjon, and she was left without an American publisher at her death. And when she offered her archives to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, she received a letter (opened in the presence of her publisher Daniel Keel and his wife, Anna) suggesting the sum of twenty-five thousand dollars for her papers.
“The price of a used car,” Pat said bitterly, and refused to let Texas have her literary bones.45
Still, Pat continued her forays to the United States, scouting material for her novels. The Greenwich Village of her youth was her literary stalking ground, just as it had been her sexual stalking ground all those years ago, and she was still taking notes on the streets she had roamed as a young woman. Alex Szogyi and Philip Thompson, who lived in Greenwich Village, remembered how Pat used to call them from Europe and ask about the features of certain buildings and the addresses of favorite places in the West Village and if this building was still there and what the name of that restaurant was.46 Pat kept her imagination of the Village as alive as she could, and she also kept a fertile eye on the rest of the United States. A visit to Michel Block and Charles Latimer in Bloomington, Indiana, in January of 1981, shortly before she moved into her stone house in Aurigeno, produced a “germ” and a character—a sweetly alcoholic next-door neighbor—for People Who Knock on the Door.
Tentatively and rather covertly—never saying that this was what she was doing—Pat used these trips to the United States to survey the American countryside for possible places to live—California, New Mexico, Long Island, and Pennsylvania were places she considered—in terrains where she had previously stayed or worked or more or less enjoyed herself. But she could never make up her mind to actually settle on a property and acquire it. Michel Block, Charles Latimer’s lover for many years, told his last companion, Robert Lumpkin, that Pat, sitting in the back of his car, had wept silent, bitter tears at the beauty of the Pennsylvania countryside they were driving through—a beauty which, practically speaking, was denied her only because she continued to refuse it, continued to choose to exile herself.47 In Europe, Pat was a bona fide literary star; in the United States, she was a blur on the book horizon, an oddity, a cult favorite. Superman in Europe, Clark Kent at home, is how her old comics colleagues might have put it.
“The reason she lived [in Europe was because] she was admired and respected as a writer in Europe,” Block told a previous biographer after Pat’s death.48 “I really think Pat sacrificed her everyday life to her reputation as an artist…. she would have been much happier living in the United States.” 49 Michel Block was a reliable witness, a man who was sensitive to the nuances of other artists’ feelings. A consummately talented concert pianist whose own concert career never measured up to his gifts, he was another one of those Jewish expatriates to whom Pat seemed to be drawn. Block took his unusual piano phrasing from the rhythmic flexibilities of the great French chanteuse Barbara—and his rubatos are like no one else’s: as moody and cloudy as an April in Paris. Pat, who used to visit Michel Block and Charles Latimer in their country house in the Lot region of France during the 1970s, gave to Ripley her preference for Block’s version of the “Rondeña” from The Iberia Suite by Isaac Albéniz (great-grandfather of Cécilia Sarkozy, former wife of the current president of France). And Block’s version of the “Rondeña” was one of the special records Pat chose as a favorite for her appearance in April of 1979 on BBC Radio’s prestigious interview program Desert Island Discs.
When it came to countries, Switzerland alone seems to have escaped Pat’s maledictions—although it did not come in for a great deal of praise. In a paragraph in which she had already equated “seriousness” with “depression” Pat wrote: “Above all, I like the seriousness of the people…. Didn’t Nietzsche like die Schweiz after all?”50 She seems, partly, to have been curbing her tongue in favor of her ambivalent application for Swiss citizenship. She was nervous about a planned interview with the magazine Linea d’ombra: “for something too extreme the Swiss could oust me. This could go for extreme left or extreme right, and maybe I’m guilty of both.”51 (She was always guilty of both.) Four years later, a visit from two former neighbors in France pushed her to another kind of extremity.
In 1990, Barbara Skelton, Pat’s new friend from the Île-de-France, and Mary Ryan, Pat’s longtime next-door neighbor in Moncourt, made the long drive to Tegna to see the Casa Highsmith. Mary, who had been “hugging a bottle of gin” all the way to Switzerland, landed on her back in Pat’s driveway when she tried to get out of Skelton’s car.
“Whereupon Pat’s pent-up years of scorn poured out in venemous abuse while standing over Mary like a gauleiter with a whip. ‘What will the neighbors think! People just don’t behave like that here. This is a very puritanical country. Suppose one of the neighbors saw you lying in my drive drunk! I risk having my Swiss citizenship annulled.’ It was all said with sadistic contempt, and set the tone of the visit.”52
Withal, Pat’s attempts to keep her cash and possessions under her control and out of the hands of native and foreign tax officials by moving to Switzerland backfired in large and small ways. Although Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, where Pat spent eight crucial weeks nearly fifty years before her death, finally did inherit about three million dollars and her literary royalties, Swiss and American taxes got the lion’s share of her holdings. (See “The Cake That Was Shaped Like a Coffin: Part 7.”) Still, a few weeks before her death, at the instigation of Daisy Winston, Pat sent a check for either one thousand or two thousand dollars (there are two accounts of this) to the New Hope–Solebury Library, in New Hope, Pennsylvania, where Daisy still lived. The librarian’s first gesture was a graceful one: Highsmith novels were bought with the money. But Pat’s closest friends, many of whom were in financial trouble, got just what Pat put in her cellars in Aurigeno: nothing at all.
And Pat, whether she wanted to or not, also effectively disinherited Charlotte, her last cat. Charlotte was another of Pat’s “barn” cats—the cats who always gave her opportunities to make derogatory references to their breeding. There were no provisions made for Charlotte in Pat’s last will (or outside the will, either) and after Pat died, Charlotte spent some time with Marylin Scowden in Geneva (under the bed, says Scowden; Charlotte was terrified of Scowden’s cat and of everything else), and then went on to the De Bernardis in Tegna, where she lived, cosseted and loved, to the great age of nineteen—longer than any of Pat’s other cats. But Charlotte never became a sociable cat. Perhaps that was because Charlotte, like her longtime human companion Patricia Highsmith, had never really been socialized.
Many of the remaining objects Pat kept in her house are small enough to hold in the hand. They radiate significance; they are the lares and penates of a writer whose walled-up emotional life found much of its meaning in things. As an artist who harvested her final, practical style from the details of daily living, every single object Pat possessed meant the world to her; meant a world to her—and they meant just as much as she aged and her work began to thin down to what was more or less in front of her.
In most of her mid- and late-life novels, Highsmith treats people and their possessions in the same deadeningly objective way. Her often unlovely prose puts one flat foot in front of the other, levelling every action with the same even tread, dumping her burden of observations and/or her aggressions directly onto the page. The result is a mass of seemingly commonplace material, each individual item of which is stripped of the adjectives and images which graced such works as The Price of Salt, This Sweet Sickness, The Blunderer, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and The Cry of the Owl. She gives as much attention to the things in her later fictions as she gives to the characters who handle them or look at them or think about them.
In her earlier works, her objects are merely fetishized, like the glass of milk in The Price of Salt or like Dickie Greenleaf’s two rings, which Tom rips from Dickie’s murdered fingers and keeps as trophies. One of these rings is a “large rectangular green stone set in gold,”53 and it is also an insider joke. Pat knew, from reading Frank Harris’s scurrilous and entertaining books about Oscar Wilde, that Oscar always wore a “great green scarab ring.”
In her later works, the push broom of Pat’s paragraphs sweeps the detritus of daily life before it, stopping, from time to time, to pick up the odd, controlling comma, then advances relentlessly onwards, trailing strings of objects or mundane actions or simple thoughts in an accumulation of detail as dispassionate as that found in most pornographies.
The novel Pat was writing when the douane swooped down on her in Moncourt, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, offers salient examples of the author at work with her push broom. In this book, she allows Ripley, in his Balzacian way, to handle the abstract details and practical calculations of the problem that harried her all the way to Switzerland: income tax preparation. (Tom started his crime career by impersonating an income tax official who extorts checks—he doesn’t cash them—from his terrified “clients.”) The following passage, inconceivable in anything other than a fiction written by Pat Highsmith, sounds like a business letter from a tax consultant whose fantasy life has been made conspicuous by dreams of larceny. Excruciating to read, it was doubtless a joy for her to write.
Tom went back to his room, where he had set himself the boring task of spending one hour, by the clock, on his monthly income and expenses for his accountant…. Heloise’s income or allowance from her father was given her in cash, so was not liable for income tax on the Ripley bill. Tom’s Derwatt company income—maybe ten thousand francs a month or close to two thousand dollars if the dollar was strong enough—came also under the table in the form of Swiss franc cheques, this money being filtered almost entirely through Perugia where the Derwatt Art Academy was, though some came from the Buckmaster Gallery sales too. Tom’s ten per cent of Derwatt profits derived also from Derwatt-labelled art supplies, from easels to erasers, but it was easier to smuggle money from northern Italy into Switzerland than to get it from London to Villeperce. Then there was the income from Dickie Greenleaf’s bequest to Tom, which had risen to about eighteen hundred dollars a month from the original three or four hundred years ago. On this, curiously enough, Tom did pay full USA income tax, considerable because it was capital gains.54
And the passage goes on, with riveting dullness, for much, much longer, bringing in stocks, U.S. Treasury bonds, the differences in declaring income for the French and American governments, the separate worksheets required, etc., etc., as Tom calculates his ill-gotten gains on his “efficient-looking pale green graph paper, income above, output below.”55
Who else but Pat Highsmith would insert an instructional manual for income tax evasion into a novel? But this kind of brain chatter was a large part of her life, and by now she couldn’t be much bothered to transform it. So she put her financial anxieties, uncooked, into her fiction—and she let Tom Ripley deal with them.
“Possessions are nine tenths of my life,” Pat had written in 1945.56 The difference, now, was that she had so many more possessions to deal with.