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Part 3
As is the way of the world, every remaining object Pat Highsmith kept under her eyes and out of her cellars is now kept entirely out of sight in someone else’s cellar: the enormous, climatically controlled cellar of the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern, Switzerland. The Highsmith Archives are on the lowest of the seven custodial levels in the national archives’ large white Bauhaus building, and they belong to the people of Switzerland.
The building housing the Swiss Literary Archives looks like the original structure from which Pat’s white block of a house in Tegna might be an abbreviated quotation. There is something official about both structures: they resemble large and small editions of municipal monuments, although the archive building is beautiful in its severity, and Pat’s house in Tegna is merely…severe. But the apparently windowless Casa Highsmith is more fortified, even, than the large, light, extravagantly windowed literary archives. And like its first owner, the Tegna house has no obvious windows, is divided into two sections, and looks inward upon itself. But from above, light streams into the Casa Highsmith, and out in back—where no public eyes can pry—it overlooks a garden and sky and trees.
“Hitler’s bunker,” said a friend at first sight of the Casa Highsmith’s blind front. Pat laughed grimly.1
Like all of Pat’s houses, the cellars of the Swiss Literary Archives are fiendishly cold, kept at temperatures which prolong the life of acid-impregnated papers. Every single thing Pat had in her house at the time of her death—barring the special trinkets distributed to friends and neighbors after her death and the furniture she bought or made—is there, boxed and catalogued, for as long as the world lasts. An enthusiastic archivist of her own effects, Pat would have appreciated the archives’ filing system.
In carefully numbered acid-free boxes, long flat drawers, and library shelves, all of Pat’s earthly remains—except what she sometimes seemed to value the most, her money—sit in that cold cellar in Bern. Bern is the capital of Switzerland, a verdant, fragrant mountain city of breathtaking views and shadowy arcades which Pat seems to have visited only by letter. The city is encircled by an azure blue, ice-cold, glacier-fed river, the River Aare. It is as dangerous as it is beautiful, with a current so swift that every five meters a handrail is riveted into its banks so that swimmers in trouble can hold on and try to catch their breath. Many swimmers do indeed plunge into the Aare—but not all of them come out alive. And that is another detail about the Swiss capital of Bern that Pat Highsmith would have appreciated.
The Highsmith possessions in the Swiss Literary Archives have all survived their owner’s turbulent life, transiting tastes, and long expatriation. They contain, as nothing else does, what Janet Flanner once called “the specific invisible remains” of Pat’s long relationship with them.
So here they are for you to see. Or rather, here it is: a sizeable sampling of Patricia Highsmith’s goods and chattels in the form of a list, Pat’s preferred method of organizing her life. The order of the list is simply the order in which the objects came before my eyes. Wherever necessary, I’ve added interpretative notes, but for the most part the list is descriptive: a catalogue raisonné of Patricia Highsmith’s hidden history of possessions.
By now, you will be able to work out for yourself most of the meanings contained in her things.
Objects
A coffee-colored Olympia De Luxe portable typewriter, manufactured in 1956, with a standard QUERTYUIOP American keyboard, an easy action (I tried it, repeatedly), and an E key whose identifying letter has been worn away long ago by heavy use. Four little rubber feet. Its hardshell, whale gray case has the curves and swells of a Slipstream trailer and has travelled everywhere: it is covered with stickers from airlines and foreign countries. Two addresses are affixed: 77 Moncourt and Tegna. The name Patricia Highsmith is attached to both addresses. This is the typewriter Pat used for most of her work from 1956 onwards.
A box of Caran d’Ache pencils.
Assorted pens. An eraser.
A Swiss Army knife. With attachments.
A dagger.
Some straight pins.
Food tins and jam jars, rinsed and cleaned, for pencils and pens.
A very sharp letter opener, bladed.
A Wite-Out pencil.
A recorder. (She used to play this, delicately wiping off the mouthpiece when she handed it to guests to try, and wiping the mouthpiece again when she took it back.)
The prescription for her regular glasses: +3 (right eye), +2½ (left eye).
A pair of reading glasses: yellow with black tops or “eyebrows.” Quite dandyish.
A medallion from the French government: Ordre des arts et des lettres.
The 1964 Critics Award from the Crimewriters’ Association.
Another recorder.
Trivets of straw that hold little seashells.
A wooden head, whose face is frozen in an expression of horror and sorrow. Approximately ten inches high with a wooden base. It seems to be the head of a male, but it looks uncannily like the long-faced portrait Allela Cornell painted of the twenty-three-year-old Pat Highsmith. Pat gave this little wood sculpture to Rosalind Constable, and Rosalind, at the end of her life, sent it back to Pat so that, as Rosalind wrote in her letter, prospective biographers “can see what you do with your left hand.”
Little decorated boxes.
A paperweight: the small, very heavy head of a longhorn cow skull, cast in bronze by her second cousin, Dan Walton Coates, a western artist of note, in his spare time, in 1991.
A papier-mâché cat’s-head box (the head lifts off) which holds Swiss coins. Inscribed: “The Cat Who Followed Pat by J & L.” Given by Linda and her friend Joëlle, the same set of friends who gave Pat a fancy address book and painted her kitchen in Moncourt.
Two large, old, heavy house keys from her Aurigeno house, marked “Ornamental, lock now changed. Main Back Door.”
Many odd little animal totems.
A goat’s bell.
A very large pair of binoculars.
A large gilt-edged mirror, with photos and postcards Scotch-taped to the sides of the glass; amongst them, a postcard of Colette in drag, a postcard of a panel from the Bayeux Unicorn Tapestry, and a photo of Bettina Berch with her newborn daughter.
A double magnifying glass.
A cheap pencil sharpener.
Another knife.
Two long, very heavy swords. These are the “Confederate swords” Pat said she bought in Texas during the year she was left with her grandmother in Fort Worth while Mary went back with Stanley to New York. She kept them in the crossed, dueling position on the walls of each of her houses. As Mary Highsmith was dying—and without mentioning Mary’s death as a motive—Pat finally uncrossed them. The swords were forged in Massachusetts: one in Chicopee and the other in Springfield.
A lethal-looking carving knife and fork set, large enough to dismember a buffalo.
An empty bullet casing made into a pen.
Many little cat figurines and toys.
Inkwells.
Coupons for stamps and mixed change from many European countries in another inkwell.
A box of buttons and stones.
A gigantic nineteenth-century stereograph, carved, detailed, and very difficult to use. It is accompanied by dozens of stiff cardboards imprinted with the double photographic images which convert into three dimensions when viewed through the stereograph.
A cork bulletin board.
Reproductions of David Hockney drawings.
An Al Fatah pin.
A blackboard with the names “B. Skelton” [Barbara Skelton, her neighbor in France] and “Millie”[Millie Alford, the cousin with whom she had a short involvement and a long friendship] printed in chalk. At one point in her life, Pat kept blackboards in both her kitchen and her workroom, so she could make lists of what she had to do on them.
A laser copy, framed in plastic, of a photograph of her former lover Natica Waterbury, grinning and alone in a boat on a lake.
The painting of the twenty-three-year-old Pat Highsmith by Allela Cornell. Pat’s huge hands are wrapped around her body and she has the look of a woman already weighted down by her future. Pat hung this painting in every house she ever lived in.
Two objects which Pat’s Swiss neighbors the Dieners took as mementos:
A lace snail encased in fiberglass and given to Pat on her sixty-sixth birthday.
An artistic deck of cards which can be arranged into a complete visual landscape. The landscape can be changed by moving the cards. Printed in Leipzig.
And one object that was given to me: A bleached and mended pair of Pat’s iconic Levi-Strauss 501 jeans. She wore them all through the 1970s in Moncourt, and they still hold the shape of her body.
Library
Pat’s library is another matter. The books that remain suggest the collection of a woman whose serious reading stopped at the college literature level. It is the library of someone who had a good classical education—and decided not to pursue it. Not much seems to have been added since her days as a student at Barnard, and many of the newer volumes are works by friends and colleagues (sent by publishers), copies of books she had been asked to review (also sent by publishers), or books by Pat herself in various languages and editions. The range of books attests to her insularity: she lived much of her adult life in Europe, but there are almost no books in any of the several continental European languages she practiced in her cahiers and diaries.
Here are some of the books left in her personal library, in some cases listed by title, in others by author.
The Personality of Cats
Erich Fromm
History of the Arabs
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
Edward Said
Colin Wilson
Snobbery with Violence
Bob Son of Battle, 1901 edition (a heroic dog story)
G. K. Chesterton
Daylight and Nightmare
Brigid Brophy
Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown (Pat had this book in English because Marion Aboudaram was its French translator and Pat helped her a bit with the translation; it’s a picaresque lesbian novel.)
Paul Bowles
Bitter Fame: a biography of Sylvia Plath, with crucial points bracketed by Pat; e.g., the fact that Plath used to leave the house without money in her pocket is marked with a word that expressed Pat’s feelings on the subject: “Horrors!” She also marked approvingly anything that favored Ted Hughes.
André Gide
Glenway Wescott
Fred McDarrah’s photographic study of Greenwich Village
Kay Boyle’s reedition of Robert McAlmon’s Being Geniuses Together
George Orwell
Chester Himes
Edith Sitwell
William Hazlitt
Merck Manual
Gray’s Anatomy
Latin Grammar
Plotinus
Domestic Manners of Americans by Frances Trollope
The Savage God: A Study of Suicide by A. Alvarez
Le Spiel, a novel by Dominique Marion (Marion Aboudaram, Pat’s former lover)
Many books about cats
Rider Haggard
Raymond Carver
Ian Rankin (Knots & Crosses); she had many more suspense and detective books than she ever admitted to reading.
The Minerva Collection of Twentieth-Century Women’s Fiction
Other Authors and Titles
Wolfgang Hildesheimer
Peter Ustinov
Dominique Marion
Carl Laszlo
Graham Greene
Brian Glanville
Arthur Koestler
Grimm’s Fairy Tales, given to her in 1944 by Rosalind Constable and dedicated “And this is the way it was Xmas, 1944 RC”
Heinemann edition of all five Ripley novels bound in red calf with gilt letters
Various dictionaries
Colorful French
Latin Grammar (she bought it in 1938)
Latin & English Dictionary
Spanish-English Dictionary
The Clans, Sects, and Regiments of the Scottish Highlands
A number of the McGraw-Hill Compendia from the 1950s on France, Germany, Great Britain, the Provinces of France, the Netherlands, Greece, Portugal, The Paris We Love, etc.
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Some early Chekhov plays given to her by Alex Szogyi in 1965
The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine
J. S. Mill
Canterbury Tales (bought when she lived at 48 Grove)
Books in the Guest Wing
1990s editions of the Criminologist’s Journal
1960 edition of Yarmolinsky’s biography of Dostoyevsky
A biography of Graham Greene which she reviewed, giving offense to Greene’s son when she suggested he hadn’t been close to his father.
Main Room Library
Remembrance of Things Past given to her in 1944 by Natica Waterbury (a four-leaf clover is pressed in it)
Intentions—essays by Oscar Wilde bought by Pat in 1938
A little Henry James, very little Hemingway, and no Fitzgerald; a little Auden and less Poe
A 1950 edition of Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood, with a clipping about Barnes from the International Herald Tribune inserted
Webster’s Ninth Collegiate Dictionary
Biographies of Paul Bowles, Truman Capote, Simenon, Edgar Allan Poe, Marlene Dietrich (Pat wrote Dietrich a fan letter when she didn’t show up at the 1978 Berlin Film Festival), Sylvia Plath Books of essays by Gore Vidal, Mary McCarthy, William Hazlitt, Thomas Mann
Twenty-nine tattered volumes of the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica with update volume for twelfth edition
Salon Room (Chimney Room)
Only books by Patricia Highsmith
Bedroom
Controversy of Zion by Douglas Read: in it, Pat inserted a clipped-out article from the International Herald Tribune about how a director at Oberammergau failed to make the Passion Play less anti-Semitic because its very nature was anti-Semitic
Roget’s Thesaurus
The Loom of Language
Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology
Large picture books in German sent by Diogenes
The Basic Book of Cats
Gray’s Anatomy
Merck Manual
German-English Dictionary
Complete Shakespeare
The Holy Bible in a box: in it she has placed another clipped-out article: “Archeologist finds the tomb of Caiphus, the Jewish High Priest who handed Jesus Christ over to the Jews”
Chambers Twentieth-Century Dictionaries
Greek-English lexicon
Harrap’s Shorter French-English Dictionary
Book on Italy
Gay & Lesbian Literary Companion with the section on Highsmith marked with a piece of paper. There is a picture of Pat at twenty-seven slipped into it. She wears an ornamental robe, and for once, her huge hands are wholly visible. Her hands look much older than she does.
A half dozen art books: Henry Moore, Rodin, Edvard Munch, Egon Schiele, Salvador Dalí
Many travel books from many countries
Desk Drawers
Dozens of maps from every city and country Pat ever visited or wanted to visit, from a beautifully produced 1946 map of Charleston, South Carolina, to 1988 maps of Hamburg, Germany, and a 1991 map of the Fort Worth–Dallas area—some of them notated, colored, and drawn upon by Pat. All of them are much more worn than her books.
Many little receipt books and notebooks and drawing pads filled with Highsmith sketches of the myriad places she travelled to. And there are fourteen pressbooks, carefully kept up to date—and with covers designed by Pat.
Finally, there are the things which mattered most to her, discovered in her linen closet after her death:
Thirty-eight cahiers
Eighteen diaries