• 35 •

The Cake that was Shaped Like a Coffin

Part 2

Pat’s move to what would be her last house in Switzerland—the fortress-like Casa Highsmith, whose planning and design made her so happy and whose building and expense caused her so many nervous moments—took a long time and went through many stages. “I can’t stand any more strain from Tegna house…. The land itself is tough to deal with, all sandy & stony,”¹ she wrote, and sent her architect, Tobias Amman, questions, complaints, and demands for repairs for at least two years after the house was completed.² Like much else that happened to Pat in the second part of her life, the impetus to go to Switzerland seems to have come from Ellen Blumenthal Hill.

In early January of 1953, Pat and Ellen, rolling through Switzerland on their automobile trip from Paris to Trieste, stopped over in Zurich. They were on the first leg of the journey whose domestic horrors Pat would satirize in the short story she called “Hell on Wheels.” As usual, the notes Pat was taking in her cahier were doing double duty: she was shaping them into a sunny little tourist article aimed at the newspaper market (her notes are marked “Neue Zürcher Zeitung, ‘Magnet Zurich’”) about the glories of “fair Helvetia.” She portrayed herself as travelling alone and very cheerful about it.

Oddly for Pat’s later reputation as a woman who ate practically nothing, her initial notes on Switzerland are all about food: the “huge portions in restaurants…enough liver and onions…to feed a couple of husky men” the “hot rich milk” of Zurich; the “best coffee” she’d had since Italy; a lunch at Möven Pick during which “I nearly killed myself sampling about five items” and where “I can imagine I’m right back in America [because] the waitress even speaks English with an American accent.” She praised the rich provender in the “Self-Service Market” by the Storchen Hotel: “All those endless shelves of cans & cellophane wrapped cookies, breakfast foods, cheeses, delicatessen, meats, fresh vegetables, cigarettes and candy, are not only like America but—(I whisper it gently)—even better.”³

Food and also clothes were Pat’s focus because this was the trip in which Switzerland revealed itself to be the only country in Europe that could fit Highsmith’s big feet with the right-sized shoes. As for the other clothes, she wrote, the clothes she was buying in Zurich in January of 1953, they were not only cheaper than clothes in Paris but they, too, “fit my American figure.” ⁴

The ways in which Pat, in 1953, lingered over her fulsome accounts of what seems to have been just ordinary good Zurich food are like the semierotic fantasies of a woman who has been starving for a long time. And her descriptions of the countryside between Basel and Zurich—“delightful farm villages, happy, healthy looking children, stronger bigger horses than those of Eastern France…the vine-like trees that are trained to grow horizontally, supporting the house corners like living arms”—made a paradise of what she later complained was a car trip that drove her crazy.⁵ This trip did something other than drive her crazy, however. It gave her a line of travel into her future.

Here is how Pat began her Swiss notes in 1953: “Whenever I get desperately homesick, but still not desperately enough to spend several hundred dollars getting back to America, I go to Switzerland…. And in fact it was that astonishingly self-confident statement in the Swiss tourist bureau ad in the Paris Herald Tribune—‘The only country in Europe where all your hosts speak English’—that gave me the final push to come.”⁶

And here is how she ended her notes: “As long as there’s a Switzerland, I don’t know when I’ll get around to going home again.”⁷

Switzerland reminded Pat Highsmith of the United States. Principally, it was the fact that she could find English speakers there: Pat resolutely refrained, as much as possible, from speaking the language of any country she lived in if that language wasn’t English. Wherever she lived, she remained oblivious to local holidays, customs, and newspapers, reserving her reading for the International Herald Tribune and her understanding for the fluctuations of currency exchange and the prices of goods and postal services. But it was also the abundance of produce (Switzerland, ostensibly “neutral” during the Second World War, was not subject to the vastations visited on the other countries Pat had passed through), the plenitude, the richness of the countryside, and the cleanliness of the cities that attracted her. Throughout the 1980s Pat would continue to contrast Zurich with the filthy and crime-ridden Manhattan.

Above all, there was the famous orderliness of Switzerland, and order was a necessity for an author whose first written lines of fiction, set down when she was fourteen, began with two shoes neatly aligned beside a bed. Certainly, the idea of a country outside the battle lines drawn by the rest of the world, a country in a state of so-called neutrality, had the greatest appeal for a woman who said she couldn’t bear conflict, who yearned for world peace, and who was so often painfully and chaotically at war, divided against herself.

Although it was her love affairs which drove her from pillar to post and from the United States to Europe, the main reason Pat went to Switzerland was because of the emotion that was slowly replacing love in her life: the desire to hang on to her money. The French law forbidding foreign residents in France from keeping their money in other countries—Pat left France because of it—was rescinded just after Pat moved herself to Aurigeno. She wrote to Monique Buffet that she wouldn’t have gone if she’d known about it.⁸ But the fact that her literary affairs were concentrated in Switzerland—Daniel Keel and his publishing company, Diogenes, were now her world representatives and were making a great deal of money for her—was crucial to her move.

Daniel Keel doesn’t think he “ever quarrelled with Pat,” and he came to understand and appreciate her in a humorous and balanced way. (When I told him that the most frequent sentence I heard about Pat was “She wasn’t nice,” he replied: “That’s quite an understatement.” When I mentioned that Pat had written three hundred unusually kind letters to her last lover, he responded: “They’ll ruin her reputation.”) “She could be very hard,” he says, “with her voice, or with an answer or a question. ‘Don’t sit there!’ she would say…. She could be nervous and unpleasant…but only in a quite superficial way, just about a certain deal or event, or a check she didn’t like, or a title [of a book].” When Keel published Found in the Street in German, he called it, in German, Elsie’s Love of Life. It was a phrase he’d found in the book. Pat didn’t like the title change, but she accepted it. And a book which had sold sparsely in the United States became a bestseller in Switzerland.

In fact, Pat never complained in writing or in conversation about Daniel Keel. When she was cavilling about the details of some transaction—and there were serious confusions in the selling and reselling of the Ripley film rights that went on and on and cost Diogenes, Pat, and the producer Robert Hakim time and money and angst—she always displaced her anger onto the company or the company’s lawyer. Given her tendency for finding fault, her complaints about Diogenes were remarkably controlled. Keel, in his turn, treated her like royalty.

It was during a visit to Moncourt by Wim Wenders and Peter Handke in 1974^* that Pat was first introduced to the picturesque European custom of authors being represented by their publishers, a custom as unthinkable in the United States as appearing in court without a lawyer. Wim Wenders had come to negotiate for a Highsmith novel to adapt to film—and, as he describes it, he arrived at her house with an already well-developed obsession for her work.

I read one book by Patricia Highsmith, and that was The Tremor of Forgery, and I liked it so much that I read the next, and the next, greedily, until there was none left that I could have read. I was completely preoccupied by her writing. The sharpness of the observation! The immense knowledge of MEN and how their subconscious worked, but not written by a fellow man, but by a woman!…

And I became obsessed with the idea of turning one of her books into a film. And of course, I started with my favorite and you remember right, that was Cry of the Owl…. I slowly worked my way through her entire bibliography. EVERYTHING was sold, that was the sad truth. Mostly bought up by American studios who weren’t doing anything with the properties. And then I finally summed up my courage and wrote to her. I wrote how appalling I felt that “hoarding” of her books was, and that I figured the studios had bought up all her books so nobody else could use them. I also wrote to her WHY I wanted to shoot a film based on a work of hers. My friend Peter Handke had given me her address. Soon afterwards, I got a letter by Patricia Highsmith in return. She had somehow already heard of this German director determined to turn a novel of hers into a film and she was curious what was behind it….

And we talked for a while. I guess she wanted to find out for herself, if I was somehow “trustworthy.” And then she pulled this fat typewritten manuscript out of the drawer of her writing table and gave it to me. (Well, it must have been a copy.) And she said: “Even my agent hasn’t read this one yet. So I’m certain the rights are not sold yet. Maybe you want to read it.” Did I want to read it!? The title said: Ripley’s Game. I had finished it before I was home in Munich on the train. And I wrote to her: “Yes, absolutely. I want to acquire the rights to make a film after this novel!” And it became The American Friend. My first working title was: Framed. Did I know that she was Texan? Sure. I knew she was from Fort Worth. I had come through there once, so I knew HOW TEXAN that was!

…After that initial meeting I only saw her again when I showed her the film. I was really happy with the picture and couldn’t wait to have Patricia see it. But then, to my great disappointment, she was quite disturbed by it, didn’t conceal that either and didn’t have anything good to say about it after the screening. I left utterly frustrated.

Months later, I got a letter from her. She said she had seen the film a second time, this time in a public screening on the Champs-Elysées, during a visit in Paris. And she had much better feelings about it now…. And she was full of praise for Dennis Hopper, too, whom she had flat-out rejected the first time. She now wrote that my film had captured the essence of that Ripley character better than any other films. You can guess how relieved I was!⁹

During her meeting with Peter Handke and Wenders, Pat had been fascinated when Handke explained the European practice of editors representing authors. The idea might have been at the back of her mind one late evening in the summer of 1979 as she sat on a stool in Daniel Keel’s living room in Zurich, finding bitter fault with her sales, with her American agent (Patricia Schartle Myrer had just dropped Pat for her behind-the-scenes machinations over international commissions), and with most of her publishers. She was, says Keel, “very unhappy,” and so he suggested that he should telephone her current German-language representative in Zurich, Rainer Heumann, while she was still sitting there and talk to him about representing her more fully.

“He’s already your German agent,” Keel said; “he handles things beautifully…. He’ll be transported with joy [or words to that effect] if he can manage your world rights.”

So Daniel Keel picked up the telephone and called Mr. Heumann—now it was almost midnight and Pat was sitting at his elbow—and Heumann “shouted” back at him: “Are you mad?! I don’t want her or her world rights! She’s much too difficult and don’t you ever wake me up at midnight again!”

Heumann, Keel says, “was afraid of her difficult nature,” and Keel had to struggle to keep the agent’s response from leaking out of the telephone. And so Daniel Keel offered to take over the world agenting for Pat, and the whole business of Diogenes becoming Pat’s world representative was the result of “an accident,” an accident whose final terms Pat negotiated for just as toughly as Diogenes over the next seven months. She sought constant counsel from Alain Oulman, and, anxious to preserve her ability to deal directly with Calmann-Lévy, she sent back at least one contract to Diogenes unsigned. Finally, the papers were signed in March of 1980, the month the douane invaded her house in Moncourt.¹⁰

Marianne Liggenstorfer met Pat when she came to work in the foreign rights department at Diogenes in 1981. Pat took a distinct shine to her new rights representative, and although Marianne says she was unaware of any special feeling from her author, Pat was soon asking for Marianne Liggenstorfer whenever she telephoned Diogenes from Aurigeno. Liggenstorfer was trying to reorganize the complicated Highsmith backlist, centralizing and reselling her works to only one publisher in each country. “We always tried to get the best offers for her and then she’d say how expensive the house was, and would it be possible to get more money.”¹¹

An exceptionally patient woman, Marianne Liggenstorfer says she always took her cues from Pat’s own she didn’t exactly give me orders…. It was very important when dealing with Pat that you were not too fast with her. She needed a lot of time to get used to you and be comfortable.”¹²

Marianne accompanied Pat on two separate publicity junkets to Spain, at the behest of Pat’s Spanish publisher: once they went to Barcelona, and then they travelled to the film festival at San Sebastian, where Pat was the guest of honor in an homage to Plein Soleil, René Clément’s film version of The Talented Mr. Ripley. They stayed for about ten days each time, and although Pat “could blow up and calm down twenty times a day,” they enjoyed themselves. Pat drew all the time on both trips: “She’d go into her room, sit at the window, and she’d sketch.” She drank beer continually, and, says Marianne carefully, “when she drank a little more than usual, she was sometimes laughing very strangely, a stifled laugh, not very loud.” That was Pat having her own special kind of fun. At the festival, Pat answered a lot of questions amiably, and then, fascinated as always by a group of transvestites in the hotel hall, sat in the bar watching, and drinking, and talking about them.¹³

When Liggenstorfer married a director at Diogenes, Pat came to her wedding party, and to everyone’s astonishment, she danced with both Daniel Keel and Liggenstorfer’s father. (There is a photograph of Pat on the dance floor, one enormous hand lightly bunched at the knuckles and resting on the shoulder of the smiling father of the bride.) And when Pat gave a housewarming party for the Casa Highsmith in Tegna in 1989 (“The house was HER,” says Marianne), Marianne Liggenstorfer (now Fritsch) came with her husband and stayed the night, suffering agonies because she’d forgotten her cat-allergy medicine and Pat’s cats were everywhere. It was part of the special care with which Pat was treated at Diogenes that Marianne never said a word about the “nightmare” of suffering caused by her allergies that night: she wanted to spare Pat’s feelings in her new house.¹⁴ Pat’s contract with Diogenes would make her a multimillionaire at a time when a million dollars was still a good definition of the American Dream.

But becoming a Swiss citizen—a long and arduous process of certification which can last for fourteen years—was another matter, and Pat seems to have alternated her desire for it (she thought it would help her tax bill in America) with her fear of losing her American citizenship, one of her crucial identities. America was still the country which commanded her imagination, still the country with which she had the strongest emotional ties. As late as the end of 1991, she was writing to one of her legal advisors that “for sentimental reasons I may not wish to renounce USA citizenship.”¹⁵ And the depth of her feeling for her native land could always be measured by the agitated abuse she continued to heap on it. When she wrote to Kingsley about her campaign to become a Swiss citizen, it was in terms which reflected her ambivalence: “I am seriously considering switching to Swiss citizenship…. If I switch I’ll probably have to stay in bed 2 days, because of emotional shock.”^*16

If America remained the focal point of many of Pat’s feelings, her house in Moncourt, France, continued to be the locus of her dreams and her regrets.

In 1988, after seven gardenless years in Aurigeno, Pat looked at “20 envelopes of photos from my desk cubbyholes”¹⁷—they were photographs of her Moncourt garden—and allowed them to put a halo of nostalgia around her feelings for the house. She wrote to Monique Buffet about it.

“I must say I was touched by the sight of that garden in colour. Nothing can substitute for a happy garden (walled to boot), and nice friends around. I did not dwell on the photos; I am just serious on the subject; not the same kind of seriousness that brings tears, not at all.”¹⁸

Perhaps Pat, a nightly reader of dictionaries, knew that the word “paradise” is derived from the Persian word for “walled garden.”

In 1992, the house in Moncourt was very much on her mind when she sent a letter to Barbara Skelton in the Seine-et-Marne:

“As I look back, as they say—I think I should have tried for compromise in 1980 with the frogs. 1971–80 was the happiest time of my life to work, garden, cats, friends. What else is life all about?”¹⁹

But Pat’s Moncourt house was long since sold, and death would take the thorny question of citizenship out of her hands. She died an American citizen, with her American-born, Geneva-residing accountant, Marylin Scowden, as her very last houseguest. Pat had first met Marylin Scowden in Geneva on the evening of the April day in 1992 when she’d been chauffeured to Peter Ustinov’s house in Rolle for a double interview by German Vogue.²⁰ Ustinov had requested Pat as his lunch partner for the interview, and she was quite taken with both Peter Ustinov and the paintings he had hanging in his house.²¹

Although Pat was fond of Marylin Scowden and had gone some distance in the direction of trusting her (not, to be sure, with any personal information), and although Scowden had come to Tegna to settle some important financial matters with her client (Pat made her last will just three days before she died), Pat probably preferred the way in which this final guest availed herself of the hospitality of the Casa Highsmith, arriving, as Scowden did, at the white block of a house a little after Pat had been taken to the hospital in Locarno. Of previous visits to Pat in Tegna, Scowden says: “I think she was happy I came and very happy when I left.”²² This time—the very last time she had company—Pat was not obliged to share her house with her visitor.

And there are strong indications that she didn’t want to share her hospital room, either. When Scowden arrived in Tegna, she had a necessary meeting with Pat’s banker at Pat’s house, and then went straight to the hospital in Locarno with papers for Pat to sign.

“I said to Pat: ‘This can wait till tomorrow,’ and Pat said: ‘No no, I want to sign them now.’ Her intuition made her feel that it was necessary to sign those papers: it was done at her insistence…. She was on morphine, very uncomfortable, and she kept saying ‘My legs are hurting, my legs are hurting,’ and I tried to massage them, and there was no muscle left.”²³

But Pat couldn’t bear the personal attention. “You should go, you should go, don’t stay, don’t stay,” she repeated several times to her deeply concerned visitor.²⁴

And so Marylin Scowden, with no indication from the doctors that this was to be Patricia Highsmith’s last night on earth, left the room.

In January of 1980, on the third or fourth day after she had been hospitalized in Nemours, France, for a catastrophically gushing nosebleed, Pat asked a nurse to leave the door of her hospital room open. She was afraid of dying alone, and the prospect felt very near: she was “losing” more blood than she was “gaining.” She thought then that it was “maybe…a sign of vitality or brotherliness to want to speak to someone at the last and say, ‘Stay with me a minute, please—I’m going.’” The nurse refused her request to open the door because the children on the ward were “very impressionnant about blood,” and Pat, bleeding copiously every two hours, was covered with it. Pat was angry at the nurse, but she was also “ashamed of my fear of dying alone, since I’ve always known death is an individual act anyway. I swear to myself next time I’ll be better prepared.”²⁵

Perhaps her insistence in Switzerland, a decade and a half later when she really was dying, on sending her final visitor out of her hospital room—it is Pat Highsmith’s last reported act—was what she had meant by being “better prepared.” But as the longtime companion and close observer of many felines, Pat would also have known that when a country cat is mortally ill, it begins its instinctive transit out of life by going off into the woods to die alone.

The contrast between the happy little Swiss travel piece Pat was working on in her notebook in 1953—overflowing with praise and pleasure and local color—and the glum, grim, grayed-out notes she took when she actually moved to Switzerland in the early 1980s (to the house in Aurigeno which Ellen Hill, with the assistance of architect Tobias Amman, had picked out for her) is marked. Pat hadn’t had so much peace and quiet since she’d left her double cottage in Earl Soham in 1968—and its effect on her was that her inspirational flame burned low and her depression was awful. She experienced “some of the blackest moments of my life, when for fifteen minutes at a time, I would feel that I’d got myself into a trap, and an unhappy one.”

Part of the problem was the lack of light. The seventeenth-century stone summerhouse Ellen had chosen for Pat sat in the Maggia Valley in the deep shadow of the Dunzio Mountain; in the winter the house got sunlight for perhaps two hours a day. The windows of the house were small (and some of them were barred), and the walls were a good half meter thick, so that even when the sun was out the house was dark and cool.

Daniel Keel says: “People come to the Ticino for the light, and she put herself into the darkest, most cramped house, no room, no quality of life; she didn’t give her guests anything, but she didn’t give herself anything either. It was the most uncomfortable house in the world with the mountains right up against it, which cut out even the two hours of sunlight a day the town got.”²⁶

“This is where I write,” Pat told Keel, showing him her desk corner. Her desk, as usual, faced the wall and was accompanied by the “most uncomfortable chair” in the house.²⁷

In an odd—a very odd—article entitled “Winter in the Ticino” (the canton in which both Aurigeno and Tegna are located), Pat wrote that in Aurigeno she chose to fraternize only with Germans or Swiss Germans, even though she was living in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. She described her house as a “submarine”—but a submarine set in stone and not in water—and evoked the peculiar mineral emanations from the heavy concentrations of granite in the mountains, concentrations which produced a “magnetic effect” said to drain you of your life’s energy. Pat seemed to like this idea and to accept it fatalistically: “How can one escape the density of rock?”²⁸

Although Pat began her residency in Aurigeno by giving a cocktail party on her terrace on the day before the opening of the Locarno Film Festival (one guest’s report on the hors d’oeuvres: “Boiled eggs, cut in half, mayonnaise out of the tube, the food was quite terrible and unattractive; whoever did it was not exactly an aesthete in food matters”),²⁹ her description of her social life was bleak. “There is only one American, a retired widow, in the region and she lives in Ascona.” (That was Ellen Blumenthal Hill.) “I recently met an Englishman,” she continued, as though she’d been bird-watching and had spotted a rare specimen. She “happen[ed] to like the quiet,” she wrote, but the village appeared to be “without inhabitants.” (Counting Highsmith, the population was 106.) She was a submariner living in a ghost town.³⁰

There was a weekly “or so” dinner party in Aurigeno in which wine and food seemed to play a central role. “Food is important here,” a friend said to her, “because there’s nothing else that’s very amusing.” These weekly dinners engendered heated political arguments until “2 in the morning,” conducted by guests “made happy on wine.”³¹ (Were they unhappy without it?) Once again, Pat found someone to do favors and errands for her—a kind and considerably overburdened neighbor in the village, Ingeborg Moelich, a former opera singer, who had a car but very little money, and who was not, say neighbors, adequately recompensed for her efforts. She shopped for Pat, she did some sewing and some laundry, as well as many driving errands. And she continued, faithfully, to stop by Pat’s house in Tegna during Pat’s last illness. It was Ingeborg Moelich who drove Pat, leaning heavily on Julia Diener-Diethelm in the backseat of Moelich’s car, on her very last ride to the hospital in Locarno in early February of 1995.

Pat also befriended the one man in the village who had fought for Germany during the Second World War, a grouchy old gentleman to whom no one else spoke. She found the elderly soldier from Hitler’s army quite interesting. But when the man died, Pat, like any good New Yorker, immediately began to speculate on the possibilities of buying his house, situated on the steep stone grade just above hers.³²

Someone said to her: “Nothing’s alive. Have you noticed that?” She had.³³

And so, in the way of a woman with a turbulent imagination who spends time alone in a dark house talking to herself, Pat, once again, began to dream up little inventions to lighten her days. She thought about a “Minivac—small hand-held vacuum cleaner…to dust the tops of books in bookcase.”³⁴ But this was nine years after her native land had produced the ubiquitous Dust-Buster hand vacuum with its myriad irritating attachments: Pat was out of touch with the material facts of her home country. Ditto for her idea for the “small wringer…for kitchen, in order to extract liver paste from tube which has been in fridge”—a device she felt would be a welcome addition to any home.³⁵ Her thumbs, arthritic by now, couldn’t squeeze the paste out of chilled food tubes, and she was putting the tubes on the floor and using her feet on them. But once again Pat had been preempted in her invention: it was already being manufactured in America to extract the very last drops out of stubborn toothpaste tubes.

On 1 March 1983, shortly after Pat made her initial move to Aurigeno, Arthur Koestler, whom Pat had known for thirty-five years and who was by now dying of leukemia and disabled by Parkinson’s disease, killed himself in his London home. His wife, Cynthia, joined him in what was apparently a suicide pact. Pat hadn’t seen Koestler since 2 May 1978 when she’d brought Tabea Blumenschein over to the Koestlers’ London town house to show her off. Tabea had been worried because she hadn’t read any of Koestler’s work, but Pat quickly relieved her of her doubts: “Never mind, my dear, the last thing writers want to talk about is their work.”³⁶ Pat was at Peter Huber’s house in Zurich when she got the news about Koestler, and she was alone a day later when she found out that Koestler’s wife was also dead. Pat was furious: “My first thought was that he had gently persuaded her; my emotion plain anger.”³⁷

Pat wrote to everyone about the Koestlers’ suicides, but she wrote most fully to her sympathetic German translator, Anne Uhde. Murder—self-murder in this case—always fired up Pat’s imagination, and as she was writing her description to Uhde she couldn’t help re-creating the scene of the “crime,” altering it rather prudishly to suit her taste and echoing in a backhanded way her own short tale of horror and gore, “Woodrow Wilson’s Necktie.”

Yes, the news about Koestler knocked me for a loop, I must say…. I felt upset, angry…. I am sorry mainly about Cynthia.

I know their sitting room very well indeed, and know the armchairs they always took, so I can imagine the scene. They probably took the pills after a pleasant dinner together. I know exactly where they had to leave the note to the maid, saying, “Don’t go upstairs. Call the police at…” So I keep thinking about that living room, and—absurdly—thinking they should have done it lying on two different beds, dressed of course, as if they had fallen asleep reading a newspaper. I feel that some waxworks is going to show them exactly in that room (this is the first time such an idea crossed my mind), and it will be Mme Tussaud’s, London, and I do not not wish to see it. I see, frankly, no reason for Cynthia to have died, and I’ve the feeling, maybe wrong, that K. persuaded her.³⁸

A year later the Koestlers’ suicides were still on Pat’s mind, and now she was blaming both of them: “Cynthia was a willing, clinging vine…. Arthur would never have tied himself up with a woman who had any ambition, will, even strong personality of her own.”³⁹

The lack of light in Aurigeno was draining Pat; the jagged mountain—the mountain view from her Aurigeno house is so exaggerated as to almost induce vertigo—was minatory. Worse, all the stone houses in Aurigeno have roofs which are sharply peaked, so the village itself looks like a miniature mountain range. Even in summer the steep walk to Pat’s house up the solid stone walk was slippery, and the house’s barred windows were forbidding. Pat wrote that the mountain produced “a depressing effect, a feeling of being closed in, with consequent emphasis on self-sufficiency, tendency to smugness, maybe alcoholism in the types prone to it…. I notice among outsiders like me who live here, that a great deal of time is spent in relating real or imaginary slights, insults, neglects, attitudes, to any friend or ally that will listen. Maybe it is because the community is small and little new blood comes in. Or does Ticino make people nervous?”

“Nothing’s alive”? Self-sufficient characters drinking alone in dark houses and brooding over “imaginary slights, insults, neglects”? A “depressing effect, a feeling of being closed in,” a terrain that makes people “nervous”? We are in Highsmith Country again, the only country on earth with a permanent population of one. But for its sole begetter, living in Highsmith Country was less comfortable than imagining it. In the shadows, immured in granite, Pat was beginning to let go of much of what had defined her in the past. The woman who in her teens and twenties had insisted that reading was her major “drug” stopped reading in Aurigeno for more than two years. She continued to saw and hammer away in her workroom, but for the first time she had no garden, and nothing bloomed for her but the sprouts from an occasional avocado pit skewered by a toothpick and suspended over a glass of water. The house itself was not—as almost every one of her other dwellings had been—anywhere near the sight or the sound of water. She had, in every sense, set herself in stone.

Every few days Pat turned on her portable Grundig radio to “restore her sanity” with a little classical music. “I realise that I may be reaching the point at which I think everyone is a bit cracked but me. What are people saying about me behind my back? Could I face it if I knew?” ⁴⁰

She began to give herself little sanity tests again. Could she follow the sense of this World Service broadcast? She could. But her mood lightened only with travel or with new acquaintances—and then not for very long.

One of Pat’s new acquaintances was David Streiff, who had recently taken over the directorship of the Locarno Film Festival and was busily raising its profile. Streiff wrote to Pat, offering her an “Honor Card”—a free pass to the festival, which he also offered to other notables in the area like Luise Rainer, the film actress Pat had met in New York in 1948 at Leo Lerman’s Sunday salon. Pat was “proud to have the Honor Card,” pleased to be singled out, and, of course, delighted not to have to pay for her tickets.⁴¹ She never much liked the films.

In the blistering August heat of 1983, during the running of the Locarno Film Festival, David Streiff invited Pat to the Grand Hotel in Locarno. “She didn’t want the menu, but she wanted a pizza,” he says, “which they had to bring back from some other place, and even then, she only ate the tomatoes.” Whenever they dined together after that, they went mostly to Tegna to Pat’s favorite little restaurant next to the cemetery, and Pat would always order spaghetti. And Streiff always paid for the meals.

“The ritual was I came to her house, we drank something there, I beer, she whiskey, we went by car, her broken-down car, to the restaurant. I accepted the fact that she only took a few spoonfuls and the rest went into this famous plastic bag [for] the cats…and then she took me back to Locarno…. She was not a very good driver, absentminded, not practical [but] she always found her way back and she sent a postcard or a call so I knew she got back alive…. She’d drive back with [a bottle of scotch] in her car.” ⁴²

She remained, he says, consistent in “character”—that is, dominating—but revealed more of herself to him as their relations progressed. They always spoke in “American,” and Pat, never happy to come to a settled opinion about anything by herself, made use of Streiff’s expertise in film, sending him the Diogenes film contracts for her books to look over. From her comments on the films she saw, Streiff doesn’t think Pat knew what was “good or bad vis-à-vis her own work in films.” They had “an easy contact” because he, too, is gay, and she seemed, he says, “kind of proud” that she’d made some sort of “contribution” with The Price of Salt, but she never discussed her relations or her fantasies—all she had left, by then, of her love life—with him. Except, of course, for the obligatory complaints about Ellen Hill.⁴³

“I felt enriched, I was proud to be in touch with such a famous writer and to be close to her,” says David Streiff. And Pat, too, was proud: she used to tell people that Streiff took the trouble to visit her when she moved to Tegna. A few weeks before her death, Pat, prompted by Daniel Keel, telephoned Streiff, who was by then the director of the Swiss Federal Office of Culture, to ask about placing her manuscripts and personal papers at the Swiss Literary Archives. The day Streiff sat down to discuss the terms of acceptance with Daniel Keel was the day Pat died, 4 February 1995.⁴⁴

In 1991, when Streiff retired from the Locarno Film Festival, a television documentary was made about him. Pat was asked to appear in it, and, judging from the film outtakes, she gave her usual performance before a camera as the mute and rebellious heroine of a hostage video. She managed to indicate that she “didn’t know David Streiff very well” and then, taking offence at a question, abruptly refused to go on being filmed.⁴⁵

In her thirtieth cahier, shortly after separating from Caroline Besterman in 1968, Pat had written: “To live alone, to feel occasional depression. Much of the difficulty is from not having another person around for whom one puts on a slight show—dressing nicely, presenting a pleasant expression. The trick, the sometimes difficult trick is to maintain one’s morale without the other person, the mirror.” ⁴⁶

In Switzerland, Pat had found a supportive publisher and world representative in Daniel Keel and Diogenes, a German-speaking public eager for her work, and not one single person, really, for whom she could perform her “self.” The “difficult trick” she spoke of—that of maintaining her morale without the presence of another like-minded person (well, perhaps not exactly “another person” Pat’s definition of “the other” is also Narcissus’s, i.e., a “mirror”)—was something she never mastered.

Settled in her stone house in Aurigeno in the world’s most pristine country (and continuing to remark on how “clean” Switzerland was), Pat just naturally found her mind turning to images of cancer, toxic waste, the effects of radiation, poison, rape, torture, and the horrors of nuclear war.

Not that her imagination hadn’t turned to these entertainments before. Even in her first novel, Strangers on a Train, the architect Guy Haines, in a series of thoughts that leads to the inevitable conclusion (“There’s also a person exactly the opposite of you, like the unseen part of you, somewhere in the world, and he waits in ambush”),⁴⁷ starts with the notion that the “splitting of the atom was the only true destruction, the breaking of the universal law of oneness…. Perhaps God and the Devil danced hand in hand around every single electron!” ⁴⁸ And The Price of Salt, with its references to bomb shelters and young physicists, is as casually shadowed by the atom bomb as any American novel of the 1950s: an era when all North American schoolchildren were subject to special drills during which (to the sound of a buzzer/bell like the alarm in Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days) they learned to dive under their desks to take shelter from the shower of splitting atoms that—any minute now—would be coming their way from Moscow.

Pat’s notebooks in France throughout the 1970s wince at the world’s wastage, and are punctuated by her eccentric plans for improving life on earth. The story collections which resulted from her comparatively happy occupancy of the house by the Loing Canal at 22 rue de la Boissière in Moncourt (Little Tales of Misogyny [1974], The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder [1975], Slowly, Slowly in the Wind [1979], The Black House [1981 in England, 1988 in the United States]) had already begun to throb with both a personal, character-based malice and with the kind of disasters that destroy small ecologies and little institutions: a vengeful pond, killer ferrets, abusive parents, a subtly toxic network of liberal friends, and a skyscraper permanently infested with pests.

“The Terrors of Basket-Weaving,” the best story in The Black House and one of Pat’s more evocative tales, extends the situation of a middle-class, well-employed, childless-by-choice press relations officer into something larger: a study of the dangers of creation itself. Diane Clarke, with puzzling precision and inexplicable historical accuracy, repairs a damaged basket she finds on a beach with an ability she didn’t know she had. She is increasingly frightened by this “hidden talent” which she cannot explain. “What she felt was most certainly not guilt, though it was similarly troubling and unpleasant…. Diane felt she had lost herself.” ⁴⁹ Soon, she asks for a leave of absence from work, and is feeling “as if a lot of other people were inside me besides myself.”⁵⁰ She ends by destroying the basket, and is “no happier” after doing so. “For a week, she realized, she had grasped something, and then she had deliberately thrown it away.”⁵¹ The act of creation has permanently disturbed her life, just as “The Terrors of Basket-Weaving” permanently disturbs our idea of what “making something” means to an artist.

“Please Don’t Shoot the Trees,” a story written in 1976–77 and included in Slowly, Slowly in the Wind, is another example of the way Pat’s mind was beginning to turn from the cracks in character to the crises in the cosmos. It is marked by its sneering tone, its prairie-flat prose, its comic book science—but also by its deeply discomfiting prescience. Nature, Pat imagined in her notes, “revolts—at its rape, at its reversed rivers and cut down trees—and erupts in volcanoes, collapses in earthquakes, everywhere gobbling, burning, crushing people.”⁵² The United States has been partitioned into “big fortresses,” the great cities are “unsupervised prisons of the poor and the black…. New York and San Francisco [are] dirty words,” and all the trees are shooting out inflammable sap—something like napalm—at the human inhabitants of earth.

The trees end by destabilizing the world, and a “land mass, big as a continent” (it’s the continent of North America) drops “into the dark blue waters.”

A vein of pure, vengeful nastiness—an underappreciated literary quality, but a literary quality nonetheless—runs through much of the work Pat did in Europe. By the end of 1976 in Moncourt, when she had begun to take notes on her “4th Ripley” (The Boy Who Followed Ripley), her confidence was “flitting sideways, like a bird, out of sight now.” She was finding concentration difficult, she had started too many projects, and her life was “but a kind of darkness full of dark and empty shadows.” She couldn’t wait for clarity of mind because “to have patience [would be] to erase all pride, satisfaction in a day’s work.” And the fair manuscript copy of The Boy Who Followed Ripley bears witness to her near-crippling indecisiveness: interleaved, crossed out, and overwritten, it is her most anxious manuscript.

In the first difficult phase of writing the novel (before the spring of 1978 provided her with the other difficulty of Tabea Blumenschein), it was money, again, and taxes, again, that were making her feel futile—once again. She kept on working because she had to, stabilizing herself with a plot for her novel that was concerned with money and vengeance. (Her other title for the book was Ripley and the Money Boy.) It was another prescient work: in The Boy Who Followed Ripley Pat imagined a relationship for Tom Ripley with a very young admirer. Within the next year and a half, she would have two such relationships herself. The first, with Tabea Blumenschein, prevented her from working on the novel, while the second, with Monique Buffet, allowed her to finish it. Highsmith’s life and work would always give the appearance of a balancing act.

Pat’s initial notes for The Boy Who Followed Ripley center on young Frank, who, attracted by Ripley’s dubious reputation, has run away from his family to see Ripley after pushing his “great uncle over a terrace wall” in America. (Pat later changed the victim to Frank’s grandfather, then to his father.) “Tom smells out the boy’s terror of possessing money, also fascination.” Frank—and he is anything but frank at first—is the heir to a great food fortune (there’s a whiff of Pat’s discomfort with food in this), and “so strong” is Frank’s “adherence to Tom” (the Whitmanic adjective is Pat’s) that Tom’s wife, Heloise, suspects young Frank of being a “tapette,” a “fairy.” Ripley, Pat noted from bitter personal experience, “cannot really win with H[eloise] because if he intrudes on her privacy it is too much, & if he doesn’t, it is a sign of indifference.”⁵³

In the early days of 1977, Pat was also brooding about (but not reading) Dostoyevsky’s efforts to “reconcile God’s will with God’s indifference” and calling it “rubbish.” Money and taxes were now at the center of her thoughts. “Artists, writers and some filmmakers,” she wrote with asperity, “like Ingmar Bergman—end up as they started…writing for love, working for love, not money because taxes take almost all the money. A strange cycle.”⁵⁴ By the end of 1977, she was writing that Christ (still a touchstone for her and the only divinity with whom she never argued) was lucky “not to be able to see this unchristian, uncharitable and dishonest Catholic community in which I live.”

Once again, Pat had decided that she was surrounded by thieving enemies and—a slight variation—that her friends were crooks as well. She described her next-door neighbor Desmond Ryan as a petty criminal—“an alcoholic adulterer, now pilfering firewood bought by me to give to the poor”—and she would later curse him roundly to Barbara Skelton, one of whose husbands, the millionaire physicist Derek Jackson, had been “an old school chum” of Ryan.⁵⁵ Everyone, she thought with the kind of satisfaction that familiarity brings, was cheating her. Pat was settling comfortably into one of her oldest themes.

Expatriatism and the loverless wilderness into which she finally wandered in Switzerland did nothing to alter this view, and napalm-shooting trees, murderous ferrets, and killer ponds were not the only vengeful organisms in the Highsmith stories to come: the author, too, was beginning to wreak a near-biblical vengeance on all the milieux she’d abandoned (and by which she felt abandoned) in America. By 1977, Pat had chronicled the very American Edith Howland’s slow slippage into insanity in Edith’s Diary,accompanying it with Edith’s confused but condign jeremiads about America and the war in Vietnam. (Edith’s political “thinking” is that of a thinly sourced article; her ideas are mostly superficial summaries.) Pat was entering a long period of focusing her talents on broader targets than those which lurked in the hearts of men.