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The Cake that was Shaped Like a Coffin

Part 3

Before she moved to peaceful, pristine, orderly Switzerland, Pat had never been tempted to make the decline and fall of the earth a focus of her artistic attention. Nor had she summoned up the world’s decay in anything more substantial than a halo of implication around the protagonists of her novels (like Edith Howland’s poisoned suburban family in Edith’s Diary or the brutal effects of Howard Ingham’s identity-dissolving holiday in Hammamet in The Tremor of Forgery), or explored it in anything more serious than a few caricatural short stories. But Pat’s thirty-sixth notebook, which bridges her life in Aurigeno, Switzerland, from August of 1983 to August of 1988, explodes in a series of apocalyptic horrors. Most of the keime in this journal—those creative “germs” which inspired and infected her work—are viral, carcinogenic, and irradiated.

She imagined (and then crossed the notebook entry out) a “small country in East Africa, composed of blacks and Spanish mixed,” where “[c]ruelty to the elderly provokes laughter” and [n]urses, p[hilanthropists]—all murdered and raped.”¹ Another crossed-out entry: “Begin story with stuck elevator which has 20 corpses in it, putrefying.”² Another idea: “A contagious E. Coli germ gets loose. Devastating diarrhea…abandonment of beaches, hotels, resorts…Eels triumph on the beaches, eating even the corpses of…swimmers. Mercury poisoning…a pretty girl swimmer swallows a morsel of human excrement.”³ Another entry: a story called “Mass Unemployment,” which details a series of disasters in which the “survivors of the human race have fled to Switzerland,” where they hope to live in unpolluted air. “But even Switzerland has been bombed.” ⁴

At the end of 1984, two years after Michael Jackson’s revolutionary album Thriller appeared, Pat beamed her laser briefly on the idea of writing Michael Jackson into a short story. She saw something metastasizing in Jackson, something she recognized and understood and was drawn to. She began—shrewdly, for the limited amount of information she had about him—to parse Jackson’s character. Like so many other of her subjects now, her brief re-creation of Michael Jackson returned her to the motive of money.

“A type like Michael Jackson, [ambiguously gendered,] in love with himself. Sterling image to the public. Schizo finally. He talks to himself as he dresses. He becomes two persons within himself. Friends are aware of this—but the boy is a money-maker.”⁵

Along with the odd note for a novel about murder-minded protagonists who kill, steal, and/or exchange guilts for love, and the occasional plot summary about toxic relations in a small circle of people, Pat, from her rocky perch in Switzerland, continued to widen her scope at the expense of its depth: her imagination was indicting worldwide institutions (like the Catholic Church) in her short story “Pope Sixtus VI—about which the Catholic convert Graham Greene (who, according to Muriel Spark, “wasn’t happy if he wasn’t sinning”)⁶ wrote Pat an approving letter. In other short stories such as “Nabuti: Warm Welcome to a UN Committee,” or her crude parody of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, “President Buck Jones Rallies and Waves the Flag,” she was destroying whole civilizations.

Pat had already published the rancorous results of her move to Switzerland in Found in the Street (1985), a novel which upsets the premises of her other inverted Manhattan fairy tale, The Price of Salt. This time, the lovely young ingenue to whom everyone is attracted (and who spices up the marriage of Jack and Natalia, the young couple living in Highsmith’s old apartment building in Grove Street) comes to Manhattan to “try her luck” and is brutally murdered in front of what appears to be Buffie Johnson’s loft building on Greene Street. (See “Patricia Highsmith’s New York.”) And the net in which every character is ambiguously snared is the paranoid consciousness of the crank and failure, Ralph Linderman: very much a product of the same Pat Highsmith who, forty-odd years before, had created the single-room occupant with the withered ear, Archie, in her first published story, “Uncertain Treasure.” (The novelist Anita Brookner, in a Spectator review of Found in the Street, called Linderman “a nuisance and a bore. In the country of the laid-back he is an intruder.”)⁷ Single men in single rooms would always be a Highsmith speciality.

Ralph’s honorable return of a wallet (as we have seen, Pat yearned to return a wallet herself; it was the ultimate proof of honesty required by her criminal mind) and his judgement of Manhattan as a sinful city plagued by irritating minorities and sexual deviants enjoying themselves, is the ostinato of Found in the Street. Pat left out of the novel the ugly little ethnic dictionary she’d made up for Ralph, but she still allowed him to use a repugnant epithet for Jews and to imagine black Americans as apes swinging from trees.

But the fact that Ralph Linderman is both the “moral center” of the book (all his puritanical predictions of disaster come true) and an obsessive nutcase who misinterprets things attests strongly to his creator’s still-active, still-generative, still-productive ambivalence. Amongst the other things this novel “finds in the street” is a female murderer who is also a “butch dyke” and a far more caricatural depiction of lesbianism than the one which irritated Pat so much in Marc Brandel’s 1950 novel, The Choice. Sisterhood had never been a Highsmith theme.

Like all of Pat’s writings set in America in the 1970s and 1980s, Found in the Street was subject to her misunderstandings of the culture she’d left behind. The food and drink in the novel are from 1960s New York, not 1980s Manhattan; her re-creation of the habits of hip young couples in Greenwich Village is unrecognizable; and the social scenes into which she inserts her characters seem to be dramatized by someone who has been observing Manhattan from another galaxy, not to mention another epoch. Pat’s French editor, Alain Oulman, politely found the relationship between the young couple, Jack and Natalia, unbelievable—“they don’t speak or act as if they were husband and wife,” he wrote Pat—and he was correct: they are difficult to believe in.⁸

Still, Pat divided some of her own personal quirks between Jack and Natalia: Jack, who is working on something like a graphic novel, has, like Pat, a tendency to prefer pictures of women to the women themselves, while Natalia has secret affairs with women and loves to mark passages in books the way Pat marked them, with little brackets. And Pat gave to the crackpot Ralph Linderman more than a few of her own ethnic prejudices: proof, perhaps, that her artistic self was more “advanced” than the self which harbored the prejudices. Oddly—this would always be a Highsmith trademark—the novel’s social disjunctures and cross-cultural misunderstandings add another layer of creepy fascination to what is already a decidedly creepy work.

It was the American publication of Found in the Street in January of 1988 that prompted Terrence Rafferty’s lucid, praiseful consideration of Patricia Highsmith’s work (he called it “peerlessly disturbing—not great cathartic nightmares but banal bad dreams that keep us restless and thrashing for the rest of the night[,]” and characterized her prose as “blunt and straightforward as a strip search”) in The New Yorker that same month.⁹ The article seems to have given Pat, who as late as 1969 was still having her stories and poems and cartoons rejected from The New Yorker, the most pleasure she’d gotten out of a piece of journalism since Francis Wyndham’s unparalleled survey of her work (part of his long review of The Cry of the Owl) for English readers in 1963. Wyndham had written:

Her peculiar brand of horror comes less from the inevitability of disaster, than from the ease with which it might have been avoided. The evil of her agents is answered by the impotence of her patients—this is not the attraction of opposites, but in some subtle way the call of like to like. When they finally clash in climactic catastrophe, the reader’s sense of satisfaction may derive from sources as dark as those which motivate Patricia Highsmith’s destroyers and their fascinated victims.¹⁰

Nine years after Wyndham’s piece appeared, Julian Symons, doyen of British crime writers, biographer of his interesting older brother A. J. A. Symons (Pat liked and, of course, identified with the subject of A. J. A. Symons’s innovative biography, the effortlessly eccentric Baron Corvo), and a critic who regularly championed and occasionally chastised Pat’s novels in print, extended the public awareness of her duality.

“There are no more genuine agonies in modern literature than those endured by the couples in her books who are locked together in a dislike and even hatred that often strangely contains love.”¹¹

Symons understood how necessary “violence” was to Pat: “the threat or actuality of it produces her best writing.”¹²

Two months after Terrence Rafferty’s piece was published, the American journalist Joan Dupont travelled from Paris to Aurigeno to interview Pat, sympathetically, for The New York Times—editing out Pat’s more intemperate comments about Israel, to Pat’s irritation. But neither Rafferty’s essay nor Dupont’s article helped Pat’s new novel in the United States: Found in the Street sold fewer than five thousand copies.

After Found in the Street, Pat’s next letter to the world from Switzerland was a collection of short stories written in the cartoonish spirit of her early comics work: Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes (1987). Pat never lost her interest in cartoons and even sent some cartoon ideas to Gary Trudeau for his nationally syndicated Doonesbury strip while she was living in Aurigeno. She also sent Trudeau a copy of Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes, thinking that these stories would be prime material for a political cartoonist.¹³ And they would have been: each story in Catastrophes is as distorted by repulsion as an expressionist caricature.

Most of the Catastrophes collection could also have found its way into that strangest of American pulp magazines, Weird Tales (see “Alter Ego, Part 1”)—especially the oddest story, “The Mysterious Cemetery.” Inspired by Pat’s friend Anne Morneweg’s bout with breast cancer and the blackly humorous way Morneweg recounted her experience to Pat,¹⁴ “The Mysterious Cemetery” tells the story of a secret cemetery near a hospital which is infected with metastasizing growths, growths which come from the bodies of the hospital’s illegally experimented-on cancer patients, who are buried in the cemetery grounds. The growths propagate and burgeon, and Pat likens them to “a man-made wreckage of his own soul, to an insane tinkering with nature, such as that which had resulted in the accursed atomic bomb.”¹⁵ She imagines that the strange blooms will become cult objects, revered artifacts—enlivening the work of artists, scientists, and writers.

“The Mysterious Cemetery” could have been the Highsmith version of a bitter “environmental” dialectic, but the contrapuntal voice, the antiphon of the dialectic, is missing. And so the tale, like all the tales in Catastrophes, remains another exhibit in the Highsmith Museum of Contemporary Maladies. The same impulse—the impulse to attack—had inspired Little Tales of Misogyny, but the Misogyny tales (although Pat cast the women in them as “types”) are more bitter and more personal: they are directed against women, in some cases against specific, living women. The Catastrophes tales are directed against the entire world.

After a publicity trip to Manhattan in late October of 1987 (see “The Cake That Was Shaped Like a Coffin: Part 5”), Pat flew from New York to London to promote Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes. Aside from the usual round of interviews and meetings with friends and colleagues (she invited a young writer, who had just accompanied her on a publicity junket to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn and was flying to London herself, to a luncheon “at which Patricia Losey arrived with her husband’s ashes [film director Joseph Losey] in an urn”),¹⁶Pat made an unusual appearance on the BBC2 television program Cover to Cover, presented by the Australian poet and novelist Jill Neville. Other Cover to Cover panellists included the biographer Victoria Glendinning, the young actor Jack Klaff, and Kenneth Williams, farceur, review artist, and caustic star of the Carry On films. Kenneth Williams’s mordant diaries make Pat’s own complaint-filled journals seem like chronicles of unrestrained joy.

Three books were on Cover to Cover’s agenda for the evening, and Pat’s collection of short stories came second, to be followed by Richard Ellmann’s biography of Oscar Wilde, a work which later appeared on Tom Ripley’s own reading list. Pat didn’t get around to reading the Ellmann book until April of 1990; she really wasn’t reading anything in Aurigeno. But when she finally did read it, she joined Oscar in her mind with her favorite spiritual hero—“Oscar’s story reminds me of that of Christ”—and then coerced his destructive relationship with Bosie into a parable about her own life: “Art is not always healthy,” she wrote, “and why should it be?”¹⁷

Panellist Jack Klaff’s memory of the taping of Cover to Cover was “very strong.”

There was this legendary writer, not only having a book up for review, Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes, but she was actually going to be there…. I suppose we were all expecting crime stories and stuff like that and then we got these rather socially conscious stories. When a writer of that stature writes something like that, you pay attention, even if the stories are slightly confused.

My impression [of Patricia] was, well, she was quite sunken into herself…. She had a sort of molelike or badgerlike aspect. She was perched at the end of the table, she was hunched over, her eyes were sad, even before she started…. She looked like a person who spent her life just writing.

Kenneth Williams, at the far end of the on-set table, was

sitting ramrod straight, arms folded, legs crossed, couldn’t wait for the Ellmann bio of Wilde…. I think he had two months to go before he died. He was not in a good mood, not feeling well, and he went into makeup not in a good state. And [Pat] had made this huge fuss over Kenneth Williams in makeup; everyone got the impression that she adored the films, the stage work; there was this huge buildup for him to return the compliment. And he just carpetbombed her. He said what a load of crap the book was…. I’m not sure if he actually said the book should be chucked on the rubbish bin, but he did say how much he’d enjoyed The Talented Mr. “this” and Strangers on the “that,” and it was clear that he absolutely loathed this book….^*

But with enormous respect for her dignity, and in the most polite way possible, she didn’t really betray any reactions…. She simply responded to what he had to say…. She said perhaps Mr. Williams means this and means that…. If the author is present, they usually defend themselves. She didn’t do that, she simply took it on the chin. Perhaps she was awed by this man…. We’d all been polite about the book, in some cases enthusiastic, but Kenneth Williams felt it was up to him to say what he said. It was hugely uncomfortable….

Well, they edited the show very, very strongly; they cut out a lot of Williams’s stronger comments.¹⁸

In fact, Victoria Glendinning’s praise of Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes is what comes through most prominently in the edited version of the broadcast. Glendinning compared it to Animal Farm and described it, accurately, as dealing with “the psychopathology of the entire world.” But Pat’s personal dignity comes through just as forcefully. Even her embarrassed demeanor couldn’t hide the quiet distinction of her responses.

Thus, it was from Switzerland where Pat launched her last creative reversal of values. She began, unconsciously as always, to rechannel the Calvinist-influenced, world-correcting thinking of her grandmother Willie Mae (as well as those cranky little human-improvement theories she’d begun to confect in Moncourt in the 1970s, like the course designed for “ten year olds” to be given “on life’s problems,” a course she felt sure “would be very popular among children”)¹⁹ into an imagined destruction of the planet Earth, a planet she now saw as poisoned and choking on its own refuse.

There are no suggestions for world betterment in Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes—this was, after all, a chronicle of decay—but Pat’s writing, both good and bad (and in its final phases unhelpfully sourced by the exhaustion of her inner resources and her second and third-hand knowledge of social conditions) was still marked by an eerie ability to predict the future. The instability, the fractured consciousness, the murderously repressed rages she was accustomed to detailing in relationships and psychologies, she now projected onto whole societies and grand institutions. In her own way, and in her own voice, Pat was abandoning the particular for the general, “turning loose” of psychology in favor of cosmology. It had interesting consequences for her work.

One of those consequences seems to be the growing social “relevance” of Pat’s later and less satisfactory writings. Amongst the reasons this late work continues to signify is that the “facts” of contemporary life have now begun to imitate her “fictions.” The planet, in its rapid decay, is finally catching up with Patricia Highsmith’s imagination.

In 1987, in a notebook entry she never developed into a story, Pat returned for a moment to a double view of Mother Mary, rewriting her early relationship with her mother into something resolute, and casting herself, as she did in another story she wrote about her mother, “No End in Sight,” in the role of a son. Picking up the stitch of her suspicions that Mary’s friend and former neighbor in Fort Worth had a son who was pilfering things from Mary (see “The Real Romance of Objects: Part 1”), Pat imagined a teenage homosexual, a thief, whose mother “mocks him for effeminacy.” The mother negotiates the will of their “dotty female neighbor,” then tries to get her son to murder the old woman, to push her down the stairs. The boy rebels and murders his mother instead because in a “brief moment of confidence, spontaneity, [the dotty neighbor who] has spoken to the boy as if she has known all along that he was homosexual, asks him about a young man with whom the boy is in love. This opens the gates of love, of humanity, for the boy.”²⁰ Splitting Mother Mary into two characters—both the evil mother and the dotty neighbor—was a momentary relief from Pat’s usual characterization of Mary as the Bitch from Hell’s Inner Precincts. But Pat never wrote these notes into a story.

Instead—increasingly irritated at having to contribute $1,100 a month towards Mary’s care at the Fireside Lodge in Fort Worth—Pat moved Mary into the entirely unforgiving neigborhood of “No End in Sight,” a story she included in Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes.

In Gulliver’s Travels, Lemuel Gulliver is thrilled to hear of a race of humans, the Struldbruggs, who cannot die. He is less thrilled when he learns that they continue to age and to live “without relish or appetite.” (“At 90 they lose their teeth and hair…. In talking they forget the common appellation of their nearest friends and relations.”) Naomi Barton Markham, the main character of “No End in Sight” (“a hundred and ninety, some say two hundred and ten, with no end in sight”), whose faithful son Stevey died “a hundred and ten years ago” is a Struldbrugg to the life. A Struldbrugg in a rest home in Oklahoma.

Although Pat wasn’t reading Jonathan Swift, her inner Swift could always be ignited by thoughts of Mother Mary and the money that she, Pat, was “wasting” on her, and this story is vibrant with a daughter’s resentments and repulsions, disguised as those of a son’s. Pat is the self-acknowledged “son” of “No End in Sight,” just as she was the “son” in the story she called “Under a Dark Angel’s Eye” (published in The Black House) about the nefarious dealings of the rest home and the community to which an unloved mother has been consigned. In “No End in Sight,” Pat focused her resentments on her current obsession, repeating ad infinitum that Naomi Barton Markham was a lifeless “tube” into which money was being ceaselessly funnelled at the Old Homestead Nursing and Rest Home.^*

Into the story Pat also slipped a sly reference to an Atwater-Kent radio—the company owned by her old lover Ginnie Kent Catherwood’s father—and added a little true-life crime vignette taken from Mary’s increasingly grim days at the Fireside Lodge. To curb her wandering, Mary was often strapped into an adult high chair at the lodge. When she wasn’t strapped down, she used to creep into the rooms of other residents, remove their sets of false teeth, and hide them in blankets in her room.²¹ Naomi Barton Markham does the same thing.

Pat makes a great deal of Naomi’s bodily functions and dysfunctions and how costly they are: “Those wet, nasty, stinking diapers!” Although practically insensate, Naomi is characterized as sly and cunning, and the attendants at the rest home hate her (“She’s a horror!”). Pat gives to Naomi Mary Highsmith’s pregnancy history with a malicious twist: in “No End in Sight,” it is Naomi who wants a miscarriage more than her first husband does. (The opposite was true in the Plangman marriage.) Naomi divorces her first husband, gives birth to her son, leaves him with her mother, and goes off to Chicago to pursue a vaudeville career. And then she lives on forever in the rest home, “insane,” writes Pat, and disturbing the staff by talking “in a somewhat Southern accent.” “You’ll finish us all, Naomi,” Pat ends the story, “you’ll bury us all…. How does this incubus feel, lying on its back with a rubber ring under the rump to avoid bedsores?”²²

“No End in Sight” is entirely fueled by physical disgust (the opposite of physical passion) and by hatred (the opposite of love). And Pat wrote it in the single-sided, artistically “unbalanced” state to which she’d reverted in her own “black house” in Aurigeno.

Whatever she told herself about it, Mary’s long-livedness, the wandering of her wits, her sinking into near speechlessness and, finally, into immobility, were a constant source of pain and rage to Pat. That same sense of confusion of “selves” between the mother and daughter—the psychological twinning of Pat and Mary which breached the borders of their bodies and their desires and led Mary to impersonate Pat for some French journalists in a hotel lobby in Paris in 1959 and rendered Pat unable to work when her mother was angry or ill or poor—lived on in Pat, in an exhausted state, long after Mary had lost most of her memory. In 1985, Pat wrote to Kingsley that Mary was “worse” since her hip operation last March and that “[a]ll this simply depresses me…and it plays havoc with one’s concentration.”²³

The last time Pat had seen her mother in Texas (it was at the end of September 1974), Mary had been having one of her “bad” days and hadn’t, Pat said aggrievedly, “looked” at her own daughter; she’d watched television instead. Pat, on this visit, was still intent on getting that “Hamilton watch” from Mary (see “The Real Romance of Objects: Part 1”), and she was deeply distressed at the “total disorder” in which she’d found Mary’s house: “dishes from days back in the kitchen sink, old newspapers, letters, envelopes on the living-room floor, the fat dog full of fleas, the oven full of half-finished plates of food.” Back in Manhattan, where Pat stopped on her way to Moncourt, her cousin Millie Alford had given her a letter from Mary, a letter with which Mary ended the lifelong volley of love and damage she and her daughter had continued for so long. Mary’s letter scumbles the line between mother and daughter, lays claim to the same feelings Pat had about her, and reads like a message from a heartbroken lover, full of the dashes Mary always used to catch her breath between emotions.

“Well, you’ve done it—broken my heart—yet gave me a freedom I’ve not felt in years…. That you could use the word to me that you used in describing the man you asked to adopt you…It’s good you never had children—they’d be forever criticized and then never come up to your demands. You can think of no one but yourself…. Don’t write—I shan’t.”²⁴

Pat’s identification with Mary’s mental state was serious enough to push her into writing letters blaming Mary for her own dementia. She was so exercised on the subject that she lashed out at friends who were advising “kindness” to the afflicted or the ill.

When Caroline Besterman expressed the thought that comatose people should be kept alive because their dreams might be so pleasant, Pat got angry all over again. When Christa Maerker wrote to tell Pat that she had moved in with her own much-loved, very ill mother in order to care for her, Pat wrote back “an incredibly nasty letter…about how crazy it is to take care of your mother.” The letter was so belligerent that Christa didn’t communicate with Pat for “several years” after she received it.²⁵

In March of 1987, Jeva Cralick, the lively, levelheaded fashion illustrator who had been Mary Highsmith’s closest friend in New York and “a full-fledged member of the Highsmith clan…since Pat was 5 or 6,”²⁶ and who had kept up an affectionate correspondence with Pat for decades, wrote to Dan and Florine Coates in Weatherford, Texas, from her apartment in Brooklyn about Mary’s deteriorating condition—and about what it might mean for Pat.

“We know what a vibrant, gifted, articulate person Mary was. And how proud she was of Pat and how much she loved Pat—Pat will never know or choose to remember—but she must sense how much she has inherited from Mary. Well Pat is Pat.”²⁷

And that’s how the laissez-faire Coates family says they used to explain Pat’s increasingly armigerous letters about her mother. “Well, that’s Pat” became their standard response to nearly everything Pat said or did.