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Part 4
By January of 1988, after five years in Aurigeno, Pat was once again handing her problems over to Thomas Ripley in the notes she was taking for Ripley’s final appearance in a novel. (Perhaps Terrence Rafferty’s favorable New Yorker article had something to do with Ripley’s reappearance.) Tom Ripley—that master of escape—was now beginning to escape “into another person. A form of schizophrenia…Tom feel[s] that he is…touching madness, experiencing it, as he could not do in the presence of Mme Annette [his devoted housekeeper] and Heloise.” Like Pat, Ripley was turning outwards, brooding on the “variety of horror that man has invented for himself, against himself: Chains, whips, sadism—yes, in marriages, the nagging defiling wives, the wife-beaters. The animal torturers. Tom felt that this destructive rage in man…seemed to equal the beauty of architecture, painting, music…. It was like a dramatic balance,” Pat wrote. The balance she had been able to maintain in her work (and, more precariously, in her life) was now, without love to counter it, heavily weighted in favor of decay and destruction. Tom was merely keeping pace with his creator’s feelings.
Certainly a spur to finishing Ripley Under Water—she’d put the manuscript aside for a while—was the journey Pat finally decided to take to visit Buffie Johnson in Morocco in mid-August of 1988. Pat, who had long since started a correspondence with Buffie and had visited her in her East Forty-third Street apartment and again in her Greene Street loft in New York, knew that Buffie had inherited the lease of Jane Bowles’s apartment in the Immeuble Itesa in Tangier (on the floor beneath Paul Bowles’s apartment) from Maurice Grosser, the lover of the composer Virgil Thompson. The idea of remeeting Paul Bowles figured into Pat’s travel plans, and Buffie had initially suspected that Bowles was Pat’s chief reason for coming. He wasn’t. But Bowles did become her chief reason for enjoying the trip.
Paul Bowles was just the man to interest Pat: a homosexual widower from a milieu she’d known in Manhattan whose exquisitely glacial style and continuing expatriatism had given him a kind of international cachet—although style was never the royal road to Pat’s affections. Pat had been in light correspondence (twenty letters) with Bowles’s friend Gore Vidal since 1978, making her first note to Vidal a modest request to send “a comment” for the Lippincott publication of The Boy Who Followed Ripley in New York. (“If you say a flat no, I shall understand…. But you might even like the book,” she’d written shyly and boldly to Vidal.)1
When Pat returned to Switzerland from her trip to Tangier, she and Paul Bowles developed a gossipy, mutually admiring habit of writing letters to each other (Pat had thirty-six letters from Bowles), much focused on Buffie Johnson, but also dragging in the usual writers’ complaints about translations, money, expatriatism, the selling of archives, and the total treachery of publishers. The correspondence was sparked by Pat’s sending two of her books to Paul when she got back to Aurigeno and by an article she wrote about meeting him. And Bowles admired Pat’s writing: he told her that even on the third reading of Strangers on a Train he’d forgotten and was again “shocked and disappointed” by the fact that the hero was apprehended. “It’s such a good novel,” he wrote.2
It is worth noting that Pat’s collection of affirming quotes from well-known male writers did her a power of good. The quotation Gore Vidal sent to the Atlantic Monthly Press in 1988, ten years after she’d first written him3 (“One of our greatest modernist writers,” he’d written)—a quotation for which she’d asked Vidal—and the quotation from Graham Greene’s introduction to a collection of her short stories (“the poet of apprehension” was Greene’s phrase)—an introduction for which she’d paid Greene—are reproduced more frequently than anything else that has been written about her work.
But no one quotes the entirely spontaneous comment made by Arthur Koestler to Cyril Connolly in a 1965 interview in the London Sunday Times on the occasion of Koestler’s sixtieth birthday. Koestler said: “Patricia Highsmith is in a very high class.” And Connolly responded: “I don’t know about her.” “Don’t you?” said Koestler. “There is a joy waiting for you.” 4
Practical as always, Pat got a commission from the Sunday Times to write an article about Tangier before she left Aurigeno (the article was rejected, but from it she salvaged the much shorter piece about Bowles which she finally published in Le Monde), and full of enthusiasm, she flew to the exotic North African port “where,” as Buffie Johnson later said, “intrigue was a way of life,” and Pat “wanted to see everything in Morocco.” Buffie wasn’t in her fifth-floor flat when Pat arrived—she’d gone out for a yoga class—so Pat ascertained from the concierge the number of Paul Bowles’s apartment and went up to the sixth floor to knock on his door. She found Paul in bed, eating and tended to by his protégé Mohammed Mrabet. When Buffie returned, Pat was “ensconced in Paul’s apartment drinking scotch.”
Buffie and Pat were at odds about what to see and do in Tangier. Buffie said that all “that was normal” for her was “new” to Pat; Pat was interested in everything in Tangier except the prehistoric ruins—the only thing Buffie hadn’t explored in her five summers in Tangier. Buffie’s flat, in a building solidly constructed by the French, had a large living room and two bedrooms, one of which, the room Pat was sleeping in, Buffie had turned into a painting studio. Buffie was not happy to give up her work as Pat lingered for almost two weeks in the bedroom. Pat, unbothered, was amusing herself by using her window like the frame of a painting: “The view of the Medina, or Old City from my breezy window would be a joy for Bracque—and it looks already like a horizontal Klee composition—chalky-white squares of houses of varying sizes with tiny dark squares of windows in them, the scene topped by what looks like a water tower.”5
Buffie dutifully took Pat sightseeing, and on the third day after Pat’s arrival, Pat and Buffie were chauffeured to Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton’s palatial house for a private tour. Pat, whose observation was sharpened by the foreignness of Tangier (and by the parts of it that reminded her of Hammamet), recorded that the walls of the Hutton house were composed of “squares of white stone, about 6 × 6 inches, hand-carved with filigree, all identical. It is said that 1,000 workmen worked here at the same time.” She noted that Miss Hutton had her initials—“B.H.”—tiled into the bottom of the swimming pool; then they went on to visit financier Malcolm Forbes’s Museum of Toy Soldiers. Pat drank cocktails at the El Minzah Hotel (and spent a lot of time looking for places where she could drink beer), and noted that the water supply in Tangier was cut off at 3:00 P.M. every day and that the city and its services had decayed considerably “since the French left”—all observations that would turn up in Ripley Under Water, along with the Bay of Tangier, the weather, and bits of local color like this description of a café that Pat tucked into her cahier: “Home notes: La Haffa, the Hole, on the ocean, a tea-café, arcades, where one can smoke kif, recline on mats, be semi-private. Stone steps downward, and mind how you go.”6
Pat couldn’t look at a flight of stairs without imagining someone falling down them.
During the time Pat was staying with Buffie, Paul Bowles, whose apartment was a favorite stop for writers passing through Tangier, was visited by the novelist and critic Edmund White, who had come to interview Paul for Vogue magazine and to gather information for his acclaimed biography of Jean Genet. White carried away with him a fleeting impression of Pat.
Patricia, Edmund White remembered, “was perfectly pleasant, although bloated, naturally,” from what he assumed to be “alcohol”—and she was “not entirely sober.” Paul Bowles was as “elegant” as always, but “out of it” because he smoked kif from morning till night.7Withdrawal had always been Bowles’s style, and in his essay about Bowles, White quoted Jane Bowles’s description of her husband: “There’s a disconnection. Even if he’s on the same floor, he’s in a different room.”8 Gavin Lambert, the British-born screenwriter, novelist, and biographer, a close friend of Bowles who was then living in Tangier, was much in evidence: he dropped in on Buffie and Pat, and went to dinner with them. And he told Paul Bowles some stories about Buffie’s second husband which Bowles relayed to a very interested Pat.
Buffie, nervously preparing for the publication of her book about goddess history, thought Pat “had by then the look of someone no longer enjoying life.” She said she’d never accepted Pat’s invitations to visit her in Moncourt (she’d known Pat’s next-door neighbor Desmond Ryan from London) or in Switzerland (where she’d lived while meeting with Carl Jung) because “over the years I felt Pat had grown increasingly detached and though I did not understand why, I began to feel uncomfortable in her company.” “Pat,” she also said, “tried very hard to be a good houseguest,” but the gift of good guesthood just wasn’t in her personality.
Meanwhile Pat, fixing on Buffie’s apparent self-absorption, had a few complaints of her own. When she got back to Aurigeno, she wrote in her notebook: “What am I to make of B.J.?…I was slowly but surely disturbed by her. She is slow in reacting, speaking, obsessed by pill-taking; walk-taking, self…But she is not over the self absorption; what Merck [the Merck Manual] mentions as syndrome of Alzheimer’s.”9
The trip to Tangier—one of many escapes she was to make from Aurigeno—did its job, and in the two weeks before she went off to Hamburg, Pat took copious notes which she used in her “5th [and final] Ripley”: Ripley Under Water. Later, her notes would include, as they often did for other Ripley novels,10 the kind of music that might inspire Ripley in his crimes: “Rachmaninof’s 3rd Piano Concerto. Exuberantly beautiful and strong. Not so sad as #2. Tom would like the 3rd.”11 She also wrote to Kingsley, asking her to find another copy of Karl Menninger’s book The Human Mind, with its case histories of deviation. She could use it, she thought, for Ripley Under Water, and she told Kingsley that she still found Menninger, the Freudian popularizer of her youth, “more inspiring to me than Jung.” Pat had just had an earful of Carl Jung from Buffie Johnson.12
Shortly after she returned from Tangier, Pat was visited by a young German filmmaker, Peter Goedel, who wanted to make a film of The Tremor of Forgery. Goedel had the usual years-long, complicated correspondence with both Pat and Diogenes about acquiring the rights to make a feature film of the novel. He got something less than he bargained for—and something more, too.
When Goedel first called Diogenes about The Tremor of Forgery, he was instructed to send a précis of his intentions and told that the important thing was what Highsmith would think of his proposal. After his proposal was submitted, he was informed that Patricia wanted to meet him personally, and he was given the means to contact her. He dialed her number in Aurigeno nervously and Pat gave him directions to her house. “She never gave an address but just said things like: there’s an old fountain in the center of town and to the left of it is an old farmhouse and there’s a little green door in the farmhouse and if you knock I’ll open it.”13
“It was like a fairy tale,” says Goedel, and, like a character in a fairy tale, he was to have three meetings with Patricia Highsmith. This first meeting, at her house in Aurigeno, was the longest one. Her green door was very small indeed, and when Pat opened it Goedel saw a woman dressed in dark clothes, with a little osteoporotic hump on her back, and a cat threading the space between her feet. The house was very dark with small windows, “kind of a mess, really,” with her sculptures and work tools scattered hither and yon. Goedel felt as though he were entering “the house of a witch.”
It was ten o’clock in the morning when he arrived, and there were many empty beer bottles around, big ones—bottles that had once contained the cheap Swiss beer Kalenda. (Whichever state, province, or country Pat lived in, she always managed to find and consume its cheapest native beer.) Pat asked Goedel what he wanted to drink. “Coffee,” he said, and thought right away that he’d made a mistake. So he finished the coffee quickly and asked for a beer and she was very happy to drink beer with him at ten in the morning. It seemed to “put her at her ease.”
They had a “great conversation,” Goedel says, although Pat never spoke about herself but rather about the trip she’d taken to Tangier “to see Paul Bowles [she didn’t mention Buffie Johnson],” by whom she was “very impressed.” She had photos of the trip and of Paul Bowles and showed them proudly. In 1990, she would take them out again, along with Paul’s letters, to show to Richard Schroeder, the French photographer who managed to capture Pat in a pose of terrifying hostility in front of a wall hung with her saws and hammers. But it was Pat herself who had gleefully suggested the setting.14
Pat’s force field of self-protection was very strong, says Peter Goedel. She was interested only in the matter before them: what he intended to do with her novel. She sat hunched over, balled up, with one leg crossed over the other, her body in a defensive position, looking up at him from her lowered head through her hair and eyebrows. “She absolutely fixed you with her gaze, you couldn’t avoid it, you were trapped in it,” says Goeddel.
After three hours of Pat wanting to know his ideas of how he would write and film The Tremor of Forgery, Goedel was exhausted. He’d had too many unaccustomed morning beers; he was drunk, and he was happy to leave. It was, he says, “too much.”
When Goedel had finished his script and sent it to Pat, a letter came from Pat saying it was fine, she liked it; then three days later, another letter came saying she had showed it to a friend of hers, the woman thought the script was horrible, and Pat was withdrawing permission. They went back and forth for two years, and he thinks she was waiting for a more famous director to make the film. She was: at the end of 1988, the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar had expressed interest in buying the book for a feature film.15 Pat, who had to be told who Almodóvar was, quickly decided that she liked him.
Goedel, still anxious to make his film, tracked Pat down at the Bayreuth Festival in the summer of 1989. He met her in her hotel for a quarter of an hour. It was an old, small, dark hotel, they met in the lobby, and this second meeting was a repetition of the first meeting. Pat was dressed appropriately but in somber colors, the room was dark, and she was again evasive: “Oh, I don’t know, something to think about, I’m thinking about it…”, etc., etc. The script in its current form was making her angry, she wrote to Monique Buffet; she didn’t really want to give the film rights to him.
While he waited out several months without any news, Goedel got a German producer involved, they had a meeting with Daniel Keel, and Goedel was advanced on to his third and final meeting with Patricia, who had by now moved into her house in Tegna.
The house appeared to Goedel as it appeared to everyone: windowless. But then he saw that the windows were high up between the walls and the ceiling so that light could come in but no gaze could intrude. The feeling of the house was very different from their last two meeting places—white walls and ceilings and a much lighter atmosphere. Pat herself, however, was the same, her manner unchanged. They were there for an hour or so and Pat kept saying: “I have to speak to Daniel about this.” And Daniel Keel had said: “I have to speak to Patricia about this.” The German producer didn’t do well with Pat because he refused to drink beer in the morning.
Finally, Goedel got a call from Diogenes saying that Pat had agreed to his film, but only for the TV rights, not as a feature film. (In fact, it was Daniel Keel’s idea.) Goedel was unhappy at the evaporation of his hopes for a feature film but decided to go ahead with a television film anyway. Pat had many suggestions for his new teleplay and she presented them in her typical list form: 1, 2, 3, 4. “They were very detailed and they were good,” he says.
When Goedel went to Tunis to film his script, he kept looking for a bungalow hotel in which to set the action, and in Hammamet he finally found one that was closed. When he contacted the owners, it turned out that he had found the very place where Patricia had stayed with Elizabeth Lyne in the summer of 1966 when she was taking her notes for The Tremor of Forgery. Goedel was amazed: Pat’s descriptions in the book had been so accurate that he’d been able, unconsciously, to select the exact place she had described. The owners remembered Pat, as did the owner of the restaurant in Hammamet—Ashua (Melik’s in The Tremor of Forgery)—where she and Mme Lyne as well as the protagonist of The Tremor of Forgery, Howard Ingham, had gone every night for dinner during their stay in Hammamet.
When Pat finally saw Goedel’s television film in the summer of 1993, she sent him a perfectly characteristic postcard. She objected, she wrote, to Howard Ingham’s belt and shoes.16 They were wrong for him. But she had never liked Goedel’s decision to change Ingham’s profession from writer to archaeologist, and—a recurrent theme in her letters to other people—she hated the fact that Goedel was using her title, The Tremor of Forgery (his final title was Trip to Tunis), for the film after she had asked him not to.