Appendix 1
(with Notes by the Author and Commentary by Patricia Highsmith)
Patricia Highsmith: Cradle to Grave
1921. 19 January: Mary Patricia Highsmith born in Fort Worth, Texas, in the boardinghouse owned by her maternal grandparents, Willie Mae Stewart Coates and Daniel Oscar Coates, at 603 West Daggett Avenue. Pat’s mother, Mary Coates Plangman, an artist and fashion illustrator, divorces Pat’s father, Jay Bernard Plangman, a graphic artist, nine days before Pat is born. From birth, Mary and the Coates family are the sole support of little “Patsy” Jay Bernard Plangman disappears from family history until Pat is twelve.
1921–26. Pat spends her first few years under the love and discipline of her Calvinist-inclined, Presbyterian- and Methodist-influenced grandmother Willie Mae, as Mother Mary goes out to work as an illustrator. Pat lives in the family boardinghouse with her mother and her older, orphaned cousin Dan Coates. At the age of three and a half, Pat is introduced to the Fort Worth graphic artist Stanley Highsmith, who is marrying her mother. It is hate at first sight.
1924. 24 June: Mary marries Stanley Highsmith and he joins the household at 603 West Daggett Avenue.
1927–38. The Highsmiths take Pat to New York City, where they have been working as graphic artists. They live first in Manhattan at West 103rd Street, then in Astoria, Queens, at two addresses from 1930 to 1933. Pat reads and is deeply marked by Karl Menninger’s The Human Mind, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, and an anatomy book used by her artist parents, The Human Anatomy. She never forgets that she shares her 19 January birthday with Edgar Allan Poe. In 1929, the Highsmiths return to Fort Worth, where Pat is enrolled for a year in the old Sixth Ward School (Austin Elementary), the same school her biological father attended as a child.
1930–33. January: The Highsmiths move to 1919 Twenty-first Road in Astoria, at the end of Queens County near Wards Island (where the largest mental hospital in the world is located), Rikers Island (where New York’s largest prison facility was being established), and Hell Gate Bridge, the longest railway bridge in the United States. The family moves a few blocks away to Twenty-eighth Street, and Pat becomes a student at P.S. 122 on Ditmars Boulevard in February of 1930. Both Hell Gate and Ditmars Boulevard will later occupy Pat’s imagination. At ten years old, she joins a girl gang and refuses to learn French before studying Latin, because, as she says, that is the classical order observed in English schools.
1933. Summer: She is sent for a month to a girls’ summer camp near West Point, New York. She writes letters home. Her attention is caught by her female tennis instructor and the camp rituals of girls swimming naked, and counsellors and campers exchanging clothes. Her letters are published in 1935 as an article in Women’s World Magazine.
1933–34. Mary and Pat return to Fort Worth to Willie Mae’s boardinghouse; Mary has promised Pat that she will divorce Stanley. Stanley travels from New York to Fort Worth and persuades Mary to return with him to New York. Pat is left with Willie Mae for a year to go to school in Fort Worth. Pat says she purchased her two “Confederate” swords (they were made in Massachusetts) during her stay in Fort Worth; she probably didn’t. She calls this “the saddest year of my life”—and never forgives Mary for “abandoning” her. She meets her father, Jay B Plangman, for the first time during this year and attends the junior high school on South Jennings Avenue in Fort Worth, where she is the only girl in her woodworking class.
1934–38. Pat is retrieved from Texas by Mary and Stanley in 1934 and taken back to New York, where the Highsmith family has moved to Greenwich Village in Manhattan and is living at One Bank Street. Pat attends the all-girl, eight-thousand-pupil Julia Richman High School on East Sixty-seventh Street where she falls in love with various classmates and befriends Judy Tuvim (Judy Holliday).
Like Fiorello La Guardia, the half-Catholic, half-Jewish mayor of New York from 1934 to 1945, and like New York City itself, the majority of the Julia Richman High School population is unevenly divided between Catholics and Jews. Pat’s memories of high school are resentful: “There are never enough Protestants to throw a party.” She begins making the rounds of Greenwich Village bars and cafés: her favorite is the Jumble Shop on MacDougal Street. She starts to take notes on her surroundings and relations; she transcribes these early notes in her Cahier 9.
1935. Pat begins her first story. It is lost, but in 1968 she still remembers the first sentence: “He prepared to go to sleep, removed his shoes and set them parallel, toe outward, beside his bed.” This sentence gave her, she says, “a sense of order, seeing the shoes neatly beside the bed in my imagination.”
1937. June: Pat writes her second story, “Crime Begins,” done, she said, because she was tempted to steal a book from the Julia Richman High School library, but instead wrote a story about a girl who steals a book. “Crime Begins” and another story, “Primroses Are Pink,” are published separately in the Bluebird, the Julia Richman High School literary magazine.
1938. Pat begins her first official cahier with these words: “A lazy phantom-white figure of a girl dancing to a Tschaikowski waltz.”
1938–42. Pat attends Barnard College, where she serves on the editorial board of the school’s literary magazine, the Barnard Quarterly, and enters the Barnard Greek Games as a “hurdle-jumper.” She studies zoology, English, playwriting, Latin, Greek, German, and logic (in which she receives a D grade) and earns a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. At Barnard she meets Kate Kingsley (later Skattebol), who becomes her lifelong friend and correspondent. Pat joins the Young Communist League, but not for long. During her college years, much of Pat’s social life is conducted outside school: she goes to parties at the Commerce Street studio of the photographer Berenice Abbott, meets the wealthy painter Buffie Johnson and the “eyes and ears” of the Luce organization, the English journalist Rosalind Constable. Buffie Johnson, Rosalind Constable, and Constable’s lover, the painter and gallerist Betty Parsons, introduce Pat to many well-placed people in New York.
1939. The Highsmiths move briefly from One Bank Street to 35 Morton Street, also in Greenwich Village.
1940. The Highsmiths move to 48 Grove Street, a street of piano bars and historically revolutionary residents. They live directly across the street from the Federal mansion in which John Wilkes Booth is said to have plotted the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
1940. Pat starts her first diary, “containing the body.”
1941. September: Pat writes “The Heroine,” rejected everywhere—even by her own college literary magazine, the Barnard Quarterly. The story will make its debut in the August 1945 issue of Harper’s Bazaar and is reprinted in the O. Henry Prize Stories volume of 1946. In the spring of 1941, the Barnard Quarterly publishes “The Legend of the Convent of St. Fotheringay,” a story about a boy raised as a girl in a convent of nuns (Pat gives the boy her own first name, Mary), who engineers a violent escape in order to become a boy again.
1942. Pat graduates, jobless, from Barnard in June.
1942. Summer: She forms an intense friendship with the great émigrée photographer Ruth Bernhard, intersected by a relationship with another émigré photographer Rolf Tietgens. Both Bernhard and Tietgens photograph Pat. Rejected by the major magazines she hoped to work for, Pat is employed by Ben-Zion Goldberg at FFF Publications, writing material for the Jewish press.
1943. December: She answers an ad at the Sangor-Pines Comics Shop at 10 West Forty-fifth Street, a comic book packaging and production company. She is hired by the respected comic book editor Richard E. Hughes, creator of the Superhero Black Terror, and works for a year in the writers’ bullpen, scripting comics. She writes Superheroes with Alter Egos, “text stories,” “funny animal comics,” westerns, war hero comics, “real-life” stories, and “fillers,” and then spends the next six years as a freelance comics scripter for many different comics companies. Her favorite company is Timely comics; it later becomes Marvel Comics.
Vince Fago, her editor at Timely, tries to arrange a date for her with another comic book writer, Stan Lee. Neither Lee nor Pat is interested, so Spider-Man (the Superhero Stan Lee cocreated) misses his opportunity to date Tom Ripley (the antihero Pat Highsmith created). Pat and Mickey Spillane both work on the same comic title, Jap Buster Johnson, at different times. Pat is one of the few women—perhaps the only consistently employed female scripwriter—to work regularly in comic books during the Golden Age of American Comics. She begins to extend the notes for her first novel, The Click of the Shutting, which, like most of her work, is colored by the world of comic book Alter Egos. She completes a short story, “Uncertain Treasure,” also influenced by the comics. She will remove all traces of her comic book work from her archives.
1943. May: Pat falls in love with a young painter, Allela Cornell: “I love Allela and God within her…“[S]he is the best!” She also falls in love with Allela’s girlfriend, Tex Eversol. Allela paints a prophetic portrait of Pat, which Pat keeps all her life. For most of the 1940s Pat never stops falling in love with women—sometimes for no more than an hour or an evening. She also begins to date a few men.
August: Pat’s short story “Uncertain Treasure” is published along with some drawings in Home and Food; it is her first work featuring two men in pursuit of each other.
1943–44. Pat travels to Mexico, in the company of the still-married blond model with whom she is temporarily in love. They quickly separate, and from January to May Pat lives in Taxco, working on her never-finished novel The Click of the Shutting. This Mexican trip is the first of her many foreign travels, and her behavior in Taxco sets the pattern for all her foreign residencies: intense correspondence, fervid note taking, fiction writing, serious drinking, and a yearning for home.
1944. She makes a synopsis of The Dove Descending, one of her three unfinished novels of the 1940s. She stops after seventy-eight pages.
Summer: She writes more comics scripts and has simultaneous affairs, including one with the blond, alcoholic socialite Natica Waterbury, whose daredevil exploits (she flies planes) and literary interests (she assisted Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare & Company in Paris) command Pat’s attention. Pat will later dedicate a collection of stories to Natica.
1945. “Movies in America destroy that fine, seldom even perceived sense of the importance and dignity of one’s own life,” Pat muses on 27 August. Six months later, on 16 December, during a walk in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, with her parents, the idea for her novel Strangers on a Train, which will be made into a classic film by Alfred Hitchcock, comes to her. She goes home and outlines the plot, giving it, amongst other titles, At the Back of the Mirror.
1946. Pat notices two snails, locked in hours-long coitus, in a fish market in New York and takes home six of them to keep as pets. She also tells an alternate story about her introduction to snails: In 1949, she writes, she saw a pair of snails “kissing” and rescued them from the cooking pot. She says she finds it “relaxing” to watch snails copulate. “I admire snails for their self-sufficiency…. I usually take five or six of my favorites with me when I go on holiday” (Reveille, 28 April–4 May 1966). When she lives in Suffolk, in the 60s, she keeps three hundred snails. She gives Vic Van Allen, the psychopath-hero of her novel Deep Water, her feeling for snails—and she names his favorite snails Edgar and Hortense after two of her own favorite snails. Pat says, pointedly, in a self-interview about snails: “It is quite impossible to tell which is the male and which is the female.”
1946. June: Pat meets again a woman she’d met in 1944 at a party of Rosalind Constable, Virginia Kent Catherwood. Virginia is a divorced, alchoholic, wealthy socialite—she has been presented at the Court of Saint James’s—and she occupies a high position in the American Dream Pat has been chasing. Pat falls in love with Virginia and uses Virginia’s own marital history in The Price of Salt.
September: Allela Cornell attempts suicide, and suffers a lingering death: her suicide has nothing to do with Pat, but Pat feels guilty. Virginia and Pat separate over infidelities in 1947, but “Ginnie” becomes one of Pat’s enduring “types.” Two years after Virginia Kent Catherwood’s early death in 1966, Pat writes in her 1968 diary: “She is Lotte in The Tremor of Forgery—the woman whom my hero will always love.”
1946. “The Heroine” is published in the O. Henry Prize Stories collection.
1947. Pat meets, in an elevator on the way to a “gay” party, Lil Picard, the refugee arts journalist, milliner, and performance artist from Alsace-Lorraine, who becomes “one of my more amusing friends.” (Picard is Jewish and a Marxist; she considers Pat a “fascist.” In the 1970s, Lil Picard writes a famous arts column for the East Village Other in New York.) Pat begins to write her short story “The Snail-Watcher,” in which a man is suffocated by the proliferating snails he keeps as pets.
April: “The World’s Champion Ball-Bouncer” is published by Woman’s Home Companion.
On 23 June she begins to write Strangers on a Train; in November she briefly meets the black writer Owen Dodson, who reads the first part of Strangers, says it has “good economy” and that it can “be a terrible story” he names a character “Deaconess Highsmith” in his current novel. She also shows the first eighty pages of the book to her old editor at FFF Publications, Ben-Zion Goldberg, who reminds her that she has used this two-man theme before in The Click of the Shutting, the novel she failed to finish in Mexico.
1948. Pat meets Truman Capote during one of her visits to Leo Lerman’s Sunday evening salons, and Capote recommends her to Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. Pat spends two months there, drinking heavily, flirting successfully, and doing serious work on Strangers on a Train. Chester Himes has the room across the hall, Flannery O’Connor is also in residence, and so is the British novelist Marc Brandel, who becomes Pat’s on-again-off-again fiancé.
1948. November: Pat enters psychoanalysis (her friend the composer David Diamond has recommended two analysts) for six months because of her homosexuality and her ambivalance about marrying Marc Brandel. Though Dr. Eva Klein’s Freudian therapy presents her with some new perceptions (“I am acting out that with which my mother served me—the loving and leaving pattern, the basic heartlessness & lack of sympathy”), Pat soon rebels against Dr. Klein’s conclusions, and when the doctor suggests that she join group therapy with some “married women who are latent homosexuals,” the end is near. Pat remarks of the married women: “Perhaps I shall amuse myself by seducing a couple of them.”
1948. 8 December: Mrs. E. R. Senn, wife of a wealthy executive from New Jersey, buys a doll from Pat, who is temporarily employed behind the toy counter at Bloomingdale’s department store. This “two or three minute” meeting becomes the “germ” for The Price of Salt. Pat goes home, love-struck, and writes up the entire plot in one sitting, aided by a high fever and a case of chicken pox. She never meets Mrs. Senn again.
1949. Spring: Pat sails to Europe, her first trip to London, Paris, Marseille, Italy. In London, Pat falls in love with Kathryn Hamill Cohen, the psychiatrist-wife of her London publisher, and manages several other adventures as well. In Marseille, she visits one of Mother Mary’s young “protegés,” Jean David, called “Jeannot,” an aspiring artist-turned-cartoonist. A flirtation ensues. Jeannot had been a guest of the Highsmiths in New York, invited because, after seeing one of Mary’s illustrations in a magazine, he wrote to Mary from France. Pat continues to be an ami de maison in Jeannot’s family.
1950. Pat works on the novel that will become The Price of Salt and writes the first of what will be many reviews and articles: a highly favorable critique of Theodora (Roosevelt) Keogh’s Meg, a New York novel about a preadolescent girl who has many of Pat’s own childhood characteristics—including a fascination with knives and a precocious interest in adults. Pat meets and befriends the Austrian Jewish émigré writer and adventurer Arthur Koestler.
15 March: Strangers on a Train is published.
1951. The Price of Salt is rejected by Harper & Brothers, but published in May of 1952 by Coward-McCann. Pat goes to Paris, London, back to Paris, then Rome, then travels from Rome to Naples with Natalia Danesi Murray, Janet Flanner’s lover, then to Florence and Venice—where, at Peggy Guggenheim’s palace, Somerset Maugham mixes her a perfect martini. She goes on to Munich, where she polishes The Price of Salt for publication and works on her four-hundred-page “lost” novel, now called The Sleepless Night, but later titled The Traffic of Jacob’s Ladder.
Alfred Hitchcock finishes his film of Strangers on a Train (he buys the book for $6,800 plus a bonus of $700), starring Farley Granger, Robert Walker, Ruth Roman, and his daughter, Patricia Hitchcock. (In 1958, Pat told her editor Joan Kahn that the Hitchcock contract for Strangers on a Train was lost, mistakenly thrown out by a cleaner at the A. S. Lyons office, where her agent Margot Johnson worked.) Hitchcock’s version of the transaction: he disguised his name and voice when telephoning Margot Johnson so he could get the book for less money. But Margot Johnson’s records indicate that she knew she was dealing with Alfred Hitchcock. Raymond Chandler, then Czenzi Ormonde, are Hitchcock’s scriptwriters. Chandler finds the book’s plot unworkable and says it drives him crazy. He is fired. Robert Walker, the actor who plays Bruno, dies shortly after the film is released.
1951. Fall: Pat meets Ellen Blumenthal Hill in Munich and falls in love. Their affair lasts four years, and goes through many phases, during which they traverse much of Europe, some of America, and quite a bit of Mexico. Their quarrelling friendship lasts until 1988, and Pat moves to Switzerland in the early 1980s to be near Ellen Hill.
1952. Ellen Hill attempts suicide after reading Pat’s diary comments about her. The William Bradley Agency begins to represent Pat in Europe; the legendary Mme Jenny Bradley becomes her agent.
1952. The Traffic of Jacob’s Ladder is rejected by both Harper & Brothers and Coward-McCann. The manuscript, except for ten final, awkwardly written pages, vanishes later in the 1950s: “Some have said,” Pat wrote, [it was rejected because of] the triteness of its ideas.”
May. The Price of Salt is published by Coward-McCann. Pat insists on publishing it under a pseudonym, Claire Morgan.
Summer: While travelling with Ellen Hill, Pat begins The Blunderer, based on her already “poisoned” relations with Ellen Hill. It circles around the theme of one man, Walter Stackhouse, who is inspired by the murderous act of another man. Like Pat, the novel’s hero, Walter, takes notes on the unequal relations between pairs of male friends, one strong, one weak. Pat kills Ellen off fictionally—a suicide—in the character of Walter’s wife.
From the balcony of her room in the Albergo Mirimare in Positano, Italy, Pat sees, at six o’clock one morning, a young man “in shorts and sandals,” with black hair, walking on the beach. His separation from all context intrigues her, and he becomes one of the “germs” for Tom Ripley. She pays an unsatisfactory visit to W. H. Auden, who is staying near Positano, and eventually sends him a copy of Strangers on a Train. He writes her a not entirely favorable critique from his apartment on Cornelia Street in New York City.
1953. July: Ellen Hill tries suicide again in Pat’s presence, and Pat walks out of the apartment. Ellen survives and they separate. Pat finds several girlfriends in New York, amongst them a twenty-eight-year-old blonde, Lynn Roth, who wants to be an actress and is one of “Pat’s types.”
By September Pat is in Fort Worth, where she works on The Blunderer until January 1954. She stays first at her uncle Claude’s apartment-hotel and then at her cousin Millie Alford’s, and continues to work on The Blunderer. She is still calling the novel The Man in the Queue and A Deadly Innocence and gives it its final title in November 1953, when she finishes the first draft. She is drinking heavily.
1954–55. Summer 1954: Pat rents a cottage from an undertaker in Lenox, Massachusetts. She begins The Talented Mr. Ripley—two of its early titles are The Pursuit of Evil and The Thrill Boys—reading Tocqueville’s Democracy in America in preparation.
September: She reunites with Ellen Hill and begins to write the second part of Ripley in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she lives with Ellen. December: Pat and Ellen and Ellen’s French poodle (Pat kills a similarly named poodle in A Dog’s Ransom) drive down through Mexico, arguing from El Paso to Acapulco and back again. Once again, her quarrelsome relations with Ellen produce the nerves of an excellent novel, Deep Water (published in 1958). “I want to explore the diseases produced by sexual repression,” Pat writes about Deep Water. She does so.
Pat sends a copy of the manuscript version of The Talented Mr. Ripley to grandmother Willie Mae; Willie Mae dies on 5 February 1955 and the manuscript is lost. Before the end of 1955, Pat and Ellen separate, and Pat moves back to her apartment on East Fifty-sixth Street in Manhattan.
The Talented Mr. Ripley is published by Coward-McCann in New York in December 1955. Pat will later make many remarks that allow her to be identified with Tom Ripley: “Pat H, alias Ripley,” “I often felt that Ripley was writing it,” etc.
1955. She begins The Dog in the Manger, published as Deep Water in 1957. She shares with its pathological hero a fascination with snails.
1956. June: Pat starts to make notes for A Game for the Living. She gives up her apartment at 356 East Fifty-sixth Street after thirteen years.
1956–58. She falls in love with an advertising copywriter, Doris, and goes to live with her in Snedens Landing. They write a rhyming book for children, Miranda the Panda Is on the Veranda, a book which later makes Janet Flanner “wince.” Pat does the illustrations and dedicates the book to Mary Highsmith.
1957. Le Grand Prix de la littérature policière is awarded to Pat for the French edition of The Talented Mr. Ripley, published by Calmann-Lévy. Pat publishes her first story in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, “The Perfect Alibi.”
1958. Pat joins the choir of a small Presbyterian church in Palisades, New York. She has been writing fervently about Jesus Christ for most of her life—and she continues the argument she started with God when she was in her twenties.
Summer: She begins, at Doris’s suggestion, to draft a novel about “a man who creates a second character” and lives a second life. It will become This Sweet Sickness. While continuing to live with Doris, she begins a clandestine affair with Mary Ronin, a commercial artist who lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with another woman. Her fantasies about Mary Ronin pour into her manuscript. Pat and Doris move to Sparkill, New York, in September, but by the end of the year their relationship is over. Pat moves back to New York alone, to 75 Irving Place, in December, just across the street from Pete’s Tavern. She continues to see Mary Ronin.
Special Award from the Mystery Writers of America for The Talented Mr. Ripley.
1958. A Game for the Living, her much revised and awkwardly constructed Mexican novel, is published by Harper & Brothers, In May, she suggests herself as the godmother for her friend Kingsley’s daughter: “Let me know how you feel about my presenting the new first born with a Bible. After all, it is traditional.” Pat leaves Margot Johnson’s literary agency (A. S. Lyons) and signs with Patricia Schartle (later Myrer), then a partner in Constance Smith Associates. Schartle represents her for the next twenty years.
1959. Pat writes This Sweet Sickness, using her feelings for Mary Ronin as the inspiration for the psychopath David Kelsey’s delusions about the married woman he wants to marry, the woman for whom he buys a house and constructs a second identity. Again, Pat dedicates the book to Mary Highsmith.
Mme Jenny Bradley, Pat’s European agent, sells the rights to The Talented Mr. Ripley to Robert and Raymond Hakim, who produce René Clément’s classic film version Plein Soleil, starring Alain Delon, Marie Laforêt, and Maurice Ronet.
Pat meets and begins a brief affair with pulp novelist Marijane Meaker, then goes to Europe on a publicity tour at the end of September with Mother Mary, who is recovering from a bad depression. Pat hopes to meet Mary Ronin in Greece, but Mary Ronin doesn’t come. Mother Mary and Pat quarrel on the European trip; Mary impersonates Pat for two journalists in their Paris hotel lobby, intimating that her action was a joke. “I think a psychiatrist would put another meaning to it,” Pat writes to her cousin Dan. Pat continues her travels with her ex-lover Doris. She goes to Marseille, back to Paris, to Greece, and then to Crete.
1960. February: Pat returns from Europe. This Sweet Sickness is published. In May she begins to take notes on the the idea of an American embezzler who travels to Greece, the start of a tortuous series of revisions which result in her novel The Two Faces of January. (Other titles for January: The Power of Negative Thinking, Rydal’s Folly.) She rekindles her romance with Marijane Meaker and moves with her to a house on Old Ferry Road, seven miles outside New Hope, Pennsylvania, for a turbulent six-month relationship. During this time, she reworks The Two Faces of January and writes several short stories, amongst them “The Terrapin” (published in EQMM in 1961). “The Terrapin” wins the Raven Award from the Mystery Writers of America. She produces many inadequate drafts of The Two Faces of January. Her editor at Harper & Brothers, Joan Kahn, reluctantly rejects all of them. In May 1962, the final Harper & Brothers reader’s report submitted to Joan Kahn about The Two Faces of January contains this sentence: “A very unhealthy air hangs over it…and I finished it all with a strong sense of revulsion.”
1960. Spring: She meets Alex Szogyi, a professor at Wesleyan University, who admires her work and becomes a close friend. When she leaves permanently for Europe in 1962, she gives him her writing desk. They continue a mostly epistolary friendship until the 1980s, when she becomes “possessive” over his growing friendship with Jeanne Moreau (to whom she introduced him) and their relations break off.
1961. January: Pat begins work on Girls’ Book, which becomes First Person Novel, about a woman recounting her lesbian experiences to her husband by letter. She stops the book after fifty-nine pages.
Spring: Pat and Meaker separate; Pat moves to an apartment and then to a house in New Hope at 113 South Sugan Road. She begins a yearlong affair with Daisy Winston, later a travel agent, now an occasional waitress at Odette’s, a nightclub in New Hope. Daisy becomes a lifelong friend.
April: Pat begins The Cry of the Owl, set in Lambertville, Pennsylvania, just across the river from New Hope. She writes to Kingsley that with this book, “I am writing something out of my system.” In it, she again kills off a girlfriend: Marijane Meaker in the character of Robert Forester’s pathological ex-wife. A case of German measles in June helps her work along.
1962. Summer: She travels to Europe, sharing a house in Positano with Ellen Hill; they immediately begin to quarrel again. They go on to Rome and Pat travels to Venice, staying at the Pensione Seguso, which she will make use of in her Venice novel Those Who Walk Away. In July, she is in Paris, weeping over Oscar Wilde’s grave in Père Lachaise. During this summer in Europe, she meets Caroline Besterman and falls in love “as never before.” She returns to Pennsylvania, struck to the heart.
September: Back in New Hope, Pat begins to write The Glass Cell, inspired in part by a correspondence with an inmate in a Chicago prison. She visits Doylestown prison for atmosphere (but isn’t allowed inside), and takes some details for the novel from a book about an unjustly imprisoned engineer who was strung up by his thumbs in prison and became a morphine addict—details she attaches to The Glass Cell’s hero, Philip arter.
1962. Obsessed by her love for Caroline Besterman and unable to work, she decides to move to England to be near the married Caroline.
1963. February: Pat takes a boat to Lisbon, then to Positano, where Edna Lewis, mother-in-law of her New Hope friend Peggy Lewis, has an art school. She rents the house she had the year before. At Edna Lewis’s party she meets the writer Larry Kramer and spends time with some expatriate artists. She makes a quick trip to London to see Caroline, whose husband has been told of their affair. While in London, she does a radio interview with the writer Francis Wyndham, the first person in England to write about her at length as a serious novelist. (Maurice Richardson wrote about her work for The Observer in 1957.) Wyndham writes a subsequent article in the New Statesmen which effectively introduces her work to Britain. Caroline comes back with her to Positano. Pat is so deeply in love with Caroline that she changes her will, leaving half her estate to Caroline, half to Mary Highsmith, and her manuscripts to her friend from Barnard College, Kate Kingsley Skattebol. She is in the habit of changing her will frequently, but she has never left money to a lover before—nor will she ever do so again. The depth of her feeling for Caroline is contained in this characteristic statement: “I have imagined killing myself, strangely, more strongly now than with anyone else I have ever known” (Diary 15, 3 May 1963).
Pat moves to Aldeburgh, to 27 King Street, in Suffolk. Then she buys Bridge Cottage in Earl Soham, Suffolk. Caroline visits on weekends.
Pat writes A Suspension of Mercy (published as The Story-Teller in the United States) and makes friends with her neighbor, the writer Ronald Blythe, and his circle, which includes James Hamilton-Paterson, future author of Cooking with Fernet-Branca.
1963. February: Pat takes a boat to Lisbon, then to Positano, where Edna Lewis, mother-in-law of her New Hope friend Peggy Lewis, has an art school. She rents the house she had the year before. At Edna Lewis’s party she meets the writer Larry Kramer and spends time with some expatriate artists. She makes a quick trip to London to see Caroline, whose husband has been told of their affair. While in London, she does a radio interview with the writer Francis Wyndham, the first person in England to write about her at length as a serious novelist. (Maurice Richardson wrote about her work for The Observer in 1957.) Wyndham writes a subsequent article in the New Statesmen which effectively introduces her work to Britain. Caroline comes back with her to Positano. Pat is so deeply in love with Caroline that she changes her will, leaving half her estate to Caroline, half to Mary Highsmith, and her manuscripts to her friend from Barnard College, Kate Kingsley Skattebol. She is in the habit of changing her will frequently, but she has never left money to a lover before—nor will she ever do so again. The depth of her feeling for Caroline is contained in this characteristic statement: “I have imagined killing myself, strangely, more strongly now than with anyone else I have ever known” (Diary 15, 3 May 1963). Pat moves to Aldeburgh, to 27 King Street, in Suffolk. Then she buys Bridge Cottage in Earl Soham, Suffolk. Caroline visits on weekends. Pat writes A Suspension of Mercy (published as The Story-Teller in the United States) and makes friends with her neighbor, the writer Ronald Blythe, and his circle, which includes James Hamilton-Paterson, future author of Cooking with Fernet-Branca.
1964. The Two Faces of January is finally published by Doubleday in the United States and Heinemann in the UK in 1965. The Two Faces of January wins the Crime Writers Association of England’s Silver Dagger Award for best foreign crime novel of 1964. Julian Symons is president of the awards committee and becomes another of her British champions, as does the novelist and political activist Brigid Brophy. Pat adds the Silver Dagger (it’s an actual dagger) to her growing collection of sharpened instruments.
1965. Pat starts to make notes for the novel which becomes Ripley Under Ground, published in 1970. The idea for the central figure, the dead artist Derwatt, came to her in 1952 when, sojourning on the Riviera with Ellen Hill, she wrote down a memory of Allela Cornell’s studio on Washington Square, with “Allela like Christ, returned to be a painter. Who could be in her presence without being suffused with joy and contentment…? I should at some time like to do a story permeated with this paradisical atmosphere of the life creative and creating in her studio, destroyed in the fleshly suicide (so was X [Christ] a suicide) but living on always in the hearts of people who knew her” (Cahier 21, 4/5/52).
May: Pat goes to Venice with Caroline Besterman: “my first vacation in nineteen months.” She does many drawings and is snubbed by Peggy Guggenheim, who refuses her invitation to Harry’s Bar. Pat never wastes a trip, and she doesn’t waste this one, later telling Mike Sundell, director of Yaddo, that she plotted Those Who Walk Away from her Venice maps. From October 1965 to March 1966 she writes Those Who Walk Away, her Venice novel of endless, topographically accurate, and paranoid pursuits.
November: She begins to think of Ripley Under Ground as a television play: Derwatt Resurrected. “A religious television play, based on the effect of a friend (Jesus) upon a group of people. The Jesus figure dies, some what of a suicide, whereupon his influence grows.” Her thoughts about Jesus Christ, always present, are finding creative forms.
1966. She writes a “ghost story” at the suggestion of Caroline Besterman, “The Yuma Baby,” and one of her snail stories, “The Quest for Blank Claveringi.” She makes some tables out of wood.
June: Pat drives to Marseille with her old friend the designer Elizabeth Lyne. They take a boat to Tunis, where they put up at a hotel in Hammamet for a few weeks, then sail to Naples and go overland to Alpnach, Austria. Pat’s notes from the Tunisian part of her trip go into The Tremor of Forgery—as do her feelings about the Arab population’s “petty thieving.”
August: Caroline Besterman joins Pat for five days in Paris.
September: At Anne Duveen’s house in Cagnes-sur-Mer, Pat meets, for the first time, the former photographer Barbara Ker-Seymer and her companion, Barbara Roett. Pat is in the South of France because the film director Raoul Lévy wants her to collaborate on his screenplay of Deep Water. She finishes the script, but Lévy shoots himself dead on New Year’s Eve and the film is never made. Pat returns to Earl Soham.
October: Pat and Caroline separate; Pat calls this “the very worst time of my entire life.” Pat continues to refer to the relationship in her cahiers (but not in her fiction) for most of the rest of her life.
Pat makes notes about writing a more “intellectual and funnier” Ripley. Claude Autant-Lara makes a film of The Blunderer, Le Meurtrier. Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction is published in the United States.
1967. January: Pat begins the year with an indictment of Caroline Besterman’s behavior—and moves to the Île-de-France. Over the next several years, she rents a house near Fontainebleau, then buys a house in Samois-sur-Seine with her old friend from New York the designer and painter Elizabeth Lyne, then rents another house in Montmachoux. Her cotenancy with Mme Lyne is not a success. Pat thought Lyne had “what was known as a Man’s Mind.” Instead she finds her like “Every Woman.” Their arguments about co-ownership end up in a court of law.
Pat begins The Tremor of Forgery, based on her trip to Tunisia with Mme Lyne. Originally planning to give her “hero,” the divorced writer Howard Ingham (who is writing a book called The Tremor of Forgery), an affair with an Arab boy, she is instead content to deracinate him in other ways. He kills an intruding Arab with his typewriter and dissembles the act. Ingham’s divorced wife—who never appears in the book—is based on the remnants of Pat’s feelings for Ginnie Catherwood and Lynn Roth. The book is finished in February of 1968. Set during the Israeli-Arab Six-Day War, it is pervaded by contradictory political sentiments. Rolf Tietgens tells her that the politics of Tremor “is the weakest part of the book.”
1967. Daniel Keel, cofounder of Diogenes Verlag in Zurich, takes over from Rowohlt as Pat’s principal German publisher with his German-language publication of Those Who Walk Away. Keel, who saw Hitchcock’s film of Strangers on a Train as a young man and stayed in the theater until he could identify the author’s name on the credits, will include Pat’s work in his renowned “black and yellow” crime series in 1974. After seven months of what Pat called “tough” bargaining between Pat and Keel (1979–80), Daniel Keel becomes Highsmith’s world representative as well as her principal publisher. At the end of her life, Pat appoints him as her literary executor. Keel and Diogenes Verlag are responsible for much of Pat’s fame and a large part of her fortune.
1968. March: In Paris, Pat dines with Janet Flanner and lunches with Nathalie Sarraute, with whom she debates the “femininity” of Colette. (Pat doesn’t think Colette is feminine.) “[Sarraute] was absolutely charming and wrote a wonderful inscription” in the Sarraute novel, which, typically, Pat borrowed from Elizabeth Lyne. Pat begins a yearlong affair with a young journalist, Madeleine Harmsworth, who comes to Samois-sur-Seine to interview her for Queen magazine.
April: Pat buys a house in Montmachoux and moves from Samois-sur-Seine. 25 April–6 May: she stays with Barbara Ker-Seymer and Barbara Roett in North London, returning to France in time to be outraged by the student revolution of May 1968.
20 June: She moves to Montmachoux and works on a play for a London producer called When the Sleep Ends. She is writing the lead role for her friend the actress Heather Chasen. Chasen later remarks that Pat was unable to write dialogue, and anyway, the character Pat was creating for her was a “perfect bitch.” The play is never produced.
1968. October: Pat begins to take notes for the book that will become Ripley Under Ground, centering the plot on the “Christ-like” dead painter Derwatt (for whom Allela Cornell provides the inspiration), and the international forgery business that a now-married Ripley (he turns “green” with terror at his wedding) murders to protect. She is also inspired by Hans van Meegeren, the man who fooled Hermann Göring with his forgeries of Vermeer. She falls in love with “Jacqui,” a Parisian, who perpetually disappoints her. Pat borrows some of Jacqui’s traits for Heloise Plisson, Tom Ripley’s wife in Ripley Under Ground.
1969. Madeleine Harmsworth breaks off with Pat. July: Pat visits Arthur and Cynthia Koestler in Alpnach.
1970. February: Thinking of moving back to the States, Pat flies to New York and travels to Fort Worth, where her battles with Mother Mary result in letters like this one from Mary: “My doctors say if you had stayed 3 more days I would be dead.”
March: Pat goes to Santa Fe to stay with Rosalind Constable for a couple of weeks, finishing her corrections on the manuscript of Ripley Under Ground.
May: She starts to write A Dog’s Ransom, reviving her interest in poison-pen letters. She gives the dog in question, a poodle, the name of Ellen Hill’s poodle (Tina) and kills it off. She gives Greta Reynolds, one of the fictional Tina’s owners, some of Lil Picard’s traits. A Dog’s Ransom is her jeremiad against a “corrupt” and “corrupting” New York; its confusions are a result of the fact that her chief contact with the United States is limited to daily readings of the International Herald Tribune. She concentrates the story on an idealistic young policeman who becomes infected by the venality he hopes to fight. Pat didn’t know any policemen, and she was relying on Kingsley Skattebol’s research on New York police procedure. The novel is interpreted in Europe as an expression of Pat’s ability to find the surreal in the real and is highly praised.
Summer: Doubleday publishes her story collection The Snail-Watcher and Other Stories: she pays four hundred dollars of Graham Greene’s five-hundred-dollar fee to write the introduction. She isn’t completely pleased with what Greene writes: “A trifle hectic the prose, but not bad, I suppose.”
1970. October: Throughout her sojourn in France, Pat has been supported in every way by her editor at Calmann-Lévy, Alain Oulman, with whom she has a warm friendship and an extensive correspondence. He introduces her to both James Baldwin and Colette de Jouvenel, daughter of the writer Colette. Colette de Jouvenel and Pat are neighbors in the Île-de-France and share an interest in cats as well as in Jouvenel’s mother.
14 November: She moves to a hameau in Moncourt, buying a house at 21 rue de la Boissière, next door to two Anglo-Irish journalists she knows and likes, Desmond and Mary Ryan. As usual, proximity diminishes her liking. She meets many interesting people through the Ryans, including Isabella Rawsthorne, Francis Bacon’s muse.
1971. March: Pat’s almost thirteen-year-old goddaughter, her college friend Kingsley’s daughter, comes for a fortnight to stay with Pat in Moncourt and to travel. Pat takes her to London but does not prove to be a sympathetic hostess, remarking in a letter to Ronald Blythe that her goddaughter is five feet three inches and 138 pounds, and that she fears for the cases in the British Museum when the girl leans on them. Pat regularly refers to herself in letters to the girl as “evil fairy godmother,” “old witch,” and “delinquent godmother.”
June: Barbara Ker-Seymer and Barbara Roett visit Moncourt and have the usual experience of many Highsmith guests: if they want to eat, they have to buy the food. On another visit, Pat throws a dead rat up from the garden through their bedroom window: her idea of a joke.
1971. Fall: Pat leaves Doubleday, publishers of her last five books in the United States, when her editor, Larry Ashmead, turns down A Dog’s Ransom—which is then accepted by Knopf. Her editor at Knopf, Bob Gottlieb, suggests revisions, as does her editor at Heinemann, Janice Robertson. Pat is not pleased to make revisions.
November: She is taking notes for the book that will become Ripley’s Game. One of her early ideas is that Tom should carry out a series of revenge murders for a sixty-year-old writer (Pat is fifty). She calls this idea “A dialogue with myself.”
1972. January: She continues developing Ripley’s Game and begins to note down some ideas for the collection of short stories that will become The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder.
September: Stanley Highsmith dies. Pat asks for—and receives—his autopsy report. Pat and Mary begin their long correspondence about the watch and chain Pat gave to Stanley when she was twelve or thirteen. Pat wants it back. She doesn’t get it.
1973. 26 May: “I’d love to meet Francis Bacon some time. I would imagine he is a very ‘disturbing’ type, in the sense that the mentally deranged can be disturbing. I may be quite wrong. He is probably well organized on the surface. Artists react to such temperaments at once—a sensation I have always described as ‘shattering.’”
“Shattering” is the word Pat uses most often to describe the effect Mother Mary has on her. In her house in Tegna, Pat keeps a postcard of Francis Bacon’s Study Number 6—it is one of his screaming popes—on her desk.
1974. Film director Joseph Losey is interested in adapting Pat’s novel The Tremor of Forgery. The project comes to nothing, but cordial relations develop between Pat and Losey and his writer-producer wife, Patricia.
28 June: Wim Wenders and Peter Handke come to see Pat in Moncourt. They bring a gift from Jeanne Moreau (whom Pat met when Moreau was starring in a Handke play in Paris): an igneous ball on a pedestal “black and clear.” Handke says to Pat: “When I start any of your books, I have the feeling that you love life, that you want to live.” Pat’s comment in her Cahier 33: “That’s very nice!” (Ten years later, in November of 1984, Pat writes to her German translator, Anne Uhde: “By the way, I find Peter Handke’s prose writings quite boring much of the time”—and then goes on to say that Ellen Hill thinks his plays are brilliant.) Wim Wenders says that it is Handke who introduced Pat to the European custom of having your publisher for an agent. Pat hands over to Wenders a manuscript of the book she has just finished, Ripley’s Game, and he is eager to make it into a film.
August: The germ of Edith’s Diary: Pat plans a book about “a modern intellectual” who is so disappointed in her family and “her beautiful dream of America” that she creates a better world in her diary. (This leaves the “truthfulness” of Pat’s own diaries open to some interesting questions.) Edith, undeveloped as an “intellectual” character, goes mad as her diary develops a saner, far more bourgeois world than the one she inhabits. Pat takes the son of a former lover as a model for Cliffie, Edith’s criminal and psychologically puzzling son (another of Pat’s “literary” revenges), and writes to Lil Picard for political positions for the increasingly crackpot Edith. “Edith’s ideas are partly mine,” Pat says. Edith is pulled to her death down a flight of stairs (one of Pat’s own recurring nightmares) by the weight of the bust of her son she has been sculpting. Pat gives to Edith her preferred quotation from Thomas Paine: a reminder of the plaque featuring Paine on Grove Street, a block from where the Highsmith family lived in Manhattan in 1940–42.
September: Pat goes to Fort Worth, to find Mother Mary’s house in terrible disorder and Mary deteriorating. “What terrifies me is the insanity, the knowledge that it will only get worse. She doesn’t eat properly. Food is rotting…the dog has the mange…[the visit] is ‘shattering.’”
Pat stops in New York, where she stays with women friends. “Overall impression: extroversion, constant stimulation, causing ‘resentment’ or ‘reaction’ such as, ‘I’m holing up this weekend,’ or ‘I’ll hang onto my little handful of friends.’ Neither of these phrases uttered of course. Variety—no doubt, in New York. One is flung from the best in the arts, to the worst of humanity.” As usual she haunts Greenwich Village, finding Jane Street still “quite lovely” and Eighth Street “a dump and a slum. What a shame! I remember it aglow with pretty shops” (Cahier 33). She meets with Robert Gottlieb, who will edit her at Knopf.
December: Marion Aboudaram, a novelist and translator from Paris, contacts Pat for an interview in Moncourt (for which Aboudaram has not been commissioned and which never transpires: Marion just wants to meet Pat).
1975. January: Marion and Pat become lovers. Pat works on Edith’s Diary.
April: She goes to Stockholm on a publicity tour, noting, as always, the amount of alcohol on offer. Another note in her cahier: “7/27/75—~60 milligrams to 100 milli-litres, permitted alcohol content for drivers of cars. U.K.”
“A day to remember—perhaps. On 6 August, my mother accidentally set her Texas house on fire—with a left cigarette.” The place is gutted, the dog dies, and Mary is installed in a care facility, the Fireside Lodge, by her helpful nephew Dan Coates. Pat stays away, but pays for part of Mary’s care.
September: Pat, along with Michael Frayn and Stanley Middleton, is invited by the Swiss Association of Teachers of English in Hölstein, Switzerland, to speak at a weeklong series of seminars. She discusses The Glass Cell—“its origins and difficulties”—and meets Peter Huber and Frieda Sommer. The former will become her neighbor in Tegna; the latter, one of her executors.
Jay Bernard Plangman, Pat’s father, who has maintained a friendship with Mary Highsmith, offering to give her driving lessons, dies in Fort Worth, Texas. Pat does not return for her father’s funeral.
1976. June. Edith’s Diary is rejected by Knopf.
1977. Wim Wenders makes a film of Ripley’s Game, Der Amerikanishe freund (The American Friend), scripted by Peter Handke. It stars Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz and features seven film directors in minor roles. “What have they done to my Ripley is my wail,” Pat writes to Ronald Blythe. Wenders says Pat ultimately told him she liked the film. Little Tales of Misogyny wins the Grand Prix de l’Humeur Noir in Paris for Pat and her illustrator, Roland Topor. Hans Geissendörfer makes a film of The Glass Cell, Die gläserne Zelle. Pat likes it.
May: Edith’s Diary is published by Heinemann in London and, later in the year, by Simon & Schuster in New York.
Claude Miller makes a film of This Sweet Sickness, Dites-lui que je l’aime (with Gérard Depardieu and Miou-Miou). Pat doesn’t like it.
Belle Ombre, a play adapted from two Highsmith short stories—“When the Fleet Was In at Mobile” and “The Terrapin”—is produced by Francis Lacombrade at Théâtre de l’Épicerie, in Paris.
1978. Pat is elected president of the jury at the Berlin Film Festival, another unhappy public experience. Committee work is not her forte and she didn’t really want the job. She remeets actress and costume designer Tabea Blumenschein and film director Ulrike Ottinger in Berlin.
Spring: Pat falls in love with Tabea Blumenschein. It is a short relationship and Pat is devastated by its end; it is as though she met her own youthful self in a mirror and then lost her. She and Tabea exchange letters for some years, meet infrequently, then fall into silence. The violence of her feelings for Tabea will affect Pat for several years.
August: Begins an affair of a few months with a young French teacher of English, Monique Buffet—it is the last affair of Pat’s life. It produces many letters, good relations, and a satisfying friendship, and allows Pat to finish the novel that was interrupted by her breakup with Tabea, The Boy Who Followed Ripley. She dedicates the book to Monique.
1979. Slowly, Slowly in the Wind (Leise, leise im Wind), a collection of reliably perverse tales, is published in England by Heinemann and in Zurich by Diogenes.
1980. 26 March: The French fiscal authority, the douane, raids Pat’s house in Moncourt, looking for evidence of tax evasion. She is profoundly disturbed by the intrusion. Pat gives this raid as her reason for buying a house in Aurigeno, Switzerland, but, at Ellen Hill’s direction, she had picked out a house in Aurigeno before the douane raided her. Pat works on a new edition of Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction for St. Martin’s Press and begins some stories that will appear in the collection The Black House(published in 1981 in the UK and 1988 in the United States.)
October: She begins to work on People Who Knock on the Door, published in 1983 in the UK and in 1985 in the United States.
1981. January: She travels to the United States to look at the question of Christian fundamentalism as a subject for People Who Knock on the Door. She goes to New York, where she sees Larry Ashmead, now at Simon & Schuster, and then goes on to Indianapolis, where she stays with her friends the concert pianist Michel Block and Charles Latimer, ex–advertising director at Heinemann. She watches televangelists on their television for a week, researching her novel at one remove. She travels to Fort Worth and Los Angeles. The entire trip takes three weeks.
February: She moves to Aurigeno, Switzerland—but just barely. French tax law requires that she spend six months out of the country and six months in it, and that’s what she does, shuttling between Moncourt and Aurigeno for several years, ambivalent as to whether or not she should sell the house in Moncourt. She advertises the Moncourt house in The New York Review of Books for one hundred thousand dollars, reduces the price to seventy-five thousand dollars, and receives tentative interest in buying it from Peter Handke, Hedli MacNeice (her neighbor in Moncourt and the ex-wife of poet Louis MacNeice), and a “nice bachelor.” In her absences, she doesn’t heat the house sufficiently and the radiators burst.
1983. People Who Knock on the Door published in the UK. The Black House, a collection of short stories, and People Who Knock on the Door rejected by Harper & Row. She is without a publisher in the United States for two years.
April: She travels to Paris to publicize People Who Knock on the Door. The filmmaker and journalist Christa Maerker visits her in Aurigeno; Pat coolly points out to Maerker the local railway crossing where she has recently driven her car into a train.
June: Pat starts to plot out Found in the Street, a novel which takes place in her old Greenwich Village neighborhood. She gives two of her protagonists her old address on Grove Street, and her heroine is murdered at Buffie Johnson’s address on Greene Street. The precipitating event in her story is a returned wallet—Pat had always dreamt of returning a wallet—and “Half the characters,” she writes to her longtime correspondent Barbara Ker-Seymer, “are gay or half-gay.” (Pat never did get the opportunity to return a wallet, but in Paris, in 1952, her own lost wallet was returned. She wasn’t particularly grateful.) The heroine is a young girl who inspires dreams of love in all the major characters—but only the male protagonist’s wife gets to sleep with her. In this work, Pat’s rendering of the Manhattan ambiance of the early 1980s is based on some interesting cross-cultural misunderstandings.
Naiad Press, the lesbian publishing company in Florida founded by Barbara Grier and Donna McBride, buys the rights to reprint The Price of Salt. In spring of 1989 Pat writes a new preface for Naiad’s edition of The Price of Salt.
November: She flies to New York to do more “research” for Found in the Street, stays in East Hampton, and sojourns in Greenwich Village at the venerable Hotel Earle (now the Washington Square Hotel). Her stay inspires the cockroach story in Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes. She meets both Otto Penzler, founder of the Mysterious Press, who tells her he wants to publish her books, and Anne-Elizabeth Suter, who represents Diogenes’s writers in the United States.
1984. June: Bettina Berch, who teaches at Barnard College, visits Pat in Aurigeno and conducts a revealing interview with her.
October: Pat goes to Istanbul to write a travel piece about the Orient Express; it’s another of her pleasurable experiences with trains. She doesn’t travel now unless she is paid—or unless she can make use of her travels in a book or an article.
1985. People Who Knock on the Door published by Simon & Schuster in the United States. After 1985, Highsmith is without a trade publisher in the United States. It is Otto Penzler who takes up the publishing burden with his Mysterious Press, and he publishes six Highsmith titles between 1985 and 1988. He admires her work but finds her behavior odious.
May: Marc Brandel visits her in Aurigeno with his third wife to discuss his scripting of her novel The Blunderer for an English film company. In 1956, Brandel had adapted The Talented Mr. Ripley for New York television’s Studio One. She advances him eight thousand dollars of her own money to write the script. The film is never made.
In March, she lists “Twenty Things I Like” and “Twenty Things I Do Not Like” for Diogenes Verlag. Amongst the things she doesn’t like: “A TV set in my house,” “People who believe that some god or other really has control over everything but is not exercising that control just now,” “Fascists,” and “petty thieves and well-to-do housebreakers who specialize in silverware.” Her likes include: “Swiss army knives,” “Things made of leather,” “Making anything out of wood,” “Fountain pens with real points,” “Kafka’s writing,” and “Being alone.” In May, she answers the Proust Questionnaire for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (10 May 1985 “Fragebogen”): she says that her best quality is “perseverance,” her biggest fault is “indecision,” she likes “intelligence” in women, her favorite color is still “yellow,” and, at the moment, the painters she likes are “Munch” and “Balthus.” (In March, her favorite painter was “Kokoschka.”) She quotes Noël Coward: “Work is more fun than play.”
“The only thing that makes one feel happy and alive is trying for something that one cannot get” (Cahier 36, 5 August 1985).
September: Mermaids on the Golf Course published by Heinemann.
1986. February: Found in the Street published by Heinemann and by Calmann-Lévy in Paris.
10 April: She is successfully operated on for a cancerous tumor in her lung at Brompton Hospital in London. “You must not think I had to use any discipline to stop smoking,” she writes to Patricia Losey (with whose husband, Joseph Losey, she had been in discussion about a film) on 12 June 1986, “it was fear alone that made me stop.”
June: She finally sells the house at 21 rue de la Boissière in Moncourt: she has owned it longer than any other house, sixteen years. The day she sells it, she tries, unsuccessfully, to buy it back for 125,000 francs more than she was paid for it. In August, she goes back to Moncourt to look for another house to buy; she fails to find anything suitable.
She sends the first of many letters to the International Herald Tribune criticizing Israel. Most of these letters are written under one of at least forty pseudonyms; this one is signed Edgar S. Sallich and is published on 9 July. She returns to the Brompton Hospital in London for an examination in July and is told that there is no recurrence of her cancer and that her tumor was glandular and unrelated to smoking. She lights up immediately.
1987. Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes is published in the UK. Her most political book. Much of the satire in the stories is awkward (vide: “President Buck Jones Rallies and Waves the Flag”), though prescient in its analysis. One of the stories, “No End in Sight,” is a revolted meditation on Mary Highsmith’s condition at the Fireside Lodge, her nursing home in Fort Worth. In the story, Pat gives Mary a son, who she says is herself. Pat wants to write an even more revolted sequel to “No End in Sight” called “The Tube.” She never gets around to it.
April: Peter Huber tells her of the land for sale adjacent to the house he and his wife share with Bert Diener and Julia Diener-Diethelm. She buys it and works with the architect, Tobias Amman, who renovated her Aurigeno house, to design “Casa Highsmith”: a white, seemingly windowless block of a house, divided into two “lobes,” whose seclusions and divisions suit her imagination. She calls it “a strong house.” It is a variation on the old Coates boardinghouse in Fort Worth, whose design she consults while constructing it. She signs a contract with the Atlantic Monthly Press to publish her books in America. Gary Fisketjon becomes her editor.
Claude Chabrol writes and directs a French film adaption of The Cry of the Owl, Le Cri du hibou (starring Christophe Malavoy, Mathilda May, Virginie Thévenet, Jacques Penot).
Pat changes her English publisher from Heinemann to Bloomsbury.
29 October: Pat appears in genial form on New York Book Beat, Donald Swaim’s CBS radio interview program for authors. She has come to publicize Atlantic Monthly’s publication of Found in the Street, and she makes some (for her) revealing statements.
1988. January: “Ripley touches madness,” Pat writes in a cahier. Pat starts taking notes for her fifth Ripley book, Ripley Under Water. It becomes the last and most awkwardly plotted of the Ripleys, drawn from her fascination with sadomasochistic relations, and from her trip to Tangier to visit Buffie Johnson (and Paul Bowles). Ripley again laughs inappropriately at the double death of the “odd couple” who irritate him, and he once again tosses incriminating evidence into the Loing Canal, the canal which bordered Pat’s best-loved house in Moncourt.
August: Pat goes to visit Buffie Johnson in Tangier, where Buffie is living and painting in Jane Bowles’s apartment at the Immeuble Itesa just beneath Paul Bowles’s apartment. Pat takes extensive notes on life in Tangier which she will use for Ripley Under Water and befriends Paul, whom she knew slightly from her New York years. Paul Bowles and Pat begin a correspondence. The ideas for story and novel titles at the end of her cahier become more bitter: Sweet Smell of Death, King of the Garbage, The Bearer of Bad Tidings, Bright Murder, Dull Knife—and the bilingual jokes get worse: Creepy School (Crepuscule), A Fete Worse Than Death.
September: Pat receives the Prix litteraire from the American Film Festival in Deauville, France.
December: Pat moves to her new house in Tegna.
1990. Pat is made an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France.
1991. 12 March: Mary Highsmith dies at ninety-five.
1992. January: Little Tales of Misogyny performed as a theater piece by the Companya Teatre de Barcelona.
Spring: Pat visits Peter Ustinov’s house in Rolle for a double interview with German Vogue. She begins to consult with an American accountant in Geneva about a subject never far from her mind: her double taxation problem. She starts to write Small g: A Summer Idyll.
October: Pat travels to the United States on a publicity junket for Ripley Under Water, published by Knopf. She reads at Rizzoli’s bookstore in New York and meets the chairman of the Yaddo board to discuss the possible donation of her house in Tegna as an artists’ retreat. She is dissuaded from this idea—it is impractical—and she begins to think of other ways she might endow Yaddo. She goes to Box Canyon Ranch in Weatherford, Texas, to visit Dan and Florine Coates, then travels to Toronto to read at the Harbourfront festival on 18 October. Having initiated a correspondence with Marijane Meaker after twenty-seven years of silence, Pat spends three days at Meaker’s house in East Hampton. The visit does not go well.
1993. July: She is diagnosed as seriously anemic and told to stop drinking. She does so—cold turkey—for three weeks.
1994. Fall: She makes a last, promotional trip to Paris accompanied by a Swiss neighbor; there she meets her new editor at Calmann-Lévy, Patrice Hoffman.
1995. 4 February: Pat dies in the hospital at Locarno of two competing diseases, aplastic anemia and cancer, and she dies an American citizen. The last friend she speaks to in the hospital is her American accountant, Marylin Scowden, on the evening of 3 February. Six weeks before her death, Pat changed her will, appointing Daniel Keel, already her publisher and international representative, as her literary executor; he replaces Kingsley Skattebol. Her assets and royalties are left to Yaddo. Her notebooks and diaries are found in a linen closet. 6 February: She is cremated at the cemetery in Bellinzona.
11 March: A memorial service for Pat, organized by Daniel Keel and filmed for German television, is conducted in the Catholic church at Tegna. Highsmith publishers from all over Europe fly in and join her friends in paying their respects. No editor from America comes; she no longer has a publisher in America. Pat’s ashes are interred in the church’s columbarium.
February: Small g: A Summer Idyll is published posthumously. Its most implausible plot point—a gay man is falsely told by his doctor that he has AIDS to frighten him into safe sexual practices—is taken from life: Pat’s friend Frieda Sommer, who researched the book’s Zurich details, has a friend on whom the character of Rikki Markwalder is vaguely based. The novel is like a classic comic book version of all previous Highsmith themes—but with attempts to be “current” it strains towards inclusion and modernity. Even the dog in the novel—dogs in Highsmith fictions usually get kidnapped or shot—is a charming poodle who has a happy life. Pat’s old friend from Florence in 1952, Brian Glanville, writes in European Magazine that he wishes the book “had not appeared.” Josyane Savigneau, another friend, is more charitable in Le Monde: she says the book might be thought of as a kind of testament, “disturbed however by the evident wish for a happy end” (Le Monde, 17 February 1995).
1996. Pat’s papers are sold to the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern, Switzerland, where they become one of the library’s largest holdings.
The settlement of her estate takes eight years.