Patricia Highsmith used the American dating system in her cahiers and diaries—except, of course, when she didn’t. I have kept to her wayward customs as nearly as possible, using the numbers and forward slashes she employed for her diary and cahier entries, and reverting unwaveringly to European dating for interviews, letters, articles, and other written communications. Unless otherwise indicated, all primary (and much secondary) material comes from the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern, Switzerland. Translations from the French and Spanish are my own; German translations are by Ulrich Weber, Anna von Planta, and Ina Lannert.
The following abbreviations have been adopted for some of the institutions and proper names cited in the notes:
BCA—Barnard College Archives (Patricia Highsmith Records: photographs, transcripts, college publications), New York, New York
BKS—Barbara Ker-Seymer
CLA—Calmann-Lévy Archives (dossier Patricia Highsmith), Paris, France CURB—Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Harper & Row Archives), New York, New York
DOC—Dan Oscar Coates
FWPL—Fort Worth Public Library (Fort Worth Star-Telegram Archives), Fort Worth, Texas
GFF—Gary Fisketjon’s publishing files concerning Patricia Highsmith; courtesy Gary Fisketjon, New York, New York
HRC—Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (Alfred A. Knopf Archives, William Aspenwall Bradley Archives, Jane Bowles Archives), University of Texas, Austin, Texas
JAMAM—James A. Michener Art Museum (Patricia Highsmith Records), New Hope, Pennsylvania
JBP—Jay Bernard Plangman
KKS—Kate Kingsley Skattebol
MB—Monique Buffet
MC—Menil Collection (Rosalind Constable Archives), Houston, Texas MCH—Mary Coates Highsmith
NM—L’Office National Metéorologique, Paris, France
NYPL—New York Public Library (Yaddo Archives, The New Yorker Records), New York, New York
PH—Patricia Highsmith
PS 122—Public School 122 (Patricia Highsmith Records), Astoria, Queens, New York
SH—Stanley Highsmith
SLA—Swiss Literary Archives (Patricia Highsmith Archives), Bern, Switzerland
TGA—Tate Gallery Archives (Barbara Ker-Seymer Papers, 1925–81), London, England (Courtesy Jane Stevenson)
UIL—University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections Department (Papers of Lil Picard, 1915–94), Iowa City, Iowa
UML—University of Maryland Libraries (Djuna Barnes Collection), College Park, Maryland
VCL—Vassar College Library Special Collections (Mary McCarthy Archives), Poughkeepsie, New York
For simplicity, all written communications are referred to as “letters” and are followed whenever possible by their dates of composition. All interviews are indicated by the abbreviation CWA, “conversation with the author.” All interviews are dated except those with Don Coates, Kate Kingsley Skattebol, and Jim Amash—with whom I conversed so frequently over the years that dating every one of our communications seemed beside the point.
Notes
A Note on Biography
1. CWA Marylin Scowden, 1 Sept. 2002.
2. Diary 10, 14 June 1950.
3. “It is curious that in the most interesting periods of one’s life, one never writes one’s diary. There are some things that even a writer cannot put down in words (at the time). He shrinks from putting them down. And what a loss!” Cahier 22, 8/18/53.
4. “I must remember to use books as books instead of a drug.” Cahier 2, 5/27/40.
5. Cahier 22, 9/25/53.
6. Virginia Woolf, Notebooks, Monk’s House Papers, University of Sussex, quoted by Hermione Lee in Virginia Woolf (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), p. 10.
7. PH letter to Mr. Reichardt, 3 Nov. 1970 (Montmachoux).
8. Cahier 24, 12/15/55.
9. Diary 3, Sept. 17, 1942.
10. PH letter to DOC, 26 Dec. 1968.
11. Diary 8, May 10, 1948.
12. Cahier 28, 8/31/66.
13. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (Boston: The Writer, 1966), p. 51.
14. Cahier 26, 10/14/60.
15. Pat scribbled this phrase on a letter from DOC about her mother, Mary, in February 1974, adding: “There is no end and no hope.”
16. Pat thought this about herself as well: “Further consolation: my personal maladies and malaises are only those of my own generation and of my time, heightened.” Cahier 20, 10/9/50.
17. Cahier 24, 1/3/56: “And then alone, unconsoled, one rejoices suddenly at being able to take part in that purely human sport of thinking. One is at last a member of the human race, in the only way one can be. To think, thinking, is the only passport.”
1. How to Begin: Part 1
1. CWA Dr. Jerry Bails, 13 Mar. 2002.
2. Cahier 31, 8/15/72.
3. CWA Don Coates, 20 Apr. 2002. PH herself wrote to President Jimmy Carter, senators, and cabinet officials with her own suggestions for improving the country.
4. Cahier 28, 3/30/66. Also PH, Edith’s Diary (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press 1989), pp. 94–95. Pat had a precedent for her plans to mobilize children: in the early 1940s, when she was writing scripts for comic book publishers, the legendary team of Simon and Kirby created the Boy Commandos, a comic strip about a group of children from Allied countries whose covert and patriotic operations often stopped Hitler’s worst plans.
5. Cahier 11, 10/14/44.
6. “[A]ny manuscript, even a perfectly typed one, looks absolutely awful…. Pages become dog-eared if not grimy, and all in all the manuscript no longer looks like something you want to present with pride to your parents.” PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, p. 101.
7. Cahier 3, 4/27/41.
8. Cahier 31, 1/30/70.
9. Cahier 32, 11/25/73.
10. Cahier 31, endpaper list of titles.
11. In a 1989 letter to Kingsley Skattebol, she was still calling it “my favorite” typewriter.
12. CWA Phyllis Nagy, 26 June 2002.
13. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, p. 68.
14. CWA Josyane Savigneau, 1 July 2002.
15. CWA Henri Robillot, 6 Nov. 2002.
16. CWA Linda Ladurner, 10 May 2003.
17. Barbara Skelton, “Patricia Highsmith at Home,” London Magazine, Aug.–Sept. 1995.
18. Cahier 7, June 12, 1942.
19. Cahier 27, 9/10/62
20. Cahier 5, 12/2/41.
2. How to Begin: Part 2
1. CWA Camilla Butterfield, 17 Dec. 2003.
2. Diary 1, Dec. 31, 1941.
3. PH letter to KKS, 8 Jan. 1965.
4. Diary 13, Nov. 16, 1962.
5. Pat may have lost her head over Caroline Besterman, but she never lost her consciousness of details or objects; she noted the loss of that earring very precisely. See “The Real Romance of Objects: Part I.”
6. Diary 13, Nov. 12, 1962.
7. The Prix Goncourt for 1962 was won by the novel Les Bagages des Sables, written by André Langfus. Pat, nonetheless, notes in her diary that the award was “[w]on by a woman.”
8. Diary 13, Nov. 16–20, 1962.
9. Diary 13, Nov. 26, 1962.
10. Cahier 27, Dec. 5, 1962.
11. Ibid.
12. Cahier 27, Dec. 7, 1962.
13. CWA Ronald Blythe, 20 Sept. 2004. He says that both he and Pat had brick-floored studies.
14. Cahier 27, 12/13/64.
15. Ibid., 12/16/64.
16. PH letter to KKS, 8 Jan. 1965.
17. MCH letter to PH, undated.
18. PH letter to KKS, 8 Jan. 1965.
19. CWA KKS.
20. PH letter to Ronald Blythe, 25 July 1972 (Collection Ronald Blythe).
21. Ibid. (Collection Ronald Blythe).
22. CWA Ronald Blythe, 20 Sept. 2004.
23. Ibid.
24. Cahier 5, 4/12/41.
25. CWA Ronald Blythe, 20 Sept. 2004.
26. CWA Barbara Roett, 18 May 2003.
27. Ibid.
28. It was demolished by a friend of Evelyn Waugh who hoped to put up something even better.
29. PH letter to Alex Szogyi, 12 May 1965.
30. CWA Camilla Butterfield, 17 Dec. 2003.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. MCH letter to PH, undated.
37. PH letter to DOC, 13 May 1977.
38. PH letter to Alex Szogyi, 10 July 1967.
39. PH letter to Ronald Blythe, 25 July 1972.
40. PH, “No End in Sight” (Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes, London: Bloomsbury, 2005); numerous letters, remarks.
41. “I have in my possession two large envelopes of letters from my mother, going back as far as 1958. These are labelled FOR DOCTOR OR PSYCHIATRIST ONLY.”
42. Cahier 36, 5/28/85.
43. PH letter to KKS, 27 July 1964.
44. PH letter to BKS, 17/2/68.
45. Cahier 2, Dec. 1939. Italics added.
46. MCH letter to Marijane Meaker, “Friday AM 11th” (no other date).
47. Diary 1, Dec. 1941, p. 109.
48. Ibid., p. 112.
49. Cahier 26, 8/4/62.
50. Ibid., 10/7/61.
51. Ginette Billard letter to the author, 23 Mar. 2002.
52. CWA Linda Ladurner, 10 May 2003. Letters to the author 12–16 May 2003.
53. She put this in Cahier 26 in 1960, and ten years later it turned up in slightly altered form in the writings of the dead painter Derwatt in Ripley Under Ground.
54. Cahier 12, 4/6/45.
55. Henry James, “Preface to the New York Edition,” Portrait of a Lady (London: Penguin 2003), pp. 41–55.
56. Chart of Apr. 1945, inserted in Cahier 12.
57. Ibid.
58. CWA Gary Fisketjon, 10 Dec. 2002.
59. CWA Larry Ashmead, 26 Nov. 2002.
60. CWA Otto Penzler, 27 Dec. 2002.
61. Cahier 29, 1/28/67.
62. Cahier 16, 11/20/47.
63. PH, “My First Job,” Oldie, 1993.
64. PH letter to KKS, 1 Dec. 1986.
65. Cahier 9, PH transcription of high school notebooks, 1938.
66. CWA KKS, 31 Aug. 2005. It was a very late-life tattoo, and how Pat came by it is unknown. Pat’s last three lovers, Marion Aboudaram, Tabea Blumenschein, and Monique Buffet, all say she had no tattoo when they knew her. Kingsley Skattebol caught sight of it in Tegna once when Pat’s watchband moved to reveal it.
67. Cahier 13, 8/30/45.
68. Ibid.
69. Michael Haederle, interview with PH, Houston Chronicle, Feb. 3, 1991.
70. Diary 8, Dec. 22, 1947.
71. Cahier 25, 7/8/58.
72. Cahier 28, 9/12/65.
73. Cahier 5, 4/12/41.
74. Cahier 16, 10/4/47.
75. Cahier 17, 5/14/48.
76. Pat’s notation in Cahier 21 on 4/2/52 is one of many examples: “And Ellen telling me gleefully, gleefully, with a smile that spreads over her whole little face, that she likes going to bed with me more than with anyone she has ever known before…. Ah women.”
77. Cahier 18, 10/21/49.
78. Ibid., 10/24/49.
79. Diary 10, Mar. 15, 1950; Mar. 28, 1949.
80. PH letter to KKS, 5 Mar. 1958: “I have joined the very small Presbyterian choir out here in Palisades. Only trouble is I can be heard when I sing.”
81. CWA KKS, 20 May 2002.
82. PH on Don Swaim’s radio show, Book Notes, 29 Oct. 1987.
83. Diary 8, 22/6/1947.
84. Cahier 17, June 30, 1948.
85. “Between Jane Austen and Philby”, PH, typed on ms: “Sept. 1968 written for ‘Vogue, London.” June 1968. MS.
86. Cahier 15, 3/8/47
87. CWA M. Knet, 6 Nov. 2002.
88. Cahier 27, Dec. 5, 1962.
3. A Simple Act of Forgery: Part 1
1. Pat’s London hostess informed her by note that a writer from Harper’s Bazaar wanted her comments on the man “who has just knifed the Poussin in the National Gallery.” In a postscript, the hostess, a worldly woman quoting a former Highsmith comment, recommended that Pat tell the journalist to “stuff it.”
2. Cahier 35, 3/18/81.
3. PH, The Boy Who Followed Ripley (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 183.
4. PH letter to Alex Szogyi, 15 Mar. 1969.
5. Ibid.
6. Cahier 32, 5/8/72.
7. Diary 4, 7/20/43.
8. Cahier 2, 2/40.
9. “You can easily see / Upon closer enquiry / There are things in this book / That belong in a diary / But there’re things in my diary / (Where you’ll never look) / That with proper deletions / might go in this book” (Cahier 2, 7/13/40)
10. CWA Dan Walton Coates, 22 Nov. 2003.
11. Gore Vidal, Palimpsest (London: Penguin Books, 1995) p. 5.
12. CWA Tabea Blumenschein, 15 June 2003.
13. Diary 16, 20 Aug. 1969.
14. Draft letters, pseudonymous political correspondence of PH.
15. CWA Christa Maerker, 21 July 2004.
16. Ibid.
17. Cahier 34, 3/22/78.
18. CWA David Streiff, 20 Jan. 2001.
19. PH letter to Lil Picard, 20 Aug. 1970 (UIL).
20. CWA Christa Maerker, 21 July 2004.
21. CWA Susannah Clapp, 2 Jan. 2003.
22. CWA Caroline Besterman, 19 Dec. 2003.
23. CWA Marion Aboudaram, 23 Sept. 2002.
24. CWA Linda Ladurner, 10 May 2003.
25. PH letter to Lil Picard, 11 June 1969 (UIL).
26. Ibid.
27. CWA Susannah Clapp, 2 Jan. 2003.
28. Ibid.
29. Gerald Peary, “Patricia Highsmith,” Sight and Sound 75, no. 2 (Spring 1988): pp. 104–5
30. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1990), p.. 57.
31. PH letter to KKS, 14 Mar. 1968. Sarraute, who loved Americans and gave Highsmith a warm welcome, said that Colette was too feminine for her; Highsmith bravely defended Colette’s virility.
32. Cahier 34, 12–18 June 1979.
33. CWA Tabea Blumenschein, 15 June 2003.
34. PH, The Boy Who Followed Ripley (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 90.
35. PH, Edith’s Diary, p. 251.
36. Cahier 34, Mar. 22, 1978.
37. Cahier 12, Apr. 4, 1945.
38. Cahier 3, 2/10/41; Cahier, 3, 4/12/41.
39. CWA Tabea Blumenschein, 15 June 2003.
40. CWA Marion Aboudaram, 23 Sept. 2002.
41. Cahier 34, Apr. 11, 1978.
42. Duncan Fallowell, “The Talented Miss Highsmith,” Sunday Times Telegraph Magazine, 20 Feb. 2000 (interview with PH conducted in 1987).
43. CWA Barbara Roett, 18 May 2003.
44. Alain Oulman letters to PH, 23 May and 25 Sept. 1985 (CLA).
45. CWA Susannah Clapp, 2 Jan. 2003.
46. PH, The Price of Salt (Tallahassee, FL: Naiad Press, 1993), p. 21.
47. Ibid., Afterword (no pagination in this edition for the Afterword).
48. Cahier 20, 10/20/50. “Now, now, now, to fall in love with my book—this same day I have decided not to publish it, not for an indefinite length of time. But I shall continue to work on it for some weeks to come, to polish and perfect it. I shall fall in love with it now, in a different way from the way I loved it before. This love is endless, disinterested, unselfish, impersonal even (P. of S.).”
49. Cahier 34, 4/4/78.
50. Ibid.
51. PH letter to Christopher Petit, 19 Apr. 1978 (Collection Christopher Petit).
52. CWA Christopher Petit, 9 Jan. 2004.
53. PH letter to Christopher Petit, 19 Apr. 1978.
54. Christopher Petit letter to the author, 29 Jan. 2004 (Collection Christopher Petit).
55. Pat did this again in March of 1989, when she complained in a letter to the Washington Post that the writer David Streitfeld didn’t mention her “resentment” against Israel in the interview he did with her.
56. Christopher Petit letter to the author, 29 Jan. 2004.
57. Ibid.
58. PH letter to Christopher Petit, 25 Apr. 1978 (Collection Christopher Petit).
59. PH letter to Christopher Petit, 8 Aug. 1978 (Collection Christopher Petit).
60. PH, This Sweet Sickness (New York: Norton, 2002), p. 238.
61. PH, The Boy Who Followed Ripley (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 178.
62. PH, Those Who Walk Away (London, Hamlyn, 1985), p. 117.
4. A Simple Act of Forgery: Part 2
1. Cahier 28, 12/7/62. Every subsequent quotation in this chapter, unless otherwise noted, comes from Pat’s notebook entry of 12 July.
2. Joan Schenkar, Truly Wilde (London: Virago, 2000), p. 240.
5. La Mamma: Part 1
1. Anna von Planta, “Notes on Stories” in PH, Nothing That Meets the Eye (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), p. 451.
2. Cahier 31, 6/5/71.
3. CWA Janice Robertson, 22 June 2003.
4. PH letter to Curt Johnson, editor of Who’s Who, undated.
5. PH letter to EQQM, Jan. 5, 1962 (CURB).
6. CWA Janice Robertson, 22 June 2003.
7. Barbara Skelton, “Patricia Highsmith at Home,” London Magazine, 1995.
8. Cahier 18, 6/13/49.
9. CWA Dan Walton Coates, 22 Nov. 2003.
10. MCH letter to PH, Jan. 1965.
11. CWA Tommy Tune, 14 Jan. 2003.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. JBP letter to PH, undated.
16. JBP letter to PH, undated.
17. CWA Dan Walton Coates, 22 Nov. 2003.
18. JBP letter to PH, undated.
19. On 24 Oct. 1971, in Cahier 31, Pat wrote: “My mother told me she saw my father first in a photograph in a Ft Worth photographer’s window and—sought (somehow) his acquaintance. It occurs to me I have preferred people who sought me out, essentially, rather than those I had to make an effort for. I mean my emotional fascination lingered…far longer for those who made the first advances to me.”
20. On 9 Apr. 1978, in Cahier 34, Pat wrote a love poem to her last coup de coeur, the twenty-five-year old actress Tabea Blumenschein: “I fell in love not with flesh and blood / But with a picture….”
21. PH letter to JBP, 15 July 1971
22. JBP letter to PH, 30 July 1971.
23. CWA Dan Walton Coates, 22 Nov. 2003. Dan Coates, who said that Coates family members still wear Judson cowboy boots, was wearing a pair of Judson boots himself when he spoke with me.
24. Joan Dupont “The Poet of Apprehension,” Village Voice, 30 May 1995.
25. CWA Don Coates, 14 Apr. 2002.
26. CWA Dan Walton Coates, 22 Nov. 2003.
27. PH letter to MCH, 12 Apr. 1966.
28. MCH letter to DOC, 1965, undated.
29. PH letter to DOC, 13 May 1977.
30. PH letter to DOC, 12 Dec. 1974.
31. PH letter to JBP, 27 Mar. 1972.
32. MCH letter to PH, undated.
33. CWA Camilla Butterfield, 6 Nov. 2003.
34. CWA Marijane Meaker, 1 Feb. 2004.
35. Cahier 36, 5/28/85.
36. PH letter to DOC, 11 Nov. 1986.
37. MCH letter to PH, “Tuesday AM” (no date).
38. MCH letter to PH, 1 Jan. 1965.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
6. La Mamma: Part 2
1. Bettina Berch, unpublished interview with PH, 1984 (Collection Bettina Berch).
2. MCH letter to PH, “Tuesday AM” (no date).
3. Coates and Highsmith family home movies shot in Texas and New York State, 1930s–1950s.
4. In later life, Pat was to become obsessed by the Stewart genealogy although, with all her travelling, she never managed to visit either of the Stewart countries of orgin: Scotland and Ireland. One of the Stewart cousins Pat corresponded with at the end of her life was a state trooper with a passion for the works of Tom Clancy and Len Deighton. “I get the reading from both my Mother and Father,” he wrote to Pat, adding that he “was really tired of seeing death.” Mary Highsmith, with Pat’s same interest in family genealogy, had already corresponded with his parents.
5. Masonic Lodge No. 158, Winchester, Tennessee: entries for William Stewart.
6. Stewart family history compiled by Samuel Smith Stewart, 1935.
7. Marshall Wingfield, General A. P. Stewart, His Life and Letters (Memphis, TN: West Tennessee Historical Society, 1954), pp. 204–5.
8. Obituary: “Mrs. D.C. Coates, 88, to Be Buried Today,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 7 Feb. 1955.
9. Wingfield, General A. P. Stewart, pp. 204–5.
10. CWA Don Coates, 7 Sept. 2002.
11. CWA Don Coates, 22 Aug. 2003.
12. Houston Chronicle, “Fisher Dye Works Owner Does Pictures on Paper by Embroidery,” 7 Aug. 1955. “He often watched his mother, the late Mrs. Willie Mae Coates, as she embroidered an old picture of the family homestead in Coates Bend, Alabama. So about six years ago he decided to try the art himself.”
13. Joan Dupont, “The Mysterious Patricia Highsmith,” Paris Metro, 9 Nov. 1977.
14. CWA Don Coates, 22 Aug. 2003.
15. Ibid.
16. CWA Dan Walton Coates, 22 Nov. 2003.
17. Ibid.
18. CWA Don Coates, 22 Aug. 2003.
19. PH letter to SH, 29 Aug. 1970.
20. Eugene Walter letter to PH, 14 Sept. 1992.
21. MCH letter to PH, undated.
22. MCH letter to PH, undated.
23. Diary 12, 23 Jan. 1953.
24. MCH letter to PH, undated.
25. Cahier 36, 28/5/85.
26. Cahier 9, PH transcription of high school notebooks, Apr. 27, 1938. “Mother warns me about letters to Cralick & Marj.”
27. CWA Annabelle Potin, 24 Mar. 2007.
28. MCH letter to PH, undated.
29. Cahier 16, 7/5/47.
30. CWA Don Coates, 11 May 2002.
31. CWA Don Coates, 14 Apr. 2002.
32. CWA Dan Walton Coates, 22 Nov. 2003.
33. An “orphan” who still has parents is Judith Thurman’s useful description throughout her biography of Colette, Secrets of the Flesh (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999).
34. CWA Don Coates, 22 Aug. 2003.
35. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (Boston: The Writer, 1966), p. 20.
36. Ibid.
37. CWA Dan Walton Coates, 22 Nov. 2003.
38. PH, “An American Book Bag,” circa 1974, 6 carbon pages, publication unknown.
39. MCH letter to PH, undated.
7. La Mamma; Part 3
1. Cahier 1, 2/7/39.
2. CWA Dan Walton Coates, 22 Nov. 2003.
3. “Slimming Sickness,” London Sunday Times, 9 Feb. 1969.
4. Cahier 9, PH transcription of high school notebooks, Dec. 14, 1937.
5. Ibid., Feb. 1938.
6. Cahier 9, PH transcription of high school notebooks, Feb.–Mar. 1938.
7. Ibid.
8. The Book Programme, BBC2, 11 Nov. 1976.
9. PH letter to SH, 29 Aug. 1970.
10. Cahier 20, 7/27/51.
11. CWA Dan Walton Coates, 22 Nov. 2003.
12. Ibid.
13. MCH letter to PH, 26 Nov. 1970.
14. Cahier 3, 1/30/41.
15. PH letter to MCH, 9 Apr. 1971.
16. CWA Don Coates, 20 Apr. 2002.
17. MCH letter to PH, May, no year, presumably 1971.
18. MCH letter to PH, undated.
19. Diary 2, 11 June 1942.
20. Cahier 31, 1/12/70.
21. Diary 12, Dec. 25, 1952.
22. Ibid. Jan. 27, 1953.
23. Ibid. Jan-Feb. 1953.
24. Ibid. Jan. 13, 1953.
25. Ibid. Jan. 23, 1953.
26. Ibid.
8. La Mamma: Part 4
1. CWA Marijane Meaker, 1 Feb. 2003.
2. Karl Augustus Menninger, The Human Mind (New York: Knopf, 1930), p. ix.
3. Ibid., p. 5.
4. PH, “A Try at Freedom,” undated, unpublished.
5. Ibid.
6. Pupil’s record card for PH, 1930–33, New York State Dept. of Education (P.S. 122, Queens, New York).
7. PH, “A Try at Freedom.”
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. PH letter to Karl Menninger, 8 Apr. 1989.
11. Janet Watts, “Love and Highsmith,” Observer Magazine, 9 Sept. 1990.
12. CWA Janine Hérisson, 29 Oct. 2002.
13. PH, “Christmases—Mine or Anybody’s,” marked “sent to Granta 23 March 1990.”
14. Cahier 13, 3/4/46.
15. Jeva Cralick letter to PH, undated.
16. CWA Vivien De Bernardi, 15 Aug. 2002.
17. CWA Peter Hyun, 26 Apr. 2008.
18. Ned Rorem letter to the author, 10 Jan. 2008.
19. PH, “E. 57th St. Tomboy,” Saturday Review, 1 Apr. 1950.
20. Karl Menninger letter to PH, 17 Mar. 1989.
21. Cahier 4, 8/29/40.
22. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, p. 22.
23. Ibid., p. 16.
24. Cahier 31, 1/2/70.
25. Cahier 10, Jan. 5, 1940.
26. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, p. 3.
27. Ibid.
28. PH letter to BKS, 22 Feb. 1972.
29. Paul Ingendaay, Afterword, Nothing That Meets the Eye (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), p. 442.
30. CWA Vivien De Bernardi, 15 Aug. 2002.
31. PH, “Between Jane Austen and Philby,” Vogue, September 1968.
32. Ibid.
33. Diary 10, May 16, 1950.
34. PH, “Between Jane Austen and Philby.”
35. “PH, “Some Christmases—Mine or Anybody’s.”
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Cahier 2, 7/8/40.
39. Ibid.
40. Cahier 17, 3/8/48.
41. Ibid.
42. PH, The South Bank Show, Episode 125, 14 Nov. 1982.
43. PH letter to DOC, Montmachoux, 26 Dec. 1968.
44. Cahier 19, 4/2/50.
45. Ibid.
46. Cahier 13, 9/20/45.
47. Cassette tape recorded by DOC and sent to PH in Moncourt, Aug. 1975.
48. PH letter to DOC, 31 Aug. 1976.
49. PH letter to Bettina Berch 2 July, 1983.
9. Greek Games
1. PH, “A Try at Freedom.”
2. Cahier 9, PH transcription of high school notebooks, Aug. 1938.
3. Ibid., 1937.
4. Ibid., Aug. 7, 1939.
5. Ibid., 1938.
6. Ibid., Sept. 1937.
7. Ibid., Feb. 2, 1938.
8. Ibid., Feb. 4, 1938.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., Sept.–Oct. 1938.
11. Ibid., Sept. 1937.
12. PH, “A Try at Freedom.”
13. PH to Joan Dupont, quoted in a letter to KKS, 14 Mar. 1988.
14. Ibid.
15. Programme, Barnard College Greek Games, 1939 (BCA).
16. BCA.
17. Archives, Julia Richman High School.
18. Cahier 36, 29/12/83.
19. Ted Solotaroff, ed., Alfred Kazin’s America (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), p. 45.
20. Cahier 36, 29/12/83.
21. CWA Alice Gershon Lassally, 22 Feb. 2003.
22. CWA Helen Kandel Hyman, 16 Feb. 2003.
23. CWA Alice Gershon Lassally, 22 Feb. 2003.
24. CWA Helen Kandel Hyman, 16 Feb. 2003.
25. Ibid.
26. CWA Alice Gershon Lassally, 22 Feb. 2003.
27. CWA Rita Rohner Semel, 18 Feb. 2003.
28. “A Minute on the Death of Miss Ethel G. Sturtevant,” presented at the Faculty Meeting at Barnard College by Professor Cabell Greet, 28 Oct. 1968.
29. Cahier 6, 4/24/42.
30. Diary 1, Jan. 1–17, 1940.
31. Diary 8, 4/8/47.
32. Cahier 3, 1/6/41.
33. Cahier 24, 24/5/57.
34. CWA KKS.
35. Cahier 5, 9/16/41.
36. Cahier 6, 12/17/41.
37. PH, The Price of Salt, p. 221.
38. Cahier 6, 12/17/41.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. Cahier 12, 11/12/44.
42. “Thrillers and Crime Fiction,” interview with PH, 3 Dec. 1972, BBCTV.
43. Cahier, 1 Feb. 1938.
44. Cahier 24, 2/7/56.
45. Cahier 1, Aug. 1939.
46. Craig Little, “Interview with PH,” Publishers Weekly, 2 Nov. 1992.
47. Diary 1, 1941.
48. Cahier 18, 8/20/49.
49. Ibid.
50. Cahier 9, PH transcription of high school notebooks, 1935.
51. Cahier 18, 11/5/48.
52. Ibid., 7/29/49.
53. CWA Caroline Besterman, 19 Dec. 2003.
54. Cahier 4, 9/19/40.
55. Cahier 24, 1/5/56.
56. Cahier 5, 9/10/41.
57. Cahier 4, 9/15/40.
58. Diary 3, Feb. 19, 1942.
10. Alter Ego: Part 1
1. Jim Amash, “I Let People Do Their Job,” Alter Ego, Nov. 2001.
2. Cahier 2, 5/22/40.
3. Ibid.
4. In her radio interview in New York in 1987 with Don Swaim for the Atlantic Monthly Press publication of Found in the Street, Pat referred to the advertisement she’d read as an ad for a “reporter/rewrite” job and said she thought she might be applying to a newspaper, but then saw, in the office, “posters of Black Terror on the walls.”
5. Will Murray letter to the author, 6 Aug. 2002.
6. Quoted in Jamie Coville, “The Comic Book Villain, Dr. Frederic Wertham,” Integrative Arts 10, 2/11/2002.
7. Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King (South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 1999), p. 279. “He thought suddenly of an ancient Latin fragment called The Pumpkinification of Claudius. The idea amused him. You might try to get Al Capp or Caniff started on a dumb boy named Claud who has the best of intentions but always takes some wrong step that turns him into a pumpkin, he said, and then noting Miss Jones’ blank expression added, ‘Never mind.’”
8. CWA Everett Ray Kinstler, 10 July 2004.
9. “The Fighting Yank,” America’s Best Comics 16, Jan. 1946.
10. “One day in 1943,” Stanley Kauffmann said to me, “I went back to Cinema Comics to go out to lunch with a friend. He said, ‘Would you like to meet your replacement, Pat Highsmith?’ We said hello—and that was that” (CWA Stanley Kauffmann, 9 May 2002).
11. CWA Everett Ray Kinstler, 10 July 2004.
12. CWA Everett Ray Kinstler, 1 July 2004.
13. Kahn would later tell fellow editor Keith Kahla that while Strangers on a Train was a “good book,” its author was a “terrible person.”
14. CWA Marc Jaffee, 18 July 2003.
15. In 1958, Cecil Day-Lewis, under his pseudonym of Nicholas Blake, published A Penknife in My Heart, a Harper Novel of Suspense with a crime-switching plot similar to Strangers on a Train. In an author’s note in the paperback edition, he disclaimed all knowledge of Strangers on a Train, and apologized to “Miss Highsmith for being so charmingly sympathetic to the predicament in which the long arm of coincidence put me.”
16. Quoted in Terry Teachout, The Skeptic: A life of H. L. Mencken (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), p. 125.
17. Patricia Schartle Myrer letter to author, 17 Feb. 2003.
18. EQMM, August 1960.
19. Diary 4, 7/8/43.
20. Pat selected Bellow as her favorite writer in an essay entitled “My Favorite Writer(s),” sent to Konkret Sonderhefte, Hamburg, Germany, 20 July 1987.
21. Diary 10, Oct. 13, 1950.
22. William Shawn letter to PH with opinion attached, 24 Sept. 1942.
23. PH letter to Joan Kahn, 3 Feb. 1958 (CURB).
24. Diary 3, Dec. 1, 1942.
25. Diary 2, May 28, 1943.
26. Ibid., Saturday, June 6, 1942.
27. PH letter to DOC, 7 Oct. 1976.
28. CWA Caroline Besterman, 6 Nov. 2003.
29. PH letter to Willie Mae Stewart Coates, undated, but probably written when Pat was between eight and ten.
30. PH, “Between Jane Austen and Philby.”
31. Cahier 9, 11/23/42, “Sonny—(a real boy of L. Island).”
32. PH, Strangers on a Train (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), p. 12.
33. Ibid., p. 279.
34. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, pp. 19–20.
35. Cahier 22, 8/7/51.
36. CWA France Burke and “Sam,” 5 Feb. 2003.
37. Cahier 22, 1/3/52.
38. CWA Julia Diener-Diethelm, 1 Apr. 2003.
39. Cahier 26, 12/1/61.
40. Cahier 5, Sept. 23, 1941.
41. Cahier 4, Sept. 1940; this history of Ruthie and Eddy was dropped down in the middle of the cahier without date or further reference, and was marked by PH “Interesting” at a later date.
42. PH, “Venice: The One and Only,” 6/7/1992 (manuscript).
43. CWA Janice Robertson, 23 June 2003.
44. PH, “Twenty Things I Like,” a list made for Diogenes Verlag, 12 March 1983.
45. Cahier 19, 7/22/50.
46. Cahier 17, 6/3/48.
47. Diary 3, Dec. 13, 1942.
48. Marijane Meaker in her memoir, Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2003), p. 9.
49. CWA Bert Diener, 1 Apr. 2003.
50. CWA Caroline Besterman, 6 Nov. 2003.
51. PH letter to MCH, 1 Nov. 1969, 10:00 P.M.
52. PH, The Talented Mr. Ripley, p. 249.
53. SH letter to PH, 3 Mar. 1970.
54. CWA Marijane Meaker, 1 Feb. 2003.
55. CWA Caroline Besterman, 19 Dec. 2003.
56. Diary 2, June 17, 1942.
57. Ibid.
58. Sherill Tippins, February House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).
59. CWA Daniel Bell, 24 Aug. 2003.
60. Emily M. Morison letter to PH, 8 Aug. 1945, Alfred A. Knopf Archives (HRC).
61. “The Heroine” was also reprinted in O. Henry Prize Stories, 1946, and in Today’s Woman, Mar. 1948.
62. Cahier 11, 8/19/44.
63. CWA Daniel Bell and Pearl Kazin, 24 Aug. 2003.
64. CWA Daniel Bell, 18 Aug. 2003.
65. CWA Robert Gottlieb, 6 Aug. 2003.
66. CWA Gary Fisketjon, 10 Dec. 2002.
67. CWA Norman Mailer, 23 June 2002.
68. Diary 1, 1940.
69. Diary 2, May 31, 1942.
70. Ibid., June 4, 1942.
71. Ibid., June 1, 1942.
72. Ibid., June 6, 1942.
73. Donald Swaim, Book Beat, interview with PH, WCBS-Radio, New York, 29 Oct. 1987. Pat said the same thing in print interviews.
74. Cahier 20, 10/23/50.
75. Ibid.
76. Cahier 17, 3/8/48.
77. Cahier 17, 2/23/48.
78. Diary 10, Nov. 17, 1950.
79. Ibid., Jan. 8, 1943.
80. Document of the Jewish Antifascist Committee of the USSR, 21 June 1946, Library of Congress.
81. Diary 2, Dec. 1, 1942.
82. Ibid., June 26, 1942.
83. Ibid., June 24, 1942.
84. Ibid., July 3, 1942.
85. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, p. 138.
86. Diary 2, July 31, 1942.
87. Ibid., July 7, 1942.
88. PH, “My First Job,” Oldie, 26 Mar. 1993.
89. Ibid.
90. Ibid.
91. DOC letter to PH, undated.
92. Pat accused Miss Phimister, her sublettor at 353 East Fifty-sixth Street, of being “a small-time crook” and of “using my stuff”—Pat’s usual reaction to anyone she put in charge of anything belonging to her. PH letter to KKS, 17 May 1951.
93. Diary 5, 10/6/43.
94. Diary 5, 12/8/43.
95. CWA KKS, 14 Nov. 2006.
96. CWA Buffie Johnson, 24 Dec. 2002.
97. CWA Vince Fago, 28 Nov. 2001.
98. Cahier 16, 10/24/47.
99. Cahier 8, 9/22/42.
100. CWA Marion Aboudaram, 23 Sept. 2002.
101. PH letter to Elby Skattebol, 9 Jan. 1983.
102. Cahier 11, 10/18/42.
103. Cahier 8, 9/25/42.
104. Cahier 23, 2/14/55.
105. Diary 6, 28 Dec. 1944.
106. Cahier 18, 8/27/49.
107. PH letter to KKS, 14 June 1952.
108. Ibid.
109. PH, The Talented Mr. Ripley (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 290.
110. CWA Everett Ray Kinstler, 10 July 2004.
111. Ibid., 20 Sept. 2004.
11. Alter Ego: Part 2
1. CWA Marijane Meaker, 5 Dec. 2001.
2. CWA Everett Ray Kinstler, 10 July 2004.
3. PH letter to “Elby,” 15 June 1969.
4. Ibid.
5. CWA Barbara Roett, 18 May 2003.
6. PH letter to “Elby,” 15 June 1969.
7. Cahier 27, 7/14/63.
8. Jim Amash letter to the author, 4 Dec. 2004.
9. CWA Gerard Albert, 15 Jan. 2005.
10. Diary 4, 24/8/43.
11. CWA Kingsley Skattebol, 20 May 2002.
12. CWA Gerald Albert, 15 Jan. 2002.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Diary entries, June 1949.
16. Diary entries, Oct. 1949.
17. CWA Jim Amash, 25 Feb. 2007.
18. Trina Robbins’s influential book, The Great Women Cartoonists, traces the women who made a career in the business.
19. Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book (New York: Basic, Books, 2004), p. 57, and CWA, Michael Feldman, comics historian and a source for Men of Tomorrow, 20 Sept. 2004.
20. James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974), p. 393.
21. Arie Kaplan, “How the Jews Created the Comic Book Industry,” Reform Judaism Magazine 32, no. 1. (Fall 2003).
22. CWA Jim Amash.
23. Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow, p. 237. Figures provided by Michael Feldman.
24. CWA Jim Amash.
25. Will Murray letter to the author, 6 Aug. 2002.
26. Cahier 30, 12/16/68.
27. CWA Jim Amash, also Steven Rowe, 4 Dec. 2001.
28. Along these same lines is the disappearance of the workbooks of Pat’s Sangor-Pines shop editor, Richard E. Hughes, workbooks whose information would make an important addition to the history of the comics and to this biography. In his workbooks, Hughes meticulously registered both the assignments he gave and the artists and writers who carried them out. On his death, Hughes’s widow passed the workbooks on to his alma mater in New Jersey. In an episode Highsmith herself might have imagined, the university library became a “sick building” and the institution “deaccessioned” many of its holdings—including Hughes’s workbooks, which were sold to a man who does not live in the United States and did not acknowledge to the author his ownership of the workbooks. The history of the American comic book continues to be plagued by incidents like this one.
29. Comics companies changed their names as frequently as they churned out different Superheroes; thus, Mr. Hughes might be editing comics for Cinema, Better/Standard, or ACG, amongst others, all under the umbrella of the Sangor-Pines shop, which provided the various companies with complete, camera-ready art.
30. Kaplan, “How the Jews Created the Comic Book Industry.”
31. Ibid.
32. Don Swaim interviews PH, Book Notes, WCBS-Radio, New York, Oct. 1987.
33. Angelo S. Rappoport, The Folklore of the Jews (London: Soncino Press, 1937), pp. 195–203.
34. Kaplan, “How the Jews Created the Comic Book Industry.”
35. Jules Feiffer, quoted in the exhibition Masters of American Comics, at the Jewish Museum, New York City, Sept. 15, 2006–Jan. 28, 2007.
36. Umberto Eco’s useful term in his foreword to Will Eisner’s last book, The Plot: the Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005).
37. Diary 10, Friday, 6/16/50.
38. Cahier 23, 10/1/54.
39. Cahier 23, 2/14/55.
40. Ripley’s triumph is the opposite of the destiny of Raskolnikov, Dostoyevsky’s surly graduate student with a Napoleonic complex, whose acte gratuite in Crime and Punishment was one of Pat’s favorite crimes. But Raskolnikov’s murders do not transform him into the superman of his dreams; they lead to the pursuit, the confession, and the Christian redemption which Dostoyevsky insisted was his real point in writing Crime and Punishment. Modern readers of Crime and Punishment usually overlook the Christian themes in the novel because the suspenseful deployment of Raskolnikov’s guilt (Pat thought Dostoyevsky should be considered a suspense writer) is so much more compellingly written than the sullen student’s eight-year conversion to Christianity in dreary Siberia by Sonia, the faithful prostitute with the golden heart.
Pat also made Ripley’s fate the reverse of Lambert Strether’s, the “ambassador” in Henry James’s eponymous novel. Strether must take nothing for himself, must “fail” as an ambassador, in order to do the right thing, while Ripley escapes failure by only doing the wrong thing. Ripley’s operating principle—winner take all—is Pat’s version of Strether’s famous advice to Little Bilham: “Live all you can.”
41. Diary 4, 6/28/43.
42. Diary, Apr. 14, 1949.
43. All of these, according to her multiple diary entries, were Superhero titles Pat wrote for in the 1940s.
44. Bettina Berch interview with PH, 1984, unpublished.
45. Ibid.
46. Don Swaim interviews PH, Book Notes, WCBS-Radio, Oct. 1987.
47. “Uncertain Treasure,” Home and Food vol. 6, no. 21 (August 1943).
48. Diary 4, 3/25/1943.
49. Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow, p. 237.
50. PH, “Primroses Are Pink” published in the Fall 1937 issue of the Julia Richman High School literary magazine, the Bluebird.
51. Cahier 4, 8/25/40.
52. Don Swaim interviews PH, Book Notes, WCBS-Radio, New York, Oct. 1987.
53. Cahier 9, 12/19/42.
54. Real Life Comics no. 13.
55. Real Life Comics no. 18.
56. PH’s personal library at SLA; translations from the Russian are by Constance Garnett.
57. Diary 3, 6 Jan. 1943.
58. Note from Real Life Comics editor “CSS,” 1/2/46, pasted into Diary 6.
59. Letter from “LHS,” 5/13/46, pasted into Diary 7.
60. Diary 4, May 14, 1943.
61. Interview with Bob Oksner by Jim Amash, 4 Dec. 2004 (Collection Jim Amash).
62. CWA Gerald Albert, 15 Jan. 2002.
63. Cahier 11, 10/2/44.
64. Cahier 17, 2/17/48.
65. Diary 17, Nov. 25, 1990.
66. CWA KKS, 11 June 2004.
67. CWA KKS, 21 Apr. 2002.
68. Diary 2, Jan.–Aug. 1942.
69. Diary 4, 7/8/43.
70. Diary 3, Jan. 1943.
71. Ibid., Jan. 8, 1943.
72. Numerous diary entries, 1940s.
73. Terry Gross interviews Stan Lee, Fresh Air, NPR, 4 June 2002.
74. All these items can be seen in the Highsmith Archives at the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern, Switzerland.
75. Notebook and two lists, undated, private collection.
76. Cahier 1, Aug. 21, 1939.
77. Drawing of “Golden Arrow,” private collection.
78. PH letter to Lil Picard, 20 Feb. 1969 (UIL).
79. Andrew Wilson, Beautiful Shadow (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), p. 286.
80. CWA Heather Chasen, 22 Sept. 2002.
81. Cahier 14, 12/18/46.
82. Many comics writers had been pulp writers themselves “and liked the comics even less than they liked the pulps, but needed the comics work because pulps were dying” (CWA Jim Amash).
83. Diary 9, Apr. 7, 1948.
12. Alter Ego: Part 3
1. Westchester County Surrogate Court, adoption papers for Mary Patricia Plangman, filed November 1946.
2. Ibid.
3. CWA Everett Ray Kinstler, 10 July 2004.
4. Diary 2, Jan. 3, 1942.
5. CWA Don Coates, 20 Apr. 2002.
6. MCH letter to PH, undated.
7. Diary 10, Aug. 10, 1950.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
1) Constant self-consciousness—visual and mental—“What does the world—my relatives, etc. etc. think of me?”
2) Uncoordinated attitudes—M[ary] B[aker] Eddy and spirituality vs. love of show, e.g. when she goes to Texas, she intends to “look like the money.” Yet she will ridicule anyone who avowedly sets his standards by money.
3) Blank, vague expression when she flatly says something palliative about a situation I know fully—the economic situation at home. Refusal to face facts—to speak forthrightly and seriously on matters both of us know about.
4) Wrongly placed consideration for others—carrying dishes 2 ft. further toward kitchen at the Minots.
5) Intellectual laziness. Unwilling to challenge self to utmost for the sheer joy of it on any puzzle or game, though she continually escapes life via games. Veers away from controversial matter once I broach it for mutual discussion.
6) Thought patterns that are rigid—on the Negro question; homosexuality; “respect for elders” people I call dull, etc. etc.
11. CWA Marijane Meaker, 1 Feb. 2003.
12. Diary 4, 7/31/43.
13. Cahier 29, 11/1/67.
14. Rolf Tietgens letter to PH, 7 Aug. 1969. Also see photographs of PH by Rolf Tietgens in illustrations.
15. Diary 4, 6/21/43.
16. Ibid., May 20, 1943.
17. According to Fawcett comics expert Paul Hamerlinck, this dialect was later removed by Fawcett’s executive editor, Will Lieberson. The only Jasper comic I have seen, a late one published in 1948, was couched in the president’s, if not the King’s, English.
18. “Invitation to Death,” “Jap Buster Johnson,” USA Comics, no. 14, Fall 1944.
19. “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey,” Leslie Fiedler, Partisan Review 15, June 1948.
20. Desert Island Discs, BBC4, 21 Apr. 1979.
21. PH letters to Bettina Berch, 7 Jan. and 25 Sept. 1987.
22. Diary 4, 8/19/43. Also 8/22/43.
23. Ibid., 5/30/43.
24. Ibid., 6/21/43.
25. Ibid., 1/7/43.
26. Cahier 9, PH transcription of high school journals.
27. Diary 4, 6/13/43.
28. Diary 5, 10/15/43.
29. Diary 4, 6/6/43.
30. Diary 5, 10/11/43.
31. Ibid., 10/10–11/43.
32. Diary 4, 6/6/43.
33. Diary 5, 9/30/43.
34. Ibid., 10/18/43.
35. Diary 4, 9/19/43.
36. Diary 5, 10/27/43.
37. Ibid., Oct. 29–30, 1943.
38. Ibid., 10/27/43.
39. Ibid., 10/27/43.
40. Diary 5, 10/15/43.
41. Ibid., 10/25/43.
42. Diary 5, various entries, fall 1943.
43. Ibid., Oct. 11–17, 1943.
44. Ibid., 11/13/43.
45. Ibid., Oct. 11–17, 1943.
46. CWA David Diamond, 18 Dec. 2004.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. Ethel Sturtevant letter no. 5, undated letters, 1962–68.
50. PH, “My Life with Greta Garbo,” 1990.
51. Ibid.
52. Joan Juliet Buck, “A Terrifying Talent,” Observer Magazine, 20 Nov. 1977.
53. Bettina Berch interview with PH, 1987.
54. Diary 2, Feb. 7, 1942.
55. Ibid., Feb. 17, 1942.
56. Ibid., Apr. 5, 1942.
57. MCH letter to Marijane Meaker, undated (Collection Marijane Meaker).
58. Diary 1, July 23, 1941.
59. Diary 9, July 22, 1948.
60. Diary 8, 27 May 1947.
61. Diary 4, 24/6/43.
62. PH reading list from 1950.
63. Cahier 16, 9/4/47.
64. Cahier 33, 1/12/74.
65. PH personal library. The Art of Loving is inscribed from her parents for her birthday, 19 Jan. 1967.
66. PH letter to BKS, 13 Sept. 1983.
67. Cahier 24, 3/25/56.
68. After Dark, Channel 4, 18 June 1988.
69. Diary 4, 7/18/43.
70. Ibid., 28/6/43.
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid., 22/8/43
73. Diary 5, 7/11/43.
74. Ibid., Oct. 1943.
75. Ibid., 8/11/43.
13. Alter Ego: Part 4
1. Diary 5, 8/11/43.
2. Sybille Bedford, A Visit to Don Otavio (New York: Counterpoint, 2003), p. 286.
3. “I Got a Scheme,” interview of Saul Bellow by Philip Roth, New Yorker, 15 Apr. 2005.
4. Bedford, A Visit to Don Otavio, p. 286.
5. Ibid., p. 282.
6. Diary 9 (Mexico Diary), Dec. 1943.
7. Ibid., Dec. 1943–9 Mar. 1944.
8. Ibid., p. 27.
9. Ibid., 19 Jan. 1943.
10. Ibid., Dec. 1943–9 March 1944.
11. Ibid., Mar. 11, 1944.
12. PH, “In the Plaza,” Nothing That Meets the Eye. First draft written in April 1944.
13. PH, “The Car,” ibid. First draft written in March 1945, revised in December 1962.
14. Joan Kahn, PH’s editor at Harper & Brothers, suggested many such changes to her.
15. Cahier 23, 6/26/54 and 6/30/54.
16. Don Swaim interview of PH, Book Notes, CBS-Radio, New York, Oct. 1987.
17. Cahier 11, 3/25/44.
18. Ibid., 4/16/44.
19. Ibid., 4/14/44.
20. Ibid.
21. Cahier 8, 9/25/42.
22. Cahier 11, 4/14/44.
23. Francis Wyndham, “Sick of Psychopaths,” Sunday Times (London), 4 Nov. 1965.
24. Diary 2, Jan. 1942.
25. Cahier 9, Jan. 1, 1943.
26. Ibid., p. 1.
27. Dickie Greenleaf’s signet ring—the ring Tom pulls over his “scuffed knuckle” after he murders him and then wears forever after—is green. Pat knew about Oscar Wilde’s “great green scarab ring” from reading Frank Harris’s books about Oscar.
28. Cahier 11, 12/24/43.
29. In this extract from Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, written at exactly the same time she was asserting the contrary to Francis Wyndham, Pat admitted: The theme I have used over and over again in my novels is the relationship between two men, usually quite different in make-up, sometimes obviously the good and the evil…. [I]t was a friend, a newspaperman, who pointed it out to me…a man who had seen the manuscript of my first effort at twenty-two [The Click of the Shutting], the book that was never finished. This was about a rich, spoiled boy and a poor boy who wanted to be a painter. They were fifteen years old in the book. As if that weren’t enough, there were two minor characters, a tough athletic boy who seldom attended school (and then only to shock the school with things like the bloated corpse of a drowned dog…) and a puny clever boy who giggled a great deal and adored him and was always in his company. (p. 145)
30. Interview with E. L. Doctorow, Time, Feb. 26, 2006.
31. Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (New York: Viking Press, 1959), p. 1.
32. Cahier 8, 9/25/42.
33. Cahier 9, 12/19/42.
34. Ibid., 11/30/42.
35. Ibid., 12/29/42. “Gregory often amused himself before falling asleep, by finding the brief, fleeting sensations of being another person—someone of course he did not know—a face which was entirely out of his own mind.”
36. Margaretta K. Mitchell, Ruth Bernhard: Between Art & Life (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000), p. 75.
37. PH, The Click of the Shutting, manuscript, p. 138.
38. Ibid., p. 134.
39. Ibid., p. 170.
40. Ibid., p. 5.
41. Ibid., p. 4.
42. Ibid., p. 5.
43. Cahier 34, 12/17/76.
44. Ibid., 7/15/78.
45. Cahier 9, 11/23/42.
46. Ibid., 12/29/42.
47. PH, The Click of the Shutting, manuscript, p. 144.
48. Ibid., p. 67.
49. Ibid., p. 70.
50. Ibid., p. 217.
51. Ibid., p. 139.
52. Diary 9 (Mexico Diary), Wednesday, Mar. 15, 1944.
53. Ibid., Mar. 11, 1944.
54. Ibid., Monday, Mar. 13, 1944.
55. Ibid., Monday, Mar. 20, 1944.
56. Ibid.
57. Diary 2, Feb. 23, 1942.
58. PH letter to KKS, 12 May 1944.
59. Ibid.
60. CWA Dan Walton Coates, 22 Nov. 2003.
61. Cahier 1, undated 1938.
62. CWA Dan Walton Coates, 22 Nov. 2003.
63. Cahier 11, Sept. 29, 1944.
14. Alter Ego: Part 5
1. Jap Buster Johnson appeared in USA Comics nos. 6–15; All Select Comics nos. 2, 8, and 9; Complete Comics no. 2; and Kid Komics nos. 6 and 8–10. (Information provided by Dr. Michael J. Vassallo.)
2. CWA Vince Fago, 30 Nov. 2001.
3. Ibid., 28 Nov. 2001.
4. CWA Stan Lee via Roy Thomas, Nov. 29, 2001.
5. Jim Amash letter to the author, 10 April 2009, quoting his 2005 interview with the late Leon Lazarus.
6. CWA Will Eisner, 23 Dec. 2002.
7. The Whip first appeared in Flash Comics no. 1, in 1940.
8. CWA William Woolfolk, 15 Dec. 2001.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. PH letter to SH, 1 Sept. 1970.
12. CWA Elizabeth Hardwick, 12 Apr. 2002.
13. Roy Thomas, editor of Alter Ego, cites this as a letter to the editor by Pierce Rice, appearing in a mid-nineties issue of Robin Snyder’s The Comics, p. 56.
14. Ibid.
15. A remark made by Mickey Spillane to a British interviewer. When the interviewer asked if that’s how Spillane treated his wife, he replied: “We’re talking about fiction” (“Obituary, Mickey Spillane,” Guardian, 18 July 2006).
16. Ibid.
17. Cahier 22, 6/12/53.
18. CWA Vince Fago, 28 Nov. 2001.
19. Ibid., 30 Nov. 2001.
20. Ibid.
21. Who’s Who of American Comic Books, volume 2 (1974), is the volume that first mentions Patricia Highsmith.
22. PH letter to SH, 1 Sept. 1970.
23. PH letter to Anita Bryant, 13 May 1978.
24. CWA Jerry Bails, 3 Dec. 2002.
25. Ibid.; also see Who’s Who of American Comic Books.
15. Social Studies: Part 1
1. Cahier 3, 12/23/40. “Unfortunately, [Proust] wrote of an age just past, as an historian rather than a prophet…. A writer like Steinbeck…can write in the present, of the present, of people’s passions.”
2. Cahier 12, 4/6/45.
3. Ibid., 3/26/45.
4. Chart made by PH and inserted by her in Cahier 12, Apr. 1945.
5. Cahier 19, 11/23/49.
6. Ibid.
7. Cahier 4, 9/2/40.
8. Cahier 29, 7/17/68.
9. Ibid.
10. MCH telegram to PH (Collection Annebelle Potin).
11. SH letter to PH, 23 Aug. 1970.
12. PH letter to SH, 29 Aug. 1970.
13. Don Swaim interviews PH, Book Notes.
14. Cahier 13, 9/8/45.
15. Cahier 3, 10/30/1940.
16. Diary 4, May 31–June 6, 1943.
17. Cahier 9, PH transcription of high school notebooks, Oct. 18, 1937.
18. Diary 2, Wed. Apr. 8, 1942.
19. Eugene Walter, Milking the Moon (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001), p. 86.
20. Francis King, Oldie, “Angry Old Woman,” Sept. 2003.
21. Betty Curry letter to PH, 5 Nov. 1977.
22. CWA Betty Curry, 26 Aug. 2003.
23. Liz Smith, Natural Blonde (New York: Hyperion, 2000), p. 117.
24. Patricia Schartle Myrer letter to the author, 17 Feb. 2003.
25. Ibid.
26. CWA Caroline Besterman, 6 Nov. 2003.
27. Ibid., 19 Dec. 2003.
28. CWA Camilla Butterfield, 17 Dec. 2003.
29. Ibid.
30. Diary 8, Feb. 27, 1949.
31. CWA Karl Bissinger, 3 Dec. 2004.
32. Diary 2: Vendredi le 13 juin, 1941, “Berenice Abbot m’a invité à une soirée chez elle le vendredi prochain.”
33. Mitchell, Ruth Bernhard, p. 57.
34. Diary 2, Jan. 22, 1942.
35. Diary 1, summer and fall of 1941; diary 2, winter of 1942.
36. PH, The Talented Mr. Ripley, pp. 245–47.
37. Cahier 9, PH transcription of high school notebooks, Sept. 1938.
38. Ibid., 21 Dec. 1938.
39. Ibid., Aug. 24, 1939.
40. Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), pp. 7–8.
41. Diary 1, June 13, 1941.
42. Mitchell, Ruth Bernard, p. 57.
43. Diary 3, 9 Aug. 1942.
44. Ibid.
45. Cahier 8, 11/11/1942.
46. Diary 5, May 26–27, 1943.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., July 28, 1941.
49. Diary 1, July 6, 1941.
50. CWA Ruth Bernhard, 14 Feb. 2003.
51. PH letter to Bettina Berch, 22 Dec. 1991.
52. CWA Donald Windham, 30 June 2004.
53. Buffie Johnson interviewed by Romy Ashby, Goodie no. 3.
54. CWA Buffie Johnson, 14–16 Nov., 29 Nov., 1 Dec., 13 Dec. 2001; and 26 Apr., 30 Apr., 24 Dec. 2002; 26 Aug. 2003; and undated memoirs.
55. Diary 1, July 5, 1941.
56. Diary 2, June 30, 1942.
57. Ibid., Feb. 9, 1942.
58. CWA Sybille Bedford, 16 June 2005.
59. Sybille Bedford, Quicksands: A Memoir (New York: Counterpoint, 2005), p. 124.
60. CWA Daniel Bell, 18 Aug. 2003.
61. MCH letter to Marijane Meaker, “Friday AM, 11th” (no other date).
62. MCH letter to PH, dated “Tues AM.”
63. Diary 4, Aug. 16–22, 1943.
64. Diary 2, Jan. 10, 1942.
65. Ibid., Feb. 3, 1942.
66. PH letter to SH, 1 Sept. 1970.
67. Diary 8, Oct. 1947.
68. Hortense Calisher, 26 Feb. 2003, at the Yaddo benefit honoring PH.
69. Diary 2, Feb. 10, 1942.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid., June 4, 1942.
72. Ibid., June 6, 1942.
73. CWA Dorothy Wheelock Edson, 7 June 2004.
74. Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire (New York: Free Press, 1993), p. 36.
75. CWA Phillip Lloyd Powell, 8 Feb. 2003.
76. Ibid.
77. CWA Heather Chasen, 22 Sept. 2002.
78. Ibid.
79. Christian Gonzalez, “Jeanne Moreau: La Vie Me Nourris,” Figaro Madame, July 2004.
80. CWA Phyllis Nagy, 26 June 2002.
81. PH letter to DOC, 14 Oct. 1977.
82. CWA Vivien De Bernardi, 15 Aug. 2002.
83. CWA Don Coates, 9 Dec. 2005.
84. Shirley Jackson, The Lottery—or, The Adventures of James Harris (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1949).
85. Diary 4, June 24, 1943.
86. Diary 8, Mar. 17, 1949.
87. Author’s note: Before her death in 2001, I saw Fanny Brennan’s entire current oeuvre, perhaps sixty or seventy paintings, hanging in her coat closet in New York. The paintings were so small that they fit comfortably in the tiny closet, which had been kitted out as a miniature art gallery.
88. PH letter to Lee Israel, 19 Mar. 1974.
89. Cahier 36, 5/16/88.
90. Ibid.
91. CWA Christa Maerker, 27 July 2004.
92. Ibid.
93. CWA Betty Comden, 25 Aug. 2003.
94. Cahier 16, 12/9/47.
95. Ibid., 12/28/47.
96. Diary 8, May 14, 1947.
97. Diary 10, May 8, 1950.
98. Diary 8, May 27, 1947.
99. PH letter to Millicent Dillon, 5 June 1977 (HRC).
100. Diary 8, 5/27/47.
101. Drawing of Jane Bowles by PH, undated.
102. Diary 10, Wed., Nov. 1950.
103. PH letter to Millicent Dillon, 5 June 1977 (HRC).
104. Ibid.
105. Ibid.
106. Diary 8, May 13, 1947.
107. Diary 10, August 16, 1950.
108. Diary 8, May 15–16, 1947.
109. Nancy Mitford letter to Evelyn Waugh, 3 Dec. 1962. Quoted in The Letters of Nancy Mitford & Evelyn Waugh, ed. Charlotte Mosley (London: Sceptre, 1997), p. 469.
110. Leo Lerman, The Grand Surprise (New York: Knopf, 2007), pp. 425–6.
111. Ibid., p. 329.
112. Ibid., p. 202.
113. Grey Foy, speaking about Leo Lerman’s salon in Truman Capote, George Plimpton, ed. (New York: Anchor Books, 1997) p. 44.
114. PH letter to Millicent Dillon, 5 June 1977 (HRC).
115. Diary 10, Mar. 17, 1950.
116. Diary 8, Jan. 25, 1948.
117. Ibid., Feb. 13, 1948.
118. Ibid., Feb. 21, 1948.
119. Ibid., Feb. 26, 1948.
120. Ibid., Feb. 29, 1948.
121. Diary 9, 11/3/48.
122. Gerald Clarke, ed., Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 53.
123. CWA Donald Windham, 30 June 2004.
124. Truman Capote letter to Elizabeth Ames, 2 Mar. 1948 (NYPL).
125. Diary 9, 5/2/48.
126. PH, Proposed Snail Interview (with Herself), undated.
127. Diary 8, Mar. 6, 1948.
128. PH letter to KKS, 2 June 1948.
129. PH letter to KKS, 30 June 1964.
16. Social Studies: Part 2
1. MCH letter to Miss Townsend, 27 Apr. 1948.
2. PH letter to KKS, 2 June 1948.
3. Diary 8, May 11–30, 1948.
4. Ibid., May 11, 1948.
5. There is no evidence in Pat’s Yaddo file that she applied to Yaddo again, but Pat writes in her diary that both she and Marc Brandel had their applications for another residency rejected. She thought her public use of alcohol and their sleeping together had something to do with the rejections.
6. Cahier 15, 16/6/48.
7. Diary 8, July 5, 1948.
8. Letter PH to KKS, 2 June 1948.
9. CWA Phyllis Nagy, 13 Oct. 2002.
10. Cahier 17, 6/21/48.
11. Cahier 17, 5/19/48.
12. CWA Ruda Brandel Dauphin, 31 Jan. 2009.
13. Cahier 17, 19/5/48.
14. Diary 8, June 17, 1948.
15. Ibid., Dec. 22, 1947.
16. Cahier 17, 7/25/48.
17. PH, Strangers on a Train, p. 181.
18. Ibid., p. 180.
19. Ibid., p. 274.
20. Bruno, who reads only comic books and detective stories and is obsessed with creating “perfect crimes,” enters Guy Haines’s nightmares as a creature who looks a lot like the Superhero Batman. Guy dreams of Bruno as “a tall figure in a great cape like a bat’s wing” who climbs up the side of his house and “springs” into his room. Before trying to throttle him, Guy asks, “‘Who are you?’ ‘You,’ Bruno answer[s] finally” (PH, Strangers on a Train, p. 181).
And Bruno imagines himself joined to Guy, two heroes flying through the sky: “He longed for Guy to be with him now. He would clasp Guy’s hand, and to hell with the rest of the world! Their feats were unparalleled! Like a sweep across the sky! Like two streaks of red fire that came and disappeared so fast, everybody stood wondering if they really had seen them” (ibid., p. 167).
“Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It’s Superman” is the catchphrase that Bruno’s fantasy would have suggested to many mid-century Americans—no matter how sophisticated their literary tastes. Beginning in 1940, that phrase introduced the radio program taken from the Superman comic books (and then was used in the comic books themselves), and it was as widespread and accessible as the phrase “Ripley’s Believe It or Not”—another locution from America’s popular culture which would find its way into a Highsmith novel.
21. PH, Strangers on a Train (New York: Bantam Books, 1951), p. 257.
22. Diary 9, Feb. 21–28, 1949.
23. Ibid., May–June 1948.
24. PH letter to SH, 1 Sept. 1970.
25. Ibid.
26. Diary 9, Sept. 30, 1948.
27. Ibid., Nov. 14–25, 1948.
28. Pat, exercising a bit of poetic license in the Afterword she finally wrote for The Price of Salt, telescoped the time frame of the effects of meeting Kathleen Senn, the woman who inspired the plot of The Price of Salt, and the outbreak of chicken pox she suffered while making her first notes for that novel. In fact, she met Senn on 8 December and didn’t come down with chicken pox until ten or twelve days later. And it’s not entirely clear when she actually scribbled the plot of The Price of Salt down in her notes; perhaps it wasn’t the precise day she met Mrs. Senn. But the high-fever part was true—and her inspiration for the novel came about, metaphorically at least, just as she said.
29. Diary 9, Dec. 22–29, 1948.
30. Edmund Bergler, “The Myth of a New National Disease: Homosexuality and the Kinsey Report,” Psychiatric Quarterly 22 (January 1948).
31. Diary 9, Dec. 22, 1948.
32. PH letter to SH, 29 Aug. 1970.
33. Diary 9, Jan. 11, 1949.
34. PH letter to SH, 29 Aug. 1970.
35. Diary 9, Jan. 27, 1949 (fourteenth visit to psychoanalyst).
36. Ibid., Mar. 1, 1949.
37. Ibid., Feb. 22 and 24, 1949.
38. Ibid., 1949 (twenty-second, twenty-fourth, twenty-ninth visits).
39. Ibid., May 3, 1949.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., May 6, 1949.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., May 18, 1949 (forty-fifth visit).
44. Ibid., May 24, 1949 (forty-seventh visit).
17. Les Girls: Part 1
1. “A heavy rain dissolved yesterday most of the 4-inch snowfall of Wednesday and left many slushy thoroughfares here and in the suburbs.” “The Weather Bureau,” New York Times, 12–17 Dec. 1948.
2. PH, Afterword, The Price of Salt.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Diary 10, June 1950: “Pray God, she never troubled to look up my name. (After the Xmas card.)”
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. PH, Carol (London: Bloomsbury, 1990), p. 260.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Cahier 26, 6/18/61. “As usual, I have found the fever beneficial to the imagination, and found an ending for my book.”
12. Diary 10, Dec. 23, 1949.
13. PH, The Dove Descending, unpublished manuscript.
14. PH, The First Person Novel, unpublished manuscript.
15. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, p. 143.
16. Cahier 26, 1/21/61.
17. She also used the first-person narrative in two short stories about animals: “Chorus Girl’s Absolutely Final Performance”—the story made her weep—and “Notes from a Respectable Cockroach.”
18. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, p. 89.
19. Diary 10, Oct. 24, 1950.
20. Ibid., Jan. 19, 1951.
21. And she used the name Senn in her very last novel, Small g, the novel that is both a summary and a parody of her career. Senn is, conveniently, a Swiss name, and for Small g it was used for Thomas Senn, a sturdy blond Zurich detective. By 1995, Pat had come a long way from obsessive love.
22. Cahier 18, 12/9/48.
23. Ibid., 12/9/48.
24. Ibid., 9/9/48.
25. Priscilla Senn Kennedy letter to the author, quoting Kathleen Senn’s deceased cousin, 14 Feb. 2009.
26. “[S]omething of a fairytale, something of a castle” was Pat’s comment on Mrs. Senn’s Murray Avenue house on her second trip to Ridgewood, New Jersey, to spy on Mrs. Senn.
27. PH, The Price of Salt (New York: Bantam Books, 1958), p. 197.
28. Ibid., p. 174.
29. Ibid., p. 136.
30. Cahier 19, June 28, 1950. Written the day before another finishing touch was put on the novel.
31. André Gide, The Counterfeiters, trans. Dorothy Bussy (New York: Vintage Books 1973), p. 123.
32. Diary 10, Dec. 10, 1949.
33. Property listings in the Ridgewood, New Jersey, property directory, in 1940: Book: 8052, p. 533. Block: 1811, Lot: 21.02. According to the property directory, the address became North Murray Avenue in 1952 (Ridgewood Public Library).
34. Diary 10, Sunday, Jan. 21, 1951.
35. Ibid., June 5, 1950.
36. Ibid., June 8, 1950.
37. Ibid., June 30, 1950.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., June 12, 1950.
40. Ibid., July 1950.
41. Ibid., July 2, 1950.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., Oct. 24, 1950.
44. Cahier 19, 6/6/50.
45. Diary 10, May 17, 1950.
46. Ibid., Oct. 17, 1950.
47. Ibid., Oct. 27, 1950.
48. Ibid., Sept. 6, 1950.
49. Cahier 13, 8/27/45.
50. Diary 1952–54, Feb. 25, 1953 (Trieste). Dan Walton Coates, eldest son of Pat’s “brother Dan,” who spent time as a boy with Pat at Willie Mae’s house in Fort Worth whenever Pat passed through Texas, remembered something about Pat’s teeth that alarmed him. He thought it was tied in with her “artistic” temperament and how she felt that she had to suppress her good looks. But first he wanted to talk about the fun he’d had with Pat. When Pat was young, Dan said, she was “very upbeat and she’d cuss like a sailor and of course I liked to cuss even as a kid so we’d talk out of Grandma’s hearing because she would not have had THAT. We had a lot of fun in the early years.”
Both Pat and Mary Highsmith helped young Dan with his artwork—he grew up to be an investment advisor, a rancher, and a painter and sculptor of western subjects—and Mary, Dan said, was “the most patient thing” with him. “A lot of Pat’s things were still at Grandma’s, her sketchbooks and so forth,” and so most of Dan’s conversations with Pat centered on art. Pat and Mary would buy him sketchbooks and critique his work seriously, as though he were already an artist, and Dan retained a shining memory of Pat’s beauty, which, during “these early years, was drop-dead gorgeous. Dark dark eyes, that raven dark hair in a pageboy and golly she just looked great.” It was his memory of Pat’s stunning looks in the 1940s that made his next experience of her so shocking.
“Well, she went to Europe and it may have been five years, ten years later—I’m not worth a darn on dates—and I’ll swear to God I couldn’t believe it. She looked like the wrath of God…. Come to find out, for some reason only known to Pat, she had filed her teeth. They were all jagged-looking and from that point on her dental problems got worse” (CWA Dan Walton Coates, 22 Nov. 2003).
51. PH letter to KKS, 25 Jan. 1974.
52. Cahier 19, 12/19/49.
53. PH letter to KKS, 3 Oct. 1988.
54. PH letter to KKS, 20 Aug. 1970.
55. Ibid.
56. CWA Caroline Besterman, 6 Nov. 2003.
57. Cahier 20, 8/13/51.
58. Cahier 19, 12/19/49.
59. CWA Dan Walton Coates, 22 Nov. 2003.
60. Diary 11, Sept. 24, 1951.
61. Diary 10, Aug. 22–Sept. 6, 1950.
62. Ibid., Oct. 29, 1950.
63. CWA Jean-Étienne Cohen-Séat, 26 June 2007.
64. Diary 10, Oct. 29, 1950.
65. Ibid., Oct. 21, 1950.
66. Ibid., Nov., 1950.
67. Ibid., Nov. 1, 1950.
68. Ibid. 10, Nov. 8, 1950.
69. Ibid., Nov. 11, 1950.
70. Ibid., Dec. 1950.
71. Ibid., Dec. 1950.
72. Ibid., Dec. 1950.
73. Ibid., New Year’s Eve, 1950.
74. Cahier 19, 7/1/50.
75. Cahier 16, 9/7/47.
76. Diary 10, Oct. 11, 1950.
77. Time, 13 Jan. 1941.
78. Ibid.
79. PH letter to KKS, 19 Apr. 1964.
80. Cahier 16, 9/4/47.
81. PH letter to Virginia Kent Catherwood, 6 Sept. 1947.
82. Diary 9, Jan. 4, 1948.
83. PH letter to KKS, 22 Mar. 1952.
84. In her diary for 1968 Pat wrote of Ginnie Catherwood: “She is Lotte in The Tremor of Forgery—the woman whom my hero will always love.”
85. “The Private Life and Times of Prince David Mdivani,” on Glamour Girls of the Silver Screen Web site, www.glamourgirlsofthesilverscreen.com.
18. Les Girls: Part 2
1. Cahier 18, 6/19/49.
2. Diary 8, June 26, 1949.
3. Ibid., July 1, 1949.
4. Ibid., July 27, 1950.
5. Cahier 19, 12/12/49.
6. Cahier 19, 2/27/50.
7. Cahier 24, 11/17/57.
8. CWA Caroline Besterman, 19 Dec. 2003.
9. CWA Barbara Roett, 18 May 2003.
10. Diary 11, Oct. 14, 1951.
11. CWA Joan Dupont, 7 Nov. 2002.
12. PH letter to Alex Szogyi, 27 Aug. 1977.
13. CWA Marion Aboudaram, 2 Oct. 2002.
14. PH letter to BKS, 16 Apr. 1968.
15. Ibid., 10 Feb. 1969.
16. PH letter to Alex Szogyi, 18 Feb. 1969.
17. Ibid., 4 Nov. 1968.
18. Ibid.
19. Cahier 17, 2/29/48.
20. Cahier 19, 8/11/50.
21. Diary 10, Oct. 13, 1950.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., Oct. 15–16, 1950.
24. Ibid., Oct. 13–14, 1950.
25. PH, Strangers on a Train, p. 26.
26. CWA Marijane Meaker, 17 Apr. 2002.
27. Cahier 20, 9/14/51.
28. Cahier 23, 6/13/55.
29. Cahier 23, 11/11/54.
30. Diary 11, Sept. 4, 1951.
31. Diary 12, May 24, 1953.
32. Ibid.
33. Diary 4, Aug. 8, 1943.
34. Rolf Tietgens letter to PH, 7 Aug. 1968.
35. Ibid., 12 Mar. 1969.
36. Ibid., 22 Feb. 1969.
37. Dorothy Wheelock Edson letter to the author, 26 June 2004.
38. Ibid., 14 June 2004.
39. Diary 10, July 17, 1950.
40. Diary 11, June 5, 1951.
41. PH letter to Lil Picard, 2 June 1971 (UIL).
42. PH letter to Ellen Blumenthal Hill, 8 July 1978 (UIL).
43. Lil Picard letter to PH, 21 Oct. 1970.
44. Diary 9, 5/10/47.
45. PH letter to BKS, 12 Apr. 1972.
46. Diary 12, insert, May 29, 1953.
47. Diary 12, June 1, 1953.
48. Ibid., May 23–29, 1953.
49. Ibid., June 1953.
50. Ibid., June 15, 1953.
51. Ibid., May 24, 1953.
52. Ibid., June 17, 1953.
53. PH letter to KKS, 14 June 1952.
54. Ibid.
55. Cahier 22, 6/18/53.
56. Diary 12, June 24, 1953.
57. Willis Goldbeck, entry in Internet Movie Database, www.IMDb.com.
58. Diary 12, Dec. 24, 1952.
59. PH letter to KKS, 15 Dec. 1952.
60. Patricia Schartle had been the first woman editor in chief in American book-publishing history (introduction by Brian Garfield to Second International Congress of Crime Writers, Mar. 15, 1978).
61. Diary 12, June 24–28, 1953.
62. Ibid., July 1, 1953.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid.
65. Cahier 23, 6/12/55.
66. Ibid. “I stopped writing my diary nearly a year ago—but for the very good reason that I knew somebody was reading it (E.B.H. alas).”
67. PH letter to Monique Buffet, 8 Apr. 1988 (Collection Monique Buffet).
68. Diary 12, July 3, 1953.
69. Ibid., July 4, 1953.
70. Diary 11, Sept. 7, 1951.
71. In the same vein, Pat was indulgent about Buffie Johnson’s long-researched book Lady of the Beasts: The Goddess and Her Sacred Animals (1988), corresponding with Buffie at length about the work. Keeping whatever private thoughts she had on the subject to herself, Pat loyally sent a review of it to Le Monde in Paris.
72. Cahier 20, 10/17/51.
73. Diary 11, 7/19/51.
74. PH letter to KKS, 14 June 1952.
75. Diary 11, Sept. 2, 1951.
76. Ibid., Mar. 3, 1952.
77. Ibid., Aug. 23, 1951. Subsequent quotations by PH about her private life are from Diaries 11 and 12.
78. PH, review of Meg, Saturday Review, 1 Apr. 1950.
79. Diary 11, Apr. 23, 1951.
80. Ibid., May 1, 1951.
81. Ibid., May 3, 1951.
82. Ibid., Apr. 28, 1951.
83. Ibid., May 7, 1951.
84. Ibid., May 9–12, 1951.
85. Ibid., June 6–24, 1951.
86. Ibid., June 18, 1951.
87. PH letter to Djuna Barnes, 1 Jan. 1959 (UML).
88. Djuna Barnes letter to PH, 6 Jan. 1959 (UML).
89. Diary 11, Oct. 1, 1951.
90. Ibid., July 3, 1951.
91. Ibid., July 23–27, 1951.
92. Ibid., July 29, 1951.
93. Don Swaim, Book Notes, Oct. 1987.
94. Diary 11, Aug. 29, 1951.
95. Ibid., Aug. 23, 1951.
19. Les Girls: Part 3
1. Cahier 20, 9/8/51.
2. PH letter to KKS, 13 Aug. 1952.
3. Diary 11, 1/11/51.
4. CWA H. M. Qualunque, 3 Aug. 2004.
5. Cahier 31, 4/18/71.
6. CWA H. M. Qualunque, 3 Aug. 2004.
7. Diary 8, 12/13/47.
8. CWA H. M. Qualunque, 3 Aug. 2004.
9. Ibid.
10. CWA Peter Huber, 20 Apr. 2003.
11. Ibid.
12. Diary 11, Sept. 4, 1951.
13. PH, The Blunderer, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 23.
14. Diary 12, July 9, 1952. “Man’s Best Friend” was published posthumously in a much later version with a different ending.
15. Diary 11, Nov. 16, 1951.
16. PH letter to Alex Szogyi, Sept. 24–25, 1969.
17. PH letter to BKS, 2 June 1972.
18. CWA Bettina Berch, 10 Aug. 2003.
19. CWA Christa Maerker, 3 Aug. 2006.
20. Diary 11, Sept. 4, 1951.
21. Ibid., Sept. 9, 1951.
22. Ibid., Sept. 14, 1951.
23. Cahier 16, 11/13/47.
24. Diary 11, Dec. 3, 1951.
25. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1990), p. 81.
26. Diary 11, Sept. 30, 1951.
27. Gerald Peary, interview in Toronto with PH, www.geraldpeary.com., 1988.
28. Diary 11, Oct. 22, 1951.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., Oct. 28, 1951.
31. Ibid., Oct. 25, 1951.
32. Ibid., Nov. 5, 1951.
33. Ibid., Dec. 3, 1951.
34. Ibid., Jan. 11, 1952.
35. PH letter to KKS, 5 Jan. 1967.
36. W. H. Auden letter to PH, dated “Mar 23” and pasted in her Scrapbook no. 1, 1950–61.
37. PH, “Scene of the Crime,” Granta 29 (Winter 1989). Also published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 24 Aug. 1991.
38. Cahier 21, Dec. 2, 1952.
39. Andrew Wilson, Beautiful Shadow (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), p. 182.
40. Diary 12, Dec. 5, 1952.
41. Ibid., Nov. 27, 1952.
42. Ibid., Dec. 1, 1952.
43. Ibid., Dec. 5, 1952.
44. Ibid., Dec. 17, 1952.
45. Cahier 21, 12/2/52.
46. Ibid.
47. Diary 12, Jan. 19, 1953.
48. Ibid., Dec. 25, 1952.
49. Ibid., Jan. 23, 1953.
50. Cahier 22, Keime, entries from 1952–53.
51. Diary 12, Feb. 12, 1953.
52. Cahier 22, 2/15/53.
53. Diary 12, Jan. 27, 1953
54. Ibid., Feb., various dates, 1953.
55. Cahier 21, 10/28/52.
56. Cahier 22, 2/14/53.
57. Diary 12, July 15–16, 1953.
20. Les Girls: Part 4
1. Diary 12, July and Aug., various dates, 1953.
2. Ibid., Aug. 6–7, 1953.
3. Ibid., June 8, 1953.
4. Ibid., Aug. 20, 1953.
5. PH, The Blunderer (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 189.
6. Ibid., p. 16.
7. Ibid., pp. 99, 93–94.
8. PH letter to Alex Szogyi, 17 Aug. 1965.
9. PH, The Blunderer, p. 97.
10. Ibid., p. 167.
11. Ibid., p. 97.
12. Ibid., p. 188.
13. Ibid., p. 148.
14. Paul Ingendaay, Afterword to Nothing That Meets the Eye (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), p. 446.
15. Cahier 23, 8/21/55.
16. Diary 12, Aug. 26 and 31, 1953.
17. Cahier 22, 10/27/53.
18. PH letters to KKS, 27 Oct. and 24 Dec. 1953.
19. CWA Dan Walton Coates, 22 Nov. 2003.
20. CWA Annebelle Potin, 24 Mar. 2007.
21. Diary 12, Mar. 16, 1954.
22. Cahier 23, 4/14/54.
23. PH letter to Lil Picard, 20 Dec. 1967 (UIL).
24. Cahier 23, 4/22/54.
25. Ibid.
26. Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Viking Press, 1957).
21. Les Girls: Part 5
1. PH letter to KKS, 23 Mar. 1953.
2. PH, The Talented Mr. Ripley, p. 174.
3. Fort Worth Star-Telegram, archives for 1931 (FWPL).
4. Cahier 23, 4/24/54.
5. “Man ‘Buried’ as Fire Victim Seized as Murder Suspect,” New York Herald Tribune, 16 Apr. 1954.
6. Cahier 6, 2/23/42.
7. PH letter to Rosalind Constable, 15 Jan. 1968.
8. Ibid.
9. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1990), p. 76.
10. Ibid., p. 75.
11. No one ever mentions Willa Cather’s wonderful short story “Paul’s Case” (1906) in connection with The Talented Mr. Ripley; it is perhaps time to do so. Pat admired Cather, lived for two years with her parents in a building on the site of Cather’s old Greenwich Village residence on Bank Street, and would certainly have known “Paul’s Case” as one the few overtly American examples of a doubtfully sexed protagonist. There is something of the stagestruck Paul in Ripley and in his effeminacy, compulsive lying, felonious instincts, love of fine costume, and loathing of the low condition of his family. But Paul finishes, like Anna Kerenina, under the wheels of a train, while Tom Ripley ends up in the best hotel in Athens.
12. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, p. 140.
13. Ibid., p. 123.
14. Patricia Highsmith: Leben und Werk, eds. Franz Cavigelli, Fritz Senn, and Anna von Planta (Zurich: Diogenes, 1996). Peter Handke: “Die Privaten Weltkriege der Patricia Highsmith,” pp. 169–180 (trans. Anna von Planta).
15. CWA Judith Conklin Peters, 1 June 2002.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Cahier 23, 6/13/54.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 5/27/55.
21. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, p. 74.
22. CWA Ned Roche, 24 May 2002.
23. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, p. 75.
24. PH, The Talented Mr. Ripley, p. 131.
25. Ibid., pp. 137–38.
26. Diary 8, May 12, 1947.
27. Cahier 23, 10/1/54.
28. Cahier 23, 3/7/54.
29. Cahier 24, 9/29/57.
30. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, p. 50.
31. Cahier 26, 8/19/60.
32. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, p. 76.
33. Lisa Maria Hogeland, Afterword to In a Lonely Place, by Dorothy B. Hughes (New York: Feminist Press, 2003), p. 240.
34. Antonia Fraser, “The Unsuitable Suitor in the Lake,” Spectator, June 2003.
35. Patricia Schartle Myrer letter to the author, 17 Feb. 2003.
36. Dorothy B. Hughes letter to Joan Kahn, Dec. 1958 (CURB).
37. Don Swaim, Book Notes, Oct. 1987.
38. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, p. 75.
39. Pat added Ripley’s name to a letter to Barbara Ker-Seymer and did the same in a book dedication to Charles Latimer.
40. Cahier 23, 5/3/54.
41. Ibid., 11/19/54.
42. Duhamel was the name of one of PH’s French translators.
43. PH letter to KKS, 6 May 1970.
44. CWA Dan Walton Coates, 11 May 2002.
45. CWA Dan Walton Coates, 22 Nov. 2003.
46. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, pp. 23–24.
47. Cahier 23, 12/28/54.
48. Ibid., “New Year’s Eve,” 1954.
49. Cahier 26, 8/30/61.
50. Cahier 23, 12/6/55.
51. Ibid., 6/26/55.
52. Ibid., 7/3/54.
53. Diary 10, Jan. 6, 1951.
22. Les Girls: Part 6
1. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, pp. 20–21.
2. Cahier 24, 2/29/56.
3. Ibid., 1/28/56.
4. Ibid., 1/13/56.
5. “Books in Brief,” The New Yorker, 14 Jan. 1956, p. 100.
6. “Criminals at Large,” Anthony Boucher, New York Times Book Review, 25 Dec. 1955.
7. Cahier 24, 3/28/56.
8. Ibid., 4/13/56.
9. Ibid., 6/8/56.
10. Ibid., 6/17/56.
11. Ibid., 5/29/56.
12. PH letter to KKS, 23 Sept. 1956.
13. Ibid., 4 June 1956.
14. Cahier 24, 7/31/56.
15. Cahier 23, 6/4/55.
16. Cahier 24, 10/21/56.
17. Ibid., 11/23/56.
18. Ibid., 11/27/56.
19. PH letter to Joan Kahn, 14/9/59 (CURB).
20. Cahier 24, 3/7/57.
21. Ibid., 5/1/57.
22. Ibid., 5/22/57.
23. Ibid., 1/15/57.
24. Ibid., front cover.
25. PH letter to KKS, 24/9/53.
26. Cahier 24, 8/27/57.
27. Ibid., 9/30/57.
28. Ibid., 1/3/58 and 1/16/58.
29. Ibid., 1/3/58.
30. Cahier 23, 9/28/55.
31. Cahier 24, 5/19/57.
32. Ibid.
23. Les Girls: Part 7
1. Pat’s and Marijane’s agent, Patricia Schartle Myrer, described Marijane as “star-struck” by Pat in a letter to the author, 17 Feb. 2003.
2. Marijane Meaker interviewed by Terry Gross, Fresh Air, NPR, 12 July 2003.
3. CWA Marijane Meaker, 1 Feb. 2003.
4. Diary 11, July 27, 1951.
5. Liz Smith, Natural Blonde (New York: Hyperion, 2000), p. 258.
6. CWA Megan Terry, 29 Oct. 2006.
7. CWA Jean Rosenthal, 30 Oct. 2002.
8. CWA Megan Terry, 29 Oct. 2006.
9. Marijane Meaker, Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s, p. 1.
10. Ibid., p. 2.
11. Cahier 25, 9/28/59.
12. CWA Marijane Meaker, 1 Feb. 2003.
13. Marion Meade, Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (New York: Penguin, 1989), p. 266.
14. CWA Marijane Meaker, 1 Feb. 2003.
15. Ibid., 1 Feb. and 12 Nov. 2003.
16. Cahier 3, 7/7/40.
17. Ibid., 1/10/40.
18. MCH letter to Marijane Meaker, “Friday AM 11th” (Collection Marijane Meaker).
19. Ibid.
20. CWA Marijane Meaker, 1 Feb. 2003.
21. Cahier 26, 12/1/61.
22. Ibid., 3/23/61. “She denied having asked me, when I was replacing a hammer in the rack last night, ‘Do you want to hit me, Pat?’ I said of course not and hung up the hammer.”
23. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, pp. 11–12.
24. Joan Kahn letter to Patricia Schartle, 21 Feb. 1961 (CURB).
25. Cahier 26, 3/3/61.
26. Ibid., 3/14/61.
27. Ibid., 3/22/61.
28. Ibid.
29. Meaker, Highsmith; a theme of the book.
30. Cahier 26, 3/22/61.
31. Meaker, Highsmith, pp. 20, 166. Meaker is quoting Polly Cameron on Pat’s drinking.
32. Cahier 26, 3/22/61.
33. CWA Marijane Meaker, 1 Feb. 2003.
34. Cahier 27, 12/28/64.
It was no doubt a tragedy that I saw
“Forbidden” written like a word in red paint,
“Stop,” and could read it, when I was six,
A tragedy that at sixteen and eighteen,
Love still a new gift to me, ungiven because untaken,
A tragedy that I would have given this best that I had,
Better than precious stones I read about in books.
It’s perhaps a tragedy I had to swallow my precious stone
At sixteen, watching careless boys and girls
Walking hand in hand down public streets,
As indifferent to what people thought of them
As they were to their own sensations, walking the next day with someone else.
MY envy turned to hatred
And the hatred to contempt….
35. Meaker, Highsmith, p. 179.
36. Diary 10, Nov. 24, 1950.
37. CWA Vivien De Bernardi, 15 Aug. 2002.
24. Les Girls: Part 8
1. CWA Phillip Lloyd Powell, 13 Feb. 2003.
2. Ibid.
3. CWA Nora Ellen Lewis, 14 Feb. 2006.
4. Diary 13, Sunday, 16 Sept. 1962.
5. CWA Marion Aboudaram, 23 Sept. 2002.
6. PH letter to KKS, 30 Mar. 1988.
7. PH letter to Lil Picard, 23 Jan. 1968 (UIL).
8. Diary 15, Jan. 23., 1968.
9. CWA Linda Ladurner, 10 May 2003.
10. PH letter to Lil Picard, 23 Jan. 1968 (UIL).
11. PH letter to KKS, 11 Feb. 1976.
12. CWA Frédérique Chambrelent, 19 May 2003.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Anthony Cronin, one of Samuel Beckett’s biographers, writes of a boisterous, bibulous Desmond Ryan, on a night out with Samuel Beckett and Ralph Cusack in 1947, hurling ecclesiastical chair after ecclesiastical chair down the hundreds of steps which descend from the front of Paris’s second-best-known church, Sacre Coeur.
17. CWA Janine Hérisson, 29 Oct. 2002.
18. Henri Robillot letter to the author, 29/10/02.
19. PH letter to MCH, 3 May 1968.
20. CWA Nora Ellen Lewis, 14 Feb. 2006.
21. CWA Larry Kramer, 14 June 2006.
22. Larry Kramer letter to PH, 10 Feb. 1971.
23. CWA Larry Kramer, 14 Feb. 2006.
24. Diary 15, Aug. 11, 1963.
25. Ibid., Jan. 31, 1964.
26. PH letter to Lil Picard, 11 June 1969 (UIL).
27. Ibid., 8 July 1969 (UIL).
28. Ibid.
29. Cahier 26, 3/4/61.
30. Ibid., 9/4/61.
31. Ibid., 6/16/61.
32. PH, The Cry of the Owl (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989), p. 27.
33. PH letter to KKS, 6 Feb. 1963.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., 3 May 1963.
36. Ibid., 4 June, 1964.
25. Les Girls: Part 9
1. Cahier 28, 12/15/64.
2. Ibid., 3/3/65.
3. Ibid., 4/23/65.
4. Ibid., 7/12/65.
5. Ibid., 8/5/65.
6. Ibid., 1/15/67.
7. Ibid., 4/12/65.
8. Ibid., 4/12/67.
9. Most of the character names in Those Who Walk Away, like most character names in other Highsmith fictions, are unconvincing as names: they sound like bad aliases. Whether they’re the product of an imagination which spent quite a bit of time inventing for the comics, where similarly incredible proper names abound, or whether they are merely the result of Pat’s tin ear for intonation, is impossible to determine. If we contrast, for example, the name Odile Masarati, the woman in the Highsmith short story “The Cruellest Month” who is proud to be physically scarred in her pursuit of a Graham Greene–like author, with any of the names on Vladimir Nabokov’s pitch-perfect list of Lolita’s little classmates in the novel Lolita, the difference between a fictional name that sounds real and one that sounds false becomes obvious. Pat did pluck one surname for Those Who Walk Away from her grandmother Willie Mae’s family history: she made the unseen Mallorcan landlord of Ray and Peggy Garret a Deckkard.
10. PH, Strangers on a Train, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 270.
11. CWA Janice Robertson, 22 June 2003.
12. Cahier 28, 1/15/67.
13. Cahier 26, 2/3/62.
14. Cahier 28, 7/11/65.
15. Ibid., 2/7/66.
16. Ibid., 3/30/66.
17. Ibid., 7/13/66.
18. Ibid., 7/7/66.
19. Ibid., 7/19/66.
20. Ibid., 7/19/66.
21. Ibid., 7/21/66.
22. PH, The Tremor of Forgery, p. 87.
23. Cahier 28, 1/27/67.
24. Ibid., 1/16/67.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., 1/2/67.
28. Cahier 29, 1/27/67.
29. Cahier 28, 3/28/67.
26. Les Girls: Part 10
1. PH letter to Alex Szogyi, 14 Nov. 1969.
2. Ibid.
3. CWA Barbara Roett, 18 May 2003.
4. Diary 10, Jan. 27, 1950.
5. Cahier 34, 4/9/78.
6. PH letter to Alex Szogyi, 24 Apr. 1978.
7. Cahier 35, 8/24/80.
8. CWA Phyllis Nagy, 26 June 2002.
9. Sally Vincent, “Wave from Afar,” Observer, 27 Apr. 1980.
10. CWA Francis Wyndham, 20 Dec. 2003.
11. Francis Wyndham letter to PH, 4 Nov. 1984.
12. CWA Linda Ladurner, 10 May 2003.
13. CWA Tabea Blumenschein, 15 June 2003.
14. Diary 9, 27 Jan. 1949.
15. BKS letter to Barbara Roett, 8 June 1978 (TGA).
16. Meaker, Highsmith, pp. 189, 190.
17. Ibid., pp 183–98.
18. PH, unpublished “Impossible Interview” with Yitzhak Shamir, 1990.
19. CWA Christa Maerker, 21 July 2004.
20. CWA Phyllis Nagy, 26 June 2002.
21. Cahier 24, 9/30/57.
22. Cahier 25, 11/19/59.
27. Les Girls: Part 11
1. Cahier 36, 4/3/84.
2. Cahier 26, 12/22/61.
3. Cahier 4, 9/15/40.
4. CWA Susannah Clapp, 2 Jan. 2004.
5. Cahier 26, 8/25/62.
6. Cahier 27, 1/19/63.
7. Cahier 32, 6/17/73.
8. Ibid.
9. Cahier 9, 9/29/43.
10. Joyce Carol Oates, “Dark Laughter,” New York Review of Books, 15 Nov. 2001; also in Oates, Uncensored: Views & (Re)views (New York: Ecco, 2005), p. 44. Nothing That Meets the Eye, a second posthumous collection of Highsmith stories written between 1938 and 1989, is not a collection Highsmith herself would have approved. The stories appeared in such publications as Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Woman’s Home Companion, Cosmopolitan, Today’s Woman, and Home and Food. In a letter to Kingsley Skattebol on 27 September 1994, four months before she died, Pat strongly objected to the publication of her early work: “What I am against—since you’re my lit. exec.—is publishing inferior products of mine…. My point is, it’s scraping the bottom of the barrel, just to make a few francs…. I decided today to refuse to publish (or work on) such a book, and so wrote to v. Planta.”
11. PH letter to Alex Szogyi, 10–11 Mar. 1969.
12. CWA Daniel Keel, 12 Apr. 2003.
13. Ibid.
14. CWA KKS, 12 Sept. 2003.
15. CWA Marion Aboudaram, 21 Sept. 2002.
16. Descriptions of Pat’s laughter come from Vivien De Bernardi, Charles Latimer, Joan Dupont.
17. Patricia Schartle Myrer letter to the author, 17 Feb. 2003.
18. PH letter to Alain Oulman, 18 Sept. 1982 (CLA).
19. CWA Jonathan Kent, 18 Nov. 2003.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. CWA Peter and Anita Huber-Speck, 18 Apr. 2003.
23. PH letter to BKS, 11 Sept. 1973.
24. Cahier 23, 5/2/54.
25. Cahier 21, 11/30/51.
26. CWA Barbara Roett, 18 May 2003.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. CWA Marion Aboudaram, 21 Sept. 2002.
30. Ibid., 23 Sept. 2002.
31. Ibid., 25 Sept. 2002.
32. Ibid., 23 Sept. 2002.
33. Ibid., 25 Sept. 2002.
34. Ibid., 23 Oct. 2002.
35. Francis Wyndham, “Miss Highsmith,” New Statesman, 30 May 1963.
36. CWA Francis Wyndham, 20 Dec. 2003.
37. Ibid.
38. Cahier 13, 9/6/45.
39. CWA Peter Huber, 22 Apr. 2003.
40. Peter Handke, “Die Privaten Weltkriege der Patricia Highsmith,” pp. 169–180.
41. CWA Barbara Roett, 18 May 2003.
42. PH letter to KKS, 26 Oct. 1953.
43. Cahier 15, 4/16/47.
28. Les Girls: Part 12
1. Cahier 32, 10/20/73.
2. Juliette Ryan letter to the author, 8 Nov. 2002.
3. PH, Deep Water (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), p. 84.
4. CWA Juliette Ryan, 6 Nov. 2002.
5. Judith Freeman, The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007).
6. PH, Introduction to The World of Raymond Chandler, edited by Miriam Gross (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977).
7. Ibid., p. 5.
8. Ibid., p. 2.
9. Raymond Chandler letter to Carl Brandt, 11 Dec. 1950, Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, edited by Frank MacShane (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981), p. 247.
10. PH, Introduction to The World of Raymond Chandler, p. 3.
11. Edward Burra letter to BKS, autumn 1971 (TGA).
12. CWA Noëlle Loriot, 5 July 2002.
13. All direct quotations, unless otherwise cited, come from Noëlle Loriot, “Trois Jours avec Patricia Highsmith,” L’Express, 8 June 1979.
14. CWA Noëlle Loriot, 5 July 2002.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
29. Les Girls: Part 13
1. PH letter to KKS, 14 Mar. 1968.
2. CWA Peter Huber, 18 Apr. 2003.
3. CWA DéDé Moser, 2 Aug. 2004.
4. A partial list of people close to Pat who fall into one of the several categories of not caring for Pat’s work—or not reading it: Kingsley Skattebol, Ellen Hill, Caroline Besterman, Peter Huber and Anita Huber-Speck (with reservations), Vivien De Bernardi, Monique Buffet, Marion Aboudaram (with reservations), Tabea Blumenschein, and Barbara Ker-Seymer.
5. Barbara Skelton, “Patricia Highsmith at Home,” London Magazine, Aug.–Sept. 1995.
6. CWA Vivien De Bernardi, 15 Aug. 2003.
7. Ibid.
8. Diary 17, Dec. 24, 1989.
9. Ibid., Nov. 15, 1991.
10. Ibid., May 23, 1992.
11. Mary Ford, “This Is Your Second Brain,” Sunday Telegraph, 4 Sept. 2005.
12. CWA Vivien De Bernardi, 15 Aug. 2003.
13. CWA Bert Diener and Julia Diener-Diethelm, 1 Apr. 2003.
14. CWA KKS, 6 Jan. 2003.
15. PH letter to KKS, 14 June 1988.
16. CWA Marion Aboudaram, 24 Sept. 2002.
17. PH letter to KKS, 23 Mar. 1953.
18. PH letter to Mary McCarthy, 3 Oct. 1972 (VCL).
19. Mary Kling remembers “two or three lunches [with Pat]—and I knew if she wanted to be my client I couldn’t refuse her, but…she wasn’t conversable.”
20. PH letter to Mary McCarthy, 9 Sept. 1983 (VCL).
21. Ibid., 16 May 1983 (VCL).
22. Ibid., 10 Oct. 1977 (VCL).
23. Mary McCarthy Archives (VCL).
24. CWA Marion Aboudaram, 23 Sept. 2002.
25. CWA Monique Buffet, 7 Apr. 2003.
26. MB letter to the author, 27 Sept. 2004.
27. CWA Barbara Roett, 18 May 2003.
28. PH letter to Ellen Hill, 10 July 1978.
29. PH, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, manuscript.
30. CWA Monique Buffet, 7 Apr. 2003.
31. CWA Tabea Blumenschein, 15 June 2003.
32. Diary 6, 11/14/44.
33. CWA Phyllis Nagy, 13 Oct. 2002.
34. PH letter to Monique Buffet, 13 Aug. 1978 (Collection Monique Buffet).
35. Ibid., 23 Aug. 1978 (Collection Monique Buffet).
36. Ibid., 27 Sept. 1978 (Collection Monique Buffet).
37. PH letter to MB, 19 Nov. 1978.
38. CWA Barbara Roett, 18 May 2003.
39. Meaker, Highsmith, p. 48.
40. PH letter to Mr. Reichardt, 4 Nov. 1970.
41. PH letter to KKS, 16 Mar. 1971.
42. Muriel Spark telegram to PH, 1968.
43. CWA Muriel Spark, 24 May 2005.
44. Muriel Spark, A Far Cry from Kensington (New York: New Directions, 1988), pp. 93–94.
45. Cahier 26, 7/3/60.
46. PH letter to MB, Sept. 13, 1978 (Collection Monique Buffet).
47. CWA Monique Buffet, 21 June 2003.
48. Ibid., 7 Apr. 2003.
49. PH letter to MB, 6 Sept. 1978 (Collection Monique Buffet).
50. PH letter to Alex Szogyi, 18 Feb. 1969.
30. Les Girls: Part 14
1. PH letter to MB, 24 Sept. 1992 (Collection Monique Buffet).
2. CWA Francis Wyndham, 20 Dec. 2003.
3. Meaker, Highsmith, p. 60.
4. Joan Juliet Buck, “A Terrifying Talent,” Observer Magazine, 20 Nov. 1977.
5. Andrew Wilson, Beautiful Shadow (New York: Bloomsbury, 2003). p. 286.
6. Francis King, “Angry Old Woman,” Oldie, 6 Jan. 2004.
7. CWA Caroline Besterman, 6 Nov. 2003.
8. CWA Christa Maerker, 21 July 2004.
9. CWA Alex Szogyi and Philip Thompson, 9 Dec. 2002.
10. CWA KKS, 19 Apr. 2005.
11. Cahier 3, 4/12/41.
12. CWA MB, 7 Apr. 2003.
13. CWA Bettina Berch, 10 Aug. 2003.
14. PH letter to Alex Szogyi, 31 Mar. 1969.
15. Ibid., 4 Nov. 1968.
16. Ibid., 23 Aug. 1970.
17. Cahier 36, 2/8/88.
18. CWA Monique Buffet, 5 Dec. 2003.
19. PH letter to KKS, 6 Feb. 1989.
20. Cahier 36, 18/5/88.
21. One of Pat’s uncles, Mother Mary’s brother, was named Claude, and he and Mary were coexecutors of Willie Mae Coates’s estate, the disposition of which had left Pat feeling cheated. (She hadn’t been cheated, but she didn’t forget the incident, either.)
22. PH, “Two Disagreeable Pigeons,” in Nothing That Meets the Eye (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002).
23. Cahier 19, 7/22/50.
24. Diary 10, Jan. 4, 1950.
25. PH letter to Ronald Blythe, 26 Nov. 1966 (Collection Ronald Blythe).
31. The Real Romance of Objects: Part 1
1. PH, “The View from My Window,” draft article dated 1980.
2. CWA Josyane Savigneau, 1 July 2002.
3. Ripley Under Ground (1970) features a cellar in which one man is murdered and another man mimics suicide. Of the enormous cellar in her house in Tegna, Pat wrote to her architect: “The guests can go in the cellar.” Nothing good happens underground in the Highsmith imagination.
4. Cahier 23, 5/6/55.
5. PH letter to KKS, 27 Oct. 1953.
6. CWA KKS, 12 June 2004.
7. Marijane Meaker letter to the author, 7 Nov. 2003.
8. Ibid. Mary responded to Meaker with a tsunami from Texas: five closely typed single-spaced pages setting out (1) Pat’s terrible treatment of Mary on several continents; (2) a long list of the older women Mary held responsible for influencing/corrupting Pat; (3) Mary’s own formerly glorified circumstances including her “Filipino house boy (“He was small, slight, attractive and graceful as a ballet dancer and made an effort to please me in every way”); and (4) a self-assessment: “I too am an extrovert and have never met a stranger.” Mary—so much like her daughter—had no trouble in emptying the contents of her mind onto a page when she was exercised on a subject:
First of all and I think you will agree—PAT IS SICK. Somewhere along the line she is insecure, unsure and completely swayed by women older than herself whom I have met and loathe[d] on sight—Rosalind [Constable], [Elizabeth] Lyne, [Lil] Picard and the like…. It’s the last person Pat is with who has the influence. She is exactly like a chamelian [sic] changing colors and turning on a good friend as tho mesmerized…. Can you figure her out…. I think Pat is wearing a very uncomfortable hair-shirt of her own designing…. I can only wait—I still have faith in Pat, I brought her up and I know her background.
9. CWA Josyane Savigneau, 1 July 2002.
10. CWA Phyllis Nagy, 13 Oct. 2002.
11. Ibid.
12. PH letter to KKS, 31 May 1989.
13. Don Swaim, Book Notes, Oct. 1987.
14. Diary 1, July 7, 1941.
15. PH letter to Nini Wills, 9 Mar. 1972.
16. MCH letter to PH, 10 May 1972.
17. Cahier 36, 2/11/87.
18. PH letter to MCH, 9 April 1971.
19. Cahier 9, PH transcription from high school notebooks, July 1937.
20. PH letter to DOC, 26 Dec. 1968.
21. Alain Oulman letters to PH, 3 Dec. 1979 and 8 Feb. 1980. PH letters to Alain Oulman, 21 Aug. 1979 and 10 Feb. 1980 (CLA).
22. PH letter to Alex Szogyi, 23 Aug. 1970.
23. PH letter to BKS, 24–25 Oct. 1970.
24. CWA Claire Cauvin, 4 July 2002.
25. PH letter to BKS, 1 Mar. 1972.
26. PH letter to Alex Szogyi, 10 Sept. 1973.
27. CWA Vivien De Bernardi, 15 Aug. 2003.
28. CWA Marion Aboudaram, 23 Sept. 2002.
29. PH letter to MB, 2 July 1980.
30. Cahier 34, 12 Aug. 1978.
31. CWA Phyllis Nagy, 13 Oct. 2002.
32. PH letter to Florine Coates, 9 July 1994.
33. CWA Vivien De Bernardi, 15 Aug. 2003.
34. KKS letter to the author, 16 Jan. 2003.
35. PH, The Traffic of Jacob’s Ladder, manuscript fragment.
36. Don Swaim, Book Notes, Oct. 1987.
37. PH letter to Bettina Berch, 17 May 1984.
38. PH letter to Abe Janssens, piano player at the Hotel Normandy in Deauville, France, 15 Oct. 1987.
39. Cahier 30, 11/9/69.
40. PH letter to Lil Picard, 11 June 1969 (UIL).
41. CWA Christa Maerker, 21 July 2004.
42. Cahier 21, 11/30/52.
43. PH letter to Ellen Blumenthal Hill, 30–31 Jan. 1982.
44. CWA Bettina Berch, 10 Aug. 2003.
45. PH letter to KKS, 7 May 1989.
46. PH letter to Bettina Berch, 13 Apr. 1984.
47. Donald Swaim, Book Notes, Oct. 1987.
48. CWA Bettina Berch, 10 Aug. 2003.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. PH letter to Bettina Berch, 21 July 1984.
52. Bettina Berch, introduction to unpublished interview, “A Talk with Patricia Highsmith,” 15 June 1984.
53. Bettina Berch, “A Talk with Patricia Highsmith,” pp. 10, 17.
54. CWA Vince Fago, 28 Nov. 2001.
55. PH letter to Marijane Meaker, 18 Oct. 1988 (Collection Marijane Meaker).
56. CWA Josyane Savigneau, 1 July 2002.
57. Patricia Schartle Myrer letter to PH, 21 Aug. 1979.
32. The Real Romance of Objects: Part 2
1. On 18 October 1973, Pat’s literary agency in Paris, the William Bradley Agency, wrote her: “According to your final instructions, we have just asked Morgan Guaranty Trust Co. here to transfer to your account with S.R.M. Management, E. D. Sassoon, Nassau, Bahamas, the film monies received from Film Number one and Glan Productions for The Tremor of Forgery.”
2. PH letter to KKS, 25 Aug. 1969.
3. CWA Samuel Okoshken, 25 June 2003.
4. PH letter to Monique Buffet, 14 Jan. 1980 (Collection Monique Buffet).
5. Ibid., 9 Oct. 1979 (Collection MB).
6. Ibid., 14 Jan. 1980 (Collection MB).
7. CWA Samuel Okoshken, 25 June 2003.
8. PH letter to Monique Buffet, 14 Jan. 1980 (Collection Monique Buffet).
9. CWA Samuel Okoshken, 25 June 2003.
10. PH, The Tremor of Forgery, pp. 139–40.
11. PH letter to DOC, 9 Nov. 1969.
12. PH letter to KKS, 9 July 1973.
13. CWA Vivien De Bernardi, 15 Aug. 2003.
14. PH letter to BKS, 31 Mar. 1980.
15. PH letter to MB, 29 Mar. 1980 (Collection Monique Buffet).
16. Ibid.
17. PH letter to BKS, 19 June 1980.
18. Ibid., 31 March 1980.
19. CWA Samuel Okoshken, 25 Aug. 2003.
20. CWA MB, 7 Apr. 2003.
21. Paul Bowles letter to PH, 23 Feb. 1990.
22. PH letter to MB, 28–29 Mar. 1980 (Collection Monique Buffet).
23. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1990), p. 143.
24. Ibid.
25. PH, Edith’s Diary, p. 296.
26. PH letter to MB, 28–29 Mar. 1980 (Collection Monique Buffet).
27. Ibid.
28. CWA Marion Aboudaram, 21 Sept. 2002. Also CWA Christa Maerker, 27 July 2008.
29. Cahier 31, 8/25/71.
30. Ibid.
31. CWA KKS, 20 Dec. 2002.
32. Cahier 31, 8/25/71.
33. PH letter to MB, 9–10 Apr. 1980 (Collection Monique Buffet).
34. Ibid.
35. CWA Marylin Scowden, 1 Sept. 2002.
36. Diary 16, Jan. 17, 1970.
37. PH letter to DOC, 9 Nov. 1969.
38. Rosalind Constable letter to PH, 15 Jan. 1968.
39. Cahier 30, 8/13/69.
40. Cahier 30, 7/29/68.
41. Rosalind Constable letter to PH, 3 Mar. 1968.
42. Ibid., 14 Nov. 1969.
43. CWA MB, 25 Aug. 2004.
44. PH letter to Bettina Berch, 4 Sept. 1985.
45. CWA Daniel Keel, 20 Mar. 2003.
46. CWA Alex Szogyi, 11 Dec. 2001.
47. CWA Robert Lumpkin, 1 Aug. 2004.
48. Andrew Wilson, Beautiful Shadow (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), p. 341.
49. Ibid., p. 388.
50. Cahier 35, 6/1/83.
51. PH letter to Bettina Berch, 14 Feb. 1986.
52. Barbara Skelton, “Patricia Highsmith at Home,” The London Magazine, Aug.-Sept. 1995.
53. PH, The Talented Mr. Ripley, p. 49.
54. PH, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, pp. 63–64.
55. Ibid., p. 64.
56. Cahier 13, 8/12/45.
33. The Real Romance of Objects: Part 3
1. CWA Phyllis Nagy, 26 June 2002.
34. The Cake that was Shaped Like a Coffin: Part I
1. The Animal-Lovers Book of Beastly Murder, Little Tales of Misogyny, Slowly, Slowly in the Wind, Mermaids on the Golf Course, The Black House.
2. CWA Otto Penzler, 23 Dec. 2002.
3. Ibid., 27 Dec. 2002.
4. Ibid.
5. David Streitfeld, “Highsmith’s Final Twist,” Washington Post, 8 Mar. 1988.
6. David Streitfeld, Washington Post, 29 Jan. 1989.
7. David Streitfeld letter to the author, 2 Jan. 2006.
8. CWA Otto Penzler, 27 Dec. 2002.
9. CWA Daniel Keel, 12 Apr. 2003.
35. The Cake that was Shaped Like a Coffin: Part 2
1. Diary, 17, 18 Sept. 1988.
2. PH letters to Tobias Amman, 1988–90.
3. Cahier 22, 3/1/52 (misdated in cahier; it’s 1953).
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. PH letter to MB, 11 Oct. 1982 (Collection Monique Buffet).
9. CWA Wim Wenders, 20 Sept. 2006.
10. CWA Daniel Keel, 20 Mar. and 12 Apr. 2003. It could hardly have escaped Pat’s attention that, with Daniel Keel, she added another Daniel to the long line of Daniels that had been her Coates family inheritance.
11. CWA Marianne Liggenstorfer-Fritsch, 20 Mar. 2003.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. PH letter to Dr. Girsberger, 19 Dec. 1991.
16. PH letter to KKS, 20 Dec. 1987.
17. PH letter to MB, 2 Feb 1988 (Collection Monique Buffet).
18. Ibid.
19. PH letter to Barbara Skelton, quoted in Skelton, “Patricia Highsmith at Home.”
20. PH letter to KKS, 25 Apr. 1992.
21. Liz Calder, “Patricia Highsmith,” Oldie, Mar. 1995.
22. CWA Marylin Scowden, 1 Sept. 2002.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Cahier 35, 1/15/80.
26. CWA Daniel Keel, 20 Mar. 2003.
27. Ibid.
28. PH, “Winter in the Ticino,” in Ticking Along with the Swiss, edited by Dianne Dicks (Basel: Bergli Books, 1988).
29. CWA David Streiff, 19 Sept. 2002.
30. PH, “Winter in the Ticino.”
31. Ibid.
32. PH letter to KKS, 20 Mar. 1984.
33. PH, “Winter in the Ticino.”
34. Cahier 37, 6/10/88.
35. Ibid., 12/5/89.
36. PH letter to KKS, 15 May 1978.
37. Ibid., 14 May 1983.
38. PH letter to Anne Uhde, 6 Mar. 1983.
39. PH letter to Patricia Losey, 16 Apr. 1984.
40. PH, “Winter in the Ticino.”
41. CWA David Streiff, 30 July 2002.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. Documentary film, David Streiff, outtakes, Switzerland, 1991.
46. Cahier 30, 12/12/68.
47. PH, Strangers on a Train, p. 251.
48. Ibid., pp. 180–81.
49. PH, The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 410.
50. Ibid., p. 414.
51. Ibid., p. 416.
52. Cahier 34, 4/30/77.
53. Ibid., 7/25/77.
54. Ibid., 12/10/77.
55. Skelton, “Patricia Highsmith at Home.”
36. The Cake that was Shaped Like a Coffin: Part 3
1. Cahier 36, 10/18/83.
2. Ibid., 3/24/84.
3. Ibid., 4/16/84.
4. Ibid., 4/7/83.
5. Ibid., 10/12/84.
6. CWA Muriel Spark, 24 May 2005.
7. Anita Brookner, “Found in the Street,” Spectator, 19 Apr. 1986.
8. Alain Oulman letter to PH, 19 Aug. 1985 (CLA).
9. Terrence Rafferty, “Found in the Street,” The New Yorker, 4 Jan. 1988.
10. Francis Wyndham, “Miss Highsmith,” New Statesman, 31 May 1963.
11. Julian Symons, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), p. 178.
12. Ibid.
13. PH letter to KKS, 8 Mar. 1988.
14. CWA Anne Morneweg, 22 Jan. 2004.
15. PH, Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), p. 19.
16. CWA Phyllis Nagy, 13 Oct. 2002.
17. Cahier 37, 2/21/90 and 5/20/90.
18. CWA Jack Klaff, 14 Jan. 2004.
19. Cahier 35, 11/24/79.
20. Cahier 36, 4/15/87.
21. CWA Dan Walton Coates, 22 Nov. 2003, and Don Coates, 20 Apr. 2002.
22. PH, Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes, p. 139.
23. PH letter to KKS, 9 Sept. 1985.
24. MCH letter to PH, 31 Sept. 1974.
25. CWA Christa Maerker, 21 July 2004.
26. Jeva Cralick letter to Dan and Florine Coates, Christmas, 1978.
27. Ibid., 12 Mar. 1987.
37. The Cake that was Shaped Like a Coffin: Part 4
1. PH letter to Gore Vidal, 6 July 1979.
2. Paul Bowles letter to PH, 15 Dec. 1991.
3. PH letter to Gore Vidal, 29 Jan. 1988.
4. Cyril Connolly, “Koestler at Sixty,” Sunday Times, 19 Sept. 1965.
5. Cahier 37, 8/19/88.
6. Ibid., 8/29/88.
7. CWA Edmund White, 19 Aug. 2006.
8. Edmund White, “Paul Bowles,” in Arts and Letters (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2004).
9. Cahier 35, 1/9/88.
10. Stéphanie Cudré-Mauroux, “Tom Ripley, collectionneur et psychopathe,” Studer, Bärlach, Ripley, Gunten & Co., Quarto, revue des Archives littéraires suisses, 21–22, 2006.
11. Cahier 37, 12/5/89.
12. PH letters to KKS, 16 and 28 Oct. 1988.
13. CWA Peter Goedel, 16 June 2002. All subsequent quotations concerning Goedel’s dealings with PH are from this 16 June interview, unless otherwise attributed.
14. CWA Richard Schroeder, 19 Jan. 2004.
15. PH letter to Patricia Losey, 7 Jan. 1989.
16. PH postcard to Peter Goedel, undated (Collection Peter Goedel).
38. The Cake that was Shaped Like a Coffin: Part 5
1. Cahier 36, 26/1/87.
2. Ibid., 29/1/87.
3. Ibid., 25/1/87.
4. Ibid., 20/8/87.
5. Ibid., 25/9/87.
6. Ibid., 4/3/84.
7. CWA Vivien De Bernardi, 15 Aug. 2002.
8. PH letter to KKS, 1 Sept. 1990.
9. Ibid., 25 Apr. 1990.
10. Ibid., 26 Aug. 1987.
11. Cahier 32, 1/26/70.
12. CWA Heather Chasen, 22 Sept. 2002.
13. CWA Alex Szogyi, 11 Dec. 2001.
14. Ibid.
15. PH letter to Alex Szogyi, 22 Mar. 1973.
16. Alex Szogyi letter to PH, 19 June 1978.
17. PH letter to Lil Picard, 23 Oct. 1974 (UIL).
18. PH letter to KKS, 1 Dec. 1986.
19. CWA Peter Huber, 18 Apr. 2003.
20. PH letter to KKS, 30 Dec. 1987.
21. CWA Peter Huber, 18 Apr. 2003.
22. PH letter to KKS, 27 May 1991.
23. Cahier 37, 30/6/91.
24. Cahier 37, 14/3/92.
25. PH letter to KKS, 24 Apr. 1990.
26. PH letter to Alex Szogyi, 22–23 Jan. 1972.
27. Marc Brandel letter to PH, 6 Jan. 1987.
28. Ibid., 17 Nov. 1979.
29. Cahier 36, 27/8/86.
30. Cahier 36, Brompton Account, April–July 1986. The entire history of Pat’s lung operation is taken from two pages in Cahier 36, labelled Brompton Account.
31. The Cry of the Owl, Edith’s Diary, Found in the Street, A Game for the Living, Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes, Those Who Walk Away, The Tremor of Forgery, The Two Faces of January, Eleven.
32. CWA Anne Elizabeth Suter, 8 July 2004.
33. CWA Gary Fisketjon, 10 Dec. 2002.
34. CWA Phyllis Nagy, 13 Oct. 2002.
The Cake that was Shaped Like a Coffin: Part 6
1. Rosalind Constable letter to PH, 21 Feb. 1983.
2. CWA Peter Huber, 18 Apr. 2003.
3. Betty Curry letter to PH, December 19, 1991. Also letters of 21 June 1974, 12 Dec. 1986, 21 May 1989, 18 Dec. 1991.
4. Ibid., 23 May 1993.
5. Gert Macy letter to PH, 22 Nov. 1974.
6. Lynn Roth letter to PH, 20 June 1985.
7. Natalia Danesi Murray letter to PH, 1 Dec. 1985.
8. Gina letters to PH, 24 July 1978–22 Sept. 1989.
9. Polly Cameron letter to PH, 23 Dec. 1990.
10. Betty Curry letter to PH, 5 Nov. 1977.
11. Daisy Winston letter to PH, 20 Apr. 1992.
12. Ibid., Friday, 22 Mar. (no year).
13. Ibid., 1 Nov. 1992.
14. Ibid., undated.
15. Ibid., 16 Jan. 1985.
16. Ibid., 28 Dec. 1991.
17. Buffie Johnson letter to PH, 11 Mar. 1986.
18. CWA Buffie Johnson, 1 Dec. 2001.
19. PH letter to KKS, 20 Oct. 1989.
20. Ibid., 28 Nov. 1989.
21. PH letter to Alain Oulman, 27 Nov. 1989.
22. Ellen Hill letter to Lil Picard, 2 Jan. 1978 (UIL).
23. PH letter to Lil Picard, 28 Dec. 1975 (UIL).
24. Cahier 34, 9/23/76.
25. Ibid.
26. Rosalind Constable letter to PH, 7 Apr. 1968.
27. Ibid., 16 Sept. 1968.
28. Ibid., 3 Sept. 1968.
29. Ibid., 28 Sept. 1973.
30. Cahier 37, 31/12/92.
31. Rosalind Constable letter to PH, 3 May 1982.
32. Ibid., 9 Apr. 1989.
33. Ibid., 17 Nov. 1992.
The Cake that was Shaped Like a Coffin: Part 7
1. Skelton, “Patricia Highsmith at Home.”
2. Peter Ruedi, “For Patricia Highsmith, Tegna 11 March, 1995.”
3. CWA Tanja Howarth, 22 Oct. 2002.
4. Ibid.
5. CWA Vivien De Bernardi, 15 Aug. 2003.
6. CWA Gary Fisketon, 10 Dec. 2002.
7. PH letter to Gary Fisketjon, 26 July 1994 (GFF).
8. CWA Peter Huber, 18 Apr. 2003.
9. CWA KKS, 21 Apr. 2002.
10. Ibid., 7 Oct. 2007.
11. CWA Tanja Howarth, 22 Oct. 2002.
12. Cahier 26, 7/12/62.
13. CWA Tanja Howarth, 22 Oct. 2002.
14. CWA Bert Diener, 18 Apr. 2003.
15. Ibid.
16. CWA Myra Sklarew, 1 Mar. 2004.
17. CWA Mike Sundell, 4 Mar. 2004.
18. CWA Liz Calder, 9 May 2003.
19. Cahier 37, 8/2/92.
20. CWA Heather Chasen, 19 Oct. 2002.
21. Cahier 37, 2/8/92.
22. Cahier 37, 10/10–13/92.
23. Lucretia Stewart, “Animal Lover’s Beastly Murders,” Sunday Telegraph, 8 Sept. 1991.
24. Ibid.
25. Cahier 37, 10/10–13/92.
26. CWA Bob Lemstron-Sheedy, 25 July 2003.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. CWA Donald Rice, 25 Feb. 2004.
32. CWA DéDé Moser, 2 Aug. 2004.
33. CWA Donald Rice, 25 Feb. 2004.
34. Ibid.
35. Mike Sundell letter to the author, 29 Nov. 2007.
36. Ibid.
37. CWA Mike Sundell, 4 Mar. 2004.
38. PH letter to Dr. Stewart Clarke, 18 July 1993.
39. Skelton, “Patricia Highsmith at Home.”
40. PH letter to Bettina Berch, 19 Mar. 1994; PH letter to Florine Coates, 9 July 1994.
41. PH letter to Bettina Berch, 19 Mar. 1994.
42. CWA Bruno Sager, 7 June 2003.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. CWA Anna Keel, 20 Mar. 2003.
47. CWA Bruno Sager, 7 June 2003.
48. PH letter to Jean-Étienne Cohen-Séat, 27 Oct. 1994 (CLA).
49. CWA Patrice Hoffman, 26 Aug. 2004.
50. Ibid.
41. The Cake that was Shaped Like a Coffin: Part 8
1. CWA Mike Sundell, 4 Mar. 2004.
2. Ibid.
3. CWA Don Rice, 25 Feb. 2004.
4. CWA Daniel Keel and Anna Keel, 20 Mar. 2003.
5. CWA Marylin Scowden, 1 Sept. 2002.
6. CWA Bert Diener and Julia Diener-Diethelm, 18 Apr. 2003.
7. CWA Anne Morneweg, 22 Jan. 2004.
8. CWA Marylin Scowden, 1 Sept. 2002.
9. Cahier 35, 5/9/80.