The Talented Miss Highsmith (95 page)

 

1961.
January: Pat begins work on
Girls' Book
, which becomes
First Person Novel,
about a woman recounting her lesbian experiences to her husband by letter. She stops the book after fifty-nine pages.
    Spring: Pat and Meaker separate; Pat moves to an apartment and then to a house in New Hope at 113 South Sugan Road. She begins a yearlong affair with Daisy Winston, later a travel agent, now an occasional waitress at Odette's, a nightclub in New Hope. Daisy becomes a lifelong friend.
    April: Pat begins
The Cry of the Owl
, set in Lambertville, Pennsylvania, just across the river from New Hope. She writes to Kingsley that with this book, “I am writing something out of my system.” In it, she again kills off a girlfriend: Marijane Meaker in the character of Robert Forester's pathological ex-wife. A case of German measles in June helps her work along.

 

1962.
Summer: She travels to Europe, sharing a house in Positano with Ellen Hill; they immediately begin to quarrel again. They go on to Rome and Pat travels to Venice, staying at the Pensione Seguso, which she will make use of in her Venice novel
Those Who Walk Away.
In July, she is in Paris, weeping over Oscar Wilde's grave in Père Lachaise. During this summer in Europe, she meets Caroline Besterman and falls in love “as never before.” She returns to Pennsylvania, struck to the heart.
    September: Back in New Hope, Pat begins to write
The Glass Cell,
inspired in part by a correspondence with an inmate in a Chicago prison. She visits Doylestown prison for atmosphere (but isn't allowed inside), and takes some details for the novel from a book about an unjustly imprisoned engineer who was strung up by his thumbs in prison and became a morphine addict—details she attaches to
The Glass Cell
's hero, Philip arter.

 

1962.
Obsessed by her love for Caroline Besterman and unable to work, she decides to move to England to be near the married Caroline.

 

1963.
February: Pat takes a boat to Lisbon, then to Positano, where Edna Lewis, mother-in-law of her New Hope friend Peggy Lewis, has an art school. She rents the house she had the year before. At Edna Lewis's party she meets the writer Larry Kramer and spends time with some expatriate artists. She makes a quick trip to London to see Caroline, whose husband has been told of their affair. While in London, she does a radio interview with the writer Francis Wyndham, the first person in England to write about her at length as a serious novelist. (Maurice Richardson wrote about her work for
The Observer
in 1957.) Wyndham writes a subsequent article in the
New Statesmen
which effectively introduces her work to Britain. Caroline comes back with her to Positano. Pat is so deeply in love with Caroline that she changes her will, leaving half her estate to Caroline, half to Mary Highsmith, and her manuscripts to her friend from Barnard College, Kate Kingsley Skattebol. She is in the habit of changing her will frequently, but she has never left money to a lover before—nor will she ever do so again. The depth of her feeling for Caroline is contained in this characteristic statement: “I have imagined killing myself, strangely, more strongly now than with anyone else I have ever known” (Diary 15, 3 May 1963).
    Pat moves to Aldeburgh, to 27 King Street, in Suffolk. Then she buys Bridge Cottage in Earl Soham, Suffolk. Caroline visits on weekends.
    Pat writes
A Suspension of Mercy
(published as
The Story-Teller
in the United States) and makes friends with her neighbor, the writer Ronald Blythe, and his circle, which includes James Hamilton-Paterson, future author of
Cooking with Fernet-Branca
.

 

1963.
February: Pat takes a boat to Lisbon, then to Positano, where Edna Lewis, mother-in-law of her New Hope friend Peggy Lewis, has an art school. She rents the house she had the year before. At Edna Lewis's party she meets the writer Larry Kramer and spends time with some expatriate artists. She makes a quick trip to London to see Caroline, whose husband has been told of their affair. While in London, she does a radio interview with the writer Francis Wyndham, the first person in England to write about her at length as a serious novelist. (Maurice Richardson wrote about her work for
The Observer
in 1957.) Wyndham writes a subsequent article in the
New Statesmen
which effectively introduces her work to Britain. Caroline comes back with her to Positano. Pat is so deeply in love with Caroline that she changes her will, leaving half her estate to Caroline, half to Mary Highsmith, and her manuscripts to her friend from Barnard College, Kate Kingsley Skattebol. She is in the habit of changing her will frequently, but she has never left money to a lover before—nor will she ever do so again. The depth of her feeling for Caroline is contained in this characteristic statement: “I have imagined killing myself, strangely, more strongly now than with anyone else I have ever known” (Diary 15, 3 May 1963). Pat moves to Aldeburgh, to 27 King Street, in Suffolk. Then she buys Bridge Cottage in Earl Soham, Suffolk. Caroline visits on weekends. Pat writes
A Suspension of Mercy
(published as
The Story-Teller
in the United States) and makes friends with her neighbor, the writer Ronald Blythe, and his circle, which includes James Hamilton-Paterson, future author of
Cooking with Fernet-Branca
.

 

1964.
The Two Faces of January
is finally published by Doubleday in the United States and Heinemann in the UK in 1965.
The Two Faces of January
wins the Crime Writers Association of England's Silver Dagger Award for best foreign crime novel of 1964. Julian Symons is president of the awards committee and becomes another of her British champions, as does the novelist and political activist Brigid Brophy. Pat adds the Silver Dagger (it's an actual dagger) to her growing collection of sharpened instruments.

 

1965.
Pat starts to make notes for the novel which becomes
Ripley Under Ground,
published in 1970. The idea for the central figure, the dead artist Derwatt, came to her in 1952 when, sojourning on the Riviera with Ellen Hill, she wrote down a memory of Allela Cornell's studio on Washington Square, with “Allela like Christ, returned to be a painter. Who could be in her presence without being suffused with joy and contentment…? I should at some time like to do a story permeated with this paradisical atmosphere of the life creative and creating in her studio, destroyed in the fleshly suicide (so was X [Christ] a suicide) but living on always in the hearts of people who knew her” (Cahier 21, 4/5/52).
    May: Pat goes to Venice with Caroline Besterman: “my first vacation in nineteen months.” She does many drawings and is snubbed by Peggy Guggenheim, who refuses her invitation to Harry's Bar. Pat never wastes a trip, and she doesn't waste this one, later telling Mike Sundell, director of Yaddo, that she plotted
Those Who Walk Away
from her Venice maps. From October 1965 to March 1966 she writes
Those Who Walk Away,
her Venice novel of endless, topographically accurate, and paranoid pursuits.
    November: She begins to think of
Ripley Under Ground
as a television play:
Derwatt Resurrected
. “A religious television play, based on the effect of a friend (Jesus) upon a group of people. The Jesus figure dies, some what of a suicide, whereupon his influence grows.” Her thoughts about Jesus Christ, always present, are finding creative forms.

 

1966.
She writes a “ghost story” at the suggestion of Caroline Besterman, “The Yuma Baby,” and one of her snail stories, “The Quest for Blank Claveringi.” She makes some tables out of wood.
    June: Pat drives to Marseille with her old friend the designer Elizabeth Lyne. They take a boat to Tunis, where they put up at a hotel in Hammamet for a few weeks, then sail to Naples and go overland to Alpnach, Austria. Pat's notes from the Tunisian part of her trip go into
The Tremor of Forgery
—as do her feelings about the Arab population's “petty thieving.”
    August: Caroline Besterman joins Pat for five days in Paris.
    September: At Anne Duveen's house in Cagnes-sur-Mer, Pat meets, for the first time, the former photographer Barbara Ker-Seymer and her companion, Barbara Roett. Pat is in the South of France because the film director Raoul Lévy wants her to collaborate on his screenplay of
Deep Water
. She finishes the script, but Lévy shoots himself dead on New Year's Eve and the film is never made. Pat returns to Earl Soham.
    October: Pat and Caroline separate; Pat calls this “the very worst time of my entire life.” Pat continues to refer to the relationship in her cahiers (but not in her fiction) for most of the rest of her life.
    Pat makes notes about writing a more “intellectual and funnier” Ripley. Claude Autant-Lara makes a film of
The Blunderer
,
Le Meurtrier. Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
is published in the United States.

 

1967.
January: Pat begins the year with an indictment of Caroline Besterman's behavior—and moves to the Île-de-France. Over the next several years, she rents a house near Fontainebleau, then buys a house in Samois-sur-Seine with her old friend from New York the designer and painter Elizabeth Lyne, then rents another house in Montmachoux. Her cotenancy with Mme Lyne is not a success. Pat thought Lyne had “what was known as a Man's Mind.” Instead she finds her like “Every Woman.” Their arguments about co-ownership end up in a court of law.
    Pat begins
The Tremor of Forgery,
based on her trip to Tunisia with Mme Lyne. Originally planning to give her “hero,” the divorced writer Howard Ingham (who is writing a book called
The Tremor of Forgery
), an affair with an Arab boy, she is instead content to deracinate him in other ways. He kills an intruding Arab with his typewriter and dissembles the act. Ingham's divorced wife—who never appears in the book—is based on the remnants of Pat's feelings for Ginnie Catherwood and Lynn Roth. The book is finished in February of 1968. Set during the Israeli-Arab Six-Day War, it is pervaded by contradictory political sentiments. Rolf Tietgens tells her that the politics of
Tremor
“is the weakest part of the book.”

 

1967.
Daniel Keel, cofounder of Diogenes Verlag in Zurich, takes over from Rowohlt as Pat's principal German publisher with his German-language publication of
Those Who Walk Away.
Keel, who saw Hitchcock's film of
Strangers on a Train
as a young man and stayed in the theater until he could identify the author's name on the credits, will include Pat's work in his renowned “black and yellow” crime series in 1974. After seven months of what Pat called “tough” bargaining between Pat and Keel (1979–80), Daniel Keel becomes Highsmith's world representative as well as her principal publisher. At the end of her life, Pat appoints him as her literary executor. Keel and Diogenes Verlag are responsible for much of Pat's fame and a large part of her fortune.

 

1968.
March: In Paris, Pat dines with Janet Flanner and lunches with Nathalie Sarraute, with whom she debates the “femininity” of Colette. (Pat doesn't think Colette is feminine.) “[Sarraute] was absolutely charming and wrote a wonderful inscription” in the Sarraute novel, which, typically, Pat borrowed from Elizabeth Lyne. Pat begins a yearlong affair with a young journalist, Madeleine Harmsworth, who comes to Samois-sur-Seine to interview her for
Queen
magazine.
    April: Pat buys a house in Montmachoux and moves from Samois-sur-Seine. 25 April–6 May: she stays with Barbara Ker-Seymer and Barbara Roett in North London, returning to France in time to be outraged by the student revolution of May 1968.
    20 June: She moves to Montmachoux and works on a play for a London producer called
When the Sleep Ends
. She is writing the lead role for her friend the actress Heather Chasen. Chasen later remarks that Pat was unable to write dialogue, and anyway, the character Pat was creating for her was a “perfect bitch.” The play is never produced.

 

1968.
October: Pat begins to take notes for the book that will become
Ripley Under Ground,
centering the plot on the “Christ-like” dead painter Derwatt (for whom Allela Cornell provides the inspiration), and the international forgery business that a now-married Ripley (he turns “green” with terror at his wedding) murders to protect. She is also inspired by Hans van Meegeren, the man who fooled Hermann Göring with his forgeries of Vermeer. She falls in love with “Jacqui,” a Parisian, who perpetually disappoints her. Pat borrows some of Jacqui's traits for Heloise Plisson, Tom Ripley's wife in
Ripley Under Ground.

 

1969.
Madeleine Harmsworth breaks off with Pat. July: Pat visits Arthur and Cynthia Koestler in Alpnach.

 

1970.
February: Thinking of moving back to the States, Pat flies to New York and travels to Fort Worth, where her battles with Mother Mary result in letters like this one from Mary: “My doctors say if you had stayed 3 more days I would be dead.”
    March: Pat goes to Santa Fe to stay with Rosalind Constable for a couple of weeks, finishing her corrections on the manuscript of
Ripley Under Ground
.
    May: She starts to write
A Dog's Ransom,
reviving her interest in poison-pen letters. She gives the dog in question, a poodle, the name of Ellen Hill's poodle (Tina) and kills it off. She gives Greta Reynolds, one of the fictional Tina's owners, some of Lil Picard's traits.
A Dog's Ransom
is her jeremiad against a “corrupt” and “corrupting” New York; its confusions are a result of the fact that her chief contact with the United States is limited to daily readings of the
International Herald Tribune
. She concentrates the story on an idealistic young policeman who becomes infected by the venality he hopes to fight. Pat didn't know any policemen, and she was relying on Kingsley Skattebol's research on New York police procedure. The novel is interpreted in Europe as an expression of Pat's ability to find the surreal in the real and is highly praised.
    Summer: Doubleday publishes her story collection
The Snail-Watcher and Other Stories
: she pays four hundred dollars of Graham Greene's five-hundred-dollar fee to write the introduction. She isn't completely pleased with what Greene writes: “A trifle hectic the prose, but not bad, I suppose.”