Beautiful Shadow (75 page)

     On their third evening together Highsmith almost spoilt the blissful atmosphere by asking Tabea whether she played games with people. ‘It was not easy for me to come here,’ responded the young German. Highsmith went on to write a poem about the experience, which begins, ‘Your kisses fill me with terror’, a stanza which charts the intensity of the relationship.
⁷⁴
After Tabea’s return to Berlin, Highsmith flew back to France in a state of desperate lovesickness. In this dangerously heightened frame of mind, she turned to poetry to explore her contradictory emotions, emotions which found expression in another suicidal image – blowing her brains out with a gun in front of her new lover. On 1 June she heard that Tabea couldn’t make it to Moncourt later in the month, as she had planned, and over the next few weeks Pat went quietly mad. She asked her friends what she should do about Tabea and even asked Alex Szogyi to analyse her lover’s handwriting for any clues to her girlfriend’s personality and their future together.

     ‘She has a “big” personality,’ wrote Alex of Tabea, ‘is used to a great deal of lebensraum. She knows herself and is very well adjusted to her life . . . Her mind is highly precise, razor-sharp, and I imagine she doesn’t suffer fools gladly. She is very exigent, possessive, and wonderfully open and spontaneous intellectually. She is naturally impatient, but brilliantly cool and collected. A superior lady, indeed  . . .’
⁷⁵

     The days between the 5 and 19 June Highsmith classified as ‘awful’, and as her depression worsened, she wrote herself an action plan to prevent herself from slipping further into insanity. She told herself to breathe deeply, eat frequently, keep busy and maintain her self-esteem. Yet she also realised that her unhappiness was caused, once again, by an old, familiar source. As she wrote,

I realize that any sorrow I may know

Will come from ‘wanting’,

Desiring what I cannot have  . . .
⁷⁶

     There was a suggestion that Tabea might join her in the Lot – where Pat was staying with Charles Latimer and Michel Block, who were soon due to leave Europe for America – but the visit never happened. Although Highsmith knew her tenuous relationship with Tabea was making her unhappy, she preferred it to some of her past liaisons. As she wrote to Charles, ‘I am such a romantic . . . I am hopeless, maybe, but I’d rather have a dream than some hysterical reality.’
⁷⁷
Another visit by Tabea was planned to Moncourt in July and while she tried, on the advice of her friends, to play it cool, inside she was a nervous wreck. ‘I live on thin air, maybe,’ she wrote to Barbara Ker-Seymer. ‘So be it. My style.’
⁷⁸

     The affair came to a climax when Highsmith wrote Tabea a letter asking whether she wanted to end it all. The uncertainty of the situation was not only placing a strain on her mental health, but it was interfering with her work. Tabea wrote back, a kind but brutally honest letter, informing Pat that she was sorry but her affairs never lasted longer than four weeks. ‘I think relationships last as long as they last,’ says Tabea.
⁷⁹
The news plunged Highsmith into ‘an abyss of misery’
⁸⁰
for four days; the after-shocks continued to unsettle her for months, if not years, later.

Chapter 29

A girl who allows me to dream

1978–1980

Highsmith’s obsession with Tabea – and the subsequent collapse of their relationship – had an immediate effect on her writing. By 1 January 1978, she had written fifty-two pages of
The Boy who Followed Ripley
, but ever since June, as she admitted in a letter to Barbara Ker-Seymer, she found that she simply could not concentrate and as a result she was making ‘slow progress’ on the novel.
¹
Yet Highsmith’s spirits were soon boosted by the entry into her life of a twenty-seven-year-old French woman, Monique Buffet, a teacher of English, who like the young German actress, was blonde and boyish-looking. The two women met in early August, through an English fan and pen-pal and by the end of the month – after a date in Paris – they were lovers.

     ‘I found her very attractive,’ says Monique. ‘She had a real charm. She was extremely shy, had these incredibly piercing eyes, black hair streaked with grey, and a very soft voice, a lovely voice. I don’t know why she was attracted to me, but I think she always seemed to be drawn to women who were a little androgynous. My friends always told me I looked more like a gay boy than a lesbian woman. The thirty-year gap did not bother me at all, in fact I preferred older women. Pat told me that she felt physically attracted to me, which she said was quite rare. Pat was so tender towards me and very attentive. She wanted to offer me everything – a flat in Paris, a car, trips around the world – but I never accepted anything from her. Every time I had a problem, I could go to her and she was always very forgiving – she loved me in spite of my faults.

     ‘She would never eat – she would cook
lapin à la crème
for her two Siamese cats, but would not touch it herself. She was, of course, crazy about her cats. I remember once, when I was staying over at her house, I heard this strange noise in the night. It was Pat shouting in a bizarre language, one I couldn’t understand. The next morning she said, “I’m sorry, maybe you heard me in the night. But I was angry that the cats had scratched the leather sofa in the living room.” Apparently she would speak to her cats in a special language.

     ‘I have extremely fond memories of the time we spent together at her house in Moncourt. Pat always worked in her bedroom, in which there was a single bed and a desk. That was her private room and nobody was really allowed in there. But she told me she’d always had working bedrooms in which her bed had to be near her desk.

     ‘She kept thanking me all the time because she had been left devastated by the collapse of her relationship with Tabea. She told me that I was the one who helped her get over that and start writing again. She told me twice that she loved me and it was entirely down to me that she was able to write
The Boy who Followed Ripley
. While she was working on that novel she told me she was looking for a certain type of music for a particular scene and so I lent her a Lou Reed album, which she loved and which she incorporated into the book. Looking at that novel, I’m convinced there are aspects of me in the character of Frank. That is one of the reasons why she dedicated that novel to me.’
²

     From the eighty pages she had written in August 1978, the book swelled to 200 pages by October and by 9 November she had completed the first draft. Her next task was to retype the book which, she said, had been ‘so badly interrupted, one solid year, Aug-to-Aug of this year’
³
and check the accuracy of scenes set in the gay men’s bars of Berlin with her friend Walther Busch. She put the finishing touches to the manuscript in early 1979 and sent it off to her publishers on 3 April. She asked Calmann-Lévy whether they could increase her advance to 30,000 francs, as Mary Kling, whom she was considering appointing as her new French agent, promised she could secure one of 50,000 francs. ‘I know this is advance against royalty, so I never see any big advantage to a high advance,’ Highsmith wrote to Alain Oulman, who agreed to the sum, ‘except that it forces the publisher to advertise, etc.’
⁴
On 8 May she heard that Simon & Schuster had rejected the book and exactly a month later she learnt that it had been turned down by Putnam’s, because it was ‘not enough of a thriller’.
⁵
The same day, however, Pat Schartle Myrer wrote to her to tell her that the Ripley novel had been accepted by Larry Ashmead at Lippincott & Cromwell.

     Highsmith was grateful to Monique, whom, as she wrote on the back of a scrap of typing paper, she thanked for being ‘a girl who allows me to dream’,
⁶
but although she did her best to forget Tabea Blumenschein, Pat continued to be haunted by memories of her. She described the actress in glowing terms in her letters to friends and at the end of the year she bought a curious mirror crafted from a bicycle gear which she posted to Tabea in Germany. In September she sent Hachette – the French publishing house, which was gathering together material for a planned anthology of work from ‘great contemporary writers’
⁷
– a selection of poems she had written during the short, intense, relationship. ‘They requested poems from me, after seeing two in my novels,’ she wrote to Alain Oulman. ‘I have never considered myself a poet.’
⁸

     The connections between her personal life and her work would have to be discussed in any future biography, Highsmith believed. In the spring of 1979, she entrusted Kingsley and Charles Latimer, the latter whom she had suggested as a possible assistant to her old friend in her role as literary executor, with the task of ‘steering off the wrong biographers when I am dead’.
⁹
Despite her promises of post-mortem openness – she believed that, after her death, pretending she was anything other than homosexual would be hypocritical – while still alive she remained terribly guarded about her private life. If she went out in public with Monique Buffet she told people that her new lover was her agent and on 21 April, during a broadcast of the BBC’s
Desert Island Discs
, she refused to discuss the reason why she had published her second novel,
The Price of Salt
, under a pseudonym. ‘No particular reason,’ she told Roy Plomley, ‘I thought it was outside of the mystery genre.’
¹⁰
Her choice of music was varied: the first movement of the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 23; the opening of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto; Bach’s ‘Coffee Cantata’ and his St Matthew Passion; ‘In Our Little Den of Iniquity’, from the musical
Pal Joey
; Mahler’s Symphony No 6; Rondena from the Iberia suite by Albeniz, played by Michel Block, a record also favoured by Ripley; and George Shearing’s ‘Lullaby of Birdland’. She chose writing materials as her luxury item and her book, in addition to the Bible and the works of Shakespeare, was Melville’s
Moby-Dick
. Could she endure loneliness on the fictional desert island, Plomley asked her? ‘I think I could, better than most people probably,’ she said.
¹¹

Highsmith’s interview on
Desert Island Discs
coincided with the publication of
Slowly, Slowly in the Wind
, a short-story collection which she had dedicated to Natica Waterbury, who had died in March 1978. The stories were originally published between 1972 and 1977, mostly in
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
; two had first appeared in
New Review
and
Winter Crimes
and one, ‘Please Don’t Shoot the Trees’, Highsmith had written for an anthology of twentieth-century nightmare edited by Giles Gordon. The collection articulates familiar Highsmithian themes – the power of the unconscious and the allure of fantasy – illustrating her belief, as voiced by Ripley, in
The Boy who Followed Ripley
, that ‘every strong emotion such as love, hatred, or jealousy eventually showed itself in some gesture, and not always in the form of a clear illustration of that emotion, not always what the person himself, or the public, might have expected.’
¹²

     In ‘The Baby Spoon’ a respectable professor of English marries a stupid, childish woman because she reminds him of his mother, and is murdered by one of his ex-students, whom he believes has formed a homosexual emotional attachment to him. A doctor in ‘A Curious Suicide’ murders his old love rival and then, after getting away with the crime, decides that, at some point in the future, he will kill himself. The hero of ‘The Man who Wrote Books in his Head’ goes to his grave thinking that he has written numerous novels, without having put anything down on paper, a story which Lorna Sage, writing in the
Observer
believed to the best in the collection. ‘In it, she [Highsmith] produces a dizzying and very funny illusion within illusion, a casual reminder of the skills behind the blacker magic.’
¹³
Blake Morrison, reviewing the anthology in the
New Statesman
, observed that Highsmith was ‘at her most macabre when most mundane’.
¹⁴