Beautiful Shadow (82 page)

     After supper, Ellen drove back to Cavigliano and Pat and Bettina retired to Highsmith’s house for the interview. At midnight, the two women started talking, Highsmith fuelled by a bottle of beer and a packet of Gauloises. Their conversation was wide-ranging, covering the motivation of her characters, particularly Ripley; the source of her ideas: ‘They just pop into my head – how else do you say it?’
⁸
, the vulgarity of women’s magazines, which she described as ‘unrealistic, it’s fantasy, it’s Prince Charming, or it’s how to wash out your vagina,’
⁹
; and the nature of love and desire: ‘There’s always one person who loves more than the other, and very often
one
cannot
get
the other.’
¹⁰

     The women’s movement, remembers Bettina, was one subject she expressed quite vociferous opinions about. ‘She talked about women almost as if she was something other, like she wasn’t one. It was always women are incapable because they have been foot-bound over the centuries, their minds are worthless and they don’t have ambition.

     ‘The other thing that really turned her off the women’s movement was what she saw as the lack of privacy that went with talking about one’s body and bodily symptoms. That completely offended her. I think she would have rather spent time with the most crude male chauvinist than sit with some woman who wanted to talk about her secretions. And yet I don’t think she was a misogynist. I think she loved women too much maybe.’
¹¹

     Highsmith’s view of the feminist movement was, as Bettina Berch discovered, completely divorced from the reality. ‘It was as if she had decided in her head what the women’s movement was all about,’ she says, ‘and this was symptomatic of the fact that she lived in her own closed, self-created world. I remember spending about an hour with her trying to explain how to use an ATM card. She did not own one but wanted to feature one in
Found in the Street
. I took out my plastic card and showed her what you did, took her through the whole process step by step. I think the last time she had really been in the world was probably back in the fifties.

     ‘Yet I liked her a great deal, I thought she was a wonderful person, and we became friends. After that visit we corresponded regularly and she really cared about what happened in my life. She made me feel that my news was of interest to her and that she was on my side. Although I was keen to write her biography, she was resistant to the idea and told me, “Not while I’m alive, thank you.” I respected that. She didn’t want to come out because she thought she would become even more obscure. She also believed in the concept of ambiguity – she didn’t see any point in clarifying one’s sexual orientation. The whole fun was in the ambiguity.’
¹²

For all of Highsmith’s obsession with order, when she arrived in Istanbul, to write a travel piece for a German magazine, on 5 October 1984, she was immediately charmed by the chaotic sensory delights of the city. Peering out of the window of her taxi as she journeyed from the airport to her hotel, she was thrilled to see the towering minarets, remains of ancient fortresses and majestic watchtowers which rose above the Bosporus. She spent two days in Istanbul, staying at the Hilton hotel, which seemed devoid of personality compared to the vibrancy of the surrounding city. Her one regret, she said, was not being able to see the slums before embarking on the next stage of her journey, a three-day trip on the Orient Express, stopping in Budapest and Vienna, where she attended a dinner and ball at the Palais Schwarzenberg Hotel, finally arriving in Zurich on 11 October. ‘I wonder what kind of people can afford 5,500 SF for these six days?’ she wrote to Marc Brandel.
¹³

     Highsmith’s relationship with money was an unpredictable and contradictory one. On the one hand she parted easily with the $8,000 retainer she sent to Brandel and yet she made a special effort to drive across the border into Italy with her reading-glasses prescription to have her spectacles made because it was 20 per cent cheaper than in Switzerland. ‘Her attitude towards money was nutty,’ says Vivien De Bernardi. ‘She had all this money, but who knew it? I remember she went to have the snow tyres on her car changed, but refused to pay the bill because she decided it was too high. She wore the same clothes she had worn when she was eighteen and after her death I found the swimsuit she had had ever since she was a teenager – and it was her only swimsuit.’
¹⁴
Frieda Sommer told Joan Dupont, ‘She must have had deep fears: the way she lived, never allowing herself any luxury because she was afraid she might be a pauper.’
¹⁵

     Peter Huber, her friend, and from 1988, her neighbour in Tegna, remembers how Pat closely guarded a heap of old timber, covered with cement and rusty nails, transporting it from her house in Moncourt, to Aurigeno and then on to Tegna. ‘One afternoon Pat called my wife Anita and me and asked us if we would like a cup of tea and a look at the fire,’ he says. ‘We went over to her house where there were two pieces of this building wood on the fire, from where a small flame flickered. After asking us to sit down, she went to the fire and knocked it so as to make it go out. I said, “Pat, Pat, don’t do that, that will make the fire go out.” But she looked at me in a very queer way, and I realised then that was the reason why she had knocked it – she wanted it out so as not to waste it. After all, this wood had come a long way. It was just extraordinary.’
¹⁶
Jack Bond, however, does not believe Highsmith was motivated by stinginess. ‘I would have thought she was conserving rather than mean,’ he says. ‘Maybe she figured that her money had been very hard won, and it could go easily, so she had better save up for rainy days.’
¹⁷

     In November, Highsmith typed out a tally of how much it cost to keep her mother in her Fort Worth nursing home. A total of $15,300 was needed each year, $7,486 of which was met by Mary Highsmith’s pension. This left a shortfall of $7,814 a year which would have to come from her savings. The idea did not please her. ‘If I can get some “tax relief” from a retroactive claim,’ she wrote to her cousin, Dan Coates, two years later, ‘it will be a tremendous help. My mother’s bills now cost me more than my ordinary expenses such as food and clothing.’
¹⁸

     Although Highsmith had, in the past, admired right-wing figures such as Margaret Thatcher, in the November 1984 US Presidential election she voted for Democrat Walter Mondale, who campaigned for a nuclear freeze and attacked Reagan for an alleged lack of ‘fairness’ in his economic policies. Mondale was, however, defeated, losing to the incumbent President. American foreign policy disgusted Highsmith and she even went so far as to say, in a letter to Marc Brandel, that ‘I begin to be ashamed of my USA passport, considering what the USA is backing now.’
¹⁹

     In early December, Highsmith returned to the USA on another research trip. She spent six days with Charles Latimer in East Hampton and another six in New York, staying at the Royalton. ‘I went to the Village three times, much to the benefit of the book I am writing’,
²⁰
she wrote to Bettina Berch, referring to
Found in the Street
. In Manhattan, she had lunch with Otto Penzler, whose imprint, Penzler Books, she had chosen as her US publisher and in her hotel room, Highsmith signed 180 sheets of paper which would form the title pages of a special edition of
Slowly, Slowly in the Wind
. Although Highsmith, in a letter to Marc Brandel, professed to liking Penzler, the publisher has no fond memories of her. In fact, in a review in the
Wall Street Journal
in August 2001, to coincide with the publication of W. W. Norton’s
The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith
, Penzler wrote, ‘Two points should immediately be stated about Patricia Highsmith: She may have been one of the dozen best short-story writers of the 20th century, and she may have been one of the dozen most disagreeable and mean-spirited as well . . . The photograph on the cover of this handsome tome shows the hard, harsh face of an unloving and unlovable woman.’
²¹

     He expanded his views in an interview. ‘Besides her writing – which I thought was fabulous and original – there was not one thing I liked about her,’ he says. ‘There was an unredeemable ugliness to her. I never witnessed a kind thought, a kind word, a kind gesture in all the time we spent together. I took her around some of the publicity interviews and between appointments we’d sometimes have an hour to kill when we’d go and have a beer but most of that time we spent in silence. I could never be at ease with her.

     ‘She was pretty good-looking when she was younger, she was a really attractive woman, but she was ugly later in life. I think a lot of that ugliness – that anger and that hatred, hatred of almost everything and everyone – came from the inside. It might have had something to do with the fact that she wasn’t accepted in America and she felt bitter because she thought she was more talented than a lot of other people making more money than her.

     ‘I’m an enthusiast by nature, an optimist and a generally upbeat sort of person, but she was one of the most odious people I’ve ever met. She was a totally horrible woman. She was mean, unkind, unfriendly and cold and never missed an opportunity to be nasty. I remember once, during a dinner with my then wife, and a publicity director, at one of my favourite New York Italian restaurants, she behaved appallingly. The publicity director arrived with two roses, one for my wife and one for Pat, but when he presented her with it, she just dropped it to the floor without acknowledgement or thanks. She was endlessly strange and I never knew what to make of her.’
²²

In December 1984, Highsmith returned home to find the Ticino in the grip of an unusually cold spell, with temperatures dropping to their lowest in a hundred years. Winter sunlight was rare in Aurigeno, as the village lay on the side of the valley shadowed by the mountains. In fact, the sight of the sun easing its way through the snow-capped peaks was such a novelty it prompted Highsmith to take her cats out to witness the event, while if snow fell in December it was quite common for it to still cover the ground a couple of months later. ‘I’ve been walking through shoulder-high trenches in the snow for [the] past six weeks, now it’s knee-high, but the paths are treacherous with ice,’ she wrote to Bettina Berch, in early February 1985.
²³

     Highsmith busied herself by writing a number of short essays, including a piece about books which she had enjoyed or which had influenced her. She included old favourites such as works by Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe, Joseph Conrad, Hermann Melville, Djuna Barnes and Cyril Connolly, as well as more modern works by Ronald Blythe and Tom Sharpe, particularly
Porterhouse Blue
and
Blott on the Landscape
. ‘If you have to put a Tom Sharpe book down for a few minutes,’ she wrote, ‘you will want to get back to it as soon as possible, regardless of pressing matters.’
²⁴
In February, she sent off a piece to
Libération
on the subject of why she wrote. She did so, she said, in order to exorcise emotion; to entertain herself; to order experience, and because she was, quite frankly, hooked on it. ‘The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication,’ she said, quoting Cyril Connolly in
The Unquiet Grave
, ‘that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.’
²⁵
She also agreed to answer the famous ‘Proust’ questionnaire – a 37-question Q & A interview whose subjects in the past had included Karl Marx, Georges Simenon and Eugene Ionesco – for
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
. Her idea of perfect earthly happiness was visiting the Jeu de Paume in Paris. Her favourite painters were Munch and Balthus; her preferred composers, Mozart and Stravinsky. She admired the ability to stick to principles in men, intelligence in women, and, in friends, honesty and dependability, while her own best quality was, she said, perseverance. She despised selfishness and deception. Her greatest fault was her inability to decide quickly or easily. Asked about her dream of happiness, she responded, ‘I don’t dream about happiness.’ Her favourite colour, flower, and bird were, respectively, yellow, carnation and robin redbreast. Her favourite writer was Dostoevsky, while her choice of poet, W.H. Auden. From history she admired, Horatio Nelson and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, while she loathed Savonarola, the fifteenth-century Italian religious reformer, and the majority of Popes. The one piece of reform which she most admired was women getting the vote. How would she like to die, she was asked. ‘Suddenly,’ she said. And her motto? ‘Work is more fun than play,’ she replied, quoting Noel Coward.
²⁶