Beautiful Shadow (85 page)

     The dedication, however, further alienated her American market and brought about the collapse of her relationship with yet another US publisher. When Otto Penzler saw the line he called Highsmith’s agent and asked if he could replace the dedication or drop it altogether. ‘I said this is really not going to go down very well in America – the publishing and the reviewing worlds are very heavily populated with Jews and that is just part of New York culture,’ says Penzler. ‘But I didn’t hear back, it got closer and closer to publication date and finally I called the agent again and I said, “Listen we have to have an answer – yes or no,” and she said, “OK just drop it,” which I did. Years later Pat was being interviewed by a journalist and she told the writer that she wasn’t speaking to me because I had dropped the dedication from one of her books. She thought I had done it without her agent’s permission, something I would never have done even though I thought it was suicidal for her literary career. At the time, I didn’t even know I had had a fall out with Pat as she was always so unfriendly and openly hostile.’
³⁰

     Annoyed with what she thought of as her rather shabby treatment at the hands of Penzler Books, in April 1987 Highsmith signed a contract with the Atlantic Monthly Press to publish her books in America. The following month, her agents also negotiated a new UK deal for her, finally dropping Heinemann in favour of Bloomsbury, who offered an advance of £25,000 for
Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes
. ‘I got annoyed with Heinemann because they seemed to be falling asleep in the office . . .’ she later told
Publishers Weekly
. ‘They took my work for granted. There was no particular effort to push a book.’
³¹

     During the summer of 1987, Highsmith also became increasingly agitated by the battle to secure the film rights to her Ripley novels. The previous year, the film producer Joseph Janni had approached her with the idea to adapt
The Boy who Followed Ripley
. She met Janni and the scriptwriter David Sherwin while in London in July 1986 to discuss the project but she was not overly impressed by Sherwin’s eight-page treatment, which she described as ‘so-so’.
³²
But then in March 1987, the BBC sent word of a proposal to film all four Ripley novels, an eight-part series to be directed by Jonathan Powell. Highsmith was attracted by the idea, especially since it would net her $100,000 plus a possible 5 per cent fee from any sales. ‘I have been in a quandary for six days over a choice of film versus BBC mini-series,’ she wrote to Patricia Losey.
³³
‘Well, I can’t have the BBC and Janni both, it’s either or,’ she wrote, again to Patricia Losey, in May.
³⁴
The matter, however, was decided for her when, in September, while in Deauville, she met Robert Hakim, one of the producers of
Plein Soleil
. ‘Did I tell you that in Deauville I ran briefly into M. Hakim . . . who fairly attacked me verbally in the lobby,’ she wrote to Marc Brandel, ‘saying that he had the rights to The Talented Mr Ripley and not I . . . Diogenes can’t as yet do anything to dispute this fellow.’
³⁵

     Highsmith had been invited to Deauville – the elegant resort on the French Atlantic coast and home to the Festival of American Film – to collect the ‘Prix Littéraire’ in recognition of her literary contribution to the movie industry. By 1987, it was clear to film-makers that Highsmith’s work – for all its ambiguity of characterisation and subtlety of narrative – was highly cinematic and that year saw the release of Chabrol’s
Le Cri du Hibou
starring Christophe Malavoy and Mathilda May. Although Joseph Janni’s adaptation of
The Boy who Followed Ripley
was squashed by problems with finance, Highsmith’s novels continue to be adapted into films.

     While in Deauville, accompanied by Alain Oulman, Highsmith met the actors Douglas Fairbanks Jr and Bette Davis. Highsmith described her audience with Davis, which took place in the film star’s hotel suite, in a letter to Christa Maerker. The actress was, she said, ‘very thin, but nervous and active. She was standing up, black dress and little round black hat, saying hello, but with the air of the sooner you leave, the better. She tells you to leave, by zooming a hand forward and shaking your own hand, which you’ve of course extended.’
³⁶

     Although she had been in Deauville for only two nights – 8 and 9 September – when she returned home she felt on edge and exhausted. She was due to travel to Mallorca on 14 September to write a 3,000-word travel piece for the
Sunday Times
but knew that if she did not cancel the trip she would be left feeling wretched. ‘For the 6th day now I suffer from diarrhoea after the French trip,’ she wrote in her diary on 15 September, ‘and I did neither eat nor drink unwisely. I can’t account for it. Really weakening.’
³⁷
Travelling always upset her constitution and yet she was aware that the next couple of months she would have to fly to Toronto, New York and London to fulfil her various publishing obligations. ‘Medical news: intestinal complaints all gone,’ she noted on 10 October, a week before her flight to Canada. ‘But it takes 5 days of calm to set me right instead of one or two in my youth. What a bore!’
³⁸

     On 20 October she read from
Found in the Street
at the Harbourfront in Toronto – she was one of the star guests of the Toronto International Festival of Authors – and the day after she was driven to Niagara, where, after another reading from the novel, she donned a blue waterproof for a Maid of the Mist tour of the spectacular Falls, accompanied by the author William Trevor. ‘I liked her books a great deal and thought that she was one of the best writers of her generation,’ he says. ‘When I met her in Toronto I had that feeling that this was indeed the woman who had written those novels. One night, after dinner, I was looking for her to go for a drink and came across her in the car park of the hotel, a dark and dingy place, where she was snooping around, probably to gather information or atmosphere for her writing. From the beginning I liked her a great deal – she was, like many novelists, a very private person and she did not push herself forward or promote herself at all. She liked to keep a little bit in the shadows.’
³⁹
On her return to Toronto, she was delighted to receive an invitation to take tea with the Canadian author Margaret Atwood. Highsmith adored Canada – its cleanliness and orderliness no doubt reminded her of Switzerland – but when she flew to New York, she was, as usual, disgusted by what she regarded as the vulgarity and brashness of modern America. She flirted with the idea of Swiss citizenship – something she never actually received; she died a US citizen – as she knew that a return to live in the country of her birth was highly unlikely. ‘The very thought of the news reports – now called ‘bites’, depresses me,’ she said.
⁴⁰

     In New York she met her new US editor Gary Fisketjon of the Atlantic Monthly Press. ‘It’s strange because for all the time that she spent in Europe, Pat always seemed to me basically an American character,’ says Fisketjon. ‘She was a Civil War buff and I always used to send her a lot of books on the subject. We hit it off straight away – we both liked to take a drink – and I remember we held a little party for her at a French joint downtown. She has always been very much in favour with a bunch of writers over here and so there was no problem in getting people to come along. I recall that she had this way of letting her hair fall down over her face, which I thought was interesting. She was extremely direct, you knew exactly who you were dealing with; she was an intriguing woman with very good instincts about people. She was also very sweet, because after my son was born, in January 1989, she always remembered his birthday and would send cards over. Although we didn’t know each other well, I certainly liked her a hell of a lot. But I didn’t know that she was ill; that was something she never talked to me about.’
⁴¹

     Considering that Highsmith had been forced to confront her own mortality only the year before, her decision to accept a commission from the
New York Times
to write a detailed piece about Green-Wood cemetery in Brooklyn was a brave one. Highsmith was far from sentimental about death, yet before she died she voiced her fears to Vivien De Bernardi. ‘She said she was afraid of dying,’ recalls Vivien. ‘I asked why and she said, “I guess it’s the unknown.” ’
⁴²

     She made the trip on 26 October, with Phyllis Nagy, then a researcher at the
New York Times
, who picked her up from her hotel in Gramercy Park. ‘It was a completely silent, miserable journey to the cemetery except for the three occasions when Pat spoke to me,’ says Phyllis. ‘First, she asked whether it was true I wanted to be a writer. “Yes,” I said, followed by silence. Then, “What do you think of Eugene O’Neill?” “Not much,” I replied. “Good,” she said and then there was more silence. Twenty minutes later, “What about Tennessee Williams?” I told her that I liked him and she replied, “Good” once again. We took our tour of the cemetery in silence and every once in a while Pat would use a stick that she was carrying to poke at certain features. Finally we were taken to the ovens used to burn the bodies and we were asked by the guide to place our hands inside. The ovens were still warm and you could hear the bones being grated in this huge blender. It was pretty gruesome. After the tour, which finished at about eleven in the morning, we stood outside and I remember she took out her flask and said in the American accent she never lost, “I don’t know about you but I need a drink.” After she had had a drink, I took a sip of the Scotch and I think I must have passed some kind of test because she invited me back to her hotel for lunch.’
⁴³

     Highsmith’s piece for the
New York Times
– written at the end of 1987 and which she entitled ‘Green-Wood: Listening to the Talking Dead’ – was never published, but it makes for powerful reading. While travelling in the car with Phyllis towards the cemetery, Highsmith noticed that a garbage truck, edging its way slowly beside them in the slow-moving Manhattan traffic, was overflowing with rotting food, a chlorophyllic leak spilling down its side. ‘Its apparently inexhaustible drip of squashed vegetable matter or leftover orange juice reminds me of human mortality with its attendant ugliness, stench and inevitability,’ Highsmith wrote.
⁴⁴
She was keen to learn about the gravestones bearing the names of soldiers killed in the American Civil War and see the statue of twelve-year-old drummer boy Clarence McKenzie, a Brooklyn-born victim who had died at Annapolis. After walking around some of the cemetery’s twenty miles of footpaths, Highsmith took an elevator down to the crematorium’s ovens, or retorts. Each coffin, she learned, is pushed into one of the five ovens, a gas fire is then switched on and two hours later the contents are reduced to two pounds of ashes.

     ‘I stuck my hand and forearm a little ways into the open retort, and was a bit surprised to find the interior quite warm, perhaps from a cremation of yesterday, perhaps even of that morning . . .’ she wrote. ‘The warmth of that retort, even though it may have come from a pilot flame, brought home death to me as none of the stone monuments above ground had.’
⁴⁵

     From New York, Highsmith flew to London to promote
Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes
, arriving in Britain on 30 October. After only a weekend’s rest, she ploughed herself into the punishing round of interviews, including a television appearance on BBC2’s
Cover to Cover
, recorded on 3 November for transmission two days later. Her fellow guests included the actor Jack Klaff, the biographer and writer Victoria Glendinning and the actor Kenneth Williams, whom Highsmith described as ‘screaming gay, v. pleasant, however’.
⁴⁶
Williams, a fan of Highsmith’s work, took the trouble to record the meeting in his diary: ‘Patricia came right across the hospitality room to me with outstretched hand. “You
are
Kenneth Williams? I
so
wanted to meet you.” I could hardly believe it . . . I was amazed that she’d even
heard
of me: she’s always lived in France or Switzerland . . . Tried to be reasonable about [the] Highsmith [book] but made it clear I found it disappointing. She said, “Kenneth obviously thinks I’ve written a moral tract instead of the usual thriller,” but I quickly interjected, “No, it is entertaining reading . . . just not what I expected.” ’
⁴⁷
During the discussion, Highsmith outlined her intention, ‘I meant . . . to talk about certain problems of our time’
⁴⁸
– a point which was taken up by Glendinning, who said that the stories articulated the ‘psychopathology of the whole world’ and that they were ‘politically important, as well as being funny, in the same way that something like
Animal Farm
is politically important because there is hardly anything that’s going wrong which she does not treat in these stories.’
⁴⁹