Beautiful Shadow (88 page)

     Highsmith had no faith in the after-life, loathed organised religion, and thought life was fundamentally meaningless. Throughout the year she did everything she could to put her affairs in order in the event of her death. In May, she sent a copy of her will, dated 19 April, to Kingsley, in which she bequeathed her clothes, furniture, household items, personal effects, and insurance policies to her old friend, whom she also appointed literary executor. She empowered Kingsley to sell her papers to the University of Texas and for the profits of such a sale to go directly to Yaddo, to which she also left the bulk of her property. In June, while in London for
After Dark
, Highsmith once again visited John Batten, who carried out a number of tests, including another lung X-ray and an ECG. Although the results showed that she was free of lung cancer, Highsmith obviously felt she should prepare herself for the worst as, later in the year, she joined EXIT, stipulating that if she developed a hopelessly terminal illness she should not be kept alive by drugs. She did not want to be resuscitated in the event of a heart attack, while if she entered a senile state she demanded that she be given, at most, nutritional fluid. ‘If and when my condition is diagnosed as hopeless, I am to be given any amount of analgesics, although their effect could be lethal.’
³⁷

     In whatever time she had left, Highsmith was determined to squeeze every last drop of experience out of life and in July, she accepted an invitation from Buffie Johnson to visit her in Tangier. The trip would give her a good opportunity to catch up with her old friend but it was not entirely driven by the pursuit of pleasure – she travelled there with a commission from the
Sunday Times
and she would also use the location in
Ripley Under Water
. She arrived in the north Moroccan port overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar on 17 August and took a taxi from the airport to Buffie’s flat, 15 Immeuble Itesa – the apartment situated below that of Paul Bowles, which had once belonged to his wife Jane. Buffie, however, was not at home and so Pat announced herself to Bowles, who although she found him eating in bed from a tray, made her feel welcome. ‘By the time I got home she was ensconced in Paul’s apartment drinking his Scotch,’ says Buffie.
³⁸
Highsmith delighted in the exoticism of Tangier, noting that the view of the old town from her window looked like a Braque or Klee composition; enjoyed drinks at the famous 1930s Hotel El Minzah, whose guests had included Cecil Beaton and which is featured in
Ripley Under Water
; and took a tour around the house of Woolworth’s heiress Barbara Hutton, who, it was rumoured, outbid General Franco for the palace. Yet the visit was not wholly successful, as Pat and Buffie, once close friends, felt distinctly uncomfortable with one another. ‘Because the guest room was in fact my studio, for the next week I had to sacrifice my work to entertain Pat . . .’ says Buffie, who was in the final stages of proofing her book,
Lady of the Beasts: Ancient Images of the Goddess and her Sacred Animals
. ‘She had by then the look of someone no longer enjoying life.’
³⁹
For her part, Highsmith found Buffie to be strangely distant and on her return to Switzerland at the end of the month, she wrote a letter to Christa Maerker telling her that the experience had left her feeling disconnected. ‘I felt like someone transported me to the moon,’ she said.
⁴⁰
After sending off her thirteen-page piece to the
Sunday Times
, she heard back that it had been rejected, but she did manage to place a 500-word feature on Paul Bowles with
Le Monde
.

     After a couple of weeks at home, Highsmith was off on her travels again, this time to Hamburg where she was due to read from
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
and
Little Tales of Misogyny
– she in English, the actress Angela Winkler in German – at the Festival der Frauen. Accompanying Highsmith to the festival was her Ticino friend, Gudrun Mueller, who met Pat at the airport and travelled with her by taxi to the Intercontinental Hotel. ‘At the hotel there was a bottle of champagne waiting for her in the suite, but she didn’t drink it,’ says Gudrun, a painter. ‘Instead, she took from her handbag a bottle of whisky, a cheap one, fetched a glass from the bathroom and poured herself a large measure. She glugged down a few glasses, each time pacing around the room. I said to her that she must rest and not drink too much. Eventually she forced herself to go down to the lobby of the hotel, where lots of photographers and newspaper people were waiting for her. Journalists asked her questions, and although she’d had a lot to drink, she answered in a clear and professional manner. She was not at all drunk.’
⁴¹

     Gudrun remembers Pat with a mixture of affection, frustration, wonder and puzzlement. During their fifteen-year friendship, Gudrun only caught an occasional glimpse of the essence of Highsmith’s personality. ‘It was so difficult to talk to her. Often if I asked her questions she would get angry and tell me that I was just like one of the journalists who bothered her. I said, “I’m not a journalist, I’m your
friend
.” I would cry out, “who are you?” but she would never answer. She never showed her feelings and I never knew what she thought of me. If someone reached out to touch or greet her she would always take one or two steps back. Yet her face was full of life and everything she thought or felt you could see in her eyes.’
⁴²

Chapter 35

Art is not always healthy and why should it be?

1988–1992

On 13 December 1988 – after a ten-day trip to America – Highsmith moved into her new house in Tegna. Although Semyon, her Siamese, howled non-stop for ten days and nights, Charlotte, her ginger barn cat, and Pat settled in quite comfortably. From the front, ‘Casa Highsmith’ looked quite forbidding – the windows were nothing but minimal slashes in the anonymous grey cladding – but at the back French doors opened on to the large garden overlooking the valley. The view of the mountains was sublime, although Pat would joke how the Alpine peaks were mere youngsters in comparison to the grand old men of the American Rockies.

     The house was a U-shaped structure, with its two wings arranged around a central courtyard. Highsmith’s bedroom and bathroom were situated at one end, the guest bedroom and bathroom in the other wing, the areas separated by a large living room. It was a single-storey building, apart from a terrace above the sitting room, and a cellar below, an underground nuclear shelter, a prerequisite for all newly built houses in Switzerland. ‘As I recall, Pat’s shelter was for eight to ten people subsidized by the community of Tegna,’ says Vivien De Bernardi. ‘I always thought God help both Pat and anyone that might be required to live in that confined space with her.’
¹

     At first glance, visitors compared the structure to a ‘bunker’,
²
a ‘municipal bath’
³
and a ‘fortress’,
⁴
but the light and spacious interior of the house, with its terracotta-tiled floor, its eclectic mix of new and old furniture and the occasional decorative touch, often surprised. ‘At one end of the sitting-room sits a sculpture of a hand holding a bright blue eyeball through which a length of wire has been placed, but her own paintings are unexpectedly cheery,’ observed Craig Brown.
⁵
Janet Watts, during an interview with the writer in 1990, described her bedroom: ‘A single bed is in one corner. Her imposing French roll-top desk bears a small Olympia typewriter, covered with a printed handkerchief. Above it is a tiny painting of a monk gazing at a crucifix and a skull.’
⁶
Mavis Guinard, who interviewed the writer for the
International Herald Tribune
, observed that the open-plan rooms were ‘spacious and cool’,
⁷
while its patio was nothing but a ‘patch of parched grass’ dotted with the occasional marigold. ‘The long dining table is stacked with papers and books,’ she said. ‘At the far end, there’s barely space for a bamboo place mat for one, an open pack of Gauloise cigarettes beside the plate.’
⁸

     During the six years she lived in Tegna, Highsmith enjoyed close friendships with a number of her neighbours. Irma Andina, who lives in a small house near the village’s railway station, remembers Highsmith as a modest, kind woman, but someone who felt distinctly ill at ease with the world. ‘To me she wasn’t a genius, or a writer; to me she was a simple person, someone who was not at all stuck up,’ she says. ‘I used to weed her garden for her and one day she turned up with a huge bucket of roses for me. The only thing I didn’t like about her was the fact that when you went to greet her, she never held your hand. She didn’t know how to react; she didn’t like to breathe other people’s air.’
⁹
Ingeborg Lüscher first remembers seeing Highsmith shopping in the village. Although she wanted to approach her and introduce herself, Ingeborg held back, which in retrospect was a fortunate move as she knew Highsmith would have hated such an invasion. Over time, the neighbours became good friends. ‘She was a fascinating writer, but for a long time we had extremely boring conversations,’ says Ingeborg, an artist. ‘She spoke to me about the cost of bills and health insurance, very practical things. But then, we started to speak about other things, such as Gertrude Stein and Oscar Wilde. It was never possible to analyse a subject in depth, but she had this ability of saying something that another person would take an hour to express. So, after five sentences the whole discussion was over and then we started speaking about bills or whatever again. She had a very delicate personality and I felt like I wanted to help her. But she was also very witty. She made the most curious jokes, she imitated people – at times she could be quite theatrical and she was a performer. She loved to make me laugh.’
¹⁰

     Soon after moving into the house, Highsmith’s long, tortuous relationship with Ellen Hill – who Ingeborg Lüscher remembers as a woman ‘not only full of poison for Pat, but full of poison for the whole world’
¹¹
– finally came to an end. Highsmith was, as she told Kingsley in a letter on 6 February, ‘sick of her scolding and all round domineering’.
¹²
‘When the Tegna house was finished, Pat didn’t allow Ellen to enter,’ says Peter Huber, ‘but one day Ellen arrived and dashed in like a rugby player. She walked around and had a look, but Pat told her to leave. She did not want anything to do with her.’
¹³
Vivien De Bernardi recalls Highsmith telling her that her friendship with Ellen was over. ‘Pat told me she was angry with her because Ellen had insulted her, which I can believe because Ellen insulted me too,’ she says. ‘She continually told her she was stupid, and one day Pat had had enough.’
¹⁴

     Unsurprisingly, Highsmith did not invite Ellen to a drinks party at the Tegna house, which she hosted for twenty-five people on 25 February. Immediately before the housewarming, Highsmith turned to Vivien De Bernardi for help as it was obvious she did not have a clue how to organise or plan the event. ‘She was inept when it came to basic, simple things,’ says Vivien. ‘She was a really good writer and that was it – period.’
¹⁵
During a shopping trip at a local supermarket, Vivien witnessed her friend panic and fall apart. ‘Pat was overwhelmed by sensory stimulation – there were too many people and too much noise and she just could not handle the supermarket,’ she says. ‘She continually jumped, afraid that someone might recognise or touch her. She could not make the simplest of decisions – which type of bread did she want, or what kind of salami? I tried to do the shopping as quickly as possible, but at the check-out she started to panic. She took out her wallet, knocked off her glasses, dropped the money on the floor, stuff was going all over the place.’
¹⁶
The next day, Vivien arrived at the party, but as she walked into the hallway she was met by a floor full of wet newspaper – it was raining outside – and a yellow bucket full of long-stem red roses. ‘Daniel [Keel] had sent her something like fifty red roses, but she had stuck them in this plastic bucket. It was hysterical. Earlier in the day, one of my colleagues who had helped her move, rang Pat and asked about her favourite colours. She replied that she liked orange and yellow and so he went out and bought this most gorgeous bouquet of flowers in those colours. He gave her the flowers, arranged very artistically with lots of greenery, but the next thing I knew she started to yank out all the green. “Pat, it’s supposed to be like that,” I said. She just didn’t have a clue. She’d stick newspapers on her floor and put the roses in a plastic bucket and whip out all the greenery from a 200 franc bouquet of flowers.’
¹⁷