Beautiful Shadow (92 page)

     From New York, Pat travelled to Texas, where she stayed with her cousin Dan Coates at his ranch in Weatherford and where she was interviewed by a journalist from
People
magazine. Although she was fond of her cousin and his wife, she felt depressed by the crass materialism, the vulgar philistinism and the pro-Republican opinions she encountered in Texas. After six days in the state where she was born but where she no longer felt at home, she flew to Toronto for a reading at the Harbourfront Festival on 18 October and a party with guests that included Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje. She was relieved to fly home at the end of the month. ‘On visiting Texas – something is missing: it’s Europe, it’s the world missing,’ she wrote in her notebook.
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The reporter from
People
magazine, in an effort to try and capture Highsmith’s ethereal quality, described the writer as ‘reclusive’,
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a notion she rejected. ‘To say I’m a recluse is journalistic nonsense . . .’ she told Naim Attallah. ‘I like talking to people on the phone, I like people to drop by for a coffee. I do not consider myself a recluse.’
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One who can testify to the truth of Highsmith’s statement is Bee Loggenberg, whom the writer met in late 1992. She may have been private, but that did not mean she did not still enjoy getting to know new people. ‘Pat and I seemed to get on very well together instantly,’ says Bee. ‘She always used to say that I was so exuberant and full of life and it was quite a treat for her to come and chatter about things, as she was broody. We talked about sexuality – I’m homosexual, and she was homosexual. She was quite a tough bird in many ways – she felt quite comfortable with gay men, but she didn’t particularly like lesbians. She was quite masculine in outlook and, for me, spending time with Pat was like being with a mate, like being with another boy. She talked about Ripley quite a lot and identified with him very strongly.’
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Loggenberg laughs as he recalls a conversation in which Highsmith complained of the cost of maintaining her Tegna garden; she simply could not afford to get someone in to help, she said, neither did she want to spend money on the mowing of her lawn. Bee – who employed a full-time gardener at his house in Monte Bré, near Locarno – kindly offered to help. Just before she died, Pat was discussing her will with Bee, when she mentioned casually that she had a substantial amount of money in one of her accounts. ‘That’s when I realised that she probably had as much money as I had and I had been cutting her fucking lawn,’ he says. ‘My garden costs something like two thousand quid a month [to maintain], but I was spending a day weeding her garden!’
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It started with a cold, accompanied by a series of nosebleeds. As she battled to finish the first draft of
Small g
, which she did in mid-March 1993, she felt increasingly wretched. Yet Highsmith refused to let the illness get the better of her. On 14 July, she finally saw a doctor about the problem. He told her she was badly anaemic – after a blood test, it was discovered that she had only 40,000 as opposed to the 150,000 platelets of a healthy person. In order to find out exactly what was wrong, the doctor ordered more tests at the hospital in Locarno; she was also ordered to give up drinking for three weeks. ‘I thought she wouldn’t be able to do that, but she did, she went cold turkey for three weeks,’ says Vivien. ‘Yet her behaviour didn’t change. I think by this time she would be what you call a classic alcoholic. Pat would just feel halfway decent when she drank alcohol because by that time the alcoholism had progressed to such a point that she was depressed whether she drank or not. It wasn’t that she got real cheerful when she drank or anything. By the end she was basically living on beer. She would carry jars of peanut butter around in her handbag, as that’s all she could eat.’
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     That summer, Highsmith said, was ‘rough’.
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On 14 September she underwent surgery in Locarno’s Caritas hospital for removal of a non-cancerous tumour in her lower intestine and then on 10 October she was admitted to Basel’s Kantonspital, a modern hospital specialising in blood disorders. There she was given daily injections of Neupogen, a drug designed to treat neutropenia, the shortage of neutrophils (cells which surround and destroy bacteria in the body). ‘I am said to be stable now,’ she wrote to Barbara Skelton. ‘To me that means I may not die in the next months, which I certainly thought I would do last year and most of this year. I’ve lost about 15 kilos in a year, have far less strength, but now I’m not losing more, and have managed to learn to stuff myself with calories – hoping to gain an ounce or two.’
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Finally, it was discovered that she was suffering from aplastic anaemia, failure of the bone marrow to produce sufficient blood cells, and multiple small tumours in the lung and the adrenal gland. Treatment proved problematic – the cancers could not be removed by surgery because they were too minute, while radiotherapy and chemotherapy could not be administered until the blood marrow had recovered. Doctors prescribed a drug which inhibited the auto-immune attack of the bone marrow; a high dose of intravenous immunoglobulins for three days and another medication to help stimulate the production of blood cells. After the initial treatment, Highsmith’s blood had to be tested twice a week and she had to go for transfusions of haemoglobin and thrombocytes once every nine days. This made her feel, as she told Bettina Berch, as though she were ‘a dog on a leash’.
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     Highsmith tried to be optimistic about the future – she continued to hope that the aplastic anaemia would right itself, as it sometimes did, and even voiced the possibility of having a bone marrow transplant – but, feeling weak and continually fatigued, she knew that her time was limited. In September 1993, Diogenes Verlag bought the world rights of Highsmith’s complete works and in January 1994, she gave Frieda Sommer the power of attorney. In May 1994, she appointed Bruno Sager, who had spent time in the monastery at Einsiedeln, as her carer. ‘She was small, thin, almost transparent, with these very fine hands she didn’t want you to touch,’ remembers Sager, who lived with Highsmith from June until December. ‘I liked her – she was intelligent and sensitive, had very good taste in literature and art. But she did not talk a lot. To begin with, she wanted somebody in the house in case of an emergency and a driver who could take her to hospital. But when I arrived, I started to help organise the house and clear the garden. She loved her roses, and she showed me exactly how to cut them, but she hadn’t the strength to do any real gardening. She told me that she could be difficult to live with, but we occupied separate parts of the house, sharing the big living room. She would get up at around eight in the morning, and we would take breakfast separately. She worked in the mornings, we had lunch at about one, she slept a little in the afternoon and then read or wrote. I did a lot of the cooking as she didn’t have the energy. Sometimes she said, “I would love to have some cornbread,” and I would make it. She loved American food, things like beans with bacon, but only very small portions. After supper, we would sometimes watch television – she would look at her watch and say, “Oh, it’s time for
EastEnders
”, which she liked – or videos of films made from her books. She would go to bed around ten or eleven. Her bedroom was also her workroom – it contained a single bed, a little table and her desk.

     ‘She was very clean and she liked to have everything in order; for instance, the laundry had to be done in a certain way. I think one can also say she saw that money was not spent too easily. I did the shopping and she would look at what I’d bought, saying, “Why did you buy this, this is much too expensive.” She paid me a very small amount, I think 400 SF a month, but I didn’t do it for the money. Although at the beginning it was difficult, as I really didn’t know what she wanted, I’ll never forget the experience and I’ll never forget her. She was a real character.’
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     Highsmith appreciated Bruno’s efforts – she told Kingsley that ‘life is better’ with him
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– and Vivien De Bernardi witnessed an improvement in her friend’s spirits. ‘She had a reflowering,’ says Vivien. ‘He took over the day-to-day work; she ate a little; she had a wonderful six months.’
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Photographs taken by Ingeborg Lüscher in the summer of 1994 show Pat, her slight frame enveloped by a mannish sweater, her neck swathed in an elegant cravat, sporting an enormous grin, her dark eyes sparkling with mischief, looking like she had just heard a dirty limerick. Despite her desperate lack of energy, she carried on working, writing book reviews for the
Times Literary Supplement
and
The Oldie
, a piece about O.J. Simpson for the
Washington Post
, and in September and October she oversaw the editing of
Small g
, a novel which netted her a £20,000 advance from Bloomsbury. Jean-Etienne Cohen-Séat, president of Calmann-Lévy, wrote to her expressing his admiration for the book: ‘No doubt many a reader will be delighted by this modern approach to everlasting issues such as human compulsion for pleasure and suffering through sexuality, love, friendship and social life.’
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     However, when the manuscript was shown to her American publishers, Knopf, they felt they had no choice but to turn it down. ‘It’s a very sweet and baffling book,’ says Gary Fisketjon. ‘In the best of all possible worlds it would be published as a young title, but the lunatic right-wing fringe that’s running this country wouldn’t have that.’
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If Knopf had gone ahead and published the book, ‘it would have undone whatever good had been done over the years,’ says Fisketjon. ‘But she wrote back, saying that she didn’t take the rejection personally. I think she probably knew it wasn’t quite up to snuff.’
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The rejection left her with no American publisher at the end of her life, a final symbolic gesture summing up the uneasy relationship between the displaced writer and the country of her birth. Highsmith’s marginalisation in the US, believes Neil Gordon, is symptomatic of the country’s failure to grapple with the power of her writing. America has, for the most part, ‘denied her insight – her painful and complicated insight into guilt and denial – much as her characters deny their guilt. That leaves her, so to speak, denied in the unconscious of our literature much like guilt is denied in her characters: always present, never cured, never acknowledged and never understood.’
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     In November, she travelled to Paris with Bee Loggenberg, where she met her friend, the actress Jeanne Moreau. The occasion was the celebration of
Le Nouvel Observateur
’s thirtieth anniversary. ‘She went to Paris even though she was feeling very weak at the time – sort of a Last Hurrah,’ says Kingsley.
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Snapshots taken by Bee in a restaurant show her looking frail, although smartly dressed in a white shirt, cobalt-blue cowboy pendant and Mexican-style waistcoat. ‘When we went to Paris she was already very ill and weak,’ says Bee, ‘but we had a lot of fun.’
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She did everything she could to fulfil her obligations, but she had to admit that she couldn’t possibly commit herself to future engagements. ‘I hesitate to make promises about next March,’ Highsmith wrote to Jean-Etienne Cohen-Séat after he asked whether she would be free to travel to Paris in March 1995 for the launch of
Small g
. ‘I wish I could . . . I haven’t the strength that I had a year ago.’
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     Back home, Highsmith took up, once again, the task of settling the details of her estate. On 15 November, she wrote to Daniel Keel asking him to act as a mediator in the sale of her papers to the Swiss Literary Archives, in Berne. There had been some discussion about whether to sell her literary remains to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin. At the end of September, Highsmith had written a letter to Tom Staley, the director of the Center, in which she tried to outline, in as modest a way as possible, her status amongst world writers, dropping in the fact that in 1991 she had been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature, an honour which that year went to Nadime Gordimer. But although Texas had bid $26,000 for the documents, Highsmith thought this amount ‘insulting and so she decided she would leave her papers to Switzerland,’ according to Vivien De Bernardi. ‘The Swiss Archive paid 150,000 SF which was nearly four times as much.’
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