Nom de Plume (31 page)

He had always drawn attention because of his gargantuan appetites, including his sexual escapades, yet in private he was an ordinary man who followed a rigid routine—as cited in a 1969
New York Times
profile, just a few years before his final novel was published: “Mr. Simenon lives by order and discipline. Not only does he rise at 6 on the dot, but he also goes to bed at the first stroke of 10, whether he is in the middle of the sentence or watching a drama on one of his seven TV sets. He falls asleep immediately.”

He had the luxury of adhering, without interference, to the simple routine he had designed—never having to do a single thing, for work or pleasure, that he did not schedule himself. And on September 4, 1989, he didn't feel like waking again. With nothing left to say, the great Simenon died serenely in his slumber at 3:30 in the morning.

He could not have written a better ending.

She kept snails as pets

Chapter 15

Patricia Highsmith &
CLAIRE MORGAN

S
he was one of the most wretched people you could ever meet, with mood shifts that swung as wildly as the stock market. Patricia Highsmith was born eleven years before Sylvia Plath, and the two women had a similar temperament. Like Plath, Highsmith possessed a legendary cruel streak and harbored feelings of murderous rage that were directed at family members, lovers, and innocent bystanders alike. One friend said that although she appreciated Highsmith's startlingly direct manner, unaccompanied by tact, she did not care for “the ranting and raving, the nastiness, the hatred which would overflow.” When a biographer of Highsmith was asked why she'd become interested in her subject, she replied, “I have always been interested in women who go too far—and Highsmith went further than anyone.”

That point is hard to dispute. Highsmith was a heavy smoker (Gauloises), an alcoholic, and sexually promiscuous. She had affairs with both men and women—almost all of these relationships were intense and unhappy—and she compulsively recorded her sexual encounters. She revised her work by retyping her manuscripts in their entirety “two-and-a-half times” on a manual typewriter. She was living proof that not all women have a maternal instinct. She was secretive, misanthropic, gruff, cheap, rude, and generally mean. She had wanderlust. She collected maps. She had an eating disorder and described food as her “bête noire.” She felt disgusted by feminists. She was openly and relentlessly anti-Semitic, and felt that the Holocaust didn't go far enough. She wrote hateful letters, critical of Israel, to politicians and newspapers, using more than forty pseudonyms (including “Phyllis Cutler” and “Edgar S. Sallich”) and disguised signatures. She saved, in her edition of the Holy Bible, an old article with the headline “Archaeologist Finds the Tomb of Caiphus, the Jewish High Priest Who Handed Jesus Christ Over to the Jews.” She said that she refused to sell Israel the rights to publish any of her books, and when the ham sandwiches she liked were no longer served in first class on airline flights, she blamed “the yids” for it. Yet she had Jewish lovers and friends. She had huge hands. She loved cats and owned many books about cats. She was a racist who believed that if black men didn't have sex many times a month, they became ill. She simultaneously cursed her fame and courted it. She was a compulsive liar. She had a febrile imagination and boasted that she had ideas “as often as rats have orgasms.” One of her editors described her as being like a “child of 10 or 11.” On her left wrist, she had a tattoo of her initials in Greek letters. She enjoyed watching violent scenes in movies, but shielded her eyes during sex scenes, which repelled her. She always wanted to play the harpsichord. She did play the recorder. She kept snails as pets because she enjoyed watching them copulate, liked their indeterminate gender and self-sufficiency, and said they provided a sense of tranquillity—this from someone almost incapable of relaxation. Her fondness for snails was such that she kept three hundred of them in her garden in Suffolk and insisted on traveling with them. When she moved to France in 1967, she smuggled snails into the country by hiding them under her breasts—and she made several trips back and forth to smuggle them all. Her favorite snails were named Hortense and Edgar. Her favorite flower was the carnation. She liked her Scotch neat. She had bad teeth. She was lonely and anxious, ambidextrous, and physically clumsy. She was sensitive to noise and despised it. She was obsessed by routine and repetition in all areas of her life. She believed that her phone was being wiretapped by people who wanted to steal her money. She liked to read the dictionary every evening before dinner. She was known to start drinking screwdrivers at seven o'clock in the morning. She made furniture. She felt that her best quality was perseverance. She was a gifted visual artist and admired the work of Francis Bacon because “he sees mankind throwing up into a toilet.” She was tall, dark, and handsome. She slept with many women named Virginia. She was paranoid and controlling. She contemplated suicide, but rejected the act as too selfish.

Patricia Highsmith was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, and grew up in New York City. She never felt at home in the United States and left permanently for Europe in 1963. Expatriate life suited her well. “My most persistent obsession—that America is fatally . . . off the mark of the true reality, that the Europeans have it precisely,” she wrote in her notebook at age twenty-seven. Her childhood could hardly be described as happy; she despised her equally vicious mother, Mary. Highsmith said that she “learned to live with a grievous and murderous hatred early on.”

After falling out with Mary in 1974, Highsmith did not see her for the last seventeen years of Mary's life. (It rankled her that her mother lived to the age of ninety-five.) Among what she considered countless slights and misdeeds, Highsmith deeply resented Mary's refusal to accept responsibility for her daughter's character, “or to put it bluntly queerness.” When she was fourteen years old her mother asked, “Are you a les? You are beginning to make noises like one.” This belittling remark served to alienate Highsmith further from everyone around her.

When she was nearly sixty years old, Highsmith was asked by a reporter why she did not love her mother. “First, because she made my childhood a little hell,” she said. “Second, because she herself never loved anyone, neither my father, my stepfather, nor me.” One of Highsmith's former lovers once commented that Mary was “high-strung, jealous, and possessive,” and that mother and daughter “enjoyed a certain
folie à deux.
” Although Highsmith dedicated a few books to her mother, she said that she did it only to impress the woman who found fault with everything she did.

In her diary, Highsmith described herself as feeling “like a glacier or like stone” until the age of thirty, but that sense of remove would never leave her. She had a lifelong aversion to being touched, and she bristled when someone shook her hand. (Many acquaintances learned never to do this with her.) Highsmith was perpetually anxious about maintaining boundaries with people. She viewed living with a romantic partner as “catastrophic.” Being alone was her preferred state: “My imagination functions better when I don't have to speak to people,” she said.

She was well aware that her taut, self-protective carapace had been caused partly by her upbringing and that it was “certainly tied up with the fact I had to conceal the most important emotional drives of myself completely.” Those yearnings were directed toward other women, a fact that drew baffled contempt from her mother.

Highsmith's parents divorced a few days before she was born, and five months before the birth, Mary had tried to abort the fetus by ingesting turpentine. “Highsmith” was actually the name of Patricia's stepfather, who the girl believed was her biological father until she was ten years old. (Her initial surname, Plangman, belonged to her father, but she never used it.) When she learned the truth about her stepfather, she wasn't terribly shocked, because she'd suspected for a while that he wasn't her real father. Still, the revelation added another confounding element to her already fragmented sense of identity. The experience of shifting and shedding selves would prove a recurring theme in her work. It was a conundrum she was never able to solve and one that never ceased to fascinate her.

As a child, Highsmith was reticent, hypersensitive, and self-conscious; she had difficulty forming attachments. By age six, she was aware of an inchoate longing for other girls, which she tried to suppress. An itinerant childhood added to her struggle with (and ambivalence toward) making new friends. But she was a sophisticated and voracious reader, which provided solace. She immersed herself in Dostoevsky, Kafka, Poe, Woolf, and Proust, among others.

When she was just eight years old, she discovered
The Human Mind
, the first book by the influential American psychiatrist Karl Menninger. “He writes about pyromaniacs, kleptomaniacs, schizos and so on; their case histories, whether they're cured or not,” she later recalled. “I found this very interesting, and it was only much later that I realized that it had had such an effect on my imagination, because I started writing these weirdo stories when I was fifteen or sixteen.” The opening sentence of the first story she wrote was, “He prepared to go to sleep, removed his shoes and set them parallel, toe outward, beside his bed.” (Even when she was a teenager, her obsessive-compulsive tendencies were set. These were efforts at control—a coping mechanism in response to the tumult of her early years.)

She was a lifelong diarist and a relentless maker of charts, sketches, and lists that included ratings of lovers by character trait and category. At her death, she left behind about eight thousand pages from her diaries and “cahiers,” as she called her notebooks. (The diaries were for chronicling personal experiences; the “cahiers” recorded ideas for stories, poems, and other creative endeavors.) These writings were searching, anguished, and intimate. “Every move I make on earth is in some way for women,” she wrote. “I adore them! I need them as I need music, as I need drawings.”

She struggled with the gap between who she was and who she longed to become: “What and why am I? There is an ever more acute difference . . . between my inner self which I know is the real me, and various faces of the outside world.” Her identity seemed in perpetual flux, and it was quite a lot to manage. “Dostoevsky is criticized for ambivalence, for illogic, contradictions—worst of all, ambivalences in his philosophy,” she once wrote in her diary. “But there are always two. Perhaps this wonderful, magical, creative, public & private number is the mystic secret of the universe. One can love two people, the sexes are within all of us, emotions directly contrary do exist side by side. This is the way I see the world too.”

On December 31, 1947, she wrote a private “New Year's Toast”: “[T]o all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envys, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle—may they never give me peace.” Her own happiness, whatever that meant, was not relevant. Nor did anyone else's well-being matter to her, and in that sense she was a bit like the sociopathic characters in her stories.

In 1942, Highsmith graduated from Barnard College. Thus began a series of failed job interviews with various magazines. This was (and remains) a common entry-level field for literary college graduates in Manhattan. But no one would have her.
Time, Fortune, Good Housekeeping
, and
Mademoiselle
were among the publications that turned her down. Her interview with
Vogue
was comically disastrous, even though she did have a flair for clothing and usually displayed a distinctive, androgynous style. She was also meticulous about ironing, a domestic task she'd mastered at a young age and found satisfying. Yet for some reason, Highsmith showed up for her much-coveted interview looking like a mess. She appeared at the offices of the world's most glamorous and prestigious fashion magazine “with a stained and wrinkled blouse, bad hair, and, in the formal 1940s, a head unadorned by a hat,” as her biographer Joan Schenkar noted. She appeared to have rolled out of bed and gone straight to her interview. In her diary, Highsmith was angry about the rejection (which was clearly her fault). “Well, I did wash my hair just before going in,” she wrote. “There'll come a time when I shall be bigger than
Vogue
and I can thank my lucky star I escaped their corruptive influences.” Unlikely as it was, she would prove to be right.

After Barnard, she had a secret life: writing comic strips (story lines and dialogue) for at least seven years. Later, as Schenkar discovered, Highsmith attempted to remove, without explanation, all traces of this extensive work from her archives. Still, she seemed oddly suited to writing comics if you consider that she specialized in superheroes with alter egos—secret lives and clandestine identities that shifted from day to night. One of her few pleasures in life was fiercely guarding secrets about herself, down to the most banal details.

In 1950, she would publish her first novel,
Strangers on a Train.
It promptly launched her career. The story—which follows two men, Guy and Bruno, who meet on a train and form a murder pact, as well as a twisted, homoerotic bond—had been rejected by six publishers. Yet upon publication it was an immediate success, and Alfred Hitchcock adapted it into a well-received film. (Highsmith was unhappy that the director had paid only about $7,000 to secure the rights. She never got over it.) The process of getting the script written proved challenging; writers such as Dashiell Hammett and John Steinbeck turned down the project. Raymond Chandler wrote an early draft but was fired by Hitchcock. That was probably for the best, as Chandler admitted that he had struggled with the material. “It's darn near impossible to write, because consider what you have to put over: a perfectly decent young man (Guy) agrees to murder a man he doesn't know, has never seen, in order to keep a maniac from giving himself away and from tormenting the nice young man,” Chandler wrote. “We are flirting with the ludicrous. If it is not written and played exactly right, it will be absurd.”

Other film adaptations of Highsmith's work over the years included René Clément's
Purple Noon
and Anthony Minghella's
The Talented Mr. Ripley.
In the 1980s, a smart, talented young film director named Kathryn Bigelow, who would go on to direct the Academy Award–winning film
The Hurt Locker
, wrote a script on spec for a Highsmith novel she loved. The project never went anywhere, but Highsmith liked Bigelow very much.

Truman Capote was responsible for helping the author complete her draft of
Strangers on a Train.
In the summer of 1948, thanks to his endorsement, Highsmith was awarded a residency at Yaddo, the prestigious writers' and artists' colony in upstate New York. Also there that summer were Chester Himes and Flannery O'Connor. Highsmith finally got the space and time she needed to finish the manuscript, despite her two-day hangovers. She was thrilled: “If I cannot give birth in the supreme hospital of Yaddo, where can I ever?” Fifty years later, in a rare magnanimous gesture, Highsmith would show her gratitude to Yaddo by naming it the sole beneficiary of her estate, along with a $3 million bequest.