‘She was a monster’: the real Patricia Highsmith, according to the people who knew her | Books

P.Publisher and bookseller Otto Penzler loved Patricia Highsmith’s work all his life, but their first meeting was a failure. In 1984, she agreed to give a reading at The Mysterious Bookshop, her store on West 56th Street in New York. The American author of the Ripley novels, then 63, had lived 20 years in Europe – in England, then France, then Switzerland – and rarely appeared in public, so he had high hopes.

“But no one showed up. There were maybe four of us,” Penzler says from his book-lined office beneath the store. Now 84 years old, with a well-groomed white beard and a warm, amused demeanor, he has just returned from a crime convention and is still very much in the game. Highsmith, he recalled, had little time for his readers. “She was somewhat taciturn. People would get their books signed and leave within five minutes. I had a two-hour event planned, so what should I do? With some authors I can say, ‘Let me buy you dinner.’ Well, not with Pat. She interrupted his little rant about France with a ‘I can’t stand damn frogs.’

Highsmith, born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, achieved success with her first film in 1950, Strangers on a Train, boosted by the Alfred Hitchcock film. A perfect second novel, Lesbian Road Trip The Price of Salt (later reissued as Carol), sold a million copies under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) was a critical success. But by the mid-1960s, Highsmith’s American luck ran out: his agent wrote that his books were “too subtle,” and his characters too unlikeable, to make a paperback. In 1984, she found herself without an American publisher.

“She never found a home because she was very unpleasant,” Penzler says. “I don’t think anyone said, ‘Oh, look, we’re losing money but I love her so much, let’s keep her.'” Not knowing it yet, he signed a six-book deal with Highsmith, creating a new imprint. “Pat didn’t want to be identified as a mystery writer, so I started Penzler Books.” He knew Highsmith’s first editor, Joan Kahn. “When I told her I bought Pat, she said, ‘My God, what’s wrong with you?’ Later we agreed that she was a monster.

In Anton Corbijn’s new film A Talent for Murder, adapted from Joanna Murray-Smith’s 2014 play Switzerland, a dying Highsmith is played by Helen Mirren, who shows off her physique with dark contact lenses, a wig and a way to make her neck disappear. In 1995, when the film was made, Highsmith had been living alone for years, ending her last relationship with translator Monique Buffet, then 27, when she was 66. Tortured by her sexuality, unrequited love and a poisoned mother, happiness largely eluded her.

The premise of the film is that a young American editor must persuade Highsmith to write one last novel about Ripley: if she signs, her job is guaranteed and her uncertain inheritance assured. It is, of course, fiction, albeit lovingly constructed on real details, from the glasses of water filled with cigarettes to her pet snail tank and the Bond villain bunker she designed.

The image of the misanthrope has helped maintain Highsmith’s legacy, with Ripley recently remade by Netflix, but has the sadistic knife collector become a caricature? Did she deserve greater recognition in America? She hated publicity, which made life difficult for its champions. Penzler recalls that on a book tour, “my wife and I took her to our most beloved Italian restaurant. A young publicist, whose job it was to take Pat to all the interviews, came over with two long-stemmed roses. My wife said, ‘Oh, what a sweet thing!’ Pat threw hers on the floor without making eye contact. You can’t imagine a person like that.

After that, Penzler took on supporting duties. The interviews were brief and sometimes never published. “The only time Pat said anything positive was when I asked her if she would like to stop for a drink. She said, ‘I’ll have a beer. I like beer.'” Highsmith’s Swiss editor Anna von Planta recalls a similar first meeting in 1984: “Pat greeted me coldly, ignoring my outstretched hand. She then ordered a beer and kept quiet.”

By 1967, Highsmith had begun a lifelong relationship with the Swiss publisher Diogenes, who took control of his literary estate upon his death, along with 56 volumes of unpublished diaries, letters and stories, carefully filed at the bottom of his linen cupboard. These newspapers exposed Highsmith’s anti-Semitism and racism. In his introduction to a 2021 published edition of these, Von Planta writes that Highsmith’s views were accurately represented, even when offensive, but that “in a handful of more extreme cases (we did) felt it our editorial duty to deny Pat a stage for them, just as we did during his lifetime.” Did Penzler ever feel like she was overstepping her boundaries? “She hated so many things, including women. If there was anti-Semitism in her stories, I probably missed it because it was mild compared to the other things.”

Even those who were put off by Highsmith’s prejudices shared an appreciation of his work – its strangeness, its precision, its gift of character and its old-fashioned darkness. The horror of Tom Ripley’s novels lies not so much in their violence (even if it is abundant) as in the increasing pleasure they derive from it. Is he planning to murder an art collector with a bottle of Margaux in Ripley Under Ground? “Tom just couldn’t answer that question. And did it matter much?” she wrote. This Sadness sold better in Europe: even a weak late novel, Found in the Street, sold 40,000 copies in Germany compared to 4,000 in America.

Gary Fisketjon was Highsmith’s next and last American editor, at Atlantic then Knopf. He died suddenly of a stroke on November 7, aged 72, but when I spoke to him a week earlier, he had only fond memories of her.. She wasn’t a pussy, nor were her other authors, including Jay McInerney, Donna Tartt and Cormac McCarthy. He still had regrets about a lunch that never really came to fruition with Highsmith, Bret Easton Ellis and Michel Houellebecq, which would have been a fairly nihilistic triumvirate: you can trace a direct line from Tom Ripley to Patrick Bateman.

“We never had a crossword,” Fisketjon said by phone from Oregon. “I took Pat to dinner at the Odeon, which was very popular. Kind of a classy crowd, downtown, artsy and whatnot, and she was just captivated. She was studying everyone in the room.” In a 1984 diary, Highsmith wrote that “it would be interesting to see what good writers will come from cocaine users”, and by the mid-1980s she had her answer on the literary scene.

At the Frankfurt Book Fair, she and Fisketjon talked about their cats. “She was a superstar in Germany and she took care to explain to me the best way to drink their beer, with the foam on it.” Fisketjon published Found in the Street (1987) and Ripley’s final novel, Ripley Under Water (1991), giving notes the same way he would anyone else. “The ideal was, and this happened several times with Pat, that she would say, ‘I see where you’re going with this, but here’s a better way to make it better.'” When Hollywood scouts took him to lunch, he told them to look at Highsmith’s list. “But the idea of ​​getting in touch with a Swiss publisher to make a deal was unusual. She was an exception, living abroad.”

Fisketjon had abandoned his last novel, Small g: A Summer Idyll, believing that he “couldn’t publish it”. with as much fervor as Pat deserved. She took it better than I feared. They remained friends, exchanging letters and cat news. He had seen A Talent for Murder a few days earlier and enjoyed it, but found the plot implausible. “Lady Mirren’s expressions reminded me vividly of Pat, although her personality was much darker than I have ever seen.”

Liz Calder looked after Highsmith in Bloomsbury in the late 1980s until the author’s death, and is mentioned in her diary: a dinner in Hampstead in 1992, with her “parrot called Jon-Jon – maybe 38, light green”. “Actually, it was Juju,” Calder says, “but they communicated pretty well. I think she was more interested in the parrot than any of us.”

Now 88, she remembers Highsmith as “very, very unusual. She would make a lot of comments about things around her – ‘look, there’s something going on there’ – or about what I was wearing. She was almost unsocialized.” At the same time, she had close friends in London, France and Switzerland. “People who had nothing to do with her work. She loosened up with me over time but I never met them.”

Highsmith died of lung cancer and anemia on February 4, 1995, aged 74. American newspapers published obituaries but sales did not increase. When publisher Robert Weil contacted Diogenes about publishing a few of his books with WW Norton in 1998, they insisted that he acquire all 14 that were then out of print in America, including Strangers on a Train. “I was new at Norton. They said, ‘This is crazy, the sales aren’t holding up.’ But I persisted.” He agreed to Diogenes’s terms, eventually agreeing to his last unpublished novel, Small g, as well as the Ripleys, Carol and dozens of unpublished stories.

Now editor-in-chief of the Norton Liveright brand, Weil speaks from a New York office lined with Highsmith boxes. Actor Alden Ehrenreich spent time here while researching A Talent for Murder (“it was a wonderful fly on the wall”) and Weil thinks there’s even more to be done with Highsmith. Small g was “not his best work”, but a new collection of short stories received “thunderous reviews” in 2001. At that time, Anthony Minghella’s 1999 film…