Free The Talented Miss Highsmith by Joan Schenkar

for part of Mary’s care.
    September: Pat, along with Michael Frayn and Stanley Middleton, is invited by the Swiss Association of Teachers of English in Hölstein, Switzerland, to speak at a weeklong series of seminars. She discusses The Glass Cell —“its origins and difficulties”—and meets Peter Huber and Frieda Sommer. The former will become her neighbor in Tegna; the latter, one of her executors.
    Jay Bernard Plangman, Pat’s father, who has maintained a friendship with Mary Highsmith, offering to give her driving lessons, dies in Fort Worth, Texas. Pat does not return for her father’s funeral.
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    1976. June. Edith’s Diary is rejected by Knopf.
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    1977. Wim Wenders makes a film of Ripley’s Game, Der Amerikanishe freund ( The American Friend ), scripted by Peter Handke. It stars Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz and features seven film directors in minor roles. “What have they done to my Ripley is my wail,” Pat writes to Ronald Blythe. Wenders says Pat ultimately told him she liked the film. Little Tales of Misogyny wins the Grand Prix de l’Humeur Noir in Paris for Pat and her illustrator, Roland Topor. Hans Geissendörfer makes a film of The Glass Cell , Die gläserne Zelle . Pat likes it.
    May: Edith’s Diary is published by Heinemann in London and, later in the year, by Simon & Schuster in New York.
    Claude Miller makes a film of This Sweet Sickness, Dites-lui que je l’aime (with Gérard Depardieu and Miou-Miou). Pat doesn’t like it.
    Belle Ombre , a play adapted from two Highsmith short stories—“When the Fleet Was In at Mobile” and “The Terrapin”—is produced by Francis Lacombrade at Théâtre de l’Épicerie, in Paris.
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    1978. Pat is elected president of the jury at the Berlin Film Festival, another unhappy public experience. Committee work is not her forte and she didn’t really want the job. She remeets actress and costume designer Tabea Blumenschein and film director Ulrike Ottinger in Berlin.
    Spring: Pat falls in love with Tabea Blumenschein. It is a short relationship and Pat is devastated by its end; it is as though she met her own youthful self in a mirror and then lost her. She and Tabea exchange letters for some years, meet infrequently, then fall into silence. The violence of her feelings for Tabea will affect Pat for several years.
    August: Begins an affair of a few months with a young French teacher of English, Monique Buffet—it is the last affair of Pat’s life. It produces many letters, good relations, and a satisfying friendship, and allows Pat to finish the novel that was interrupted by her breakup with Tabea, The Boy Who Followed Ripley . She dedicates the book to Monique.
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    1979. Slowly , Slowly in the Wind (Leise, leise im Wind) , a collection of reliably perverse tales, is published in England by Heinemann and in Zurich by Diogenes.
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    1980. 26 March: The French fiscal authority, the douane , raids Pat’s house in Moncourt, looking for evidence of tax evasion. She is profoundly disturbed by the intrusion. Pat gives this raid as her reason for buying a house in Aurigeno, Switzerland, but, at Ellen Hill’s direction, she had picked out a house in Aurigeno before the douane raided her. Pat works on a new edition of Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction for St. Martin’s Press and begins some stories that will appear in the collection The Black House (published in 1981 in the UK and 1988 in the United States.)
    October: She begins to work on People Who Knock on the Door, published in 1983 in the UK and in 1985 in the United States.
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    1981. January: She travels to the United States to look at the question of Christian fundamentalism as a subject for People Who Knock on the Door . She goes to New York, where she sees Larry Ashmead, now at Simon &