Free The Talented Miss Highsmith by Joan Schenkar Page A

Schuster, and then goes on to Indianapolis, where she stays with her friends the concert pianist Michel Block and Charles Latimer, ex–advertising director at Heinemann. She watches televangelists on their television for a week, researching her novel at one remove. She travels to Fort Worth and Los Angeles. The entire trip takes three weeks.
    February: She moves to Aurigeno, Switzerland—but just barely. French tax law requires that she spend six months out of the country and six months in it, and that’s what she does, shuttling between Moncourt and Aurigeno for several years, ambivalent as to whether or not she should sell the house in Moncourt. She advertises the Moncourt house in The New York Review of Books for one hundred thousand dollars, reduces the price to seventy-five thousand dollars, and receives tentative interest in buying it from Peter Handke, Hedli MacNeice (her neighbor in Moncourt and the ex-wife of poet Louis MacNeice), and a “nice bachelor.” In her absences, she doesn’t heat the house sufficiently and the radiators burst.
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    1983. People Who Knock on the Door published in the UK. The Black House , a collection of short stories, and People Who Knock on the Door rejected by Harper & Row. She is without a publisher in the United States for two years.
    April: She travels to Paris to publicize People Who Knock on the Door . The filmmaker and journalist Christa Maerker visits her in Aurigeno; Pat coolly points out to Maerker the local railway crossing where she has recently driven her car into a train.
    June: Pat starts to plot out Found in the Street, a novel which takes place in her old Greenwich Village neighborhood. She gives two of her protagonists her old address on Grove Street, and her heroine is murdered at Buffie Johnson’s address on Greene Street. The precipitating event in her story is a returned wallet—Pat had always dreamt of returning a wallet—and “Half the characters,” she writes to her longtime correspondent Barbara Ker-Seymer, “are gay or half-gay.” (Pat never did get the opportunity to return a wallet, but in Paris, in 1952, her own lost wallet was returned. She wasn’t particularly grateful.) The heroine is a young girl who inspires dreams of love in all the major characters—but only the male protagonist’s wife gets to sleep with her. In this work, Pat’s rendering of the Manhattan ambiance of the early 1980s is based on some interesting cross-cultural misunderstandings.
    Naiad Press, the lesbian publishing company in Florida founded by Barbara Grier and Donna McBride, buys the rights to reprint The Price of Salt. In spring of 1989 Pat writes a new preface for Naiad’s edition of The Price of Salt.
    November: She flies to New York to do more “research” for Found in the Street, stays in East Hampton, and sojourns in Greenwich Village at the venerable Hotel Earle (now the Washington Square Hotel). Her stay inspires the cockroach story in Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes. She meets both Otto Penzler, founder of the Mysterious Press, who tells her he wants to publish her books, and Anne-Elizabeth Suter, who represents Diogenes’s writers in the United States.
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    1984. June: Bettina Berch, who teaches at Barnard College, visits Pat in Aurigeno and conducts a revealing interview with her.
    October: Pat goes to Istanbul to write a travel piece about the Orient Express; it’s another of her pleasurable experiences with trains. She doesn’t travel now unless she is paid—or unless she can make use of her travels in a book or an article.
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    1985. People Who Knock on the Door published by Simon & Schuster in the United States. After 1985, Highsmith is without a trade publisher in the United States. It is Otto Penzler who takes up the publishing burden with his Mysterious Press, and he publishes six