Free The Talented Miss Highsmith by Joan Schenkar Page B

Highsmith titles between 1985 and 1988. He admires her work but finds her behavior odious.
    May: Marc Brandel visits her in Aurigeno with his third wife to discuss his scripting of her novel The Blunderer for an English film company. In 1956, Brandel had adapted The Talented Mr. Ripley for New York television’s Studio One . She advances him eight thousand dollars of her own money to write the script. The film is never made.
    In March, she lists “Twenty Things I Like” and “Twenty Things I Do Not Like” for Diogenes Verlag. Amongst the things she doesn’t like: “A TV set in my house,” “People who believe that some god or other really has control over everything but is not exercising that control just now,” “Fascists,” and “petty thieves and well-to-do housebreakers who specialize in silverware.” Her likes include: “Swiss army knives,” “Things made of leather,” “Making anything out of wood,” “Fountain pens with real points,” “Kafka’s writing,” and “Being alone.” In May, she answers the Proust Questionnaire for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (10 May 1985 “Fragebogen” ): she says that her best quality is “perseverance,” her biggest fault is “indecision,” she likes “intelligence” in women, her favorite color is still “yellow,” and, at the moment, the painters she likes are “Munch” and “Balthus.” (In March, her favorite painter was “Kokoschka.”) She quotes Noël Coward: “Work is more fun than play.”
    “The only thing that makes one feel happy and alive is trying for something that one cannot get” (Cahier 36, 5 August 1985).
    September: Mermaids on the Golf Course published by Heinemann.
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    1986. February: Found in the Street published by Heinemann and by Calmann-Lévy in Paris.
    10 April: She is successfully operated on for a cancerous tumor in her lung at Brompton Hospital in London. “You must not think I had to use any discipline to stop smoking,” she writes to Patricia Losey (with whose husband, Joseph Losey, she had been in discussion about a film) on 12 June 1986, “it was fear alone that made me stop.”
    June: She finally sells the house at 21 rue de la Boissière in Moncourt: she has owned it longer than any other house, sixteen years. The day she sells it, she tries, unsuccessfully, to buy it back for 125,000 francs more than she was paid for it. In August, she goes back to Moncourt to look for another house to buy; she fails to find anything suitable.
    She sends the first of many letters to the International Herald Tribune criticizing Israel. Most of these letters are written under one of at least forty pseudonyms; this one is signed Edgar S. Sallich and is published on 9 July. She returns to the Brompton Hospital in London for an examination in July and is told that there is no recurrence of her cancer and that her tumor was glandular and unrelated to smoking. She lights up immediately.
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    1987. Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes is published in the UK. Her most political book. Much of the satire in the stories is awkward (vide: “President Buck Jones Rallies and Waves the Flag”), though prescient in its analysis. One of the stories, “No End in Sight,” is a revolted meditation on Mary Highsmith’s condition at the Fireside Lodge, her nursing home in Fort Worth. In the story, Pat gives Mary a son, who she says is herself. Pat wants to write an even more revolted sequel to “No End in Sight” called “The Tube.” She never gets around to it.
    April: Peter Huber tells her of the land for sale adjacent to the house he and his wife share with Bert Diener and Julia Diener-Diethelm. She buys it and works with the architect,