The Talented Miss Highsmith Read Online Free Page A

with any of the Virginias, the Jeans, the Jeannes, the Joans, the Anns, the Annes, the Ellens, the Katherines, Kathryns, Catherines or Carolines, the Diones, the Sheilas, the Helens, the Marions, the Lynns, the Moniques, the Marias, the Mickeys, the Billies or the Marys, et al. , who had, at one time or another, been so achingly available to her.
    But even if she was unable to sustain her long relationship with Ellen Hill (so good for her work, so bad for her living) or her equally long relationship with the married Caroline Besterman (the last “adult love” of her life), Pat did manage to keep the resentments and furies of these failed love affairs alive and well for decades, as hot and bright—almost—as love itself.

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The Real Romance of Objects
    Part 3
    As is the way of the world, every remaining object Pat Highsmith kept under her eyes and out of her cellars is now kept entirely out of sight in someone else’s cellar: the enormous, climatically controlled cellar of the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern, Switzerland. The Highsmith Archives are on the lowest of the seven custodial levels in the national archives’ large white Bauhaus building, and they belong to the people of Switzerland.
    The building housing the Swiss Literary Archives looks like the original structure from which Pat’s white block of a house in Tegna might be an abbreviated quotation. There is something official about both structures: they resemble large and small editions of municipal monuments, although the archive building is beautiful in its severity, and Pat’s house in Tegna is merely…severe. But the apparently windowless Casa Highsmith is more fortified, even, than the large, light, extravagantly windowed literary archives. And like its first owner, the Tegna house has no obvious windows, is divided into two sections, and looks inward upon itself. But from above, light streams into the Casa Highsmith, and out in back—where no public eyes can pry—it overlooks a garden and sky and trees.
    â€œHitler’s bunker,” said a friend at first sight of the Casa Highsmith’s blind front. Pat laughed grimly. 1
    Like all of Pat’s houses, the cellars of the Swiss Literary Archives are fiendishly cold, kept at temperatures which prolong the life of acid-impregnated papers. Every single thing Pat had in her house at the time of her death—barring the special trinkets distributed to friends and neighbors after her death and the furniture she bought or made—is there, boxed and catalogued, for as long as the world lasts. An enthusiastic archivist of her own effects, Pat would have appreciated the archives’ filing system.
    In carefully numbered acid-free boxes, long flat drawers, and library shelves, all of Pat’s earthly remains—except what she sometimes seemed to value the most, her money—sit in that cold cellar in Bern. Bern is the capital of Switzerland, a verdant, fragrant mountain city of breathtaking views and shadowy arcades which Pat seems to have visited only by letter. The city is encircled by an azure blue, ice-cold, glacier-fed river, the River Aare. It is as dangerous as it is beautiful, with a current so swift that every five meters a handrail is riveted into its banks so that swimmers in trouble can hold on and try to catch their breath. Many swimmers do indeed plunge into the Aare—but not all of them come out alive. And that is another detail about the Swiss capital of Bern that Pat Highsmith would have appreciated.
    The Highsmith possessions in the Swiss Literary Archives have all survived their owner’s turbulent life, transiting tastes, and long expatriation. They contain, as nothing else does, what Janet Flanner once called “the specific invisible remains” of Pat’s long relationship with them.
    So here they are for you to see. Or rather, here it is: a sizeable sampling of Patricia Highsmith’s goods and chattels