The Talented Miss Highsmith by Joan Schenkar

Tobias Amman, who renovated her Aurigeno house, to design “Casa Highsmith”: a white, seemingly windowless block of a house, divided into two “lobes,” whose seclusions and divisions suit her imagination. She calls it “a strong house.” It is a variation on the old Coates boardinghouse in Fort Worth, whose design she consults while constructing it. She signs a contract with the Atlantic Monthly Press to publish her books in America. Gary Fisketjon becomes her editor.
    Claude Chabrol writes and directs a French film adaption of The Cry of the Owl , Le Cri du hibou (starring Christophe Malavoy, Mathilda May, Virginie Thévenet, Jacques Penot).
    Pat changes her English publisher from Heinemann to Bloomsbury.
    29 October: Pat appears in genial form on New York Book Beat, Donald Swaim’s CBS radio interview program for authors. She has come to publicize Atlantic Monthly’s publication of Found in the Street, and she makes some (for her) revealing statements.
    Â 
    1988. January: “Ripley touches madness,” Pat writes in a cahier. Pat starts taking notes for her fifth Ripley book, Ripley Under Water. It becomes the last and most awkwardly plotted of the Ripleys, drawn from her fascination with sadomasochistic relations, and from her trip to Tangier to visit Buffie Johnson (and Paul Bowles). Ripley again laughs inappropriately at the double death of the “odd couple” who irritate him, and he once again tosses incriminating evidence into the Loing Canal, the canal which bordered Pat’s best-loved house in Moncourt.
    August: Pat goes to visit Buffie Johnson in Tangier, where Buffie is living and painting in Jane Bowles’s apartment at the Immeuble Itesa just beneath Paul Bowles’s apartment. Pat takes extensive notes on life in Tangier which she will use for Ripley Under Water and befriends Paul, whom she knew slightly from her New York years. Paul Bowles and Pat begin a correspondence. The ideas for story and novel titles at the end of her cahier become more bitter: Sweet Smell of Death, King of the Garbage, The Bearer of Bad Tidings, Bright Murder, Dull Knife —and the bilingual jokes get worse: Creepy School (Crepuscule), A Fete Worse Than Death.
    September: Pat receives the Prix litteraire from the American Film Festival in Deauville, France.
    December: Pat moves to her new house in Tegna.
    Â 
    1990. Pat is made an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France.
    Â 
    1991. 12 March: Mary Highsmith dies at ninety-five.
    Â 
    1992. January: Little Tales of Misogyny performed as a theater piece by the Companya Teatre de Barcelona.
    Spring: Pat visits Peter Ustinov’s house in Rolle for a double interview with German Vogue . She begins to consult with an American accountant in Geneva about a subject never far from her mind: her double taxation problem. She starts to write Small g: A Summer Idyll .
    October: Pat travels to the United States on a publicity junket for Ripley Under Water, published by Knopf. She reads at Rizzoli’s bookstore in New York and meets the chairman of the Yaddo board to discuss the possible donation of her house in Tegna as an artists’ retreat. She is dissuaded from this idea—it is impractical—and she begins to think of other ways she might endow Yaddo. She goes to Box Canyon Ranch in Weatherford, Texas, to visit Dan and Florine Coates, then travels to Toronto to read at the Harbourfront festival on 18 October. Having initiated a correspondence with Marijane Meaker after twenty-seven years of silence, Pat spends three days at Meaker’s house in East Hampton. The visit does not go well.
    Â 
    1993. July: She is diagnosed as seriously anemic and told to stop drinking. She does so—cold turkey—for three weeks.
    Â 
    1994. Fall: She makes a last, promotional trip to Paris accompanied by a Swiss