The Talented Miss Highsmith by Joan Schenkar Page A

neighbor; there she meets her new editor at Calmann-Lévy, Patrice Hoffman.
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    1995. 4 February: Pat dies in the hospital at Locarno of two competing diseases, aplastic anemia and cancer, and she dies an American citizen. The last friend she speaks to in the hospital is her American accountant, Marylin Scowden, on the evening of 3 February. Six weeks before her death, Pat changed her will, appointing Daniel Keel, already her publisher and international representative, as her literary executor; he replaces Kingsley Skattebol. Her assets and royalties are left to Yaddo. Her notebooks and diaries are found in a linen closet. 6 February: She is cremated at the cemetery in Bellinzona.
    11 March: A memorial service for Pat, organized by Daniel Keel and filmed for German television, is conducted in the Catholic church at Tegna. Highsmith publishers from all over Europe fly in and join her friends in paying their respects. No editor from America comes; she no longer has a publisher in America. Pat’s ashes are interred in the church’s columbarium.
    February: Small g: A Summer Idyll is published posthumously. Its most implausible plot point—a gay man is falsely told by his doctor that he has AIDS to frighten him into safe sexual practices—is taken from life: Pat’s friend Frieda Sommer, who researched the book’s Zurich details, has a friend on whom the character of Rikki Markwalder is vaguely based. The novel is like a classic comic book version of all previous Highsmith themes—but with attempts to be “current” it strains towards inclusion and modernity. Even the dog in the novel—dogs in Highsmith fictions usually get kidnapped or shot—is a charming poodle who has a happy life. Pat’s old friend from Florence in 1952, Brian Glanville, writes in European Magazine that he wishes the book “had not appeared.” Josyane Savigneau, another friend, is more charitable in Le Monde : she says the book might be thought of as a kind of testament, “disturbed however by the evident wish for a happy end” ( Le Monde , 17 February 1995).
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    1996. Pat’s papers are sold to the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern, Switzerland, where they become one of the library’s largest holdings.
    The settlement of her estate takes eight years.

Appendix 2
Patricia Highsmith’s New York
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    From 1927 to 1960, with short intermissions, Patricia Highsmith and her parents kept apartments in New York City. Pat was schooled in New York, she started her cahiers and diaries there, and she began both her “secret” career as a scriptwriter for comic books and her public career as a writer of fiction in Manhattan.
    Wherever she lived in the world, Pat continued to set many of her novels and stories in New York or in small, imaginary suburban towns—in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and New York State—just a railway ride away from the city. New York was a kind of terminal for these fictions, and her imagination went out from it and returned to it again and again.
    This map shows some of the “real” addresses in Pat Highsmith’s city life and some of the “fictional” addresses that feature in her work. Often enough the two coincide, especially when Pat had murder on her mind.
    FACT
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    1. Manhattan: The Highsmiths’ first Manhattan apartment on West 103rd Street.
    2. Astoria, Queens: The Highsmith apartments on Twenty-first Road and Twenty-eighth Street.
    3. Hell Gate Railway Bridge; Wards Island: the largest mental hospital in the United States; Rikers Island: the largest prison in New York State. These two landmarks are in the waters just beyond Pat’s first childhood apartments in Astoria.
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    4. The Highsmith apartment at One Bank Street in Greenwich Village (on the site of an apartment building formerly occupied by Willa Cather).
    5. Julia Richman High School at 327