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Patricia Highsmith & Oscar Wilde: The Dark Lady of American Letters Meets Her Match in Père Lachaise
By
Published: Nov 29, 2009
Category: Biography
Oscar Wilde died on November 30, 1900. To Joan Schenkar --- author of the massive, definitive, shocking and entertaining biography, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith, which will be published on December 8 --- the date of Wilde's death suggested a little-known story. Here, Wilde is dead and buried. And one summer's day Miss Highsmith comes to visit….
It's July 12, 1962. And it's Paris. Patricia Highsmith –- the forty-one year-old author of such dark-hearted fictions as Strangers On a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Deep Water -- has just emerged from a lengthy ride on the Paris Metro. Her alabaster skin and almond eyes have already begun to show the signs of her drinking and her disappointments.
Pat enters an imposing gate set in a stone wall so long she can't see the end of it, keeping her eyes on her size 9 1/2 shoes as they walk her up and over the hilly, cobblestoned streets of France's largest literary gathering ground: Père Lachaise cemetery. She is as interested in counterfeit, forgery and homosexuality as the still-dishonoured gentleman she has come to visit.
Paris is hot and bright this July day, perfect weather for cemetery-walking. Fleecy clouds are chasing each other across an enormous expanse of Cézanne-blue sky but Pat is not interested in the atmosphere. She is carrying her bolsa, one of those large woven bags she brought back from her five months in Mexico in the early 1940's and never threw away. In it, she packs a 3"x 5" spiral "travelling" notebook, along with something to drink and something to smoke. These are the props of her creative life and she is never without them: a notebook, a fountain pen, a lit cigarette, a bottle –- and her tenebrous imagination.
"These stones," she writes in her notebook with the kind of satisfaction that only thoughts of death can bring her, "must make a grim, loud noise when metal wheels of carts, carrying bodies, go over them!"
Pat Highsmith isn't alone in having to watch her feet in Père Lachaise. Every writer who makes the pilgrimage there –- and every writer does; Père Lachaise is the Dead Letter Office of Literary Aspirations -- ends up with eyes on the ground. Part of the pleasure in wandering this City of the Dead is the perpendicularity of the visitor's position in relation to that of the visitee; no one strolling the cemetery wants to stumble on a stone and fall flat on a grave. Pat, who has already killed quite a few of her characters with nasty fictional falls, understands very well how the smallest irregularity in a rock can make the difference between life and death.
Because the only thing Pat likes more than a good list is a good map, she is very much at home here. The moment she walked through the gate, she was handed -- without charge, this was 1962 –- a map of the cemetery. She needs it: Père Lachaise is the largest burial ground in Paris. It has its own roads, its own posted dead celebrity lists, and its 105 acre plot is partitioned into neat, well-defined segments. But as she walks past the graves of Bizet, Balzac and Alfred de Musset (and bypasses entirely the graves of Chopin, Sarah Bernhardt, and Isadora Duncan), "the only name which interested" her on the map was "Oscar Wilde's." She finally "reached [his grave] after nearly a mile of walking among time-darkened "rectangular vaults."
"I came upon Oscar’s [monument] – a large nearly square rectangle of granite with a large Egyptian figure in headdress, flying horizontally."
To an outsider artist -- an outsider everything -- like Patricia Highsmith, Oscar's lines, inscribed on the back of the monument, seem to be written for her alone.
And alien tears will fill for him
Pity's long broken urn
For his mourners will be outcast men
And outcasts always mourn
"My eyes fill with tears," she writes later, and then corrects herself in her notebook: "(filled)." This moment is too important, too authentic, to counterfeit. But, still, she never takes her eyes off her audience.
"Such tears," she writes remembering Oscar's "lonely, pauper's" funeral, "are brief and deep, like a stab wound."
And then –- perhaps it's a cameo appearance by one of the Little Fiends from Satan's Inner Circle dedicated to tripping up troubled authors –-- something odd happens. The otherwise hypervigilant writer misinterprets a detail, miscalculates a date, miscontrues an impression -- and creates a counterfeit description from all her errors. It's the kind of mistake Pat will make more and more as her imagination, never at home in Europe, distances itself from the only place and time she ever really understood: New York City in the 1940's and 1950's.
Pat has always cast a cold eye on life and death. And so, as she weeps, she can't stop herself from criticizing Oscar's funerary architecture. This is a most inappropriate monument, she thinks, for the tomb of a writer whose meditations on forgery and counterfeit, seductive portrayal of criminals, and long, unlovely martyrdom for homosexuality has moved her since she was a teenager. But her critique rests squarely on the misapplication of a talent she is widely supposed to have mastered: close observation of detail.
Pat's error is to imagine that Jacob Epstein's famous funerary monument of a Winged Egyptian erected in the Belle Epoque of 1909 is an Art Deco construction of the "mid-Twenties." Worse, she judges "the Egyptian motif not at all appropriate" for Oscar Wilde. So, as well as getting the sculpture's style and date wrong, she misunderstands the suitability of a pharoanic figure for the tomb of a writer whose delusions of grandeur were as outsized as Ozymandias's; a man who composed a poem called "The Sphinx," and who gave the sobriquet "Sphinx" to one of his muses, Ada Leverson, grandmother of Francis Wyndham, the author who will soon give Pat's work its most intelligent critical introduction in England.
And –- was it her famous reluctance to see or speak in public anything that had to do with sex? –- Pat also managed to miss the Winged Egyptian's most salient feature: the mutilation of its manly marbles. Jacob Epstein, the sculptor, had been criticized for his "undue attention" to the sexual characteristics of his statues, and the prominent genitalia of this one had been hacked away by industrious lycée students. When the great New Yorker writer Janet Flanner made her own pilgrimage to Père Lachise in the early 1920's to place a single black iris on Oscar's tomb, Epstein's statue had already been emasculated. Today, the Winged Egyptian is still without its principal part.
And so Pat Highsmith –- inspired observer of detail, serious fan of all things Wildean, compulsive collector of dates and times in her notebooks –- mistook every single thing she saw at the tomb of Oscar Wilde: the style, the substance, the suitability, the context, even the epoch.
But at the graveside, the wheel of Pat's imagination was already spinning her misunderstandings into fictional gold. Because she didn't like what she had just misidentified as the " Art Deco Egyptian motif" of what was, in fact, an Art Nouveau Egyptian monument, she began to search her mind for a suitable replacement, for the kind of tomb she might have created for the King of Counterfeit.
And inspiration came to her.
Oscar's funerary monument, Patricia Highsmith decided, "should have been a Greek boy."