Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes

CONTENTS

Introduction by Wells Tower

The Mysterious Cemetery

Moby Dick II; or The Missile Whale

Operation Balsam; or Touch-Me-Not

Nabuti: Warm Welcome to a UN Committee

Sweet Freedom! And a Picnic on the White House Lawn

Trouble at the Jade Towers

Rent-a-Womb vs. the Mighty Right

No End in Sight

Sixtus VI, Pope of the Red Slipper

President Buck Jones Rallies and Waves the Flag

Introduction

by Wells Tower

When this book first appeared in 1987, Patricia Highsmith laconically told an interviewer that the stories it contained were “fun to write.” That pert little adjective reveals much about an author, who, in these pages, brings us tales of nuclear holocaust, psychotic politicians, plagues of cockroaches, carcinogenic fungi, and roving hordes of the criminally insane—all unfolding amid enough merrily rendered slaughter and mayhem to disturb the sleep of the most hardened Highsmith fans.

Highsmith published these stories while living abroad in Switzerland in the final decade of her frequently unhappy life. Their inspirational germs were items she came across in the American and international press, which offered, as Highsmith put it, “an
embarras de richesse
of ‘catastrophes’ that the human race has, almost, learned to live with at the end of the twentieth century.”

The bent mirror Highsmith’s
Tales
holds up to history offers no moralistic reflections on the pathologies of the age. Her errand here is one of black amusement: to populate a world with fools and evildoers and devise thrillingly inventive methods of setting them aflame. The pleasures of the
Tales
aren’t as subtle or as rich in moral intricacy as the best Ripley books, yet the author’s pervasive spirit of naked morbid glee is as infectious as a noxious spore. You cannot help but break into unwholesome laughter reading “Nabuti: A Warm Welcome to A UN Committee,” a comedy of error P.G. Wodehouse might have written about Idi Amin. And one has to applaud the dauntless absurdity of a story like “President Buck Jones Rallies and Waves the Flag,” a satiric effigy-roasting of Ronald Reagan wherein the First Lady, in a drunken sulk, drops nuclear warheads on the USSR.

Early critics of the
Tales
quibbled that they “lack sympathy,” an obtuse if accurate observation about one of twentieth century literature’s more famous misanthropes. Once, when asked why she didn’t write more likeable characters, Highsmith replied, “Perhaps it is because I don’t like anyone. My last books may be about animals.” Appropriately, the book’s lone heroic character arrives in the form of a vengeful sperm whale, who, girded an arsenal of mines, roams the seas eating sailors and blowing up whaling ships.

Beneath the high, weird notes of the
Tales
morbid larking, you can hear, in places, the perhaps unintended subfrequency of Highsmith’s desolating estrangement from those closest to her. “No End in Sight” chronicles the long, bleak life of Naomi Markham, a mindlessly senile megageriatric who’s had the misfortune of living more than two hundred years. According to one biographer, Highsmith drew Naomi’s inspiration from the last years of her own mother, who attempted to induce miscarriage when Patricia was in utero by drinking turpentine. Highsmith’s brutal comic gloss of Naomi’s efforts to abort her child is breathtaking in its refusal to cede a hairsbreadth of sentimental ground. Reading this story, we grieve less for Naomi than for Highsmith, pondering her mother’s fictional counterpart in words of an emotional temperature close to absolute zero: “How does this incubus feel, lying on its back with a rubber ring under its rump to avoid bedsores? What does it think about? Does it go
gubbah-gubbah-gubbah
with toothless gums, as it did in babyhood, when it was also swathed at the loins in a diaper?”

Outré and inconceivable though many of the stories may be, what elevates the
Tales
from mere
divertissements
or “spoofs” as Highsmith called them, is their abiding and disquieting pertinence. A quarter century later, we’re still beset by all of Highsmith’s pet menaces—nuclear debacles, environmental calamites, the homicidal madnesses of church and state—perils invincible to every plea, prayer, and talisman except a good sense of the absurd.

The Mysterious Cemetery

On the outskirts of the small town of G— in eastern Austria lies a mysterious cemetery hardly an acre in size, filled with the remains of paupers for the most part, their places marked by nothing at all, or at best by tombstone fragments now all in the wrong spots. Yet the cemetery became famous for its odd excrescences, bulbous figurines of bluish-green and off-white color, which eerily rose above the surface of the soil and grew, some, to a height of two meters or so. Others of these mushroom-like growths attained only fifty centimeters, some were even smaller, and all were bizarre, like nothing else in nature, even coral. When several such small ones had manifested themselves above the grassy and muddy earth, the cemetery caretaker called it to the attention of one of the nurses in the adjacent National Hospital. The cemetery lay to the rear of the red-brick hospital building, so one did not easily see the cemetery when approaching the hospital on the one road that went past it with a turn-off toward the hospital’s front doors.

The caretaker, Andreas Silzer, explained that he had knocked down a couple of these growths with his hoe, taken them to the compost heap expecting them to rot, but they hadn’t.

“Just a fungus, but there’s more coming,” said Andreas. “I’ve put fungicide down, but I don’t want to kill off the flowers with anything stronger.” Andreas faithfully cared for pansies, rosebushes and the like which a few relatives of the deceased had planted. Occasionally he was tipped for his services.

The nurse did not answer for several seconds. “I’ll speak to Dr Muller. Thank you, Andreas.”