The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  Doubled, too, were the problems of her nationality. Pat was as American as rattlesnake venom—and never more so than in her valiant attempts to master in exile that uniquely American vocation (Benjamin Franklin invented it for Poor Richard’s Almanack, Scott Fitzgerald adapted it for The Great Gatsby) of self-help. Many of the obsessive little lists and charts she devoted herself to making are all about strenuous self-improvement and serious self-betterment. As hard (almost) on herself as she was on everyone else, Pat would list and compare what she considered to be her own failing traits or the failing traits of others; she would contrast these traits with her goals or with her romantic ideals; and she would resolve to do much, much better.

  At the end of one riveting chart plotted out in 1945 when she was twenty-four—it rates her women lovers by category and character trait—she writes:

  I lack sympathy, am impatient with that which attracted me. Unconscious masochism, I am resolved to do better as well as change my type radically.56

  And then she adds, typically: “From the two most advantageous, I fled, was false.”57

  Gary Fisketjon, Pat’s editor at Atlantic Monthly Press and Knopf in New York, who met her infrequently, drank with her socially, and found her “terrific company,” felt that Pat was like a “child of 10 or 11” who has been told she had to “grow up on her own.” “Keeping lists like that,” he thinks, “is the way a child figures out how to live in an alien world.”58

  Larry Ashmead, the legendary American editor who supervised her novels at Doubleday, Simon & Schuster, and Lippincott, caught Pat in a distinctly performative mood one night in the late 1960s when he telephoned her in London and invited her to dinner.

  “And she said to me, ‘Remember, no romance.’ I recall that very clearly. She was very gruff. And I said: ‘Of course not, we’re just meeting for the first time.’

  “She was very talkative at dinner and she was drinking, which was par for the course…. She had bought this house in France and she wanted to take her [pet] snails there, and she couldn’t take them because there’s a gastronomic law: no transportation of live snails into France. But she was slowly smuggling them in. Every time she went, she would put some under her breasts and take them in that way. And, as I was eating my steak tartare, she was telling me this story and I wanted to say something about the state of her breasts. But I thought that would be too ‘romantic,’ so I didn’t.”*59

  Otto Penzler, who published seven of Pat’s books under his Mysterious Press imprimatur in Manhattan during the 1980s and remains “a great fan” of her work, had a series of exchanges with her which were so dire that he concluded it must be her character that was preventing her books from selling in the United States.

  “She was a horrible human being. I think people somehow feel it. They don’t know why they know it, but they don’t like Pat…. Who wants to identify with a character in a Highsmith story?…[T]hese are mean-spirited people, they have no humanity, no spirit of shared experience, they’re otherworldly in a way.”60

  Otto Penzler is correct. Highsmith Country is another world. And Patricia Highsmith was its only begettor.

  In 1967, when Pat’s American agent, Patricia Schartle (later Patricia Schartle Myrer), reported that the reason editors said her paperbacks weren’t selling in the States was that they were “too subtle” and that there was “no one likeable in the book,” Pat’s response was: “Perhaps it is because I don’t like anyone. My last books may be about animals.”61 One of them—The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder (1975)—was.

  A libertarian au fond (but a libertarian who preferred countries where there was an established “peasant class” and who was regularly enraged by the “liberties” other people were entitled to), Pat believed with all her heart that people ought to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and “stand on their own two feet.” Just as she had always done, just as her enterprising family had always done. She had the Calvinist worldview and tried her best to refuse the theology that went with it. Count Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America she read in preparation for writing The Talented Mr. Ripley one long, hot summer in western Massachusetts, noted similar leanings in the citizens of North America during his travels across that continent in 1835. He thought—correctly, it turns out—that such traits would lead to isolationism.

  But it was her lifelong lovers’ quarrel with her “mother-country” (that’s what she called it) and the lifelong self-exile that quarrel produced which were the most significant signs of Pat Highsmith’s Americanism. American artists, flinging bitter indictments of their native land over their shoulders, have always refugeed to Europe for cultural development, political shelter, and artistic support. The youthful Pat shared this pleasant dream of a self-liberating European continent. It’s a dream usually entertained by Romantics in love with displacement and the favorable rate of currency exchange whose imaginations have been colonized by European novels long before their actual selves have had to rub up against the realities of European life.

  At twenty-six Pat wrote:

  “My most persistent obsession—that America is fatally (from my point, an artist’s point of view) off the road of the true reality, that the Europeans have it precisely.”62

  But Pat Highsmith does not slip comfortably into any convenient categories, and her European expatriatism was unlike that of any other American artist: it did not contribute to her “development.”

  Although her fictions include many serious critiques of the American society she left behind, her unusual way of living—the constant moves (early on, she began the compulsive, roving patterns that were to govern the rest of her life; her mother said she was “born restless”), the protections her solitudes and her obsessions required, the insularities of her own nature—encouraged her to archive, conserve, and concentrate the social maladies and personal biases she brought with her when she first arrived in Europe. Many of these maladies festered away untreated in the high-security cell of her long exile, and her later life was disfigured by open, ugly expressions of the racial and ethnic prejudices which found their first form in her high school notebooks. For the most part, her fictional work—the work she allowed to be published—escaped the infection.

  Principally, it was anti-Semitism that clawed her, although it is difficult to label as an anti-Semite someone who threatened to leave her entire fortune to the Intifada. (Palestinians are Semites too.) “Jew-hater” is really the proper term for what Patricia Highsmith was. When she wasn’t calling the Holocaust “Holocaust, Inc.,” she was referring to it as the “semicaust”—apparently because it had destroyed only half of world Jewry. And she was none too fond of Blacks, Italians, Portuguese, Latinos, Catholics, Koreans, East Indians, “Red Indians,” small, dark children, or, if you look closely at her work (we will), Arabs, either.

  Naturally, given the deep divisions and strange attractors in her nature, Pat’s Jew-hating came partnered with quite a bit of what might be mistaken for its opposite. She had serious love affairs and long, close friendships with many Jews. Jews were her principal employers, her frequent publishers, and they numbered amongst her most consistent supporters. None of this was accidental.

  In 1942, the year she graduated from Barnard College, Fate (apparently disguised as a Borscht Belt comedian) made Pat the editorial assistant to a certain Mr. Ben-Zion Goldberg at FFF Publications in Manhattan, a publishing company that provided topical articles to the Jewish press. And so, in her first long-term paying job, Pat Highsmith, scribbling anti-Semitisms in her notebook, also found herself scribbling away on such subjects as Jewish homemaking, Jewish art, and Jewish culture for The Jewish Family Year Book—an employment she entirely neglected to mention in the article “My First Job” she wrote for The Oldie magazine in 1993.63

  Pat seemed to admire Hannah Arendt—she cited Arendt’s residency in Tegna for having made that region “famous”64—but she read Arendt’s Anti-Semitism: Part One of the Origins of Totalitarianism in conjunction wit
h Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf as though the two works were of equal argument. In the same high school notebook in which she used a repellent epithet for her Jewish classmates, she also recorded her pleasure in a growing friendship with Judy Tuvim—the precocious, fifteen-year-old Jewish Proustian who grew up to become the brilliant, Oscar-winning comic actress Judy Holliday. (This is the place to put a persistent biographical rumor to rest: Pat Highsmith and Judy Holliday were never lovers. It was Judy’s best friend Pat was after.)

  Judy’s mother, Helen Tuvim, offered Pat free piano lessons at the Henry Street Settlement House on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Pat, fiercely disparaging Mrs. Tuvim and her family in her notebook (it was the generous quantities of food served in the Tuvim household—such a Jewish trait—that drew the semi-anorectic teenager’s scalding commentary),65 gladly took up the offer of instruction. Pat Highsmith was constitutionally incapable of single-mindedness. She also played the piano rather badly.

  In fact, Pat’s rapid rotation of “selves”—those advances and retreats of the extreme emotional states that composed her character—often appear to be guided by Newton’s third law of motion. A student of the classics in her youth, employing a little high Greek at the end of her life (her lone late-life tattoo, hidden under the watchband she wore on her left wrist, was made up of her initials in Greek),66 and deeply involved in her own bodily functions, Pat Highsmith would probably prefer to invoke Galen’s theory of an imbalance of “humours” or Richard Burton’s “atrabiliousness” (an excess of black bile) to explain her vascillations.

  Every strong, positive reaction Pat had seemed to force her into a devastating withdrawal. Psychologically, she veered between attraction and revulsion, self-hatred and self-aggrandizement. Not to mention her simultaneous consciousness (and hypergraphic diary and cahier notations) of all her emotional, spiritual, and physical states at once.

  It was an exhausting way to live—like seeing double all the time—and Pat began to feel that all her good work came out of having “enough sleep.” Sleep affected her, she said, like the “resurrection of Christ”67 her attachment to it was sacramental and she “honor[ed] sleep as the highest goddess. She is the source sometimes, she is the fuel always, like love and the sun and food.”68

  In The Price of Salt, written before she was thirty, Highsmith makes cool, blond, about-to-be-middle-aged Carol tell her teenage lover, Therese, that “all adults have secrets.” In her own midlife, however, Pat rather liked to leave the lid of her personal Pandora’s box slightly raised. If you knew how to read her indirectly dropped clues—a few people did—you were often rewarded with some very interesting views. And sometimes, just like the rest of us, she liked to drop little tidbits about herself and her opinions—but never the same tidbits and often not the same opinions—by tailoring her conversation to the milieu, the political leanings, the degree of closeness, and the sexual tastes of her specific and very separate audiences.

  Still, in a lifetime of half-revealed mysteries, there was one secret so important that Pat Highsmith kept it entirely to herself. It was a secret that had to do with her work life and she hid it where people often hide the things they are ashamed of: right out there in plain sight, just like Edgar Allan Poe’s purloined letter.

  For at least seven years—long before and after she was a published writer and far more seriously than has been previously assumed—Patricia Highsmith wrote scripts and scenarios for America’s most successful publishing industry: comic book companies. She created dialogue and story lines for dozens of desperate Alter Egos trailing their Superior Selves and Secret Identities through violently threatening terrains and luridly colored fantasies.

  If this motif—the threatening terrain, the lurid fantasy, the desperate pursuit of Alter Egos by each other—sounds familiar, it should: it is the central obsession of practically every novel Patricia Highsmith ever wrote, from Strangers on a Train to Ripley Under Water. But she worked on that obsession in the comics before she worked it into her fictions, and, covering her tracks, she obfuscated the comics’ titles she wrote for. “Comics like Superman and Batman,” she sometimes replied when interviewers asked, leaving the impression that “to pay the rent” she’d trifled—ever so briefly in the year after graduating from college—with the lives of those two respectable Superheroes.69

  Superman and Batman made good copy, but the truth was much stranger and seven years longer than the little misdirection she gave to the press, and Pat Highsmith—a woman who kept every single artifact associated with her writing for a posterity she fully expected to have—removed all traces of her lengthy comics career from her own archives. Almost all traces, that is.

  With the (super)heroic aid of many of the great comics creators and historians of the Golden Age of American Comics, I have been able to exemplify Pat’s long career in the comics, one of only two art forms native to the United States (the other, for the record, is jazz). We can now add “Black Terror,” “Pyroman,” “Fighting Yank,” “The Destroyer,” “Sergeant Bill King,” “Jap Buster Johnson,” “The Human Torch,” “Crisco and Jasper,” “Real Life Comics,” “Spy Smasher,” “Captain Midnight,” “Golden Arrow,” and a panoply of other comics titles, writers, and artists as well as Dostoyevsky, Proust, Kafka, Gide, Wilde, Willa Cather, Julien Green, Graham Greene, and Edgar Allan Poe to the universe of Pat Highsmith’s influences.

  Always keen on advancement, Pat tried to write for the high-paying, widely distributed Wonder Woman comic book, but was shut out of the job.70 This was in 1947, just one year before she began to imagine her lesbian novel, The Price of Salt. Wonder Woman, daughter of Amazon Queen Hippolyta and still the heroine of her own comic book, has a favorite exclamation: “Suffering Sappho!” She lives on the forbidden-to-males Paradise Island with a happy coepheroi of lithe young Amazons, and she arrived in America in 1942, in the form of her Alter Ego, Lieutenant Diana Prince, to help the Allies fight World War II. The thought of what Patricia Highsmith, in her most sexually active period (the 1940s were feverish for Pat) and in the right mood, might have made of Wonder Woman’s bondage-obsessed plots and nubile young Amazons can only be inscribed on the short list of popular culture’s lingering regrets.

  On the subject of love-and-money—the subject of love of money—Pat was impossible. The richer she got, the poorer she felt and the more costive she became. She knew, of course, what she was doing—“My poverty has become a disease, unfortunately one of the mind”71—and her description of the island of Majorca in 1958 illustrates how she often tried to understand a new experience; she measured it entirely in currency: “Deya, Majorca. 60 pesetas to the dollar. 10 to post a letter airmail to USA. Six for a packet of cigarettes. 45 for a good meal. 50 for table bottle of good (RIOJA) wine.”72

  On the subject of love of women, Pat was merely incredible. She appeared to dislike women and said so. Her notebooks are full of disapproving judgements of women as humans and intoxicated statements about them as inspirational love objects. It was an extraordinary position for a lesbian to maintain, but then, the extraordinary was Highsmith’s Saturday Night Special.

  At a precocious twenty, she wrote this about love:

  I often wonder if it is love I want or the thrill of domination—not thrill exactly but satisfaction. Because this is often more enjoyable than the love itself; though I cannot imagine a domination without love, nor a love without domination.73

  But she also wrote this:

  Every move I make on earth is in some way for women. I adore them! I need them as I need music, as I need drawings. I would give up anything visible to the eye for them, but this is not saying much. I would give up music for them: that is saying much.74

  The emotional experience Pat most often left out of her published fictions was requited love—but her private writings and her life were filled with it. Few writers have been more inspired by love than Patricia Highsmith. She lived for love, she died a thousand symbolic deaths for love, and she killed for love—over and over and over
again in her novels.

  Her own problem with love was proximity. She could live for love, but she couldn’t live with it. And she really couldn’t bear anything that wasn’t writing for very long.

  Here is Pat at twenty-seven, yearning for her society lover, “Ginnie” Kent Catherwood, one of the several “Virginias” she would take into her bed:

  My green and red goddess, my jade and garnet, my moss and holly-berry, my sea and sun, my marrow and my blood, my stop and go baby, I adore you, I worship you, I kiss you, I cherish you, I defend you, I defy you ever not to love me, I caress your nipples with my tongue.75

  Although she liked to imagine her favorite lovers as goddesses or monarchs, Pat’s behavior in love was usually that of a regicide. She approached the queens of her heart with a crown in one hand and a headsman’s axe in the other. The love affair with Virginia Catherwood which provoked the luscious paragraph above (a paragraph written as their affair was in its final stages of alcohol and accusation) lasted only a turbulent year, but it continued to generate images for Pat’s work for decades. Emotional memory was Pat Highsmith’s personal mausoleum, but it was also her best inspiration for making art.

  Touchingly certain that the women she slept with were telling her the truth when they said she was the best lover they’d ever had (she set that phrase down in a cahier or diary whenever she heard it, and she seems to have heard it a lot),76 Pat continued to lie to every one of her girlfriends, usually by omitting information they would have considered vital to love’s understandings.

  She carried on multiple affairs involving various degrees of physicality during many of the “committed” love relationships she had, taking care that none of her myriad women friends—or either of her serious male attachments—would ever learn the truth of her fluctuating feelings or the facts about her sexual adventuring.

  Pat thought about love the way she thought about murder: as an emotional urgency between two people, one of whom dies in the act. Love had the driving force of a faith for her—“A sexual love can become a religion, and serve as well”77—and she always managed to find Satan at the center of it. “The lover (in love) suffers complete upset of all principles. To the man in love, all axioms, and all truths, may be askew.”78