The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  Pat, whose engagement with history was erratic but whose unreconstructed Rebel soul lived on as a romantic legacy from her Confederate heritage (one of the three places where she is known to have shed public tears was the battlefield where two of her maternal grandfather’s brothers lost their lives), would have been delighted by the association of the manor house across the street with the Confederate cause—if she’d known about it.

  In 1919, on the Highsmiths’ side of Grove Street, the south side, the great anarchist Emma Goldman, released from one of her imprisonments in the United States, was living at number 36—from which address the U.S. government chose to deport her to the Soviet Union. In the Highsmiths’ same apartment building, when Pat was living there, was another well-known radical, Sidney Hook. Hook was then New York’s leading Marxist theorist (literary critic Alfred Kazin called him “the most devastating logician the world would ever see”).19 Forty years after she left 48 Grove Street, Pat suddenly remembered that Sidney Hook had lived there when she did—and made a note about him in her cahier.20

  Farther east on Grove Street, towards Seventh Avenue on the north side of the street, the place of death of the political pamphleteer and agitator Tom Paine was marked by a plaque on the façade of Marie’s Crisis Café, still one of the oldest piano bars in Greenwich Village and a place Pat used to frequent. Next to Marie’s Crisis is the building where the murder that inspired the film On the Waterfront was committed in 1947. Every block in Greenwich Village has a rich history of rebellion against practically everything—and Grove Street was no exception. Pat put Edith Howland, of her 1977 novel Edith’s Diary, in an apartment on Grove Street and gave her an affinity for Tom Paine’s most obvious phrases, then used the street again for the residence of the handsome, wealthy, oddly matched couple, Jack and Natalia Sutherland, at the center of her New York novel, Found in the Street. (See “Patricia Highsmith’s New York.”)

  Pat’s four years at Barnard were marked by a taste for the classics—Latin, French, German, English, and Greek (at P.S. 122 in Astoria, she’d refused to learn French before Latin because that was the “order observed in English schools”); an attachment to the works of Sir Thomas Browne (Religio Medici was her favorite, and she made Guy Haines read it in Strangers on a Train) and the novels of Graham Greene; a D grade in her Logic course; and a freshman year election to the editorial board of the Barnard College literary magazine in which she would publish nine stories and which, as a senior, she would edit.

  Alice Gershon (Lassally), a student editor with Pat on the Barnard Quarterly, had some dramatic tales to tell about her old classmate.

  Pat always had an aura about her, there was something special. It wasn’t just from the students, it was from the faculty…. Pat was very tied in with her mother. She hated her or loved her. I knew that but I don’t know how I knew that.21 [Author’s note: Every one of Pat’s living classmates says this about Pat and Mary; usually adding, as Mrs. Lassally did, that Pat always gave the impression of being “raised by women.” Helen Kandel (Hyman), another classmate, thought Pat had grown up “in a house without men.”]22 But I knew there was something special…. She was a very attractive girl. When I saw pictures of her later on, I couldn’t believe them. Was that a disease? But she was seething—one felt that—and she looked tremendously sophisticated to me…. My vision of her is with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth. And the camel hair coat, the high white collar and I think she wore an ascot. I mean, she was very stylish.23

  Helen Kandel (Hyman) also remembered Pat for her dress:

  My image of Pat is wearing riding clothes and starched white shirts. I remember those starched white shirts of Pat’s. I remember nothing about how anybody else dressed—including myself—but I remember those starched white shirts. She would stand in the library reading at a kind of a lectern instead of sitting down as we all did. She was something of a loner, but she had a little group around her.24

  Alice Gershon recalled sitting near Pat in their freshman Hygiene class. The class always featured a sex lecture by the school doctor, “a darling, jolly little woman” named Dr. Alsop, who was the live-in lover of their playwriting professor, Minor Latham, a famously prejudiced and inspiring woman. Latham, says Helen Kandel, who was Latham’s advisee, “wore suits and ties and was very gruff.”25 Alice Gershon remembers Dr. Alsop’s freshman Hygiene lectures as “adorable and very nonthreatening.”

  There was always a legend that in freshman Hygiene the most sophisticated girl in the class would pass out. And lo and behold one of them did at that freshman class. But Pat sat next to me in that class and she put the collar of her camel’s hair coat way up and sunk into it. I thought: Is she going to be the sophisticated one who passes out? I wasn’t sure if she was full of disdain or full of fear or what in the world was going on.

  I told this to my friend Midge [Kurtz], who got to know Pat pretty well…. Midge used to go down to the Village and see Pat some, while we were in school…and Midge laughed and said Pat was having an affair with Leadbelly. That’s what Midge told me, that Pat told her she was having an affair with Leadbelly. I’m sure she was experimental, I wouldn’t be surprised. But it amazed me at the time.26

  “Leadbelly” was the performing name of Huddie Ledbetter, the black, Southern convicted murderer and folk and blues singer—his signature song, “Goodnight Irene,” was made famous by the Weavers in 1950—whose murderous past and several jail terms (the last one was served at Rikers Island in 1940 within view of the Highsmith family apartments in Queens) mingled with his arresting artistry to provide him with a dangerously attractive aura in liberal New York. During Pat’s time at Barnard College, and until his death in 1949, Leadbelly was performing his huge repertoire of songs in many Greenwich Village cafés.

  If Pat really did tell this story about herself—and there’s no reason to assume she didn’t; it’s not the kind of story Barnard girls were making up about each other in 1940—then she was behaving like any self-mythologizing English major: polishing her reputation as a college sophisticate with tales of an outré relationship which she would have been quite incapable—because of her feelings about race and gender—of entering into. It’s also a story which might have helped dissemble her sexuality to her “straight” classmates. Mary Highsmith, no small-time self-mythologizer herself, always said that Pat had missed her true calling as an “actress.” Mary would have been shocked but not surprised by this overheated little tale from her daughter’s college days.

  Rita Rohner (Semel), editor of the Barnard Quarterly when Pat was associate editor, had another kind of story to tell about Pat.

  She was unlike anybody I’d ever met before. Those were quite innocent days. And she was a very sophisticated young woman who lived with her mother in Greenwich Village and I realized dimly, I’m trying to think of how to put this because I don’t want to color it with hindsight, I think I realized that she was…we didn’t even have the word for it.

  It was obvious even then. Her talent. I saw only the stories she published [in the Barnard Quarterly: nine of Pat’s stories were published, including “Quiet Night” (rewritten in 1966 as “The Cries of Love”), “A Mighty Nice Man,” “The Legend of the Convent of St. Fotheringay,” and “Silver Horn of Plenty”]. I think people thought of her as a loner; I don’t recall her having any friends, now that I think about it. I did go to dinner at her house one night, down on Grove Street. It was very peculiar. If I thought anything, I would have thought the apartment was bohemian. Her mother wasn’t there and I thought her mother was going to be there. And as I recall we sort of foraged around for something to eat…. I was offered wine, which was not done, and I had a glass and I felt very daring about it…. It wasn’t a family dinner and I got away as soon as I could…. I realized long years later that she was, in today’s phrase, “coming on to me.”…

  She was very needy and her abrupt manner covered that up. In fact, most people really didn’t get along with her.

  Her fac
e just flashed into my mind, kind of hawklike, almost Indian, very angular. And she dressed up, but she wore very, very tailored clothes. And very simple and she had this black hair….

  She [was] bound and determined to be a success at college. She was ambitious and hardworking [and] when she was successful, I wasn’t surprised. But I wouldn’t have wanted her life.27

  Pat’s college career (a more useful term might be Pat’s “behavior at college”), like her four years in high school, threads its way through this book. For now, it is enough to say that although she favored and was favored by her literature and short-story-writing teacher, the theatrical and supportive Miss Ethel Sturtevant (in the “minute” devoted to her at a faculty meeting at Barnard after her death, Sturtevant was eulogized as having “a magical voice,” “the airs of a beauty,” and the adoration of her students, to whom she gave “unremitting attention”),28 Pat took notes which recorded her contempt for her favorite teacher’s long service to Barnard as “only” an assistant professor and for Ethel Sturtevant’s depressed powerlessness in the face of the academic hierarchy. Pat wouldn’t be caught dead in such a situation herself.

  While she was still at Barnard, Pat, always ready to improve, allowed herself to be stimulated by “even the dullest people. Being amusing for them is like practising the piano when you are sure no one is listening. You can be freer, attempt bolder things, and often succeed.”29

  Pat liked to rehearse her social graces with people who didn’t intimidate her, just as she liked to practice certain states of mind and emotions for her novels. One of the attitudes she was rehearsing at Barnard was her politics, which shifted as frequently and as theatrically as her affections; at first showing brief signs of egalitarianism, even of Communism. Inspired by the Spanish Civil War, she joined the Young Communist League, persuaded her reluctant parents to attend a birthday celebration for Lenin in Madison Square Garden, and wrote a play that was criticized as “too communist” by her drama professor, Minor Latham.30 As late as 1947, she seems to have been vaguely acquainted with the notorious Communist Party organizer and spy Josef Peters, who telephoned her—“surprisingly,” she wrote in her diary—under his pseudonym of Alex Goldfarb. Pat’s German friend Rolf Tietgens was convinced that it was Goldfarb’s “words [which] had sent him” to an alien internment camp in El Paso, Texas.31

  Although the injustices in Spain attracted Pat to the Young Communist League, it was the cloak-and-dagger “activities” of American Communism that held her interest. “This business of dodging and bulldozing the authorities has limitless opportunities for clever remarks!”32 Eventually she decided that the high life, the high culture, and the high crowd of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines were closer to her ambitions (though farther from her tastes), and Communist—or, more accurately, communitarian—ideas would appear in her notebooks only when they represented the kind of social ideals embodied by the life of Jesus Christ.33

  Like many of her fellow Americans, Pat gave lip service to the disadvantaged. In actual fact, she preferred the society, if not the close company, of “winners.” (The home church of capitalism has always counted poverty as a sin.) Pat wanted only what she thought of as “the best” for herself, and she sought the same thing in her friendships and her loves. Many of her relationships had social and professional implications, and it was the letters from her more prominent friends which Pat tended to keep. Kingsley Skattebol (Kate Kingsley as she was then), Pat’s oldest platonic friend from Barnard College—a worshipful college freshman to Pat’s superior college junior—said that finding out Pat had destroyed the hundreds of letters she’d written to her over the half century of their friendship was more painful than learning that Pat had cut her out of her will.34

  At twenty, between her junior and senior years at Barnard and still doing more theorizing about writing than actual writing, Pat was describing the characters she thought were inside her—and what she was going to do with them.

  “I am four people: the Jewish intellectual, the success, the failure, and the Fascist-snob. These shall be my novel characters.”35

  Three months later, in December of 1941, she made up an image that pleased her so much she marked it with a vertical line in the margin of her cahier:

  “God knows love, in this room with us now, is not kisses or embraces or touches. Not even a glance or a feeling. Love is a monster between us, each of us caught in a fist.”36

  Pat would harvest the image for The Price of Salt in 1950, but in the novel she turned its meaning to a commentary on the world: “the whole world was ready to be their enemy, and suddenly what [Therese] and Carol had together seemed no longer love…but a monster between them, with each of them caught in a fist.”37

  On the evening in Grove Street when she imagined love to be a “monster,” Pat “passed” what she called her “first suicide moment.”38 Love and death would always be in the room with her, but it wasn’t love the college senior wanted to die for. What made her want to kill herself was something more exasperating than love. Pat couldn’t, on this particular evening, find the right form on paper for her feelings. “[O]ne stands confronted with work, empty sheets of paper all about, and inside one’s head, shame and confusion, inside a maelström that will not subside, fragments that will not hang together…. This was a great emotion.”39

  The idea of dying immediately whetted Pat’s sense of competition: “Life is a matter of self-denial at the right moments…. My solace is in thinking: what are other people doing now? And if they are playing, I feel better, because I want always to be doing something a little more difficult, a little more demanding.” 40

  Pat’s competitive edge would find its sharpest expression in her cahiers and diaries; they were what she really meant by “doing something a little more difficult” than what her classmates were doing. She began keeping her cahiers the month she entered Barnard and she started the diaries when she was twenty. The journals gave her an opportunity to continually renew her vows for the only lasting “marriage” she ever made: the union that joined her intense rushes of feeling with her compelling need to commit them to paper. The fact that she repeated those vows dressed more like a groom than a bride and that she usually did so in a counterfeit “male voice” (“I am a strong man, like Chaucer, like Shakespeare, like Joe Louis)” 41 was merely one of the ways her obsessions colored her work. But Pat’s journals were the real harvest of her years at Barnard College: the physical proof of a professional approach to writing.

  Thirty-seven notebooks of identical size and similar organization followed her first cahier (see “A Simple Act of Forgery: Part 1”), and all of them were standard-issue Barnard College or Columbia University notebooks, 7 by 8½ inches with rolled wire binders. By the time she finished college, she had also filled nine cahiers and four diaries.

  Pat was already taking notes when she was at Julia Richman High School—bitingly candid comments on her classmates, her moods, and her ideas—and she was writing stories, too. There was a forgotten first story written when she was fourteen. And, before high school, there was a (mercifully) lost blank-verse poem in the style of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Then there was “Crime Begins,” the short story she wrote at sixteen about a sixteen-year-old girl who steals a book and gets away with it. It was the result, she explained thirty-six years later, of her “desperate” need to take out a history book from the library at Julia Richman High School. There were only three copies of the book, 150 girls were after it, and Pat, “strongly tempted to steal it,” wrote the story instead.42 Pat was subject to many such temptations.

  In 1935, the ambitious fourteen-year-old already had the instinct to put her private feelings in print in the magazine Woman’s World. She published (and was paid twenty-five dollars for) a series of letters she’d written to Stanley and Mary Highsmith two years before, when she was a yearning twelve-year-old packed away to a sleepover camp near West Point, New York, for a month of summer. The camp provided her with some early material: her att
ention was caught by her female tennis instructor and by the camp rituals of girls swimming naked and counsellors and campers exchanging clothes. By the fall of 1937, Pat was displaying feelings of another kind, publishing her short story “Primroses Are Pink” in the Bluebird, the Julia Richman High School literary magazine. “Primroses Are Pink” is a tale of class pretensions and the instabilities introduced into a marital relationship by a work of art.

  In a 1968 article written for Vogue magazine (it ranges from Jane Austen to Kim Philby), Pat typed out the first sentence of the first story she ever wrote, the lost story written when she was fourteen: “He prepared to go to sleep, removed his shoes and set them parallel, toe outward, beside his bed.” More like a map locator than the beginning of a fiction, this sentence gave her, she said, “a sense of order, seeing the shoes neatly beside the bed in my imagination.” Pat blamed her need for order on her turbulent family circumstances, but she was silent on the origin of another important need: the need to embody her feelings in a male character.

  Very little of Pat’s juvenilia, apart from what she published in school magazines, survived her childhood. But from the care she took in setting up her 1938 cahier—dividing it into separate categories, belatedly inserting dates—it is clear she was thinking professionally. Later on, she copied her 1935–38 high school journals into her ninth cahier—and her cahiers became more important to her than any manuscript. She preserved them as evidence of the life of her mind, and she reread, reworked, reused, and responded to them in a dialogue with herself that went on for decades. They are the record and, in many cases, the origin of her creative impulses.

  The cahier that launched her life as a writer in her first term at Barnard College, Cahier 1, did so with a rare kind of ecstasy: the evocation of a young girl in the act of creation rising wraithlike off its first page. At not quite eighteen, Pat was not yet as adept as she would become about nailing her journal notes to dates and times. But a few pages into this cahier she was already being compulsive about another kind of numbering: the kind that measured her competitive drive against a clock: