The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  In New York, Pat loved to socialize with women in the world of la mode. She had a twenty-year, deeply attached friendship (ruined forever by their house-owning venture together in Samois-sur-Seine in the late 1960s) with Mme Elizabeth Lyne, the much older designer and painter who created dress lines for Hattie Carnegie. The painter, writer, and performance artist Lil Picard, Pat’s friend for three decades and older than Pat by twenty years, began as a fashion designer and fashion editor in Berlin, made jewelry in Manhattan, and had her own milliner’s studio—the Custom Hat Box—in Bloomingdale’s department store, where Pat was to set crucial scenes for The Price of Salt.

  Pat went on to have affairs with a bevy of attractive dress models—blondes of course—and her novels show that she was familiar with the art of dressmaking. In The Price of Salt and in her posthumously published novel, Small g—during whose writing she frequently consulted her dress-designer neighbor in Tegna, Julia Diener-Diethelm38—Pat gives detailed accounts of how fashion and fashions are created. Two of the older women characters in The Price of Salt present its young heroine, Therese, with handmade dresses, and elaborate rituals surround Therese’s fittings for these garments. One of the central relationships in Small g owes something to Pat’s careful observation in Manhattan in 1961 of the “old witch with the button shop on Madison Avenue [who tyrannized] over the younger, more sensitive, more beautiful redheaded girl—who did escape.”39

  In her cahiers, as early as 1940, Pat was giving proper dress, and the concealing/revealing/role-playing purposes of it, close attention in both fact and fiction. She always remarked when a jacket or a pair of slacks was “well cut,” when a dress draped nicely over a woman’s shapely torso, or when an attractive girl who was pretending to be seductively rich had a visible hole in the sole of her shoe.40

  On one of her trips “home” to Texas—she was still in her teens—Pat made friends with a married couple in El Paso, a city on the Texas-Mexican border just across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Juárez. The woman, Eddy, was a very masculine horse-trainer, and the man, Ruthie, was an exceedingly effeminate dress designer. They were both homosexual and had married each other, Pat wrote approvingly, for cover. (Eddy and Ruthie’s behavior in gay bars was so outrageous that their marriage was “urgently advisable.”) Even better, Eddy and Ruthie had married in order to wear each other’s clothes. Pat was enthralled.

  “Eddy [the woman] wore beautifully cut jackets with silk shorts and foulard ties. Ruthie [the man] wore open collar sport shirts and loud tweed jackets and also beautifully cut English slacks…. Each would have liked the other’s body for his own to put clothes on…. [T]hey were…finding the greatest pleasure in the world in buying clothes for each other—which neither wore—and which soon were taken back and worn by each respectively—which was what they’d wanted after all.” 41

  Three years before her death, Pat was still thinking about clothes. In an article about Venice written for The Oldie in July of 1992, she lingered lovingly over the wares of her favorite Venetian “haberdashery,” where she liked to buy shirts of unusual colors that were still hanging in her wardrobe: a yellow shirt (yellow, the color of warning signs, was Pat’s favorite hue) and a porter’s yellow and black striped jacket with yellow metal buttons which, Pat reported with the satisfaction of someone who has spent her money wisely, “has worn like iron.” 42

  Pat’s own clothing always had a ritually gendered aspect—and left open the question of which gender, too. But her most consistent gift to the women she cared about (including her mother and her editor at Heinemann in London, Janice Robertson) couldn’t have been more feminine: she liked to present them with handbags. Pat gave Janice Robertson a Hermès bag when Robertson left Heinemann in 1972—and, says Janice Robertson, Pat was the only author to remember her with a going-away gift.*43

  It wasn’t until 1983, when Pat made a list for her Swiss publisher Diogenes of “Twenty Things I Like,” that she publicly announced her penchant for wearing old clothes. “Old clothes” was number 9 on her preference list, followed by “Sneakers” at number 10. “Kafka’s writing” was number 20.44

  During different periods in her life, Pat’s costumes really were costumes: composed expressions of the gender wars she waged within herself and represented in her dress. Her boy’s shirts, men’s trousers, collegiate loafers, tailored jackets, smart vests—as well as the little beaded necklaces and bracelets, the jaunty ascots, the occasional skirt, and the light lipsticks she sometimes applied—kept her suspended between the possibilities she’d acknowledged so “brilliantly” at the age of twelve: “I am a walking perpetual example of…a boy in a girl’s body.” 45 At twenty-seven, she was phrasing her dilemma a little more philosophically: “The most beautiful word is ‘transcend.’ By all the laws that are Platonic, I am a man and love women.” 46

  The term “transgender” hadn’t yet been invented. If it had been, Pat wouldn’t have used it.

  At Barnard College, Pat’s riding breeches, hacking jackets, and signature trench and polo coats (she pawned the polo coat and her green Harris Tweed riding jacket, “in which I spent the proudest, happiest hours of my life,” in an “ignominious” moment in December of 1942 when she ran out of cash)47 made her memorable; attracting her classmates’ wary admiration and lending a cultivated air of sophistication to her appearance. From her trips to Mexico, she brought back white waiter’s jackets—they suited her very well, says a lover48—and the giant woven purses, bolsas, which she carried everywhere and filled with her necessaries: her cigarettes, her writer’s notebooks, her Parker fountain pens (later on, it was Esterbrook pump pens with stainless-steel nibs), and the inevitable little bottle of something with a high alcohol proof.

  After she moved to Europe, Pat continued to send for clothes from the United States, ordering her vests and white oxford shirts with the turn-back cuffs shipped from the boys’ department of Brooks Brothers in Manhattan, where she had a charge account, and making sure that her Levi’s and belts came directly from Texas. And she carried her bolsas from Mexico to Europe with her. In Tegna, her attentive occasional next-door neighbor Bert Diener, who drove her to the hospital in Locarno for blood treatments during her final illness, remembered how Pat always carried her bolsa and just what she kept in the “big woven bag: something to read, something to write with, and a little something to drink.” 49

  Pat’s distinctive “look” is still a subject of conversation for her former lovers. When Caroline Besterman first met Pat in 1962, she was struck by Pat’s good looks and her fashion sense. Pat, says Besterman, was “fantastically, arrestingly good-looking.” Although Pat “was awkward in company [and] handled cigarettes very badly—she looked as though she were mending roads with them, stubbing out her Gauloises most ungracefully—I found her [privately] quite graceful.”

  Caroline remembers Pat as

  very exotic, the kind of person to whom you would immediately be drawn in a room. And she was still very much in control of her look, always well dressed, her hair was well cut…. Until the later years, Pat always had a certain style, comme les garçons.…The first time I met her, she was in a yellow sailcloth skirt and tight top and she did look rather like a sailor. There was a dash to her…. She always liked to change her clothes and get nicely ready for supper. She always had beads and a bracelet, her things were well cut and elegant.50

  Pat kept her loyal friend Kingsley; her mother, Mary; and several other members of the Coates family on the hop for four decades, mailing the items she urgently required from the United States: the shirts, the vests, the leather belts, the bolo ties and tie slides, the inevitable Levi’s and loafers, the “bed-clothes,” and those special pens and notebooks which are always part of a writer’s “outfit.” One of the many requests Pat sent to Mary from France—this one came from Samois-sur-Seine in 1969—shows just how pernickety she could be about her dress:

  “I wouldn’t mind a Western shirt. I was not mad about the last pattern you sent: I prefer a stripe, or a s
olid dark blue, for instance…. I think I take neck 14 (inches), therefore size fourteen.

  “…The last (brownish-tan) western shirt you sent is a good fit: I have just checked its size: 14; and 32 (sleeve)…. I have plenty of bedding thanks to you. The only thing else I can think of—is a pen, of a decent variety with a point that is not a ball point but a real point.”51

  And Pat paid close attention to how she dressed her favorite characters, too, especially when she was dressing them up to kill someone. In The Talented Mr. Ripley, Tom Ripley, attired without permission in Dickie Greenleaf’s expensive clothes, is caught by Dickie in Dickie’s own bedroom in Mongibello just as Tom has finished miming the murder of Dickie’s “girlfriend,” Marge Sherwood, in a mirror. After he murders Dickie and Dickie’s friend Freddie, and installs himself in a palazzo apartment on the Grand Canal in Venice with Dickie’s money, Tom likes to spend whole

  evenings looking at his clothes—his clothes and Dickie’s—and feeling Dickie’s rings between his palms and running his fingers over the antelope suitcase he had bought at Gucci’s…. He loved possessions, not masses of them, but a select few…. They gave a man self-respect. Not ostentation but quality, and the love that cherished the quality. Possessions reminded him that he existed…. It was as simple as that.52

  In later Ripley novels, Tom shares Pat’s taste for well-pressed Levi’s, pyjamas with bottoms, and handsome bathrobes from the better men’s shops.

  But the desire for conventional success that sent the young, fashion-conscious Barnard graduate to Vogue magazine for an interview in June of 1942 was apparently overtaken by an equal and opposite reaction, something like an undertow in her ambition. And so the girl who was so particular about her clothes, the girl who had already filled hundreds of pages of cahiers and diaries with her reflections on dress and appearance—on the way she looked at the world, on the way the world looked at her, on the way the world would one day look upon her—managed to show up for her appointment at Vogue, New York’s principal style and fashion magazine, with a stained and wrinkled blouse, bad hair, and, in the formal 1940s, a head unadorned by a hat.

  Pat’s messy presentation at her Vogue interview is especially suspicious because she was such a sedulous wielder of the steam iron. Like her mother, Mary, who used to go to Pat’s apartment on East Fifty-sixth Street to talk to Pat and when “[t]here would be no satisfactory contact” ended up frustratedly “ironing [Pat’s clothes] until time to go,”53 Pat ironed for satisfaction and she ironed for inspiration. She ironed because pressing freshly washed materials flat and sharpening their creases to a knife-edged perfection gave a little order to the conflicting emotions she dealt with every day.

  “She ironed everything herself, she wouldn’t let me take anything to the cleaners,” says Marijane Meaker of her short cohabitation with Pat in Pennsylvania in 1960.54 And Caroline Besterman confirms that Pat went right on ironing through the 1960s in England at Bridge Cottage: “She ironed a lot, she loved ironing, she found it soothing.”55 Pat used to tell journalists that she got “ideas” for her work at the ironing board—although no Highsmith character was ever dispatched with a blow from a red-hot steam iron.

  It was an obviously exasperated Rosalind Constable who telephoned Pat on 17 June 1942 at her parents’ apartment to deliver the bad news from the Vogue interview: “They said you looked like you’d just got out of bed.”56 Rosalind made it clear that Pat should have had more sense than to show up “looking as [she] did.” Humiliated because she’d embarrassed Rosalind, Pat set the whole incident down defensively in her diary, dealing with it as she always dealt with rejection: “Well, I did wash my hair just before going in…. There’ll come a time when I shall be bigger than Vogue and I can thank my lucky star I escaped their corruptive influences.”57

  Pat never said so, but the serial rejections she suffered at Harper’s Bazaar for her story submissions in the 1940s must have been as painful to her as the rejection from Vogue. The forward-looking Harper’s was setting an enviable literary tone for New York. Under, first, George Davis’s and then Mary Louise Aswell’s more or less unbridled fiction editorship, Harper’s was publishing Truman Capote, Jean Cocteau, and Salvador Dalí as well as Carson McCullers, W. H. Auden, Gypsy Rose Lee, and most of the other former inhabitants of George Davis’s roisterous, rented, boardinghouse-to-the-arts on Middagh Street in Brooklyn.58

  Daniel Bell, the eminent sociologist whose widely influential book, The End of Ideology (1960), gave a name to the tenor of political debate in 1950s America (Edith of Edith’s Diary reads Daniel Bell, so Pat read him as well: her characters always read what she read), says that before William Shawn became its editor The New Yorker was “quite hostile to new fiction, so writers who ordinarily would have been published in The New Yorker went to Harper’s.”59 When Mary Louise Aswell took over as fiction editor, Harper’s published Pat’s own superb story “The Heroine,” written while she was at Barnard and rejected by her fellow student editors at the Barnard Quarterly as too “upsetting” to publish. The Harper’s publication of “The Heroine” attracted some interest from the publisher Knopf, which Pat failed—was it insecurity? lack of finished material?—to follow up on.60 But that was later, in August of 1945.61 This was now. Now, Pat was on the outside looking in.

  Editor and literary critic Pearl Kazin, Daniel Bell’s wife, former lover of Dylan Thomas, and sister of critic Alfred Kazin (Pat, always interested in surveying the competition, read Kazin’s book about American literature’s golden age, On Native Grounds, and failed to find it brilliant),62 worked at Harper’s before she became the chief copy editor at The New Yorker. She says that she, too, had a hand in editing Pat at Harper’s Bazaar. In 2003, Pearl Kazin managed, from her sickbed, to deliver a trenchant summary of the impression Patricia Highsmith had made on her in the 1940s in New York City.

  “Terrible,” said Pearl Kazin. Just “terrible.”63

  And Daniel Bell gives an idea of how absent from the American literary landscape Pat has always been: “In all the years that Pearl and I were married [since 1960] she never mentioned Highsmith.”64 Robert Gottlieb, who had been Pat’s editor at Knopf for A Dog’s Ransom and Ripley’s Game (he found her style “pebbly”), says the same thing: “She seemed to have no presence in New York.”65 Her last American editor, Gary Fisketjon at Atlantic Monthly Press and Knopf, agrees: “I never heard of her growing up; she wasn’t even remotely in the lexicon.”66 Norman Mailer, two years younger than Pat and, along with Truman Capote, one of the New York publishing sensations of 1948 with his war novel The Naked and the Dead, had a similar response.

  “Remind me, Joan,” said Norman Mailer, “what was Highsmith? A high-class detective novelist?”67

  Pat’s humiliation at not securing a job after she graduated from Barnard—even before she left college she had been anxiously seeking a good position—was intense. She said to herself that she really “didn’t want to see anyone” from Barnard until she had some decent employment. Perhaps her failure to be elected to the honorary academic society, Phi Beta Kappa, had something to do with her humiliation. “Went to school this P.M. and got the shock of my life: D in Logic. My first D of course. Phi Beta Kappa—forever goodby! It upset me terribly more than I had believed it would.”68

  For decades after she left Barnard, Pat made shamed references to that D in Logic, which had not, after all, killed her chances for a Phi Beta Kappa key: her grades at Barnard were already quite a bit lower than what Phi Beta Kappa required for membership. But a D in Logic (part of her yearlong philosophy course) was another unwelcome point of resemblance to Mother Mary. Pat was always criticizing Mary for being “illogical.”

  Shame for not finding a job was certainly the reason Pat quietly skipped her college graduation, slipping into the Barnard Quarterly offices the day before the ceremony, 31 May 1942, and “bringing home my weight in manila envelopes, stationery, etc,” but avoiding her classmates. “Saw no one, tho’ today was S[enior] picnic & tomorrow gradu
ation!”69

  She got herself excused from the graduation ceremony by writing a false letter saying that she had a job interview at a New Jersey newspaper on graduation day. Pleased with her alibi and even more pleased to be hoodwinking the administration, she wrote in her diary: “Barnard sent me the mark sheet & blanks for diploma by mail, apparently on the strength of my beautiful letter yesterday to [Columbia University president] N.M. Butler.”70

  But Pat wasn’t so pleased about missing a graduation lunch at Schrafft’s with her circle of intimate classmates, Babs and Peter (a girl) and Helen, at least two of whom, as a matter of course, she’d slept with. And she wasn’t happy at all about not appearing at her graduation. “I had to convince myself that I didn’t want to go.”71 In the week after graduation, she consoled herself by trying to write like the expatriate American novelist Kay Boyle, whose work she was reading with great attention. Kay Boyle, Pat wrote in her diary in yet another of her attempts at impersonation, “has the style I feel I should naturally continue.”72

  After she left Barnard, aside from a little temping work, Pat was forced to accept the only job offer she got: an offer for work researching and writing factual pieces at FFF Publications. She considered this respectable job degrading, and as the work was petering out, she hastened to answer Richard Hughes’s ad for a “writer-researcher” at Sangor-Pines—a job everyone considered degrading. Ever after, Pat would tell prying journalists (if she mentioned the subject at all) that she hadn’t “realized” she was applying to a comic book company for work.73

  Pat’s sharp history of failure in the New York job market, where “quality” was both a requirement for success and the reward you received for being a success, made it especially important for the ambitious young writer, living on the fringes of her older friends’ well-remunerated lives, to keep up a good front. It was the counterweight to what she referred to, always, as her “maimed” nature, a nature that needed “crutches.”74 “I never fall asleep at night,” she wrote, “without writhing in agony at least twice, remembering something which I imagine horrid that I have done that day, or the day before.75 Pierced by insecurities about her family background, Pat brought forth analyses as harsh as punishments whenever she encountered her blood relatives in Fort Worth or in New York; analyses which reinforced her sense of being a “loser” in a wide world of “winners.”