The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  And when Pat, in early November, finally persuaded Chloe to go to Mexico with her, another family fault line was exposed. Mary and Grandmother Willie Mae, still in New York, joined together in their jealousy of Chloe. “Grandma and Mother very curious about my feelings for Chloe,” Pat wrote in her diary. “‘Why?’ [they ask] and ‘What does she have?’ and ‘I would like to learn what strange power this girl has!’”75

  • 13 •

  Alter Ego

  Part 4

  Like all her later travels outside the United States, Pat’s trip to Mexico in December of 1943 started out in one direction, took an unexpected turn, and picked up enough emotional baggage and artistic impression to fill several of her future fictions. The purpose of her voyage—to continue to write her novel The Click of the Shutting in a setting of exotic exile—was followed by another urge just as basic: the urge to run away. Whenever Pat fell in love, her first thought was to escape with her new lover and her second thought was to escape from her new lover. Newly in love with Chloe, Pat was feeling the old, romantic pull of the road again. This time, she managed to persuade her girlfriend to go with her.

  Perhaps the $350 Pat had saved up from her comics work*—and from selling her radio and record player to Mary and Stanley—had something to do with Chloe’s initial assent to the trip. Richard Hughes agreed to allow Pat to send in comic book scenarios by mail to Sangor-Pines from Mexico, so she was secure in the promise of a little income. But Chloe was ambivalent about going anywhere with Pat, changing her mind, Pat noted acidly, “faster than the Russian frontlines.”1

  There was something premonitory about this Mexican trip. Once Pat had stepped across the border, the needle on her personal compass swung around to point to the country where all her journeys would end: Switzerland. The novel she went to Mexico to work on, The Click of the Shutting, took some of its impetus from her writing for comic books (whose progenitor was the Swiss graphic artist Rodolph Töpffer); she based one of her two Mexican short stories, “The Car,” on the odd relations of a Swiss hotel owner with his American wife in Taxco; and in Mexico City she spent time (reluctantly, because he was pursuing Chloe) with a naughty Swiss bandleader and nightclub owner, Teddy Stauffer, whose jazz band, the Original Teddies, was named after the bear on the coat of arms of Bern, Switzerland. Bern is the Swiss city where all Pat’s literary archives are now kept.

  Mexico—to which Pat would return several times and for several reasons—shared a border with her home state of Texas. It was also the place where she first began to lay down patterns for her “songlines,” those magnetic meridians of travel which all her later, far-flung journeys would follow.

  If you couldn’t get to Paris in the 1940s (and in 1943 you couldn’t; the city had been occupied by the Germans since June of 1940), Mexico would do. Every American (and many a European) who considered herself or himself an artist, a free spirit, a bohemian, or even a fan of D. H. Lawrence was attracted to the idea of Mexico. Katherine Anne Porter and Hart Crane went to Mexico in the 1930s; Tennessee Williams visited a recessive Paul and a receptive Jane Bowles in Acapulco in 1940; Saul Bellow managed to spend his mother’s life-insurance money on an extended sojourn in Taxco. And the teenage aesthete Ned Rorem seems to have dropped in on everyone who was anyone South of the Border. In the 1930s and 1940s, Americans were drawn to Mexico by what always draws people who make more art than money to such places: cheap rents, cheap food, abundant liquor, exotic scenery, and the recklessness of behavior that is permissible in a country to which you owe no allegiance. American nationals came in droves, and they usually returned with complaints about the low class and excessive drinking of their fellow expatriates.

  Saul Bellow, who lived and travelled in Mexico in 1940, said “Mexico was everything that D. H. Lawrence said it was, and a good deal more besides.” He and his wife fetched up in Taxco, the silver-working center of Mexico: a town on a hill with a fantastically mannered cathedral, Santa Pisca. (Sybille Bedford* described Santa Pisca as “shimmering with chromatic tiles” like “a brilliant pastiche of late—very late—Hispano American Baroque.”)2 Taxco was where Pat would spend most of her Mexican time.

  Taxco, Bellow said, “had a sizable foreign colony, mostly Americans, but also Japanese, Dutch, and British.” None of the people Bellow met there “had a very firm grip on anything at all.” The Bellows were able to rent a fine house and pay two Indian servants to take care of everything “for about ten bucks a week.” And the sun “shone so dramatically, so explicitly, you were never allowed to forget death.” In Taxco, Bellow found that he was drinking more than usual, much more, he said, than was good for him. He drank with his “American buddies in the zócalo…and with hard-drinking professionals who wrote for Black Mask and other pulps.” Like most American writers with any pretensions to seriousness—like Pat herself at the Sangor-Pines shop—Saul Bellow was ashamed to be “in the low company of the pulp writers.”3

  Sybille Bedford, in Taxco ten years after Bellow on a yearlong odyssey with her companion Esther Murphy Arthur, praised the town’s “lovely position” and the “houses sprawling across a slope on four levels, everywhere red-tiled roofs, archways, flowers, prospects.” Bedford wrote slyly that Taxco’s famous silversmiths were now performing for “the transient and the naïve” and that “the foreigners who live in Taxco take villas and stay a very long time. Some may once have thought of writing a book; a few do paint.” 4

  Like Teddy Stauffer, who opened his Casablanca Club with its death-defying pearl divers in 1943 in Acapulco, the entrepreneuring expatriates who came to Mexico catered to what Bedford called the “Americans fast and rich.”5 Pat and Chloe met Teddy Stauffer in Mexico City during a season which often spelled trouble for Pat: the Christmas holiday.

  Pat and Chloe arrived by train in San Antonio, Texas, from New York on 14 December 1943. Pat had a bad toothache and suffered, at the Mexican border, the first of what would become her lifelong travel troubles with luggage and typewriters. She was carrying so many books that some of her bags had to be sent back to New York, others of her bags got lost, and her typewriter was detained. The two women turned around, spent the night in Laredo, and crossed into Mexico the next day. They parked themselves at a hotel Betty Parsons had recommended to Pat, the Guardiola (Chloe, already beginning to chafe, found it distasteful and was attacking Pat verbally), and began a frantic round of going out, attracting new people, and drinking too much. Chloe stayed out later than Pat, and Pat let a man take her home and kiss her. (“Since he has got a brain it was not too bad.”)6 By Christmas, Pat and Chloe had been in Mexico City for little more than a week, and their relationship was in tatters; the following year, Pat remembered this Christmas in Mexico as yet another “miserable” Christmas holiday.7

  Chloe, not much moved by Pat’s passion for her and still in love with her husband, went out drinking every night with Teddy Stauffer, who would later succeed in charming many movie stars into his bed. (In 1951, he married the cleverest of them: Hedy Lamarr.) Stauffer’s band had played jazz in the style of Benny Goodman at the infamous 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, and he turned the “Horst Wessel Song” into a “swing” number in Germany—and managed to avoid being jailed for it. The competition was too stiff for Pat. She decided that further relations with Chloe would ruin her work, and she went back to what she’d come to Mexico for in the first place: the idea of writing The Click of the Shutting. “My novel still needs a lot of work, of course I think of it all day long.”8

  By 7 January, Pat was high in the Atachi hills of Mexico, alone in picturesque Taxco except for a part-time maid, in what she called “the most beautiful house” in town: La Casa Chiquita, which she rented from the Castillo family. Before she moved into La Casa Chiquita, Pat had taken a room with a balcony and a washing machine in Taxco, bought paper and pencils, and set up a work schedule which called for her to draw in the morning, walk in the afternoon, and write at night. She drank seven cups of coffee a day and yearned for her typewriter, whic
h hadn’t yet made it over the border. She began to imagine a future for herself in Mexico—it was the future she would have in Switzerland forty years later—as a rich and famous writer in exile, estranged in a strange land and missing her native country. Pat often went away from places so she could miss them; yearning is a productive emotion for writers.

  One of the reasons Pat decided to stay in Taxco was the fact that the town was so full of foreigners that trousers on women were tolerated there, as they were not in other Mexican villages. On the nineteenth of January, Pat’s twenty-third birthday, Mother Mary sent her a telegram, saying that their mutual friend Jeva Cralick had a present for her. Mary also sent what Pat called a “terrible” letter, full of criticisms and endearments. “My darling,” Mary wrote, and then launched into one of her searing lectures. It was just the taste of home and the touch of emotional battery that Pat had been longing for. (In her diary, Pat was writing: “Suche jeden Tag nach einem Brief von mother. Warum nicht? Warum?” “Every day I look for a letter from my mother. Why not? Why?”)9

  Then Mary, as she often did, enclosed money in a missive, and followed that charitable act with several more letters accusing Pat of drinking too much, of not cleaning her house, and of living a “phony life” built on alcohol. Mary’s letters upset Pat so much that she couldn’t write her novel for a while. When she started work again, she was hoping that her former employer, Ben-Zion Goldberg, would like her book; he had telegrammed her that he was coming to visit. Grandmother Willie Mae weighed in with a letter from Fort Worth to say that she was “praying” for Pat. Pat, according to her diary, was reading and thinking about God every day.

  Pat also got a letter from her father; a letter from Richard Hughes (to whom she was sending two of her “best 16 page comic book” synopses); a letter from her inquisitive seatmate at Sangor-Pines, Gerry Albert; a letter from Allela Cornell; a letter from Chloe saying she’d like to visit in February; and a letter from a man who was in love with Chloe and wanted a report on Chloe’s current drinking habits. Lacking neither correspondents nor the will to correspond, Pat answered everyone. And she wrote a letter to her friend the photographer Ruth Bernhard for good measure. Another of Pat’s lifelong patterns was being laid down here in her first month in Mexico: a massive and quotidian foreign correspondence.

  La Casa Chiquita and its part-time maid cost Pat nearly twice as much as Saul Bellow said he had been paying for his Taxco house and two servants in 1940—Pat’s rent was about fifty-four dollars a month—so the inflation of prices that accompanies American expatriatism was already biting into beautiful Taxco. Pat’s house was a low adobe affair with a charming pitched roof, handcrafted Mexican tiles framing the lintel, and a cactus garden around the side. Pat did a nice drawing of the house. The native wildlife—pulgas (fleas) and ants and little hopping lizards—made free with the door and the open windows. In February, she took in a cat, calling it Frank. In April, the month before she left Taxco, she adopted a kitten. The kitten wouldn’t sleep on her bed, perhaps in mute rebellion against the name she gave it: Fragonard.10

  Very soon, Pat began to set down in her cahier her customarily sharp character notes, longer than the ones she usually wrote, on the expatriate residents of Taxco. She was finding or seeking in her neighbors what she would always find or seek in humans: cracks in their characters, traits and patterns which reinforced her view that human behavior was unreliable, double-natured, and capable of turning on a dime. Pat looked into people for much the same reasons that she read books or fell in love with women: to “recognize” something in them that corresponded to her belief that life was flawed, cleft, and sundered.

  And so the “characters” she records in her cahiers often appear to have been alive in her imagination long before she met and described them—rather than the other way around. (The cool eye Pat cast on people would always merge with her imaginative taste for fiasco: despite having at least a normal experience of both, she almost never wrote about “good” people or “happy” circumstances in her notebooks.) But the unusual thing about these Taxco portraits is just how affectionate their ironies are: especially her portrait of “Paul Cook,” a budding “hero-criminal.” Pat was young, only twenty-three, and as yet relatively unembittered. Nothing would ever be quite so affectionate again.

  Although Pat complained constantly of loneliness, continued to yearn for letters from her mother (and felt terrible when she got them), and cursed the food on a daily basis (“Fish again!” “Ohh, if only I could have a carrot, a banana, a piece of celery with no salt! I would be so happy!”),11 she was deeply engaged by Taxco and by the side trips she took to Acapulco, Jalapa, Cuernavacas, Monterrey, and other places. Her descriptions of her neighbors are as graphic as if they were painted. Oddly, these descriptions were dulled down, made less vivid and plausible and emotional, when she folded them into her Mexican fictions: the two short stories (“In the Plaza”12 and “The Car”13) and the one novel (A Game for the Living) written from her direct experience of Mexico. It is only in their original form—a portrait gallery of the people who surrounded her in Taxco in the winter and spring of 1944—that these studies give a picture of Pat’s artistic weights and measures, of her intense socializing (despite constant claims of loneliness), and of the exotic environment in which she had chosen to work on her first novel.

  Here are a few of Pat’s Mexican portraits, printed at length. They are as much a study of the young writer’s state of mind as they are likenesses of her subjects.

  Margot Castillo and Tonio Castillo—Margot charming, French and Dutch, but before an artist, before a wife, a hard business woman. Tonio, a clerk in Spratling’s “persuaded her” they should marry…. * For a couple of years they worked hard, building their own business…and finally built up to be second to Spratling in design and volume of business.

  Tonio is generous, warm, youthful. Twenty-six now. Margot is economical, warm when she wants to be, a garrulous talker, and perhaps thirty-eight or forty-two now. They build a house, in Margot’s excellent style…but Tonio does not think he will like it. He cannot live without her and can hardly live with her…Tonio…pays high wages so [the workers] will love him. Margot delights in pointing out to him that they don’t.

  Margot no longer draws for pleasure, or paints, but concentrates on her business. She wears fuchsia ribbons in her coal black hair, (up-swept) and is often bandboxy. Tonio must be rather a cute pet to be seen with in New York restaurants…. Margot shows an excess of affection & generosity. Margot is black and white.

  The Luzis—Alexander Luzi—Swiss born, linguist, rather ordinary but pine-knotty family…. He was engaged to a Mexican woman when Marguerite Re came down on a visit…. It was love at first sight. Alex invited her and her friend to stay three days at the Victoria Hotel, the best here, of which he was part owner. [“As a Swiss, he is expert at all tourist rackets.”] “Will you marry me?” he asked one night over dinner. “I never got the spoon to my mouth,” says Mrs. Luzi…. Later, Marguerite found he had a son to support. [“Alex married a Mexican-Arabian girl of low family, five days before their son was born.”]…If Alex had not been quite the fellow he is, he would have left the little chippie in the trouble she deserved….

  …Alex wants [Marguerite] to buy property to nail herself down here, selling her car (the symbol of flight) to get the money for it…. “I can’t stand it much longer. I certainly can’t stand it the rest of my life,” Marguerite says.

  …Their arguments are few but interesting: the second major one in five years started when Alex asked for Marguerite’s car…. “You can pack your things and go,” he said. “You can pack yours, and I’ll do it for you right now,” she said, doing it, and setting the valise outside the door…. He has something of the personality of Stanley Laurel, with not all the comedy removed. They have the neatest kitchen in Taxco.

  Paul Cook—who talks better than he writes or paints…. He was a football player, married at thirty-two, to a Texas woman of good and wealthy fami
ly. Divorced last year after 14 years because of jealousy on her part, demands, criticism of his drinking. He has always drunk quite a little and now in Taxco drinks quite a lot…. He is the son of a Welsh doctor and an Italian woman. He is 6’3”, lanky, blue eyed, and distinguished looking no matter what he does or how he dresses…. The cantina proprietors adore him, for sincere reasons.

  He is paid $150 dollars per month by the U.S. Government to catch dope peddlers. Sometimes he makes a catch. Ostensibly, he is the washed-up American painter going to hell in Taxco…. People get attached to [Paul], admire him, even want to be like him…. He has done what no other American I know has done, made the Mexicans like him, I mean inspired their friendship. Despite his height, despite his blue eyes, they love him….

  Paul came home with me for the first time one night to read my manuscript. He read 11 pages and said it was excellent, told me good reasons why. Then I went to bed and he was to sleep on the porch. Later he joined me in my bed, and while I didn’t like it at first, I decided it was not true cameraderie [sic] to stand on ceremony. He slept like a log on his side all night, got up first and got breakfast. The next night when I got home at 12:45 A.M. he was in my bed and I had to sleep on the porch. He is as undependable as a Negro when he is drunk. Wants to do my portrait. He can make drama, and art, out of nothing.

  Miss Jones—hostess at the Victoria. Moles all over her face, and a Chicago accent. Vender-Bearer of delicious imported cheeses which come in excess of the pecan pie that concludes the five peso meal—the best Taxco or even Mexico City affords. She is patient, friendly, and somehow immeasurably sad…. Discovered crying in her room because a 26 year old woman’s child was so beautiful.

  Stanley Coventry—fop, fascist. Britisher, sponger off his aunt, Mrs. Auchinclaus (Samuel). Stanley is a frightful bore, inspiring hatred in Paul Cook…. He goes about with a Schnauzer. Has done some good designs, they say, for jewelry. Paints when he needs money, which is seldom. Has lived two years in Tahiti and tells his sexual experiences on short acquaintance…. His voice, like many Englishmen’s voices, from a distance sounds effete and like a homosexual’s…. A namby-pamby, pantywaist, generally repulsive character. Looks much like the Prince of Wales, though taller, with the incipient embonpoint of a gourmet.