The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  Pat—turning out scripts and scenarios during the day in a genre dominated by male fantasies and entertaining herself lavishly at home at night with her own richly detailed, “male” fanatasies—would have considered Vince Fago’s description quite a compliment.

  In 1970, twenty-five years after they’d last worked together, Vince wrote to Pat in France asking her to participate in a book featuring the “hundred best comics” he’d ever edited. Pat replied briefly that she was “too busy” to have anything to do with comic books.20 A few years later, at the end of 1973, the comic book historian Dr. Jerry Bails, who was compiling his second edition of Who’s Who of American Comic Books, sent Pat a list of questions about her comics work.21

  Pat always did like to see her name in professional journals. The exception (naturally) was a reference collection entitled Contemporary Lesbian Writers, to whose editor in 1992 she sent a registered letter saying that she “did not want to have a biographical essay written about me.” Generally, though, Pat added her name to Who’s Whos and to professional catalogues whenever she was invited to do so.* Professional listings had the advantage of making good ammunition in an argument, and well into her fifth decade, Pat was using this ammunition to assert her worth in quarrels with her parents. “I am not playing the martyr,” she wrote in 1970 to her long-suffering stepfather, who was, as always, the proxy for Mother Mary:

  In fact, I often wonder what my mother thinks is so wrong with me. I have not been in prison, I do not take drugs, I have had no car accidents, no broken marriages, no illegitimate children, I earn a good living—I am even in Who’s Who—the International, published in London. This honour came to me less than a year ago.22

  In 1978 Pat employed one of her Who’s Who credentials in a more public way. Gore Vidal’s vocal involvement in the controversy between the newly forming Christian Right and male homosexuals in the United States drew Pat into the debate. She wrote a perfectly Highsmithian response to the American singer Anita Bryant’s campaign against the influence of homosexuals in public schools: actually “coming out” to Anita Bryant twelve years before she could bear to acknowledge her authorship of The Price of Salt, then bolstering herself with her listing in Who’s Who. “I am an American,” Pat began her letter to Bryant coolly. “You have taken on quite a target, however, in the homosexuals. We are not a stupid lot, we are sharp as foxes…. Curiously, I wish you good luck—you may need it…. For further information on me, see Who’s Who, the one published in England.”23

  So, although she left out most of the details of her comics career for the Who’s Who of American Comic Books questionnaire sent to her in Moncourt, France, in 1973 by Jerry Bails—i.e., she omitted Jap Buster Johnson, Pyroman, The Whizzer, Spy Smasher, Captain Midnight, Fighting Yank, The Champion, Ghost, Golden Arrow, The Destroyer, Rangers, Betty Fairfield, Nellie the Nurse, as well as all the biographical stories she wrote for Real Life Comics—Pat actually did reply to Bails’s questions about her comics work. It was probably the “fill-in-the-list” form of Bails’s query that tempted Pat to mark down two or three of the comics titles she’d written for—The Black Terror, Sergeant Bill King, Crisco and Jasper, along with some “unidentified comics materials”24—and send the entire questionnaire straight back to Jerry Bails.25

  Pat just couldn’t resist the impulse to add her name to another list.

  • 15 •

  Social Studies

  Part 1

  No one who knew Patricia Highsmith in the last, claustral years of her life in Switzerland can believe just how social—and even how socially confident—she could seem to be in the 1940s in Manhattan. The Embittered Old Oyster, shut up in a shell of her own devising in suburban Switzerland in the last decade of the twentieth century, was once a Pearl of a Girl in wartime Manhattan: avid for experience, hungry for connections, and going to every single place in New York City where she could find both.

  Romanticism was one of Pat’s best excuses for her sexual adventuring. In New York in the 1940s, she pursued her constantly upgraded romantic ideals in the beds of (mostly) women who sometimes, though not always, became her primary lovers. Part of her desire to look ever upwards in her sexual affections had to do with her early understanding of New York’s stairway to success—and with her shame at how her family couldn’t seem to get beyond the first step. “Making it” has always been a double entendre in Manhattan, and whenever Pat felt herself sinking lower on the city’s socio-sexual-professional ladder, she did her best to reverse direction: first by self-analysis and then by action.

  At twenty-four, in the spring of 1945, Pat drew up a chart for the purpose of comparing, ranking, and categorizing her ten most important love affairs with women to date (see illustration). Her goal was to “do better” in love (this, too, had a double meaning for Pat), and the chart is a chilling record of her attempt to impose this ambition on her wayward affections. The chart is much influenced by the only thing in Proust’s work which ever really spoke to Pat: his insistence that you can never change your “type” in love. (Pat’s understanding of Proust was eccentric. She thought he made Virginia Woolf seem “too feminine” and once compared his writing unfavorably to that of John Steinbeck.)*1 Pat’s chart is also, as near as she could make it, a diagram of her ideas about love. She inserted it into a cahier in April of 1945 shortly after noting that “[d]eep in my heart stands a silver sword with two edges,”2 and a little while after kissing a “twenty-three year old New Zealander I met tonight in a Sixth Avenue Penny Arcade [whom I didn’t] ask…up [for] his last night in America.”3

  On her chart, Pat’s careful listing of her lovers includes the duration of each love affair; the age of the lover in relation to Pat (of the ten, all but two are older); the color of each woman’s hair (she definitely prefers blondes); their physicality (“slim,” “sturdy”); their work status; the reason for the breakup (“time,” “cruelty,” “boredom”); their psychology (“neurotic,” “extroverted”); a rating of each affair on a scale of 100 (no one gets less than an 80); and the length of time Pat thinks the affair lingered on after it was actually over (“2 years?,” “9 months?”).

  Some lovers’ initials on the chart are starred (“End due to my lack of sympathy”) or marked with a cross (“End due to her lack of sympathy”) or circled (“Bad judgement on my part”). Her “most advantageous” lovers are awarded a second cross: only three of them got it.

  Pat’s conclusions are as unnerving as they are revealing: “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…. From the two most advantageous, I fled, was false.” 4

  Pat’s summer of love in 1944 notwithstanding, the entire decade of the 1940s was one of intense sexual and social activity for her: the kind of intoxicating experience Manhattan can offer to an attractive, talented, seriously ambitious young woman who is using enough alcohol—more than enough alcohol—to cover her shyness, fuel her energy, and help her, in a phrase she used again and again, “try her luck.” By Thanksgiving Day of 1949, having spent the afternoon quietly reading and raking leaves in the sun and open air of her parents’ house in Hastings-on-Hudson, Pat was thinking over her last ten years in Manhattan.

  “[I]f my experience should be shut off now, sexually, emotionally (not intellectually), but mundanely, practically, I feel I should have enough. I have stretched an hour into eternity.”5

  She also took the trouble, that afternoon, to make up one of the little sanity tests she liked to spring on herself from time to time. This one involved watching herself “lov[ing] my love with all my heart.” The fact that she could concentrate on a current lover (or at least concentrate on her feelings for that lover) reassured her that her complete absorption thirty minutes before in Herman Melville’s novel Pierre, or The Ambiguities, “following his vagaries of soul with the most personally involved Fascination,” didn’t mean that she was going “mad.” “For Melville became insane and I shall no
t,” she wrote smugly.6 The threat of insanity was always buzzing around the corners of Pat Highsmith’s ideas about herself.

  “People are less sharply divided as men and women,” she wrote penetratingly at nineteen, “as they are as people with ambition and people without.”7 Although Pat seemed ready to go anywhere in New York City that might offer an opportunity, she was most at ease in smaller gatherings, and so intimate parties, gallery exhibitions, and drawing classes were the assemblies she frequented most. It was only when she was looking for sexual adventure that she found Manhattan’s crowded bars attractive.

  It wasn’t until 1968, when Pat was living in France, that she discovered the right phrase for her aversion to crowds. “I seem to suffer involuntarily, like an animal, from a sense of overcrowding, or the fact of overcrowding.”8 It was why, she said, she was willing to live in a village of 160 people (it was Montmachoux, then), far from the butcher, the sanitation department, the library, and company in the evenings: “it is worth it to me to have a sense of elbow room.”9

  Space and its encroachments would always be a problem for the writer whose first beds in New York were a succession of living-room couches in her parents’ small apartments, and whose invasive mother seemed to her to be everywhere. Mother Mary’s powers of simultaneous occupancy were certainly impressive. She corresponded with Pat’s friends and lovers about Pat’s behavior, filled the postes restantes of Europe with letters of advice and boxes of presents for her daughter, and always managed to track Pat down wherever she was. In 1969, when Pat, forty-eight years old and living in Montmachoux, hadn’t written to Mary for a few weeks, Mary sent a telegram of admirably compressed panic to their mutual friend in Paris, the cartoonist Jeannot (Jean David): “WORRIED ABOUT PAT ONE MONTH NO LETTER HELP ME…MARY.”10

  In 1970, in one of three long letters to her stepfather, Stanley—letters that, in their way, were just as panicked as Mary’s 1969 telegram to Jeannot—Pat tried to justify her violent behavior at her parents’ home in Texas during a visit she’d paid to them earlier in the year. Her stepfather said she’d behaved like a “mad woman.”11 Pat had wrecked the Highsmith kitchen—thrown milk all over it and shattered a louvered door—and her letter to Stanley cited Mary’s pervasive “crowding” of her as the reason for her explosion.

  “In the kitchen at Fort Worth, after I’d cleared a few square inches to whip an egg in a bowl…that space was instantly filled with something my mother put there. It is as if she sees a clear space anywhere, she has to fill it.”12

  Pat was so sensitive to spatial proprieties that she felt crowded by signs of her own success. When invited to tell how she reacted when she saw her first copies of Strangers on a Train, she gave an odd response to her interviewer. The books were delivered to her apartment on East Fifty-sixth Street, she said, in a “cube,” a big box. And “My first thought was: these are taking up a lot of space in the world…. I didn’t feel particularly proud or shy. I thought: These take up space.”13

  Always en garde against invasion, Pat made concerted efforts to preserve her sense of self by “avoiding meeting people, encountering them on my walks, greeting even the most pleasant acquaintances by crossing the street when I see them far ahead of me on the sidewalk…. Perhaps it is, basically, the eternal hypocrisy in me, of which I’ve been aware since about thirteen. I may feel, therefore, that I am never quite myself with others….

  “What troubles me somewhat is the superimposed problem of being in touch with humanity. Flatly, I do not want it.”14

  She felt the same way about “the afterworld.” If the afterworld were an “active” place, with “contact…to others living or dead,” then, she wrote, she found it not only “improbable,” but “definitely untempting.”15 Heaven for Highsmith would have to have a countable population of one.

  Because art classes were well within her comfort zone (attention was fixed on the model; the only necessary contact was with the drawing you were making), she started attending drawing classes, sometimes with Allela Cornell, later with her friend Lil Picard. Karl Bissinger, the photographer and political activist who was Pat’s sympathetic neighbor on the Upper East Side in the 1940s, was one of the organizers of a rather chic drawing class Pat went to. In this class, Pat said, she often found herself drawing “cartoons.”16

  Karl Bissinger was taking photographs for Harper’s Bazaar when he first met Pat. By the end of the 1940s, he was the resident photographer for the world’s most elegant magazine, Fleur Cowles’s star-studded Flair, a publication so expensive to put out that it lasted for only twelve issues.* Bissinger knew a lot of people in the wide world of “quality” Pat was anxious to enter.

  A photograph Bissinger made for Flair magazine has become, faute de mieux, one of the iconic images of America’s “Golden Years,” a term Gore Vidal likes to apply to the period in the 1940s just after the Second World War ended and before the “Korean Adventure” began, when the arts in New York, energized by the influx of brilliant refugees from a ravaged Europe and by enterprising veterans returning from war service, flourished and flowered as never before. Bissinger’s photograph, taken in 1949 in the garden of the Café Nicholson on East Fifty-seventh Street (owned by Bissinger’s then-partner, Johnny Nicholson), seems to incarnate everything Pat meant when she spoke or dreamt of “the best.”

  Café Nicholson was a place Pat herself went to, a place, said the painter Buffie Johnson, “where everyone knew everyone else and you knew you were making history.” It was the enclave where High Society first crossed with High Bohemia, and Bissinger’s alluring photograph captures the spirit of the era. In his photograph, seated around a garden table laughing and talking, are Pat’s old friend Buffie Johnson; Buffie’s friend the playwright Tennessee Williams (Williams used to stay in the building Buffie Johnson owned, and he broke, said Buffie, every single piece of her good china); the novelist Donald Windham; the ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq; and the writer Gore Vidal, looking beyond the frame of the photograph. A formally attired black waitress, Virginia Reed, is in the background, serving tray in hand.

  Everyone at the table is young and beautiful; everyone at the table looks rich and successful. In fact, Buffie Johnson was the only person there with any real money, and Tennessee Williams, the only one with solid success.

  Pat was never photographed in circumstances like those in Karl Bissinger’s photograph. Judging by her youthful pictures, you wouldn’t know she’d ever attended any convocation of humans that numbered more than two or three. (One of her stories is called “One Is a Number You Can’t Divide.”) She is notably absent from the biographies and cultural histories of the period, and if she shows up in someone’s memoir or memory, it is usually as a cameo player in a darkly framed vignette; she’s like the Third Murderer in an Elizabethan tragedy. (Pat made this association herself. At Julia Richman High School she chose to write a “good essay on the third murderer in Macbeth,”17 and when she was at Barnard she authored a play called The Saboteurs, which “went on after much difficulty” but produced “a pattern of applause” in the audience.)18

  The vignettes in the few memoirs which feature Pat are little scenes of eccentricity and oddness. She is the woman who brought a tortoise to a party;19 the woman who produced snails from her handbag and encouraged them to leave sticky trails all over her host’s tabletop;20 the woman who “drifted dark and concerned from one room to another”21 and then jumped out at her guest from behind a tree;22 the woman who railed against her mother in a Greenwich Village bar.23

  Broadly speaking, though, Pat is as absent from the cultural and/or personal histories of mid-twentieth century New York as she was absent from Karl Bissinger’s photograph. Her European success must have come as quite a surprise to the people who knew her then.

  “She could never have made it here,” says Karl Bissinger, who knew all the ropes in New York. “And because she was an exotic in Europe, it worked for her.”

  Pat’s American agent for twenty years, Patricia Schartle (from
1970, after she married, she was known as Patricia Schartle Myrer) agrees with Bissinger. Pat first brought herself to Schartle’s attention in 1958, after she had fallen out with her first real agent, Margot Johnson, a supportive woman who was, says Patricia Schartle, twenty years older than Pat and, “like Pat,” a “notorious lesbian and a drunk.”24 Schartle was recommended to Pat by a woman who had been Schartle’s copy editor when Schartle was editor in chief at the Appleton-Century Publishing Company. By the time Pat met Patricia Schartle, she had travelled extensively and lived in Europe, won two foreign literary awards, and spent a couple of years living with Doris, an advertising copywriter, in the socially exclusive outpost of Snedens Landing (yet another good address) in Palisades, New York, just outside New York City. There, says Schartle, Pat had begun to think of herself as “a sophisticated cosmopolitan who had lived abroad and had great success.”

  But Pat was not cosmopolitan, writes Schartle, and certainly not cosmopolitan enough to handle herself socially in Snedens Landing, where “the artists [Katharine] Cornell, [Guthrie] McClintock, Nancy Hamilton, The Murphies [Gerald and Sara], Paul Manship, etc. etc., were really cosmopolitan…. [S]he did not fit in. When Noel Coward and the Lunts visited Cornell she would have been totally out of place. Even after the first success of Strangers she knew she would be more interesting if she returned and lived in Europe. It was one of the few things we really talked about. Living abroad saved her.”25

  Pat’s social awkwardnesses and confusions were usually most apparent in formal or crowded milieux; places where instant recognitions of social and cultural patterns were necessary. Without directions, without a chart or a map or a near-diagrammatic understanding of a social situation, Pat was often lost in a maze. (Most of Manhattan, with its gridiron street design, was an uncomplicated pleasure to Pat, while Greenwich Village, with its atypically winding streets and wayward byways, was one of her favorite venues for fictional crime.)