The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  In the mid-1960s, in London, Caroline Besterman witnessed Pat’s discomfort with crowds. “I’m a great football fan and I took Pat to the Arsenal once in Highbury, to a football game there: fifty thousand people. It was hilarious. ‘How do they know when to stop?’ she asked…. What she meant was that play stops when the referee blows the whistle, but she was too [stupefied]—literally—to figure that out. It’s a simple game but it has many subtleties. Women didn’t go then; it was the maleness of the crowd, I think, that confused her. She couldn’t understand it.”26

  Social awkwardness was not the only jarring trait people noticed in Pat as she got older. There was something else, too, something Pat herself often mentioned in her self-appraising way. It was the sense that something was “wrong” with Pat. Or rather, the sense that something was “not right” with her. People close to Pat felt this, made allowances for it, and tried to avoid its consequences. Patricia Schartle writes:

  When I first met Highsmith and in the years that followed, I felt great sympathy for her. She was forever ill at ease. Awkward and gauche, she had very little grace, if any. She was hard to like. No I did not like her. But I cared about her. One did not like her because there was a curious cunning about her just when you thought she might be more human.

  Caroline Besterman felt something like this, too. Pat, says Caroline, always thought that “people didn’t help her,” but

  I have never seen someone who was so “helped.” And she was given so much leeway, everyone gave her leeway—and had it been anyone else they would have been thrown out the door. It wasn’t sympathy, exactly, it was some sort of feeling that she must somehow have got something wrong with her. But no, you couldn’t do anything, she would be sidetracked onto a branch line that went God knows where. She had no way of saying, “Well, that’s that.” It was very, very sad, given that she had a very good capacity for being a good friend and having a good time and making fun of everybody and all that kind of thing. And being witty and making a quick little drawing. But it didn’t last because nothing was right enough for her. She wanted more.27

  One evening in 1963, when Pat first moved to Suffolk, a friend invited her to have dinner at an old hotel in Aldeburgh. Pat tended to be “very mute” in Aldeburgh, says the friend, because it was full of the “old bourgeoisie. There were writers there, there were artists there, and they were all extremely ‘U’” [Nancy Mitford’s borrowed term for upper-class characteristics]—and Pat “didn’t like that either because she didn’t understand it. It frightened her.” But the hotel was full of “nice people.”28

  “The owner of [the hotel], an extremely bizarre woman, was a good artist; a very excitable but interesting person, and sharp as anything. We arrived and we were having a drink in the dining hall and another visitor who was a psychiatrist went over to Connie and [nodding in Pat’s direction] said: ‘You do know you have a psychopath in the hall.’ Yes. Just from observation of Pat. Connie told me this because she had always suspected, too, that there was not anything at all right with Pat.”

  “I remember Pat sitting there with a hard, baffled look on her face. She was lost; these people were all very sure of themselves. A heavy, a really heavy look. Full of hatred.”29

  “The two of them,” Caroline Besterman said, referring to what she believed was the root of Pat’s problem. “Mary and Pat. Just destroying each other. Like the old nursery rhyme: ‘The gingham dog and the calico cat side by side on the mantle sat’…and they tore each other to pieces. It was one of those real nursery rhymes, you know. Dark. I was always very fond of it.”*

  Karl Bissinger lived with Johnny Nicholson on East Fifty-eighth Street between First and Second Avenues just a couple of blocks from Pat, and he used to see her on the street “all the time” when she was still working for the comics. They were neighbors in a New Yorkish kind of way, and his recollections of Pat were vivid.

  I knew Pat before the war; when the war was coming on. It was her psychosexual presentation that drew me to her: The Troubled Woman. And we were seen, roughly, in the same—let’s call it what it was—lesbian set.

  The war years in New York were very interesting because the forbidden life—things now are complicated in another way and on the surface—the forbidden life was alive [if you knew where to look for it]. Before the Kinsey Report, they used to say that 2 percent of the world was homosexual, and if that’s true, then it’s like the Jews: they’ve had the biggest influence on everything in the world that any group ever had….

  Everyone drank a lot more in the 1940s. Imagine having three martinis before lunch and going back to the office. It can’t be done now, but everyone did it then….

  One of the things we did, we would get together once a week or so, hire a model, and have a sketch class…. Let’s call it “Bohemia” for lack of a better word. We all know what that meant in those days. Some of us had money, some of us were on our way somewhere, and some if us were, I guess, shooting up, and I don’t know what some of us were doing. Most of the people in the group were what we now call “gay.” And among the people who came to the sketch class was Pat Highsmith.

  Now Pat, I liked her immediately because she was difficult; and when I say difficult I mean she was the kind of woman—you immediately sensed this as a male—you sensed she didn’t like men. She just plain didn’t like men. On the other hand, she sensed my empathy for her, the fact that I liked her. She didn’t smile easily and she made NO effort to reach out socially as far as I had any idea. She was very reserved and I sort of understood very much that she was what I would call “angry at the world.” In those days, I would have called her a “man-hater.” But of course, she had a long life, she went abroad, she could have changed, I’m sure there were lots of other sides to her.

  It was clear that she would have preferred to be a man—though that’s an oversimplification of the complicated emotional thing that she had. I liked the way she cut her hair. She made an effort not to be what we used to call “butch.” Underneath that, of course, that was clearly what she was.

  The gossip: Pat was supposed to be in love with Babs Simpson.*

  When you talk about Americans being aristocrats, Babs Simpson is a wonderful example. [She came from the de Monocol family,] who had a lot of money. A lot of these kids in this drawing class had a lot of money. [Babs] was one of the senior fashion editors who went from Harper’s Bazaar to Vogue. These were the days when the top fashion magazines, almost all of them, had poetry editors and Harper’s was the first to publish Truman Capote and I could go down the list of all the neurotics they published. Carson McCullers [for example]—who was out of the same pod as Pat Highsmith. They were two women who probably wouldn’t like each other if they knew each other. I don’t know that they did know each other, though they probably did.

  Carson McCullers and Pat did know each other, and one Sunday afternoon, 27 February 1949 to be precise, Pat and two of the women she was sleeping with, Jeanne and Dione, went to visit Carson McCullers and her family at the McCullerses’ house in Nyack, New York, a half hour’s drive outside of New York City. Pat’s diary notes on the day were succinct: “Carson very hospitable, and we stay for about 4 hours. Reeves (Carson’s husband), her mother, and Margerita Smith, her sister.” Carson continued, all afternoon, to tell Pat that she had a “very good figure.” And Pat continued, all afternoon, to drink Cokes and sherry. No one seems to have disliked anyone, although Pat did allow herself the comment that she’d heard Reeves and Carson had been drinking too much in Paris.30

  “The reason I remember these small things,” says Karl Bissinger,

  is because Pat’s name kept flashing across the screen of memory as her books came out. I began to follow her as a writer, and I began to read in her writing so much of what I knew instinctively about her: the anger that was deep within her. She really looked at herself through masculine eyes. On the other hand she did know a little something about what was called bisexual men—or men who were meant to be bisexual…. It was
clear that she adored the looks of those ambiguous males she wrote about.

  I’m sure nobody could claim they knew Patricia….

  My feeling about Pat is that she was only interested in success. That would make up for a lot of the anger which she probably carried around.31

  Pat, in her periods of social confidence in the 1940s, during which she was certain of her destiny and her attractiveness, lived in a whirl of social and sexual connections, and continued to assess everyone with a coroner’s eye, were always followed by equal and opposite periods of feelings of insufficiency. The flights and drops of her self-regard in her private writings are as regular as the ups and downs of a working seesaw. But Pat’s interests and attractions, as they had in high school, still flew everywhere: to “Hilda” and “Mary” and “Jackie” and “Dickie” and “Barbara” and “ABBOTT” (Berenice Abbott) and “Billie” and “Corinne” and “Virginia.” Several Virginias. And then there was “Madeleine Bemelmans,” a student at Barnard, ten years older than Pat, who was the wife of the writer, illustrator, and wit Ludwig Bemelmans and the eponym of his enchanting Madeline books.* Pat liked Madeleine Bemelmans, was interested by her husband’s success, and kept in sporadic touch with her for some years.

  During the early 1940s, Pat attended the mostly female parties in the two flats and a hallway that Berenice Abbott shared with her lover, the editor Elizabeth McCausland, on the fourth floor of an old building at 50 Commerce Street in Greenwich Village. (Pat complained that the females at Abbott’s parties weren’t interesting enough).32 Abbott, an inventor of photographic apparatuses and one of the world’s great photographers, washed her own prints in a big wooden tub in her studio, lamenting, “No matter what I do, these prints won’t last more than a hundred years.”33 Mother Mary’s suspicions were aroused: “Is she a les [lesbian]?” Mary inelegantly queried Pat about Berenice Abbott. Pat adroitly replied that there were always men at Abbott’s parties.

  With her women friends, and later with her professional acquaintances, Pat was always concerned with who was “superior” to whom. Her compulsion was to list, rank, classify, and put everyone in their proper place in relation to herself (i.e.: “V[irginia] better than J.S. & also has a brain”). Pat also weighed herself obsessively, recording the results (they ranged from “108½” to “114”), and washed her hands, as she said, “too often.” In both high school and college Pat liked to note the failing grades of her classmates, to calculate their suitability for friendship (“She has no contacts that I know of”),34 to record their (and her) couplings and uncouplings, and to refer to all her connections as “Proustian.” What she meant by this was that her relationships were complicated and snobbish, but her use of the adjective “Proustian” gives a good idea of just how grandly the adolescent Pat was phrasing her social life.35

  Later on, she would lend tricky Tom Ripley her ability to size up a room and assess the opportunities in it. Ripley’s reaction to anything less than “quality” company was exactly the same as Pat’s:

  Tom…realiz[ed] that he had been rude, was being rude, and that he ought to pull himself together, because behaving courteously even to this handful of second-rate antique dealers and bric-a-brac and ashtray buyers…was part of the business of being a gentleman. But they reminded him too much of the people he had said good-bye to in New York, he thought, and that was why they got under his skin like an itch and made him want to run…. It was the class of people he despised, and why say that to Marge, who was of the same class?”36

  Pat’s sexual attractions were also subject to elaborate rephrasings. In the fall semester of her freshman year at Barnard College, when she was trying to lure Mickey (a girl) away from Judy Tuvim (tuvim resembles part of the Hebrew word for “holiday,” hence Judy’s stage name, “Holliday”), and fending off, as well as encouraging, the advances of Ernst Hauser, the journalist she met on her spring boat trip to Texas, Pat began to fall in love with the first of her several Virginias.37 Pat always wrote this first Virginia’s name as though it were an abbreviation for the state, “Va.,” and Virginia tormented Pat in just the way Pat preferred: “Va. criticizes me always” and “Phoned Va. who was terrible to me as always on phone.”38 Virginia was two years older than Pat, and they kissed but rarely went further than that. The “Proustian” part of Pat’s attraction is that Pat thought this first Virginia looked just like the resident royalty of English literature, Virginia Woolf.

  This relationship, as well as Pat’s scrutiny of two young girls, “Charlotte and Emily,” at play, helped to inspire a powerfully allusive short story of sexual complicity, “A Mighty Nice Man.” Pat finished “A Mighty Nice Man” on 24 August 1939, and it was one of the stories she published in the Barnard Quarterly. It is a testament to her naïveté about her work and the world that Pat thought this story of a very young girl being “groomed” by a molesting male was an example of the “good popular stuff…I shall yet write.” 39

  In the 1940s, much of Manhattan was still a place of unlocked doors, open hospitalities, and relatively inexpensive pleasures. Anatole Broyard captured its postwar spirit—and the soul of that spirit, which was Greenwich Village—in his memoir of the forties, Kafka Was the Rage. “New York City had never been so attractive. The postwar years were like a great smile in its sullen history. The Village was as close in 1946 as it would ever come to Paris in the Twenties. Rents were cheap, restaurants were cheap, and it seemed to me that happiness itself might be cheaply had.” 40

  But it was just as she was leaving her teens, six months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor—the act which would eventually produce the “open Manhattan” Broyard was writing about—that Pat’s serious sexual life began. Pat went to a gay party in Greenwich Village, to which she had been invited by an older woman she met in a bar, Mary Sullivan. Pat noticed the photographer Ruth Bernhard at the party but spoke a great deal with Sullivan, watching Mary “fly here and there all evening. The boys adore her!” Finally, Mary and Pat went to Child’s Restaurant in Times Square to eat, where they talked until four thirty in the morning. Since they were near Mary’s apartment, Pat went there to sleep. Mary politely gave Pat her bed and took the divan for herself. And it was then that the teenage Pat began her sexual career as she meant to continue it—aggressively, suggesting to Mary that the bed was big enough for both of them. As Pat later wrote in her diary in the bad French she reserved for matters of the body, Mary “accepted with alacrity. Quickly. And then well, we barely slept, but what does that matter? She is marvellous. Kind, sweet, understanding.” 41

  Mary Sullivan ran what Ruth Bernhard called a “wonderful bookstore at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel,” and it was there that Bernhard, beginning her career in New York at her famous father’s insistence (Bernhard’s father was Lucian Bernhard [real name: Emil Kahn], the German graphic designer known as “the Father of the German Poster,” who created the running torchbearer emblem still used for Modern Library publications), met “the little Irish woman, Mary Sullivan,” some years before Pat did. This was in the late 1930s, when the same Child’s Restaurant in Times Square where Mary Sullivan and Pat went to talk had “tea dancing for girls in the afternoon. The space was always filled, with everyone in snappy clothes, dressed up, even sophisticated. There was a band playing all the best tunes of the era. Everyone danced.” 42

  Mary Sullivan introduced Bernhard to Berenice Abbott—who would later say that no one photographed female nudes better than Bernhard—and so perhaps it was Mary who introduced Bernhard to Pat as well. A year or so after meeting Sullivan, Pat developed an intense friendship with Ruth Bernhard that, as all Pat’s intense friendships did, briefly broke into a kind of love. But Bernhard, whose photography studio was in the same building as Rolf Tietgens’s studio, introduced Pat to Rolf in the summer of 1942—thus giving Pat another chance to feature in her favorite geometrical figure, the triangle. And Pat came to feel that Bernhard was too “unfortunately feminine inside” for her.43

  In the summer of 1942, Pat and Ber
nhard went with Rolf Tietgens on a weekend trip to a house on the swampy North Shore of Long Island—where Pat, whose luck with dogs was never good, was bitten on the “rear end” by a local canine. Ruth Bernhard almost fainted in response, and Pat and Bernhard spent a night in the same bed.44 Later, Bernhard and her sister read Pat’s early stories and thought them “wonderful,” and Pat and Bernhard went out regularly for coffee, took the subway to Harlem together, and accompanied each other to gallery openings. Pat’s lengthy description of an evening spent at the gallery managed by Betty Parsons shows her alertness to social maneuvering—and just how much she was depending on Ruth Bernhard for support.

  I moved about the room, waiting to be spoken to before I should have to speak, and saw Lola, drinking a Martini, and as I had seen her in Saks’ lady’s room only two hours before. I said loftily, “What again?” And I told her…that I had spent the afternoon reading View in the library*—(because her lover writes surréaliste articles for it) and she said she’d spent hers even better, seeing the Tchelichew [Pavel Tchelitchew] show at the Museum of Modern Art….

  Bernhard came in, all aglow with inner fire…. [S]everal of my friends knew how often I saw Bernhard, until she had become a part of my own protectorate, to guard against darts of criticism. And regally, we viewed the exhibit, I now much more comfortably drawing back & squinting my eyes as I love to do at art exhibits, Bernhard steadying herself, guarding me with a hand ever on my arm.45

  In May of 1943, Pat asked Mother Mary if she thought Ruth Bernhard would be a good roommate for her: “I should be able to get along with her well.” 46 Mary said it was an “excellent” idea and then asked the same inelegant question she’d asked about Berenice Abbott: “[D]id I think Bernhard was a les?” 47