The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  Now, in 1951, in Munich, Pat was having equally bad luck with her German princess. Pat questioned a translation the princess was doing—it’s not clear if it was a translation of one of Pat’s stories—and “[t]he Princess blew up and said I was exactly what R. Yorke had said I was, etc.”89 Pat had already acquired a reputation.

  Early in July, Pat was in Salzburg buying “a beautiful hunting knife for Shillings 53. About $2.50. I hope I shall have it for many years.” (She does still have it; it’s in her archives.) In Salzburg, she felt “fat, old” again. “I heard my heart and felt mortal as mortal can be…. Thirty—what a turning point. I remember Natalia saying, in Capri: ‘Thirty? You don’t begin to live until you are 30.’ Tonight. My movie opened, I believe.”90 She meant Strangers on a Train. It was the first time Pat had claimed any relationship to this other version of her first published work—and the very idea (“my movie”) seems to have reminded her that she was going to die.

  Late in July she was in Ambach, just outside of Munich, taking driving lessons and coming to the end of “my typing over” of The Price of Salt. “Have integrated Richard much more with the action, and also included that element of morbid curiousity [sic] and self participation I remarked in Marc [Brandel].” The book was still coming directly out of her life.91 Pat was also keeping up her usual pace of correspondence, with letters to and from friends, to and from old lovers, and to and from prospective lovers, new acquaintances, and business contacts in the book world. It was the habit she had begun with her first foreign outposting, to Taxco, Mexico, in 1944–45, and chronic correspondence would become her version of fidelity. On paper, Pat was able to keep her affections focused and her loyalties alive. Aside from the colloquies she conducted with herself in her diaries and cahiers, letter writing would serve as her main form of conversation.

  By the end of July Pat was back in Munich, thinking that the pseudonymous authorship she’d decided on for The Price of Salt was a handicap, that the whole book was a handicap, and, almost as bad, that it was also responsible for her two abscessed teeth. “I know instinctively that anxiety and mental tension can cause this…. I live under the threat of having half my remaining teeth removed (tomorrow) and the resulting ignominy and disfigurement.”92 She had seen a “torturing” dentist in Venice and hunted up an American one in Germany, and was working away on short stories, radio pieces, and an article for the New Orleans Times-Picayune (it was turned down). Her energy was enormous; her social networking, plans for future work, and persistent physical complaints (and complaints about those physical complaints) never stopped.

  On 11 August, she “ended my book [another version of The Price of Salt] and it’s ready to pack.” It was, she felt, time for an accounting and so she did one: counting up her lovers on a little strip of paper she entitled “whole show.” She printed their initials out in ink, and the paper is stained with what appears to be beer.

  Twenty-one of them! I count—

  V-C – B M.S. B.B. C.S. R.B. – J.S. N.W. – V.C.K. – J.P. – J.C. J.I. – J.T. – A.S. – P.F. – S.D. – B.C. – K.G. – M.E. – T.R. K.C.

  But Pat was only counting the lovers that still counted for her. There was no Rolf Tietgens (he hadn’t, technically, been able to make love with her in their short month of trying years ago, anyway), no Marc Brandel, no male initials discernible, in fact. And she was certainly not counting the dozens, the hundreds, of short flings she’d had with women and a comparatively small number of men, nor the many longer relations she’d had with the women for whom she’d felt more than a passing fancy. This was Pat remembering her memories in the moment and then ranking them, not Pat telling her history on a witness stand. Her diary entries—this can’t be stressed too often—were regularly written long after the dates she put on them, and her opinions were always subject to change. (“J.T.” is not Judy Tuvim; it is her lover Jeanne, whom Pat continued to try to lure to Europe, and who married shortly after Pat made this diary entry.)

  In August in Munich, three weeks after marking and then relinquishing her celibacy to Jo and Tessa, Pat failed a typing test (three times in a row) at the Peterson Caserne, the American army base in Munich, where she was trying to get a little work as an army typist in the Criminal Investigation Commission. Pat’s interest in the criminal mind and her talent for flunking job interviews never left her. Thirty-seven years later, on Don Swaim’s radio program in New York City in 1987, Pat said that she’d “wanted to avoid learning anything useful [so she] never learned to type.” She “didn’t,” she repeated, “want to get stuck with a secretarial job.”93

  By 29 August, in Munich with Jo, Pat found herself staring “at a woman who was staring at me, not knowing it was Ellen Hill. I stared because she was the only attractive woman I had seen in days, and the staring is inevitable in this town.”94 Six days before this sighting, Pat had been prompting Jo to see “if she liked sleeping with me [and] she said ‘I suppose basically I’ll always want to sleep with you.’” But Jo’s opportunity was short-lived; within a week, Pat was madly in love with Ellen Hill.95

  • 19 •

  Les Girls

  Part 3

  Pat’s tendency to make marble monuments of her lovers and then to discover, painfully, that their pedestals were made of clay found a perfect match in the array of dominations, virtues, and failures in human tolerance that made up the character of Ellen Blumenthal Hill. Ellen and Pat’s long love affair repeated the Alice in Wonderland plot of all Pat’s major love affairs: first it made her feel larger and then it made her feel smaller.

  “O the benevolence! O the beautiful world! O the generosity of the heart as I go walking down the street…today, I am vaster….

  “How could it be? Isn’t she like Titania charmed into loving the donkey?”1

  Pat followed her usual bliss with Ellen, and had her usual trouble describing her lover. Pat was always at a loss when summing up the good qualities of the women she loved; her natural talent was for describing their bad qualities. But the adjectives she used for Ellen—“small, quite chic, good-looking,” “very intelligent and efficient,” as well as “possessive,” “dominating,” and “very feminine”—were the traits before which she always felt most inadequate.2 And Pat’s feelings of inadequacy affected her like potent injections of a love drug.

  “Darling, come to me in a silver dress with dragonflies’ wings, come to me on a column of smoke, come into my room though a keyhole, and through the crack of the door and the floor…. I turn like an idiot in quest of you.”3

  But Pat was never happy to be “an idiot” for long.

  The small, neat, elegant, “rather humorless woman” who inspired these effusions was a serious European intellectual with a solid academic background and a German Jewish refugee heritage she was determined to conceal. Ellen’s colleague and friend in Munich after the war, the philosophically minded H. M. Qualunque,* who sensed Ellen’s distress on the subject of her ethnicity, says that Ellen “was in charge of the United States resettlement desk at the Munich IRO, the international agency set up by the United Nations to research all Displaced Persons after the war.” 4

  Mr. Qualunque was introduced to Pat by Ellen Hill in 1971—he retained an impression of Pat’s “aggression” and her physical decay—and he asked Pat a question which Pat thought important enough to note down in her cahier: “a question that I can’t answer: if life has no meaning, why has morality?”5 Mr. Qualunque had spotted Pat’s moral contradiction. She was a woman who wrote about the “meaninglessness” of life while still being seriously worried about right and wrong.6 Pat agreed with him.

  “Why my constant preoccupation with morality? It has been the theme of almost all I write, from my first story, ‘Crime Begins,’ at sixteen, until now, when I write a book about murder.”7

  Ellen Hill, says Mr. Qualunque, was a born moralist with a “cutting-edge” intelligence and “no time for fools.” This left her with no time for anyone because “she considered almost everyone else a moro
n.” Still, Ellen was “absolutely devoted to the idea of rational social justice and systems for living [and] was very much respected at the IRO…. She was a very difficult person, a rough character, but who isn’t? I knew her, so her character didn’t bother me and I admired her intellect…. It was easy for the average person to describe Ellen Hill because she could be extremely abrasive and competitive. I couldn’t care less. I knew how and what she was and I was interested in those aspects of her that were interesting.”8

  During the Second World War Ellen “taught ‘Area Studies’—the mores and political makeup of various countries”—at Stanford University in California to diplomats and career officers, and “married Mr. Hill for a British passport, then disposed of him.” After her stint with the IRO in Munich, she moved to Rome, where she affiliated herself with a “social research institute and published highly specialized articles in Italian sociological reviews.” Later on, she had an office at the University of Zurich. Ellen spoke several languages and managed to produce merciless judgments in every one of them.9

  Christa Maerker, the Berlin filmmaker and writer, remembers Ellen Hill as “the dragonic General…but with a sweet face” whose stentorian voice boomed out over the railway station café in Locarno when she spotted Pat there with Maerker sipping a morning beer: “Pat! Not in the morning!” Kingsley saw Ellen as a “governess” and says that Pat behaved like “an Oriental servant” with her. Daniel Keel describes a luncheon in Zurich during which Pat did everything Ellen told her to do, exactly—and how Ellen tried, unsuccessfully, to make him do the same thing. And Peter Huber recollects a 6:30 A.M. call in Tegna (“We are late risers,” says Huber) from Ellen, who telephoned Huber and his wife to see if they’d taken the advice she had given during dinner the night before about driving to Zurich very early in the morning, “saying how shocked she was that we hadn’t left yet and that we really ought to get ready.”10

  But in the sole official record of Ellen’s relationship with Patricia—a German television documentary shot at Pat’s house in Moncourt at the end of October 1978 in which Ellen interviews Pat in German for the camera—some charitableness of manner is evident. Pat’s visual grammar in this documentary is, once again, that of a captive forced to give false testimony in a hostage video. But her awkward, choppy German (a Swiss neighbor says that “German was Pat’s best foreign language—and it was bad”)11 is much assisted by the elegant Ellen’s gently phrased questions and bridgings of conversational gaps. And in an unguarded moment Pat, suddenly remembering the richly Balzacian possibilities in the old French custom of selling an apartment en viager (i.e., an apartment sale that leaves the apartment’s elderly former owner in place, while the new buyer pays a regular stipend to the former owner for life, betting that the life will be a short one), forgets the camera for a moment and unleashes a chortle of pure pleasure.

  Before Pat and Ellen’s first date—it turned out to be a well-wined lunch at a lake restaurant outside of Munich—Ellen had inquired of Pat if she preferred Baroque castles to Rococo castles. This taste for precise distinctions would later grate like sandpaper on Pat’s nerves. The two women embraced for the first time two days later on Ellen’s sofa—the invitation to do so was Pat’s—after primly listening to poetry and classical music on Ellen’s radio in her apartment on Karl Theodorstrasse. It was on that day when Pat wrote in her diary that Ellen reminded her physically of Ginnie Catherwood and that the experience of sleeping with Ellen blotted “out everyone who’s been between Ginnie and her.”12

  Only Pat, with her rigid categorization of experience and her Procrustean drive to force each new woman into a previous prototype, could ever think that this highly strung, intellectually disdainful European Jew—whose habits were as prim as a paper cutter’s—could ever resemble the rich, spoiled, socially registered, alcoholic divorcée, Virginia Kent Catherwood, for whom Pat had fallen so hard in 1946.

  It was a matter of weeks before Ellen’s precisions were grinding Pat’s feelings into a resentful powder; a fortnight before the sound of Pat’s typewriter was murdering Ellen’s sleep and driving her mad; and just a few days before Ellen’s behavior with her dog was pushing Pat to thoughts of canicide. To be sure, Ellen made Pat order the kind of food in restaurants which her beloved dachshund, Henry, could eat, knowing that Pat’s lackluster appetite would guarantee plenty of leftovers. Pat, who rarely forgot anything that happened around a dinner table, gave the character of Clara Stackhouse this same relationship with a dog in The Blunderer, the novel into which she wove her complicated and violent feelings for Ellen.

  She also gave Clara’s husband her feelings for Henry: “Walter restrained an impulse to crush the dog in his hands.”13

  Still, Henry the dachshund gave as good he got. As sensitive to insult and sexual jealousy as Pat was, he tore up the bedroom, brought clothes racks down to the floor, flattened a Christmas package Pat had made for Ellen, and defecated on the parquet. A year into the relationship, when Henry began “attacking [Pat] without provocation” (without overt provocation, that is; Pat’s thinking about Henry was now running heavily to strangulation fantasies), Ellen, in what even Pat had to admit was a noble gesture, gave the dog away uncomplainingly.

  Pat was sufficiently inspired by Henry to make certain that terrible things happened to dogs whenever they appeared in her novels.* (It probably didn’t help that Mother Mary had always kept small dogs with names like Wing Wang and Zsa Zsa.) But The Blunderer was only just finding its form, and Pat, needing immediate relief, put some of her feelings about Ellen and Henry into a short story “aimed at The New Yorker” (it missed the target). She mailed the story off to Margot Johnson in New York, calling it “Man’s Best Friend.” The story is about Baldur, a German shepherd who is so superior to his dentist master that the dentist tries to kill himself—twice—in order to escape the dog’s unbearably severe judgments.14

  In life, dogs didn’t fare any better with Pat than they did in fiction. During one of her many separations from Ellen, while staying briefly with her friend Tity in Florence, Pat made the mistake of taking Tity’s dog Mala for a walk. Mala, Pat was moved to write, was “abominable to walk with. Like having an octopus with suction pads below the leash.”15 Pat’s description of her lover Jacqui’s dog in Paris in 1969 could only have been the product of a long-cultivated disgust: “Her dog sucks his penis all day, and has his ears in my canapes at the cocktail hour.”16 Pat’s disapproval of the sexual habits of Pif, the ancient bird dog living with her next-door neighbors in Moncourt, Desmond and Mary Ryan, caused her to deliver a swift, secret kick to poor Pif’s derrière. Pif, Pat wrote to Barbara Ker-Seymer, was “sexually obsessed,” a condition she could sympathize with only in herself.17 And Pat’s empathy for her other Moncourt neighbor’s dog—the dachshund living with Hedli MacNeice, ex-wife of the poet Louis MacNeice—had to do with the dog’s superb bloodlines, the knowledge that it had been killed on the road, and the fact that Pat could comfortably blame Hedli for its death.

  Even at the end of her life in Tegna, Pat was still having trouble with dogs. A neighbor’s two “huge” dogs continued to romp regularly through her back garden. Her letters about these canine interlopers are radiant with the urge to kill.

  Nonetheless, Pat would go on to make use of food with her cats in much the same way that Ellen had done with her dog Henry. The scholar Bettina Berch noticed it during a visit to Pat’s house in Aurigeno in 1984: “I knew very well that we were eating food that was basically intended for the cats. We sat down to eat food that was chosen with the cats’ palette in mind; herring, dairy products.

  “What do these foods have in common, I thought? That when we’re finished with them, the cats will enjoy them. Except, of course, for the beer and the scotch.”18

  And Christa Maerker was quite certain that at Pat’s last house in Tegna she had been given food the cats had already sampled.19

  Pat’s relations with Ellen Hill began as they were to continue for the next four decades: “
Ellen and I argue or misunderstand in all of our conversations.” Still, Pat felt that falling in love with Ellen “was Europe as Europe is supposed to be, and so few individuals find.”20 And she even “got the curse in the morning [of 8 September].” It was the first time she’d menstruated in seven months, and she understood immediately that there was “[no] better indication of my emotional…awakening.”21 Pat would get her period more regularly throughout this turbulent affair—as often as “every 35 days”—than at any other time in her life, except for the years that she was with Caroline Besterman. She almost never menstruated during the months of her ambivalent relations with Marc Brandel in 1948–49, and ordinarily her periods were so infrequent that she noted them in her diaries, while continuing to get estrogen shots for what she called “the usual hormone deficiencies.”

  By 14 September, Pat and Ellen were on their way in Ellen’s car—Ellen at the wheel, Pat still without a driver’s license—to Venice. It was an axiom by now: the first thing to do after falling in love was take a trip. Jo had been left to deal with Pat’s clothes and car, just as Ann Smith had been left to deal with the possessions in Pat’s New York apartment. Margot Johnson sold the rights to Strangers on a Train for two hundred dollars to Sweden, so Pat, “terribly happy,” bought candy for Ellen and began to drink more. Prostrate before her new queen, she was feeling “like a coolie the gods have suddenly snatched up and made a prince, with ring, a halo, and immortality.”22

  In Venice, “after a long splendid ride in the sun,” Ellen insisted on changing their “darkish rooms” for hotel rooms on the Grand Canal. For the rest of their two-week journey, Pat and Ellen would rarely travel less than “first class.” The writer Alan Campbell, a friend of Ellen (and twice married to Dorothy Parker, so he was used to difficult women), telephoned immediately from his room in Venice, and Pat thought he was playing “Dan Cupid”: he approved highly of Pat. “Who doesn’t,” Pat wrote with an uncharacteristic flourish, but she was also asking herself a characteristic question: “[W]hat can break this up? And it’s so sweet to be able to think of nothing that can.” By 16 September, the worm was in the apple and Pat was writing in her diary: “I must watch Ellen from moment to moment to judge her temper. She is not easy to get on with.”