The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  On her thirty-second birthday—“who cares,” Pat thought—she wrote in her diary that she was restless and unhappy, “not knowing yet what Harper’s has said, nor what has happened to my pictures in my [New York] apartment, the remainder of my books.” When Ellen was too tired to make love, Pat became “enraged. Unfortunately, it lasts.” 47 Inexpressive in other ways, Pat made many pen and ink drawings. Ellen brought her back a “big gold ring” from Rome to wear on her little finger. Pat kept it all her life.

  From Trieste, in January of 1953, at the apartment she shared with Ellen (who was still working to settle Displaced Persons), Pat received a long, depressed letter from Mother Mary, who was shuttling back and forth with Stanley between Miami and Orlando, Florida, facing joblessness and contemplating a trip to Texas for “emotional help.” Pat wrote back to Mary what she thought was a “heartening yet still honest letter, in which I reminded her she had a habit of not facing facts until too late.” 48 It was the kind of letter Mary was always sending to Pat.

  But Pat identified so strongly with Mary that she was actually feeling her pain, understanding “too well” what Mary and Stanley were going through. Both mother and daughter were desperate for money and barely afloat in leaking artistic boats and unsatisfying relationships—and at the same time, too.49

  In debt to Ellen, with no story sold for a year, Pat was complaining that her “work [was] at a stand-still because Ellen cannot bear the typing.” But Pat worked on as she had always worked on, taking copious notes for dozens of stories: the story of a “selfish bachelor” in Trieste, the story of two friends charged with spying on each other for political reasons, the story of a man “who unconsciously seeks failure all his life, and finds himself happiest when he has attained it.”50

  Insisting that she was paralyzed, Pat was never without creative ideas or schemes for advancement. She wrote to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, asking if the paper wanted a piece on the “D.P. Camps which I visited today…. I saw the mess.”51 Pat had gone to “San Sabba” and to the “Opicina Camp” for Displaced Persons just outside Trieste with an eye to selling articles about them. Her description of the people interred at San Sabba—mostly Russians and Serbs imprisoned by the Germans who had been displaced by the war and who were now desperately trying to get visas to more salubrious locations—was confined to the observation that they were “shabby, half dirty,” “dressed in rags,” “a bit anxious.” And of the people passing her, all she had to say was: “most of them are old.” The weight she gives these refugees is exactly the weight she gave to the camp’s “two storied buildings with good roofing” and their contents.52 And nowhere does Pat note (perhaps she did not wish to notice) that the Displaced Persons camp she had just visited—it was actually called Campo Profughi; she gave it its wartime name, San Sabba—had all too recently been the San Sabba concentration camp: the only extermination camp in Italy during the Second World War.

  On 27 January an unwelcome letter from Harper & Brothers arrived—and Pat found herself in a familiar position: arrayed against “the whole world.”

  “[T]o my rather great disappointment they don’t like the book [apparently a version of The Sleepless Night]—evidently not at all…. They say too much ground covered…. Joan Kahn writes it is “not worthy of Pat.” [Kahn was to say the same thing of The Glass Cell in 1963.] Apparently I am wrong—if the whole world is in accord against me.”53

  Pat did find one pleasure in Trieste: a lecture by James Joyce’s brother Stanislaus, who was teaching at Trieste University. It was a lecture on Dubliners, and she thought Stanislaus “very entertaining, as different from James as night from day.” But she felt lost and “stagnant,” could no longer give her relationship with Ellen a name, “not even an adjective.” She thought of herself as “a 3rd rate writer” and kept wishing she were in New Orleans, in New York, in Texas—anywhere she had ever enjoyed herself in the United States. And she wished she were back in time, too—for preference, 1946.54 Perhaps because 1946 was the year she fell in love with Ginnie Catherwood and the year her short story “The Heroine” was published in Harper’s Bazaar.

  Pat blamed Ellen for everything—except when she could bear to acknowledge a more fundamental source: “Most of my depression is caused by overweening ambition,” she wrote before the end of 1952.55 On Valentine’s Day of 1953, she went a little further: “My Epitaph ’53. Here lies one who always continually muffed his chance.”56

  The two women were supposed to stay a year in Trieste, but stayed only four months: Ellen kept leaving jobs, apparently hoping that a new city would bring new attitudes to their love affair. It never did. They continued to quarrel and harry each other from pillar to post in what Pat was calling “this little private hell of marriage.” From Trieste they went to Genoa, took the boat to Gibraltar, and then rattled around in the south of Spain.

  It wasn’t until May that they finally sailed for New York, and their long hot summer of 1953 began.

  Many years later, Pat made an addition to her diary of July 1953, marked with a vertical line to emphasize its importance. She dated it 15–16 July, ten days after Ellen Hill tried to kill herself with Veronal in Lil Picard’s apartment: “This evening I met Lynn Roth—267½ W. 11th St Thurs 16 July Ex–girl friend of Ann Smith’s—& roommate Doris.”57

  Pat was preparing to fall in love again, the kind of falling in love that usually worked best for her: a few weeks’ contact with the woman in question and years and years of yearning fantasies. It is a condition most writers would guiltily admit to finding productive.

  • 20 •

  Les Girls

  Part 4

  A family tree, a diagrammatic view of affairs and duration among les girls. From one individual radiate twenty lines, crossing those of their other partners, coming full circle again…. Everybody has been with everybody else.

  —Patricia Highsmith, 1947

  Although Pat’s affair with Lynn Roth in the summer of 1953 would pass as quickly as a fever in a Russian novel, she loved to dwell on Roth’s image or, rather, on Roth’s “type”: a lovely, slim, stylish, inconstant blond girl who wanted to be an actress.

  Commendably thorough, Pat was still sleeping with her other lovely blonde, Roth’s ex-lover Ann Smith, when she took up with Lynn. And she would in future live with Doris, the blond woman Roth was currently living with and “cheating on” with Pat. Pat herself was now sharing an apartment and a bed with Jean P., and she had also resumed seeing Ellen Hill secretly. In this period of her life, Pat seems to have taken Henry James’s dictum that a writer should be someone on whom “nothing is lost” a little too seriously.

  Pat and Lynn Roth got together quickly. Desperate for places in which to make love (i.e., places where they could avoid their various lovers), and well supplied with keys to other people’s doors, they snuck into their friends’ apartments without permission—including Ellen Hill’s new digs at One Fifth Avenue. Then Ellen surreptitiously visited Pat in the apartment Pat was sharing with Jean. Then Lynn dropped in on that apartment “by accident” when Ellen was there. Then they all ran into each other, in various combinations, on the streets of Greenwich Village. It was a busy July and August.1

  Pat’s behavior during the summer of 1953 looks like the material for bedroom farce. But it was also guilt-making, manipulative, thrilling for Pat, and criminal in the way that her imagination liked things to be criminal. The remark she would later make to a lover about life having no meaning “unless there was a crime in it” was the word made flesh just now. The Price of Salt had been cut to this same cloth: the story of a love affair conducted “on the run,” perceived as a crime by the society in which it was set, with the lovers pursued and threatened with prosecution. Pat was reliving this scenario in multiple variations in her novel. She even sounded like a criminal to herself as she failed to unpick her skein of deception.

  “Must soon confess or lay cards on the table or whatever. I have ambiguous feelings about Ellen, which hopelessly thwart m
e: to take her for what I enjoy about her…or to be strong & fend for myself?

  “If I do decide, I should make a move. I cannot. So I drink. Like any American.”2

  Pat’s generous third cousin on the Coates side, Millie Alford, visiting New York this summer, offered her house in Fort Worth to Pat as a refuge. Pat, ashamed of her poverty before a family member just as Mother Mary was always ashamed before “the Texas family” for being poor, suddenly wondered what Millie knew “of my sex life. Because she seems wildly interested.”3

  When Millie left town in August, Pat noted, with something like awakening interest, that Millie had embraced her “for long moments on parting.”4

  By 26 August, Pat, writing furiously, was up to page 110 on The Blunderer—“visit of Walter to Kimmel.” But, she thought, “my life is so much more important now than the book.” Her life was certainly busier than her book: her “hero,” the “blunderer” Walter Stackhouse, didn’t much care for sex with the opposite sex (“Walter could feel her desire like a pull, a drain on him”),5 and he imitated Pat in other ways, too: he liked to clip out and save articles from newspapers which he used for making lists of “unworthy friendships” (i.e., unequal power relationships) between superior men and their inferior friends. Walter thought such friendships were “maintained…because of certain needs and deficiencies that were either mirrored or complemented by the inferior friend.”

  Pat was still creating Clara, the desperately neurotic wife of Walter Stackhouse, out of her relations with Ellen Hill. (Walter, with his architectural surname, and Clara, with her job as a real estate agent, should have been a perfect pair.) Like Ellen, Clara provides “that old pattern of punishment after favors granted,”6 and prefers her dog to her husband, her job to her marriage, and the negation of pleasure to the celebration of life. Clara—as Ellen had done with Pat, as every lover had done with Pat—constantly accuses Walter of drinking too much. And Walter expresses the violent oppositions love always encouraged in his creator:

  A strange sensation ran through him at the touch of her fingers. A start of pleasure, of hatred, of a kind of hopeless tenderness that Walter crushed as soon as his mind recognized it. He had a sudden desire to embrace her hard at this last minute, then to fling her away from him.7

  Melchior Kimmel, The Blunderer’s “foreign” wife-murderer, whose gross enjoyment of delicatessen food is part of his vivid repulsiveness, commits the murder which first inspires Walter (who, with his “Anglo-Saxon good looks” is the exact opposite of Kimmel) to think about killing Clara. After seeing the actor Gert Fröbe in Claude Autant-Lara’s 1965 film Enough Rope, Pat said that Fröbe—later to play Auric Goldfinger in the eponymous James Bond movie—was “exactly as I pictured Kimmel.”8

  Because of the way Walter blunders into Kimmel’s plans, Kimmel becomes Walter’s own “unworthy” Alter Ego, with the usual accompanying sexual undertones. (“Kimmel’s fat mouth with the heavy seam along the heart-shaped upper lip seemed to Walter the most vulgar thing he had ever looked at.”)9 As always in a Highsmith novel (and in a Highsmith life, too), everyone is pursuing everyone: Corby (the sadistic cop), Kimmel, and Walter all swerve, dip, and wheel like rapacious birds of prey in confused flight. (“Corbie,” the cop’s name, is Scots border dialect for blackbird.) The pursuer becomes the pursued—and then turns back again. The characters are always changing places—“Suddenly…Kimmel appeared as a shining angel in contrast to a diabolic Corby”10—and the violence is both sexualized and gendered: “Kimmel was aware that he felt intensely feminine…. it gave him pleasure of a kind he had not felt in years. He waited for the next blow, which he anticipated would strike his ear.”11

  Pat would always have the adept’s feel for sadomasochistic relations.

  As in her earliest story in this genre, “Uncertain Treasure,” it is the chase that matters most, not its nominal motive. “The old favorite sport of the human race, hunting down their fellows” is how Pat phrases it in The Blunderer.”12 Pat’s overheated vie d’amour—love as a criminal pursuit—was made of the same material. “Cops and robbers. It must take a mind that’s nasty or twisted somewhere [Walter] thought, to devote itself exclusively to homicide.”13 But Pat herself was never exclusively devoted to homicide: love and murder would regularly substitute for each other in her works and in her dreams.

  Pat was guiltily finding “the suicide & Ellen’s character in the book…very disturbing & too personal of course.” (The suicide disturbed her more when she wrote about it than when Ellen had actually tried to commit it.) In Walter’s passivity and ineptitude (he implicates himself in a crime he hasn’t committed, kills the wrong man, and is murdered himself), it is possible to see Pat’s flagellation of herself as a person who always did the wrong thing. German literary critic Paul Ingendaay noticed a curious linguistic tic in Pat’s cahiers: “It is striking,” he wrote in the Afterword to her short story collection Nothing That Meets the Eye, “how often the word ‘failure’ occurs in the notes and plot sketches.”14

  Next to madness, failure was what Pat feared most, and for a long time she’d been conscious of a cloak of failure settling over her family like a tragic pall. Death of a Salesman—the play with whose central character she said she had no sympathy—kept recurring to her as a model for this enveloping doom. Two years later, in the summer of 1955, she would consider making Salesman the foundation of an autobiographical novel.

  “I revert more and more to the projected novel of my parents and myself. The Death of a Salesman theme in another profession, another period—and to me far more tragic because the aspirations were higher. In this book my parents will be writers, becoming increasingly hack, and I shall become a painter.”15

  But now, at the end of August 1953, Pat suddenly performed one of her lightning substitutions: she went to Provincetown with Ellen Hill, with whom she’d broken up six weeks before. “I do not forget Lynn, yet am content temporarily with Ellen.”16 By the end of September, Ellen and Pat had broken up again; Ellen had decamped for Europe and Pat was in Fort Worth, at the Coates Hotel, her uncle Claude’s apartment hotel, for which, to her quiet irritation, Uncle Claude was charging her rent. Before she left New York she saw a doctor for her blood; her weight was 117. She changed the language in which she was writing her diary—as she usually did when she had something to hide—from awkward German to bad Italian.

  In Texas, Pat was drinking even more heavily than she had in New York. And she was writing ever more obsessively, transferring the focus from her life’s complications with Ellen et al. to the complications posed by The Blunderer. She gave an interview to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in which she mentioned “afternoon beer” as an inspiration (but it was the hard liquor she was hitting the hardest), and she moved, briefly, to her cousin Millie’s house. It was during this time that Pat had a short sexual relationship with Millie of which “the family” was perfectly aware. Millie Alford would be a supportive friend to Pat for the rest of her life, doing everything she could in later years to persuade Pat to accept her mother Mary’s foibles and to get on with her life. But Pat was unresponsive to any pleas that had to do with letting Mary Highsmith off any of the hooks she’d hung her on.

  Conscious that her apparent inability to settle anywhere for long made her look bad, Pat wrote to Kingsley: “And by now, I am sure, I shall be permanently placed in your mind as eccentric, or what was it—the most unstable character of your acquaintance.” She began to attribute the “chaos” inside her to the country and the system she had spent the last year in Europe yearning to get back to: “America” and “democracy.” She wrote a bit of bad verse: “Despite the poverty and destruction [in Europe] / There is order. / It does not exist in America.”17 In her indirect way, Pat—her life in disorder—was identifying herself with her native country.

  Ellen Hill was in Mallorca and on her way to Rome, and, in a letter to Kingsley linking Ellen to the character of Clara in The Blunderer, Pat was feeling “sorry for her, as she’s a tragic character.
” Feeling sorry for Ellen was the next step to feeling guilty about her, and guilt, once again, would move Pat closer to Ellen. But now, in need of reassurance from Kingsley and having decided on The Blunderer as a title for her manuscript at last, Pat was asking: “What do you think of this title, my literary Nestor?” On Christmas Eve, Pat sent a copy of the last page of the finshed manuscript of The Blunderer to Kingsley “to prove…that it can be done…despite discouragement, poverty, and mediocre health.”18

  Meanwhile, Pat continued to drink her way through visits to Dallas, through long drawing sessions, through meetings with family members, and through a reanimation of her friendship with a horseback-riding friend, Florence Brillheart. Pat, who loved to ride, also liked to get herself up in English riding gear when she was in Texas. The number of photographs taken of her over the years wearing jodhpurs, hacking jackets, and gleaming English riding boots and mounted on a horse or posed against a fence in Texas—land of chaps, six-gallon hats, and the Judson (cowboy) Boot Factory (just across the street from Willie Mae’s Fort Worth house)—are legion. Pat presents herself in these pictures as a girl boarder at an English prep school—Roedean, perhaps, or the Cheltenham Ladies College—momentarily detained by the camera, but almost certainly on her way to a point-to-point. It was all part of the theatrical oppositions by which this daughter of another kind of boardinghouse operated, oppositions which were deeply rooted in her fidelity to the American Dream.

  Still, Dan Walton Coates did remember one glorious day in the 1940s (Pat’s diary fixes it as Christmas Day, 1949) when Pat, visiting his father Dan Coates’s Box Canyon Ranch in Wetherford, Texas, on a cross-country drive with Elizabeth Lyne, was especially radiant and wearing what he remembered as “her standard wardrobe”:

  A starched white shirt, her Levi’s, a black wristband on her watch, it looked like one of those Cartier tank watches, and she had on a pair of black loafers and white socks and had a little cuff rolled on her Levi’s. We were raising horses and we had a stallion and Pat wanted to ride him. And I said, “Sure.” And we went out there and put a bridle on him, and I said, “I’ll put a saddle on him.” “Oh no,” Pat said, “I’ll just ride him bareback.”