The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  Now, in one of her quirkier descriptions, Pat made another attempt to explain what Ellen really meant to her. It was anything but a direct compliment, but it was a compliment all the same. And it was the compliment Pat would continue to pay to Ellen for the next thirty-five years.

  “If I shall ever pay tribute to Ellen Hill in words, the most important thing I shall say is that with her, I often had fascinating and valuable conversations between the breaking of a dinner plate and the bathing of a dog…. Of no other woman can I say this…. It was her challenging mind often irritating, her point not always justified, that inspired the conversations generally, however.” 41

  And so Pat and Ellen set out again on one of their long, quarrelsome journeys by car, this time to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Ellen had by now replaced Henry the dachshund with Tina the French poodle, but Pat had stopped keeping her diaries (Ellen had peeked at them again), and there is no evidence that Pat got on any better with Tina than she did with the clever, vengeful Henry. Three years later, Pat amiably included Tina in her dedication of Deep Water to Ellen. But in 1970, when Pat was feeling particularly alienated from her home country (she hated Nixon, loathed the civil rights movement, and, although against the war in Vietnam, she was agitated by the protests the war had engendered), she started to write A Dog’s Ransom, a shambolic novel which begins with a poison pen letter and ends with the thorough corruption of Clarence Duhamel, a New York policeman of high morals, good education, and Pat’s own reading habits.42 But Pat had never met a New York cop, knew nothing about the workings of a police precinct, and had to ask Kingsley, long distance, to do the police research for her.43 And in this new novel, Pat couldn’t resist kidnapping and murdering a poodle, a poodle she couldn’t help naming after Ellen’s poodle, Tina.

  The day after they arrived in Santa Fe, Pat, possessed by her book and without bothering to fully unpack her suitcase, began to write. Ripley was to take her only six months, and she finished the manuscript before the end of the year. She sent the original copy (the original is missing from her archives, as are original manuscripts for The Blunderer, The Cry of the Owl, This Sweet Sickness, The Two Faces of January, and A Game for the Living) to her grandmother in Fort Worth. But two weeks after Pat’s thirty-fourth birthday, on 5 February 1955, Willie Mae Stewart Coates, eighty-eight years old and still in possession of the manuscript of The Talented Mr. Ripley, fell dead of an aneurysm while working in her garden. Pat, travelling in Mexico with Ellen at the time, was near enough to Texas to go to Willie Mae’s funeral. But she didn’t go, just as she didn’t go to her father’s, her stepfather’s, or her mother’s funeral. Perhaps the news didn’t reach her in Mexico in time; perhaps she simply couldn’t face a family funeral.

  Willie Mae died as she had lived—busy and productive in her own house. A few months before her death, she was up on a ladder painting a twelve-foot-high ceiling. She fell from the ladder, breaking some ribs, and made her lodgers swear not to tell her family what had happened. Even before he learned the truth, her great-grandson Don remembers thinking that Willie Mae—despite the fact that she had always maintained a severely upright Victorian posture—was looking especially erect with her secretly taped-up ribs.44

  Pat’s initial mourning for Willie Mae quickly combusted into rage. She decided to blame Mary for the loss of the manuscript of The Talented Mr. Ripley, which had disappeared in the confusion following Willie Mae’s death. Willie Mae’s boardinghouse and its contents were sold to the owners of the Judson Boot Factory, who tore it down to build a parking lot, and Mary told Pat that “the Negroes” (presumably the people living in the boardinghouse’s back-shacks) had done the packing up of the house and somehow her manuscript had been lost. Dan Walton Coates bought back his great-grandparents’ “bedroom suite” from Judson Boots, but didn’t come in time to save from the wrecker’s ball those vividly decorated closet panels Pat had painted for Willie Mae in the mid-1940s.45

  Pat’s secondary mourning for Willie Mae—the kind that produces tears—didn’t come until years later, but it, too, was triggered by an object. When Pat glanced down at one of her own worn-out shoes—it had taken the shape of her foot—she suddenly saw “the shape, or expression, of my grandmother’s foot [and] I shed the first real tears for my grandmother.” 46

  Ellen and Pat’s car trip from New York to Santa Fe, where they spent three months, along with their travels through Mexico were as unstructured as all their wanderings through Europe; but the movement was productive for Pat. Her notes for Deep Water proliferated, and whole passages in her cahier became part of the finished novel. The more intolerable her personal experiences with Ellen were (she called Santa Fe “l’enfer” in her notebook—and leaves us to imagine why), the more elevated her creative life. Mexico, too, was inspiring to her—although without the intense enthusiasms produced by her first trip there in 1944. But Pat’s higher body temperatures had always favorably affected her writing, and perhaps the extremes of climate and society in Mexico, with the natural colors of the mountain villages and plateaus haloed by the feverish yellow light, affected her imagination as creatively as illness did.

  As Pat and Ellen drove from Ciudad Juarez to Mexico City and all the way down to Acapulco, Pat kept a continuous chronicle of their travels—written, with her usual thriftiness, to be reshaped into an article for a magazine like the one which continued to reject her, The New Yorker. (Pat calls Ellen “my companion” in her notes, and excludes all sexual and most emotional commentary.) Some of her liveliest descriptions are the result of this running reportage, and the disparity between her situation and that of the Mexican locals was continually on her mind. Unlike her haute bourgeois view of Europe, however, all she saw in Mexico was “unjust poverty.” But poverty never evoked much of a sympathetic reaction from Pat, and in Hidalgo del Parral, she found “[t]he populace is shockingly poverty-stricken” and wrote that their “frank rags” could “produce fear in the onlooker.” 47

  In Mexico City, Pat and Ellen checked into the Majestic Hotel, the only hotel that would take a dog. The bellboys were drunk by 8:00 P.M. on New Year’s Eve, and the two women were taken to see the house of the former mayor of New York William O’Dwyer. O’Dwyer was a man who intermittently interested Pat as a subject: she was certainly interested in his beautiful second wife, Sloan Simpson, a John Powers model from Texas, a darling of jetset society, and a close friend of Pat’s future lover Daisy Winston. (Claustrophobia would be a reasonable response to lesbian circles on the eastern seaboard of the United States in the 1950s.) O’Dwyer was more or less an unindicted criminal, residing (after some putatively shady doings in New York) in Mexican exile or, as Pat put it, “in plain hiding,” in the “plush San Angel residential section,” which Pat and Ellen entered through an iron gate “like those of Sing Sing Prison (where O’Dwyer ought to be).” 48

  In 1961, Pat finally managed to meet Mayor O’Dwyer in his apartment on the Upper East Side of New York. And the first thing she noticed about him were his shoes: “Short, common feet in common black shoes suggest the feet of an ordinary policeman, walking his beat.” Pat was remembering, rather scornfully, that William O’Dwyer had started his political career as a cop walking the beat in Brooklyn.49

  In Taxco with Ellen, Pat remarked that the Santa Prisca bells were “never accurate,” and then, with particular precision, described the braying of a donkey: “It starts out with a honking, squeaking sound, like a bucket being hauled up by a rusty crank, progresses to the agonized E-E-E-aw—E-E-E-aw! which winds down to a very melancholy, sobbing line of onck-onck-onck—as if that donkey’s world had come to an end.”50

  To Puebla and Oaxaca and Acapulco and Cuernavaca the two women went, with Pat continuing to keep her amusing, impersonal travel diary, just as she had in Switzerland in 1953. In June of 1955, somewhere on their journey—perhaps they were in Santa Fe again, because two days later they were back on the road between Santa Fe and Tulsa, Oklahoma, on their way to New York—Pat made this note under the Keim
e category in her twenty-third cahier. It was the first of her several expressions of interest over the years in the subject of returning a wallet. “A man (or a girl) who finds a wallet in New York with considerable money in it, plus the address. He has lost so many wallets of his own, he takes pleasure in returning this with every stamp intact. An adventure begins…. The hero or heroine thus walks into a murder story.”51

  And so, Pat’s long and troubled association with Ellen Blumenthal Hill produced yet another inspiration. From this keime, thirty years later, would come Found in the Street, Pat’s Manhattan novel of a found wallet and the fatal consequences attending its discovery.

  By the end of 1955, Pat and Ellen had finally gone their not-entirely-separate ways. “I am always in love,” Pat had written in July of 1954, from the safety of her solitary cabin in Massachusetts, “with the worthy and the unworthy…and I wonder now is it a giving or a taking? Before, it was obviously a taking, because I needed merely the emotion, if nothing else.”52 Pat’s lover in France twenty-five years later, the novelist and translator Marion Aboudaram, said nearly the same thing, and she said it without rancor: Pat made ruthless use of the women she loved and of the emotions generated by her tangled relationships with them. Without a woman lover, as Pat wrote in her diary shortly after meeting Ellen Hill, “I cannot even develop as a writer any farther, or sometimes, even exist.”53

  Pat managed to keep her affair with Ellen Hill going for more than four years, thereby keeping her all-important Muse’s Chair occupied—even if uncomfortably so. Her attachment to this special piece of furniture in her Romance Room would go right on creating art and trouble for her for much of the rest of her life.

  • 22 •

  Les Girls

  Part 6

  After separating from Ellen, Pat went back to her flat on East Fifty-sixth Street in Manhattan, the apartment she’d first rented in 1942, with the fire escape and the ladder down to the courtyard that gave easy access to her living quarters. Too easy, it turned out. One day, she returned to the apartment to find five or six boys “hunched over my books and paint boxes”: they had already daubed one of her suitcases with paint. She carefully erased their presence by removing the markings from her suitcase with turpentine. On another day, the boys returned and were having a free-for-all on the fire escape “only two yards from where I sat.” Pat “backed into the far corner of the room like a scared rat,” still frowning with concentration and composing in her mind the sentence she’d left unfinished in her typewriter. She stayed there until the boys clattered down the cast-iron stairs.1

  It was what Pat called the “vicious emotional cycle” of the boys’ noise, and the fear and hatred that were her response to it, that gave her the keime for the beginning of a short story, “The Barbarians,” about a man “who paints on weekends,” is tortured by the sound of handball players just under his window, and takes violent—and ineffectual—action to stop them. Pat called it a story about “the hell of metropolitan society.”2 She was keenly feeling that an apartment menaced by rowdy neighborhood boys was not the gracious Manhattan living she had been yearning for in Europe.

  Coinciding with the breakup of her four-year relationship with Ellen, and just after the publication of The Talented Mr. Ripley in December of 1955, Pat dropped into another of her seasonal depressions. “My life, my activities seem to have no meaning, no goal, at least no attainable goal…. I can feel my grip loosening on myself.”3 “One wants to die, simply. Not to die, but not to exist, simply, until this is over.” 4

  It was her usual Christmas/New Year/birthday dip into unworthiness, colored by yet another quarrel with Ellen Hill and accompanied by a deep sense of failure. Despite the good reviews The Talented Mr. Ripley had just received—her bête noire, The New Yorker, found it a “remarkably immoral story very engagingly” written,5 and The New York Times Book Review had praised “her unusual insight into a particular type of criminal”6—Pat was plunged into an “undefined, unreconciled self.” And that self, if not expressed by daily writing and enhanced by the presence of an attractive woman, was never a self Pat liked to be alone with for very long.7

  And then, suddenly, in the middle of April, Pat had a new complaint: “What a strenuous thing it is to be in love.”8

  When Pat fell in love with Doris, a midwesterner working in advertising in Manhattan, it was more than a familiar feeling, it was a familial one. Doris had been living with Lynn Roth when Pat had fallen in love with Lynn, and Lynn had been the ex-girlfriend of Pat’s lover, Ann Smith. The closeted nature of lesbian life—especially closeted in the 1950s—has always made for imbricated relations, but Pat’s relations were more plaited than most. Women were her muses, and she could never quite let go of one woman before reaching for the next one.

  But all this was in the past and in the future. Pat, in love with Doris now, was as lyrical as a summer sonnet. She looked into Doris’s eyes and thought or at least wrote: “The trust in the eyes of a girl who loves you. It is the most beautiful thing in the world.”9 And she went on to praise the “insuppressibly, incorrigibly, happy and optimistic” Agnus Dei of Mozart—as opposed to gloomy old Bach’s B Minor Mass, “oppressed with the hopelessness of the world’s sin.”10

  Falling in love always put Pat in a good mood—at first anyway—and it often increased the number of her petitions to God. So when she fell in love with Doris, Pat made up a little prayer. The prayer shows that love had come again to Pat Highsmith as it always came: violently, subversively, and in the expectation of “pain and disappointment”:

  My dear God, who is nothing but Truth and Honesty, teach me forbearance, patience, courage in the face of pain and disappointment.

  Teach me hard, because I am stubborn and desperate, and one day I shall take you by the throat and tear the wind pipe and the arteries out, though I go to hell for it. I have known Heaven. Have you the courage to show me hell?11

  Pat was beginning to feel more like her “self.”

  Doris, a year younger than Pat—Pat generally preferred older women until she became one herself—was a copywriter at the McCann-Erickson Agency in New York. She was also, as Pat wrote to Kingsley, “perhaps overserious, a perfectionist, doesn’t like to go out much (socially)—and [is] very pretty.”12 Doris was someone, in short, with whom Pat could imagine living. But Doris did not share Pat’s taste for “hell,” “pain,” and “disappointment,” and this was to be a major disappointment for Pat. The crucial consonances as well as the critical oppositions were missing.

  Pat and Doris, who had the social connections of Pat’s new agent, Patricia Schartle, to thank for their country retreat, moved from New York to what Pat called “Sneden’s Landing” in the southernmost part of Rockland County. Snedens Landing (Pat the Grammarian always added an unnecessary apostrophe before the final s) was (and is) an exclusive enclave on the Hudson River, part of the hamlet of Palisades, New York. It has always been a haven for people in the arts and show business. Together Pat and Doris bought “a brand new Ford convertible, black, though,” said Pat, “with more chrome than I like. I like none,”13 and shared the rental of a converted barn in whose garden Pat grew radishes, string beans, cantaloupes, and sweet peas. But four months after Pat fell in love with Doris, and a little more than a month after they’d moved to Snedens Landing, Pat was writing about “the danger of living without one’s normal diet of passion. Things are so readily equalized, soothed, forgotten with a laugh, with perspective. I don’t really want perspective, except my own.”14

  Faced with domestic tranquility, Pat was itching for a good fight.

  During the summer of 1956, Pat began to take notes for what she considered one of her least successful works, her “Mexican” novel, A Game for the Living (she was calling it, typically, “6th Book” in her cahier). She was also finishing the final revisions on Deep Water, the destabilizingly brilliant novel she’d begun as Dog in the Manger, when she and Ellen Hill were quarrelling steadily and productively across Europe. Pat had e
xpanded the book as they continued their fruitful squabbling in the Southwest and down into Mexico, and in the character of Deep Water’s resident psychopath, Vic Van Allen, Pat created a “hero-criminal” who directly challenges gender categories: he refuses sex, cooks and cleans his house with an apron on, takes care of his child, murders two of his wife Melinda’s lovers, and—he’s a completist—murders Melinda as well. Vic also upsets all ideas of sexual proclivity: his major excitements seem to be observing the slow copulations of his companion snails and encouraging his pet bedbugs to draw blood from his arm. And he extends the uses of ingenuity by fostering the rumor that he is a murderer before he has actually knocked anyone off. His blackly blooming imagination permeates the book and delivers him to a state beyond morality. Deep Water is a deeply uncomfortable novel.

  Always the good Freudian, Pat wrote that in Vic’s character she was interested in exploring the “evil things,” the “peculiar vermin” that arise from “unnatural [sexual] abstinence.” Vic, she insisted, was “a paranoiac,” a “megalomaniac,” a “fascist, a sadist and a masochist,” and even “insaner than his wife.”15 Vic is also Pat’s only witty psychopath. When his compulsively unfaithful wife, Melinda (a caricature of predatory female sexuality: even her necklace looks like it’s made of tiger’s teeth), wants to dress herself up as an historical character for a costume party, Vic suggests that she try Madame Bovary. Independently wealthy, Vic’s métier is to design and print exquisite, limited-edition books on his hand-operated press. The suspicions of a distinctly lower-class detective novelist—an unattractive author of bad works who is Vic’s neighbor and Melinda’s ally—lead to the capture of this quietly mad publisher of superior taste and means. Deep Water’s class-conscious author slipped her own social resentments into Vic Van Allen: he yearns for a better class of lover for Melinda, whose taste runs, lamentably, to lounge lizards (Vic wants someone for Melinda he can live with). Pat also saddled Vic with quite a few of her reimagined traits, talents, and leftover feelings for Ellen Blumenthal Hill. But she didn’t acknowledge the resemblances between the author and her psychopathic character when she was ticking off her list of Vic’s psychoses, perhaps because they were the kind of maladies that could only be accommodated at institutions like Austen Riggs or Broadmoor.