The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  By the fall of 1956, Pat was worried both for her work and about it: she was making caustic comments about meticulously editing this manuscript (Deep Water) that wasn’t going to sell, and then identifying, in another quickly extinguished flare of illumination, the ragged hole in her design for living:

  “My continuing troubles about my work. My writing, the themes I write on, do not permit me to express love, and it is necessary for me to express love. I can do this only in drawing, it seems.”16

  Pat made a sexual overture to Ellen Hill during this period—and then had a dream in which she was “reminded” of it. In an entry in (bad) French in her notebook, she wrote that the dream began with her making up a couch-bed in the Highsmith family house, reminiscent, no doubt, of all those couch-beds she’d slept on as a girl. Magically infused with the knowledge that she didn’t have to sleep on the couch, she suddenly found herself in bed with her mother, Mary, and her stepfather, Stanley. Mother Mary said clearly: “‘I have news for you. I’m going to throw you out of the house.’”

  “She gave me the idea,” Pat wrote aggrievedly, “that I interfered between the two of them.” The idea was not exactly a new one.

  The dream came out of Pat’s recent late night in Manhattan. She had stayed over at Ellen Hill’s apartment and made a pass at Ellen; wordlessly, Ellen let her know that she didn’t want to take her back as a lover. “She accepted me, but she rejected me too,” Pat wrote. On waking from this dream in Snedens Landing, Pat reached over and touched Doris, and “was very happy to have her.”17 Four days later, recovering from one of her innumerable dental procedures and trying to put herself in the “bored with day-to-day, under-my-nose existence, which is what prompts me to write (work) at all,” Pat attacked Ellen Hill bitterly in her notebook.18

  In the same month, November of 1956, in which she stage-managed this dream, Pat started work on what she later described to the fiction writer, journalist, and critic Francis Wyndham as a “political satire in the manner of Voltaire”: a long, labored picaresque she called The Straightforward Lie. Over the years, the manuscript was promptly returned by every publisher she sent it to. Joan Kahn at Harper & Brothers returned it in 1959, after reading both the manuscript and Pat’s naïve comment that it would be “ideal for a hot summer weekend!”19

  The Straightforward Lie is more like the crude scenario for a graphic novel than it is like Voltaire’s Candide, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, or Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas. Still, like Pat’s later, equally primitive political satires, it was proleptic: American foreign policy is what she was getting at, and her tendency to see things in black and white, cru et cuit, serves the piece all too well.

  In The Straightforward Lie, a young man, George Stephanost, of dubious sexuality and odd appearance (something about shoes again), wins a trip around the world as a propaganda agent charged with presenting his imperialistic government in the best possible light. George is loathed wherever he goes, beginning his travels by precipitating the suicide of a journalist whose alcoholism he has reported (there’s usually a drinker in anything Highsmith writes, and she made a note saying she was going to dedicate this manuscript “to alcohol”). George is propelled through a series of incidents which show him to be a pompous representative of an overbearing government, jibed at by the fools and knaves of other countries.

  As though her imagination had rifled the canon of German folk poetry and come up with the old figure of the bucklicht Männlein—the little hunchback who causes so much trouble for German children in Des Knaben Wunderhorn—Pat provided a small black dancing figure of a man to haunt and harry George. The little man repeats the words “Trouble” and “Evil,” and taunts George with: “They hate you! Ha! HA! Ha!” George, entirely confused, ends up in “a really attractive summerlike place in the country…[t]he Happy Day Asylum,” still haunted by the little black man.

  Voltaire, it’s not—but it is Patricia Highsmith. Entirely impaired by her clubbed thumb for satire (her “satire” operates on a level lower than sarcasm) and her less-than-nuanced understanding of global politics, the work still manages to reverse the values other people live by. The Straightforward Lie left a ghostly trace in the other novel Pat was working on at the same time: A Game for the Living. She slipped it into that book as the title of an “illustrated novel…a satire of modern life,” which one of the characters is working on.

  In Snedens Landing, Pat had her two cats and a growing family of snails, and Doris had a dog. (Doris’s dog was probably the model for the bulldog puppy with the mutilated ears in Deep Water. Pat wasn’t half done with dogs yet.) They took their Ford convertible to Mexico in January of 1957, apparently to allow Pat to absorb the mise-en-scène for her “6th Book” (A Game for the Living) and to work off her restlessness, and they drove the length of Mexico, staying on well into March. Pat was transfixed by the Mardi Gras in Vera Cruz. “I can set stories here. I can make it better than it is,” she wrote after watching a “Carnavale” parade. In Mexico, it was the transvestites who riveted her: “Gay boys unmasked…One in drag, black short dress, pink cheeks, and a bawdy ‘I dare you’ impudent stare, pursed mouth, and then the tongue stuck out.”20 She didn’t forget them. Pat’s French lover Marion Aboudaram says that in Paris, twenty years later, Pat was always much more amorous when transvestite prostitutes were working the street outside Marion’s apartment in Montmartre.

  But Pat’s excitements in Mexico failed to transfer to A Game for the Living. The book gave her trouble in its initial composition and then troubled everyone else when she finished it. Unhappy with the “first sketch of 58 pages,” she wrote: “Don’t know where I’m going, resulting in static effect.”21 The book continued to irritate Pat during the several careful revisions her editor, Joan Kahn, requested. This was one of those novels whose murderers Pat changed at an editor’s request; Kahn thought, quite correctly, that it made no sense to have an unknown street boy do the murder. So Pat, who was much more attached to the idea of beginning her novel with the murder of a beautiful woman than she was to the inconsequential murderer she’d chosen, put up no resistance at all and switched her killer to “Carlos.” It didn’t help the story.

  No one—including Pat’s agent, Margot Johnson, who found the novel verbose and said so—ever liked it much. And Pat’s attempt to inflict her external reading on what she was writing—she was using a little Kierkegaard for illumination and finding in the gloomy Dane exactly what she had found in Proust, i.e., a recognition of the compulsion to love22—was just as unsuccessful as her later attempts to impress her superficial understanding of American politics on her novel Edith’s Diary (1977). The real problem was that Pat was uninspired.

  Even though Doris left every day for her advertising job in Manhattan, Pat began to complain that she was spending “less time alone” than ever. In January of 1957, she felt crowded enough to invoke her harsh personal rating system again: “In view of the fact that I surround myself with numbskulls now, I shall die among numbskulls, and on my deathbed shall be surrounded by numbskulls who will not understand what I am saying….

  “Whom am I sleeping with these days? Franz Kafka.”23

  And on the front of her cahier from this period, in the place where she always put the countries and cities she travelled to, she printed: “New York, Sneden’s [sic] Landing, Santa Fe, Mexico, And Greater Inner and Outer Mediocrity.”24

  Happiness never made Pat happy for very long.

  Pat began to read more, draw more, and think much more about the delights of moving to another country again. Alone, for preference. She was remembering how well she’d worked on The Price of Salt when she was sailing back alone from her first trip to Europe in 1949, inspired by her long-distance love for Kathryn Hamill Cohen and shut up in a hot little cabin on an Italian freighter where no one spoke any English.25 “This recalls my sensation, when in a non-English speaking country, of being more than usually eloquent. The words come from a fresh and purer spring. Their full measure is recovered.r />
  “…I haven’t the precision of intellect that a good writer needs, nor the sense of dignity when I want to call it up. But in drawing or painting I can always achieve this, if I want to, from a source uncorrupted, uncorrupted by pressure and other people’s opinions.”26

  Still, by September of 1957, Pat was making notes for an article she eventually published in The Writer magazine, an article she would expand in a single month in 1965 in Suffolk into Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction. And she was unusually pleased to project herself into the distinguished company in Colin Wilson’s serious study of alienation and creation, The Outsider. “The book stirs my mind to the murky depths (emotional depths) in which I lived my adolescence like Van Gogh and T. E. Lawrence trying ‘to gain control’ by fasting, exercise, routines for doing everything.”27

  But nothing helped her relations with Doris.

  By January of 1958 Pat was complaining about feeling physically crowded: “My present house is not big enough for two people.” She began to snipe indirectly at Doris’s dog, comparing the “false” loyalty of dogs to the comforting “selfishness” of cats.28 She was missing the exquisite discomforts of her relationship with Ellen Blumenthal Hill: the constant seesaw of emotion from “elation to depression” which had always inspired her best work.29 Without this irritation, the oyster couldn’t produce the pearl.

  A poem—it’s an incantation, really—written by Pat in September of 1955, some months before she took up with Doris, makes it plain that her relationship with Doris was doomed before it began.

  Her chaste kisses cannot hold me.

  Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!

  Nor the way her arms enfold me.

  Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!

  Though I know that she has told me

  She would love me all my life,

  She would always be my wife.

  Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!

  I want stronger arms around me,

  Insane arms and devils’ kisses,

  Teeth that bite my lips and wound me,

  Girls whose love will never last.

  Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! 30

  Trouble, in the form of a secret affair with an attractive older woman (a decade older than Doris), was only six months away.

  When Pat and Doris returned from their trip to Mexico in March of 1956, Pat, still feeling the pull of “going to God” on Sunday, joined the choir of the small Presbyterian church in Palisades and continued or tried to continue her peaceful domestic life. Doris worked on a TV script from an idea by Pat, while Pat worked on everything else and made some social gestures. One of her gestures resulted in a meeting with the great choreographer Martha Graham, a neighbor in Snedens Landing; and a photograph of Graham with one of Pat’s Siamese cats lives on in her archives. Pat also met another neighbor, Gertrude Macy, the Broadway producer and Katharine Cornell’s lover, manager, and biographer, who became a lifelong correspondent. Meanwhile, Pat was still making sporadic efforts to integrate her hopes for the world with her continued acceptance of Jesus Christ: “It is conceivable that mankind, with the guidance of a dominant faith in God, can work a system out for their own good, which will be closer to Communism and the word of Jesus Christ than any form of government yet seen on earth.”31

  Like many Americans in the 1950s, Pat was also thinking about just how the atomic and hydrogen bombs would change the things she cared most about: “the perishability of books…due to H-bombs” was preoccupying her. “This total extinction could not have occurred to the mind of Dickens, for instance…. Now every writer may see himself and his readers quite wiped out.” But she added to her thoughts the inevitable Highsmith detail: “The book may exist, but it’s radioactive. Don’t touch it.”32 She would use that same caveat about a knife—“Don’t touch it”—to end The Cry of the Owl in 1962.

  Still, nothing could stop the engine of Pat’s writing for long, and Pat and Doris even made a book together, a book of cartoons and accompanying rhymes called Miranda the Panda Is on the Veranda (Coward-McCann, 1958). Doris made up the rhymes and Pat provided the cartoons, and, even in this sweet, sticky, inconsequential work, Pat refused to allow anything of her seven years’ connection to the comics to appear. The jacket copy simply states: “Her one other occupation involved a short term as a salesgirl in the toy section of a large department store.” Pat, who had loathed all the other salesgirls at Bloomingdale’s, except for one Greenwich Village resident, Rachel Kipness (another of those “good eggs” whose shells she liked to crack), actually preferred to be identified as a “salesgirl” rather than as a writer of comic books.

  A book made by two people living together (as Doris and Pat were) suggests a certain degree of emotional stability. Pat couldn’t wait to disrupt it. Her domestic relationship with Doris didn’t offer the painful oppositions she craved, and she knew that the work she was doing now was far from her best. And so Pat—it was no effort at all—fell deeply in love with Mary Ronin.

  Aside from her symbolic first name, there were other ways in which Mary Ronin reminded Pat of Mother Mary. She was a commercial artist in a long-term relationship (a relationship Pat did her best to break up) with a wealthy woman who owned a brownstone on New York’s Upper East Side. Charming, from the vivid photograph that remains in Pat’s archives, Mary was also creative and witty. When Pat was living with Marijane Meaker in New Hope in 1961, Ronin sent Pat a birthday card with not a single word on it, just a drawing of herself, nude, in front of a calendar opened to Pat’s birthdate, 19 January. Mary Ronin was sufficiently older than Pat, and sufficiently unavailable to her, to become the kind of tantalizing inspiration Pat could work with. And so, from this mostly denied relationship came one of Pat’s best novels. It’s the story of a pyschopath with a double identity and two names to match it. He creates a house for (and an imaginary relationship with) the woman he loves. And he murders her husband. Pat called her book This Sweet Sickness (1960), and she dedicated it to the other crucial Mary in her life, her mother.*

  • 23 •

  Les Girls

  Part 7

  In the spring of 1959, Pat, still obsessed with Mary Ronin, had “just that afternoon come back from a trip to Mexico” when a young paperback writer, Marijane Meaker, “starstruck” at spotting the author of The Price of Salt, introduced herself to Pat in a lesbian bar on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village.1 Pat’s authorship of The Price of Salt was an open secret in New York lesbian circles, and the whisper had gone round the bar: “Claire Morgan is here.”

  In the 1950s, says Marijane Meaker, “most lesbian bars were Mafia bars, with people watching the ladies’ room, letting the women in one at a time and handing them one piece of toilet paper, and a low-level Mafia guy with a pinkie-ring at the door vetting the entrants.”2 Pat, who both liked and deplored lesbian bars (she hated the overpriced drinks, disparaged the downmarket “dikes,” and found the casual encounters exciting), was something of a fixture in bars like Three Steps Down and Provincetown Landing, two of the several bars on West Third Street.3 And she liked (but was less comfortable at) Johnny Nicholson’s High Bohemian Café Nicholson on East Fifty-eighth Street, whose garden was the site of Karl Bissinger’s iconic 1948 photograph (see “Social Studies: Part 1”).

  Pat also frequented Spivy’s, Jane Bowles’s favorite Upper East Side nightclub; Romeo Salta’s on East Fifty-sixth Street (where, in a wonderful scene in her novel This Sweet Sickness, Pat sends her psychopathic hero David Kelsey/William Neumeister to order two Italian dinners and two cocktails: one for himself and one for his imaginary girlfriend); the bar at the St. Regis Hotel; and the mostly gay male restaurants in Greenwich Village like Aldo’s, the Finale, and Fedora (still in business on West Fourth Street), as well as more mixed-gathering establishments like the Pony Stable, Mona’s, Show Spot, and the Jumble Shop.4 These last were places where women could drink and eat, sometimes dance and hold hands, and meet each other for professional and personal reasons.

  Liz Smith, America’s preeminent show-business gossip columnist, was
introduced to Pat “in Greenwich Village in the mid-Fifties…by a successful TV producer named Jacqueline Babbin.” Fifty years after their meeting, Smith remembered the explanation for Pat’s “aloof and forbidding” behavior. “Highsmith was a very odd bird, even in her youth. She took to me because we had both been born in Fort Worth. But it wasn’t possible to really know her. Once we had exhausted Texas memories, she was off again into her own odd world…. Like many people, she had a serious ‘mother has rejected me’ problem.”5

  Megan Terry, the feminist playwright whose experimental work put her in the center of 1960s avant-garde theater in Manhattan, met Pat after she’d broken up with Doris and moved to an apartment at 76 Irving Place. Terry, eleven years younger, saw the sweet side of Pat.

  “She was wonderful to be with, so beautiful, so much fun. And she was very romantic, always projecting her hopes on her lovers. When I knew her she was very sweet, a lot like a naïve teenage boy. But when you get up to a quart of gin a day, something else happens. I couldn’t believe how much [alcohol] she could put away. She needed the alcohol because she was so vulnerable.”

  Terry remembered a dramatic feature of Pat’s Irving Place apartment (yet another Highsmith apartment in the vicinity of an elegant neighborhood, Gramercy Park).* “I used to babysit Pat’s cats, stay in her apartment in Irving Place when she was gone. She had a big built-up platform bed there, very theatrical. It was a great apartment.”6