The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  Pat’s first French translator, Jean Rosenthal (he and his wife, Renée, translated many Highsmith novels for Laffont and Calmann-Lévy, including The Blunderer, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Strangers on a Train, Deep Water, Those Who Walk Away, and The Two Faces of January), remembered a well-watered dinner Pat gave for him in her Irving Place apartment. It was his first trip to the United States, there were ten people invited, he was unused to cocktails before dinner, and Pat, “still very beautiful,” was serving copious “dry martinis. I had to aim myself to get to the table.” Rosenthal also remembered travelling on a plane from Paris to New York with Pat, who was smuggling “a green plant” for her mother hidden in her valise. Plants, he said, were like “drugs” to American customs officials, but Mary had asked for it, so Pat was sneaking it into the country.7

  Long after Pat had left Irving Place, Megan Terry came across a photograph of her aging friend in a book. Like Pat’s Barnard College classmates, she was so shocked by the change in appearance that she “just had to close the book…. I couldn’t believe the way she looked…. She was so lovely when she was young. And so much fun…She and Marijane Meaker really weren’t good for each other at all…A real folie à deux and a weird mutual projection.”8

  El’s (or L’s), the MacDougal Street bar where Marijane Meaker had introduced herself to Pat, was different from most Greenwich Village women’s bars. It was the “beginning,” says Meaker, “of graciousness in the lesbian bar world.” There was no Mafia ownership in evidence and most of the clientele were as well dressed as “young college girls.”9

  Pat—tall, thin, dark, and handsome in a trench coat—was drinking gin and standing up at the bar. She looked to Marijane like “a combination of Prince Valiant and Rudolf Nureyev” and was more than receptive to Meaker’s attempt to introduce herself.10 It was, says Meaker, “a fast take” (although Pat’s first question to Marijane was to ask if she liked to travel, so Pat was interested in a fast getaway as well), and they both told lies about their current situations. Marijane, living comfortably with a lover, told Pat she was at the “end” of a relationship, and Pat, still obsessed by Mary Ronin, said that she was entirely unattached.

  Pat fell for Marijane deeply enough to cancel one tramp steamer trip to Europe, duffel bag and Olympia typewriter in hand. Then she did leave for Europe on a publication trip to Paris for Calmann-Lévy with Mother Mary in tow—during which she arranged for Mary Ronin to join her in Greece. But Ronin didn’t oblige, and Pat spent a month with her increasingly eccentric mother in Paris—seeing the poisoned future that awaited her in the resemblances between herself, her grandmother, and her mother. “It’s inevitable, too, to think that there go I in another twenty-five years.”11

  After bundling Mary off to Rome, Pat went to visit the cartoonist Jeannot in Marseille, then travelled to Salzburg, Athens, and Crete with her former lover Doris. But Pat didn’t tell Marijane Meaker of her foiled plan to meet Mary Ronin in Greece, and Meaker remained obsessed with Pat the whole time Pat was in Europe. Moving around Europe with Doris, Pat never referred to Marijane in her notebooks and occupied herself with other women en voyage.

  But when she returned to New York, Pat and Marijane resumed their relations and decided to move together to Pennsylvania, to a farmhouse on Old Ferry Road seven miles outside of New Hope. Pat’s first choice had been posh Snedens Landing, where she’d lived with Doris and where she still had women friends like Polly Cameron, who would design the Harper & Row book jackets for Deep Water and The Cry of the Owl. “We called [Snedens Landing] the Lesbian Graveyard,” says Marijane Meaker.12 But rents in Snedens Landing and the surrounding Palisades were too high, so the two women moved to New Hope, where Pat also had friends: Al and Betty Ferres in Tinicum, and in New Hope, Peggy Lewis, whom Pat knew from the art gallery Peggy and her husband, Michael, had operated in Greenwich Village and reopened in New Hope.

  Peggy Lewis, from a Baltimore Orthodox Jewish family, was liberated from religion, say her daughters, and attracted to “anything artistic.” She was a cultural and social force in New Hope, spoke her “very critical” mind, and kept open house for all manner of people. Peggy spent quite a bit of time helping Pat: housing her on trips back from Europe, visiting Meyer’s garage in New Hope to check up on Pat’s stored car, paying a fraught visit to Pat and Ellen Hill during their drive through Mexico in 1955 (long before Pat moved to New Hope), and reviewing every single Highsmith book for the Bucks County Life journal in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Peggy had started the “Books” column in Bucks County Life and enticed Pat to both write and draw for the journal.

  Bucks County, where New Hope is located, has always been a gathering place for what used to be called “creative types”: homosexuals, bohemians, theater folk, film people, well-to-do commercial artists, and even rural illiterates like Dorothy Parker and her husband Alan Campbell, who in 1936, with many of their friends living in or moving to every hamlet along the Delaware River (amongst them Bella and Samuel Spewack, Ruth and Augustus Goetz, S. J. and Laura Perelman, George S. Kaufman, Moss Hart, Jean Garrigue, Josephine Herbst, Glenway Wescott, and Arthur Koestler), purchased a farm in Pipersville and promptly mowed down a forest of beautiful old trees that was obstructing their “view.” All of Bucks Country recoiled in convulsive horror.13

  Marijane Meaker’s romantic memoir of her meeting with Pat in Manhattan and their attempt to live together in Bucks County, Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s (although, says Meaker, it was often “far from a love story”),14 with its vivid portrayal of the deeply closeted lesbian life in 1950s New York, highlights Pat’s sweetnesses and eccentricities: her insistence on dressing for dinner even in the country (shoes shined, a freshly ironed white shirt, a blazer and an ascot); her gentlemanly manners (always standing up for a woman and pulling out her chair); her habit of proffering small presents (a flower on the table, a book of Renée Vivien’s poems with a page marked by an autumn leaf, love notes on any old piece of paper that came to hand); her attachment to bad puns and worse jokes; and her instinctively guilty response to any situation for which she might be held vaguely responsible.

  But under the romantic vignettes lurk other stories: troubling stories about what happens when two obsessive women writers, each at a different stage in her career and each writing a book whose organizing principle is murder, try to live together for six months in a rural idyll with their cats.*15 One of the stories has a switchblade in it.

  Pat had always carried a knife in her pocket—pointed instruments occupied a practical and fantastical place in the Highsmith imagination for decades (see “The Real Romance of Objects, Parts 1 and 3”)—and even her written approaches to love were armed with blades. At eighteen, she’d inserted a couple of cutting edges into a jaunty little sea shanty she called “High Romance.” “I happen to like this,” she wrote pugnaciously beside the first verse.16

  If I were a sailor

  You’d be my wife

  I’d carry a cutlass

  And a big clasp knife.17

  In New Hope, Pat used her pocketknife for grooming plants, and during one of many arguments with Marijane, she stuck it roughly and repeatedly into a wooden tabletop, let the handle quiver, and pulled it out again, casting menacing looks at her lover all the while.

  Meaker was worried enough about the knife to write to Mary Highsmith. Mary wrote back, trying to convince her that fainthearted Pat wasn’t capable of slipping a shiv into a lover.

  “Never would she have harmed you with that knife deal tho an unspeakable thing to do. She is too much a coward at the sight of blood. She would have been the first to keel over. She faints at the prick of a finger.”18

  In the same letter Mary treated herself to a long, hot, maternal denunciation of all Pat’s previous female friends, especially the older ones (see “The Real Romance of Objects: Part 1”).19 It couldn’t have been a comfortable letter to receive, and it wasn’t a comfortable relationship for either Pat or Marijane Meaker by now. Meaker says that one thing kep
t the two writers together: “By then, we didn’t like each other, we didn’t want to be around each other, but in bed it was fire.”20

  Pat and Marijane broke up quickly (and then continued to break up slowly) during their six months of cohabitation. And all through 1961 and part of 1962, Pat stayed on in New Hope, meeting attractive women. She met so many women that she felt compelled to lie to Caroline Besterman (whom she’d recently met in London), telling her that there were no lesbians in New Hope at all. But Pat was thinking about her “Ever Present Subject”—and about how to write lesbian stories under her pseudonym of Claire Morgan. Ellen Hill—Pat and Ellen, quarreling as they always did, shared a house in Positano and a trip to Rome in the summer of 1962—figured prominently in Pat’s plans for lesbian fiction. At the end of 1961, after discarding the idea of writing a sequel to The Price of Salt, Pat added vengeful thoughts about Ellen to her hateful feelings about Marijane and arrived at a sum: another “girls’ book” which she thought she might call The Inhuman Ones. It would be a book “about the types of female homosexuals who have something missing from their hearts, who really hate their own sex, who must have visible, palpable strife in order to keep going…. Remember: E.B.H. [Ellen Blumenthal Hill]—and M.J.M. [Marijane Meaker]”21

  Marijane, meanwhile, was even more suspicious than Pat. Pat noted grimly that “M.J.” caught her with a hammer in her hand and asked if she was thinking of hitting her with it.22

  The notes Pat took on her affair with Marijane Meaker are free of romanticism. They provide sketches of violent arguments, defensive analyses of motives, and deadpan descriptions of short-term reconciliations enhanced by lovemaking and disabled by recrimination. As usual, Pat chose to record what was wrong and not what was right in her life. Also as usual, she set down her thoughts according to her lights: the lights of someone defending herself against what she felt was an assault.

  Desperate to return to Europe, as desperate as she was to return to the United States the last time she was in Europe (“I admire the common virtues of the Europeans more than I admire the common virtues of the Americans”), and focused on her perpetually unsuccessful revision of the Mexican novel she’d begun while living with Doris, A Game for the Living, Pat was hiding her morning drinking and a few other clandestine activities from Meaker. Since coming back from Europe in February of 1960, Pat had also been working on The Two Faces of January, a novel with a trio of dubious characters set in Greece. Two of those characters were a murkily attached male duo: Rydal, a “footloose” young American whom Pat described emphatically as “not a beatnik,” and Chester, a middle-aged con man who reminds Rydal of his father. Chester’s wife, Olga/Colette, is more or less there to be killed—and she is: by accident and by her husband, who is trying to kill Rydal.

  Pat conjured up The Two Faces of January out of her feeling of being “slightly rooked by a middle-aged man” with “a highly aristocratic but weak face” when she was in Europe with Doris. A visit to the Palace of Knossos and a “musty old hotel” in Athens were further inspirations.23 The first title she gave to The Two Faces of January was The Power of Negative Thinking—a title she thriftily bestowed on the fictional work of her fictional author, Howard Ingham, in her novel The Tremor of Forgery. The title was a clue to her mood.

  Her editor Joan Kahn’s response to the first completed version of The Two Faces of January wouldn’t have lightened Pat’s mood. Kahn called Pat’s bluff. “The book,” Kahn wrote to Pat’s agent, Patricia Schartle, “makes sense only if there is a homosexual relationship between Rydal and Chester…. We cannot like any of the characters, but more difficult, we cannot believe in them.”24 A couple of days after she received Kahn’s letter, Pat made a note in her cahier: “The ultra-neurotic, which is myself. The Underground Man. To hell with reader identification in the usual sense, or a sympathetic character.”25 Pat was taking Kahn’s rejection like a real writer—which is to say she was taking it personally—and Kahn would reject, in all, three revisions of The Two Faces of January. The novel was finally published by Doubleday in New York and Heinemann in London, where it won the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger for 1965, thus providing Pat with yet another knife: the silver dagger that came with the award. Pat said, no doubt with the sour smile the French call un sourire jaune, that she used the dagger to open all her letters.

  As was her habit, Pat described herself as the “victim” in her love affair with Marijane Meaker. She couldn’t understand why Marijane “attempted to…punish me”26 she was “terrified of [Marijane’s] temper” she felt that “the insults from her have gone beyond bounds.”27 “The morning was the worst. The worst of any verbal conflict to date. M.J. keeps me on the defensive, by wild attacks…e.g. accusing me the night before of having whined, of having said that I have the worst of it, in regard to housing.”28

  Pat and Marijane broke up so often, and Pat moved in and out of the house so many times, that they had to change moving companies a couple of times to avoid embarrassment. Pat finally rented—and kept—an apartment and then another house on South Sugan Road in New Hope. And she and Marijane continued to see each other and continued to argue.29 It was an old pattern by now for Pat, and even the mutual accusations were getting old. Pat wrote down the most familiar of them.

  “‘You’re trying to defend yourself with what’s left of your logical mind, because gin has got it [said Marijane]. You can’t make it with Marijane Meaker. I threw you out, Pat, because you’re a common drunk.’”

  “I said, ‘Hang on to it. It’s all you’ve got.’”30

  Pat’s drinking was heavy. So heavy that her friend Polly Cameron said her drinks were named for the activities they fueled: “Walking Drinks,” “Talking Drinks,” “Cooking Drinks,” “Dressing Drinks,” “Argument Drinks,” “Sleepless Night Drinks,” “Planting Drinks,” etc.31 And just as she used to complain to other people about Mother Mary, Pat now complained constantly to Al and Betty Ferres about Marijane Meaker. Her theme was that “the mainspring of our difficulties is M.J.’s jealousy of me.”32

  Meaker says that Pat provided “the great epiphany in my work because I was always worried about [repeating the theme of] folie à deux…and Pat said: ‘That’s your bone; sharpen it. That’s your bone, make it better.’”33 When they fell in love, Marijane Meaker, six years younger than Pat, was writing crime novels and lesbian reportage for pulp publishers under a flock of pseudonyms (Vin Packer and Ann Aldrich were two of them). Meaker wanted to break into the prestigious “hardback” market, while Pat was already a “hardback” writer with a fancy French award (the 1957 Roman policier for The Talented Mr. Ripley), two American distinctions (the Crime Writers of America designations for both Strangers on a Train and Ripley), and a Hollywood film (Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train) under her writer’s belt.

  Pat slipped something else under that belt, too, when she helped herself to a writer’s revenge on Marijane Meaker—by no means her last literary revenge on a woman. “[R]esentment was my second emotion,” Pat would later write in response to Caroline Besterman’s analysis of her problems with women.

  Now you say I hate as well as love

  Women and you are quite right.

  They have the power to hurt me,

  To play with, then run away from me,

  Laughing, or at least smug and unhurt.

  They have not suffered privation as I have.

  Tantalization, as I have.34

  And in The Cry of The Owl (1962), the novel Pat wrote after she and Meaker broke up, Pat managed to murder Marijane “accidentally” with a knife in the character of Nickie: the scheming, taunting, lying painter of many pseudonyms and psychotically jealous ex-wife of the novel’s unlucky hero, Robert Forester.

  Marijane Meaker’s own fictional revenge was as direct as Pat’s. In her post-Pat novel, Intimate Victims (1962), she had the character she called Harvey Plangman, an obsessively self-improving, list-making, small-time grifter, battered to death with his own hammer.

&nbs
p; “Harvey,” Meaker wrote forty years later, “was in no way like Pat. I probably just wanted to kill her off, too, so I chose Plangman for the victim’s name.”35 But Harvey Plangman is very like Pat: he’s a catalogue of her most Balzacian qualities. He slips German words into his sentences, just as Pat did, and he imitates her compulsive list making, her obsession with dress, and the deep social insecurities which ran under her attraction to “quality.”

  In fact, the abject Harvey Plangman is as clear a portrayal of certain “male” aspects of Patricia Highsmith as Jill Hillside is of her “female” aspects. Jill Hillside is the ambivalent, sweetly depressed, sexually absent lesbian character in Marc Brandel’s own post-Pat novel, The Choice (1950).

  Of The Choice, Pat had written in her diary: “I am Jill Hillside, & there down to the last detail of cigarette holder, hands, levis etc. & a screamingly funny breakfast scene: identical with our own…. I suppose it’s all over town. I am called a dike.”36

  Pat, who was as versatile in her self-presentations (when she wanted to be) as her hero-criminal Tom Ripley, contained many characters. Jill Hillside and Harvey Plangman were only two of them. As one of her late-life Swiss neighbors observed with some surprise: “Whenever I talk about Pat, I never say the same thing twice.”37

  • 24 •

  Les Girls

  Part 8

  Because New Hope was a charming little country town of artisans and craftspeople, endowed with a “magical aura” and its own mythologies, Pat stayed on in New Hope after she and Marijane had called their very last moving company. “New Hope was fabulous from the Thirties to the Sixties,” said longtime resident furniture maker and designer Phillip Lloyd Powell, “and then it went the way of all tourist places.”1 And New Hope was a relaxed place for women to meet and match: Odette’s (still in existence) was the restaurant/bar/nightclub where Pat was to pick up at least one lover after she and Marijane Meaker split up. Expedient as always, Pat made advances to the waitress, Daisy Winston.