The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  But separation had often been Pat’s modus operandi with her friends; it was her daisy chain of lovers she used to want to introduce to one another. Like her favorite hero-criminal, Tom Ripley, and like Carol and Therese, the fugitive couple of her only lesbian novel, Patricia Highsmith got away with a hell of a lot.

  Still, no one could say Pat hadn’t tried to do her best in what mattered to her most. To make sure of it, she put herself on trial at the end of every working day.

  “It is impossible for me to live from day to day without putting myself to a judgement—of some kind. How well have I done? What did I mean to accomplish today?”9

  She spent her life writing through those “awful dawns,” through the bad binges, the “shattering” psychological states, the self-punishing, hope-dashing, heartbreaking love affairs. Her incessant moves from house to house and from country to country and her insistent, restless travels did not stop her; she took what she needed and turned her experience to good use in her work. She kept her central wound—that terrible certainty that she was cursed at birth and was, really, nobody’s child—stubbornly intact (she could not have done otherwise), and she found a fountain of inspiration in it, although not beauty or peace, for a very long time. With it, she managed to create a Bizarro World* of inverted values and unstable psychological states which exceeded even her own instabilities. She did her job.

  Perhaps, working as doggedly as she had worked all her life, Patricia Highsmith did more than her job. She wrote five or six of the more unsettling long fictions of the twentieth century. Anyone who has read even one of these novels with close attention has taken out citizenship papers in Highsmith Country and been provided with a passport that can never be revoked. The works are indelibly odd: Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Blunderer, The Cry of the Owl, Deep Water, and This Sweet Sickness are my own favorites. Pat herself would have added Edith’s Diary and The Tremor of Forgery to the list—and then changed her mind the following week. But in all her long fictions and in her best short works, there is always something wounding, something disorienting, and something that doesn’t meet the eye—something deeply damaging to the reader. Few authors have been so willing to bite the hand that buys them.

  Even to the very end of her life, Pat was uncertain as to what her own last name really was. Did Stanley Highsmith’s illegitimacy entitle him or his adopted daughter to the name Highsmith? Did she legally change her name at twenty-five from the right one—Plangman—to the wrong one, the name she wasn’t entitled to but had been using since she was in school in New York City—Highsmith? No one seemed to know, and the Swiss lawyers she wrote to at the end of her life were unable, apparently, to disentangle the matter for her. She’d voiced the hope that Yaddo might use some of her legacy to put up a plaque inscribed with her double surname: Patricia Highsmith-Plangman. But it is not the policy of Yaddo to put up plaques, and her urn burial in Tegna is marked only with the name she made famous: Patricia Highsmith. Is Patricia buried under a pseudonym? Given the body and blood and meaning of her work, it’s an idea with definite appeal.

  And there is one more thing. In death, Pat Highsmith appears to have been delivered from the slow dissolve of her powers in the last decade of her life and restored once again to her most vibrant state: that volatile ambivalence which allowed all her violent and contradictary emotions to meet and mate and ignite into art.

  In the little Catholic church in Tegna, Switzerland, close by the railroad tracks to Domadosilla and festooned with all the colorful symbols of orthodox Catholic faith (faded frescoes, cherubim on the wing, a profusion of flickering candles, and a large statue of the Madonna), the niche in the columbarium where Pat’s ashes are walled up is piled high with the yahrzeit pebbles left by her Jewish admirers. After half a lifetime of refusing religion (and holding up Jesus Christ as her spiritual and social model), of ranting against “the Jews” (and sleeping with them, too), of bitterly rejecting one country after another (and desperately seeking to make a home in each of them), Pat is suspended once again between the poles of opposite passions: interred in a sanctified Catholic space, visited by the children of Sarah and Abraham, and attached in the most final way to the country of which she had never managed—quite—to become a citizen.

  It is possible to imagine (but only in the language spoken in Highsmith Country) that Patricia Highsmith has ended up in a kind of equipoise. Her kind of equipoise: the kind that makes for inspired writing.

  Any moment now she might hitch up her chair to the big rolltop desk, pluck a smouldering Galoise jaune from the edge of an ashtray for one last, inspirational drag, then raise those huge hands over the keyboard of the coffee-colored Olympia typewriter and begin to strike the keys with a sound like little pistol shots; busy, as always, with her daily work—the work of a serious writer about to add a new terror to the world.

  When Pat was twenty-six years old and still alight with a hundred new ideas a day, still attracting lovers like a magnet, still writing for the comics, still having the time of her life in a Manhattan where the American Dream was still vibrantly alive, she picked up her pen in the early hours of the last day of December 1947 and condensed her hopes for the coming year into a single sentence. She called this little challenge—for that’s what it was, a youthful fist raised in the face of Fortune—“My New Year’s Toast.” She could as easily have called it “My Epitaph.”

  2:30 A.M. My New Year’s Toast: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envys, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle—may they never give me peace.

  They never did.

  Appendix 1

  Just The Facts

  (with Notes by the Author and Commentary by Patricia Highsmith)

  Patricia Highsmith: Cradle to Grave

  1921. 19 January: Mary Patricia Highsmith born in Fort Worth, Texas, in the boardinghouse owned by her maternal grandparents, Willie Mae Stewart Coates and Daniel Oscar Coates, at 603 West Daggett Avenue. Pat’s mother, Mary Coates Plangman, an artist and fashion illustrator, divorces Pat’s father, Jay Bernard Plangman, a graphic artist, nine days before Pat is born. From birth, Mary and the Coates family are the sole support of little “Patsy” Jay Bernard Plangman disappears from family history until Pat is twelve.

  1921–26. Pat spends her first few years under the love and discipline of her Calvinist-inclined, Presbyterian- and Methodist-influenced grandmother Willie Mae, as Mother Mary goes out to work as an illustrator. Pat lives in the family boardinghouse with her mother and her older, orphaned cousin Dan Coates. At the age of three and a half, Pat is introduced to the Fort Worth graphic artist Stanley Highsmith, who is marrying her mother. It is hate at first sight.

  1924. 24 June: Mary marries Stanley Highsmith and he joins the household at 603 West Daggett Avenue.

  1927–38. The Highsmiths take Pat to New York City, where they have been working as graphic artists. They live first in Manhattan at West 103rd Street, then in Astoria, Queens, at two addresses from 1930 to 1933. Pat reads and is deeply marked by Karl Menninger’s The Human Mind, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, and an anatomy book used by her artist parents, The Human Anatomy. She never forgets that she shares her 19 January birthday with Edgar Allan Poe. In 1929, the Highsmiths return to Fort Worth, where Pat is enrolled for a year in the old Sixth Ward School (Austin Elementary), the same school her biological father attended as a child.

  1930–33. January: The Highsmiths move to 1919 Twenty-first Road in Astoria, at the end of Queens County near Wards Island (where the largest mental hospital in the world is located), Rikers Island (where New York’s largest prison facility was being established), and Hell Gate Bridge, the longest railway bridge in the United States. The family moves a few blocks away to Twenty-eighth Street, and Pat becomes a student at P.S. 122 on Ditmars Boulevard in February of 1930. Both Hell Gate and Ditmars Boulevard will later occupy Pat’s imagination. At ten years old,
she joins a girl gang and refuses to learn French before studying Latin, because, as she says, that is the classical order observed in English schools.

  1933. Summer: She is sent for a month to a girls’ summer camp near West Point, New York. She writes letters home. Her attention is caught by her female tennis instructor and the camp rituals of girls swimming naked, and counsellors and campers exchanging clothes. Her letters are published in 1935 as an article in Women’s World Magazine.

  1933–34. Mary and Pat return to Fort Worth to Willie Mae’s boardinghouse; Mary has promised Pat that she will divorce Stanley. Stanley travels from New York to Fort Worth and persuades Mary to return with him to New York. Pat is left with Willie Mae for a year to go to school in Fort Worth. Pat says she purchased her two “Confederate” swords (they were made in Massachusetts) during her stay in Fort Worth; she probably didn’t. She calls this “the saddest year of my life”—and never forgives Mary for “abandoning” her. She meets her father, Jay B Plangman, for the first time during this year and attends the junior high school on South Jennings Avenue in Fort Worth, where she is the only girl in her woodworking class.

  1934–38. Pat is retrieved from Texas by Mary and Stanley in 1934 and taken back to New York, where the Highsmith family has moved to Greenwich Village in Manhattan and is living at One Bank Street. Pat attends the all-girl, eight-thousand-pupil Julia Richman High School on East Sixty-seventh Street where she falls in love with various classmates and befriends Judy Tuvim (Judy Holliday).

  Like Fiorello La Guardia, the half-Catholic, half-Jewish mayor of New York from 1934 to 1945, and like New York City itself, the majority of the Julia Richman High School population is unevenly divided between Catholics and Jews. Pat’s memories of high school are resentful: “There are never enough Protestants to throw a party.” She begins making the rounds of Greenwich Village bars and cafés: her favorite is the Jumble Shop on MacDougal Street. She starts to take notes on her surroundings and relations; she transcribes these early notes in her Cahier 9.

  1935. Pat begins her first story. It is lost, but in 1968 she still remembers the first sentence: “He prepared to go to sleep, removed his shoes and set them parallel, toe outward, beside his bed.” This sentence gave her, she says, “a sense of order, seeing the shoes neatly beside the bed in my imagination.”

  1937. June: Pat writes her second story, “Crime Begins,” done, she said, because she was tempted to steal a book from the Julia Richman High School library, but instead wrote a story about a girl who steals a book. “Crime Begins” and another story, “Primroses Are Pink,” are published separately in the Bluebird, the Julia Richman High School literary magazine.

  1938. Pat begins her first official cahier with these words: “A lazy phantom-white figure of a girl dancing to a Tschaikowski waltz.”

  1938–42. Pat attends Barnard College, where she serves on the editorial board of the school’s literary magazine, the Barnard Quarterly, and enters the Barnard Greek Games as a “hurdle-jumper.” She studies zoology, English, playwriting, Latin, Greek, German, and logic (in which she receives a D grade) and earns a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. At Barnard she meets Kate Kingsley (later Skattebol), who becomes her lifelong friend and correspondent. Pat joins the Young Communist League, but not for long. During her college years, much of Pat’s social life is conducted outside school: she goes to parties at the Commerce Street studio of the photographer Berenice Abbott, meets the wealthy painter Buffie Johnson and the “eyes and ears” of the Luce organization, the English journalist Rosalind Constable. Buffie Johnson, Rosalind Constable, and Constable’s lover, the painter and gallerist Betty Parsons, introduce Pat to many well-placed people in New York.

  1939. The Highsmiths move briefly from One Bank Street to 35 Morton Street, also in Greenwich Village.

  1940. The Highsmiths move to 48 Grove Street, a street of piano bars and historically revolutionary residents. They live directly across the street from the Federal mansion in which John Wilkes Booth is said to have plotted the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

  1940. Pat starts her first diary, “containing the body.”

  1941. September: Pat writes “The Heroine,” rejected everywhere—even by her own college literary magazine, the Barnard Quarterly. The story will make its debut in the August 1945 issue of Harper’s Bazaar and is reprinted in the O. Henry Prize Stories volume of 1946. In the spring of 1941, the Barnard Quarterly publishes “The Legend of the Convent of St. Fotheringay,” a story about a boy raised as a girl in a convent of nuns (Pat gives the boy her own first name, Mary), who engineers a violent escape in order to become a boy again.

  1942. Pat graduates, jobless, from Barnard in June.

  1942. Summer: She forms an intense friendship with the great émigrée photographer Ruth Bernhard, intersected by a relationship with another émigré photographer Rolf Tietgens. Both Bernhard and Tietgens photograph Pat. Rejected by the major magazines she hoped to work for, Pat is employed by Ben-Zion Goldberg at FFF Publications, writing material for the Jewish press.

  1943. December: She answers an ad at the Sangor-Pines Comics Shop at 10 West Forty-fifth Street, a comic book packaging and production company. She is hired by the respected comic book editor Richard E. Hughes, creator of the Superhero Black Terror, and works for a year in the writers’ bullpen, scripting comics. She writes Superheroes with Alter Egos, “text stories,” “funny animal comics,” westerns, war hero comics, “real-life” stories, and “fillers,” and then spends the next six years as a freelance comics scripter for many different comics companies. Her favorite company is Timely comics; it later becomes Marvel Comics.

  Vince Fago, her editor at Timely, tries to arrange a date for her with another comic book writer, Stan Lee. Neither Lee nor Pat is interested, so Spider-Man (the Superhero Stan Lee cocreated) misses his opportunity to date Tom Ripley (the antihero Pat Highsmith created). Pat and Mickey Spillane both work on the same comic title, Jap Buster Johnson, at different times. Pat is one of the few women—perhaps the only consistently employed female scripwriter—to work regularly in comic books during the Golden Age of American Comics. She begins to extend the notes for her first novel, The Click of the Shutting, which, like most of her work, is colored by the world of comic book Alter Egos. She completes a short story, “Uncertain Treasure,” also influenced by the comics. She will remove all traces of her comic book work from her archives.

  1943. May: Pat falls in love with a young painter, Allela Cornell: “I love Allela and God within her…“[S]he is the best!” She also falls in love with Allela’s girlfriend, Tex Eversol. Allela paints a prophetic portrait of Pat, which Pat keeps all her life. For most of the 1940s Pat never stops falling in love with women—sometimes for no more than an hour or an evening. She also begins to date a few men.

  August: Pat’s short story “Uncertain Treasure” is published along with some drawings in Home and Food; it is her first work featuring two men in pursuit of each other.

  1943–44. Pat travels to Mexico, in the company of the still-married blond model with whom she is temporarily in love. They quickly separate, and from January to May Pat lives in Taxco, working on her never-finished novel The Click of the Shutting. This Mexican trip is the first of her many foreign travels, and her behavior in Taxco sets the pattern for all her foreign residencies: intense correspondence, fervid note taking, fiction writing, serious drinking, and a yearning for home.

  1944. She makes a synopsis of The Dove Descending, one of her three unfinished novels of the 1940s. She stops after seventy-eight pages.

  Summer: She writes more comics scripts and has simultaneous affairs, including one with the blond, alcoholic socialite Natica Waterbury, whose daredevil exploits (she flies planes) and literary interests (she assisted Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare & Company in Paris) command Pat’s attention. Pat will later dedicate a collection of stories to Natica.

  1945. “Movies in America destroy that fine, seldom even perceived sense of the importance and dignit
y of one’s own life,” Pat muses on 27 August. Six months later, on 16 December, during a walk in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, with her parents, the idea for her novel Strangers on a Train, which will be made into a classic film by Alfred Hitchcock, comes to her. She goes home and outlines the plot, giving it, amongst other titles, At the Back of the Mirror.

  1946. Pat notices two snails, locked in hours-long coitus, in a fish market in New York and takes home six of them to keep as pets. She also tells an alternate story about her introduction to snails: In 1949, she writes, she saw a pair of snails “kissing” and rescued them from the cooking pot. She says she finds it “relaxing” to watch snails copulate. “I admire snails for their self-sufficiency…. I usually take five or six of my favorites with me when I go on holiday” (Reveille, 28 April–4 May 1966). When she lives in Suffolk, in the 60s, she keeps three hundred snails. She gives Vic Van Allen, the psychopath-hero of her novel Deep Water, her feeling for snails—and she names his favorite snails Edgar and Hortense after two of her own favorite snails. Pat says, pointedly, in a self-interview about snails: “It is quite impossible to tell which is the male and which is the female.”

  1946. June: Pat meets again a woman she’d met in 1944 at a party of Rosalind Constable, Virginia Kent Catherwood. Virginia is a divorced, alchoholic, wealthy socialite—she has been presented at the Court of Saint James’s—and she occupies a high position in the American Dream Pat has been chasing. Pat falls in love with Virginia and uses Virginia’s own marital history in The Price of Salt.