The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  September: Allela Cornell attempts suicide, and suffers a lingering death: her suicide has nothing to do with Pat, but Pat feels guilty. Virginia and Pat separate over infidelities in 1947, but “Ginnie” becomes one of Pat’s enduring “types.” Two years after Virginia Kent Catherwood’s early death in 1966, Pat writes in her 1968 diary: “She is Lotte in The Tremor of Forgery—the woman whom my hero will always love.”

  1946. “The Heroine” is published in the O. Henry Prize Stories collection.

  1947. Pat meets, in an elevator on the way to a “gay” party, Lil Picard, the refugee arts journalist, milliner, and performance artist from Alsace-Lorraine, who becomes “one of my more amusing friends.” (Picard is Jewish and a Marxist; she considers Pat a “fascist.” In the 1970s, Lil Picard writes a famous arts column for the East Village Other in New York.) Pat begins to write her short story “The Snail-Watcher,” in which a man is suffocated by the proliferating snails he keeps as pets.

  April: “The World’s Champion Ball-Bouncer” is published by Woman’s Home Companion.

  On 23 June she begins to write Strangers on a Train; in November she briefly meets the black writer Owen Dodson, who reads the first part of Strangers, says it has “good economy” and that it can “be a terrible story” he names a character “Deaconess Highsmith” in his current novel. She also shows the first eighty pages of the book to her old editor at FFF Publications, Ben-Zion Goldberg, who reminds her that she has used this two-man theme before in The Click of the Shutting, the novel she failed to finish in Mexico.

  1948. Pat meets Truman Capote during one of her visits to Leo Lerman’s Sunday evening salons, and Capote recommends her to Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. Pat spends two months there, drinking heavily, flirting successfully, and doing serious work on Strangers on a Train. Chester Himes has the room across the hall, Flannery O’Connor is also in residence, and so is the British novelist Marc Brandel, who becomes Pat’s on-again-off-again fiancé.

  1948. November: Pat enters psychoanalysis (her friend the composer David Diamond has recommended two analysts) for six months because of her homosexuality and her ambivalance about marrying Marc Brandel. Though Dr. Eva Klein’s Freudian therapy presents her with some new perceptions (“I am acting out that with which my mother served me—the loving and leaving pattern, the basic heartlessness & lack of sympathy”), Pat soon rebels against Dr. Klein’s conclusions, and when the doctor suggests that she join group therapy with some “married women who are latent homosexuals,” the end is near. Pat remarks of the married women: “Perhaps I shall amuse myself by seducing a couple of them.”

  1948. 8 December: Mrs. E. R. Senn, wife of a wealthy executive from New Jersey, buys a doll from Pat, who is temporarily employed behind the toy counter at Bloomingdale’s department store. This “two or three minute” meeting becomes the “germ” for The Price of Salt. Pat goes home, love-struck, and writes up the entire plot in one sitting, aided by a high fever and a case of chicken pox. She never meets Mrs. Senn again.

  1949. Spring: Pat sails to Europe, her first trip to London, Paris, Marseille, Italy. In London, Pat falls in love with Kathryn Hamill Cohen, the psychiatrist-wife of her London publisher, and manages several other adventures as well. In Marseille, she visits one of Mother Mary’s young “protegés,” Jean David, called “Jeannot,” an aspiring artist-turned-cartoonist. A flirtation ensues. Jeannot had been a guest of the Highsmiths in New York, invited because, after seeing one of Mary’s illustrations in a magazine, he wrote to Mary from France. Pat continues to be an ami de maison in Jeannot’s family.

  1950. Pat works on the novel that will become The Price of Salt and writes the first of what will be many reviews and articles: a highly favorable critique of Theodora (Roosevelt) Keogh’s Meg, a New York novel about a preadolescent girl who has many of Pat’s own childhood characteristics—including a fascination with knives and a precocious interest in adults. Pat meets and befriends the Austrian Jewish émigré writer and adventurer Arthur Koestler.

  15 March: Strangers on a Train is published.

  1951. The Price of Salt is rejected by Harper & Brothers, but published in May of 1952 by Coward-McCann. Pat goes to Paris, London, back to Paris, then Rome, then travels from Rome to Naples with Natalia Danesi Murray, Janet Flanner’s lover, then to Florence and Venice—where, at Peggy Guggenheim’s palace, Somerset Maugham mixes her a perfect martini. She goes on to Munich, where she polishes The Price of Salt for publication and works on her four-hundred-page “lost” novel, now called The Sleepless Night, but later titled The Traffic of Jacob’s Ladder.

  Alfred Hitchcock finishes his film of Strangers on a Train (he buys the book for $6,800 plus a bonus of $700), starring Farley Granger, Robert Walker, Ruth Roman, and his daughter, Patricia Hitchcock. (In 1958, Pat told her editor Joan Kahn that the Hitchcock contract for Strangers on a Train was lost, mistakenly thrown out by a cleaner at the A. S. Lyons office, where her agent Margot Johnson worked.) Hitchcock’s version of the transaction: he disguised his name and voice when telephoning Margot Johnson so he could get the book for less money. But Margot Johnson’s records indicate that she knew she was dealing with Alfred Hitchcock. Raymond Chandler, then Czenzi Ormonde, are Hitchcock’s scriptwriters. Chandler finds the book’s plot unworkable and says it drives him crazy. He is fired. Robert Walker, the actor who plays Bruno, dies shortly after the film is released.

  1951. Fall: Pat meets Ellen Blumenthal Hill in Munich and falls in love. Their affair lasts four years, and goes through many phases, during which they traverse much of Europe, some of America, and quite a bit of Mexico. Their quarrelling friendship lasts until 1988, and Pat moves to Switzerland in the early 1980s to be near Ellen Hill.

  1952. Ellen Hill attempts suicide after reading Pat’s diary comments about her. The William Bradley Agency begins to represent Pat in Europe; the legendary Mme Jenny Bradley becomes her agent.

  1952. The Traffic of Jacob’s Ladder is rejected by both Harper & Brothers and Coward-McCann. The manuscript, except for ten final, awkwardly written pages, vanishes later in the 1950s: “Some have said,” Pat wrote, [it was rejected because of] the triteness of its ideas.”

  May. The Price of Salt is published by Coward-McCann. Pat insists on publishing it under a pseudonym, Claire Morgan.

  Summer: While travelling with Ellen Hill, Pat begins The Blunderer, based on her already “poisoned” relations with Ellen Hill. It circles around the theme of one man, Walter Stackhouse, who is inspired by the murderous act of another man. Like Pat, the novel’s hero, Walter, takes notes on the unequal relations between pairs of male friends, one strong, one weak. Pat kills Ellen off fictionally—a suicide—in the character of Walter’s wife.

  From the balcony of her room in the Albergo Mirimare in Positano, Italy, Pat sees, at six o’clock one morning, a young man “in shorts and sandals,” with black hair, walking on the beach. His separation from all context intrigues her, and he becomes one of the “germs” for Tom Ripley. She pays an unsatisfactory visit to W. H. Auden, who is staying near Positano, and eventually sends him a copy of Strangers on a Train. He writes her a not entirely favorable critique from his apartment on Cornelia Street in New York City.

  1953. July: Ellen Hill tries suicide again in Pat’s presence, and Pat walks out of the apartment. Ellen survives and they separate. Pat finds several girlfriends in New York, amongst them a twenty-eight-year-old blonde, Lynn Roth, who wants to be an actress and is one of “Pat’s types.”

  By September Pat is in Fort Worth, where she works on The Blunderer until January 1954. She stays first at her uncle Claude’s apartment-hotel and then at her cousin Millie Alford’s, and continues to work on The Blunderer. She is still calling the novel The Man in the Queue and A Deadly Innocence and gives it its final title in November 1953, when she finishes the first draft. She is drinking heavily.

  1954–55. Summer 1954: Pat rents a cottage from an undertaker in Lenox, Massachusetts. She begins The Talent
ed Mr. Ripley—two of its early titles are The Pursuit of Evil and The Thrill Boys—reading Tocqueville’s Democracy in America in preparation.

  September: She reunites with Ellen Hill and begins to write the second part of Ripley in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she lives with Ellen. December: Pat and Ellen and Ellen’s French poodle (Pat kills a similarly named poodle in A Dog’s Ransom) drive down through Mexico, arguing from El Paso to Acapulco and back again. Once again, her quarrelsome relations with Ellen produce the nerves of an excellent novel, Deep Water (published in 1958). “I want to explore the diseases produced by sexual repression,” Pat writes about Deep Water. She does so.

  Pat sends a copy of the manuscript version of The Talented Mr. Ripley to grandmother Willie Mae; Willie Mae dies on 5 February 1955 and the manuscript is lost. Before the end of 1955, Pat and Ellen separate, and Pat moves back to her apartment on East Fifty-sixth Street in Manhattan.

  The Talented Mr. Ripley is published by Coward-McCann in New York in December 1955. Pat will later make many remarks that allow her to be identified with Tom Ripley: “Pat H, alias Ripley,” “I often felt that Ripley was writing it,” etc.

  1955. She begins The Dog in the Manger, published as Deep Water in 1957. She shares with its pathological hero a fascination with snails.

  1956. June: Pat starts to make notes for A Game for the Living. She gives up her apartment at 356 East Fifty-sixth Street after thirteen years.

  1956–58. She falls in love with an advertising copywriter, Doris, and goes to live with her in Snedens Landing. They write a rhyming book for children, Miranda the Panda Is on the Veranda, a book which later makes Janet Flanner “wince.” Pat does the illustrations and dedicates the book to Mary Highsmith.

  1957. Le Grand Prix de la littérature policière is awarded to Pat for the French edition of The Talented Mr. Ripley, published by Calmann-Lévy. Pat publishes her first story in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, “The Perfect Alibi.”

  1958. Pat joins the choir of a small Presbyterian church in Palisades, New York. She has been writing fervently about Jesus Christ for most of her life—and she continues the argument she started with God when she was in her twenties.

  Summer: She begins, at Doris’s suggestion, to draft a novel about “a man who creates a second character” and lives a second life. It will become This Sweet Sickness. While continuing to live with Doris, she begins a clandestine affair with Mary Ronin, a commercial artist who lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with another woman. Her fantasies about Mary Ronin pour into her manuscript. Pat and Doris move to Sparkill, New York, in September, but by the end of the year their relationship is over. Pat moves back to New York alone, to 75 Irving Place, in December, just across the street from Pete’s Tavern. She continues to see Mary Ronin.

  Special Award from the Mystery Writers of America for The Talented Mr. Ripley.

  1958. A Game for the Living, her much revised and awkwardly constructed Mexican novel, is published by Harper & Brothers, In May, she suggests herself as the godmother for her friend Kingsley’s daughter: “Let me know how you feel about my presenting the new first born with a Bible. After all, it is traditional.” Pat leaves Margot Johnson’s literary agency (A. S. Lyons) and signs with Patricia Schartle (later Myrer), then a partner in Constance Smith Associates. Schartle represents her for the next twenty years.

  1959. Pat writes This Sweet Sickness, using her feelings for Mary Ronin as the inspiration for the psychopath David Kelsey’s delusions about the married woman he wants to marry, the woman for whom he buys a house and constructs a second identity. Again, Pat dedicates the book to Mary Highsmith.

  Mme Jenny Bradley, Pat’s European agent, sells the rights to The Talented Mr. Ripley to Robert and Raymond Hakim, who produce René Clément’s classic film version Plein Soleil, starring Alain Delon, Marie Laforêt, and Maurice Ronet.

  Pat meets and begins a brief affair with pulp novelist Marijane Meaker, then goes to Europe on a publicity tour at the end of September with Mother Mary, who is recovering from a bad depression. Pat hopes to meet Mary Ronin in Greece, but Mary Ronin doesn’t come. Mother Mary and Pat quarrel on the European trip; Mary impersonates Pat for two journalists in their Paris hotel lobby, intimating that her action was a joke. “I think a psychiatrist would put another meaning to it,” Pat writes to her cousin Dan. Pat continues her travels with her ex-lover Doris. She goes to Marseille, back to Paris, to Greece, and then to Crete.

  1960. February: Pat returns from Europe. This Sweet Sickness is published. In May she begins to take notes on the the idea of an American embezzler who travels to Greece, the start of a tortuous series of revisions which result in her novel The Two Faces of January. (Other titles for January: The Power of Negative Thinking, Rydal’s Folly.) She rekindles her romance with Marijane Meaker and moves with her to a house on Old Ferry Road, seven miles outside New Hope, Pennsylvania, for a turbulent six-month relationship. During this time, she reworks The Two Faces of January and writes several short stories, amongst them “The Terrapin” (published in EQMM in 1961). “The Terrapin” wins the Raven Award from the Mystery Writers of America. She produces many inadequate drafts of The Two Faces of January. Her editor at Harper & Brothers, Joan Kahn, reluctantly rejects all of them. In May 1962, the final Harper & Brothers reader’s report submitted to Joan Kahn about The Two Faces of January contains this sentence: “A very unhealthy air hangs over it…and I finished it all with a strong sense of revulsion.”

  1960. Spring: She meets Alex Szogyi, a professor at Wesleyan University, who admires her work and becomes a close friend. When she leaves permanently for Europe in 1962, she gives him her writing desk. They continue a mostly epistolary friendship until the 1980s, when she becomes “possessive” over his growing friendship with Jeanne Moreau (to whom she introduced him) and their relations break off.

  1961. January: Pat begins work on Girls’ Book, which becomes First Person Novel, about a woman recounting her lesbian experiences to her husband by letter. She stops the book after fifty-nine pages.

  Spring: Pat and Meaker separate; Pat moves to an apartment and then to a house in New Hope at 113 South Sugan Road. She begins a yearlong affair with Daisy Winston, later a travel agent, now an occasional waitress at Odette’s, a nightclub in New Hope. Daisy becomes a lifelong friend.

  April: Pat begins The Cry of the Owl, set in Lambertville, Pennsylvania, just across the river from New Hope. She writes to Kingsley that with this book, “I am writing something out of my system.” In it, she again kills off a girlfriend: Marijane Meaker in the character of Robert Forester’s pathological ex-wife. A case of German measles in June helps her work along.

  1962. Summer: She travels to Europe, sharing a house in Positano with Ellen Hill; they immediately begin to quarrel again. They go on to Rome and Pat travels to Venice, staying at the Pensione Seguso, which she will make use of in her Venice novel Those Who Walk Away. In July, she is in Paris, weeping over Oscar Wilde’s grave in Père Lachaise. During this summer in Europe, she meets Caroline Besterman and falls in love “as never before.” She returns to Pennsylvania, struck to the heart.

  September: Back in New Hope, Pat begins to write The Glass Cell, inspired in part by a correspondence with an inmate in a Chicago prison. She visits Doylestown prison for atmosphere (but isn’t allowed inside), and takes some details for the novel from a book about an unjustly imprisoned engineer who was strung up by his thumbs in prison and became a morphine addict—details she attaches to The Glass Cell’s hero, Philip arter.

  1962. Obsessed by her love for Caroline Besterman and unable to work, she decides to move to England to be near the married Caroline.

  1963. February: Pat takes a boat to Lisbon, then to Positano, where Edna Lewis, mother-in-law of her New Hope friend Peggy Lewis, has an art school. She rents the house she had the year before. At Edna Lewis’s party she meets the writer Larry Kramer and spends time with some expatriate artists. She makes a quick trip to London to see Caroline, whose husban
d has been told of their affair. While in London, she does a radio interview with the writer Francis Wyndham, the first person in England to write about her at length as a serious novelist. (Maurice Richardson wrote about her work for The Observer in 1957.) Wyndham writes a subsequent article in the New Statesmen which effectively introduces her work to Britain. Caroline comes back with her to Positano. Pat is so deeply in love with Caroline that she changes her will, leaving half her estate to Caroline, half to Mary Highsmith, and her manuscripts to her friend from Barnard College, Kate Kingsley Skattebol. She is in the habit of changing her will frequently, but she has never left money to a lover before—nor will she ever do so again. The depth of her feeling for Caroline is contained in this characteristic statement: “I have imagined killing myself, strangely, more strongly now than with anyone else I have ever known” (Diary 15, 3 May 1963).

  Pat moves to Aldeburgh, to 27 King Street, in Suffolk. Then she buys Bridge Cottage in Earl Soham, Suffolk. Caroline visits on weekends.

  Pat writes A Suspension of Mercy (published as The Story-Teller in the United States) and makes friends with her neighbor, the writer Ronald Blythe, and his circle, which includes James Hamilton-Paterson, future author of Cooking with Fernet-Branca.

  1963. February: Pat takes a boat to Lisbon, then to Positano, where Edna Lewis, mother-in-law of her New Hope friend Peggy Lewis, has an art school. She rents the house she had the year before. At Edna Lewis’s party she meets the writer Larry Kramer and spends time with some expatriate artists. She makes a quick trip to London to see Caroline, whose husband has been told of their affair. While in London, she does a radio interview with the writer Francis Wyndham, the first person in England to write about her at length as a serious novelist. (Maurice Richardson wrote about her work for The Observer in 1957.) Wyndham writes a subsequent article in the New Statesmen which effectively introduces her work to Britain. Caroline comes back with her to Positano. Pat is so deeply in love with Caroline that she changes her will, leaving half her estate to Caroline, half to Mary Highsmith, and her manuscripts to her friend from Barnard College, Kate Kingsley Skattebol. She is in the habit of changing her will frequently, but she has never left money to a lover before—nor will she ever do so again. The depth of her feeling for Caroline is contained in this characteristic statement: “I have imagined killing myself, strangely, more strongly now than with anyone else I have ever known” (Diary 15, 3 May 1963). Pat moves to Aldeburgh, to 27 King Street, in Suffolk. Then she buys Bridge Cottage in Earl Soham, Suffolk. Caroline visits on weekends. Pat writes A Suspension of Mercy (published as The Story-Teller in the United States) and makes friends with her neighbor, the writer Ronald Blythe, and his circle, which includes James Hamilton-Paterson, future author of Cooking with Fernet-Branca.