The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

14. Café Nicholson on East Fifty-eighth Street.

  15. Pat’s apartment at 75 Irving Place.

  16. Village hangouts: The Jumble Shop, the Prohibition era tearoom at 176 MacDougal Street, and the lesbian bar L’s (or El’s) at 116 MacDougal Street.

  17. Henry Street Settlement House: Where Pat took piano lessons from Judy [Tuvim] Holliday’s mother.

  18. Brooks Brothers, Madison Avenue at Forty-fourth Street, Pat’s preferred place to buy shirts and vests.

  19. Art galleries: Christopher Fourth: the Village art gallery belonging to Pat’s friends in Manhattan and New Hope, Peggy and Michael Lewis. The Midtown Galleries where Betty Parsons worked; the Betty Parsons Gallery opened in 1946.

  20. Train and bus stations: Pennsylvania Station: The old Penn Station, modelled on the Baths of Caraculla; Grand Central Terminal; Port Authority Bus Terminal.

  21. Caso’s Drugstore: Corner of Third Avenue and Sixty-eighth Street, “where I used to go at sixteen and fifteen, when I went to high school a block from here…. And the crises I have known here, the faces I looked for, and saw, or missed, the afternoons metamorphosed by some overwhelming event that happened in school that day, days that twisted one’s life around completely and permanently, I remember them.”

  22. The Hotel Earle: corner of Waverly Place and Washington Square (now the Washington Square Hotel); Pat stayed here and so did Mary Highsmith.

  23. The Chelsea Hotel: Pat stayed here several times in the 1960s when she was taking notes on her old Greenwich Village haunts.

  24. Kingsley Skattebol, Pat’s friend from Barnard, had an apartment on West Eleventh Street.

  25. Buffie Johnson, Pat’s old friend, owned a loft building at 102 Greene Street.

  26. Bloomingdale’s department store: Pat, in real life, met Kathleen Senn here while she was working in the toy department and living on East Fifty-sixth Street.

  27. The East Village and East Ninth Street: Respectively, the artistic domain and home of writer and performance artist Lil Picard, Pat’s longtime friend.

  28. Gracie Square: The Upper East Side address where Pat visited the painter Fanny Myers [Brennan], who, like Cleo in The Talented Mr. Ripley, painted miniscule landscapes.

  FICTION

  A. Strangers on a Train: Guy Haines’s apartment on West Fifty-third Street which Charles Bruno, his Alter Ego, haunts.

  B. Found in the Street: Ralph Linderman’s apartment on Bleecker Street Pat makes two geographical errors in Found in the Street: she gives Ralph a job at an arcade on Eighth Avenue in the West Eighties. Eighth Avenue becomes Central Park West at Fifty-ninth Street, and the arcades themselves would have been in the West Forties.

  Found in the Street: Natalia and Jack Sutherland’s apartment on Grove Street.

  Found in the Street: Elsie Tyler shares an apartment on Minetta Lane and works in a coffee shop on Seventh Avenue South. She is photographed at the Chelsea Hotel.

  Found in the Street: The Armstrongs’ apartment on West Eleventh Street. (Kingsley Skattebol had an apartment at West Eleventh Street.)

  Found in the Street: Elsie Tyler’s apartment on Greene Street, where she is murdered. (Buffie Johnson owned a loft building at 102 Greene Street.)

  C. The Blunderer: West Forty-fourth Street: Walter Stackhouse’s law office, around the corner from the Sangor-Pines office.

  The Blunderer: Central Park, where Walter Stackhouse mistakes a stranger for Melchior Kimmel, kills him, and is himself murdered by Kimmel.

  D. The Talented Mr. Ripley: East Fifty-first Street between Second and Third avenues is where Tom Ripley shares a dingy brownstone apartment with Bob, “a window dresser.” He receives extorted checks there under the name George McAlpin. Previously Ripley lived in a brownstone on East Forty-fifth Street with a man who likes to shelter young men.

  The Talented Mr. Ripley: Park Avenue: home of Dickie Greenleaf’s parents, Herbert and Emily.

  The Talented Mr. Ripley: Gracie Square: Ripley’s friend, Cleo Dobelle, who paints pictures so small they can be viewed only through a magnifying glass, lives at this Upper East Side address.

  The Talented Mr. Ripley: Brooks Brothers: Tom Ripley buys clothes for Dickie Greenleaf and himself here.

  E. This Sweet Sickness: Romeo Salta’s Restaurant on West Fifty-sixth Street where David Kelsey, in the character of his Alter Ego, William Neumeister, appears with his imaginary girlfriend Annabelle and insists on “Two orders of everything, please.” The owner of Salta’s later sent Pat a case of wine in New Hope to thank her.

  This Sweet Sickness: 410 Riverside Drive, the apartment from which David Kelsey/William Neumeister jumps to his death (near Barnard College in Morningside Heights).

  This Sweet Sickness: Brooks Brothers: Kelsey/Neumeister wants to shop here, but can’t.

  F. The Price of Salt: Frankenberg’s department store (Bloomingdale’s in real life) at Fifty-ninth Street and Lexington Avenue, where Therese meets Carole, while working in the toy department.

  The Price of Salt: East Sixty-third Street is where Therese lives; it is also where Pat rented her first room after graduating from Barnard College.

  The Price of Salt: Frankenburg’s department store (Bloomingdale’s in real life). Pat has a salesgirl steal Therese’s steak from the cloakroom—“Wolves, she had thought, wolves, stealing a bloody bag of meat”—just as someone stole her own steak while she was working at Bloomingdale’s in December of 1948.

  G. Edith’s Diary: Edith Howland’s apartment on Grove Street, where Cliffie tries to suffocate the family cat.

  H. The Cry of the Owl: The apartment on East Eighty-second Street where Nickie Jurgen, Robert Forester’s pathological ex-wife, lives with her new husband. She hides Robert’s opponent, Greg Wyncoop, in a shabby hotel “off Fourth Avenue.” Fourth Avenue is also where Carol, at the end of The Price of Salt, gets a job in a furniture store.

  I. The Tremor of Forgery: Howard Ingham’s apartment on “Fourth Street near Washington Square” where John Castlewood, the director of the film Howard is writing, kills himself.

  J. Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt, The Cry of the Owl, This Sweet Sickness, etc.: all novels in which the Holland Tunnel, the George Washington Bridge, the Port Authority Bus Station, and New York’s two train stations are featured.

  K. “The Terrapin”: Victor, who murders his artist mother (and is given Pat’s childhood preferences in books), lives with his mother on Riverside Drive (on the Upper West Side, where the Highsmiths first lived in Manhattan), then on Third Avenue, in the vicinity of Mary and Stanley Highsmith’s last New York apartment.

  L. A Dog’s Ransom: Riverside Park, where Tina the poodle is kidnapped and killed. The dog’s owners, Greta and Ed, live nearby on West 106th Street.

  A Dog’s Ransom: 103rd Street and West End Avenue, where Kenneth Rowajinski, the poison-pen writer and dog killer, lives. It is the site of the Highsmiths’ first apartment in New York. York Avenue in the East Sixties: the ransom dropoff for the dog is near Pat’s first rented room in the East Sixties, and near the Julia Richman High School on East Sixty-seventh Street.

  A Dog’s Ransom: Astoria: Clarence Duhamel, the good cop, is brought up in Astoria, reading the authors Pat read: Krafft-Ebing, Freud, Dostoyevsky, and Proust. He also has Pat’s home subway stop, Ditmars—which she misspells in the novel. MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village is where he stays with his girlfriend.

  A Dog’s Ransom: Morton Street: the location of the apartment to which the dognapper Kenneth Rowajinski is released from Bellevue Hospital. He is killed there.

  M. The Click of the Shutting: Gregory Bullick lives in a Greenwich Village loft with his father. His subway stop is Pat’s home stop when she was his age and living on Grove Street: the Christopher Street station at Sheridan Square.

  N. “Blow It” (from The Black House): Jane Street, Harry Rowe’s apartment in Greenwich Village where he separately entertains the two women he can’t decide to marry.

  O. “The Baby Spoon” (from Slowly, Slo
wly in the Wind): Faculty housing near Columbia University (Pat’s alma mater) where Claude Lamm, the pompous professor, is murdered by his former student, Winston, who steals his wife’s baby spoon. “Claude suspected that Winston had a vaguely homosexual attachment to him, and Claude had heard that homosexuals were apt to take something from someone they cared for.” Winston lives in a “genuine garret at the top of a brownstone in the West Seventies.”

  P. “The Romantic” (from Mermaids on the Golf Course): West Fifty-fifth Street: location of the apartment where Isabel Crane takes care of her invalid mother.

  Q. “The Network” (from Slowly, Slowly in the Wind): “Seventh Avenue and 53rd Street” along with “West 11th Street, Gramercy Park, even Yorkville”—all of them considered “hearts of the city” by a network of friends in Manhattan portrayed by Pat as part of the great scamming racket that is New York. The “East Village” is a place where blacks “cut your fingers off if they can’t get the rings off” easily.

  R. “The Still Point of the Turning World”: Mrs. Robinson lives in the London Terrace Apartments on West Twenty-third Street. Philip and Dickie have their encounter in the little park on the West Side Highway.

  S. “Notes from a Respectable Cockroach”: The Hotel Earle (Pat calls it the Hotel Duke) inspired this cockroach story.

  Appendix 3

  Charts, Maps, Diagrams, And Plans

  1. “Golden Arrow” Diagram. Drawn by Pat Highsmith to help plot a comic book script.

  2. Lover Chart. This is the chart Pat Highsmith created in 1945 to rank and compare her lovers. The initials of the women have been removed to protect their privacy.

  3. Map to Highsmith Haus in Tegna, made by Pat Highsmith for Monique Buffet.

  4. Natal Chart of Patricia Highsmith by Alex Szogyi.

  5. Diagram for The Price of Salt, called here Argument of Tantalus (or The Lie).

  6. Plan of Willie Mae’s boardinghouse in Fort Worth, drawn by Dan Oscar Coates.

  Selected Bibliography

  All books are dated according to the edition used, not the date of first publication.

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  Bloom, Harold, ed. Lesbian and Bisexual Fiction Writers. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1997.

  Brandel, Marc. The Choice. New York: Dial Press, 1950.

  Broyard, Anatole. Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir. New York: Vintage, 1997.

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  ———. Notes from Underground. London: Vintage Books, 1993.

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  ———. Paris Was Yesterday. New York: Penguin, 1979.

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  ———. The Power and the Glory. London: Penguin, 1962.

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  ———. Love from Nancy: The Letters of Nancy Mitford. Edited by Charlotte Mosley. London: Sceptre, 1993.

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  ———. Steranko History of Comics 2. Reading, PA: Supergraphics, 1972.

  Symons, A. J. A. The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography. (New York: NYRB, 2001.

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  ———. A Sign for Cain. London: Robert Hale, 1966.

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  Also by Joan Schenkar

  Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde, Oscar’s Unusual Niece

  Signs of Life: Six Comedies of Menace

  Acknowledgments

  To the many people around the world who offered their time, their minds, and their materials, I owe too much to tell here. This book is the down payment on my very great debt to them.