The Talented Miss Highsmith (23 page)

Beginning in the 1950s, to Pat's barely suppressed embarrassment,
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
would become the most frequent publisher of her short fictions.
¹⁷
One of her worst stories (“The Perfect Alibi,” the first Highsmith story to be published in
EQMM,
in 1957) and one of her best stories (“The Terrapin,” published in 1961) would appear in
EQMM.
^*
The editors at
Ellery Queen's
liked to mix their contributors: in the August 1960 edition of
EQMM,
Pat's tale of yet another nerveless psychopath with a taste for symbolic trophies, “The Thrill Seeker,” was printed alongside “The Club,” a story by the great American poet Muriel Rukeyser.
¹⁸

At the time Pat graduated from Barnard, popular publishing giants Condé Nast (
Vogue, Mademoiselle, Vanity Fair
), Henry Luce (
Time, Life, Fortune
), and William Randolph Hearst (
Harper's Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Town & Country)
were beginning to hire fiction and poetry editors for many of the fashion, style, and news magazines under their vast New York umbrellas. And these editors were giving national exposure to the writers they published. Meanwhile, small literary and political journals—like
Partisan Review
—were exercising a disproportionate influence on the American intellectual conversation.

With a subscriber base that never exceeded fifteen thousand,
Partisan Review,
begun in 1934 by William Phillips and Philip Rahv (who liked to refer to the USA as “the United States of Amnesia”), published serious, anti-Stalinist literary writers, many of them from Jewish immigrant families and most of them defenders of high modernism: Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg, Lionel Abel, Delmore Schwartz, Elizabeth Hardwick, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Daniel Bell, Meyer Schapiro, Dwight Macdonald, Alfred Kazin, Arthur Koestler, Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, et al.

Earnestly preparing for her literary close-up, Pat was subscribing to
Partisan Review
in the 1940s: “The
Partisan Review
has arrived and I am very proud of it,” she enthused in 1943.
¹⁹
But she was unequipped for its fierce intellectual arguments and could never write the kind of fiction
PR
liked to publish. Still, Pat read
PR
avidly, and her introduction to the work of Saul Bellow, a novelist whose writing makes profound use of what used to be called “the modern Jewish experience,” probably dates from her discovery of his stories in
PR
. (It was Bellow's uncanny ability to reimagine the New York she'd lived in, to bring the alienated European emigrant experience to bear upon it, and to vividly dramatize his moral concerns that caused Pat to write an article for a German paper in 1987 naming Saul Bellow as her “favorite” author and
Mr. Sammler's Planet
as his best book. Pat wouldn't have disagreed with the harsh fictional views Bellow took of the women in his life, either.)
²⁰

In 1950, still hoping to be introduced to “the
Partisan Review
crowd” by her new friend, the novelist Arthur Koestler, Pat was pleased to hear that Koestler had mentioned her name to Philip Rahv.
²¹
But what Pat really wanted when she got out of college was something closer to the conventional center of New York power: a staff job at
The New Yorker
or, at least, an assistant's position at
Mademoiselle.

William Shawn of
The New Yorker
turned Pat down for a job in June of 1942 after scanning four issues of the
Barnard Quarterly
containing her stories, reading some “on spec” pieces she'd done for the magazine's “Talk of the Town” feature, and giving her reason to hope for work as a “girl reporter.” Four months after Pat talked to Shawn, a reader at
The New Yorker
compounded the insult by rejecting as “sordid” her unsolicited story “These Sad Pillars,” about a man and a woman who scribble notes to each other on subway posts.
²²
In 1958, Pat was still finding
The New Yorker
“so forbidding” that she was “afraid even to telephone them for…information” on how to submit an idea for a cover drawing, so she diffidently wrote to ask her editor at Harper & Brothers, Joan Kahn, to do it for her.
²³

Vogue
joined the chorus of disapproval by refusing to give the newly graduated Pat a position after a particularly disastrous interview.
Harper's Bazaar
asked to see “several short stories” and then didn't take them.
²⁴
Mademoiselle,
where Carson McCullers's sister Rita was the fiction editor, invited Pat for a meeting some months later, praised her “references & accomplishments,” put her in their “active file,” but never called her back.
²⁵
There were just too many smart English majors with “references & accomplishments” jostling for jobs in wartime Manhattan, and something about Pat—could they have guessed what she was
thinking
?—put the magazine editors off.

It was the
Vogue
rejection that did the most damage. (“I'm horribly worried about
Vogue
. Rosalind told me
not
to write.”)
²⁶
Pat's well-connected friend the arts journalist Rosalind Constable—Pat was desperate to please her—had taken the trouble to recommend Pat personally to the ladies at
Vogue
, and Pat showed up for her interview in June of 1942, bright eyed and bushy tailed, but also, apparently, disheveled and
décoiffée
.

What wayward impulse, it is useful to ask, could have brought a young woman as ambitious and self-conscious as Patricia Highsmith to an interview at
Vogue
magazine in such a disorderly state? Something, perhaps, about not wanting to conform to the impeccably
female
image
Vogue
was showcasing in page after page of its perfectly styled fashion photographs?

Pat's mother, after all, was a fashion illustrator who had worked on and off for years for
Women's Wear Daily
(and had done a cover illustration for
Collier's
magazine in 1936).
²⁷
From her earliest days Pat was absorbing the grammar of women's fashions from Mary—although no one would ever accuse Pat Highsmith of dressing like a girl. (Caroline Besterman says that even in a skirt she looked “rather like a sailor.”)
²⁸
Pat grew up listening to the shop talk of Mary's fashion illustrator friends Jeva Cralick and Marjorie Thompson, and Pat and “Cralick,” as she was always called, had an affectionate correspondence that went on for decades. Pat and Mary, too, wrote to each other in letters that feature descriptions of clothing, and Pat's sole surviving letter from childhood (to her grandmother Willie Mae) includes an extended phrase about her favorite tennis shoes.
²⁹

It was probably the size of Pat's feet—all the Coates family had big hands and big feet, and Pat's hands and feet were enormous—that provoked her lifelong fascination with shoes. By the end of her life she was slipping those big feet into size 9½ loafers, and her lamb's-wool-lined moccasins from L.L. Bean, preserved in her archives, really do look like gunboats. Shoes were among Pat's initial artistic inspirations: the first line of the first story she ever wrote began with a pair of shoes beside a bed (see “
Greek Games
”).
³⁰

Pat's emotional memory continued to be stimulated by footwear as she got older. In 1942 she remembered a boy from her Astoria childhood because she had given him her “new tennis shoes, much too masculine, I discovered, even for me to play in unselfconsciously.” When the boy died shortly afterward, Pat wondered guiltily: would they “put my shoes into the coffin with him?”
³¹
Her first published novel,
Strangers on a Train
(1950), introduces its two fatal Alter Egos to each other by having Guy “accidentally touch the outstretched foot of [Bruno,] the young man asleep[,]” with his own.
³²
And Guy's pointless confession of murder to the oafish, unheeding Owen Markman at the novel's end is perfectly symbolized by Markman's “big scuffed brown shoes…. Suddenly their flaccid, shameless, massive stupidity seemed the essence of all human stupidity…and before he knew how or why, [Guy] had kicked, viciously, the side of Owen's shoe.”
³³

Shoes brought death sharply into Pat's mind once again when, years after her beloved grandmother Willie Mae's demise, one of her own shoes made her remember that Willie Mae's feet were shaped like her own feet, and only then, Pat wrote, had she been able to “shed the first real tears for my grandmother.”
³⁴
And in Munich, in 1951, the sense-memory of her ex-lover Virginia Catherwood's shoes pierced her heart with quite another feeling: “O Ginnie, your little black suede shoes, sitting in the hall side by side, so small in the hall, sexy beautiful shoes that made my heart jump and my lips smile…and I could have made love to you in a minute.”
³⁵

Twenty years later, shoes were still fascinating her. Pat, staying with Barbara Ker-Seymer and Barbara Roett in Islington, was taken to dinner with her hosts at Simpson's-in-the-Strand in early November of 1972 by the Barbaras' two other houseguests, France Burke, daughter of the literary philosopher Kenneth Burke, and her lover, “Sam.” Sam, who sat next to Pat at dinner, says that aside from “worrying” about the huge joints of meat that were arriving at their table with alarming frequency and orating obsessively about some family silver she was intent on extracting from an aunt, Pat's principal topic of conversation was shoes.

Sam was wearing a pair of Gucci loafers that were too narrow for her feet, and “Pat was VERY involved with this and she took the whole thing very seriously.” Pat liked Gucci loafers too, but suggested that Sam buy them in men's sizes because only “the men's sizes were wide enough.” Pat was “quietly peculiar, worrying about silver and shoes,” but about the shoes, she was “quite earnest and very precise,” sizing up Sam's foot with practiced accuracy and giving her an exact men's size equivalent.
³⁶

Fashion footwear evidently did a lot for Pat—she even said that one of her first reasons for liking Switzerland was that only the Swiss made the kind of shoes that fit her feet
³⁷
—but shoes weren't the sole reason Pat was interested in fashion. Fashion, after all, was the glamorous province of beautiful women.

In New York, Pat loved to socialize with women in the world of
la mode
. She had a twenty-year, deeply attached friendship (ruined forever by their house-owning venture together in Samois-sur-Seine in the late 1960s) with Mme Elizabeth Lyne, the much older designer and painter who created dress lines for Hattie Carnegie. The painter, writer, and performance artist Lil Picard, Pat's friend for three decades and older than Pat by twenty years, began as a fashion designer and fashion editor in Berlin, made jewelry in Manhattan, and had her own milliner's studio—the Custom Hat Box—in Bloomingdale's department store, where Pat was to set crucial scenes for
The Price of Salt
.

Pat went on to have affairs with a bevy of attractive dress models—blondes of course—and her novels show that she was familiar with the art of dressmaking. In
The Price of Salt
and in her posthumously published novel,
Small g—
during whose writing she frequently consulted her dress-designer neighbor in Tegna, Julia Diener-Diethelm
³⁸
—Pat gives detailed accounts of how fashion and fashions are created. Two of the older women characters in
The Price of Salt
present its young heroine, Therese, with handmade dresses, and elaborate rituals surround Therese's fittings for these garments. One of the central relationships in
Small g
owes something to Pat's careful observation in Manhattan in 1961 of the “old witch with the button shop on Madison Avenue [who tyrannized] over the younger, more sensitive, more beautiful redheaded girl—who did escape.”
³⁹

In her cahiers, as early as 1940, Pat was giving proper dress, and the concealing/revealing/role-playing purposes of it, close attention in both fact and fiction. She always remarked when a jacket or a pair of slacks was “well cut,” when a dress draped nicely over a woman's shapely torso, or when an attractive girl who was pretending to be seductively rich had a visible hole in the sole of her shoe.
⁴⁰

On one of her trips “home” to Texas—she was still in her teens—Pat made friends with a married couple in El Paso, a city on the Texas-Mexican border just across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Juárez. The woman, Eddy, was a very masculine horse-trainer, and the man, Ruthie, was an exceedingly effeminate dress designer. They were both homosexual and had married each other, Pat wrote approvingly, for cover. (Eddy and Ruthie's behavior in gay bars was so outrageous that their marriage was “urgently advisable.”) Even better, Eddy and Ruthie had married in order to wear each other's clothes. Pat was enthralled.

“Eddy [the woman] wore beautifully cut jackets with silk shorts and foulard ties. Ruthie [the man] wore open collar sport shirts and loud tweed jackets and also beautifully cut English slacks…. Each would have liked the other's body for his own to put clothes on…. [T]hey were…finding the greatest pleasure in the world in buying clothes for each other—which neither wore—and which soon were taken back and worn by each respectively—which was what they'd wanted after all.”
⁴¹