The Talented Miss Highsmith (25 page)

For decades after she left Barnard, Pat made shamed references to that D in Logic, which had not, after all, killed her chances for a Phi Beta Kappa key: her grades at Barnard were already quite a bit lower than what Phi Beta Kappa required for membership. But a D in Logic (part of her yearlong philosophy course) was another unwelcome point of resemblance to Mother Mary. Pat was always criticizing Mary for being “illogical.”

Shame for not finding a job was certainly the reason Pat quietly skipped her college graduation, slipping into the
Barnard Quarterly
offices the day before the ceremony, 31 May 1942, and “bringing home my weight in manila envelopes, stationery, etc,” but avoiding her classmates. “Saw no one, tho' today was S[enior] picnic & tomorrow graduation!”
⁶⁹

She got herself excused from the graduation ceremony by writing a false letter saying that she had a job interview at a New Jersey newspaper on graduation day. Pleased with her alibi and even more pleased to be hoodwinking the administration, she wrote in her diary: “Barnard sent me the mark sheet & blanks for diploma by mail, apparently on the strength of my beautiful letter yesterday to [Columbia University president] N.M. Butler.”
⁷⁰

But Pat wasn't so pleased about missing a graduation lunch at Schrafft's with her circle of intimate classmates, Babs and Peter (a girl) and Helen, at least two of whom, as a matter of course, she'd slept with. And she wasn't happy at all about not appearing at her graduation. “I had to convince myself that I didn't want to go.”
⁷¹
In the week after graduation, she consoled herself by trying to write like the expatriate American novelist Kay Boyle, whose work she was reading with great attention. Kay Boyle, Pat wrote in her diary in yet another of her attempts at impersonation, “has the style I feel I should naturally continue.”
⁷²

After she left Barnard, aside from a little temping work, Pat was forced to accept the only job offer she got: an offer for work researching and writing factual pieces at FFF Publications. She considered this respectable job degrading, and as the work was petering out, she hastened to answer Richard Hughes's ad for a “writer-researcher” at Sangor-Pines—a job
everyone
considered degrading. Ever after, Pat would tell prying journalists (if she mentioned the subject at all) that she hadn't “realized” she was applying to a comic book company for work.
⁷³

Pat's sharp history of failure in the New York job market, where “quality” was both a requirement for success and the reward you received for
being
a success, made it especially important for the ambitious young writer, living on the fringes of her older friends' well-remunerated lives, to keep up a good front. It was the counterweight to what she referred to, always, as her “maimed” nature, a nature that needed “crutches.”
⁷⁴
“I never fall asleep at night,” she wrote, “without writhing in agony at least twice, remembering something which I imagine
horrid
that I have done that day, or the day before.
⁷⁵
Pierced by insecurities about her family background, Pat brought forth analyses as harsh as punishments whenever she encountered her blood relatives in Fort Worth or in New York; analyses which reinforced her sense of being a “loser” in a wide world of “winners.”

“Marriages, in all of my grandmother's children, have been to people beneath them, intellectually and culturally, as if the entire family, through want of education or money or both had been permeated with the disease of inferiority.”
⁷⁶

Success, expecially in the postwar boom years, always seemed to Pat to be everywhere but in the Highsmith house. Her Deep Southern background, alive with the family mythology of a glorious but defeated Confederacy and a long-gone Southern Way of Life, as well as her birth in what was then considered to be a second-class Texas cow town, couldn't have helped. (In 1906, the American philosopher-psychologist William James defined success, at that time a more or less Northern notion, as “our national disease”—and memorably called it a “bitch-goddess.” “Bitch-goddess” is a good description of how Pat liked to think of her lovers.) In the winter of 1948, surveying the sullied New York snow in the backyard of her apartment building on East Fifty-sixth Street and immersing herself in critical works about Kafka all weekend, Pat felt she was being swiftly driven “from neurosis to psychosis” by the thought of failure:

“In every direction I turn and move, I am met by failure or a wall impenetrable. The only success I can recall recently is a successful batch of hardened fudge.”
⁷⁷

She wasn't kidding.

After attending a Broadway performance of Arthur Miller's
Death of a Salesman
in November of 1950, Pat, for the rest of her life, would compare her mother Mary's perpetually collapsing career as a fashion illustrator to the situation of Willy Loman, the “hero” of Miller's tragedy, undone by his passive faith in the American Dream. Pat's private response to Willy Loman's downfall was completely consistent with her own ambitions and entirely
in
consistent with the meaning of
Death of a Saleman
. “I find I have no sympathy,” Pat wrote in her diary on 17 November 1950, “for the individual whose spirit has not led him to seek higher goals, in the first place, at a much younger age.”
⁷⁸

Pat was seeking “higher goals,” and at a “younger age,” too, while she labored away at the comics. During this time Mary Louise Aswell—she and Pat would keep up with each other through lesbian circles when Mrs. Aswell retired with her lover Agnes Sims to New Mexico—sent Pat another rejection letter from
Harper's Bazaar
which summed up Pat's ironic relationship to “quality.” It was the kind of encouraging letter—Mrs. Aswell genuinely admired Pat's writing and was one of her recommenders to the artists' colony, Yaddo, in 1948—which usually has the opposite effect on its recipient, implying that while Pat's toe might be on the literary ladder, her heel was still firmly fixed to the waiting room floor. “Your writing,” wrote Mary Louise Aswell, “has considerable quality, & while this story is not for us, would you let us see some more of your work?”
⁷⁹

One of the ways Pat kept her front up and her goals high was to conceal the extent of her participation in the comics trade. She also took the trouble to conceal the nature and even the fact of her first postcollege job, at FFF Publications. Pat had been taken on at FFF Publications to work with the author, newspaper columnist, and editor Ben-Zion Goldberg—already a household name among readers of Yiddish journals in America. Goldberg, the son of a rabbi from Vilnius, had travelled the world reporting and writing on Jewish matters. In 1931, he published a book about sex in religion called
The Sacred Fire
(1931), and by the mid-1940s he was chairman of the Committee of Jewish Scientists, Writers, and Artists of the United States. (Albert Einstein was the president of that committee.) Goldberg wrote for many papers and journals in both English and Yiddish in Canada and the United States (including
The New Republic
), and he was active in antifascist organizations. In 1946, he spent six months in Russia meeting with Soviet writers and Jewish political committees.
⁸⁰

Ben-Zion Goldberg hired Pat as his editorial assistant at FFF Publications in the last week of June 1942, when she was at the end of her job-hunting rope. (She would eke out the finish of her employment with Goldberg with some temping work at
Modern Baby
magazine.)
⁸¹
He chose her over two hundred other applicants, but Pat was not pleased to be joining the only “club” that would admit her: a publishing company run by Jews who hired her to do research on Jewish history and provide articles to the national Jewish press. The Jewish press was FFF Publications' primary market. “It's a lousy, journalistic…job,” she wrote in her diary, “and I'm frankly bored & ashamed of it. Why couldn't it be on the scarabs of Tutankhamen? Why not the history of the Dalai Lamas?…Why not the story of the philosopher's stone?”
⁸²
Pat was afraid Goldberg would “try to Jew me down to eighteen [dollars] a week” and wrote of him contemptuously: “He seems to be of some repute—somewhere.”
⁸³
But Goldberg hired Pat at twenty dollars a week, and ten days later he gave her a raise.

So, just her luck, not only was Pat Highsmith—busily scribbling anti-Semitisms in her notebook—researching and providing material for a large part of the North American Jewish press, she had also managed to get herself hired by the son-in-law of the world's most famous Jewish writer. Ben-Zion Goldberg had been the tutor of the renowned Yiddish fabulist Sholem Aleichem's youngest daughter, and he married her in 1917.
^*
Now Goldberg was Pat's boss: the only person in New York, apparently, who wanted to hire her. The situation was alive with all the convergent ironies of a good Jewish joke. Not for the talented Miss Highsmith, however, who had never heard of Sholem Aleichem.

But then Pat did some research on Goldberg (while she was doing some research
for
him), and discovered that he'd been arrested for shouting “Scab!” at a political demonstration. She decided this was a pretty good character recommendation, that she “liked Goldberg personally,” and that his “methods are sound.”
⁸⁴
And then Pat and Mother Mary started studying Spanish together and going to more galleries, and Pat's evening life sparkled and scintillated with more sexual and social possibilities. So she settled down to working for Goldberg with something resembling goodwill.

Pat and Goldberg stayed friendly for years (see “
Alter Ego: Part 4
”), and it was Goldberg to whom she first showed her early attempts at long fiction writing. And when Pat was twenty-six, it was Goldberg who pointed out to her—she said she'd never realized it before—that her perennial “theme” was the relationship between two “ill-matched” men.
⁸⁵
When she first gave him her work to read, he said: “There's something in your writing that intrigues me—a rhythm…an occasional new form…. But it's inclined to be rocky. Uneven.”
⁸⁶

But rather than tell the world that she'd written the “household section for The Jewish Family Year Book” in 1942, and had worked for the well-known Yiddish journalist Ben-Zion Goldberg for six months,
⁸⁷
Pat published an article in
The Oldie
magazine in 1993 (“My First Job”),” describing as her “first job” one of the “filler” jobs she'd taken
after
her employment with Goldberg and FFF Publications ended: a “fortnight's” stint as a street pollster for the Arrid Deodorant Company.
⁸⁸
For this polling job, the constitutionally shy Pat was required to stand in front of Saks, Macy's, and Bloomingdale's department stores and try out advertising slogans on passers-by.

Fifty years on, Pat still remembered the accosting phrases she'd had to repeat to strangers in her disguise as a pollster: “Arrid is the most efficient deodorant in the world today.” “Arrid is the fastest selling underarm deodorant in America and the world.”
⁸⁹
She added, making a feeble joke, that she hoped that publishing these phrases so much later didn't mean she was
still
advertising Arrid.
⁹⁰
But Pat knew very well she wasn't advertising anything. In 1993, when she published the article in
The Oldie
—it was late in her life and her anti-Israeli stance had become a propulsive obsession—Pat was hiding the fact that her “first real job” in Manhattan had been a job compiling research for the Jewish press.

Pat used her nineteen-dollar-a-week salary pitching deodorant to move, briefly, to a bed-sitting room in a “respectable house in the East Sixties” (the adjective “respectable” made all the difference to class-conscious Pat) “from [w]here I could walk to my parents' apartment in East Fifty-seventh Street [also proximate to a “good address”] where I often had dinner which was economical and cheering.” But cheap and cheerful wasn't what Pat was looking for, and one of the ways she dissembled her financial condition was to rent an apartment in the
vicinity
of a “quality” neigborhood: the Upper East Side.

Because the stuff of Pat's hopes and dreams always found its way into her work, the fragile, tentative dream of happiness she put together at the end of the 1940s for the two lesbian lovers Carol and Therese in
The Price of Salt
depends partially upon Carol securing an apartment on Madison Avenue (an Upper East Side address) and inviting Therese to share it. In the 1940s, Madison Avenue, with its sedate buildings and elegant shops, was well on the way to becoming the ultraexpensive thoroughfare of symbolic achievement and carbon monoxide gas that it is today. Madison Avenue must have seemed like Heaven's Own Boulevard to the young writer whose birth in her grandmother's boardinghouse in Fort Worth, Texas, was “mid-wived” by one of the upstairs' boarders,
⁹¹
and whose first six years there were spent close enough to railyard crossings to hear the lonesome freight trains whistling down the tracks.

Pat's next New York home, a studio apartment at 353 East Fifty-sixth Street, into which she moved in early 1943 and kept, on and off, until 1960 (subletting it briefly to Truman Capote and lengthily and contentiously to the designer Eveline Phimister, lover of her friend the photographer Ruth Bernhard),
⁹²
was just around the block from her parents' apartment on East Fifty-seventh Street. She bought furniture for the apartment, painted the walls and bookshelves a greenish blue, and Mary Highsmith came over to help with the painting. While mother and daughter were wielding their paintbrushes, Mary, with her usual disconcerting prescience in anything that concerned her daughter, told Pat that she shouldn't become like Allela Cornell (the young painter who was about to become Pat's lover), crying every evening, wanting to be “beautiful,” and doing nothing about it. Mary uttered the word “lesbian” about Allela and Pat was unnerved.
⁹³
Pat hung up one of her friend Ruth Bernhard's exquisite photographs—an arm made of wood, cradling the head of a doll
⁹⁴
—but Kingsley Skattebol says that the apartment's “chief attraction was the trompe l'oeil fireplace Pat had cleverly painted on one wall.”
⁹⁵
Pat couldn't afford an apartment with a fireplace, so she made one for herself.