The Talented Miss Highsmith (33 page)

Pat always hated to be classified—especially by others. And she was quite capable of contradicting herself without having
other
people trying to contradict her.

Still, it was Sigmund Freud's interpretations to which Pat usually returned. His bold, artistic analyses attracted her, his misogynies were congruent with her own, and his sense of art as the locus of loss suited her understanding of the act of creation. She had begun to read his work at Barnard, and the only time she seriously rebelled against his schematic approach was when it was applied to her own psychology during her six-month stint in Freudian therapy in 1948–49. And on only one occasion—at the beginning of 1956, in the deep depression that sparked another of her long interior dialogues with herself about God and “the humanistic morale versus Freud”—did she decide, briefly, to favor the “pre-Freudian Joseph Conrad” of
The Outcast of the Islands
over Freud. “The old fashioned, human morality is far more appealing to the writer” than Freud, she wrote.
⁶⁷
It was the way Grandmother Willie Mae had brought her up—although, with his silver lining of irony, Joseph Conrad is anything but old-fashioned.

But this lapse from Freudian faith was a brief one, and as late as 1988, Pat, a guest on a British television program devoted to the investigation of how to survive the murder of a loved one, gave her only direct response (it was Freudian) to a question about the definition of a murderer. “Frankly,” she said, “I'd call them sick if they were murderers, mentally sick.”
⁶⁸
For most of her life, Pat would explain herself to herself, and life to others, in more or less Freudian terms. Her novels do the same thing.

In July of 1943, Pat was paying attention to Mother Mary's faith in Christian Science again, and she did a drawing “while listening to a sermon by a X[Christian] Scientist.
⁶⁹
She tried her hand at the liturgical form herself, writing “sermons in my cahiers like the one of Jonathan Edwards.”
⁷⁰
The eighteenth-century Calvinist theologian Jonathan Edwards's most famous sermon—it was part of the curriculum of every American junior high school for most of the twentieth century, so it must have been the one Pat was referring to—is “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” It begins: “In this verse is threatened the vengeance of God on the wicked unbelieving Israelites.”

Pat, turning things upside down as usual, wrote a sermon called “Will the Lesbian's Soul Sleep in Peace?” (she seemed to feel that her own soul might
not
rest in peace) and then dropped in on the artist and art dealer Betty Parsons in the gallery where she worked in order to show her the sermon. Parsons asked Pat for a copy. Parsons was Rosalind Constable's lover, and Pat was always fascinated by the lovers of women she was attached to.
⁷¹
The fact that Betty Parsons was not only an artist herself but a dealer at an important midtown gallery did not escape Pat's attention, and Pat followed Parsons's career as she went on to open her own gallery in 1946, the Betty Parsons Gallery, and become the most influential female gallerist in New York City. Parsons was the first person to exhibit the Abstract Expressionists, and amongst her artists were Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, and Pat's friend Buffie Johnson.

Dan Coates's travels in the East had begun late in the summer of 1943, and so it was in August that he dropped in on Mary and Stanley in New York for the first time. During this visit, Pat felt that “mother has no time” (for
her
) and that Dan was “very boring, living completely for the present and the present is little and insignificant.”
⁷²
Good-natured, handsome Dan didn't share Pat's dreams of Manhattan triumph and eventual world conquest—but, then, Pat usually disliked her favorite relatives when they came to New York.

When her beloved grandmother Willie Mae showed up in New York in October of 1943, Pat suddenly started to see Willie Mae in another light: “Grandmother makes me nervous…. She lives in the past and always talks—every minute, about ‘your uncle,' ‘my brothers,' ‘your aunt'—all people who died 50 years ago.”
⁷³
This had something to do with Willie Mae's proximity. Pat preferred her family in their proper places, in a stable “character,” and in the relations and the context in which she first knew them. Pat's artistic concentrations were always the opposite of her hopeless yearning for stability.

Relations got worse during Willie Mae's visit to New York, and Pat went so far as to have a disloyal little chat with her mother about her grandmother. The chat, however, was loyal to Mary, and it is the only time on record that Pat took Mary's side against Willie Mae.

“At home a secret is spoken out: we don't like Grandma. She is disagreeable, because she doesn't let anybody tell her anything, she is jealous, talks too much, wants to spend money (!), go out and doesn't show any thoughtfulness towards Mother. It worries me that Mother still tries to understand and change Grandma, to show her where she is wrong, and that mother still is looking for something that has never been. Something must be done, as she intends to come here every summer and this will make Mother old: she drives us all to drink!”
⁷⁴

Like mothers, like daughters. These were the same criticisms Pat and Mary Highsmith would hurl at each other—in far more developed and colorful language—for decades; each woman standing in the dock, each woman sitting in the judge's chair. Mary, Pat would insist, had “shattered” her with criticisms, made her shake for days, and twisted her sexually, while Pat's physical and emotional “violence,” Stanley Highsmith (standing in for Mary) told Pat, had driven Mary to hysterical vomiting and a consultation with a psychiatrist. (The psychiatrist's name was Dr. Ripley, and he may have been the same Dr. Ripley who “treated” the novelist Mary McCarthy when her first husband committed her to the Harkness Pavilion in New York—and left her there.)

“[S]till looking for something that has never been”—it is Pat's phrase for Mary's attempts to get Willie Mae to pay attention to her—would be a long life's work for both the Highsmith women. Each of them was irretrievably linked to loss; and both of them were linked by their “loss” of each other.

And when Pat, in early November, finally persuaded Chloe to go to Mexico with her, another family fault line was exposed. Mary and Grandmother Willie Mae, still in New York, joined together in their jealousy of Chloe. “Grandma and Mother very curious about my feelings for Chloe,” Pat wrote in her diary. “‘Why?' [they ask] and ‘What does she have?' and ‘I would like to learn what strange power this girl has!'”
⁷⁵

Part 4

Like all her later travels outside the United States, Pat's trip to Mexico in December of 1943 started out in one direction, took an unexpected turn, and picked up enough emotional baggage and artistic impression to fill several of her future fictions. The purpose of her voyage—to continue to write her novel
The Click of the Shutting
in a setting of exotic exile—was followed by another urge just as basic: the urge to run away. Whenever Pat fell in love, her first thought was to escape with her new lover and her second thought was to escape
from
her new lover. Newly in love with Chloe, Pat was feeling the old, romantic pull of the road again. This time, she managed to persuade her girlfriend to go with her.

Perhaps the $350 Pat had saved up from her comics work
^*
—and from selling her radio and record player to Mary and Stanley—had something to do with Chloe's initial assent to the trip. Richard Hughes agreed to allow Pat to send in comic book scenarios by mail to Sangor-Pines from Mexico, so she was secure in the promise of a little income. But Chloe was ambivalent about going anywhere with Pat, changing her mind, Pat noted acidly, “faster than the Russian frontlines.”
¹

There was something premonitory about this Mexican trip. Once Pat had stepped across the border, the needle on her personal compass swung around to point to the country where all her journeys would end: Switzerland. The novel she went to Mexico to work on,
The Click of the Shutting,
took some of its impetus from her writing for comic books (whose progenitor was the Swiss graphic artist Rodolph Töpffer); she based one of her two Mexican short stories, “The Car,” on the odd relations of a Swiss hotel owner with his American wife in Taxco; and in Mexico City she spent time (reluctantly, because he was pursuing Chloe) with a naughty Swiss bandleader and nightclub owner, Teddy Stauffer, whose jazz band, the Original Teddies, was named after the bear on the coat of arms of Bern, Switzerland. Bern is the Swiss city where all Pat's literary archives are now kept.

Mexico—to which Pat would return several times and for several reasons—shared a border with her home state of Texas. It was also the place where she first began to lay down patterns for her “songlines,” those magnetic meridians of travel which all her later, far-flung journeys would follow.

If you couldn't get to Paris in the 1940s (and in 1943 you couldn't; the city had been occupied by the Germans since June of 1940), Mexico would do. Every American (and many a European) who considered herself or himself an artist, a free spirit, a bohemian, or even a fan of D. H. Lawrence was attracted to the idea of Mexico. Katherine Anne Porter and Hart Crane went to Mexico in the 1930s; Tennessee Williams visited a recessive Paul and a receptive Jane Bowles in Acapulco in 1940; Saul Bellow managed to spend his mother's life-insurance money on an extended sojourn in Taxco. And the teenage aesthete Ned Rorem seems to have dropped in on everyone who was anyone South of the Border. In the 1930s and 1940s, Americans were drawn to Mexico by what always draws people who make more art than money to such places: cheap rents, cheap food, abundant liquor, exotic scenery, and the recklessness of behavior that is permissible in a country to which you owe no allegiance. American nationals came in droves, and they usually returned with complaints about the low class and excessive drinking of their fellow expatriates.

Saul Bellow, who lived and travelled in Mexico in 1940, said “Mexico was everything that D. H. Lawrence said it was, and a good deal more besides.” He and his wife fetched up in Taxco, the silver-working center of Mexico: a town on a hill with a fantastically mannered cathedral, Santa Pisca. (Sybille Bedford
^*
described Santa Pisca as “shimmering with chromatic tiles” like “a brilliant pastiche of late—very late—Hispano American Baroque.”)
²
Taxco was where Pat would spend most of her Mexican time.

Taxco, Bellow said, “had a sizable foreign colony, mostly Americans, but also Japanese, Dutch, and British.” None of the people Bellow met there “had a very firm grip on anything at all.” The Bellows were able to rent a fine house and pay two Indian servants to take care of everything “for about ten bucks a week.” And the sun “shone so dramatically, so explicitly, you were never allowed to forget death.” In Taxco, Bellow found that he was drinking more than usual, much more, he said, than was good for him. He drank with his “American buddies in the
zócalo
…and with hard-drinking professionals who wrote for
Black Mask
and other pulps.” Like most American writers with any pretensions to seriousness—like Pat herself at the Sangor-Pines shop—Saul Bellow was ashamed to be “in the low company of the pulp writers.”
³

Sybille Bedford, in Taxco ten years after Bellow on a yearlong odyssey with her companion Esther Murphy Arthur, praised the town's “lovely position” and the “houses sprawling across a slope on four levels, everywhere red-tiled roofs, archways, flowers, prospects.” Bedford wrote slyly that Taxco's famous silversmiths were now performing for “the transient and the naïve” and that “the foreigners who live in Taxco take villas and stay a very long time. Some may once have thought of writing a book; a few do paint.”
⁴

Like Teddy Stauffer, who opened his Casablanca Club with its death-defying pearl divers in 1943 in Acapulco, the entrepreneuring expatriates who came to Mexico catered to what Bedford called the “Americans fast and rich.”
⁵
Pat and Chloe met Teddy Stauffer in Mexico City during a season which often spelled trouble for Pat: the Christmas holiday.

Pat and Chloe arrived by train in San Antonio, Texas, from New York on 14 December 1943. Pat had a bad toothache and suffered, at the Mexican border, the first of what would become her lifelong travel troubles with luggage and typewriters. She was carrying so many books that some of her bags had to be sent back to New York, others of her bags got lost, and her typewriter was detained. The two women turned around, spent the night in Laredo, and crossed into Mexico the next day. They parked themselves at a hotel Betty Parsons had recommended to Pat, the Guardiola (Chloe, already beginning to chafe, found it distasteful and was attacking Pat verbally), and began a frantic round of going out, attracting new people, and drinking too much. Chloe stayed out later than Pat, and Pat let a man take her home and kiss her. (“Since he has got a brain it was not too bad.”)
⁶
By Christmas, Pat and Chloe had been in Mexico City for little more than a week, and their relationship was in tatters; the following year, Pat remembered this Christmas in Mexico as yet another “miserable” Christmas holiday.
⁷

Chloe, not much moved by Pat's passion for her and still in love with her husband, went out drinking every night with Teddy Stauffer, who would later succeed in charming many movie stars into his bed. (In 1951, he married the cleverest of them: Hedy Lamarr.) Stauffer's band had played jazz in the style of Benny Goodman at the infamous 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, and he turned the “Horst Wessel Song” into a “swing” number in Germany—and managed to avoid being jailed for it. The competition was too stiff for Pat. She decided that further relations with Chloe would ruin her work, and she went back to what she'd come to Mexico for in the first place: the idea of writing
The Click of the Shutting
. “My novel still needs a lot of work, of course I think of it all day long.”
⁸

By 7 January, Pat was high in the Atachi hills of Mexico, alone in picturesque Taxco except for a part-time maid, in what she called “the most beautiful house” in town: La Casa Chiquita, which she rented from the Castillo family. Before she moved into La Casa Chiquita, Pat had taken a room with a balcony and a washing machine in Taxco, bought paper and pencils, and set up a work schedule which called for her to draw in the morning, walk in the afternoon, and write at night. She drank seven cups of coffee a day and yearned for her typewriter, which hadn't yet made it over the border. She began to imagine a future for herself in Mexico—it was the future she would have in Switzerland forty years later—as a rich and famous writer in exile, estranged in a strange land and missing her native country. Pat often went away from places so she could miss them; yearning is a productive emotion for writers.

One of the reasons Pat decided to stay in Taxco was the fact that the town was so full of foreigners that trousers on women were tolerated there, as they were not in other Mexican villages. On the nineteenth of January, Pat's twenty-third birthday, Mother Mary sent her a telegram, saying that their mutual friend Jeva Cralick had a present for her. Mary also sent what Pat called a “terrible” letter, full of criticisms and endearments. “My darling,” Mary wrote, and then launched into one of her searing lectures. It was just the taste of home and the touch of emotional battery that Pat had been longing for. (In her diary, Pat was writing:
“Suche jeden Tag nach einem Brief von mother. Warum nicht? Warum?”
“Every day I look for a letter from my mother. Why not? Why?”)
⁹

Then Mary, as she often did, enclosed money in a missive, and followed that charitable act with several more letters accusing Pat of drinking too much, of not cleaning her house, and of living a “phony life” built on alcohol. Mary's letters upset Pat so much that she couldn't write her novel for a while. When she started work again, she was hoping that her former employer, Ben-Zion Goldberg, would like her book; he had telegrammed her that he was coming to visit. Grandmother Willie Mae weighed in with a letter from Fort Worth to say that she was “praying” for Pat. Pat, according to her diary, was reading and thinking about God every day.

Pat also got a letter from her father; a letter from Richard Hughes (to whom she was sending two of her “best 16 page comic book” synopses); a letter from her inquisitive seatmate at Sangor-Pines, Gerry Albert; a letter from Allela Cornell; a letter from Chloe saying she'd like to visit in February; and a letter from a man who was in love with Chloe and wanted a report on Chloe's current drinking habits. Lacking neither correspondents nor the will to correspond, Pat answered everyone. And she wrote a letter to her friend the photographer Ruth Bernhard for good measure. Another of Pat's lifelong patterns was being laid down here in her first month in Mexico: a massive and quotidian foreign correspondence.

La Casa Chiquita and its part-time maid cost Pat nearly twice as much as Saul Bellow said he had been paying for his Taxco house and two servants in 1940—Pat's rent was about fifty-four dollars a month—so the inflation of prices that accompanies American expatriatism was already biting into beautiful Taxco. Pat's house was a low adobe affair with a charming pitched roof, handcrafted Mexican tiles framing the lintel, and a cactus garden around the side. Pat did a nice drawing of the house. The native wildlife—
pulgas
(fleas) and ants and little hopping lizards—made free with the door and the open windows. In February, she took in a cat, calling it Frank. In April, the month before she left Taxco, she adopted a kitten. The kitten wouldn't sleep on her bed, perhaps in mute rebellion against the name she gave it: Fragonard.
¹⁰

Very soon, Pat began to set down in her cahier her customarily sharp character notes, longer than the ones she usually wrote, on the expatriate residents of Taxco. She was finding or seeking in her neighbors what she would always find or seek in humans: cracks in their characters, traits and patterns which reinforced her view that human behavior was unreliable, double-natured, and capable of turning on a dime. Pat looked into people for much the same reasons that she read books or fell in love with women: to “recognize” something in them that corresponded to her belief that life was flawed, cleft, and sundered.

And so the “characters” she records in her cahiers often appear to have been alive in her imagination long before she met and described them—rather than the other way around. (The cool eye Pat cast on people would always merge with her imaginative taste for fiasco: despite having at least a normal experience of both, she almost never wrote about “good” people or “happy” circumstances in her notebooks.) But the unusual thing about these Taxco portraits is just how affectionate their ironies are: especially her portrait of “Paul Cook,” a budding “hero-criminal.” Pat was young, only twenty-three, and as yet relatively unembittered. Nothing would ever be quite so affectionate again.

Although Pat complained constantly of loneliness, continued to yearn for letters from her mother (and felt terrible when she got them), and cursed the food on a daily basis (“Fish again!” “Ohh, if only I could have a carrot, a banana, a piece of celery with no salt! I would be so happy!”),
¹¹
she was deeply engaged by Taxco and by the side trips she took to Acapulco, Jalapa, Cuernavacas, Monterrey, and other places. Her descriptions of her neighbors are as graphic as if they were painted. Oddly, these descriptions were dulled down, made less vivid and plausible and emotional, when she folded them into her Mexican fictions: the two short stories (“In the Plaza”
¹²
and “The Car”
¹³
) and the one novel (
A Game for the Living
) written from her direct experience of Mexico. It is only in their original form—a portrait gallery of the people who surrounded her in Taxco in the winter and spring of 1944—that these studies give a picture of Pat's artistic weights and measures, of her intense socializing (despite constant claims of loneliness), and of the exotic environment in which she had chosen to work on her first novel.