The Talented Miss Highsmith (35 page)

Pat had Edgar Allan Poe at the back of her mind while she was working on
The Click of the Shutting
(she was thinking of “William Wilson,” Poe's 1839 tale of paranoid and murderous doubles, when she named the house's proprietary family “Willson”). But despite long, shapely passages and some subtle characterizations, much of her writing approached the ungainly style that made the novelist E. L. Doctorow call Edgar Allan Poe a “genius hack” and “our greatest bad writer.”
³⁰

Besides “great detail,” Pat invested the Willson house with its own “character,” and her manuscript predates by fifteen years the next American novel to present a house with a personality: Shirley Jackson's elegant psychological ghost story,
The Haunting of Hill House.
The first sentence of Jackson's 1959 work could almost be a summary of the reasons Pat would always give for why she wrote. “No live organism,” Shirley Jackson wrote, “can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.
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Pat began to make little notes for
The Click of the Shutting
six weeks before she started work for Richard Hughes at Sangor-Pines. In September of 1942, she'd been imagining the “enormous possibilities” of using adolescents as major characters “in a novel.” She was thinking about (but not reading again) André Gide's
The Counterfeiters,
reminding herself of the precocity of his teenagers.
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A week after Hughes hired her, Pat began extending her notes into the idea of a novel about an artistic teenage boy who spies upon the house and enters the life of another, far wealthier boy.
³³

Pat was, after all, still an adolescent herself (she liked to think of herself as an adolescent boy), and so she imagined Gregory Bullick as a high school student who had some of the characteristics of one of her high school friends. “Let Gregory = B.B. but he will not be the main character because he is a Jew. A perfectionist.”
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“B.B.” was Babs, the close friend of Judy Tuvim (Holliday) and a girl to whom Pat had been attracted. But as Pat, in Taxco, was writing her way through the comic book scenarios she was mailing back to Sangor-Pines in Manhattan, her notes for Gregory show that she was allowing him to split off, to become half of a double nature, to take something from her own psychology and something from what she was writing for Richard Hughes.
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She gave Gregory some of her tastes, too: sending him to Carnegie Hall to see the cross-dressed Flamenco dancer, Carmen Amaya, by whom both she and Ruth Bernhard had been enthalled.
³⁶

So Gregory loses his “Jewishness” and his minor status and becomes a major character whose homoerotic attachments and meek outward demeanor are more like Patricia Highsmith's—and more like the Alter Egos she is writing for Sangor-Pines (“Bob Benton: mild-mannered young pharmacist”)—than they are like the traits of Dostoyevsky's liverish young antiheroes or Gide's perversely philosophical adolescent geniuses.

An impoverished boy, Gregory is also a talented one, and parasitical in his attachments to the other, richer boys he worships. He has some of Pat's protectiveness about his art: he is horribly insulted when a friend of his father's looks at his drawing of “the wind” and says: “It's nothing.” He shares with Pat the double conviction that he is worthless and that, therefore, the world must revolve around him. Gregory's narcissism fosters the creation of an Alter Ego the way a petri dish encourages the growth of bacteria; he's a candidate for the dark side of the American Dream. “[Gregory] felt he was driven by some terrific energy that would never exhaust itself and that must surely translate itself finally into something magnificent.”
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Like Pat, he “driv[es] himself on nerve alone” and loves the “destructive” way this makes him feel.
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Gregory lives with his alcoholic father, a failed passport photographer, in a disheveled loft in Pat's old neighborhood in Greenwich Village. Gregory uses Pat's old subway stop, the Christopher Street station, and, like her, he has a penchant for good addresses, fine houses, and drinking at Pete's Tavern. He comes back every day for weeks to spy on the house of the Willson family, with whose spoiled and destructive son, George, he creates a rivalrous and Alter Ego–like relationship. Gregory is also a would-be novelist.

When Gregory enters George Willson's house for the first time, George sees that Gregory is ravished by the house's interior; Gregory seems zombie-like to George, seems “to be in a perpetual trance…. It was like he was dead and would do anything he was told to do.”
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Gregory is trying to think himself into George Willson's body, trying to be “born directly into heaven without the trouble of a lifetime of living and dying.”
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“Wanting the house was a strange and unreasonable thing.”
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Wanting George's family was even stranger: “It was as much the imagined household as the physical house that he loved.”
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As though the Willsons have been compelled by the force of Gregory's feelings, they pack off their son George to a military academy and invite Gregory to take his place. While Gregory is not the first of Pat's long line of adopted or semiadopted characters—that distinction goes to the “boy called Mary” in “The Legend of the Convent of St. Fotheringay”—Gregory is the first fully developed character who is “adopted,” and the first one who tries to replace his Alter Ego. In
The Click of the Shutting,
Pat was beginning to test out some of the abiding themes—replacement, substitution, and forgery—that would color even the works she devoted to women. Therese in
The Price of Salt
is an “orphan” whose absent, neglectful mother is still alive, while Edith Howland of
Edith's Diary
has unresponsive parents but a motherly Aunt Melanie.

Pat's imagination liked to exclude birth families or destroy them, and this preference found expression even in her most casual lines. One of them was part of a little limerick she wrote in 1976: “Home presents a dismal picture / Things are gloomy as the tomb.”
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Another is a note she took a couple of years later: “Families are nice to visit but I wouldn't want to live with one.”
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André Gide, Pat's literary guide to sexualizing adolescents, had already reduced the familial subject to its essentials:
“Familles! Je vous haïs!”

Early on, Pat was thinking of The Murder in
The Click of the Shutting
as essential: “[c]ommitted on a day when Dominick and Donato [she uses the names of several other paired boys in subplots: Bernard and Charles, Gregory and George, Alex and Paul, etc.] have been laughing too much.”
⁴⁵
In a later version, it is the boys' high school teacher who is murdered. Pat frames this murder in homosexual terms, and the killing is committed, once again, because the boys have been laughing too much:

In the notes Pat made for the end of
The Click of the Shutting
(she managed 385 pages before abandoning it as unfinishable) she indicated that she wanted Gregory to sketch George's mother, Margaret, then sleep with her, and then, in a scuffle with George, accidentally kill her. Her first idea was that it was Margaret's son, George Willson, who should do the killing.

As befits a recent college graduate whose longest experience of life has been school, Pat's imagination of the high school in
The Click of the Shutting
is the best thing in the novel. Reminiscent of Kafka's confining structures, the school is more vicious, more contemporary, and less randomly organized than Kafka's trackless mental architectures. The deteriorating physical plant—everything is gray and greasy and abandoned—the violent hall monitors, the hungover children, the persistent and cruel torturing of teachers by students and the students' torturing of each other, are both uncomfortably modern and sinisterly Gothic.

Many of Pat's conflicted feelings about women went straight into the male characters of
The Click of the Shutting
. It was a double displacement for her (and a nice play on Gide's idea of
dédoublement,
although her understanding of Gide was limited to his adolescent boys) by which, as she became a boy on the page, she lost both her “female self” and her “real” antipathies for women. (Pat had begun the book by thinking of herself as the boy who would fall in love with George's mother, Margaret.) Her antipathies towards women were much more powerful (and much less subtle) when she wrote about them in the voice of her cahiers, which was, more or less, her own voice. Or, rather,
one
of her voices.

Gregory has odd feelings about girls: “Most of all he hated to bump into the girls' breast. Their soft pressure was to him unclean and a little spooky.”
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Everett, George Willson's uncle, looks down into the “disconcertingly intense face” of his wife, Lydia, and says: “You remind me of Lady Macbeth.”
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And “[a]s he strokes her hair, he thinks: It was an ugly thing he did, touching her…a very ugly thing.”
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George Willson plays a nastily misogynist game with his great uncle Alfred called “Lord Twitchbottom and Lady Twot.”

Gregory develops a crush on another wealthy male classmate, too, Paul Cotton. “His devotion to Paul was a far worthier thing, for Paul was a fine person.” Gregory, as Tom Ripley will do ten years later, impersonates the object of his crush: “Still being Paul, mingling friendliness with unconcern, he descended the rest of the stairs.”
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And, just as Ripley will do, Gregory makes a throat-slitting gesture in front of a mirror with a razor and calls out the name of Paul's girlfriend.
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Gregory's crush on Paul might have forced
The Click of the Shutting
to follow an even more dangerous direction—but Pat held that particular fire for
The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Pat worked diligently on
The Click of the Shutting
in Taxco, in between bouts of watching her recent history parade itself before her eyes. Ben-Zion Goldberg, her employer from FFF Publications, did come to visit her in Mexico, just as he'd written he would, and he stayed there mooning around her for quite a while. He told Pat he wanted to share a house with her for “two years.” Mother Mary took alarm from afar, calling him an “old goat” in a letter. Goldberg and Pat did some travelling together—to Acapulco, principally, in March—and some flirting too.

In Acapulco, Pat worked on her novel while small lizards ran through her room and across the roof, and a “noisy pig” noisily enjoyed the orange peels she'd thrown away.
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The heavy concentration of ions in the air excited and energized her; the green sparks she and Goldberg could make by stamping on wet sand and the sparks she saw dancing on the water made her “very happy.” Those green sparks found their way into another interesting, unfinished text Pat would set partially in Mexico:
The Dove Descending
.

Ben-Zion Goldberg, according to Pat, was in love with her, and he came to the same conclusion most of Pat's rejected admirers would come to: “Goldberg says that I'm incapable of loving, that I am in love…. with myself.” On their trip to Acapulco, Goldberg visited her diligently every night at eleven o'clock in her room by the sea to speak about her novel and about their possible relations. And he stayed, talking, until the early hours of the morning.
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He was too much of a gentleman to press his case with more than a few “advances”—and Pat was too much of a lesbian to be interested in them.

“His conversation is very inspiring,” Pat wrote in her Mexico Diary of their Acapulco trip, “and he tries with much patience to make me really fall in love with him, but that is impossible.”
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Goldberg would later ask her to read a lengthy novel he'd written, so she could show it to her agent, Margot Johnson. Pat didn't find much in the manuscript to interest her.

On 20 March, taking the swaying bus back from Acapulco to Taxco with Goldberg (who accompanied Pat even though it was out of his way), Pat refused to sit with other people because she wanted “to dream” by herself. When the bus stopped in Tierra Colorada, she was suddenly and sharply transfixed by the figure of a child which seemed to materialize out of previous “dreams”—transgressive dreams about young girls. This figure was “a nine year old girl, the most beautiful girl I've seen in Mexico. I wanted to bring her with me. She was asking for some centavos with others. I thought of her until Chispamingo and Iguala.”
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Just before she left Taxco for the United States, Pat saw Chloe again, “my alcoholic beauty…in Mexico City. She, being immune to the subtle…effects of this Latin atmosphere, is staying on. Her hands still shake as badly as they did in New York—and for the same thing.”
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As usual, Pat's interest in herself and in what was directly around her in Mexico precluded interest in anything else. The Second World War didn't wrest much prose from her pen. The few entries she made in her journals about the war seem to have been made in summary, with an eye to her future readers. They run along the lines of the journal entry she made shortly before leaving Barnard: