The Talented Miss Highsmith (38 page)
Read The Talented Miss Highsmith Online
Authors: Joan Schenkar
Pat's American agent for twenty years, Patricia Schartle (from 1970, after she married, she was known as Patricia Schartle Myrer) agrees with Bissinger. Pat first brought herself to Schartle's attention in 1958, after she had fallen out with her first real agent, Margot Johnson, a supportive woman who was, says Patricia Schartle, twenty years older than Pat and, “like Pat,” a “notorious lesbian and a drunk.”
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Schartle was recommended to Pat by a woman who had been Schartle's copy editor when Schartle was editor in chief at the Appleton-Century Publishing Company. By the time Pat met Patricia Schartle, she had travelled extensively and lived in Europe, won two foreign literary awards, and spent a couple of years living with Doris, an advertising copywriter, in the socially exclusive outpost of Snedens Landing (yet another good address) in Palisades, New York, just outside New York City. There, says Schartle, Pat had begun to think of herself as “a sophisticated cosmopolitan who had lived abroad and had great success.”
But Pat was not cosmopolitan, writes Schartle, and certainly not cosmopolitan enough to handle herself socially in Snedens Landing, where “the artists [Katharine] Cornell, [Guthrie] McClintock, Nancy Hamilton, The Murphies [Gerald and Sara], Paul Manship, etc. etc., were
really
cosmopolitanâ¦. [S]he did not fit in. When Noel Coward and the Lunts visited Cornell she would have been totally out of place. Even after the first success of
Strangers
she knew she would be more interesting if she returned and lived in Europe. It was one of the few things we really talked about. Living abroad saved her.”
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Pat's social awkwardnesses and confusions were usually most apparent in formal or crowded
milieux
; places where instant recognitions of social and cultural patterns were necessary. Without directions, without a chart or a map or a near-diagrammatic understanding of a social situation, Pat was often lost in a maze. (Most of Manhattan, with its gridiron street design, was an uncomplicated pleasure to Pat, while Greenwich Village, with its atypically winding streets and wayward byways, was one of her favorite venues for fictional crime.)
In the mid-1960s, in London, Caroline Besterman witnessed Pat's discomfort with crowds. “I'm a great football fan and I took Pat to the Arsenal once in Highbury, to a football game there: fifty thousand people. It was hilarious. âHow do they know when to stop?' she askedâ¦. What she meant was that play stops when the referee blows the whistle, but she was too [stupefied]âliterallyâto figure that out. It's a simple game but it has many subtleties. Women didn't go then; it was the maleness of the crowd, I think, that confused her. She couldn't understand it.”
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Social awkwardness was not the only jarring trait people noticed in Pat as she got older. There was something else, too, something Pat herself often mentioned in her self-appraising way. It was the sense that something was “wrong” with Pat. Or rather, the sense that something was “not right” with her. People close to Pat felt this, made allowances for it, and tried to avoid its consequences. Patricia Schartle writes:
When I first met Highsmith and in the years that followed, I felt great sympathy for her. She was forever ill at ease. Awkward and gauche, she had very little grace, if any. She was hard to like. No I did not like her. But I cared about her. One did not like her because there was a curious cunning about her just when you thought she might be more human.
Caroline Besterman felt something like this, too. Pat, says Caroline, always thought that “people didn't help her,” but
I have never seen someone who was so “helped.” And she was given so much leeway, everyone gave her leewayâand had it been anyone else they would have been thrown out the door. It wasn't sympathy, exactly, it was some sort of feeling that she must somehow have got something wrong with her. But no, you couldn't do anything, she would be sidetracked onto a branch line that went God knows where. She had no way of saying, “Well, that's that.” It was very, very sad, given that she had a very good capacity for being a good friend and having a good time and making fun of everybody and all that kind of thing. And being witty and making a quick little drawing. But it didn't last because nothing was right enough for her. She wanted
more
.
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One evening in 1963, when Pat first moved to Suffolk, a friend invited her to have dinner at an old hotel in Aldeburgh. Pat tended to be “very mute” in Aldeburgh, says the friend, because it was full of the “old bourgeoisie. There were writers there, there were artists there, and they were all extremely âU'” [Nancy Mitford's borrowed term for upper-class characteristics]âand Pat “didn't like that either because she didn't understand it. It frightened her.” But the hotel was full of “nice people.”
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“The owner of [the hotel], an extremely bizarre woman, was a good artist; a very excitable but interesting person, and sharp as anything. We arrived and we were having a drink in the dining hall and another visitor who was a psychiatrist went over to Connie and [nodding in Pat's direction] said: âYou do know you have a psychopath in the hall.' Yes. Just from observation of Pat. Connie told me this because she had always suspected, too, that there was not anything at all right with Pat.”
“I remember Pat sitting there with a hard, baffled look on her face. She was lost; these people were all very sure of themselves. A heavy, a really heavy look. Full of hatred.”
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“The two of them,” Caroline Besterman said, referring to what she believed was the root of Pat's problem. “Mary and Pat. Just destroying each other. Like the old nursery rhyme: âThe gingham dog and the calico cat side by side on the mantle sat'â¦and they tore each other to pieces. It was one of those
real
nursery rhymes, you know. Dark. I was always very fond of it.”
*
Karl Bissinger lived with Johnny Nicholson on East Fifty-eighth Street between First and Second Avenues just a couple of blocks from Pat, and he used to see her on the street “all the time” when she was still working for the comics. They were neighbors in a New Yorkish kind of way, and his recollections of Pat were vivid.
I knew Pat before the war; when the war was coming on. It was her psychosexual presentation that drew me to her: The Troubled Woman. And we were seen, roughly, in the sameâlet's call it what it wasâlesbian set.
The war years in New York were very interesting because the forbidden lifeâthings now are complicated in another way and on the surfaceâthe forbidden life was alive [if you knew where to look for it]. Before the Kinsey Report, they used to say that 2 percent of the world was homosexual, and if that's true, then it's like the Jews: they've had the biggest influence on everything in the world that any group ever hadâ¦.
Everyone drank a lot more in the 1940s. Imagine having three martinis before lunch and going back to the office. It can't be done now, but everyone did it thenâ¦.
One of the things we did, we would get together once a week or so, hire a model, and have a sketch classâ¦. Let's call it “Bohemia” for lack of a better word. We all know what that meant in those days. Some of us had money, some of us were on our way somewhere, and some if us were, I guess, shooting up, and I don't know what some of us were doing. Most of the people in the group were what we now call “gay.” And among the people who came to the sketch class was Pat Highsmith.
Now Pat, I liked her immediately because she was difficult; and when I say difficult I mean she was the kind of womanâyou immediately sensed this as a maleâyou sensed she didn't like men. She just plain didn't like men. On the other hand, she sensed my empathy for her, the fact that I liked her. She didn't smile easily and she made NO effort to reach out socially as far as I had any idea. She was very reserved and I sort of understood very much that she was what I would call “angry at the world.” In those days, I would have called her a “man-hater.” But of course, she had a long life, she went abroad, she could have changed, I'm sure there were lots of other sides to her.
It was clear that she would have preferred to be a manâthough that's an oversimplification of the complicated emotional thing that she had. I liked the way she cut her hair. She made an effort not to be what we used to call “butch.” Underneath that, of course, that was clearly what she was.
The gossip: Pat was supposed to be in love with Babs Simpson.
*
When you talk about Americans being aristocrats, Babs Simpson is a wonderful example. [She came from the de Monocol family,] who had a lot of money. A lot of these kids in this drawing class had a lot of money. [Babs] was one of the senior fashion editors who went from
Harper's Bazaar
to
Vogue.
These were the days when the top fashion magazines, almost all of them, had poetry editors and
Harper's
was the first to publish Truman Capote and I could go down the list of all the neurotics they published. Carson McCullers [for example]âwho was out of the same pod as Pat Highsmith. They were two women who probably wouldn't like each other if they knew each other. I don't know that they did know each other, though they probably did.
Carson McCullers and Pat did know each other, and one Sunday afternoon, 27 February 1949 to be precise, Pat and two of the women she was sleeping with, Jeanne and Dione, went to visit Carson McCullers and her family at the McCullerses' house in Nyack, New York, a half hour's drive outside of New York City. Pat's diary notes on the day were succinct: “Carson very hospitable, and we stay for about 4 hours. Reeves (Carson's husband), her mother, and Margerita Smith, her sister.” Carson continued, all afternoon, to tell Pat that she had a “very good figure.” And Pat continued, all afternoon, to drink Cokes and sherry. No one seems to have disliked anyone, although Pat did allow herself the comment that she'd heard Reeves and Carson had been drinking too much in Paris.
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“The reason I remember these small things,” says Karl Bissinger,
is because Pat's name kept flashing across the screen of memory as her books came out. I began to follow her as a writer, and I began to read in her writing so much of what I knew instinctively about her: the anger that was deep within her. She really looked at herself through masculine eyes. On the other hand she did know a little something about what was called bisexual menâor men who were meant to be bisexualâ¦. It was clear that she adored the looks of those ambiguous males she wrote about.
I'm sure nobody could claim they knew Patriciaâ¦.
My feeling about Pat is that she was only interested in success. That would make up for a lot of the anger which she probably carried around.
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Pat, in her periods of social confidence in the 1940s, during which she was certain of her destiny and her attractiveness, lived in a whirl of social and sexual connections, and continued to assess everyone with a coroner's eye, were always followed by equal and opposite periods of feelings of insufficiency. The flights and drops of her self-regard in her private writings are as regular as the ups and downs of a working seesaw. But Pat's interests and attractions, as they had in high school, still flew everywhere: to “Hilda” and “Mary” and “Jackie” and “Dickie” and “Barbara” and “ABBOTT” (Berenice Abbott) and “Billie” and “Corinne” and “Virginia.” Several Virginias. And then there was “Madeleine Bemelmans,” a student at Barnard, ten years older than Pat, who was the wife of the writer, illustrator, and wit Ludwig Bemelmans and the eponym of his enchanting
Madeline
books.
*
Pat liked Madeleine Bemelmans, was interested by her husband's success, and kept in sporadic touch with her for some years.
During the early 1940s, Pat attended the mostly female parties in the two flats and a hallway that Berenice Abbott shared with her lover, the editor Elizabeth McCausland, on the fourth floor of an old building at 50 Commerce Street in Greenwich Village. (Pat complained that the females at Abbott's parties weren't interesting enough).
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Abbott, an inventor of photographic apparatuses and one of the world's great photographers, washed her own prints in a big wooden tub in her studio, lamenting, “No matter what I do, these prints won't last more than a hundred years.”
33
Mother Mary's suspicions were aroused: “Is she a les [lesbian]?” Mary inelegantly queried Pat about Berenice Abbott. Pat adroitly replied that there were always men at Abbott's parties.
With her women friends, and later with her professional acquaintances, Pat was always concerned with who was “superior” to whom. Her compulsion was to list, rank, classify, and put everyone in their proper place in relation to herself (i.e.: “V[irginia] better than J.S. & also has a brain”). Pat also weighed herself obsessively, recording the results (they ranged from “108½” to “114”), and washed her hands, as she said, “too often.” In both high school and college Pat liked to note the failing grades of her classmates, to calculate their suitability for friendship (“She has no contacts that I know of”),
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to record their (and her) couplings and uncouplings, and to refer to all her connections as “Proustian.” What she meant by this was that her relationships were complicated
and
snobbish, but her use of the adjective “Proustian” gives a good idea of just how grandly the adolescent Pat was phrasing her social life.
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