The Talented Miss Highsmith (43 page)

At Lerman's Sundays, “[p]eople came for one another [and not for the food or the drink]…. Tennessee, Truman, Gore, Mr. Faulkner…I remember passing Tilly Losch on the landing, kissing Martha Graham's hand.”
¹¹³
Le tout
New York and many of its brilliant war refugees were there: Marlene Dietrich, Eleonora von Mendelssohn, Pearl Kazin, Muriel Draper, Adolph Green and Betty Comden, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Truman Capote, Jane Bowles, John La Touche, Imogene Coca, Carl Van Vechten, Stark Young, Eugene Berman, and Ruth Landshoff-Yorck.

Pat liked to position herself at the outer edge of this inner circle: the view was good, the participants famous or notorious, and the interaction was strictly voluntary. She was both an admiring audience and a resentful one, as this recollection of her salad days shows: “[T]he forties were the days of somewhat snob magazines…. All was whimsy, fuzziness, humour—of closed circle sort. Obscure, too. Tinged with Edith Sitwell and Djuna Barnes…. I was in my twenties and in awe of them all, because they had literary recognition and all that.”
¹¹⁴
In the canny guest list that the twenty-nine-year-old Pat prepared for the launch party for her novel
Strangers on a Train
—the book was published on the ides of March 1950, the party was given at Mme Lyne's apartment, and Mother Mary, miffed at not having received a personal invitation from Mme Lyne, refused to come—both Leo Lerman and Djuna Barnes were invited. Neither of them came. Djuna Barnes pleaded a “sprained back,” and Pat thought Leo Lerman didn't show up because he was offended that “I didn't send him an advance copy of my book.”
¹¹⁵

Still, she said she found Lerman's Sundays “very agreeable” indeed. Pat's friend Lil Picard compared the company there “with the one she knew in Berlin before Hitler; intellectuals, free spirits; the first that would disappear.”
¹¹⁶

Pat met both Truman Capote and film actress Luise Rainer in January of 1948 at one of Lerman's Sundays. She also made the acquaintance of yet another of her young male Jewish suitors, Lewis Howard, “a pleasant writer. Really—ideas that we were married—daydreams. I had to tell him everything about me.” Pat alternated her romantic dreams of Howard—“I have the constant feeling that Lewis is going to be my husband”
¹¹⁷
—with slightly less romantic reflections: a discussion of contraception with Mother Mary (“I feel so feminine tonight!”) and the realization that “Lewis is a Jew, therefore I feel even more that I can't go to him. But we have so much in common.”
¹¹⁸
She intermitted these thoughts with some even more characteristic ideas: “I want to change my sex. Is it possible?…Twice I tried to sleep with Lewis—masochistic failure. Lewis is an angel of patience [but I have] [n]o pleasure—God—how funny! When all parents have to forbid their children—I hate it!”
¹¹⁹

Three days after another failed attempt at making love with Lewis (she didn't call it making love), Pat was happy to see Truman Capote again at Leo Lerman's. This was the year that Capote's first novel,
Other Voices, Other Rooms
would be published, with the back cover adorned by the notorious Harold Halma photograph of the young author reclining in resplendent decadence on a Victorian sofa. Truman, three years younger than Pat, and as talented a self-publicist as he promised to be a writer (he'd posed that sulphurous Halma photograph himself when he was only twenty-two), shared an Alabama background with Pat. (Capote's mother's backwoods Alabama name—before she changed it to the more sophisticated Nina—was Lillie Mae, like the Willie Mae of Pat's own Alabama-born grandmother.) Capote was the most prominent of the Alabamians who fetched up in Manhattan in the 1940s. Another of them, Truman's childhood friend from Alabama, Nelle Harper Lee, the future author of
To Kill a Mockingbird,
was also living on the Upper East Side, trying to make her writerly way.

On this Sunday afternoon at Leo Lerman's, Truman sat next to Pat and “held my hand and was very devoted. He wants to see my room.”
¹²⁰
The next day, the first of March, Truman went with Pat to see her studio apartment on East Fifty-sixth Street—he was thinking of renting it as a writing studio so he could finish
The Tree of Night,
and she had been thinking of going to New Orleans—and he liked it. And Pat liked “to go out with little Truman: He is so attentive and so famous! And so sweet!”
¹²¹
Pat changed her mind about going to New Orleans, and she eventually changed her mind about Truman (as she did about nearly everyone), but Truman didn't change his opinion of Pat: his biographer Gerald Clarke writes that “Capote's high opinion of her work never wavered.”
¹²²
And Donald Windham, who never met Patricia but knew Capote very well, confirms it: “Truman always spoke well of Highsmith's novels to me.”
¹²³

After having dinner with Mother Mary and Rolf Tietgens, Pat and Truman agreed on the apartment rental: he gave her eighty dollars for two months' rent. Decades later, she began to say that she and Capote had a “deal”: that he had sublet her apartment in return for recommending her to Yaddo, the artist's colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. Although Capote did send his recommendation letter for Pat to Yaddo the day after the apartment money changed hands, Pat had already been thinking of going to New Orleans; she wanted, anyway, to sublet her apartment; and there is not one word about a “deal” in her diary. Capote had probably suggested Yaddo to Pat as a better idea than New Orleans, and she made the best of a situation that would supply her with both a paying sublettor
and
a recommender to an arts colony. Capote's recommendation to Yaddo was addressed to Elizabeth Ames, Yaddo's imposing director, and it shows, even for a young man given to hyperbole, just how taken he was with Pat.

“She is really enormously gifted, one story of hers shows a talent as fine as any I know. Moreover, she is a charming, thoroughly civilized person, someone I'm quite certain you would like.”
¹²⁴

It was during this March that Pat, accompanied by Jeanne (one of the several women she was sleeping with while trying to establish a physical relationship with Lewis Howard), went to see what she called “the best play of my life”:
A Streetcar Named Desire
by Tennessee Williams. Unlike Williams himself, who reserved his tenderness for Blanche DuBois (the Southern fantasist who depends upon “the kindness of strangers”), Pat didn't announce a character preference. But perhaps one of her reasons for calling it “the best play of my life” was that she recognized something of Mother Mary in Blanche Dubois's rearrangements of reality—“I don't tell the truth. I tell what ought to be the truth,” Blanche says—and something of herself in the themes of male violence and homosexuality that run under the play.

On the day of the evening she saw
Streetcar,
Pat began “my first snail story,” “The Snail-Watcher.” “I like it,” she noted, pleased with herself.
¹²⁵

Over the years, Pat would repeat a couple of origin stories for her first attraction to snails. They are disturbing stories, involving long descriptions of what it was that fascinated her about the molluscs: watching the “mating process” of two living organisms that “can go on for fourteen hours.” She found it “relaxing” to watch her snails mate because their copulation had “an aesthetic quality, nothing more bestial in it than necking, really,” and she liked to take her snails on trips with her. In Suffolk, in her cottage at Earl Soham in the 1960s, Pat kept three hundred snails as pets, and her longest-lived snail, Hortense (who appears with her real-life, loving snail partner Edgar in
Deep Water
), was, Pat claimed, “the world's most widely travelled snail. She has been to New York and back by jet, and has visited Paris, Rome, and Venice.” “It is quite impossible,” Pat wrote happily about her snails, “to tell which is the male and which is the female, because their behavior and appearance is exactly the same.”

The first of Pat's own origin stories about how she took up with snails is from 1946: she saw, in this version, snails locked in an embrace in a fish store and took six of them home. Her second story is from 1949: Pat, passing the same fish store in Manhattan, saw two snails “kissing”—[l]ittle did I know they were mating”—and brought them home to keep as pets because they “shouldn't be separated.” “The mother snail gives [the baby snails] no assistance and never appears to even see them,” she wrote in an undated self-interview she composed about her attraction to snails. “But,” she went on in what sounds like a pointed reference to her relations with her mother, “I have never found an adult snail damaging a baby snail by crawling over it.”
¹²⁶

Pat showed this first snail story—in which the intense mating of pet snails generates enough offspring to smother to death the admiring man who has kept them (love kills, even in the sticky world of molluscs)—to her college friend Kingsley, whom she hadn't seen in a long time. Kingsley said it gave her the “only happy day she has had in months” and that she found the snail story “funny.” Lil Picard, who began her friendship with Pat by praising her story “The World's Champion Ball-Bouncer” (published in
Woman's Home Companion
in April of 1948), “loved” “The Snail-Watcher,” and Pat wrote that she was “so overflowing with happiness if
anybody
loves something from me!”
¹²⁷

“The Snail-Watcher” would go on to have a checkered publishing history. In June of 1948, Pat wrote to Kingsley from Yaddo: “My snail story that I adore, my agent writes is too repellent to show editors. Cannot express how disappointed I am. Have even offered to bowdlerize it.”
¹²⁸
In 1960, “The Snail-Watcher” was finally bought by Pat's friend Jack Matcha, who edited “
Gamma
[magazine] of California.” It had, she said, “elicit[ed] ‘nays' and ‘ughs' from editors” for twelve solid years, and she noted grimly that just after “The Snail-Watcher” appeared in
Gamma,
the magazine was “seized for bankruptcy.”
¹²⁹

Part 2

Before Pat applied to the artists' colony called Yaddo in March of 1948 to work on
Strangers on a Train,
another art colony, the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, had already turned her down. She muttered something about how this proved you had to know people to get in anywhere—it was true for Yaddo, which preferred to select its “guests” from recommendations made by previous colonists—and then she went on to apply to Yaddo using the kind of recommenders (besides Truman Capote) who “knew people”: Marguerite Young, the novelist and Greenwich Village resident; Mary Louise Aswell, the literary editor of
Harper's Bazaar
; Rosalind Constable, the cultural eyes of the Luce empire; Ethel Sturtevant, her old literature professor at Barnard College; and Margot Johnson, her literary agent.

Yaddo was an obvious choice for Pat. Many of the writers, composers, and artists she was meeting in New York—and many of those she would later meet—had spent time at Yaddo. Leo Lerman went there with Truman Capote; Marguerite Young was a perennial guest; Marc Blitzstein, David Diamond, Virgil Thompson, Buffie Johnson, Paul Bowles, Carson McCullers, and dozens of others had all worked at their various arts in the main mansion, in the icehouse Tower, or in the fanciful stone-and-shingle West House on Yaddo's four hundred secluded acres.

Yaddo made a little revision to Pat's arrival date, and Mary Highsmith, moving as she always did into any territory Pat was trying to occupy, responded for her daughter in her best white-glove manner while Pat was out of town. “In the interest of my daughter, Patricia, I am taking the liberty of answering your note.
¹
Mary's letter affirmed the change in Pat's arrival from 3 May to 10 May and that she would be staying for two months. Finally, the thing was done and Pat was there.

Three weeks into her residency, Pat was praising Yaddo in a letter to Kingsley (and indirectly praising Kingsley) to the skies: “Yaddo is everything you've ever heard about it and lots more…. [T]he solitude builds up great electrical charges of gregariousness…so that when we do go on a spree we overdo and suffer 48 hour hangovers…. [T]he work seems going fine, I am staying on the subject like a tightrope walker, but it is already a little longer than I should like. I have cause to think of you every day certainly, because I've used your plot suggestions to get going on it.”
²

But Pat was less thrilled with her fellow colonists, who were not, as she'd hoped, people who “knew” people: “A singularly dull bunch, no big names—though Marc Brandel is interesting…. Chester Himes [the black, gay male novelist installed across the hall from her in West House] tried to kiss me in my room. Did I mention it? Never mind. I read the Bible every morning.”
³

Of the eleven other colonists who were at Yaddo while Pat was there, four of them were men who irritated her by borrowing money and cigarettes from her and “forgetting” to pay her back. Marc Brandel, an attractive six-footer with red-gold hair and a radiating intelligence, was one of the borrowers, but he, at least, balanced his debt by proposing marriage to her four times in six weeks. Another male colonist who was at Yaddo with his artist wife was similarly smitten. But because Pat was sneaking her current lover Jeanne onto the Yaddo premises (and enraging “the board” by going off to Glens Falls for two nights with her), she wasn't bothering much about the women at Yaddo.

When Pat arrived at Yaddo's rural retreat in Saratoga Springs, the colony had already been in operation for twenty-two years. The Corporation of Yaddo was formed in 1900 by Katrina and Spencer Trask, artistically minded, wealthy, philanthropic residents of Brooklyn, New York, who bought the land that became Yaddo with an old Queen Anne
maison de maître
on it for summer living. Eventually, their haunting and melodramatic family history—four children tragically dead and their summerhouse burned to the ground—inspired them to construct four lakes to commemorate the spirits of their dead children and to build a brooding stone mansion on the ashes of the house that had burned down. They added eccentrically designed outbuildings to shelter the bodies and stimulate the work habits of the artists to whom they had decided to consecrate their property.

The main mansion at Yaddo, always described as “Tudor-like,” mixes the Gothic and the Medieval with a dash of Victorian fantasy. Several hundred yards away, West House, the turreted building where Pat was billeted in May and June of 1948, is the material of which fantasies are made. The Trasks indulged themselves with elaborate dramatic scenarios (Katrina Trask was crowned “Queen of Yaddo” in one such ceremony), and once the Corporation had been firmly established with Elizabeth Ames at its head, the resident artists did the same thing in their work.

Pat, who lived at home the whole time she was going to Barnard College, had never had a taste of dormitory life. The moment she got to Yaddo she set about transforming Yaddo's Elizabeth Ames into a dormitory mistress: She Who Must Be Disobeyed. Pat was not alone in this behavior. Many colonists, lapsing into early adolescence in the dignified presence of Miss Ames, would stage rebellions against her. The worst rebellion occurred in 1949, the year after Pat was in residence, when the poet Robert Lowell tried to have Miss Ames denounced and fired as a Communist sympathizer.

So, while Pat did her work at Yaddo and did it religiously (in every sense of the word), she also systematically violated the colony's rules. In a spring season of hard-drinking colonists, Pat was a standout. The day after she arrived at Yaddo, she walked with a group of other Yaddo guests into the town of Saratoga Springs (a refreshing two-mile hike if you weren't drunk), quaffed almost as many martinis and Manhattans as she had fingers on both hands, added a skinful of wine to her cocktails, and nearly passed out in the restaurant. She managed to drink Marc Brandel under the table: “Marc soon succumbed, with his carrot hair in his carrot soup.”
⁴
Her hard drinking caught Elizabeth Ames's attention, and Pat thought the drinking and her association with Marc Brandel were the reasons she was turned down for a second residency at Yaddo a year later.
⁵

A month into her stay, Pat was mixing Jehovah up with Bacchus—or perhaps just mixing her morning martinis with her morning Bible reading.

“I am drunk every morning almost, at Yaddo. Who knows not what I mean knows not the kingdom of heaven within him. I am the God-intoxicated, the material-intoxicated, the art-intoxicated, yes and the something that would transcend even God-intoxicated!”
⁶

Pat drank at Yaddo, she told herself, to harness the creative energy that was coursing through her with a power she found terrifying. Pat always had a handful of reasons for drinking to excess, but this one was at least biologically sound: alcohol is a depressant, and in the healthful countryside, left alone all day to work with a staff-prepared box lunch to sustain her, Pat was electrified by bolts of writing energy she didn't know how to handle. She described herself as being as tense as “a coiled spring”
⁷
and “happy like a battery chicken”: her way of saying that she was poised for greatness and producing like mad.

At the beginning of June, the twenty-four-year-old writer Flannery O'Connor arrived to join the other colonists at Yaddo. Pat identified her as the “[n]ew writer Capote likes very much. Maybe another McCullers, I don't know…. I expected from the name a racy colt with reddish hair, a six-gear brain [but she] personifies Iowa [the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa] once removed from Georgia, which she is.”
⁸

Forty years later, Pat told a young friend who loved Flannery O'Connor's work a story about her time at Yaddo with the deeply religious O'Connor. Nearly every night, she said, she and Chester Himes and other colonists would go out and drink themselves into stupors, and

Pat went on drinking heavily and reading her Bible every day—a satisfyingly oppositional regime which she continued more or less without interruption for the rest of her life. On her second day at Yaddo, the day of the evening on which she drank all those martinis and Manhattans, Pat, glancing through
Harper's Bazaar,
came upon an article about the theoretical work the physicist Albert Einstein was doing with electromagnetic energy. It added a few nouns—“electrons,” “matter,” and “energy” were three of them—to how she was already thinking about God and the Devil, and to how she would write about Guy and Bruno in
Strangers on a Train.
God kept turning up in the poems she was dedicating to women in her cahier, while her Bible's influence was obvious in the many uplifting notes she took: “How beautiful the words of Peter and John—ignorant and poor men—when seized for their preachings of Christ!…All sin (R. Niebuhr) comes from man's forgetting that God is the center of the universe.”
¹⁰

“N.B. Small wonder the old-timers tell us to go back to moral standards. Not only more security but more happiness follows. Our guilt is not that we have broken away from moral laws, but that we are not voyaging toward anything.”
¹¹

“Guilt” was a word that would always catch Pat's attention, and the carrot-haired Marc Brandel used it publicly nine days into her stay at Yaddo. Two years older than Pat, the English-born, Cambridge-educated Brandel had already published in 1945 the novel for which he would be best known:
Rain Before Seven
. Brandel's real name was Marcus Beresford, and his attractions included the high, beautiful “Beresford brow” of his aristocratic family.
¹²
(Pat seems to have been entirely surrounded by pseudonymous males in the 1940s.) Marc made a little speech at dinner about how children rebel against their parents and then are left with the “guilt which produces all our neuroses.”
¹³
Immersed in Dostoyevsky's
House of the Dead
(and certain that Dostoyevsky shared her guilt feelings), Pat had just spent three illicit days with her lover Jeanne and was feeling “a persistent need to be forgiven.” But the offers of marriage coming from Marc Brandel were turning her head and her attention to other questions.

“What is so impossible, is that the male face doesn't attract me, isn't
beautiful
to me. Though I can imagine a familiarity with a man, which would…allow us to work and make us happy—and certainly sane…[t]he question is, whether men alone, their
selves
, don't get
unbearably boring
?”
¹⁴

Meanwhile, Pat's revisions and additions to her manuscript were multiplying. The brilliant premise that had come to her on a walk with Mary and Stanley in Hastings-on-Hudson in 1945—two men exchanging crimes and “getting away with it”—was finding a far more complex and shadowy form in a novel which perverted the Platonic ideal of love and duality, embedded it in a history of coerced murder and mutual seduction, and was as much about the pathology of Superheroes and their Alter Egos as it was about guilt, the spirituality of architecture, and the horrible need to submit to the right, the true confessor.

Six months before she'd arrived at Yaddo—having worked for almost twelve hours on a single scene in the novel that would become
Strangers on a Train
—Pat made a frank confession of just how much the idea of murder meant to her life, and to her book. She'd just killed the character she was calling Tucker and would eventually call Guy Haines. (Later, as she often did, she changed the victim and killed only Guy's Alter Ego, Bruno.) And she was joyous about it. The murder fullfilled her as nothing else could.

“Today is a great day; I have written the murder, the
raison d'être
of the novel…. Something happened today, I feel I have grown older, completely adult…. I turned back at home, completely satisfied, very happy. I don't want to marry. I have my good friends (most of them European Jews) and girls?—I always have enough.”
¹⁵

Dark as her novel was, the infinite gradations of “character” Pat was beginning to counterfeit for her male protagonists allowed her to try for a lighthearted little sub-Wildean epigram, an epigram in which she distilled all the pleasure she felt in choosing art over life: “Acquired tastes are so much more delightful than natural ones.”
¹⁶

Strangers on a Train
remains Pat's most Dostoyevskyan novel in that its two male protagonists, like the most fully imagined of Dostoyevsky's creations, vacate their “characters” at the drop of a threat, exchange traits as easily as they trade hats, and, like God and the Devil, “dance hand in hand around every single electron,”
¹⁷
mingling their identities and flummoxing their detective pursuer (who is also deceiving them) before surrendering to him completely.

Guy Haines, a brilliant young architect and the divine half of the novel's Terrible Twins, is as obsessed with guilt, God, and the effect his behavior is having on the spiritual dimension of the buildings he designs as any of Dostoyevsky's would-be Christian martyrs. (Guy makes an interesting contrast to that other architect to come out of an American novel of the forties: Ayn Rand's man of steel, Howard Roark, who first appeared in Rand's bestselling 1943 novel,
The Fountainhead,
and then returned—this time with Gary Cooper's face—in the 1949 film of the same name.)