The Talented Miss Highsmith (44 page)

Guy's moody purity summons up the devilish Charles Anthony Bruno—the subliterate, alcoholic scion of a wealthy family who is also a psychopathic genius. Bruno appears on Guy's train to Texas with the physical expression of his inner evil growing in the middle of his forehead: a huge boil, a “plague of Job.” “All things had opposites close by, every decision a reason against it, every animal an animal that destroys it, the male the female, the positive the negative.”
¹⁸
The coincidental meeting of these two opposites—during which Bruno has the infernal inspiration that they should exchange crimes—produces a double negative: the infestation of the best by the worst. “A murderer looks like anybody!” is the conclusion forced upon Guy.
¹⁹
After
he has killed.

Unable to get Miriam, his coarse, unfaithful wife in Texas, to agree to a divorce, Guy has fallen in love with the rich, blond New Yorker of Patricia Highsmith's upper-class dreams: Anne Faulkner. Bruno, homoerotically attached to Guy, coerces Guy into committing the companion murder to his murder of Miriam by showering Guy with diagrammatic instructions for the murder of his own hated father. Bruno's character is accoutered with some of the barely disguised signifiers of homosexuality: he is left in possession of Guy's copy of Plato; his father's company makes “AC-DC gadgets” he travels to Haiti on a yacht called
The Fairy Prince;
he gives Guy purple women's gloves, which Guy wears when he takes his little pistol out of its lavender sack and uses it to murder Bruno's father.

As if these broad suggestions weren't enough, Bruno sullies Guy's new marriage with Anne Faulkner by constant, drunken intrusions into their gleaming, shining white house. And Guy, feeling guilty for Bruno's murder of his wife (but not for his own murder of Bruno's father), allows Bruno's dreams and passions to penetrate his own. Guy's relations with Bruno destroy his marriage, his career, and his life. Bruno is luckier: he merely drowns in deep water.

The cautionary tale of the brilliant Chicago teenagers and quondam lovers, Nathan Leopold and Robert Loeb, who plotted the “perfect Nietzschean murder”—they were the first Americans to be publicized as “thrill-killers”—of young Bobby Franks in Chicago in 1924 (just about the time little Patsy Plangman in Fort Worth, Texas, was hatching her infant fantasies of knocking off her new stepfather), hovers vaguely and uneasily over the plot of
Strangers on a Train
just as it hovered for decades over the lives of many homosexuals in America. Amongst those shadowed by Leopold and Loeb was Pat's host in the late 1940s, Leo Lerman, who said that his mother used to warn him with: “Don't be a Leopold and Loeb.”

Perhaps Alfred Hitchcock, who had already filmed a version of the Leopold and Loeb story in his 1948 movie,
Rope
(starring Farley Granger, who would also star in Hitchcock's
Strangers on a Train
), was thinking of the fatal clue that trapped the two boys—Nathan Leopold's horn-rimmed glasses with the special identifying hinge—when he created the most celebrated scene in his 1951 film of
Strangers on a Train
: the murder of Guy's wife, Miriam, by Bruno reflected in Miriam's discarded glasses. But the film's opening shot, which famously follows the shoes of Guy and Bruno as they separately approach Union Station in Washington, D.C., could only have come from the detailed descriptions of shoes in
Strangers on a Train;
descriptions which were amply furnished by the novel's footwear-obsessed young author.

Intricate as the film is (the scriptwriter who was fired from the film, Raymond Chandler, said the plot drove him “crazy”), it doesn't begin to approach the complexities of the novel which inspired it; and the film's plot excludes the novel's most dangerous games. Pat Highsmith's excesses at Yaddo, her
dérèglement de tous les sens,
managed to produce what Arthur Rimbaud wanted his “disordering of all the senses” to lead to: a masterpiece.
^*
And the brilliance of
Strangers on a Train
owes at least as much to Pat's daily Bible reading (the moral complement to her guilt) and to the crude Alter Ego psychologies which glazed the plots of her comic book scenarios as it does to Dostoyevsky, to Gide, to her quondam college hero Graham Greene, or to Leopold and Loeb.
²⁰
(Bruno, a reader of comic books, says: “Guy and I are supermen!”—but he sounds as though he means “Supermen.”)
²¹

By the twenty-third of June, Pat had completed a first draft of her as yet untitled book. (Marc Brandel would eventually supply her with the title,
Strangers on a Train,
and Pat, back in New York and freelancing comic book scenarios for the Fawcett company when she finished the novel, wrote an ending—still visible in one or two metaphors in the last chapter—that saw Guy crushed to death under a large rock. The book was saved from this cartoonlike resolution by Pat's agent, Margot Johnson, who insisted that Guy survive his confession. And so Guy's haunting line, “Take me,” was how Pat finished her novel.)
²²
On the twenty-fourth and again on the twenty-sixth of June, Pat walked the grounds of Yaddo with Marc Brandel, and it was, once more, her attraction to guilt that brought them together: Pat talked to Marc about her mother and her guilt at being homosexual. She thought Marc was “amazingly tolerant.”

“And he convinced me I must abolish guilt for these impulses and feelings. (Can't I remember Gide? Must I always try to ‘improve' myself?) I returned with quite a different attitude. I think more lightly of myself. I have opened myself a little to the world.”
²³

The next morning, however, she was physically imagining her lover Jeanne's kiss on her lips, feeling bad about it, and also yearning for it.

But before Marc left Yaddo, Pat made plans for him to come and visit her in Hastings-on-Hudson even though she was still living, imaginatively and physically, the life of her novel: “I am in love with Jeanne in the way Guy is in love with Anne…. I am pleased with the secrecy.” After leaving Yaddo, Pat alternated nights with Jeanne and a new girlfriend named Valerie, spent a night with Herbert L. (she'd tried him out before without satisfaction), and then added Marc to her list. “Three people in three nights!” she wrote, impressed with herself.

Pat's sojourn in Saratoga Springs not only allowed her to revise and finish a first draft of her novel, it also provided her with a yearned-for “respectability” (a male fiancé), led her indirectly into psychoanalysis, and, at the end of a life not noted for philanthropy, gave her the opportunity to confound everyone's expectations by endowing Yaddo with her comfortable fortune. Her two months at Yaddo—10 May to the first week of July 1948—produced what would now be called a “perfect Highsmith storm”: a capsizing set of circumstances inspired by Pat's entirely contradictory impulses. If she'd ever taken the time to analyze what Yaddo had
really
done for her, Pat would have been doubly thrilled.

Back in New York and still working hard on
Strangers on a Train,
Pat allowed Marc to convince her to visit him in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in September. There he made the mistake of introducing her to his new acquaintance, the artist Ann Smith—and Pat immediately added Ann to the list of women with whom she was already sleeping. Once Ann had left Provincetown, Pat felt she was “in prison” with Marc and told him she was leaving. “[B]ecause of that I have to sleep with him, and only the fact that it is the last night strengthens me to bear it.”

This unpromising beginning for her love affair with Marc Brandel more or less dictated its direction. Pat never slept with just Marc (nor did Marc confine his attentions to Pat) during their turbulent time together; she always had other lovers. And whenever she did sleep with him, she resented it. In a letter she sent to her stepfather, Stanley, in 1970 (every letter Pat sent to her stepfather evokes pity and terror for the man, but this letter is especially hair-raising), Pat, counting her blessings, toted up the number of times she'd made love with Marc and—a bonus for poor Stanley—described their sexual encounters as “steel wool in the face, a sensation of being raped in the wrong place—leading to a sensation of having to have, pretty soon, a boewl [
sic
] movement.” [Pat meant “bowel” it's one of the very few uncorrected misspellings in her archives.]
²⁴

“I have never put this into a book,” she added to what must have been her stepfather's relief or, more likely, his dawning horror, since her writing career was far from over and she still had time to put “this” into a book. Pat figured that she'd been to bed with Marc Brandel “many times…[t]wenty-thirty,” and she thought thirty times was
plenty
.
²⁵

It was the psychoanalysis, however, that really finished the affair for her.

At the end of September, back from Provincetown and explaining her complicated sex life to Lil Picard, Pat took Lil's summarizing question to heart—“Why do you torture yourself so much?”—and answered it herself. “The $64 question. Answer: Me.”
²⁶
Two months later, she decided to have the question answered again—this time with the help of a psychiatrist.

By October, Pat, still seeing both Jeanne and Ann Smith and about to add another woman, Dione, to her lovemaking list, had broken off provisionally with Marc.

By the second week in November, temporarily bored with her work on
Strangers on a Train,
Pat began to write a vividly painful, powerful story set in the South: “When the Fleet Was in at Mobile” (published in
London Life,
3 December 1965, and reprinted in
Eleven,
by Heinemann, in 1970). Unusually, the story is about a woman who tries to get away with murder in order to get away from marriage—and doesn't. A week later, Pat was at a film with Marc Brandel, an aptly chosen film as it turned out. It was Anatole Litvak's stark drama about insanity,
The Snake Pit
(1948), anchored by Olivia de Havilland's luminous performance as Virginia, a newly married woman haunted by childhood feelings of guilt, and slipping into mental illness.
The Snake Pit
is rife with the kind of psychoanalytic notions which Pat would shortly encounter in her new psychiatrist's office.

Pat was so pleased to be back with Marc (who had just had excellent reviews for his latest novel) that she was thanking God, in her own special way, for their reunion. “God is very kind to me: He gave me Marc—a man who is as neurotic as I am, and He showed me Rosalind [Constable].”
²⁷

At the end of November, Pat found herself a psychiatrist and began what would become a six-month course of analysis. She wanted to be able to marry Marc Brandel and “to regularize herself sexually,” as the (and her) thinking went in mid-twentieth-century America. Things didn't exactly work out that way.

It was the composer David Diamond who gave Pat the names of two psychiatrists. The first one, a man, told her it would take two years to bend her in the direction she said she wanted to go: heterosexuality. She didn't continue to see him. The second psychiatrist, Dr. Eva Klein, newly minted in her field at Pat's old alma mater, Columbia University, and married to a psychiatrist herself (but practicing under her maiden name), seemed to be someone Pat could work with. And so, on 30 November 1948, Pat began the first of what would be forty-seven psychoanalytic sessions with Dr. Klein. Pat summarized each session in her diary, and her summaries stealthily trace her resistance to being “bent out of shape” (
her
shape). The one thing Pat didn't resist was Dr. Klein's classic encouragement to lay the responsibility for her troubles at Mother Mary's feet.

Eva Klein, as socially coercive and attached to a heterosexual agenda as most American psychiatrists were in the 1940s, nevertheless had some very intelligent things to say about her new analysand. (Dr. Klein was conducting a more or less conventional Freudian psychoanalysis—with some help from the theories of Karen Horney.) Many of the remarks Klein made, recorded by Pat, have the ring of authenticity about them, and Pat thought so too. The problem was that Pat was too creatively resistant (and had too many other problems—of which alcoholism was only the most salient) for six months of formal and more or less “criminalizing” analysis (homosexuality treated as an illness) to produce either a full picture or a transformative understanding.

Nevertheless, during her six months with Dr. Klein, Pat Highsmith told more of what she felt and knew about herself to another human being (and heard more cogent theories about what she didn't know) than she was ever to do again in her life. Naturally, the experience left her with the same grinding ambivalences that all her deep experiences left her with: an abiding sense of resentment and another tool to use in her work.

The analysis of Patricia Highsmith by Dr. Eva Klein began promisingly. After the first visit, Pat was bubbly with enthusiasm: “I like her very much—she instantly asked the necessary questions.” Pat had talked about “Ginnie [Catherwood]” while barely mentioning Marc—about whom she was suddenly quite uncertain. The analysis was going to cost her fifteen dollars a session, she was going to have two sessions a week, and she was trying hard not to resent having to pay for them. By the second visit, the canny Dr. Klein was recommending that Pat see a male psychiatrist; Pat instantly refused to do so. Their relationship was already starting “to feel like a mother-child relationship” to Pat, who was “already half in love with Dr. Klein.”

By 15 December, the day Pat was “let go” from the sales job she'd taken in the toy section of Bloomingdale's department store to help pay for her analysis, Pat was lunching with Mother Mary, finding it “very comfortable, and I told her almost all I learned from Doctor Klein—and she understands.” Two days later, Pat was playing her analyst off against her mother: “Why shouldn't I fall in love with her? Didn't she give me more than a mother?” And she was feeling frightened because she was actually thinking “that Mrs. Klein is my mother.” By her eighth visit, very “ill, hot and weak” with the chicken pox she thought she'd picked up at Bloomingdale's,
²⁸
Pat lost consciousness on the subway but staggered to her appointment with Dr. Klein anyway, hoping “Mrs. Klein would nurse me…. I only wanted to see Mrs. Klein! She is the only person in the world, who gives me the right answers!” Dr. Klein gave her a cognac and sent her on to a general practitioner. Not, however, before speaking about “‘the vagina'—a favorite subject,” Pat said.