The Talented Miss Highsmith (47 page)

Always able to entertain herself with an array of possible identities (another kind of fun), Pat liked to call herself a “kraut”—and to sprinkle her plain American speech with simple German words and phrases:
“Bitte,”
she would say, and
“Danke.”

“This German thing obsessed her,” says Caroline Besterman. “She would always break into German phrases, terribly badly. These lapses into German, there wouldn't be an afternoon or a lunch that would pass without German phrases being intruded. Never French, always German. She knew nothing about Germany. This enormous race, intelligent, cultured, which produced without turning a hair instantly a race of maniacs.”
⁵⁶

But if Pat's affinity for Jewish dentists was yet another example of the subversive Miss Highsmith turning an ordinary exchange upside down—i.e., the “German-identified” Pat being “gassed” by “Jewish dentists” (an idea so offensive that it might actually have appealed to Pat)—she never said so. Still, she was conscious enough of the connection between gas, Germans, and racial superiority (or unconscious enough of it) to make this little note in the section of her cahier that she reserved for her
Keime,
her “germs”:
“Little Keime
—The Element of Dental Gas in the German Nationalism and Psyche.” Being fascinating comparison of gaseous dreams of mystical absolute with individual, collective, and national dreams of Germans and Germany as the chosen race.”
⁵⁷

Perhaps Pat's attraction to dental gas was just another instance of her yearning for a spiritual life in the old German Romantic mode—” those “cosmic suggestions” she talked about—or for leaving her troublesome body behind.
⁵⁸
Or perhaps the appeal of gas was that it produced a more refined “high” than the alcohol she was consuming. Her down-to-earth Texas family—the only people close to her who can bear to use the word “alcoholic”—say that her taste in beer when she was in Texas (Lone Star beer was her choice there) was just as “inexpensive” as her taste in wine: “She would just suck on that grape,” said Dan Walton Coates. “Yeah, everybody understood that Pat was alcoholic [but] you damn sure didn't want to stir her up about the alcohol.”
⁵⁹

Certainly, the “total anesthesia” of the dental gas allowed Pat to enjoy the kind of intoxication she liked best: the kind that relieved her, if only for an hour, from being Patricia Highsmith.

 

Restless in Manhattan during the summer of 1950, Pat went back to Fire Island from New York. There, she ran into Jane Bowles, “whose uncustomary fit of working” made Pat feel “vaguely guilty.” She went for drinks at Duffy's Hotel with the woman Rosalind Constable had found her in bed with—as well as with her agent Margot's girlfriend and with Carson McCullers and Marc Blitzstein. Nobody could have accused Pat of being idle.

From Fire Island she travelled to Provincetown to stay with Ann Smith, her intermittent lover. Pat usually took up with the lovely Ann as a filler between other, more serious affairs, although she much preferred Ann to her current, official “fiancé” Marc Brandel (who had the bad luck to have introduced her to Ann) and said so.
⁶⁰
Ann's Provincetown house was without “a tub or hot water,” and Pat worked steadily on another version of
Tantalus,
“resting only on Sundays [and] pleased with the speed of its going” but “extremely worried about an itch I have developed in the region generally invaded by crabs.”
⁶¹

Pat may have spent a sexually reckless few months, drowning her anxieties about
The Price of Salt
in alcohol and dental gas and slipping into beds and bars up and down the eastern seaboard, but in her written references to her body she remained as prim as a prawn.

By the end of October she was drinking so much that she thought about taking “therapeutic measures against alcoholism. Something must be done.”
⁶²
Her new friend, Arthur Koestler, who had finished the novel he was working on, was being “very generous” to her professionally, recommending that she have her manuscript typed so that it would come back to her with “a new dignity.” And he did, as he had promised, introduce her to the “
Partisan Review
crowd.” She met Philip Rahv and William Phillips with Koestler in Greenwich Village at the Brevoort Café one evening in October. Koestler had talked her up so “considerably” that Rahv and Phillips were “ready to read
Strangers”
and give her reviews to do. And then Calmann-Lévy, Koestler's French publisher, bought
Strangers on a Train
, for which, Pat wrote, Koestler “claims credit, though M[argot]J[ohnson] said she'd had requests before.” (Calmann-Lévy's director, Jeanne-Étienne Cohen-Séat, thought it was Koestler who introduced Pat's work to his publishing company.)
⁶³

But nothing penetrated Pat's terrors about
The Price of Salt
for very long. Suffused with shame, she was trying hard to “suspend [her own] judgement of homosexuality until [Koestler] has seen [the manuscript].”
⁶⁴
And she was in the state of mind that preferred almost anyone's opinion of the novel to her own.
⁶⁵
“These days are on the brink again. The least thing depresses me to the point of suicide.”
⁶⁶

In the beginning of November Pat made a numbered list of the crippling feelings that writing
The Price of Salt
had brought her. She was suffering for having created what she knew to be (and denied for the rest of her life) a most unusual novel which drew its resonant qualities from its “close truthfulness” to her life. It was a sad reward for all her hard work and a self-administered punishment for all her self-exposure.

“Shame…for what I have done…Plus sense of failure, I have not got it done in the time for spring publication, like Koestler. I shall not have gained in reputation and fame, if it is published not under my name…. Leading to drunkenness, bad behavior, especially before people I care about, like Lyne. Desire to shame myself, too, feel guilty & hang my head.”
⁶⁷

One week later, after spending the evening at Café Society on Sheridan Square with Elizabeth Lyne, the elegant émigrée and chief designer for Hattie Carnegie to whose friendship she became so attached in the 1940s and 1950s, Pat began, aggressively, to cross personal lines. She asked Mme Lyne if she could spend the night in her bed. “Come on, Pat, snap out of it,” retorted Mme Lyne. “Which crushed me,” Pat wrote in her diary.”
⁶⁸
Then Pat went to see
The Bicycle Thief
, and, just as
Death of a Salesman
had done, the film harrowed up her fears of poverty. She thought it was “the most depressing picture I have ever seen. People through poverty having to live like dogs.”
⁶⁹
Pat's violations extended to her diet: she went on a date with Carl Hazelwood, ate a whole plate of snails at the St. Regis Hotel on the sixteenth of November (“How could I!” she wrote) and was drinking so heavily that she had a “blank in memory until around Dec. 5.”

And then, sometime in early December, frustrated that Elizabeth Lyne was late for an evening out with her, she crossed the most dangerous line yet: “on impulse” she went straight to her agent, Margot Johnson, and “told her I'd seen Kay G. [Margot Johnson's lover] several times, which being behind M's back, precipitated her breaking with Kay the following Monday.”
⁷⁰

At Margot's “after the debacle,” Pat, without apparent remorse for purloining her agent's girlfriend but telling herself that she could perhaps use another short course of psychoanalysis, began to feel a “terrific but slowly growing lust” for another guest at Margot's apartment, Sonya Cache
^*
—a richly sophisticated Paris-born theatrical and literary agent whose first affair with a woman had been with the writer Josephine Herbst. “Quite by delicious accident,” Sonya Cache joined Pat in bed at Margot's that evening (Pat had used Margot's apartment for assignations before), and Pat went lyrically mad for Sonya.

“I had almost forgotten that pleasure beyond all pleasures, that joy beyond all treasures…the pleasure of pleasing a woman…. And her body, her head and hair in the darkness…was suddenly more than Europe, art, Renoir, which she resembled, one of his women, beyond creative satisfaction…. She is mysterious in a Russian Jewish way, melancholic, devious by nature in her mind, witty as a fairy.”
⁷¹

Sonya Cache had a long-term lover, and Pat was already calculating the odds of their competition: “I believe I shall stack up better than she in a contest, and it may come to that.”
⁷²
Then, “a bit tight,” and reminded by love of the pleasures of war, Pat telephoned Sonya's lover and “announced in a loud clear voice that I was in love with [Sonya].” Pat couldn't, mercifully, remember the conversation that followed, and anyway, she was still secretly seeing Kay, Margot Johnson's newly ex-lover. On the afternoon of New Year's Eve, she got “blind drunk” and had a “slight blackout” which made her late to Mme Lyne's and to a party in Yonkers where she met “a curious little girl, attractive.”
⁷³

There was no end to Pat's destructiveness at this time—to herself and to the relationships of others—as she waited to see what would become of
The Price of Salt,
the book into which she had poured her most exalted feelings.

As usual, Pat's creativity was stimulated by destruction. She was reworking two short stories, “Baby Spoon” (another trophy-killer story about the attraction between a professor and his psychopathic student expressed in a theft and in a murder) and “Love Is a Terrible Thing” (a story more representative of Pat's own state: she was anxious about not hearing from Kathryn Hamill Cohen in London [see “Les Girls: Part 2”] and desperately anxious about what would happen with
The Price of Salt
). She was hoping, to no avail, to sell both of her new stories to
The New Yorker
. “Baby Spoon” and “Love Is a Terrible Thing” were eventually published in
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine,
and Pat gave no sign that she might have borrowed the title “Love Is a Terrible Thing” from
The Golden Bowl,
the novel by Henry James in which that line is almost an ostinato.

“Love Is a Terrible Thing” was published in 1968 by
EQMM
as “The Birds Poised to Fly.” It is yet another revenge-and-substitution story, about a man who is waiting for a love letter (just as Pat was waiting for a letter from Kathryn Hamill Cohen in London) from a woman who doesn't write to him. He breaks into his vacationing neighbor's mailbox, telling himself that his letter might have been misdelivered, and, using his neighbor's name, answers a letter he finds in the mailbox from the neighbor's lovesick female correspondent. He makes a date with the woman in the name of his neighbor, approaches her, apologizes anonymously, and then, leaving her horribly disappointed, walks away weeping for himself. “Love Is a Terrible Thing” is a fair psychological summary of Pat's own behavior at this time.

The chance meeting with Kathleen Senn in Bloomingdale's in December of 1948 set off a series of reactions which were so disturbing for Patricia that she had to balance them out by squeezing them into the perfections offered by art—and by death. (There is no clearer example of the dangers and delights of creation than Pat's own account of how she behaved while writing
The Price of Salt.
) Thus, the “automatic writing” of the plot of
The Price of Salt
that “flowed” from her pen was neatly counterweighted by the urge to tighten her hands around Kathleen Senn's throat: an urge that was overpowering Pat by the time she'd finished her novel. It brought forth her fullest explanation of how the muscles of her life moved her work, and she wrote it down the day after she'd first gone to New Jersey to spy on Mrs. Senn.

Murder was a call that came quite naturally to Patricia Highsmith when she was in the grip of an overwhelming desire. “Murder fills my heart tonight / Like the words of first love,” she'd written in 1947, in a love/jealousy poem to Virginia Kent Catherwood.
⁷⁵
If Pat's brush with Kathleen Senn had been the inspiration for
The Price of Salt,
then Pat's affair with Ginnie Catherwood provided many of the solid marital details of that novel—even down to the phallic recording spike driven into the wall of the motel room through which the pursuing detective gathers evidence to take Carol's child away from her. The same thing had happened to Ginnie Catherwood, and Pat was “worr[ied] that Ginnie may feel Carol's case too similar to her own.”
⁷⁶
That worry didn't stop her from publishing Ginnie's history, however. Publishing personal histories (lightly or largely transformed) was something Pat would do again and again to her friends, her lovers, and to herself. The persistent “neutrality” and “coolness” of her prose was the mark of the metaphorical flatiron she passed over these histories in order to press them, hotly, into the forms of her fictions.