The Talented Miss Highsmith (60 page)

Pat managed to keep her affair with Ellen Hill going for more than four years, thereby keeping her all-important Muse's Chair occupied—even if uncomfortably so. Her attachment to this special piece of furniture in her Romance Room would go right on creating art and trouble for her for much of the rest of her life.

Part 6

After separating from Ellen, Pat went back to her flat on East Fifty-sixth Street in Manhattan, the apartment she'd first rented in 1942, with the fire escape and the ladder down to the courtyard that gave easy access to her living quarters. Too easy, it turned out. One day, she returned to the apartment to find five or six boys “hunched over my books and paint boxes”: they had already daubed one of her suitcases with paint. She carefully erased their presence by removing the markings from her suitcase with turpentine. On another day, the boys returned and were having a free-for-all on the fire escape “only two yards from where I sat.” Pat “backed into the far corner of the room like a scared rat,” still frowning with concentration and composing in her mind the sentence she'd left unfinished in her typewriter. She stayed there until the boys clattered down the cast-iron stairs.
¹

It was what Pat called the “vicious emotional cycle” of the boys' noise, and the fear and hatred that were her response to it, that gave her the
keime
for the beginning of a short story, “The Barbarians,” about a man “who paints on weekends,” is tortured by the sound of handball players just under his window, and takes violent—and ineffectual—action to stop them. Pat called it a story about “the hell of metropolitan society.”
²
She was keenly feeling that an apartment menaced by rowdy neighborhood boys was
not
the gracious Manhattan living she had been yearning for in Europe.

Coinciding with the breakup of her four-year relationship with Ellen, and just after the publication of
The Talented Mr. Ripley
in December of 1955, Pat dropped into another of her seasonal depressions. “My life, my activities seem to have no meaning, no goal, at least no attainable goal…. I can feel my grip loosening on myself.”
³
“One wants to die, simply. Not to die, but not to exist, simply, until this is over.”
⁴

It was her usual Christmas/New Year/birthday dip into unworthiness, colored by yet another quarrel with Ellen Hill and accompanied by a deep sense of failure. Despite the good reviews
The Talented Mr. Ripley
had just received—her bête noire,
The New Yorker
, found it a “remarkably immoral story very engagingly” written,
⁵
and
The New York Times Book Review
had praised “her unusual insight into a particular type of criminal”
⁶
—Pat was plunged into an “undefined, unreconciled self.” And that self, if not expressed by daily writing and enhanced by the presence of an attractive woman, was never a self Pat liked to be alone with for very long.
⁷

And then, suddenly, in the middle of April, Pat had a new complaint: “What a strenuous thing it is to be in love.”
⁸

When Pat fell in love with Doris, a midwesterner working in advertising in Manhattan, it was more than a familiar feeling, it was a familial one. Doris had been living with Lynn Roth when Pat had fallen in love with Lynn, and Lynn had been the ex-girlfriend of Pat's lover, Ann Smith. The closeted nature of lesbian life—especially closeted in the 1950s—has always made for imbricated relations, but Pat's relations were more plaited than most. Women were her muses, and she could never quite let go of one woman before reaching for the next one.

But all this was in the past and in the future. Pat, in love with Doris now, was as lyrical as a summer sonnet. She looked into Doris's eyes and thought or at least wrote: “The trust in the eyes of a girl who loves you. It is the most beautiful thing in the world.”
⁹
And she went on to praise the “insuppressibly, incorrigibly, happy and optimistic”
Agnus Dei
of Mozart—as opposed to gloomy old Bach's
B Minor Mass,
“oppressed with the hopelessness of the world's sin.”
¹⁰

Falling in love always put Pat in a good mood—at first anyway—and it often increased the number of her petitions to God. So when she fell in love with Doris, Pat made up a little prayer. The prayer shows that love had come again to Pat Highsmith as it always came: violently, subversively, and in the expectation of “pain and disappointment”:

Pat was beginning to feel more like her “self.”

Doris, a year younger than Pat—Pat generally preferred older women until she became one herself—was a copywriter at the McCann-Erickson Agency in New York. She was also, as Pat wrote to Kingsley, “perhaps overserious, a perfectionist, doesn't like to go out much (socially)—and [is] very pretty.”
¹²
Doris was someone, in short, with whom Pat could imagine living. But Doris did not share Pat's taste for “hell,” “pain,” and “disappointment,” and this was to be a major disappointment for Pat. The crucial consonances as well as the critical oppositions were missing.

Pat and Doris, who had the social connections of Pat's new agent, Patricia Schartle, to thank for their country retreat, moved from New York to what Pat called “Sneden's Landing” in the southernmost part of Rockland County. Snedens Landing (Pat the Grammarian always added an unnecessary apostrophe before the final
s
) was (and is) an exclusive enclave on the Hudson River, part of the hamlet of Palisades, New York. It has always been a haven for people in the arts and show business. Together Pat and Doris bought “a brand new Ford convertible, black, though,” said Pat, “with more chrome than I like. I like none,”
¹³
and shared the rental of a converted barn in whose garden Pat grew radishes, string beans, cantaloupes, and sweet peas. But four months after Pat fell in love with Doris, and a little more than a month after they'd moved to Snedens Landing, Pat was writing about “the danger of living without one's normal diet of passion. Things are so readily equalized, soothed, forgotten with a laugh, with perspective. I don't really want perspective, except my own.”
¹⁴

Faced with domestic tranquility, Pat was itching for a good fight.

During the summer of 1956, Pat began to take notes for what she considered one of her least successful works, her “Mexican” novel,
A Game for the Living
(she was calling it, typically, “6th Book” in her cahier). She was also finishing the final revisions on
Deep Water,
the destabilizingly brilliant novel she'd begun as
Dog in the Manger,
when she and Ellen Hill were quarrelling steadily and productively across Europe. Pat had expanded the book as they continued their fruitful squabbling in the Southwest and down into Mexico, and in the character of
Deep Water
's resident psychopath, Vic Van Allen, Pat created a “hero-criminal” who directly challenges gender categories: he refuses sex, cooks and cleans his house with an apron on, takes care of his child, murders two of his wife Melinda's lovers, and—he's a completist—murders Melinda as well. Vic also upsets all ideas of sexual proclivity: his major excitements seem to be observing the slow copulations of his companion snails and encouraging his pet bedbugs to draw blood from his arm. And he extends the uses of ingenuity by fostering the rumor that he is a murderer before he has actually knocked anyone off. His blackly blooming imagination permeates the book and delivers him to a state beyond morality.
Deep Water
is a deeply uncomfortable novel.

Always the good Freudian, Pat wrote that in Vic's character she was interested in exploring the “evil things,” the “peculiar vermin” that arise from “unnatural [sexual] abstinence.” Vic, she insisted, was “a paranoiac,” a “megalomaniac,” a “fascist, a sadist and a masochist,” and even “insaner than his wife.”
¹⁵
Vic is also Pat's only witty psychopath. When his compulsively unfaithful wife, Melinda (a caricature of predatory female sexuality: even her necklace looks like it's made of tiger's teeth), wants to dress herself up as an historical character for a costume party, Vic suggests that she try Madame Bovary. Independently wealthy, Vic's métier is to design and print exquisite, limited-edition books on his hand-operated press. The suspicions of a distinctly lower-class detective novelist—an unattractive author of bad works who is Vic's neighbor and Melinda's ally—lead to the capture of this quietly mad publisher of superior taste and means.
Deep Water
's class-conscious author slipped her own social resentments into Vic Van Allen: he yearns for a better class of lover for Melinda, whose taste runs, lamentably, to lounge lizards (Vic wants someone for Melinda
he
can live with). Pat also saddled Vic with quite a few of her reimagined traits, talents, and leftover feelings for Ellen Blumenthal Hill. But she didn't acknowledge the resemblances between the author and her psychopathic character when she was ticking off her list of Vic's psychoses, perhaps because they were the kind of maladies that could only be accommodated at institutions like Austen Riggs or Broadmoor.

By the fall of 1956, Pat was worried both
for
her work and
about
it: she was making caustic comments about meticulously editing this manuscript (
Deep Water
) that wasn't going to sell, and then identifying, in another quickly extinguished flare of illumination, the ragged hole in her design for living:

“My continuing troubles about my work. My writing, the themes I write on, do not permit me to express love, and it is necessary for me to express love. I can do this only in drawing, it seems.”
¹⁶

Pat made a sexual overture to Ellen Hill during this period—and then had a dream in which she was “reminded” of it. In an entry in (bad) French in her notebook, she wrote that the dream began with her making up a couch-bed in the Highsmith family house, reminiscent, no doubt, of all those couch-beds she'd slept on as a girl. Magically infused with the knowledge that she didn't
have
to sleep on the couch, she suddenly found herself in bed with her mother, Mary, and her stepfather, Stanley. Mother Mary said clearly: “‘I have news for you. I'm going to throw you out of the house.'”

“She gave me the idea,” Pat wrote aggrievedly, “that I interfered between the two of them.” The idea was not exactly a new one.

The dream came out of Pat's recent late night in Manhattan. She had stayed over at Ellen Hill's apartment and made a pass at Ellen; wordlessly, Ellen let her know that she didn't want to take her back as a lover. “She accepted me, but she rejected me too,” Pat wrote. On waking from this dream in Snedens Landing, Pat reached over and touched Doris, and “was very happy to have her.”
¹⁷
Four days later, recovering from one of her innumerable dental procedures and trying to put herself in the “bored with day-to-day, under-my-nose existence, which is what prompts me to write (work) at all,” Pat attacked Ellen Hill bitterly in her notebook.
¹⁸

In the same month, November of 1956, in which she stage-managed this dream, Pat started work on what she later described to the fiction writer, journalist, and critic Francis Wyndham as a “political satire in the manner of Voltaire”: a long, labored picaresque she called
The Straightforward Lie
. Over the years, the manuscript was promptly returned by every publisher she sent it to. Joan Kahn at Harper & Brothers returned it in 1959, after reading both the manuscript and Pat's naïve comment that it would be “ideal for a hot summer weekend!”
¹⁹

The Straightforward Lie
is more like the crude scenario for a graphic novel than it is like Voltaire's
Candide,
Swift's
Gulliver's Travels,
or Samuel Johnson's
Rasselas
. Still, like Pat's later, equally primitive political satires, it was proleptic: American foreign policy is what she was getting at, and her tendency to see things in black and white,
cru et cuit
, serves the piece all too well.

In
The Straightforward Lie,
a young man, George Stephanost, of dubious sexuality and odd appearance (something about shoes again), wins a trip around the world as a propaganda agent charged with presenting his imperialistic government in the best possible light. George is loathed wherever he goes, beginning his travels by precipitating the suicide of a journalist whose alcoholism he has reported (there's usually a drinker in anything Highsmith writes, and she made a note saying she was going to dedicate this manuscript “to alcohol”). George is propelled through a series of incidents which show him to be a pompous representative of an overbearing government, jibed at by the fools and knaves of other countries.

As though her imagination had rifled the canon of German folk poetry and come up with the old figure of the
bucklicht Männlein
—the little hunchback who causes so much trouble for German children in
Des Knaben Wunderhorn
—Pat provided a small black dancing figure of a man to haunt and harry George. The little man repeats the words “Trouble” and “Evil,” and taunts George with:
“They hate you! Ha! HA! Ha!”
George, entirely confused, ends up in “a really attractive summerlike place in the country…[t]he Happy Day Asylum,” still haunted by the little black man.