The Talented Miss Highsmith (61 page)

Voltaire, it's not—but it
is
Patricia Highsmith. Entirely impaired by her clubbed thumb for satire (her “satire” operates on a level lower than sarcasm) and her less-than-nuanced understanding of global politics, the work still manages to reverse the values other people live by.
The Straightforward Lie
left a ghostly trace in the other novel Pat was working on at the same time:
A Game for the Living
. She slipped it into that book as the title of an “illustrated novel…a satire of modern life,” which one of the characters is working on.

In Snedens Landing, Pat had her two cats and a growing family of snails, and Doris had a dog. (Doris's dog was probably the model for the bulldog puppy with the mutilated ears in
Deep Water
. Pat wasn't half done with dogs yet.) They took their Ford convertible to Mexico in January of 1957, apparently to allow Pat to absorb the mise-en-scène for her “6th Book” (
A Game for the Living
) and to work off her restlessness, and they drove the length of Mexico, staying on well into March. Pat was transfixed by the Mardi Gras in Vera Cruz. “I can set stories here. I can make it better than it is,” she wrote after watching a “Carnavale” parade. In Mexico, it was the transvestites who riveted her: “Gay boys unmasked…One in drag, black short dress, pink cheeks, and a bawdy ‘I dare you' impudent stare, pursed mouth, and then the tongue stuck out.”
²⁰
She didn't forget them. Pat's French lover Marion Aboudaram says that in Paris, twenty years later, Pat was always much more amorous when transvestite prostitutes were working the street outside Marion's apartment in Montmartre.

But Pat's excitements in Mexico failed to transfer to
A Game for the Living
. The book gave her trouble in its initial composition and then troubled everyone else when she finished it. Unhappy with the “first sketch of 58 pages,” she wrote: “Don't know where I'm going, resulting in static effect.”
²¹
The book continued to irritate Pat during the several careful revisions her editor, Joan Kahn, requested. This was one of those novels whose murderers Pat changed at an editor's request; Kahn thought, quite correctly, that it made no sense to have an unknown street boy do the murder. So Pat, who was much more attached to the idea of beginning her novel with the murder of a beautiful woman than she was to the inconsequential murderer she'd chosen, put up no resistance at all and switched her killer to “Carlos.” It didn't help the story.

No one—including Pat's agent, Margot Johnson, who found the novel verbose and said so—ever liked it much. And Pat's attempt to inflict her external reading on what she was writing—she was using a little Kierkegaard for illumination and finding in the gloomy Dane exactly what she had found in Proust, i.e., a recognition of the compulsion to love
²²
—was just as unsuccessful as her later attempts to impress her superficial understanding of American politics on her novel
Edith's Diary
(1977). The real problem was that Pat was uninspired.

Even though Doris left every day for her advertising job in Manhattan, Pat began to complain that she was spending “less time alone” than ever. In January of 1957, she felt crowded enough to invoke her harsh personal rating system again: “In view of the fact that I surround myself with numbskulls now, I shall die among numbskulls, and on my deathbed shall be surrounded by numbskulls who will not understand what I am saying….

“Whom am I sleeping with these days? Franz Kafka.”
²³

And on the front of her cahier from this period, in the place where she always put the countries and cities she travelled to, she printed: “New York, Sneden's [
sic
] Landing, Santa Fe, Mexico, And Greater Inner and Outer
Mediocrity
.”
²⁴

Happiness never made Pat happy for very long.

Pat began to read more, draw more, and think much more about the delights of moving to another country again. Alone, for preference. She was remembering how well she'd worked on
The Price of Salt
when she was sailing back alone from her first trip to Europe in 1949, inspired by her long-distance love for Kathryn Hamill Cohen and shut up in a hot little cabin on an Italian freighter where no one spoke any English.
²⁵
“This recalls my sensation, when in a non-English speaking country, of being more than usually eloquent. The words come from a fresh and purer spring. Their full measure is recovered.

“…I haven't the precision of intellect that a good writer needs, nor the sense of dignity when I want to call it up. But in drawing or painting I can always achieve this, if I want to, from a source uncorrupted, uncorrupted by pressure and other people's opinions.”
²⁶

Still, by September of 1957, Pat was making notes for an article she eventually published in
The Writer
magazine, an article she would expand in a single month in 1965 in Suffolk into
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction.
And she was unusually pleased to project herself into the distinguished company in Colin Wilson's serious study of alienation and creation,
The Outsider
. “The book stirs my mind to the murky depths (emotional depths) in which I lived my adolescence like Van Gogh and T. E. Lawrence trying ‘to gain control' by fasting, exercise, routines for doing everything.”
²⁷

But nothing helped her relations with Doris.

By January of 1958 Pat was complaining about feeling physically crowded: “My present house is not big enough for two people.” She began to snipe indirectly at Doris's dog, comparing the “false” loyalty of dogs to the comforting “selfishness” of cats.
²⁸
She was missing the exquisite discomforts of her relationship with Ellen Blumenthal Hill: the constant seesaw of emotion from “elation to depression” which had always inspired her best work.
²⁹
Without this irritation, the oyster couldn't produce the pearl.

A poem—it's an incantation, really—written by Pat in September of 1955, some months before she took up with Doris, makes it plain that her relationship with Doris was doomed before it began.

Trouble, in the form of a secret affair with an attractive older woman (a decade older than Doris), was only six months away.

When Pat and Doris returned from their trip to Mexico in March of 1956, Pat, still feeling the pull of “going to God” on Sunday, joined the choir of the small Presbyterian church in Palisades and continued or tried to continue her peaceful domestic life. Doris worked on a TV script from an idea by Pat, while Pat worked on everything else and made some social gestures. One of her gestures resulted in a meeting with the great choreographer Martha Graham, a neighbor in Snedens Landing; and a photograph of Graham with one of Pat's Siamese cats lives on in her archives. Pat also met another neighbor, Gertrude Macy, the Broadway producer and Katharine Cornell's lover, manager, and biographer, who became a lifelong correspondent. Meanwhile, Pat was still making sporadic efforts to integrate her hopes for the world with her continued acceptance of Jesus Christ: “It is conceivable that mankind, with the guidance of a dominant faith in God, can work a system out for their own good, which will be closer to Communism and the word of Jesus Christ than any form of government yet seen on earth.”
³¹

Like many Americans in the 1950s, Pat was also thinking about just how the atomic and hydrogen bombs would change the things she cared most about: “the perishability of books…due to H-bombs” was preoccupying her. “This total extinction could not have occurred to the mind of Dickens, for instance…. Now every writer may see himself and his readers quite wiped out.” But she added to her thoughts the inevitable Highsmith detail: “The book may exist, but it's radioactive. Don't touch it.”
³²
She would use that same caveat about a knife—“Don't touch it”—to end
The Cry of the Owl
in 1962.

Still, nothing could stop the engine of Pat's writing for long, and Pat and Doris even made a book together, a book of cartoons and accompanying rhymes called
Miranda the Panda Is on the Veranda
(Coward-McCann, 1958). Doris made up the rhymes and Pat provided the cartoons, and, even in this sweet, sticky, inconsequential work, Pat refused to allow anything of her seven years' connection to the comics to appear. The jacket copy simply states: “Her one other occupation involved a short term as a salesgirl in the toy section of a large department store.” Pat, who had loathed all the other salesgirls at Bloomingdale's, except for one Greenwich Village resident, Rachel Kipness (another of those “good eggs” whose shells she liked to crack), actually preferred to be identified as a “salesgirl” rather than as a writer of comic books.

A book made by two people living together (as Doris and Pat were) suggests a certain degree of emotional stability. Pat couldn't wait to disrupt it. Her domestic relationship with Doris didn't offer the painful oppositions she craved, and she knew that the work she was doing now was far from her best. And so Pat—it was no effort at all—fell deeply in love with Mary Ronin.

Aside from her symbolic first name, there were other ways in which Mary Ronin reminded Pat of Mother Mary. She was a commercial artist in a long-term relationship (a relationship Pat did her best to break up) with a wealthy woman who owned a brownstone on New York's Upper East Side. Charming, from the vivid photograph that remains in Pat's archives, Mary was also creative and witty. When Pat was living with Marijane Meaker in New Hope in 1961, Ronin sent Pat a birthday card with not a single word on it, just a drawing of herself, nude, in front of a calendar opened to Pat's birthdate, 19 January. Mary Ronin was sufficiently older than Pat, and sufficiently unavailable to her, to become the kind of tantalizing inspiration Pat could work with. And so, from this mostly denied relationship came one of Pat's best novels. It's the story of a pyschopath with a double identity and two names to match it. He creates a house for (and an imaginary relationship with) the woman he loves. And he murders her husband. Pat called her book
This Sweet Sickness
(1960), and she dedicated it to the other crucial Mary in her life, her mother.
^*

Part 7

In the spring of 1959, Pat, still obsessed with Mary Ronin, had “just that afternoon come back from a trip to Mexico” when a young paperback writer, Marijane Meaker, “starstruck” at spotting the author of
The Price of Salt,
introduced herself to Pat in a lesbian bar on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village.
¹
Pat's authorship of
The Price of Salt
was an open secret in New York lesbian circles, and the whisper had gone round the bar: “Claire Morgan is here.”

In the 1950s, says Marijane Meaker, “most lesbian bars were Mafia bars, with people watching the ladies' room, letting the women in one at a time and handing them one piece of toilet paper, and a low-level Mafia guy with a pinkie-ring at the door vetting the entrants.”
²
Pat, who both liked and deplored lesbian bars (she hated the overpriced drinks, disparaged the downmarket “dikes,” and found the casual encounters exciting), was something of a fixture in bars like Three Steps Down and Provincetown Landing, two of the several bars on West Third Street.
³
And she liked (but was less comfortable at) Johnny Nicholson's High Bohemian Café Nicholson on East Fifty-eighth Street, whose garden was the site of Karl Bissinger's iconic 1948 photograph (see “
Social Studies: Part 1
”).

Pat also frequented Spivy's, Jane Bowles's favorite Upper East Side nightclub; Romeo Salta's on East Fifty-sixth Street (where, in a wonderful scene in her novel
This Sweet Sickness,
Pat sends her psychopathic hero David Kelsey/William Neumeister to order two Italian dinners and two cocktails: one for himself and one for his imaginary girlfriend); the bar at the St. Regis Hotel; and the mostly gay male restaurants in Greenwich Village like Aldo's, the Finale, and Fedora (still in business on West Fourth Street), as well as more mixed-gathering establishments like the Pony Stable, Mona's, Show Spot, and the Jumble Shop.
⁴
These last were places where women could drink and eat, sometimes dance and hold hands, and meet each other for professional and personal reasons.

Liz Smith, America's preeminent show-business gossip columnist, was introduced to Pat “in Greenwich Village in the mid-Fifties…by a successful TV producer named Jacqueline Babbin.” Fifty years after their meeting, Smith remembered the explanation for Pat's “aloof and forbidding” behavior. “Highsmith was a very odd bird, even in her youth. She took to me because we had both been born in Fort Worth. But it wasn't possible to really know her. Once we had exhausted Texas memories, she was off again into her own odd world…. Like many people, she had a serious ‘mother has rejected me' problem.”
⁵

Megan Terry, the feminist playwright whose experimental work put her in the center of 1960s avant-garde theater in Manhattan, met Pat after she'd broken up with Doris and moved to an apartment at 76 Irving Place. Terry, eleven years younger, saw the sweet side of Pat.

“She was wonderful to be with, so beautiful, so much fun. And she was very romantic, always projecting her hopes on her lovers. When I knew her she was very sweet, a lot like a naïve teenage boy. But when you get up to a quart of gin a day, something else happens. I couldn't believe how much [alcohol] she could put away. She needed the alcohol because she was so vulnerable.”

Terry remembered a dramatic feature of Pat's Irving Place apartment (yet another Highsmith apartment in the vicinity of an elegant neighborhood, Gramercy Park).
^*
“I used to babysit Pat's cats, stay in her apartment in Irving Place when she was gone. She had a big built-up platform bed there, very theatrical. It was a great apartment.”
⁶

Pat's first French translator, Jean Rosenthal (he and his wife, Renée, translated many Highsmith novels for Laffont and Calmann-Lévy, including
The Blunderer, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Strangers on a Train, Deep Water, Those Who Walk Away,
and
The Two Faces of January
), remembered a well-watered dinner Pat gave for him in her Irving Place apartment. It was his first trip to the United States, there were ten people invited, he was unused to cocktails before dinner, and Pat, “still very beautiful,” was serving copious “dry martinis. I had to aim myself to get to the table.” Rosenthal also remembered travelling on a plane from Paris to New York with Pat, who was smuggling “a green plant” for her mother hidden in her valise. Plants, he said, were like “drugs” to American customs officials, but Mary had asked for it, so Pat was sneaking it into the country.
⁷

Long after Pat had left Irving Place, Megan Terry came across a photograph of her aging friend in a book. Like Pat's Barnard College classmates, she was so shocked by the change in appearance that she “just had to close the book…. I couldn't believe the way she looked…. She was so lovely when she was young. And so much fun…She and Marijane Meaker really weren't good for each other at all…A real folie à deux and a weird mutual projection.”
⁸

El's (or L's), the MacDougal Street bar where Marijane Meaker had introduced herself to Pat, was different from most Greenwich Village women's bars. It was the “beginning,” says Meaker, “of graciousness in the lesbian bar world.” There was no Mafia ownership in evidence and most of the clientele were as well dressed as “young college girls.”
⁹

Pat—tall, thin, dark, and handsome in a trench coat—was drinking gin and standing up at the bar. She looked to Marijane like “a combination of Prince Valiant and Rudolf Nureyev” and was more than receptive to Meaker's attempt to introduce herself.
¹⁰
It was, says Meaker, “a fast take” (although Pat's first question to Marijane was to ask if she liked to travel, so Pat was interested in a fast getaway as well), and they both told lies about their current situations. Marijane, living comfortably with a lover, told Pat she was at the “end” of a relationship, and Pat, still obsessed by Mary Ronin, said that she was entirely unattached.

Pat fell for Marijane deeply enough to cancel one tramp steamer trip to Europe, duffel bag and Olympia typewriter in hand. Then she did leave for Europe on a publication trip to Paris for Calmann-Lévy with Mother Mary in tow—during which she arranged for Mary Ronin to join her in Greece. But Ronin didn't oblige, and Pat spent a month with her increasingly eccentric mother in Paris—seeing the poisoned future that awaited her in the resemblances between herself, her grandmother, and her mother. “It's inevitable, too, to think that there go I in another twenty-five years.”
¹¹

After bundling Mary off to Rome, Pat went to visit the cartoonist Jeannot in Marseille, then travelled to Salzburg, Athens, and Crete with her former lover Doris. But Pat didn't tell Marijane Meaker of her foiled plan to meet Mary Ronin in Greece, and Meaker remained obsessed with Pat the whole time Pat was in Europe. Moving around Europe with Doris, Pat never referred to Marijane in her notebooks and occupied herself with other women
en voyage.

But when she returned to New York, Pat and Marijane resumed their relations and decided to move together to Pennsylvania, to a farmhouse on Old Ferry Road seven miles outside of New Hope. Pat's first choice had been posh Snedens Landing, where she'd lived with Doris and where she still had women friends like Polly Cameron, who would design the Harper & Row book jackets for
Deep Water
and
The Cry of the Owl.
“We called [Snedens Landing] the Lesbian Graveyard,” says Marijane Meaker.
¹²
But rents in Snedens Landing and the surrounding Palisades were too high, so the two women moved to New Hope, where Pat also had friends: Al and Betty Ferres in Tinicum, and in New Hope, Peggy Lewis, whom Pat knew from the art gallery Peggy and her husband, Michael, had operated in Greenwich Village and reopened in New Hope.

Peggy Lewis, from a Baltimore Orthodox Jewish family, was liberated from religion, say her daughters, and attracted to “anything artistic.” She was a cultural and social force in New Hope, spoke her “very critical” mind, and kept open house for all manner of people. Peggy spent quite a bit of time helping Pat: housing her on trips back from Europe, visiting Meyer's garage in New Hope to check up on Pat's stored car, paying a fraught visit to Pat and Ellen Hill during their drive through Mexico in 1955 (long before Pat moved to New Hope), and reviewing every single Highsmith book for the
Bucks County Life
journal in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Peggy had started the “Books” column in
Bucks County Life
and enticed Pat to both write and draw for the journal.

Bucks County, where New Hope is located, has always been a gathering place for what used to be called “creative types”: homosexuals, bohemians, theater folk, film people, well-to-do commercial artists, and even rural illiterates like Dorothy Parker and her husband Alan Campbell, who in 1936, with many of their friends living in or moving to every hamlet along the Delaware River (amongst them Bella and Samuel Spewack, Ruth and Augustus Goetz, S. J. and Laura Perelman, George S. Kaufman, Moss Hart, Jean Garrigue, Josephine Herbst, Glenway Wescott, and Arthur Koestler), purchased a farm in Pipersville and promptly mowed down a forest of beautiful old trees that was obstructing their “view.” All of Bucks Country recoiled in convulsive horror.
¹³

Marijane Meaker's romantic memoir of her meeting with Pat in Manhattan and their attempt to live together in Bucks County,
Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s
(although, says Meaker, it was often “far from a love story”),
¹⁴
with its vivid portrayal of the deeply closeted lesbian life in 1950s New York, highlights Pat's sweetnesses and eccentricities: her insistence on dressing for dinner even in the country (shoes shined, a freshly ironed white shirt, a blazer and an ascot); her gentlemanly manners (always standing up for a woman and pulling out her chair); her habit of proffering small presents (a flower on the table, a book of Renée Vivien's poems with a page marked by an autumn leaf, love notes on any old piece of paper that came to hand); her attachment to bad puns and worse jokes; and her instinctively guilty response to any situation for which she might be held vaguely responsible.

But under the romantic vignettes lurk other stories: troubling stories about what happens when two obsessive women writers, each at a different stage in her career and each writing a book whose organizing principle is murder, try to live together for six months in a rural idyll with their cats.
^*
15
One of the stories has a switchblade in it.

Pat had always carried a knife in her pocket—pointed instruments occupied a practical and fantastical place in the Highsmith imagination for decades (see “
The Real Romance of Objects, Parts 1
and
3
”)—and even her written approaches to love were armed with blades. At eighteen, she'd inserted a couple of cutting edges into a jaunty little sea shanty she called “High Romance.” “I happen to like this,” she wrote pugnaciously beside the first verse.
¹⁶

In New Hope, Pat used her pocketknife for grooming plants, and during one of many arguments with Marijane, she stuck it roughly and repeatedly into a wooden tabletop, let the handle quiver, and pulled it out again, casting menacing looks at her lover all the while.

Meaker was worried enough about the knife to write to Mary Highsmith. Mary wrote back, trying to convince her that fainthearted Pat wasn't capable of slipping a shiv into a lover.

“Never would she have harmed you with that knife deal tho an unspeakable thing to do. She is too much a coward at the sight of blood. She would have been the first to keel over. She faints at the prick of a finger.”
¹⁸

In the same letter Mary treated herself to a long, hot, maternal denunciation of all Pat's previous female friends, especially the older ones (see “
The Real Romance of Objects: Part 1
”).
¹⁹
It couldn't have been a comfortable letter to receive, and it wasn't a comfortable relationship for either Pat
or
Marijane Meaker by now. Meaker says that one thing kept the two writers together: “By then, we didn't like each other, we didn't want to be around each other, but in bed it was fire.”
²⁰

Pat and Marijane broke up quickly (and then continued to break up slowly) during their six months of cohabitation. And all through 1961 and part of 1962, Pat stayed on in New Hope, meeting attractive women. She met so many women that she felt compelled to lie to Caroline Besterman (whom she'd recently met in London), telling her that there were no lesbians in New Hope at all. But Pat was thinking about her “Ever Present Subject”—and about how to write lesbian stories under her pseudonym of Claire Morgan. Ellen Hill—Pat and Ellen, quarreling as they always did, shared a house in Positano and a trip to Rome in the summer of 1962—figured prominently in Pat's plans for lesbian fiction. At the end of 1961, after discarding the idea of writing a sequel to
The Price of Salt,
Pat added vengeful thoughts about Ellen to her hateful feelings about Marijane and arrived at a sum: another “girls' book” which she thought she might call
The Inhuman Ones.
It would be a book “about the types of female homosexuals who have something missing from their hearts, who really hate their own sex, who must have visible, palpable strife in order to keep going…. Remember: E.B.H. [Ellen Blumenthal Hill]—and M.J.M. [Marijane Meaker]”
²¹