The Talented Miss Highsmith Page 21
“Marriages, in all of my grandmother’s children, have been to people beneath them, intellectually and culturally, as if the entire family, through want of education or money or both had been permeated with the disease of inferiority.”76
Success, expecially in the postwar boom years, always seemed to Pat to be everywhere but in the Highsmith house. Her Deep Southern background, alive with the family mythology of a glorious but defeated Confederacy and a long-gone Southern Way of Life, as well as her birth in what was then considered to be a second-class Texas cow town, couldn’t have helped. (In 1906, the American philosopher-psychologist William James defined success, at that time a more or less Northern notion, as “our national disease”—and memorably called it a “bitch-goddess.” “Bitch-goddess” is a good description of how Pat liked to think of her lovers.) In the winter of 1948, surveying the sullied New York snow in the backyard of her apartment building on East Fifty-sixth Street and immersing herself in critical works about Kafka all weekend, Pat felt she was being swiftly driven “from neurosis to psychosis” by the thought of failure:
“In every direction I turn and move, I am met by failure or a wall impenetrable. The only success I can recall recently is a successful batch of hardened fudge.”77
She wasn’t kidding.
After attending a Broadway performance of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in November of 1950, Pat, for the rest of her life, would compare her mother Mary’s perpetually collapsing career as a fashion illustrator to the situation of Willy Loman, the “hero” of Miller’s tragedy, undone by his passive faith in the American Dream. Pat’s private response to Willy Loman’s downfall was completely consistent with her own ambitions and entirely inconsistent with the meaning of Death of a Saleman. “I find I have no sympathy,” Pat wrote in her diary on 17 November 1950, “for the individual whose spirit has not led him to seek higher goals, in the first place, at a much younger age.”78
Pat was seeking “higher goals,” and at a “younger age,” too, while she labored away at the comics. During this time Mary Louise Aswell—she and Pat would keep up with each other through lesbian circles when Mrs. Aswell retired with her lover Agnes Sims to New Mexico—sent Pat another rejection letter from Harper’s Bazaar which summed up Pat’s ironic relationship to “quality.” It was the kind of encouraging letter—Mrs. Aswell genuinely admired Pat’s writing and was one of her recommenders to the artists’ colony, Yaddo, in 1948—which usually has the opposite effect on its recipient, implying that while Pat’s toe might be on the literary ladder, her heel was still firmly fixed to the waiting room floor. “Your writing,” wrote Mary Louise Aswell, “has considerable quality, & while this story is not for us, would you let us see some more of your work?”79
One of the ways Pat kept her front up and her goals high was to conceal the extent of her participation in the comics trade. She also took the trouble to conceal the nature and even the fact of her first postcollege job, at FFF Publications. Pat had been taken on at FFF Publications to work with the author, newspaper columnist, and editor Ben-Zion Goldberg—already a household name among readers of Yiddish journals in America. Goldberg, the son of a rabbi from Vilnius, had travelled the world reporting and writing on Jewish matters. In 1931, he published a book about sex in religion called The Sacred Fire (1931), and by the mid-1940s he was chairman of the Committee of Jewish Scientists, Writers, and Artists of the United States. (Albert Einstein was the president of that committee.) Goldberg wrote for many papers and journals in both English and Yiddish in Canada and the United States (including The New Republic), and he was active in antifascist organizations. In 1946, he spent six months in Russia meeting with Soviet writers and Jewish political committees.80
Ben-Zion Goldberg hired Pat as his editorial assistant at FFF Publications in the last week of June 1942, when she was at the end of her job-hunting rope. (She would eke out the finish of her employment with Goldberg with some temping work at Modern Baby magazine.)81 He chose her over two hundred other applicants, but Pat was not pleased to be joining the only “club” that would admit her: a publishing company run by Jews who hired her to do research on Jewish history and provide articles to the national Jewish press. The Jewish press was FFF Publications’ primary market. “It’s a lousy, journalistic…job,” she wrote in her diary, “and I’m frankly bored & ashamed of it. Why couldn’t it be on the scarabs of Tutankhamen? Why not the history of the Dalai Lamas?…Why not the story of the philosopher’s stone?”82 Pat was afraid Goldberg would “try to Jew me down to eighteen [dollars] a week” and wrote of him contemptuously: “He seems to be of some repute—somewhere.”83 But Goldberg hired Pat at twenty dollars a week, and ten days later he gave her a raise.
So, just her luck, not only was Pat Highsmith—busily scribbling anti-Semitisms in her notebook—researching and providing material for a large part of the North American Jewish press, she had also managed to get herself hired by the son-in-law of the world’s most famous Jewish writer. Ben-Zion Goldberg had been the tutor of the renowned Yiddish fabulist Sholem Aleichem’s youngest daughter, and he married her in 1917.* Now Goldberg was Pat’s boss: the only person in New York, apparently, who wanted to hire her. The situation was alive with all the convergent ironies of a good Jewish joke. Not for the talented Miss Highsmith, however, who had never heard of Sholem Aleichem.
But then Pat did some research on Goldberg (while she was doing some research for him), and discovered that he’d been arrested for shouting “Scab!” at a political demonstration. She decided this was a pretty good character recommendation, that she “liked Goldberg personally,” and that his “methods are sound.”84 And then Pat and Mother Mary started studying Spanish together and going to more galleries, and Pat’s evening life sparkled and scintillated with more sexual and social possibilities. So she settled down to working for Goldberg with something resembling goodwill.
Pat and Goldberg stayed friendly for years (see “Alter Ego: Part 4”), and it was Goldberg to whom she first showed her early attempts at long fiction writing. And when Pat was twenty-six, it was Goldberg who pointed out to her—she said she’d never realized it before—that her perennial “theme” was the relationship between two “ill-matched” men.85 When she first gave him her work to read, he said: “There’s something in your writing that intrigues me—a rhythm…an occasional new form…. But it’s inclined to be rocky. Uneven.”86
But rather than tell the world that she’d written the “household section for The Jewish Family Year Book” in 1942, and had worked for the well-known Yiddish journalist Ben-Zion Goldberg for six months,87 Pat published an article in The Oldie magazine in 1993 (“My First Job”),” describing as her “first job” one of the “filler” jobs she’d taken after her employment with Goldberg and FFF Publications ended: a “fortnight’s” stint as a street pollster for the Arrid Deodorant Company.88 For this polling job, the constitutionally shy Pat was required to stand in front of Saks, Macy’s, and Bloomingdale’s department stores and try out advertising slogans on passers-by.
Fifty years on, Pat still remembered the accosting phrases she’d had to repeat to strangers in her disguise as a pollster: “Arrid is the most efficient deodorant in the world today.” “Arrid is the fastest selling underarm deodorant in America and the world.”89 She added, making a feeble joke, that she hoped that publishing these phrases so much later didn’t mean she was still advertising Arrid.90 But Pat knew very well she wasn’t advertising anything. In 1993, when she published the article in The Oldie—it was late in her life and her anti-Israeli stance had become a propulsive obsession—Pat was hiding the fact that her “first real job” in Manhattan had been a job compiling research for the Jewish press.
Pat used her nineteen-dollar-a-week salary pitching deodorant to move, briefly, to a bed-sitting room in a “respectable house in the East Sixties” (the adjective “respectable” made all the difference to class-conscious Pat) “from [w]here I could walk to my parents’ apartment in East
Fifty-seventh Street [also proximate to a “good address”] where I often had dinner which was economical and cheering.” But cheap and cheerful wasn’t what Pat was looking for, and one of the ways she dissembled her financial condition was to rent an apartment in the vicinity of a “quality” neigborhood: the Upper East Side.
Because the stuff of Pat’s hopes and dreams always found its way into her work, the fragile, tentative dream of happiness she put together at the end of the 1940s for the two lesbian lovers Carol and Therese in The Price of Salt depends partially upon Carol securing an apartment on Madison Avenue (an Upper East Side address) and inviting Therese to share it. In the 1940s, Madison Avenue, with its sedate buildings and elegant shops, was well on the way to becoming the ultraexpensive thoroughfare of symbolic achievement and carbon monoxide gas that it is today. Madison Avenue must have seemed like Heaven’s Own Boulevard to the young writer whose birth in her grandmother’s boardinghouse in Fort Worth, Texas, was “mid-wived” by one of the upstairs’ boarders,91 and whose first six years there were spent close enough to railyard crossings to hear the lonesome freight trains whistling down the tracks.
Pat’s next New York home, a studio apartment at 353 East Fifty-sixth Street, into which she moved in early 1943 and kept, on and off, until 1960 (subletting it briefly to Truman Capote and lengthily and contentiously to the designer Eveline Phimister, lover of her friend the photographer Ruth Bernhard),92 was just around the block from her parents’ apartment on East Fifty-seventh Street. She bought furniture for the apartment, painted the walls and bookshelves a greenish blue, and Mary Highsmith came over to help with the painting. While mother and daughter were wielding their paintbrushes, Mary, with her usual disconcerting prescience in anything that concerned her daughter, told Pat that she shouldn’t become like Allela Cornell (the young painter who was about to become Pat’s lover), crying every evening, wanting to be “beautiful,” and doing nothing about it. Mary uttered the word “lesbian” about Allela and Pat was unnerved.93 Pat hung up one of her friend Ruth Bernhard’s exquisite photographs—an arm made of wood, cradling the head of a doll94—but Kingsley Skattebol says that the apartment’s “chief attraction was the trompe l’oeil fireplace Pat had cleverly painted on one wall.”95 Pat couldn’t afford an apartment with a fireplace, so she made one for herself.
Although the painter Buffie Johnson (see “Social Studies: Part 1”) described Pat’s neighborhood as “posh enough,”96 this new apartment fell quite a bit short of “posh.” It did have an unobstructed view out the back window, but it was on the first floor, the backyard was full of the washing of Irish tenants, and there was a fire escape with a ladder just outside her window that provided easy access to her living room.
Still, Vince Fago, Pat’s editor at Timely comics, remembered her apartment (in one of those careful calibrations that social life in Manhattan always requires) just as Pat would have wanted him to: as being “near Sutton Place.”97 Sutton Place is the exclusive, expensive enclave of private houses, terraced gardens, and luxury apartment buildings clustered between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-ninth streets, one block east of First Avenue. It was colonized in 1920, when America’s first theatrical agent, the legendary lesbian Elisabeth “Bessie” Marbury,* and her like-minded lady friends Elsie de Wolfe, Anne Morgan (J. P. Morgan’s daughter), and Anne Vanderbilt began buying up the town houses next to the Burns Brothers coal yard and opening up their new homes to society. Sutton Place has been one of New York’s best addresses for the better part of a century.*
Pat’s social weakness was the one she always criticized in Mother Mary: the desire to appear before the world surrounded by “the best.” At 353 East Fifty-sixth Street she would have been a couple of blocks from it. And despite her constant complaints about her mother, Pat didn’t seem to want to live very far from her. With the Highsmiths installed on East Fifty-seventh Street, around the corner from Mary was as far away as Pat ever got.
In October of 1947, after Mary and Stanley had moved up the Hudson River to the fancy house they couldn’t afford in Hastings-on-Hudson (Mary, just as intent as her daughter on the American Dream, was thrilled to have a live-in Filipino “houseboy”), Pat admitted in her cahier just how much having a family meant to her work.
“What the young artist loses when he moves away from home may easily outweigh his gained independence. He loses an all important psychological security and framework, which has to do with his state of mind, the all important self. The artist is forever a child in some respects…. Ergo, to write with the free declarations of childhood it is essential sometimes to be in the shadow of the parents’ wings.”98
So perhaps the detail Pat recorded so casually in her diary on 16 December 1945 has greater significance than the short sentence she allotted to it. Pat wrote that the plot of Strangers on a Train came to her while she was out for a walk in Hastings-on-Hudson with her parents, Mary and Stanley Highsmith.
On the night of 18 October 1944, Pat was sitting up with a book in bed in her studio apartment, holding the cup of hot milk she always liked to drink before she fell asleep. Two years earlier, she’d described her bedtime drink in a notebook in tropes she would later import to The Price of Salt, making Carol serve Therese a similar cup of milk in similar circumstances.
“Hot milk. How wonderful on autumn idle days, lovely with silent books. I hold a finger-burning cup of it in my hands. It tastes organic, of blood and hair, meat and bone. It is alive as an embryo, sucked from a womb.”99
Pat would go on drinking milk, sometimes by the liter, for most of the rest of her life.100 She wouldn’t have denied the Freudian explanation for her taste, either: the one that begins with the theory that because Mother Mary had left Fort Worth three weeks after Pat was born to look for work in Chicago, she wouldn’t have been able to nurse her infant daughter for very long.
Alone with her book and her ritual tipple in her first real apartment, with its three-quarter couch-bed, “plus a real kitchen, plus a bath with tub and shower,”101 Pat came close to sounding like Walt Whitman. In a long passage in her cahier, she managed to merge with her surroundings, her country, her kind—with everything, in fact, except her own gender. “The sudden feeling tonight, coming to me with a pleasurable start, the kinship, brotherhood, I have with all the lighted homes all over America, stretching behind me four thousand miles westward.”102
This feeling of peace and reconciliation on an autumn night in the middle of the Second World War wouldn’t last. It was, anyway, a far cry from Pat’s “normal” feelings of being out of place everywhere—and a very far cry from the artistic theme she would pursue in every single work of fiction she ever wrote.
“What keeps recurring to me as a fundamental of the novel is the individual out of place in this century.”103
Alienation has been the house specialty of writers since Cervantes, but nothing could have been more alienating to Pat’s ambitions than her current work as a comic book scriptwriter. The idea that comics were at the center of the American Zeitgeist wouldn’t occur to anyone for several decades—and it never did occur to Patricia Highsmith. But when Pat declared that the novel had to be about an “individual out of place in this century” she had already been writing works about displaced individuals for quite a while: comic book Superheroes whose traits were so alien to their epoch that they required earth-bound Alter Egos for ballast (see “Alter Ego: Part 2”). And Pat’s other writing, the “serious” writing she did at night after work, was stealthily borrowing from her “pulp” scenarios, as though the comic book work were the secret Alter Ego of her serious stories.
Pat—who complained about everything—complained that she was bored writing for comics, but boredom, as she took the trouble to explain some years later, was a state her imagination positively thrived on: “Whenever I become intolerably bored, I produce another story, in my head.”104
In December of 1944, writing hard for the comics and grumbling about it, working on the novel she’d been thinking about f
or two years, The Click of the Shutting, making notes for short stories at night, entertaining more love possibilities than she could possibly handle (a Virginia or two, the socialite Natica Waterbury, an Anne and an Ann, the model Chloe, et al.) and feeling abysmally poor, Pat still kept her eyes on the prize. She framed her desire for the “best” in life in metaphors saturated by the war and couched in the language of the enemy. (Her diary note is in bad German.)
“When I work (write), I must have the best, the best cigarettes, a clean shirt, because I am a soldier, who fights, but in this case the enemy is terrible and brave, and sometimes I don’t win.”105
In August of 1949, on her first trip to London, already planning to seduce her English publisher Dennis Cohen’s brilliant, beautiful showgirl-turned-psychiatrist wife, Kathryn Hamill Cohen, Pat was still holding fast to her conviction of “quality.”
“I shall have the best, in the long run. Not a house with children, not even a permanent thing (what is permanent in life and in art? What ever is permanent except one’s own heartbeat?) but the best will always be attracted to me. For this, I do, most sincerely, thank God.”106
In June of 1952, from Florence, Pat wrote to Kingsley in New York to explain why she’d gone back to Europe. The subject of “the best”—never far from Pat’s mind—came up again in the letter. The fact that Mary and Stanley Highsmith had left New York State was one of the interesting reasons Pat gave for leaving the United States,107 but her old obsession with quality was her strongest theme.