The Talented Miss Highsmith Read online

  Pat had been introduced to Allela Cornell by one of the many other Anns in her life, a woman named Ann McFarland. Allela was living in a loft on Hudson Street with a roommate, the composer David Diamond. David, who went on to become romantically involved with both Carson McCullers and McCullers’s husband, Reeves, became friendly with Pat, too. Whenever Pat came to the loft, David and Pat would go around the corner to talk and have lunch at the Jai Alai, a Basque restaurant which was a fixture in Greenwich Village for decades.

  “Pat,” said David Diamond, “was quite a depressed person—and I think people explain her by pulling out traits like cold and reserved, when in fact it all came from depression.” That, and the “loneliness” which outlined her life like an aura, is why Diamond thought Pat valued Allela’s “devoted friendship” so much.46

  “I never connected Pat with the Village,” he said. “I always connected her with uptown. She wasn’t bohemian at all. People thought she was because she wore men’s white shirts. They mistook [her mild form of cross-dressing] for bohemianism. I found her a very warm human being and I loved talking with her about music. I think she was obsessed with music.” 47

  Pat and David Diamond shared a fondness for certain composers—Ravel, for instance, whom David had met when he was ten and who told him that he must go to Paris to study with the great teacher Nadia Boulanger. Like very nearly his entire generation of gifted American composers, David Diamond did just that.

  “Pat and I would always talk about where musical notes came from…. A piece of mine that was very popular in the 1940s—‘Round for Street Orchestra’—she wondered where I got the idea for that because it was so popular. She could practically imitate the whole first movement….” And Pat would let me read some short works that were still in manuscript. I thought she was a remarkable writer and that she had great psychological insight.

  “I do remember that she was as fascinated by Greta Garbo as I was. And when she found out that I had met Garbo in Hollywood, of course she was always hoping that I could perhaps introduce her to Garbo.” 48

  Greta Garbo was a lifelong obsession for Pat, and Pat knew, through lesbian circles in New York and Paris, Garbo’s former lover, the flamboyant playwright Mercedes de Acosta.* De Acosta’s romantic hats, stylish slacks, autocratic demeanor, and striking Cuban looks made her a standout in the 1920s. (At ten, she had been Dorothy Parker’s classmate at a convent school in Manhattan.) De Acosta, who was always kind to Pat, inviting her for dinner several times when Pat first arrived in Paris in July of 1949, had the distinction of having slept with, as Alice B. Toklas put it, “three of the most important women of the twentieth century.” Two of those women were Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo. (Eva Le Gallienne and Isadora Duncan are candidates for the third.) Pat herself, when young and lovely, sometimes brought out Garbo-like comparisons from her friends, and her admiring English professor, Ethel Sturtevant, once invited her to “[b]e the Greta Garbo of the novel!” 49 Pat tried her best.

  After Garbo’s death in 1990, Pat wrote an entirely worshipful article about the reclusive star, “My Life with Greta Garbo,” published finally in The Oldie on 3 April 1992. The piece is aglow with love, admiration, and incomprehension (Pat never met Garbo). And it is as quirky as anything Pat ever put on paper, dappled and stippled with all her perverse little interests. It also shows just how much of herself Pat projected into whatever she was working out in her writing at the moment. Pat’s work, despite its vaunted “neutrality,” was almost always intensely personal.

  In this article, Pat fondly remembers stalking Garbo on the streets of Upper East Side Manhattan (Pat was not unique—all New Yorkers did this) while keeping a respectful distance. She recollects almost colliding with Garbo on a corner; the experience “made” her day. And although Pat loved to imagine Garbo alone, so alone, she also liked to imagine the enormous telephone bills—the size of them had a near-pornographic excitement for Pat—that Garbo must be racking up by talking to her many admirers all over the world.

  By the time Pat wrote her Garbo article, she owned a little drawing that had once been in Garbo’s personal collection: a sexually ambiguous study of an older man who is pictured with a much younger person of indeterminate gender. She ruminated on it avidly. “That there is a sexual business between the two figures there is no doubt. The real ambiguity is in the beautiful face of the blond figure, which except for a strong jaw appears female….”50 Pat wanted to think Garbo bought the drawing because the ambiguous figure looked like Garbo herself. And Pat imagined that she “can never forget—and I can hear this too—Garbo’s voice saying, ‘I vant to be alone,’ in a deep and earnest tone that meant to any hearer, Garbo speaks the truth.”51

  Garbo may have been speaking the truth, but Pat wasn’t quoting it. Like almost everyone else, she misquotes Garbo on this particular line. What Garbo actually said was, “I want to be let alone.” Given Pat’s proclivities, her misquotation is perfectly understandable.

  In 1977, thirteen or so years before she wrote the piece on Garbo and three or four years after she and her mother cut off their relations, Pat made another interesting allusion to the Swedish actress during a seven-hour interview with the writer and journalist Joan Juliet Buck, who had come to Moncourt to talk to Pat for the Observer Magazine. It’s a sign of the feelings Pat still harbored for Mother Mary after all those years (and all those tears) that she told Buck that Mary Highsmith was “the double of Greta Garbo.”52 Mary Highsmith had her own Modigliani-like attractiveness, but only a besotted daughter could assert that Mary was a “double” for Greta Garbo’s unearthly beauty and paralyzing presence, best summed up by theater critic Kenneth Tynan with the sentence: “What one sees in other women drunk, one sees in Garbo sober.”

  Drunk or sober, when Pat looked at Mary with her mind’s eye, she saw Greta Garbo—or, at least, she sometimes said she did.

  For most of the 1940s Pat never stopped falling for women—sometimes for no more than an hour or an evening. She also began to date a few men. The majority of them were young Jewish males by whom she seemed to be both repelled and fascinated. These young men were up-and-comers with names like Jack Berger and Walter Marlowe and Lewis Howard—she particularly liked Jack Berger because he criticized his own milieu as being “sort of Jewy sometimes”—and she speculated on their potential earning power with the calculating enthusiasm of any bourgeoise. (In 1984, she would reprise this enthusiasm in a conversation with Bettina Berch: “You have to marry a man who has quite a bit of money,” Pat told Berch with a keen grasp of what marriage meant, “or you turn into a servant.”)53

  When Pat was seeing a lot of Jack Berger in early 1942—(“I was practically the only Gentile in the house”)—she complained about how his Jewish friends seemed to need to eat all the time.54 And then she criticized everything else about them. It was an interesting point of view for a woman who was to spend so much of her creative and personal life in close—often very close—association with Jews.

  “Went to American Institute of Graphic Arts tonight with Berger. I like him a lot. The Jewish mind is analytical, critical, but not sympathetic or creative. I enjoy Jews’ company when I am most on the surface of my mind—when I am concerned with superficial things or impersonal things. When I am the other way—they are intolerable to me. Babs B has been intolerable at times.”55

  A couple of months later, Pat was still preoccupied with the subject, but in a different way.

  “Walked with M. Wolf over Queensborough Bridge. She talked intelligently, but too pro-communist on my tradition question. One has to go to a Jew for decent conversation these days.”56

  One of Mary’s complaints against her daughter—that Pat calculated her female friendships according to what they could bring her—might help to explain Pat’s always-ambivalent association with Jews. Mary wrote in a letter to one of Pat’s lovers that Pat had made friends with the Alsatian-raised Jewish refugee artist Lil Picard because, as Pat told Mary, Lil was “going places.”57
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  Pat liked to explore sex intellectually, but not necessarily physically, with the young men she was seeing. In the summer between her junior and senior years in college, one of her young men made a remark about Pat’s potential for heterosexual relations that caught her attention: “[He says] that I’m always psychologically unready but often physically ready. What an observant lad.”58

  Later on, Pat would dine with and then try out in bed the occasional young man. “Herbert L. called, we had dinner and he stayed for the night…. I want to learn to love men.”59 Her attitude towards men was usually that of a canny shopper testing out an unknown product which she strongly suspected was not going to live up to its advertising. She judged these (mostly) nameless encounters solely on the kind of sexual response they produced in her. And it was never enough; it was negligible, in fact. What she was hoping for couldn’t happen because she always set the bar too high. She set it at the physical/spiritual communion she attained with women. She would always be disappointed.

  “Don’t you ever desire a man’s body?” asked one of her male candidates plaintively. Pat had been mentally—and very unfavorably—comparing his profusion of “awful” chest hair, “which he thinks to be so beautiful,” with her female lover Ginnie’s “sweet breasts.”60 The young men never stood a chance, although Pat kept on hoping they would.

  While still at Sangor-Pines, Pat continued to be preoccupied by thoughts of religion and spirituality, just as she would be for the rest of her life. She was reading Freud on religion in June of 1943 and finding him “wonderfully interesting.”61 Freud and his disciples would always be a good fit for Pat. (Jean Genet’s biographer Edmund White writes that Genet thought Freud was the best friend homosexuals ever had.) A little later, she became interested in a book by Theodor Reik, one of Freud’s first pupils, called The Unknown Murderer (1932): a study of how to profile unidentified criminals by tracking the clues their unconscious guilt compelled them to leave behind.62 In her work, Pat returned repeatedly to the effects of unconscious guilt. It was a condition she understood in her bones.

  And nothing so clearly reveals her creative reliance on frustrated desires—that classic Freudian explanation for both creation and its achievements—than the idea for a story Pat wrote down in a cahier in early September of 1947. Considering her mostly effaced paternal history, the continued reliance on male “hero-criminals” in her work, and the fact that her own first name was Mary, the meaning of this cloudy little keime couldn’t be clearer:

  Mary loved and worshiped her father. When he died, she fell ill herself, was in delirium even as he was buried. She was not told of his death. Afterward she ministered still to his needs, bringing him broth and tea, shading the light from the eyes of the figure half asleep, face turned to the wall, on its bed.63

  For her forty-sixth birthday in 1967, Mary and Stanley Highsmith gave Pat a book by another of Freud’s disciples, Erich Fromm. The book, no doubt a pointed present on Mary’s part, was called The Art of Loving. Seven years later—as though she’d read no psychology in the intervening years, which, probably, she had not—Pat noted that “Erich Fromm states boldly that if a person cannot get from another the love he desires, the person resorts to sadism,”64 and gave the irritatingly passive and masochistic Edith Howland of Edith’s Diary a taste for Fromm’s Talmud-inflected psychology.65 But in the summer of 1983, Pat came away from an avant-première in London of Hans Geissendörfer’s TV film of Edith’s Diary (Ediths Tagebuch) irritated herself to see how the filmmaker had imposed a Freudian interpretation on her novel. She thought Geissendörfer had reduced the complications of Edith’s relationship with Cliffie to “a neat Freudian mother-son love relationship” and that the film was “obvious and a bit vulgar.”66 There was nothing, she felt, neat about Edith and Cliffie.

  Pat always hated to be classified—especially by others. And she was quite capable of contradicting herself without having other people trying to contradict her.

  Still, it was Sigmund Freud’s interpretations to which Pat usually returned. His bold, artistic analyses attracted her, his misogynies were congruent with her own, and his sense of art as the locus of loss suited her understanding of the act of creation. She had begun to read his work at Barnard, and the only time she seriously rebelled against his schematic approach was when it was applied to her own psychology during her six-month stint in Freudian therapy in 1948–49. And on only one occasion—at the beginning of 1956, in the deep depression that sparked another of her long interior dialogues with herself about God and “the humanistic morale versus Freud”—did she decide, briefly, to favor the “pre-Freudian Joseph Conrad” of The Outcast of the Islands over Freud. “The old fashioned, human morality is far more appealing to the writer” than Freud, she wrote.67 It was the way Grandmother Willie Mae had brought her up—although, with his silver lining of irony, Joseph Conrad is anything but old-fashioned.

  But this lapse from Freudian faith was a brief one, and as late as 1988, Pat, a guest on a British television program devoted to the investigation of how to survive the murder of a loved one, gave her only direct response (it was Freudian) to a question about the definition of a murderer. “Frankly,” she said, “I’d call them sick if they were murderers, mentally sick.”68 For most of her life, Pat would explain herself to herself, and life to others, in more or less Freudian terms. Her novels do the same thing.

  In July of 1943, Pat was paying attention to Mother Mary’s faith in Christian Science again, and she did a drawing “while listening to a sermon by a X[Christian] Scientist.69 She tried her hand at the liturgical form herself, writing “sermons in my cahiers like the one of Jonathan Edwards.”70 The eighteenth-century Calvinist theologian Jonathan Edwards’s most famous sermon—it was part of the curriculum of every American junior high school for most of the twentieth century, so it must have been the one Pat was referring to—is “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” It begins: “In this verse is threatened the vengeance of God on the wicked unbelieving Israelites.”

  Pat, turning things upside down as usual, wrote a sermon called “Will the Lesbian’s Soul Sleep in Peace?” (she seemed to feel that her own soul might not rest in peace) and then dropped in on the artist and art dealer Betty Parsons in the gallery where she worked in order to show her the sermon. Parsons asked Pat for a copy. Parsons was Rosalind Constable’s lover, and Pat was always fascinated by the lovers of women she was attached to.71 The fact that Betty Parsons was not only an artist herself but a dealer at an important midtown gallery did not escape Pat’s attention, and Pat followed Parsons’s career as she went on to open her own gallery in 1946, the Betty Parsons Gallery, and become the most influential female gallerist in New York City. Parsons was the first person to exhibit the Abstract Expressionists, and amongst her artists were Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, and Pat’s friend Buffie Johnson.

  Dan Coates’s travels in the East had begun late in the summer of 1943, and so it was in August that he dropped in on Mary and Stanley in New York for the first time. During this visit, Pat felt that “mother has no time” (for her) and that Dan was “very boring, living completely for the present and the present is little and insignificant.”72 Good-natured, handsome Dan didn’t share Pat’s dreams of Manhattan triumph and eventual world conquest—but, then, Pat usually disliked her favorite relatives when they came to New York.

  When her beloved grandmother Willie Mae showed up in New York in October of 1943, Pat suddenly started to see Willie Mae in another light: “Grandmother makes me nervous…. She lives in the past and always talks—every minute, about ‘your uncle,’ ‘my brothers,’ ‘your aunt’—all people who died 50 years ago.”73 This had something to do with Willie Mae’s proximity. Pat preferred her family in their proper places, in a stable “character,” and in the relations and the context in which she first knew them. Pat’s artistic concentrations were always the opposite of her hopeless yearning for stability.

 
; Relations got worse during Willie Mae’s visit to New York, and Pat went so far as to have a disloyal little chat with her mother about her grandmother. The chat, however, was loyal to Mary, and it is the only time on record that Pat took Mary’s side against Willie Mae.

  “At home a secret is spoken out: we don’t like Grandma. She is disagreeable, because she doesn’t let anybody tell her anything, she is jealous, talks too much, wants to spend money (!), go out and doesn’t show any thoughtfulness towards Mother. It worries me that Mother still tries to understand and change Grandma, to show her where she is wrong, and that mother still is looking for something that has never been. Something must be done, as she intends to come here every summer and this will make Mother old: she drives us all to drink!”74

  Like mothers, like daughters. These were the same criticisms Pat and Mary Highsmith would hurl at each other—in far more developed and colorful language—for decades; each woman standing in the dock, each woman sitting in the judge’s chair. Mary, Pat would insist, had “shattered” her with criticisms, made her shake for days, and twisted her sexually, while Pat’s physical and emotional “violence,” Stanley Highsmith (standing in for Mary) told Pat, had driven Mary to hysterical vomiting and a consultation with a psychiatrist. (The psychiatrist’s name was Dr. Ripley, and he may have been the same Dr. Ripley who “treated” the novelist Mary McCarthy when her first husband committed her to the Harkness Pavilion in New York—and left her there.)

  “[S]till looking for something that has never been”—it is Pat’s phrase for Mary’s attempts to get Willie Mae to pay attention to her—would be a long life’s work for both the Highsmith women. Each of them was irretrievably linked to loss; and both of them were linked by their “loss” of each other.