The Talented Miss Highsmith Read online

  Mrs. Auchinclaus, a dowager widow, blue, alert eyes, constant smoker, quizzes me with an interest as to what I am writing…. When she was young, she saw all Europe, made photographs of places of interest and sold them to museums and galleries. She clings to youth and life, as I have seen so many her age and type cling to it.

  Pat also cast her assessing eye on the Weltons: he looks like “Carl Sandburg,” she like “Julie Haydon” Colonel Newton, “the West Point graduate” back on a thirty-day leave from the war and married to a “26 year old girl, very sweet, a trifle hebraic” and the other Newton family, the female half of which “was seen in Chachalaca’s bar by half the town one afternoon pulling her dress down and presenting her fifty year old bosom to all who would have a feel,” and the husband, Dr. Newton, who “left Taxco [without his wife] owing me ten pesos, Paul about 300, Chachalaca’s 180, Arturo’s 140.” And then there was “Fidel Figueroa,” an early, compellingly heterosexual prototype for her hero-criminals, whom Pat put at the center of her short story “In the Plaza.” Fidel is “an Indian, who came into town with one peso, and a handsome face, and somewhere underneath it, the energy to climb fast and the ruthlessness.”

  Murder was usually on Pat’s mind when she wrote fiction, and as her fictions took their various forms in Mexico, she began to use murder as a replacement for love—or as a reaction to love. Fifteen years later she would admit to a lover that life didn’t make any sense unless there was a crime in it. In early manuscript versions of several of her novels (A Game for the Living, The Two Faces of January amongst them), Pat changed the murderer from manuscript to manuscript—sometimes at the suggestion of an editor—as though it didn’t really matter to her who did the deed as long as the impulse to kill found expression in the plot.14 Even in The Talented Mr. Ripley, the novel whose initial murder is so iconically linked to its theme, the original murder victim was Dickie’s father, Herbert Greenleaf, who, in various versions, is pushed from a cliff by both Dickie and Tom or stabbed and filled with opium so Tom Ripley can “engage…in a smuggling operation.”15

  Both Pat’s Mexican short stories end in awkward deaths. She has the character who represents Fidel Figueroa killed in “In the Plaza,” and she also kills the character who stands in for Marguerite Luzi in her short story “The Car.” But in life, Mrs. Luzi lived on in Taxco, and in life Fidel Figueroa enchanted many foreign ladies with his paintings (which sold “faster than he could paint them”), left Mrs. Cadenas, who had pulled him up from poverty and kept and dressed him beautifully—Pat lingers on Fidel’s “New York” clothes—and married the “none too prepossessing Mrs. Kitzelman, whose husband made his fortune in barbed wire fences.” “They live in the most ornate house in Taxco, decorated by all the best decorators from Mexico City in Mrs. K’s execrable taste.” Pat took the happy ends in her models’ lives and turned them into tragedy (or at least into murder) in her fictions.

  Fiction, as Pat was to say decades later in an interview on American radio, was for what she really wished would happen.16

  Pat also took careful notes on the Taxco residents’ most serious extracurricular activity: drinking. Taxco was a place where steady drinkers could find plenty of company. Pat did most of her own imbibing at the bar in the Victoria Hotel and in Chachalaca’s Bar. In Mexico, she wrote with less embarrassment about drinking than she was ever to do again.

  The moon is a tired wheel of chance rolling across the sky, and I am to be found in a bar. Hours and hours I sit watching the business man from Chicago paw a lady who is not his wife, listening to the jaded mariachis grinding out “Jalisco,” absorbing greedily a thousand monotonous details that I have seen a thousand times before, absorbing alcohol to feel things I have felt a thousand times before.17

  In Taxco people do not drink to fill social intervals, or as a ritual between four and six, and do not drink for a mild lift, but for total oblivion.18

  Alcohol is a virus…. One drink leads to another, with an infallibility unequalled anywhere else on the globe. Masculine cameraderie is strong. Wines are comic.19

  Pat was considering writing a “book or short stories on Taxco, preferably a book,”20 and her thoughts were a variation on the theme she’d identified at the age of twenty: “What keeps recurring to me as a fundamental of the novel is the individual out of place in this century.”21

  As always, Pat was following the split, the fault line, the fracture in her own psychology to imagine the subject of her future novels. But her musings in Taxco seemed to predict her future life as well, setting out with uncanny pre-science her struggles in the next five decades in all those foreign countries where she lived and worked as a resident alien. Pat said she wanted her writing to

  show the effects of foreign milieu on Americans. Americans, because Americans, less than French, Germans, far less than the English, do not know whether to assimilate themselves or hold apart. They try to do both, and lose their own souls, their mores, their minds. The Englishman takes a little England along with him, and lives in proud isolation. The Frenchman forgets his European blood and marries. The American sits astride the fence, drinks, and earns the hostility of every native in the foreign country. It is this split personality that makes the American a total failure, that tears him apart.22

  In between her bouts of tequila drinking, drawing and sketching, taking observant character notes, and imagining new fictions, Pat, full of confidence and despair, worked on the novel at hand, the novel she was never to finish: The Click of the Shutting.

  In 1965, in an interview for the London Sunday Times—the same interview in which she announced that “stories are absolutely essential to me, like poetry: I write a lot of both”—Pat gave an account of her abandoned novel to the writer and critic Francis Wyndham:

  I…went to Mexico and started a long Gothic novel which never got finished. It was about two boys of fourteen, one rich and one poor. The poor boy goes and stays in the rich boy’s house and falls in love with his mother. I described the house in great detail, and when I realised I’d written hundreds of pages and still hadn’t got to the action, I gave it up. It was quite unlike my later books.23

  On the first day of 1943, a week after she got her job at Sangor-Pines, Pat had taken a New Year’s walk to Sutton Place, the expensive Manhattan enclave close to her new apartment on East Fifty-sixth Street. It was a walk she would turn into a little voyage of discovery for Gregory, the main character of her “long Gothic novel,” The Click of the Shutting. (The title, borrowed from one of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnets, refers to the sound a clasp knife, the kind of knife Pat always carried, makes as it closes.) Although Pat insisted that “[u]nlike Nietzsche, my best thoughts do not come in the fresh air,”24 some of her best images did, and in her notes for the novel the boy Gregory sees what Pat saw that day on Sutton Place: a lamp enclosed in an iron frame over a colonial doorway, “all grey like an ancient knight’s crest…. It was then, young as he was at sixteen, that Gregory knew he must have always and only his love of the fantastic and the unreal.”25

  As she walked past Manhattan’s elegant mansions, Pat must have repeated to herself many times the phrase with which she began The Click of the Shutting: “‘I’ll pretend that I live there,’ Gregory whispered as he came into the block.”26

  Pat did describe a “house in great detail” in this novel—which, contrary to what she told Francis Wyndham, was so much like her “later books” that most of the themes (including the “big signet ring,”27 a feature of all Pat’s Ripley novels)28 in most of her later works can be found in The Click of the Shutting.29 The novel’s grand house, the house of the Willson family, is the first of many invented houses—a “house of fiction,” in Henry James’s phrase—to appear in a Highsmith novel. Like all the other houses she would make up, this house was what Patricia Highsmith desperately wanted at twenty-three.

  Pat had Edgar Allan Poe at the back of her mind while she was working on The Click of the Shutting (she was thinking of “William Wilson,”
Poe’s 1839 tale of paranoid and murderous doubles, when she named the house’s proprietary family “Willson”). But despite long, shapely passages and some subtle characterizations, much of her writing approached the ungainly style that made the novelist E. L. Doctorow call Edgar Allan Poe a “genius hack” and “our greatest bad writer.”30

  Besides “great detail,” Pat invested the Willson house with its own “character,” and her manuscript predates by fifteen years the next American novel to present a house with a personality: Shirley Jackson’s elegant psychological ghost story, The Haunting of Hill House. The first sentence of Jackson’s 1959 work could almost be a summary of the reasons Pat would always give for why she wrote. “No live organism,” Shirley Jackson wrote, “can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.31

  Pat began to make little notes for The Click of the Shutting six weeks before she started work for Richard Hughes at Sangor-Pines. In September of 1942, she’d been imagining the “enormous possibilities” of using adolescents as major characters “in a novel.” She was thinking about (but not reading again) André Gide’s The Counterfeiters, reminding herself of the precocity of his teenagers.32 A week after Hughes hired her, Pat began extending her notes into the idea of a novel about an artistic teenage boy who spies upon the house and enters the life of another, far wealthier boy.33

  Pat was, after all, still an adolescent herself (she liked to think of herself as an adolescent boy), and so she imagined Gregory Bullick as a high school student who had some of the characteristics of one of her high school friends. “Let Gregory = B.B. but he will not be the main character because he is a Jew. A perfectionist.”34

  “B.B.” was Babs, the close friend of Judy Tuvim (Holliday) and a girl to whom Pat had been attracted. But as Pat, in Taxco, was writing her way through the comic book scenarios she was mailing back to Sangor-Pines in Manhattan, her notes for Gregory show that she was allowing him to split off, to become half of a double nature, to take something from her own psychology and something from what she was writing for Richard Hughes.35 She gave Gregory some of her tastes, too: sending him to Carnegie Hall to see the cross-dressed Flamenco dancer, Carmen Amaya, by whom both she and Ruth Bernhard had been enthalled.36

  So Gregory loses his “Jewishness” and his minor status and becomes a major character whose homoerotic attachments and meek outward demeanor are more like Patricia Highsmith’s—and more like the Alter Egos she is writing for Sangor-Pines (“Bob Benton: mild-mannered young pharmacist”)—than they are like the traits of Dostoyevsky’s liverish young antiheroes or Gide’s perversely philosophical adolescent geniuses.

  An impoverished boy, Gregory is also a talented one, and parasitical in his attachments to the other, richer boys he worships. He has some of Pat’s protectiveness about his art: he is horribly insulted when a friend of his father’s looks at his drawing of “the wind” and says: “It’s nothing.” He shares with Pat the double conviction that he is worthless and that, therefore, the world must revolve around him. Gregory’s narcissism fosters the creation of an Alter Ego the way a petri dish encourages the growth of bacteria; he’s a candidate for the dark side of the American Dream. “[Gregory] felt he was driven by some terrific energy that would never exhaust itself and that must surely translate itself finally into something magnificent.”37 Like Pat, he “driv[es] himself on nerve alone” and loves the “destructive” way this makes him feel.38

  Gregory lives with his alcoholic father, a failed passport photographer, in a disheveled loft in Pat’s old neighborhood in Greenwich Village. Gregory uses Pat’s old subway stop, the Christopher Street station, and, like her, he has a penchant for good addresses, fine houses, and drinking at Pete’s Tavern. He comes back every day for weeks to spy on the house of the Willson family, with whose spoiled and destructive son, George, he creates a rivalrous and Alter Ego–like relationship. Gregory is also a would-be novelist.

  When Gregory enters George Willson’s house for the first time, George sees that Gregory is ravished by the house’s interior; Gregory seems zombie-like to George, seems “to be in a perpetual trance…. It was like he was dead and would do anything he was told to do.”39 Gregory is trying to think himself into George Willson’s body, trying to be “born directly into heaven without the trouble of a lifetime of living and dying.” 40 “Wanting the house was a strange and unreasonable thing.” 41 Wanting George’s family was even stranger: “It was as much the imagined household as the physical house that he loved.” 42

  As though the Willsons have been compelled by the force of Gregory’s feelings, they pack off their son George to a military academy and invite Gregory to take his place. While Gregory is not the first of Pat’s long line of adopted or semiadopted characters—that distinction goes to the “boy called Mary” in “The Legend of the Convent of St. Fotheringay”—Gregory is the first fully developed character who is “adopted,” and the first one who tries to replace his Alter Ego. In The Click of the Shutting, Pat was beginning to test out some of the abiding themes—replacement, substitution, and forgery—that would color even the works she devoted to women. Therese in The Price of Salt is an “orphan” whose absent, neglectful mother is still alive, while Edith Howland of Edith’s Diary has unresponsive parents but a motherly Aunt Melanie.

  Pat’s imagination liked to exclude birth families or destroy them, and this preference found expression even in her most casual lines. One of them was part of a little limerick she wrote in 1976: “Home presents a dismal picture / Things are gloomy as the tomb.” 43 Another is a note she took a couple of years later: “Families are nice to visit but I wouldn’t want to live with one.” 44

  André Gide, Pat’s literary guide to sexualizing adolescents, had already reduced the familial subject to its essentials: “Familles! Je vous haïs!”

  Early on, Pat was thinking of The Murder in The Click of the Shutting as essential: “[c]ommitted on a day when Dominick and Donato [she uses the names of several other paired boys in subplots: Bernard and Charles, Gregory and George, Alex and Paul, etc.] have been laughing too much.” 45 In a later version, it is the boys’ high school teacher who is murdered. Pat frames this murder in homosexual terms, and the killing is committed, once again, because the boys have been laughing too much:

  Gregory haunts the pistol all the week, the pistol which Alphonse owns…. And on the day it happens, the chemistry teacher scolds the two of them for unruliness, and they still laugh too much, and Alphonse, softened by the gentle lapping, licking of Gregory’s adulation, pulls the trigger at his broad short back. 46

  In the notes Pat made for the end of The Click of the Shutting (she managed 385 pages before abandoning it as unfinishable) she indicated that she wanted Gregory to sketch George’s mother, Margaret, then sleep with her, and then, in a scuffle with George, accidentally kill her. Her first idea was that it was Margaret’s son, George Willson, who should do the killing.

  As befits a recent college graduate whose longest experience of life has been school, Pat’s imagination of the high school in The Click of the Shutting is the best thing in the novel. Reminiscent of Kafka’s confining structures, the school is more vicious, more contemporary, and less randomly organized than Kafka’s trackless mental architectures. The deteriorating physical plant—everything is gray and greasy and abandoned—the violent hall monitors, the hungover children, the persistent and cruel torturing of teachers by students and the students’ torturing of each other, are both uncomfortably modern and sinisterly Gothic.

  Many of Pat’s conflicted feelings about women went straight into the male characters of The Click of the Shutting. It was a double displacement for her (and a nice play on Gide’s idea of dédoublement, although her understanding of Gide was limited to his adolescent boys) by which, as she became a boy on the page, she lost both her “female self” and her “real” antipathies for women. (Pat had begun the book by thinking of herself as the boy who would fall in love with George’s mother, Margaret.) H
er antipathies towards women were much more powerful (and much less subtle) when she wrote about them in the voice of her cahiers, which was, more or less, her own voice. Or, rather, one of her voices.

  Gregory has odd feelings about girls: “Most of all he hated to bump into the girls’ breast. Their soft pressure was to him unclean and a little spooky.” 47 Everett, George Willson’s uncle, looks down into the “disconcertingly intense face” of his wife, Lydia, and says: “You remind me of Lady Macbeth.” 48 And “[a]s he strokes her hair, he thinks: It was an ugly thing he did, touching her…a very ugly thing.” 49 George Willson plays a nastily misogynist game with his great uncle Alfred called “Lord Twitchbottom and Lady Twot.”

  Gregory develops a crush on another wealthy male classmate, too, Paul Cotton. “His devotion to Paul was a far worthier thing, for Paul was a fine person.” Gregory, as Tom Ripley will do ten years later, impersonates the object of his crush: “Still being Paul, mingling friendliness with unconcern, he descended the rest of the stairs.”50 And, just as Ripley will do, Gregory makes a throat-slitting gesture in front of a mirror with a razor and calls out the name of Paul’s girlfriend.51 Gregory’s crush on Paul might have forced The Click of the Shutting to follow an even more dangerous direction—but Pat held that particular fire for The Talented Mr. Ripley.