The Talented Miss Highsmith Page 35

  After the war, Pat’s social life in New York tilted more towards the professional and the commercial—she was particularly interested in selling her work to the “money magazines”—and she was careful to note the notables and the notables-in-waiting she met on her evenings out, often writing up her experiences in French or German. Her commercial intentions began to leak into her creative work, and in the days after Christmas of 1947 she was pierced with guilt about this artistic and spiritual “self-betrayal”:

  Note after writing my first insincere story: it eats at my brain when I turn from it to write my book [Strangers on a Train]. I feel my thoughts are soiled and unclear. God forgive me for turning my talents to ugliness and to lies. God forgive me. I shall not do it again. Only this vow permits me to work any longer tonight at all. Best if I were punished by the story’s being a complete fiasco. Miserere mihi. Dirige me, Domine, sempiterne.95

  But in May of 1947, Pat had been writing her story “Mrs. Afton, Among Thy Green Braes,” and feeling very pleased with it. She hadn’t, she said, “worked so hard on a story since ‘The Heroine.’”96 “The Heroine” was the story against which Pat measured all her writing in the 1940s, going so far as to say, while she was working on The Price of Salt, that she hoped this book would be “better than ‘The Heroine.’ O to remove that curse one day!”97 “Mrs. Afton” is a fine, quiet, disturbing tale, reminiscent of the eerie economies of Shirley Jackson’s best short fictions.

  Mrs. Afton (an alias) is a well-mannered, middle-aged Southern lady whose detailed report of her imaginary husband gives a consulting psychiatrist a bad afternoon. Because of Mrs. Afton’s deception, the psychiatrist must track down Mrs. Afton’s real name (it’s Miss Gorham), and he is forced into a serious readjustment of his own ideas of “reality”: i.e., the knowledge that his psychiatric sense has failed him and that now he must treat “Miss Gorham” for a disease that “Mrs. Afton” did not seem to suffer from. “Mrs. Afton,” like so many of Pat’s best stories, was published, fifteen years after she wrote it, in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in December of 1962.

  While she was working on “Mrs. Afton,” Pat was invited to a party given by the set designer Oliver Smith in the writer Jane Bowles’s apartment on Tenth Street in Greenwich Village. Jane’s wealthy lover from Vermont, Helvetia Perkins, was there, as well as the refugee composer Marc Blitzstein (“who had some sort of passion for me,” Pat thought),98 the choreographer Jerry Robbins, and the great theater actress Stella Adler. Forty years later, Pat remembered the evening as “a fabulous party, including Paul [Bowles], John Gielgud, Oliver Smith, Jerome Robbins—everybody notable except me—I felt!…I always had a high and awed respect for [Jane’s] talent.”99 Pat, who had given some stories to Jane, got, not for the first time, some writerly advice from her: “Don’t plan,” Jane said to the diagram-obsessed Pat. “It always works better to write first, and then rewrite.”100

  At some point, Pat made a little line drawing of Jane Bowles.101 Although Pat and Jane would never be more than social acquaintances eying each other appraisingly (Pat said that Jane was amongst the women who were sexually available to her, but that she wasn’t “really attractive to me”),102 they actually had some common lifelines. For one thing, Jane, as Pat wrote appreciatively, “could hold half a bottle of gin in an admirably quiet way.”103 Jane and Pat had both lived in the borough of Queens as children, they had both attended Julia Richman High School (at different times), and they had discussed the idea of going to North Africa together, during the period when Jane was anxiously trying to rejoin her husband, Paul, in Tangier. In 1949, they accompanied each other to the passport office in New York City to register for their passports; Pat remembered the occasion because this was her first passport, although not her first attempt to get one.104 She also remembered that “at the question ‘What is the purpose of your journey (to N. Africa)’ Jane said she wanted to write ‘To rejoin tribe.’”105 Although sexually uninterested in Jane, Pat was still alert to the opportunity: “[I]f we go to Africa no doubt something would happen.”106

  Luckily, their African trip never came off. Jane Bowles had phobias about trains, tunnels, bridges, elevators, and making decisions, while Pat’s phobias included, but were not confined to, noise, space, cleanliness, and food, as well as making decisions. A journey to the Dark Continent by Patricia Highsmith and Jane Bowles in each other’s unmediated company doesn’t bear thinking about.

  The night after the party at Oliver Smith’s, Pat went to a reception at Rosalind Constable’s apartment to honor another potentially incongruous duo: Dorothy Parker and Simone de Beauvoir. Pat wangled an invitation for her then-primary lover, the alcoholic, divorced socialite Ginnie Kent Catherwood (see “Les Girls: Part 1”)—Pat called Ginnie her “wife, harlot, sweetheart—all in one! Irresistible.”107—whose marital woes and child custody problems Pat would ruthlessly mine for the character of Carol in The Price of Salt. Securing an invitation for Ginnie entailed elaborate explanations to Rosalind by Pat, and after the party, Ginnie, in a rage about something, punched Pat. Pat laughed at Ginnie’s flailing fists, just as she often laughed at violence. Everyone Rosalind had invited to the party for Simone de Beauvoir and Dorothy Parker showed up—except the guests of honor themselves. Wisely, they had decided to absent themselves from an evening which seemed to promise, in Dorothy Parker’s immortal phrase, “fresh hell.”108

  Ten days later, Pat was at a reception given by a well-connected lesbian couple for “Mrs. Chester Arthur,” the brilliant, garrulous, aggressively intellectual Esther Murphy Arthur, whose long-awaited book on Mme de Maintenon, last wife of Louis XIV, never did get written. (Perhaps it was unwritten because of Mme de Maintenon’s own caveat: “I shall not write my life. I cannot tell everything, and what I could tell would not be believed.”) The English writer and wit Nancy Mitford, who was very fond of Esther Murphy Arthur, once described her to Evelyn Waugh as “a large sandy person like a bedroom cupboard packed full of information, much of it useless, all of it accurate.”109

  Pat knew how brilliant Esther Murphy Arthur was, but she always got restive when Esther spoke. In Paris in the early 1950s, when she was seeing a lot of Esther Murphy Arthur in her “palatial apartment” on the rue de Lille, Pat just had to flee a St-Germain café in the middle of one of Esther’s learned discourses. Esther, a daughter of the family that owned the Mark Cross Company, a companion of Sybille Bedford, and a friend of Janet Flanner (author of The New Yorker’s fifty-year-long column, “Letter from Paris,” whom Pat had met through the lesbian community in New York), was a sister of Gerald Murphy, the American expatriate who “discovered” the Riviera and gave far too many parties for Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. During this reception for Esther Murphy Arthur, Pat also met the sharp-tongued, discreetly homosexual Bowden Broadwater, a researcher at The New Yorker. He was a year older than Pat and newly married to Mary McCarthy, the bright star in Partisan Review’s firmament.

  Amongst the other gatherings at which Pat was making appearances was Leo Lerman’s informal Sunday evening salon at his Lexington Avenue apartment in Manhattan. Perhaps Pat had been introduced into the Lerman milieu by Buffie Johnson, who saw Lerman frequently and whose name was on Lerman’s luminary-packed guest list for a party he gave for the couturier Pierre Balmain in 1948. Possibly it was the photographer who had also recently been Pat’s lover, “Sheila”—she photographed Leo Lerman—who directed her to Lerman.110 Perhaps Mme (Elizabeth) Lyne, the Hattie Carnegie designer who also knew Lerman and whose attentions Pat craved so deeply during the 1940s, was her entrée to Lerman’s gatherings. Or maybe it was Betty Parsons. By now, Pat, advancing steadily if idiosyncratically in the direction of her dreams, was well connected enough to have been handed several keys to Leo Lerman’s salon door.

  Leo Lerman, the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, wrote for many magazines and papers on the arts; he became a features editor at Vogue, then editor in chief of Vanity Fair, and finally served as editorial advis
or to Condé Nast Publications until his death in 1994. Lerman shared with Pat a Proustian scrutiny of the social circles in which he moved (in his case, High Society and Café Society) and his journals are a treasure trove of 1940s Manhattan observations: “Stella Adler, when Ned Rorem told her that he had been introduced to her five times and she still did not recognize him: ‘To me all goyim look alike.’”111 “When Marlene [Dietrich] sits or rather strides a chair and growls ‘One for the Road’ she is very beautiful in two sexes simultaneously.”112

  At Lerman’s Sundays, “[p]eople came for one another [and not for the food or the drink]…. Tennessee, Truman, Gore, Mr. Faulkner…I remember passing Tilly Losch on the landing, kissing Martha Graham’s hand.”113 Le tout New York and many of its brilliant war refugees were there: Marlene Dietrich, Eleonora von Mendelssohn, Pearl Kazin, Muriel Draper, Adolph Green and Betty Comden, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Truman Capote, Jane Bowles, John La Touche, Imogene Coca, Carl Van Vechten, Stark Young, Eugene Berman, and Ruth Landshoff-Yorck.

  Pat liked to position herself at the outer edge of this inner circle: the view was good, the participants famous or notorious, and the interaction was strictly voluntary. She was both an admiring audience and a resentful one, as this recollection of her salad days shows: “[T]he forties were the days of somewhat snob magazines…. All was whimsy, fuzziness, humour—of closed circle sort. Obscure, too. Tinged with Edith Sitwell and Djuna Barnes…. I was in my twenties and in awe of them all, because they had literary recognition and all that.”114 In the canny guest list that the twenty-nine-year-old Pat prepared for the launch party for her novel Strangers on a Train—the book was published on the ides of March 1950, the party was given at Mme Lyne’s apartment, and Mother Mary, miffed at not having received a personal invitation from Mme Lyne, refused to come—both Leo Lerman and Djuna Barnes were invited. Neither of them came. Djuna Barnes pleaded a “sprained back,” and Pat thought Leo Lerman didn’t show up because he was offended that “I didn’t send him an advance copy of my book.”115

  Still, she said she found Lerman’s Sundays “very agreeable” indeed. Pat’s friend Lil Picard compared the company there “with the one she knew in Berlin before Hitler; intellectuals, free spirits; the first that would disappear.”116

  Pat met both Truman Capote and film actress Luise Rainer in January of 1948 at one of Lerman’s Sundays. She also made the acquaintance of yet another of her young male Jewish suitors, Lewis Howard, “a pleasant writer. Really—ideas that we were married—daydreams. I had to tell him everything about me.” Pat alternated her romantic dreams of Howard—“I have the constant feeling that Lewis is going to be my husband”117—with slightly less romantic reflections: a discussion of contraception with Mother Mary (“I feel so feminine tonight!”) and the realization that “Lewis is a Jew, therefore I feel even more that I can’t go to him. But we have so much in common.”118 She intermitted these thoughts with some even more characteristic ideas: “I want to change my sex. Is it possible?…Twice I tried to sleep with Lewis—masochistic failure. Lewis is an angel of patience [but I have] [n]o pleasure—God—how funny! When all parents have to forbid their children—I hate it!”119

  Three days after another failed attempt at making love with Lewis (she didn’t call it making love), Pat was happy to see Truman Capote again at Leo Lerman’s. This was the year that Capote’s first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms would be published, with the back cover adorned by the notorious Harold Halma photograph of the young author reclining in resplendent decadence on a Victorian sofa. Truman, three years younger than Pat, and as talented a self-publicist as he promised to be a writer (he’d posed that sulphurous Halma photograph himself when he was only twenty-two), shared an Alabama background with Pat. (Capote’s mother’s backwoods Alabama name—before she changed it to the more sophisticated Nina—was Lillie Mae, like the Willie Mae of Pat’s own Alabama-born grandmother.) Capote was the most prominent of the Alabamians who fetched up in Manhattan in the 1940s. Another of them, Truman’s childhood friend from Alabama, Nelle Harper Lee, the future author of To Kill a Mockingbird, was also living on the Upper East Side, trying to make her writerly way.

  On this Sunday afternoon at Leo Lerman’s, Truman sat next to Pat and “held my hand and was very devoted. He wants to see my room.”120 The next day, the first of March, Truman went with Pat to see her studio apartment on East Fifty-sixth Street—he was thinking of renting it as a writing studio so he could finish The Tree of Night, and she had been thinking of going to New Orleans—and he liked it. And Pat liked “to go out with little Truman: He is so attentive and so famous! And so sweet!”121 Pat changed her mind about going to New Orleans, and she eventually changed her mind about Truman (as she did about nearly everyone), but Truman didn’t change his opinion of Pat: his biographer Gerald Clarke writes that “Capote’s high opinion of her work never wavered.”122 And Donald Windham, who never met Patricia but knew Capote very well, confirms it: “Truman always spoke well of Highsmith’s novels to me.”123

  After having dinner with Mother Mary and Rolf Tietgens, Pat and Truman agreed on the apartment rental: he gave her eighty dollars for two months’ rent. Decades later, she began to say that she and Capote had a “deal”: that he had sublet her apartment in return for recommending her to Yaddo, the artist’s colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. Although Capote did send his recommendation letter for Pat to Yaddo the day after the apartment money changed hands, Pat had already been thinking of going to New Orleans; she wanted, anyway, to sublet her apartment; and there is not one word about a “deal” in her diary. Capote had probably suggested Yaddo to Pat as a better idea than New Orleans, and she made the best of a situation that would supply her with both a paying sublettor and a recommender to an arts colony. Capote’s recommendation to Yaddo was addressed to Elizabeth Ames, Yaddo’s imposing director, and it shows, even for a young man given to hyperbole, just how taken he was with Pat.

  “She is really enormously gifted, one story of hers shows a talent as fine as any I know. Moreover, she is a charming, thoroughly civilized person, someone I’m quite certain you would like.”124

  It was during this March that Pat, accompanied by Jeanne (one of the several women she was sleeping with while trying to establish a physical relationship with Lewis Howard), went to see what she called “the best play of my life”: A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams. Unlike Williams himself, who reserved his tenderness for Blanche DuBois (the Southern fantasist who depends upon “the kindness of strangers”), Pat didn’t announce a character preference. But perhaps one of her reasons for calling it “the best play of my life” was that she recognized something of Mother Mary in Blanche Dubois’s rearrangements of reality—“I don’t tell the truth. I tell what ought to be the truth,” Blanche says—and something of herself in the themes of male violence and homosexuality that run under the play.

  On the day of the evening she saw Streetcar, Pat began “my first snail story,” “The Snail-Watcher.” “I like it,” she noted, pleased with herself.125

  Over the years, Pat would repeat a couple of origin stories for her first attraction to snails. They are disturbing stories, involving long descriptions of what it was that fascinated her about the molluscs: watching the “mating process” of two living organisms that “can go on for fourteen hours.” She found it “relaxing” to watch her snails mate because their copulation had “an aesthetic quality, nothing more bestial in it than necking, really,” and she liked to take her snails on trips with her. In Suffolk, in her cottage at Earl Soham in the 1960s, Pat kept three hundred snails as pets, and her longest-lived snail, Hortense (who appears with her real-life, loving snail partner Edgar in Deep Water), was, Pat claimed, “the world’s most widely travelled snail. She has been to New York and back by jet, and has visited Paris, Rome, and Venice.” “It is quite impossible,” Pat wrote happily about her snails, “to tell which is the male and which is the female, because their behavior and appearance is exactly the same.
”

  The first of Pat’s own origin stories about how she took up with snails is from 1946: she saw, in this version, snails locked in an embrace in a fish store and took six of them home. Her second story is from 1949: Pat, passing the same fish store in Manhattan, saw two snails “kissing”—[l]ittle did I know they were mating”—and brought them home to keep as pets because they “shouldn’t be separated.” “The mother snail gives [the baby snails] no assistance and never appears to even see them,” she wrote in an undated self-interview she composed about her attraction to snails. “But,” she went on in what sounds like a pointed reference to her relations with her mother, “I have never found an adult snail damaging a baby snail by crawling over it.”126

  Pat showed this first snail story—in which the intense mating of pet snails generates enough offspring to smother to death the admiring man who has kept them (love kills, even in the sticky world of molluscs)—to her college friend Kingsley, whom she hadn’t seen in a long time. Kingsley said it gave her the “only happy day she has had in months” and that she found the snail story “funny.” Lil Picard, who began her friendship with Pat by praising her story “The World’s Champion Ball-Bouncer” (published in Woman’s Home Companion in April of 1948), “loved” “The Snail-Watcher,” and Pat wrote that she was “so overflowing with happiness if anybody loves something from me!”127

  “The Snail-Watcher” would go on to have a checkered publishing history. In June of 1948, Pat wrote to Kingsley from Yaddo: “My snail story that I adore, my agent writes is too repellent to show editors. Cannot express how disappointed I am. Have even offered to bowdlerize it.”128 In 1960, “The Snail-Watcher” was finally bought by Pat’s friend Jack Matcha, who edited “Gamma [magazine] of California.” It had, she said, “elicit[ed] ‘nays’ and ‘ughs’ from editors” for twelve solid years, and she noted grimly that just after “The Snail-Watcher” appeared in Gamma, the magazine was “seized for bankruptcy.”129