The Talented Miss Highsmith Page 36

  • 16 •

  Social Studies

  Part 2

  Before Pat applied to the artists’ colony called Yaddo in March of 1948 to work on Strangers on a Train, another art colony, the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, had already turned her down. She muttered something about how this proved you had to know people to get in anywhere—it was true for Yaddo, which preferred to select its “guests” from recommendations made by previous colonists—and then she went on to apply to Yaddo using the kind of recommenders (besides Truman Capote) who “knew people”: Marguerite Young, the novelist and Greenwich Village resident; Mary Louise Aswell, the literary editor of Harper’s Bazaar; Rosalind Constable, the cultural eyes of the Luce empire; Ethel Sturtevant, her old literature professor at Barnard College; and Margot Johnson, her literary agent.

  Yaddo was an obvious choice for Pat. Many of the writers, composers, and artists she was meeting in New York—and many of those she would later meet—had spent time at Yaddo. Leo Lerman went there with Truman Capote; Marguerite Young was a perennial guest; Marc Blitzstein, David Diamond, Virgil Thompson, Buffie Johnson, Paul Bowles, Carson McCullers, and dozens of others had all worked at their various arts in the main mansion, in the icehouse Tower, or in the fanciful stone-and-shingle West House on Yaddo’s four hundred secluded acres.

  Yaddo made a little revision to Pat’s arrival date, and Mary Highsmith, moving as she always did into any territory Pat was trying to occupy, responded for her daughter in her best white-glove manner while Pat was out of town. “In the interest of my daughter, Patricia, I am taking the liberty of answering your note.1 Mary’s letter affirmed the change in Pat’s arrival from 3 May to 10 May and that she would be staying for two months. Finally, the thing was done and Pat was there.

  Three weeks into her residency, Pat was praising Yaddo in a letter to Kingsley (and indirectly praising Kingsley) to the skies: “Yaddo is everything you’ve ever heard about it and lots more…. [T]he solitude builds up great electrical charges of gregariousness…so that when we do go on a spree we overdo and suffer 48 hour hangovers…. [T]he work seems going fine, I am staying on the subject like a tightrope walker, but it is already a little longer than I should like. I have cause to think of you every day certainly, because I’ve used your plot suggestions to get going on it.”2

  But Pat was less thrilled with her fellow colonists, who were not, as she’d hoped, people who “knew” people: “A singularly dull bunch, no big names—though Marc Brandel is interesting…. Chester Himes [the black, gay male novelist installed across the hall from her in West House] tried to kiss me in my room. Did I mention it? Never mind. I read the Bible every morning.”3

  Of the eleven other colonists who were at Yaddo while Pat was there, four of them were men who irritated her by borrowing money and cigarettes from her and “forgetting” to pay her back. Marc Brandel, an attractive six-footer with red-gold hair and a radiating intelligence, was one of the borrowers, but he, at least, balanced his debt by proposing marriage to her four times in six weeks. Another male colonist who was at Yaddo with his artist wife was similarly smitten. But because Pat was sneaking her current lover Jeanne onto the Yaddo premises (and enraging “the board” by going off to Glens Falls for two nights with her), she wasn’t bothering much about the women at Yaddo.

  When Pat arrived at Yaddo’s rural retreat in Saratoga Springs, the colony had already been in operation for twenty-two years. The Corporation of Yaddo was formed in 1900 by Katrina and Spencer Trask, artistically minded, wealthy, philanthropic residents of Brooklyn, New York, who bought the land that became Yaddo with an old Queen Anne maison de maître on it for summer living. Eventually, their haunting and melodramatic family history—four children tragically dead and their summerhouse burned to the ground—inspired them to construct four lakes to commemorate the spirits of their dead children and to build a brooding stone mansion on the ashes of the house that had burned down. They added eccentrically designed outbuildings to shelter the bodies and stimulate the work habits of the artists to whom they had decided to consecrate their property.

  The main mansion at Yaddo, always described as “Tudor-like,” mixes the Gothic and the Medieval with a dash of Victorian fantasy. Several hundred yards away, West House, the turreted building where Pat was billeted in May and June of 1948, is the material of which fantasies are made. The Trasks indulged themselves with elaborate dramatic scenarios (Katrina Trask was crowned “Queen of Yaddo” in one such ceremony), and once the Corporation had been firmly established with Elizabeth Ames at its head, the resident artists did the same thing in their work.

  Pat, who lived at home the whole time she was going to Barnard College, had never had a taste of dormitory life. The moment she got to Yaddo she set about transforming Yaddo’s Elizabeth Ames into a dormitory mistress: She Who Must Be Disobeyed. Pat was not alone in this behavior. Many colonists, lapsing into early adolescence in the dignified presence of Miss Ames, would stage rebellions against her. The worst rebellion occurred in 1949, the year after Pat was in residence, when the poet Robert Lowell tried to have Miss Ames denounced and fired as a Communist sympathizer.

  So, while Pat did her work at Yaddo and did it religiously (in every sense of the word), she also systematically violated the colony’s rules. In a spring season of hard-drinking colonists, Pat was a standout. The day after she arrived at Yaddo, she walked with a group of other Yaddo guests into the town of Saratoga Springs (a refreshing two-mile hike if you weren’t drunk), quaffed almost as many martinis and Manhattans as she had fingers on both hands, added a skinful of wine to her cocktails, and nearly passed out in the restaurant. She managed to drink Marc Brandel under the table: “Marc soon succumbed, with his carrot hair in his carrot soup.” 4 Her hard drinking caught Elizabeth Ames’s attention, and Pat thought the drinking and her association with Marc Brandel were the reasons she was turned down for a second residency at Yaddo a year later.5

  A month into her stay, Pat was mixing Jehovah up with Bacchus—or perhaps just mixing her morning martinis with her morning Bible reading.

  “I am drunk every morning almost, at Yaddo. Who knows not what I mean knows not the kingdom of heaven within him. I am the God-intoxicated, the material-intoxicated, the art-intoxicated, yes and the something that would transcend even God-intoxicated!”6

  Pat drank at Yaddo, she told herself, to harness the creative energy that was coursing through her with a power she found terrifying. Pat always had a handful of reasons for drinking to excess, but this one was at least biologically sound: alcohol is a depressant, and in the healthful countryside, left alone all day to work with a staff-prepared box lunch to sustain her, Pat was electrified by bolts of writing energy she didn’t know how to handle. She described herself as being as tense as “a coiled spring”7 and “happy like a battery chicken”: her way of saying that she was poised for greatness and producing like mad.

  At the beginning of June, the twenty-four-year-old writer Flannery O’Connor arrived to join the other colonists at Yaddo. Pat identified her as the “[n]ew writer Capote likes very much. Maybe another McCullers, I don’t know…. I expected from the name a racy colt with reddish hair, a six-gear brain [but she] personifies Iowa [the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa] once removed from Georgia, which she is.”8

  Forty years later, Pat told a young friend who loved Flannery O’Connor’s work a story about her time at Yaddo with the deeply religious O’Connor. Nearly every night, she said, she and Chester Himes and other colonists would go out and drink themselves into stupors, and

  Flannery O’Connor would never go with them. One night they went out on another bender, and once again, Flannery refused to come, and they left her on the porch. And there was a tremendous thunder and lightning storm and [when they came back] there was Flannery kneeling on the porch. And Pat said: “What are you doing?” And Flannery said: “Look, can’t you see it?!” And she’s pointing to some knot in the porch wood. And then she s
aid: “Jesus’ face.”

  And Pat said to me, “That happened. And ever since then I’ve not liked that woman.”9

  Pat went on drinking heavily and reading her Bible every day—a satisfyingly oppositional regime which she continued more or less without interruption for the rest of her life. On her second day at Yaddo, the day of the evening on which she drank all those martinis and Manhattans, Pat, glancing through Harper’s Bazaar, came upon an article about the theoretical work the physicist Albert Einstein was doing with electromagnetic energy. It added a few nouns—“electrons,” “matter,” and “energy” were three of them—to how she was already thinking about God and the Devil, and to how she would write about Guy and Bruno in Strangers on a Train. God kept turning up in the poems she was dedicating to women in her cahier, while her Bible’s influence was obvious in the many uplifting notes she took: “How beautiful the words of Peter and John—ignorant and poor men—when seized for their preachings of Christ!…All sin (R. Niebuhr) comes from man’s forgetting that God is the center of the universe.”10

  “N.B. Small wonder the old-timers tell us to go back to moral standards. Not only more security but more happiness follows. Our guilt is not that we have broken away from moral laws, but that we are not voyaging toward anything.”11

  “Guilt” was a word that would always catch Pat’s attention, and the carrot-haired Marc Brandel used it publicly nine days into her stay at Yaddo. Two years older than Pat, the English-born, Cambridge-educated Brandel had already published in 1945 the novel for which he would be best known: Rain Before Seven. Brandel’s real name was Marcus Beresford, and his attractions included the high, beautiful “Beresford brow” of his aristocratic family.12 (Pat seems to have been entirely surrounded by pseudonymous males in the 1940s.) Marc made a little speech at dinner about how children rebel against their parents and then are left with the “guilt which produces all our neuroses.”13 Immersed in Dostoyevsky’s House of the Dead (and certain that Dostoyevsky shared her guilt feelings), Pat had just spent three illicit days with her lover Jeanne and was feeling “a persistent need to be forgiven.” But the offers of marriage coming from Marc Brandel were turning her head and her attention to other questions.

  “What is so impossible, is that the male face doesn’t attract me, isn’t beautiful to me. Though I can imagine a familiarity with a man, which would…allow us to work and make us happy—and certainly sane…[t]he question is, whether men alone, their selves, don’t get unbearably boring?”14

  Meanwhile, Pat’s revisions and additions to her manuscript were multiplying. The brilliant premise that had come to her on a walk with Mary and Stanley in Hastings-on-Hudson in 1945—two men exchanging crimes and “getting away with it”—was finding a far more complex and shadowy form in a novel which perverted the Platonic ideal of love and duality, embedded it in a history of coerced murder and mutual seduction, and was as much about the pathology of Superheroes and their Alter Egos as it was about guilt, the spirituality of architecture, and the horrible need to submit to the right, the true confessor.

  Six months before she’d arrived at Yaddo—having worked for almost twelve hours on a single scene in the novel that would become Strangers on a Train—Pat made a frank confession of just how much the idea of murder meant to her life, and to her book. She’d just killed the character she was calling Tucker and would eventually call Guy Haines. (Later, as she often did, she changed the victim and killed only Guy’s Alter Ego, Bruno.) And she was joyous about it. The murder fullfilled her as nothing else could.

  “Today is a great day; I have written the murder, the raison d’être of the novel…. Something happened today, I feel I have grown older, completely adult…. I turned back at home, completely satisfied, very happy. I don’t want to marry. I have my good friends (most of them European Jews) and girls?—I always have enough.”15

  Dark as her novel was, the infinite gradations of “character” Pat was beginning to counterfeit for her male protagonists allowed her to try for a lighthearted little sub-Wildean epigram, an epigram in which she distilled all the pleasure she felt in choosing art over life: “Acquired tastes are so much more delightful than natural ones.”16

  Strangers on a Train remains Pat’s most Dostoyevskyan novel in that its two male protagonists, like the most fully imagined of Dostoyevsky’s creations, vacate their “characters” at the drop of a threat, exchange traits as easily as they trade hats, and, like God and the Devil, “dance hand in hand around every single electron,”17 mingling their identities and flummoxing their detective pursuer (who is also deceiving them) before surrendering to him completely.

  Guy Haines, a brilliant young architect and the divine half of the novel’s Terrible Twins, is as obsessed with guilt, God, and the effect his behavior is having on the spiritual dimension of the buildings he designs as any of Dostoyevsky’s would-be Christian martyrs. (Guy makes an interesting contrast to that other architect to come out of an American novel of the forties: Ayn Rand’s man of steel, Howard Roark, who first appeared in Rand’s bestselling 1943 novel, The Fountainhead, and then returned—this time with Gary Cooper’s face—in the 1949 film of the same name.)

  Guy’s moody purity summons up the devilish Charles Anthony Bruno—the subliterate, alcoholic scion of a wealthy family who is also a psychopathic genius. Bruno appears on Guy’s train to Texas with the physical expression of his inner evil growing in the middle of his forehead: a huge boil, a “plague of Job.” “All things had opposites close by, every decision a reason against it, every animal an animal that destroys it, the male the female, the positive the negative.”18 The coincidental meeting of these two opposites—during which Bruno has the infernal inspiration that they should exchange crimes—produces a double negative: the infestation of the best by the worst. “A murderer looks like anybody!” is the conclusion forced upon Guy.19 After he has killed.

  Unable to get Miriam, his coarse, unfaithful wife in Texas, to agree to a divorce, Guy has fallen in love with the rich, blond New Yorker of Patricia Highsmith’s upper-class dreams: Anne Faulkner. Bruno, homoerotically attached to Guy, coerces Guy into committing the companion murder to his murder of Miriam by showering Guy with diagrammatic instructions for the murder of his own hated father. Bruno’s character is accoutered with some of the barely disguised signifiers of homosexuality: he is left in possession of Guy’s copy of Plato; his father’s company makes “AC-DC gadgets” he travels to Haiti on a yacht called The Fairy Prince; he gives Guy purple women’s gloves, which Guy wears when he takes his little pistol out of its lavender sack and uses it to murder Bruno’s father.

  As if these broad suggestions weren’t enough, Bruno sullies Guy’s new marriage with Anne Faulkner by constant, drunken intrusions into their gleaming, shining white house. And Guy, feeling guilty for Bruno’s murder of his wife (but not for his own murder of Bruno’s father), allows Bruno’s dreams and passions to penetrate his own. Guy’s relations with Bruno destroy his marriage, his career, and his life. Bruno is luckier: he merely drowns in deep water.

  The cautionary tale of the brilliant Chicago teenagers and quondam lovers, Nathan Leopold and Robert Loeb, who plotted the “perfect Nietzschean murder”—they were the first Americans to be publicized as “thrill-killers”—of young Bobby Franks in Chicago in 1924 (just about the time little Patsy Plangman in Fort Worth, Texas, was hatching her infant fantasies of knocking off her new stepfather), hovers vaguely and uneasily over the plot of Strangers on a Train just as it hovered for decades over the lives of many homosexuals in America. Amongst those shadowed by Leopold and Loeb was Pat’s host in the late 1940s, Leo Lerman, who said that his mother used to warn him with: “Don’t be a Leopold and Loeb.”

  Perhaps Alfred Hitchcock, who had already filmed a version of the Leopold and Loeb story in his 1948 movie, Rope (starring Farley Granger, who would also star in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train), was thinking of the fatal clue that trapped the two boys—Nathan Leopold’s horn-rimmed glasses with th
e special identifying hinge—when he created the most celebrated scene in his 1951 film of Strangers on a Train: the murder of Guy’s wife, Miriam, by Bruno reflected in Miriam’s discarded glasses. But the film’s opening shot, which famously follows the shoes of Guy and Bruno as they separately approach Union Station in Washington, D.C., could only have come from the detailed descriptions of shoes in Strangers on a Train; descriptions which were amply furnished by the novel’s footwear-obsessed young author.

  Intricate as the film is (the scriptwriter who was fired from the film, Raymond Chandler, said the plot drove him “crazy”), it doesn’t begin to approach the complexities of the novel which inspired it; and the film’s plot excludes the novel’s most dangerous games. Pat Highsmith’s excesses at Yaddo, her dérèglement de tous les sens, managed to produce what Arthur Rimbaud wanted his “disordering of all the senses” to lead to: a masterpiece.* And the brilliance of Strangers on a Train owes at least as much to Pat’s daily Bible reading (the moral complement to her guilt) and to the crude Alter Ego psychologies which glazed the plots of her comic book scenarios as it does to Dostoyevsky, to Gide, to her quondam college hero Graham Greene, or to Leopold and Loeb.20 (Bruno, a reader of comic books, says: “Guy and I are supermen!”—but he sounds as though he means “Supermen.”)21

  By the twenty-third of June, Pat had completed a first draft of her as yet untitled book. (Marc Brandel would eventually supply her with the title, Strangers on a Train, and Pat, back in New York and freelancing comic book scenarios for the Fawcett company when she finished the novel, wrote an ending—still visible in one or two metaphors in the last chapter—that saw Guy crushed to death under a large rock. The book was saved from this cartoonlike resolution by Pat’s agent, Margot Johnson, who insisted that Guy survive his confession. And so Guy’s haunting line, “Take me,” was how Pat finished her novel.)22 On the twenty-fourth and again on the twenty-sixth of June, Pat walked the grounds of Yaddo with Marc Brandel, and it was, once more, her attraction to guilt that brought them together: Pat talked to Marc about her mother and her guilt at being homosexual. She thought Marc was “amazingly tolerant.”