The Talented Miss Highsmith Page 37

  “And he convinced me I must abolish guilt for these impulses and feelings. (Can’t I remember Gide? Must I always try to ‘improve’ myself?) I returned with quite a different attitude. I think more lightly of myself. I have opened myself a little to the world.”23

  The next morning, however, she was physically imagining her lover Jeanne’s kiss on her lips, feeling bad about it, and also yearning for it.

  But before Marc left Yaddo, Pat made plans for him to come and visit her in Hastings-on-Hudson even though she was still living, imaginatively and physically, the life of her novel: “I am in love with Jeanne in the way Guy is in love with Anne…. I am pleased with the secrecy.” After leaving Yaddo, Pat alternated nights with Jeanne and a new girlfriend named Valerie, spent a night with Herbert L. (she’d tried him out before without satisfaction), and then added Marc to her list. “Three people in three nights!” she wrote, impressed with herself.

  Pat’s sojourn in Saratoga Springs not only allowed her to revise and finish a first draft of her novel, it also provided her with a yearned-for “respectability” (a male fiancé), led her indirectly into psychoanalysis, and, at the end of a life not noted for philanthropy, gave her the opportunity to confound everyone’s expectations by endowing Yaddo with her comfortable fortune. Her two months at Yaddo—10 May to the first week of July 1948—produced what would now be called a “perfect Highsmith storm”: a capsizing set of circumstances inspired by Pat’s entirely contradictory impulses. If she’d ever taken the time to analyze what Yaddo had really done for her, Pat would have been doubly thrilled.

  Back in New York and still working hard on Strangers on a Train, Pat allowed Marc to convince her to visit him in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in September. There he made the mistake of introducing her to his new acquaintance, the artist Ann Smith—and Pat immediately added Ann to the list of women with whom she was already sleeping. Once Ann had left Provincetown, Pat felt she was “in prison” with Marc and told him she was leaving. “[B]ecause of that I have to sleep with him, and only the fact that it is the last night strengthens me to bear it.”

  This unpromising beginning for her love affair with Marc Brandel more or less dictated its direction. Pat never slept with just Marc (nor did Marc confine his attentions to Pat) during their turbulent time together; she always had other lovers. And whenever she did sleep with him, she resented it. In a letter she sent to her stepfather, Stanley, in 1970 (every letter Pat sent to her stepfather evokes pity and terror for the man, but this letter is especially hair-raising), Pat, counting her blessings, toted up the number of times she’d made love with Marc and—a bonus for poor Stanley—described their sexual encounters as “steel wool in the face, a sensation of being raped in the wrong place—leading to a sensation of having to have, pretty soon, a boewl [sic] movement.” [Pat meant “bowel” it’s one of the very few uncorrected misspellings in her archives.]24

  “I have never put this into a book,” she added to what must have been her stepfather’s relief or, more likely, his dawning horror, since her writing career was far from over and she still had time to put “this” into a book. Pat figured that she’d been to bed with Marc Brandel “many times…[t]wenty-thirty,” and she thought thirty times was plenty.25

  It was the psychoanalysis, however, that really finished the affair for her.

  At the end of September, back from Provincetown and explaining her complicated sex life to Lil Picard, Pat took Lil’s summarizing question to heart—“Why do you torture yourself so much?”—and answered it herself. “The $64 question. Answer: Me.”26 Two months later, she decided to have the question answered again—this time with the help of a psychiatrist.

  By October, Pat, still seeing both Jeanne and Ann Smith and about to add another woman, Dione, to her lovemaking list, had broken off provisionally with Marc.

  By the second week in November, temporarily bored with her work on Strangers on a Train, Pat began to write a vividly painful, powerful story set in the South: “When the Fleet Was in at Mobile” (published in London Life, 3 December 1965, and reprinted in Eleven, by Heinemann, in 1970). Unusually, the story is about a woman who tries to get away with murder in order to get away from marriage—and doesn’t. A week later, Pat was at a film with Marc Brandel, an aptly chosen film as it turned out. It was Anatole Litvak’s stark drama about insanity, The Snake Pit (1948), anchored by Olivia de Havilland’s luminous performance as Virginia, a newly married woman haunted by childhood feelings of guilt, and slipping into mental illness. The Snake Pit is rife with the kind of psychoanalytic notions which Pat would shortly encounter in her new psychiatrist’s office.

  Pat was so pleased to be back with Marc (who had just had excellent reviews for his latest novel) that she was thanking God, in her own special way, for their reunion. “God is very kind to me: He gave me Marc—a man who is as neurotic as I am, and He showed me Rosalind [Constable].”27

  At the end of November, Pat found herself a psychiatrist and began what would become a six-month course of analysis. She wanted to be able to marry Marc Brandel and “to regularize herself sexually,” as the (and her) thinking went in mid-twentieth-century America. Things didn’t exactly work out that way.

  It was the composer David Diamond who gave Pat the names of two psychiatrists. The first one, a man, told her it would take two years to bend her in the direction she said she wanted to go: heterosexuality. She didn’t continue to see him. The second psychiatrist, Dr. Eva Klein, newly minted in her field at Pat’s old alma mater, Columbia University, and married to a psychiatrist herself (but practicing under her maiden name), seemed to be someone Pat could work with. And so, on 30 November 1948, Pat began the first of what would be forty-seven psychoanalytic sessions with Dr. Klein. Pat summarized each session in her diary, and her summaries stealthily trace her resistance to being “bent out of shape” (her shape). The one thing Pat didn’t resist was Dr. Klein’s classic encouragement to lay the responsibility for her troubles at Mother Mary’s feet.

  Eva Klein, as socially coercive and attached to a heterosexual agenda as most American psychiatrists were in the 1940s, nevertheless had some very intelligent things to say about her new analysand. (Dr. Klein was conducting a more or less conventional Freudian psychoanalysis—with some help from the theories of Karen Horney.) Many of the remarks Klein made, recorded by Pat, have the ring of authenticity about them, and Pat thought so too. The problem was that Pat was too creatively resistant (and had too many other problems—of which alcoholism was only the most salient) for six months of formal and more or less “criminalizing” analysis (homosexuality treated as an illness) to produce either a full picture or a transformative understanding.

  Nevertheless, during her six months with Dr. Klein, Pat Highsmith told more of what she felt and knew about herself to another human being (and heard more cogent theories about what she didn’t know) than she was ever to do again in her life. Naturally, the experience left her with the same grinding ambivalences that all her deep experiences left her with: an abiding sense of resentment and another tool to use in her work.

  The analysis of Patricia Highsmith by Dr. Eva Klein began promisingly. After the first visit, Pat was bubbly with enthusiasm: “I like her very much—she instantly asked the necessary questions.” Pat had talked about “Ginnie [Catherwood]” while barely mentioning Marc—about whom she was suddenly quite uncertain. The analysis was going to cost her fifteen dollars a session, she was going to have two sessions a week, and she was trying hard not to resent having to pay for them. By the second visit, the canny Dr. Klein was recommending that Pat see a male psychiatrist; Pat instantly refused to do so. Their relationship was already starting “to feel like a mother-child relationship” to Pat, who was “already half in love with Dr. Klein.”

  By 15 December, the day Pat was “let go” from the sales job she’d taken in the toy section of Bloomingdale’s department store to help pay for her analysis, Pat was lunching with Mother Mary, finding it “very comfortable, an
d I told her almost all I learned from Doctor Klein—and she understands.” Two days later, Pat was playing her analyst off against her mother: “Why shouldn’t I fall in love with her? Didn’t she give me more than a mother?” And she was feeling frightened because she was actually thinking “that Mrs. Klein is my mother.” By her eighth visit, very “ill, hot and weak” with the chicken pox she thought she’d picked up at Bloomingdale’s,28 Pat lost consciousness on the subway but staggered to her appointment with Dr. Klein anyway, hoping “Mrs. Klein would nurse me…. I only wanted to see Mrs. Klein! She is the only person in the world, who gives me the right answers!” Dr. Klein gave her a cognac and sent her on to a general practitioner. Not, however, before speaking about “‘the vagina’—a favorite subject,” Pat said.

  Pat, sick as only an adult stricken with chicken pox can be, was cared for over Christmas by Mother Mary at the family house in Hastings-on-Hudson. Mary annoyed her feverish daughter by trying out some Christian Science healing techniques when all Pat wanted was an aspirin. In Hastings-on-Hudson, Pat drew and painted, fretted about her inability to sell stories, and cued up her holiday reading to her holiday depression: Graham Greene’s Ministry of Fear and Tolstoy’s War and Peace.29

  During Pat’s ninth analytic session in January of the New Year, 1949, Dr. Klein gave her a Rorschach test. Klein said the test showed that Pat had a “raging violence [which was] completely pent-up,” a tendency towards “hypochondriacal” behavior, and a “weak Ego.” No one could argue with that.

  Pat was reading, as analysands do when they decide to outsmart their analysts, current Freudian psychiatric theory: books by Helene Deutsch, lent to her by Dr. Klein, and books by Edmund Bergler, chosen by Pat herself. Helene Deutsch, a pupil and then an assistant of Sigmund Freud in Vienna, was the first pschoanalyst to concern herself exclusively with the psychology of women. Bergler, a Freudian who was not well disposed towards homosexuals (in January of 1948, he published an article called “The Myth of a New National Disease: Homosexuality and the Kinsey Report”),30 developed a theory that might have been made for Pat Highsmith: the hypothesis that humans are psychologically and emotionally attached to unresolved negative feelings which they have formed, subjectively, in childhood.

  Meanwhile, Dr. Klein told David Diamond—who repeated it to Marc Brandel, who repeated it to Pat—of her genuine interest in Pat. (Any psychiatrist would have been interested in the young Patricia Highsmith, with her handsome array of twentieth-century maladies and her uncanny ability to inhabit and/or mimic aberrant psychological states.) Delighted, Pat transcribed the compliment: “Marc said that Mrs. Klein had told David that she was very much interested in me, that I was so creative in everything I did, etc.”31

  It was mostly downhill from there. Pat’s typewriter broke, she was “sick of penises,” and, despite a little of what she liked to refer to as “success” with Marc Brandel in bed, she was sexually unhappy with him. For her twenty-eighth birthday on 19 January, Willie Mae sent her five dollars from Fort Worth, but neither Stanley Highsmith nor Jay B Plangman gave her a present. (Jay B almost never sent his daughter presents and left nothing to her in his will.) Before Pat’s tenth psychoanalytic session, Mary Highsmith “took the liberty” of calling Eva Klein. She provided the usual explanations of a defensive parent: she had educated Pat “very well,” Pat came from a “good family,” etc., etc. The doctor said Mary was rather “excited” and “tearful” and that Mary had told her she should look into Pat’s relations with Lil Picard. But, Pat wrote, “Eva stopped her: ‘If you really want to help, be a little more compassionate,’” she said to Pat’s mother. Dr. Klein concluded that Mary felt guilty about Pat’s depressions.

  In the fall, Mary, hoping for a marriage with Marc Brandel for her daughter, had made a familiar offer to Pat: “‘Oh, if there’s a child you can let me raise it.’” Pat’s response was: “My blood ran a bit cold. I don’t think this is the ideal way to raise a child.”32 It was the way Pat herself had been raised. In Pat’s next session with Eva Klein, after she’d told Klein that Marc was allowing her to “sacrifice” herself sexually to him, the doctor suggested that Pat should abstain from sex for “three months.” Pat balked at the idea immediately: “That means men and women…. But women don’t make me feel depressed!”33

  In the middle of all this, during her thirteenth psychiatric session, Pat made an interesting admission. Contrary to what she would write to her long-suffering stepfather twenty-two years later about the “lingering kisses when I was seventeen in Texas, not exactly paternal” that her father Jay B Plangman had apparently forced upon her,34 Pat seems to have decided with Dr. Klein that whatever happened between her and her birth father happened when she was “16”—and that the incident was responsible for her barely acknowledged “eating disorder”: “Therefore my culpability, when I was 16, and the reason, why I wanted to eat so little.”

  Dr. Klein, scenting victory for the home team, was zealous in pressing her case: “‘I will try to make you want to be kissed by your father,’ she said…. ‘You don’t hate men…. I will show you that you look for men in your women.’” Klein was making Pat “furious” and that, Pat thought, was “progress.” But Pat had also solipsized the good doctor into her ambivalence. “I love and hate her. Want to give her presents and quarrel with her. Want to arrive drunk. And I want to tell her my passionate feelings for her and her progress with me.”35

  Still, the psychoanalysis was doing something for Pat—but it wasn’t quite the something that Dr. Klein had in mind. Pat suddenly wanted to “dominate” a woman again (she did so with Ann Smith), and then she spent a night with Dione, giving her experience the correct analytic spin: “[I]n my current stage of ‘hurting’ a girl. Sadistic reaction from these years—those eons—of masochism.”36

  Pat continued to be “embarrassed” whenever Dr. Klein asked her to “free-associate” with words. By her twenty-first visit, Klein was able to tell Pat: “Your sexual feeling is completely connected with attack.” For her twenty-second visit, on 24 February, Pat managed to produce a “castration” dream for Eva Klein. But she promptly asserted her own attitude towards it: “Shame on Eva,” she wrote in her diary, “for taking away my fantasies about having a male penis.”37 Pat knew what she liked.

  But Dr. Klein also went on telling her what she didn’t like: her mother, Mary. So Pat began deducing, dutifully, that “my guilt drives me to girls, overcompensation…with Dione and Ann [Smith], Jeanne, I am acting out that with which my mother served me—the loving and leaving pattern, the basic heartlessness & lack of sympathy.” She spoke to her doctor about her early years in Texas, “the hated watermelon parties.”38 But Pat, still seeing Marc, was also having pregnancy scares and trying to avoid Marc as much as she could. She had no problem lying to him, she said, but she resented his inquiries and wanted to be free of him.39

  It was at this point that Pat began to mount an attack on Eva Klein. By the beginning of May she was writing: “More and more I fear she is a cut & dried Freudian. Her hammerblows of propaganda no longer even sink in properly.” 40 Dr. Klein didn’t help by providing an unfortunate suggestion; unfortunate, in that it was made to someone who hated crowds and yearned to be the sole focus of her psychiatrist’s loving attention.

  “At this rate—she [Dr. Klein] decides, I must go into group ‘therapy,’ with three or four married women who are latent homosexuals. (Better latent than never, remarks Ann [Smith]. And also reminds me of the alcoholic who joined the A.A. when he ran out of drinking companions.) They sound deadly—all progressing so nicely. Though they still have homosexual dreams occasionally and all usually have lunch together after their jolly double sessions.” 41

  Pat concluded her little summary of group therapy with women by making the decision that would shut the door on her own psychoanalysis.

  “Perhaps I shall amuse myself by seducing a couple of them.” 42

  By the middle of May, her forty-fifth visit to Dr. Klein, Pat had already delivere
d the coup de grâce. She had gone back to Dr. Gutheil, the male psychiatrist she had initially rejected, to check up on Eva Klein’s credentials. As a deliberate provocation, she reported this to Dr. Klein—and brought about the hoped-for response: “Eva flared up in typically Jewish way after I mentioned seeing Gutheil.” 43 (A former lover of Pat says that whenever Pat was finished with someone, she or he suddenly became “Jewish.”)

  Pat’s very last visit to her psychiatrist on 24 May, before she sailed to England to visit her new publisher, Dennis Cohen (and to fall in love with his wife, Kathryn), is best represented by the final note she took on her psychoanalysis: “Bloody angry at having to pay this bill before I leave.” 44 And she blamed Dr. Klein’s fees for the fact that she couldn’t afford to buy a first-class ticket on the Queen Mary.

  • 17 •

  Les Girls

  Part 1

  Sometimes, when the day had gone right for her, or the stars were in their proper alignment, or the world wasn’t entirely out of joint, she could eat a peach with such delight that it was an almost sexual experience.

  —Caroline Besterman, in conversation with the author

  I don’t know why I was very fond of Pat, I don’t exactly know why. I was under a spell, like a bird before a snake.

  —Marion Aboudaram, in conversation with the author