The Talented Miss Highsmith Read online

  Pat felt “conscience stricken” and thought about lending her parents a thousand dollars; she was flush from the sale of some stories. But she decided, typically, against becoming her mother’s banker because Mary “resents my success, my ability to organize my life.” 42

  On 12 October, Pat finished her second version of The Price of Salt, got deeply drunk, and found that she had her period for the first time “since May or June”—something she ascribed to completing her book. Off the leash at last, she extended her “drunk” into a long, bad binge.

  “I am ashamed of my self-indulgent and destructive behavior—which I cannot seem to control. I can blame fatigue but not entirely. Such a deplorable waste of time and money—and I feel I sink as low morally as any of the [Greenwich] Village wastrels of whom I have heard, have known, all my life, without suspecting I could ever be like them.” 43

  Pat had spent the spring and summer of 1950, with only a week or two out in August, almost completely absorbed in her revisions of The Price of Salt, the novel she was still calling Tantalus. In May and early June, she was boarding in a fairy-tale setting: an old turreted and towered building in Tarrytown, New York, called the Tarrytown Castle, half an hour up the Henry Hudson Parkway from Manhattan. And she was falling “madly in love with my Carol…. I want to spend all my time, all my evenings with her.” 44 She was having dreams full of “homosexual symbols” and other dreams “filled with self-confidence. A strange new atmosphere as if even the mind dreaming it were not mine.” 45

  Back in Manhattan, along with her work came heavy bouts of drinking, waves of shame and fear at the thought of publishing a “lesbian” novel that would wreck her career (“I shall try to persuade Margot [her literary agent] that the book should not be published now”),46 and behavior as feverish as that of any of her love-struck protagonists. She experienced a “[t]emporary relief from shame” when her agent suggested she publish the novel under a pseudonym—but she was resolved not to tell “the family” about it.47

  Pat continued to work on the manuscript in Provincetown, in New York, and on Fire Island, where she was a resentful and messy guest at the house of Rosalind Constable and Rosalind’s lover, Claude. Rosalind, drinking heavily herself, stumbled across Pat in bed with yet another woman named Anne in what Rosalind called a “house reeking of liquor, fornication, and unmade beds.” It was really, Pat thought, the “cataclysmic end” of her ten-year friendship with Rosalind Constable. But there were compensations: before she left the island, Pat began a secret flirtation with her agent Margot Johnson’s girlfriend, Kay.

  While Pat was in Provincetown, Alfred Hitchcock sent her a telegram asking for a meeting. He was “already shooting [the tennis scenes of Strangers on a Train] in Forest Hills.” “He seems to be going…mad over my book,” she wrote in her diary.48 But Pat didn’t rush away from Provincetown to meet the famous director, and she gave no explanation for her behavior.* Perhaps it was shyness; perhaps she was simply focused on her new book and up to her eyes in her always complicated love life. Films, anyway, weren’t a form Pat took very seriously in the 1940s. “Movies in America,” she wrote, “destroy that fine, seldom even perceived sense of the importance and dignity of one’s own life.” 49

  Pat wouldn’t have known that Farley Granger, the handsome young actor playing Guy Haines in the tennis scenes Hitchcock was now shooting in Forest Hills, Queens, had the same ambiguous sexuality with which she’d haloed the character of Guy Haines in her novel. Nor would Farley Granger have known what Pat Highsmith’s sexual tastes were. And that was the underworld of homosexuality in mid-twentieth-century America: so darkly lit, no one could see anyone else’s face.

  Returning to New York, Pat managed to find yet another woman named Virginia to sleep with and considered, in her practical way, Ann Smith’s invitation to come and live with her in Provincetown: “[P]erhaps her youth…would tend to make me stronger…rather than if I lived with an older person, which is my inclination.” All this happened in July.

  Pat began August by relaxing: “Idle-idle-idle-idle—and I love it. All my clothes are clean.” From New York she went to New Hampshire with Mother Mary to stay as a paying guest with the family of farmers Pat and Mary usually stayed with on their New Hampshire trips, the Minots, and she sketched and read while Mary played interminable games of canasta. Back in New York, Pat spent the night with one of her casual lovers, Jeanne T., once again wishing for her favorite Virginia, Ginnie Catherwood—“wife, harlot, sweetheart—all in one! Irresistible!” Margot Johnson’s magazine sale of Pat’s chauffeur story, “Where to, Madame?” for $1,150 made her think of reworking Tantalus (The Price of Salt) and she thought of two more titles for her revision: The Sun Gazer and The Echo.

  And then, Pat had a wisdom tooth extracted. It was “a ghastly experience…. I am conscious at the moment of extraction. And gas dreams are the most cataclysmic episodes of my existence.”

  Pat’s taste for dental gas was one of her stranger introductions into the feelings she usually associated with love. She suffered from bad teeth all her life, and it affected the way she thought of herself. As an early adolescent, Pat had stifled her attraction for a girl classmate because she assumed, mistakenly, that the girl was jibing at her decaying teeth. It was Pat’s recurrent attempts to repair that decay that led her into “gas dreams.” At thirty-two, agonizing once more over her bad teeth in Trieste, she summed up her problem.

  “About twice a week I have bad dreams about my bad teeth, always connected with general inferiority, social and otherwise. With better teeth, I should be quite a different personality.”50

  At forty-nine, Pat already had false teeth she could “sleep in and eat corn on the cob” with. At fifty-three, she reported sarcastically to Kingsley: “Just had the remainder of my upper teeth out—isn’t that cheerful news?”51 From late adolescence, Pat had been writing (sometimes in German) about the pain of her frequent tooth extractions, and about the transcendent ecstasy dental gas afforded her. She said the experience of anesthesia—rather like her contemplations of love and murder—allowed her to have “cosmic” feelings.

  In December of 1949, shortly after she’d returned to New York from her first trip to Europe (and then went on to New Jersey, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida; she was twitchy as a Mexican jumping bean from her European experiences of art and love), Pat made this enthusiastic entry—one of many on the subject—in her nineteenth cahier.

  GAS

  My sensations under gas are really too compelling for me to ignore any longer…a recurrent pattern with cosmic suggestions. They have made me feel I was all consciousness that ever existed, that in this black bowl at whose perimeter the bouncing rabbit, the bouncing rubber ball races, I feel all sensations, wisdom, achievements, potentialities, and the stupendous failure of the stupendous experiment of the Human Race.52

  Aside from the occasional porcelain filling, some deeply painful tooth extractions in London, and a crown or two that had to be replaced in Europe, most of the serious repair work on Pat’s mouth was done in New York. All of the dentists she saw there were Jews, and she continued to seek out her old New York dentists long after she’d moved permanently to Europe, making appointments with them on her short stays in Manhattan and spending more time with her dentists than she did with any other medical practitioners. Her favorite dentist was Dr. Arnold Gottlieb on Fifth Avenue, and he went on treating her teeth and replacing the last of them, finally, with false teeth well into the 1980s.53 Pat wrote rhapsodically to Kingsley about the “deep curettage” Gottlieb had performed on her and about the upper bridge he’d installed in 1970: “In his way, I think he’s an artist.”54 And she continued to take a relishing pleasure in the gas and in her near-technical familiarity with its administration—for whose details she continued to pump the good doctor. Dr. Gottlieb, Pat said to Kingsley, “doesn’t mind telling you what he is doing.”55

  Always able to entertain herself with an array of possi
ble identities (another kind of fun), Pat liked to call herself a “kraut”—and to sprinkle her plain American speech with simple German words and phrases: “Bitte,” she would say, and “Danke.”

  “This German thing obsessed her,” says Caroline Besterman. “She would always break into German phrases, terribly badly. These lapses into German, there wouldn’t be an afternoon or a lunch that would pass without German phrases being intruded. Never French, always German. She knew nothing about Germany. This enormous race, intelligent, cultured, which produced without turning a hair instantly a race of maniacs.”56

  But if Pat’s affinity for Jewish dentists was yet another example of the subversive Miss Highsmith turning an ordinary exchange upside down—i.e., the “German-identified” Pat being “gassed” by “Jewish dentists” (an idea so offensive that it might actually have appealed to Pat)—she never said so. Still, she was conscious enough of the connection between gas, Germans, and racial superiority (or unconscious enough of it) to make this little note in the section of her cahier that she reserved for her Keime, her “germs”: “Little Keime—The Element of Dental Gas in the German Nationalism and Psyche.” Being fascinating comparison of gaseous dreams of mystical absolute with individual, collective, and national dreams of Germans and Germany as the chosen race.”57

  Perhaps Pat’s attraction to dental gas was just another instance of her yearning for a spiritual life in the old German Romantic mode—” those “cosmic suggestions” she talked about—or for leaving her troublesome body behind.58 Or perhaps the appeal of gas was that it produced a more refined “high” than the alcohol she was consuming. Her down-to-earth Texas family—the only people close to her who can bear to use the word “alcoholic”—say that her taste in beer when she was in Texas (Lone Star beer was her choice there) was just as “inexpensive” as her taste in wine: “She would just suck on that grape,” said Dan Walton Coates. “Yeah, everybody understood that Pat was alcoholic [but] you damn sure didn’t want to stir her up about the alcohol.”59

  Certainly, the “total anesthesia” of the dental gas allowed Pat to enjoy the kind of intoxication she liked best: the kind that relieved her, if only for an hour, from being Patricia Highsmith.

  Restless in Manhattan during the summer of 1950, Pat went back to Fire Island from New York. There, she ran into Jane Bowles, “whose uncustomary fit of working” made Pat feel “vaguely guilty.” She went for drinks at Duffy’s Hotel with the woman Rosalind Constable had found her in bed with—as well as with her agent Margot’s girlfriend and with Carson McCullers and Marc Blitzstein. Nobody could have accused Pat of being idle.

  From Fire Island she travelled to Provincetown to stay with Ann Smith, her intermittent lover. Pat usually took up with the lovely Ann as a filler between other, more serious affairs, although she much preferred Ann to her current, official “fiancé” Marc Brandel (who had the bad luck to have introduced her to Ann) and said so.60 Ann’s Provincetown house was without “a tub or hot water,” and Pat worked steadily on another version of Tantalus, “resting only on Sundays [and] pleased with the speed of its going” but “extremely worried about an itch I have developed in the region generally invaded by crabs.”61

  Pat may have spent a sexually reckless few months, drowning her anxieties about The Price of Salt in alcohol and dental gas and slipping into beds and bars up and down the eastern seaboard, but in her written references to her body she remained as prim as a prawn.

  By the end of October she was drinking so much that she thought about taking “therapeutic measures against alcoholism. Something must be done.”62 Her new friend, Arthur Koestler, who had finished the novel he was working on, was being “very generous” to her professionally, recommending that she have her manuscript typed so that it would come back to her with “a new dignity.” And he did, as he had promised, introduce her to the “Partisan Review crowd.” She met Philip Rahv and William Phillips with Koestler in Greenwich Village at the Brevoort Café one evening in October. Koestler had talked her up so “considerably” that Rahv and Phillips were “ready to read Strangers” and give her reviews to do. And then Calmann-Lévy, Koestler’s French publisher, bought Strangers on a Train, for which, Pat wrote, Koestler “claims credit, though M[argot]J[ohnson] said she’d had requests before.” (Calmann-Lévy’s director, Jeanne-Étienne Cohen-Séat, thought it was Koestler who introduced Pat’s work to his publishing company.)63

  But nothing penetrated Pat’s terrors about The Price of Salt for very long. Suffused with shame, she was trying hard to “suspend [her own] judgement of homosexuality until [Koestler] has seen [the manuscript].”64 And she was in the state of mind that preferred almost anyone’s opinion of the novel to her own.65 “These days are on the brink again. The least thing depresses me to the point of suicide.”66

  In the beginning of November Pat made a numbered list of the crippling feelings that writing The Price of Salt had brought her. She was suffering for having created what she knew to be (and denied for the rest of her life) a most unusual novel which drew its resonant qualities from its “close truthfulness” to her life. It was a sad reward for all her hard work and a self-administered punishment for all her self-exposure.

  “Shame…for what I have done…Plus sense of failure, I have not got it done in the time for spring publication, like Koestler. I shall not have gained in reputation and fame, if it is published not under my name…. Leading to drunkenness, bad behavior, especially before people I care about, like Lyne. Desire to shame myself, too, feel guilty & hang my head.”67

  One week later, after spending the evening at Café Society on Sheridan Square with Elizabeth Lyne, the elegant émigrée and chief designer for Hattie Carnegie to whose friendship she became so attached in the 1940s and 1950s, Pat began, aggressively, to cross personal lines. She asked Mme Lyne if she could spend the night in her bed. “Come on, Pat, snap out of it,” retorted Mme Lyne. “Which crushed me,” Pat wrote in her diary.”68 Then Pat went to see The Bicycle Thief, and, just as Death of a Salesman had done, the film harrowed up her fears of poverty. She thought it was “the most depressing picture I have ever seen. People through poverty having to live like dogs.”69 Pat’s violations extended to her diet: she went on a date with Carl Hazelwood, ate a whole plate of snails at the St. Regis Hotel on the sixteenth of November (“How could I!” she wrote) and was drinking so heavily that she had a “blank in memory until around Dec. 5.”

  And then, sometime in early December, frustrated that Elizabeth Lyne was late for an evening out with her, she crossed the most dangerous line yet: “on impulse” she went straight to her agent, Margot Johnson, and “told her I’d seen Kay G. [Margot Johnson’s lover] several times, which being behind M’s back, precipitated her breaking with Kay the following Monday.”70

  At Margot’s “after the debacle,” Pat, without apparent remorse for purloining her agent’s girlfriend but telling herself that she could perhaps use another short course of psychoanalysis, began to feel a “terrific but slowly growing lust” for another guest at Margot’s apartment, Sonya Cache*—a richly sophisticated Paris-born theatrical and literary agent whose first affair with a woman had been with the writer Josephine Herbst. “Quite by delicious accident,” Sonya Cache joined Pat in bed at Margot’s that evening (Pat had used Margot’s apartment for assignations before), and Pat went lyrically mad for Sonya.

  “I had almost forgotten that pleasure beyond all pleasures, that joy beyond all treasures…the pleasure of pleasing a woman…. And her body, her head and hair in the darkness…was suddenly more than Europe, art, Renoir, which she resembled, one of his women, beyond creative satisfaction…. She is mysterious in a Russian Jewish way, melancholic, devious by nature in her mind, witty as a fairy.”71

  Sonya Cache had a long-term lover, and Pat was already calculating the odds of their competition: “I believe I shall stack up better than she in a contest, and it may come to that.”72 Then, “a bit tight,” and reminded by love of the pleasures of war, Pat te
lephoned Sonya’s lover and “announced in a loud clear voice that I was in love with [Sonya].” Pat couldn’t, mercifully, remember the conversation that followed, and anyway, she was still secretly seeing Kay, Margot Johnson’s newly ex-lover. On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, she got “blind drunk” and had a “slight blackout” which made her late to Mme Lyne’s and to a party in Yonkers where she met “a curious little girl, attractive.”73

  There was no end to Pat’s destructiveness at this time—to herself and to the relationships of others—as she waited to see what would become of The Price of Salt, the book into which she had poured her most exalted feelings.

  As usual, Pat’s creativity was stimulated by destruction. She was reworking two short stories, “Baby Spoon” (another trophy-killer story about the attraction between a professor and his psychopathic student expressed in a theft and in a murder) and “Love Is a Terrible Thing” (a story more representative of Pat’s own state: she was anxious about not hearing from Kathryn Hamill Cohen in London [see “Les Girls: Part 2”] and desperately anxious about what would happen with The Price of Salt). She was hoping, to no avail, to sell both of her new stories to The New Yorker. “Baby Spoon” and “Love Is a Terrible Thing” were eventually published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and Pat gave no sign that she might have borrowed the title “Love Is a Terrible Thing” from The Golden Bowl, the novel by Henry James in which that line is almost an ostinato.

  “Love Is a Terrible Thing” was published in 1968 by EQMM as “The Birds Poised to Fly.” It is yet another revenge-and-substitution story, about a man who is waiting for a love letter (just as Pat was waiting for a letter from Kathryn Hamill Cohen in London) from a woman who doesn’t write to him. He breaks into his vacationing neighbor’s mailbox, telling himself that his letter might have been misdelivered, and, using his neighbor’s name, answers a letter he finds in the mailbox from the neighbor’s lovesick female correspondent. He makes a date with the woman in the name of his neighbor, approaches her, apologizes anonymously, and then, leaving her horribly disappointed, walks away weeping for himself. “Love Is a Terrible Thing” is a fair psychological summary of Pat’s own behavior at this time.