The Talented Miss Highsmith Page 41

  Pat was being modest here; she had long since “learned to reject first” and even to survive being rejected herself. In fact, she spent the 1940s busily constructing her character as a “lover” around the flights and drops of rejection. By the end of the preceding paragraph, she was even enlisting God to do her rejecting for her. And she went on to embellish her technique.

  In 1957, Pat would briefly entertain the idea of writing a “second homosexual novel” using her sequential, parallel, and lateral love affairs as inspiration. (The Price of Salt was her first and only overtly “homosexual novel,” but, with the exception of Edith’s Diary, homosexual themes are everywhere in her fictions.) She made notes for this second homosexual novel in her cahier in the section she always reserved for her thoughts on homosexuality: “Notes on an Ever Present Subject.”

  “The romantic girl, who could never live long with a lover. Show her from seventeen to sixty. She learns to accept the romantic, neurotic character of her love, to know that the girls will come and go…. End of story is…a table in a sidewalk café of Portofino, awaiting the next experience.”7

  Caroline Besterman, the married Londoner who had thirty years of intimate opportunity—four of them as the most important “love” of Pat’s middle life, the only “love” Pat couldn’t make use of in fiction—to reflect on who Pat was and why, put it another way.

  “I think, you see, there was always a hope that she would take up with somebody new or find a different situation. If she couldn’t change her inside she could change her outside. That’s a sign of people who tend to be insane.”*8

  Barbara Roett, who observed Pat’s behavior in London in the spring of 1971 when they spent a night on the town together, had another kind of story to tell: “Pat looked at the whole evening as though we were two men going to pick up tarts. Not even women!” They ended up at the “famous old lesbian club,” the Gateways, just off the King’s Road and a fixture in Chelsea since the 1930s.

  “Pat’s way of trying to attract young women was so strange and so sort of alarming. She would put her foot up on the bench next to them, with her hair coming down over her face, and look at them in a deeply disapproving fashion. Like this. [Barbara glowered.] And the poor girls would be terrified….”

  “But when I saw her behavior that night…Well, I didn’t even KNOW a man who would behave like that with women!”

  Pat and Barbara “were invited to a party by two very hospitable girls.” Barbara wanted to invite them back to Islington because Pat seemed to be interested in one of the girls. “And Pat said: ‘You CAN’T have women like this, you CAN’T invite women like this to your own home!!’ And they were just a bunch of very innocent gay girls who were being very kind and understanding of Pat. So I realized it would not be simple for her to find a partner.”*9

  Ellen Blumenthal Hill, the woman who had the longest, strongest influence on Pat’s life (after Mother Mary) and never one to suppress an opinion, spent four years instructing Pat in a succinct sociologist’s “analysis” of her “past pattern” in love. Like the good student of psychology she was, Pat took notes. “She says, I fit the person to my wishes, find they don’t fit, and proceed to break it off.”10 Proust and Procrustes each had a hand in Patricia Highsmith’s ideas of love.

  The “truth”—whatever it was at the moment—was something Pat usually reserved for those people with whom she was not in love. Or for current lovers she wanted to get away from. Or for prospective lovers she was hoping to fend off. She deployed the truth critically, punitively, or protectively, the way she and Mother Mary had always used it with each other. Pat could be very candid indeed—“authentic” is how one observer put it11—but her “authenticity” was often tied up with the immediacy of her responses. With her lover Marion Aboudaram, Pat had no difficulty in being candid.

  When Pat met the French novelist and translator Marion Aboudaram alone for the first time in 1976, she said to her straightforwardly: “Go away, you’re not my type.” It was true, says Marion Aboudaram, “I wasn’t. I was a bit plump and boyish. Her type was young blondes, very made up. The first time we met, when I was interviewing her, I brought my girlfriend and Pat winked at her. She would have preferred my girlfriend, I think.”

  Pat, Marion said, wasn’t “in love” with her, but Marion persisted, they got together, and Marion Aboudaram’s letters to Pat are amongst the most amusing in the Highsmith archives. Pat gave Marion some help with her translation into French from the American of Rita Mae Brown’s lesbian novel, Rubyfruit Jungle, in August of 197712—as clear an indication of Pat’s real interests as her joining a Presbyterian church choir in Palisades, New York, had been in 1958.

  Pat’s penchant for speaking her mind to Marion could be charming. Once, when Pat was ill, Marion tried to tempt her into eating a bowl of soup, the way one offers nourishment to a recalcitrant child.

  “I would hold the spoon in front of her and say, ‘One spoon for Poe, one spoon for Shakespeare, one spoon for Agatha Christie.’ And when I got to Agatha Christie, Pat refused the soup.

  “‘No,’ she said. ‘Not Agatha Christie. She sells more books than I do.’”

  When Pat and Marion’s three-year relationship was interrupted in 1978 by Pat’s coup de foudre for the twenty-five-year-old blond “made up” German costume-designer-cum-film-actor Tabea Blumenschein (see “A Simple Act of Forgery: Part 1”), Pat delivered the message to Marion brutally, candidly, and with the flair for adolescent theatricality that marked all her love affairs.

  “Pat knew I was coming to the house in Moncourt [says Marion Aboudaram], and she wrote I LOVE TABEA over every mirror she had. In the bathroom, in the bedroom, everywhere. And she wrote it in lipstick and she wrote it to hurt me.”

  When Tabea cut off the sexual relationship with Pat (after four fraught weeks), Marion proposed that she and Pat might stay together, “and each do what we wanted. Have affairs, etc.” And Pat said, again, very truthfully: “‘I want young girls, I want to be with young girls…’ I was forty then,” says Marion, “already too old for Pat, who was fifty-seven.”13

  With Madeleine Harmsworth, a well-connected, “very nice girl, aged 26, like Keats, which always strikes a bit of a dagger in my heart,”14 who responded to Pat’s advances at her house in Samois-sur-Seine the day she came to interview Pat for the Guardian and Queen magazine in the spring of 1968, the then-forty-seven-year-old Pat was a little less direct than she would later be with Marion. A few months into her affair with Madeleine, Pat began by remarking sharply on the spinach that had lodged between Madeleine’s teeth while she ate her lunch—and the fact that Madeleine was picking at it. Then Pat moved purposefully on to comments about Madeleine’s habit of talking and chewing her food simultaneously. Soon thereafter, “I asked her to make her remarks louder and clearer at the table next time. I felt she mumbled. I suppose she will not like my saying this.”15 Pat knew what she was doing: “that might be an excuse on my part to wriggle out of a relationship which is quite good for me, as Madeleine’s character is very good.”16

  Finally, Pat delivered the coup de grâce. With obvious inspiration, she managed, while sound asleep next to Madeleine, to mumble the name of her tantalizingly unavailable former lover, Jacqui, with whom she was still “a bit in love…. I always am, with people who are bad for me.”17 Sounding like a satisfied woman, Pat reported that “Madeleine heard [me mumbling Jacqui’s name] twice in Portugal, and blew her stack.”18

  The technique varied; the effect did not. The lover was usually pushed away by Pat’s “candor.”

  Still, proximity in love had always made Pat nervous. At twenty-seven, troubled by her homosexuality and just as troubled by the prospect of taking up residence in a heterosexual world, Pat had already decided that Hell was other people.

  “Now I am incapable of the smallest decisions, and cannot even envisage my future life, since I am undecided whether I can be happy alone, or whether I must spend it with someone—in which latter case I shall have to mak
e radical adjustments, either to male or female.

  “A Quandary? Hell.”19

  In August of 1950—Pat was twenty-nine—her ideas of a live-in love affair were more specific and (unintentionally) much funnier.

  “Living with somebody. At first in the moments one wants to read on a bed, for instance, every movement of the other is annoying…. Get over the terror and the hostility and one lives with another person very well? Question mark.”20

  Two months later, in October of 1950 in New York City, Pat was introduced to the brilliant Austrian Jewish émigré novelist, political activist, and adventurer Arthur Koestler. His dangerous charms,* “completely masculine…ways with the ladies,” and professional connections greatly appealed to her. He “wants to introduce me to Partisan Review crowd,” Pat wrote hopefully in her diary, after noting that she “[c]ould have murdered [Marc] Brandel who it seems told Koestler flatly I was a Lesbian, and that half of his book The Choice was about me.”21

  She need not have worried; Koestler made “the inevitable pass” at her anyway.22 But Pat, filled with guilt as usual, and unable, as she said the next day over “seven martinis, a bottle of wine and three gins” to her friend Elizabeth Lyne, to “bear the thought of The Price of Salt appearing in print,”23 was afraid that a double truth (the publication of her lesbian novel and Marc Brandel’s revelation to Arthur Koestler about her sexuality) would sink her professionally. So she attempted to dissemble her situation with Koestler by going to bed with him. But truth will out, and the truth of Pat’s own tastes “outed” her:

  “Koestler came back here, we tried to go to bed. A miserable, joyless episode. There is a mood of self torture in me—when it comes to men…. And so hostility, masochism, self-hatred, self-abasement…Koestler, efficient as always, decides to abandon the sexual with me. He did not know homosexuality was so deeply engrained, he said.”24

  In Pat’s highly personalized system of reversals, truth-in-love continued to be an instrument of war: a shield that could ward off a possible relationship or a weapon that could rupture an existing one. And she stitched this approach to truth into her novels. In a Highsmith novel (any Highsmith novel except The Price of Salt, where the murder resides only in the metaphors) the clearest, truest expression of feeling arrives with the instrument of death: a strangler’s grip in Deep Water and Strangers on a Train; the point of a knife in A Game for the Living, The Blunderer, and The Cry of the Owl; the blunt end of a bludgeon in The Talented Mr. Ripley and The Glass Cell; the business end of a gun in Strangers on a Train, The Cry of the Owl, Those Who Walk Away, and People Who Knock on the Door; the bottom of a body of water in Deep Water, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Strangers on a Train; and the end of a long, horrible fall in Edith’s Diary, A Suspension of Mercy, This Sweet Sickness, Deep Water, and Small g.*

  Pat’s deployment of truth, in other words, usually resulted in the violent death of something—symbolic or actual, a character or a relationship—and it was always just a little more interesting and a lot more available to her in art than it was in life. Still, she continued to rehearse its techniques in both arenas.

  In fact, Pat was more likely to “spill” certain truths about herself or her opinions to casual acquaintances than to near neighbors or close friends. It was the people she ran into in cars and bars, railway stations and airports, the “strangers on trains” she met on her many travels, with whom she often felt safe enough to talk. Guy Haines, in Strangers on a Train, acts on this impulse with disastrous results: “And, worst of all, he was aware of an impulse to tell Bruno everything, the stranger on the train who would listen, commiserate, and forget.”25 Pat herself had better luck.

  And so some of the most vivid punctuation for this book has come from the briefer encounters of Pat’s life: a limousine driver who took her to Heathrow Airport; a piano player at the Hotel Normandy in Deauville; a journalist at the Berlin Film Festival of 1978; a young woman in the Gateways, the lesbian bar in London featured in the film The Killing of Sister George; the proprietor of Katmandu, the lesbian club de luxe in Paris’s St-Germain; a French photographer; a German filmmaker; an eloquent refugee from a Displaced Persons’ camp who knew Ellen Hill; and two translator neighbors in Fontainebleau who lived near enough to Pat for observation and far enough away to reflect on what they saw.

  There were, certainly, some friends and one or two lovers of Pat’s who thought her incapable of telling a lie. “[T]he Pat I knew,” Marijane Meaker told me, “was most unguarded, needy, open, accessible, and never tricky.” But Pat kept many things from Meaker—she would say what was on her mind but not what was under it—including the continuing importance of Mother Mary in her life, the extent of her drinking (Marijane discovered it one morning when Pat handed her the wrong glass of juice, the glass filled mostly with vodka that was meant for Pat herself), the names of certain former lovers (and what she was still doing with them), and her past experiences with psychoanalysis.26

  The people who found Pat frank may have been confusing her famously candid responses-in-the-moment with her deeper fidelity to an operating principle which made deception, evasion, and secrecy, as well as silence, exile, and cunning, her most important emotional and artistic tools.

  And they were natural tools, too, for a woman who could remark, as Pat did when falling in love with Ellen Hill in September of 1951, “Oh who am I? Reflections only in the eyes of those who love me.”27 And whose “typical” daydream—set down when she was working on her novel Deep Water in June of 1955—took this form:

  “Typical day dream—that a total stranger comes to me when I am alone, criticizes me, points out the ideals to which I have not remained loyal, or have failed to meet; leaving me in tears, completely broken in spirit, leaving me with the idea my life is worthless and I had better not have been born.”28

  It’s summer in New York City, the last week of June 1953. Pat is thirty-two years old now, with a plethora of short stories and two published novels to her credit (one of them, The Price of Salt, is pseudonymous) and another novel, The Blunderer, under way. Conventionally enough, Pat has always used metaphors of childbirth to describe how her books get “born”: “How much like babies books are to a writer!” she will write of the book she considered “healthier” and “handsomer” than her other books at its “birth,” The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955). As early as 1948, she was comparing her residency at Yaddo to time spent in a maternity ward (“If I cannot give birth in the supreme hospital of Yaddo, where can I ever?”), and her 1969 novel The Tremor of Forgery is eloquent on the “post-natal,” post-novel depression of its writer-hero, Howard Ingham.29

  Pat has just returned to the United States from a second trip to Europe, a trip that lasted two and a half years. Much of that time has been spent in separating from and going back to Ellen Blumenthal Hill, the fiercely intelligent, ferociously controlling sociologist with whom Pat has been in love and hate for all but three months of her European travels. Her affair with Ellen began in early September of 1951 when, seated on a couch in Ellen’s apartment in Munich, Germany, Pat suddenly felt something she could recognize.

  “I held her hands that felt like Ginnie’s, and her body, too, and soon she asked me to come up to bed. Or would I rather go home? I stayed. She is much like Ginnie. Tonight was only wonderful sensation—blotting out everyone who’s been between Ginnie and her.”30

  Ellen and Pat are both Capricorns, born under the astrological sign of the goat, one day and six years apart. Ellen is the elder of the two, and her relationship with Pat has considerably extended the meaning of phrases like “getting each other’s goat” and “locking horns.” It will continue to do so for most of the next forty years.

  When Pat and Ellen arrived back in New York from Europe in early May of 1953, their love affair was in a fragile state. But by 22 May, with Ellen safely in the American Southwest, Pat had decided once and for all to settle down with Ellen to a happy future and an apartment in New York. The next night, she ate a hearty steak din
ner and slipped into bed with Rolf Tietgens, the gay German photographer who had played a sporadic, intense, and unconsummated role in her emotional life ever since 1943. (See “Alter Ego: Part 2.”) Of her “not quite successful” bedding of Rolf, Pat noted in her diary, “In my system of morals I do not feel this in the least unfaithful to Ellen”—and kept silent about it otherwise.31

  Rolf’s main attraction for Pat had always been his homosexuality (“I feel with him as if he is another girl, or a singularly innocent man, which he is in these respects”),32 the fact that he continued to insist that she was “really a boy” (and more or less photographed her as one),* and her gleeful understanding of the way they complemented each other: “If God puts us together, I will be the man!”33 There was the additional lure of Rolf’s moroseness, his hypochondria, and his Teutonic romanticism, and Pat matched him easily in all these departments. Rolf’s last, alcohol-embittered letters to Pat from his dwelling on King Street in New York in 1968 and 1969 are monuments to self-pity and collapsed hopes.

  Immured in his squalid apartment in Greenwich Village with “bursting closets,” “no studio, no darkroom,” no money, and “thousands of pictures and negatives, which climb up the walls here like poison ivy, reminding me of my past,”34 Rolf Tietgens described himself as the prey of violent robbers and male hustlers—“I am becoming more and more the victim of the young”35—and he wrote that he no longer knew who he was.36

  “When Tietgens died,” says his friend and onetime neighbor on Long Island, the former features editor of Harper’s Bazaar Dorothy Wheelock Edson, “I found out that his lungs, supposedly shot and keeping him from working, were in good shape.”37 Rolf had brought Pat to Dorothy Edson’s house in Wheatley Hills, Long Island, in 1943, and it was this meeting with Mrs. Edson that led to Pat’s work being recommended for publication in Harper’s Bazaar. Mrs. Edson, who surmised from the encounter that Pat was “surely a lesbian,” was a little surprised to hear from the homosexual Rolf that he had proposed to Pat. At the time, Rolf kept a “fascinating” apartment in a “made-over dairy” in Locust Valley near Mrs. Edson and her husband on Long Island’s North Shore. Rolf’s bed was adorned with purple blankets, and his white floors were kept shiny by the practical expedient of making his visitors remove their shoes at the door and enter barefoot. Dorothy Wheelock Edson, a good New Hampshirewoman who was also the first ghostwriter for Gypsy Rose Lee’s mystery novel, The G-String Murders, was so impressed by Tietgens’s decorative tastes that at ninety-seven she said she was still sleeping under purple blankets herself.38