The Talented Miss Highsmith Read online

  Then, her usually uncertain appetite stimulated by the evening’s excitements, Pat went on to Jean P.’s apartment, where she ate two hamburgers and alarmed Jean with “the sad story of tonight & Ellen.” When Pat finally made her way home at two o’clock in the morning (and she took her time about it), she found Ellen in “a coma—out, anyway, beyond coffee & cold towels…. A doctor…arrived, pumped her stomach to no avail [then] the police, then Bellevue [Hospital] where I delivered her at 4:30 AM.

  “There was a note on typewriter which the cops took”: ‘Dear Pat I should have done this 20 years ago. This is no reflection on you or anyone—’”

  Pat spent the night with Jean P., then went in the early morning to Bellevue Hospital, where she answered questions about Ellen’s health. The “doctor gives [Ellen] an even chance,” Pat noted without comment, and went on to her agent Margot Johnson’s apartment. Margot provided “general comfort” and martinis (“unfelt”). Rosalind Constable’s lover Claude offered her apartment to Pat for the weekend, but Pat said she was driving Ellen’s Morris Minor out to Fire Island—“the first of the black eyes I give myself through apparently crude behavior where Ellen is concerned.”

  The next morning, 3 July, Pat met Jim Dobrochek, Ellen’s artist friend, at the hospital. She told him the whole story and gave him Ellen’s “effects.” Ellen was still in a coma.

  “Jim had been walking streets all night. Told me over AM coffee Ellen mistreated him on his arrival here…buttonholed him at the pier & said: Don’t ever tell a soul that I am Jewish! I had not known before she was totally Jewish, from that tight, sophisticated, brittle German Jewish intellectual set of pre-Hitler Berlin.”*

  After meeting Jim, Pat made her getaway to Fire Island with Jean P. in Ellen’s car. This, she wrote, “is a major strike against me, with Ellen’s mother. Ideal weather & connection & its heaven to be out here. I am escaping from hell.”68

  By the following morning, 4 July, Independence Day, Pat was forcing herself to “work, half believing Ellen dead.” At six in the evening, she called Jim from the legendary Fire Island hotel, Duffy’s (burned to the ground in 1956), and learned that Ellen “came to yesterday—early this morning. The strain is over.” At one thirty that morning, Pat, skunk drunk, “picked [a] fight with some late girl callers.” It was a physical fight and she was “sadly beaten,” ending up with a chest so bruised that she had to have it X-rayed when she got back to Manhattan. It was Jean P. who broke up the fight and pulled Pat away.

  Pat was already planning to take an apartment with Jean, “a major decision…that cannot possibly last” and that evening she drove back to Manhattan with Jean and another friend from New York, Betty—“one of few confidants—in Ellen’s car.” Betty may have been Pat’s confidante, but Pat was confidently double-crossing her: Betty’s lover was Ann Smith, Pat had been seeing Ann secretly again, and Betty didn’t know a thing about it.

  By 7 July, Pat was installed on Twenty-fifth Street in the apartment of a friend of Jean, cat-sitting, entertaining “T.V. speculations,” and feeling “[t]he old ambiguous pull—toward safety & toward destruction.” After trying to get away from Ellen, she was now afraid that Ellen was trying to get away from her—and she was dining out or having people in every night and carefully monitoring her “bruised chest,” “mental strain,” and low red blood cell count: “I am in the 60s in blood.”69

  On the fourteenth of July—a Tuesday—a “Notice arrives Neue Zuricher [sic] pays me $18.70 [for an article]. Am extremely proud!” Ellen was already receding from her thoughts.

  Pat and Ellen had been tempestuously together and rumbustiously apart—it’s often hard to tell which was which—since September of 1951, when they were introduced to each other in Munich by a classmate of Pat’s from New York, Jo, who had been Ellen’s lover and was, secretly, a lover of Pat as well. Pat failed to mention to Ellen that she had been sleeping with Jo, but, pleased as always to be part of a triangle and part of its destruction, Pat wrote in her diary that “Jo has suddenly lost me and Ellen as well.”70

  Pat fell hard for Ellen and quickly elevated her to her currently vacant (but always fully endowed) Muses’ Chair: that gilded hot seat in her Heaven of Love reserved for women who could inspire her writing. Pat’s delight in Ellen produced some superb literary results—as well as an occasional writing voice no one would ever associate with Patricia Highsmith.71

  Ellen! Helen! Helena! Hellenes!

  Tambourine and sunflower,

  Parasol and pumpkin,

  Veins of Venus

  And Ariadne, spinning her unexpected fruit,

  Mother, madonna, womb and matrix,

  Placenta, placid, plaisant!72

  In July of 1951, a month and a half before meeting Ellen Hill, Pat had been alone in Munich, lamenting the lack of inspiration in her life. “The danger of the celibate. The danger of disaster. He lives for himself alone, must be his own spur, his own inspiration, even his own goal. It’s so difficult, and so inhuman. It’s so easy to work for someone one loves.”73

  Pat would later write ingenuously to Kingsley that although she couldn’t really say why she’d gone to Europe in early February of 1951, she thought it might have something to do with “my very queer life in N.Y., which led to dismal similar cycles by no means normal or usual even in New York, I think. My family had left the state. I had broken with Rosalind.”74

  What Pat didn’t mention to Kingsley was that the violent spiral of alcoholism, sexual promiscuity, and psychological destructiveness she was demurely calling “my very queer life in N.Y.” had been caused by her desperate feelings about publishing her lesbian novel, The Price of Salt: the work that came most directly out of her own history. The real reason Pat went to Europe was to escape herself.

  While she may not have fallen in love in Munich in July of 1951, Pat’s celibacy didn’t last long either. In August, she ran into her old Barnard classmate Jo at the American consulate, and soon invited her to bed. Pat was also returning to “the voluptuous shoulder” of a German woman, Tessa, with whom she had already spent some exciting nights.75 In late August, Pat “[v]isited Schleissheim DP [Displaced Persons] Camp…. There must be something masochistic in my nature.” But she didn’t describe the camp, just as she hadn’t described the postwar, bombed-out or otherwise battle-scarred conditions of the cities she’d been touring: London, Paris, and Munich. In Europe, the scenery Pat chose to write about was usually aglow with her long-term goal: “All I want is to be rich & famous! Not much, eh?”76

  Cheering up fast (but in her own special way), Pat went to the theater with Jo to see Jean Cocteau’s play The Typewriter.

  “This is the kind of evening (and life) of which I dreamed in college—in a very Scott Fitzgerald way: Europe, a girl, money, leisure, a car. [Pat had a secondhand BMW but no driver’s license.] Now I’ve had one night of it, after twelve years.”77

  Pat had been in Europe since “5:15 AM Paris time” of 5 February 1951. She had flown from New York to Paris with “a slight hangover,” obsessively marking the height the airplane attained (nineteen thousand feet), the length of the flight (eleven hours), and the price of her one-way ticket (four hundred dollars). She’d had a “hectic departure” at Idlewild International Airport, seen off by Mary and Stanley, Rosalind Constable, Ann Smith, and her agent Margot Johnson, who, after observing Mother Mary and Pat together, remarked in apparent bemusement: “There must be some mistake.”

  Pat went a little too early in the morning from Le Bourget Airport to Elizabeth Lyne’s apartment on the rue de Lille, where she was to stay with Mme Lyne in a nearly empty house of great and dilapidated beauty. She met Janet Flanner and her lover Natalia Danesi Murray immediately for cocktails at the Hotel Continental (“Poor Natalia, a slave for 11 years to Janet”); looked for and then wrote to Ruth Landshoff-Yorck, the writer, refugee, and patron of avant-garde arts she’d known from Leo Lerman’s salon; and went to lunch with Lucien Vogel, founder of VU, the first journal in France to expose the
existence of Nazi concentration camps, and his wife, Cosette, sister of Jean de Brunhoff, creator of the Babar books. Vogel spoke French too rapidly for Pat’s comprehension, and André Gide, the Frenchman Pat most wanted to meet, would die later that month, before, as Mme Lyne said to Pat pointedly, Pat could “improve her French so she wouldn’t sound like an idiot when she met him.” Pat went to “a phony lesbian night club off the Champs-Elysées [which was] a favorite haunt of Peggy Fears” she met Tom and Theodora Keogh (to whose highly original first novel, Meg, she had given such a good review a year ago—the best review she was ever to give a woman writer) at Deux-Magots;78 saw Esther Murphy Arthur and Paul Monash; and visited her European literary agent, Mme Jenny Bradley, on the Quai Bethune. Mme Bradley, the perfect agent, gave her washcloths and Ivory soap. All this, and much more, Pat did in the first week of her arrival in Paris.

  Late in February, Pat flew to London and was met by two reporters who “took a few snaps” and talked about Strangers on a Train. She stayed, once again in opulent surroundings on Old Church Street, with her Cresset publisher-to-be, Dennis Cohen, and his wife, Kathryn, for whose signs of love she had waited so anxiously in New York. Pat now took unsympathetic notes on Kathryn’s depression (Kathryn committed suicide in 1960), her “cheerlessness,” and her obvious lack of response to Pat and to the manuscript Pat would soon be calling The Price of Salt. Pat feared Kathryn didn’t like the book and wouldn’t want to recommend it to her husband to publish. Kathryn didn’t and wouldn’t. Pat wrote: “I failed with K—as a person, as a writer.” Pat’s best feelings about The Price of Salt dissolved immediately: she suddenly couldn’t understand “how Ann Smith could have liked it so unreservedly.”

  Pat lunched with Rosalind Constable’s former lover Maria (with whom Pat had also slept on her last trip to London) and renewed their affair to cheer herself up. She got the idea for her “third decadent novel,” called The Sleepless Night (The Traffic of Jacob’s Ladder in its final form), and after her night with Maria, the new book “broke its embryonic waters,” and her writing began to go well for the first time. Pat and Maria went constantly to the Pheasantry, a private eating club in Chelsea. “That is bringing the night into the day. That is bringing paradise into the prosaic,” Pat wrote about Maria, wondering, however, if she had “lost the giving power of falling in love…. Lately it is entirely bound up with whether the person is accessible or not.” Pat would have agreed with Ivy Compton-Burnett that the most important aspect of friendship was “availability.”

  In London, Pat saw a lot of the handsome Austrian writer Raimund von Hofmannsthal, son of Richard Strauss’s librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. They discussed, censoriously, the effect comic books had on his children, without Pat saying anything about her long employment in the comics trade. Through Dennis and Kathryn Hamill Cohen, Pat was interviewed regularly by the press and met many people: Alan Pryce-Jones, the John Canters, the actress Constance Cummings (who lived next door to the Cohens). And everywhere Pat went, everywhere she was invited, she saw in bombed-out, still-rationed London only what she had always “dreamt of having”: a “[c]harming 2 story house, good martinis and a good dinner with French wine…a wife, and books and a Siamese cat.”

  Pat flew back to Paris on the ides of March, fearing that she had overstayed her welcome at Dennis and Kathryn’s (she had), and took a room at the Hôtel des Saints-Pères in St-Germain-des-Pres. She had her usual trouble getting her typewriter out of customs—it took several days and a good lie—and she had to go to Le Bourget Airport for it. She resumed her regular dinners with Janet Flanner and Natalia Danesi Murray. Natalia was trying to engineer a contract with the Bompiani publishing company in Rome (where her mother was an editor) for Strangers on a Train.

  On her way to Rome, in April, Pat once again visited Jeannot and his mother, Lily, in Marseille. This time it wasn’t Jeannot who pressed his attentions upon Pat; it was Jeannot’s gorgeous girlfriend who made the “violent pass.” “I was cold,” Pat wrote, and then “I thought, I am making an awful mistake.” As usual, Pat felt she was overeating and overweight. Also as usual, she was thin as a rail, but this feeling of being fat would persist for months. She took a train—she was thrilled to be on a train again—on her way to the isle of Capri to visit Natalia Danesi Murray and her mother, Ester Danesi, who had a “charming apartment next to the Quisisana Hotel. Her mother, formerly a journalist, very calm & slow, working diligently now on p. 67 of [the translation of] ‘Strangers.’ Very touching & heartwarming.”79

  Pat was plagued by both constipation and also, good Freudian that she was, by deep fears of being entirely without money. She was depending on Natalia Murray for too much, including meals and introductions to many people (the composer Lukas Foss was among them), and she was wrestling with her dependence.

  Janet Flanner said to everyone about Pat: “She has talent.” But Pat felt inadequate and resentful around Janet: “typical frustrating afternoon which so exposes my own miserable psychological contitution…. I am unable to speak, to participate on my own level, but must remain tongue-tied, stupid, dull. Janet F. often affects me like this.”80 When Janet finally left for the United States, “flat broke, homeless in Paris,” on 3 May, “everyone [was] chagrined” except Pat, who wrote in her diary: “Very lovely tonight without Janet.”81 (Given Pat’s crabbed handwriting, the phrase could have been “very lonely” certainly, both phrases were true.) A few days earlier, Pat had written about herself and Janet: “How like a schmuck I feel in comparison to her—and in accordance with my perverse nature, I am immediately better (more open in every way) as soon as she is gone, while all I should have liked to do was please her.”82

  In Paris, Pat managed to run into her old lover Natica Waterbury and Natica’s lover Maria—leaping across the Boulevard St-Germain when she recognized Natica—and they enjoyed themselves separately and together in a succession of lesbian bars, notably Le Monocle in Montparnasse. But Pat was rarely interested in the women she found in bars. She made an appointment to meet “Sybille Bedford and her smooth-faced friend, Evelyn Keyes,” but something interrupted it. Pat went many places in every city she visited, met many people on whom she took extensive notes, but nowhere in her diary notes on Paris, London, or Munich is there any sense that these cities might still be suffering the effects of one of the most devastating conflicts in human history, the Second World War. As she would make Tom Ripley do, Pat continued to see in Europe mostly what she wanted to possess: “Il meglio.” The best.

  On the seventh of May she heard that Ester Danesi, Natalia’s mother, had at last secured the Bompiani contract for Strangers on a Train, and as she finished the story she was working on, Pat thought: “Christ, I can write, but when I am done I need an editor! God, if it were only easier for me to make decisions.”

  That evening, she did make a decision. Instead of taking home one of her two dinner companions, “the beautiful Deirdre,” she took the other one, “Grant,” the man, home with her. “Better than I expected, but in the morning I am uncomfortable and ashamed & feel unnatural.”83

  On 9 May Pat was in Florence, and by the twelfth she was in Venice staying with Ruth Landshoff-Yorck, who, she wrote, was ordering her around the way Rosalind Constable used to. She went to cocktails with Peggy Guggenheim, “Somerset Maugham attending. Short, stutters, extremely polite. We did not talk about writing.” It was decades later that Pat thought she remembered Maugham telling her that in mixing martinis, he merely “showed the cork” of the vermouth to the gin. But Maugham said this to everyone.84

  On 6 June, Pat heard from Margot Johnson that Harper had rejected The Price of Salt. “Harper’s reports not enough enthusiasm from the editorial board, that I probably can’t do the book because I am too close to the subject, haven’t the ‘mature approach.’” Margot immediately submitted the manuscript to Coward-McCann. (Pat was still “going over my [manuscript] with a fine tooth comb.”) Pat sounded relieved about the rejection: “It doesn’t depress me in the least.�
� But by 24 June, Coward-McCann had taken it “with compliments” and the promise of “$500 to come.”85

  As usual, Pat’s affinities for women waxed, waned, and flared up as unexpectedly as Saint Anthony’s fire. Amongst her serious crushes at this time was Ursula—“with whom I am half in love”—a German princess and a friend of Ruth Yorck. Pat was impressed by her title and inclined to listen to her. “Ursula says I write so well but am full of tricks which the reader doesn’t quite swallow. A depressing judgement, with perhaps some truth in it.”86 She saw a lot of Ursula and went with her and the writer Wolfgang Hildesheimer—another of the talented Jewish refugees Pat had met and magnetized on her last trip to Europe—to a poetry reading in Munich.

  Eight years later in New York, on New Year’s Day of 1959, Pat would use the name of Wolfgang Hildesheimer, who was by then translating Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood into German, to try to strike up an acquaintance with the reclusive Miss Barnes. Pat wrote transparently and awkwardly to Barnes at her apartment on Patchen Place to say that Wolfgang Hildesheimer was a “great friend” of hers who might require some help in his translation of Nightwood and that she hoped to meet Miss Barnes for a “cup of coffee together or a drink some time, so I can tell him what you are like.”87 Djuna Barnes, far too canny to be so easily trapped, riposted in a letter to Pat five days later that she herself had just written to Hildesheimer to offer him assistance with his translation and, as for the matter of what she was “like,” “if [Hildesheimer] wishes a photograph of me he may obtain one from my publisher, Faber & Faber.”88 Pat never met Djuna Barnes.