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Greek Games

Although Pat thought classes without boys were classes without “any sense of humor,”¹ Julia Richman High School,^* the eight-thousand-student-strong, penitential-looking secondary school for girls on Manhattan’s Upper East Side where she was a student from 1934 to 1938, managed to provide her with plenty of entertainment. Her divided affections and perpetual crushes leapt from girl to girl so quickly that she found it difficult to keep track of their movements. But keep track of them she did, and, assembled from the cryptic notes she began keeping at fifteen, here is a small sampling of what more or less constitutes Patricia Highsmith’s High School Book of Love.

“Mickey…I hate her & she pleases me very much,” although “I thought I loved J.” (“J” is Judy Tuvim, who grew up to become the Tony- and Oscar-winning actress and comedienne Judy Holliday.) But it was Judy’s girlfriend, Babs, to whom Pat was more attracted and to whom she wrote secret summer letters from Fort Worth. Still, Pat loved triangles and felt that “[w]ith B[abs] and J[udy] T[uvim] it is something stronger. We are like each other.”² Besides, “J.S.” still had a serious place in her heart along with the first of her several “Virginias” and “Brillhart,” a married socialite from Texas.³

Pat’s relations with her girl schoolmates were so complicated that her smart high school friends—and Judy Tuvim was the smartest (Pat noted sourly that Judy got a 97 in English while she got only an 85)—had to conduct themselves like teenage Prousts to explain her behavior.

“Everything Judy said came true; that Va. [Virginia] was not good enough for me—that I should spoil myself—that I should go back to her. Judy has much woman in her. The masculinity is only an exaggeration. Das glaube ich.” ⁴

By the age of seventeen, Pat was reminding herself that she already had a lot to remember—and still there were so many girls to choose from. “Affair [of the heart] with B.Z. beginning in October ’35. B. or C. or H. or E. or A.?”⁵ Whenever she saw “M.G. [Mickey Goldfarb]” her feeling for “Judy goes to thin air”⁶ and she was pleased to “find it surprisingly easy to forget Helen.”⁷

In the same notebook entry in which she mentioned her “43 in geometry” and her “resolve to apply Christian Science (Mother Mary’s spiritual practice),” Pat also recorded her central chagrin d’amour: the betrayal in love by the first and longest love of her life. “M[other] will never leave S[tanley] and never know real happiness. I know we could be happy us two.”⁸

Meanwhile she had only recently stopped writing in her notebook the initials “ILE.” They stood for “I Love Eliane”—a classmate she had yearned after for three years and with whom she parted over a misunderstanding about dental fillings. Eliane had complimented Pat’s teeth, and Pat, humiliated, felt she’d opened her mouth too wide. Pat’s teeth remained sore subjects and painful objects for her all her life and she never learned to accept a compliment gracefully. But she quickly replaced ILE with “ILH” (I Love Helen) in her notebook; apparently “Helen” was not so “easy to forget” after all.⁹

“Sept. 9 Judy keeps breaking dates…. I tell Judy I am jealous of Mickey…. Sept. 21 Judy & Adolph [Green]^* come at 5:00…. I am uncomfortable that she knows I was with Mickey…. Sept. 26 I tell [Mickey] I shall never forget her…. I am tired, depressed, disturbed. Lunch with J. Strauss. She says I build marble pedestals of ones I like.”

“I observe the pickings at Barnard.”¹⁰

Pat’s most accurate judgment of her behavior during her high school years was probably the one she gave to Judy Tuvim: “I tell Judy I lie always.”¹¹ It’s a nice variation on that oldest of logical paradoxes: “‘All Cretans are liars,’ said the Cretan.”

When Pat went looking for higher education, she let her fear of crowds—as well as her fear of being “crowded out”—be her guide. At least, that’s how she explained herself in an undated essay she wrote in midlife, “A Try at Freedom.” She never thought of leaving Manhattan to go to college, so she began her search with New York University, the institution closest to the Highsmith apartment in Greenwich Village. There, she found what she’d already found at Julia Richman High School: that, like Fiorello La Guardia, the half-Catholic, half-Jewish mayor of New York from 1934 to 1945, and like New York City itself, the majority of the student body was divided between Catholics and Jews.

Here for the first time in three years I saw the brothers of the [Jewish and Italian] girls I had been going to high school with, and I couldn’t face it. Already I knew that the rare Protestant or the Nothing could count on the Catholics and the Jews for a social ostracism…. There were never enough Protestants to throw a party…. [T]he student body of N.Y.U. looked twenty-five years old to me…. everyone seemed to weigh two hundred pounds and to be covered with hair, and I knew what it was to be bumped by one of them while walking in a hall or climbing a stairway.¹²

In 1988, she gave an equally visceral explanation to a journalist interviewing her for The New York Times: “About NYU. Having come from Julia Richman (crowded, girls) I was terrified at Large Figures at NYU…. I weighed 10 pounds less than I do now, and frankly did not relish the idea of tangling with big people going up a stairway.”¹³

And so Pat chose to go to “Barnard College of Columbia University” in the upper reaches of Broadway. Like Julia Richman High School, Barnard was for women only, it was part of the Ivy League, and it had been turning out distinguished women graduates since its founding in 1889.

What Pat would make of Barnard, however, was something else: “Here was a taste of the freedom I craved.”¹⁴

“Grief fills the world. Pluto, the God of Hades, has carried Persephone off in his chariot: but no one is as grief-stricken as Demeter, the mother of the Goddess [Persephone]. After searching for her daughter in vain, Demeter, in great anguish, throws herself before the altar.”

This isn’t a descriptive paragraph lifted from the painful history of Pat and Mary Highsmith—although it could easily be mistaken for the Attic version of their grief-streaked relations. It’s a quotation from the program for a Barnard College annual event, the Greek Games of 1939. The theme of Barnard’s 1939 Greek Games was “The Return of Persephone,” and college sophomore Patricia Highsmith was competing, appropriately enough, as a hurdler: a girl athlete who jumps over fences.¹⁵ The next year, 1940, she was back in the Greek Games jumping over fences again.

On her 1937 application form to Barnard, Pat wrote that the two subjects which interested her most were “English” and “German.” She wanted to be a novelist, she said, because that was the work she was best “fitted for,” and she was quick to cite secondary interests in “drama” and “journalism.”¹⁶ When she was accepted at Barnard, she was accepted “with conditions” (much as she would be accepted at Yaddo in 1948: categorizing Highsmith would always be difficult), meaning that Barnard had some reservations about taking her—probably because the B-average she earned at Julia Richman High School gave the college admission’s committee pause. (Although Pat’s New York State Regents exams were a decent 88 percent, her overall grade average was 79.6 percent.)¹⁷Pat’s school marks were never as fancy as her self-presentations, and her grades at Barnard weren’t high enough to admit her to the national university honors society, Phi Beta Kappa.

For someone so resistant to group behavior, Pat Highsmith had a lot of schooling. And it wasn’t the kind of schooling that matched her parents’ precarious income, either. Pat’s education was provided by a mother hell-bent on her child’s upward mobility; a precious-only-child-who’s-going-to-make-me-proud kind of education. Although Julia Richman High School was a city-supported institution, it had high standards and rigorous classes. It also had a dress code. Barnard College, the “women’s division” of the all-male Columbia University, was a private school, Mary Highsmith’s earnings paid for it, and Pat wasn’t required to work her way through college or to get a job during the school holidays. Mary gave her daughter an allowance (intermittently and briefly suspended for bad behavior) until she graduated.

During Pat’s first two years at Barnard, Mary, Stanley, and Pat were living in a one-bedroom apartment at One Bank Street: a massive yellow brick apartment house in Greenwich Village constructed on the site of the brownstone where novelist Willa Cather had lived with her companion, the editor Edith Lewis, from 1913 to 1927. Cather, just like Pat, detested noise and rented the apartment above her own to ensure the silence she required for her work. At the end of 1939, the Highsmiths briefly rented an apartment at 35 Morton Street, also in Greenwich Village, and then in 1940, when Pat was a junior at Barnard, the family moved to another one-bedroom apartment (Pat slept in the front room) in what Pat called a “humble, reasonably tidy” four-story red-brick building at 48 Grove Street.^*18 The Highsmith apartment was directly across the street from 45 Grove Street: the Federal-style manor house where the poet Hart Crane had lived in the early 1920s, where Djuna Barnes would sojourn on her return from Europe with the actual heroine of her novel Nightwood, and where the actor John Wilkes Booth and his fellow conspirators are said to have successfully plotted the assassination of Abraham Lincoln eighty years before.

Pat, whose engagement with history was erratic but whose unreconstructed Rebel soul lived on as a romantic legacy from her Confederate heritage (one of the three places where she is known to have shed public tears was the battlefield where two of her maternal grandfather’s brothers lost their lives), would have been delighted by the association of the manor house across the street with the Confederate cause—if she’d known about it.

In 1919, on the Highsmiths’ side of Grove Street, the south side, the great anarchist Emma Goldman, released from one of her imprisonments in the United States, was living at number 36—from which address the U.S. government chose to deport her to the Soviet Union. In the Highsmiths’ same apartment building, when Pat was living there, was another well-known radical, Sidney Hook. Hook was then New York’s leading Marxist theorist (literary critic Alfred Kazin called him “the most devastating logician the world would ever see”).¹⁹ Forty years after she left 48 Grove Street, Pat suddenly remembered that Sidney Hook had lived there when she did—and made a note about him in her cahier.²⁰

Farther east on Grove Street, towards Seventh Avenue on the north side of the street, the place of death of the political pamphleteer and agitator Tom Paine was marked by a plaque on the façade of Marie’s Crisis Café, still one of the oldest piano bars in Greenwich Village and a place Pat used to frequent. Next to Marie’s Crisis is the building where the murder that inspired the film On the Waterfront was committed in 1947. Every block in Greenwich Village has a rich history of rebellion against practically everything—and Grove Street was no exception. Pat put Edith Howland, of her 1977 novel Edith’s Diary, in an apartment on Grove Street and gave her an affinity for Tom Paine’s most obvious phrases, then used the street again for the residence of the handsome, wealthy, oddly matched couple, Jack and Natalia Sutherland, at the center of her New York novel, Found in the Street. (See “Patricia Highsmith’s New York.”)

Pat’s four years at Barnard were marked by a taste for the classics—Latin, French, German, English, and Greek (at P.S. 122 in Astoria, she’d refused to learn French before Latin because that was the “order observed in English schools”); an attachment to the works of Sir Thomas Browne (Religio Medici was her favorite, and she made Guy Haines read it in Strangers on a Train) and the novels of Graham Greene; a D grade in her Logic course; and a freshman year election to the editorial board of the Barnard College literary magazine in which she would publish nine stories and which, as a senior, she would edit.

Alice Gershon (Lassally), a student editor with Pat on the Barnard Quarterly, had some dramatic tales to tell about her old classmate.

Pat always had an aura about her, there was something special. It wasn’t just from the students, it was from the faculty…. Pat was very tied in with her mother. She hated her or loved her. I knew that but I don’t know how I knew that.²¹ [Author’s note: Every one of Pat’s living classmates says this about Pat and Mary; usually adding, as Mrs. Lassally did, that Pat always gave the impression of being “raised by women.” Helen Kandel (Hyman), another classmate, thought Pat had grown up “in a house without men.”]²²But I knew there was something special…. She was a very attractive girl. When I saw pictures of her later on, I couldn’t believe them. Was that a disease? But she was seething—one felt that—and she looked tremendously sophisticated to me…. My vision of her is with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth. And the camel hair coat, the high white collar and I think she wore an ascot. I mean, she was very stylish.²³

Helen Kandel (Hyman) also remembered Pat for her dress:

My image of Pat is wearing riding clothes and starched white shirts. I remember those starched white shirts of Pat’s. I remember nothing about how anybody else dressed—including myself—but I remember those starched white shirts. She would stand in the library reading at a kind of a lectern instead of sitting down as we all did. She was something of a loner, but she had a little group around her.²⁴

Alice Gershon recalled sitting near Pat in their freshman Hygiene class. The class always featured a sex lecture by the school doctor, “a darling, jolly little woman” named Dr. Alsop, who was the live-in lover of their playwriting professor, Minor Latham, a famously prejudiced and inspiring woman. Latham, says Helen Kandel, who was Latham’s advisee, “wore suits and ties and was very gruff.”²⁵ Alice Gershon remembers Dr. Alsop’s freshman Hygiene lectures as “adorable and very nonthreatening.”

There was always a legend that in freshman Hygiene the most sophisticated girl in the class would pass out. And lo and behold one of them did at that freshman class. But Pat sat next to me in that class and she put the collar of her camel’s hair coat way up and sunk into it. I thought: Is she going to be the sophisticated one who passes out? I wasn’t sure if she was full of disdain or full of fear or what in the world was going on.

I told this to my friend Midge [Kurtz], who got to know Pat pretty well…. Midge used to go down to the Village and see Pat some, while we were in school…and Midge laughed and said Pat was having an affair with Leadbelly. That’s what Midge told me, that Pat told her she was having an affair with Leadbelly. I’m sure she was experimental, I wouldn’t be surprised. But it amazed me at the time.²⁶

“Leadbelly” was the performing name of Huddie Ledbetter, the black, Southern convicted murderer and folk and blues singer—his signature song, “Goodnight Irene,” was made famous by the Weavers in 1950—whose murderous past and several jail terms (the last one was served at Rikers Island in 1940 within view of the Highsmith family apartments in Queens) mingled with his arresting artistry to provide him with a dangerously attractive aura in liberal New York. During Pat’s time at Barnard College, and until his death in 1949, Leadbelly was performing his huge repertoire of songs in many Greenwich Village cafés.

If Pat really did tell this story about herself—and there’s no reason to assume she didn’t; it’s not the kind of story Barnard girls were making up about each other in 1940—then she was behaving like any self-mythologizing English major: polishing her reputation as a college sophisticate with tales of an outré relationship which she would have been quite incapable—because of her feelings about race and gender—of entering into. It’s also a story which might have helped dissemble her sexuality to her “straight” classmates. Mary Highsmith, no small-time self-mythologizer herself, always said that Pat had missed her true calling as an “actress.” Mary would have been shocked but not surprised by this overheated little tale from her daughter’s college days.

Rita Rohner (Semel), editor of the Barnard Quarterly when Pat was associate editor, had another kind of story to tell about Pat.

She was unlike anybody I’d ever met before. Those were quite innocent days. And she was a very sophisticated young woman who lived with her mother in Greenwich Village and I realized dimly, I’m trying to think of how to put this because I don’t want to color it with hindsight, I think I realized that she was…we didn’t even have the word for it.

It was obvious even then. Her talent. I saw only the stories she published [in the Barnard Quarterly: nine of Pat’s stories were published, including “Quiet Night” (rewritten in 1966 as “The Cries of Love”), “A Mighty Nice Man,” “The Legend of the Convent of St. Fotheringay,” and “Silver Horn of Plenty”]. I think people thought of her as a loner; I don’t recall her having any friends, now that I think about it. I did go to dinner at her house one night, down on Grove Street. It was very peculiar. If I thought anything, I would have thought the apartment was bohemian. Her mother wasn’t there and I thought her mother was going to be there. And as I recall we sort of foraged around for something to eat…. I was offered wine, which was not done, and I had a glass and I felt very daring about it…. It wasn’t a family dinner and I got away as soon as I could…. I realized long years later that she was, in today’s phrase, “coming on to me.”…

She was very needy and her abrupt manner covered that up. In fact, most people really didn’t get along with her.

Her face just flashed into my mind, kind of hawklike, almost Indian, very angular. And she dressed up, but she wore very, very tailored clothes. And very simple and she had this black hair….

She [was] bound and determined to be a success at college. She was ambitious and hardworking [and] when she was successful, I wasn’t surprised. But I wouldn’t have wanted her life.²⁷

Pat’s college career (a more useful term might be Pat’s “behavior at college”), like her four years in high school, threads its way through this book. For now, it is enough to say that although she favored and was favored by her literature and short-story-writing teacher, the theatrical and supportive Miss Ethel Sturtevant (in the “minute” devoted to her at a faculty meeting at Barnard after her death, Sturtevant was eulogized as having “a magical voice,” “the airs of a beauty,” and the adoration of her students, to whom she gave “unremitting attention”),²⁸ Pat took notes which recorded her contempt for her favorite teacher’s long service to Barnard as “only” an assistant professor and for Ethel Sturtevant’s depressed powerlessness in the face of the academic hierarchy. Pat wouldn’t be caught dead in such a situation herself.

While she was still at Barnard, Pat, always ready to improve, allowed herself to be stimulated by “even the dullest people. Being amusing for them is like practising the piano when you are sure no one is listening. You can be freer, attempt bolder things, and often succeed.”²⁹

Pat liked to rehearse her social graces with people who didn’t intimidate her, just as she liked to practice certain states of mind and emotions for her novels. One of the attitudes she was rehearsing at Barnard was her politics, which shifted as frequently and as theatrically as her affections; at first showing brief signs of egalitarianism, even of Communism. Inspired by the Spanish Civil War, she joined the Young Communist League, persuaded her reluctant parents to attend a birthday celebration for Lenin in Madison Square Garden, and wrote a play that was criticized as “too communist” by her drama professor, Minor Latham.³⁰ As late as 1947, she seems to have been vaguely acquainted with the notorious Communist Party organizer and spy Josef Peters, who telephoned her—“surprisingly,” she wrote in her diary—under his pseudonym of Alex Goldfarb. Pat’s German friend Rolf Tietgens was convinced that it was Goldfarb’s “words [which] had sent him” to an alien internment camp in El Paso, Texas.³¹

Although the injustices in Spain attracted Pat to the Young Communist League, it was the cloak-and-dagger “activities” of American Communism that held her interest. “This business of dodging and bulldozing the authorities has limitless opportunities for clever remarks!”³²Eventually she decided that the high life, the high culture, and the high crowd of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines were closer to her ambitions (though farther from her tastes), and Communist—or, more accurately, communitarian—ideas would appear in her notebooks only when they represented the kind of social ideals embodied by the life of Jesus Christ.³³

Like many of her fellow Americans, Pat gave lip service to the disadvantaged. In actual fact, she preferred the society, if not the close company, of “winners.” (The home church of capitalism has always counted poverty as a sin.) Pat wanted only what she thought of as “the best” for herself, and she sought the same thing in her friendships and her loves. Many of her relationships had social and professional implications, and it was the letters from her more prominent friends which Pat tended to keep. Kingsley Skattebol (Kate Kingsley as she was then), Pat’s oldest platonic friend from Barnard College—a worshipful college freshman to Pat’s superior college junior—said that finding out Pat had destroyed the hundreds of letters she’d written to her over the half century of their friendship was more painful than learning that Pat had cut her out of her will.³⁴

At twenty, between her junior and senior years at Barnard and still doing more theorizing about writing than actual writing, Pat was describing the characters she thought were inside her—and what she was going to do with them.

“I am four people: the Jewish intellectual, the success, the failure, and the Fascist-snob. These shall be my novel characters.”³⁵

Three months later, in December of 1941, she made up an image that pleased her so much she marked it with a vertical line in the margin of her cahier:

“God knows love, in this room with us now, is not kisses or embraces or touches. Not even a glance or a feeling. Love is a monster between us, each of us caught in a fist.”³⁶

Pat would harvest the image for The Price of Salt in 1950, but in the novel she turned its meaning to a commentary on the world: “the whole world was ready to be their enemy, and suddenly what [Therese] and Carol had together seemed no longer love…but a monster between them, with each of them caught in a fist.”³⁷

On the evening in Grove Street when she imagined love to be a “monster,” Pat “passed” what she called her “first suicide moment.”³⁸ Love and death would always be in the room with her, but it wasn’t love the college senior wanted to die for. What made her want to kill herself was something more exasperating than love. Pat couldn’t, on this particular evening, find the right form on paper for her feelings. “[O]ne stands confronted with work, empty sheets of paper all about, and inside one’s head, shame and confusion, inside a maelström that will not subside, fragments that will not hang together…. This was a great emotion.”³⁹

The idea of dying immediately whetted Pat’s sense of competition: “Life is a matter of self-denial at the right moments…. My solace is in thinking: what are other people doing now? And if they are playing, I feel better, because I want always to be doing something a little more difficult, a little more demanding.” ⁴⁰

Pat’s competitive edge would find its sharpest expression in her cahiers and diaries; they were what she really meant by “doing something a little more difficult” than what her classmates were doing. She began keeping her cahiers the month she entered Barnard and she started the diaries when she was twenty. The journals gave her an opportunity to continually renew her vows for the only lasting “marriage” she ever made: the union that joined her intense rushes of feeling with her compelling need to commit them to paper. The fact that she repeated those vows dressed more like a groom than a bride and that she usually did so in a counterfeit “male voice” (“I am a strong man, like Chaucer, like Shakespeare, like Joe Louis)” ⁴¹ was merely one of the ways her obsessions colored her work. But Pat’s journals were the real harvest of her years at Barnard College: the physical proof of a professional approach to writing.

Thirty-seven notebooks of identical size and similar organization followed her first cahier (see “A Simple Act of Forgery: Part 1”), and all of them were standard-issue Barnard College or Columbia University notebooks, 7 by 8½ inches with rolled wire binders. By the time she finished college, she had also filled nine cahiers and four diaries.

Pat was already taking notes when she was at Julia Richman High School—bitingly candid comments on her classmates, her moods, and her ideas—and she was writing stories, too. There was a forgotten first story written when she was fourteen. And, before high school, there was a (mercifully) lost blank-verse poem in the style of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Then there was “Crime Begins,” the short story she wrote at sixteen about a sixteen-year-old girl who steals a book and gets away with it. It was the result, she explained thirty-six years later, of her “desperate” need to take out a history book from the library at Julia Richman High School. There were only three copies of the book, 150 girls were after it, and Pat, “strongly tempted to steal it,” wrote the story instead.⁴² Pat was subject to many such temptations.

In 1935, the ambitious fourteen-year-old already had the instinct to put her private feelings in print in the magazine Woman’s World. She published (and was paid twenty-five dollars for) a series of letters she’d written to Stanley and Mary Highsmith two years before, when she was a yearning twelve-year-old packed away to a sleepover camp near West Point, New York, for a month of summer. The camp provided her with some early material: her attention was caught by her female tennis instructor and by the camp rituals of girls swimming naked and counsellors and campers exchanging clothes. By the fall of 1937, Pat was displaying feelings of another kind, publishing her short story “Primroses Are Pink” in the Bluebird, the Julia Richman High School literary magazine. “Primroses Are Pink” is a tale of class pretensions and the instabilities introduced into a marital relationship by a work of art.

In a 1968 article written for Vogue magazine (it ranges from Jane Austen to Kim Philby), Pat typed out the first sentence of the first story she ever wrote, the lost story written when she was fourteen: “He prepared to go to sleep, removed his shoes and set them parallel, toe outward, beside his bed.” More like a map locator than the beginning of a fiction, this sentence gave her, she said, “a sense of order, seeing the shoes neatly beside the bed in my imagination.” Pat blamed her need for order on her turbulent family circumstances, but she was silent on the origin of another important need: the need to embody her feelings in a male character.

Very little of Pat’s juvenilia, apart from what she published in school magazines, survived her childhood. But from the care she took in setting up her 1938 cahier—dividing it into separate categories, belatedly inserting dates—it is clear she was thinking professionally. Later on, she copied her 1935–38 high school journals into her ninth cahier—and her cahiers became more important to her than any manuscript. She preserved them as evidence of the life of her mind, and she reread, reworked, reused, and responded to them in a dialogue with herself that went on for decades. They are the record and, in many cases, the origin of her creative impulses.

The cahier that launched her life as a writer in her first term at Barnard College, Cahier 1, did so with a rare kind of ecstasy: the evocation of a young girl in the act of creation rising wraithlike off its first page. At not quite eighteen, Pat was not yet as adept as she would become about nailing her journal notes to dates and times. But a few pages into this cahier she was already being compulsive about another kind of numbering: the kind that measured her competitive drive against a clock:

The only time I feel that I am cheating time, is when I walk a block, or read or write a sentence, or solve a problem while I hear a clock striking the hour. Then time stands still for a few seconds and one can start off again with a slight advantage.⁴³

“[E]ternally ashamed of [her] backwardness in mathematics,” given to repeating that “[t]he arts and literature are not enough to live by,” and that “without mathematics,” you can’t really be “civilized,” ⁴⁴ Pat was obsessed by numbers. Her letters, cahiers, and diaries bristle with figures—financial calculations, numbered lines of tasks, addresses, miles, kilometers, times, dates, body temperatures, red blood cell counts, her IQ (121 in her midteens), etc., etc. Early in her college career, Pat was also making numbered lists of the relative virtues of different religions. She delved into Hinduism (while still under the protection of her mother’s Christian Science), but—ever ambitious and still computing her chances—decided that she couldn’t possibly get ahead in the Western world with that philosophy.⁴⁵

Henry David Thoreau, calculating every nail in his cabin on Walden Pond (and going home regularly to lunch with his mother), was no match for Patricia Highsmith in the compulsive counting department.

Pat’s numbering and tallying went on to the very end of her life. During an interview for Publishers Weekly in 1992, she surveyed the land beyond her Swiss property with a baleful eye—local developers had designs on it—and then treated what must have been her suprised interviewer to the fruits of her survey:

“They’ve got easily 14 little houses going up there. That means 28 adults, 28 cars, and something like 56 children, and an underground garage. It’s going to be hell.” ⁴⁶

But Pat doesn’t begin her first cahier by counting anything. She begins it with a lyrical vision of a “phantom-like girl dancing to a Tschaikowski waltz,” in “selfless-spontaneity” as if “the music had been growing within her and ripening through the years.” It is Pat’s coming out as a writer, and she joins the “phantom-like girl’s” dance and Tchaikovsky’s music to a kind of tribute to Marcel Proust, whose initials are prominently entered and lightly crossed out on the page. It’s as though the youthful Pat were inviting those representatives of the high arts, Tchaikovsky and Proust, to lend inspiration to her maiden effort.

A more prosaic explanation for this fancy footwork from an ambitious and self-regarding seventeen-year-old might be this one: Pat had recently been given the first volume of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu by Judy Tuvim and Babs Baer, who had been her most envied, most precocious, and most attractive schoolmates at Julia Richman High School—and she simply couldn’t resist the opportunity to show off her newly acquired cultural credential.

Three years after she started this notebook, Pat was inscribing her first diary: “And here is my diary, containing the body.” ⁴⁷ She wasn’t kidding. Although she tried to keep her cahiers for notes on writing and her diaries for life notes and sexual encounters, she couldn’t quite keep these divisions separate, and her cahiers and diaries—especially the cahiers—are always begging and borrowing materials from each other. And Pat was always reminding herself in marginal notes that they were doing so.

But this first notebook, in the partitioned format she would keep all her life, was a nice beginning for the young writer. She would continue as she began, using visions of women and cross-dressed narrative voices to convey the complex mechanism of her fantasies.

Pat had always been fascinated by the image or the presence of a young girl—even when she herself was still a young girl. On her first trip to Italy in high summer of 1949, sitting in a restaurant in Florence, “a graceful hospitable city…where more beauty is gathered in less space than anywhere else in the world,” ⁴⁸ she made candid notes on the subject of her feelings for young girls. Then she crossed them out.

“On regarding a beautiful young girl in a Florence restaurant. Finally, it gets to be the pleasure of the adoration, the fascination one exerts over the young. No longer can we say, it is to give pleasure that is our greatest pleasure. We have become the self-cognisant satyrs.” ⁴⁹

Pat yearned after youth and idealized her own past (when she wasn’t complaining about it) all her life. While she was at Barnard, she was already nostalgic for her early adolescence, momentarily forgetting her bitter descriptions of her childhood as an “endless hell on earth.”⁵⁰Later, she dotted her cahiers with notes for backward-looking works she would never write, like this one: “A novel of America’s sadness and longing for the remembered childhood neighborhood, for the tranquil past in a Civil War photograph.”⁵¹ And she rejoiced in her first trip to Europe because it made her feel “young” again: “for the first time at twenty-eight…it widens one’s interests again, makes one diverse as at seventeen. This closing up! I hate it. It grows on one slowly from nineteen onward, as S. Johnson said.”⁵²

Withal, it’s hard to imagine that the girl doing the dancing on the first page of Pat’s 1938 cahier might actually be Pat herself. Her self-consciousness was such that she rarely permitted herself spontaneous expressions in public. But of course Pat did think of herself as the dancing girl: a young artist, filled with inspiration, performing alone on the dance floor with the tacit support of her two fairy godfathers, Proust and Tschaikovsky.

Caroline Besterman, deeply schooled in the languages and literatures of France and Germany, doesn’t believe Pat had a good understanding of the works of Marcel Proust.

“When Pat talked about Proust…I’d just change the subject because I didn’t understand her understanding. Of course he’s not an easy writer and you’d have to know more than she did about France and French society and the placement of adverbs and the faubourg…. She just didn’t understand.”⁵³

There is no evidence that Pat’s reading of Proust ever amounted to more than the sum of her college girl remarks about his work (“I can never make a character unless I take him from actual life—with as little changes as possible…even Proust had a germ of reality for his characters. And why not?”).⁵⁴ Or that she ever got beyond her repeated reworking of Proust’s observation that nothing is more pleasurable than falling back into the arms of someone who is bad for us.⁵⁵

Although Pat’s array of styles and subjects couldn’t be more different from Proust’s exquisite deconstructions of the phantoms of the faubourg, her best long fictions—like demented, demotic chips off the Proustian block—share a serious approach with Proust: the capillarial crawl of a hypervigilant consciousness over a detailed psychological territory, every word of whose narrative is conveyed in a voice cloaked (but not necessarily concealed) by another (but not exactly opposite) gender.

One of the things Pat did with her adolescent energy in college was walking. She often walked herself into exhaustion so she could sleep, and it was these long walks in New York that filled her cahiers with observations—and helped inspire the writing of one of her better college short stories. “Quiet Night,” published in the fall edition of the 1939 Barnard Quarterly (and rewritten with a more explicitly savage ending as “The Cries of Love” in 1966 when her relations with Caroline Besterman were breaking down), came from one of Pat’s rambles in Manhattan’s most genteel and only private park, Gramercy Park, on East Twentieth Street. Pat went there to observe the elderly ladies sitting on the benches, but part of her pleasure must have come from her trespassing. Gramercy Park is surrounded by a high cast-iron fence to which the use of a gate key by a local property owner is the only legal means of entry.

“Quiet Night”—the story nicely tries to marry love and loathing—puts two old women, Hattie and Alice, together as roommates in a residence hotel. One night, Hattie takes a scissors and deliberately makes slashing cuts in Alice’s favorite sweater. When Alice finds it and accuses her, Hattie dissolves into the first inappropriate fit of laughter to appear in a Highsmith fiction. In the 1939 version of the story, Alice poises herself to cut off Hattie’s long braid—her only glory—as she sleeps. But she fails to do so. (By 1966, Pat was embittered enough to rewrite the story and make Alice cut off Hattie’s braid.) “Quiet Night,” published posthumously in its earliest version in 2002, shows only Alice’s desire to wreak damage: “Her revenge had to be something that would last, that would hurt, something that Hattie must endure and that she, Alice, could enjoy.” The work’s maturity lies in its affirmation of how united the two women are in the impurity of their feelings.

All through her college years, Pat’s eyes were creatively filled by what she saw on the streets of Greenwich Village, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan near Columbia University, and on the Upper East Side near the East River. She spent hours riding the metropolitan underground trains between these neighborhoods; the same trains also took her back and forth between rendezvous with her many girl friends (see “Social Studies: Part 1”). Pat’s earliest cahiers are descriptive feasts mixing the contents of subway cars after midnight, the courting habits of adolescents lurking in doorways, and the marginal life of people working along the docks.

One meets terrifying characters on the subway at one thirty in the morning. The pasty couple hanging one on either side of the Exit doorway, chewing gum, and moon-eyed, plotting their next assignation; the pale fairy in the beige jacket and grey flannels, with the holes in both heels of his socks, smoking, and looking into everyone’s eyes; the prostitute with a mass of yellow curls all over her head like a poodle dog;…the lonely sailor desperate now for a girl…. This is sordid. But it is the bill of fare for New York, my daily scene after a certain hour of the night. It is the same in love and out of love.⁵⁶

Pat was more than a walker and a rider in the city. She was someone in whom the visual sense was preternaturally developed; someone stimulated to excitation by what she saw. She stalked with her eyes as well as with her imagination, and she often attracted what she was looking for. The streets of New York performed for her, and occasionally something that she saw kicked over the concealing rocks of her own early sexual history.

During one mid-September walk in 1940, wrapped in a gray coat—perhaps it was the trench coat her Barnard classmates remember her wearing in college—Pat’s eye caught something going on between “two little girls sitting on the threshold of a door with their feet on the sidewalk.”

The older was touching the other in some way so that when they saw me pass they drew back and pulled their dresses over their knees. They looked at me then a little embarrassed and I waited a few feet away to watch them a moment. I knew in that moment that something had occurred that they would remember possibly all their lives. Something that would flash into their minds at strange times during childhood and adolescence, that would make them wince and close their teeth in shame—and perhaps when they were older make them smile…. I know all this, of course, because the same thing has happened to me.⁵⁷

In 1941, when Pat was a junior at Barnard, F. O. Matthiesen, the brilliant, left-leaning, closeted literary scholar at Harvard University, published his revolutionary study of American literature, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. He and the other scholars in the expanding field of American Studies were beginning to claim a local habitation and a name for American writing and thought. The universities were suddenly alive with the idea of American literature, which until now had always been treated as a parenthesis in the larger sentence of English literature. But Pat, reading American literature (Mother Mary had already accused her of being as egotistical as Theodore Dreiser), had eyes only for European culture and was impervious to the enticements of Greenwich Village—which was undergoing its gaudiest creative flowering since 1914, the year Mabel Dodge’s influential salon at 23 Fifth Avenue closed its doors. New York was now welcoming some of the world’s most creative people: National Socialism and the Second World War had already forced many of the best European cultural thinkers and artists to refugee to the United States. These brilliant emigrants (amongst them Claude Lévi-Strauss, Erich Fromm, and Hannah Arendt) were finding teaching jobs at the University in Exile at the New School for Social Research on West Twelfth Street, seeking out patrons amongst the bohemian rich (Peggy Guggenheim, who herself had just escaped from France in 1941, was under constant siege), and meeting their fellow Europeans and American counterparts in Greenwich Village cafés and bars and bookstores.

But Pat and Mother Mary, bent on fleeing their bohemian neighborhood, were, in Pat’s senior year at Barnard, looking for apartments on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It was their idea of “quality.” When they finally found an apartment on East Fifty-seventh Street, Pat was thrilled.

“Saw our future apartment: 345 E. 57th St. Only drawback is the view over yards to homebacks…. The fireplace isn’t real either, but the neighborhood! And the house!”⁵⁸

Even when she was in college, Patricia Highsmith always wanted to be someplace else.