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Alter Ego

Part 3

Like most of the people at work in the comics, Pat Highsmith wasn’t working under her real name. Her “real” name—for once, the double-identity joke was on Highsmith—was actually the name she was born with, Mary Patricia Plangman. When the bubble of her “false identity” finally burst, the lateness of the news was almost as shocking to her as the knowledge itself.

It was in November of 1946, while applying for her first passport in a U.S. government office, that Pat learned that her stepfather, Stanley Highsmith, had never actually adopted her. Mother Mary, regally ignoring the legalities of adoption (Pat would have said “as usual” Mary said she did so with the cooperation of the school authorities), had simply registered the six-year-old Patsy in grade school in New York under the Highsmith name and continued to do so right up through college. And so Pat, like many of her male fictional characters, had to be adopted—and for the second time, too, since grandmother Willie Mae had more or less taken charge of Pat’s first six years. The documents securing Pat’s legal status in New York State are rife with confusion.

In the first of the two files that comprise the adoption papers of Mary Patricia Highsmith (filed with the Westchester County Surrogate Court in November of 1946), “the deponent” (Mother Mary) states that “her husband and her daughter have lived together for over twenty years and that always the relationship between Mr. Highsmith and Mary [Pat is referred to by her first name in the document] was that of father and daughter…. deponent earnestly desires that said relationship become a legal one for all purposes through adoption.”¹ The Westchester County clerk did not distinguish, as he/she should have done, between Mary Highsmith (mother) and the new Mary Highsmith-to-be (daughter), Mary Patricia. Thus, although Pat signed the adoption papers with her old name, Mary Patricia Plangman, she and her mother, nominally at least, are treated as a single entity in the deposition. It was a case of the law inadvertently following the life.

In the second of the two papers, Pat attests that “I have always looked upon Stanley Highsmith…with daughter-like love and respect and desire now to make him my foster father in the eyes of the law as well [because we have] lived together as one closely-knit family.”² Pat would blame Mary bitterly for the necessity of this adoption, as she would blame her for most things. Blaming her mother was a convenience of which Pat never failed to take advantage.

Like many people working for the comics—let’s imagine Pat back at her desk in the Sangor-Pines bullpen for a moment, cigarette lit, a cup of coffee balanced on the narrow strip of desk next to her typewriter, and Ken Battefield, the “Dickensian-type” artist she liked to chat with at the office,³ leaning over to give her quiet advice about working for Quality Comics—Pat can both draw and write. She has been sketching, cartooning, and illustrating all her life. It’s one of the tastes and talents she inherited from Mother Mary, who, as her daughter would do in later life, paints and draws her own Christmas cards. All through the 1940s, Pat and Mary go to museums and art galleries together, draw together (eying each other’s work competitively), and, quarrelling or not, continue to seek each other’s company.

“Will be unspeakably glad to see Mother altho’ I can’t tell her all my problems. She symbolizes all the stability, the femininity, the comfort and warmth of my life. Shall have to take her…for champagne cocktails and a long talk Friday.” ⁴

Pat’s cousin Don Coates remembers Pat and Mary in New Hope, Pennsylvania, in 1961 mesmerized by the same dead bird. The bird had fallen to the ground with one of its “little claws stuck up in the air,” and Mary and Pat were making drawings of the tiny corpse in impromptu nature morte sessions.⁵ While they drew, Pat repeated a line from a poem by Dylan Thomas and Mary carefully copied the quotation onto one of her sketches.⁶

Mary’s and Pat’s letters to each other are full of references to drawing and painting. In her diaries, Pat records sketching trips with her mother to places as far away as the Minots’ farm in New Hampshire, where, in August of 1950, they spent a week, got on “well enough,” slept on “poor mattresses,” and “starve[d] for our eighteen dollars a week.” They had been going to New Hampshire together on little vacations for years, and photographs of Pat and Mary in the New England countryside in 1937 show more than either woman cared to tell. Mary is always dressed to the nines—she had been wearing high heels for so long that the backs of her legs hurt if she didn’t put them on, even in the country—and Pat is always dressed as Mary’s charmingly androgynous sidekick. (There is more than a suggestion of Batman and Robin—or Black Terror and Tiny Tim—in these photographs. See illustrations.)

On this particular trip to New Hampshire, Pat made her usual character notes on the people around her, but it was the farmer’s sons who really caught her eye: “One gregarious and jolly, the other taciturn, the unknown.” She saw them as paired opposites, and, as Alter Egos often did, they set her to thinking about murder. “Anyway, here are the characters. Who did the murder?”⁷ She was hoping to write “a long story in a place just such as this…with some mystery and crime in it.”⁸

Pat did most of the sketching on this trip, while Mary did most of the canasta playing—which prompted Pat to “list the things I dislike about her.”⁹ Pat’s list neatly summarized some of the traits Pat herself retreated to in middle age (“rigid thought patterns,” “self-consciousness,” “refusal to face facts”).¹⁰ Pat complained that Mary never praised her drawings, and after Mary’s death, when a cousin wrote to ask if she could send one of Mary’s early paintings to Pat in Switzerland, Pat ignored the offer. Instead, she queried the cousin about what was currently obsessing her: family genealogy.

At twenty-two, Pat’s artwork was as discretely partitioned as everything else about her. Born left-handed, she was forced by her grade school teachers to shift her writing implement to her right hand. (But the teachers forgot to make her draw with her right hand.) She got low marks for “handwriting” in grade school, and in 1960, in a story that coincides nicely with the absence of her German-American birth father, Pat told a lover that she “taught herself” to write with her right hand by copying out “German phrases.”¹¹Divided between being an artist and becoming a writer right up until the time she left the Sangor-Pines shop at the end of 1943, Pat kept on drawing with her left hand and writing with her right hand for the rest of her life. She split her talents, just as she split her differences. Just as she split everything.

Pat’s divisions went even deeper than her talents. Because her chronic anemia was a constant source of worry, she made careful records of her frequent blood tests and kept up a murmur of anxiety about her low red blood cell count (Mary Highsmith was badly anemic, too) and low blood pressure (for which she was always getting “injections”). Like the rest of her, her blood was subject to partitioning and disguise. Pat had type O blood, the blood type of the “universal donor.” The Japanese, perhaps the only people to use blood type for character analysis, regard possessers of O type blood as “warriors.” The Americans, always more interested in stress than in character, discovered that people in the O blood group are most prone to developing ulcers. (Pat suffered severe gastric problems all her life.) For the purposes of blood donation, a person in the O group can receive blood only from another O type, but an O type can still donate to anyone in the ABO blood groups. O blood, in other words, can both disguise itself and remain itself; it mimics other blood types. Right down to her platelets, Pat was capable of doing double duty.

By August of 1943, the month young Everett Kinstler was hired at Sangor-Pines, Pat had published some drawings as well as her short story “Uncertain Treasure” in the magazine Home and Food.¹² The magazine’s art director, Rolf Tietgens, a stylish, gloomy German émigré photographer, was her new friend, and his capacity for melancholy was not relieved by having a steady job. In 1967, Pat remembered: “when I could not too well understand it, being twenty-one and hopeful, [Rolf said] that we are living in the Middle Ages now.”¹³ At the time, Pat thought that Rolf, a German alien, really shouldn’t be criticizing the United States.

Pat hoped to buy a radio with the money she would get for “Uncertain Treasure.” The day she learned the story was going be published, 21 June 1943, she went straight to Rolf’s studio to be photographed. It was a commemorative photo session—the triumphant young author on the occasion of her first serious publication—and the photos would be used in Home and Food. Pat disliked them. Perhaps this was also the afternoon during which Rolf took a series of nude photos of Pat, photos whose “positives” she got back from him in 1968 and kept for the rest of her life. Much later, two of Rolf’s (clothed) photos of Pat would be used on the book jackets of two of her Doubleday publications.¹⁴ But on this afternoon, Rolf elevated the posing experience for Pat by translating and reading out a “poem by Hölderlin, which sound[ed] beautiful” to her. Pat felt that Rolf loved her “a little,” but he hated the new short story she showed him, “Laval,” and she agreed with him. It needed work.¹⁵

Rolf introduced Pat to his boyfriend, Frank, and Pat imagined that he, at least, was falling for her. Then Pat and Rolf went to dinner alone. They talked about “the Greeks and art,” and Pat wondered how, after such an uplifting conversation, she could go back and work on such “nonsense” as “Bill King.” Bill King—that’s Sergeant Bill King—was another comic book character Pat had been writing stories for, and Pat was quite right: Bill King is of minor interest. But three weeks earlier, she’d been enjoying the sergeant’s exploits enough to comment on them and was even claiming divine inspiration for her work in her diary: “[S]at in the sun and got from heaven a story for [Sgt.] Bill King.”¹⁶

Sergeant Bill King’s story lines are always clear: he must do more damage to the German army than an atom bomb. He outwits, outfights, and outmaneuvers whole squadrons of badly drawn, stereotypically portrayed German soldiers. In writing for Black Terror, Fighting Yank, Sergeant Bill King, and a host of other war heroes and their diminished doubles, Pat entered into another of the many contradictions that would mark her life. She was a woman who couldn’t tolerate visible signs of conflict, but she was writing graphic and violent war propaganda with every “heroic” comic book scenario she filed. And because this was wartime America, most of the stories she wrote were pocked and pitted with vulgar racial stereotypings: “Japs” and “Krauts” were the mildest terms used for enemy Asians and Teutons. Pat objected to the stereotyping of Germans, but not to the caricaturing of Japanese, and her later work for Fawcett Publications on the comic book Crisco and Jasper (taken from film shorts that feature stop-motion animation puppets) would run along the same lines. Crisco and Jasper stories used a Southern Negro dialect so crude that it made the Uncle Remus tales sound like Virgillian idylls.¹⁷

However bloody-minded Sergeant Bill King’s exploits were, they don’t begin to compare to the homicidal adventures of the character Pat would start writing for Timely comics in 1944. That character, Everett Johnson (like Tom Ripley, he hails from Boston), is notorious throughout the U.S. Pacific naval fleet for his nom de guerre: “Jap Buster” Johnson. Jap Buster Johnson is a real killer, and his mass murders, like those of Bill King, are sanctioned by the circumstances of war.

In every one of his stories, Jap Buster Johnson, stationed on an American destroyer somewhere in the Pacific, mercilessly slaughters an endless rotation of Japanese soldiers, sailors, and pilots. And he has his reasons. Jap Buster’s Best Buddy, his closest pal, his almost–Alter Ego, is Dave Nichols. One fateful day, when a Japanese bomber strafes Everett Johnson’s and Nichols’s aircraft carrier, Dave dies with his boots on. Vowing vengeance, Everett is transformed into an enhanced self, “Jap Buster Johnson”: a war machine who kills the Japanese swiftly, violently, and in their thousands.

And when Jap Buster Johnson takes time off from his daily slaughter to stand on the deck of his destroyer and smoke a reflective pipe—the blood of a thousand bucktoothed, slit-eyed Japanese sailors running a red river underneath his feet—he sees the ghostly image of his Best Buddy Dave’s face shimmering out there on the ocean surface just beyond the starboard side of his ship. And that’s when Johnson feels he has to say something to Dave, something meaningful. So he looks down into Dave’s watery reflection and he dedicates the day’s body count to his Best Buddy. “I did it for you Dave old boy,” says Jap Buster Johnson, tenderly. “I wish you had been there with me fellow.”¹⁸

Jap Buster “did it” for Dave, all right, but—it can’t be said too plainly—he also “did it” for the fictional work of Patricia Highsmith. Those classic authors, Dostoyevsky, Gide, Proust, Julien Green, et al., hovering, Pat liked to think (and wanted us to think) over her artistic life, weren’t the only figures in her universe concerned with suggestive relations between men, the double nature of reality, and the instability of identity. It is possible to see, even in characters as crude as Black Terror and Jap Buster Johnson, how the great themes of the Zeitgeist—also, as it happens, the great themes of American literature—slowly trickled downwards and found a form in comic books—comic books for which Patricia Highsmith was writing.

Those “great themes” were not obvious to everyone—or to anyone, apparently, judging by the unholy stir a little essay published in Partisan Review, the journal Pat was so proudly subscribing to in the 1940s, made when it appeared in 1948. The essay was titled “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey,”¹⁹ and it was written by one of the Bad Boys of American Criticism, a maverick young scholar named Leslie Fiedler. Fiedler was indeed a bad boy; he was the first person, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, to apply the word “postmodern” to literature.

Just as Pat was packing up her kit bag for the Saratoga Springs artists’ colony, Yaddo, in June of 1948 for six weeks of public and private drinking, enthusiastic flirtation, and some very serious revisions of the manuscript that would become Strangers on a Train,Fiedler’s explosive essay (it added an extra line to Mark Twain’s masterpiece Huckleberry Finn, because Nigger Jim never did say “Come back to the raft ag’in, Huck honey”) hit American literary life like a bucket of dirty water gleefully hurled against a windshield by a rebellious teenager.

Fiedler’s theory in “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey”—fully presented in his 1960 book, Love and Death in the American Novel—is that American literature was a literature for, by, and about boys; obsessed with death and characterized by the implicitly homosexual pairing of two men (Fiedler noted the frequency of mixed-racial pairings in Twain, Melville, and Cooper) who, hand in hand, “light out for the territory” that is, anyplace without civilizing females. The American novel, according to Fiedler, was vibrant with sexual anxieties about women, who are always portrayed as “monsters of virtue or bitchery, symbols of the rejection or fear of sexuality.”

Fiedler’s essay forever readjusted the American view of just what was really going on in the novels of Mark Twain, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. (In 1979, on the BBC4 radio interview program Desert Island Discs, Pat selected Moby-Dick, Herman Melville’s brilliant, ham-handed, poetic epic of obsessed pursuit, social Darwinism, and extreme Calvinism, as the only book she’d want to take with her to a desert island.)²⁰ And Fiedler’s essay, if you substitute class for race, and Europe (in the Ripley books) or Central Park (in The Blunderer) or the woods of Pennsylvania (in The Cry of the Owl) for the “territory,” also provided a pretty good avant-première of what would go on in the novels of Patricia Highsmith.

Looked at through Leslie Fiedler’s lens, Patricia Highsmith has all the minor marks of the archetypal American writer and two of the major marks as well: She is the most unconscious “gay male novelist” since Ernest Hemingway, and she is as gifted an anatomist of male sexual anxiety as Norman Mailer.

Later, Fiedler turned his theoretical attentions to comic books, as did his contemporary, Gershon Legman, the self-taught American sexologist, folklorist, and social critic. Legman, living in the South of France in the 1970s when Pat was occupying the North, was Pat’s favorite editor of limericks and dirty jokes. And Pat—one of whose ideas of humor was to collect names from the “Sunday Social columns [of the] NY Times, people getting engaged or married…. Barbara Scheetz getting married, e.g., is the low standard I aspire to”²¹—kept at least one of Legman’s massive editions of limericks in her personal library and consulted it frequently. She would have been as delighted by Legman’s next book, Rationale of the Dirty Joke (with a whole section devoted to dirty jokes about Texas), as Legman himself would have been clinically interested in Pat’s own favorite dirty joke, “The Japanese Wife Joke.” (See “Les Girls: Part 11.”)

In his Freud-influenced pamphlet, Love and Death, published in 1949—much of it was about the comic books of the 1940s during the period that Pat was writing steadily for the genre—the exuberantly eccentric (and steadfastly homophobic) Gershon Legman saw male homosexuality and misogyny every single place he looked.^*

Pat’s love life during her year at Sangor-Pines was like her imagination and her work habits: more or less in a hyperkinetic state.

In May of 1943, she fell in love with a dedicated young painter, Allela Cornell: “I love Allela and God within her…. she is the best! The best soul I could ever find!”²² Holding hands with Allela at the movies made Pat want more of her, in the same way, she said, that she wanted “more and more money.”²³ Allela was a slim, spiritually inclined, short-haired girl with round, rimless glasses, a plain face, an earnest manner, and larger problems than Pat could guess at, although the clues were there in letters Allela sent to Pat: “I am destroyed,” she wrote to Pat, “and I don’t know why.”²⁴

Pat didn’t like Allela’s body and was much more excited by thinking “male” thoughts about Allela than by sleeping with her. “This morning, I thought so much about Allela that I had to go to the bathroom to relieve myself of a big erection. Is this disgusting? Am I a psychopath? Yes, but why not!?”²⁵ In 1946, three years after Allela and Pat broke up, Allela drank a bottle of nitric acid—her suicide had nothing to do with Pat—and suffered a lingering and painful death. It was especially poignant because Allela had decided she didn’t want to die after all. Pat, as always, felt guilty for some callous behavior towards Allela and tried to get Allela’s paintings placed in New York galleries. She was unsuccessful in her attempt, but later used Allela’s situation as one of the “germs” for her novel Ripley Under Ground.

Allela Cornell had the good painter’s ability to foretell the future of her human subject in the subject’s present pose, and she did an uncannily predictive portrait of Pat in oils. In the painting, Pat is in a red jacket, with her massive hands wrapped around her torso and her thumbs sticking straight up. A trademark furrow folds the space between her brows. On her face is a fixed, mature, intractable expression—not at all the expression of a twenty-two- or twenty-three-year-old girl—of controlled rage and pain: it’s the terrible frown Pat was always reminding herself to get rid of; the frown her face just naturally fell into. The painting is like the portrait Picasso did of Gertrude Stein: if it didn’t look like Pat when Allela made it, it would look like Pat later on. It did. Pat hung it in every house she ever lived in.

As she always did with a new lover, Pat dreamt of travelling with Allela. Since high school, travelling had been “the most desirable thing on earth” to her.²⁶ She sent Allela her poems and one of the Spy Smasher stories she was writing for Sangor-Pines.²⁷ (She was also writing Pyroman and Sergeant Bill King for Sangor-Pines, and Golden Arrow for Fawcett.) Their communion was more that of two spiritually inclined artists—“Cornell was an idea, born of an x-ray,” Pat wrote—than of a sensual union of the flesh.²⁸Inevitably, Pat began to sleep with Allela’s other lover, too, an attractive blond woman named Tex whom Pat had noticed riding her bicycle before learning that Tex was involved with Allela. The ensuing jealous scenes made Pat “want to jump out a window.”²⁹

Pat was also seeing a woman named Ann T., who, like Allela and Pat’s coworker at Sangor-Pines, Leo Isaacs, dedicated some poems to Pat; Pat slipped them into her cahier.³⁰ She let Leo Isaacs, who was married, kiss her and instantly regretted the liberty: “I allowed too much. It has to stop.”³¹ Pat’s good looks and reckless behavior, and the slow sexual burn she emitted, inspired a lot of poetry and stirred many emotions in the people around her.

Like the proverbial pinball, Pat’s feelings occasionally stopped ricocheting around: “Our three lives [Allela’s, Tex’s, and Pat’s] are bound tightly together. We love each other—what will happen now?”³² The triangle was Pat’s favorite form of loving and she never could sustain it. The relationship with Allela unraveled after only five months, in September of 1943.

Pat’s second favorite form of loving—the tantalizing, torturing, withholding kind—was what she moved towards in her next affair: a mostly unconsummated relationship with a beautiful, married-but-separated thirty-year-old Hattie Carnegie model, Chloe. Pat first met Chloe at a party at Angelica de Monocol’s, and continued to meet her at the Manhattan art gallery of Julien Levy, son-in-law of the avant-garde artist and writer Mina Loy. Levy’s gallery on Fifty-seventh and Madison had been a showplace for Modernist works of art in New York for the last twelve years. Pat thought Julien Levy was a “snake” and his wife a “piglet.” Perhaps this opinion was colored by the fact that Chloe was staying with the Levys, and Rosalind Constable told Pat that Julien Levy had a reputation as a “skirt chaser.” Pat wooed Chloe with a bottle of Calvert’s whiskey which she was almost prevented from buying. Liquor store owners still thought Pat was “17 or 18.”³³ So did Pat.

Pat and Chloe spent passionate, but unconsummated, Saturday nights together. Chloe’s condition for staying with Pat was kissing but no sex. Pat was thrilled with this (and then she wasn’t), rhapsodizing about the excitements of limited physical contact in her diary. “By God! I remember the days when I was fifteen or sixteen, when the accidental touch of the hand of a girl was a whole heaven!”³⁴ But through her haze of desire, Pat’s assessing eye was still on Chloe: “Like all beautiful women, she prefers talking about herself.”³⁵ Pat and Chloe listened to Pat’s favorite popular songs—a taste that lasted thoughout Pat’s life—at Pat’s apartment on East Fifty-sixth Street: “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” “Why Do I Love You,” and “Make Believe.” Chloe was constantly drunk and wore black underwear. “My god!” thought Pat, as naïve as any schoolboy, when she first saw Chloe drunk and passed out in her lingerie.³⁶ When Pat and Chloe finally did make love Pat’s comment to herself was typical: “[T]he earth didn’t move.”³⁷

Chloe was clever and flattering as well as fragile and beautiful. She read two of Pat’s short stories, “Silver Horn of Plenty” and “Uncertain Treasure,” and told Pat that as a writer she had the same problem as Djuna Barnes: she didn’t know how to end her fictions.³⁸ Chloe also told Pat that “if she were in love with a woman, it would be me, but that she preferred men.” Since Pat had just confessed to her friend Rosalind Constable that “there is something perverted in me; I don’t love a girl any more, if she loves me more than I love her,” Chloe’s attitude suited her very well.³⁹

Almost immediately Pat started to do “good work on the story called The Three [which I am] proud of…as much as of my Uncertain Treasure.”⁴⁰ Perhaps “The Three” had something to do with the “three loves” Pat said she had had in the last two years: Rosalind Constable (a beacon of accomplishment in Pat’s dark night of professional struggles), Allela Cornell, and Chloe. Or perhaps it was the three people Chloe said she was in love with just then. Chloe’s withholding was giving Pat the impetus for her work on “The Three,” another story Rolf Tietgens didn’t like. “[T]oo peculiar, not clear, not poetic enough,” he told Pat. What Pat told herself was that Rolf wasn’t always right, that it was time to make use of Leo Isaacs’s critical talents (Leo, her fellow comic book writer, was still in love with her), and that she would send the story to The New Yorker anyway.⁴¹ In fact, she sent it to Harper’s Bazaar. It wasn’t published.

“I have to work like a man and I need a woman—but one who loves me strongly and quietly,” Pat wrote in the creative afterglow of yet another physical rejection from Chloe—and after having to listen to yet another love poem read aloud to her by the besotted Leo Isaacs.⁴²

On 12 October 1943, Pat went to East Fifty-seventh Street to have dinner with “the parents” and her cousin Dan Coates, who had been travelling for some time in the East. This was the second time Dan had visited the Highsmiths since August. Mary had to hold the meal back more than an hour for Dan—Pat decided this was evidence that Dan was “destructive” (but she went to a rodeo in Madison Square Garden with him the next day anyway, a rodeo she would carefully describe in The Click of the Shutting)—and Mary and Stanley lectured Pat about “my drinking, my friends (and girl friends) etc.” “The parents ruin me,” she thought. Everyone wondered aloud about what Pat saw in Chloe, whom they thought of as “an unintellectual model.” As usual, Pat was at the center of her family’s conversation.

At this dinner with Dan, it was Mary, always hoping for a suitable boyfriend, any boyfriend, for Pat, who taxed her with rejecting “Leo [Isaacs]’s questions like a man who refuses to give insight into his private life. I answered that I could never love a Jew and that, if he tried to discover anything, I wouldn’t see him again.” ⁴³ This was plain enough, but it wouldn’t have stopped Mary’s prodding. The other plain thing—Pat said it to herself and to no one else—was that she didn’t think Leo had “the big dream,” the ambition that “makes real artists.” ⁴⁴ He was not headed in a direction that would lead to the “best” in life. But Pat didn’t say the plainest thing of all, which was that Leo Isaacs was not the right gender for her.

The next evening, 13 October, Ann T. and Chloe met at Pat’s apartment. Pat always liked to have her lovers meet each other; the geometry of the triangle never lost its appeal. Chloe left first, and then Ann got drunk in order to sleep with Pat. Pat confessed to Ann, a little inopportunely, that “Chloe fills my whole life,” and the day after that, Pat broke up with Ann. (Not, as it turned out, for long.) Pat was still not sleeping with Chloe, but she would always prefer the bird in the bush to the bird in her bed.⁴⁵ Besides, Pat was still emotionally involved with Allela Cornell, who gained in imaginative and artistic importance the further she receded from Pat’s direct experience. For the rest of her life, Pat would refer to Allela with love, respect, and lingering regret.

Pat had been introduced to Allela Cornell by one of the many other Anns in her life, a woman named Ann McFarland. Allela was living in a loft on Hudson Street with a roommate, the composer David Diamond. David, who went on to become romantically involved with both Carson McCullers and McCullers’s husband, Reeves, became friendly with Pat, too. Whenever Pat came to the loft, David and Pat would go around the corner to talk and have lunch at the Jai Alai, a Basque restaurant which was a fixture in Greenwich Village for decades.

“Pat,” said David Diamond, “was quite a depressed person—and I think people explain her by pulling out traits like cold and reserved, when in fact it all came from depression.” That, and the “loneliness” which outlined her life like an aura, is why Diamond thought Pat valued Allela’s “devoted friendship” so much.⁴⁶

“I never connected Pat with the Village,” he said. “I always connected her with uptown. She wasn’t bohemian at all. People thought she was because she wore men’s white shirts. They mistook [her mild form of cross-dressing] for bohemianism. I found her a very warm human being and I loved talking with her about music. I think she was obsessed with music.” ⁴⁷

Pat and David Diamond shared a fondness for certain composers—Ravel, for instance, whom David had met when he was ten and who told him that he must go to Paris to study with the great teacher Nadia Boulanger. Like very nearly his entire generation of gifted American composers, David Diamond did just that.

“Pat and I would always talk about where musical notes came from…. A piece of mine that was very popular in the 1940s—‘Round for Street Orchestra’—she wondered where I got the idea for that because it was so popular. She could practically imitate the whole first movement….” And Pat would let me read some short works that were still in manuscript. I thought she was a remarkable writer and that she had great psychological insight.

“I do remember that she was as fascinated by Greta Garbo as I was. And when she found out that I had met Garbo in Hollywood, of course she was always hoping that I could perhaps introduce her to Garbo.” ⁴⁸

Greta Garbo was a lifelong obsession for Pat, and Pat knew, through lesbian circles in New York and Paris, Garbo’s former lover, the flamboyant playwright Mercedes de Acosta.^* De Acosta’s romantic hats, stylish slacks, autocratic demeanor, and striking Cuban looks made her a standout in the 1920s. (At ten, she had been Dorothy Parker’s classmate at a convent school in Manhattan.) De Acosta, who was always kind to Pat, inviting her for dinner several times when Pat first arrived in Paris in July of 1949, had the distinction of having slept with, as Alice B. Toklas put it, “three of the most important women of the twentieth century.” Two of those women were Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo. (Eva Le Gallienne and Isadora Duncan are candidates for the third.) Pat herself, when young and lovely, sometimes brought out Garbo-like comparisons from her friends, and her admiring English professor, Ethel Sturtevant, once invited her to “[b]e the Greta Garbo of the novel!” ⁴⁹ Pat tried her best.

After Garbo’s death in 1990, Pat wrote an entirely worshipful article about the reclusive star, “My Life with Greta Garbo,” published finally in The Oldie on 3 April 1992. The piece is aglow with love, admiration, and incomprehension (Pat never met Garbo). And it is as quirky as anything Pat ever put on paper, dappled and stippled with all her perverse little interests. It also shows just how much of herself Pat projected into whatever she was working out in her writing at the moment. Pat’s work, despite its vaunted “neutrality,” was almost always intensely personal.

In this article, Pat fondly remembers stalking Garbo on the streets of Upper East Side Manhattan (Pat was not unique—all New Yorkers did this) while keeping a respectful distance. She recollects almost colliding with Garbo on a corner; the experience “made” her day. And although Pat loved to imagine Garbo alone, so alone, she also liked to imagine the enormous telephone bills—the size of them had a near-pornographic excitement for Pat—that Garbo must be racking up by talking to her many admirers all over the world.

By the time Pat wrote her Garbo article, she owned a little drawing that had once been in Garbo’s personal collection: a sexually ambiguous study of an older man who is pictured with a much younger person of indeterminate gender. She ruminated on it avidly. “That there is a sexual business between the two figures there is no doubt. The real ambiguity is in the beautiful face of the blond figure, which except for a strong jaw appears female….”⁵⁰ Pat wanted to think Garbo bought the drawing because the ambiguous figure looked like Garbo herself. And Pat imagined that she “can never forget—and I can hear this too—Garbo’s voice saying, ‘I vant to be alone,’ in a deep and earnest tone that meant to any hearer, Garbo speaks the truth.”⁵¹

Garbo may have been speaking the truth, but Pat wasn’t quoting it. Like almost everyone else, she misquotes Garbo on this particular line. What Garbo actually said was, “I want to be let alone.” Given Pat’s proclivities, her misquotation is perfectly understandable.

In 1977, thirteen or so years before she wrote the piece on Garbo and three or four years after she and her mother cut off their relations, Pat made another interesting allusion to the Swedish actress during a seven-hour interview with the writer and journalist Joan Juliet Buck, who had come to Moncourt to talk to Pat for the Observer Magazine. It’s a sign of the feelings Pat still harbored for Mother Mary after all those years (and all those tears) that she told Buck that Mary Highsmith was “the double of Greta Garbo.”⁵²Mary Highsmith had her own Modigliani-like attractiveness, but only a besotted daughter could assert that Mary was a “double” for Greta Garbo’s unearthly beauty and paralyzing presence, best summed up by theater critic Kenneth Tynan with the sentence: “What one sees in other women drunk, one sees in Garbo sober.”

Drunk or sober, when Pat looked at Mary with her mind’s eye, she saw Greta Garbo—or, at least, she sometimes said she did.

For most of the 1940s Pat never stopped falling for women—sometimes for no more than an hour or an evening. She also began to date a few men. The majority of them were young Jewish males by whom she seemed to be both repelled and fascinated. These young men were up-and-comers with names like Jack Berger and Walter Marlowe and Lewis Howard—she particularly liked Jack Berger because he criticized his own milieu as being “sort of Jewy sometimes”—and she speculated on their potential earning power with the calculating enthusiasm of any bourgeoise. (In 1984, she would reprise this enthusiasm in a conversation with Bettina Berch: “You have to marry a man who has quite a bit of money,” Pat told Berch with a keen grasp of what marriage meant, “or you turn into a servant.”)⁵³

When Pat was seeing a lot of Jack Berger in early 1942—(“I was practically the only Gentile in the house”)—she complained about how his Jewish friends seemed to need to eat all the time.⁵⁴ And then she criticized everything else about them. It was an interesting point of view for a woman who was to spend so much of her creative and personal life in close—often very close—association with Jews.

“Went to American Institute of Graphic Arts tonight with Berger. I like him a lot. The Jewish mind is analytical, critical, but not sympathetic or creative. I enjoy Jews’ company when I am most on the surface of my mind—when I am concerned with superficial things or impersonal things. When I am the other way—they are intolerable to me. Babs B has been intolerable at times.”⁵⁵

A couple of months later, Pat was still preoccupied with the subject, but in a different way.

“Walked with M. Wolf over Queensborough Bridge. She talked intelligently, but too pro-communist on my tradition question. One has to go to a Jew for decent conversation these days.”⁵⁶

One of Mary’s complaints against her daughter—that Pat calculated her female friendships according to what they could bring her—might help to explain Pat’s always-ambivalent association with Jews. Mary wrote in a letter to one of Pat’s lovers that Pat had made friends with the Alsatian-raised Jewish refugee artist Lil Picard because, as Pat told Mary, Lil was “going places.”⁵⁷

Pat liked to explore sex intellectually, but not necessarily physically, with the young men she was seeing. In the summer between her junior and senior years in college, one of her young men made a remark about Pat’s potential for heterosexual relations that caught her attention: “[He says] that I’m always psychologically unready but often physically ready. What an observant lad.”⁵⁸

Later on, Pat would dine with and then try out in bed the occasional young man. “Herbert L. called, we had dinner and he stayed for the night…. I want to learn to love men.”⁵⁹ Her attitude towards men was usually that of a canny shopper testing out an unknown product which she strongly suspected was not going to live up to its advertising. She judged these (mostly) nameless encounters solely on the kind of sexual response they produced in her. And it was never enough; it was negligible, in fact. What she was hoping for couldn’t happen because she always set the bar too high. She set it at the physical/spiritual communion she attained with women. She would always be disappointed.

“Don’t you ever desire a man’s body?” asked one of her male candidates plaintively. Pat had been mentally—and very unfavorably—comparing his profusion of “awful” chest hair, “which he thinks to be so beautiful,” with her female lover Ginnie’s “sweet breasts.”⁶⁰ The young men never stood a chance, although Pat kept on hoping they would.

While still at Sangor-Pines, Pat continued to be preoccupied by thoughts of religion and spirituality, just as she would be for the rest of her life. She was reading Freud on religion in June of 1943 and finding him “wonderfully interesting.”⁶¹ Freud and his disciples would always be a good fit for Pat. (Jean Genet’s biographer Edmund White writes that Genet thought Freud was the best friend homosexuals ever had.) A little later, she became interested in a book by Theodor Reik, one of Freud’s first pupils, called The Unknown Murderer (1932): a study of how to profile unidentified criminals by tracking the clues their unconscious guilt compelled them to leave behind.⁶² In her work, Pat returned repeatedly to the effects of unconscious guilt. It was a condition she understood in her bones.

And nothing so clearly reveals her creative reliance on frustrated desires—that classic Freudian explanation for both creation and its achievements—than the idea for a story Pat wrote down in a cahier in early September of 1947. Considering her mostly effaced paternal history, the continued reliance on male “hero-criminals” in her work, and the fact that her own first name was Mary, the meaning of this cloudy little keime couldn’t be clearer:

Mary loved and worshiped her father. When he died, she fell ill herself, was in delirium even as he was buried. She was not told of his death. Afterward she ministered still to his needs, bringing him broth and tea, shading the light from the eyes of the figure half asleep, face turned to the wall, on its bed.⁶³

For her forty-sixth birthday in 1967, Mary and Stanley Highsmith gave Pat a book by another of Freud’s disciples, Erich Fromm. The book, no doubt a pointed present on Mary’s part, was called The Art of Loving. Seven years later—as though she’d read no psychology in the intervening years, which, probably, she had not—Pat noted that “Erich Fromm states boldly that if a person cannot get from another the love he desires, the person resorts to sadism,”⁶⁴ and gave the irritatingly passive and masochistic Edith Howland of Edith’s Diary a taste for Fromm’s Talmud-inflected psychology.⁶⁵ But in the summer of 1983, Pat came away from an avant-première in London of Hans Geissendörfer’s TV film of Edith’s Diary (Ediths Tagebuch) irritated herself to see how the filmmaker had imposed a Freudian interpretation on her novel. She thought Geissendörfer had reduced the complications of Edith’s relationship with Cliffie to “a neat Freudian mother-son love relationship” and that the film was “obvious and a bit vulgar.”⁶⁶There was nothing, she felt, neat about Edith and Cliffie.

Pat always hated to be classified—especially by others. And she was quite capable of contradicting herself without having other people trying to contradict her.

Still, it was Sigmund Freud’s interpretations to which Pat usually returned. His bold, artistic analyses attracted her, his misogynies were congruent with her own, and his sense of art as the locus of loss suited her understanding of the act of creation. She had begun to read his work at Barnard, and the only time she seriously rebelled against his schematic approach was when it was applied to her own psychology during her six-month stint in Freudian therapy in 1948–49. And on only one occasion—at the beginning of 1956, in the deep depression that sparked another of her long interior dialogues with herself about God and “the humanistic morale versus Freud”—did she decide, briefly, to favor the “pre-Freudian Joseph Conrad” of The Outcast of the Islands over Freud. “The old fashioned, human morality is far more appealing to the writer” than Freud, she wrote.⁶⁷ It was the way Grandmother Willie Mae had brought her up—although, with his silver lining of irony, Joseph Conrad is anything but old-fashioned.

But this lapse from Freudian faith was a brief one, and as late as 1988, Pat, a guest on a British television program devoted to the investigation of how to survive the murder of a loved one, gave her only direct response (it was Freudian) to a question about the definition of a murderer. “Frankly,” she said, “I’d call them sick if they were murderers, mentally sick.”⁶⁸ For most of her life, Pat would explain herself to herself, and life to others, in more or less Freudian terms. Her novels do the same thing.

In July of 1943, Pat was paying attention to Mother Mary’s faith in Christian Science again, and she did a drawing “while listening to a sermon by a X[Christian] Scientist.⁶⁹ She tried her hand at the liturgical form herself, writing “sermons in my cahiers like the one of Jonathan Edwards.”⁷⁰ The eighteenth-century Calvinist theologian Jonathan Edwards’s most famous sermon—it was part of the curriculum of every American junior high school for most of the twentieth century, so it must have been the one Pat was referring to—is “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” It begins: “In this verse is threatened the vengeance of God on the wicked unbelieving Israelites.”

Pat, turning things upside down as usual, wrote a sermon called “Will the Lesbian’s Soul Sleep in Peace?” (she seemed to feel that her own soul might not rest in peace) and then dropped in on the artist and art dealer Betty Parsons in the gallery where she worked in order to show her the sermon. Parsons asked Pat for a copy. Parsons was Rosalind Constable’s lover, and Pat was always fascinated by the lovers of women she was attached to.⁷¹ The fact that Betty Parsons was not only an artist herself but a dealer at an important midtown gallery did not escape Pat’s attention, and Pat followed Parsons’s career as she went on to open her own gallery in 1946, the Betty Parsons Gallery, and become the most influential female gallerist in New York City. Parsons was the first person to exhibit the Abstract Expressionists, and amongst her artists were Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, and Pat’s friend Buffie Johnson.

Dan Coates’s travels in the East had begun late in the summer of 1943, and so it was in August that he dropped in on Mary and Stanley in New York for the first time. During this visit, Pat felt that “mother has no time” (for her) and that Dan was “very boring, living completely for the present and the present is little and insignificant.”⁷² Good-natured, handsome Dan didn’t share Pat’s dreams of Manhattan triumph and eventual world conquest—but, then, Pat usually disliked her favorite relatives when they came to New York.

When her beloved grandmother Willie Mae showed up in New York in October of 1943, Pat suddenly started to see Willie Mae in another light: “Grandmother makes me nervous…. She lives in the past and always talks—every minute, about ‘your uncle,’ ‘my brothers,’ ‘your aunt’—all people who died 50 years ago.”⁷³ This had something to do with Willie Mae’s proximity. Pat preferred her family in their proper places, in a stable “character,” and in the relations and the context in which she first knew them. Pat’s artistic concentrations were always the opposite of her hopeless yearning for stability.

Relations got worse during Willie Mae’s visit to New York, and Pat went so far as to have a disloyal little chat with her mother about her grandmother. The chat, however, was loyal to Mary, and it is the only time on record that Pat took Mary’s side against Willie Mae.

“At home a secret is spoken out: we don’t like Grandma. She is disagreeable, because she doesn’t let anybody tell her anything, she is jealous, talks too much, wants to spend money (!), go out and doesn’t show any thoughtfulness towards Mother. It worries me that Mother still tries to understand and change Grandma, to show her where she is wrong, and that mother still is looking for something that has never been. Something must be done, as she intends to come here every summer and this will make Mother old: she drives us all to drink!”⁷⁴

Like mothers, like daughters. These were the same criticisms Pat and Mary Highsmith would hurl at each other—in far more developed and colorful language—for decades; each woman standing in the dock, each woman sitting in the judge’s chair. Mary, Pat would insist, had “shattered” her with criticisms, made her shake for days, and twisted her sexually, while Pat’s physical and emotional “violence,” Stanley Highsmith (standing in for Mary) told Pat, had driven Mary to hysterical vomiting and a consultation with a psychiatrist. (The psychiatrist’s name was Dr. Ripley, and he may have been the same Dr. Ripley who “treated” the novelist Mary McCarthy when her first husband committed her to the Harkness Pavilion in New York—and left her there.)

“[S]till looking for something that has never been”—it is Pat’s phrase for Mary’s attempts to get Willie Mae to pay attention to her—would be a long life’s work for both the Highsmith women. Each of them was irretrievably linked to loss; and both of them were linked by their “loss” of each other.

And when Pat, in early November, finally persuaded Chloe to go to Mexico with her, another family fault line was exposed. Mary and Grandmother Willie Mae, still in New York, joined together in their jealousy of Chloe. “Grandma and Mother very curious about my feelings for Chloe,” Pat wrote in her diary. “‘Why?’ [they ask] and ‘What does she have?’ and ‘I would like to learn what strange power this girl has!’”⁷⁵