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Alter Ego

Part 4

Like all her later travels outside the United States, Pat’s trip to Mexico in December of 1943 started out in one direction, took an unexpected turn, and picked up enough emotional baggage and artistic impression to fill several of her future fictions. The purpose of her voyage—to continue to write her novel The Click of the Shutting in a setting of exotic exile—was followed by another urge just as basic: the urge to run away. Whenever Pat fell in love, her first thought was to escape with her new lover and her second thought was to escape from her new lover. Newly in love with Chloe, Pat was feeling the old, romantic pull of the road again. This time, she managed to persuade her girlfriend to go with her.

Perhaps the $350 Pat had saved up from her comics work^*—and from selling her radio and record player to Mary and Stanley—had something to do with Chloe’s initial assent to the trip. Richard Hughes agreed to allow Pat to send in comic book scenarios by mail to Sangor-Pines from Mexico, so she was secure in the promise of a little income. But Chloe was ambivalent about going anywhere with Pat, changing her mind, Pat noted acidly, “faster than the Russian frontlines.”¹

There was something premonitory about this Mexican trip. Once Pat had stepped across the border, the needle on her personal compass swung around to point to the country where all her journeys would end: Switzerland. The novel she went to Mexico to work on, The Click of the Shutting, took some of its impetus from her writing for comic books (whose progenitor was the Swiss graphic artist Rodolph Töpffer); she based one of her two Mexican short stories, “The Car,” on the odd relations of a Swiss hotel owner with his American wife in Taxco; and in Mexico City she spent time (reluctantly, because he was pursuing Chloe) with a naughty Swiss bandleader and nightclub owner, Teddy Stauffer, whose jazz band, the Original Teddies, was named after the bear on the coat of arms of Bern, Switzerland. Bern is the Swiss city where all Pat’s literary archives are now kept.

Mexico—to which Pat would return several times and for several reasons—shared a border with her home state of Texas. It was also the place where she first began to lay down patterns for her “songlines,” those magnetic meridians of travel which all her later, far-flung journeys would follow.

If you couldn’t get to Paris in the 1940s (and in 1943 you couldn’t; the city had been occupied by the Germans since June of 1940), Mexico would do. Every American (and many a European) who considered herself or himself an artist, a free spirit, a bohemian, or even a fan of D. H. Lawrence was attracted to the idea of Mexico. Katherine Anne Porter and Hart Crane went to Mexico in the 1930s; Tennessee Williams visited a recessive Paul and a receptive Jane Bowles in Acapulco in 1940; Saul Bellow managed to spend his mother’s life-insurance money on an extended sojourn in Taxco. And the teenage aesthete Ned Rorem seems to have dropped in on everyone who was anyone South of the Border. In the 1930s and 1940s, Americans were drawn to Mexico by what always draws people who make more art than money to such places: cheap rents, cheap food, abundant liquor, exotic scenery, and the recklessness of behavior that is permissible in a country to which you owe no allegiance. American nationals came in droves, and they usually returned with complaints about the low class and excessive drinking of their fellow expatriates.

Saul Bellow, who lived and travelled in Mexico in 1940, said “Mexico was everything that D. H. Lawrence said it was, and a good deal more besides.” He and his wife fetched up in Taxco, the silver-working center of Mexico: a town on a hill with a fantastically mannered cathedral, Santa Pisca. (Sybille Bedford^* described Santa Pisca as “shimmering with chromatic tiles” like “a brilliant pastiche of late—very late—Hispano American Baroque.”)² Taxco was where Pat would spend most of her Mexican time.

Taxco, Bellow said, “had a sizable foreign colony, mostly Americans, but also Japanese, Dutch, and British.” None of the people Bellow met there “had a very firm grip on anything at all.” The Bellows were able to rent a fine house and pay two Indian servants to take care of everything “for about ten bucks a week.” And the sun “shone so dramatically, so explicitly, you were never allowed to forget death.” In Taxco, Bellow found that he was drinking more than usual, much more, he said, than was good for him. He drank with his “American buddies in the zócalo…and with hard-drinking professionals who wrote for Black Mask and other pulps.” Like most American writers with any pretensions to seriousness—like Pat herself at the Sangor-Pines shop—Saul Bellow was ashamed to be “in the low company of the pulp writers.”³

Sybille Bedford, in Taxco ten years after Bellow on a yearlong odyssey with her companion Esther Murphy Arthur, praised the town’s “lovely position” and the “houses sprawling across a slope on four levels, everywhere red-tiled roofs, archways, flowers, prospects.” Bedford wrote slyly that Taxco’s famous silversmiths were now performing for “the transient and the naïve” and that “the foreigners who live in Taxco take villas and stay a very long time. Some may once have thought of writing a book; a few do paint.” ⁴

Like Teddy Stauffer, who opened his Casablanca Club with its death-defying pearl divers in 1943 in Acapulco, the entrepreneuring expatriates who came to Mexico catered to what Bedford called the “Americans fast and rich.”⁵ Pat and Chloe met Teddy Stauffer in Mexico City during a season which often spelled trouble for Pat: the Christmas holiday.

Pat and Chloe arrived by train in San Antonio, Texas, from New York on 14 December 1943. Pat had a bad toothache and suffered, at the Mexican border, the first of what would become her lifelong travel troubles with luggage and typewriters. She was carrying so many books that some of her bags had to be sent back to New York, others of her bags got lost, and her typewriter was detained. The two women turned around, spent the night in Laredo, and crossed into Mexico the next day. They parked themselves at a hotel Betty Parsons had recommended to Pat, the Guardiola (Chloe, already beginning to chafe, found it distasteful and was attacking Pat verbally), and began a frantic round of going out, attracting new people, and drinking too much. Chloe stayed out later than Pat, and Pat let a man take her home and kiss her. (“Since he has got a brain it was not too bad.”)⁶ By Christmas, Pat and Chloe had been in Mexico City for little more than a week, and their relationship was in tatters; the following year, Pat remembered this Christmas in Mexico as yet another “miserable” Christmas holiday.⁷

Chloe, not much moved by Pat’s passion for her and still in love with her husband, went out drinking every night with Teddy Stauffer, who would later succeed in charming many movie stars into his bed. (In 1951, he married the cleverest of them: Hedy Lamarr.) Stauffer’s band had played jazz in the style of Benny Goodman at the infamous 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, and he turned the “Horst Wessel Song” into a “swing” number in Germany—and managed to avoid being jailed for it. The competition was too stiff for Pat. She decided that further relations with Chloe would ruin her work, and she went back to what she’d come to Mexico for in the first place: the idea of writing The Click of the Shutting. “My novel still needs a lot of work, of course I think of it all day long.”⁸

By 7 January, Pat was high in the Atachi hills of Mexico, alone in picturesque Taxco except for a part-time maid, in what she called “the most beautiful house” in town: La Casa Chiquita, which she rented from the Castillo family. Before she moved into La Casa Chiquita, Pat had taken a room with a balcony and a washing machine in Taxco, bought paper and pencils, and set up a work schedule which called for her to draw in the morning, walk in the afternoon, and write at night. She drank seven cups of coffee a day and yearned for her typewriter, which hadn’t yet made it over the border. She began to imagine a future for herself in Mexico—it was the future she would have in Switzerland forty years later—as a rich and famous writer in exile, estranged in a strange land and missing her native country. Pat often went away from places so she could miss them; yearning is a productive emotion for writers.

One of the reasons Pat decided to stay in Taxco was the fact that the town was so full of foreigners that trousers on women were tolerated there, as they were not in other Mexican villages. On the nineteenth of January, Pat’s twenty-third birthday, Mother Mary sent her a telegram, saying that their mutual friend Jeva Cralick had a present for her. Mary also sent what Pat called a “terrible” letter, full of criticisms and endearments. “My darling,” Mary wrote, and then launched into one of her searing lectures. It was just the taste of home and the touch of emotional battery that Pat had been longing for. (In her diary, Pat was writing: “Suche jeden Tag nach einem Brief von mother. Warum nicht? Warum?” “Every day I look for a letter from my mother. Why not? Why?”)⁹

Then Mary, as she often did, enclosed money in a missive, and followed that charitable act with several more letters accusing Pat of drinking too much, of not cleaning her house, and of living a “phony life” built on alcohol. Mary’s letters upset Pat so much that she couldn’t write her novel for a while. When she started work again, she was hoping that her former employer, Ben-Zion Goldberg, would like her book; he had telegrammed her that he was coming to visit. Grandmother Willie Mae weighed in with a letter from Fort Worth to say that she was “praying” for Pat. Pat, according to her diary, was reading and thinking about God every day.

Pat also got a letter from her father; a letter from Richard Hughes (to whom she was sending two of her “best 16 page comic book” synopses); a letter from her inquisitive seatmate at Sangor-Pines, Gerry Albert; a letter from Allela Cornell; a letter from Chloe saying she’d like to visit in February; and a letter from a man who was in love with Chloe and wanted a report on Chloe’s current drinking habits. Lacking neither correspondents nor the will to correspond, Pat answered everyone. And she wrote a letter to her friend the photographer Ruth Bernhard for good measure. Another of Pat’s lifelong patterns was being laid down here in her first month in Mexico: a massive and quotidian foreign correspondence.

La Casa Chiquita and its part-time maid cost Pat nearly twice as much as Saul Bellow said he had been paying for his Taxco house and two servants in 1940—Pat’s rent was about fifty-four dollars a month—so the inflation of prices that accompanies American expatriatism was already biting into beautiful Taxco. Pat’s house was a low adobe affair with a charming pitched roof, handcrafted Mexican tiles framing the lintel, and a cactus garden around the side. Pat did a nice drawing of the house. The native wildlife—pulgas (fleas) and ants and little hopping lizards—made free with the door and the open windows. In February, she took in a cat, calling it Frank. In April, the month before she left Taxco, she adopted a kitten. The kitten wouldn’t sleep on her bed, perhaps in mute rebellion against the name she gave it: Fragonard.¹⁰

Very soon, Pat began to set down in her cahier her customarily sharp character notes, longer than the ones she usually wrote, on the expatriate residents of Taxco. She was finding or seeking in her neighbors what she would always find or seek in humans: cracks in their characters, traits and patterns which reinforced her view that human behavior was unreliable, double-natured, and capable of turning on a dime. Pat looked into people for much the same reasons that she read books or fell in love with women: to “recognize” something in them that corresponded to her belief that life was flawed, cleft, and sundered.

And so the “characters” she records in her cahiers often appear to have been alive in her imagination long before she met and described them—rather than the other way around. (The cool eye Pat cast on people would always merge with her imaginative taste for fiasco: despite having at least a normal experience of both, she almost never wrote about “good” people or “happy” circumstances in her notebooks.) But the unusual thing about these Taxco portraits is just how affectionate their ironies are: especially her portrait of “Paul Cook,” a budding “hero-criminal.” Pat was young, only twenty-three, and as yet relatively unembittered. Nothing would ever be quite so affectionate again.

Although Pat complained constantly of loneliness, continued to yearn for letters from her mother (and felt terrible when she got them), and cursed the food on a daily basis (“Fish again!” “Ohh, if only I could have a carrot, a banana, a piece of celery with no salt! I would be so happy!”),¹¹ she was deeply engaged by Taxco and by the side trips she took to Acapulco, Jalapa, Cuernavacas, Monterrey, and other places. Her descriptions of her neighbors are as graphic as if they were painted. Oddly, these descriptions were dulled down, made less vivid and plausible and emotional, when she folded them into her Mexican fictions: the two short stories (“In the Plaza”¹² and “The Car”¹³) and the one novel (A Game for the Living) written from her direct experience of Mexico. It is only in their original form—a portrait gallery of the people who surrounded her in Taxco in the winter and spring of 1944—that these studies give a picture of Pat’s artistic weights and measures, of her intense socializing (despite constant claims of loneliness), and of the exotic environment in which she had chosen to work on her first novel.

Here are a few of Pat’s Mexican portraits, printed at length. They are as much a study of the young writer’s state of mind as they are likenesses of her subjects.

Margot Castillo and Tonio Castillo—Margot charming, French and Dutch, but before an artist, before a wife, a hard business woman. Tonio, a clerk in Spratling’s “persuaded her” they should marry…. ^* For a couple of years they worked hard, building their own business…and finally built up to be second to Spratling in design and volume of business.

Tonio is generous, warm, youthful. Twenty-six now. Margot is economical, warm when she wants to be, a garrulous talker, and perhaps thirty-eight or forty-two now. They build a house, in Margot’s excellent style…but Tonio does not think he will like it. He cannot live without her and can hardly live with her…Tonio…pays high wages so [the workers] will love him. Margot delights in pointing out to him that they don’t.

Margot no longer draws for pleasure, or paints, but concentrates on her business. She wears fuchsia ribbons in her coal black hair, (up-swept) and is often bandboxy. Tonio must be rather a cute pet to be seen with in New York restaurants…. Margot shows an excess of affection & generosity. Margot is black and white.

The Luzis—Alexander Luzi—Swiss born, linguist, rather ordinary but pine-knotty family…. He was engaged to a Mexican woman when Marguerite Re came down on a visit…. It was love at first sight. Alex invited her and her friend to stay three days at the Victoria Hotel, the best here, of which he was part owner. [“As a Swiss, he is expert at all tourist rackets.”] “Will you marry me?” he asked one night over dinner. “I never got the spoon to my mouth,” says Mrs. Luzi…. Later, Marguerite found he had a son to support. [“Alex married a Mexican-Arabian girl of low family, five days before their son was born.”]…If Alex had not been quite the fellow he is, he would have left the little chippie in the trouble she deserved….

…Alex wants [Marguerite] to buy property to nail herself down here, selling her car (the symbol of flight) to get the money for it…. “I can’t stand it much longer. I certainly can’t stand it the rest of my life,” Marguerite says.

…Their arguments are few but interesting: the second major one in five years started when Alex asked for Marguerite’s car…. “You can pack your things and go,” he said. “You can pack yours, and I’ll do it for you right now,” she said, doing it, and setting the valise outside the door…. He has something of the personality of Stanley Laurel, with not all the comedy removed. They have the neatest kitchen in Taxco.

Paul Cook—who talks better than he writes or paints…. He was a football player, married at thirty-two, to a Texas woman of good and wealthy family. Divorced last year after 14 years because of jealousy on her part, demands, criticism of his drinking. He has always drunk quite a little and now in Taxco drinks quite a lot…. He is the son of a Welsh doctor and an Italian woman. He is 6’3”, lanky, blue eyed, and distinguished looking no matter what he does or how he dresses…. The cantina proprietors adore him, for sincere reasons.

He is paid $150 dollars per month by the U.S. Government to catch dope peddlers. Sometimes he makes a catch. Ostensibly, he is the washed-up American painter going to hell in Taxco…. People get attached to [Paul], admire him, even want to be like him…. He has done what no other American I know has done, made the Mexicans like him, I mean inspired their friendship. Despite his height, despite his blue eyes, they love him….

Paul came home with me for the first time one night to read my manuscript. He read 11 pages and said it was excellent, told me good reasons why. Then I went to bed and he was to sleep on the porch. Later he joined me in my bed, and while I didn’t like it at first, I decided it was not true cameraderie [sic] to stand on ceremony. He slept like a log on his side all night, got up first and got breakfast. The next night when I got home at 12:45 A.M. he was in my bed and I had to sleep on the porch. He is as undependable as a Negro when he is drunk. Wants to do my portrait. He can make drama, and art, out of nothing.

Miss Jones—hostess at the Victoria. Moles all over her face, and a Chicago accent. Vender-Bearer of delicious imported cheeses which come in excess of the pecan pie that concludes the five peso meal—the best Taxco or even Mexico City affords. She is patient, friendly, and somehow immeasurably sad…. Discovered crying in her room because a 26 year old woman’s child was so beautiful.

Stanley Coventry—fop, fascist. Britisher, sponger off his aunt, Mrs. Auchinclaus (Samuel). Stanley is a frightful bore, inspiring hatred in Paul Cook…. He goes about with a Schnauzer. Has done some good designs, they say, for jewelry. Paints when he needs money, which is seldom. Has lived two years in Tahiti and tells his sexual experiences on short acquaintance…. His voice, like many Englishmen’s voices, from a distance sounds effete and like a homosexual’s…. A namby-pamby, pantywaist, generally repulsive character. Looks much like the Prince of Wales, though taller, with the incipient embonpoint of a gourmet.

Mrs. Auchinclaus, a dowager widow, blue, alert eyes, constant smoker, quizzes me with an interest as to what I am writing…. When she was young, she saw all Europe, made photographs of places of interest and sold them to museums and galleries. She clings to youth and life, as I have seen so many her age and type cling to it.

Pat also cast her assessing eye on the Weltons: he looks like “Carl Sandburg,” she like “Julie Haydon” Colonel Newton, “the West Point graduate” back on a thirty-day leave from the war and married to a “26 year old girl, very sweet, a trifle hebraic” and the other Newton family, the female half of which “was seen in Chachalaca’s bar by half the town one afternoon pulling her dress down and presenting her fifty year old bosom to all who would have a feel,” and the husband, Dr. Newton, who “left Taxco [without his wife] owing me ten pesos, Paul about 300, Chachalaca’s 180, Arturo’s 140.” And then there was “Fidel Figueroa,” an early, compellingly heterosexual prototype for her hero-criminals, whom Pat put at the center of her short story “In the Plaza.” Fidel is “an Indian, who came into town with one peso, and a handsome face, and somewhere underneath it, the energy to climb fast and the ruthlessness.”

Murder was usually on Pat’s mind when she wrote fiction, and as her fictions took their various forms in Mexico, she began to use murder as a replacement for love—or as a reaction to love. Fifteen years later she would admit to a lover that life didn’t make any sense unless there was a crime in it. In early manuscript versions of several of her novels (A Game for the Living, The Two Faces of January amongst them), Pat changed the murderer from manuscript to manuscript—sometimes at the suggestion of an editor—as though it didn’t really matter to her who did the deed as long as the impulse to kill found expression in the plot.¹⁴ Even in The Talented Mr. Ripley, the novel whose initial murder is so iconically linked to its theme, the original murder victim was Dickie’s father, Herbert Greenleaf, who, in various versions, is pushed from a cliff by both Dickie and Tom or stabbed and filled with opium so Tom Ripley can “engage…in a smuggling operation.”¹⁵

Both Pat’s Mexican short stories end in awkward deaths. She has the character who represents Fidel Figueroa killed in “In the Plaza,” and she also kills the character who stands in for Marguerite Luzi in her short story “The Car.” But in life, Mrs. Luzi lived on in Taxco, and in life Fidel Figueroa enchanted many foreign ladies with his paintings (which sold “faster than he could paint them”), left Mrs. Cadenas, who had pulled him up from poverty and kept and dressed him beautifully—Pat lingers on Fidel’s “New York” clothes—and married the “none too prepossessing Mrs. Kitzelman, whose husband made his fortune in barbed wire fences.” “They live in the most ornate house in Taxco, decorated by all the best decorators from Mexico City in Mrs. K’s execrable taste.” Pat took the happy ends in her models’ lives and turned them into tragedy (or at least into murder) in her fictions.

Fiction, as Pat was to say decades later in an interview on American radio, was for what she really wished would happen.¹⁶

Pat also took careful notes on the Taxco residents’ most serious extracurricular activity: drinking. Taxco was a place where steady drinkers could find plenty of company. Pat did most of her own imbibing at the bar in the Victoria Hotel and in Chachalaca’s Bar. In Mexico, she wrote with less embarrassment about drinking than she was ever to do again.

The moon is a tired wheel of chance rolling across the sky, and I am to be found in a bar. Hours and hours I sit watching the business man from Chicago paw a lady who is not his wife, listening to the jaded mariachis grinding out “Jalisco,” absorbing greedily a thousand monotonous details that I have seen a thousand times before, absorbing alcohol to feel things I have felt a thousand times before.¹⁷

In Taxco people do not drink to fill social intervals, or as a ritual between four and six, and do not drink for a mild lift, but for total oblivion.¹⁸

Alcohol is a virus…. One drink leads to another, with an infallibility unequalled anywhere else on the globe. Masculine cameraderie is strong. Wines are comic.¹⁹

Pat was considering writing a “book or short stories on Taxco, preferably a book,”²⁰ and her thoughts were a variation on the theme she’d identified at the age of twenty: “What keeps recurring to me as a fundamental of the novel is the individual out of place in this century.”²¹

As always, Pat was following the split, the fault line, the fracture in her own psychology to imagine the subject of her future novels. But her musings in Taxco seemed to predict her future life as well, setting out with uncanny pre-science her struggles in the next five decades in all those foreign countries where she lived and worked as a resident alien. Pat said she wanted her writing to

show the effects of foreign milieu on Americans. Americans, because Americans, less than French, Germans, far less than the English, do not know whether to assimilate themselves or hold apart. They try to do both, and lose their own souls, their mores, their minds. The Englishman takes a little England along with him, and lives in proud isolation. The Frenchman forgets his European blood and marries. The American sits astride the fence, drinks, and earns the hostility of every native in the foreign country. It is this split personality that makes the American a total failure, that tears him apart.²²

In between her bouts of tequila drinking, drawing and sketching, taking observant character notes, and imagining new fictions, Pat, full of confidence and despair, worked on the novel at hand, the novel she was never to finish: The Click of the Shutting.

In 1965, in an interview for the London Sunday Times—the same interview in which she announced that “stories are absolutely essential to me, like poetry: I write a lot of both”—Pat gave an account of her abandoned novel to the writer and critic Francis Wyndham:

I…went to Mexico and started a long Gothic novel which never got finished. It was about two boys of fourteen, one rich and one poor. The poor boy goes and stays in the rich boy’s house and falls in love with his mother. I described the house in great detail, and when I realised I’d written hundreds of pages and still hadn’t got to the action, I gave it up. It was quite unlike my later books.²³

On the first day of 1943, a week after she got her job at Sangor-Pines, Pat had taken a New Year’s walk to Sutton Place, the expensive Manhattan enclave close to her new apartment on East Fifty-sixth Street. It was a walk she would turn into a little voyage of discovery for Gregory, the main character of her “long Gothic novel,” The Click of the Shutting. (The title, borrowed from one of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnets, refers to the sound a clasp knife, the kind of knife Pat always carried, makes as it closes.) Although Pat insisted that “[u]nlike Nietzsche, my best thoughts do not come in the fresh air,”²⁴ some of her best images did, and in her notes for the novel the boy Gregory sees what Pat saw that day on Sutton Place: a lamp enclosed in an iron frame over a colonial doorway, “all grey like an ancient knight’s crest…. It was then, young as he was at sixteen, that Gregory knew he must have always and only his love of the fantastic and the unreal.”²⁵

As she walked past Manhattan’s elegant mansions, Pat must have repeated to herself many times the phrase with which she began The Click of the Shutting: “‘I’ll pretend that I live there,’ Gregory whispered as he came into the block.”²⁶

Pat did describe a “house in great detail” in this novel—which, contrary to what she told Francis Wyndham, was so much like her “later books” that most of the themes (including the “big signet ring,”²⁷ a feature of all Pat’s Ripley novels)²⁸ in most of her later works can be found in The Click of the Shutting.²⁹ The novel’s grand house, the house of the Willson family, is the first of many invented houses—a “house of fiction,” in Henry James’s phrase—to appear in a Highsmith novel. Like all the other houses she would make up, this house was what Patricia Highsmith desperately wanted at twenty-three.

Pat had Edgar Allan Poe at the back of her mind while she was working on The Click of the Shutting (she was thinking of “William Wilson,” Poe’s 1839 tale of paranoid and murderous doubles, when she named the house’s proprietary family “Willson”). But despite long, shapely passages and some subtle characterizations, much of her writing approached the ungainly style that made the novelist E. L. Doctorow call Edgar Allan Poe a “genius hack” and “our greatest bad writer.”³⁰

Besides “great detail,” Pat invested the Willson house with its own “character,” and her manuscript predates by fifteen years the next American novel to present a house with a personality: Shirley Jackson’s elegant psychological ghost story, The Haunting of Hill House. The first sentence of Jackson’s 1959 work could almost be a summary of the reasons Pat would always give for why she wrote. “No live organism,” Shirley Jackson wrote, “can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.³¹

Pat began to make little notes for The Click of the Shutting six weeks before she started work for Richard Hughes at Sangor-Pines. In September of 1942, she’d been imagining the “enormous possibilities” of using adolescents as major characters “in a novel.” She was thinking about (but not reading again) André Gide’s The Counterfeiters, reminding herself of the precocity of his teenagers.³² A week after Hughes hired her, Pat began extending her notes into the idea of a novel about an artistic teenage boy who spies upon the house and enters the life of another, far wealthier boy.³³

Pat was, after all, still an adolescent herself (she liked to think of herself as an adolescent boy), and so she imagined Gregory Bullick as a high school student who had some of the characteristics of one of her high school friends. “Let Gregory = B.B. but he will not be the main character because he is a Jew. A perfectionist.”³⁴

“B.B.” was Babs, the close friend of Judy Tuvim (Holliday) and a girl to whom Pat had been attracted. But as Pat, in Taxco, was writing her way through the comic book scenarios she was mailing back to Sangor-Pines in Manhattan, her notes for Gregory show that she was allowing him to split off, to become half of a double nature, to take something from her own psychology and something from what she was writing for Richard Hughes.³⁵ She gave Gregory some of her tastes, too: sending him to Carnegie Hall to see the cross-dressed Flamenco dancer, Carmen Amaya, by whom both she and Ruth Bernhard had been enthalled.³⁶

So Gregory loses his “Jewishness” and his minor status and becomes a major character whose homoerotic attachments and meek outward demeanor are more like Patricia Highsmith’s—and more like the Alter Egos she is writing for Sangor-Pines (“Bob Benton: mild-mannered young pharmacist”)—than they are like the traits of Dostoyevsky’s liverish young antiheroes or Gide’s perversely philosophical adolescent geniuses.

An impoverished boy, Gregory is also a talented one, and parasitical in his attachments to the other, richer boys he worships. He has some of Pat’s protectiveness about his art: he is horribly insulted when a friend of his father’s looks at his drawing of “the wind” and says: “It’s nothing.” He shares with Pat the double conviction that he is worthless and that, therefore, the world must revolve around him. Gregory’s narcissism fosters the creation of an Alter Ego the way a petri dish encourages the growth of bacteria; he’s a candidate for the dark side of the American Dream. “[Gregory] felt he was driven by some terrific energy that would never exhaust itself and that must surely translate itself finally into something magnificent.”³⁷ Like Pat, he “driv[es] himself on nerve alone” and loves the “destructive” way this makes him feel.³⁸

Gregory lives with his alcoholic father, a failed passport photographer, in a disheveled loft in Pat’s old neighborhood in Greenwich Village. Gregory uses Pat’s old subway stop, the Christopher Street station, and, like her, he has a penchant for good addresses, fine houses, and drinking at Pete’s Tavern. He comes back every day for weeks to spy on the house of the Willson family, with whose spoiled and destructive son, George, he creates a rivalrous and Alter Ego–like relationship. Gregory is also a would-be novelist.

When Gregory enters George Willson’s house for the first time, George sees that Gregory is ravished by the house’s interior; Gregory seems zombie-like to George, seems “to be in a perpetual trance…. It was like he was dead and would do anything he was told to do.”³⁹Gregory is trying to think himself into George Willson’s body, trying to be “born directly into heaven without the trouble of a lifetime of living and dying.” ⁴⁰ “Wanting the house was a strange and unreasonable thing.” ⁴¹ Wanting George’s family was even stranger: “It was as much the imagined household as the physical house that he loved.” ⁴²

As though the Willsons have been compelled by the force of Gregory’s feelings, they pack off their son George to a military academy and invite Gregory to take his place. While Gregory is not the first of Pat’s long line of adopted or semiadopted characters—that distinction goes to the “boy called Mary” in “The Legend of the Convent of St. Fotheringay”—Gregory is the first fully developed character who is “adopted,” and the first one who tries to replace his Alter Ego. In The Click of the Shutting, Pat was beginning to test out some of the abiding themes—replacement, substitution, and forgery—that would color even the works she devoted to women. Therese in The Price of Salt is an “orphan” whose absent, neglectful mother is still alive, while Edith Howland of Edith’s Diary has unresponsive parents but a motherly Aunt Melanie.

Pat’s imagination liked to exclude birth families or destroy them, and this preference found expression even in her most casual lines. One of them was part of a little limerick she wrote in 1976: “Home presents a dismal picture / Things are gloomy as the tomb.” ⁴³ Another is a note she took a couple of years later: “Families are nice to visit but I wouldn’t want to live with one.” ⁴⁴

André Gide, Pat’s literary guide to sexualizing adolescents, had already reduced the familial subject to its essentials: “Familles! Je vous haïs!”

Early on, Pat was thinking of The Murder in The Click of the Shutting as essential: “[c]ommitted on a day when Dominick and Donato [she uses the names of several other paired boys in subplots: Bernard and Charles, Gregory and George, Alex and Paul, etc.] have been laughing too much.” ⁴⁵ In a later version, it is the boys’ high school teacher who is murdered. Pat frames this murder in homosexual terms, and the killing is committed, once again, because the boys have been laughing too much:

Gregory haunts the pistol all the week, the pistol which Alphonse owns…. And on the day it happens, the chemistry teacher scolds the two of them for unruliness, and they still laugh too much, and Alphonse, softened by the gentle lapping, licking of Gregory’s adulation, pulls the trigger at his broad short back. ⁴⁶

In the notes Pat made for the end of The Click of the Shutting (she managed 385 pages before abandoning it as unfinishable) she indicated that she wanted Gregory to sketch George’s mother, Margaret, then sleep with her, and then, in a scuffle with George, accidentally kill her. Her first idea was that it was Margaret’s son, George Willson, who should do the killing.

As befits a recent college graduate whose longest experience of life has been school, Pat’s imagination of the high school in The Click of the Shutting is the best thing in the novel. Reminiscent of Kafka’s confining structures, the school is more vicious, more contemporary, and less randomly organized than Kafka’s trackless mental architectures. The deteriorating physical plant—everything is gray and greasy and abandoned—the violent hall monitors, the hungover children, the persistent and cruel torturing of teachers by students and the students’ torturing of each other, are both uncomfortably modern and sinisterly Gothic.

Many of Pat’s conflicted feelings about women went straight into the male characters of The Click of the Shutting. It was a double displacement for her (and a nice play on Gide’s idea of dédoublement, although her understanding of Gide was limited to his adolescent boys) by which, as she became a boy on the page, she lost both her “female self” and her “real” antipathies for women. (Pat had begun the book by thinking of herself as the boy who would fall in love with George’s mother, Margaret.) Her antipathies towards women were much more powerful (and much less subtle) when she wrote about them in the voice of her cahiers, which was, more or less, her own voice. Or, rather, one of her voices.

Gregory has odd feelings about girls: “Most of all he hated to bump into the girls’ breast. Their soft pressure was to him unclean and a little spooky.” ⁴⁷ Everett, George Willson’s uncle, looks down into the “disconcertingly intense face” of his wife, Lydia, and says: “You remind me of Lady Macbeth.” ⁴⁸ And “[a]s he strokes her hair, he thinks: It was an ugly thing he did, touching her…a very ugly thing.” ⁴⁹ George Willson plays a nastily misogynist game with his great uncle Alfred called “Lord Twitchbottom and Lady Twot.”

Gregory develops a crush on another wealthy male classmate, too, Paul Cotton. “His devotion to Paul was a far worthier thing, for Paul was a fine person.” Gregory, as Tom Ripley will do ten years later, impersonates the object of his crush: “Still being Paul, mingling friendliness with unconcern, he descended the rest of the stairs.”⁵⁰ And, just as Ripley will do, Gregory makes a throat-slitting gesture in front of a mirror with a razor and calls out the name of Paul’s girlfriend.⁵¹ Gregory’s crush on Paul might have forced The Click of the Shutting to follow an even more dangerous direction—but Pat held that particular fire for The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Pat worked diligently on The Click of the Shutting in Taxco, in between bouts of watching her recent history parade itself before her eyes. Ben-Zion Goldberg, her employer from FFF Publications, did come to visit her in Mexico, just as he’d written he would, and he stayed there mooning around her for quite a while. He told Pat he wanted to share a house with her for “two years.” Mother Mary took alarm from afar, calling him an “old goat” in a letter. Goldberg and Pat did some travelling together—to Acapulco, principally, in March—and some flirting too.

In Acapulco, Pat worked on her novel while small lizards ran through her room and across the roof, and a “noisy pig” noisily enjoyed the orange peels she’d thrown away.⁵² The heavy concentration of ions in the air excited and energized her; the green sparks she and Goldberg could make by stamping on wet sand and the sparks she saw dancing on the water made her “very happy.” Those green sparks found their way into another interesting, unfinished text Pat would set partially in Mexico: The Dove Descending.

Ben-Zion Goldberg, according to Pat, was in love with her, and he came to the same conclusion most of Pat’s rejected admirers would come to: “Goldberg says that I’m incapable of loving, that I am in love…. with myself.” On their trip to Acapulco, Goldberg visited her diligently every night at eleven o’clock in her room by the sea to speak about her novel and about their possible relations. And he stayed, talking, until the early hours of the morning.⁵³ He was too much of a gentleman to press his case with more than a few “advances”—and Pat was too much of a lesbian to be interested in them.

“His conversation is very inspiring,” Pat wrote in her Mexico Diary of their Acapulco trip, “and he tries with much patience to make me really fall in love with him, but that is impossible.”⁵⁴ Goldberg would later ask her to read a lengthy novel he’d written, so she could show it to her agent, Margot Johnson. Pat didn’t find much in the manuscript to interest her.

On 20 March, taking the swaying bus back from Acapulco to Taxco with Goldberg (who accompanied Pat even though it was out of his way), Pat refused to sit with other people because she wanted “to dream” by herself. When the bus stopped in Tierra Colorada, she was suddenly and sharply transfixed by the figure of a child which seemed to materialize out of previous “dreams”—transgressive dreams about young girls. This figure was “a nine year old girl, the most beautiful girl I’ve seen in Mexico. I wanted to bring her with me. She was asking for some centavos with others. I thought of her until Chispamingo and Iguala.”⁵⁵

Just before she left Taxco for the United States, Pat saw Chloe again, “my alcoholic beauty…in Mexico City. She, being immune to the subtle…effects of this Latin atmosphere, is staying on. Her hands still shake as badly as they did in New York—and for the same thing.”⁵⁶

As usual, Pat’s interest in herself and in what was directly around her in Mexico precluded interest in anything else. The Second World War didn’t wrest much prose from her pen. The few entries she made in her journals about the war seem to have been made in summary, with an eye to her future readers. They run along the lines of the journal entry she made shortly before leaving Barnard:

Bali is now partially occupied, the British are maneuvering at Rangoon, the first American battleship has been sunk, the Bali fleet of Japan smashed and a new Russian army, trained east of the Urals, is ready to go. Today’s the anniversary of the Red Army! And tomorrow I have a date for lunch with Rosalind!⁵⁷

Unlike the comics Superheroes and war heroes whose scenarios she was still sending to Richard Hughes, and unlike some of her more adventurous Barnard classmates, it never occurred to Pat, once she’d left Barnard and the Sangor-Pines shop, to assist the U.S. war effort or to actually go to war. She was already indirectly assisting the armed forces by writing what amounted to war propaganda for the comics, but her most obvious response to the Second World War was to ignore it. Instead of going to war, she went to Mexico with an attractive model—and she worked on her first novel and hoarded up material for her cahiers and diaries.

From Monterrey, in the second week of May 1944, Pat wrote to Kingsley wistfully about her Barnard classmates (and bedmates, although Kingsley wasn’t privy to this part of the story)—feeling, suddenly, as though she’d been left out of one of history’s great designs. She righted herself with a burst of ironic fantasy and a short shot of false “feminism.” (Even in the palmy days of its ascendancy, “feminism” was a word Pat would have used only under water torture.)

“What has become of Babs? Is she in the war?…That girl will never know how much I like and admire her, and maybe it’s best that way…. And what of Helen and Peter? Bumping along in some ambulance in France, I suppose. Or in the Marines. My God, if I wanted to join any of those goddam things, I’d go to Russia, where they give women the honor of being fighter pilots. Better than cleaning out kitchens, no?”⁵⁸

No. Being a fighter pilot wasn’t better than cleaning out kitchens for someone like Pat Highsmith. She would never have joined the Russian air force because she was (1) too ambivalent to fight for any side but her own, (2) a terrible driver of any vehicle that required steering, (3) terrified of the sight of blood, and (4) actually very enthusiastic about cleaning out almost anything, kitchens included.

In the same letter, Pat said that she was reading Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and wondered if it was a bad thing to do “for anyone writing a first novel…for the inevitable question appears—what need of more after this?” And she made the first of many requests over many decades for Kingsley to pick up for her personal use some of “the old Columbia spiral notebooks…. You know what a stickler I am for uniformity and I’ll need one soon.”⁵⁹

“Contrary to what you’ve read and heard,” said Pat’s cousin Dan Walton Coates, “for someone who didn’t like Fort Worth worth a damn, Pat sure as hell surfaced here quite frequently. When things were down for her, it was nice to go home.”⁶⁰ Texas was both a magnet for Pat’s irritations and a mythical harbor where her battered little love boat could anchor and shelter in Grandmother Willie Mae’s upright manners and unyielding morals. Because of Willie Mae’s rocklike presence, the stability of the home situation in Fort Worth attracted Pat in exactly the same measure as its rigidity oppressed her. One of her notes for a “3rd person” short story, written during her precollege Fort Worth visit of 1938, reads: “Sunday at Grandmother’s…Stillness, the silence, the noises, the air, heat, the purpose. Depression, oppression, conscience.”⁶¹ But Pat kept coming back to Willie Mae, and Fort Worth was an interim stop on some of her trips to and from Mexico.

Willie Mae’s house on West Daggett Avenue had a den with storage cabinets which ran all the way around the room. The doors to these cabinets were made up of unusually tall wooden panels, and Pat, stopping at Willie Mae’s on her way back to New York from Taxco, decorated every single one of the panels with paintings. She painted scenes from the Texas countryside into which she set, naturally enough, Texas cattle. And on the ground under the tail of one of those Texas cows, she carefully brushed in a large, fresh pile of cow dung. “That,” said her cousin Dan, “was a big subject of conversation.”⁶²

Back in New York at the end of May, Pat was poring over John Ruskin’s work. By the end of September, she was toting up the progress of her love life over the summer of 1944, during which she had enjoyed the reverse of her usual love troubles. One of the multiple affairs Pat began that summer was with the lovely, adventurous, alcoholic blond socialite Natica Waterbury, a woman Pat would keep up with all her life. Natica’s early death prompted Pat to dedicate a collection of short stories to her, and Natica’s daredevil exploits (she was a pilot) and literary and social interests (she assisted Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare & Company in Paris and was part of the international lesbian daisy chain) commanded Pat’s heart and head for quite a while. Still, it all seemed to come to the same thing in the end.

“Loves by the dozen, love affairs by the dozen are all very well. But oh God, when they overlap! If one could merely be clear with one before beginning another, all would be well. It is the overlapping, the overlapping, the overlapping, until where one’s love heart is, is so thickly padded, nothing can any longer be felt.”⁶³