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Social Studies

Part 1

No one who knew Patricia Highsmith in the last, claustral years of her life in Switzerland can believe just how social—and even how socially confident—she could seem to be in the 1940s in Manhattan. The Embittered Old Oyster, shut up in a shell of her own devising in suburban Switzerland in the last decade of the twentieth century, was once a Pearl of a Girl in wartime Manhattan: avid for experience, hungry for connections, and going to every single place in New York City where she could find both.

Romanticism was one of Pat’s best excuses for her sexual adventuring. In New York in the 1940s, she pursued her constantly upgraded romantic ideals in the beds of (mostly) women who sometimes, though not always, became her primary lovers. Part of her desire to look ever upwards in her sexual affections had to do with her early understanding of New York’s stairway to success—and with her shame at how her family couldn’t seem to get beyond the first step. “Making it” has always been a double entendre in Manhattan, and whenever Pat felt herself sinking lower on the city’s socio-sexual-professional ladder, she did her best to reverse direction: first by self-analysis and then by action.

At twenty-four, in the spring of 1945, Pat drew up a chart for the purpose of comparing, ranking, and categorizing her ten most important love affairs with women to date (see illustration). Her goal was to “do better” in love (this, too, had a double meaning for Pat), and the chart is a chilling record of her attempt to impose this ambition on her wayward affections. The chart is much influenced by the only thing in Proust’s work which ever really spoke to Pat: his insistence that you can never change your “type” in love. (Pat’s understanding of Proust was eccentric. She thought he made Virginia Woolf seem “too feminine” and once compared his writing unfavorably to that of John Steinbeck.)^*1 Pat’s chart is also, as near as she could make it, a diagram of her ideas about love. She inserted it into a cahier in April of 1945 shortly after noting that “[d]eep in my heart stands a silver sword with two edges,”² and a little while after kissing a “twenty-three year old New Zealander I met tonight in a Sixth Avenue Penny Arcade [whom I didn’t] ask…up [for] his last night in America.”³

On her chart, Pat’s careful listing of her lovers includes the duration of each love affair; the age of the lover in relation to Pat (of the ten, all but two are older); the color of each woman’s hair (she definitely prefers blondes); their physicality (“slim,” “sturdy”); their work status; the reason for the breakup (“time,” “cruelty,” “boredom”); their psychology (“neurotic,” “extroverted”); a rating of each affair on a scale of 100 (no one gets less than an 80); and the length of time Pat thinks the affair lingered on after it was actually over (“2 years?,” “9 months?”).

Some lovers’ initials on the chart are starred (“End due to my lack of sympathy”) or marked with a cross (“End due to her lack of sympathy”) or circled (“Bad judgement on my part”). Her “most advantageous” lovers are awarded a second cross: only three of them got it.

Pat’s conclusions are as unnerving as they are revealing: “I lack sympathy, am impatient with that which attracted me. Unconscious masochism, I am resolved to do better as well as change my type radically…. From the two most advantageous, I fled, was false.” ⁴

Pat’s summer of love in 1944 notwithstanding, the entire decade of the 1940s was one of intense sexual and social activity for her: the kind of intoxicating experience Manhattan can offer to an attractive, talented, seriously ambitious young woman who is using enough alcohol—more than enough alcohol—to cover her shyness, fuel her energy, and help her, in a phrase she used again and again, “try her luck.” By Thanksgiving Day of 1949, having spent the afternoon quietly reading and raking leaves in the sun and open air of her parents’ house in Hastings-on-Hudson, Pat was thinking over her last ten years in Manhattan.

“[I]f my experience should be shut off now, sexually, emotionally (not intellectually), but mundanely, practically, I feel I should have enough. I have stretched an hour into eternity.”⁵

She also took the trouble, that afternoon, to make up one of the little sanity tests she liked to spring on herself from time to time. This one involved watching herself “lov[ing] my love with all my heart.” The fact that she could concentrate on a current lover (or at least concentrate on her feelings for that lover) reassured her that her complete absorption thirty minutes before in Herman Melville’s novel Pierre, or The Ambiguities, “following his vagaries of soul with the most personally involved Fascination,” didn’t mean that she was going “mad.” “For Melville became insane and I shall not,” she wrote smugly.⁶ The threat of insanity was always buzzing around the corners of Pat Highsmith’s ideas about herself.

“People are less sharply divided as men and women,” she wrote penetratingly at nineteen, “as they are as people with ambition and people without.”⁷ Although Pat seemed ready to go anywhere in New York City that might offer an opportunity, she was most at ease in smaller gatherings, and so intimate parties, gallery exhibitions, and drawing classes were the assemblies she frequented most. It was only when she was looking for sexual adventure that she found Manhattan’s crowded bars attractive.

It wasn’t until 1968, when Pat was living in France, that she discovered the right phrase for her aversion to crowds. “I seem to suffer involuntarily, like an animal, from a sense of overcrowding, or the fact of overcrowding.”⁸ It was why, she said, she was willing to live in a village of 160 people (it was Montmachoux, then), far from the butcher, the sanitation department, the library, and company in the evenings: “it is worth it to me to have a sense of elbow room.”⁹

Space and its encroachments would always be a problem for the writer whose first beds in New York were a succession of living-room couches in her parents’ small apartments, and whose invasive mother seemed to her to be everywhere. Mother Mary’s powers of simultaneous occupancy were certainly impressive. She corresponded with Pat’s friends and lovers about Pat’s behavior, filled the postes restantes of Europe with letters of advice and boxes of presents for her daughter, and always managed to track Pat down wherever she was. In 1969, when Pat, forty-eight years old and living in Montmachoux, hadn’t written to Mary for a few weeks, Mary sent a telegram of admirably compressed panic to their mutual friend in Paris, the cartoonist Jeannot (Jean David): “WORRIED ABOUT PAT ONE MONTH NO LETTER HELP ME…MARY.”¹⁰

In 1970, in one of three long letters to her stepfather, Stanley—letters that, in their way, were just as panicked as Mary’s 1969 telegram to Jeannot—Pat tried to justify her violent behavior at her parents’ home in Texas during a visit she’d paid to them earlier in the year. Her stepfather said she’d behaved like a “mad woman.”¹¹ Pat had wrecked the Highsmith kitchen—thrown milk all over it and shattered a louvered door—and her letter to Stanley cited Mary’s pervasive “crowding” of her as the reason for her explosion.

“In the kitchen at Fort Worth, after I’d cleared a few square inches to whip an egg in a bowl…that space was instantly filled with something my mother put there. It is as if she sees a clear space anywhere, she has to fill it.”¹²

Pat was so sensitive to spatial proprieties that she felt crowded by signs of her own success. When invited to tell how she reacted when she saw her first copies of Strangers on a Train, she gave an odd response to her interviewer. The books were delivered to her apartment on East Fifty-sixth Street, she said, in a “cube,” a big box. And “My first thought was: these are taking up a lot of space in the world…. I didn’t feel particularly proud or shy. I thought: These take up space.”¹³

Always en garde against invasion, Pat made concerted efforts to preserve her sense of self by “avoiding meeting people, encountering them on my walks, greeting even the most pleasant acquaintances by crossing the street when I see them far ahead of me on the sidewalk…. Perhaps it is, basically, the eternal hypocrisy in me, of which I’ve been aware since about thirteen. I may feel, therefore, that I am never quite myself with others….

“What troubles me somewhat is the superimposed problem of being in touch with humanity. Flatly, I do not want it.”¹⁴

She felt the same way about “the afterworld.” If the afterworld were an “active” place, with “contact…to others living or dead,” then, she wrote, she found it not only “improbable,” but “definitely untempting.”¹⁵ Heaven for Highsmith would have to have a countable population of one.

Because art classes were well within her comfort zone (attention was fixed on the model; the only necessary contact was with the drawing you were making), she started attending drawing classes, sometimes with Allela Cornell, later with her friend Lil Picard. Karl Bissinger, the photographer and political activist who was Pat’s sympathetic neighbor on the Upper East Side in the 1940s, was one of the organizers of a rather chic drawing class Pat went to. In this class, Pat said, she often found herself drawing “cartoons.”¹⁶

Karl Bissinger was taking photographs for Harper’s Bazaar when he first met Pat. By the end of the 1940s, he was the resident photographer for the world’s most elegant magazine, Fleur Cowles’s star-studded Flair, a publication so expensive to put out that it lasted for only twelve issues.^* Bissinger knew a lot of people in the wide world of “quality” Pat was anxious to enter.

A photograph Bissinger made for Flair magazine has become, faute de mieux, one of the iconic images of America’s “Golden Years,” a term Gore Vidal likes to apply to the period in the 1940s just after the Second World War ended and before the “Korean Adventure” began, when the arts in New York, energized by the influx of brilliant refugees from a ravaged Europe and by enterprising veterans returning from war service, flourished and flowered as never before. Bissinger’s photograph, taken in 1949 in the garden of the Café Nicholson on East Fifty-seventh Street (owned by Bissinger’s then-partner, Johnny Nicholson), seems to incarnate everything Pat meant when she spoke or dreamt of “the best.”

Café Nicholson was a place Pat herself went to, a place, said the painter Buffie Johnson, “where everyone knew everyone else and you knew you were making history.” It was the enclave where High Society first crossed with High Bohemia, and Bissinger’s alluring photograph captures the spirit of the era. In his photograph, seated around a garden table laughing and talking, are Pat’s old friend Buffie Johnson; Buffie’s friend the playwright Tennessee Williams (Williams used to stay in the building Buffie Johnson owned, and he broke, said Buffie, every single piece of her good china); the novelist Donald Windham; the ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq; and the writer Gore Vidal, looking beyond the frame of the photograph. A formally attired black waitress, Virginia Reed, is in the background, serving tray in hand.

Everyone at the table is young and beautiful; everyone at the table looks rich and successful. In fact, Buffie Johnson was the only person there with any real money, and Tennessee Williams, the only one with solid success.

Pat was never photographed in circumstances like those in Karl Bissinger’s photograph. Judging by her youthful pictures, you wouldn’t know she’d ever attended any convocation of humans that numbered more than two or three. (One of her stories is called “One Is a Number You Can’t Divide.”) She is notably absent from the biographies and cultural histories of the period, and if she shows up in someone’s memoir or memory, it is usually as a cameo player in a darkly framed vignette; she’s like the Third Murderer in an Elizabethan tragedy. (Pat made this association herself. At Julia Richman High School she chose to write a “good essay on the third murderer in Macbeth,”¹⁷ and when she was at Barnard she authored a play called The Saboteurs, which “went on after much difficulty” but produced “a pattern of applause” in the audience.)¹⁸

The vignettes in the few memoirs which feature Pat are little scenes of eccentricity and oddness. She is the woman who brought a tortoise to a party;¹⁹ the woman who produced snails from her handbag and encouraged them to leave sticky trails all over her host’s tabletop;²⁰ the woman who “drifted dark and concerned from one room to another”²¹ and then jumped out at her guest from behind a tree;²² the woman who railed against her mother in a Greenwich Village bar.²³

Broadly speaking, though, Pat is as absent from the cultural and/or personal histories of mid-twentieth century New York as she was absent from Karl Bissinger’s photograph. Her European success must have come as quite a surprise to the people who knew her then.

“She could never have made it here,” says Karl Bissinger, who knew all the ropes in New York. “And because she was an exotic in Europe, it worked for her.”

Pat’s American agent for twenty years, Patricia Schartle (from 1970, after she married, she was known as Patricia Schartle Myrer) agrees with Bissinger. Pat first brought herself to Schartle’s attention in 1958, after she had fallen out with her first real agent, Margot Johnson, a supportive woman who was, says Patricia Schartle, twenty years older than Pat and, “like Pat,” a “notorious lesbian and a drunk.”²⁴ Schartle was recommended to Pat by a woman who had been Schartle’s copy editor when Schartle was editor in chief at the Appleton-Century Publishing Company. By the time Pat met Patricia Schartle, she had travelled extensively and lived in Europe, won two foreign literary awards, and spent a couple of years living with Doris, an advertising copywriter, in the socially exclusive outpost of Snedens Landing (yet another good address) in Palisades, New York, just outside New York City. There, says Schartle, Pat had begun to think of herself as “a sophisticated cosmopolitan who had lived abroad and had great success.”

But Pat was not cosmopolitan, writes Schartle, and certainly not cosmopolitan enough to handle herself socially in Snedens Landing, where “the artists [Katharine] Cornell, [Guthrie] McClintock, Nancy Hamilton, The Murphies [Gerald and Sara], Paul Manship, etc. etc., were really cosmopolitan…. [S]he did not fit in. When Noel Coward and the Lunts visited Cornell she would have been totally out of place. Even after the first success of Strangers she knew she would be more interesting if she returned and lived in Europe. It was one of the few things we really talked about. Living abroad saved her.”²⁵

Pat’s social awkwardnesses and confusions were usually most apparent in formal or crowded milieux; places where instant recognitions of social and cultural patterns were necessary. Without directions, without a chart or a map or a near-diagrammatic understanding of a social situation, Pat was often lost in a maze. (Most of Manhattan, with its gridiron street design, was an uncomplicated pleasure to Pat, while Greenwich Village, with its atypically winding streets and wayward byways, was one of her favorite venues for fictional crime.)

In the mid-1960s, in London, Caroline Besterman witnessed Pat’s discomfort with crowds. “I’m a great football fan and I took Pat to the Arsenal once in Highbury, to a football game there: fifty thousand people. It was hilarious. ‘How do they know when to stop?’ she asked…. What she meant was that play stops when the referee blows the whistle, but she was too [stupefied]—literally—to figure that out. It’s a simple game but it has many subtleties. Women didn’t go then; it was the maleness of the crowd, I think, that confused her. She couldn’t understand it.”²⁶

Social awkwardness was not the only jarring trait people noticed in Pat as she got older. There was something else, too, something Pat herself often mentioned in her self-appraising way. It was the sense that something was “wrong” with Pat. Or rather, the sense that something was “not right” with her. People close to Pat felt this, made allowances for it, and tried to avoid its consequences. Patricia Schartle writes:

When I first met Highsmith and in the years that followed, I felt great sympathy for her. She was forever ill at ease. Awkward and gauche, she had very little grace, if any. She was hard to like. No I did not like her. But I cared about her. One did not like her because there was a curious cunning about her just when you thought she might be more human.

Caroline Besterman felt something like this, too. Pat, says Caroline, always thought that “people didn’t help her,” but

I have never seen someone who was so “helped.” And she was given so much leeway, everyone gave her leeway—and had it been anyone else they would have been thrown out the door. It wasn’t sympathy, exactly, it was some sort of feeling that she must somehow have got something wrong with her. But no, you couldn’t do anything, she would be sidetracked onto a branch line that went God knows where. She had no way of saying, “Well, that’s that.” It was very, very sad, given that she had a very good capacity for being a good friend and having a good time and making fun of everybody and all that kind of thing. And being witty and making a quick little drawing. But it didn’t last because nothing was right enough for her. She wanted more.²⁷

One evening in 1963, when Pat first moved to Suffolk, a friend invited her to have dinner at an old hotel in Aldeburgh. Pat tended to be “very mute” in Aldeburgh, says the friend, because it was full of the “old bourgeoisie. There were writers there, there were artists there, and they were all extremely ‘U’” [Nancy Mitford’s borrowed term for upper-class characteristics]—and Pat “didn’t like that either because she didn’t understand it. It frightened her.” But the hotel was full of “nice people.”²⁸

“The owner of [the hotel], an extremely bizarre woman, was a good artist; a very excitable but interesting person, and sharp as anything. We arrived and we were having a drink in the dining hall and another visitor who was a psychiatrist went over to Connie and [nodding in Pat’s direction] said: ‘You do know you have a psychopath in the hall.’ Yes. Just from observation of Pat. Connie told me this because she had always suspected, too, that there was not anything at all right with Pat.”

“I remember Pat sitting there with a hard, baffled look on her face. She was lost; these people were all very sure of themselves. A heavy, a really heavy look. Full of hatred.”²⁹

“The two of them,” Caroline Besterman said, referring to what she believed was the root of Pat’s problem. “Mary and Pat. Just destroying each other. Like the old nursery rhyme: ‘The gingham dog and the calico cat side by side on the mantle sat’…and they tore each other to pieces. It was one of those real nursery rhymes, you know. Dark. I was always very fond of it.”^*

Karl Bissinger lived with Johnny Nicholson on East Fifty-eighth Street between First and Second Avenues just a couple of blocks from Pat, and he used to see her on the street “all the time” when she was still working for the comics. They were neighbors in a New Yorkish kind of way, and his recollections of Pat were vivid.

I knew Pat before the war; when the war was coming on. It was her psychosexual presentation that drew me to her: The Troubled Woman. And we were seen, roughly, in the same—let’s call it what it was—lesbian set.

The war years in New York were very interesting because the forbidden life—things now are complicated in another way and on the surface—the forbidden life was alive [if you knew where to look for it]. Before the Kinsey Report, they used to say that 2 percent of the world was homosexual, and if that’s true, then it’s like the Jews: they’ve had the biggest influence on everything in the world that any group ever had….

Everyone drank a lot more in the 1940s. Imagine having three martinis before lunch and going back to the office. It can’t be done now, but everyone did it then….

One of the things we did, we would get together once a week or so, hire a model, and have a sketch class…. Let’s call it “Bohemia” for lack of a better word. We all know what that meant in those days. Some of us had money, some of us were on our way somewhere, and some if us were, I guess, shooting up, and I don’t know what some of us were doing. Most of the people in the group were what we now call “gay.” And among the people who came to the sketch class was Pat Highsmith.

Now Pat, I liked her immediately because she was difficult; and when I say difficult I mean she was the kind of woman—you immediately sensed this as a male—you sensed she didn’t like men. She just plain didn’t like men. On the other hand, she sensed my empathy for her, the fact that I liked her. She didn’t smile easily and she made NO effort to reach out socially as far as I had any idea. She was very reserved and I sort of understood very much that she was what I would call “angry at the world.” In those days, I would have called her a “man-hater.” But of course, she had a long life, she went abroad, she could have changed, I’m sure there were lots of other sides to her.

It was clear that she would have preferred to be a man—though that’s an oversimplification of the complicated emotional thing that she had. I liked the way she cut her hair. She made an effort not to be what we used to call “butch.” Underneath that, of course, that was clearly what she was.

The gossip: Pat was supposed to be in love with Babs Simpson.^*

When you talk about Americans being aristocrats, Babs Simpson is a wonderful example. [She came from the de Monocol family,] who had a lot of money. A lot of these kids in this drawing class had a lot of money. [Babs] was one of the senior fashion editors who went from Harper’s Bazaar to Vogue. These were the days when the top fashion magazines, almost all of them, had poetry editors and Harper’s was the first to publish Truman Capote and I could go down the list of all the neurotics they published. Carson McCullers [for example]—who was out of the same pod as Pat Highsmith. They were two women who probably wouldn’t like each other if they knew each other. I don’t know that they did know each other, though they probably did.

Carson McCullers and Pat did know each other, and one Sunday afternoon, 27 February 1949 to be precise, Pat and two of the women she was sleeping with, Jeanne and Dione, went to visit Carson McCullers and her family at the McCullerses’ house in Nyack, New York, a half hour’s drive outside of New York City. Pat’s diary notes on the day were succinct: “Carson very hospitable, and we stay for about 4 hours. Reeves (Carson’s husband), her mother, and Margerita Smith, her sister.” Carson continued, all afternoon, to tell Pat that she had a “very good figure.” And Pat continued, all afternoon, to drink Cokes and sherry. No one seems to have disliked anyone, although Pat did allow herself the comment that she’d heard Reeves and Carson had been drinking too much in Paris.³⁰

“The reason I remember these small things,” says Karl Bissinger,

is because Pat’s name kept flashing across the screen of memory as her books came out. I began to follow her as a writer, and I began to read in her writing so much of what I knew instinctively about her: the anger that was deep within her. She really looked at herself through masculine eyes. On the other hand she did know a little something about what was called bisexual men—or men who were meant to be bisexual…. It was clear that she adored the looks of those ambiguous males she wrote about.

I’m sure nobody could claim they knew Patricia….

My feeling about Pat is that she was only interested in success. That would make up for a lot of the anger which she probably carried around.³¹

Pat, in her periods of social confidence in the 1940s, during which she was certain of her destiny and her attractiveness, lived in a whirl of social and sexual connections, and continued to assess everyone with a coroner’s eye, were always followed by equal and opposite periods of feelings of insufficiency. The flights and drops of her self-regard in her private writings are as regular as the ups and downs of a working seesaw. But Pat’s interests and attractions, as they had in high school, still flew everywhere: to “Hilda” and “Mary” and “Jackie” and “Dickie” and “Barbara” and “ABBOTT” (Berenice Abbott) and “Billie” and “Corinne” and “Virginia.” Several Virginias. And then there was “Madeleine Bemelmans,” a student at Barnard, ten years older than Pat, who was the wife of the writer, illustrator, and wit Ludwig Bemelmans and the eponym of his enchanting Madeline books.^* Pat liked Madeleine Bemelmans, was interested by her husband’s success, and kept in sporadic touch with her for some years.

During the early 1940s, Pat attended the mostly female parties in the two flats and a hallway that Berenice Abbott shared with her lover, the editor Elizabeth McCausland, on the fourth floor of an old building at 50 Commerce Street in Greenwich Village. (Pat complained that the females at Abbott’s parties weren’t interesting enough).³² Abbott, an inventor of photographic apparatuses and one of the world’s great photographers, washed her own prints in a big wooden tub in her studio, lamenting, “No matter what I do, these prints won’t last more than a hundred years.”³³ Mother Mary’s suspicions were aroused: “Is she a les [lesbian]?” Mary inelegantly queried Pat about Berenice Abbott. Pat adroitly replied that there were always men at Abbott’s parties.

With her women friends, and later with her professional acquaintances, Pat was always concerned with who was “superior” to whom. Her compulsion was to list, rank, classify, and put everyone in their proper place in relation to herself (i.e.: “V[irginia] better than J.S. & also has a brain”). Pat also weighed herself obsessively, recording the results (they ranged from “108½” to “114”), and washed her hands, as she said, “too often.” In both high school and college Pat liked to note the failing grades of her classmates, to calculate their suitability for friendship (“She has no contacts that I know of”),³⁴ to record their (and her) couplings and uncouplings, and to refer to all her connections as “Proustian.” What she meant by this was that her relationships were complicated andsnobbish, but her use of the adjective “Proustian” gives a good idea of just how grandly the adolescent Pat was phrasing her social life.³⁵

Later on, she would lend tricky Tom Ripley her ability to size up a room and assess the opportunities in it. Ripley’s reaction to anything less than “quality” company was exactly the same as Pat’s:

Tom…realiz[ed] that he had been rude, was being rude, and that he ought to pull himself together, because behaving courteously even to this handful of second-rate antique dealers and bric-a-brac and ashtray buyers…was part of the business of being a gentleman. But they reminded him too much of the people he had said good-bye to in New York, he thought, and that was why they got under his skin like an itch and made him want to run…. It was the class of people he despised, and why say that to Marge, who was of the same class?”³⁶

Pat’s sexual attractions were also subject to elaborate rephrasings. In the fall semester of her freshman year at Barnard College, when she was trying to lure Mickey (a girl) away from Judy Tuvim (tuvim resembles part of the Hebrew word for “holiday,” hence Judy’s stage name, “Holliday”), and fending off, as well as encouraging, the advances of Ernst Hauser, the journalist she met on her spring boat trip to Texas, Pat began to fall in love with the first of her several Virginias.³⁷ Pat always wrote this first Virginia’s name as though it were an abbreviation for the state, “Va.,” and Virginia tormented Pat in just the way Pat preferred: “Va. criticizes me always” and “Phoned Va. who was terrible to me as always on phone.”³⁸ Virginia was two years older than Pat, and they kissed but rarely went further than that. The “Proustian” part of Pat’s attraction is that Pat thought this first Virginia looked just like the resident royalty of English literature, Virginia Woolf.

This relationship, as well as Pat’s scrutiny of two young girls, “Charlotte and Emily,” at play, helped to inspire a powerfully allusive short story of sexual complicity, “A Mighty Nice Man.” Pat finished “A Mighty Nice Man” on 24 August 1939, and it was one of the stories she published in the Barnard Quarterly. It is a testament to her naïveté about her work and the world that Pat thought this story of a very young girl being “groomed” by a molesting male was an example of the “good popular stuff…I shall yet write.” ³⁹

In the 1940s, much of Manhattan was still a place of unlocked doors, open hospitalities, and relatively inexpensive pleasures. Anatole Broyard captured its postwar spirit—and the soul of that spirit, which was Greenwich Village—in his memoir of the forties, Kafka Was the Rage. “New York City had never been so attractive. The postwar years were like a great smile in its sullen history. The Village was as close in 1946 as it would ever come to Paris in the Twenties. Rents were cheap, restaurants were cheap, and it seemed to me that happiness itself might be cheaply had.” ⁴⁰

But it was just as she was leaving her teens, six months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor—the act which would eventually produce the “open Manhattan” Broyard was writing about—that Pat’s serious sexual life began. Pat went to a gay party in Greenwich Village, to which she had been invited by an older woman she met in a bar, Mary Sullivan. Pat noticed the photographer Ruth Bernhard at the party but spoke a great deal with Sullivan, watching Mary “fly here and there all evening. The boys adore her!” Finally, Mary and Pat went to Child’s Restaurant in Times Square to eat, where they talked until four thirty in the morning. Since they were near Mary’s apartment, Pat went there to sleep. Mary politely gave Pat her bed and took the divan for herself. And it was then that the teenage Pat began her sexual career as she meant to continue it—aggressively, suggesting to Mary that the bed was big enough for both of them. As Pat later wrote in her diary in the bad French she reserved for matters of the body, Mary “accepted with alacrity. Quickly. And then well, we barely slept, but what does that matter? She is marvellous. Kind, sweet, understanding.” ⁴¹

Mary Sullivan ran what Ruth Bernhard called a “wonderful bookstore at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel,” and it was there that Bernhard, beginning her career in New York at her famous father’s insistence (Bernhard’s father was Lucian Bernhard [real name: Emil Kahn], the German graphic designer known as “the Father of the German Poster,” who created the running torchbearer emblem still used for Modern Library publications), met “the little Irish woman, Mary Sullivan,” some years before Pat did. This was in the late 1930s, when the same Child’s Restaurant in Times Square where Mary Sullivan and Pat went to talk had “tea dancing for girls in the afternoon. The space was always filled, with everyone in snappy clothes, dressed up, even sophisticated. There was a band playing all the best tunes of the era. Everyone danced.” ⁴²

Mary Sullivan introduced Bernhard to Berenice Abbott—who would later say that no one photographed female nudes better than Bernhard—and so perhaps it was Mary who introduced Bernhard to Pat as well. A year or so after meeting Sullivan, Pat developed an intense friendship with Ruth Bernhard that, as all Pat’s intense friendships did, briefly broke into a kind of love. But Bernhard, whose photography studio was in the same building as Rolf Tietgens’s studio, introduced Pat to Rolf in the summer of 1942—thus giving Pat another chance to feature in her favorite geometrical figure, the triangle. And Pat came to feel that Bernhard was too “unfortunately feminine inside” for her.⁴³

In the summer of 1942, Pat and Bernhard went with Rolf Tietgens on a weekend trip to a house on the swampy North Shore of Long Island—where Pat, whose luck with dogs was never good, was bitten on the “rear end” by a local canine. Ruth Bernhard almost fainted in response, and Pat and Bernhard spent a night in the same bed.⁴⁴ Later, Bernhard and her sister read Pat’s early stories and thought them “wonderful,” and Pat and Bernhard went out regularly for coffee, took the subway to Harlem together, and accompanied each other to gallery openings. Pat’s lengthy description of an evening spent at the gallery managed by Betty Parsons shows her alertness to social maneuvering—and just how much she was depending on Ruth Bernhard for support.

I moved about the room, waiting to be spoken to before I should have to speak, and saw Lola, drinking a Martini, and as I had seen her in Saks’ lady’s room only two hours before. I said loftily, “What again?” And I told her…that I had spent the afternoon reading View in the library^*—(because her lover writes surréaliste articles for it) and she said she’d spent hers even better, seeing the Tchelichew [Pavel Tchelitchew] show at the Museum of Modern Art….

Bernhard came in, all aglow with inner fire…. [S]everal of my friends knew how often I saw Bernhard, until she had become a part of my own protectorate, to guard against darts of criticism. And regally, we viewed the exhibit, I now much more comfortably drawing back & squinting my eyes as I love to do at art exhibits, Bernhard steadying herself, guarding me with a hand ever on my arm.⁴⁵

In May of 1943, Pat asked Mother Mary if she thought Ruth Bernhard would be a good roommate for her: “I should be able to get along with her well.” ⁴⁶ Mary said it was an “excellent” idea and then asked the same inelegant question she’d asked about Berenice Abbott: “[D]id I think Bernhard was a les?” ⁴⁷

Pat knew just how to deflect a question like that. In 1941, when Mary Sullivan was sending Pat gardenias every day under the name of “Mike Thomas” (the name of the host at their first party together), Pat, living at home on Grove Street with Mary and Stanley, put the flowers in her parents’ refrigerator with the card still attached, amusing herself by allowing Mother Mary to think that a man named Mike Thomas was courting her.⁴⁸ Perhaps she also amused herself with the idea that her first “real lesbian lover” had her own and her mother’s first name.^*

Pat’s meeting with Mary Sullivan was her entrée into the big-city world of casual and not-so-casual sexual encounters. With extraordinary confidence for a college girl, Pat was soon going through women like wildfire. A month after they met, in July of 1941, Pat got rid of Mary Sullivan. In fact, she got rid of her twice—once in life, and once in the first of the diaries (it had an appropriate superscription: “And here is my diary, containing the body”) she’d begun to use for recording her sexual adventures. “But I know in the way of intelligence, fidelity, dependability, and intensity, Mary is superior to Virginia. Perhaps I shall live to regret it—breaking with her. I told Mary what I felt about her. ‘But it wasn’t enough.’ And it wasn’t.”⁴⁹

“Mary Sullivan was an interesting woman,” Ruth Bernhard remembered during the conversations I had with her in her ninety-ninth year. “I never knew anyone that Mary Sullivan had a relationship with. If it was Pat, it was not a bad choice…. Pat was a very attractive person, a wonderful-looking woman, and people were drawn to her. She…had lots of connections and quite a few little love affairs.”⁵⁰ Although Ruth Bernhard was “sure” she had taken nude photographs of Pat in the early 1940s, the photograph she best remembered making of Pat has nothing to do with physical exposure. It is as she described it: a “thoughtful,” dignified portrait of a young writer thinking about her work and imagining her future. Ruth Bernhard gave a copy of the photograph to Pat—and sixty years after she took it, she gave me permission to publish it here (see frontispiece).

The next phase of Pat’s Manhattan social life—the phase that lasted the longest—coincided with the war-inspired exodus from Europe to New York of a great number of interesting and artistic expatriate women. And Pat was ready to meet them: an attractive, intermittently forward, highly talented twenty-year-old; a kind of “club kid” with brains and a master plan (success!), trying her luck and dreaming of artistic immortality. Until she could be famous, however, Pat was settling for seductive friendships. And many people were interested.

In 1991, Pat remembered her longest streak of New York social luck.

“I met Janet [Flanner] whan I was 20 in Manhattan, when I met some 20 interesting people all in a fortnight, many of whom I still know—it’s only a matter of their being alive.”⁵¹

In July of 1941, Pat met Buffie Johnson, a wealthy, witty, charming painter with exquisite, if sometimes imperious, manners and highly cultivated tastes. Donald Windham, the handsome young novelist sitting next to Tanaquil LeClercq in Karl Bissinger’s Café Nicholson photograph, remembers when Buffie Johnson rented the whole floor of a palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice and let him stay there, but then wanted him to chaperone a statue back to the United States for her. “Just something small, darling,” said Buffie winningly. The statue was five feet tall and heavy as a house, and Windham wisely declined to be its minder.⁵²

In 1941, Buffie had recently returned from Paris, where she’d been living in the soprano Mary Garden’s famous house at 44 rue du Bac and studying painting with Francisco Pissarro. Buffie would later become known for painting the largest abstract expressionist mural ever to be commissioned in New York, the mural at the old Astor Theatre, but her social persona, her money, and her commitment to Jungian psychology and goddess history tended to overshadow her reputation as a painter.

When she was in Paris, Buffie, who knew everyone and went everywhere, was invited to both Natalie Barney’s literary salon and Gertrude Stein’s gatherings on the rue de Fleurus. When Buffie went to the rue de Fleurus, Gertrude, as was her custom, immediately relegated her to the “women’s corner” of the room with Alice B. Toklas, while she, Gertrude, spoke of important things with the men. Although Alice Toklas was very kind, Buffie was piqued at being ignored by Gertrude, and so, as she was leaving the atelier, she leaned over and surreptitiously pinched Gertrude Stein on her bottom. “It had,” Buffie reported, “the consistency of a block of mahogany.”⁵³

At ninety, Buffie Johnson recalled for me where and how she first met Patricia Highsmith.

“I met her at a party, a party of people I never saw again; people I didn’t care to see again…. I knew right away that Pat was very intelligent. There was an immediate [she made an intertwining gesture with her fingers to signal “connection”]. She was rather bold in her approach…. She wasn’t at all sophisticated when I first met her…. She wasn’t sleeping with just everyone. [Buffie stopped to correct herself.] Well I guess she was sleeping with someone or someones.”

Buffie knew that “Pat was a student at Columbia” and was quite convinced that Pat was living with her grandmother. She thought Pat had told her that. “I didn’t know she had a mother.” Buffie also thought that Pat was “terrificly attractive and sparkly and energetic.” Invited to make a painter’s assessment of the likenesses of a number of photographs taken of Pat in her early twenties, Buffie chose a photo of Pat gesturing vigorously over a railing as “the most like.” “Not facially,” she said, but the gesture, the energy, that’s what was “like” Pat. She paused over a rather plain photograph of Pat’s face: “I forgot about that furrow,” she said, pointing to the concentrated knot of problems that had settled between Pat’s eyebrows by the time she was twenty. “She looks cross.” Pat did look cross in the photograph. But Pat didn’t look cross when Buffie first met her: “I would have remembered if she did,” Buffie said.

Some years before I spoke with her, Buffie Johnson had dictated in a formal way her memories of meeting Pat—and the memoir fills in some gaps. At that time, in 1941, Buffie owned a “little house on East Fifty-eighth Street” on the Upper East Side, Pat’s favorite neighborhood for socializing.

Although I cannot recollect our conversation at the party I was aware from her attention that she wanted to become my friend. When I was about to leave she asked if she could see me again and I said yes. But when I gave her my telephone number I noticed that she didn’t write it down. I mentioned this and she laughed, saying, “I’ll remember.” To my surprise, she did and I was impressed with this trick of memory especially since my own is so abominable.

Although she was far from being sweet, she had an interesting and well-organized mind and indeed she knew what she wanted. Moreover, it was not every day that one meets an attractive and intelligent young woman. So, later when she did telephone we got together and would thereafter meet fairly often.⁵⁴

Pat’s accounts of her meetings with Buffie and of her own intentions are more intimate. Pat liked Buffie’s situation—monied—and she more than liked Buffie herself, wondering if her feelings for Buffie might be deepening. In her cool way, she assessed Buffie’s painting. “I was pleasantly surprised. Somewhat derivative—the Cezanne, Dalí—Chirico…Renoir School, but some portraits have something too.”⁵⁵ Pat and Buffie continued to see each other—and Pat continued to meet many other women—for some months. Buffie allowed Pat to stay in her house when she went to California to prepare for her first marriage, and she continued to provide Pat with important introductions to people in the world of arts: people like the cult lyricist and wit John La Touche (“horribly, silencingly flip,” the intimidated Pat thought), who would write the lyrics for Cabin in the Sky and for the songs “Taking a Chance on Love” and “Lazy Afternoon” “Touche’s” quondam wife “Teddie” (“in cream colored tights, coachman livery…with black boots”),⁵⁶ a lesbian from a prominent banking and investment family who interested Pat quite a bit; and the painter Fernand Léger (“Simply wonderful,” Pat enthused when Buffie invited her to a Léger cocktail party).⁵⁷

It was probably Buffie who was Pat’s introduction to the heiress, art philanthropist, and gallerist Peggy Guggenheim (she had exhibited Buffie’s paintings) as well as to a larger professional circle to which Buffie had access and Pat, still just a junior at Barnard College but circulating socially with astounding assurance, did not. Forty years later, Buffie was also responsible for Pat’s reintroduction to Paul Bowles in Tangier, and Buffie remained a frequent subject for the lively correspondence that sprang up between Bowles and Highsmith.

Two weeks after Pat and Buffie met, as Buffie Johnson tells it, “I was invited to a party of a friend whose husband was the editor and chief of Fortune magazine. Thinking this might prove fortuitous for my young acquaintance—many people there were highly placed in the hierarchy of Luce Publications—I took Patricia with me and, although they were much older, she immediately busied herself among them. Emerging from a deep conversation with my friend, I looked up and the room had emptied. Without even saying goodnight, Patricia had left with the group of editors.”

Amongst those editors was Rosalind Constable, the woman who would haunt Pat’s diaries, cahiers, and life for the next ten years.

Sybille Bedford, who remembered meeting Pat in the 1940s “in Rome when she was a little bit wild,”⁵⁸ knew Rosalind Constable very well. In her dazzling memoir, Quicksands, Bedford wrote that Constable was “a bright light of the Life/Time establishment, hard-working, hard-playing.”⁵⁹

Fourteen years older than Pat, Rosalind Constable was a sophisticated arts journalist from England. She knew and was known by nearly everyone in British and American arts and publishing circles. She had blond “Norwegian”-looking hair, light, cold eyes, a serious intellectual background, and a pronounced ability to spot coming trends in all the arts: Rosalind was a “cool-hunter” avant la lettre. Long employed at Fortune, she was greatly influential in the magazine publishing world that Pat was finding so attractive. Rosalind had the ear of the publishing magnate Henry Luce, who, Daniel Bell says, gave Rosalind one of the most “enviable” jobs in New York. Rosalind was the editor of an in-house newsletter in the Luce corporation called Rosie’s Bugle. Its purpose was to alert all the other Luce magazine editors to the cultural subjects about which they should be writing.⁶⁰

Mary Highsmith—Pat had made the mistake of excitedly pointing out Rosalind to Mary from a Manhattan bus one day—took an instant dislike to Rosalind. And Mary’s eye for serious rivals was at least as good as Rosalind’s eye for serious art.⁶¹ She continued to blame Rosalind for years for the alienation of Pat’s affections: “Stanley and I were with you 100%,” she wrote painedly to Pat in Europe. “Then you met Rosalind—everything changed. We were no longer your friends…you wanted to make us out ignorant, crude and unthinking so you could show people how far you had sprung from your poor and slimy background.”⁶² Mary’s criticisms were rewarded in the way such criticisms are usually rewarded: Pat created a pedestal for Rosalind Constable and kept her on it for the next decade.

Pat, more socially aggressive in the 1940s than she would ever be again (sober, that is), telephoned to Rosalind the day after they met and launched a long, complex friendship. The connection was vigorously pursued by Pat and indulgently encouraged by Rosalind. On her first visit, Pat was invited to spend the night in Rosalind’s guest bedroom and she did so. Long walks with hands intertwined followed, and Rosalind—this thrilled Pat—called her “Baby,” gave her cryptically dedicated books, and introduced her to people prominent in the arts world, including Rosalind’s own lover, the gallerist and artist Betty Parsons. “You’re a sloppy Joe,” Rosalind said to Pat, who never quite came up to Rosalind’s expectations of public presentation, “but I think you’re an artist!” Pat thought it was a fair exchange.⁶³ There were lunches in expensive restaurants liberally irrigated with alcohol and much anticipated by Pat. (Rosalind, in the style of the times, drank a lot.) After lunch, Pat sometimes sat on Rosalind’s lap. It was the kind of Courtly Love story Pat preferred when she was young: a sensual pursuit of an older woman gauzily masked by an artistic and professional mentoring/mothering. This one had all the intoxications of a love affair that would never be physically consummated.

Pat transferred to Rosalind some of the liens of her bondage to Mother Mary; that boyish and intermittent courtship of her mother of which Pat wrote at twenty: “I’m happy if I can be boss, lighting her cigarettes and dominating as I did yesterday.”⁶⁴ Pat encouraged her friends to bring back reports of Rosalind—and delighted in the backchat. When Kingsley telephoned Pat with a “wonderful message”—“I have it on reliable authority that Rosalind Constable is your slave!”—Pat gleefully extracted the details from her. Kingsley had been to the Wakefield gallery, where Rosalind’s lover Betty Parsons presided, and Parsons had said to Kingsley: “‘Oh, Pat! Yes, Rosalind talks about her constantly! About how brilliant she is. In fact, I’m rather tired of hearing about her, etc.’ and how I inspire Rosalind to work so hard.”⁶⁵

Pat herself, although notoriously closemouthed in her suburban life in France and Switzerland, was regularly and correctly accused of gossiping in New York, in Snedens Landing, in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and in Earl Soham, Suffolk. Pat couldn’t help telling tales on people: she was always somehow involved in making a “case” for herself—and that meant recounting stories of other people’s “behavior” towards her. “The reason I like to document things, and to have witnesses—is because I do not like to be falsely accused,” she wrote to her stepfather in the middle of a five-page single-spaced torrent of tattling on her mother.⁶⁶ Perhaps Pat’s childhood habit of coolly and hotly discussing her mother with her grandmother had something to do with her tattling.

Like Buffie Johnson, Rosalind was responsible for Pat’s introduction to “quality” and also to some very high-style amusements. Through Rosalind, Pat met sophisticates like Peggy Fears, the former Ziegfeld Follies girl whose film career had fizzled out by the mid-1930s but whose Hollywood connections, incessant partying (she was a close friend of the film actress Louise Brooks: c’est tout dire), and pursuit of beautiful women on both coasts was notorious. Pat, announcing that she was “looking for adventure,” began to visit Peggy daily in the fall of 1947 and was being far “too enthusiastic” about her for Rosalind’s taste. Peggy Fears, in addition to her other attractions, supplied the intermittently insomniac Pat with sleeping pills.⁶⁷

According to her diaries, Pat was always telephoning women at one thirty in the morning—from other women’s bedrooms, corner phone booths, bars, almost never from her own apartment—to come by unexpectedly, make love with them if they were willing and she was interested, and then depart. Sometimes Pat’s intentions were indirectly expressed, as when she paid an unanticipated visit to the novelist Hortense Calisher. (Decades later, Curtis Harnack, Calisher’s husband, would become the executive director of Yaddo, the arts colony to which Pat—at the very last possible moment—left all her worldly goods.) Calisher said that Pat dropped in on her apartment announcing “that she came about a house, but I really wondered if it wasn’t about me.”⁶⁸

Pat talked to every magazine editor, book publisher, and cultural arbiter she could get an appointment with: inviting Betty Parsons to dinner so that Parsons could look at her drawings (Parsons, as Rosalind Constable’s lover, provided Pat with another opportunity to be the third arm of yet another triangle); accompanying Buffie Johnson to artist “[Fernand] Léger’s madhouse cocktail party,” where she met the set and costume designer Stewart Chaney and the architect Frederick Kiesler (“very nice,” Pat thought), who in 1942, the year Pat met him, would create and supervise the visionary design of Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, Art of This Century. Pat went, despite her afflicting shyness and contrasting boldness, to whatever she was invited to—to “[s]omething terrific…at Rosalind’s Thursday night,”⁶⁹ to publishing parties, to art lectures, to openings. Wherever there might be people able to help a career or connect a social life, there was this intelligent, magnetically attractive college girl, consumed by the American Dream of the perfect house, the right book contract, the burgeoning bank account, and the series of selves whose perfectability was always just around the corner.

It would have taken a keener eye than the casually admiring or coldly censorious ones turned towards Patricia Highsmith during all those Manhattan evenings to see that her seductive behavior, heavy imbibing, rapid advances, and sharp withdrawals were signals through the flames burning in her psyche. (“Now I feel quite socialized once more,” she wrote after a week of frantic activity. “I want to be alone now.”)⁷⁰ Only Karl Bissinger and the composer David Diamond seemed to notice the skull beneath her skin—and what was going on inside it. And only Buffie Johnson was perceptive enough to talk with Pat about her sexuality.

“Buffie…told me she worried about me sexually and in a neat, catchy presentation like a lawyer’s two-edged sword, told me she worried if I had ever had an orgasm…. She said my tenseness is dynamic and charming now, but later will be a problem…. In the course of the afternoon, I assured her, with conviction, of being a confirmed free-lover.”⁷¹

“Peculiar,” Pat wrote defensively in her diary, “with all [Mary] Sullivan’s experience she never had any complaints.”⁷²

In these heavily monitored times, it is easy to look askance at the young (and the old) Patricia Highsmith for her marathon drinking. More useful to remember—as every single person who approached drinking age in the 1940s told me—is the fact that people in New York in the 1940s drank a great deal more than people drink today. As the writer and editor Dorothy Wheelock Edson said, after explaining how her husband, “a very considerate man, always drove the drunks home” after one of their lively parties at their home on the North Shore of Long Island: “I can’t say that I knew Patricia Highsmith was an alcoholic—because everyone was drinking so much in the 1940s you could hardly tell the difference.”⁷³

But Pat, by her own account, seems to have been drinking even more than the people she drank with, and her drinking raises all the serious questions about the motives and responsibilities of a chronic drinker. Can an alcoholic be held accountable for what she says when she is drunk? Or is alcoholism so distorting a disease that a prejudice expressed by an inveterate drinker is merely the bomb site for the detonation of a rage that cannot be released in any other way?

Because Pat, like her birthday twin and fellow alcoholic, Edgar Allan Poe, suffered all her life from depressive cycles and agitated mental states, there are other questions to be raised. Kay Redfield Jamison, in her invaluable book Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, has called them “complicated questions about whether the melancholic muse is also a ‘thirsty muse.’”⁷⁴

Did the drinking help ease Pat into the subconscious state from which her writing proceeded? And did she use it to relieve her depressions? Or did the alcohol itself increase her depressions, add to her rages, and contribute to the late-life waning of her work? Was she enough like Poe so that we can say—as Poe’s biographers have already said of him—that the forces which made Patricia Highsmith write were also the forces which made her drink? The answer to each of these questions is probably a variously qualified yes.

And there is one more thing to be accounted for. In light of Pat’s more or less morning-till-night drinking habits (begun in late adolescence and exacerbated in her twenties), did anyone, after a certain point, ever actually see Patricia Highsmith sober? Some friends even claim to have been unaware that Pat was ever drunk, mostly because they had no basis of sobriety with which to compare her behavior.

Phillip Lloyd Powell, furniture maker, designer, and resident of New Hope, Pennsylvania, for sixty years, was a close friend of Pat’s New Hope lover, Daisy Winston. He was “part of a group of people in New Hope” with whom Pat occasionally socialized in the very early 1960s. Although a casual acquaintance, he formed a vivid impression of Pat’s relationship to alcohol.

“She was never visibly drunk; she kept a certain level. Her darkness would be exuded. She was surrounded by a black cloud. She WAS a black cloud.”⁷⁵

On 10 March 1963 (Pat noted the date and the encounter in her diary), Powell ran into Pat in Rome. They were both on their way to the airport. Pat had been staying in Positano, and she was on her way to London to be with Caroline Besterman, whose confusions over her marriage and her long-distance love affair with Pat had made her ill. Powell continues the story:

At that time in Rome, the airport bus stopped in the train station. It was a beauty, an architectural landmark. You came into the bus station on the train and then the bus took you to the airport. The waiting room had all the amenities, cafeterias, bars, etc….

I was sitting there waiting for my bus to the plane, with my Italian suit on, done up to the hilt because at that time you dressed to travel. And I saw this figure pacing, up and down the corridor, stalking was more the word, in a big ankle-length cloak. This tall dark figure, brooding and stalking up and down. And I realized it was Pat Highsmith. It was such a visual experience; she looked like a character out of a Gorey illustration. And she was very very into herself.

And I went up to her and said, “Hello, I’m Daisy’s friend.” And she said “Oh I’m in a terrible state. A friend of mine in England, a married friend, a woman, is very ill. And I’m going back to see her and the plane is late.” And so we went for a coffee and as we were approaching the bar she said: “I don’t think I’ll have a coffee, I’ll have a grappa.” And I go up and I order an espresso and a grappa. And when we were served, the bartender put the coffee in front of me and the grappa in front of her. He knew, without being told, exactly who should get the alcohol in that group.⁷⁶

The English actress Heather Chasen, for whom Pat wrote her unproduced play When the Sleep Ends, met Pat through Annie Duveen shortly after Pat moved to England in the early 1960s. Like all theater people, Chasen dates her life from the plays she performed in, and she remembers that she was doing The Severed Head in London (“I was in it for two years, God help me”) when she first met Pat. “If Severed Head was on, it must have been ’63 or ’64.”

“I was very fond of Pat…and I admired her talent…but she was an extremely difficult woman, extremely difficult. There was a period of time when I didn’t see her for several years when I felt she’d gone too far in her very strange behavior and she really pissed me off. The best relationship I had with Pat was through letters because she wrote wonderful letters and you couldn’t really fall out with her in letters.”

When asked if she had ever seen Pat intoxicated, Chasen roared with laughter.

All the time, dear. The proper question would be: did I ever see her sober. She was always the same, she was always topped up with alcohol, but it didn’t make any difference in her behavior. I never saw her sober, so I don’t know the difference. She was always aggressive and grumpy [and] she was always making passes. When you’ve had enough to drink, dear, you overcome your shyness…. [But] I saw underneath all this sort of grumpy, belligerent behavior and I saw a very vulnerable person and that touched me….

I did a play, Call Me Jacky, by Enid Bagnold, and I played opposite Dame Sybil Thorndike. I played Jacky. When Enid lived in Brighton in the war, she couldn’t get a cook, so she got her staff from a local lunatic asylum and she got this woman called Jacky who was a homicidal lesbian drunk. And she wrote a play about her. It was a wonderful part to play. They wanted to dress Jacky in a cashmere twin set and pearls, but I dressed her like Pat, and Pat never knew. A maniac, an alcoholic. Perfect. [See illustration.]⁷⁷

Chasen visited Pat in France in the late 1960s and 1970s “in several places…she didn’t stay with me but I stayed with her and that was worse” and had the experience common to most Highsmith guests: she went hungry in a house whose hostess was indifferent, if not positively hostile, to food.

“I remember being absolutely starving and looking in the fridge and all there was was peanut butter and vodka. I hardly saw her eat…. When she came here, she ate, because I provided the food. But when I used to say to Pat, “Oh come and let’s have lunch,” she would say: “I’VE GOT TO WATER THE GARDEN IF YOU DON’T MIND!” And lunch was never mentioned again and you never got it….

“Someone asked me do they change for dinner in France and I said: ‘Yes, Pat used to change from gin to whiskey.’”⁷⁸

Jeanne Moreau, who met Pat in 1974 when she was acting in a Peter Handke play at L’Espace Cardin in Paris, had a somewhat similar experience at Pat’s house, although she framed it differently. Moreau and Pat got on very well, and she was invited to visit Pat with Peter Handke at Pat’s house in Moncourt. There, Moreau, a famous gourmand, “discovered that [Patricia’s] refrigerator was almost empty.”

“She explained to me that she was very frugal and didn’t know how to cook. I told her that I adored cooking and she proposed that I return and cook a duck because she liked duck very much. So much so that each time I saw her, I arrived with a duck, we feasted, and Patricia’s cats feasted with us.”⁷⁹

Pat, who liked Jeanne Moreau very much—“I like the way she talks, I like the way she smokes,” she told a young friend⁸⁰—made a culinary exception for her. Moreau was too discreet to mention the fact that while Pat’s houses were usually empty of food, they were always well stocked with alcohol. In 1975, Jeanne Moreau gave Pat a hazelnut tree for her Moncourt garden: Pat planted it and it continued to flourish.⁸¹ And Moreau visited Pat for lunch in Moncourt and traveled to her last house in Tegna, where Pat’s neighbor, Peter Huber, taking no chances, cooked for both of them.

Another of Pat’s neighbors in Tegna remembered the time she’d brought “a dear friend and houseguest” who was “quite heavy” to Pat’s house.

“Pat was horrible, insulted her with a comment about some people going to the grocery store and buying everything in sight…. The next day I telephoned Pat from the office [to confront her] with [her] totally unacceptable behavior…. [S]he didn’t remember a single thing! She genuinely didn’t know what I was talking about. I wondered if she’d been drunk and we couldn’t tell…. I don’t think I ever introduced her to a friend…again.”⁸²

In most of Pat’s later-life outbursts, outbursts in which she had no trouble giving her array of prejudices overt and vocal form, alcohol was implicated. Enforcing the importance of drink in Pat’s life was the fact that alcohol is a recurring prop—virtually a character—in many of her novels. Like the small flask of gin, vodka, or scotch she always kept in her large Mexican purse, her bolsa (Grandmother Willie Mae also carried a flask of her “toddy” on car journeys with her family “in case she got sick”),⁸³ Pat Highsmith took the idea of drink with her everywhere.

In June of 1943, Pat accompanied Seymour Krim, a fledgling journalist who would later spend much of his career glorifying the Beat writers, to have coffee at the Greenwich Village apartment of Stanley Edgar Hyman and his wife, Shirley Jackson. Hyman, a brilliantly loquacious twenty-four-year-old literary critic, was already a staff writer at The New Yorker, while Shirley Jackson was at the beginning of her own career as a writer of near-perfect short stories (“The Lottery”) and uncanny novels (The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, et al.) Later in the decade, Jackson’s fictions would elegantly explore some of the same psychological states which obsessed Pat. A recurrent character in Jackson’s collection of short stories The Lottery (1949), Jamie Harris, “the daemon lover,” is a trickster figure who was more than a bit of a Ripley himself—six years before Tom Ripley made his literary debut.⁸⁴

On this visit to the Jackson/Hyman household, Pat seems to have been infuriated by the talk, and had undoubtedly tried to calm her insecurities by some presocial drinking at home. Perhaps Stanley Edgar Hyman’s wunderkind status at The New Yorker (which continued to reject Pat’s manuscripts and cartoons) got under her skin. Or maybe it was Hyman’s garrulousness (he was famously exuberant and Pat always felt inadequate around intellectuals) that provoked the little French phrase she wrote in her diary about the afternoon’s social call: “[T]he Jews disgusting!”⁸⁵ Pat did better with Shirley Jackson, who, to be sure, wasn’t Jewish. Shirley gave her good advice about the importance of finding a literary agent.

Pat usually preferred to do her socializing uptown, and as soon as she had moved to the Upper East Side, she declared her preference for it and her rejection of all the Village “losers” she had known. Among the people she called upon in her new neighborhood was Fanny Lee Myers (later Fanny Myers Brennan). Pat called Fanny Myers “a girl painter,” the same term she used for Buffie Johnson, and at twenty Fanny was already a known artist, with reviews and gallery showings to her credit. Fanny was the daughter of the Herald Tribune’s Paris bureau chief, Richard Myers, and the international hostess Alice Lee Herrick Myers, and she was connected through her parents to all the well-known or socially prominent people Pat would meet in New York and Paris, among them, Americans such as Janet Flanner (who had gone to the University of Chicago with both the Myerses) and Esther Murphy Arthur.

After Fanny married Hank Brennan, Pat went to a party the couple hosted for Rosalind Constable in March of 1949. And she remembered that Fanny had been a painting student of Buffie Johnson, “which evokes a host of memories.”⁸⁶ Fanny was Pat’s exact contemporary, and she had the kind of background Pat coveted: graduation from the Spence School and art study in Paris before coming back to New York. Fanny made perfect, minuscule landscapes, captivating worlds on a thumbnail, none of them larger than two or three inches on any side.⁸⁷

Fanny Myers’s tiny paintings were the likely source of inspiration for the character of Ripley’s friend Cleo in The Talented Mr. Ripley, although Pat, who knew Myers only slightly, entirely invented the relationship for Tom in the novel. Cleo comes from the same social background as Myers, and she paints exquisitely tiny paintings just as Myers did—except that Cleo paints them on pieces of ivory. In The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley spends chaste nights at Cleo’s Upper East Side apartment admiring her miniature paintings, drinking heavily of her wine, and sleeping quietly beside her—as a sister might do—on the floor in front of her fireplace. Cleo is the one person with whom Tom can share the good news of his “ambassadorship” to Europe, and she is the recipient of the only kiss—again, it is sisterly—he bestows in the novel. (Kisses in Highsmith novels are not quite as rare as kisses in Henry James’s work, but “scant” is a good description of their number.) Cleo is also the only good artist in the novel. Tom, who has both an “eye” and the adopted New Yorker’s desire to use it critically, is both disappointed by Dickie Greenleaf’s mediocre paintings and disgusted with Marge Sherwood’s dilatory attempts at novel writing.

But nothing picked Pat out as a New Yorker more than her classically Manhattan attachment to musical comedy—and to her old classmate Judy Tuvim/Holliday’s musical comedy sketch group, the Revuers. Pat followed Judy’s career and the careers of two of her collaborators in the Revuers, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, in their shows at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village in the 1940s. And she went uptown to see them at the Rainbow Room, bringing Rosalind Constable with her. When Judy Tuvim transformed herself into Judy Holliday and starred as Billie Dawn in Garson Kanin’s play Born Yesterday (it opened on Broadway on 4 February 1946), Pat went to see the show several times and remembered that “Judy always welcomed me backstage…and was very friendly also to whomever I dragged along—my mother or my grandmother, maybe.”⁸⁸

When Pat moved to Europe, she brought her mid-century American taste for musical comedy with her, choosing, in April of 1979, as one of her selections for the BBC4 radio interview program Desert Island Discs a witty little ditty from the Rodgers and Hart musical Pal Joey, “Our Little Den of Iniquity” (“Just two little lovebirds all alone / In a cozy nest…”). It was perhaps a tip of the Highsmith hat to her lost but not forgotten love, Caroline Besterman, at whose house in London she had played that same song one amorous afternoon in 1962.

In May of 1988, when Pat was phrasing her anger at the “career failure” of her ex-lover, Tabea Blumenschein, in terms of a fictional murder—she thought about writing a “story reversing gender, so that a woman kills a younger man in whom she once had confidence perhaps as playwright, or actor, or writer”—the Cole Porter song “Use Your Imagination” (from the 1950 musical comedy Out of This World) became her inspiration for imagining the crime.⁸⁹ “Cole Porter’s Imagination—which I adore, puts me into a higher world, so that visible failure makes me angry. One is of course angry at past misjudgements, mistakes. Consequently, murder sometimes follows.”⁹⁰

And one day, in the middle of a short filmed interview for German television about the Geissendörfer film Die Gläserne Zelle (The Glass Cell) at her house in Moncourt in 1977, Pat, “quite drunk,” grabbed the cameraman’s white lighting umbrella and began to dance around the room with it, intoning the title song from the musical comedy film Singin’ in the Rain, in her deep cigarette-and-alcohol-flavored voice. The celebrated lyricists for Singin’ in the Rain were the very same Betty Comden and Adolph Green who had been Judy Holliday’s young partners in the Revuers at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village—where Pat had gone to applaud them so many times in the 1940s.

At this unexpected display of high spirits and musical comedy–consciousness from the forbidding Miss Highsmith, the cameraman shooting the television film, Wilfried Reichardt, and the writer doing the interviewing, Christa Maerker, threw their own inhibitions to the wind and happily “joined in” to sing and dance along with Pat.⁹¹

It must have been quite an international tableau: two filmmakers from Berlin and one soused and happy Texas-American novelist interrupting the shooting of an interview for a German television channel in the novelist’s house in suburban France to perform an American musical comedy number whose words they all knew.⁹² Pat’s early association with Judy Holliday, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green makes the vignette more personal. Betty Comden, the last of the Revuers and, when she spoke with me in 2003, the last surviving member of the celebrated musical comedy team of Comden and Green, remembered very well how Judy Holliday had “mentioned Patricia to me and admired her work.”

“We all did,” said the legendary Miss Comden.⁹³

Although Pat continued to love musical comedy all her life, a middle-of-the-night visit she made to a theatrical milieu in the winter of 1947 opened up another, darker side of the business for her.

On 9 December 1947, on her way back from yet another evening out on the town, Pat casually dropped in on the home of a Broadway producer, an unnamed woman she apparently knew quite well; well enough, anyway, to visit unannounced in the middle of the night. The producer was probably Peggy Fears, whom Pat had been visiting all fall and whose lengthy and contentious divorce from the financier A. C. Blumenthal—“I’m down to my last string of pearls” is how Fears put it in 1938—allowed her to try her hand at independent theatrical production. Pat wrote about this evening as a kind of warning to herself; a warning of what can happen when alcohol affects a talent, flattens a career, and diminishes the sexual appeal on which performing artists count so heavily.

The end of a talent, perhaps a genius. For where does genius show itself more brilliantly in America than in the creation of musical comedy…? I chanced to drop in on the way home at one in the morning on a producer then hard at work with her two writers…. All were tight on Rheims champagne. “I’ve been auditioning hit shows—I BEG your pardon—since 1926, and you two CHILDREN try to tell me how to audition?—I’m very sorry, let’s try that number again, Phil.” And she sings to his piano playing…a few lines from the song’s main lyric…. What heart, male or female, can this soprano with the cracked face, the exhausted and false eyes, the straggling, not-even-bedroomy hair enflame…?⁹⁴

After the war, Pat’s social life in New York tilted more towards the professional and the commercial—she was particularly interested in selling her work to the “money magazines”—and she was careful to note the notables and the notables-in-waiting she met on her evenings out, often writing up her experiences in French or German. Her commercial intentions began to leak into her creative work, and in the days after Christmas of 1947 she was pierced with guilt about this artistic and spiritual “self-betrayal”:

Note after writing my first insincere story: it eats at my brain when I turn from it to write my book [Strangers on a Train]. I feel my thoughts are soiled and unclear. God forgive me for turning my talents to ugliness and to lies. God forgive me. I shall not do it again. Only this vow permits me to work any longer tonight at all. Best if I were punished by the story’s being a complete fiasco. Miserere mihi. Dirige me, Domine, sempiterne.⁹⁵

But in May of 1947, Pat had been writing her story “Mrs. Afton, Among Thy Green Braes,” and feeling very pleased with it. She hadn’t, she said, “worked so hard on a story since ‘The Heroine.’”⁹⁶ “The Heroine” was the story against which Pat measured all her writing in the 1940s, going so far as to say, while she was working on The Price of Salt, that she hoped this book would be “better than ‘The Heroine.’ O to remove that curse one day!”⁹⁷ “Mrs. Afton” is a fine, quiet, disturbing tale, reminiscent of the eerie economies of Shirley Jackson’s best short fictions.

Mrs. Afton (an alias) is a well-mannered, middle-aged Southern lady whose detailed report of her imaginary husband gives a consulting psychiatrist a bad afternoon. Because of Mrs. Afton’s deception, the psychiatrist must track down Mrs. Afton’s real name (it’s Miss Gorham), and he is forced into a serious readjustment of his own ideas of “reality”: i.e., the knowledge that his psychiatric sense has failed him and that now he must treat “Miss Gorham” for a disease that “Mrs. Afton” did not seem to suffer from. “Mrs. Afton,” like so many of Pat’s best stories, was published, fifteen years after she wrote it, in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in December of 1962.

While she was working on “Mrs. Afton,” Pat was invited to a party given by the set designer Oliver Smith in the writer Jane Bowles’s apartment on Tenth Street in Greenwich Village. Jane’s wealthy lover from Vermont, Helvetia Perkins, was there, as well as the refugee composer Marc Blitzstein (“who had some sort of passion for me,” Pat thought),⁹⁸ the choreographer Jerry Robbins, and the great theater actress Stella Adler. Forty years later, Pat remembered the evening as “a fabulous party, including Paul [Bowles], John Gielgud, Oliver Smith, Jerome Robbins—everybody notable except me—I felt!…I always had a high and awed respect for [Jane’s] talent.”⁹⁹ Pat, who had given some stories to Jane, got, not for the first time, some writerly advice from her: “Don’t plan,” Jane said to the diagram-obsessed Pat. “It always works better to write first, and then rewrite.”¹⁰⁰

At some point, Pat made a little line drawing of Jane Bowles.¹⁰¹ Although Pat and Jane would never be more than social acquaintances eying each other appraisingly (Pat said that Jane was amongst the women who were sexually available to her, but that she wasn’t “really attractive to me”),¹⁰² they actually had some common lifelines. For one thing, Jane, as Pat wrote appreciatively, “could hold half a bottle of gin in an admirably quiet way.”¹⁰³ Jane and Pat had both lived in the borough of Queens as children, they had both attended Julia Richman High School (at different times), and they had discussed the idea of going to North Africa together, during the period when Jane was anxiously trying to rejoin her husband, Paul, in Tangier. In 1949, they accompanied each other to the passport office in New York City to register for their passports; Pat remembered the occasion because this was her first passport, although not her first attempt to get one.¹⁰⁴ She also remembered that “at the question ‘What is the purpose of your journey (to N. Africa)’ Jane said she wanted to write ‘To rejoin tribe.’”¹⁰⁵ Although sexually uninterested in Jane, Pat was still alert to the opportunity: “[I]f we go to Africa no doubt something would happen.”¹⁰⁶

Luckily, their African trip never came off. Jane Bowles had phobias about trains, tunnels, bridges, elevators, and making decisions, while Pat’s phobias included, but were not confined to, noise, space, cleanliness, and food, as well as making decisions. A journey to the Dark Continent by Patricia Highsmith and Jane Bowles in each other’s unmediated company doesn’t bear thinking about.

The night after the party at Oliver Smith’s, Pat went to a reception at Rosalind Constable’s apartment to honor another potentially incongruous duo: Dorothy Parker and Simone de Beauvoir. Pat wangled an invitation for her then-primary lover, the alcoholic, divorced socialite Ginnie Kent Catherwood (see “Les Girls: Part 1”)—Pat called Ginnie her “wife, harlot, sweetheart—all in one! Irresistible.”¹⁰⁷—whose marital woes and child custody problems Pat would ruthlessly mine for the character of Carol in The Price of Salt. Securing an invitation for Ginnie entailed elaborate explanations to Rosalind by Pat, and after the party, Ginnie, in a rage about something, punched Pat. Pat laughed at Ginnie’s flailing fists, just as she often laughed at violence. Everyone Rosalind had invited to the party for Simone de Beauvoir and Dorothy Parker showed up—except the guests of honor themselves. Wisely, they had decided to absent themselves from an evening which seemed to promise, in Dorothy Parker’s immortal phrase, “fresh hell.”¹⁰⁸

Ten days later, Pat was at a reception given by a well-connected lesbian couple for “Mrs. Chester Arthur,” the brilliant, garrulous, aggressively intellectual Esther Murphy Arthur, whose long-awaited book on Mme de Maintenon, last wife of Louis XIV, never did get written. (Perhaps it was unwritten because of Mme de Maintenon’s own caveat: “I shall not write my life. I cannot tell everything, and what I could tell would not be believed.”) The English writer and wit Nancy Mitford, who was very fond of Esther Murphy Arthur, once described her to Evelyn Waugh as “a large sandy person like a bedroom cupboard packed full of information, much of it useless, all of it accurate.”¹⁰⁹

Pat knew how brilliant Esther Murphy Arthur was, but she always got restive when Esther spoke. In Paris in the early 1950s, when she was seeing a lot of Esther Murphy Arthur in her “palatial apartment” on the rue de Lille, Pat just had to flee a St-Germain café in the middle of one of Esther’s learned discourses. Esther, a daughter of the family that owned the Mark Cross Company, a companion of Sybille Bedford, and a friend of Janet Flanner (author of The New Yorker’s fifty-year-long column, “Letter from Paris,” whom Pat had met through the lesbian community in New York), was a sister of Gerald Murphy, the American expatriate who “discovered” the Riviera and gave far too many parties for Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. During this reception for Esther Murphy Arthur, Pat also met the sharp-tongued, discreetly homosexual Bowden Broadwater, a researcher at The New Yorker. He was a year older than Pat and newly married to Mary McCarthy, the bright star in Partisan Review’s firmament.

Amongst the other gatherings at which Pat was making appearances was Leo Lerman’s informal Sunday evening salon at his Lexington Avenue apartment in Manhattan. Perhaps Pat had been introduced into the Lerman milieu by Buffie Johnson, who saw Lerman frequently and whose name was on Lerman’s luminary-packed guest list for a party he gave for the couturier Pierre Balmain in 1948. Possibly it was the photographer who had also recently been Pat’s lover, “Sheila”—she photographed Leo Lerman—who directed her to Lerman.¹¹⁰ Perhaps Mme (Elizabeth) Lyne, the Hattie Carnegie designer who also knew Lerman and whose attentions Pat craved so deeply during the 1940s, was her entrée to Lerman’s gatherings. Or maybe it was Betty Parsons. By now, Pat, advancing steadily if idiosyncratically in the direction of her dreams, was well connected enough to have been handed several keys to Leo Lerman’s salon door.

Leo Lerman, the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, wrote for many magazines and papers on the arts; he became a features editor at Vogue, then editor in chief of Vanity Fair, and finally served as editorial advisor to Condé Nast Publications until his death in 1994. Lerman shared with Pat a Proustian scrutiny of the social circles in which he moved (in his case, High Society and Café Society) and his journals are a treasure trove of 1940s Manhattan observations: “Stella Adler, when Ned Rorem told her that he had been introduced to her five times and she still did not recognize him: ‘To me all goyim look alike.’”¹¹¹ “When Marlene [Dietrich] sits or rather strides a chair and growls ‘One for the Road’ she is very beautiful in two sexes simultaneously.”¹¹²

At Lerman’s Sundays, “[p]eople came for one another [and not for the food or the drink]…. Tennessee, Truman, Gore, Mr. Faulkner…I remember passing Tilly Losch on the landing, kissing Martha Graham’s hand.”¹¹³ Le tout New York and many of its brilliant war refugees were there: Marlene Dietrich, Eleonora von Mendelssohn, Pearl Kazin, Muriel Draper, Adolph Green and Betty Comden, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Truman Capote, Jane Bowles, John La Touche, Imogene Coca, Carl Van Vechten, Stark Young, Eugene Berman, and Ruth Landshoff-Yorck.

Pat liked to position herself at the outer edge of this inner circle: the view was good, the participants famous or notorious, and the interaction was strictly voluntary. She was both an admiring audience and a resentful one, as this recollection of her salad days shows: “[T]he forties were the days of somewhat snob magazines…. All was whimsy, fuzziness, humour—of closed circle sort. Obscure, too. Tinged with Edith Sitwell and Djuna Barnes…. I was in my twenties and in awe of them all, because they had literary recognition and all that.”¹¹⁴ In the canny guest list that the twenty-nine-year-old Pat prepared for the launch party for her novel Strangers on a Train—the book was published on the ides of March 1950, the party was given at Mme Lyne’s apartment, and Mother Mary, miffed at not having received a personal invitation from Mme Lyne, refused to come—both Leo Lerman and Djuna Barnes were invited. Neither of them came. Djuna Barnes pleaded a “sprained back,” and Pat thought Leo Lerman didn’t show up because he was offended that “I didn’t send him an advance copy of my book.”¹¹⁵

Still, she said she found Lerman’s Sundays “very agreeable” indeed. Pat’s friend Lil Picard compared the company there “with the one she knew in Berlin before Hitler; intellectuals, free spirits; the first that would disappear.”¹¹⁶

Pat met both Truman Capote and film actress Luise Rainer in January of 1948 at one of Lerman’s Sundays. She also made the acquaintance of yet another of her young male Jewish suitors, Lewis Howard, “a pleasant writer. Really—ideas that we were married—daydreams. I had to tell him everything about me.” Pat alternated her romantic dreams of Howard—“I have the constant feeling that Lewis is going to be my husband”¹¹⁷—with slightly less romantic reflections: a discussion of contraception with Mother Mary (“I feel so feminine tonight!”) and the realization that “Lewis is a Jew, therefore I feel even more that I can’t go to him. But we have so much in common.”¹¹⁸ She intermitted these thoughts with some even more characteristic ideas: “I want to change my sex. Is it possible?…Twice I tried to sleep with Lewis—masochistic failure. Lewis is an angel of patience [but I have] [n]o pleasure—God—how funny! When all parents have to forbid their children—I hate it!”¹¹⁹

Three days after another failed attempt at making love with Lewis (she didn’t call it making love), Pat was happy to see Truman Capote again at Leo Lerman’s. This was the year that Capote’s first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms would be published, with the back cover adorned by the notorious Harold Halma photograph of the young author reclining in resplendent decadence on a Victorian sofa. Truman, three years younger than Pat, and as talented a self-publicist as he promised to be a writer (he’d posed that sulphurous Halma photograph himself when he was only twenty-two), shared an Alabama background with Pat. (Capote’s mother’s backwoods Alabama name—before she changed it to the more sophisticated Nina—was Lillie Mae, like the Willie Mae of Pat’s own Alabama-born grandmother.) Capote was the most prominent of the Alabamians who fetched up in Manhattan in the 1940s. Another of them, Truman’s childhood friend from Alabama, Nelle Harper Lee, the future author of To Kill a Mockingbird, was also living on the Upper East Side, trying to make her writerly way.

On this Sunday afternoon at Leo Lerman’s, Truman sat next to Pat and “held my hand and was very devoted. He wants to see my room.”¹²⁰ The next day, the first of March, Truman went with Pat to see her studio apartment on East Fifty-sixth Street—he was thinking of renting it as a writing studio so he could finish The Tree of Night, and she had been thinking of going to New Orleans—and he liked it. And Pat liked “to go out with little Truman: He is so attentive and so famous! And so sweet!”¹²¹ Pat changed her mind about going to New Orleans, and she eventually changed her mind about Truman (as she did about nearly everyone), but Truman didn’t change his opinion of Pat: his biographer Gerald Clarke writes that “Capote’s high opinion of her work never wavered.”¹²² And Donald Windham, who never met Patricia but knew Capote very well, confirms it: “Truman always spoke well of Highsmith’s novels to me.”¹²³

After having dinner with Mother Mary and Rolf Tietgens, Pat and Truman agreed on the apartment rental: he gave her eighty dollars for two months’ rent. Decades later, she began to say that she and Capote had a “deal”: that he had sublet her apartment in return for recommending her to Yaddo, the artist’s colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. Although Capote did send his recommendation letter for Pat to Yaddo the day after the apartment money changed hands, Pat had already been thinking of going to New Orleans; she wanted, anyway, to sublet her apartment; and there is not one word about a “deal” in her diary. Capote had probably suggested Yaddo to Pat as a better idea than New Orleans, and she made the best of a situation that would supply her with both a paying sublettor and a recommender to an arts colony. Capote’s recommendation to Yaddo was addressed to Elizabeth Ames, Yaddo’s imposing director, and it shows, even for a young man given to hyperbole, just how taken he was with Pat.

“She is really enormously gifted, one story of hers shows a talent as fine as any I know. Moreover, she is a charming, thoroughly civilized person, someone I’m quite certain you would like.”¹²⁴

It was during this March that Pat, accompanied by Jeanne (one of the several women she was sleeping with while trying to establish a physical relationship with Lewis Howard), went to see what she called “the best play of my life”: A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams. Unlike Williams himself, who reserved his tenderness for Blanche DuBois (the Southern fantasist who depends upon “the kindness of strangers”), Pat didn’t announce a character preference. But perhaps one of her reasons for calling it “the best play of my life” was that she recognized something of Mother Mary in Blanche Dubois’s rearrangements of reality—“I don’t tell the truth. I tell what ought to be the truth,” Blanche says—and something of herself in the themes of male violence and homosexuality that run under the play.

On the day of the evening she saw Streetcar, Pat began “my first snail story,” “The Snail-Watcher.” “I like it,” she noted, pleased with herself.¹²⁵

Over the years, Pat would repeat a couple of origin stories for her first attraction to snails. They are disturbing stories, involving long descriptions of what it was that fascinated her about the molluscs: watching the “mating process” of two living organisms that “can go on for fourteen hours.” She found it “relaxing” to watch her snails mate because their copulation had “an aesthetic quality, nothing more bestial in it than necking, really,” and she liked to take her snails on trips with her. In Suffolk, in her cottage at Earl Soham in the 1960s, Pat kept three hundred snails as pets, and her longest-lived snail, Hortense (who appears with her real-life, loving snail partner Edgar in Deep Water), was, Pat claimed, “the world’s most widely travelled snail. She has been to New York and back by jet, and has visited Paris, Rome, and Venice.” “It is quite impossible,” Pat wrote happily about her snails, “to tell which is the male and which is the female, because their behavior and appearance is exactly the same.”

The first of Pat’s own origin stories about how she took up with snails is from 1946: she saw, in this version, snails locked in an embrace in a fish store and took six of them home. Her second story is from 1949: Pat, passing the same fish store in Manhattan, saw two snails “kissing”—[l]ittle did I know they were mating”—and brought them home to keep as pets because they “shouldn’t be separated.” “The mother snail gives [the baby snails] no assistance and never appears to even see them,” she wrote in an undated self-interview she composed about her attraction to snails. “But,” she went on in what sounds like a pointed reference to her relations with her mother, “I have never found an adult snail damaging a baby snail by crawling over it.”¹²⁶

Pat showed this first snail story—in which the intense mating of pet snails generates enough offspring to smother to death the admiring man who has kept them (love kills, even in the sticky world of molluscs)—to her college friend Kingsley, whom she hadn’t seen in a long time. Kingsley said it gave her the “only happy day she has had in months” and that she found the snail story “funny.” Lil Picard, who began her friendship with Pat by praising her story “The World’s Champion Ball-Bouncer” (published in Woman’s Home Companion in April of 1948), “loved” “The Snail-Watcher,” and Pat wrote that she was “so overflowing with happiness if anybody loves something from me!”¹²⁷

“The Snail-Watcher” would go on to have a checkered publishing history. In June of 1948, Pat wrote to Kingsley from Yaddo: “My snail story that I adore, my agent writes is too repellent to show editors. Cannot express how disappointed I am. Have even offered to bowdlerize it.”¹²⁸ In 1960, “The Snail-Watcher” was finally bought by Pat’s friend Jack Matcha, who edited “Gamma [magazine] of California.” It had, she said, “elicit[ed] ‘nays’ and ‘ughs’ from editors” for twelve solid years, and she noted grimly that just after “The Snail-Watcher” appeared in Gamma, the magazine was “seized for bankruptcy.”¹²⁹