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Les Girls

Part 4

A family tree, a diagrammatic view of affairs and duration among les girls. From one individual radiate twenty lines, crossing those of their other partners, coming full circle again…. Everybody has been with everybody else.

—Patricia Highsmith, 1947

Although Pat’s affair with Lynn Roth in the summer of 1953 would pass as quickly as a fever in a Russian novel, she loved to dwell on Roth’s image or, rather, on Roth’s “type”: a lovely, slim, stylish, inconstant blond girl who wanted to be an actress.

Commendably thorough, Pat was still sleeping with her other lovely blonde, Roth’s ex-lover Ann Smith, when she took up with Lynn. And she would in future live with Doris, the blond woman Roth was currently living with and “cheating on” with Pat. Pat herself was now sharing an apartment and a bed with Jean P., and she had also resumed seeing Ellen Hill secretly. In this period of her life, Pat seems to have taken Henry James’s dictum that a writer should be someone on whom “nothing is lost” a little too seriously.

Pat and Lynn Roth got together quickly. Desperate for places in which to make love (i.e., places where they could avoid their various lovers), and well supplied with keys to other people’s doors, they snuck into their friends’ apartments without permission—including Ellen Hill’s new digs at One Fifth Avenue. Then Ellen surreptitiously visited Pat in the apartment Pat was sharing with Jean. Then Lynn dropped in on that apartment “by accident” when Ellen was there. Then they all ran into each other, in various combinations, on the streets of Greenwich Village. It was a busy July and August.¹

Pat’s behavior during the summer of 1953 looks like the material for bedroom farce. But it was also guilt-making, manipulative, thrilling for Pat, and criminal in the way that her imagination liked things to be criminal. The remark she would later make to a lover about life having no meaning “unless there was a crime in it” was the word made flesh just now. The Price of Salt had been cut to this same cloth: the story of a love affair conducted “on the run,” perceived as a crime by the society in which it was set, with the lovers pursued and threatened with prosecution. Pat was reliving this scenario in multiple variations in her novel. She even sounded like a criminal to herself as she failed to unpick her skein of deception.

“Must soon confess or lay cards on the table or whatever. I have ambiguous feelings about Ellen, which hopelessly thwart me: to take her for what I enjoy about her…or to be strong & fend for myself?

“If I do decide, I should make a move. I cannot. So I drink. Like any American.”²

Pat’s generous third cousin on the Coates side, Millie Alford, visiting New York this summer, offered her house in Fort Worth to Pat as a refuge. Pat, ashamed of her poverty before a family member just as Mother Mary was always ashamed before “the Texas family” for being poor, suddenly wondered what Millie knew “of my sex life. Because she seems wildly interested.”³

When Millie left town in August, Pat noted, with something like awakening interest, that Millie had embraced her “for long moments on parting.”⁴

By 26 August, Pat, writing furiously, was up to page 110 on The Blunderer—“visit of Walter to Kimmel.” But, she thought, “my life is so much more important now than the book.” Her life was certainly busier than her book: her “hero,” the “blunderer” Walter Stackhouse, didn’t much care for sex with the opposite sex (“Walter could feel her desire like a pull, a drain on him”),⁵ and he imitated Pat in other ways, too: he liked to clip out and save articles from newspapers which he used for making lists of “unworthy friendships” (i.e., unequal power relationships) between superior men and their inferior friends. Walter thought such friendships were “maintained…because of certain needs and deficiencies that were either mirrored or complemented by the inferior friend.”

Pat was still creating Clara, the desperately neurotic wife of Walter Stackhouse, out of her relations with Ellen Hill. (Walter, with his architectural surname, and Clara, with her job as a real estate agent, should have been a perfect pair.) Like Ellen, Clara provides “that old pattern of punishment after favors granted,”⁶ and prefers her dog to her husband, her job to her marriage, and the negation of pleasure to the celebration of life. Clara—as Ellen had done with Pat, as every lover had done with Pat—constantly accuses Walter of drinking too much. And Walter expresses the violent oppositions love always encouraged in his creator:

A strange sensation ran through him at the touch of her fingers. A start of pleasure, of hatred, of a kind of hopeless tenderness that Walter crushed as soon as his mind recognized it. He had a sudden desire to embrace her hard at this last minute, then to fling her away from him.⁷

Melchior Kimmel, The Blunderer’s “foreign” wife-murderer, whose gross enjoyment of delicatessen food is part of his vivid repulsiveness, commits the murder which first inspires Walter (who, with his “Anglo-Saxon good looks” is the exact opposite of Kimmel) to think about killing Clara. After seeing the actor Gert Fröbe in Claude Autant-Lara’s 1965 film Enough Rope, Pat said that Fröbe—later to play Auric Goldfinger in the eponymous James Bond movie—was “exactly as I pictured Kimmel.”⁸

Because of the way Walter blunders into Kimmel’s plans, Kimmel becomes Walter’s own “unworthy” Alter Ego, with the usual accompanying sexual undertones. (“Kimmel’s fat mouth with the heavy seam along the heart-shaped upper lip seemed to Walter the most vulgar thing he had ever looked at.”)⁹ As always in a Highsmith novel (and in a Highsmith life, too), everyone is pursuing everyone: Corby (the sadistic cop), Kimmel, and Walter all swerve, dip, and wheel like rapacious birds of prey in confused flight. (“Corbie,” the cop’s name, is Scots border dialect for blackbird.) The pursuer becomes the pursued—and then turns back again. The characters are always changing places—“Suddenly…Kimmel appeared as a shining angel in contrast to a diabolic Corby”¹⁰—and the violence is both sexualized and gendered: “Kimmel was aware that he felt intensely feminine…. it gave him pleasure of a kind he had not felt in years. He waited for the next blow, which he anticipated would strike his ear.”¹¹

Pat would always have the adept’s feel for sadomasochistic relations.

As in her earliest story in this genre, “Uncertain Treasure,” it is the chase that matters most, not its nominal motive. “The old favorite sport of the human race, hunting down their fellows” is how Pat phrases it in The Blunderer.”¹² Pat’s overheated vie d’amour—love as a criminal pursuit—was made of the same material. “Cops and robbers. It must take a mind that’s nasty or twisted somewhere [Walter] thought, to devote itself exclusively to homicide.”¹³ But Pat herself was never exclusively devoted to homicide: love and murder would regularly substitute for each other in her works and in her dreams.

Pat was guiltily finding “the suicide & Ellen’s character in the book…very disturbing & too personal of course.” (The suicide disturbed her more when she wrote about it than when Ellen had actually tried to commit it.) In Walter’s passivity and ineptitude (he implicates himself in a crime he hasn’t committed, kills the wrong man, and is murdered himself), it is possible to see Pat’s flagellation of herself as a person who always did the wrong thing. German literary critic Paul Ingendaay noticed a curious linguistic tic in Pat’s cahiers: “It is striking,” he wrote in the Afterword to her short story collection Nothing That Meets the Eye, “how often the word ‘failure’ occurs in the notes and plot sketches.”¹⁴

Next to madness, failure was what Pat feared most, and for a long time she’d been conscious of a cloak of failure settling over her family like a tragic pall. Death of a Salesman—the play with whose central character she said she had no sympathy—kept recurring to her as a model for this enveloping doom. Two years later, in the summer of 1955, she would consider making Salesman the foundation of an autobiographical novel.

“I revert more and more to the projected novel of my parents and myself. The Death of a Salesman theme in another profession, another period—and to me far more tragic because the aspirations were higher. In this book my parents will be writers, becoming increasingly hack, and I shall become a painter.”¹⁵

But now, at the end of August 1953, Pat suddenly performed one of her lightning substitutions: she went to Provincetown with Ellen Hill, with whom she’d broken up six weeks before. “I do not forget Lynn, yet am content temporarily with Ellen.”¹⁶ By the end of September, Ellen and Pat had broken up again; Ellen had decamped for Europe and Pat was in Fort Worth, at the Coates Hotel, her uncle Claude’s apartment hotel, for which, to her quiet irritation, Uncle Claude was charging her rent. Before she left New York she saw a doctor for her blood; her weight was 117. She changed the language in which she was writing her diary—as she usually did when she had something to hide—from awkward German to bad Italian.

In Texas, Pat was drinking even more heavily than she had in New York. And she was writing ever more obsessively, transferring the focus from her life’s complications with Ellen et al. to the complications posed by The Blunderer. She gave an interview to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in which she mentioned “afternoon beer” as an inspiration (but it was the hard liquor she was hitting the hardest), and she moved, briefly, to her cousin Millie’s house. It was during this time that Pat had a short sexual relationship with Millie of which “the family” was perfectly aware. Millie Alford would be a supportive friend to Pat for the rest of her life, doing everything she could in later years to persuade Pat to accept her mother Mary’s foibles and to get on with her life. But Pat was unresponsive to any pleas that had to do with letting Mary Highsmith off any of the hooks she’d hung her on.

Conscious that her apparent inability to settle anywhere for long made her look bad, Pat wrote to Kingsley: “And by now, I am sure, I shall be permanently placed in your mind as eccentric, or what was it—the most unstable character of your acquaintance.” She began to attribute the “chaos” inside her to the country and the system she had spent the last year in Europe yearning to get back to: “America” and “democracy.” She wrote a bit of bad verse: “Despite the poverty and destruction [in Europe] / There is order. / It does not exist in America.”¹⁷ In her indirect way, Pat—her life in disorder—was identifying herself with her native country.

Ellen Hill was in Mallorca and on her way to Rome, and, in a letter to Kingsley linking Ellen to the character of Clara in The Blunderer, Pat was feeling “sorry for her, as she’s a tragic character.” Feeling sorry for Ellen was the next step to feeling guilty about her, and guilt, once again, would move Pat closer to Ellen. But now, in need of reassurance from Kingsley and having decided on The Blunderer as a title for her manuscript at last, Pat was asking: “What do you think of this title, my literary Nestor?” On Christmas Eve, Pat sent a copy of the last page of the finshed manuscript of The Blunderer to Kingsley “to prove…that it can be done…despite discouragement, poverty, and mediocre health.”¹⁸

Meanwhile, Pat continued to drink her way through visits to Dallas, through long drawing sessions, through meetings with family members, and through a reanimation of her friendship with a horseback-riding friend, Florence Brillheart. Pat, who loved to ride, also liked to get herself up in English riding gear when she was in Texas. The number of photographs taken of her over the years wearing jodhpurs, hacking jackets, and gleaming English riding boots and mounted on a horse or posed against a fence in Texas—land of chaps, six-gallon hats, and the Judson (cowboy) Boot Factory (just across the street from Willie Mae’s Fort Worth house)—are legion. Pat presents herself in these pictures as a girl boarder at an English prep school—Roedean, perhaps, or the Cheltenham Ladies College—momentarily detained by the camera, but almost certainly on her way to a point-to-point. It was all part of the theatrical oppositions by which this daughter of another kind of boardinghouse operated, oppositions which were deeply rooted in her fidelity to the American Dream.

Still, Dan Walton Coates did remember one glorious day in the 1940s (Pat’s diary fixes it as Christmas Day, 1949) when Pat, visiting his father Dan Coates’s Box Canyon Ranch in Wetherford, Texas, on a cross-country drive with Elizabeth Lyne, was especially radiant and wearing what he remembered as “her standard wardrobe”:

A starched white shirt, her Levi’s, a black wristband on her watch, it looked like one of those Cartier tank watches, and she had on a pair of black loafers and white socks and had a little cuff rolled on her Levi’s. We were raising horses and we had a stallion and Pat wanted to ride him. And I said, “Sure.” And we went out there and put a bridle on him, and I said, “I’ll put a saddle on him.” “Oh no,” Pat said, “I’ll just ride him bareback.”

And by golly, she swung up on that son of a gun and loped him down the front of the property and rode him around quite a little while. And then she came back and slid off and she was just exhilarated. I mean it was just one of the best things going for her.¹⁹

With admirable contrariness, Pat mostly wore her western shirts, her belts from Texas, and her bolo ties with the fancy slides when she was living in France and Switzerland. And it was only to Paris and Marseille that she brought, as presents for her friend Jeannot’s young stepdaughter, boy’s cowboy shirts from Texas with snap fasteners and pairs of boy’s jeans with fly fronts. This was Pat’s idea of what a twelve-year-old French girl should wear in the conservative South of France. Jeannot’s stepdaughter remembered Pat’s beauty, her mysterious “presence,” and the very “masculine” and “sexist” conversations Pat was always having with Jeannot; and she also recalled the kindness Pat showed her as a child of a difficult marriage. But then she recollected how much she was teased in Marseille by the other children for wearing those “boy’s pants with the zipper in front” that Pat Highsmith had brought her all the way from America’s Wild West.²⁰

On this particular trip to Texas in 1953, Pat took special care to criticize the “commercialism” of the country music she was hearing on every radio station. She had a point, but her point was personal and contrarian. She was trying hard to reverse the old adage, trying to “take the Texas out of the girl” (herself)—something she was especially prone to doing when the girl herself was actually in Texas.

Back in New York in January and still drinking like a sailor on leave, Pat waited until March to haul herself up before the court of her conscience, ensuring the severity of her sentence by making her self-indictment the only entry in English amid all the bad Italian at the end of her diary. Like the American Calvinist she continued to be, Pat thought that being poor was her punishment for bad morals and too much drinking. “The last year…nothing made sense. My attitude was have another drink. Nothing makes sense now either (March 16 1954) but as long as one has decided to live, one must always try to ‘do the right thing.’ I did not try last year. I spent my money like a drunken sailor. And the worst was, I knew what I was doing. It serves me jolly well right if I am broke, or if I land in debtor’s prison even…. It does not matter that I have worked pretty hard…. I have been imprudent, irreverent, false to myself, in fact.”²¹

Another interpretation might be: Pat was being true to the only “self” she couldn’t bear to acknowledge.

In New York, Pat’s despair seemed to increase. Lynn Roth, she thought, was tantalizing her, going back to Doris, moving in and out of her life, only to vanish by spring. Pat thought about making a story out of Lynn: a girl who can associate love only with people she sees secretly, “away from her regular girl friend. She is incapable of forming an orthodox relationship with anyone with whom she enjoys going to bed.”²² Instead of writing this story, Pat wrote several long, tortuous, and abstract disquisitions on the impossibility of homosexual love, once again making the personal into something “political.” And Lynn Roth, faithful at least to the complications of homosexual life in mid-century Manhattan, spent the last forty years of her life living with a woman who had been married to one of James Merrill’s lovers. Lynn’s stable relationship never ceased to irritate Pat, who, in a 1967 letter to Lil Picard, was still calling Lynn “the love of my life”—and referring to her lover as “a quiet bore.” By that time, Pat hadn’t been in touch with Lynn Roth for years.²³

In the extremity of her feelings for Lynn, it began to cross Pat’s mind again that she might be going “actually insane,” so she gave herself another of those little quizzes with which she liked to test her sanity. Could she follow “attentively and with interest” a news broadcast on the radio? She could. But she was still “homeless, miserable, where I am, my possessions—scattered, my love gone and yet worse, not entirely gone: she tantalizes me.” She was also suffering with another infected tooth and afflicted—as only an experienced hypochondriac can be—with “the many, many other bodily ailments that remind of Death, the final conqueror.” She compared herself to all the “concentration camp victims” she’d failed to describe on all her visits to DP camps in Europe.²⁴

It was now that someone told her—she recorded the information with obvious self-reference—that “the manic-depressive affliction is one of the few psychoses that are…nearly impossible to cure.” And it was now that she composed her clear identification with the “other” side of life.

“Whatever pity I have for the human race is a pity for the mentally deranged, and for the criminals. (That is why they will always be the best characters in whatever I write.)” Normal people “do not need help. They bore me.”²⁵

Jack Kerouac, one year younger than Pat Highsmith and crisscrossing the United States at about the same time that she was, had already typed out his own identification with the “mad” in 1951: the long, formless, culture-changing riff which would be published as On the Road in 1957. He wrote:

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.²⁶

Kerouac, like many of the Beats, was infinitely more expansive about his experience of life than Pat had ever wanted to be. (Until he, too, aging prematurely and bloated with alcohol, turned to obsessions and anti-Semitism.) It was only William S. Burroughs—older and colder than the other Beats—whose misogyny, repelled examinations of homosexuality, and personal acts of criminality might have resonated with the disaffected Miss Highsmith. Pat and Burroughs could easily have crossed each other’s paths in Texas and Mexico City, where Burroughs “accidentally” blew his wife Joan Vollmer’s head off in 1951.

It was in this “criminal” mood (but when was Pat not in this mood) that the idea of writing a novel about the “pursuit of evil” (The Pursuit of Evil would be one of her discarded titles for this novel and The Thrill Boys, another one) began to attract her.