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Les Girls

Part 6

After separating from Ellen, Pat went back to her flat on East Fifty-sixth Street in Manhattan, the apartment she’d first rented in 1942, with the fire escape and the ladder down to the courtyard that gave easy access to her living quarters. Too easy, it turned out. One day, she returned to the apartment to find five or six boys “hunched over my books and paint boxes”: they had already daubed one of her suitcases with paint. She carefully erased their presence by removing the markings from her suitcase with turpentine. On another day, the boys returned and were having a free-for-all on the fire escape “only two yards from where I sat.” Pat “backed into the far corner of the room like a scared rat,” still frowning with concentration and composing in her mind the sentence she’d left unfinished in her typewriter. She stayed there until the boys clattered down the cast-iron stairs.¹

It was what Pat called the “vicious emotional cycle” of the boys’ noise, and the fear and hatred that were her response to it, that gave her the keime for the beginning of a short story, “The Barbarians,” about a man “who paints on weekends,” is tortured by the sound of handball players just under his window, and takes violent—and ineffectual—action to stop them. Pat called it a story about “the hell of metropolitan society.”² She was keenly feeling that an apartment menaced by rowdy neighborhood boys was not the gracious Manhattan living she had been yearning for in Europe.

Coinciding with the breakup of her four-year relationship with Ellen, and just after the publication of The Talented Mr. Ripley in December of 1955, Pat dropped into another of her seasonal depressions. “My life, my activities seem to have no meaning, no goal, at least no attainable goal…. I can feel my grip loosening on myself.”³ “One wants to die, simply. Not to die, but not to exist, simply, until this is over.” ⁴

It was her usual Christmas/New Year/birthday dip into unworthiness, colored by yet another quarrel with Ellen Hill and accompanied by a deep sense of failure. Despite the good reviews The Talented Mr. Ripley had just received—her bête noire, The New Yorker, found it a “remarkably immoral story very engagingly” written,⁵ and The New York Times Book Review had praised “her unusual insight into a particular type of criminal”⁶—Pat was plunged into an “undefined, unreconciled self.” And that self, if not expressed by daily writing and enhanced by the presence of an attractive woman, was never a self Pat liked to be alone with for very long.⁷

And then, suddenly, in the middle of April, Pat had a new complaint: “What a strenuous thing it is to be in love.”⁸

When Pat fell in love with Doris, a midwesterner working in advertising in Manhattan, it was more than a familiar feeling, it was a familial one. Doris had been living with Lynn Roth when Pat had fallen in love with Lynn, and Lynn had been the ex-girlfriend of Pat’s lover, Ann Smith. The closeted nature of lesbian life—especially closeted in the 1950s—has always made for imbricated relations, but Pat’s relations were more plaited than most. Women were her muses, and she could never quite let go of one woman before reaching for the next one.

But all this was in the past and in the future. Pat, in love with Doris now, was as lyrical as a summer sonnet. She looked into Doris’s eyes and thought or at least wrote: “The trust in the eyes of a girl who loves you. It is the most beautiful thing in the world.”⁹And she went on to praise the “insuppressibly, incorrigibly, happy and optimistic” Agnus Dei of Mozart—as opposed to gloomy old Bach’s B Minor Mass, “oppressed with the hopelessness of the world’s sin.”¹⁰

Falling in love always put Pat in a good mood—at first anyway—and it often increased the number of her petitions to God. So when she fell in love with Doris, Pat made up a little prayer. The prayer shows that love had come again to Pat Highsmith as it always came: violently, subversively, and in the expectation of “pain and disappointment”:

My dear God, who is nothing but Truth and Honesty, teach me forbearance, patience, courage in the face of pain and disappointment.

Teach me hard, because I am stubborn and desperate, and one day I shall take you by the throat and tear the wind pipe and the arteries out, though I go to hell for it. I have known Heaven. Have you the courage to show me hell?¹¹

Pat was beginning to feel more like her “self.”

Doris, a year younger than Pat—Pat generally preferred older women until she became one herself—was a copywriter at the McCann-Erickson Agency in New York. She was also, as Pat wrote to Kingsley, “perhaps overserious, a perfectionist, doesn’t like to go out much (socially)—and [is] very pretty.”¹² Doris was someone, in short, with whom Pat could imagine living. But Doris did not share Pat’s taste for “hell,” “pain,” and “disappointment,” and this was to be a major disappointment for Pat. The crucial consonances as well as the critical oppositions were missing.

Pat and Doris, who had the social connections of Pat’s new agent, Patricia Schartle, to thank for their country retreat, moved from New York to what Pat called “Sneden’s Landing” in the southernmost part of Rockland County. Snedens Landing (Pat the Grammarian always added an unnecessary apostrophe before the final s) was (and is) an exclusive enclave on the Hudson River, part of the hamlet of Palisades, New York. It has always been a haven for people in the arts and show business. Together Pat and Doris bought “a brand new Ford convertible, black, though,” said Pat, “with more chrome than I like. I like none,”¹³ and shared the rental of a converted barn in whose garden Pat grew radishes, string beans, cantaloupes, and sweet peas. But four months after Pat fell in love with Doris, and a little more than a month after they’d moved to Snedens Landing, Pat was writing about “the danger of living without one’s normal diet of passion. Things are so readily equalized, soothed, forgotten with a laugh, with perspective. I don’t really want perspective, except my own.”¹⁴

Faced with domestic tranquility, Pat was itching for a good fight.

During the summer of 1956, Pat began to take notes for what she considered one of her least successful works, her “Mexican” novel, A Game for the Living (she was calling it, typically, “6th Book” in her cahier). She was also finishing the final revisions on Deep Water, the destabilizingly brilliant novel she’d begun as Dog in the Manger, when she and Ellen Hill were quarrelling steadily and productively across Europe. Pat had expanded the book as they continued their fruitful squabbling in the Southwest and down into Mexico, and in the character of Deep Water’s resident psychopath, Vic Van Allen, Pat created a “hero-criminal” who directly challenges gender categories: he refuses sex, cooks and cleans his house with an apron on, takes care of his child, murders two of his wife Melinda’s lovers, and—he’s a completist—murders Melinda as well. Vic also upsets all ideas of sexual proclivity: his major excitements seem to be observing the slow copulations of his companion snails and encouraging his pet bedbugs to draw blood from his arm. And he extends the uses of ingenuity by fostering the rumor that he is a murderer before he has actually knocked anyone off. His blackly blooming imagination permeates the book and delivers him to a state beyond morality. Deep Water is a deeply uncomfortable novel.

Always the good Freudian, Pat wrote that in Vic’s character she was interested in exploring the “evil things,” the “peculiar vermin” that arise from “unnatural [sexual] abstinence.” Vic, she insisted, was “a paranoiac,” a “megalomaniac,” a “fascist, a sadist and a masochist,” and even “insaner than his wife.”¹⁵ Vic is also Pat’s only witty psychopath. When his compulsively unfaithful wife, Melinda (a caricature of predatory female sexuality: even her necklace looks like it’s made of tiger’s teeth), wants to dress herself up as an historical character for a costume party, Vic suggests that she try Madame Bovary. Independently wealthy, Vic’s métier is to design and print exquisite, limited-edition books on his hand-operated press. The suspicions of a distinctly lower-class detective novelist—an unattractive author of bad works who is Vic’s neighbor and Melinda’s ally—lead to the capture of this quietly mad publisher of superior taste and means. Deep Water’s class-conscious author slipped her own social resentments into Vic Van Allen: he yearns for a better class of lover for Melinda, whose taste runs, lamentably, to lounge lizards (Vic wants someone for Melinda he can live with). Pat also saddled Vic with quite a few of her reimagined traits, talents, and leftover feelings for Ellen Blumenthal Hill. But she didn’t acknowledge the resemblances between the author and her psychopathic character when she was ticking off her list of Vic’s psychoses, perhaps because they were the kind of maladies that could only be accommodated at institutions like Austen Riggs or Broadmoor.

By the fall of 1956, Pat was worried both for her work and about it: she was making caustic comments about meticulously editing this manuscript (Deep Water) that wasn’t going to sell, and then identifying, in another quickly extinguished flare of illumination, the ragged hole in her design for living:

“My continuing troubles about my work. My writing, the themes I write on, do not permit me to express love, and it is necessary for me to express love. I can do this only in drawing, it seems.”¹⁶

Pat made a sexual overture to Ellen Hill during this period—and then had a dream in which she was “reminded” of it. In an entry in (bad) French in her notebook, she wrote that the dream began with her making up a couch-bed in the Highsmith family house, reminiscent, no doubt, of all those couch-beds she’d slept on as a girl. Magically infused with the knowledge that she didn’t have to sleep on the couch, she suddenly found herself in bed with her mother, Mary, and her stepfather, Stanley. Mother Mary said clearly: “‘I have news for you. I’m going to throw you out of the house.’”

“She gave me the idea,” Pat wrote aggrievedly, “that I interfered between the two of them.” The idea was not exactly a new one.

The dream came out of Pat’s recent late night in Manhattan. She had stayed over at Ellen Hill’s apartment and made a pass at Ellen; wordlessly, Ellen let her know that she didn’t want to take her back as a lover. “She accepted me, but she rejected me too,” Pat wrote. On waking from this dream in Snedens Landing, Pat reached over and touched Doris, and “was very happy to have her.”¹⁷ Four days later, recovering from one of her innumerable dental procedures and trying to put herself in the “bored with day-to-day, under-my-nose existence, which is what prompts me to write (work) at all,” Pat attacked Ellen Hill bitterly in her notebook.¹⁸

In the same month, November of 1956, in which she stage-managed this dream, Pat started work on what she later described to the fiction writer, journalist, and critic Francis Wyndham as a “political satire in the manner of Voltaire”: a long, labored picaresque she called The Straightforward Lie. Over the years, the manuscript was promptly returned by every publisher she sent it to. Joan Kahn at Harper & Brothers returned it in 1959, after reading both the manuscript and Pat’s naïve comment that it would be “ideal for a hot summer weekend!”¹⁹

The Straightforward Lie is more like the crude scenario for a graphic novel than it is like Voltaire’s Candide, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, or Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas. Still, like Pat’s later, equally primitive political satires, it was proleptic: American foreign policy is what she was getting at, and her tendency to see things in black and white, cru et cuit, serves the piece all too well.

In The Straightforward Lie, a young man, George Stephanost, of dubious sexuality and odd appearance (something about shoes again), wins a trip around the world as a propaganda agent charged with presenting his imperialistic government in the best possible light. George is loathed wherever he goes, beginning his travels by precipitating the suicide of a journalist whose alcoholism he has reported (there’s usually a drinker in anything Highsmith writes, and she made a note saying she was going to dedicate this manuscript “to alcohol”). George is propelled through a series of incidents which show him to be a pompous representative of an overbearing government, jibed at by the fools and knaves of other countries.

As though her imagination had rifled the canon of German folk poetry and come up with the old figure of the bucklicht Männlein—the little hunchback who causes so much trouble for German children in Des Knaben Wunderhorn—Pat provided a small black dancing figure of a man to haunt and harry George. The little man repeats the words “Trouble” and “Evil,” and taunts George with: “They hate you! Ha! HA! Ha!” George, entirely confused, ends up in “a really attractive summerlike place in the country…[t]he Happy Day Asylum,” still haunted by the little black man.

Voltaire, it’s not—but it is Patricia Highsmith. Entirely impaired by her clubbed thumb for satire (her “satire” operates on a level lower than sarcasm) and her less-than-nuanced understanding of global politics, the work still manages to reverse the values other people live by. The Straightforward Lie left a ghostly trace in the other novel Pat was working on at the same time: A Game for the Living. She slipped it into that book as the title of an “illustrated novel…a satire of modern life,” which one of the characters is working on.

In Snedens Landing, Pat had her two cats and a growing family of snails, and Doris had a dog. (Doris’s dog was probably the model for the bulldog puppy with the mutilated ears in Deep Water. Pat wasn’t half done with dogs yet.) They took their Ford convertible to Mexico in January of 1957, apparently to allow Pat to absorb the mise-en-scène for her “6th Book” (A Game for the Living) and to work off her restlessness, and they drove the length of Mexico, staying on well into March. Pat was transfixed by the Mardi Gras in Vera Cruz. “I can set stories here. I can make it better than it is,” she wrote after watching a “Carnavale” parade. In Mexico, it was the transvestites who riveted her: “Gay boys unmasked…One in drag, black short dress, pink cheeks, and a bawdy ‘I dare you’ impudent stare, pursed mouth, and then the tongue stuck out.”²⁰ She didn’t forget them. Pat’s French lover Marion Aboudaram says that in Paris, twenty years later, Pat was always much more amorous when transvestite prostitutes were working the street outside Marion’s apartment in Montmartre.

But Pat’s excitements in Mexico failed to transfer to A Game for the Living. The book gave her trouble in its initial composition and then troubled everyone else when she finished it. Unhappy with the “first sketch of 58 pages,” she wrote: “Don’t know where I’m going, resulting in static effect.”²¹ The book continued to irritate Pat during the several careful revisions her editor, Joan Kahn, requested. This was one of those novels whose murderers Pat changed at an editor’s request; Kahn thought, quite correctly, that it made no sense to have an unknown street boy do the murder. So Pat, who was much more attached to the idea of beginning her novel with the murder of a beautiful woman than she was to the inconsequential murderer she’d chosen, put up no resistance at all and switched her killer to “Carlos.” It didn’t help the story.

No one—including Pat’s agent, Margot Johnson, who found the novel verbose and said so—ever liked it much. And Pat’s attempt to inflict her external reading on what she was writing—she was using a little Kierkegaard for illumination and finding in the gloomy Dane exactly what she had found in Proust, i.e., a recognition of the compulsion to love²²—was just as unsuccessful as her later attempts to impress her superficial understanding of American politics on her novel Edith’s Diary (1977). The real problem was that Pat was uninspired.

Even though Doris left every day for her advertising job in Manhattan, Pat began to complain that she was spending “less time alone” than ever. In January of 1957, she felt crowded enough to invoke her harsh personal rating system again: “In view of the fact that I surround myself with numbskulls now, I shall die among numbskulls, and on my deathbed shall be surrounded by numbskulls who will not understand what I am saying….

“Whom am I sleeping with these days? Franz Kafka.”²³

And on the front of her cahier from this period, in the place where she always put the countries and cities she travelled to, she printed: “New York, Sneden’s [sic] Landing, Santa Fe, Mexico, And Greater Inner and Outer Mediocrity.”²⁴

Happiness never made Pat happy for very long.

Pat began to read more, draw more, and think much more about the delights of moving to another country again. Alone, for preference. She was remembering how well she’d worked on The Price of Salt when she was sailing back alone from her first trip to Europe in 1949, inspired by her long-distance love for Kathryn Hamill Cohen and shut up in a hot little cabin on an Italian freighter where no one spoke any English.²⁵ “This recalls my sensation, when in a non-English speaking country, of being more than usually eloquent. The words come from a fresh and purer spring. Their full measure is recovered.

“…I haven’t the precision of intellect that a good writer needs, nor the sense of dignity when I want to call it up. But in drawing or painting I can always achieve this, if I want to, from a source uncorrupted, uncorrupted by pressure and other people’s opinions.”²⁶

Still, by September of 1957, Pat was making notes for an article she eventually published in The Writer magazine, an article she would expand in a single month in 1965 in Suffolk into Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction. And she was unusually pleased to project herself into the distinguished company in Colin Wilson’s serious study of alienation and creation, The Outsider. “The book stirs my mind to the murky depths (emotional depths) in which I lived my adolescence like Van Gogh and T. E. Lawrence trying ‘to gain control’ by fasting, exercise, routines for doing everything.”²⁷

But nothing helped her relations with Doris.

By January of 1958 Pat was complaining about feeling physically crowded: “My present house is not big enough for two people.” She began to snipe indirectly at Doris’s dog, comparing the “false” loyalty of dogs to the comforting “selfishness” of cats.²⁸ She was missing the exquisite discomforts of her relationship with Ellen Blumenthal Hill: the constant seesaw of emotion from “elation to depression” which had always inspired her best work.²⁹ Without this irritation, the oyster couldn’t produce the pearl.

A poem—it’s an incantation, really—written by Pat in September of 1955, some months before she took up with Doris, makes it plain that her relationship with Doris was doomed before it began.

Her chaste kisses cannot hold me.

Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!

Nor the way her arms enfold me.

Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!

Though I know that she has told me

She would love me all my life,

She would always be my wife.

Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!

I want stronger arms around me,

Insane arms and devils’ kisses,

Teeth that bite my lips and wound me,

Girls whose love will never last.

Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! ³⁰

Trouble, in the form of a secret affair with an attractive older woman (a decade older than Doris), was only six months away.

When Pat and Doris returned from their trip to Mexico in March of 1956, Pat, still feeling the pull of “going to God” on Sunday, joined the choir of the small Presbyterian church in Palisades and continued or tried to continue her peaceful domestic life. Doris worked on a TV script from an idea by Pat, while Pat worked on everything else and made some social gestures. One of her gestures resulted in a meeting with the great choreographer Martha Graham, a neighbor in Snedens Landing; and a photograph of Graham with one of Pat’s Siamese cats lives on in her archives. Pat also met another neighbor, Gertrude Macy, the Broadway producer and Katharine Cornell’s lover, manager, and biographer, who became a lifelong correspondent. Meanwhile, Pat was still making sporadic efforts to integrate her hopes for the world with her continued acceptance of Jesus Christ: “It is conceivable that mankind, with the guidance of a dominant faith in God, can work a system out for their own good, which will be closer to Communism and the word of Jesus Christ than any form of government yet seen on earth.”³¹

Like many Americans in the 1950s, Pat was also thinking about just how the atomic and hydrogen bombs would change the things she cared most about: “the perishability of books…due to H-bombs” was preoccupying her. “This total extinction could not have occurred to the mind of Dickens, for instance…. Now every writer may see himself and his readers quite wiped out.” But she added to her thoughts the inevitable Highsmith detail: “The book may exist, but it’s radioactive. Don’t touch it.”³² She would use that same caveat about a knife—“Don’t touch it”—to end The Cry of the Owl in 1962.

Still, nothing could stop the engine of Pat’s writing for long, and Pat and Doris even made a book together, a book of cartoons and accompanying rhymes called Miranda the Panda Is on the Veranda (Coward-McCann, 1958). Doris made up the rhymes and Pat provided the cartoons, and, even in this sweet, sticky, inconsequential work, Pat refused to allow anything of her seven years’ connection to the comics to appear. The jacket copy simply states: “Her one other occupation involved a short term as a salesgirl in the toy section of a large department store.” Pat, who had loathed all the other salesgirls at Bloomingdale’s, except for one Greenwich Village resident, Rachel Kipness (another of those “good eggs” whose shells she liked to crack), actually preferred to be identified as a “salesgirl” rather than as a writer of comic books.

A book made by two people living together (as Doris and Pat were) suggests a certain degree of emotional stability. Pat couldn’t wait to disrupt it. Her domestic relationship with Doris didn’t offer the painful oppositions she craved, and she knew that the work she was doing now was far from her best. And so Pat—it was no effort at all—fell deeply in love with Mary Ronin.

Aside from her symbolic first name, there were other ways in which Mary Ronin reminded Pat of Mother Mary. She was a commercial artist in a long-term relationship (a relationship Pat did her best to break up) with a wealthy woman who owned a brownstone on New York’s Upper East Side. Charming, from the vivid photograph that remains in Pat’s archives, Mary was also creative and witty. When Pat was living with Marijane Meaker in New Hope in 1961, Ronin sent Pat a birthday card with not a single word on it, just a drawing of herself, nude, in front of a calendar opened to Pat’s birthdate, 19 January. Mary Ronin was sufficiently older than Pat, and sufficiently unavailable to her, to become the kind of tantalizing inspiration Pat could work with. And so, from this mostly denied relationship came one of Pat’s best novels. It’s the story of a pyschopath with a double identity and two names to match it. He creates a house for (and an imaginary relationship with) the woman he loves. And he murders her husband. Pat called her book This Sweet Sickness (1960), and she dedicated it to the other crucial Mary in her life, her mother.^*