• 2 •
Part 2
It is late April, still the cruellest month, in 1965. And it is London, still “swinging”—but not for everyone.
London is certainly not swinging for Patricia Highsmith, the attractive, fiercely ambitious, and, in Europe at least, seriously regarded forty-four-year-old American “suspense” writer whose alabaster skin and almond eyes have only just begun to show the signs of her drinking and her disappointments. She has driven down to North London—she has some business with the BBC1—from her rural residence in Suffolk, Bridge Cottage in Earl Soham, having passed the winter holidays of 1964–65 in her usual festive spirits.
“The holidays here exhaust one, creeping through closed windows like a poisonous gas,” Pat writes from Suffolk, sounding just like a Highsmith character. Never one to greet the New Year with anything like enthusiasm (“Happy New Year…I hate the phrase”),2she complains steadily of the English weather, the English temperament, and the “dreary” English pubs with their “dangerous dart-games.”3 She is—this has only darkened her mood—deep in the dying stages of an English love affair.
The object of Pat’s affections is a vibrantly attractive, classically cultured, solidly married Londoner—we’ll call her Caroline Besterman*—and she is the most profound attachment of Pat’s adult life. Pat’s first meeting with Caroline in London in the summer of 1962 left her love-struck as never before. The honeymoon the two women managed to steal in France that autumn set the seal on their love affair. Pat flew over to Paris from New York to scoop Caroline shyly off the boat train from London and spend a delerious long week with her in a hotel in the Sixth arrondissement, a week Pat described in scorching terms. “She…melts into my arms as if she were smelted by Vulcan expressly for that purpose. I can make love happily to her all night long.” 4
Some of this love affair was conducted in public. Pat, whose late-life neighbors in Switzerland saw her shudder away from the touch of other people, even to the extent of refusing formal handshakes, felt free enough on the streets of Paris in late 1962 to embrace Caroline Besterman so passionately that her own earring flew off and rolled out of sight down the Boulevard St-Germain.5
“‘Can I kiss you in some doorway?,’” Pat asked, deferentially.
“‘Never mind the doorway,’” said Caroline.6
When they could bear to leave their bed, the two women dined and drank à la française, paid a visit to Baudelaire’s tomb and Notre Dame, went to the ceremonies for the Prix Goncourt (Pat was a little surprised to see a woman win),7 and met several times with Pat’s French translator, Jean Rosenthal, who gave her clear advice about French publishing houses. Pat, trying to hide her new relationship from Rosenthal and his wife, travelled with Caroline out to a small studio in St. Cloud where they saw a soundless preview of Le Meurtrier, Claude Autant-Lara’s film of Pat’s novel The Blunderer. Caroline found the lead actor, Maurice Ronet, “very attractive” and Pat thought the film “very intense, quite faithful to the book.”8 Their long week together was a rare combination of business, culture, and pleasure.
On her way back to the States, the enraptured Pat made a quick stop in London, where Caroline booked her a room at Oscar Wilde’s last London hotel, the Cadogan. Pat paid a secret visit to Caroline’s marital home, kissed her “in several rooms, though not in every one of them!” and celebrated by playing songs from the cast album of Pal Joey before taking a taxi to the airport. Pat was followed as far as the gate by Caroline—and accompanied onto the plane by the bottle of Gordon’s gin she kept in the large woven Mexican bag she always carried with her: her bolsa.9
Back in her house in New Hope, Pennsylvania, in November, Pat finds that all terms are inadequate to her feelings. And that all feelings are inadequate to her situation:
Beauty, perfection, completion—all achieved and seen. Death is the next territory, one step to the left. I don’t want to see any more, to feel or experience any more…. Pleasure has already killed me, transformed and translated me…. I am the drunken bee wandered into your household. You may with courage eject me through the window; or by accident step on me. Be assured, I’ll feel no pain.10
Love, as usual, makes Pat think of death, of murder. And thoughts of death, also as usual, force her into a decision.
“But there is no use in making any further effort to live without her. I cannot. And in all my 41 years, I have never said or written this about anyone else before.”11
So, although Pat was correcting the proofs of her much-rewritten novel The Two Faces of January, and had been hoping “to do a short story & make a beginning on paper of the prison novel [The Prisoner, later The Glass Cell]” she’d been imagining since September of 1962, she “cleared [her] complicated decks,”12 left her possessions and her rented house in New Hope, where she’d been living since 1960, and, in early 1963, crossed the wine-dark seas and settled in Earl Soham in Suffolk (after moving from Paris to Positano into the house she’d rented the summer before, and thence to Aldeburgh; despite her reference to Emily Dickinson’s “drunken bee,” the “beeline” was never part of Pat Highsmith’s approach to travel) in what had been two country cottages, now “knocked together” as one dwelling: Bridge Cottage.
The double structure of Bridge Cottage suits Pat’s psychology just as much as the ambiguities of this love affair with Caroline Besterman, someone else’s wife, suit her temperament.
As her feelings for Caroline sink into familiar acrimony (Pat has a fetching habit of falling for women because they are married, then berating them for being attached to their husbands), Pat spends the Suffolk winter of 1964–65 holed up in her “brick-floored” study; freezing, brooding, and trying hard to understand her new country.13 “England is brilliant at describing its own shortcomings, very slow at doing anything about them.”14 She is also making “Notes on Suspense” for a book she is writing for a Boston publisher.
“Suspense writers, present and future: Remember you are in good company. Dostoyevsky, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe…there are hacks in every kind of literary field…. Aim at being a genius.”15
She saws wood to warm herself instead of firing up her stoves—“I become more Scrooge-like with age,” she confesses16—and she does not take her mother’s practical advice about the excellent insulating properties of old newspapers.17
“I see little of my friend [Caroline Besterman]…,” Pat writes to her college chum in New York, Kingsley Skattebol, in January of 1965. “It is hard to bear when I sit alone in the country 98% of the time.”18 Kingsley is one of Pat’s oldest friends, but she has never been told that Pat and Caroline Besterman are lovers, and she will not learn this interesting fact until after Pat’s death.19 Pat likes to partition her confidences, imagine herself as emotionally neglected (a satisfying habit since childhood), and calculate the percentages of her unhappiness.
Actually, Pat is having a much better time in Earl Soham than she lets on. She has made fast friends with her obliging neighbor, the writer Ronald Blythe, who is working on his soon-to-be-acclaimed book about Suffolk, Akenfield, when he first meets her. Ronald Blythe invites Pat into his circle of artistic and literary males. Amongst them is James Hamilton-Paterson, future author of Gerontius and Cooking with Fernet-Branca. Hamilton-Paterson once walked out of a room after Pat had erupted in a “brief burst of tears.”20 “I don’t blame him,” wrote Pat, who would certainly have done the same thing herself; “give him my love.”21
Ronald Blythe and Pat see each other regularly; he, “cycling to Earl Soham to have supper with her, or she, coming to see me in her Volkswagen.” They go on day trips together to scout out old churches and unfamiliar pubs, they cook for each other (Pat always “left stuff on her plate, smoked between courses, and didn’t much like food”), and—dedicated writers both—they communicate by letter between visits, even though they live only four miles apart.
“She was a great ranter,” Ronald Blythe says. And there is certainly “a great deal” of ranting about Caroline Besterman in Pat’s early letters to him, while her conversation was “full of hatred for her mother and wild goings on.” But Pat never ranted at Blythe or even quarrelled with him—perhaps because he never challenged her. “She had beautiful manners,” he thinks, “lovely manners…and I got used to her excessive language.”22
But there are sharp drops into strangeness in their friendship. Cycling home from a visit to Pat, Ronald Blythe—then a warden of his village church, now a canon of the cathedral—was once “overcome by a kind of terrible darkness. I felt quite ill, as though I’d been in the presence of something awful…. And then the next time we saw each other she said that, well, some things about her, I wasn’t to worry about them. She knew [what I’d been feeling]…. It never happened again[,] but I had just felt awful in her presence.”23
And on “one or two occasions,” Pat breached the boundaries of their friendship with “a faint, physical exploration…Her attitude was a kind of trespass on my body, rather like a man examining me…. I couldn’t understand it really, [but] it was of no importance whatsoever.”*They were never, says Dr. Blythe, lovers in any conventional sense; this was something else. Something, quite possibly, to do with Pat’s rather clinical interest in the male anatomy and in what she once identified as “the thrill of domination.”24
Ordinarily, though, Pat is “very close and affectionate and warm and touching. [Our] relationship was almost entirely about writing…. We didn’t have anyone near we could talk to about writing [and so] we talked by the hour about our work…. I took all my friends to see her.”25
The Suffolk solitude Pat complains of in her letters (and describes self-pityingly in her notebooks, her cahiers) is far more populous and social than she cares to admit. And so, as she chats for hours on end about her work to her fellow writer Ronald Blythe, she is also inserting into her little handbook-in-progress for suspense writers, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1965), this resonant antipathy:
“I cannot think of anything worse or more dangerous than to discuss my work with another writer. It would give me an uncomfortably naked feeling.”
Like most writers, what Pat really likes to set down in her notebooks are the things that disturb her, the daily and historic irritations rasping away at her nerves. Because of this, her meticulous self-archiving—at the end of her life, there will be eight thousand pages of notebooks and diaries—can be deceptive. The areas of Pat’s life which do not bother her often go unrecorded.
Taking Patricia Highsmith at her “word” will always be a complicated business.
Just now, Pat has come to London to stay for a few days with Barbara Ker-Seymer—the impeccably well-connected, once-bohemian portrait photographer and close friend of most of London’s twenties and thirties Café Society—and Ker-Seymer’s lover, the enterprising Barbara Roett.
The Barbaras live together in a charming crescent street in Islington with a house on one side of the crescent’s curve and a studio en face. They prefer to have Pat stay with them because, as Barbara Roett says, “if she were only visiting us, it was hell.” When Pat came to London “it was for a binge, [she liked] to chat and tirade around the house until quite late…whereas we wanted to go to bed at a reasonable time.”26 It was much easier to give Pat keys of her own.
“Quarrelling with Pat,” says Barbara Roett, “would be like quarrelling with a dog with rabies. You could get bitten. But it wasn’t the fear of being bitten, it was the fear of knowing better…. When I understood her…I felt a compassion for her. I thought she was isolated from love in a simple way: Love your parents.”27
On the other side of London, in a leafy part of Kensington, in a lovely old house with steps that curve like a castle staircase from the walk in its front yard to the top of the house’s final floor, lives another friend of Pat Highsmith. Let us call her Camilla Butterfield.* Camilla Butterfield’s house is filled with books and comfortable corners, woodcuts are on the walls, and out in back there is a fragrant, well-tended garden whose green shade gives a slightly aquarium cast to the ground floor.
Pat has just lunched at Mrs. Butterfield’s, leaving her white English Volkswagen parked in the drive while she goes off to do her business at the BBC. She intends to return, pick the car up, and head back to the two Barbaras’ house in Islington, where she will once again spend the night.
Suddenly the telephone rings at Mrs. Butterfield’s house, and it proves to be an unsettling call. It is Pat’s mother, Mary Coates Highsmith—always well provided with the coordinates of Pat’s friends and lovers—and she has arrived in London from the United States with rather less warning than the Blitz. In a distinctively deep Southern voice, unplaceable, says Mrs. Butterfield, as to social class, and very upset, Mary Highsmith begins to relate a sorry tale.
It seems that Mary, who flew from Texas without a hotel reservation, had directed her taxi driver to take her to the Cavendish Hotel. When “the driver finished laughing,” he told Mary that the Cavendish was nothing more than a hole in the ground; it had just been pulled down.28 Worse, Mary’s luggage had been misplaced when she transferred planes in New York City and her traveller’s checks had been lost or stolen at the venerable Hotel Earle in Greenwich Village.29 So Mary Highsmith was stranded on her first day in London with no money, no luggage, no idea of where her daughter might be, and no place to stay. It was “a bad beginning for the poor woman” and the herald of worse to come.30
Mary had the presence of mind to ask the taxi man to drive around and find her a hotel, which he did. Mrs. Butterfield thinks it was “something in Bloomsbury.” On the telephone, says Mrs. Butterfield, Mary had:
announced herself as “Mrs. Highsmith”—of course one doesn’t do that—and begun this long, terrific series of complaints in a deep Southern voice. All about Pat and everything else. She was neglected, she said, and Pat knew she was coming. Well, I don’t know that Pat did know she was coming. So I told her that Pat was at the BBC and that…I would give Pat the message immediately when she came back.31
Pat returned from the BBC to pick up her car at about four o’clock, “or even a bit later, drinks time.” Camilla Butterfield, privy to Pat’s version of the tangled emotional relations between the Highsmith mother and daughter, opened the door and greeted Pat jauntily. “Brace yourself,” she announced; “the Deep South has arrived.
“And Pat fainted away right on the doorstep.
“It was incredible and it was more than a faint. Her legs just gave way. She just crumpled into a heap on top of herself, like a doll, so to speak.
“I’ve never seen anything like it.”32
Pat recovered herself quickly, and, despite the fact that she was driving back to Islington, Mrs. Butterfield poured her a large drink, then gave her Mary’s message and the telephone number. But Pat didn’t ring her mother. She drove straight back to North London.
Camilla Butterfield discovered subsequently that Pat and Mary “were in touch, and so I invited them to tea. It was brave of me, but I was curious.”33
When Mrs. Butterfield’s husband came back to Kensington from work at about six o’clock on the afternoon of the tea party, he found his wife in “a state of shock. After Pat and Mary Highsmith had gone, the air quivered,” says Mrs. Butterfield, “and I just sat on. My husband came in—he had no idea anyone had been in the house—and he said to me: ‘You look as though you’ve been through an earthquake.’
“‘Take me out to dinner,’ I said, ‘I have.’”34
Camilla Butterfield recollects that she sat motionless for about twenty minutes after Mary and Pat left her house, so the tea party couldn’t have lasted very long, perhaps an hour and a half. But it was, Mrs. Butterfield thought, “quite long enough.” She remembers that the “atmospheric pressure” of the room was “incredible.” It was “as though some disturbance in the air had passed through the house and torn everything apart.” She felt as though she’d “been in a thunderstorm.
“Well, of course, Pat and Mary were mutually antagonistic, but they were also both very rattled. It was chaos, just chaos. Everywhere things were put down out of place. I had made quite a nice formal tea party for them—I had gone to quite a lot of trouble—and when they’d finished, when they’d gone, there was a teacup here and a saucer over there. And a bit of sandwich there, a tea strainer here, and an olive in a plant, and the ashtray…Well, it was chaos. After that I think they went straight back to Suffolk and there were dreadful scenes there.”35
There were indeed dreadful scenes between Pat and her mother, Mary, at Bridge Cottage in Suffolk; so dreadful that Pat had to call in Dr. Auld, the local physician, to sedate them both. Pat reported that Mary had threatened her with a coat hanger—and each woman said things the other never forgot.
Four years earlier, Mary Highsmith had written to her daughter: “I believe you would gladly put me in Dachau if it were possible without a minute’s thought.”36 And Pat told her cousin Dan that during Mary’s visit to Bridge Cottage in Suffolk she had locked up her writing “at night, out of instinct” because she was certain her mother meant to destroy it.37
Patricia Highsmith and her mother, Mary Coates Highsmith—let us take the kind of shortcut that only an introduction permits—were each other’s deepest experience of love. This was a rich recipe for hell on earth for both women. “I adored my mother, and could see no wrong in her, until I was near 17,” Pat said at forty-six.38 This version of love would later be measured only by the violence of Pat’s rejection of it—and by her violent rejection of Mary.
Art is always the issue of a “tangled bank” and its making is an infinitely complicated matter, but Patricia Highsmith’s earth-cracking reversal of feeling for her mother was almost certainly a crucial source for the upside-down view of the world she created in her work—as well as an inspiring pattern for the inverted way she lived most of her affections. Because of it, in spite of it, her retreats in life and her advances in art often appear to adhere to strict dictionary definitions of the word “perverse.”
Mary and Pat had what the French call un amour fusionnel. Neither woman could distinguish herself from the other in her deepest feelings. And so Pat’s lifelong horror at her mother’s “failed career” and “irrational behavior” were her worst fears for herself made flesh. And Mary’s long-lived anguish at Pat’s “disloyalties” and attachments to other women was the rage of someone who felt she was losing her love of self, losing the love that belonged to her self. Their profound emotional competitiveness—it would surface from time to time like the flash of a fin above water signalling danger to limbs dangling below—was that of Terrible Twins, Alter Egos, Substitute Siblings locked in a struggle for each other’s—and for yet one more woman’s—love.*
In later life, when thrown together, Pat and Mary (as Mrs. Butterfield’s husband, who experienced only the aftershocks of a disturbing tea party, quickly guessed) made the earth tremble—and not in the conventional way. Chasms of unsatiated pain and need opened in each of them and they devoured each other: first, in love—according to both of them, they had years of only slightly clouded affections, and their early, affectionate letters are the hard copy of these softer feelings—and then in a lifetime of rage and recrimination. There is no mediating a relationship like this, and all their attempts to do so fell into horrible failure. They could not bear each other’s company and they could not leave each other alone.
From the fastness of her care home in Texas, in July of 1972, Mary wrote to Pat in France that she looked like “Dracula” in her photographs, that her books were “forgotten” in America, that no single bookseller in Fort Worth (Mary’s current point of reference) knew Pat’s name.39 What Pat wrote to Mary has been mostly lost, but what she wrote about her was awful enough: Mary was an inert vegetable, a useless tube, a devouring cloaca with Pat’s money being shoveled in at one end (very little of it was, as a matter of fact) and shit coming out the other.40
Earlier still, when Mary was sexually viable, Pat wrote her into a slightly more elevated role. Mary was Pat’s Bitch from Hell: the paradigmatic femme fatale who haunted all Pat’s works and whose shadow Pat stalked in so many of her own sexual affairs, night dreams, and fantasies.
Pat kept a file whose documents, she truly hoped, would prove to the world that her mother was mad. She labelled the file “FOR DOCTOR OR PSYCHIATRIST ONLY.” 41 If Mary were mad, Pat’s thinking went, then she herself must be sane. Pat also thought—this is more complicated—that Mary “would not have become semi-insane, if I had not existed.” 42
Sanity was a central preoccupation of Patricia Highsmith, who, in certain solid ways, knew herself very well indeed. She worked hard at sanity and was mostly successful at it. Her icy, invigilator’s eye scanned her own behavior and monitored her own thoughts regularly and often, the way a searchlight sweeps a prison yard for escaping convicts. “I think I have some schizoid tendencies, which must Be Watched,” she wrote grimly.43 And then again: “I fear the madness in me, quite near the surface.” 44
Whenever a destructive feeling tunnelled its way out of confinement and fled howling out into the night, Pat swivelled her lamp, surveyed the terrain around her prison, and froze the miscreant in its tracks. Not, of course, before it had done some impressive damage—usually during the dinner hour. Meals were often a problem for Pat, and she made them a problem for the people she ate with, too. One of her funniest legacies (at this distance from her table, at least) is the long list of her thoroughly harrowed dinner partners.
“How one slides in and conforms easily within a limited sense of course to ‘normalcy,’” 45 Pat noted with her customary detached interest in 1939. But she would hear nothing except that her mother was crazy.
Mary, a considerable force in her own right, felt the same way about her daughter. “Pat is SICK,” Mary wrote to one of Pat’s lovers.46 Their moods were tied and twinned.
Relations like this one are not for sissies. Unfortunately, each woman, though capable of iron-willed action, was also constitutionally quite timid and given to replacing an analysis of her family situation with Vesuvian eruptions of anger and name-calling. So there was no bridge back. It was everybody’s fault and it was nobody’s fault. “We are in a vicious circle,” Pat wrote in a moment of clarity, “of which each of us forms one half. Each the cause and the result. And we can’t change the course.” 47
Across their self-made chasm the two women howled brokenheartedly at each other—it was always the howl of love betrayed, the curdled milk of mother-daughter misapprehension—and for very nearly half a century Pat Highsmith’s relationship with her mother, Mary, was the real love that dared not speak its name.
[C]ould I possibly be in love with my own mother? Perhaps in some incredible way I am. And it is the recalcitrance in all of us that shows in my ingratitude for my mother’s overzealous effort to please me, and to do things for me. It is the old story of things being too simple—and out of our refusal to throw our love to the easiest and most deserving and most logical object.48
Without understanding this fundamental dynamic—that some version of love was, not at the bottom exactly (there is no bottom to Pat Highsmith’s bag of literary tricks), but somewhere in the forefront of her approach to the world (“My excess baggage—no pun—I’m in no mood for joking—is the eternal love I cannot turn loose of,” Pat wrote at forty-one)49—there is no understanding Mary Patricia Highsmith. Which, of course, is not quite the “real” name—for even in death, Pat’s fascination with sleight of hand seems to have pulled one more stunned bunny from her overstuffed identity hat—of Her High Darkness, Patricia Highsmith: author of some of the twentieth century’s most dangerous fictions.*
Highsmith’s work, at its best, is highly unusual. At its very best (six or seven of the novels and a double handful of the short stories), it is like nothing that surrounds it in time and space. It is far stranger (she was very strange), far more obsessive and original and hallucinatory, than anything else in its immediate literary landscape. It splays across genres, interrogates genders, provides as thorough an anatomy of guilt as can be found in contemporary literature, and attacks its readers right where they live. And—an oddly convincing proof of its staying power—quite a bit of it is as flat as Kansas and clumsily phrased to boot.
In very nearly everything she wrote, good intentions corrupt naturally and automatically, guilt often afflicts the innocent and not the culpable, and life is a suffocating trap from which even an escape artist like the talented Mr. Ripley cannot find a graceful exit. Although she never tried to achieve its style, High Art was always Highsmith’s inspiration. What makes her own work so undefinably odd is that most of her murdering, mutilating, muggish characters are inspired by it as well.
There is often a bit of blood in the corner of a smile—and a recommendation to read Henry James; a knife turning restlessly in someone’s hand at the mildest moment—and a preference for the poems of Auden; a lunch punctured by a horrible suspicion—and a man weeping at the grave of Keats.
“I don’t think my books should be in prison libraries,” Pat Highsmith wrote circumspectly in 1966. They probably shouldn’t be in bedroom libraries, either; no Highsmith fiction qualifies as a book before bedtime. Her work belongs way down at the bottom of the Sandman’s bag where all the bad dreams are kept. While quite literally preserving her own life, her writing quite figuratively endangers ours. It’s a hard job, but only Patricia Highsmith could manage it in exactly this way.
Highsmith was an amazingly fecund creator. She had, she wrote in a grating and characteristically unpleasant comparison, “ideas as often as rats have orgasms” and they came to her in many forms. Aside from her scores of published works, she left 250 unpublished manuscripts of varying length, thirty-eight writer’s notebooks (or “cahiers,” as she rather grandly called them, using a term from a language she couldn’t really speak), and at least eighteen diaries. She drew, she sketched, she made sculpture. She hand-crafted furniture and carved out little statues. Her notebooks and diaries are punctuated with charts, symbols, line drawings, and thumbnail sketches. She pasted up her own Christmas and birthday cards and decorated the covers of all fourteen of her fat press books with cutouts and lettering of her own devising. At the end of her life, she tried oil-painting lessons, but quarrelled with her teacher. The teacher said that Pat had her own way of doing things.
“I dabble in all the arts,” Pat wrote in a 1961 quatrain, “And make a mess of each. / I’m a person of many parts, / With a goal beyond my reach.50
She couldn’t not make art—but she often preferred to practice it as a craft: i.e., the kind of art that comes out of daily life and goes back into it as something useful. She made her own mailbox in Fontainebleau,51 and she rifled dumps for odd objects to incorporate into indoor mobiles and outdoor assemblages.52 She insisted that furniture making and digging a garden gave her as much pleasure as writing.
But it was the writing that was essential to her. She lived to write and she literally wrote, as we shall see, for her life. There is no imagining her life without her work. You have to see it to believe it (the preceding chapter is a faithful portrayal of Pat at her desk), and you have to believe it to understand its life-sustaining importance to her.
After one or two unpublished starts—The Click of the Shutting and The Dove Descending are the interesting ones—Highsmith simply leapt full blown into the set of styles and modalities which she would continue to employ until she aged and iced and became too removed from her sources—and too ill—to do her best work. Or any work at all. And if she couldn’t do her work, there was really not much reason to go on. Her last writer’s notebook, Cahier 38, titled and prepared by her for use when she was dying of two competing diseases, is very eloquently blank.
“There is no depression for a writer but a return to the Self”,53 Pat wrote in 1960 (and again, in slightly altered form, in Ripley Under Ground in 1970), neatly separating her “Self” from her work. And no writer has more successfully concealed the ways in which her art and her life transfused each other’s material than the talented Miss Highsmith. The Patricia Highsmith who did the writing and the Pat Highsmith who lived the life, like Terrible Twins arising from the vapors of her youthful obsession with both sides of her complicated parentage (“Deep in my heart stands a silver sword with two edges,” she declared at twenty-four),54 stalked each other for more than fifty years, forging out of their deep and necessary doubling a very profitable partnership.
In thirty volumes of horrific novels and uncannily unpleasant short stories, and in eight thousand obsessively notated pages of notebooks and diaries, the two Highsmiths rehearsed the same primary wounds and repeated the same compulsive themes, passing them back and forth with a dexterous flick of the writer’s wrist and (as Henry James once said of an expatriate American life he was writing) a slight rotation of aspects.55 Only illness and the last big move of her life to Switzerland were able to dissolve Highsmith’s long-enduring doubles act.
Doubled, too, were the problems of her nationality. Pat was as American as rattlesnake venom—and never more so than in her valiant attempts to master in exile that uniquely American vocation (Benjamin Franklin invented it for Poor Richard’s Almanack, Scott Fitzgerald adapted it for The Great Gatsby) of self-help. Many of the obsessive little lists and charts she devoted herself to making are all about strenuous self-improvement and serious self-betterment. As hard (almost) on herself as she was on everyone else, Pat would list and compare what she considered to be her own failing traits or the failing traits of others; she would contrast these traits with her goals or with her romantic ideals; and she would resolve to do much, much better.
At the end of one riveting chart plotted out in 1945 when she was twenty-four—it rates her women lovers by category and character trait—she writes:
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.56
And then she adds, typically: “From the two most advantageous, I fled, was false.”57
Gary Fisketjon, Pat’s editor at Atlantic Monthly Press and Knopf in New York, who met her infrequently, drank with her socially, and found her “terrific company,” felt that Pat was like a “child of 10 or 11” who has been told she had to “grow up on her own.” “Keeping lists like that,” he thinks, “is the way a child figures out how to live in an alien world.”58
Larry Ashmead, the legendary American editor who supervised her novels at Doubleday, Simon & Schuster, and Lippincott, caught Pat in a distinctly performative mood one night in the late 1960s when he telephoned her in London and invited her to dinner.
“And she said to me, ‘Remember, no romance.’ I recall that very clearly. She was very gruff. And I said: ‘Of course not, we’re just meeting for the first time.’
“She was very talkative at dinner and she was drinking, which was par for the course…. She had bought this house in France and she wanted to take her [pet] snails there, and she couldn’t take them because there’s a gastronomic law: no transportation of live snails into France. But she was slowly smuggling them in. Every time she went, she would put some under her breasts and take them in that way. And, as I was eating my steak tartare, she was telling me this story and I wanted to say something about the state of her breasts. But I thought that would be too ‘romantic,’ so I didn’t.”*59
Otto Penzler, who published seven of Pat’s books under his Mysterious Press imprimatur in Manhattan during the 1980s and remains “a great fan” of her work, had a series of exchanges with her which were so dire that he concluded it must be her character that was preventing her books from selling in the United States.
“She was a horrible human being. I think people somehow feel it. They don’t know why they know it, but they don’t like Pat…. Who wants to identify with a character in a Highsmith story?…[T]hese are mean-spirited people, they have no humanity, no spirit of shared experience, they’re otherworldly in a way.”60
Otto Penzler is correct. Highsmith Country is another world. And Patricia Highsmith was its only begettor.
In 1967, when Pat’s American agent, Patricia Schartle (later Patricia Schartle Myrer), reported that the reason editors said her paperbacks weren’t selling in the States was that they were “too subtle” and that there was “no one likeable in the book,” Pat’s response was: “Perhaps it is because I don’t like anyone. My last books may be about animals.”61 One of them—The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder (1975)—was.
A libertarian au fond (but a libertarian who preferred countries where there was an established “peasant class” and who was regularly enraged by the “liberties” other people were entitled to), Pat believed with all her heart that people ought to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and “stand on their own two feet.” Just as she had always done, just as her enterprising family had always done. She had the Calvinist worldview and tried her best to refuse the theology that went with it. Count Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America she read in preparation for writing The Talented Mr. Ripley one long, hot summer in western Massachusetts, noted similar leanings in the citizens of North America during his travels across that continent in 1835. He thought—correctly, it turns out—that such traits would lead to isolationism.
But it was her lifelong lovers’ quarrel with her “mother-country” (that’s what she called it) and the lifelong self-exile that quarrel produced which were the most significant signs of Pat Highsmith’s Americanism. American artists, flinging bitter indictments of their native land over their shoulders, have always refugeed to Europe for cultural development, political shelter, and artistic support. The youthful Pat shared this pleasant dream of a self-liberating European continent. It’s a dream usually entertained by Romantics in love with displacement and the favorable rate of currency exchange whose imaginations have been colonized by European novels long before their actual selves have had to rub up against the realities of European life.
At twenty-six Pat wrote:
“My most persistent obsession—that America is fatally (from my point, an artist’s point of view) off the road of the true reality, that the Europeans have it precisely.”62
But Pat Highsmith does not slip comfortably into any convenient categories, and her European expatriatism was unlike that of any other American artist: it did not contribute to her “development.”
Although her fictions include many serious critiques of the American society she left behind, her unusual way of living—the constant moves (early on, she began the compulsive, roving patterns that were to govern the rest of her life; her mother said she was “born restless”), the protections her solitudes and her obsessions required, the insularities of her own nature—encouraged her to archive, conserve, and concentrate the social maladies and personal biases she brought with her when she first arrived in Europe. Many of these maladies festered away untreated in the high-security cell of her long exile, and her later life was disfigured by open, ugly expressions of the racial and ethnic prejudices which found their first form in her high school notebooks. For the most part, her fictional work—the work she allowed to be published—escaped the infection.
Principally, it was anti-Semitism that clawed her, although it is difficult to label as an anti-Semite someone who threatened to leave her entire fortune to the Intifada. (Palestinians are Semites too.) “Jew-hater” is really the proper term for what Patricia Highsmith was. When she wasn’t calling the Holocaust “Holocaust, Inc.,” she was referring to it as the “semicaust”—apparently because it had destroyed only half of world Jewry. And she was none too fond of Blacks, Italians, Portuguese, Latinos, Catholics, Koreans, East Indians, “Red Indians,” small, dark children, or, if you look closely at her work (we will), Arabs, either.
Naturally, given the deep divisions and strange attractors in her nature, Pat’s Jew-hating came partnered with quite a bit of what might be mistaken for its opposite. She had serious love affairs and long, close friendships with many Jews. Jews were her principal employers, her frequent publishers, and they numbered amongst her most consistent supporters. None of this was accidental.
In 1942, the year she graduated from Barnard College, Fate (apparently disguised as a Borscht Belt comedian) made Pat the editorial assistant to a certain Mr. Ben-Zion Goldberg at FFF Publications in Manhattan, a publishing company that provided topical articles to the Jewish press. And so, in her first long-term paying job, Pat Highsmith, scribbling anti-Semitisms in her notebook, also found herself scribbling away on such subjects as Jewish homemaking, Jewish art, and Jewish culture for The Jewish Family Year Book—an employment she entirely neglected to mention in the article “My First Job” she wrote for The Oldie magazine in 1993.63
Pat seemed to admire Hannah Arendt—she cited Arendt’s residency in Tegna for having made that region “famous”64—but she read Arendt’s Anti-Semitism: Part One of the Origins of Totalitarianism in conjunction with Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf as though the two works were of equal argument. In the same high school notebook in which she used a repellent epithet for her Jewish classmates, she also recorded her pleasure in a growing friendship with Judy Tuvim—the precocious, fifteen-year-old Jewish Proustian who grew up to become the brilliant, Oscar-winning comic actress Judy Holliday. (This is the place to put a persistent biographical rumor to rest: Pat Highsmith and Judy Holliday were never lovers. It was Judy’s best friend Pat was after.)
Judy’s mother, Helen Tuvim, offered Pat free piano lessons at the Henry Street Settlement House on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Pat, fiercely disparaging Mrs. Tuvim and her family in her notebook (it was the generous quantities of food served in the Tuvim household—such a Jewish trait—that drew the semi-anorectic teenager’s scalding commentary),65 gladly took up the offer of instruction. Pat Highsmith was constitutionally incapable of single-mindedness. She also played the piano rather badly.
In fact, Pat’s rapid rotation of “selves”—those advances and retreats of the extreme emotional states that composed her character—often appear to be guided by Newton’s third law of motion. A student of the classics in her youth, employing a little high Greek at the end of her life (her lone late-life tattoo, hidden under the watchband she wore on her left wrist, was made up of her initials in Greek),66 and deeply involved in her own bodily functions, Pat Highsmith would probably prefer to invoke Galen’s theory of an imbalance of “humours” or Richard Burton’s “atrabiliousness” (an excess of black bile) to explain her vascillations.
Every strong, positive reaction Pat had seemed to force her into a devastating withdrawal. Psychologically, she veered between attraction and revulsion, self-hatred and self-aggrandizement. Not to mention her simultaneous consciousness (and hypergraphic diary and cahier notations) of all her emotional, spiritual, and physical states at once.
It was an exhausting way to live—like seeing double all the time—and Pat began to feel that all her good work came out of having “enough sleep.” Sleep affected her, she said, like the “resurrection of Christ”67 her attachment to it was sacramental and she “honor[ed] sleep as the highest goddess. She is the source sometimes, she is the fuel always, like love and the sun and food.”68
In The Price of Salt, written before she was thirty, Highsmith makes cool, blond, about-to-be-middle-aged Carol tell her teenage lover, Therese, that “all adults have secrets.” In her own midlife, however, Pat rather liked to leave the lid of her personal Pandora’s box slightly raised. If you knew how to read her indirectly dropped clues—a few people did—you were often rewarded with some very interesting views. And sometimes, just like the rest of us, she liked to drop little tidbits about herself and her opinions—but never the same tidbits and often not the same opinions—by tailoring her conversation to the milieu, the political leanings, the degree of closeness, and the sexual tastes of her specific and very separate audiences.
Still, in a lifetime of half-revealed mysteries, there was one secret so important that Pat Highsmith kept it entirely to herself. It was a secret that had to do with her work life and she hid it where people often hide the things they are ashamed of: right out there in plain sight, just like Edgar Allan Poe’s purloined letter.
For at least seven years—long before and after she was a published writer and far more seriously than has been previously assumed—Patricia Highsmith wrote scripts and scenarios for America’s most successful publishing industry: comic book companies. She created dialogue and story lines for dozens of desperate Alter Egos trailing their Superior Selves and Secret Identities through violently threatening terrains and luridly colored fantasies.
If this motif—the threatening terrain, the lurid fantasy, the desperate pursuit of Alter Egos by each other—sounds familiar, it should: it is the central obsession of practically every novel Patricia Highsmith ever wrote, from Strangers on a Train to Ripley Under Water. But she worked on that obsession in the comics before she worked it into her fictions, and, covering her tracks, she obfuscated the comics’ titles she wrote for. “Comics like Superman and Batman,” she sometimes replied when interviewers asked, leaving the impression that “to pay the rent” she’d trifled—ever so briefly in the year after graduating from college—with the lives of those two respectable Superheroes.69
Superman and Batman made good copy, but the truth was much stranger and seven years longer than the little misdirection she gave to the press, and Pat Highsmith—a woman who kept every single artifact associated with her writing for a posterity she fully expected to have—removed all traces of her lengthy comics career from her own archives. Almost all traces, that is.
With the (super)heroic aid of many of the great comics creators and historians of the Golden Age of American Comics, I have been able to exemplify Pat’s long career in the comics, one of only two art forms native to the United States (the other, for the record, is jazz). We can now add “Black Terror,” “Pyroman,” “Fighting Yank,” “The Destroyer,” “Sergeant Bill King,” “Jap Buster Johnson,” “The Human Torch,” “Crisco and Jasper,” “Real Life Comics,” “Spy Smasher,” “Captain Midnight,” “Golden Arrow,” and a panoply of other comics titles, writers, and artists as well as Dostoyevsky, Proust, Kafka, Gide, Wilde, Willa Cather, Julien Green, Graham Greene, and Edgar Allan Poe to the universe of Pat Highsmith’s influences.
Always keen on advancement, Pat tried to write for the high-paying, widely distributed Wonder Woman comic book, but was shut out of the job.70 This was in 1947, just one year before she began to imagine her lesbian novel, The Price of Salt. Wonder Woman, daughter of Amazon Queen Hippolyta and still the heroine of her own comic book, has a favorite exclamation: “Suffering Sappho!” She lives on the forbidden-to-males Paradise Island with a happy coepheroi of lithe young Amazons, and she arrived in America in 1942, in the form of her Alter Ego, Lieutenant Diana Prince, to help the Allies fight World War II. The thought of what Patricia Highsmith, in her most sexually active period (the 1940s were feverish for Pat) and in the right mood, might have made of Wonder Woman’s bondage-obsessed plots and nubile young Amazons can only be inscribed on the short list of popular culture’s lingering regrets.
On the subject of love-and-money—the subject of love of money—Pat was impossible. The richer she got, the poorer she felt and the more costive she became. She knew, of course, what she was doing—“My poverty has become a disease, unfortunately one of the mind”71—and her description of the island of Majorca in 1958 illustrates how she often tried to understand a new experience; she measured it entirely in currency: “Deya, Majorca. 60 pesetas to the dollar. 10 to post a letter airmail to USA. Six for a packet of cigarettes. 45 for a good meal. 50 for table bottle of good (RIOJA) wine.”72
On the subject of love of women, Pat was merely incredible. She appeared to dislike women and said so. Her notebooks are full of disapproving judgements of women as humans and intoxicated statements about them as inspirational love objects. It was an extraordinary position for a lesbian to maintain, but then, the extraordinary was Highsmith’s Saturday Night Special.
At a precocious twenty, she wrote this about love:
I often wonder if it is love I want or the thrill of domination—not thrill exactly but satisfaction. Because this is often more enjoyable than the love itself; though I cannot imagine a domination without love, nor a love without domination.73
But she also wrote this:
Every move I make on earth is in some way for women. I adore them! I need them as I need music, as I need drawings. I would give up anything visible to the eye for them, but this is not saying much. I would give up music for them: that is saying much.74
The emotional experience Pat most often left out of her published fictions was requited love—but her private writings and her life were filled with it. Few writers have been more inspired by love than Patricia Highsmith. She lived for love, she died a thousand symbolic deaths for love, and she killed for love—over and over and over again in her novels.
Her own problem with love was proximity. She could live for love, but she couldn’t live with it. And she really couldn’t bear anything that wasn’t writing for very long.
Here is Pat at twenty-seven, yearning for her society lover, “Ginnie” Kent Catherwood, one of the several “Virginias” she would take into her bed:
My green and red goddess, my jade and garnet, my moss and holly-berry, my sea and sun, my marrow and my blood, my stop and go baby, I adore you, I worship you, I kiss you, I cherish you, I defend you, I defy you ever not to love me, I caress your nipples with my tongue.75
Although she liked to imagine her favorite lovers as goddesses or monarchs, Pat’s behavior in love was usually that of a regicide. She approached the queens of her heart with a crown in one hand and a headsman’s axe in the other. The love affair with Virginia Catherwood which provoked the luscious paragraph above (a paragraph written as their affair was in its final stages of alcohol and accusation) lasted only a turbulent year, but it continued to generate images for Pat’s work for decades. Emotional memory was Pat Highsmith’s personal mausoleum, but it was also her best inspiration for making art.
Touchingly certain that the women she slept with were telling her the truth when they said she was the best lover they’d ever had (she set that phrase down in a cahier or diary whenever she heard it, and she seems to have heard it a lot),76 Pat continued to lie to every one of her girlfriends, usually by omitting information they would have considered vital to love’s understandings.
She carried on multiple affairs involving various degrees of physicality during many of the “committed” love relationships she had, taking care that none of her myriad women friends—or either of her serious male attachments—would ever learn the truth of her fluctuating feelings or the facts about her sexual adventuring.
Pat thought about love the way she thought about murder: as an emotional urgency between two people, one of whom dies in the act. Love had the driving force of a faith for her—“A sexual love can become a religion, and serve as well”77—and she always managed to find Satan at the center of it. “The lover (in love) suffers complete upset of all principles. To the man in love, all axioms, and all truths, may be askew.”78
One reason her work is so often characterized as “amoral” is that the moral disorder that love created in her life always made its way into her novels. But even though crime was always on her mind (like Edgar Wallace’s enigmatic detector, JG Reeder, she saw evil everywhere), and even though murder was her absolute necessity, Pat’s self-hating, self-torturing “hero-criminals” make her—if indeed they make her anything at all—much more of a “punishment novelist” than a “crime novelist.”
A party girl in her Manhattan youth despite her extreme shyness, and very attractive to men as well as seductive to women, Pat had a preference for bowling over both halves of a female couple (another kind of doubling) and extending her charms to their extracurricular lovers as well. In middle age, she began to operate directly on families—including, as it happens, her own. One or two rebelliously feminist ideas came to her while she was forcing herself to sleep with Marc Brandel, the English novelist she was trying to persuade herself to marry. (“I do not feel…that going to bed with him will ever be anything to anticipate with unbridled delight.” “Oh, the unfairness of this sexual business to women!”)79
In the context of her usual thoughts about women, Pat’s “feminist” notions couldn’t be funnier.
Surprisingly—she is often surprising—Pat Highsmith sang in a church choir as late as the age of thirty-seven, joking that the “only trouble is I can be heard when I sing.”80 Joking aside, she makes many references to God—and many more references to Jesus—throughout her cahiers and diaries. Kingsley Skattebol, her oldest friend from school, thinks Pat wasn’t a “God-fearing person, but a God-reverencing one” and that “she attributed to God the custody of her unconscious.”81
Pat’s strong Southern Calvinist family background and stern moral underpinnings have eluded the notice of previous biographers. Her family’s religious history included prominent preachers, interesting apostasies, and a tradition of opposed and opposing religious communities. Much like her overlooked work in the comics, her involvement with religious tenets was another critical part of a life concealed in plain sight. It was responsible for her lifelong preoccupation with Jesus Christ and, to a large extent, for the Big Chill at the center of her work: the one she defined so aptly as “the presence of the absence of guilt.”82
God was a long argument Pat seemed to be having with herself, and it was an argument she eventually lost. “If I happen to think that I can be a happier person for believing in God, then I shall believe,” she wrote pugnaciously in June of 1940, at an age when most college students are flirting with atheism. (Even her religiosity had a practical side.) By 1947, she was more serious about God and more regular about noting her attendance at His services. “Today yes, no church. I miss it. If I don’t go to God for a couple of hours (on Sundays), I like to listen to holy music or words.”83 At twenty-eight, she was still proclaiming God’s central importance:
A certain calm is essential in order to live, relief from anxiety. I myself can never have this without belief in the power of God which is greater than man and all the power in the universe.84
Twenty years later, having given up on church, Pat, still thinking about what it meant to be a “religious person,” provided a perfect description of herself. “It is not in the nature of truly religious people to join anything,” she wrote in an inadvertently revealing little essay, “Between Jane Austen and Philby,” in 1968. “The religious person is ascetic and lives alone…. Anyway, if one has enough sense of guilt, it is not necessary to belong to a church.”85 No one could explain Highsmith more clearly than Patricia Highsmith—especially if she thought she was writing about someone other than Patricia Highsmith.
Of course, Pat had her mother’s Christian Science to combat (evil, Mary Baker Eddy wrote, is only a form of ignorance), and she did so with frequent and convoluted disquisitions on Jesus, with whom, just like her early idol Dostoyevsky, she tended to identify. Later on, a kind of ensorcelled and ecstatic union with a long list of female lovers was her closest approach to religious communion—and much of the inspiration for her writing. (“With the complete opening of the heart in love of another person, there is surely an opening directly to God.”)86
The last person to share a house with her shortly before her death (he was on his way to a monastery and taking care of Pat Highsmith was his six-month preparation for monastic life) thought she was seeking some kind of spiritual life, but couldn’t face the “cage” of religion. Religion was one of the two subjects he had to stop discussing with her.
But I am getting ahead of her story.
All through the 1970s, at her house in the hamlet of Moncourt (the house she loved the best and the one she kept the longest), Pat had a near neighbor, a Czechoslovakian émigré who occasionally did odd jobs for her. Monsieur Knet was exactly the kind of self-made man Pat liked to trade small talk with. He used to return home from his night job in the early-morning hours and note the lighted roof window in Pat’s upstairs bedroom—the only light visible at that hour in the hameau—and the sound of her venerable Olympia portable typewriter clickety-clacking across the courtyard.
And that is how Monsieur Knet remembered Patricia to me: a sharply syncopated sound in the night, a rectangle of eery illumination, a woman sitting at her desk, writing, he said, “frightful things dripping with blood.”
But then he remembered one more thing: “But if she so much as scratched her finger, there would be a terrible drama.”87
Typing away in the attic of her favorite of all the temporary houses she hopes to make permanent, the top of her head framed by the high, lighted window in her writing room so that she appears to her neighbor as a mostly missing portrait nailed up to the night sky, Patricia Highsmith steadily pilots her old German typewriter into the early hours of a cool French dawn…. It’s as good an introduction as any to the life of this profoundly complicated writer who, despite all her restless travels, made her most rewarding journeys seated at her desk in what she called an “appointment kept on the edge of a chair.”88
It scarcely needs saying that “the edge of a chair” is where people usually perch when they expect to receive bad news.
Patricia Highsmith’s news is disturbing—perhaps it was even more disturbing for her than it is for her readers—and she always went to the ends of her nerves to get it. But there is nothing like taking that journey with her (nothing like it in the world, in fact) for illuminating the resemblances between what your imagination has been concealing from you and the pitiless exposures of her dark and dangerous art.
And here that journey must continue.
I wish you a bon voyage.