The Talented Miss Highsmith (106 page)

114.
PH letter to Millicent Dillon, 5 June 1977 (HRC).

115.
Diary 10, Mar. 17, 1950.

116.
Diary 8, Jan. 25, 1948.

117.
Ibid., Feb. 13, 1948.

118.
Ibid., Feb. 21, 1948.

119.
Ibid., Feb. 26, 1948.

120.
Ibid., Feb. 29, 1948.

121.
Diary 9, 11/3/48.

122.
Gerald Clarke, ed.,
Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote
(New York: Random House, 2004), p. 53.

123.
CWA Donald Windham, 30 June 2004.

124.
Truman Capote letter to Elizabeth Ames, 2 Mar. 1948 (NYPL).

125.
Diary 9, 5/2/48.

126.
PH, Proposed Snail Interview (with Herself), undated.

127.
Diary 8, Mar. 6, 1948.

128.
PH letter to KKS, 2 June 1948.

129.
PH letter to KKS, 30 June 1964.

16. Social Studies: Part 2

1.
MCH letter to Miss Townsend, 27 Apr. 1948.

2.
PH letter to KKS, 2 June 1948.

3.
Diary 8, May 11–30, 1948.

4.
Ibid., May 11, 1948.

5.
There is no evidence in Pat's Yaddo file that she applied to Yaddo again, but Pat writes in her diary that both she and Marc Brandel had their applications for another residency rejected. She thought her public use of alcohol and their sleeping together had something to do with the rejections.

6.
Cahier 15, 16/6/48.

7.
Diary 8, July 5, 1948.

8.
Letter PH to KKS, 2 June 1948.

9.
CWA Phyllis Nagy, 13 Oct. 2002.

10.
Cahier 17, 6/21/48.

11.
Cahier 17, 5/19/48.

12.
CWA Ruda Brandel Dauphin, 31 Jan. 2009.

13.
Cahier 17, 19/5/48.

14.
Diary 8, June 17, 1948.

15.
Ibid., Dec. 22, 1947.

16.
Cahier 17, 7/25/48.

17.
PH,
Strangers on a Train
, p. 181.

18.
Ibid., p. 180.

19.
Ibid., p. 274.

20.
Bruno, who reads only comic books and detective stories and is obsessed with creating “perfect crimes,” enters Guy Haines's nightmares as a creature who looks a lot like the Superhero Batman. Guy dreams of Bruno as “a tall figure in a great cape like a bat's wing” who climbs up the side of his house and “springs” into his room. Before trying to throttle him, Guy asks, “‘Who are you?' ‘You,' Bruno answer[s] finally” (PH,
Strangers on a Train
, p. 181).
And Bruno imagines himself joined to Guy, two heroes flying through the sky: “He longed for Guy to be with him now. He would clasp Guy's hand, and to hell with the rest of the world! Their feats were unparalleled! Like a sweep across the sky! Like two streaks of red fire that came and disappeared so fast, everybody stood wondering if they really had seen them” (ibid., p. 167).
“Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It's Superman” is the catchphrase that Bruno's fantasy would have suggested to many mid-century Americans—no matter how sophisticated their literary tastes. Beginning in 1940, that phrase introduced the radio program taken from the
Superman
comic books (and then was used in the comic books themselves), and it was as widespread and accessible as the phrase “Ripley's Believe It or Not”—another locution from America's popular culture which would find its way into a Highsmith novel.

21.
PH,
Strangers on a Train
(New York: Bantam Books, 1951), p. 257.

22.
Diary 9, Feb. 21–28, 1949.

23.
Ibid., May–June 1948.

24.
PH letter to SH, 1 Sept. 1970.

25.
Ibid.

26.
Diary 9, Sept. 30, 1948.

27.
Ibid., Nov. 14–25, 1948.

28.
Pat, exercising a bit of poetic license in the Afterword she finally wrote for
The Price of Salt
, telescoped the time frame of the effects of meeting Kathleen Senn, the woman who inspired the plot of
The Price of Salt,
and the outbreak of chicken pox she suffered while making her first notes for that novel. In fact, she met Senn on 8 December and didn't come down with chicken pox until ten or twelve days later. And it's not entirely clear when she actually scribbled the plot of
The Price of Salt
down in her notes; perhaps it wasn't the precise day she met Mrs. Senn. But the high-fever part was true—and her inspiration for the novel came about, metaphorically at least, just as she said.

29.
Diary 9, Dec. 22–29, 1948.

30.
Edmund Bergler, “The Myth of a New National Disease: Homosexuality and the Kinsey Report,”
Psychiatric Quarterly
22 (January 1948).

31.
Diary 9, Dec. 22, 1948.

32.
PH letter to SH, 29 Aug. 1970.

33.
Diary 9, Jan. 11, 1949.

34.
PH letter to SH, 29 Aug. 1970.

35.
Diary 9, Jan. 27, 1949 (fourteenth visit to psychoanalyst).

36.
Ibid., Mar. 1, 1949.

37.
Ibid., Feb. 22 and 24, 1949.

38.
Ibid., 1949 (twenty-second, twenty-fourth, twenty-ninth visits).

39.
Ibid., May 3, 1949.

40.
Ibid.

41.
Ibid., May 6, 1949.

42.
Ibid.

43.
Ibid., May 18, 1949 (forty-fifth visit).

44.
Ibid., May 24, 1949 (forty-seventh visit).

17. Les Girls: Part 1

1.
“A heavy rain dissolved yesterday most of the 4-inch snowfall of Wednesday and left many slushy thoroughfares here and in the suburbs.” “The Weather Bureau,”
New York Times,
12–17 Dec. 1948.

2.
PH, Afterword,
The Price of Salt
.

3.
Ibid.

4.
Ibid.

5.
Diary 10, June 1950: “Pray God, she never troubled to look up my name. (After the Xmas card.)”

6.
Ibid.

7.
Ibid.

8.
PH,
Carol
(London: Bloomsbury, 1990), p. 260.

9.
Ibid.

10.
Ibid.

11.
Cahier 26, 6/18/61. “As usual, I have found the fever beneficial to the imagination, and found an ending for my book.”

12.
Diary 10, Dec. 23, 1949.

13.
PH,
The Dove Descending
, unpublished manuscript.

14.
PH,
The First Person Novel,
unpublished manuscript.

15.
PH,
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
, p. 143.

16.
Cahier 26, 1/21/61.

17.
She also used the first-person narrative in two short stories about animals: “Chorus Girl's Absolutely Final Performance”—the story made her weep—and “Notes from a Respectable Cockroach.”

18.
PH,
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
, p. 89.

19.
Diary 10, Oct. 24, 1950.

20.
Ibid., Jan. 19, 1951.

21.
And she used the name Senn in her very last novel,
Small g
, the novel that is both a summary and a parody of her career. Senn is, conveniently, a Swiss name, and for
Small g
it was used for Thomas Senn, a sturdy blond Zurich detective. By 1995, Pat had come a long way from obsessive love.

22.
Cahier 18, 12/9/48.

23.
Ibid., 12/9/48.

24.
Ibid., 9/9/48.

25.
Priscilla Senn Kennedy letter to the author, quoting Kathleen Senn's deceased cousin, 14 Feb. 2009.

26.
“[S]omething of a fairytale, something of a castle” was Pat's comment on Mrs. Senn's Murray Avenue house on her second trip to Ridgewood, New Jersey, to spy on Mrs. Senn.

27.
PH,
The Price of Salt
(New York: Bantam Books, 1958), p. 197.

28.
Ibid., p. 174.

29.
Ibid., p. 136.

30.
Cahier 19, June 28, 1950. Written the day before another finishing touch was put on the novel.

31.
André Gide,
The Counterfeiters
, trans. Dorothy Bussy (New York: Vintage Books 1973), p. 123.

32.
Diary 10, Dec. 10, 1949.

33.
Property listings in the Ridgewood, New Jersey, property directory, in 1940: Book: 8052, p. 533. Block: 1811, Lot: 21.02. According to the property directory, the address became North Murray Avenue in 1952 (Ridgewood Public Library).

34.
Diary 10, Sunday, Jan. 21, 1951.

35.
Ibid., June 5, 1950.

36.
Ibid., June 8, 1950.

37.
Ibid., June 30, 1950.

38.
Ibid.

39.
Ibid., June 12, 1950.

40.
Ibid., July 1950.

41.
Ibid., July 2, 1950.

42.
Ibid.

43.
Ibid., Oct. 24, 1950.

44.
Cahier 19, 6/6/50.

45.
Diary 10, May 17, 1950.

46.
Ibid., Oct. 17, 1950.

47.
Ibid., Oct. 27, 1950.

48.
Ibid., Sept. 6, 1950.

49.
Cahier 13, 8/27/45.

50.
Diary 1952–54, Feb. 25, 1953 (Trieste). Dan Walton Coates, eldest son of Pat's “brother Dan,” who spent time as a boy with Pat at Willie Mae's house in Fort Worth whenever Pat passed through Texas, remembered something about Pat's teeth that alarmed him. He thought it was tied in with her “artistic” temperament and how she felt that she had to suppress her good looks. But first he wanted to talk about the fun he'd had with Pat. When Pat was young, Dan said, she was “very upbeat and she'd cuss like a sailor and of course I liked to cuss even as a kid so we'd talk out of Grandma's hearing because she would not have had THAT. We had a lot of fun in the early years.”
Both Pat and Mary Highsmith helped young Dan with his artwork—he grew up to be an investment advisor, a rancher, and a painter and sculptor of western subjects—and Mary, Dan said, was “the most patient thing” with him. “A lot of Pat's things were still at Grandma's, her sketchbooks and so forth,” and so most of Dan's conversations with Pat centered on art. Pat and Mary would buy him sketchbooks and critique his work seriously, as though he were already an artist, and Dan retained a shining memory of Pat's beauty, which, during “these early years, was drop-dead gorgeous. Dark dark eyes, that raven dark hair in a pageboy and golly she just looked great.” It was his memory of Pat's stunning looks in the 1940s that made his next experience of her so shocking.
“Well, she went to Europe and it may have been five years, ten years later—I'm not worth a darn on dates—and I'll swear to God I couldn't believe it. She looked like the wrath of God…. Come to find out, for some reason only known to Pat, she had filed her teeth. They were all jagged-looking and from that point on her dental problems got worse” (CWA Dan Walton Coates, 22 Nov. 2003).

51.
PH letter to KKS, 25 Jan. 1974.

52.
Cahier 19, 12/19/49.

53.
PH letter to KKS, 3 Oct. 1988.

54.
PH letter to KKS, 20 Aug. 1970.