The Talented Miss Highsmith (118 page)

THE TALENTED MISS HIGHSMITH
. Copyright © 2009 by Joan Schenkar. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

FRONTISPIECE: Patricia Highsmith, portrait by Ruth Bernhard, 1948 (Collection Ruth Bernhard)

www.stmartins.com

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Schenkar, Joan.

The talented Miss Highsmith: the secret life and serious art of Patricia Highsmith / Joan Schenkar.—1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN: 978-0-312-30375-4

1. Highsmith, Patricia, 1921–1995. 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. 3. Bisexuals—United States—Biography. I. Title.

PS3558.I366Z87 2009

813'.54—dc22

[B]

2009018363

^*
Of the expatriate American writer Julien Green, whose roots were also Southern and whose religious and sexual preoccupations were as guilty as hers, Pat wrote: “I feel a rare friendship with J. Green…. I recognize my own thoughts [in his].” In
The Counterfeiters
of André Gide she saw her own transgressive fascination with the young—along with new ways to represent it. Oscar Wilde's mannered dialogues and capsizing paradoxes were little mirrors for the girl who thought the “words ‘average' and ‘normal'…the most ridiculous of the English language.” Henry James gave her the opportunity of a lifetime: she turned his central premise in
The Ambassadors
upside down (the only way she could imagine it) and smuggled it into
The Talented Mr. Ripley
. And in Marcel Proust's resplendent monologues and shimmering sense-memories (she understood just enough of Proust to quote him appropriately) Pat found the explanation for her love life.

 

^*
Pat often recorded events days and weeks after they had passed, pretending in her diaries and cahiers that her entries were “current.” They weren't. She forged her chronologies to give order to her life, altering the record of her life and the purport of her writing by doing so.

 

^*
A single example: One of my play agents now deceased—a brilliant, elderly, dignified woman when I knew her in the 1980s—had been, unknown to me, a lover of Patricia Highsmith four decades before she became my agent. And one sunny afternoon in the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern, I opened a Highsmith diary at random and found the richly explicit physical details of their torrid love affair. It's a description I still look forward to forgetting.

 

^*
Previously unseen and unpublished material from friends, family, lovers, photographers, and filmmakers allows us to join Patricia Highsmith in this chapter in both the physical act of writing and in language which reflects some of the secrets of her style: her coroner's eye for detail, her hyperconsciousness of the ways human activity can be enumerated, and the high optical refractions she was able to scan into her mostly plain prose.
    At twenty, while Pat was still passionate about other people's writing—and still mixing her metaphors the way a novice bartender might mix her liquors—she dreamt of doing the same thing: “If we were permitted one quarter hour in Shakespeare's study in 1605, how we should watch his every movement, how hungrily we should notice the lift of his head, the touch of his hand on the edge of his paper…the angle of his back as he writes…. How little we know of history. Time is a column of carbon monoxide fraying into oblivion at its far end like the tail of an old rope” (Cahier 6, 12/12/41).

 

^*
The other figure born on 19 January—Pat later named him as her favorite historical character—was the Confederacy's great hero: General Robert E. Lee.

 

^*
From the 1930 American's children's classic
The Little Engine That Could
by the pseudonymous Watty Piper (a “house-name” used by Platt & Munk Publishers), illustrated by Lois Lenski. The Little Blue Engine (characterized as a female) pulls a trainload of Christmas toys over an impassable mountain by repeating to herself the uplifting phrase “I
think
I can, I
think
I can, I
think
I can.” Read by every schoolchild in America and still in print today,
The Little Engine That Could
is among the best self-help books ever written.

 

^*
Caroline Besterman is a pseudonym.

 

^*
Ronald Blythe was “surprised” to see himself featured in a BBC documentary about Patricia Highsmith as one of her “lovers.” The idea, he says, is “ridiculous.”

 

^*
Camilla Butterfield is a pseudonym.

 

^*
That of Willie Mae Stewart Coates, Pat's grandmother and Mary's mother.

 

^*
Pat had good reason to think that her last name, Highsmith, wasn't a legal one. On 16 November 1994, two and a half months before her death, she was still writing to a Swiss lawyer (Dr. Barbara Simone) about her long-pending Swiss citizenship and “in regard to legalizing my name Highsmith,” characteristically adding: “I hope I shall not get a large bill for this, or for the name legalization.”

 

^*
This was Pat being theatrical; as one of her former lovers sensibly pointed out (and as nude photographs confirm), Pat's breasts were too small to conceal anything. Her usual method of snail smuggling was cottage cheese cartons.

 

^*
Harry Houdini's celebrated “escape” from handcuffs secured by a double-nested Bramah lock at the London Hippodrome in 1904 seems to have been the result of a setup between the
Daily Mirror
's owner, Alfred Charles Harmsworth, and Houdini himself. Harmsworth, incidentally, was a relation of one of Pat Highsmith's young lovers.

 

^*
The urge to transform is as American as it is Ovidian. It was America's first statesman and inventor, Benjamin Franklin, whose obsession with transformation from poverty to wealth produced
Poor Richard's Almanack
: the self-help manual designed to instruct Americans in the useful art of reinventing themselves. And it was Franklin's quick-change compatriots—the rebellious English colonists in Massachusetts whose forged identities as “Indians” allowed them to dump tea belonging to the East India Company into Boston Harbor and spark the American Revolution—who transformed themselves into the first American citizens.

 

^*
She gives Tom Ripley exactly the same adventure with young Frank Pierson in
The Boy Who Followed Ripley.

 

^*
The publication of
Women's Barracks
by Tereska Torres in 1950 (Fawcett) opened the door to lesbian pulp fiction with its sales of four million copies, although Tereska Torres was and is a serious novelist, and
Women's Barracks,
like
The Price of Salt,
is by no means a “pulp novel.” It was Torres's husband, the writer Meyer Levin—as Torres revealed to me in an interview published in the fifty-fifth-anniversary edition of
Women's Barracks
in 2005—who rewrote her novel in English (Torres wrote it in French) to include both the narrator's anti-lesbian attitude and the invented “male friend” whose faintly prurient “introduction” frames the book.

 

^*
In October of 1977, Pat, rightfully enraged, sent a letter to the editor of the
Evening Standard
in London which had printed an article by Sam White (“That Lady from Texas,” 30 September 1977) mistaking Pat's age and tastes while insinuating her sexual preference: “Markedly masculine in appearance, she is something of a man-hater, a kind of female chauvinist.” White had (less rightfully) also incurred the wrath of Nancy Mitford, who satirized him as Amyas Mockbar in her final novel,
Don't Tell Alfred.

 

^*
On both sides. Jay B Plangman is quoted at his retirement dinner in Fort Worth as having told his art students that they should “memorize eight new things a day.”

 

^*
The Coates and Stewart families' bloodlines were the family histories Pat Highsmith researched most fully. She continued to link many of her own traits to them, even when she had taken to calling herself a “kraut.” Her inquiries into her father Jay B Plangman's German Lutheran heritage were minimal; limited, more or less, to asking her father and his brother, Walter Plangman, if there was any “red Indian blood” in the family because they were all, Pat included, so very dark. Jay B assured Pat that the dark complexion came from his mother Minna Hartman's family, direct from his grandmother Liena, who, with her two sisters, was part of the vast emigration of Germans to the United States in the 1850s. The three Hartman sisters became, Jay B wrote to his daughter, “servants in well-to-do homes in Galveston.” The Plangmans, Gesina and Herman, were also emigrants from Germany, and their son Herman Plangman married Minna Hartman and fathered Jay Bernard Plangman. Jay B's brother Walter remembered that one of his grandmothers had taught him German before he learned English. He recollected this as he was answering yet another question from his uneasy niece Patricia about her German grandmother: “She definitely had no Indian Blood,” Walter wrote.

 

^*
He was assisted by Samuel Smith Stewart, the genealogist of the Stewart family, who sent all his research to Pat.

 

^*
Like Oscar Wilkinson Stewart, Daniel Hokes Coates's three brothers fought in the War Between the States, taking their personal slaves with them and dying in battle. A mostly unreconstructed Rebel, Pat visited Civil War battlefields in states of high emotion and repeatedly named Robert E. Lee, commander of the Rebel army, as her favorite historical figure.

 

^*
Standard time wasn't actually “standardized” or strictly enforced until the great train lines were laid across whole continents in the nineteenth century: in order to catch a train, you had to know the exact time it was leaving. It's a sidelight on the imagination of Pat Highsmith, who, preoccupied with time herself, ran so many trains through her novels.

 

^*
Mistaking the date, Pat refers here to the three letters she wrote to her stepfather in 1970 justifying a break with her mother.

 

^*
Menninger, with his father and later his brother, founded the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, and the clinic's enlightened practices and sophisticated public relations did much to legitimize and Americanize Freudian theories of psychiatry in the United States.

 

^*
In Texas, Dan Oscar Coates, rodeo entrepreneur, cattleman, and wrestling announcer, was renowned as “the man with the Golden Voice,” and he was much better known in the West than his novelist cousin. Dan's speaking voice, like Pat's, was beautiful: compellingly deep and dramatic. Dan Oscar Coates was posthumously inducted into the Texas Rodeo Cowboy Hall of Fame.

 

^*
Named after Julia Richman (1855–1912), the descendant of a long line of Prague rabbis and the first woman district school superintendent in New York City.

 

^*
With Betty Comden and Judy Tuvim (Holliday), Adolph Green founded the Revuers sketch comedy group which played the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village regularly. (Leonard Bernstein was the pianist.) Betty Comden and Adolph Green, the longest-collaborating team in American musical theater, went on to write the lyrics for some of Broadway's most celebrated musical comedies.

 

^*
A previous biography has incorrectly placed the Highsmith family apartment on Grove Street in the building where Marie's Crisis Café is located. The Highsmith apartment was (and still is) across the street and one block to the west of Marie's Crisis Café.

 

^*
Pat would both suffer artistically and profit financially from the “crime” and suspense” categories into which her unruly work was regularly corralled.

 

^*
Pat's fashion sense became markedly eccentric when she was required to dress like a “girl.” After finishing her novel
A Dog's Ransom
in 1971, Pat went to visit her friend Trudi Gill, a painter who was also the wife of the American ambassador to Panama, in Vienna. Pat took her “one Yves St-Laurent dress”—which must have caused quite a stir at the three “embassy functions” to which she wore it in the chill Austrian November. The dress was “bright orange cotton.”

 

^*
Sholem Aleichem (real name: Sholem Rabinowitz), 1859–1916, the Ukrainian Jewish writer and popular humorist, was a prodigious author of works in Yiddish. The musical comedy
Fiddler on the Roof
is based on his collection of stories about Tevye the Milkman.

 

^*
Bessie Marbury, an outsized (in every way) personality and a mainstay of the Democratic Party, invented the profession of theatrical agent in America, saved Oscar Wilde's royalties for him while he was in prison, produced Cole Porter's first musical, and also backed a Broadway play in which Pat's future lover, Kathryn Hamill Cohen, appeared.

 

^*
In
A Suspension of Mercy
(1965), Pat introduces her murdering fantasist, Sydney Bartleby, to his well-to-do young wife at a party on Sutton Place.

 

^*
“Everyone already knows, instinctively,” writes Graham Robb in
Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century,
“that Holmes is homosexual…. Without the tense, suppressed passion that binds him to his biographer, Holmes is merely a man with an interesting hobby” (pp.260–61).