The Talented Miss Highsmith (20 page)

Helen Kandel (Hyman) also remembered Pat for her dress:

Alice Gershon recalled sitting near Pat in their freshman Hygiene class. The class always featured a sex lecture by the school doctor, “a darling, jolly little woman” named Dr. Alsop, who was the live-in lover of their playwriting professor, Minor Latham, a famously prejudiced and inspiring woman. Latham, says Helen Kandel, who was Latham's advisee, “wore suits and ties and was very gruff.”
²⁵
Alice Gershon remembers Dr. Alsop's freshman Hygiene lectures as “adorable and very nonthreatening.”

“Leadbelly” was the performing name of Huddie Ledbetter, the black, Southern convicted murderer and folk and blues singer—his signature song, “Goodnight Irene,” was made famous by the Weavers in 1950—whose murderous past and several jail terms (the last one was served at Rikers Island in 1940 within view of the Highsmith family apartments in Queens) mingled with his arresting artistry to provide him with a dangerously attractive aura in liberal New York. During Pat's time at Barnard College, and until his death in 1949, Leadbelly was performing his huge repertoire of songs in many Greenwich Village cafés.

If Pat really did tell this story about herself—and there's no reason to assume she didn't; it's not the kind of story Barnard girls were making up about each other in 1940—then she was behaving like any self-mythologizing English major: polishing her reputation as a college sophisticate with tales of an outré relationship which she would have been quite incapable—because of her feelings about race
and
gender—of entering into. It's also a story which might have helped dissemble her sexuality to her “straight” classmates. Mary Highsmith, no small-time self-mythologizer herself, always said that Pat had missed her true calling as an “actress.” Mary would have been shocked but not surprised by this overheated little tale from her daughter's college days.

Rita Rohner (Semel), editor of the
Barnard Quarterly
when Pat was associate editor, had another kind of story to tell about Pat.

Pat's college career (a more useful term might be Pat's “behavior at college”), like her four years in high school, threads its way through this book. For now, it is enough to say that although she favored and was favored by her literature and short-story-writing teacher, the theatrical and supportive Miss Ethel Sturtevant (in the “minute” devoted to her at a faculty meeting at Barnard after her death, Sturtevant was eulogized as having “a magical voice,” “the airs of a beauty,” and the adoration of her students, to whom she gave “unremitting attention”),
²⁸
Pat took notes which recorded her contempt for her favorite teacher's long service to Barnard as “only” an assistant professor and for Ethel Sturtevant's depressed powerlessness in the face of the academic hierarchy. Pat wouldn't be caught dead in such a situation herself.

While she was still at Barnard, Pat, always ready to improve, allowed herself to be stimulated by “even the dullest people. Being amusing for them is like practising the piano when you are sure no one is listening. You can be freer, attempt bolder things, and often succeed.”
²⁹

Pat liked to rehearse her social graces with people who didn't intimidate her, just as she liked to practice certain states of mind and emotions for her novels. One of the attitudes she was rehearsing at Barnard was her politics, which shifted as frequently and as theatrically as her affections; at first showing brief signs of egalitarianism, even of Communism. Inspired by the Spanish Civil War, she joined the Young Communist League, persuaded her reluctant parents to attend a birthday celebration for Lenin in Madison Square Garden, and wrote a play that was criticized as “too communist” by her drama professor, Minor Latham.
³⁰
As late as 1947, she seems to have been vaguely acquainted with the notorious Communist Party organizer and spy Josef Peters, who telephoned her—“surprisingly,” she wrote in her diary—under his pseudonym of Alex Goldfarb. Pat's German friend Rolf Tietgens was convinced that it was Goldfarb's “words [which] had sent him” to an alien internment camp in El Paso, Texas.
³¹

Although the injustices in Spain attracted Pat to the Young Communist League, it was the cloak-and-dagger “activities” of American Communism that held her interest. “This business of dodging and bulldozing the authorities has limitless opportunities for clever remarks!”
³²
Eventually she decided that the high life, the high culture, and the high crowd of
Time, Life,
and
Fortune
magazines were closer to her ambitions (though farther from her tastes), and Communist—or, more accurately, communitarian—ideas would appear in her notebooks only when they represented the kind of social ideals embodied by the life of Jesus Christ.
³³

Like many of her fellow Americans, Pat gave lip service to the disadvantaged. In actual fact, she preferred the society, if not the close company, of “winners.” (The home church of capitalism has always counted poverty as a sin.) Pat wanted only what she thought of as “the best” for herself, and she sought the same thing in her friendships and her loves. Many of her relationships had social and professional implications, and it was the letters from her more prominent friends which Pat tended to keep. Kingsley Skattebol (Kate Kingsley as she was then), Pat's oldest platonic friend from Barnard College—a worshipful college freshman to Pat's superior college junior—said that finding out Pat had destroyed the hundreds of letters she'd written to her over the half century of their friendship was more painful than learning that Pat had cut her out of her will.
³⁴

At twenty, between her junior and senior years at Barnard and still doing more theorizing about writing than actual writing, Pat was describing the characters she thought were inside her—and what she was going to do with them.

“I am four people: the Jewish intellectual, the success, the failure, and the Fascist-snob. These shall be my novel characters.”
³⁵

Three months later, in December of 1941, she made up an image that pleased her so much she marked it with a vertical line in the margin of her cahier:

“God knows love, in this room with us now, is not kisses or embraces or touches. Not even a glance or a feeling. Love is a monster between us, each of us caught in a fist.”
³⁶

Pat would harvest the image for
The Price of Salt
in 1950, but in the novel she turned its meaning to a commentary on the world: “the whole world was ready to be their enemy, and suddenly what [Therese] and Carol had together seemed no longer love…but a monster between them, with each of them caught in a fist.”
³⁷

On the evening in Grove Street when she imagined love to be a “monster,” Pat “passed” what she called her “first suicide moment.”
³⁸
Love and death would always be in the room with her, but it wasn't love the college senior wanted to die for. What made her want to kill herself was something more exasperating than love. Pat couldn't, on this particular evening, find the right form on paper for her feelings. “[O]ne stands confronted with work, empty sheets of paper all about, and inside one's head, shame and confusion, inside a maelström that will not subside, fragments that will not hang together…. This was a great emotion.”
³⁹

The idea of dying immediately whetted Pat's sense of competition: “Life is a matter of self-denial at the right moments…. My solace is in thinking: what are other people doing now? And if they are playing, I feel better, because I want always to be doing something a little more difficult, a little more demanding.”
⁴⁰

Pat's competitive edge would find its sharpest expression in her cahiers and diaries; they were what she really meant by “doing something a little more difficult” than what her classmates were doing. She began keeping her cahiers the month she entered Barnard and she started the diaries when she was twenty. The journals gave her an opportunity to continually renew her vows for the only lasting “marriage” she ever made: the union that joined her intense rushes of feeling with her compelling need to commit them to paper. The fact that she repeated those vows dressed more like a groom than a bride and that she usually did so in a counterfeit “male voice” (“I am a strong man, like Chaucer, like Shakespeare, like Joe Louis)”
⁴¹
was merely one of the ways her obsessions colored her work. But Pat's journals were the real harvest of her years at Barnard College: the physical proof of a professional approach to writing.

Thirty-seven notebooks of identical size and similar organization followed her first cahier (see “
A Simple Act of Forgery: Part 1
”), and all of them were standard-issue Barnard College or Columbia University notebooks, 7 by 8½ inches with rolled wire binders. By the time she finished college, she had also filled nine cahiers and four diaries.

Pat was already taking notes when she was at Julia Richman High School—bitingly candid comments on her classmates, her moods, and her ideas—and she was writing stories, too. There was a forgotten first story written when she was fourteen. And, before high school, there was a (mercifully) lost blank-verse poem in the style of Tennyson's
Idylls of the King
. Then there was “Crime Begins,” the short story she wrote at sixteen about a sixteen-year-old girl who steals a book and gets away with it. It was the result, she explained thirty-six years later, of her “desperate” need to take out a history book from the library at Julia Richman High School. There were only three copies of the book, 150 girls were after it, and Pat, “strongly tempted to steal it,” wrote the story instead.
⁴²
Pat was subject to many such temptations.

In 1935, the ambitious fourteen-year-old already had the instinct to put her private feelings in print in the magazine
Woman's World
. She published (and was paid twenty-five dollars for) a series of letters she'd written to Stanley and Mary Highsmith two years before, when she was a yearning twelve-year-old packed away to a sleepover camp near West Point, New York, for a month of summer. The camp provided her with some early material: her attention was caught by her female tennis instructor and by the camp rituals of girls swimming naked and counsellors and campers exchanging clothes. By the fall of 1937, Pat was displaying feelings of another kind, publishing her short story “Primroses Are Pink” in the
Bluebird,
the Julia Richman High School literary magazine. “Primroses Are Pink” is a tale of class pretensions and the instabilities introduced into a marital relationship by a work of art.