The Talented Miss Highsmith (31 page)

Those “great themes” were not obvious to everyone—or to
anyone,
apparently, judging by the unholy stir a little essay published in
Partisan Review,
the journal Pat was so proudly subscribing to in the 1940s, made when it appeared in 1948. The essay was titled “Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey,”
¹⁹
and it was written by one of the Bad Boys of American Criticism, a maverick young scholar named Leslie Fiedler. Fiedler was indeed a bad boy; he was the first person, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary,
to apply the word “postmodern” to literature.

Just as Pat was packing up her kit bag for the Saratoga Springs artists' colony, Yaddo, in June of 1948 for six weeks of public and private drinking, enthusiastic flirtation, and some very serious revisions of the manuscript that would become
Strangers on a Train,
Fiedler's explosive essay (it added an extra line to Mark Twain's masterpiece
Huckleberry Finn,
because Nigger Jim never did say “Come back to the raft ag'in, Huck honey”) hit American literary life like a bucket of dirty water gleefully hurled against a windshield by a rebellious teenager.

Fiedler's theory in “Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey”—fully presented in his 1960 book,
Love and Death in the American Novel
—is that American literature was a literature for, by, and about boys; obsessed with death and characterized by the implicitly homosexual pairing of two men (Fiedler noted the frequency of mixed-racial pairings in Twain, Melville, and Cooper) who, hand in hand, “light out for the territory” that is, anyplace without civilizing females. The American novel, according to Fiedler, was vibrant with sexual anxieties about women, who are always portrayed as “monsters of virtue or bitchery, symbols of the rejection or fear of sexuality.”

Fiedler's essay forever readjusted the American view of just what was
really
going on in the novels of Mark Twain, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. (In 1979, on the BBC4 radio interview program
Desert Island Discs,
Pat selected
Moby-Dick,
Herman Melville's brilliant, ham-handed, poetic epic of obsessed pursuit, social Darwinism, and extreme Calvinism, as the only book she'd want to take with her to a desert island.)
²⁰
And Fiedler's essay, if you substitute class for race, and Europe (in the Ripley books) or Central Park (in
The Blunderer
) or the woods of Pennsylvania (in
The Cry of the Owl
) for the “territory,” also provided a pretty good
avant-première
of what would go on in the novels of Patricia Highsmith.

Looked at through Leslie Fiedler's lens, Patricia Highsmith has all the minor marks of the archetypal American writer and two of the major marks as well: She is the most unconscious “gay male novelist” since Ernest Hemingway, and she is as gifted an anatomist of male sexual anxiety as Norman Mailer.

Later, Fiedler turned his theoretical attentions to comic books, as did his contemporary, Gershon Legman, the self-taught American sexologist, folklorist, and social critic. Legman, living in the South of France in the 1970s when Pat was occupying the North, was Pat's favorite editor of limericks and dirty jokes. And Pat—one of whose ideas of humor was to collect names from the “Sunday Social columns [of the] NY Times, people getting engaged or married…. Barbara Scheetz getting married, e.g., is the low standard I aspire to”
²¹
—kept at least one of Legman's massive editions of limericks in her personal library and consulted it frequently. She would have been as delighted by Legman's next book,
Rationale of the Dirty Joke
(with a whole section devoted to dirty jokes about Texas), as Legman himself would have been clinically interested in Pat's own favorite dirty joke, “The Japanese Wife Joke.” (See “
Les Girls: Part 11.
”)

In his Freud-influenced pamphlet,
Love and Death,
published in 1949—much of it was about the comic books of the 1940s during the period that Pat was writing steadily for the genre—the exuberantly eccentric (and steadfastly homophobic) Gershon Legman saw male homosexuality and misogyny every single place he looked.
^*

 

Pat's love life during her year at Sangor-Pines was like her imagination and her work habits: more or less in a hyperkinetic state.

In May of 1943, she fell in love with a dedicated young painter, Allela Cornell: “I love Allela and God within her…. she is the best! The best soul I could ever find!”
²²
Holding hands with Allela at the movies made Pat want more of her, in the same way, she said, that she wanted “more and more money.”
²³
Allela was a slim, spiritually inclined, short-haired girl with round, rimless glasses, a plain face, an earnest manner, and larger problems than Pat could guess at, although the clues were there in letters Allela sent to Pat: “I am destroyed,” she wrote to Pat, “and I don't know why.”
²⁴

Pat didn't like Allela's body and was much more excited by thinking “male” thoughts about Allela than by sleeping with her. “This morning, I thought so much about Allela that I had to go to the bathroom to relieve myself of a big erection. Is this disgusting? Am I a psychopath? Yes, but why not!?”
²⁵
In 1946, three years after Allela and Pat broke up, Allela drank a bottle of nitric acid—her suicide had nothing to do with Pat—and suffered a lingering and painful death. It was especially poignant because Allela had decided she didn't want to die after all. Pat, as always, felt guilty for some callous behavior towards Allela and tried to get Allela's paintings placed in New York galleries. She was unsuccessful in her attempt, but later used Allela's situation as one of the “germs” for her novel
Ripley Under Ground
.

Allela Cornell had the good painter's ability to foretell the future of her human subject in the subject's present pose, and she did an uncannily predictive portrait of Pat in oils. In the painting, Pat is in a red jacket, with her massive hands wrapped around her torso and her thumbs sticking straight up. A trademark furrow folds the space between her brows. On her face is a fixed, mature, intractable expression—not at all the expression of a twenty-two- or twenty-three-year-old girl—of controlled rage and pain: it's the terrible frown Pat was always reminding herself to get rid of; the frown her face just naturally fell into. The painting is like the portrait Picasso did of Gertrude Stein: if it didn't look like Pat when Allela made it, it would look like Pat later on. It did. Pat hung it in every house she ever lived in.

As she always did with a new lover, Pat dreamt of travelling with Allela. Since high school, travelling had been “the most desirable thing on earth” to her.
²⁶
She sent Allela her poems and one of the
Spy Smasher
stories she was writing for Sangor-Pines.
²⁷
(She was also writing
Pyroman
and
Sergeant Bill King
for Sangor-Pines, and
Golden Arrow
for Fawcett.) Their communion was more that of two spiritually inclined artists—“Cornell was an idea, born of an x-ray,” Pat wrote—than of a sensual union of the flesh.
²⁸
Inevitably, Pat began to sleep with Allela's other lover, too, an attractive blond woman named Tex whom Pat had noticed riding her bicycle before learning that Tex was involved with Allela. The ensuing jealous scenes made Pat “want to jump out a window.”
²⁹

Pat was also seeing a woman named Ann T., who, like Allela and Pat's coworker at Sangor-Pines, Leo Isaacs, dedicated some poems to Pat; Pat slipped them into her cahier.
³⁰
She let Leo Isaacs, who was married, kiss her and instantly regretted the liberty: “I allowed too much. It has to stop.”
³¹
Pat's good looks and reckless behavior, and the slow sexual burn she emitted, inspired a lot of poetry and stirred many emotions in the people around her.

Like the proverbial pinball, Pat's feelings occasionally stopped ricocheting around: “Our three lives [Allela's, Tex's, and Pat's] are bound tightly together. We love each other—what will happen now?”
³²
The triangle was Pat's favorite form of loving and she never could sustain it. The relationship with Allela unraveled after only five months, in September of 1943.

Pat's second favorite form of loving—the tantalizing, torturing, withholding kind—was what she moved towards in her next affair: a mostly unconsummated relationship with a beautiful, married-but-separated thirty-year-old Hattie Carnegie model, Chloe. Pat first met Chloe at a party at Angelica de Monocol's, and continued to meet her at the Manhattan art gallery of Julien Levy, son-in-law of the avant-garde artist and writer Mina Loy. Levy's gallery on Fifty-seventh and Madison had been a showplace for Modernist works of art in New York for the last twelve years. Pat thought Julien Levy was a “snake” and his wife a “piglet.” Perhaps this opinion was colored by the fact that Chloe was staying with the Levys, and Rosalind Constable told Pat that Julien Levy had a reputation as a “skirt chaser.” Pat wooed Chloe with a bottle of Calvert's whiskey which she was almost prevented from buying. Liquor store owners still thought Pat was “17 or 18.”
³³
So did Pat.

Pat and Chloe spent passionate, but unconsummated, Saturday nights together. Chloe's condition for staying with Pat was kissing but no sex. Pat was thrilled with this (and then she wasn't), rhapsodizing about the excitements of limited physical contact in her diary. “By God! I remember the days when I was fifteen or sixteen, when the accidental touch of the hand of a girl was a whole heaven!”
³⁴
But through her haze of desire, Pat's assessing eye was still on Chloe: “Like all beautiful women, she prefers talking about herself.”
³⁵
Pat and Chloe listened to Pat's favorite popular songs—a taste that lasted thoughout Pat's life—at Pat's apartment on East Fifty-sixth Street: “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” “Why Do I Love You,” and “Make Believe.” Chloe was constantly drunk and wore black underwear. “My god!” thought Pat, as naïve as any schoolboy, when she first saw Chloe drunk and passed out in her lingerie.
³⁶
When Pat and Chloe finally did make love Pat's comment to herself was typical: “[T]he earth didn't move.”
³⁷

Chloe was clever and flattering as well as fragile and beautiful. She read two of Pat's short stories, “Silver Horn of Plenty” and “Uncertain Treasure,” and told Pat that as a writer she had the same problem as Djuna Barnes: she didn't know how to end her fictions.
³⁸
Chloe also told Pat that “if she were in love with a woman, it would be me, but that she preferred men.” Since Pat had just confessed to her friend Rosalind Constable that “there is something perverted in me; I don't love a girl any more, if she loves me more than I love her,” Chloe's attitude suited her very well.
³⁹

Almost immediately Pat started to do “good work on the story called
The Three
[which I am] proud of…as much as of my
Uncertain Treasure.”
⁴⁰
Perhaps “The Three” had something to do with the “three loves” Pat said she had had in the last two years: Rosalind Constable (a beacon of accomplishment in Pat's dark night of professional struggles), Allela Cornell, and Chloe. Or perhaps it was the three people Chloe said she was in love with just then. Chloe's withholding was giving Pat the impetus for her work on “The Three,” another story Rolf Tietgens didn't like. “[T]oo peculiar, not clear, not poetic enough,” he told Pat. What Pat told herself was that Rolf wasn't always right, that it was time to make use of Leo Isaacs's critical talents (Leo, her fellow comic book writer, was still in love with her), and that she would send the story to
The New Yorker
anyway.
⁴¹
In fact, she sent it to
Harper's Bazaar.
It wasn't published.

“I have to work like a man and I need a woman—but one who loves me strongly and quietly,” Pat wrote in the creative afterglow of yet another physical rejection from Chloe—and after having to listen to yet another love poem read aloud to her by the besotted Leo Isaacs.
⁴²

On 12 October 1943, Pat went to East Fifty-seventh Street to have dinner with “the parents” and her cousin Dan Coates, who had been travelling for some time in the East. This was the second time Dan had visited the Highsmiths since August. Mary had to hold the meal back more than an hour for Dan—Pat decided this was evidence that Dan was “destructive” (but she went to a rodeo in Madison Square Garden with him the next day anyway, a rodeo she would carefully describe in
The Click of the Shutting
)—and Mary and Stanley lectured Pat about “my drinking, my friends (and girl friends) etc.” “The parents ruin me,” she thought. Everyone wondered aloud about what Pat saw in Chloe, whom they thought of as “an unintellectual model.” As usual, Pat was at the center of her family's conversation.

At this dinner with Dan, it was Mary, always hoping for a suitable boyfriend,
any
boyfriend, for Pat, who taxed her with rejecting “Leo [Isaacs]'s questions like a man who refuses to give insight into his private life. I answered that I could never love a Jew and that, if he tried to discover anything, I wouldn't see him again.”
⁴³
This was plain enough, but it wouldn't have stopped Mary's prodding. The other plain thing—Pat said it to herself and to no one else—was that she didn't think Leo had “the big dream,” the ambition that “makes real artists.”
⁴⁴
He was not headed in a direction that would lead to the “best” in life. But Pat didn't say the plainest thing of all, which was that Leo Isaacs was not the right gender for her.