Read The Talented Miss Highsmith Online
Authors: Joan Schenkar
The Talented Miss Highsmith (34 page)
Here are a few of Pat's Mexican portraits, printed at length. They are as much a study of the young writer's state of mind as they are likenesses of her subjects.
Margot Castillo and Tonio Castillo
âMargot charming, French and Dutch, but before an artist, before a wife, a hard business woman. Tonio, a clerk in Spratling's “persuaded her” they should marryâ¦.
*
For a couple of years they worked hard, building their own businessâ¦and finally built up to be second to Spratling in design and volume of business.
Tonio is generous, warm, youthful. Twenty-six now. Margot is economical, warm when she wants to be, a garrulous talker, and perhaps thirty-eight or forty-two now. They build a house, in Margot's excellent styleâ¦but Tonio does not think he will like it. He cannot live without her and can hardly live with herâ¦Tonioâ¦pays high wages so [the workers] will love him. Margot delights in pointing out to him that they don't.
Margot no longer draws for pleasure, or paints, but concentrates on her business. She wears fuchsia ribbons in her coal black hair, (up-swept) and is often bandboxy. Tonio must be rather a cute pet to be seen with in New York restaurantsâ¦. Margot shows an excess of affection & generosity. Margot is black and white.
The Luzis
âAlexander LuziâSwiss born, linguist, rather ordinary but pine-knotty familyâ¦. He was engaged to a Mexican woman when Marguerite Re came down on a visitâ¦. It was love at first sight. Alex invited her and her friend to stay three days at the Victoria Hotel, the best here, of which he was part owner. [“As a Swiss, he is expert at all tourist rackets.”] “Will you marry me?” he asked one night over dinner. “I never got the spoon to my mouth,” says Mrs. Luziâ¦. Later, Marguerite found he had a son to support. [“Alex married a Mexican-Arabian girl of low family, five days before their son was born.”]â¦If Alex had not been quite the fellow he is, he would have left the little chippie in the trouble she deservedâ¦.
â¦Alex wants [Marguerite] to buy property to nail herself down here, selling her car (the symbol of flight) to get the money for itâ¦. “I can't stand it much longer. I certainly can't stand it the rest of my life,” Marguerite says.
â¦Their arguments are few but interesting: the second major one in five years started when Alex asked for Marguerite's carâ¦. “You can pack your things and go,” he said. “You can pack yours, and I'll do it for you right now,” she said, doing it, and setting the valise outside the doorâ¦. He has something of the personality of Stanley Laurel, with not all the comedy removed. They have the neatest kitchen in Taxco.
Paul Cook
âwho talks better than he writes or paintsâ¦. He was a football player, married at thirty-two, to a Texas woman of good and wealthy family. Divorced last year after 14 years because of jealousy on her part, demands, criticism of his drinking. He has always drunk quite a little and now in Taxco drinks quite a lotâ¦. He is the son of a Welsh doctor and an Italian woman. He is 6'3”, lanky, blue eyed, and distinguished looking no matter what he does or how he dressesâ¦. The
cantina
proprietors adore him, for sincere reasons.
He is paid $150 dollars per month by the U.S. Government to catch dope peddlers. Sometimes he makes a catch. Ostensibly, he is the washed-up American painter going to hell in Taxcoâ¦. People get attached to [Paul], admire him, even want to be like himâ¦. He has done what no other American I know has done, made the Mexicans like him, I mean inspired their friendship. Despite his height, despite his blue eyes, they love himâ¦.
Paul came home with me for the first time one night to read my manuscript. He read 11 pages and said it was excellent, told me good reasons why. Then I went to bed and he was to sleep on the porch. Later he joined me in my bed, and while I didn't like it at first, I decided it was not true cameraderie [
sic
] to stand on ceremony. He slept like a log on his side all night, got up first and got breakfast. The next night when I got home at 12:45
A.M.
he was in my bed and I
had
to sleep on the porch. He is as undependable as a Negro when he is drunk. Wants to do my portrait. He can make drama, and art, out of nothing.
Miss Jones
âhostess at the Victoria. Moles all over her face, and a Chicago accent. Vender-Bearer of delicious imported cheeses which come in excess of the pecan pie that concludes the five peso mealâthe best Taxco or even Mexico City affords. She is patient, friendly, and somehow immeasurably sadâ¦. Discovered crying in her room because a 26 year old woman's child was so beautiful.
Stanley Coventry
âfop, fascist. Britisher, sponger off his aunt, Mrs. Auchinclaus (Samuel). Stanley is a frightful bore, inspiring hatred in Paul Cookâ¦. He goes about with a Schnauzer. Has done some good designs, they say, for jewelry. Paints when he needs money, which is seldom. Has lived two years in Tahiti and tells his sexual experiences on short acquaintanceâ¦. His voice, like many Englishmen's voices, from a distance sounds effete and like a homosexual'sâ¦. A namby-pamby, pantywaist, generally repulsive character. Looks much like the Prince of Wales, though taller, with the incipient
embonpoint
of a gourmet.
Mrs. Auchinclaus
, a dowager widow, blue, alert eyes, constant smoker, quizzes me with an interest as to what I am writingâ¦. When she was young, she saw all Europe, made photographs of places of interest and sold them to museums and galleries. She clings to youth and life, as I have seen so many her age and type cling to it.
Pat also cast her assessing eye on the Weltons: he looks like “Carl Sandburg,” she like “Julie Haydon” Colonel Newton, “the West Point graduate” back on a thirty-day leave from the war and married to a “26 year old girl, very sweet, a trifle hebraic” and the other Newton family, the female half of which “was seen in Chachalaca's bar by half the town one afternoon pulling her dress down and presenting her fifty year old bosom to all who would have a feel,” and the husband, Dr. Newton, who “left Taxco [without his wife] owing me ten pesos, Paul about 300, Chachalaca's 180, Arturo's 140.” And then there was “Fidel Figueroa,” an early, compellingly heterosexual prototype for her hero-criminals, whom Pat put at the center of her short story “In the Plaza.” Fidel is “an Indian, who came into town with one peso, and a handsome face, and somewhere underneath it, the energy to climb fast and the ruthlessness.”
Murder was usually on Pat's mind when she wrote fiction, and as her fictions took their various forms in Mexico, she began to use murder as a replacement for loveâor as a reaction to love. Fifteen years later she would admit to a lover that life didn't make any sense unless there was a crime in it. In early manuscript versions of several of her novels (
A Game for the Living, The Two Faces of January
amongst them), Pat changed the murderer from manuscript to manuscriptâsometimes at the suggestion of an editorâas though it didn't really matter to her who did the deed as long as the impulse to kill found expression in the plot.
14
Even in
The Talented Mr. Ripley,
the novel whose initial murder is so iconically linked to its theme, the original murder victim was Dickie's father, Herbert Greenleaf, who, in various versions, is pushed from a cliff by both Dickie and Tom or stabbed and filled with opium so Tom Ripley can “engageâ¦in a smuggling operation.”
15
Both Pat's Mexican short stories end in awkward deaths. She has the character who represents Fidel Figueroa killed in “In the Plaza,” and she also kills the character who stands in for Marguerite Luzi in her short story “The Car.” But in life, Mrs. Luzi lived on in Taxco, and in life Fidel Figueroa enchanted many foreign ladies with his paintings (which sold “faster than he could paint them”), left Mrs. Cadenas, who had pulled him up from poverty and kept and dressed him beautifullyâPat lingers on Fidel's “New York” clothesâand married the “none too prepossessing Mrs. Kitzelman, whose husband made his fortune in barbed wire fences.” “They live in the most ornate house in Taxco, decorated by all the best decorators from Mexico City in Mrs. K's execrable taste.” Pat took the happy ends in her models' lives and turned them into tragedy (or at least into murder) in her fictions.
Fiction, as Pat was to say decades later in an interview on American radio, was for what she really
wished
would happen.
16
Pat also took careful notes on the Taxco residents' most serious extracurricular activity: drinking. Taxco was a place where steady drinkers could find plenty of company. Pat did most of her own imbibing at the bar in the Victoria Hotel and in Chachalaca's Bar. In Mexico, she wrote with less embarrassment about drinking than she was ever to do again.
The moon is a tired wheel of chance rolling across the sky, and I am to be found in a bar. Hours and hours I sit watching the business man from Chicago paw a lady who is not his wife, listening to the jaded mariachis grinding out “Jalisco,” absorbing greedily a thousand monotonous details that I have seen a thousand times before, absorbing alcohol to feel things I have felt a thousand times before.
17
In Taxco people do not drink to fill social intervals, or as a ritual between four and six, and do not drink for a mild lift, but for total oblivion.
18
Alcohol is a virusâ¦. One drink leads to another, with an infallibility unequalled anywhere else on the globe. Masculine cameraderie is strong. Wines are comic.
19
Pat was considering writing a “book or short stories on Taxco, preferably a book,”
20
and her thoughts were a variation on the theme she'd identified at the age of twenty: “What keeps recurring to me as a fundamental of the novel is the individual out of place in this century.”
21
As always, Pat was following the split, the fault line, the fracture in her own psychology to imagine the subject of her future novels. But her musings in Taxco seemed to predict her future life as well, setting out with uncanny pre-science her struggles in the next five decades in all those foreign countries where she lived and worked as a resident alien. Pat said she wanted her writing to
show the effects of foreign milieu on Americans. Americans, because Americans, less than French, Germans, far less than the English, do not know whether to assimilate themselves or hold apart. They try to do both, and lose their own souls, their mores, their minds. The Englishman takes a little England along with him, and lives in proud isolation. The Frenchman forgets his European blood and marries. The American sits astride the fence, drinks, and earns the hostility of every native in the foreign country. It is this split personality that makes the American a total failure, that tears him apart.
22
In between her bouts of tequila drinking, drawing and sketching, taking observant character notes, and imagining new fictions, Pat, full of confidence and despair, worked on the novel at hand, the novel she was never to finish:
The Click of the Shutting
.
In 1965, in an interview for the London
Sunday Times
âthe same interview in which she announced that “stories are absolutely essential to me, like poetry: I write a lot of both”âPat gave an account of her abandoned novel to the writer and critic Francis Wyndham:
Iâ¦went to Mexico and started a long Gothic novel which never got finished. It was about two boys of fourteen, one rich and one poor. The poor boy goes and stays in the rich boy's house and falls in love with his mother. I described the house in great detail, and when I realised I'd written hundreds of pages and still hadn't got to the action, I gave it up. It was quite unlike my later books.
23
On the first day of 1943, a week after she got her job at Sangor-Pines, Pat had taken a New Year's walk to Sutton Place, the expensive Manhattan enclave close to her new apartment on East Fifty-sixth Street. It was a walk she would turn into a little voyage of discovery for Gregory, the main character of her “long Gothic novel,”
The Click of the Shutting.
(The title, borrowed from one of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnets, refers to the sound a clasp knife, the kind of knife Pat always carried, makes as it closes.) Although Pat insisted that “[u]nlike Nietzsche, my best thoughts do not come in the fresh air,”
24
some of her best images did, and in her notes for the novel the boy Gregory sees what Pat saw that day on Sutton Place: a lamp enclosed in an iron frame over a colonial doorway, “all grey like an ancient knight's crestâ¦. It was then, young as he was at sixteen, that Gregory knew he must have always and only his love of the fantastic and the unreal.”
25
As she walked past Manhattan's elegant mansions, Pat must have repeated to herself many times the phrase with which she began
The Click of the Shutting
: “âI'll pretend that I live there,' Gregory whispered as he came into the block.”
26
Pat did describe a “house in great detail” in this novelâwhich, contrary to what she told Francis Wyndham, was so much like her “later books” that most of the themes (including the “big signet ring,”
27
a feature of all Pat's Ripley novels)
28
in most of her later works can be found in
The Click of the Shutting.
29
The novel's grand house, the house of the Willson family, is the first of many invented housesâa “house of fiction,” in Henry James's phraseâto appear in a Highsmith novel. Like all the other houses she would make up, this house was what Patricia Highsmith desperately wanted at twenty-three.