The Talented Miss Highsmith (40 page)

Some years before I spoke with her, Buffie Johnson had dictated in a formal way her memories of meeting Pat—and the memoir fills in some gaps. At that time, in 1941, Buffie owned a “little house on East Fifty-eighth Street” on the Upper East Side, Pat's favorite neighborhood for socializing.

Pat's accounts of her meetings with Buffie and of her own intentions are more intimate. Pat liked Buffie's situation—monied—and she more than liked Buffie herself, wondering if her feelings for Buffie might be deepening. In her cool way, she assessed Buffie's painting. “I was pleasantly surprised. Somewhat derivative—the Cezanne, Dalí—Chirico…Renoir School, but some portraits have something too.”
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Pat and Buffie continued to see each other—and Pat continued to meet many other women—for some months. Buffie allowed Pat to stay in her house when she went to California to prepare for her first marriage, and she continued to provide Pat with important introductions to people in the world of arts: people like the cult lyricist and wit John La Touche (“horribly, silencingly flip,” the intimidated Pat thought), who would write the lyrics for
Cabin in the Sky
and for the songs “Taking a Chance on Love” and “Lazy Afternoon” “Touche's” quondam wife “Teddie” (“in cream colored tights, coachman livery…with black boots”),
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a lesbian from a prominent banking and investment family who interested Pat quite a bit; and the painter Fernand Léger (“Simply wonderful,” Pat enthused when Buffie invited her to a Léger cocktail party).
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It was probably Buffie who was Pat's introduction to the heiress, art philanthropist, and gallerist Peggy Guggenheim (she had exhibited Buffie's paintings) as well as to a larger professional circle to which Buffie had access and Pat, still just a junior at Barnard College but circulating socially with astounding assurance, did not. Forty years later, Buffie was also responsible for Pat's reintroduction to Paul Bowles in Tangier, and Buffie remained a frequent subject for the lively correspondence that sprang up between Bowles and Highsmith.

Two weeks after Pat and Buffie met, as Buffie Johnson tells it, “I was invited to a party of a friend whose husband was the editor and chief of
Fortune
magazine. Thinking this might prove fortuitous for my young acquaintance—many people there were highly placed in the hierarchy of Luce Publications—I took Patricia with me and, although they were much older, she immediately busied herself among them. Emerging from a deep conversation with my friend, I looked up and the room had emptied. Without even saying goodnight, Patricia had left with the group of editors.”

Amongst those editors was Rosalind Constable, the woman who would haunt Pat's diaries, cahiers, and life for the next ten years.

Sybille Bedford, who remembered meeting Pat in the 1940s “in Rome when she was a little bit wild,”
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knew Rosalind Constable very well. In her dazzling memoir,
Quicksands,
Bedford wrote that Constable was “a bright light of the
Life/Time
establishment, hard-working, hard-playing.”
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Fourteen years older than Pat, Rosalind Constable was a sophisticated arts journalist from England. She knew and was known by nearly everyone in British and American arts and publishing circles. She had blond “Norwegian”-looking hair, light, cold eyes, a serious intellectual background, and a pronounced ability to spot coming trends in all the arts: Rosalind was a “cool-hunter”
avant la lettre.
Long employed at
Fortune,
she was greatly influential in the magazine publishing world that Pat was finding so attractive. Rosalind had the ear of the publishing magnate Henry Luce, who, Daniel Bell says, gave Rosalind one of the most “enviable” jobs in New York. Rosalind was the editor of an in-house newsletter in the Luce corporation called
Rosie's Bugle.
Its purpose was to alert all the other Luce magazine editors to the cultural subjects about which they should be writing.
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Mary Highsmith—Pat had made the mistake of excitedly pointing out Rosalind to Mary from a Manhattan bus one day—took an instant dislike to Rosalind. And Mary's eye for serious rivals was at least as good as Rosalind's eye for serious art.
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She continued to blame Rosalind for years for the alienation of Pat's affections: “Stanley and I were with you 100%,” she wrote painedly to Pat in Europe. “Then you met Rosalind—everything changed. We were no longer your friends…you wanted to make us out ignorant, crude and unthinking so you could show people how far you had sprung from your poor and slimy background.”
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Mary's criticisms were rewarded in the way such criticisms are usually rewarded: Pat created a pedestal for Rosalind Constable and kept her on it for the next decade.

Pat, more socially aggressive in the 1940s than she would ever be again (sober, that is), telephoned to Rosalind the day after they met and launched a long, complex friendship. The connection was vigorously pursued by Pat and indulgently encouraged by Rosalind. On her first visit, Pat was invited to spend the night in Rosalind's guest bedroom and she did so. Long walks with hands intertwined followed, and Rosalind—this thrilled Pat—called her “Baby,” gave her cryptically dedicated books, and introduced her to people prominent in the arts world, including Rosalind's own lover, the gallerist and artist Betty Parsons. “You're a sloppy Joe,” Rosalind said to Pat, who never quite came up to Rosalind's expectations of public presentation, “but I think you're an artist!” Pat thought it was a fair exchange.
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There were lunches in expensive restaurants liberally irrigated with alcohol and much anticipated by Pat. (Rosalind, in the style of the times, drank a lot.) After lunch, Pat sometimes sat on Rosalind's lap. It was the kind of Courtly Love story Pat preferred when she was young: a sensual pursuit of an older woman gauzily masked by an artistic and professional mentoring/mothering. This one had all the intoxications of a love affair that would never be physically consummated.

Pat transferred to Rosalind some of the liens of her bondage to Mother Mary; that boyish and intermittent courtship of her mother of which Pat wrote at twenty: “I'm happy if I can be boss, lighting her cigarettes and dominating as I did yesterday.”
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Pat encouraged her friends to bring back reports of Rosalind—and delighted in the backchat. When Kingsley telephoned Pat with a “wonderful message”—“I have it on reliable authority that Rosalind Constable is your slave!”—Pat gleefully extracted the details from her. Kingsley had been to the Wakefield gallery, where Rosalind's lover Betty Parsons presided, and Parsons had said to Kingsley: “‘Oh, Pat! Yes, Rosalind talks about her constantly! About how brilliant she is. In fact, I'm rather tired of hearing about her, etc.' and how I inspire Rosalind to work so hard.”
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Pat herself, although notoriously closemouthed in her suburban life in France and Switzerland, was regularly and correctly accused of gossiping in New York, in Snedens Landing, in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and in Earl Soham, Suffolk. Pat couldn't help telling tales on people: she was always somehow involved in making a “case” for herself—and that meant recounting stories of other people's “behavior” towards her. “The reason I like to document things, and to have witnesses—is because I do not like to be falsely accused,” she wrote to her stepfather in the middle of a five-page single-spaced torrent of tattling on her mother.
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Perhaps Pat's childhood habit of coolly and hotly discussing her mother with her grandmother had something to do with her tattling.

Like Buffie Johnson, Rosalind was responsible for Pat's introduction to “quality” and also to some very high-style amusements. Through Rosalind, Pat met sophisticates like Peggy Fears, the former Ziegfeld Follies girl whose film career had fizzled out by the mid-1930s but whose Hollywood connections, incessant partying (she was a close friend of the film actress Louise Brooks:
c'est tout dire
), and pursuit of beautiful women on both coasts was notorious. Pat, announcing that she was “looking for adventure,” began to visit Peggy daily in the fall of 1947 and was being far “too enthusiastic” about her for Rosalind's taste. Peggy Fears, in addition to her other attractions, supplied the intermittently insomniac Pat with sleeping pills.
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According to her diaries, Pat was always telephoning women at one thirty in the morning—from other women's bedrooms, corner phone booths, bars, almost never from her own apartment—to come by unexpectedly, make love with them if they were willing and she was interested, and then depart. Sometimes Pat's intentions were indirectly expressed, as when she paid an unanticipated visit to the novelist Hortense Calisher. (Decades later, Curtis Harnack, Calisher's husband, would become the executive director of Yaddo, the arts colony to which Pat—at the very last possible moment—left all her worldly goods.) Calisher said that Pat dropped in on her apartment announcing “that she came about a house, but I really wondered if it wasn't about
me
.”
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Pat talked to every magazine editor, book publisher, and cultural arbiter she could get an appointment with: inviting Betty Parsons to dinner so that Parsons could look at her drawings (Parsons, as Rosalind Constable's lover, provided Pat with another opportunity to be the third arm of yet another triangle); accompanying Buffie Johnson to artist “[Fernand] Léger's madhouse cocktail party,” where she met the set and costume designer Stewart Chaney and the architect Frederick Kiesler (“very nice,” Pat thought), who in 1942, the year Pat met him, would create and supervise the visionary design of Peggy Guggenheim's gallery, Art of This Century. Pat went, despite her afflicting shyness and contrasting boldness, to whatever she was invited to—to “[s]omething terrific…at Rosalind's Thursday night,”
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to publishing parties, to art lectures, to openings. Wherever there might be people able to help a career or connect a social life, there was this intelligent, magnetically attractive college girl, consumed by the American Dream of the perfect house, the right book contract, the burgeoning bank account, and the series of selves whose perfectability was always just around the corner.

It would have taken a keener eye than the casually admiring or coldly censorious ones turned towards Patricia Highsmith during all those Manhattan evenings to see that her seductive behavior, heavy imbibing, rapid advances, and sharp withdrawals were signals through the flames burning in her psyche. (“Now I feel quite socialized once more,” she wrote after a week of frantic activity. “I want to be alone now.”)
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Only Karl Bissinger and the composer David Diamond seemed to notice the skull beneath her skin—and what was going on inside it. And only Buffie Johnson was perceptive enough to talk with Pat about her sexuality.

“Buffie…told me she worried about me sexually and in a neat, catchy presentation like a lawyer's two-edged sword, told me she worried if I had ever had an orgasm…. She said my tenseness is dynamic and charming now, but later will be a problem…. In the course of the afternoon, I assured her, with conviction, of being a confirmed free-lover.”
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“Peculiar,” Pat wrote defensively in her diary, “with all [Mary] Sullivan's experience
she
never had any complaints.”
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In these heavily monitored times, it is easy to look askance at the young (and the old) Patricia Highsmith for her marathon drinking. More useful to remember—as every single person who approached drinking age in the 1940s told me—is the fact that people in New York in the 1940s drank a great deal more than people drink today. As the writer and editor Dorothy Wheelock Edson said, after explaining how her husband, “a very considerate man, always drove the drunks home” after one of their lively parties at their home on the North Shore of Long Island: “I can't say that I knew Patricia Highsmith was an alcoholic—because everyone was drinking so much in the 1940s you could hardly tell the difference.”
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But Pat, by her own account, seems to have been drinking even more than the people she drank with, and her drinking raises all the serious questions about the motives and responsibilities of a chronic drinker. Can an alcoholic be held accountable for what she says when she is drunk? Or is alcoholism so distorting a disease that a prejudice expressed by an inveterate drinker is merely the bomb site for the detonation of a rage that cannot be released in any other way?

Because Pat, like her birthday twin and fellow alcoholic, Edgar Allan Poe, suffered all her life from depressive cycles and agitated mental states, there are other questions to be raised. Kay Redfield Jamison, in her invaluable book
Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament,
has called them “complicated questions about whether the melancholic muse is also a ‘thirsty muse.'”
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