Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires

by Richard Bradford

  During her four years there, Highsmith exhibited personality traits by parts eclectic and exhibitionist. Those of her contemporaries who spoke of her later gave primary attention to her physical appearance: ‘She dressed up and wore very, very tailored clothes’; ‘My image of Pat is wearing riding clothes and starched white shirts’; ‘Pat always had an aura about her, there was something special’; ‘My vision of her is with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth. And the camel hair coat, the high white collar and I think she wore an ascot. I mean she was stylish’ (Schenkar, pp. 114–17). In the cahier started when she enrolled at Barnard, there is a striking description of a girl of around Highsmith’s age dancing to the music of Tchaikovsky in an otherwise empty room. In her account of the girl Highsmith states that she becomes indistinguishable from the music, as if the sounds seemed to become part of the girl’s presence. Barnard’s English curriculum was commendably up to date, including poems by W.B. Yeats, and it seems almost certain that Yeats’s enigmatic line from ‘Among School Children’, ‘How can we know the dancer from the dance?’, was the unacknowledged inspiration for Highsmith’s passage. We have to wonder if she is acknowledging her own performance among her peers at college as, like the dance, something that obscures any clear perception of the actual Patricia Highsmith.

  Her affiliation with ideals and beliefs was ambivalent. When she started at Barnard it was already clear that the Republican, democratic forces in Spain were on the brink of defeat by Franco’s fascists. Highsmith abandoned her previous interest in Hinduism and committed herself to communism. In 1939, she joined the Young Communist League and in her later cahiers claimed that she read a considerable number of works by Marx and Engels as well as post-Marxist texts such as Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism. Why exactly she decided to commit herself publicly to the hard-left remains a matter for speculation, but it should be noted that during this period Barnard and its undergraduates maintained a comfortably conservative stance towards US and international politics. The vast majority of undergraduates were from middle-class families and only two of Highsmith’s year confessed to sympathising with the Democrats; the rest were, like their parents, Republicans, and none was associated with any kind of political radicalism, let alone communism. Again, Highsmith was making an exhibition of herself. The moody, stylish figure with the cigarette dangling from her mouth, dressed like a character in a noir movie, had now committed to a political party which promised to expose liberal democracy and capitalism as covers for mass exploitation and to undermine the government of the United States. Quite soon, though, she grew tired of this new performance. ‘A meeting this evening of the League … I feel uncomfortable with them … I wonder if I should tell them I am degenerate and be expelled’ (Diary, 1 September 1941).

  The degeneracy she was referring to? In 1940 she went to a bar in Greenwich Village, along with several of her undergraduate friends, and there met Mary Sullivan, a short and stocky middle-aged lesbian, who often dressed in trousers and the kind of jackets favoured by men. She ran a bookshop near the Astoria Hotel and according to Highsmith’s diary entry (13 June 1941) Sullivan invited her back to her apartment for drinks and offered her the divan bed for the night. Highsmith then took the initiative, suggesting that Sullivan’s bed was big enough for both of them: ‘Mary accepted with alacrity. Quickly. And then well, we barely slept, but what does that matter? She is marvellous, kind, sweet, understanding.’ There is no doubt about the existence of Mary Sullivan. She features in Margaretta Mitchell’s biography of Ruth Bernhard (2000) as a rather squat, socially active bookshop manager. But beyond that we have to take it on trust that Highsmith had a brief affair with Sullivan and that this was, as she later claimed, her rite of initiation as a lesbian. Bernhard was a wealthy New York socialite and photographer and as Highsmith’s biographer Joan Schenkar states, ‘perhaps it was Mary who introduced Bernhard to Pat’ (p.230). The ‘perhaps’ is pertinent because we have no conclusive evidence, aside from her diary entry, that Highsmith knew Sullivan at all, let alone had an affair with her. Indeed, Schenkar interviewed Bernhard six months before her death and she stated that ‘I never knew anyone that Mary Sullivan had a relationship with,’ and conceded that if she had slept with Highsmith she had not made a ‘bad choice’. But her observation was prompted solely by Schenkar’s suggestion that the two women had an affair. Bernhard had no knowledge that Highsmith and Sullivan had ever met.

  Tracking through the interviews and statements made by Highsmith’s contemporaries, such as Bernhard, on what happened during this period, and comparing these comments with the entries in Highsmith’s diaries and cahiers, there are few outright contradictions. But at the same time, there are two completely separate narratives that intersect only when her biographers, notably Schenkar, cause them to do so.

  There is then the mysterious presence of ‘Virginia’, the woman without a surname who Andrew Wilson, Highsmith’s first biographer, regards as her first serious lover, following her brief dalliance with Sullivan. First of all, we have an account in her diaries (28 July 1941) of how Sullivan was so distraught by Highsmith’s abandonment of her for Virginia that she sent regular deliveries of gardenias to her at Mary and Stanley’s apartment. Highsmith recorded in her diary that she stored the flowers in the refrigerator with the label of the sender prominently displayed: ‘Mike Thomas’. The ‘sender’ was apparently the host at the party where they had first met. He did not exist and Highsmith had not met Sullivan at a party.

  Highsmith refers to Sullivan’s replacement in her diary: ‘I know in the way of intelligence, fidelity, dependability, and intensity, Mary is superior to Virginia. Perhaps I shall live to regret it – breaking with her’ (6 July 1941). Of all the women who were at college with Highsmith at this time and who were interviewed later (five by Schenkar, three by Wilson), none refer to, or seem able to recall, an individual called Virginia or even someone who might have been her and for whom the name was invented for the sake of propriety. Bernhard has no knowledge of her and nor has Highsmith’s closest friend in college, Kate Kingsley, or anyone from among the growing circle of Highsmith’s friends outside Barnard. Yet she features in Highsmith’s diaries as a figure both erotically real and in other respects chimerical, with behavioural and temperamental features that are erratic to say the least. For example, she comments that ‘Va [her abbreviated version of Virginia] criticises me always … was terrible to me as always on the phone,’ while at other times she characterises her as consistently kind and generous. How can she be ‘always’ terrible and critical while being otherwise benign and tolerant? Perhaps ‘Va’ was indeed capricious and irresolute. Equally possible, however, is that these irregularities result from the fact that Highsmith has created a hybrid between the mysterious real woman and the fantasies of her notebooks. A further irregularity arises from the fact that ‘Va’ first features in Highsmith’s cahiers in 1938 around the time she first entered Barnard and three years before she began to see Sullivan. Can we really accept that Kate Skattebol, née Kingsley, whose friendship with Highsmith endured from their first meeting at Barnard in 1938 until the author’s death, never met or was never told anything of the woman with whom Highsmith was supposedly having an intense affair during the four years of her time as a student? Perhaps Kate did know of someone who Highsmith was seeing but was unaware of a very different version of her, the fictitious counterpart that appears in the cahiers. Barely six months after her first encounter with Virginia, Highsmith wrote that ‘I miss Va., can’t end it’ (March, 1939). Did she mean that she was thinking of finishing their relationship? Perhaps, but the subsequent sentence suggests that by putting an ‘end’ to ‘Va’ she meant that she was thinking of disposing of her as an invention: ‘Must write something good to calm and satisfy myself.’

  In 1942 Highsmith met Rosalind Constable, a verifiably real woman with whom she would have her first serious relationship. At that point ‘Va’ disappears for ever from her cahiers. When ‘something’, or
rather someone, ‘good’ entered her life she no longer needed to rely on fantasy.

  Highsmith graduated from Barnard in June 1942 and for the next few years her life followed two trajectories. The first involved her search for secure employment and the second took her through a sequence of encounters that can best be described as social climbing.

  The social climbing began around a year before her graduation. Through Bernhard’s circle of mostly European expatriates Highsmith met Buffie Johnson who, in 1941, had returned to New York from what amounted to the Grand Tour undertaken by artistically and intellectually ambitious Americans – Hemingway and Fitzgerald included. Johnson, a painter, had lived in Paris before and during the German occupation, in the house of the acclaimed soprano Mary Garden and, like many others, attended the literary salons of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Through Johnson Highsmith also formed an attachment, seemingly platonic, with the journalist and writer Janet Flanner, another veteran of Paris in the twenties and thirties, who fascinated her new young friend with stories of Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos and Pound. Once America had entered the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor, New York became more and more a replica of what Paris had been a decade before. Europe was now out of bounds and while sea battles were raging in the Pacific, the US East Coast offered a refuge for those who enjoyed the exoticism that the European fascists and Japanese imperialists seemed intent on eradicating. Through Bernhard she also formed a friendship with the photographer and painter, Rolf Tietgens. German-born, Tietgens had fled Europe shortly before the Second World War not least because, as a practising homosexual, he feared for his fate if the Nazis succeeded in their military ambitions. She and Tietgens enjoyed each other’s company and the lack of tension created by the confiding of their sexualities erased the complications of mutual attraction. His photographs of her as a naked twenty-one-year-old have become art objects in their own right, irrespective of Highsmith’s later eminence as a writer.

  She seemed particularly attracted to those associated with the visual arts. Madeleine Bemelmans, ten years older than Highsmith and a mature student at Barnard, invited her to parties which she co-hosted with her husband Ludwig, an Austrian-born writer who was enjoying acclaim as the author and illustrator of the first Madeline (1939) children’s book, which would eventually become a major classic of the genre. At one of these parties Highsmith was introduced to Berenice Abbott, a celebrated photographer and pioneer in the development of new apparatuses designed to improve and expand photography as an art form. Abbott shared a hallway with Elizabeth McCausland in an apartment building on Commerce Street in Greenwich Village. Their respective apartments occupied the entirety of the fourth floor and they were effectively live-in lesbian lovers. McCausland and Buffie Johnson were responsible for introducing Highsmith to figures in the New York literary and publishing establishment. In July 1941, just less than a year before she graduated, Highsmith was taken to a party in Greenwich Village attended largely by authors and commissioning editors from the New York literary set. Buffie was a close friend of Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Paul and Jane Bowles, though there is no evidence to suggest any of them were at the party. Buffie does remember, however, in her unpublished memoir that ‘Without even saying goodnight, Patricia had left with the group of editors.’ One of these people was Rosalind Constable, a decade older than Highsmith and well established as a member of the New York intelligentsia. She was strikingly good looking and despite being born in England, was regarded as quintessentially Scandinavian due to her posture, bone structure and shiny blonde hair. Her principal job was as a researcher for and occasional contributor to Fortune magazine. She also acted as a consultant within the literary circuit of book publishers, in which everything from individual submissions to market trends were discussed. The day after the party they went for dinner and drinks, Highsmith spent the night at Rosalind’s apartment in a spare bedroom, and for the subsequent ten years Highsmith remained obsessed with her.

  They never had sex, at least according to Constable, but the fact that Highsmith was obliged to deny herself a physical union with a woman who she regarded as a goddess is significant. This was a reversal of her sexual relationship with the ethereal Virginia. Previously she had imagined sex with a woman she had turned into a myth, and now she had to endure the perpetual denial of sex with an actual woman she adored. Think ahead to the plot of Strangers on a Train. Bruno, the disturbed predatory figure, tries to draw handsome, socially respectable Guy into a foul conspiracy. He fails, but both characters face appalling consequences. Nothing quite like this happened with Highsmith and Rosalind but there are eerie resemblances between the real-life stalker, Highsmith, and her horrid creation, Bruno.

  Highsmith’s ascent into the metropolitan bohemian elite was accompanied by her more humdrum trajectory through the job market. Rosalind Constable used her connections to get Highsmith interviews at Fortune, Good Housekeeping, Mademoiselle, Time and Vogue. For each, she failed, and Constable later informed her this might have been because ‘you looked like you’d just got out of bed’. Kate Kingsley Skattebol later revealed that she was amazed her friend managed to attend lectures and seminars, given that she spent most of her free time at parties, drank for entire days and was often incapable of standing up, let alone speaking coherently. A few weeks after the disastrous interview at Vogue in June 1942 she met William Shawn, managing editor of The New Yorker, and again Constable was responsible for persuading Shawn to see her. He looked at pieces she’d contributed to the Barnard Review and asked her to submit some sample copy for the ‘Talk of the Town’ column, but she did not hear from him again.

  Her mother had paid her college fees – considerable given that Columbia would soon be ranked as one of the elite Ivy League schools – and she lived without cost in the various apartments rented by Stanley and Mary. As a graduate, she aspired to the kind of independence she had encountered in her new circle of professional women, notably Constable. At the close of 1942, she was obliged to settle for a poorly paid job as editorial assistant to Ben Zion Goldberg who ran F.F.F. Publishers, the largest US agency for Jewish newspapers and journals. Goldberg was a mostly secular Zionist who went on to research and write about the fate of Jews in the Soviet Union and the post-war Soviet bloc. Highsmith’s work was partly administrative, but Goldberg largely utilised her as a researcher for pieces that commissioned authors were preparing for F.F.F.’s various outlets. In her December diary of 1942 she wrote that it was ‘a lousy journalistic job’ and complained that ‘I’m frankly bored and ashamed of it. Why wouldn’t it be the scarabs of Tutankhamen? Why not the history of the Dalai Lamas? … Why not the story of the philosopher’s stone?’ The angry ‘Why not?’ sequence is prompted by what she actually has to do, involving ‘kikes’. The entries are laced with antisemitic comments, some particularly vile, and she comments that Goldberg ‘would try to Jew me down to eighteen [dollars] a week’. In reality, she had been earning twenty dollars a week since her appointment and Goldberg raised it to twenty-four some time prior to this note that she expected him to ‘Jew’ her ‘down’ to eighteen. Also, she was contradicting the June 1942 diary entry describing when she was first appointed, where she states that on being offered twenty dollars, ‘I didn’t haggle … being poor at haggling’, unlike ‘kikes’. In the December entry she writes of Goldberg ‘he seems to be of some repute – somewhere’, in the full knowledge that his The Sacred Fire (1931) on sex and organised religion was one of the most controversial books of the previous decade. But given his ethnicity she found it easy to blind herself to his considerable reputation.

  Fifty years later, in 1993, Highsmith published an article called ‘My First Job’ in the London-based Oldie magazine. She described her first period of employment after Barnard as a street-corner advertiser for the Arrid Deodorant Company, involving her standing in front of Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s department stores questioning customers as to their opinion of Arrid’s possible list of advertising p
hrases. ‘How do you feel about Arrid is the fastest selling underarm deodorant in America and around the world?’ she would ask exasperated shoppers. This was partially true in that Highsmith did earn some cash in hand as a pavement promoter for several months after she left F.F.F. in early 1943. But for The Oldie she erased any reference to Goldberg and F.F.F. By then she had earned herself a reputation as a pro-Palestinian whose antagonism towards Israel was a poor façade for visceral antisemitism, though she hardly bothered to disguise her loathing for Jews per se as some form of idealism regarding Israel’s military and political activities.

  She excised records of Goldberg from her life, while in truth she remained on good terms with him after she left F.F.F. They travelled to Mexico together in 1944 and in her diaries she tells of how Goldberg would come to her room and suggest that they might be well suited, sexually. At the time, being courted by a middle-aged Jew might, one would have thought, have been particularly repulsive to her, as an antisemitic lesbian. But she describes his visits dispassionately, because she knew that he was well connected in the New York publishing business. He would, four years later, offer her constructive advice on how to make Strangers on a Train a saleable novel.

  In December 1943 she found a job that paid her, in terms of commissions, three times more than her salary at F.F.F. She became a scriptwriter for the Sangor-Pines Comics Shop at 10 West 45th Street. During the forties in America, comic books were seen as irredeemably low culture despite their sales outnumbering those of popular and mainstream fiction by around 30 per cent. At the end of the 1940s there were more than forty US comic-book publishers producing at least 250 titles monthly for an estimated seventy million readers. Highsmith provided the text and dialogue for Black Terror and The Fighting Yank. The Fighting Yank was largely a propaganda tool, offering readers an account of the heroic exploits of American servicemen in the Pacific and Europe.