Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires

by Richard Bradford

  Melinda is guilty of numerous infidelities, and in this respect she is a replica of her author, but in the novel Vic/Ellen forces her to become promiscuous. Highsmith saw her infidelities as a justifiable response to an unbearable relationship from which Ellen would not free her.

  The novel is much better than A Game for the Living but, similarly, its progress was stifled by the apparent stability of her relationship with Doris. When she was due to send the final draft to Kahn at Harper in late 1956 she found herself persistently revising key passages and finding herself unclear about how to proceed. She resolved things by taking the train to Manhattan and arriving unannounced at Ellen’s apartment. With indulgent courtesy, Ellen invited her in, they drank wine and Highsmith made a sexual advance, which Ellen resisted, asking her erstwhile partner to leave. She refused and insisted that despite what had previously occurred they could restart their relationship. Ellen was mortified, threatened to call the police and this time Highsmith left for good, fully aware of how Ellen would respond and behave. The whole episode had been choreographed in advance by Highsmith as an exercise in provocation and humiliation, based on recollections of the many occasions when the two of them seemed set on mutually destructive trajectories.

  The following day, back in Snedens Landing, Highsmith began a rewrite of the closing chapters which she completed in little more than a week. Melinda breaks with Vic, moves to New York and appears to find happiness with a surveyor named Tony Cameron. Vic agrees to a divorce but pursues Tony through town, murders him and throws his weighted-down body into a flooded quarry. Melinda suspects that her deranged husband has killed her lover and seeks the assistance of a neighbour from Little Wesley, Don Wilson, who recovers Tony’s body and reports Vic to the police. Prior to his arrest – and inevitably his being found guilty of a capital offence – Vic returns to Melinda’s apartment and strangles her to death. Don’s profession? He writes pulp crime fiction. It is not too difficult to unpick the parallels between this new conclusion and Highsmith’s rather sadistic experiment in her visit to Ellen. The visit did not involve murder but it provided the energy for Highsmith to bring her stalled novel to a murderous conclusion. Their lives, as Vic and Melinda, are brought to a close in a particularly violent piece of writing, witnessed by a pulp fiction writer who appears in the novel as a kind of talisman for its satisfactory completion.

  Highsmith’s encounter with Ellen lasted only a few hours but this was enough to rekindle those feelings of antipathy and masochism that galvanised her fiction and had been drained from it by virtue of a relationship, with Doris, involving nothing resembling aggression, deception or mutual contempt.

  Shortly after meeting Doris, Highsmith wrote a poem addressed not so much to a particular woman as to the difference between women who most would treat as the source of happiness and contentment – such as Doris – and a very different type to whom she is masochistically addicted.

  She would love me all my life

  She would always be my wife.

  Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!

  I want stronger arms around me

  Insane arms and devils’ kisses,

  Teeth that bite my lips and wound me,

  Girls whose love will never last.

  Three months after Deep Water was published Highsmith entered in her cahier her feelings about the relationship between her emotional condition and domestic arrangement and her sense of herself as a writer.

  My present house is not big enough for two people, especially if one is a writer … The interesting thing is why I endure it … Perhaps what it comes down to is that I have had about enough, perhaps spoilt my last book effort. I am trying to save myself! … I can exist, and of course grow, only by change, a challenge to which I have to make an adjustment. (3 January 1958)

  The challenge with which she had confronted herself was double edged. In her routinely sanguine, unobstructive manner Doris had listened to her partner’s complaints about their house as a form of ‘confinement’. It was not tiny; rather a modestly sized converted barn with two bedrooms, one of which Highsmith had taken as her private study for writing. Another much larger, colonial-style house was offered for rent in the nearby village of Sparkill and the couple arranged to move there in September 1958. With astute timing Highsmith had to make regular visits to New York City during the previous month, ostensibly to meet with her agent and editor regarding the direction of her work but actually to take drinks in cocktail bars with Mary Ronin, a commercial artist ten years her senior.

  It is not clear how exactly they first met but it is likely that Mary was part of the casual social network of women in New York who visited lesbian bars, some in Greenwich Village and others scattered across the rest of the inner city. The majority of these were owned and run by the Mafia, an offshoot of the mob’s moneymaking enterprises from the 1920s and 1930s onwards – gambling, drink during prohibition, prostitution and, after the war, drugs – which fed an appetite for produce and activities frowned upon or criminalised by the authorities. The most famous monument to gay bars in New York is the Stonewall Inn, where a riot was prompted by a police raid in 1969, though we should note that it attracted predominantly homosexual and lesbian customers only after the Mafia took it over in the mid-1960s, following a trend established during the previous decades.

  In the 1950s lesbianism was not a criminal offence but establishments which openly promoted themselves as meeting points for gay women would, the mob was aware, soon be subjected to all manner of spurious allegations from authorities who would not openly tolerate manifestations of ‘debauched’ sexuality. Consequently, the Mafia cleverly contrived to undermine threats to lesbian bars before these existed. Such clubs and bars had an air of protective menace about them, with smartly suited mobsters monitoring the entrances to exclude those who seemed not to belong, men obviously, and politely issuing time-stamped tickets to women entering and leaving the toilets; sex on the premises was not permitted. Men served the bar too and the prices on drinks were grossly inflated.

  According to Marijane Meaker (Highsmith’s next significant other), in a conversation with Schenkar, Highsmith loved the atmosphere of these low-life clandestine clubs and hated herself for enjoying them. Mary Ronin too enjoyed such spaces. She was good at her job, but able to treat it more as an artistic vocation than a means of keeping herself. She was in a permanent long-term relationship with a very wealthy woman who owned a brownstone in New York’s Upper East Side and who enabled her to keep her own impressive apartment in Manhattan. Like Highsmith she revelled in the lesbian bar scene as an escape, not only from heterosexual conformity but also from its settled monogamous gay counterpart. Mary suited Highsmith’s temperament because she was careless of the impression she left on others. Two years after they broke up, Mary sent her a birthday card depicting a meticulously crafted sketch of herself, naked and smiling lasciviously on a bed. By November 1958 Highsmith and Mary had begun a sexual relationship and within weeks Highsmith left Doris.

  In December Highsmith moved back to New York, to a small apartment in 76 Irving Place where she would meet Mary regularly. The affair was brief and by October 1959 it was over for good. But, like her attempt to seduce Ellen two years before, it injected something sufficiently nasty into the mind of Highsmith the writer. While she was with Mary, Highsmith wrote This Sweet Sickness (1960) in which the scientist David Kelsey becomes infatuated with Annabella, who marries another man, Gerald. Thereafter David assumes a separate identity as William Neumeister, a freelance journalist, and buys a house in the country which he imagines will be his home with Annabella. David/Neumeister decides to murder Gerald and the rest of the novel is distilled into a Nietzschean blend of fantasy and hopelessness. At the close David/Neumeister imagines that he and Annabella will be able to sightsee in New York, shop together as partners and dine in fashionable restaurants. Highsmith is projecting the relationships she is having and has had into the world of incautious heterosexuality. David has to hide because he has committed
murder but there is a clear implication that lesbianism and homosexuality involve a similar fate of concealment and fear of being pursued by the forces of orthodoxy.

  Highsmith’s affair with Marijane Meaker was significant; though brief, it marked a crossroads in her life. They met in spring 1959 before Highsmith had separated from Mary – adultery, disclosure and conflict was Highsmith’s customary route towards the finishing of a relationship. Meaker was a successful writer, publishing under several pseudonyms. As M.E. Kerr and Ann Aldrich she produced fiction for children and young adults, and as Vin Packer she shifted from hardcore Mickey Spillane-style crime to novels that offered realistic accounts of lesbian life, mainly in New York. Spring Fire (1952) is regarded as a ground-breaking classic in this respect.

  A bar in MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village called Eve’s Hangout was one of the few that was run by a lesbian woman and remained independent of the Mafia. A notice at the entrance announced that ‘Men Are Admitted But Not Welcome’. Highsmith frequented it regularly, mainly because among the clientele she had become something of a legend. For most who bought and read The Price of Salt its author remained a mysterious figure whose career had begun and ended with this remarkable novel. Within the lesbian clubs of New York, however, a particular face and name had become the subject of gossip. Marijane later disclosed that when Highsmith arrived in a bar and ordered a drink whispers would pass through the room: ‘Claire Morgan is here.’ ‘Starstruck’, Marijane introduced herself to Morgan/Highsmith and their affair began within days. We should not assume that Highsmith was simply transferring her affections from Mary Ronin – or indeed Doris, whom she still sometimes visited – to her new, reverent partner. A month before they met Highsmith recorded that her libido had peaked, that she was having sex ten times a day with women she’d met in bars and that ‘it is surprising how the girls come’ (Cahier, 15 February 1959). She was, as Marijane disclosed, something of an underworld star.

  It was a bizarre relationship. At first Highsmith was so transfixed with Marijane that she postponed her trip to Europe, with whom she would be accompanied by her mother, Mary, and for which she had, astonishingly, persuaded Mary Ronin to join her once she left Paris for the Mediterranean. Mary had agreed to fly to Italy and then to meet up with her in the Greek islands. Eventually Highsmith cancelled her visit to Greece and met up instead with Doris, in Milan. We do not have the exact details of these arrangements, but it seems fair to assume that before she left America Highsmith must have persuaded Doris to fly to Italy. It is striking that even someone as promiscuous as Highsmith would have planned two consecutive holidays with two different women in neighbouring regions of the Mediterranean and her plan came to nothing only when Mary Ronin decided against joining her. Doris filled the gap and was subjected to the full tour of locations and cities that Highsmith had established as her ritual of sexual tourism almost a decade earlier.

  To add a bizarre twist to the excursion, her mother Mary presented herself to the press in the lobby of their Paris hotel once Highsmith had gone south. But rather than speak on behalf of her now acclaimed crime-writing daughter she claimed to be her. Confused journalists checked their notes on Highsmith’s background, notably her date of birth, but hid their perplexity as Mary, evidently a woman in her late fifties at least, pretended to be her daughter and offered gnomic observations on what had inspired her novels.

  When she returned to America, Highsmith suggested to Marijane that they should move out of New York and to a place immune from the prejudices and secrecies of the city and its collateral urge towards promiscuity. They went to Pennsylvania, to a small farmhouse, a few miles from the bohemian community of New Hope. Bucks County, the region encompassing New Hope, had since the 1930s been a popular location for bohemian eccentrics of various types, notably Dorothy Parker and her husband Alan Campbell, as well as S.J. Perelman, George S. Kaufman, and to Highsmith’s dismay, Arthur Koestler, who was still an occasional visitor when she arrived.

  Although Meaker’s memoir, Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s (2003), did not appear until after Highsmith’s death we have no reason to suspect that she offered a distorted or biased portrait of her partner. Not once did she speak of Highsmith with bitterness, either in the book or in interviews. She did, however, indicate puzzlement. At New Hope Highsmith seemed to have turned herself into an impoverished version of Jay Gatsby. She made a point of dressing formally for dinner, even when only the two of them were eating together, ironing her meticulously washed white shirts and trousers and cleaning her shoes so that they reflected sunshine. Meaker noticed also that Highsmith exhibited an alarming obsession with dangerous implements, mainly knives. She kept a penknife and switchblade in her jacket, which was curious given that there was nothing, human or animal, against which she would have needed to defend herself in the lanes of New Hope. The population was made up entirely of locals – generally polite, church-going farmers – and artists of various sorts who disliked the pressures of city life. Sometimes she also prowled around the house with a hammer in her hand, with no explanation or apparent inclination to use this instrument for its conventional purpose.

  Marijane’s sense of her partner as slightly odd is illuminated and clarified when we read Highsmith’s notebook accounts of their time in New Hope. Evidently Marijane was unaware of the fact that for most of their days together, from breakfast to nightfall, Highsmith was drunk. She only learned of this later from a conversation with Highsmith’s friend Polly Cameron, according to whom she named her drinks not according to their main alcoholic content – practically all were gin – but in terms of the activities and times of the day during which she took sustenance from them: ‘Breakfast Drinks’, ‘Walking Drinks’, ‘Talking Drinks’, ‘Cooking Drinks’, ‘Dressing Drinks’, ‘Sleepless Night Drinks’, ‘Planting Drinks’ and of course ‘Writing Drinks’. Both women enjoyed alcohol but Marijane is astounded by how, in retrospect, she had remained ignorant of her partner’s ability to conceal and minimise the effects of such an extraordinary quantity of gin.

  What, we must wonder, would she have made of Highsmith’s opinions on her and on their relationship which she confined largely to her journals? She described herself as being ‘terrified of [Marijane’s] temper’, a comment that should be considered in the context of later accounts of Marijane’s disposition and personal characteristics by those who knew her, who present her as, variously, reserved, considerate and amiable. But according to Highsmith, ‘The morning was the worst. The worst of any verbal conflict to date. M.J. keeps me on the defensive, by wild attacks … e.g. accusing me the night before of having whined, of having said that I have the worst of it…’ (Cahier, 22 March 1961). Regularly she describes herself as the ‘victim’ of their exchanges, that ‘her insults towards me have gone beyond bounds’. After six months of living together permanently Highsmith moved out and rented another house, in South Sugan Road, on the other side of the village. Thereafter, for several more months, they existed in a semi-detached relationship, communicating by telephone to discuss meals together which might sometimes lead to overnight stays. We should be aware that all of Highsmith’s accounts of the state of things between them were entered in cahiers kept when she was in South Sugan Road and that each entry was a retrospective record of what had happened when they had spent virtually twenty-four hours a day together. Did she feel that she needed to guard herself against the exposure of her diaries and cahiers to her lover as had occurred, with disastrous consequences, with Ellen? In a different house it would be easier to hide them. This is possible but it is just as likely that Highsmith made use of their separation to enable inventive distortions to replace day-to-day documentary reports of what actually occurred. For example, we frequently come across passages in which the narrative of what took place is interspersed with dialogue. ‘You’re trying to defend yourself with what’s left of your logical mind, because gin has got it. You can’t make it with Marijane Meaker. I threw you out, Pat, because you’re a common drunk�
�. This, allegedly, is what Marijane said to her shortly after she left for South Sugan Road, and Highsmith reports her own reply: ‘I said, “Hang on to it [the house]. It’s all you’ve got”’ (Cahier, 22 March 1961). This is utterly at odds with Marijane’s memoir where she states she knew only of Highsmith’s heavy drinking long after they parted and in which she gives the overall impression of their relationship as sometimes difficult but certainly not beset with regular and vindictive quarrels led mostly by Marijane.

  In the end it is impossible for us to decide finally on which of them we should believe, but the contexts of their reports should be given consideration. When Marijane wrote her memoir, she had no reason to assume that she was presenting an alternative to Highsmith’s version, let alone defending herself against it. She knew nothing at all of the cahier of 1961. She was probably aware that the Highsmith estate had been deposited in the Bern archive five years earlier, but it was uncatalogued and neither she nor anyone else knew anything of the private notebooks and diaries. Highsmith’s cahier on the two of them seems like the rough draft of a novel; this is significant because the novel that did evolve out of their brief, precarious relationship, The Cry of the Owl (1962), confirms that Highsmith treated the ruining of real lives as the principal stimulation for her particular brand of fiction.

  Brigid Brophy famously wrote of the novel as one of two which created the subgenre of ‘the psychology of the self-selected victim’. The other was Nabokov’s Lolita. The plot of The Cry of the Owl is difficult, one might even say impossible, to summarise because it is made up of at least three overlapping versions of the same theme, all of which involve a stalker and a victim. It begins with Robert Forester, recently divorced, leaving New York for the village of Langley, Pennsylvania, which is an almost exact replica of New Hope. There he becomes obsessed with a neighbour, twenty-three-year-old Jenny Thierolf; roughly six years younger than him, the same age difference as between Highsmith and Marijane. Jenny, once she has met Robert, breaks off her engagement with Greg Wyncoop, who begins spying on the pair. Greg contacts Nickie, Robert’s ex-wife, who encourages him to gather incriminating information as a means of punishing her ex-husband. Next, Jenny herself follows Robert, doubting his stories about his job and eventually coming to suspect that he has murdered her former fiancé, and she commits suicide.