Beautiful Shadow (21 page)

     ‘The Lesbian, the classic Lesbian, never seeks her equal. She is . . . the soi-disant male, who does not expect his match in his mate, who would rather use her as the base-on-the-earth which he can never be.’
⁴⁸

     Her admiration for gay men was not purely conceptual. In the summer of 1942, she met the German-born photographer Rolf Tietgens. They were introduced by a mutual friend – another photographer, Ruth Bernhard – and by August, Rolf, a gay man, and Pat, a gay woman, found themselves strangely attracted to one another. Bernhard – Highsmith always called her by her surname – informed Rolf, with whom she shared a studio in New York, that he did not have a snowflake’s chance in hell of sleeping with Pat.

     ‘Pat Highsmith was a very interesting and handsome woman,’ remembers Ruth. ‘She looked wild, her facial expression was extremely intense and I liked her an awful lot. She was very direct, she said what she believed – she was unforgettable. I took some nude photographs of her – her figure was very slim, boyish. She was reserved, I did not know much about her, but she was a person with whom it was always very interesting to spend time. Our relationship was platonic, but intense. I did not have a romance with her.’
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     In August the two women, together with Rolf, enjoyed a few days at the house of the artist Jack Augustin, in Valley Stream, Long Island. While out walking in the swampy forest, Pat was bitten on the ‘rear end’ by a police dog. But the incident seemed to affect Bernhard more than the real victim. ‘The funniest thing,’ wrote Highsmith, ‘is that Bernhard was trembling and crying as soon as it happened, embraced me all the way home & practically had to be treated for shock.’
⁵⁰

     It seems Bernhard had a crush on Highsmith, but the writer judged her to be ‘unfortunately feminine inside’.
⁵¹
On their return to the city, Pat felt herself increasingly drawn to Rolf, a man she knew was gay. ‘I shall someday marry just such a man as he,’ she said.
⁵²
He was tall, dark and good-looking, but primarily Rolf appealed to her intellect; he spoke ‘like Christ and John Donne.’
⁵³
She would later dedicate
The Two Faces of January
to him. He was, in a way, ‘her alter ego’, says Dorothy Edson, who was associate editor of
Harper’s Bazaar
and a good friend of both Tietgens and Highsmith. ‘I recall Rolf asking Patricia what lesbians did when they made love and she said, “They just lie together and embrace”. Rolf said, “How dull.” ’
⁵⁴

     Rolf, too, took seductive photographs of Pat, some of them nudes, and felt attracted to her rather gamine figure. Showing her one of his portraits, he said to her, ‘I knew you’d like that one. Because you look very boyish. You are a boy, you know.’
⁵⁵
He liked her, she knew, because of her lean and hard body and because she was not afraid to speak her mind. ‘Yes, he fancies me a boy,’ she said.
⁵⁶

     The couple walked down 57th Street to the Hudson River, where they watched the boats and embraced. ‘He kissed me a few times – rather a mutual thing for a change,’ she said. ‘It was quite wonderful and perfect, and for several moments I could see happiness and read it in the sky like a strange new word written . . . He broke off several times to laugh at himself for liking a girl, because the girls have pursued him, and he has dodged . . . So tonight – I am new . . . I should like very much to sleep with him. And I know he wants it.’
⁵⁷

     Both of them talked openly about their sexuality, but, rather than mark them out as being off-limits to one another, this only increased their mutual attraction. In the middle of September, the couple attempted to sleep together. They took their clothes off, lay down on the bed, but ‘neither of us feel any physical excitement and neither want nor cause anything to happen’.
⁵⁸
She told Rolf about her past, particularly her ongoing emotional attachment to Rosalind Constable and realised that, ‘I have a definite psychosis in being with people,’ she wrote. ‘I cannot bear it very long. Perhaps in all the world there is only Rosalind with whom I can feel calm for hours on end.’
⁵⁹

     Two days later, however, after an afternoon at a Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition and a chicken dinner with her mother, they tried it again, this time at his apartment. She found herself aroused but Rolf failed to get an erection. Their failure to make love wasn’t that bad, she reasoned; after all, she only ever wanted Rosalind anyway. ‘I love Rosalind & want nothing else in the physical sense – really I don’t want her, because I love her in such a beautiful way. The fact is, I worship her.’
⁶⁰

     Pat’s almost holy adoration of what she saw as this golden-haired goddess would continue for the next eight years – until their friendship eventually cooled – but throughout her life, Highsmith looked for women whom she could worship. Sex was far from the most important factor in any relationship; rather, it was this near-divine quality for which she yearned.

As 1943 progressed, Highsmith sought out a number of women whom she imagined might be able to share space with Rosalind in her affections. From the beginning of her relationship with the painter Allela Cornell – a short, but intense liaison which lasted from May until September – Highsmith regarded her new lover as a spiritual soulmate. Allela was an odd-looking woman, thin and boyish, with a mop of dark hair and small, round glasses which magnified her eyes. In a sketch Highsmith did of her, in which Allela is reading a book, she drew her eyes as two large spirals made up of a seemingly infinite number of smaller vortexes, giving her the look of a woman who was clearly disturbed.

     ‘Allela was rather unattractive, borderline ugly,’ says her friend, the composer David Diamond, who shared a loft-studio with her in Greenwich Village. ‘So it surprised me that Pat, who I met through Allela, and she became intimate. Pat was absolutely stunning – she had a wonderful complexion, her skin was peach-like, her face beautiful and I’ll always remember her large hands and her terribly expressive fingers. Pat walked with this Garbo-like slouch, dressed in open-necked boy’s shirts and well-tailored jackets; she was more silent than talkative and there was something enigmatic and quite mysterious about her. But for all the difference in their physical appearances, Pat and Allela were enormously fond of one another.’
⁶¹

     Allela had had some success as a painter – in 1934 she exhibited a picture in the New York Watercolor Club and five years later won a prize at the Golden Gate Exhibition, in San Francisco. Yet commercially she went unrecognised and was forced to do pen and ink portraits on the sidewalks of New York for a dollar a time. Allela and Pat attended art classes together, and Highsmith often sat for her new lover. Allela’s large oil portrait of Highsmith, dressed in a red jacket and white blouse, with large, haunted owl-like eyes and a complexion tinged with green, later took pride of place in the writer’s various houses around the world. ‘Pat loved that portrait,’ says Kingsley. ‘But I think there’s something almost evil in that face, as if it’s just come out of the grave’.
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     Highsmith never found Allela physically attractive – she regarded her not so much as a real woman, but as ‘an idea, born by an X-ray’
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– and the relationship imploded. She proceeded to find another instant replacement in the form of a thirty-year-old married woman and model, Chloe, whom she described as ‘slim’, ‘dark’ and ‘neurotic’.
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In the early days of the friendship, Chloe made it known that she only wanted a limited physical relationship: Pat was allowed to share her bed and kiss her, but nothing more. This ‘beautiful – terrible’
⁶⁵
torture appealed to Highsmith’s fetishistic nature and she admired Chloe’s beauty as if she were an alabaster statue or a mannequin in a shop window. Yet when, in October, the two finally consummated their relationship, Highsmith felt strangely disappointed, confessing to Rosalind, ‘there is something perverted within me, that I don’t love a girl any more, if she loves me more than I love her.’
⁶⁶
Rosalind leafed through one of Highsmith’s journals, and, after reading a couple of entries about Chloe, asked Pat whether the book was a diary. No, replied the young writer, it was merely a literary notebook, one of her cahiers in which she recorded ideas for novels and short stories. ‘Well, then your diary must be a feasting,’ she responded.
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     Bored with her job, which she found increasingly dull, Highsmith dreamed of escaping the frenetic pace of Manhattan for Mexico, where she hoped to write her novel. She was initially thrilled by the news that Chloe agreed to accompany her, but realised that, in fact, her new lover now held little power over her. After negotiating with her employers – who told her that she would be sacked if she left, before finally agreeing that she could send stories into their New York office from Mexico – she started to make preparations for her adventure south of the border. She sublet her East 56th Street apartment for $65 a month, sold her radio and record player to her mother and stepfather for $75, busied herself learning Spanish, ordered her train ticket and endured a painful typhoid vaccination, but was annoyed that Chloe did not seem to share her sense of enthusiasm for the trip. ‘Chloe changes [her plans] faster than the Russian front line,’ she said.
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     In December, with the $350 which Highsmith had managed to save, the two women left New York for Mexico.

Chapter 8

A carefully nurtured bohemianism

1943–1945

‘Things were not always logical in Mexico,’ wrote Highsmith in her 1958 novel
A Game for the Living
.
¹
It was this very quality of irrationality which attracted the writer to the country. She thought she did her best writing at night, when her intellect was at its weakest; dreaming she believed was ‘the highest function of the mind’
²
and later she would write to Kingsley of her ambition to write a novel which had more in common with Carroll’s
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
than Dostoevsky’s
Crime and Punishment
.
³

     Highsmith was well aware of the allure the country held for writers – D.H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, Aldous Huxley, Katherine Anne Porter, John Dos Passos, Tennessee Williams, Malcolm Lowry and Paul and Jane Bowles had all journeyed south of the border. During the Depression years, post-revolutionary Mexico was seen by writers and artists as a land of promise, a place where one could discover a spirit of primitivism, an invigorating earthiness which was absent from the ‘Machine Age’ culture of more ‘sophisticated’ countries. ‘Here I feel that life is real, people really live and die here,’ Hart Crane told Katherine Anne Porter. ‘In Paris . . . they were just cutting paper dollies.’
⁴
A travel guide, written in 1935 for the American market, enthused about the country, despite its somewhat violent reputation. ‘Mexico shows a wealth of contrast: the hot country and the mountains; the quiet noble-looking Indians, and the (sometimes pleasantly, sometimes savagely) drunken ones; the constant sight of machetes, carbines, .45 automatics, and yet very little shooting . . .’ wrote its authors. ‘All life and death are vividly present: a little closer than we are used to seeing them.’
⁵

     Paralleling its reputation for vibrancy and emotional rawness, Mexico was also known for its capacity to corrupt the artistic sensibility. ‘Mexico . . . is the most Christ-awful place in the world in which to be in any form of distress,’ wrote Malcolm Lowry in his novel,
La Mordida
,
⁶
while Highsmith herself acknowledged ‘the subtle and pernicious effects of this Latin atmosphere’.
⁷

     From New York, Highsmith travelled first to San Antonio, Texas, arriving with Chloe on 14 December, and then on to Mexico City, where she spent Christmas. During that fortnight the relationship between the two women degenerated – Chloe accused the writer of being neurotic and even questioned why she had brought her to Mexico. On Christmas Day, Highsmith walked through the quiet streets of Mexico City up the hill towards Chapultepec Castle, where she stopped to chat to a group of Mexican soldiers. ‘Because of my limited Spanish, there was more laughter than conversation,’ she wrote. ‘I still recall their short figures, their small feet in thick army shoes, their smiles and their friendliness.’
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Yet the following Christmas Day, she looked back on her time in Mexico City with sadness. ‘A year ago I was miserable,’ she wrote in her diary.
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