Remembering Lesbians: Phyllis Nagy on Patricia Highsmith

I thought maybe we could start with us. We’re not of Pat Highsmith’s generation; we both came of age in the late 1970s, early 1980s, when our senses of our lesbian selves took shape politically, aesthetically, intellectually—all of those planes: it saturated my world. In your experience, then, what was that awakening, and what was at stake in the name “lesbian” in that period?

I grew up and then came of age as a lesbian in New York City. I imagine this was very different from growing up in a small town or even out here [in Los Angeles], which has always had a different relationship, it seems to me, to all things lesbian, gay, or queer. It’s always been less binary, let’s say. In New York, my identity as a lesbian was never questioned. I was really aware of my family, who are largely first- and second-generation Italians from the Lower East Side—oh, pardon me, “East Village” now—using language that I then wrestled back: “faggot,” “dyke,” and other, more-colorful words that I’ve always been fond of because I had to get them back from my family and the bigotry surrounding all of that. So my political awareness of those things came first. Aesthetically, my identity as a lesbian was formed by really peculiar things.

Like what?

There was a huge community. I moved away from home at a very early age, and so by the time I was eighteen, nineteen, I was living on my own, sometimes in sketchy situations. By the time I managed to get back downtown (after living in an SRO hotel on the Upper West Side), to the far West Village, the ways in which the transvestite prostitutes were men plying their trade as women were abundantly clear. So I had a really keen sense of gender as constructed from a fantasy perspective. I could watch [my neighbor] Jésus dressing up, pretending to be a woman for men who needed that elaborate scene. It actually helped me form a much clearer sense of people, how we actually have to become something in order to do what we want to do in the world and in life. Taking on that mantle of lesbianism was very important to me, even as a girl. We dressed up, and everyone wore the same thing in New York in the late seventies, early eighties. Everyone—straight, not straight—wore a uniform. And so we all looked alike! This was very useful, because you had young straight girls with kinda punky hair like the butches. The only people who were identifiable in lesbian culture were the true femmes: they had the make-up, the hair, the dresses. Which I’m not sure exists now. I don’t go out to bars, so I don’t know. But they were the exotics, the ones who looked like women. The rest of us looked androgynous. Generally, it was a great, freeing thing. You went to a party in those days, and if you were attracted to someone, the gaydar was useless. But that was fine, and it bizarrely promoted a kind of tolerance that I don’t see today.

What were your cultural touchstones at that time?

Well, musically, there were people like Patti Smith, who isn’t a lesbian but who might as well have been! She would wear a dress shirt and a tie. She had long hair but had that growly, New Joizy voice. So music was a great influence. Queen. Sort of odd pockets of “wait a minute … Is that person …?” Elton John even, as he started to become more flamboyant if not out. Nobody was out. I can’t think of someone who was out in the music industry. Sylvester? But that was different: Sylvester was underground. We tend to now think of him as being mainstream whereas he was never. Madonna a bit later had that going on too. Music was a touchstone.

For films, there was strangely not that much. There was Entre Nous [Diane Kurys, 1983], there was The Hunger [Tony Scott, 1983], and there were kind of bizarre macho hyperstraight films like American Gigolo [Paul Schrader, 1980] that were oddly queer in their coding. Bob Fosse was huge even though he was hyperstraight. His films had a faggotry about them, perhaps because of his song and dance, his vaudeville / strip-club background, but there was a fluidity that really appealed me as a young gay woman. Also, stuff like Peggy [Shaw] and Lois [Weaver], who performed as Split Britches, especially when they did actual plays, like Dress Suits to Hire.¹ I remember watching that at PS 122, which was where I went to kindergarten, coincidentally! I was never one for joining, so WOW Café was on the periphery.²

Even then I was much more interested in aesthetics rather than blunt politics in art. There was no subtlety to a lot of that work, although it was necessary. With the performance artist Holly Hughes, especially in her best work, there was politics, but the humor made it more outward looking than angry. Oh, Janis Ian! Janis Ian for sure! But she was a little bit more mainstream than those others. I mean, I didn’t hear about [singer-songwriters and activists] Meg Christian or Holly Near or Margie Adam until much later. My world was very downtown, very CBGB kind of, the Pyramid Club.

You went to NYU and graduated in 1986. And that was the period when you met Pat[ricia] Highsmith? You were in your early twenties?

Right. I met her in 1987. I was working at the New York Times, and she was on a book tour promoting Found in the Street [1986], which I think is her last great book. She had a new American publisher.

And that was the beginning of a friendship that lasted about a decade? How would you think about Pat’s experience of lesbian life versus where you were in 1987, in your early twenties?

What’s interesting is that I think she had quite a similar world. I mean she ran in different circles, but it was similar. She had a crazy mother and an adopted dad, and she was at Barnard. She had been to high school with people like Judy Holliday. That I would pay good money to see! But in Greenwich Village, because she lived on Grove Street, she fell in with [artist and collector] Betty Parsons, and [journalist and writer] Rosalind Constable. Pat had a thing for Rosalind, who introduced her to that whole cool trendy lesbian scene of the moment. She was blessed by being in the art world, and through that world she very quickly got to meet young queers about town, like Truman Capote, who then recommended her to [the Saratoga Springs artist retreat] Yaddo. But she was never an outsider lesbian. Ever. She did not like to do anything but stalk her targets, right?! Which brings us to the level of her fantasy life, but she was always very much a lesbian.

There are people I know who say Pat would have been a transsexual. But she knew what she was: a butch lesbian. She would often say things like, “Oh my God, I wish I were a man.” Well, haven’t we all! I wish I were a man; it would be easier. I don’t think that means that Pat wanted to be a man. In all the years that I knew her, there was never any desire expressed or regret or…. It was all “I like my Levis from Texas” [where Highsmith had spent much of her childhood].³ It’s what we do: we hang onto things from childhood or young adulthood that work, like we always keep the same hair. Every time her cousins went back to Houston or wherever, they’d bring back her 501 s.

What interested you about Pat Highsmith? And what interests you now in telling a story about her?

Well, her work was what interested me. At that point, I had read only the extant Ripley books, and Deep Water and a few of the others. I had not read The Price of Salt, nor did she encourage me to. She didn’t think it was very good, or at least she said she didn’t think it was very good. Later, when she republished it and retitled it [as Carol], she thought slightly more of it, but still she wanted [me] to focus on Edith’s Diary or one of those other books as something that one day I could adapt. She was very, very good about encouraging young writers. It’s not something that gets talked about much. She was generous. Not with everyone.

Here is one of the reasons I was very fond of her. Between 1987 and 1992, when Pat was living in Europe, we would always go out for dinner on her trips to New York. She was very fond of revisiting places she had been to as a young woman, and often brought her [straight] friend [Gloria Kate] Kingsley [Skattebol], who was a Barnard chum. [Kingsley later became one of the executors of Pat’s estate.] One of these trips down memory lane was to the Duchess, a lesbian bar that was still open. So I said, “Tell me about the Duchess when you were a young girl.” “Oh, I remember the banquettes fondly,” and I thought, Man, those are still there. “And there’s a long bar, and there’s a little dance floor,” and I said, “Yeah, those are still there.” “And all of the women were well-dressed.” And I said, “Unhh.” At that time, the Duchess had become a Black lesbian club, so I asked, “What kinds of people went to the Duchess in your day?” “Very white, very art world.” I said, “It’s very different now.” And I told her it was a disco bar basically for Black women. And she said “OK … still, I’d like to see it.” And I remember walking her through the long bar; there were lots of people dancing and they were blaring I guess house music, and we finally sat down, and she saw the banquette. She was distressed until that point, but then she saw the banquettes and said, “They’re still here.” I thought Yeah, that’s it: the world has changed all around her, even the world of her sexual identity has changed, but this damn banquette is still here. She was claiming it, she was going to reclaim it, at least for a few hours.

She also said some other colorful things on that trip. I had brought along my Jewish friend Barbara. Well, I warned Barbara, who was a poet, that Pat could or would probably say something offensive. Barbara said, “Oh no no, we’re just going out to a bar, it will be fine.” I said that I’d give her five minutes. We make our way back to the banquette, with Kingsley holding her purse and looking around and Pat with her scowl and her Jimmy Durante look. Pat sits down and says, “OK, that wasn’t so bad.” She’s looking around the dance floor filled with Black women. Then she adds, “At least there are no Jews here.” Less than five minutes. Barbara took a deep breath and said, “Miss Highsmith, I’m a Jew.” And Pat said, “Well, you don’t look like one.” I told Barbara she could tell Pat she’s a silly old fucker and have that argument, which they then did.

What story do you want to tell now about Pat, and how does that help us think about the moment that we’re in?

You spoke a little earlier about how Carol or The Price of Salt, about how the movie tried to connect that time to our time. I think what Pat understood in that book was that if you think about what she was writing about in the late forties or early fifties and how that would compare to the twenties or thirties, when you had places like [the lesbian bar] Eve’s Hangout, the prejudice, the secrecy doesn’t change.⁴ It never changes. We are in that same moment now. I don’t think you can go to, I don’t know, Smithville, North Dakota, and find women who are gay who are in any way different to Therese and Carol in the way that they must interact with one another. And that’s why so many women, after Carol came out, wrote to me from odd places that I’ve never heard of. Not just ninety-year-olds to say “This is my youth,” but younger women, to say it made them understand that they’re not alone.

I think all forms of analysis work way too hard in trying to connect historical periods to the present. There is no such thing as a historical period when we’re talking about sexual identity. We use historical references to throw that into sharp relief, which is why I always think that they are necessary. What cultural precedents do we have for what we’re living through now in terms of sexual-identity discussions, where everyone is literally afraid to talk about it, for fear of offending someone? Which is the role of art, isn’t it—to provoke, to risk causing offense? I think Pat remains an important role model for how to lead your life as a lesbian and not rely on men. The books she wrote were about men, but they were obviously also about her. Her identification is with Ripley. It’s a fascination with getting away with things, which in her day meant getting away with being a woman alone, indeed a lesbian, who was very much into behaving like a man: chasing women around beds, just wanting to take whoever—straight, gay—not having that frame of reference of who’s available, but assuming that everyone’s available! And more or less they were!

But to tie this into the join, the seamless join between the political world of The Price of Salt and the fantasy, that’s her. Pat Highsmith was a stalker. This wasn’t a romantic fantasy. Pat did go to the house of the woman she saw at the department store. She stalked her. She went and spied on her from the bushes! I’m not sure that the translation to Therese and what happens in The Price of Salt is that different. To me that book is not dealing in fantasies—strange, criminal—but obsession. I don’t want to say it’s oddly hopeful; it’s open-ended. That’s the realist version of Pat. That’s her life. She wasn’t going to go home and hang herself. She wasn’t going to go home and do the Radclyffe Hall. On the other hand, the fact that she had to publish that book under a pseudonym and remained deeply embarrassed about it, I think, was because she couldn’t have an actual crime or murder committed in that book.

And in that way it does share more with lesbian pulp novels, even the ones that end in a more tragic key; they’re not shaped in that way around murder.

The Price of Salt is about a blank person who comes into her sexual identity by means of an obsession. And it’s not exactly a romance. You’d have to say it’s a love story, but it sort of is and sort of not. What was important to Pat was not thinking twice about your sexuality; that’s where she is an example to us. And that’s why it was important for me not to give up on Carol, because I think, given my discussions with various actors and directors over years about this, everyone wanted there to a be a moment, or two or three, where Carol doubted her sexuality. Where Therese doubted her sexuality. And I thought No, this is the only reason I want to do this. Because if you tell me you wake up, actress number one, every day of your life, saying, “Why am I straight?,” I’ll entertain that. But do you? No. Neither do we. And that’s why, for me, to come way back to the beginning, identity is important. I’m a lesbian. I’m not fluid. If one day I were to decide, for some reason, that I had to have sex with George Clooney, it doesn’t not make me a lesbian. I’m distressed by today’s categories [gender nonconforming, nonbinary] only because I have seen other categories disappear over the last thirty years. Where are the butch lesbians? I have friends who are stone butches who are equally distressed by this, who go out and have much younger people assume they’re trans. They’re not trans. They have to explain this. So there are disappearing categories: straight male transvestites, of which I knew quite a few. And now, increasingly, lesbians. But I’m not sure what we’re supposed to become, or what we are, if we don’t exist as lesbians. “Queer” is a word I’ve always hated in this context. I don’t like to use it.

Because it dilutes specificity?

I prefer “homosexual” because it describes something. “Gay”: that’s fine too. “Queer”: I don’t know what that means. And “queer,” when I was young, was a slur. And it’s vague. And as an artist, I reject things that are vague. Give me specificity. Part of why so much good work has come out of the LGBT et cetera community has been because of this otherness. If everybody is now other, what the fuck are we going to do? I want my otherness. Everybody does.

That brings me back to your really salient point about how historical reference helps refract particular kinds of questions, particularly for us in this moment of enormous contestation, repression, and censorship on the one hand, and, on the other, a worrying sense of moral certainty and the policing of categories, and so on. Can you talk about the shape of this limited series?

Yes, I can, although it’s very early days and I’m not working on it now [due to the WGA strike]. The basic shape of it would be to look, as through various twists of a kaleidoscope, at how sexual identity and national identity (because I think with Pat that’s very important) converged and collided to create this particular provocative artist. She would not have described herself as provocative, but then you think about what she did in her life—like, the letters to the editor she would write about Israel.⁵ She was a bit like Joe Orton in that way, writing fake letters under various names, but basically it was an act of strange rebellion. And the fact that she would talk very freely about her prejudices, and still would have people love her and be devoted to her, is very interesting. The series explores how it can be desirable to vent publicly in order to have discussions that enlighten and move us on. She wasn’t afraid of that.

Now, because she wasn’t a politician, she didn’t have that sort of public forum, but she did have her work, which she used to talk about women. Interestingly, the ways that women are treated in books like the Ripley series are extraordinarily nuanced and feminist; nobody ever talks about that. Edith’s Diary—one of the rare books in which she has a female protagonist—is a masterpiece. Carol, even though she didn’t rate it highly herself, means a great deal to many people. This is why she remains so vital—as opposed to, for example, Agatha Christie, who’s often lumped in the same category. I think I understand what her process was, and it involved living. It involved always carrying around certain key images in her head. It involved dreaming a whole lot. It involved drinking. It involved chasing women. She was transient. She never belonged to one country or another, no one country or another claimed her, and she moved around a lot as a kid and as an adult, and so did I and I get that. So every episode is tied to a different place, to a different psychological state, to a different time: old and young Pat, for lack of a better way of putting that.

Different actors play each Pat?

Yes. They never meet until a scene at the end where I think they do. (It’s obviously not a literal meeting.)

There’s an episode devoted to her mother. “I am married to my mother” is something that Pat once said. She was. Her mom died only a few years before Pat. Pat never saw her mother again after she stuck her in a nursing home.But she paid for it—she never let anyone forget it. There was a terrible resentment about the mom. I get it. I mean, her mom told her she wanted to abort her. But I don’t think she minded that. I think that she minded that her mom had the bad taste to stay alive so long.

The series will have eight episodes (because eight is what people can sell—that’s the sweet spot). There could be one episode in Texas, which was a huge part of her life, even though she didn’t spend much time there after she was an adolescent. But her grandmother who helped raise her lived there; Pat lived there on and off when she was young, as her mom kept dragging her back and forth from Texas to New York to Texas to New York. She had a pair of Confederate swords that she kept for her whole life.

Another of Pat’s contradictions that the series will explore is her anti-Semitism. Pat didn’t discriminate if she had a lover. When she was older, she had some Jewish lovers. I’ve seen some things recently, about lesbian communities rejecting Pat Highsmith because she’s a bigot, she’s this, she’s that. You show me the person who has never had some disallowed thought about someone, and I’ll show you a god. But we don’t live with gods. I think if Pat were alive today, she’d be canceled—and bizarrely, the biography that’s done the most damage is the one by a lesbian, by Joan [Schenkar]. That book made me furious. But [it] also speaks to the unreliability of biography.⁶

I’m thinking that your limited series might be the opposite of the word “canceled.” We don’t have a term for that, but it’s a sustaining, or it keeps alive what’s vital, not just about her but about who we are, about being contradictory human beings, about fearlessness. Those kinds of things seem really important.

We teach students that the only way to succeed is to fail, so what are we saying by rejecting anyone who is considered to have put a wrong foot forward? Isn’t it possible that we can look to someone like Pat, who certainly held many contradictory positions in her life simultaneously, as proof that vital, stimulating, provocative, accomplished lives can be led because of these contradictions, not in spite of them? Oscar Wilde. Look through the history, even gay and lesbian. Natalie Barney: nobody knows who that is anymore. Renée Vivien. All of those people were balls of fire and contradiction—even Radclyffe Hall was. And you think, Let’s look at these people again, let’s not look at blandness.

The other thing that Pat insisted upon is that content is not enough. Form counts. Pat, who worked in a very rigorous but very simple form, didn’t overstep: she knew what her ability was, and she used it to its best effect. She couldn’t or didn’t want to use the highfalutin language of some of the writers she admired, but she knew how to craft a story of suspense, which is what Carol was. She was a novelist. I think it’s pretty clear that her forays into short stories are very revealing for her prejudices and bigotries, but they’re not great. Short fiction wasn’t her thing. She was not Lorrie Moore. And I think she was productive in both her career and her personal life, and she didn’t separate them. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this in our culture and our students: they think they can only do one thing. There’s a lot of compartmentalization.

Rather than living your work.

Right, and I think that’s to the detriment of people and their work.