Presenting a pleasant expression

[breathedout]

In her thirtieth cahier, shortly after separating from Caroline Besterman in 1968, Pat had written: “To live alone, to feel occasional depression. Much of the difficulty is from not having another person around for whom one puts on a slight show—dressing nicely, presenting a pleasant expression. The trick, the sometimes difficult trick is to maintain one’s morale without the other person, the mirror.”

In Switzerland [in the 1980s], Pat had found a supportive publisher and world representative in Daniel Keel and Diogenes, a German-speaking public eager for her work, and not one person, really, for whom she could perform her “self.”

—Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (Chapter 35: The Cake That was Shaped Like a Coffin, Part 2)

The capping irony: based on all the stories of all the women with whom Highsmith did live over the years, “presenting a pleasant expression” for someone else’s benefit is not something she, in reality, ever seems to have done. On the contrary, she fought cruelly and almost continually with every lover and other housemate she ever had (except, arguably, her last lover, Monique Buffet). Is she here, nearing the end of her life in solitude, remembering the past through rose-colored glasses? Or did she actually perceive herself, at the time, when she was fighting tooth and nail with Ellen Bumenthal Hill, or sleeping with both members of a couple and then informing on them to each other, as acting “pleasant” for her lovers’ benefits? If not for those lovers, would the Highsmith of the 1940s through 1970s have been even meaner and nastier? Or is the pleasantness she recalls here a red herring, and is the truth that she would have simply felt (and now did feel) less herself, somehow, without someone for whom to perform, regardless of the content of that performance?

(This is also interesting to me because, despite also being a bit obsessed with performative self-presentation, I absolutely adore(d) living alone, and usually feel most “myself” when there’s no one else around. Though I also live in the internet age, where being physically alone doesn’t mean I’m devoid of human contact.)