PATSY SOUTHGATE,
WHO INSPIRED 50’S LITERARY PARIS,
DIES AT 70
If her own poems, short stories, plays, and an unpublished novel did not put her in a league with the coterie of young writers who gravitated to her orbit in Paris, it was partly because they included such literary luminaries as William Styron, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Terry Southern, a middle-aged Irwin Shaw and her own husband, Peter Matthiessen.
Even so, Miss Southgate, a woman of fierce intelligence, bitingly funny wit and high-spirited sense of fun, made her mark on literary Paris simply by being her ineffable self.
For one thing, in a city that treasures beauty she was renowned as the most beautiful woman in Paris. A clean-cut American beauty whose finely chiseled features were set off by surprisingly full lips generally framing a dazzling, inviting smile, Miss Southgate, whose animated beauty generally confounded the camera, was blond to her eyelids and had such a steady, open gaze it was said that to look into her deep blue eyes was to fall in love.
In Paris, where falling in love is easy,the only men in the tightknit American expatriate colony who seemed to have avoided falling in love with her were those who were falling in love with one another, though that was not always sufficient defense against Miss Southgate’s captivating charm: On Long Island, she became famous for her deeply loving relationships with gay artists and poets, most notably Frank O’Hara, the poet whose companion, Joe LeSueur, actually moved in with Miss Southgate after Mr. O’Hara’s death in 1966.
A native of New York who grew up in Washington, where her father was chief of protocol for the Roosevelt White House, Miss Southgate, a 1950 Smith College graduate, was a perennial pioneer.
A member, along with Mr. Matthiessen, of the first class of the Smith-Yale junior year abroad program that helped establish Paris as a romantic way station for a generation of young Americans, Miss Southgate was ahead of her time even in her vaunted beauty. In an era when the Hollywood ideal was the shapely starlet with an overflowing bosom, her trim form prefigured a later esthetic of sturdy athleticism.
At a time when the young American writers were selfconsciously trying to re-create the fabled Paris of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and other 1920’s expatriates, Miss Southgate, though sane, was the Zelda Fitzgerald of the 1950’s.
But if there was more meaning than madness in her madcap ways, Miss Southgate had her transcendent moments. Once during the tempestuous courtship that preceded their tempestuous marriage, when a row between Miss Southgate and Mr. Matthiessen was followed by a sulking two-day silence followed by an evening phone call that failed to patch things up, Mr. Matthiessen was startled an hour or so later by a late-night banging on the door of his Paris student lodgings.
When his disapproving landlady opened the door to Miss Southgate, who had thrown on her clothes and traveled halfway across Paris after the dispiriting phone call, it took her only a moment to add to her legend as a master of the inspired spontaneous gesture.
“I thought you needed this,” she told Mr. Matthiessen as she handed him an orange and departed, leaving him to marvel, as he still does, that it was exactly what he needed.
After marrying, graduating and returning to Paris in 1951, the Matthiessens were instant leaders of a bohemian life that included legendary late-night revels at the CafÈ de Tournon, Le Champlain or the Dome. Even their apartment, a multilevel, Paris-perfect studio walk-up at 14 Rue Perceval with a balcony overlooking the Montparnasse rail yards, became the stuff of legend.
Mr. Styron made it a major setting for his 1960 novel, “Set This House on Fire,” and it was there that Mr. Matthiessen and Harold L. Humes founded The Paris Review, summoning Mr. Matthiessen’s boyhood friend, George Plimpton, from his studies at Cambridge University to run it.
For all the publication’s later acclaim, it is an open question whether the writers who gathered there would have been as willing to discuss the harebrained scheme if Miss Southgate had not been present as additional lure.
After Miss Southgate gave birth in 1952 to a child who lived only 12 hours, the couple took the precaution of moving to a ground-floor apartment for her next pregnancy, so she would not have to walk up stairs. Their son, Lucas, and The Paris Review both came out in the spring of 1953, with both parents represented by French translations.
Before the year was out they had returned to the United States and settled on Long Island, where as practically the only writers in the vicinity they fell in almost by default with their neighbor Jackson Pollock and other artists.
After the couple were divorced in 1956, Miss Southgate, whose later marriage to the artist Mike Goldberg also ended in divorce, became a fixture in the Long Island art scene, forming close friendships with Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers and other acclaimed painters even as she continued her own work, contributing to The Evergreen Review, translating a series of books from French and eventually finding her late-life niche with The East Hampton Star.
While her fabled beauty faded, her appeal did not. At her death, her hair was as blond as ever and her eyes just as blue.
She is survived by two children, Lucas and Sara Matthiessen, both of East Northport, and two grandsons.
July 26, 1998