The Talented Miss Highsmith Page 11

  You are saving me from ruining the end of my life, for which I can’t thank you enough, nor can money even pay for it. If I lived anywhere near my mother, I shouldn’t be able to work, and even in Suffolk, 1965, I locked up my work at night, out of instinct, lest she destroy it.29

  Mary’s visits to Pat in Europe always seemed to produce some kind of “earthquake.” Six years earlier, in September of 1959, Mary had travelled to New York from Texas to fly with Pat to Paris, where Pat “had a book coming out” with her French publisher, Calmann-Lévy. While Pat was upstairs in their hotel, Mary ran into two French journalists in the lobby who had come to interview Pat. In Pat’s version of this encounter—Pat was still burning with indignation nearly two decades later—Mary, “for five minutes or more[,] had tried to convince them that she was me. They took a snap of her to please her. If you, or I, were ever to bring this anecdote up, my mother would first deny that it ever happened; then…she would say that she was only joking…. I think a psychiatrist would put another meaning to it.”30

  A psychiatrist would also put the kind of meaning Pat is talking about to a similar confusion of identity—this time the confusion was Pat’s—displayed in a letter Pat wrote to her father, Jay B Plangman, when she was fifty-one years old. Pat was asking for Jay B’s help in putting her in “touch with any lawyer in Fort Worth who might be able to handle this problem. The problem is I would like to separate myself from my mother, my mother from me.”31

  On Pat and Mary’s 1959 trip to Europe together (during which Mary was trying to shake off the effects of a serious depression), mother and daughter travelled pleasantly enough to London and Paris. Then Doris, a woman with whom Pat had recently lived in Palisades, New York, joined them in Paris, precipitating an explosion which cut short Mary’s travel with her daughter and sent her off to Rome alone. Mary’s post-trip letter to Pat (the merest fragment of which is printed below) is the aggressive passion to Pat’s passive aggression.

  [Y]ou said at your place after all the early day bickering of Stanley [Pat’s stepfather] and me could I not understand why you would never marry—that was not the reason…. The only reason you have never married is because you are wholly without loyalties. You are not even loyal to yourself…. You have wholly excluded LOVE from your emotions as deliberately as you would turn a tap…

  If I were a second-rate whore I might stand higher in your esteem. I say second-rate because that is what your friend is….

  I believe you would gladly put me in Dachau if it were possible without a minute’s loss of sleep….

  Yes, I think you are sicker in the mind than I ever was. I never changed personality…NOT SO YOU.32

  A forty-four-year-old daughter who collapses into unconsciousness on a friend’s doorstep when she hears that her mother is in town on a visit, and then hides her writing “out of instinct” because she is afraid her mother will destroy it, and a sixty-six-year-old mother who thinks her daughter treats her worse than a “second-rate whore” and would put her in “Dachau without a minute’s loss of sleep,” have both taken up residence in what Jean Genet called “the universe of the irremediable.” Each one is striking out at the other because she feels attacked in her very core; both use the beard of marriage to cover up Pat’s lesbianism, which they both feel is awful. Pat wanted Mary to admit that she alone was responsible for the dreadful “abnormality” of her daughter’s sexuality; Mary refused to do so. Mary and Pat continued to drive each other crazy with accusations.

  Camilla Butterfield, whose tea party Pat and Mary had so fatally upset, took Pat’s “side” in the long, sad case of Highsmith v. Highsmith. “Having had one experience of Mary Highsmith,” says Camilla Butterfield, “I certainly didn’t want another.” She describes Mary as “very feminine” and “scatty; a type, an American type…really quite mad or driven mad by the presence of her daughter.”33 Marijane Meaker, who lived with Pat for six months in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1960–61, shared Mrs. Butterfield’s assessment of Mary Highsmith. But she added: “Pat…loved her mother very much and her mother was…jealous of all Pat’s lovers. They had a very seductive relationship. Her mother was very powerful.”34

  Mrs. Butterfield’s dramatic picture of the mad tea party she hosted for the Highsmith women is a portrait of the terrible effect two people can have upon each other. It was the collision (and collusion) of mother and daughter that so disturbed the “atmosphere” of Camilla Butterfield’s house, not Mary’s demeanor by itself. Twenty years later, in May of 1985, Pat wrote in a cahier: “My mother would not have become semi-insane, if I had not existed.”35 She could easily have reversed the subjects of her sentence.

  The intricate relations of this alarming mother-and-daughter duo had an amply archived past and went on to a well-documented future. The careful curators preserving its history were none other than Pat and Mary Highsmith themselves.

  Like jailhouse lawyers, Pat and Mary did fervid research on each other’s faults and faiblesses, kept lists of witnesses (lists, apparently, were in the blood),* and retained each other’s letters (scribbled over with corrective explanations) to support their endless grievances. They wrote to each other’s friends, complaining and justifying. Mary wrote to Pat’s lovers, and Pat wrote to her stepfather (Mary’s second husband, Stanley Highsmith), to Mary’s closest woman friend (the fashion illustrator Jeva Cralick), and to Mary’s doctors—one of whom, Pat noted grimly, was called Dr. Ripley.36

  The Coateses, the Stewarts (Mary’s mother’s family), and even the Plangman family were caught up in their fierce struggle. Third cousins (Millie Alford, who had another role to play in Pat’s life, was amongst them) were enlisted in the battle. The heavens above were regularly appealed to for assistance, and far too many false oaths were sworn on either side. The imaginary courthouse for the Highsmith women’s untried lawsuit against each other always had its doors flung open wide, and both of them cried out for the justice they both passionately felt they had been denied.

  But what justice—and denied by whom?

  Mary Highsmith, writing as she usually did from her House of Perpetual Trouble to her Daughter of Deepest Shame, still managed to have herself a pretty good time. Saying exactly what she felt came as easily to her as it came awkwardly to her daughter—and Mary never bothered to hold back an opinion.

  But in one of her most excoriating letters to Pat, Mary suddenly intermits the name-calling—both Mary and Pat were subject to these constant volte-faces—with these words:

  “When you were born, I was the happiest person imagineable [sic]. I was going to give you freedom, a free rein to do the things you wanted to do. Something I was NEVER allowed.”37

  This is anguish unadorned: the cri de coeur of a mother who projects her childhood fantasies of liberation on her daughter, and then, because no parental hope ever goes unpunished, lives to watch her bright dreams of fulfillment dissolve in a life-and-death struggle between her and her only child.

  Of course, the hostilities of mother and daughter were intermitted—they had to be, given the complexity of their feelings—with great, painful bouts of caring, sympathy, and worry for each other’s welfare. When the two women weren’t accusing each other of something (and even when they were), they were intensely involved in each other’s lives. In ways that made the mother experience life as a mirthless joke and the daughter insist that existence was a meaningless jest, Mary and Patricia Highsmith were fatally alike.

  Mary’s chatty letter introducing Tommy Tune to Pat (written only four months before she and Pat had collided at Camilla Butterfield’s tea party) was, allowing for differences in style, exactly the kind of letter Pat herself loved to send out to her hundreds of correspondents every year. Mary uses her sentences as a broom to sweep up all the external details of her life. When she isn’t in a depression (Pat, too, was often depressed), Mary, just like Pat, is always infernally busy. In this letter, she’s readying two drawings for an exhibition at the Houston Museum, exchanging some Levi’s for Pat (wh
o would wear only Levi-Strauss 501 jeans sent from Texas), painting her cement side porch, covering the fruit trees against a frost, puttying the windows, setting out bulbs in the garden beds which she has outlined with stones, and espousing a “CAUSE—that of saving the Majestic Theatre.”38

  While Mary is working her socks off, her husband, Stanley [“I have relieved him of everything around the place in order for him to have his precious time”]; is “fast becoming a problem.” Mary wants to ask Pat’s “advice on how to help Stanley,” who “fritters away his [retirement] time,” reading in “PREPARATION” for becoming the writer he has always wanted to be.

  “Well, you and I know that [preparation] can go on forever…. My heart bleeds for him to have some sort of satisfaction and feeling of achievement. But how can he in the manner he’s chosen?”39

  The complicity in this appeal from one “artist” to another is unmistakable. Mary knows how her complaints about Stanley will please Pat, who has “disliked” (the mild verb Pat generally uses for the boiling, seething, twitching hatred for Stanley Highsmith she spent her childhood repressing) her stepfather since she was introduced to him at the age of three and a half. And then Mary begins to fret that Pat, in her freezing cottage in Suffolk, “can’t do your best work and be cold. Do you use only one door in exiting? Do you realize how wonderful newspaper is for insulation?” And she goes on for several hundred words about how Pat can warm up her house and then rattles on for another few hundred words about their mutual interest in the genealogy of their maternal family line: the Stewarts.40

  Mary and Pat’s Troubles (long enough and bitter enough to be capitalized) began with the sleight of hand that reshuffled the cards of Pat Highsmith’s parentage. It was, on the face of it, a reshuffling that made Pat’s birth possible and allowed Mary to sustain her child and give her a future. But the whole business left little Patsy, as she was called in childhood, feeling cheated of just about everything.

  Pat lost her father before she was born, and she lost him completely. Mary refused (and even Pat thought her refusal admirable) to take any money from Jay B Plangman for their daughter, and Plangman seems to have dealt himself—or perhaps he was dealt—out of the family deck, never making a recorded attempt to see his only child while she was living with Willie Mae in Fort Worth and Mary was out earning a living.

  But Pat, for the first few years of her life, also lost a mother: figuratively, because of the circumstances of their housing, and then actually, because Mary travelled far and wide to get work, and then remarried. Although Pat frequently blamed the loss of her father on her mother, it was the repeated loss of her mother, Mary, that threw Patricia Highsmith into a persistent mourning for her life.

  • 6 •

  La Mamma

  Part 2

  When Mary Coates—twenty-five years old, pregnant, separated from her husband, set on divorcing and continuing a career in fashion illustration—stepped back over the threshold of the Coates family boardinghouse in Fort Worth, Texas, she surrendered much of her maternal authority. Her departure for Chicago to look for a job three weeks after she gave birth to her baby girl transferred whatever was left of that power.1 Mary’s infant came under the jurisdiction of the woman who, as Mary wrote plaintively, had “tried her sorely,” curbed her socially (“In high school I finally quit having dates [she] was so hard on me about them”), and made her feel a parental disapproval so strong that Mary swore “no daughter of mine would suffer that.”2

  This commanding figure, still dominating Mary well into middle age, was the diminutive, nearsighted, Alabama-born doctor’s daughter whose double first name bridged both genders, whose Southern Calvinist heritage was founded on Puritan rock—her great-grandson Don says that “her back never touched a chair’s back”—and whose rule over the Coates family was absolute: Mary’s mother and Pat’s grandmother, the invincible Willie Mae Stewart Coates.

  “Grandma,” says Willie Mae’s great-grandson Don, “was a tiny little thing.

  “If you saw Grandma in a car sitting in a passenger seat, the only thing you saw above the doorline was her head. And Grandpa was just as tall as he could be.”

  Don’s elder brother Dan remembered: “Willie Mae was the cutest, toughest little ‘toot’ who ever lived. Mary came by her strong personality from Willie Mae.”

  In home movies of the Coates family shot in Texas in the 1930s and 1940s, it is the self-possessed Willie Mae who draws the spectator’s gaze, just as Mary and Pat do when they’re being filmed or photographed with other people. Mary Highsmith, in a typical family film shot at her Hastings-on-Hudson house in New York State, has put a stalk of celery in her hair, and her mugging and manifestations for the camera manage to crowd nearly everyone else out of the frame. Pat, the reverse médaille of this regiment of camera-ready women, makes herself as starched, as stiff, and as still as possible whenever she is caught on film. Her visual grammar is that of the reluctant star of a hostage video.3

  In photographs, Willie Mae and Mary resemble each other closely; Mary is the elongated, modish, nervous, flirtatious version of her mother. Pat, with her cat-shaped eyes, oval visage, and black hair, looks like no one in the Coates or Stewart (Willie Mae’s maiden name) family. Of the three generations of women, it is Willie Mae who moves with the kind of definition and authority that allowed her to make such an impression—such a different impression—on the lives of both Mary and Patricia Highsmith.*

  Willie Mae Stewart Coates was born in Alabama in September of 1866. Much of the personal power she always seemed to possess came from the Calvinist line in her heritage, stretching backwards for generations. Her long family history of religious devotion and involvement in social justice was marked by the spiritual rebellions and odd, intense pieties that would trouble her granddaughter Patricia all her life.

  In the careful genealogy worked out in 1954 by the biographer of Pat’s relation,* Confederate general A. P. Stewart (later president of the University of Misssippi at Oxford), the Stewart family to which Willie Mae Coates belonged was firmly established as being of Scots-Irish origin. The American branch of the Stewart clan associated itself with the tonier “Baltimore Stewarts,” and Willie Mae’s grandfather, William Stewart, was second-generation Scots-Irish. He traced his origins, Pat was pleased to note, to Ninion Stewart, younger son of James I of Scotland and brother of James II.4

  William Stewart, whose maternal grandfather was a Presbyterian minister, moved from his birthplace in Delaware to Tennessee, where he became the postmaster of Winchester and the treasurer of Franklin County: a leading citizen and a public official. The records of the Winchester, Tennessee, Masonic Lodge No. 158 show that he was a Presbyterian and a “man of undoubted piety”5 whose reverence took a curiously physical turn: his “frequent and protracted kneeling in the act of prayer” are said to have worn holes in his bedroom carpet.6 He married Elizabeth Decherd (now spelled Deckerd), and Elizabeth, a serious convert to Methodism, bore sixteen children and died in 1847, a “bright ornament of the Methodist Church.” She, too, was intensely devout: “a truly praying woman.”

  The Stewart children were raised in the Presbyterian church, although two of the Stewart sons became well-known Methodist preachers. These conversions to (and promulgations of) Methodism in a devotedly Presbyterian family were as shocking a heresy in their day as an open profession of Communism would have been in the McCarthy era.7 Pat’s grandmother Willie Mae, who followed the family’s Methodist line, joined the St. Mark’s Methodist Church in Fort Worth.8 Affirming her faith, Willie Mae named one of her sons after the early Methodist spiritual leader John Wesley, whose principles of social justice later surfaced in peculiarly twisted forms in the musings of Willie Mae’s novelist granddaughter. Underscoring the family’s religious bent, Willie Mae’s grandparents William and Elizabeth Stewart had spent eleven years in the “strict Presbyterian community” of Rogersville, Tennessee (even though Elizabeth was a Methodist), a community founded by the grandparents of the legendary Am
erican frontiersman Davy Crockett. Their eighth child, Oscar Wilkinson Stewart, Willie Mae’s father, was first a schoolmaster and then a doctor who served out his Civil War duties as a surgeon.9

  Unlike the Coates family into which his granddaughter Willie Mae would marry, William Stewart disapproved of the institution of slavery and never owned slaves himself. But the Stewarts’ nine sons all served in the Confederate army and all of them were Masons.

  This is straightforward enough as a family history—even with the family emphasis on radiant piety, and with what must have been troubling family divisions on the subjects of religion and slave owning. But then, slowly, something almost as interesting as the Presbyterian/Methodist split starts to work its way though successive generations of the Stewart family. Sets of brothers and sisters begin to marry other sets of sisters and brothers—as though the Stewart family were gradually developing double vision. The pious William Stewart, married to the saintly Elizabeth Decherd, had a brother, Charles Stewart. Charles Stewart married his brother’s wife’s sister, Ellen Decherd. Then two of William and Elizabeth Stewart’s sons, Oscar Wilkinson and Leonidas, married the Pope sisters, Mary Ann Pope and Martha Clarissa Pope. And then two of Oscar Wilkinson Stewart’s daughters, Martha and Willie Mae, married the Coates boys, Andrew Jackson Coates and Daniel Hokes Coates.

  Pat Highsmith, who in later life entertained a mystical belief in the inherited properties of “blood,” would have known just what to say about all this doubling up and religious division in her family. She would have said that double trouble was in her blood from the moment she was conceived—and she would have blamed her mother, Mary, for it, too.

  Daniel Hokes Coates, Willie Mae’s husband, was the son of Gideon Coats, the man who founded Coats’ Bend, Alabama. Coats’ Bend was the Coates family’s Big Historical Moment, one they never forgot. Like any Founding Father, Gideon Coates got his land from the Native Americans, the Cherokees: five thousand acres of it. Although the Coateses’ founding of this township and the Coates family’s Confederate war history figured largely in Pat’s imagination,* the Coates she lived with, her grandfather Daniel Coates, made little impression on her. In the current generation of Coateses’, only Willie Mae, Mother Mary, and her cousin Dan were “real” for Pat. Still, almost all the Coates males were named for Willie Mae’s husband, Daniel Hokes Coates, and for Willie Mae’s father, Oscar Wilkinson Stewart. Willie Mae’s great-grandson Don Coates explains the family’s richly confusing tendency to double its nomenclature: