The Talented Miss Highsmith Page 14
Alice Miller’s theories about gifted children were useful explanations for someone like Pat, who always thought of her child-self as both gifted and deprived. Miller believed that the way to recover the child’s “authentic self” was to learn to blame the parent—a nostrum Pat had already applied with great enthusiasm and little success for much of her life. In 1960, as Miller was developing her theories, the English pediatrician and analyst D. W. Winnicott published his famous paper on the subject of double lives, “Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self.” In it, Winnicott observed that a child’s “false self” emerged in households where the child was raised to be so responsive to the parent’s narcissistic demands that she cannot separate her own needs and wants from those of the parent. Winnicott’s other observation—it is one Pat would have vigorously endorsed—was that the mother hates the child long before the child hates the mother.
Pat Highsmith never read Dr. Winnicott. But much of her fiction and most of her life gave a local habitation and a name to what Winnicott supposed about the divided self: that the “false self” covers the “true self” in order to protect it. And that the two selves, true and false, are yoked together by a violent psychology.
Despite her brief late-life attention to Alice Miller, Pat’s interpretations of the years and fears that formed her were unvaryingly, if unwittingly, Freudian. Naturally, she hated Freudians—she gave a lover terrible trouble over her friendship with a prominent Freudian1—but on the worst days of her life she usually thought about consulting one. When she was very young, nine and ten years old, she found a resemblance to her own imaginative life in the “abnormal” case histories of The Human Mind (1930) by Karl Augustus Menninger (1893–1990), an American popularizer of Freudian analysis who advocated treating psychiatry as a science.* The Human Mind gave young Patsy Highsmith “case models” with which to compare her own shifting psychological states, states to which the hypervigilant child was always hyperalert. And Menninger’s embrace of the “abnormal” in the preface to his bestselling book must have been especially appealing to a girl whose every childhood memory shows how far from “normal” she always felt.
“The adjuration to be ‘normal’ seems shockingly repellent to me,” Dr. Menninger wrote.
“I think it is ignorance that makes people think of abnormality only with horror and allows them to remain undismayed at the proximity of the ‘normal’ to average and mediocre. For surely anyone who achieves anything is, a priori, abnormal.”2
Many of Pat’s short fictions are phrased in the matter-of-fact American manner Menninger used to write up his psychological studies. This case history from The Human Mind—it is one of many examples—could almost be mistaken for the plain-style opening of a Highsmith short story:
The Manhaters:
Mary’s parents had done everything they could to break up a crush between her and her pal Nell but in spite of tears and lectures and threats and scoldings Mary and Nell were steadfast.3
Patsy Highsmith spent two years in grade schools on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Fresh from Texas, with a Southern accent a steak knife couldn’t cut, she was six years old when Mother Mary walked her to her first Manhattan grade school, a “four or five story red brick building trimmed with grey cement” on what she remembered as West Ninety-ninth Street. (The Highsmiths were living on West 103rd Street.) Patsy tested two years above her age for reading, but the school forgot to check her arithmetic, and in her advanced class she “developed a traumatic fear of mathematics from which I have never recovered.” Her fear didn’t stop her from being obsessed with numbers.
But back in Fort Worth, Willie Mae was pulling the family strings. When she learned that Patsy had emerged from her first day in a Manhattan public school “walking hand in hand down the steps of the school with a little black boy,” she insisted that her granddaughter be taken out of the school. Pat wrote that she’d clung to the little boy because she was used to playing with black children in Willie Mae’s “alley” and “we could at least understand what the other was saying…what else is the Southern accent but the African accent?” Mary Highsmith bent to Willie Mae’s will: she put Patsy in a “private” school on Riverside Drive “around 103rd Street” for about a year. Pat’s chief memory of this school was of throwing up in the toilet every Friday afternoon because Friday was the day they had kidneys for lunch.
“Later,” Pat wrote, “my grandmother came to her senses, I am glad to say, and I was back in an ordinary school, with blacks, within a year.” 4
Willie Mae was still running the show.
Pat’s memories of all her schools in New York City throb with resentment. She explained her feelings about Julia Richman High School, the school at 317 East Sixty-seventh Street she’d attended for four years (its motto, “Knowledge Is Power,” was chiseled over the front door) by referring to the noise, the neopenal architecture, and the overcrowding—but she seems, finally, to have blamed her unhappiness on the ethnic mix that is part of New York life. “We were sixty percent Italian, maybe thirty percent Jewish, and there was a handful of Irish, German and Polish.” When she was fifteen, the Italians began dropping out and this “led to a preponderance of Jews.”
“[F]rom 1934 until 1938 (when I graduated from high school) we often had to sit two at a seat and desk, because the Jews fleeing Hitler had begun to arrive en masse in Manhattan. I always had to share my seat, though some girls plumper than me had their seats to themselves.”5 (Pat went on to rail against overweight people—irrationally—all her life.)
Sharing—even (or especially) with young Jewish refugees or with the daughters of Jewish doctors and dentists from the Upper West Side who were getting better grades than she was—never brought out the best in Pat.
In February of 1929, Mary and Stanley Highsmith gave up their apartment in Upper Manhattan and travelled with their eight-year-old daughter back to Fort Worth, Texas, where Patsy was enrolled in the old Sixth Ward grade school near Willie Mae’s boardinghouse. Eleven months later, Patsy, Stanley, and Mary were back in New York again. These to-ings and fro-ings between the boardinghouse in Texas and apartments in New York—the product of financial, psychological, and marital crises—were a frequent and unhappy feature of Pat’s childhood. This time, the Highsmiths moved to the farthest reaches of Astoria in the western part of the borough of Queens, gateway to Long Island. Queens, then as now (with exceptions like the solidly middle-class enclave of Forest Hills), was the working-class stepsister of the more or less glamorous Manhattan. Manhattan mythologized itself. Queens was just a decent, inexpensive place to live.
Between 1930 and 1933 the Highsmiths lived first at 1919 Twenty-first Road in Astoria, near the East River, and then in an apartment on Twenty-eighth Street in the 2200 block, a few streets away. Patsy was enrolled as a fourth-grader at Public School 122 on Ditmars Boulevard on 10 February 1930. During her three years there, her grades for conduct were better than her term course grades (three As and five Bs for her courses, straight As for conduct); and her tenseness about time and numbers was already evident: she was never late for school. But she was frequently absent: thirteen times in one term, six, five, and four times in others. She was tall and skinny for a fifth-grader (57 ½ inches and 80 ¼ pounds), and her vision was twenty-twenty.6 It was at P.S. 122 that Patsy had the first of the vivid views of single men in empty spaces that would inspire and guide her at odd moments in her life. She called this one a “vision of freedom.”
Patsy was in the P.S. 122 building, “six feet from the floor, clinging to a wooden pole some twelve feet long which was used to pull down the windows from the top.”7 She’d been given the assignment by her teacher to shinny up the pole and open the window, but she was using it as an opportunity to make the class laugh—a rare attempt at being class clown. It was ten o’clock in the morning and she was looking down from the second- or third-story window of a classroom when she saw
a solitary figure, a man, walking briskly along the pavement with a b
riefcase under his arm. The sun was shining through the trees that bordered the otherwise empty residential streets in Astoria…. The man was hatless, I remember, wearing a dark suit, and he seemed to be in a hurry. I now realize he was probably a salesman, perhaps late for an appointment, but to me he symbolized freedom-at-ten-in-the-morning…answerable to nobody as to how he spent his time. The image made an indelible impression on me…. I felt that was what I wanted too.8
Nothing could better symbolize the American Dream than a salesman in a hurry with a briefcase under his arm—except perhaps that traditionally free safe haven of all American dreamers, the municipal branch library. Patsy had already begun to borrow books from her local branch, the Queensborough Public Library in Astoria, and it was there that she “plunged at once into the psychology section, took books out, and often sat reading books which were not meant to be borrowed.”9
Sixty years later, Pat wrote to Karl Menninger to let him know why reading case studies in The Human Mind had meant so much to her when she was a child living in Astoria: “To me they were real, of course, consequently more stimulating to my imagination than fairy tales or fiction would have been.”10 Practical even in her early thinking, Pat used abnormal psychology to stimulate her imagination just as she would use it when she began to write. “I can’t think,” she said at the end of her life, “of anything more apt to set the imagination stirring, drifting, creating, than the idea—the fact—that anyone you walk past on the pavement anywhere may be a sadist, a compulsive thief, or even a murderer.”11
An imagination that muddles its creative cocktails with sadists, murderers, and compulsive thieves, has probably been helped along the way by something more than an unsuccessfully blended family, a tense psychological heritage, or even one of Satan’s little sidekicks looking for trouble. Pat’s years in Astoria add a faintly delinquent note to the brine and brimstone mixture in which she had begun to marinate her fantasies, but the innocent corruptions of reading forbidden psychology texts in the Queensborough Public Library weren’t enough to make Highsmith Country. It took an entire village to raise a Patricia Highsmith. Or, rather, it took the atmosphere of an unusual neighborhood in Queens, New York, to help form Highsmith’s imagination.
“The Kite,” one of many Highsmith short stories about children, is about an unhappy little boy named Walter. Walter’s nine-year-old sister, with whom he loved to build kites, has suddenly died of double pneumonia. “The Kite,” published in 1981 in Pat’s collection of stories The Black House, might have been written at any time. It is full of the delights of building something (the instructions for kite making are quite complete), and it seems to be set in an amber era much earlier than the one in which it appeared. Walter’s family eats fried ham, baked apple, and garlic bread. He lives in a town where he can ride a bike, climb a cemetery fence, and build and fly a kite. He is the age Pat was when she lived in Queens, and he, too, has parents who argue incessantly with each other.
Secretly, Walter makes an enormous kite on which he writes his dead sister’s name. When he reels it into the sky, the kite, which has a mind of its own, takes him up with it. The aerial view delights him until a “rescue” helicopter punctures the kite and Walter has one of those nasty, skull-cracking falls with which Pat Highsmith liked to kill her idealists. It’s a simple story, crudely written. Everything about it is obvious except Walter’s delight in the flight—and the actual flight itself.
The story becomes interesting when its “reality” pulls apart—which it does with something like the rasping sound Pat’s laughter is said to have made in France in the 1970s. (Janine Hérisson, Pat’s neighbor in the Île-de-France for fifteen years, said—chillingly because she was chilled by it—that “Patricia never laughed for pleasure. It was more like something breaking than laughter.”)12 In “The Kite,” Pat breaks herself out of a dull description of a comic book–like town by flinging her story up into the sky, where “clouds somersaulted over each other like fleecy sheep” and “cars moved like ladybirds in two directions.” Walter, in flight in midair, lives “in a more beautiful atmosphere,” dreams of going to Acapulco with his dead sister, and becomes a poet, composing some lines as he glides. And that’s when the helicopter’s attempt to “rescue” Walter ends by killing him. Despite the boy’s screams—“Keep clear!” and “Leave me alone!” (phrases like those used by Pat Highsmith on her deathbed)—the rescuers inadvertently pierce both Walter’s kite and his fantasy, and he drops, dead, into the reality of a tree.
Whatever else the story does, it makes a powerful case for leaving children alone with their fantasies—and for how much better the world looks when you can see it from above, from the elevation only a map can show. For that’s the view that Walter has, high up in his kite, soaring away from his arguing parents and closer to the beauty of his beloved dead sister. The painful reality of earth, the physical details of which always occupied Pat Highsmith so intensely, is as distanced from him as the coordinates on a map. In “The Kite,” it is the map’s-eye view that makes Walter so happy. But in the author’s life, the map’s-eye view shows something quite different from the conditions for happiness. When she was Walter’s age, Pat Highsmith was living on a municipal stage set whose purlieus seem to be a lot like the mise-en-scènes of her future novels.
So let’s take a look at a map of Astoria, Queens, as it would have been in the palmy days of 1931 when ten-year-old Patsy Highsmith, her mind alive with case studies in abnormal psychology and the lightly suppressed desire to murder her stepfather, was skipping the three or four blocks from the family apartment down to the East River nearly every afternoon—Pat said she was “ebullient” only when out of doors13—to play in one of her very favorite places in the neighborhood: the fifty urban acres of Astoria Park.
The two apartments in the Ditmars Boulevard school district where the Highsmiths lived in the early 1930s are close enough to each other to form the apex of an imaginary scalene triangle. The short leg of the triangle ends in the East River (the river that separates Queens from the island of Manhattan) at Wards Island (where the largest mental hospital in the world has been built), while the long leg of the triangle stops farther north in the river at Rikers Island (where the biggest prison in New York State has just been contructed). Lapping the shores of Astoria Park are the dangerous drowning waters of Hell Gate: a narrow channel in the East River which contains some of the deepest water in all New York Harbor. Hell Gate is spanned by the longest railway arch bridge in the United States, Hell Gate Bridge. The bridge carries the trains from Canada and the United States over the river which churns and roils perilously at the very edge of Patsy’s playground.
The fantastic new skyscrapers of Manhattan (the Empire State Building was completed in 1931, the Chrysler Building in 1930) are mere vertical brackets in the corner of the forbidding landscape created by the Wards Island mental hospital. More than four thousand inmates are kept in this asylum (in an era when the insane are still “criminalized”), and it dominates the view from Astoria Park. From the northwest tip of Astoria Park (Hell Gate Bridge Park is another name for Patsy’s playground), it is just possible to catch a glimpse of a much smaller island called North Brother Island. It is here where the talented cook named Mary Mallon—latterly known as “Typhoid Mary”—is still alive and in residence: quarantined for life after having served up enough typhoid bacillus with her superb cuisine to kill several dozen New Yorkers.
Could anything be plainer than this map? In Astoria, Queens, during her ninth, tenth, and eleventh years, little Patsy Highsmith, already inclined towards thoughts of murder and melancholy, was separated from Manhattan and the Bronx by an atmosphere of Crime (the insane inmates of Wards Island who were treated like criminals) and Punishment (the criminals on Rikers Island who were certainly being punished), while a vision of Hell was just at her feet (Hell Gate) and over her head (Hell Gate Bridge). It’s worth repeating (although Pat didn’t repeat it herself) that the compass points of the Highsmith neighborho
od in Astoria, Queens—Crime, Punishment, Railroads, and Hell—are also the plotting points of that other interesting neighborhood Pat grew up to inhabit: Highsmith Country.
Hell Gate and the Ditmars Boulevard neighborhood worked their magic on Patsy, and later on, Pat Highsmith attempted to unpack them in fictions. When she was twenty-five, Pat took character notes “for an atmospheric piece with realistic dialogue [about a girl who has a] childhood in Astoria [and about] the strange power Hellgate Bridge” exerts on her. Letitia, the girl, is a character on whom Pat cast the darkest suspicions she had about her own psychology and future.
“Essentially, the development of a schizophrene, who is optimistic, tending to the extrovert, as she scampers around the Hellgate Bridge Park at the age of ten. In her is a tolerance for all, low and high: history is being made. Things are taking form….
“She has made the only compromise possible for her with the world: she has withdrawn into herself. At the age of thirty.”14
Pat slipped a reference to Hell Gate into one of Charles Bruno’s attempts to elude the pursuing detective Gerard in Strangers on a Train, and after she moved to Europe, she wrote to Jeva Cralick, Mother Mary’s friend, for drawings and descriptions of her old Ditmars Boulevard neighborhood. She was hoping to use it in a novel. And Jeva Cralick sent back detailed maps, charts of streets, the racial compositions of neighborhoods—just the kind of information Pat loved best. But Cralick also added an artist’s warning about the danger of using details you haven’t gathered for yourself. “You have been away too long from these shores to really have the feel of things—you’d have to stay here for a long time to get the drift.”15