The Talented Miss Highsmith Read online

  Along with The Human Mind—it was on her parents’ bookshelf—Patsy read an anatomical textbook used by Mary and Stanley for their illustration work: George Bridgeman’s The Human Machine. Both books made their impressions on the girl, but it was The Human Mind that stayed and stayed.

  Always happy to think of herself as neglected, Pat said she used to return to an empty apartment from P.S. 122, sit down in the big green armchair in the living room, and read through the plain prose Menninger used for the cases he’d culled from his own practice and from other, less reliable sources. But Mother Mary was a freelance fashion illustrator whose most frequent employer, Women’s Wear Daily, kept her working mostly at home. Perhaps young Patsy just felt she was home alone.

  It was in Queens, too, where Pat joined a girl gang, another faintly delinquent experience she remembered with great pleasure in the last decade of her life. It was the “activity” of the gang—“they mostly ran around and had meetings, a lot of physical movement”16—that Pat liked: the same active life she was later to admire so much in men. Her gang memories undoubtedly colored the wonderful review she gave to Meg (1950), a first novel by an ex–ballet dancer who also happened to be the adventurous granddaughter of a U.S. president. The ex-dancer’s name was Theodora Roosevelt Keogh and she lived in Paris with her artist husband Tom Keogh, resolutely refusing to give her publisher, Roger Straus, permission to trade on her illustrious name. A favorite of her formidable aunt, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Theodora shunned The Paris Review crowd (they ignored her work as well, as they ignored the work of most women writers),17 and went on to write novels of such piercing sensual perception—a marriage of Colette and L. P. Hartley—that composer and diarist Ned Rorem remembers her from 1950s Paris as “our best American writer—certainly our best female writer.”18

  Pat wrote her review of Keogh’s novel Meg for The Saturday Review in April of 1950. It was Pat’s first published piece of criticism—one of the few reviews she would ever write about a work authored by a woman—and it is probably the most favorable review she ever published. The novel about which Pat was so untypically excited is a wayward work, with just the kind of heroine who would appeal to Pat: a preadolescent, androgynous prep school girl from the Upper East Side of Manhattan who carries a knife, dreams of being suckled by lions, blackmails her lesbian history teacher, runs with a wild gang of boys from the docks, and has a distinctly undaughterly relationship with the father of one of her friends. In the last sentence of her critique of Meg, Pat left no doubt about how much of herself she saw in Theodora Keogh’s young heroine.

  “Such an admirable personage is she with her banged-up knees, her dirty sweaters, her proud vision of the universe that, remembering one’s own childhood, one wishes one had kept more of Meg intact.”19

  While she was still living in Queens in the early 1930s, Patsy’s reading of Menninger was augmented by the conventional tropes of a bookish American childhood: Bob Son of Battle, Dracula, the Sherlock Holmes stories, and Little Women, along with generous helpings of Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London. She also read the somewhat less conventional Sesame and Lilies—perhaps it had been assigned her by a hopeful educator at P.S. 122—a book of lectures for schoolchildren about aesthetics by the arch-aesthete himself, John Ruskin. Her enthusiasm for Edgar Allan Poe, who shared her January birthdate and her future interest in alcohol and pubescent girls, and for Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, which gave a form to her fantasy of sailing the high seas in homosocial company, came a little later. But it was Menninger whom Pat never stopped mentioning to the press, and she was thrilled to get a letter from the old man in 1989. Flattered by Pat’s reference to The Human Mind in a Vogue magazine interview, Karl Menninger wrote Pat in his unadorned way to say that he’d met, but didn’t like, Truman Capote, and that he was “going to get some of your books and read them.”20

  Karl Menninger was Patricia Highsmith’s first Freudian.

  The most unusual feature of Patricia Highsmith’s unusual childhood is the fact that nearly every story about it comes directly from Pat Highsmith herself. In her memory books, no fond friends or foul neighbors or feisty family members have been allowed to contribute an impression or dredge up an anecdote. Each vignette from her upbringing has been shaped and colored by Pat’s own assumptions and interpretations, and is transmitted in her own peculiar style in her diaries, her cahiers, her articles, and her interviews. And in her novels and short stories, like any good practitioner of the art, Pat puts many of her own inferences in her characters’ mouths and pretends to pluck many more of them from her characters’ minds.

  Pat’s editing of her early life—perhaps it was really only her isolation from other people’s attitudes—gave her a claustral as well as a usable view of childhood. She often produced an early memory to explain a recurring unhappiness or to justify a returning depression or a lingering anomie. At twenty, she wrote: “I cannot remember as much of my childhood as I should like, or even remember myself a few years back. I hope to do better when I am older.”21 As she aged, her memories of things past were triggered by her present emotional states. And so it seems just as important to understand when in the life of her emotions Pat remembered something as it is to understand her very specific memories. Understanding the occasion as well as the content of her memories gives us two ways of thinking about Patricia Highsmith instead of one—and Pat Highsmith was always at least two people at once.

  For such a fiercely private woman, so intolerant of personal exposure, Pat was uncommonly ready to dig up the dark familial roots from which she felt all her “deformities” had sprung. What she didn’t record plainly in her journals for posterity, she published outright in articles or books or told to disconcerted journalists. Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, the self-help book for writers it took her only a month to finish, is filled with personal, emotionally charged vignettes disguised in back-of-the-matchbook prose as little recipes for successful suspense writing. But the real “suspense” delivered by this book lies in just which secret about her private life Patricia Highsmith will reveal next.

  There are the personal revelations, like this one:

  My grandmother died some years ago. I was very fond of her, and she had most of the job of raising me until I was six, as my mother was busy with her work. There was little or no resemblance between me and my grandmother, though of course she gave me some of the bones and blood that I have, and our hands were a little alike. Not long ago, I happened to glance at a nearly worn-out shoe of mine which had taken the shape of my foot and there I saw the shape, or expression of my grandmother’s foot, as I remembered it. [And it was then that] I shed the first real tears for my grandmother, realized her death for the first time, her long life, her absence now, and I realized also my own death to come.22

  And there are the professional revelations, which were also personal. This innocuous statement was linked by lines of fire to Pat’s childhood: “Good short stories are made from the writer’s emotions alone.”23

  Pat’s early memories and feelings often blazed up during her adult battles with her parents (she remembered that she had “learned to live with a grievous and murderous hatred very early on” in 1970, when she was particularly enraged with Mother Mary and preparing herself for another break),24 and she put these “writer’s emotions” to creatively transformed use in her short stories—especially in the short stories she wrote about children.

  In “The Legend of the Convent of St. Fotheringay,” a story Pat wrote at Barnard College and published in the Barnard Quarterly in the spring of 1941, a baby boy is found and adopted by a convent of nuns. The nuns name him Mary and conceal his gender by raising and dressing him as a girl.

  Pat wrote the story “for relaxation” in a period when she could “[c]laim no amorous attachments” and “[c]annot interest myself in The Ambassadors.”25 “St. Fotheringay” is set in a world much like the female-dominated one in which Pat grew up: “there was not one masculine organism on the groun
ds outside of possible insect life.” Fotheringay, it is helpful to remember, is the name of the castle in Scotland in which one queen (Elizabeth I of England) imprisoned and then executed another one (Mary Queen of Scots). And Pat’s first six years were spent in a boardinghouse in Fort Worth in which her mother, Mary, was subject to her Scots-Irish grandmother Willie Mae’s iron rule of law.

  Pat illustrated “The Legend of the Convent of St. Fotheringay” with little cartoons of the boy called Mary (her own first name as well as her mother’s), and she drew him to look exactly like herself. The boy, who feels he is on his way to becoming a great and famous genius, blackmails his way out of the convent by threatening to blow it up—and then, the jocular narrator’s voice intimates, he dynamites it anyway and covers up his crime. “St. Fotheringay” is an excellent origin story for the complicated childhood loyalties and rages—both gender and familial—by which Pat felt confined and confused as a child. Whether or not she meant it to directly represent her life is a secret she probably preferred to keep from herself.

  In “The Terrapin” (1962), a boy with some of Pat’s childhood feelings is constantly degraded and humiliated by his commercial-artist mother. She makes him a mirror of her desires and dresses him up as a much younger child. When his mother cooks alive the terrapin he’d hoped to keep as a pet, he stabs her to death in her bedroom with the same knife she used to dismember the terrapin. In Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, Pat tells us that “The Terrapin” required “two germs” (the helpful term for inspirational spark she lifted from Henry James) to come alive. The first “germ”—a story she heard about a commercial artist who made terrible use of her ten-year-old son, turning him into a “tortured neurotic”—was activated by a second “germ”: her reading of a “horrifying recipe for cooking a terrapin stew….

  “The method of killing the terrapin was to boil it alive. The word killing was not used and did not have to be…. Readers who find that thrillers are beginning to pall may may like to skim sections in cookbooks that have to do with our feathered and shelled friends; a housewife has got to have a heart of stone to read these recipes, much less carry them out.”26

  Pat paired her recounting of “The Terrapins”’ provenience with the casual revelation that her own mother was a “commercial artist (though not like this mother).”27 She wrote this parenthetical disclaimer at a time when she was thinking of Mary, once again, as a mother who was exactly like the mother in “The Terrapin.”

  In “Hamsters vs. Websters,” little Larry Webster watches interestedly as his furry pets turn into feral killers and rip his father into bleeding pieces. In “Harry: A Ferret,” fifteen-year-old Roland thinks of his ferret as “his secret weapon, better than a gun,” and allows him to tear out the throat of an old family retainer. (Pat had read Saki, and Saki’s own famous ferret story, “Sredni Vashtar,” was a favorite of William Burroughs, whose disgust with life often resembles Pat’s own disgust at its most disgusted.) In “Those Awful Dawns” (1972)—Pat called it “my beaten baby story”28—the negligence of the parents and the physical battery of the children are almost too well imagined. Although the story portrays the parents as indifferent to the point of depravity, and although its real point is an attack on Catholicism’s birth-control ban, the narrative leaves a nasty glow of qualified pleasure around the abuse of the children. It lingers like its less violent (but equally ambivalent) analogue in another tale much admired by Pat: the smile of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland.

  In “A Mighty Nice Man,” another story Pat wrote at Barnard College, it is the little girl and her all-too-willing mother, as the German critic Paul Ingendaay noted, who are most conscious of “the conditions of sexual transaction” and not the “nice man” pressing to take the little girl for a “ride.”29 In “The Mightiest Mornings” (1945), the corrupting condition is provided by a rumor of sexual relations between the adult newcomer Bentley (so close to Ripley in name) and Freya, a ten-year-old outcast girl. Bentley’s guilt, contracted like a disease from the small-town whispers about his behavior, suggests that his intentions towards the child are less than honorable. But it is the gossip that forces Bentley into exile.

  Pat did once tell a Swiss neighbor in the Ticino—this would have been sometime in the 1980s when Virginia Woolf’s story of being stood on a wall and “interfered with” by her half brothers was still the subject of literary conversation—that she had a blurred recollection of sexual “interference” from her early Fort Worth years. “She thought she had been lifted up on the kitchen sink by two travelling salesmen when she was a child” and perhaps touched in some way. “Pat didn’t have a clear memory of this,” says her neighbor.30

  Pat, so sensitive to spatial and physical encroachments that any touch at all would have seemed like an aggression, left no other reference to this “memory,” so it is impossible to know whether this was a memory of something that actually happened, or a memory of something Pat felt had happened (bad enough), or if, on the particular day she decided to remember it, Pat simply needed another origin story for her harrowed feelings.

  One of those harrowed feelings was Pat’s own marked interest in young girls. Not the twenty-somethings who attracted her at the end of her amatory life, but the eight- and ten-year-olds who caught her attention at the beginning of it. It is probably because she acknowledged these feelings (about which she did nothing but dream) that Pat wanted to bring her own childhood “case”—all the cases of her uncomfortable childhood—to the public. She managed, finally, to publish most of them, and we can add to the importance of noting just when Pat Highsmith remembered her memories the necessity of figuring out just how she used them.

  Still, in her recollections of her early life, nothing comes through more clearly than Pat’s feeling that she was cursed at birth. Cursed, even, by being born. Amongst American fiction writers, only Edgar Allan Poe approaches her developed sense of personal doom.

  “Before the age of six and frequently afterward,” Pat had a “dream, or vision” of what it meant to be born.31 She presented this recurrent “dream, or vision” to the world in an article written, unaccountably, for Vogue magazine in 1968.32 True to her lifelong ability to experience most normal feelings in reverse (“It is always so easy for me to see the world upside down,” she wrote),33 Pat’s dream of birth is like anyone else’s vision of death, of Last Judgment. In this “dream, or vision,” Pat is surrounded by seven doctors and nurses—they are more like a tribunal than a medical team—all of whom are regarding her tiny body, laid out on a table in an atmosphere of “murk and gloom,” with a mixture of the “horror” and “pity” which Aristotle thought were the proper responses to classical tragedy. The doctors and nurses nod in “solemn agreement over some unspeakable defect in me.” Their “irrevocable pronouncement is worse than death because I am fated to live.”34

  Pat offered more dark early memories in an article she sent to Granta in March of 1990: “Some Christmases—Mine or Anybody’s.” The article is a lengthy recital of some of her worst Christmases (her only Christmas pleasure seems to have been the many church services she attended on many Christmas Eves), and it includes her deep identification with a Christ whom she imagines to be inviting crucifixion with calculated acts of passive aggression. (“I believe that Jesus, who wished to fulfill what he saw as his destiny, turned the other cheek because he knew that…would hasten events…. Mildness did not soothe his taunters, it was fat in the fire. Jesus was in a hurry.”)35 Pat was five years from her own death when she summoned up these Christmases—and much less happy than she’d hoped to be in the last house of her life in Tegna, Switzerland.

  “The first Christmas, or Christmas tree that I remember is the one when I was four. My mother reports that I peeked around or between sliding doors which separated my grandparents’ living-room from the room we called the parlour, where the tree always was. She says I was silent, looking serious or apprehensive, as well I might, as my stepfather had in the last months come on t
he scene, and it seemed to me that he and my mother were often quarrelling, though maybe this impression was half-wrong.”36

  Pat followed this anxious description of infant demeanor with a full list of dishes from the traditional Christmas dinner (preceded by the traditional spoken grace) prepared by her grandmother Willie Mae for the family in the house on West Daggett Avenue in Fort Worth. The menu, a Southern Christmas dinner menu, is worth reprinting. It’s replete with the kind of comfort food Pat hankered for (and couldn’t get) in all the countries of her European exile: roast turkey and corn bread, sweet potatoes with walnuts and marshmallows, and home-cranked vanilla ice cream. But what Pat’s memory lingered on most lovingly was the large quantity of alcohol Willie Mae put into her Christmas fruitcake.37 This was 1925. Prohibition—the United States’ great experiment in trying to keep alcohol out of the hands of its citizens—wasn’t repealed until Pat’s twelfth year, 1933. (And even after Prohibition was voted down nationally, Texas remained a technically “dry” state.) Willie Mae’s famous fruitcake, soaked in rum for many months, was, strictly speaking, contraband material. Even in childhood, Pat’s eye was attracted to life’s little irregularities.

  At nineteen, Pat remembered an alarming childhood affliction. It was a regularly appearing “hallucinatory ‘mouse’” or “grey blob that darted diagonally across the upper left hand corner of my vision.” It “bothered” her from the ages of five to seven and appeared whenever she was “reading or looking at anything intently.”38 If her dating is correct, the hallucination came to her during a time of unusual stress in an already stressful childhood: the two bridging years which comprised her last offical year in Fort Worth and her first school year in New York City (from 1926 to 1928). The picture she paints of herself is of a frightened, guilty, secretive child—unable to confide in the “other people” she can’t quite bring herself to call “family.”