The Talented Miss Highsmith Page 16

  This [the “mouse”] I should not have minded myself, had not other people remarked my start of terror and surprise whenever it happened. I was ashamed to tell them, of course, about my “mouse.” But the imagined figure was so lifelike, I was never able to control my shock. During these years the mouse appeared four and five times a week. At the age of seven I was given a brindle cat for my birthday. Shortly after that the mouse stopped appearing. I have never seen it since. Of course this has nothing to do with the cat, although it might if the cat had been hallucinatory too.39

  At twenty-seven, the Drama Queen who regularly seized Pat’s pen when she was feeling sorry for herself seized it again. Pat remembered another childhood feeling when she was mourning her lost lover Ginnie Catherwood in March of 1948, and she wrote it into her cahier just after a passage which compares her thwarted love for Ginnie to “a towering, white, straight and strong thing, an elephant’s gigantic tusk, Pharos of my existence.” 40 And so, not for the first time, Pat managed to echo Sigmund Freud as she moved, lugubriously, from the phallic to the Attic, seeing herself as

  an alert, anxious faced child over whom hangs already the grey-black spirit of doom, of foreordained unhappiness…which would have made its elders beat their breasts like the Greek tragedians. So much promised! So young to bear so cruel a fate!…O pity! O pause and shed a tear! O Thermopylae! Even you were not defeated without a chance to fight! 41

  And it was only when she appeared on a British television show in 1982 that she decided to share with the world that at “nine or ten,” “I had a feeling that I would die when I fell asleep and I was afraid of that.” Many a night, Pat reported to what must have been her disconcerted viewers, she would lie awake until two in the morning with the fear of death around her. Her remedy for this night terror was to sniff water up her nose in the hopes that it would keep her awake.42 It is not surprising that she grew up to be mortally afraid of drowning—or that she drowned so many of the characters in her fictions. Anxiety was Pat’s second self from an early age, and from an early age she was good at making use of it.

  In a letter in 1968, Pat managed to diverge from her long list of aggrieved childhood memories. From Montmachoux, France, living in a house bracketed by the houses of noisy Portuguese families who were giving her a foretaste of hell, she wrote to her cousin Dan in Texas about the one and “only happy thing” in the year she’d spent with Willie Mae in Fort Worth when she was twelve. In her one good memory of this crucial year, Pat and Dan, ten years older than Pat, are like two fraternity boys horsing around in a locker room shower: “[Y]ou and me drying dishes in the kitchen, and afterwards, snapping moist dishtowels at each other, then tossing a football on the front lawn.” 43

  Pat’s cahiers—she expected that her college friend Kingsley would edit and publish them one day and stuck a note to Kingsley in her nineteenth cahier to “have some taste, have at least the taste I have in 1950 in weeding out what is already written, and recently written” 44—are full of what Pat called “comfortable personal outgushings.” (Her diaries, on the other hand, she called “exercise books in languages I do not know.” She toyed with burning them or giving them to the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn—but Kingsley’s disapproval put a stop to the donation.) 45 But even in the cahiers, there is only one early memory Pat recalled with pleasure; a memory that came back to her in “every comfortable and happy moment” of her life.

  She described it when she was twenty-four years old and whirling through the bedrooms, barrooms, and dining rooms of Manhattan.

  The setting was once again Willie Mae’s house on West Daggett Avenue in Fort Worth. Pat remembered it as “plain and ramshackle, showing a hint of poverty…here and there.” (Ordinarily, Pat avoided references to the working-class setting and worn appurtenances of Willie Mae’s boardinghouse.) The household “could always make room for one more, could always provide food for one more mouth, and generously, and love for one more heart.” Pat’s memory was compounded “of all the five senses’ reports,” but it needed a sixth sense, she thought, to clarify why it always made her so happy.

  “I remember myself before the age of six, sitting in my beloved overalls before a gas stove in Gramma’s living room, reading the evening Press or the morning Star-Telegram, reading the serials in them, now and again holding the paper close to my nose for it would be still fragrant, almost warm, from the inky press. I recall the sound of the thin old door, wainscotted at the bottom, as my cousin Dan entered, chaffing his hands.” 46

  The last witnesses who might have lightened the dark landscapes of Pat’s early memories (she began a youthful poem with the image that she was “born under a sickly star”) with other, more pleasant recollections were her cousin Dan (“brother Dan” to Pat) and her mother, Mary. Mother Mary would have had a lot to say—and she did manage to say most of it in letters which contradict Pat’s accounts. Brother Dan would have been factual, fair, and diplomatic just as he was in August of 1975 when, trying to balance the needs of the two seasoned combatants who were his aunt Mary and his “sis Pat,” he recorded in his “golden voice”* a touching narrative on tape with which he hoped to awaken Pat to the knowledge that Mother Mary—alone, aging, and increasingly disoriented in Fort Worth with only her cat and her little dog Zsa Zsa (dead of smoke inhalation when her house burned down that same year) for company—was in desperate need of medical attention and custodial care.47

  Pat was living in Moncourt in the summer of 1975 when Dan sent her the cassette tape on which he’d recorded his impression of Mary’s failing condition, and for an entire year Pat ignored it, simply refused to listen to it, and then finally summoned up the excuse in a letter to Dan that it was her friend Marion Aboudaram—she saw Marion every weekend—who had a cassette recorder, not she.48 In 1963 and 1964, Pat used to wait “three weeks until I replied to [Mother’s] letters, by which time my sense of disturbance had died down.” By 1968, she was “on quite good terms with my mother, thank God. I suppose for three years now.” In May and June of 1970, she was, again, writing her stepfather lengthy letters filled with fulsome reasons for cutting off communication with her mother. But her real avoidance of Mary started only after her stepfather, Stanley, died in September of 1970.

  Because Pat had spent so much of her childhood and adolescence hoping (and worse) for the death of Stanley Highsmith or for his divorce from her mother, her decision to break with Mother Mary only after Stanley was gone is telling. (After Stanley’s death, Pat asked to examine his autopsy report; Mary found the request perfectly normal and sent the report off to Pat in France.) Mary—increasingly forgetful and eccentric, without a husband to help anchor the triangulated family relationship to which Pat had become so accustomed—was something Pat just couldn’t face alone. And so she avoided Mary and her problems, even on tape.

  Dan Coates died of Parkinson’s disease three years after Pat, on 15 March 1998, at the age of eighty-seven. Mary had faded away seven years earlier, more or less undone by an undiagnosed form of senile dementia, on 12 March 1991, at the age of ninety-five. (In letters, Pat was often hazy about Mary’s birth date, writing that Mary was born in 1896. Mary was born in 1895.)49 So the rather touchy history of Pat’s relations with the adults who brought her up and her rather slippery view of those relations have to be told just the way Pat liked to tell them: in her own version. There are no primary witnesses left alive to balance her telling. But beneath Pat’s stories of falling familial fortunes and failed personal relations, of the “good” grandmother and the “bad” mother, of the absent but “respectable” father and the present but “weak and creatively draining” stepfather, another, more subtle, family drama was playing itself out.

  Pat spent her life insisting that her mother’s quarrelsome, intermittently troubled marriage to Stanley Highsmith had made her childhood “a little hell.” In promoting this view, she forgot, as she also forgot when she was toting up the bitter failures of her own love affairs, to acknowledge the brighter side of t
he conditions she’d lived with. Parents who are idyllically in love with each other are often exclusively in love: they don’t have much emotional time for their children. And children who are blessed with happy childhoods almost never grow up to become famous writers.

  • 9 •

  Greek Games

  Although Pat thought classes without boys were classes without “any sense of humor,”1 Julia Richman High School,* the eight-thousand-student-strong, penitential-looking secondary school for girls on Manhattan’s Upper East Side where she was a student from 1934 to 1938, managed to provide her with plenty of entertainment. Her divided affections and perpetual crushes leapt from girl to girl so quickly that she found it difficult to keep track of their movements. But keep track of them she did, and, assembled from the cryptic notes she began keeping at fifteen, here is a small sampling of what more or less constitutes Patricia Highsmith’s High School Book of Love.

  “Mickey…I hate her & she pleases me very much,” although “I thought I loved J.” (“J” is Judy Tuvim, who grew up to become the Tony- and Oscar-winning actress and comedienne Judy Holliday.) But it was Judy’s girlfriend, Babs, to whom Pat was more attracted and to whom she wrote secret summer letters from Fort Worth. Still, Pat loved triangles and felt that “[w]ith B[abs] and J[udy] T[uvim] it is something stronger. We are like each other.”2 Besides, “J.S.” still had a serious place in her heart along with the first of her several “Virginias” and “Brillhart,” a married socialite from Texas.3

  Pat’s relations with her girl schoolmates were so complicated that her smart high school friends—and Judy Tuvim was the smartest (Pat noted sourly that Judy got a 97 in English while she got only an 85)—had to conduct themselves like teenage Prousts to explain her behavior.

  “Everything Judy said came true; that Va. [Virginia] was not good enough for me—that I should spoil myself—that I should go back to her. Judy has much woman in her. The masculinity is only an exaggeration. Das glaube ich.” 4

  By the age of seventeen, Pat was reminding herself that she already had a lot to remember—and still there were so many girls to choose from. “Affair [of the heart] with B.Z. beginning in October ’35. B. or C. or H. or E. or A.?”5 Whenever she saw “M.G. [Mickey Goldfarb]” her feeling for “Judy goes to thin air”6 and she was pleased to “find it surprisingly easy to forget Helen.”7

  In the same notebook entry in which she mentioned her “43 in geometry” and her “resolve to apply Christian Science (Mother Mary’s spiritual practice),” Pat also recorded her central chagrin d’amour: the betrayal in love by the first and longest love of her life. “M[other] will never leave S[tanley] and never know real happiness. I know we could be happy us two.”8

  Meanwhile she had only recently stopped writing in her notebook the initials “ILE.” They stood for “I Love Eliane”—a classmate she had yearned after for three years and with whom she parted over a misunderstanding about dental fillings. Eliane had complimented Pat’s teeth, and Pat, humiliated, felt she’d opened her mouth too wide. Pat’s teeth remained sore subjects and painful objects for her all her life and she never learned to accept a compliment gracefully. But she quickly replaced ILE with “ILH” (I Love Helen) in her notebook; apparently “Helen” was not so “easy to forget” after all.9

  “Sept. 9 Judy keeps breaking dates…. I tell Judy I am jealous of Mickey…. Sept. 21 Judy & Adolph [Green]* come at 5:00…. I am uncomfortable that she knows I was with Mickey…. Sept. 26 I tell [Mickey] I shall never forget her…. I am tired, depressed, disturbed. Lunch with J. Strauss. She says I build marble pedestals of ones I like.”

  “I observe the pickings at Barnard.”10

  Pat’s most accurate judgment of her behavior during her high school years was probably the one she gave to Judy Tuvim: “I tell Judy I lie always.”11 It’s a nice variation on that oldest of logical paradoxes: “‘All Cretans are liars,’ said the Cretan.”

  When Pat went looking for higher education, she let her fear of crowds—as well as her fear of being “crowded out”—be her guide. At least, that’s how she explained herself in an undated essay she wrote in midlife, “A Try at Freedom.” She never thought of leaving Manhattan to go to college, so she began her search with New York University, the institution closest to the Highsmith apartment in Greenwich Village. There, she found what she’d already found at Julia Richman High School: that, like Fiorello La Guardia, the half-Catholic, half-Jewish mayor of New York from 1934 to 1945, and like New York City itself, the majority of the student body was divided between Catholics and Jews.

  Here for the first time in three years I saw the brothers of the [Jewish and Italian] girls I had been going to high school with, and I couldn’t face it. Already I knew that the rare Protestant or the Nothing could count on the Catholics and the Jews for a social ostracism…. There were never enough Protestants to throw a party…. [T]he student body of N.Y.U. looked twenty-five years old to me…. everyone seemed to weigh two hundred pounds and to be covered with hair, and I knew what it was to be bumped by one of them while walking in a hall or climbing a stairway.12

  In 1988, she gave an equally visceral explanation to a journalist interviewing her for The New York Times: “About NYU. Having come from Julia Richman (crowded, girls) I was terrified at Large Figures at NYU…. I weighed 10 pounds less than I do now, and frankly did not relish the idea of tangling with big people going up a stairway.”13

  And so Pat chose to go to “Barnard College of Columbia University” in the upper reaches of Broadway. Like Julia Richman High School, Barnard was for women only, it was part of the Ivy League, and it had been turning out distinguished women graduates since its founding in 1889.

  What Pat would make of Barnard, however, was something else: “Here was a taste of the freedom I craved.”14

  “Grief fills the world. Pluto, the God of Hades, has carried Persephone off in his chariot: but no one is as grief-stricken as Demeter, the mother of the Goddess [Persephone]. After searching for her daughter in vain, Demeter, in great anguish, throws herself before the altar.”

  This isn’t a descriptive paragraph lifted from the painful history of Pat and Mary Highsmith—although it could easily be mistaken for the Attic version of their grief-streaked relations. It’s a quotation from the program for a Barnard College annual event, the Greek Games of 1939. The theme of Barnard’s 1939 Greek Games was “The Return of Persephone,” and college sophomore Patricia Highsmith was competing, appropriately enough, as a hurdler: a girl athlete who jumps over fences.15 The next year, 1940, she was back in the Greek Games jumping over fences again.

  On her 1937 application form to Barnard, Pat wrote that the two subjects which interested her most were “English” and “German.” She wanted to be a novelist, she said, because that was the work she was best “fitted for,” and she was quick to cite secondary interests in “drama” and “journalism.”16 When she was accepted at Barnard, she was accepted “with conditions” (much as she would be accepted at Yaddo in 1948: categorizing Highsmith would always be difficult), meaning that Barnard had some reservations about taking her—probably because the B-average she earned at Julia Richman High School gave the college admission’s committee pause. (Although Pat’s New York State Regents exams were a decent 88 percent, her overall grade average was 79.6 percent.)17 Pat’s school marks were never as fancy as her self-presentations, and her grades at Barnard weren’t high enough to admit her to the national university honors society, Phi Beta Kappa.

  For someone so resistant to group behavior, Pat Highsmith had a lot of schooling. And it wasn’t the kind of schooling that matched her parents’ precarious income, either. Pat’s education was provided by a mother hell-bent on her child’s upward mobility; a precious-only-child-who’s-going-to-make-me-proud kind of education. Although Julia Richman High School was a city-supported institution, it had high standards and rigorous classes. It also had a dress code. Barnard College, the “women’s division” of the all-male Columbia University,
was a private school, Mary Highsmith’s earnings paid for it, and Pat wasn’t required to work her way through college or to get a job during the school holidays. Mary gave her daughter an allowance (intermittently and briefly suspended for bad behavior) until she graduated.

  During Pat’s first two years at Barnard, Mary, Stanley, and Pat were living in a one-bedroom apartment at One Bank Street: a massive yellow brick apartment house in Greenwich Village constructed on the site of the brownstone where novelist Willa Cather had lived with her companion, the editor Edith Lewis, from 1913 to 1927. Cather, just like Pat, detested noise and rented the apartment above her own to ensure the silence she required for her work. At the end of 1939, the Highsmiths briefly rented an apartment at 35 Morton Street, also in Greenwich Village, and then in 1940, when Pat was a junior at Barnard, the family moved to another one-bedroom apartment (Pat slept in the front room) in what Pat called a “humble, reasonably tidy” four-story red-brick building at 48 Grove Street.*18 The Highsmith apartment was directly across the street from 45 Grove Street: the Federal-style manor house where the poet Hart Crane had lived in the early 1920s, where Djuna Barnes would sojourn on her return from Europe with the actual heroine of her novel Nightwood, and where the actor John Wilkes Booth and his fellow conspirators are said to have successfully plotted the assassination of Abraham Lincoln eighty years before.