Beautiful Shadow (13 page)

     However, at some point when she was sixteen she did, according to Vivien De Bernardi, sleep with a man. ‘She told me once that her first sexual experience was when she was sixteen. It was with a man. She hated it. It wasn’t at all pleasurable. She had no relationship with this person at all – she was just curious. Like a medical experiment.’
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     She found women more emotionally engaging and the ‘accidental touch of the hand of a girl was a whole heaven!’ she remembered later.
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In November of 1937 she went on a date with another girl in her year at Julia Richman High School, Judy Tuvim, the actress who would later take the name Judy Holliday and win an Oscar for the 1950 film
Born Yesterday
. The two young women had a great deal in common, as both had suffered unhappy childhoods; Judy’s parents’ marriage had disintegrated a year after her birth and when she was a child her mother had tried to kill herself by putting her head in the oven and switching on the gas, only to be saved by her daughter. Highsmith and Tuvim were teenage misfits and yet they both had visions of forging better lives for themselves. ‘I guess I was a natural snob. I got a kick out of being different and improving myself and everyone around me,’ said Judy later.
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     But any teenage relationships Highsmith entered into had to be put on hold: after graduation from high school, in January 1938, she intended to go back to stay for a few months with her grandparents in Fort Worth. In her last year at Julia Richman she had decided to work hard and aim for good grades and in her Regents, the standardised examinations for the state of New York, she received a distinction, a mark of 88 out of 100. Her final report stated that she was awarded 90 for English, French and Oral English, 85 in German, 93 in American History, 91 in Hygiene, and 85 in Physical Training. She was let down by Social Training, which netted her only 75 marks. Her average mark totalled 79.6 per cent, ranking her 116 out of a group of 502 graduating girls.

     Before she left New York she visited New York University on Washington Square, one of her choices of college. Although she had once relished the company of boys, she decided she couldn’t face the reality of a mixed-sex environment. ‘At any rate, in 1938, the student body of NYU looked twenty-five years old to me, though I am sure it wasn’t,’ she said, ‘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.’
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     In late January, she took a boat from New York to Houston and while sailing off the coast of Miami she was thrilled to see the city’s lights shimmering in the dawn, a rainbow curving its way across the sea. She arrived at Willie Mae’s home in Fort Worth in February, observing that the house had become rather neglected since her last visit. She also met up again with her real father, Jay B.

     Father and daughter went out to dinner and spent an increasing amount of time together, culminating in what appeared to be a clumsy attempt by Jay B to seduce her. ‘And now to my father,’ she wrote to her stepfather over thirty years later. ‘There were some lingering kisses when I was seventeen in Texas, not exactly paternal. This is all I meant. I do not want to make a big thing out of it. The word incestuous is a strong one. That my father is a gentleman has nothing to do with it. It makes as much sense as saying gentlemen have no sex drives, a patent absurdity . . .’
⁷²
There is also a suggestion that he could even have shown her pornographic material. ‘B shows me pornographic pictures (to my mingled disgust & fascination, & shame for him),’ she noted in her journal.
⁷³
Obviously their father-daughter relationship was an unusual one; he didn’t look upon her as his child, while Pat didn’t regard him as a fully-fledged parent. In contrast to the messy emotional spillage Highsmith had witnessed at home – the constant arguments between Mary and Stanley, rows which drove the girl further within herself – it’s inevitable Pat would have seen her real father, absent as he was for such a long time, as something of an idealised figure. Like many of the silhouettes which would obsess her later in life, shadow figures she glimpsed from a distance which inspired her to write her fiction, Jay B served as a
tabula rasa
, a vessel on to which she could project her own fantasies. Not only that, but Jay B was, without a doubt, the closest living person she had encountered who bore a striking physical resemblance to herself. As she stared at him, she would have seen a glimpse of what she might have looked like had she been born a boy, a narcissistic fascination which must have drawn her closer. Undoubtedly, both father and daughter would have been confused by their feelings, an empathy and recognition that somehow mutated into sexual attraction. However, whereas Highsmith was happy to record a number of traumatic incidents in her cahiers and diaries, she chose not to document this subject in detail; perhaps it was just too raw and painful to write down.

     While she was in Fort Worth, Pat made the decision to go to Barnard College, a single-sex college and part of Columbia University, New York. She spent her days reading – her favourite authors at this time included Proust, and the eighteenth-century English essayists Addison and Steele – and riding with her Fort Worth friend Florence Brillhart. One day, she remembered, she took a taxi with her grandmother, nearly blind from cataracts, from Fort Worth to a movie house out of town to see the 1935 film,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, directed by Max Reinhardt, starring James Cagney, Dick Powell, Mickey Rooney and Olivia de Havilland, with music by Mendelssohn. ‘I thought that evening, “Mendelssohn was no older than I when he wrote that overture. What a genius!” ’
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     In the evenings, she loved to walk the streets of her birthplace and imagine the psychological torment being suffered by the occupiers of the respectable houses. Clearly influenced by her early reading of Menninger, she passed the affluent homes on the west side of the city and dreamt that in one lived a madman, the son of a rich cattleowner, while another building housed an unhappy, grey-haired woman whose sons had disgraced her. ‘The walks I made at seventeen out to the west, late at night,’ she wrote in her journal, ‘were full of surprises that were yet not quite surprises.’
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     During this trip she also met a boy who would later be re-born as Bruno, the psychopathic killer of her first novel,
Strangers on a Train
. ‘When I was 17, in Texas, I met briefly, a very spoilt boy who was very much like Bruno, completely dissolute,’ she said. ‘He was an adopted boy in a wealthy family and completely worthless, and he was the sort of the genesis of Bruno, who was really quite a psychopath.’
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     In June, she sailed back to New York. She would start at Barnard College in September, and so had three months in which to enjoy the city. She went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a series of lectures on Egypt, bought a set of Dickens novels and resumed her relationship with Judy Tuvim. ‘I see much of Judy. Though I don’t like her family.’
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     She began to feel open to the possibilities of pleasure. ‘In the last month I have changed so much,’ she wrote in her diary on 8 September 1938. The future presented itself as a terrifically thrilling prospect. ‘I dream of the good days that lie before me, I hope.’
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Chapter 5

The taste of freedom

1938–1940

On 28 September 1938, Highsmith walked up Broadway, through the tall iron gates of Barnard College, and registered for her four-year Bachelor of Arts course in English Literature. ‘Here was the taste of freedom I craved,’ she wrote of her undergraduate years.
¹

     Barnard, a women-only college, and part of Columbia University, was noted for its high standards and, as part of the Ivy League, had a reputation for being somewhat exclusive. When it opened its doors, in the autumn of 1889, the institution was the first independent college in the city of New York to offer a four-year bachelor’s degree to women. Former graduates who attended Barnard before Highsmith included the astronomer Henrietta Swope, authors Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, Phoebe Atwood Taylor and Elizabeth Janeway, and the poet and critic Babette Deutsch. Officially, its motto is the same as that of Columbia University – ‘
In Lumine Tuo Videbimus Lumen
’ – ‘In thy light shall we see light’ – but for years the female students have adopted the Greek phrase, translated as ‘Pursuing the way of reason’ which appears on either side of a figure of the goddess Athena. In Highsmith’s case a more fitting motto might be, ‘In thy light shall we see darkness’ or, ‘Pursuing the way of unreason’.

     At this time, Barnard’s selection methods were strict: requirements included proficiency in fifteen units of secondary school subjects, including English, mathematics and a foreign language; good grades in the Regents exams, with a honour at high-school level; a glowing reference from the principal; and a suitably high grade in the Barnard entrance exam, a paper which tested the applicant’s knowledge of a wide range of subjects. ‘In the 1930s, only girls of exceptional accomplishment attended four-year colleges like Barnard,’ says Donald Glassman, the Barnard College archivist.
²

     In addition to studying English Literature, Highsmith also took classes in the short story and playwriting – interestingly, never the novel – together with Greek, Latin, and zoology. The atmosphere at Barnard was intensely academic, and the courses were designed to give the 950 young women admitted each year a thorough, deep and wide education. It was, she recalled later, ‘Ivory tower in those days, one long book list.’
³
During her four-year course, Highsmith studied a wide range of English texts ranging from
Piers Plowman
,
The Pearl
,
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
and Chaucer’s
The Canterbury Tales
to Conrad, James, Lawrence and Eliot, as well as a number of classics from other cultures, such as Homer’s
Odyssey
, Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
, Dante’s
Divine Comedy
, Goethe’s
Faust
, plus works by Proust, Schiller and Pushkin. It was while she was at Barnard that Highsmith experienced what she later described as her ‘Eureka’ moment, when she realised that all of the arts were one. ‘All art is based on a desire to communicate, a love of beauty, a need to create order out of disorder,’ she wrote.
⁴

     During Highsmith’s time at Barnard, the college was presided over by Dean Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve, an ex-Barnard pupil and former teacher of English. Fellow Barnard pupil Kate Kingsley Skattebol, then Gloria Kathleen Kingsley, and one of Highsmith’s closest friends, remembers the Dean as the epitome of the bluestocking. ‘We found her formidably austere and remote, primarily because we had almost no personal contact with her,’ she says. ‘I recall a speech in which she said she wanted Barnard to turn us out as “trained brains” in order to put our education into useful service to society.’
⁵
Dean Gildersleeve maintained that the function of the college was to produce young women who not only had a deep knowledge of their chosen academic subject, but girls who were well-rounded individuals. Barnard, she said in one of her reports, ‘is concerned with every side of the student’s life, and tries to provide an all-around civilizing environment. Public opinion expects it to furnish residence, social development, health instruction and supervision, vocational advice, and a position after graduation.’
⁶
Some people, she added, jokingly, ‘even suggest we should provide husbands’.
⁷

     One of Highsmith’s favourite teachers was Ethel Sturtevant, Assistant Professor of English, who taught her the art of short-story writing, and to whom she would later dedicate the novel,
A Game for the Living
. Sturtevant, an elegant woman with a passion for Jane Austen, the Brontës, Henry James, and George Meredith, had taught at Barnard since 1911, and she remained there until her retirement in 1948. ‘I always like my students to do things for themselves,’ she said. ‘What one works for, one remembers.’
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