Beautiful Shadow (16 page)

I am married to my mother

I shall never wed another.
⁴⁸

There was a lasting bond between mother and daughter, but, as in the worst of marriages, it comprised of a combination of love and loathing that she found impossible to escape. In the future, her relationships with women would always be shaped by her paradoxical emotional attachment to Mary Highsmith, a compulsion which clearly tormented her.

     Her peers misread this sense of alienation and inner despair, confusing it with superiority and haughtiness. Most of them also failed to appreciate her black – and often ribald sense of humour. It was this quality which initially attracted Kate Kingsley Skattebol, then Gloria Kathleen Kingsley – Pat would always call by her maiden name – who enjoyed a close friendship with her until Highsmith’s death in 1995. The two young Barnard students met in the offices of
Quarterly
when Kingsley gingerly handed Highsmith a short story for her appraisal. When the two students next saw one another, they exchanged limericks over the reading desk. Highsmith loved limericks, the bawdier the better, as this one, written in 1940 shows:

A clever old maid of Hampstead

Kept a burglar for year half-dead

By threat of betrayal

Should he ever fail

To bugger her nightly in bed.
⁴⁹

     ‘She was fun to be with,’ says Kingsley, ‘and her sense of humour was great. She loved to shock people. She was like a shot in the arm for me. I remember seeing her in the library – she always stood up to read – and I have this picture of her standing there surrounded by books. She had a beautiful figure, very slender, well dressed, and had exotic looks. There was a certain mystique about her and she was very alluring. After swapping limericks, we started talking and it was clear that she read an awful lot.

     ‘However, the only reason, I’m sure, that I lasted so long as a friend of hers is that we never had an erotic relationship. And so we were never subject to these emotional frailties. I had a great crush on her, but it was nothing sexual. She did not fancy me and I certainly did not fancy her in a sexual way. But aesthetically – I thought she was an object of adoration, an idol to me. I think I knew that Pat was gay from the beginning. I grew up in a fringe theatrical world, and I knew about gay people. But I think the fact that Pat was gay had extraordinarily little to do with her writing.’
⁵⁰

     Highsmith was far from sexually innocent – from November 1938 she started to see a twenty-year-old woman called Virginia, whom she described as looking like Virginia Woolf – but during her early days at Barnard there was something almost schoolgirlish about her appreciation of the feminine form. On 13 April 1940, Pat competed in the hurdles of the Greek Games – Barnard’s ‘attempt to reproduce, as nearly as modern conditions permit, a classic festival’
⁵¹
– complete with contests in athletics, costume, dance, music and lyrics and dedicated to the God Prometheus. The occasion also gave her an opportunity to ogle the other girls in their short skirts. In her programme for the event, she scribbled next to one fellow contestant the word ‘legs!’

     ‘Barnard was very prim and proper in those days,’ says Rita Semel. ‘It may sound dumb now but back then I didn’t even know what a lesbian was – I had never heard the word.’
⁵²
Deborah Karp remembers that Pat often wore riding breeches into college. ‘She was extremely dashing-looking and it never occurred to any of us that she might like women,’ she says.
⁵³

     Highsmith idealised her relationship with Virginia, describing their union as ‘the first glimpse of a piece of heaven brought down to earth’.
⁵⁴
Pat credited the slightly older woman with investing her with sharper powers of observation and a new sense of self-worth. The ‘real love’
⁵⁵
which they shared, she believed, had truly metamorphic qualities. As she walked down a sidewalk, through the dappled shadows cast by a group of low arching trees, Highsmith had the sense that she could walk for ever and that the whole world was singing. She compared the sun to Beethoven; the whisper of the grass was like Chopin; the sharp, atonal screeches of the birds sounded like Stravinsky, while the wind in the trees she likened to Debussy, phrases she would work into her 1952 novel,
The Price of Salt
, to describe Therese’s love for Carol. ‘But the tempo? The tempo was mine . . .’ she wrote in her notebook. ‘I was the beat, and the whole world marched to my pace that afternoon.’
⁵⁶

     Falling in love, she thought at the time, allowed her to feel and act like other people, ‘seeing what should be seen . . . having the correct reaction’.
⁵⁷
Later she would add, tellingly, that ‘The real return to normality is after falling out of love. Not while being in love.’
⁵⁸
Significantly, the eighteen-year-old Highsmith already connected the misery brought on by personal relationships with the need to write. Whenever she felt unhappy about Virginia’s cruel treatment of her, Highsmith translated this into a compulsive desire to expunge her feelings through her fiction. ‘I miss Va., can’t end it,’ she wrote in March 1939. ‘Must write something good to calm & satisfy myself.’
⁵⁹
Writing became a cathartic process for her, a way of expressing the contradictory responses of love and hate that seethed inside her. ‘I read, write and create,’ she wrote in December. ‘I must lose myself in work, so that there is no space for the other/anything else.’
⁶⁰

Chapter 6

A trail of unmade beds

1940–1942

‘The undergraduate of 1940 . . .’ wrote Barnard’s official historian, ‘seemed even younger than her age in her loafers and ankle sox, her casual sweaters and skirts, and with her hair often in little pigtails. If she wore make-up at all it was only lipstick, and she acted like the most carefree and comfortable of girls.’
¹
This saccharine description is one entirely at odds with the image of Highsmith as a young woman, a figure who felt dislocated from the world around her. What, she asked herself, could she do to force herself to experience life more acutely? Her adolescence had been a sheltered one, as she believed she had lived for the most part within the prescribed confines of a fictionalised reality defined by the books she had read. As she left her teenage years behind she realised it was time to move away from an imaginative landscape composed of only make-believe characters into a world inhabited by ‘real people’. The ideal, she would soon learn, was a union of the two – the knowledge gleaned from reading grafted on to the fruits of direct experience.

     She turned for inspiration to the American novelist Thomas Wolfe, whose posthumous novel,
You Can’t Go Home Again
, Highsmith read in June 1941. He believed one’s personal experiences lay at the foundation of all great fiction. ‘Nowhere can you escape autobiography whenever you come to anything that has any real or lasting value in letters,’ he wrote.
²
The notion of writing about one’s immediate life and experience appealed to Highsmith and she later compared the self to a patch of fertile soil from which she could draw creative nourishment. ‘Mother says that he [Wolfe] was a colossal egotist and that I resemble him in that respect,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘Egotist, yes, and genius too.’
³
Highsmith regarded him as a poet, a writer who used his self as the central theme of his work, as opposed to novelists such as Somerset Maugham, passive bystanders, who merely observed the world. Although she was not interested in imitating Wolfe’s ‘overwritten’, somewhat retrogressive style, peppered as it was with commas and semi-colons, Highsmith nonetheless admired him for his dedication to his craft and for being ‘true to himself’. Yet she also knew that if she wanted to succeed as a writer, she would have to find more interesting material than Barnard’s daily tittle-tattle.

     Highsmith connected her progression from literary junkie – using books as drugs to shield herself from reality – to active participant in life with her burgeoning sexual identity. At nineteen, she went along, initially quite reluctantly, with a group of other Barnard girls to a bar in Greenwich Village. There she met Mary Sullivan, a butch, five-foot-tall, middle-aged lesbian who ran the bookshop at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Mary invited Pat to a party – her friends declined the offer – and within the space of a week her ‘monastic adolescence was ended’.
⁴
She described every detail of the resulting sexual awakening in her diaries, drawing a brutally frank and viscerally powerful account of her relationships with a large number of men and women, including Mary Sullivan. This intimate account of what went on behind the closed doors of the near-incestuous, web-like network of forties gay New York makes for powerful reading. While the writer’s cahiers, or notebooks, functioned as the storehouse for her creative and philosophical thoughts, split into sections such as quotations from other writers, places and people, and ‘Keime’ or germs of ideas, Highsmith used her diaries as a collecting bowl into which she could spill the residue of her frequently chaotic personal life. This compulsive mapping of her emotional and sexual experiences raises the question of motivation: why did she feel the urge to document so fully such an intimate part of her life?

     Pat’s promiscuity and her obsessive need to record it can be traced back to the same source – an overwhelming quest towards greater self-knowledge. She was conscious that she needed to become better ‘acquainted with myself’
⁵
and throughout the diaries she connected this search for self-revelation with two interlinked activities: intimacy with women and the act of writing. She believed in the spiritualising effect of the women she loved, viewing them as muses who would inspire her to create work of which she was proud.

     ‘Our works are the mirror wherein the spirit sees its natural lineaments,’ she wrote in the opening pages of her 1941 diary, quoting a passage from Carlyle’s
Sartor Resartus
.
⁶
Taking the metaphor one step further, the portrait which emerges from the diaries is one composed of the many glistening shards of a broken mirror, reflective splinters through which she attempted to reconstruct and review her ever-changing identity. Gushing, naive, contradictory, touching, banal and romantic, the diaries may not be interesting for their inherent literary merit, yet they bear the details which Highsmith would subsequently refashion into fiction. By writing about her various liaisons, Highsmith hoped to stir up her creativity by bringing about a sort of catalytic chain reaction. She believed that the act of recording would help recapture the emotional essence of each experience, feelings which could then be channelled into a short story or novel. ‘All these bits of information and observation in this notebook should, some day, make a novel,’ she said. ‘The question is what should be the glue to hold them together? My work now is the quest for the glue.’
⁷

     Throughout Highsmith’s confessional journals there exists a tension between the two sides of the writer’s nature, a confrontation between puritanism and promiscuity, mind and body, conscious and unconscious, the philosophical and the mundane. Pleasure is pursued only for it to be sullied by guilt; statements are made which are then contradicted; and lovers lauded and worshipped only to be cast aside with the sudden discovery of a new source of wonder. As such, the diaries can be read as discourses of desire, documents which detail the protean, chimeric nature of love.

     While Highsmith was at Barnard, she immersed herself in Proust’s
A la recherche du temps perdu
, finding the work ‘a delight and an inspiration’.
⁸
Her work would stand at the opposite pole of the stylistic spectrum – Proust’s opaque prose is discursive and digressive, while Highsmith’s near-transparent writing is crisp and compact – but thematically she was drawn to explore the same subject: the illusory nature of love. When the young Highsmith opened her copy of
Swann’s Way
, the first volume of the French
roman-fleuve
, she would have seen herself reflected in its pages and there is no doubt that, subsequently, Proust’s vision of the nature of desire informed both her writing and her personal life. When we love, said Proust, we focus not on the real qualities of a particular person nor the relative merits of their appearance or character; instead, we create a fantasy of our own making which we then project on to the unsuspecting individual. Far from being empirical, love is eidetic, a mental image made visible. At the first suggestion of falling in love, says Proust, ‘we falsify it by memory and by suggestion; recognising one of its symptoms, we recall and recreate the rest.’
⁹
Each object of one’s love is a mere silhouette, a blank canvas which acts as a base for the construction of an imaginative fantasy. As such there could never be merely one Albertine, the women enamoured by Proust’s narrator; like the appearance of the ever-changing sea, his loved one’s identities were legion. Just as the narrator feels the need to give a different name to each of the Albertines he conjures in his mind, so he is compelled to regard his own self as composed of many different personae. ‘To be quite accurate, I ought to give a different name to each of the selves who subsequently thought about Albertine; I ought still more to give a different name to each of the Albertines who appeared before me, never the same’.
¹⁰
Happiness is impossible, he says, as ‘the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for further desires’.
¹¹