Beautiful Shadow (6 page)

     The concept of a culture in crisis was reflected in ‘The Waste Land’, T.S. Eliot’s epic exploring the fragmentary nature of modern life – which Highsmith would study in 1941 while at Barnard – a work published in 1922, the same year as Joyce’s
Ulysses
, Katherine Mansfield’s
The Garden Party
and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Beautiful and the Damned
and
Tales of the Jazz Age
. A year before, the year of Highsmith’s birth, Einstein delivered a lecture on relativity at Columbia University in New York; Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
was published; Freud’s
Dream Psychology
was printed in America and Rorschach’s ‘ink-blot’ test was introduced into the country. It was during the twenties that terms such as ‘libido’, ‘id’ and ‘superego’ first entered popular discourse and, in the 1924 trial of the so-called ‘thrill killers’ Leopold and Loeb, two wealthy University of Chicago students who murdered a fourteen-year-old boy and who modelled themselves on Nietzsche’s concept of the ‘superman’, Freud was cited in their defence. The popularity of Freud tapped into a desire for novelty and rebellion, and many young Americans, according to one historian, looked upon his theories as a ‘justification against all accepted conventions, especially sexual ones’.
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     At the same time the country developed an insatiable appetite for tabloid sensation stories and gruesome murder cases, such as the Snyder-Gray trial, in which a married woman, Ruth Brown Snyder and her lover Henry Judd Gray were each accused of murdering her husband; the case received wider coverage than more ‘serious’ subjects such as politics or international affairs. When Nan Britton, the secret mistress of the late Warren Harding and mother of his illegitimate child, published her autobiography,
The President’s Daughter
in 1927, America’s decade of ‘normalcy’ was finally exposed as a sham. The mood of the modern age – its superficial gloss and corresponding dark underside – was articulated by Amory Blaine, the hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel,
This Side of Paradise
: ‘Here was a new generation . . . grown up to find all Gods dead . . . all faiths in man shaken.’
⁴
Such a world would find a perfect chronicler in Patricia Highsmith.

It is all too easy for a biographer to trawl retrospectively through their subject’s childhood searching for clues that might solve the mystery of creativity. The temptation is to hunt for an incident that occurred when the individual was an infant, an unarticulated psychological trauma that caused a dislocation of identity which then predisposed them to think of themselves as an outsider. Unhappy childhood plus repression equals a writer, runs the equation. As theories go, it is an attractive one – indeed, one that Highsmith herself occasionally subscribed to – but this neat explanation never quite captures the mysterious quality that defines the literary imagination. Highsmith’s childhood was, in many ways, a desperately unhappy one, but of course, this does not explain why she became a writer.

     That is not to say, however, that a detailed investigation of her early years cannot provide insights into the familial and cultural influences that shaped her character. Each of us, she wrote in her 1941 journal, is forced to confront the fact that our personalities are largely formed by our childhood and adolescence and although one might try and change certain aspects or qualities, any substantial transformation of our character is impossible. These early formative experiences, she said, ‘now control what one is and what one is to be henceforth’.
⁵
She believed that heredity was more important than environment, yet also felt that the experiences of the first five years of life also shaped the personality.
⁶
In an interview with Diana Cooper-Clark, in 1981, Highsmith said that she believed in the concept of the ‘bad seed’ – that individuals were born evil – but yet also put some faith on the transformative potential of the individual personality. ‘The phrase “poor schools” makes me laugh,’ she said. ‘I went to several. What counts is individual motivation. Ambition and drive count.’
⁷
And although some people maintained that they were not able to trace back the source of their problems to their childhood, Highsmith believed that if one looked hard enough, such a connection was always possible, ‘some little thing will be the cause . . . a multitude of tiny things contribute like sand grains to a dune,’
⁸
she wrote in her journal in 1942.

     A portrait taken of one-year-old Patsy, as she was then called by her family, shows her sitting in a little chair clutching a ball; her dark hair is cut in a rather severe style and her almond-shaped, intelligent eyes give her the look of an oriental baby. In fact, several neighbours who lived near the house in Fort Worth took her to be of Chinese origin. Her mother spent a great deal of time outside the home trying to establish her career – Mary travelled to Chicago to work just three weeks after the birth
⁹
– and as a result Patsy was largely brought up by her grandmother, Willie Mae, who taught her to read. ‘My family says that I read nursery rhymes fluently aged two, but probably I knew them by heart,’ she said.
¹⁰

     The bond between the women in the house was a strong one, until Stanley Highsmith arrived on the scene. From their first meeting, Highsmith disliked her stepfather, she said. She remembered Stanley appearing, when she was three years old, like an intruder and she was acutely aware that he was not her father. Interestingly, later in life Highsmith would associate her stepfather’s entrance into her life with the loss of a private, imaginary language. Patsy was reading a book when the tall figure walked into the room and asked if she could pronounce a particular word on the page. ‘Open see-same!’ shouted the little girl, proud she knew this magical phrase. Stanley corrected her pronunciation to ‘Sess-a-mi!’ but when Patsy repeated the word, her spirit was crushed. Stanley smiled indulgently down at her, ‘his red heavy lips tight together and spread wide below his black moustache,’ and although logically she knew his teaching was in her best interests, she loathed him at once.
¹¹

     ‘And I knew he was right, and I hated him because he was right like grown-up people always were, and because he had forever destroyed my enchanting, “Open See-same,” and because now the new word would have no meaning to me, had destroyed my picture, had become strange, unfriendly and unknown.’
¹²

     After the wedding, Stanley moved from his home on College Avenue, Fort Worth, into one of the apartments at Willie Mae and Daniel Coates’ house, which he shared with his new wife. While he worked in the copy department of the Wimberly-Hubbard Agency, Mary tried to make a name for herself as a commercial artist and illustrator. ‘She was also (is) definitely a feminine type,’ said Highsmith about her mother. ‘She simply considered it quite normal for a woman to be interested in her work, to act upon this, but my mother never preached one word about this that I recall; she simply did it.’
¹³

     Growing up in the Coates’ house, ruled over by the kind-hearted, but terrier-like Willie Mae, Patsy realised that the women in her family were the dynamic ones; the men, she thought, were slightly insipid. Her grandfather, Daniel, worked as a district manager for the local Fort Worth newspaper, the
Star-Telegram
, but it was his wife who was the real force in the family. ‘There weren’t any strong men in my family,’ she said later.
¹⁴
This view of men as the weaker of the two sexes is at odds with her later belief that they were, in fact, far superior creatures to women – an opinion which was reflected in her writing, particularly the sharp, acidic collection of short stories,
Little Tales of Misogyny
. This reassessment was, no doubt, connected to Highsmith’s complex and, at times, contradictory emotional responses relating to her own sexual identity.

     Talking to the writer and academic Bettina Berch, in 1984, she said that she saw women only in relation to men. They were, she thought, mere appendages – either married or totally dependent. ‘Which is very curious because my mother was very . . . she was definitely rather brave. She had a career since she was twenty . . . So I had in my childhood the image of a rather strong independent woman – and yet I don’t see them that way. I see them as a bunch of pushovers, for the most part. I see them as whining, to tell you the truth  . . .’
¹⁵

     Six months after Stanley’s arrival in the household, Patsy was still not comfortable with him. In the Christmas of 1924, when she was nearly four, her mother recalled that her daughter was ‘silent, looking serious and apprehensive, as well I might, as my stepfather had in the last months come on the scene.’
¹⁶
That Christmas morning, as Patsy peeked through the sliding doors which separated the living room from the parlour – the room which housed the tree with its red and silver torch-shaped decorations and tinfoil icicles – she felt wary and unsure of herself. ‘As I child, I was never ebullient, unless outdoors playing,’ she said.
¹⁷

     That day the family breakfasted on coffee and oatmeal, followed by eggnog served from a large silver bowl and as they sat down to open their presents, they nibbled on home-baked cookies made by Willie Mae. Although they didn’t go to church, Daniel said a short grace before sitting down to eat. Lunch consisted of roast turkey, cornbread, mashed sweet potatoes mixed with walnuts and topped with marshmallows, onions and celery, followed by home-made vanilla ice cream and a slice of Willie Mae’s brandy-dosed fruit cake.

     Just over one month later, in February 1925, four-year-old Patsy had her first taste of the exhilarating qualities of literary suspense as she read the newspaper coverage of the Floyd Collins saga, a compulsive, real-life drama that gripped the nation. On 30 January, Collins, a cave explorer hoping to find a new entrance to the Mammoth Cave System, in Kentucky, was trapped when a twenty-seven-pound rock fell on his foot. For more than two weeks, Floyd was imprisoned in the cold, wet passage, waiting to be rescued, while above ground something of a media frenzy developed.

     The public’s appetite for news was insatiable and the case was reported around America. However, after fifteen days under ground, Collins died. The authorities thought it was too dangerous to remove the body and left it there for eighty days. The drama – the struggle to rescue the trapped man before he perished, together with the story’s gruesome climax – appealed to the young girl’s imagination.

     ‘I remember racing barefoot in my dropseat overalls,’ recalled Highsmith, ‘down the hall to pick up the Fort Worth
Star Telegram
from the front porch and racing back to the kitchen to read aloud to my Scots grandmother, who at 7 a.m. would be standing at the stove, stirring a pot of oatmeal. This was my first adventure story, strung out with all the suspense of instalments.’
¹⁸

     Highsmith was four when she was involved in a life-and-death drama of her own. In 1925 she fell victim to a one of the most lethal epidemics in modern history – Spanish flu. From 1918 to 1919, the illness killed between 20 and 40 million around the world. In America, an estimated 25 million people, a quarter of the population, contracted the disease, between 375,000 and 550,000 fatally. The doctor, according to Highsmith, wrote her off as a certain death and stopped coming to the house because he didn’t want another fatality on his hands. ‘My grandmother, who was the daughter of a doctor, gave me calomel, which is a kind of laxative with mercury in it. I made it through on that.’
¹⁹

‘Where does guilt come from?’ Highsmith asked. She rejected the concept that a child was born feeling guilty, but located its source in early infantile experiences. Later in life she would talk about how all her novels reflected her interest in the subject and how she created characters who were driven by the absence or presence of guilt. ‘I am interested in whether certain people have or have not a sense of guilt under certain circumstances,’ she said,
²⁰
while critics have, quite rightly, highlighted the fact that culpability or the lack of it is one of her most powerful themes.