Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires

by Richard Bradford

  Psychologists are still uncertain about the exact nature of what is commonly referred to as childhood amnesia, but empirical evidence disclosed by surveys shows that while children are able to recall more and more of their past as they progress from the ages of four to eleven, the onset of early and full adulthood diminishes the clarity of these early life remembrances. Our childhood memories do not fully disappear, but they become clouded and distorted by the aggregations of maturity. When we look back on our early experiences, for example, direct recollection is sometimes overwhelmed by our acquired perception of the environment in which we grew up, the background and activities of our parents and so on. The clash between lateral perceptions during childhood – what we thought and felt when we were, say, six years old – and our notion of our past at twenty-six, hardly concerns most of us. However, one has to wonder if Highsmith intuited childhood amnesia as a means of rewriting her past. She would later become a fan of psychologists who produced bestsellers in effortless self-diagnosis.

  After Highsmith’s death, Vivien De Bernardi, whom the author had known during the last decade of her life, told of how her friend had confided to her that ‘she thought she might have been sexually abused at her grandmother’s house … [when] she was a small child, around four or five, and remembered two men, whom she thought could have been salesmen, coming into the house’. She recalls being lifted onto a counter or kitchen sink and though she was reluctant to state that she had been raped, ‘She had a sense of being violated by these two men in the way she did not really understand’ (interview between De Bernardi and Andrew Wilson, July 1999).

  In 1968 Highsmith wrote an article for Vogue magazine and told of how, around roughly the same time that she may have been sexually abused, she was plagued by a particular nightmare. She would be lying on a table but the atmosphere was so ‘gloomy’ that it was impossible for her to tell if the room was an operating theatre or some routine domestic space. She was more precise about the individuals who stood over her. Three doctors and four nurses were present, though she does not explain how she recognised them as members of the medical profession. They seem about to perform an operation but instead they speak and ‘nod in solemn agreement over some unspeakable defect in me … It is an irrevocable pronouncement, worse than death because I am fated to live’ (Vogue, September 1968).

  Two years later she wrote to her stepfather, ‘My [sexual] character was essentially made before I was six’ (29 August 1970). What prompted her to confide such intimate details to a man she had loathed since she first encountered him? He was hardly a figure she had come to treat with grudging respect, as one might a confessor who despises the priesthood. In her cahier (16 October 1954) she recorded that from around the time she was eight she had regularly entertained ‘evil thoughts of murder of my stepfather’. Throughout her cahiers and diaries from the early 1940s until her death in 1995 she records her infanthood – roughly the period from the age of three, when she attains a sense of selfhood, to around eight – as involving a blend of fear, self-loathing and hatred for her close family, primarily her grandmother, her mother Mary and most of all Stanley. This hatred was based on ‘sex primarily and my maladjustment to it as a result of suppressed relations in the family’ (Diary, 11 June 1942). ‘I learned to live with a grievous and murderous hatred [for her family members] very early on’ (Cahier, 12 January 1970).

  Aside from relatively inconsequential facts such as her birthdate, where she lived and with whom, the story of Highsmith’s childhood is based on observations and anecdotes she offered as an adult in public interviews and articles, and privately in her cahiers and diaries. She generally reserved the more traumatic and grotesque for the confidential notebooks, but was fully aware that, in presenting them to the open archive in Bern, they would be pored over by biographers and others determined to locate the woman behind the books. There is considerable evidence to suggest that she was playing games with these scrutineers, creating some narratives that are contradicted by others and making claims upon events and their traumatic outcomes that often seen incredible. It seems odd, for example, that she should have spoken to no one of the alleged act of sexual abuse until she confided in Vivien De Bernardi. Why her? It is common for trauma to be suppressed until later in life but we should also wonder if Highsmith was carefully choreographing disclosures for other reasons. She had already decided to appoint De Bernardi as her testamentary executor, a magnet for biographers and researchers.

  The copies of letters she sent to figures such as her mother and Stanley seem to be part of a one-sided dialogue. There is little doubt that she wrote and posted the originals, but we have no record of what her mother and stepfather wrote to her. Often it seems that she was responding to questions that might never have been asked or implying that she needed answers to questions based on no more than her own speculations. One of her earliest cahiers includes an entry that stands out as more transparent and authentic than the rest. ‘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 grow older’ (Cahier, 29 August 1940). Aged nineteen she confesses that her childhood is a blur, but she feels confident that later in life ‘I hope to do better’. This is cautiously phrased. Some might treat it as an early version of what we now call ‘recovered memory’ while others could regard it as her looking forward to a time when she felt more confident about making things up.

  As we will see, Patricia Highsmith had two careers as a fiction writer. Both began around the time she wrote Strangers on a Train. As well as writing books featuring invented characters she decided that her own life should become the equivalent of a novel, a legacy of lies, fantasies and authorial interventions.

  In 1927 Stanley and Mary Highsmith moved from Fort Worth to New York, repeating the endeavour of the Plangmans six years earlier to better themselves in the city. They took an apartment in the centre of town on West 103rd Street and enrolled Patricia, aged six, at a primary school nearby on West 99th Street. Mary began work, successfully, as a freelance illustrator for advertising agencies and magazines while Stanley took on a more mundane though secure job doing layout and lettering for the Yellow Pages telephone directory. Much later, Highsmith recalled that at first she felt isolated at school, primarily because of her Southern accent, and always found a seat for herself at the back of the room. She claimed to know nothing of segregation in the South since she had never been to school there. ‘It was no surprise to me, it was indeed a pleasure, to find black children in the New York schools.’ She added that ‘I had romped and played in my grandmother’s “alley” ever since I could walk, with the black kids of the families to whom my grandmother rented houses.’

  At the end of her first day, when her mother came to collect her, she walked down the front steps of the building hand-in-hand with a black boy. Patricia formed a close friendship with the boy, at least until grandmother Willie Mae intervened, albeit by post and from a distance of about 1,500 miles. Patricia’s grandmother appeared to tolerate mixed-race ‘romping’ in the alley but the forming of what appeared to be an attachment was too much. Had Mary informed her mother of this, and if so, why? Mary herself was of a liberal mindset, and was not, as far as it is known, unsettled by the skin colour of her daughter’s new friend, so it seems odd that she should tell Willie Mae of it, knowing it would provoke her racism. According to Highsmith, she was soon moved to a more ‘respectable’ private school – i.e. one that only whites could afford – on Riverside Drive, all at the behest of the long-distance matriarch Willie Mae. The story is riddled with improbabilities, not least the fact that Mary had, for much of her life, tried to distance herself from her mother, whom she felt was a bully who treated her with a disregard that bordered on contempt. Why would she take orders from her on Patricia’s schooling?

  I mention this story because its only source is an essay by Highsmith called ‘A Try at Freedom’, which is unpublished but available in the Swiss Literary Archives (SLA). Refer
ences to other events in the essay suggest that it was composed at least four decades after the time it describes. There is no evidence that Highsmith attempted to get it into print, which would not have been difficult, given that magazines and newspapers would have been eager to offer their readers an intriguing insight into the early life of one of the world’s most celebrated writers. She knew that at some point the archived manuscript would be read and quoted from, but that by then anyone who might dispute its authenticity – principally her parents and grandparents – would not be around to do so. The piece is extraordinarily detailed and includes a reference to the mixed-race school on West 99th Street, which, as the papers of the New York Historical Society show, never existed.

  The Highsmiths moved back to Fort Worth in February 1929 and for almost a year they lived with the Coates. The reason for their return to Texas is undocumented, but we might surmise that because of the precarious and often transitory nature of their jobs, they found themselves unable to afford living in New York. Oddly, Patricia makes no mention of this in her various private notebooks. She finds space to recall completing her first school assignment, called ‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation’, based on a trip with her mother and stepfather to the Endless Caverns near New Market, Virginia, where she developed an interest in the lifestyle and history of Native American Indians. Later they visit her grandmother, who shows her the Fort Worth city centre (involving her first encounter with a Latino shanty town), followed by a visit to the cinema. She even writes of how she developed a crush on ‘a certain little red-haired girl in a lower class than mine’ (Cahier, 23 June 1942). It is a beguiling entry, but not once does its author refer to the question of why she seems perpetually rootless, shifting 1,500 miles from one part of the US to another.

  In January 1930 the Highsmiths moved to Astoria, Queens, a suburb of New York that was becoming popular with white-collar workers who commuted to and from Manhattan, but could not afford to live there. There is a picture of Patricia standing outside what appears to be a spacious brick-built house of the kind favoured by families whose breadwinners would be only a fifteen-minute subway ride from the centre of the city. The question of whether this was the Highsmith residence remains unanswered. Similarly, we know nothing from Highsmith’s recollections or elsewhere of the kind of jobs and salaries that Mary and Stanley had secured to enable them to move to this reasonably affluent district. In contrast, Patricia provides abundantly detailed records of her ongoing fascination with the psychologically ‘abnormal’. One of the bestsellers in the US in 1930 was Dr Karl Menninger’s The Human Mind. It sold 70,000 copies within three months of its publication and it proved attractive to readers who had never previously shown interest in psychology or psychiatry, because it concentrated almost exclusively on ‘deviant’ behaviour.

  By the close of 1930, Menninger had become the equivalent of today’s media don, a figure with a respectable background in the arts or sciences who offers up user-friendly, sometimes dumbed-down access to specialised research. Menninger’s qualifications and record as a psychiatrist were authentic enough, but The Human Mind was a shameless exercise in populist hucksterism. The scientific ranking of psychoanalysis is used by him as respectable padding for the prurient attractions of case studies, involving a happily married woman who murders her children while claiming to recall nothing of the incident, a student who has an uncontrollable sexual attraction to her roommate, a wealthy businessman addicted to theft seemingly for the sake of it, and so on. Menninger’s prose reminds one of Hemingway’s: clipped, unadorned and designed to allow the reader direct access to gory detail.

  References to the volume made much later in Highsmith’s life show that the nine-year-old Patricia took a precocious interest in Menninger’s tales of ‘deviant’ behaviour. In 1989, a year before his death, she wrote to him: ‘To me [aged nine] they were real, of course, consequently more stimulating to my imagination than fairy tales or fiction would have been.’ There is no record of Mary or Stanley ever mentioning the author or the book, but according to Highsmith, throughout her childhood she was intrigued by stories of deranged, murderous individuals who would later become the mainstays of her fiction.

  In 1990, she wrote to her Swiss publisher, Diogenes Verlag, of another book that in the early 1930s got ‘under my skin’: George Bridgman’s The Human Machine: The Anatomical Structure and Mechanism of the Human Body. It was a medical textbook used by artists as a guide to drawings of the human anatomy. Highsmith told her publisher that her parents, illustrators, kept a copy for this purpose and implies that its availability to her was in some way connected to her obsession with Menninger’s volume. Menninger offered examples of how human beings destroyed each other while Bridgman provided a map of how muscles, organs and other vital features of physical existence were available for those who might wish to damage them. Did the nine-year-old Highsmith read it? Or did the mature writer cause it to become part of a mythology she had manufactured: a child – unsettled and slightly disturbed – whose childhood would in some way explain, perhaps justify, the curious nature of her later years? Was she, as an adult, rewriting her past?

  Patricia was ten when Mary told her the truth, that Stanley was not her biological father. Much later in interviews (notably with Ian Hamilton in 1977 and Craig Brown in 1991) she observed that she was not particularly surprised at the disclosure. She had seen drawings in her grandparents’ house signed by one Mary Plangman, recognising the handwriting as her mother’s, and she had often wondered why Stanley’s dark hair and complexion differed so significantly from the blonde-brown hair and light skin tone of her mother, her grandparents and herself. On the South Bank Show (14 November 1982) she linked this moment of truth-telling with the onset of a kind of neurosis in which she felt that sleep would lead to death. Sometimes she would simply force herself to stay awake and when exhaustion set in she began a bizarre procedure of breathing water up her nose so that if she started to doze off the retching in her throat and nasal cavities would force her back to consciousness.

  According to her recollections from middle age, Highsmith started to menstruate when she was eleven. Having no knowledge of sexual biology, she feared that the bleeding was the indication of some fatal illness. Understandably she asked her mother for advice and bizarrely Mary replied with a question: ‘“Don’t you think that a man has something to do with it?” I replied, “No – I don’t know.”’ That was the end of the talk on the facts of life. She should be complimented on her extraordinarily accurate memory given that she wrote of this four decades after the exchange with her mother, but even more striking is the fact that she chose to share the recollection with her long-absent stepfather Stanley in a letter she sent to him on 1 September 1970.

  By the close of 1932 the relationship between Stanley and Mary had become precarious, or so we have been led to believe. In early summer 1933 Highsmith spent a month at a girls’ camp near West Point in New York State and, while there, made notes for what would become her first piece of published writing.

  In July 1935, Woman’s World published a piece called ‘Girl Campers’ by Patricia Highsmith, which was made up of letters written by a girl in her early teens to her parents on her experiences in an all-female summer camp. It was an almost verbatim version of letters that Highsmith had sent to Mary and Stanley in 1933, with some corrections by copyeditors on the magazine. Those who have scrutinised it are taken by her references to the joys of what she calls ‘Diana Swimming’, a term made up by the girls and their supervisors to describe swimming, collectively, ‘without any clothes on at all’. Most treat this as evidence of her early inclinations towards lesbianism. She seemed to exult in these experiences. She also refers to ‘Campers–Councillors Day’, when pupils and staff swapped clothes and, she implied, roles as adult and early teenage females.

  All of this is indeed intriguing, but even more so is the manner in which she addresses her parents in these letters. There is no hint that she will be unhappy to return to the f
amily home once the summer camp is over. She enjoys telling Mary and Stanley of her experiences and the mood of her account is informally affectionate.

  At the close of the Woman’s World article she informs her parents of how she feels about the imminent prospect of returning to Astoria. ‘I’m packing tonight for going home. Oh joy, oh joy.’ Was a twelve-year-old capable of an act of calculated disingenuousness in the hope of getting her letters into print? The question arises because her later accounts of this same period tell a very different story of how she felt about her life with Mary and Stanley. In 1973, she wrote to her mother that ‘I remember quarrels constantly, he was not my father, you threatened separation, packed (and sometimes unpacked) your suitcases, threatened departure and so forth’ (16 March 1973). She is referring to the period shortly before she set off for her summer camp. ‘The Highsmith house was a house divided if ever I saw one, on the brink of collapse,’ and she goes on to describe the distress this caused her. Was this the atmosphere which prompted her to write of the ‘joy’ she felt at returning to it? Barely a month after her return the marriage broke down completely, at least in the sense that Mary left Stanley and returned with Patricia to the Coates’s house in Fort Worth.