The discrepancies between the Woman’s World piece and what was actually happening are significant, and it was not that Patricia censored and improved on the reality of the Highsmith household to present a respectable picture to the reading public. The letters she actually sent to her parents from the camp are all but identical to the versions that went into print. Perhaps she was pretending to herself that all was well at home, or at least that the situation might soon repair itself. If so, what followed would be even more traumatising for the naively optimistic girl.
Mary and Patricia had been in Fort Worth for only a few weeks when Stanley arrived and took his wife back to New York. Patricia spent a year with her grandparents, but during this period it was not explained to her whether the separation from her mother and stepfather was permanent or if they hoped simply to repair their marital problems. Much later she wrote to Stanley of how she felt, particularly regarding Mary’s failure to tell her why she appeared to have been abandoned. ‘She never said in regard to the (to me) appalling year 12–13 which I spent in Texas, “We parked you with grandma because we were broke.” Or “I decided to go back to Stanley. I am so sorry because I told you we were going to be divorced, but it is not so.” Either of these situations would have made the situation easier to bear’ (29 August 1970). She had written to her biological father, Plangman, two weeks earlier of this ‘devastating betrayal of faith to me’ (8 August 1970). Plangman, who had been divorced from Mary for more than twelve years, knew nothing at all of the state of the relationship between his ex-wife and Stanley Highsmith, but by the 1960s and 1970s Patricia was prone to sending out enquiries more or less at random regarding her unusual childhood.
What we do know is that in summer 1934 Mary returned to Fort Worth, asked her daughter to pack her clothes and took her back to New York by train. Stanley and Mary had moved to an apartment in Greenwich Village, an area of nineteenth-century terraces occupied in the early twentieth century largely by destitute Italian immigrants. By the 1930s its antique aspect – some of its houses dated from the 1830s – had made it attractive to bohemians and artists and the Highsmiths, though dependent on commissions from commercial agencies of various sorts, saw themselves as part of this creative niche.
Soon after her arrival in Greenwich Village Patricia realised that Mary and Stanley had not reconciled their differences. In her diary she wrote that ‘M will never leave S, and never know real happiness’ (Cahier, 1935; otherwise undated). Much later she wrote to Mary that ‘the broken promise when I was 12 … marked the turning point in my life’ (26 March 1966).
In 1969 she expanded on this: ‘Her “abandonment” of me to my grandmother, when I was aged 12, when my mother took me to Texas, with a promise that she would divorce my stepfather … I never got over it. Thus I seek out women who will hurt me in a similar manner …’ (Letter to Alex Szogyi, 18 February 1969). This seems a rather simplistic case of self-diagnosis. If she was hurt so much by her mother’s apparent act of betrayal, why would she wish to continue to repeat the experience in her adult relationships? Moreover, the exact cause of her distress seems to come from the reluctance of anyone involved, Mary in particular, to explain what was happening or what the outcome would be for Patricia. In her 1970 letter to Stanley she complains persistently that neither her mother nor her stepfather would provide a convincing explanation for their break-up and makes it clear that the worst aspect of the whole experience was that no one had told her anything, even expedient lies. Highsmith’s claim to Szogyi that she caused pain to her lovers because of the trauma of her parents’ marriage seems to me the form of huckster psychology promoted by Menninger and his kind. As we will see, her taste for turning relationships into sado-masochistic catastrophes was contrived.
This might go some way to account for the assembly of very curious incidents that are generally accepted as the truth regarding that year in Fort Worth. In an interview with Naim Attallah in The Oldie (3 September 1993), little more than a year before her death, she tells of how she met her natural father Jay B. Plangman for the first time in her grandmother’s front room. Apparently he took her hand, seemingly as a symbol of their biological connection, and walked her to and from school several times. She describes it all as ‘brusque and formal’. Nowhere else, in her cahiers, her diaries or her letters to her family – Plangman included – does she refer to this. Nor does anyone else. The Coates had not remained in contact with Plangman after the divorce and Highsmith does not tell of who arranged this introduction. Also, again much later, she beguiled guests with the story of how she obtained two Confederate swords which she displayed prominently on the walls of her private homes. She told of how she had bought them during her year of involuntary exile in Fort Worth. Both carried the trademark of a manufacturer in Massachusetts – Union territory – and if a guest questioned this apparent anomaly, Highsmith declined to comment. Did she buy them later as an adult, from another part of America? Who knows, but she continued to delight in the mystery that surrounded her account. Everywhere she lived, the instruments were hung in a crossed duelling position, until Mary’s death when she separated them.
Throughout this traumatising period she was lied to or misled by omission, principally by her mother. So why should she not, in later life, revisit it with her own falsifications? A year after her mother took her back to New York, her letters to Mary and Stanley on the summer camp of 1933, infused with an idyll of a home life to which the youngster longed to return, appeared in Woman’s World. Who knows what she felt when she read her own completely false version of the Highsmith home life of two years before. Shame? Further anger at her mother in misleading her? Her own credulity in accepting these stories? She seemed to encounter repeated clashes between truth and betrayal, and one suspects that between the ages of twelve and thirteen she had begun to treat fabrication as a standard feature of life. Long before Highsmith had written her first adult fiction, she viewed reality as something that could be routinely manipulated and distorted.
After her return to New York in late 1934, she enrolled at the Julia Richman High School on 317 East 67th Street, where she would remain until 1938. At the age of fifteen, after less than a year at school, Highsmith began recording her observations and thoughts in the first of her cahiers. Her earliest entry involved the trial and eventual execution in the electric chair of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, who had been found guilty of the murder of the child of aviator Charles A. Lindbergh. She collected details from the comprehensive reports of the kidnapping and later the conviction of Hauptmann in the newspapers, but she also inserted pieces of dialogue which enabled her to take part in these events. At one point she implores Hauptmann to ‘“Stop lying”…’ (Cahier, 1935; no other date). By the time Highsmith wrote Strangers on a Train, twelve years later, Lindbergh’s public image as a national hero and victim of a hideous crime had been eroded by his display of support for Nazi Germany, his antipathy towards Britain as the last of the European democracies capable of defending itself against Hitler’s forces, and his suspected antisemitism. The man whose child had allegedly been murdered by a foul individual was showing himself to be undeserving of sympathy. As a result, Highsmith reincarnated Lindbergh and the kidnapper/murderer Hauptmann as a hybrid: Charles Anthony Bruno.
Richman was a single-sex girls’ school. Sixty per cent of pupils were second-generation Italian, thirty per cent were Jewish and the majority of the remaining ten per cent were from Polish, Irish or German families which had arrived in the US within only a generation. ‘Non-Catholics and non-Jews were not invited from fourteen onward to parties given by Catholics or Jews … there were never enough Protestants to throw a party’ (‘A Try at Freedom’, SLA). Highsmith felt like an outsider and the alienation she felt manifested itself in an obsession with her weight. She reports that while she usually shared seats with girls of similar size, individual chairs were reserved for the larger Germans and Jews. Evidently it was not necessary to allocate single seats to Protestants. When she entered Barn
ard College in 1938 she felt that this correlation between size and ethnicity had followed her from school to university.
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 … 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. (‘A Try at Freedom’)
As well as feeling slightly relieved at being self-evidently different, physically, from these ‘repulsive’ Judeo-Germans, she allows herself a sliver of indignation at being excluded from their clubbish grotesqueness by virtue of belonging to a WASP minority. One must assume that the hairy, overweight ‘brothers’ of her one-time school friends were visitors to Barnard.
‘Books in Childhood’ is an undated and unpublished essay, though it is evident that Highsmith wrote it in her adult years. For one thing, its first-person manner closely resembles her novels. She tells of how she became particularly fascinated by two authors, Edgar Allan Poe and Joseph Conrad. Both were misfits, the first voluntarily and the second by accidents of birth and history, and each is seen as being dissociated from their fictional universes. Poe was committed to inventing stories both grotesque and unbelievable while Conrad always seemed an uninvited visitor in the Anglophobic settings of his fiction. Highsmith tells of how she visited Poe’s cottage in Fordham, fifteen miles from New York City, which had by then become a museum. She looked at the manuscripts on display and once followed the route he took, on foot, to deliver a manuscript to his publisher in Manhattan. A few miles from the Highsmith apartment were the docks of the Hudson River, through which Highsmith would wander, looking at the various flags of the merchant ships, covering virtually all the major countries of the globe, and fantasise about climbing aboard one of them, at random, simply to ‘escape from school and family’. The parallels between Highsmith as a perpetual itinerant, never fully committed to a particular nation or continent, and Conrad, are clear enough, as are the similarities between her fiction and Poe’s radical preoccupations with the macabre.
This story of her as part of the legacy of two great, though very different, writers is beguiling. Highsmith the novelist does indeed seem to have inherited aspects of Poe and Conrad.
One of the most unusual periods of Highsmith’s early life occurred after she left Richman High School and was waiting to enrol as an undergraduate at Barnard College, the women-only branch of the prestigious Ivy League Columbia University. In February 1938 she decided to visit her grandparents in Fort Worth. There are no records, even in her intimate diaries and cahiers, of her reasons for doing so, only that she booked a steamer ticket from New York to Galveston and took with her two books: Sir Roger de Coverley, a wry, satirical portrait of an eighteenth-century country gentleman, and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, the Nazi leader’s quasi-autobiographical rant which returns again and again to the threat posed to global civilisation by the Jews. She did not explain her choice of reading but left conspicuous records of it later, probably as evidence of a seventeen-year-old’s precocious eccentricity. On reaching Fort Worth she remarked in her diary that her grandparents’ house was ‘looking more neglected’ and she seemed ill-disposed towards the other permanent guests, her cousin Dan Coates and his wife and child.
Four days after her arrival she made arrangements to once again meet her biological father, Jay B. Plangman. How she did so, let alone her motive, remains a mystery. Apparently Plangman ‘shows me pornographic pictures (to my mingled disgust and fascination, and shame for him)’. Also, ‘And now to my father. 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.’ Both reports are treated by Highsmith’s biographers as part of the same narrative, but they were written thirty-two years apart. The first appeared in her cahier of 1938 and the second in a letter she sent to her stepfather Stanley Highsmith on 29 August 1970. This does not mean that they were untrue, but it does invite us to look again at their contexts. In the cahier entry of the seventeen-year-old, the reference to her father’s displaying of pornography appears in a list of largely inconsequential reports on, for example, her visit to Dallas, where she drank whiskies in a bar.
The description of the non-paternal kiss with Plangman seems to be part of a dialogue. It was ‘all I meant’, indicating that she had referred to it in an earlier exchange of letters, and ‘the word incestuous’ seems similarly to suggest that she and Stanley had already discussed a potentially disturbing encounter between herself and her natural father. The problem is that there are no other letters or copies of letters to or from Highsmith and Stanley on these matters. It is as if we have overheard one statement from an individual involved in a conversation, while remaining deaf to the rest of it. It is possible that letters to and from Highsmith and Stanley relating to this have disappeared, but at the same time one has to be aware of the fact that the only one that survives includes the most disturbing and ultimately unanswerable questions. It is also worth noting that this letter was sent to Stanley in 1970, during a period when Highsmith was bombarding him with enquiries on what really happened between him and her mother. Why would she assume that he knew anything of Plangman? They had never met and there is no evidence that she had told him anything previously of her uncomfortable encounter with Jay B. in 1938. The letter that survives in the archive is a copy of the one she allegedly sent to Stanley, and there is significant evidence to suggest that she forged it as part of her long-term rewriting of her past. The trope of a phrase misheard or a tone of voice mimicked appears again and again in Highsmith’s fiction; Tom Ripley is made up of such fakeries and illusions.
Towards the end of her life she confided in Vivien De Bernardi that she first had sex with a man shortly before her departure for Texas. ‘It wasn’t at all pleasurable … she was just curious. Like a medical experiment’ (De Bernardi to Wilson, p.59). Neither the moderately incestuous encounter with Plangman nor her first experience of sex with the unnamed male teenager appear in her contemporaneous cahiers. She does, however, give a detailed account of her feelings for four of her female contemporaries at the Julia Richman school: Helen and Elaine (both remain unidentified, with no known surnames); Mickey Goldfarb (Mickey was a popular shortening of the Jewish female name, Michaela); and Judy Tuvim. We know most about Tuvim who in her twenties became an actress and changed her conspicuously Jewish surname to Holliday. She would win an Oscar for Best Actress in 1950 for her performance as the scatter-brained Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday, beating Bette Davis, Anne Baxter and Gloria Swanson. Four years later she starred alongside Jack Lemmon in his first feature film, It Should Happen to You, and the film’s director, the legendary George Cukor, later praised her as a comic genius. Highsmith’s entries for all four girls are scattered with references to ‘love’, ‘the two of us’, ‘together forever’, ‘kisses’ and ‘dates’. It is clear that Judy is her favourite and on one occasion she admits that ‘I tell Judy I lie always’ implying that she thinks less of the others in never confessing that she lies to them.
It is clear enough that Highsmith is aware of her lesbian inclinations – ‘I observe the pickings at Barnard,’ she discloses a little later, referring to female students – but one remains enthralled and perplexed by her tendency to include self-disclosures in her contemporaneous private journals while quietly memorising significant incidents, all involving sex, for exposure in letters and conversations decades later. Some insight into this is offered by her first attempt at literary fiction, begun shortly before the opening of her first cahier in 1937. Highsmith was seventeen when she wrote ‘Crime Begins’, a seemingly innocuous short story about the theft of a book. It was, Highsmith later admitted, based on her experience of several of her peers attempting to ‘get at’ the one history book in the library that was relevant to their ongoing studies and examinations. ‘It occurred to
me to steal it, so I wrote a story about a girl who did. I never stole the book’ (South Bank Show, 14 November 1982). Her emphasis on the difference between thinking about doing something bad and doing it is notable, given that it foreshadows the career of a woman whose disturbing private inclinations manifested themselves in novels where murderous behaviour is routine. What happens thereafter in the story is revealing. The girl who steals the book does so by cutting out a section of her very thick private notebook, big enough to hide the valuable work, while she removes it from the library. A single book contains information sought by everyone – essential knowledge, truth if you wish – but Highsmith has her proxy steal it by concealing it within a similar text, a notebook that surrounds it, enmeshes it and silences it for others.
As we have already seen, her notebooks, cahiers and diaries promise disclosures and confessions while simultaneously confusing and misleading the reader. It is evident from the SLA archive that Highsmith in her later years gave almost as much attention to embedding as many insoluble mysteries in her autobiographical legacy as in her novels. Often, she cross-references entries in her cahiers with references to comments in diaries or correspondence, enchanting the researcher with the offer of a solution to the enigma of Patricia Highsmith. But as we attempt to make sense of these internal back-and-forth narratives on how one event or emotion relates to another, we begin to realise that the sole purpose of her emendations is to create a fog of bewilderment.
‘Crime Begins’ is not necessarily an important piece of fiction in its own right, but for Highsmith it is probably her most honest and prescient.
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Barnard
Highsmith enrolled at Barnard College, Columbia, in September 1938; its campus was situated in central New York, adjacent to Broadway. It was the equivalent of the women’s colleges of Oxford and Cambridge which were established during the late nineteenth century in response to the admission of women to the ancient universities and whose separateness reflected the refusal of the male-only colleges to allow them in.
Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires Page 3
