Beautiful Shadow (11 page)

     Yet for all the school’s cultural pluralism, Highsmith felt isolated. As a Protestant, she felt excluded from the Jewish or Catholic majorities, a social segregation she clearly resented. ‘Non-Catholics and non-Jews were not invited from fourteen onward to parties given by Catholics or Jews, from which Catholics or Jews excluded the other. There were never enough Protestants to throw a party.’
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     Twenty-six years before Highsmith entered the school, Julia Richman published a book which no doubt reflected the dominant ethos of the establishment which proudly bore her name. The 1908 title,
Good Citizenship
, co-authored with Isabel Richman Wallach, was written as a practical guide for children and outlines the basics of modern living, with chapters focusing on the fire service, the department of health, street cleaning and the police. The words that Richman wrote on the subject of crime would no doubt have caused the writer, later in life, to emit one of her distinctively throaty laughs. ‘Crime is an ugly word, and it stands for ugly deeds. Disorder is bad enough to contend with, but crime is far worse . . . Men commit crime because of anger, envy, or greed; but they are generally very careful not to do it when the policeman is in sight.’
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In Highsmith’s world, crime may be ugly, but it is also something born of psychological necessity and described in such a logical, detached manner that the reader is tricked into believing it is simply part of the continuum of normal behaviour. Not only that: any policeman featured in one of her novels is just as likely to be as corrupt as his criminal quarry. Morality is shifted, unsettling one’s vision, skewing perspective and undermining accepted notions of truth and justice.

     Highsmith’s move to a single-sex environment resulted in boredom. ‘It was much more fun when I was going to school with boys before the age of fourteen,’ she said later, ‘because they have a sense of humor, much better than that of the girls, I must say, and it was amusing. And suddenly from fourteen to seventeen there was a bunch of girls . . . learning things by rote. Pretty boring.’
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     Highsmith’s school records from Julia Richman detail not only her academic record – from the beginning she earned high marks in most subjects – but offer an insight into her personality too. Observations noted on the card entry include comments such as ‘Shy?’, ‘Always so very nice to me!’, and ‘worth watching’. Yet Highsmith’s abiding memory of school is one of crushing boredom, and so, whenever she had a free moment, she escaped into a parallel universe: the endlessly thrilling world of fiction. So bored was she by her immediate reality that she would take a book with her to gym classes, which she would then read while hanging from the top of a rope. ‘It never seemed to occur to the teacher or anyone to look up,’ she said.
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     Edgar Allan Poe was a particular favourite, especially his
Tales of Mystery and the Imagination
, ‘with their ingenious fantasies about death, resurrection, and the possibility of life continuing after burial’.
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‘His was a wild imagination in full flight. He chanced anything,’ she said.
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She visited his cottage in Fordham, thirteen miles from New York, where she delighted in seeing a sample of his writing in a notebook and one of his sketches of his wife, Virginia, together with his cat. She was also rather impressed to learn that one day Poe walked from the house over the Bronx River bridge, and down to Manhattan in order to deliver a manuscript. Another literary hero, Joseph Conrad, whose
Typhoon
was one of her favourite books, prompted a fantasy of running away by hiding in the bowels of one of the ships stationed by the piers of the Hudson River, just a few blocks away from the family’s apartment: ‘I . . . used to gaze at the rusty prows of freighters docked at the end of Christopher Street and Morton Street, and wished that I could climb on one of them and escape from school and family. The ships’ names attracted me, many strange and unpronounceable.’
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This desire was shared by one of her characters, Guy, in her first published novel,
Strangers on a Train
, who remembers he had been ‘wild to go to sea at fourteen’.
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In addition to its ocean setting, it’s not difficult to understand why Conrad’s novella attracted her; its structure is determined by the dualistic, slightly homoerotic, relationship between Captain MacWhirr, driven by instinct, and his chief-mate Jukes, a symbol of intelligence, a male-male dialectic she would explore in greater detail in her own work.

     Patsy also experienced escapism – and a certain amount of vicarious pleasure – in January 1935, as she followed the high-profile prosecution of German immigrant Bruno Richard Hauptmann for the kidnapping and murder of Charles A. Lindbergh Jr, the baby son of the aviator. The fourteen-year-old was so transfixed by what became known as ‘the trial of the century’ that she took to summarising the findings in her diary. ‘Hauptman [
sic
] trial. Yells: “Stop lying . . .”,’ she wrote, before noting the guilty verdict, in February, ‘Hauptman [
sic
] guilty, sentenced to chair’.
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Twelve years later, in 1947, when Highsmith was writing
Strangers on a Train
, she would unite the names of murderer and victim in this, the most sensational crime of the early twentieth century, to create the first of her psychopathic killers – Charles A. Bruno.

When Patsy was fourteen, her mother asked her, ‘Are you a les?’ before adding cruelly, ‘You are beginning to make noises like one.’ Later Highsmith would recall how this ‘rather vulgar and frightening remark’
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made her feel even more alienated and introverted. ‘It reminds one of “Look at that hunchback isn’t he funny” on the street. I was not a cripple on the street, but a member of my mother’s family.’
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     At school, she was already forming crushes on fellow pupils and in her diary she noted that after a ‘fingerclasp’ with one girl she was too nervous to sit in the same German class with her. Her relationships, at this time, were most likely to have been romantic, non-erotic affairs, but, to a certain extent she still felt she had to suppress her sexual identity. ‘A most important fact in my character is that I did not begin, as a child and an adolescent, open, free, naive, gullible and so forth. Naive I was, no doubt of that, but I was closed up and reserved.’
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     Mary became concerned about her daughter’s odd behaviour, but didn’t make an effort to understand what she was going through, simply saying, ‘Why don’t you straighten up and fly right?’
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before walking out of the room. Mary Highsmith wanted her daughter to ‘be like other people’
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but Patsy was left feeling confused by her stinging remarks. How could she, the girl asked herself, ‘be like other people’ when her own background was so strange? Did her mother not realise the effect she had had on her own daughter when she continually rejected her? Looking back on the incident as an adult, Highsmith remembered how belittled she felt by her mother’s comments. Had Mary really cared about her, she said, surely she would have attempted to help her or at least tried to seek the opinions of a child psychiatrist?

     Patsy, like one of the snails which would obsess her later in life, turned in on herself and erected a psychological shell which she thought would protect her from the outside world. ‘Until around thirty, I was essentially, like a glacier or like stone,’ she wrote in her journal. ‘I suppose I was “protecting” myself. It was certainly tied up with the fact I had to conceal the most important emotional drives of myself completely.

     ‘This is the tragedy of the conscience-stricken young homosexual, that he not only conceals his sex objectives, but conceals his humanity and natural warmth of heart as well.’
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     Muriel Mandelbaum, née Wiesenthal, a fellow pupil at Julia Richman High School, remembers Highsmith as being amazingly bright but terribly reserved, someone who kept a certain distance from the other girls. ‘She, like me, lived on the west side and we went to school together on the bus,’ she remembers. ‘We would compete with each other to see who could do the
Herald Tribune
cryptogram first, in the shortest amount of time. She was very good at crosswords.

     ‘She was extraordinarily pretty – beautiful and tall and slender – with, quite appropriately, patrician features. I was shocked to see the pictures that were taken towards the end of her life. When I knew her she wore lipstick and had long hair. She was feminine and there was nothing butch about her at all. Of course I was an innocent, but there was no suggestion that she might be lesbian.’
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     Highsmith not only repressed her emotions at home and at school, but felt she had to censor herself even when she was writing her diary. ‘I cannot write what I want. Suppressions,’ she wrote in 1935. ‘M. [her mother] says I am very x and I think so myself for the first time,’ runs another entry.
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     It’s not surprising that Patsy felt the need to stifle the expression of her burgeoning sexuality. She may have been living in Greenwich Village, but the onset of the Depression in 1929 put a damper on the expression of female independence. During the three years following the Wall Street Crash, society became increasingly antipathetic towards working women. If a job existed it should, general opinion insisted, go to a man rather than his female counterpart. In 1931, the dean of Barnard College – the women-only college Highsmith would attend between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one – suggested each graduate should ask herself whether it was strictly necessary for her to work. If not then perhaps ‘the greatest service that you can render to the community . . . is to have the courage to refuse to work for gain,’ she said.
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     The prevailing attitude towards lesbianism was even more negative. Menninger’s
The Human Mind
classified lesbianism under ‘Perversions of Affection and Interest’ – along with fetishism, paedophilia and even satanism – and discussed the case of a college girl enamoured of her room-mate. ‘They attend each other like lovers,’ said Menninger. ‘They have violent quarrels, demonstrations of jealousy, and rapturous reunions.’
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A front-page feature in the
New York Times
, in 1935, headlined, ‘Women’s Personalities Changed by Adrenal Gland Operations’, revealed that women who suffered from ‘masculine psychological states’ – obviously a euphemism for same-sex relations – could now be treated, indeed ‘cured’, of their unnatural desires by the removal of an adrenal gland. The surgery would, it was claimed, help such women battle against their ‘aversion to marriage’ and make them less mannish.
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     In fiction, too, lesbians were regarded as somewhat freakish characters. The publication, in 1928, of Radclyffe Hall’s
The Well of Loneliness
helped increase lesbian visibility, but it portrayed them as ‘inverts’, men trapped in women’s bodies, rather than as simply women who happened to love other women. It whetted the public’s appetite for the subject matter, and a spate of novels were published which served to increase hatred of lesbians, classifying them as ‘crooked, twisted freaks of nature who stagnate in dark and muddy waters’
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while journalists took to lampooning them in the popular press. ‘Greenwich Village Sin Dives Lay Traps for Innocent Girls,’ ran the headline in a 1931 edition of the
New York Evening Graphic
. The piece described the clientele of the Bungalow, a bar full of ‘lisping boys and deep-voiced girls . . . They display their jealousies and occasionally claw at each other with their nails. They talk loudly, scream, jibe at each other and order gin continually. Always gin.’
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     Lesbians were ‘considered monstrosities in the 1930s’
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and many young women, like Highsmith, felt compelled to repress their desires. Perhaps it was this mood of self-censorship which contributed to Highsmith’s fascination with the idea of the fantasy lover, the ghost-like woman who existed purely in her mind. If she couldn’t have the reality, she would have to make do with a figure conjured from her imagination. When she was fourteen, she fell in love with someone, most probably another girl, with whom she had only the briefest of contacts. ‘I was in love aged 14 to 17 and more with someone I saw only for a few weeks in school aged 14 . . . we went to different high schools in New York, never saw each other again, and indeed we’d never been friends or even shaken hands.’
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