Beautiful Shadow (12 page)

     It would be a pattern she would repeat over and over again, forever investing her lovers with qualities they blatantly did not possess. In an unpublished interview with Bettina Berch, Highsmith was asked about the nature and essence of love. ‘Imagination,’ she replied. ‘Because it’s all in the eyes of the beholder. Nothing to do with reality. When you’re in love it’s a state of madness.’
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     After school she would stop by at Caso’s, a drugstore on 68th Street and Third Avenue, for a soda. She revisited the shop fourteen years later; as she walked past, age twenty-nine, the bittersweet memories of youth flooded back to her. ‘And the crises I have known here, the faces I looked for, and saw, or missed, the afternoons metamorphosed by some overwhelming event that had happened in school that day, days that twisted one’s life around completely and permanently, I remember them.’
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Life was, at times, as she confessed in her diary, ‘an endless hell on earth’.
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Stanley and Mary argued constantly and, although she dreamed about the possibility of a divorce between the two, she realised that it was unlikely. ‘M. will never leave S. and never never know real happiness,’ she wrote.
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At nights, she would often cry herself to sleep.

     In April 1935, however, she received news from Ray Wallace, the editor of
Woman’s
World
that his magazine would not only publish the series of letters she had written to her parents from summer camp two years previously, but he would pay her $25 when the piece ran in the July issue. Writing – the ordering of experience – appealed to her, she surmised, because her own home life was so chaotic. She remembered feeling immensely satisfied after writing her first fictional sentence, age fourteen – ‘He prepared to go to sleep, removed his shoes and set them parallel, toes outward, beside his bed.’
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Whatever happened next, she did not remember, but ‘it gave me a sense of order, seeing the shoes neatly beside the bed in my imagination . . . I longed for order and security.’
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When she was fourteen or fifteen, she also started work on an epic poem in the style of Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King’ that, in blank verse, told a romantic story set in a world of castles and battles, but which does not survive today. Her IQ she recorded as 121 and she read works as diverse as Wilkie Collins’
The Moonstone
, Melville’s
Moby-Dick
, Erich Maria Remarque’s
All Quiet on the Western Front
, and books on heredity, palmistry and Christian Science.

     Her mother was a keen disciple of the Church of Christ, Scientist, created by Mary Baker Eddy in Massachusetts in the 1870s, a movement which can be seen as a by-product of the unrest which gripped America after the end of the Civil War. Eddy’s aim was to restore what she saw as primitive Christianity and its lost element of spiritual healing through a number of alternative remedies, including homeopathy. The roots of disease, she believed, could be traced back to the mind and the only true cure was brought about by spiritual healing. By 1930, Christian Science churches in America numbered around 2,400, while the 1936 US Bureau of the Census recorded membership of the church in the United States as totalling 269,000. ‘The public wants . . . to obtain . . . cloying sweetness . . . optimism . . . and peppermint sayings . . .’ wrote one early twentieth-century commentator. ‘[It] pays a high price to Mrs Eddy for the privilege of being deluded into believing that all is sweetness and light in a era of stress and materialism.’
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However, it’s not hard to see why Eddy’s book,
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures
, originally published in 1875, but continually revised over the next thirty-five years, influenced Highsmith throughout her teens. Central to Eddy’s thesis was her belief that the human mind and spirit determined reality. ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,’ runs the quotation, from Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
at the beginning of Eddy’s text, a principle which appealed to Highsmith and one she would reassert at low points throughout her life. ‘Sometimes one has the mental habit, well, really tricks, to continue to be cheerful and to continue to imagine that one’s making progress when one really isn’t,’ she said.
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     By the time Highsmith reached her early twenties, she found the whole premise of Christian Science a ludicrous one and she distanced herself from the movement. At twenty-seven, Highsmith assessed the methods advocated by Eddy to lift one’s spirits and their influence on her mother, concluding them to be ‘hysterical’.
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However, as a young girl, shy and insecure, anxious that her sexual instincts would mark her out as a freak, she turned to Christian Science as if towards a beacon of hope. After resolving to apply the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy to her life, she believed that she did indeed feel more ‘hopeful’.
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‘The physical healing of Christian Science results now, as in Jesus’ time,’ Eddy promised her, ‘from the operation of divine Principle, before which sin and desire lose their reality in human consciousness and disappear as naturally and as necessarily as darkness gives place to light and sin to redemption.’
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     At fifteen, Highsmith started to keep what she called her ‘cahiers’, journals measuring seven by eight and a quarter inches which she would use to jot down germs of inspiration, which she referred to as ‘Keime’, and began to mix with a group of ‘intellectual’ girls who liked to be seen carrying volumes of Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield, Proust and T.S. Eliot. Each day she made sure she read the
Herald Tribune
newspaper on the way to school.

     ‘Ever since I was sixteen or seventeen I got what is [
sic
] sometimes called creepy ideas, I suppose,’ she recalled, ‘but I don’t consider it gruesome.’
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In June 1937, she wrote a story called ‘Crime Begins’, which was described by one of her teachers as being the best in the school that term. Its theme was one she would return to in various guises for the rest of her life – the interplay of morality and guilt – and its inspiration came from personal experience.

     ‘The first story I really remember was when I was sixteen years old. In the high school where I was going there were three copies of a certain history book, there were so many girls – it was an all-girls high school – trying to get at the book at the same time . . . It occurred to me to steal it, so I wrote a story about a girl who did.
I
never stole the book.’ In the story the girl cut out a section of a very thick notebook and hid the book inside. ‘It was not bad – the same style I am using now, very simple, a very simple style.’
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     Another story, ‘Primroses Are Pink’, published in the fall 1937 issue of the school literary and art magazine,
The Bluebird
, deals with a psychological crisis brought on by something as trivial as the colour of primroses. Two versions of the story survive – the one that was printed in the
The Bluebird
and a slightly longer, more confident, study which exists in manuscript and which reads like a later rewrite.

     The opening of the story printed in the school magazine reads as follows: ‘Mr. Fleming was a man of very exacting nature. For a long time he had wanted a sporting print for his study, but he had never found any suiting both his pocketbook and his taste.’
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The opening paragraph of the manuscript story is much more unsettling, terrifying as it is in its banality: ‘The beaming Mr. Theodore Fleming strode into the lobby of his apartment building, greeted the elevator boy, and stepped into the elevator. At the twelfth floor he got out and walked gaily into his apartment. His wife was in the living room.’
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     Fleming buys a monotone picture of a jockey on a Derby-winning racehorse and after learning of the authentic colours of his silks – primrose and white – he sends it away for painting. However, on seeing the transformed print, Fleming’s wife, Catherine, thinks the primrose sported by the jockey should be pink – not the greenish-yellow colour in the painting. After all, her mother always had pink primroses in her garden. Doubt and an overwhelming sense of anxiety cloud Fleming’s vision and he becomes obsessive about the correct colour of the primrose, prompting conflict between him and his wife. Although he decides to hang the painting in the apartment, he feels compelled to tell guests, ‘That’s primrose. English primroses are yellow, you know.’
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Obviously the experience has left him somewhat disturbed.

     Writing, it seems, was Highsmith’s only outlet. ‘I know why I began writing – to get an emotion out of myself, to see it on paper, organized as best as I could organize it,’ she said later.
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But at the same time as she purged herself through the experience of writing, she deliberately starved herself as a form of punishment. The sixteen-year-old girl weighed only 106 pounds and until she was nineteen she suffered from a range of health problems which would, later in the century, be classified as anorexia: failure to eat, low body weight, lack of menstruation, constipation, overactivity, blue extremities, slow heart rate and a downy skin. ‘I had all these symptoms aged 15–19,’
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she scribbled next to a newspaper feature on the subject in 1969.

     In Highsmith’s case, anorexia – a manifestation of extremely low self-esteem – can be read as a sign of an almost pathological desire to rid herself of her identity, a drive towards self-erasement which would later find expression in many of her novels, particularly
The Talented Mr Ripley
. This compulsion to fade away out of existence can be traced back to a mass of complex emotional factors: her unhappy childhood, her rejection by her mother in early puberty, her sense of dissociation from reality and confusion about her sexuality. She described her behaviour in her journal: ‘Saving part of anything, living like a rat. Self-depreciation. Lack of food intake in adolescence, to get attention of parents, also to punish myself, for sex reasons etc.’
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     The theories surrounding writing and sex are manifold but Highsmith herself believed that her creativity was an expression of frustrated and repressed desires. In a fictional sketch written in 1942, she drew heavily on her own experiences of her sixteenth year to paint a portrait of a girl called Henrietta. On Sundays the Henrietta/Highsmith figure would be possessed by the spirit of creativity – expressed as an urge to write and paint – but at the end of the day would only feel unsatisfied, desperately unhappy and on the verge of tears. Refusing the coffee and ice cream offered by her parents, she would stay in her unlit room, hunger tearing at her stomach, tears smarting in her eyes. Writing, Henrietta felt, was a cathartic process, a way of eliminating the toxic emotional mass that had built up inside her. But when she experienced a block, she was left feeling wretched. ‘Then she associated the frustration and the desire with unfulfilled sex impulses, which was a . . . reasonable one at that age.’
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These impulses would not remain unfulfilled for long.

Mary Highsmith, observing how little Pat was interested in the opposite sex, took it upon herself to find her daughter a boyfriend. Pat and her date would go out for a meal followed by dancing, but when it came to kissing goodnight, the sixteen-year-old girl found the practice disgusting. ‘It’s like falling into a bucket of oysters, isn’t it?’ she told her mother.
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She hoped Mary would give her some maternal advice, but her mother was not forthcoming on the subject.

     ‘I thought, if that’s what I have to pay, at the end of the evening, for a young man’s having paid my dinner check, I would rather pay my own dinner check. It never came to that, because I ceased seeing this young chap – a waste of time on both our parts, it was.’
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