Beautiful Shadow (3 page)

     Like her fiction, Highsmith, who was appropriately ambidextrous, was dyadic – both self and spectre, her identity constantly in flux. ‘Dostoevsky is criticised for ambivalence, for illogic, contradictions – worst of all, ambivalences in his philosophy,’ she wrote in 1947. ‘But there are always two. Perhaps this wonderful, magical, creative, public & private number is the mystic secret of the universe. One can love two people, the sexes are within all of us, emotions directly contrary do exist side by side. This is the way I see the world too.’
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     For this reason, writing about Highsmith is a dangerous undertaking, one which she would, with her streak of black, sometimes cruel, humour, have no doubt appreciated. Confronted with her diaries, I paused for a moment before leafing through their delicate, leaf-thin, pages. Of course, I was curious to know her secrets, keen to hear her distinctive voice talk to me from the past. But I also felt guilty, like a character in one of her books, especially when I opened the pages of her 1942 diary, and found this:

Look before and look behind,

There’s still time to change your mind;

Perfidy no time assuages;

Curst be he that moves these pages.
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A chilling note. Yet, on other occasions, I have felt quite blessed. Doors seemed to open, letters from long-lost friends arrived through my letter box and her inner circle, keen to protect her memory, began to reveal itself. Highsmith was adamant a biography should not be written while she was alive – indeed, she blocked several attempts – but secretly quite proud that one might be written when she was no longer around to witness the result. Biographers who swooped around her like vultures disgusted her, but she realised, as she wrote to her friend, Charles Latimer, ‘I do NOT mean to sound as important as Winston Churchill, but am absolutely sure someone will wish to “write something” when I’m dead.’
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She also stated that an examination of her relationships was a legitimate subject for investigation. ‘In case of biog how much of my personal liaisons should be mentioned, and I replied if they picked me up or let me down, they should be mentioned . . . I said it would be hypocritical to try to avoid the subject, and that everyone must know I am queer, or gay.’
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     Writing a life of anyone, let alone someone as perplexing as Highsmith, is a highly subjective task. No one, even with access to the fullest and most intimate of diaries, can document a life in all its richness. Highsmith, too, was aware of this, as she wrote in her 1940 journal. There were, she said, certain emotions or incidents which she had failed to record. Those memories, as she said in a poem, were, ‘Fixed in my head/And there they’ll remain/Even after I’m dead.’
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Even so, the novelist realised that it was still possible to trace the complex matrix of connections that link the present to the past. She was so obsessed with recording and analysing her life that the journals, diaries and letters which survive provide a rich source of material so alive with detail that the current biographical trend to turn to more fictional methods was unnecessary.

     Highsmith herself said, in a journal entry discussing a biography of Dostoevsky, that the most intimate way of knowing any writer was to make a chronological history of their ‘moods, fits and daily activities’,
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together with details about what they wrote when. That, surely, was the best way of understanding them and that is what I have attempted to do here. This is a biography first and foremost and although I have attempted to set Highsmith within her historical and cultural context, expansive literary criticism is outside the scope of this book. I have, however, for those readers unfamiliar with her work, tried to explain why her novels and short stories are superior to the mass of popular crime fiction, citing the sources from which she drew her ideas to help explain the power of her writing. As Highsmith writes in
The Blunderer
, ‘if you knew the kind of books a man wanted, you knew the man.’
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     After reading her private, unpublished papers, I felt like her confessor, like the imaginary empathetic friend she wrote about in one of her notebooks, whom she describes lying before a fire, with their hands behind their head, listening to the author talk about ‘the little dark pockets of the past’.
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As the wood smoke twists and curls its way towards me, Highsmith starts speaking. ‘I could tell you many stories, some of them bitter, many of them strange, but all of them true.’
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Chapter 1

The forever seeking

1921 and before

In one of Highsmith’s early notebooks there is a short vignette about a boy who wonders why he is happy at one moment and sad the next. As the boy grows older, he becomes increasingly fascinated by the nature of consciousness and people come from afar to ask him the question: ‘What and why am I?’
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Like the boy in her story, Highsmith was a writer in search of identity. On every page of her cahiers and diaries the same self-searching questions are asked over and over again. Was she the sum of her consciousness? Or was her self merely made up of the perceptions of other people? ‘There is an ever more acute difference . . . between my inner self which I know is the real me, and various faces of the outside world,’ she wrote in 1947.
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And could a writer, forever assuming the personalities of his or her characters, even have such a thing as a stable identity?

     Towards the end of her life, Highsmith became fascinated by genealogy, building up a mass of papers which purport to trace her lineage, through the Stewarts, her maternal grandmother’s line, back to James I. She wrote to distant relatives, genealogists, the College of Arms in London and local historians so as to piece together the fragments of her family history. Running parallel to this desperate urge to find roots in the past, was the instinct to escape the present and a desire to chase the unobtainable. This manifested itself by her nomadic journeying around the world, from her birth place in Fort Worth, Texas, to New York, Mexico, Germany, Austria, Italy, England, France and Switzerland. In a poem she wrote when she was only twenty she imagined what her state of mind would be like in the future – after travelling around the world, she surmised, she would know hundreds of people in a clutch of different cities and yet she would still be lonely. ‘I am the forever-seeking,’ she said.
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When Highsmith was thirteen years old she bought a pair of Confederate swords for $13. Later in life, each time she moved house, she would make sure these weapons from the American Civil War were displayed in a suitably prominent position. For all her European veneer – she had a working knowledge of French, German, Spanish and Italian – she was undeniably Texan. Her favourite food was the traditional cooking of the South – cornbread, collard greens, spare ribs, black-eyed peas and peanut butter – and towards the end of her life she felt most comfortable dressed in the basic uniform of the off-duty cowboy: 34-inch-waist Levis, sneakers and neckerchiefs.

     ‘The fact that Pat was from Texas is incredibly important for an accurate appreciation of her character,’ says her friend, the American playwright Phyllis Nagy, who knew Highsmith when she was in her sixties. ‘When you say things like this to people who aren’t American they think it’s terribly facile but Southern conservatism was deeply ingrained in her. People forget that she was a very conservative person – she wasn’t bohemian like Jane Bowles and she did hold some very weird and contradictory views.’
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     Highsmith was born on 19 January 1921 in Fort Worth, thirty miles west of Dallas. In addition to Poe, she shared her birthday with Robert E. Lee, the US Confederate commander in the Civil War, whom she later named as her favourite historical figure. She would leave Texas for New York at the age of six, returning intermittently for short periods throughout her childhood, including an unhappy year when she was twelve, but the spirit of the Lone Star state, with its molten-hot, colourless sun, ‘like something grown white with its own heat’,
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ran deep in her veins. Later in life, when asked by a journalist whether she was aware of any typically Texan characteristics in her personality, the writer replied, ‘Maybe a kind of independence.’
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As a young woman she also enjoyed horseriding – the one sport she indulged in – which she said was ‘perhaps the only respect in which I resemble a Texan’.
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     At school, Highsmith would have learned about the history of her home state before that of America: ‘We chose this land; we took it; we made it bear fruit,’ was a common mantra heard in many a Texan classroom. The phrase accurately articulated the ‘territoriality of Texans – the feeling for place and tribe’
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and the passion its people felt for the land no matter whose flag – Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan, Confederate, American – could be seen blowing in the wind. ‘The Texans in the 19th century did not create a “usable past”, or one that buttressed 20th-century American mainstream thought,’ writes historian T.R. Fehrenbach. ‘The Texans emerged with a “blood memory,” in the Texan writer Katherine Anne Porter’s memorable phrase.’
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     The Lone Star flag flew over Texas, proclaiming its independence, for ten years, before it was annexed by the United States. Yet the struggle for the frontier continued, a savage confrontation between the so-called ‘civilising’ elements of America and the untamed world of the Indian; a war of identity which, when retold through the generations, transformed itself into a near-mythical story of epic proportions, a tale the young Highsmith found fascinating. The constant battle for land on what was called the ‘raw scar of the frontier’
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– as late as 1870, the Kiowas, Comanches, Cheyennes, Kiowa-Apaches and Arapahoes prevented white men from stepping foot in nearly half of Texas – contributed to the Texan’s belief in the rightness of his own law-making. In a land where opposing groups were battling for dominance, each man had to make his own rules, a structure of self-regulating morality which must have also interested the writer in later life. Texans were typically atomistic, empiricist of mind and independent, and, like Highsmith and many of her characters, they tended to shy away from groups in order to pursue their own physical and psychological journeys.

     Running parallel to this rather creative approach to morality was the rich tradition of fire and brimstone inherited by detailed reading of the Bible. The Old Testament, with its graphic descriptions of good and evil, appealed to the Texan frame of mind. ‘The young Texan read of evil that was ancient and ever-present, requiring eternal discipline of man . . .’ writes Fehrenbach. ‘And although few could articulate or explain it, Texans gained a timeless portrait of man’s world, of the rise and fall of peoples, of bondage and deliverance, of God’s patience and wrath, and man’s enduring inhumanity to man.’
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     Fort Worth – Highsmith’s birthplace – was the site of many a brutal confrontation. Founded in 1849 by Major Ripley Arnold, the frontier town served as a military outpost to guard against Comanche Indian raids, protecting the white population to the east. The army left the town in 1853 but three years later, Fort Worth superseded neighbouring Birdville as the Tarrant county seat. From the 1870s onwards, Fort Worth became a place associated with movement, transition and the free flow of people, products and livestock, acting as a stopover point for the longhorn cattle drives on the Chisholm Trail, the route which ran from south of San Antonio, Texas, across Oklahoma, towards Abilene, Kansas. Its position as a cattle-shipping boomtown was secured with the arrival of the Texas and Pacific Railway in 1876, by which time Fort Worth could boast thirteen saloons, with such names as ‘Red Light’, ‘The Waco Tap’, ‘Cattle Exchange’ and ‘Our Comrades’. ‘Fort Worth was less conscious of her morals than some of her neighbors,’ one old timer is recorded as saying.
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     With the opening of the Fort Worth Stock Yards Company in 1893 and the development of the railway, Fort Worth transformed itself from a dusty cow town into a major trading centre. The railroads had revolutionised both its geography and its status and the city now proudly declared itself to be the ‘Queen of the Prairies’, attracting an influx of immigrants that only served to increase its prosperity. The population grew from 3,000 in 1876, to 23,076 in 1890, and 27,000 by the turn of the century. By 1910, 75,000 people lived within the city’s limits
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and the discovery of oil in northwest Texas in 1917 fuelled the economic boom even further. By 1924 – three years after Highsmith’s birth – the nine refineries in the area produced petroleum products valued at $52 million a year, making Fort Worth the ‘oil capital of North Texas’.