Beautiful Shadow (9 page)

     It was while living in Astoria that Patsy developed a fascination with the psychologically ‘abnormal’ which would last the rest of her life. Other girls of her age were reading fairy stories, but Highsmith was gripped by Dr Karl Menninger’s
The Human Mind
, a detailed account of so-called ‘deviant’ behaviour such as kleptomania, schizophrenia and pyromania. (Interestingly, a handful of Menninger’s studies were culled from the research done by Robert Ripley, the flamboyant creator of ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not!’, who travelled the world in the early twentieth century in search of the bizarre for his world-wide syndicated newspaper column.) Published in 1930,
The Human Mind
was one of the first psychiatric books written for a mass audience, tapping into a wider cultural need to understand the darker aspects of human behaviour. It was selected by the Literary Guild, attracted over 1,000 reviews and became an instant bestseller, selling 70,000 copies on publication. ‘It is a straightforward, non-argumentative presentation of the principles of dynamic psychiatry,’ according to Sydney Smith, editor of
The Human Mind Revisited
, ‘but it flashed a light on the shadows of the human mind.’
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     Menninger, who founded a psychiatric clinic in Topeka, Kansas and later went on to be president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, became something of a celebrity and there was a national demand for interviews, speeches, advice and newspaper and magazine articles. His book was so successful, in part, because he explained complex psychological symptoms in a clear, concise style and illustrated his points with details from real case histories. Highsmith would have been intrigued when she read the book’s opening lines.

When a trout rising to a fly gets hooked on a line and finds himself unable to swim about freely, he begins a fight which results in struggles and splashes and sometimes an escape. Often, of course, the situation is too tough for him.

     In the same way the human being struggles with his environment and with the hooks that catch him. Sometimes he masters his difficulties; sometimes they are too much for him. His struggles are all that the world sees and it usually misunderstands them. It is hard for a free fish to understand what is happening to a hooked one.
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     After school finished at 3.30 p.m., Patsy would come home to an empty house – both Mary and Stanley were at work – where she would sit in the green armchair in the living room and read Menninger’s catalogue of case histories about the mentally disturbed: the happily married woman and mother of two who shot her children and yet could remember nothing about the incident; the well-off merchant who couldn’t stop himself from robbing banks and the college girl who was sexually attracted to her female room-mate. ‘To me they were real, of course, consequently more stimulating to my imagination than fairy tales or fiction would have been,’ she wrote to Karl Menninger in 1989, one year before his death.
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     No doubt what attracted the young girl, already feeling somewhat at odds with her immediate reality, was Menninger’s rejection of the concept of normality. As Menninger wrote in the preface to
The Human Mind
, ‘The adjuration to be “normal” seems shockingly repellent to me; I see neither hope nor comfort in sinking to that low level. I think it is ignorance that makes people think of abnormality only with horror and allows them to remain undismayed at the proximity of “normal” to average and mediocre. For surely anyone who achieves anything is,
a priori
, abnormal  . . .’
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     The book appealed to her already instinctive belief that behind an individual’s respectable facade lay a mass of contradictions and perverse desires; a psychological dynamic that was ripe for creative exploration. ‘I can’t think of anything more apt to set the imagination stirring, drifting, creating, than the idea – the fact – that anyone you walk past on the pavement anywhere may be a sadist, a compulsive thief, or even a murderer,’ she said.
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     The drive to ‘get under the skin’ of her fellow man also manifested itself in her interest in human anatomy. Another influential textbook which was, perhaps again, unusual reading for a nine-year-old, was George Bridgman’s
The Human Machine: the Anatomical Structure and Mechanism of the Human Body
, a guide to the underlying structures of the body written as a textbook for art students. ‘It was an important book in the household as my mother and stepfather, as commercial artists, had to have some ability to draw the human figure,’ she wrote to her publisher, Diogenes Verlag.
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She also read Jack London, Louisa May Alcott’s
Little Women
, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ruskin’s
Sesame and Lilies
and Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
, which she would prop up in front of her while she ate lunch alone in her parents’ apartment. The book both transfixed and terrified her – as she turned its pages she would imagine that a ghost might appear in the hall doorway even though it was broad daylight.

     In biology lessons at school she learnt about Mendel’s research into pea plants and the laws of genetics. Her mother told her the truth of her parentage when she was ten, but she knew the details long before then, she claimed. She had long suspected that Stanley was not her real father – after all, she only had to look in the mirror to see how her dark eyes and hair bore no resemblance to either her mother nor her stepfather. And now Mendel’s laws confirmed her suspicion. ‘My mother is a blondish type with grey eyes and my stepfather has grey eyes too,’ she said.
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In addition, her mother had drawings in her grandmother’s house signed Mary Plangman, not Mary Highsmith. ‘I remember asking – why this name? Not to mention the fact that my stepfather came on the scene when I was three,’ she told Craig Brown.
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     The news came as no great shock to her, but the knowledge that Stanley was not her real father must have forced her, albeit unconsciously, to question the nature of her identity. Whatever the effect of this revelation, she was left feeling extremely disturbed.

     ‘When I was nine or ten I had a feeling I would die when I fell asleep and I was afraid of that. It took me ages to fall asleep, I remember many a time I was awake until two. I had a feeling I would stop breathing, so I used to take water and snuff it up my nose a bit as if it would keep me awake somehow. It must have gone on several weeks, months even.’
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     It also seems that as a child she suffered from some sort of health problem. In an undated letter to her grandmother – Highsmith’s earliest surviving piece of writing – she refers to what she calls her ‘poison’.

Dear Grandma,

     I have been bathing so much this summer at the beach that I did not have time to write to you like I did in the winter. I am saving up money to spend on you when you get up here . . . We are all anxious for you to come up here. Mother and Stanley are going to try to show you a good time.

     My poison is all cured up now. Mother cured it up. I am going to send an old letter I wrote long ago . . . Stanley says hello to all of you and looks forward to your visit  . . .

     How is grandma – and I wish I was home so I could play in the back yard. love to all Patsy.
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One day in 1931, Highsmith was at school, trying to open one of the windows with a twelve-foot-long wooden pole, when she looked out and saw a man walking quickly down the street. He was wearing a dark suit, but no hat, and carried a briefcase under his arm, but the ordinary-looking man invested the young girl with a desperate longing for a time when she too would be able to walk down the sidewalk, free from the control of her elders and betters. To the intelligent ten-year-old girl, eager to experience the world, the man represented liberty, the power to do anything and go anywhere. ‘The image made an indelible impression on me,’ she wrote later, ‘because from that moment, I felt that that was what I wanted too.’
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Fascinated by the man and what he represented, she climbed halfway up the wooden pole and, so as to disrupt the class, pretended the window would not open.

     ‘Patsy, will you come down!’ said her teacher, as the pupils fell about with laughter.

     ‘So I came down,’ Highsmith remembered, ‘but with my vision still in my eyes.’
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     The incident is important because it indicates Highsmith’s ambivalent attitude towards belonging to a group, a tension which would later shape both her career and her personal life. At one level she wanted to escape the confines of the classroom and be like the solitary man she saw walking down the street, but on another she clearly felt a strong impulse to amuse her fellow pupils. She said that her schooldays made her ‘feel like a worker ant, without identity, importance, individuality or dignity’
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and as a result from then on she battled against uniformity. At the age of eleven, she refused to be taught French before she started Latin classes – an idea she picked up from the ‘Jeremy’ books of Sir Hugh Walpole – and instead used her free time to read Hazlitt’s essays and Boswell’s
The Life of Samuel Johnson
in the school library. She may have loathed the thought of losing her identity in a crowd, but she confided to Vivien De Bernardi, that ‘the happiest year of her life was when she was ten years old and she belonged to a gang.’
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     At the onset of puberty, Highsmith was ignorant of the basic facts of life. When she started to menstruate at the age of eleven, she turned to her mother for emotional support. ‘When I was eleven, my mother of necessity had to tell me about menstruation,’ she wrote in a letter to her stepfather. ‘She added, in regard to the facts of life, “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.’
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     At the same time, Mary and Stanley’s relationship was becoming increasingly volatile. Highsmith later wrote to her mother, reminding her of the constant arguments which echoed around the house. ‘I remember quarrels constantly, he was not my father, you threatened separation, packed (and sometimes unpacked) your suitcases, threatening departure and so forth.’
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     In the summer of 1933, twelve-year-old Patsy escaped her hellish home environment to spend a month at a girls’ camp near West Point and Walker Valley, New York. Each day she wrote home to her parents, letters which were published two years later in
Woman’s World
magazine and which show her early aptitude for writing. She describes now she breakfasted on prunes and cereal, learnt how to swim and make fires, played tennis, toasted marshmallows and slept in dormitories. She was elected bunk leader, with duties to inspect the dorms, and on certain evenings she joined a group of girls who swam naked in the lake, an activity popularly known as ‘swimming Diana’. ‘Diana means without any clothes on at all,’ she wrote. ‘Do you think it’s all right to go in Diana? It’s very dark.’
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From the letters, it’s obvious she thoroughly enjoyed the experience. ‘Some of the girls are saps but some are pretty nice,’ she said, and she particularly admired her tennis coach, Miss Edna, who had ‘a swell serve. She swings her racket around twice before she hits the ball.’
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One of the highlights for her was the ‘Campers-Councillors Day’, when the staff swapped clothes and duties with the girls. ‘The Councillors had to wear the Campers’ clothes and vice-virtue. (I learned to say vice-virtue for vice versa out of a funny magazine.),’ she wrote, illustrating an early love for the vibrancy and humour of language.
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     During her stay at summer camp, Patsy missed her mother and wrote asking if she would come up and see her, while towards the end of her vacation, she expressed her eagerness and excitement at seeing Mary again. ‘I’m packing tonight for going home. O joy, O joy,’ she said.
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In her absence, Mary and Stanley had obviously tried to sort out their differences, but when Patsy returned back home, her mother told her the marriage was over. She would divorce Stanley, take her daughter back to Fort Worth, where they would live with Willie Mae. The three women would be together again, just like the old days. ‘The Highsmith house was a house divided if I ever saw one, on the brink of collapse,’ Highsmith wrote to her mother, ‘and indeed it was a collapse when I was aged 12–13.’
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