The Talented Miss Highsmith (17 page)

Whatever else the story does, it makes a powerful case for leaving children alone with their fantasies—and for how much better the world looks when you can see it from above, from the elevation only a map can show. For that's the view that Walter has, high up in his kite, soaring away from his arguing parents and closer to the beauty of his beloved dead sister. The painful reality of earth, the physical details of which always occupied Pat Highsmith so intensely, is as distanced from him as the coordinates on a map. In “The Kite,” it is the map's-eye view that makes Walter so happy. But in the author's life, the map's-eye view shows something quite different from the conditions for happiness. When she was Walter's age, Pat Highsmith was living on a municipal stage set whose purlieus seem to be a lot like the mise-en-scènes of her future novels.

So let's take a look at a map of Astoria, Queens, as it would have been in the palmy days of 1931 when ten-year-old Patsy Highsmith, her mind alive with case studies in abnormal psychology and the lightly suppressed desire to murder her stepfather, was skipping the three or four blocks from the family apartment down to the East River nearly every afternoon—Pat said she was “ebullient” only when out of doors
¹³
—to play in one of her very favorite places in the neighborhood: the fifty urban acres of Astoria Park.

The two apartments in the Ditmars Boulevard school district where the Highsmiths lived in the early 1930s are close enough to each other to form the apex of an imaginary scalene triangle. The short leg of the triangle ends in the East River (the river that separates Queens from the island of Manhattan) at Wards Island (where the largest mental hospital in the world has been built), while the long leg of the triangle stops farther north in the river at Rikers Island (where the biggest prison in New York State has just been contructed). Lapping the shores of Astoria Park are the dangerous drowning waters of Hell Gate: a narrow channel in the East River which contains some of the deepest water in all New York Harbor. Hell Gate is spanned by the longest railway arch bridge in the United States, Hell Gate Bridge. The bridge carries the trains from Canada and the United States over the river which churns and roils perilously at the very edge of Patsy's playground.

The fantastic new skyscrapers of Manhattan (the Empire State Building was completed in 1931, the Chrysler Building in 1930) are mere vertical brackets in the corner of the forbidding landscape created by the Wards Island mental hospital. More than four thousand inmates are kept in this asylum (in an era when the insane are still “criminalized”), and it dominates the view from Astoria Park. From the northwest tip of Astoria Park (Hell Gate Bridge Park is another name for Patsy's playground), it is just possible to catch a glimpse of a much smaller island called North Brother Island. It is here where the talented cook named Mary Mallon—latterly known as “Typhoid Mary”—is still alive and in residence: quarantined for life after having served up enough typhoid bacillus with her superb cuisine to kill several dozen New Yorkers.

Could anything be plainer than this map? In Astoria, Queens, during her ninth, tenth, and eleventh years, little Patsy Highsmith, already inclined towards thoughts of murder and melancholy, was separated from Manhattan and the Bronx by an atmosphere of Crime (the insane inmates of Wards Island who were treated like criminals) and Punishment (the criminals on Rikers Island who were certainly being punished), while a vision of Hell was just at her feet (Hell Gate) and over her head (Hell Gate Bridge). It's worth repeating (although Pat didn't repeat it herself) that the compass points of the Highsmith neighborhood in Astoria, Queens—Crime, Punishment, Railroads, and Hell—are also the plotting points of that other interesting neighborhood Pat grew up to inhabit: Highsmith Country.

Hell Gate and the Ditmars Boulevard neighborhood worked their magic on Patsy, and later on, Pat Highsmith attempted to unpack them in fictions. When she was twenty-five, Pat took character notes “for an atmospheric piece with realistic dialogue [about a girl who has a] childhood in Astoria [and about] the strange power Hellgate Bridge” exerts on her. Letitia, the girl, is a character on whom Pat cast the darkest suspicions she had about her own psychology and future.

“Essentially, the development of a
schizophrene
, who is optimistic, tending to the extrovert, as she scampers around the Hellgate Bridge Park at the age of ten. In her is a tolerance for all, low and high: history is being made. Things are taking
form
….

“She has made the only compromise possible for her with the world: she has withdrawn into herself. At the age of thirty.”
¹⁴

Pat slipped a reference to Hell Gate into one of Charles Bruno's attempts to elude the pursuing detective Gerard in
Strangers on a Train
, and after she moved to Europe, she wrote to Jeva Cralick, Mother Mary's friend, for drawings and descriptions of her old Ditmars Boulevard neighborhood. She was hoping to use it in a novel. And Jeva Cralick sent back detailed maps, charts of streets, the racial compositions of neighborhoods—just the kind of information Pat loved best. But Cralick also added an artist's warning about the danger of using details you haven't gathered for yourself. “You have been away too long from these shores to really have the feel of things—you'd have to stay here for a long time to get the drift.”
¹⁵

Along with
The Human Mind
—it was on her parents' bookshelf—Patsy read an anatomical textbook used by Mary and Stanley for their illustration work: George Bridgeman's
The Human Machine
. Both books made their impressions on the girl, but it was
The Human Mind
that stayed and stayed.

Always happy to think of herself as neglected, Pat said she used to return to an empty apartment from P.S. 122, sit down in the big green armchair in the living room, and read through the plain prose Menninger used for the cases he'd culled from his own practice and from other, less reliable sources. But Mother Mary was a freelance fashion illustrator whose most frequent employer,
Women's Wear Daily,
kept her working mostly at home. Perhaps young Patsy just
felt
she was home alone.

It was in Queens, too, where Pat joined a girl gang, another faintly delinquent experience she remembered with great pleasure in the last decade of her life. It was the “activity” of the gang—“they mostly ran around and had meetings, a lot of physical movement”
¹⁶
—that Pat liked: the same active life she was later to admire so much in men. Her gang memories undoubtedly colored the wonderful review she gave to
Meg
(1950), a first novel by an ex–ballet dancer who also happened to be the adventurous granddaughter of a U.S. president. The ex-dancer's name was Theodora Roosevelt Keogh and she lived in Paris with her artist husband Tom Keogh, resolutely refusing to give her publisher, Roger Straus, permission to trade on her illustrious name. A favorite of her formidable aunt, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Theodora shunned
The Paris Review
crowd (they ignored her work as well, as they ignored the work of most women writers),
¹⁷
and went on to write novels of such piercing sensual perception—a marriage of Colette and L. P. Hartley—that composer and diarist Ned Rorem remembers her from 1950s Paris as “our best American writer—certainly our best female writer.”
¹⁸

Pat wrote her review of Keogh's novel
Meg
for
The Saturday Review
in April of 1950. It was Pat's first published piece of criticism—one of the few reviews she would ever write about a work authored by a woman—and it is probably the most favorable review she ever published. The novel about which Pat was so untypically excited is a wayward work, with just the kind of heroine who would appeal to Pat: a preadolescent, androgynous prep school girl from the Upper East Side of Manhattan who carries a knife, dreams of being suckled by lions, blackmails her lesbian history teacher, runs with a wild gang of boys from the docks, and has a distinctly undaughterly relationship with the father of one of her friends. In the last sentence of her critique of
Meg,
Pat left no doubt about how much of herself she saw in Theodora Keogh's young heroine.

“Such an admirable personage is she with her banged-up knees, her dirty sweaters, her proud vision of the universe that, remembering one's own childhood, one wishes one had kept more of Meg intact.”
¹⁹

While she was still living in Queens in the early 1930s, Patsy's reading of Menninger was augmented by the conventional tropes of a bookish American childhood:
Bob Son of Battle, Dracula,
the Sherlock Holmes stories, and
Little Women,
along with generous helpings of Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London. She also read the somewhat less conventional
Sesame and Lilies
—perhaps it had been assigned her by a hopeful educator at P.S. 122—a book of lectures for schoolchildren about aesthetics by the arch-aesthete himself, John Ruskin. Her enthusiasm for Edgar Allan Poe, who shared her January birthdate and her future interest in alcohol and pubescent girls, and for Herman Melville's
Moby-Dick,
which gave a form to her fantasy of sailing the high seas in homosocial company, came a little later. But it was Menninger whom Pat never stopped mentioning to the press, and she was thrilled to get a letter from the old man in 1989. Flattered by Pat's reference to
The Human Mind
in a
Vogue
magazine interview, Karl Menninger wrote Pat in his unadorned way to say that he'd met, but didn't like, Truman Capote, and that he was “going to get some of your books and read them.”
²⁰

Karl Menninger was Patricia Highsmith's first Freudian.

 

The most unusual feature of Patricia Highsmith's unusual childhood is the fact that nearly every story about it comes directly from Pat Highsmith herself. In her memory books, no fond friends or foul neighbors or feisty family members have been allowed to contribute an impression or dredge up an anecdote. Each vignette from her upbringing has been shaped and colored by Pat's own assumptions and interpretations, and is transmitted in her own peculiar style in her diaries, her cahiers, her articles, and her interviews. And in her novels and short stories, like any good practitioner of the art, Pat puts many of her own inferences in her characters' mouths and pretends to pluck many more of them from her characters' minds.

Pat's editing of her early life—perhaps it was really only her isolation from other people's attitudes—gave her a claustral as well as a
usable
view of childhood. She often produced an early memory to explain a recurring unhappiness or to justify a returning depression or a lingering anomie. At twenty, she wrote: “I cannot remember as much of my childhood as I should like, or even remember myself a few years back. I hope to do better when I am older.”
²¹
As she aged, her memories of things past were triggered by her present emotional states. And so it seems just as important to understand
when
in the life of her emotions Pat remembered something as it is to understand her very specific memories. Understanding the occasion as well as the content of her memories gives us two ways of thinking about Patricia Highsmith instead of one—and Pat Highsmith was always at least two people at once.

For such a fiercely private woman, so intolerant of personal exposure, Pat was uncommonly ready to dig up the dark familial roots from which she felt all her “deformities” had sprung. What she didn't record plainly in her journals for posterity, she published outright in articles or books or told to disconcerted journalists.
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction,
the self-help book for writers it took her only a month to finish, is filled with personal, emotionally charged vignettes disguised in back-of-the-matchbook prose as little recipes for successful suspense writing. But the real “suspense” delivered by this book lies in just which secret about her private life Patricia Highsmith will reveal next.

There are the personal revelations, like this one:

And there are the professional revelations, which were also personal. This innocuous statement was linked by lines of fire to Pat's childhood: “Good short stories are made from the writer's emotions alone.”
²³

Pat's early memories and feelings often blazed up during her adult battles with her parents (she remembered that she had “learned to live with a grievous and murderous hatred very early on” in 1970, when she was particularly enraged with Mother Mary and preparing herself for another break),
²⁴
and she put these “writer's emotions” to creatively transformed use in her short stories—especially in the short stories she wrote about children.

In “The Legend of the Convent of St. Fotheringay,” a story Pat wrote at Barnard College and published in the
Barnard Quarterly
in the spring of 1941, a baby boy is found and adopted by a convent of nuns. The nuns name him Mary and conceal his gender by raising and dressing him as a girl.