The Talented Miss Highsmith (18 page)

Pat wrote the story “for relaxation” in a period when she could “[c]laim no amorous attachments” and “[c]annot interest myself in
The Ambassadors.
”
²⁵
“St. Fotheringay” is set in a world much like the female-dominated one in which Pat grew up: “there was not one masculine organism on the grounds outside of possible insect life.” Fotheringay, it is helpful to remember, is the name of the castle in Scotland in which one queen (Elizabeth I of England) imprisoned and then executed another one (Mary Queen of Scots). And Pat's first six years were spent in a boardinghouse in Fort Worth in which her mother, Mary, was subject to her Scots-Irish grandmother Willie Mae's iron rule of law.

Pat illustrated “The Legend of the Convent of St. Fotheringay” with little cartoons of the boy called Mary (her own first name as well as her mother's), and she drew him to look exactly like herself. The boy, who feels he is on his way to becoming a great and famous genius, blackmails his way out of the convent by threatening to blow it up—and then, the jocular narrator's voice intimates, he dynamites it anyway and covers up his crime. “St. Fotheringay” is an excellent origin story for the complicated childhood loyalties and rages—both gender and familial—by which Pat felt confined and confused as a child. Whether or not she meant it to directly represent her life is a secret she probably preferred to keep from herself.

In “The Terrapin” (1962), a boy with some of Pat's childhood feelings is constantly degraded and humiliated by his commercial-artist mother. She makes him a mirror of her desires and dresses him up as a much younger child. When his mother cooks alive the terrapin he'd hoped to keep as a pet, he stabs her to death in her bedroom with the same knife she used to dismember the terrapin. In
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction,
Pat tells us that “The Terrapin” required “two germs” (the helpful term for inspirational spark she lifted from Henry James) to come alive. The first “germ”—a story she heard about a commercial artist who made terrible use of her ten-year-old son, turning him into a “tortured neurotic”—was activated by a second “germ”: her reading of a “horrifying recipe for cooking a terrapin stew….

“The method of killing the terrapin was to boil it alive. The word killing was not used and did not have to be…. Readers who find that thrillers are beginning to pall may may like to skim sections in cookbooks that have to do with our feathered and shelled friends; a housewife has got to have a heart of stone to read these recipes, much less carry them out.”
²⁶

Pat paired her recounting of “The Terrapins”' provenience with the casual revelation that her own mother was a “commercial artist (though not like this mother).”
²⁷
She wrote this parenthetical disclaimer at a time when she was thinking of Mary, once again, as a mother who was
exactly
like the mother in “The Terrapin.”

In “Hamsters vs. Websters,” little Larry Webster watches interestedly as his furry pets turn into feral killers and rip his father into bleeding pieces. In “Harry: A Ferret,” fifteen-year-old Roland thinks of his ferret as “his secret weapon, better than a gun,” and allows him to tear out the throat of an old family retainer. (Pat had read Saki, and Saki's own famous ferret story, “Sredni Vashtar,” was a favorite of William Burroughs, whose disgust with life often resembles Pat's own disgust at its most disgusted.) In “Those Awful Dawns” (1972)—Pat called it “my beaten baby story”
²⁸
—the negligence of the parents and the physical battery of the children are almost too well imagined. Although the story portrays the parents as indifferent to the point of depravity, and although its real point is an attack on Catholicism's birth-control ban, the narrative leaves a nasty glow of qualified pleasure around the abuse of the children. It lingers like its less violent (but equally ambivalent) analogue in another tale much admired by Pat: the smile of the Cheshire Cat in
Alice in Wonderland
.

In “A Mighty Nice Man,” another story Pat wrote at Barnard College, it is the little girl and her all-too-willing mother, as the German critic Paul Ingendaay noted, who are most conscious of “the conditions of sexual transaction” and not the “nice man” pressing to take the little girl for a “ride.”
²⁹
In “The Mightiest Mornings” (1945), the corrupting condition is provided by a
rumor
of sexual relations between the adult newcomer Bentley (so close to Ripley in name) and Freya, a ten-year-old outcast girl. Bentley's guilt, contracted like a disease from the small-town whispers about his behavior, suggests that his intentions towards the child are less than honorable. But it is the gossip that forces Bentley into exile.

Pat did once tell a Swiss neighbor in the Ticino—this would have been sometime in the 1980s when Virginia Woolf's story of being stood on a wall and “interfered with” by her half brothers was still the subject of literary conversation—that she had a blurred recollection of sexual “interference” from her early Fort Worth years. “She thought she had been lifted up on the kitchen sink by two travelling salesmen when she was a child” and perhaps touched in some way. “Pat didn't have a clear memory of this,” says her neighbor.
³⁰

Pat, so sensitive to spatial and physical encroachments that any touch at all would have seemed like an aggression, left no other reference to this “memory,” so it is impossible to know whether this was a memory of something that actually happened, or a memory of something Pat
felt
had happened (bad enough), or if, on the particular day she decided to remember it, Pat simply needed another origin story for her harrowed feelings.

One of those harrowed feelings was Pat's own marked interest in young girls. Not the twenty-somethings who attracted her at the end of her amatory life, but the eight- and ten-year-olds who caught her attention at the beginning of it. It is probably because she acknowledged these feelings (about which she did nothing but dream) that Pat wanted to bring her own childhood “case”—
all
the cases of her uncomfortable childhood—to the public. She managed, finally, to publish most of them, and we can add to the importance of noting just
when
Pat Highsmith remembered her memories the necessity of figuring out just how she
used
them.

Still, in her recollections of her early life, nothing comes through more clearly than Pat's feeling that she was cursed at birth. Cursed, even, by being born. Amongst American fiction writers, only Edgar Allan Poe approaches her developed sense of personal doom.

“Before the age of six and frequently afterward,” Pat had a “dream, or vision” of what it meant to be born.
³¹
She presented this recurrent “dream, or vision” to the world in an article written, unaccountably, for
Vogue
magazine in 1968.
³²
True to her lifelong ability to experience most normal feelings in reverse (“It is always so easy for me to see the world upside down,” she wrote),
³³
Pat's dream of birth is like anyone else's vision of death, of Last Judgment. In this “dream, or vision,” Pat is surrounded by seven doctors and nurses—they are more like a tribunal than a medical team—all of whom are regarding her tiny body, laid out on a table in an atmosphere of “murk and gloom,” with a mixture of the “horror” and “pity” which Aristotle thought were the proper responses to classical tragedy. The doctors and nurses nod in “solemn agreement over some unspeakable defect in me.” Their “irrevocable pronouncement is worse than death because I am fated to live.”
³⁴

Pat offered more dark early memories in an article she sent to
Granta
in March of 1990: “Some Christmases—Mine or Anybody's.” The article is a lengthy recital of some of her worst Christmases (her only Christmas pleasure seems to have been the many church services she attended on many Christmas Eves), and it includes her deep identification with a Christ whom she imagines to be inviting crucifixion with calculated acts of passive aggression. (“I believe that Jesus, who wished to fulfill what he saw as his destiny, turned the other cheek because he knew that…would hasten events…. Mildness did not soothe his taunters, it was fat in the fire. Jesus was in a hurry.”)
³⁵
Pat was five years from her own death when she summoned up these Christmases—and much less happy than she'd hoped to be in the last house of her life in Tegna, Switzerland.

“The first Christmas, or Christmas tree that I remember is the one when I was four. My mother reports that I peeked around or between sliding doors which separated my grandparents' living-room from the room we called the parlour, where the tree always was. She says I was silent, looking serious or apprehensive, as well I might, as my stepfather had in the last months come on the scene, and it seemed to me that he and my mother were often quarrelling, though maybe this impression was half-wrong.”
³⁶

Pat followed this anxious description of infant demeanor with a full list of dishes from the traditional Christmas dinner (preceded by the traditional spoken grace) prepared by her grandmother Willie Mae for the family in the house on West Daggett Avenue in Fort Worth. The menu, a Southern Christmas dinner menu, is worth reprinting. It's replete with the kind of comfort food Pat hankered for (and couldn't get) in all the countries of her European exile: roast turkey and corn bread, sweet potatoes with walnuts and marshmallows, and home-cranked vanilla ice cream. But what Pat's memory lingered on most lovingly was the large quantity of alcohol Willie Mae put into her Christmas fruitcake.
³⁷
This was 1925. Prohibition—the United States' great experiment in trying to keep alcohol out of the hands of its citizens—wasn't repealed until Pat's twelfth year, 1933. (And even after Prohibition was voted down nationally, Texas remained a technically “dry” state.) Willie Mae's famous fruitcake, soaked in rum for many months, was, strictly speaking, contraband material. Even in childhood, Pat's eye was attracted to life's little irregularities.

At nineteen, Pat remembered an alarming childhood affliction. It was a regularly appearing “hallucinatory ‘mouse'” or “grey blob that darted diagonally across the upper left hand corner of my vision.” It “bothered” her from the ages of five to seven and appeared whenever she was “reading or looking at anything intently.”
³⁸
If her dating is correct, the hallucination came to her during a time of unusual stress in an already stressful childhood: the two bridging years which comprised her last offical year in Fort Worth and her first school year in New York City (from 1926 to 1928). The picture she paints of herself is of a frightened, guilty, secretive child—unable to confide in the “other people” she can't quite bring herself to call “family.”

At twenty-seven, the Drama Queen who regularly seized Pat's pen when she was feeling sorry for herself seized it again. Pat remembered another childhood feeling when she was mourning her lost lover Ginnie Catherwood in March of 1948, and she wrote it into her cahier just after a passage which compares her thwarted love for Ginnie to “a towering, white, straight and strong thing, an elephant's gigantic tusk, Pharos of my existence.”
⁴⁰
And so, not for the first time, Pat managed to echo Sigmund Freud as she moved, lugubriously, from the phallic to the Attic, seeing herself as

And it was only when she appeared on a British television show in 1982 that she decided to share with the world that at “nine or ten,” “I had a feeling that I would die when I fell asleep and I was afraid of that.” Many a night, Pat reported to what must have been her disconcerted viewers, she would lie awake until two in the morning with the fear of death around her. Her remedy for this night terror was to sniff water up her nose in the hopes that it would keep her awake.
⁴²
It is not surprising that she grew up to be mortally afraid of drowning—or that she drowned so many of the characters in her fictions. Anxiety was Pat's second self from an early age, and from an early age she was good at making use of it.

In a letter in 1968, Pat managed to diverge from her long list of aggrieved childhood memories. From Montmachoux, France, living in a house bracketed by the houses of noisy Portuguese families who were giving her a foretaste of hell, she wrote to her cousin Dan in Texas about the one and “only happy thing” in the year she'd spent with Willie Mae in Fort Worth when she was twelve. In her one good memory of this crucial year, Pat and Dan, ten years older than Pat, are like two fraternity boys horsing around in a locker room shower: “[Y]ou and me drying dishes in the kitchen, and afterwards, snapping moist dishtowels at each other, then tossing a football on the front lawn.”
⁴³