The Talented Miss Highsmith (4 page)

Suddenly the telephone rings at Mrs. Butterfield's house, and it proves to be an unsettling call. It is Pat's mother, Mary Coates Highsmith—always well provided with the coordinates of Pat's friends and lovers—and she has arrived in London from the United States with rather less warning than the Blitz. In a distinctively deep Southern voice, unplaceable, says Mrs. Butterfield, as to social class, and very upset, Mary Highsmith begins to relate a sorry tale.

It seems that Mary, who flew from Texas without a hotel reservation, had directed her taxi driver to take her to the Cavendish Hotel. When “the driver finished laughing,” he told Mary that the Cavendish was nothing more than a hole in the ground; it had just been pulled down.
²⁸
Worse, Mary's luggage had been misplaced when she transferred planes in New York City and her traveller's checks had been lost or stolen at the venerable Hotel Earle in Greenwich Village.
²⁹
So Mary Highsmith was stranded on her first day in London with no money, no luggage, no idea of where her daughter might be, and no place to stay. It was “a bad beginning for the poor woman” and the herald of worse to come.
³⁰

Mary had the presence of mind to ask the taxi man to drive around and find her a hotel, which he did. Mrs. Butterfield thinks it was “something in Bloomsbury.” On the telephone, says Mrs. Butterfield, Mary had:

Pat returned from the BBC to pick up her car at about four o'clock, “or even a bit later, drinks time.” Camilla Butterfield, privy to Pat's version of the tangled emotional relations between the Highsmith mother and daughter, opened the door and greeted Pat jauntily. “Brace yourself,” she announced; “the Deep South has arrived.

“And Pat fainted away right on the doorstep.

“It was incredible and it was more than a faint. Her legs just gave way. She just crumpled into a heap on top of herself, like a doll, so to speak.

“I've never seen anything like it.”
³²

Pat recovered herself quickly, and, despite the fact that she was driving back to Islington, Mrs. Butterfield poured her a large drink, then gave her Mary's message and the telephone number. But Pat didn't ring her mother. She drove straight back to North London.

Camilla Butterfield discovered subsequently that Pat and Mary “were in touch, and so I invited them to tea. It was brave of me, but I was curious.”
³³

When Mrs. Butterfield's husband came back to Kensington from work at about six o'clock on the afternoon of the tea party, he found his wife in “a state of shock. After Pat and Mary Highsmith had gone, the air quivered,” says Mrs. Butterfield, “and I just sat on. My husband came in—he had no idea anyone had been in the house—and he said to me: ‘You look as though you've been through an earthquake.'

“‘Take me out to dinner,' I said, ‘I have.'”
³⁴

Camilla Butterfield recollects that she sat motionless for about twenty minutes after Mary and Pat left her house, so the tea party couldn't have lasted very long, perhaps an hour and a half. But it was, Mrs. Butterfield thought, “quite long enough.” She remembers that the “atmospheric pressure” of the room was “incredible.” It was “as though some disturbance in the air had passed through the house and torn everything apart.” She felt as though she'd “been in a thunderstorm.

“Well, of course, Pat and Mary were mutually antagonistic, but they were also both
very
rattled. It was chaos, just chaos. Everywhere things were put down out of place. I had made quite a nice formal tea party for them—I had gone to quite a lot of trouble—and when they'd finished, when they'd
gone
, there was a teacup
here
and a saucer over
there
. And a bit of sandwich
there
, a tea strainer
here
, and an olive in a
plant,
and the ashtray…Well, it was chaos. After that I think they went straight back to Suffolk and there were dreadful scenes there.”
³⁵

There were indeed dreadful scenes between Pat and her mother, Mary, at Bridge Cottage in Suffolk; so dreadful that Pat had to call in Dr. Auld, the local physician, to sedate them both. Pat reported that Mary had threatened her with a coat hanger—and each woman said things the other never forgot.

Four years earlier, Mary Highsmith had written to her daughter: “I believe you would gladly put me in Dachau if it were possible without a minute's thought.”
³⁶
And Pat told her cousin Dan that during Mary's visit to Bridge Cottage in Suffolk she had locked up her writing “at night, out of instinct” because she was certain her mother meant to destroy it.
³⁷

 

Patricia Highsmith and her mother, Mary Coates Highsmith—let us take the kind of shortcut that only an introduction permits—were each other's deepest experience of love. This was a rich recipe for hell on earth for both women. “I adored my mother, and could see no wrong in her, until I was near 17,” Pat said at forty-six.
³⁸
This version of love would later be measured only by the violence of Pat's rejection of it—and by her violent rejection of Mary.

Art is always the issue of a “tangled bank” and its making is an infinitely complicated matter, but Patricia Highsmith's earth-cracking reversal of feeling for her mother was almost certainly a crucial source for the upside-down view of the world she created in her work—as well as an inspiring pattern for the inverted way she lived most of her affections. Because of it, in spite of it, her retreats in life and her advances in art often appear to adhere to strict dictionary definitions of the word “perverse.”

Mary and Pat had what the French call
un amour fusionnel
. Neither woman could distinguish herself from the other in her deepest feelings. And so Pat's lifelong horror at her mother's “failed career” and “irrational behavior” were her worst fears for herself made flesh. And Mary's long-lived anguish at Pat's “disloyalties” and attachments to other women was the rage of someone who felt she was losing her love of self, losing the love that
belonged
to her self. Their profound emotional competitiveness—it would surface from time to time like the flash of a fin above water signalling danger to limbs dangling below—was that of Terrible Twins, Alter Egos, Substitute Siblings locked in a struggle for each other's—and for yet one more woman's—love.
^*

In later life, when thrown together, Pat and Mary (as Mrs. Butterfield's husband, who experienced only the aftershocks of a disturbing tea party, quickly guessed) made the earth tremble—and not in the conventional way. Chasms of unsatiated pain and need opened in each of them and they devoured each other: first, in love—according to both of them, they had years of only slightly clouded affections, and their early, affectionate letters are the hard copy of these softer feelings—and then in a lifetime of rage and recrimination. There is no mediating a relationship like this, and all their attempts to do so fell into horrible failure. They could not bear each other's company and they could not leave each other alone.

From the fastness of her care home in Texas, in July of 1972, Mary wrote to Pat in France that she looked like “Dracula” in her photographs, that her books were “forgotten” in America, that no single bookseller in Fort Worth (Mary's current point of reference) knew Pat's name.
³⁹
What Pat wrote to Mary has been mostly lost, but what she wrote
about
her was awful enough: Mary was an inert vegetable, a useless tube, a devouring cloaca with Pat's money being shoveled in at one end (very little of it was, as a matter of fact) and shit coming out the other.
⁴⁰

Earlier still, when Mary was sexually viable, Pat wrote her into a slightly more elevated role. Mary was Pat's Bitch from Hell: the paradigmatic femme fatale who haunted all Pat's works and whose shadow Pat stalked in so many of her own sexual affairs, night dreams, and fantasies.

Pat kept a file whose documents, she truly hoped, would prove to the world that her mother was mad. She labelled the file “FOR DOCTOR OR PSYCHIATRIST ONLY.”
⁴¹
If Mary were mad, Pat's thinking went, then she herself must be sane. Pat also thought—this is more complicated—that Mary “would not have become semi-insane, if I had not existed.”
⁴²

Sanity was a central preoccupation of Patricia Highsmith, who, in certain solid ways, knew herself very well indeed. She
worked hard
at sanity and was mostly successful at it. Her icy, invigilator's eye scanned her own behavior and monitored her own thoughts regularly and often, the way a searchlight sweeps a prison yard for escaping convicts. “I think I have some schizoid tendencies, which must Be Watched,” she wrote grimly.
⁴³
And then again: “I fear the madness in me, quite near the surface.”
⁴⁴

Whenever a destructive feeling tunnelled its way out of confinement and fled howling out into the night, Pat swivelled her lamp, surveyed the terrain around her prison, and froze the miscreant in its tracks. Not, of course, before it had done some impressive damage—usually during the dinner hour. Meals were often a problem for Pat, and she made them a problem for the people she ate with, too. One of her funniest legacies (at this distance from her table, at least) is the long list of her thoroughly harrowed dinner partners.

“How one slides in and conforms easily
within a limited sense of course
to ‘normalcy,'”
⁴⁵
Pat noted with her customary detached interest in 1939. But she would hear nothing except that her mother was crazy.

Mary, a considerable force in her own right, felt the same way about her daughter. “Pat is SICK,” Mary wrote to one of Pat's lovers.
⁴⁶
Their moods were tied and twinned.

Relations like this one are not for sissies. Unfortunately, each woman, though capable of iron-willed action, was also constitutionally quite timid and given to replacing an analysis of her family situation with Vesuvian eruptions of anger and name-calling. So there was no bridge back. It was everybody's fault and it was nobody's fault. “We are in a vicious circle,” Pat wrote in a moment of clarity, “of which each of us forms one half. Each the cause and the result. And we can't change the course.”
⁴⁷

Across their self-made chasm the two women howled brokenheartedly at each other—it was always the howl of love betrayed, the curdled milk of mother-daughter misapprehension—and for very nearly half a century Pat Highsmith's relationship with her mother, Mary, was the
real
love that dared not speak its name.

Without understanding this fundamental dynamic—that some version of love was, not at the bottom exactly (there
is
no bottom to Pat Highsmith's bag of literary tricks), but somewhere in the forefront of her approach to the world (“My excess baggage—no pun—I'm in no mood for joking—is the eternal love I cannot turn loose of,” Pat wrote at forty-one)
⁴⁹
—there is no understanding Mary Patricia Highsmith. Which, of course, is not quite the “real” name—for even in death, Pat's fascination with sleight of hand seems to have pulled one more stunned bunny from her overstuffed identity hat—of Her High Darkness, Patricia Highsmith: author of some of the twentieth century's most dangerous fictions.
^*

 

Highsmith's work, at its best, is highly unusual. At its
very
best (six or seven of the novels and a double handful of the short stories), it is like nothing that surrounds it in time and space. It is far stranger (she was very strange), far more obsessive and original and hallucinatory, than anything else in its immediate literary landscape. It splays across genres, interrogates genders, provides as thorough an anatomy of guilt as can be found in contemporary literature, and attacks its readers right where they live. And—an oddly convincing proof of its staying power—quite a bit of it is as flat as Kansas and clumsily phrased to boot.

In very nearly everything she wrote, good intentions corrupt naturally and automatically, guilt often afflicts the innocent and not the culpable, and life is a suffocating trap from which even an escape artist like the talented Mr. Ripley cannot find a graceful exit. Although she never tried to achieve its style, High Art was always Highsmith's inspiration. What makes her own work so undefinably odd is that most of her murdering, mutilating, muggish characters are inspired by it as well.

There is often a bit of blood in the corner of a smile—and a recommendation to read Henry James; a knife turning restlessly in someone's hand at the mildest moment—and a preference for the poems of Auden; a lunch punctured by a horrible suspicion—and a man weeping at the grave of Keats.