Beautiful Shadow (15 page)

     However, by late 1941 Highsmith started to feel uneasy in the company of her fellow young communists. ‘A meeting this evening of the League,’ she recorded in her diary in September 1941, ‘I feel uncomfortable with them & useless, because now we are all supposed to be collecting money. I wonder if I should tell them I am a degenerate & be expelled.’
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In November, she dashed off what she thought was a well-worded epistle outlining her reasons for leaving the party and by the end of December, after mixing with a more sophisticated – and wealthy – crowd, Highsmith wrote in her diary about her new appreciation for money. Whereas previously she thought that having money dulled one’s artistic instincts, lately she had come around to the view that it actually helped one appreciate aesthetics.

     Many of her contemporaries experienced a similar disillusionment with the movement. Arthur Koestler, whom Highsmith would meet in October 1950 and who would become a close friend, was so depressed by the state of the world – by the failure of Marxist ideals to prevent the rise of fascism and the Stalin-Hitler pact – that he wrote how he had, like Picasso, rushed into communism as one goes to a spring of fresh water and yet turned away from the movement like a man desperate to climb from the murky waters of a poisoned river, ‘strewn with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned.’
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     Even before Highsmith resigned from the YCL she was having serious doubts about its effect on her creativity. She rejected the concept that novels should be structured according to a philosophy which is then, through the development of the plot, proven to have some kind of universal application. If she tried this approach, she said, the end result would be forced and dry; not so much a story but merely a vehicle for ideas. Rather, she believed a more fruitful approach would be to think up a narrative and then, after she had sketched out the shape of the story, she could ask herself whether it contained a ‘universal idea’. ‘If it could not be contained,’ she wrote in her journal, ‘the story could then be rejected.’
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From October 1939, paralleling her interest in Marx, Highsmith started to study the other great pioneer of twentieth-century thought: Freud. Later in life, Highsmith said she mistrusted psychoanalysis, but from reading her diaries and journals it is clear that the movement shaped both her character and her writing. ‘Conscious thinking is the weakest (How I believe this!),’ she wrote in 1940,
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while three years later, she said, ‘The highest good is the use of the subconscious mind entirely, almost to the exclusion of the conscious mind, which is patterned after those around us. Within the subconscious lies all one’s oil, one’s fire, one’s flavor, and the measure of divinity allotted to all of us.’
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     Her best ideas, she believed, came when her rational mind was switched off – when she was doing activities such as the ironing or gardening – and she allowed herself to daydream. The ideas that rose to the surface of her consciousness and articulated themselves in her early, experimental fiction were, from the beginning, dark, sinister and expressive of a haunting sense of isolation. The nine stories published in
Barnard Quarterly
, between 1939 and 1942, illustrate her already expert ability at conveying unease and building up suspense even in the most mundane of situations. ‘Pat the distinctive . . . Pat the ultra,’ reads her entry in the college magazine,
Mortarboard
, of 1942, ‘Pat the gal who reads standing up . . . all Barnard shivers to the tune of her smoothly-written
Quarterly
masterpieces  . . .’
³⁵

     ‘A Mighty Nice Man’, published in
Barnard Quarterly
in spring 1940, is about a kerbcrawler whose efforts to try and entice a girl into a car with some sweets are frustrated by an onlooker. Later when the girl’s mother asks her to explain her eagerness to get into the stranger’s car, she replies, ‘But he was a mighty nice man’.
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‘A suspense story, you see,’ said Highsmith later.
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‘Eel in the Bathtub’, published in the autumn of 1940, is so called because its central character, bachelor Nicholas Carr, is just as difficult to catch as the slippery, snake-like fish. He is obsessed with the objects that surround him – his watch, his clothes, his Abercrombie Fitch horsehide picnic kit – and turns down a weekend trip with friends, and a date with a prospective girlfriend, so he can be alone. ‘Movie Date’, in the winter 1940 issue, is a cruel, but poignant, story about Danny – dull, boring and spotty – and Helen, the girl he loves. She can’t stand his company and she tells him that she is going to marry an older man, knowing that the revelation will crush him. Indeed, the news does shock him and the tale ends with Danny’s announcement that he will quit not only his job, but may even give up on life itself. Instead of resorting to melodrama, Highsmith skilfully underplays the emotional intensity of the situation, articulating the torment through its banality.

     ‘The Legend of The Convent of Saint Fotheringay’, published in spring of 1941, tells in a comic style the story of a baby boy brought up as a girl, Mary. One day the child is found by a nun from the convent of Saint Fotheringay, an institution that prides itself on its all-female environment. Not only are all the pupils girls, but they are are denied the knowledge that there is another sex. Mary is raised as a girl, but all the time the child knows that she is different from the others and eventually blackmails the nuns into letting her leave the convent by threatening to blow it up with firecrackers. She eventually does escape, but the building is mysteriously destroyed, along with all its inhabitants. Too much shouldn’t be read into this story, but it’s intriguing to note that Highsmith’s middle name was Mary, and she felt from an early age that she had an unmistakably masculine identity. ‘It is forbidden me to mention his name in connection with the Legend of Saint Fotheringay,’ she says at the end of the story, ‘but each of you, I’m sure, dear readers, would know him if I did.’
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     Her favoured style was crisp and concise, employing the same economic technique she would use until the end of her career, but there was one exception, ‘Silver Horn of Plenty’, published in
Barnard Quarterly
in the winter of 1941. She said later that she could never have written the story, a stream of consciousness prose-poem, focusing on a woman’s preparation for a New Year’s Eve party, ‘on my own observation of parties, but only if I had attended them with my parents.’
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Clearly influenced by the modernist movement, the impressionistic story lacks a strong central narrative and is composed of a series of fragmented images. Yet it is still typically Highsmithian, as its central themes are splintered identity and simmering sexuality.

     Just as Menninger exposed the psychological torment that lurked inside the most respectable, seemingly well-balanced men and women, so Highsmith, with her instinctive feel for the subject, stripped back the mask of normality to reveal the horrors underneath.

     ‘Almost every man in the world prides himself on his delicate understanding, his magnanimity, his kindness, his wisdom, in the unreal sanctity of his study room,’ she wrote in 1940. ‘But each man when he goes into the world puts on his armor, even armor for his heart, and firms his mouth . . . In each man’s heart sits loneliness and shame and pride.’
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     Above this notebook entry, Highsmith later scrawled the word, ‘Important’.

When Highsmith stepped out from the safe confines of her study room, her armour appeared to be intact, quite invincible. The face she chose to show the world was one which bore no trace of her inner, private torments. Her fellow students at Barnard thought her a reserved, reticent, and rather shadowy figure. ‘She was a loner, rather superior but very efficient, and I don’t remember her associating much with anyone very closely,’ says Deborah Karp (then Burstein), who succeeded her as editor of
Quarterly
.
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     Rita Semel, editor of
Barnard Quarterly
in 1941, with Highsmith as her deputy, thought Pat mature for her age. ‘She was very different from all the other girls,’ she says. ‘She knew what she was going to do with her life and what she wanted to be – a writer. Words were her life then and it was clear she would succeed in her ambition. I liked her but I couldn’t say I
knew
her. I could tell she was a very complex person, but she was hard to get to know. We had as good a friendship as any we were likely to have because she was private and gave nothing away. I worked for hours on
Quarterly
with her and yet I can say I knew nothing about her.’
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     The writer Mary Cable (then Mary Pratt), who was in the same writing class at Barnard, and who met her in 1940, also remembers Pat as quite a distant figure, a handsome girl who made no effort to integrate with her peers.

     ‘I recall distinctly that she was not very communicative,’ she says. ‘She simply did not make an effort. For instance if both of us were early to class she would go and sit at the back. We never really had a conversation and that was, in a way, quite off-putting.

     ‘Yet she was very good looking and always well dressed and nicely made-up. Both of us were taught by Ethel Sturtevant, and from the beginning it was obvious that Pat was very good at writing. But she did not express much emotion when she was praised – maybe she always knew that she was good.’
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     Rather, Highsmith was racked by self-doubt. In 1938, she wrote a poem about the process of creation, how when she sat down to write she felt inspired by a ‘white heat’, a fury which possessed her, but a force which ultimately manifested itself by nothing but a wastebasket full of scribbles, nicotine-stained fingers and an unpleasant taste in the mouth.
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She spent hours recording her thoughts, observations and creative ideas in her cahiers, but after looking through them she was left feeling disappointed, convinced that her writing betrayed nothing but signs of immaturity and unoriginality. She was also terribly insecure and still felt at odds with the world around her, as she recorded in a poem in one of her notebooks.

I have been sadder than any man could be:

For nothing in the world was made for me.
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     At times she wanted simply to disappear, to erase her identity, and imagined herself to be nothing more than an abstract fragment of a thought drifting across a desert. In her journal she wrote a poignant account of how the joyous anticipation of going on a date with a woman turned into embarrassment after she became tongue-tied and self-conscious: the more she failed to communicate, the more she thought her date assumed she was stupid and had nothing to say, which then resulted in further verbal constipation. As she walked home, ashamed of her behaviour, she castigated herself for not being able to express her thoughts and feelings. This crippling sense of shyness would stay with her until middle age, as she wrote in a later letter to Arthur Koestler, describing the ‘dreadful shyness, of teens and twenties, that was like a physical pain. I think some psychiatrists call such shyness an inverted arrogance and conceit. This explanation doesn’t help the pain of it.’
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     Her home life, too, made her feel ill at ease and uncomfortable. In the latter part of 1939 the family moved to a flat at 35 Morton Street, also in Greenwich Village, but the relationship between Mary and Stanley deteriorated to such an extent that he moved out for a few months and took an apartment on Charles Street, a few blocks north. At the same time, too, Pat had begun to see her mother in a new light. Although Mary had abandoned her with her grandmother in Texas, emotionally she still felt close to her mother. However, from the age of seventeen she started to realise that it was Mary – not Stanley – who was to blame for the harsh-sounding arguments that echoed around her throughout her early years. As she wrote to her friend Alex Szogyi in 1967, she believed her mother to be not only irrational but of questionable intelligence too. The slow realisation that Mary was the source of the problem caused her to reassess her ‘childhood hell’, she said. ‘It is dreadful when love turns to hate,’ she wrote. ‘There is nothing worse.’
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She articulated these ambiguous feelings for her mother in a telling poem written in July 1940, a two-line fragment which could be compared to one of Sylvia Plath’s poems about her relationship with her father.