Beautiful Shadow (7 page)

     ‘It is the terrain of guilt and the effect of guilt, of fear and fear’s destructive potency, the territory of pretence and desperation and unease,’ says William Trevor of Highsmith’s world. ‘Hatred interested her more than love, the skewed more than the normal, the defeated more than the successful.’
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In a Highsmith novel, says Susannah Clapp, ‘guilt can seem to leak from one cracked vessel to another.’
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     Prompted by Willie Mae’s descriptions, Highsmith remembered herself as ‘a small, dark figure,’ ‘an alert, anxious-faced child over whom hangs already the grey-black spirit of doom, of foreordained unhappiness, the knowledge of which made this child weep often.’
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As authenticity is often inimical to recollection, it’s questionable whether she actually felt this at the time or whether these were memories she subsequently projected onto her past. But by the time she had reached her late teenage years, she looked back at her childhood with a mixture of poetic longing and terrifying alienation, as she wrote in a 1942 verse, which begins, ‘I was born under a sickly star.’
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     Towards the end of her life, when she was engaged in a certain amount of soul-searching and self-analysis, she confessed to her friend Vivien De Bernardi, that she thought she had been sexually abused between the ages of four and five.

     ‘She told me once that she thought she might have been sexually abused at her grandmother’s house,’ says Vivien. ‘She didn’t have a clear memory of it, but she was a small child, around four or five, and remembered two men, whom she thought could have been salesmen, coming into the house. One of the men lifted her up and sat her on a counter or the kitchen sink. What exactly the abuse consisted of, I don’t know but I certainly didn’t get the impression that she was referring to anything like a rape. She had a sense of having been violated by these two men in the way she didn’t really understand. She didn’t understand what was going on and her memory of the occasion was not clear.’
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     Of course, although this incident doesn’t explain her sexuality, Highsmith could have been referring to the experience when she wrote to the American right-wing, anti-gay rights campaigner Anita Bryant. ‘I did not say people are born homosexual,’ she said, ‘but they are quite often made homosexual by certain family conditions, as early as six or eight.’
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If indeed Highsmith had been sexually abused it would have most likely have contributed to the feelings of alienation and dislocation which haunted her throughout her life. It could also go some way to understanding the roots of the overwhelming sense of guilt from which she suffered as a young child.

     As a little girl, Highsmith had a terrifying recurring dream about being born, a nightmare which clearly symbolised the guilt which overshadowed her young life. Seven nurses and doctors stood around her small body in an atmosphere of ‘murk and gloom’. She lay on a table but all she could see, from this strange, out-of-body perspective, was herself surrounded by the medics, who stared at her with a mixture of curiosity, pity and horror. ‘They nod in solemn agreement over some unspeakable defect in me,’ she wrote. ‘It is an irrevocable pronouncement, worse than death because I am fated to live. I had this dream, or vision, before the age of six and frequently afterward.’
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     From around this time, too, she was plagued by an hallucinatory spot, a grey blob that would dance and dart diagonally across the upper left-hand corner of her vision and which took the form of a mouse. The ‘mouse’ would appear whenever she was reading or staring at anything intently. The phantom creature did not, in itself, disturb her so much as the reaction of those around her when they witnessed her surprise at its sudden appearance. ‘I was ashamed to tell them, of course, about my “mouse”. But the imagined figure was so lifelike, I was never able to control my shock . . .’
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The vision continued to appear between four and five times a week from the age of about five until she was seven. Then she was given a brindled cat for her birthday and shortly after this the mouse disappeared.

     Whatever the truth about the suggestions of childhood sexual abuse, Highsmith did have some fond memories of growing up at her grandmother’s house. She would sit in a pair of overalls, before the gas stove in the living room, reading the serials in the Fort Worth local press. From an early age she had an almost physical love for the written word and while she was reading she would often bring the newspaper close to her nose so she could breathe in the fragrant aroma from the ink, which was sometimes still warm from printing. She was also fascinated by a book about the history of the First World War which contained gruesome black and white photographs of injured and dead soldiers. Not all her reading matter was so bleak, however, as she also took to browsing through a book about Hollywood, which was packed full of photographs of matinee idols and starlets. ‘On the nose of one of the blonde, cupid’s-bow-lipped beauties, a little girl chum and I succeeded in smashing a large housefly by slamming the book shut. Gales of mirth!’ she remembered.
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     Nevertheless, she pinpointed this time in her life, when she was six years old, as the moment she first became aware that her emotional and sexual identity was somehow different from the norm. ‘My character was essentially made before I was six,’ she wrote to her stepfather.
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Six years old may seem like a precocious age at which to become aware of one’s sexuality, but she was conscious of feeling strangely different, an awareness she connected with her desire for other girls and its subsequent repression. Of course, she did not articulate it in these terms when she was a child, but later she would write, in an autobiographical, untitled, poem:

It was no doubt a tragedy that I saw

‘Forbidden’ written like a word in red paint,

‘Stop,’ and could read it, when I was six.
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     It is also clear that she resented Stanley’s presence in the household and she blamed him for coming between her and her mother. By the time she was eight she had repeated fantasies about killing Stanley, confessing in her journal the ‘evil thoughts, of murder of my stepfather, for example, when I was eight or less’.
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When Highsmith was twenty-one, during a row with her mother in which she was accused of being odd, she told Mary that the reason why she was different from other people was because of ‘sex primarily and my maladjustment to it almost from babyhood as a result of suppressed relations in the family – which is all a child’s world for many years.’
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Highsmith repressed and internalised these poisonous emotions. ‘I learned to live with a grievous and murderous hatred very early on. And learned to stifle also my more positive emotions,’ she wrote.
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The dark fantasies nourished her gothic imagination. ‘All this probably caused my propensity to write bloodthirsty stories of murder and violence,’ she said.
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Chapter 3

A house divided

1927–1933

When Patsy was six years old, she moved with her mother and stepfather from Fort Worth to New York. The Manhattan of 1927 was a city of contradictions, both beautiful and sordid, situated somewhere between the old certainties of the past and the exciting prospects of the Machine Age. ‘1927 may be regarded,’ writes New York architectural historian Robert Stern, ‘as the fulcrum on which the balance between the old and the new tipped with finality in favor of the latter’.
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     Regarded as the nation’s cultural and economic capital, New York epitomised the ‘nothing is impossible’ attitude which was sweeping America in the late twenties. Developments in technology were speeding forwards at an astonishing rate – the same year that the Highsmiths moved to Manhattan, the first national radio networks were established; television was given its first public demonstration at Bell Telephone’s laboratories on West Street; a radio-telephone service was established between New York and London; movies began to ‘talk’; and Charles Lindbergh was welcomed back to the city with ‘the Great Blizzard’, an extravagant 1,800-ton ticker-tape parade after completing the world’s first solo transatlantic flight between New York and Paris. Skyscrapers – those totems of American capitalist mythology – rose from the city’s streets, climbing ever higher in a seemingly never-ending quest to reach the heavens.

     Arriving in New York – described by one contemporary visitor as ‘like a young girl, eager, healthy, vivacious and still full of illusions’
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– would have been an exciting experience for the young Highsmith. The sense of dynamism, self-confidence and optimism was unmistakable – New York was the first conurbation to become, in Oswald Spengler’s phrase, a ‘world city’ – and yet it would have been almost impossible for the small girl not to have felt dwarfed by the enormity of the buildings and the sheer size of the crowds. In 1925, central London had a density of sixty people per acre, whereas in New York the corresponding figure stood at 162.
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Its people were unmistakably heterogeneous: figures for 1927, as listed by the Works Progress Administration’s
New York City Guide
, show that there were 465,000 Jewish residents in Manhattan, making up just over a quarter of the population, while in 1930 there were 224,670 ‘Negroes’; 117,740 Italians; 86,548 ‘Free State Irish’; 69,685 Russians; 69,111 Germans and 59,120 Poles.
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In addition, the number of cars in the city increased from 125,101 in 1918 to 790,123 in the late 1920s, meaning that there were more vehicles in Manhattan than in the whole of Europe.
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     Twenty years later Highsmith would express the sense of alienation she and her family felt on arriving in New York in the short story, ‘The World’s Champion Ball-Bouncer’, published in
Woman’s Home Companion
in April 1947. The Leverings – mother, Leila, father, A.J. (a letterer like Stanley) and daughter, Elspeth – have recently arrived in New York from the south. Although Elspeth had had dreams of the wonders of the Empire State building, as she breakfasts on oatmeal and cream the little girl feels an overwhelming sense of isolation and strangeness and realises that, after all, she does not want to make the trip up to the tallest skyscraper in the world. She notices the soiled walls of the apartment – a sign that the flat has been occupied by countless families before hers – and feels distinctly ill at ease in her new environment. After spotting a girl playing with a ball on the sidewalk, her mother suggests to her daughter to go and make friends, but when Elspeth introduces herself, she is met with an unfriendly stare and the comment, ‘You sure talk funny.’
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Elspeth’s face crumbles, she rushes inside but lies to her mother and father about speaking to the girl. Tears roll down her cheeks as her parents comfort her, who ‘were both as quiet as she during that long minute while she held her breath.’
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     Counterpointing the constant trill of the newest, the best, and the latest which echoed throughout Manhattan at this time was a darker undertone which threatened to destroy the city, a mood which was described by Walter Lippmann in 1929 as ‘a dissonance comprised of a thousand noises’,
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and articulated by F. Scott Fitzgerald. ‘By 1927 a wide-spread neurosis began to be evident . . . contemporaries of mine had begun to disappear into the dark shadow of violence,’ he wrote in an essay entitled, ‘My Lost City’.
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One of his classmates killed his wife and himself on Long Island, another tumbled accidentally from a skyscraper in New York, while one of his friends was brutally beaten in a speak-easy club in Manhattan and crawled into the Princeton Club to die. ‘These are not catastrophes that I went out of my way to look for – these were my friends; moreover, these things happened not during the depression but during the boom.’
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Figures show that in 1929 there were 401 reported murders in New York, while Chicago had none.
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     One of the unfortunate by-products of the new Machine Age – the title of a 1927 exhibition held in a gallery on West 57th Street – with its drive towards progress and its obsession with convenience and commerce, was its corresponding dehumanisation, a leaching of the soul which Highsmith would later explore in her writing. ‘It is the city of the Good Time,’ wrote Ford Madox Ford of New York in 1927, ‘and the Good Time is there so sacred that you may be excused anything you do in searching for it.’
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The city was so multifaceted and ambiguous that commentators found it beyond definition: ‘of no other city can we say with equal truth,’ wrote one observer, ‘that it defies the effort to summarise briefly its typical characteristics.’
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