Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires

by Richard Bradford

  Highsmith sometimes mentioned her to friends and in her cahier of 28 May 1985, when she knew that Mary’s condition was well advanced, she wrote, ‘My mother would not have become semi-insane … if I had not existed.’ This should not, however, be taken as a contrite response to Mary’s final letter, albeit a private one. Ten years later she composed an unsympathetic short-story account of a woman called Naomi, which is based unashamedly on the life of Mary Highsmith. The story ends with Naomi in a home, barely conscious and kept alive by drugs. In an unpublished 1990 sequel, ‘The Tube’, the same woman has become a brain-dead channel for administered liquefied foodstuffs. Both pieces are vividly realistic in terms of what awaits human beings who lose any sense of their physical presence long before it ceases to function. Their consistent feature is a lack of anything close to sympathy or compassion. Coates informed Highsmith in 1984 that for some years Mary had ceased to know who he was – and not once before or after that did Highsmith send her a letter, though given her taste for noir humour she might have considered it.

  14

  Her Last Loves

  Edith’s Diary (1977) is kept by the eponymous housewife Edith Howland, married to the journalist Brett and mother of Cliffie, who is ten when they relocate from New York City to small-town Pennsylvania. Things begin to go wrong when Brett leaves her for a younger woman and Cliffie turns into an alcoholic delinquent, cheating and failing his exams for Princeton which, in his mother’s opinion, is his deserved destination. On top of things, she is left in charge of Brett’s senile uncle, George. Edith’s life is persistently ruined by fate or the bad behaviour of those closest to her and she repairs the damage by rewriting it in her diary, correcting the faults of Brett, Cliffie and others and turning horrible actuality on its head. Cliffie, for example, does spectacularly well at Princeton, becomes a hydraulic engineer, marries and has children, while his actual counterpart, the dropout, spends his spare time masturbating into a sock while fantasising about girls who in reality treat him with derision. The closest he comes to sex is with a rubber-doll facsimile of a woman called Luce. He abandons the project only out of fear that his mother might discover the half-constructed inflatable. Perhaps she did; hence his imagined manifestation as a specialist in hydraulics.

  Edith’s diary, her book of lies and alternative truths, is her bastion against depression, possibly insanity. It enables her to create a private world, the one she prefers over the version in which she exists.

  There are few direct parallels between Edith’s dismal story and her author’s life – Highsmith was not married, nor lumbered with a deranged son. At the same time, we can see how she might have extrapolated aspects of her emotional condition to the novel. Although she would never openly admit to it, Cliffie’s anarchic, debauched existence is a version of the way her own mother, Mary, thought about her. It is not quite a moment of contrition but when we look at the letters in which Mary despairs of her daughter, confessing to being unable to understand why she seemed so determined to ruin their relationship through her behaviour, the similarities are striking.

  Edith, now middle aged, looks back on the departure of Brett with a sense of weary finality. She knows that this is not just the end of this particular relationship but that the future has no alternatives in store. By the mid-1970s Highsmith had not quite given up on affairs. Indeed, she began one with the journalist Marion Aboudaram just as she completed the novel and would dedicate the book to her. But throughout their time together Marion was under the impression that what they had was more a memorial to the irretrievable past than the beginning of something new. Brett’s Uncle George, senile and apparently destined to a condition of hardly knowing who he is, seems rather superfluous to the rest of the narrative. He is a depressing supplement to everything else. Yet the question of why Highsmith invented him can be answered in terms of a relative of her own suffering from a similar state of mental decay, whom she had preferred to leave with her cousin and a Fort Worth nursing home rather than care for herself, let alone write to.

  The novel was greeted with mixed reviews. The Times Literary Supplement and the New York Times praised Highsmith as a figure who had abandoned her home territory of populist crime and suspense fiction for an attempt at the literary mainstream, a work which tackled the travails of middle-class failure and disappointment, from the point of view of a woman. This allowed them to overlook its sometimes leaden prose and a conclusion which suggests that Highsmith ended the story because she despaired of taking it further.

  Apart from three or four of Highsmith’s closest friends no one would have been aware of the book’s most intriguing feature. In later life Highsmith’s cahiers and diaries were not always complete falsifications of the truth, but they enabled her on some occasions to reshape the actualities of her existence, and on others to tarnish the more comforting or bearable aspects of her life. One of her earliest cahiers contains the story of her first meetings with her biological father, Jay B. Plangman, who allegedly shows her pornographic photographs and kisses her in a way that is neither amicably familiar nor quite lascivious, but with just enough intention to cause her to wonder about the true nature of his feelings towards her. She picks up on this in 1970 more than three decades later when she mentions Plangman and that ‘the word incestuous is a strong one’ in a letter to her stepfather Stanley Highsmith. No evidence exists of Plangman’s sexual inclinations nor of whether the meetings during which these alleged events occurred actually took place. She was not, like Edith, attempting to improve upon her comfortless existence in the routine sense but it is clear enough that Highsmith was spinning out a legend for herself involving events that marked her out as faintly exotic.

  Typically, when she began a relationship she thought would be unique, perhaps even permanent, she recorded her thoughts in her diaries without speaking to another human being, least of all the particular woman involved. With Ellen Hill her first entry opens with enchanted hyperbole. ‘O the benevolence! O the beautiful world! O the generosity of the heart as I go walking down the street … today I am vaster … How could it be? Isn’t she like Titanic charmed into loving the donkey?’ We should note that she had done it several times before, beginning with her first ‘true love’ in 1944, Virginia Kent Catherwood, who gave her a ‘oneness’ and a ‘timelessness’ and continuing with Caroline Besterman: ‘I am nearly sick … and must get hold of myself or crack up …’

  These are three among many of her visions of where each new affair would lead, and in every instance it is clear that by constructing the idyll she knows she is guaranteeing its destruction. Her description of Ellen Hill’s physical characteristics – for example, ‘small, quite chic, very good-looking … very feminine’ – are generous to say the least. She was not a plain woman but in the cahier Highsmith is determined to create a fantasy based on these exaggerations of her waif-like attractions. Ellen’s discovery of Highsmith’s diaries contributed to the collapse of their relationship but Ellen was not dismayed so much by her partner’s disparaging remarks about her – she had heard many of these directly – as by the web of fantasy that Highsmith had spun around the two of them from when they had first met. Ellen felt that their actual lives had been appropriated by her lover to build a preferred world of her own.

  It was even more complicated than this because Highsmith’s cahiers and notebooks are sometimes more like a dialogue than an alternative reality. Often she remonstrates with herself for allowing fancy to overrule common sense. In 1968, for example, she wrote to her former girlfriend Ann Clark informing her that she was the real love of her life and as she posted the letter she entered in her cahier a question: ‘I wonder if anything will ever come of it?’ and answered: ‘It is obvious that my falling in love is not love … but a necessity of attaching myself to someone’ (7 August 1968).

  Similarly, Edith’s diary is made up of fantasies and remonstrations against herself for indulging them. Rarely does she reread her versions of the past, because she is aware that comparin
g what she knows to be true with what amounts to a work of fiction would be unbearable, and comments, ‘Isn’t it safer, even wiser, to believe that life has no meaning at all?’ This maxim is repeated dozens of times in Highsmith’s notebooks and Edith continues: ‘She felt better after getting that down on paper.’ She knew that her entries would not alter anything in the real world but after she creates a particularly fantastical version of Cliffie’s successful life after Princeton she notes that ‘the entry was a lie. But after all, who was going to see it? And she felt better, having written it, felt less melancholic, almost cheerful, in fact.’ Rereading the diaries, for both women, would serve only as a reminder that they preferred delusion to a confrontation with fact. Within a few days of beginning the novel she entered in her cahier that ‘Today I have the alarming feeling that fantasy alone keeps me going…’ (12 July, 1974).

  Many writers and figures who have achieved esteem in other fields have kept diaries and notebooks as a means of influencing their legacy, particularly for biographers who would compare and contrast their subjects’ records and observations with empirical evidence from the real world. A classic case is W.H. Auden’s journal entry for 1 September 1939 in which he refers to a dream in which ‘C was unfaithful’. ‘C’ was Chester Kallman, his most recent lover. Homosexuality was illegal in 1939 but he might, like Edith, have reflected that ‘after all, who was going to see it?’ – at least during his lifetime. He also refers a few days later in the journal to what would be one of his most famous poems, ‘September 1, 1939’, on which he was working, and refers to the events that inform it, principally the onset of the Second World War. What actually happened in September 1939 both to Auden as a private individual and within the world as a whole provides the framework for his subjective impressions and speculations, and the dynamic between the journal and its context offers the literary biographer vital raw material for a portrait of Auden at the close of the 1930s. What impression would he have left if, say, two weeks later he had expressed his relief that Germany had not invaded Poland and the war in Europe had been avoided? The more sympathetic would treat him as having created a parallel universe, perhaps because he was unable to face up to the likely consequences of another world war, though a larger number would probably regard him as having succumbed to madness.

  Edith does the equivalent of this by rewriting the story of her family as she preferred it to be, but as a suburban middle-class housewife rather than a globally acclaimed poet, she could console herself that no one was going to see it. But fate, or rather Highsmith, had other ideas. Her ex-husband and other members of her family become concerned about her psychological condition and she becomes terrified that while she can as an individual present herself as sane the discovery of the diaries will mean a one-way ticket to a mental institution. The novel ends with her desperate attempt to collect and destroy them. She trips on the stairs and dies from head injuries.

  In her early twenties, when fame was only a distant prospect, Highsmith treated her diaries as works of fiction, often inventing people and events for which there is no empirical evidence. Later, when she became aware that her private documents would influence perceptions of her as an individual and writer after her death, she stopped making things up, factually at least, but she continued to enter observations and reflections by parts fantastical, unhinged and sometimes unpalatable. Like Edith, she began a conversation with her alternative self. All of Highsmith’s papers survive for inspection in the Bern archive. We have a record of when she decided to offer them to Switzerland but we can only speculate on the point at which she became content that her legacy would involve aspects of her personality that most would prefer to be lost from scrutiny for ever. It seems likely, however, that when she created the scenario of Edith panicking at the prospect of her secrets being disclosed Highsmith was considering what people would make of her, post mortem, after reading her diaries. Irrespective of how we feel about her as an individual we might also imagine a dark smile forming as she decided to do the opposite of the fearful Edith.

  In December 1974, Highsmith was contacted by Marion Aboudaram, a writer and translator based in Paris who told her that she had been commissioned by the French edition of Cosmopolitan to do an interview, which was a lie. They did, however, speak briefly at an art exhibition in the city in January 1975 to make further arrangements for a meeting. Marion had made notes on Highsmith’s likely return journey, and followed her by taxi to the Gare du Nord, boarding the same local train to Montcourt while making sure that she took a seat in a different carriage. Answering the door to Marion, Highsmith was beguiled and invited her in, and Marion confessed that she had been obsessed with her, from afar, for some time and asked if they could go upstairs to her bedroom and sleep together immediately. ‘I could be your mother,’ Highsmith replied, ‘I’m too old.’ The age difference was around twenty years – Marion was in her mid-thirties – but after phone calls they met again in Montcourt and began an affair, one that was as bizarre as any that featured in Highsmith’s fiction.

  Marion told Schenkar that their first sexual encounters were in Montcourt and that on every occasion Highsmith, after allowing her in, insisted that she strip naked, which had nothing to do with sex. ‘She washed my clothes all the time. When I came in, she took off my raincoat, my trousers … she put the clothes in the bathtub and washed them’ (Schenkar, p.404). To Wilson she stated that ‘before we went to bed, she summoned me to the bathroom where I had to have a bath to wash off my perfume … she said the smell made her feel sick’ (Wilson, p.352). Marion was puzzled by this behaviour. She was also fascinated by Highsmith’s preoccupation with what had happened in Paris during the German occupation. Highsmith asked for photographs of her parents and questioned her on the length and smoothness of her legs, her facial bone structure and her skin tone. Marion’s mother was one of the native French Jews of the capital who had evaded deportation and extermination by the Nazis. Marion remained confused by the fact that Highsmith insisted that they should visit only one place other than Montcourt and her apartment in Paris. ‘I’m Jewish and you know I hate Germany because of that. And the only place Pat ever invited me to go was Germany!’ (Schenkar, p.405).

  After a few months Highsmith agreed to stay for longer periods with Marion in Paris. ‘We made love a lot – the best love we made was at my place in Montmartre, where there are a lot of prostitutes on the streets and I think the prostitutes excited her. But we also used to make love in a little shack in the garden, where she had placed a little bed’ (Wilson, p.353). Highsmith came to prefer Marion’s little shack to her own house in Montcourt, and not just for sex. She even turned the small terrace between it and the main building into a version of her enclosed walled garden. From various discarded pots and pans she built small artificial ponds for a frog that had taken up residence. She fed the creature regularly and named it Dorothy. ‘We laughed a lot,’ recalls Marion, ‘but underneath it, I was anxious because she was an alcoholic.’ At the beginning of their affair Highsmith would come up with spurious tasks she needed to undertake in the kitchen or other ground-floor rooms of the Montcourt house where she had hidden bottles of spirits. In one letter to Marion in Paris she wrote, ‘Poor dear, you’re married to an alcoholic … Bring your ass and your typewriter but especially your ass.’

  Their affair lasted almost three years and ended in 1978, if not quite by mutual consent then without bitterness. Compared with Highsmith’s other relationships it might appear casual, even trivial, but for each it seems to have been suffused with a special kind of happiness. Leaving aside Highsmith’s preoccupation with Jewishness and Germany, Marion implies that their enjoyment of each other’s company and their mutual sexual attraction resulted from their both being slightly abnormal. Highsmith’s various eccentricities often caused friction between her and her friends and sometimes she even regarded their tolerance as a licence to cause offence, but with Marion she had for once met a woman who had no concern with how she looked or behaved. Altho
ugh she mentioned the affair to others, notably in letters to Blythe, Highsmith’s descriptions of it and Marion were relaxed, casual and at no point did she resort to the ecstatic hyperbole of her time with Virginia, Ellen, Caroline et al. Marion was her amiably whimsical alter ego and it seems a pity that what they had should have ended as soon as it did.

  The cause of their separation was principally Highsmith’s obsession with Tabea Blumenschein. The two women had met several times before, but it was during the 1978 Berlin Film Festival that Highsmith declared that she wanted to take things beyond their mutual interest in the arts. Highsmith was fifty-seven and Tabea, a German avant-garde film producer and director, was twenty-five and a fan of the newly fashionable punk mode of dress and hairstyle. Her loose denims were ripped and paint-stained, her make-up colourfully garish and her hair blonde, carefully spiked. Once more Highsmith resorted to building up a private verbal account of the affair as something spectacularly unique, while conveniently forgetting that she had done this on numerous occasions before.

  Despite apparent similarities between Marion and Tabea – young, rebellious and radical in their behaviour and outlook – Highsmith was drawn to the latter for perverse reasons, as a means of ruining her relationship with Marion. Just as she had done with her doomed affairs of the previous thirty-five years she wrapped herself and Tabea in a web of verbal grotesquery. In April 1978, for example, she sent Tabea a poem in which she compared the intensity of her love for her with a sudden desire to throw herself into a deep lake and drown, adding that ‘This isn’t blackmail … I’d do it with a smile,’ which must have comforted her new lover greatly. She took her to London and introduced her to Arthur and Cynthia Koestler in their house in Montpelier Square. Tabea, despite her radical bravado, felt completely out of her depth and returned to Berlin two days later. Shortly after that Highsmith wrote a poem about the episode opening with ‘your kisses fill me with terror’ and after she returned to Montcourt she sent a number of Tabea’s (confidential) letters to Alex Szogyi, who, aside from his respectable literary persona, claimed to be able to discern the true nature of a person’s character from their birth signs and handwriting. Szogyi, without having met Tabea, replied to Highsmith with a full character profile on a woman who had a ‘“big” personality … and is used to a great deal of lebensraum’.