The Talented Miss Highsmith (12 page)

Nevertheless, the great love of Pat Highsmith's life—and, certainly, her greatest hate—was her artistic, stylish, erratic, critical, and very frustrated mother, Mary Highsmith. No one affected Pat more strongly than Mary did, and the reverse was also true. Until the moment she stopped communicating with her mother about twenty years before her own death (Pat actually disinherited
herself
in a letter to Mary) no one's opinion mattered more to Pat than Mary's.

A critical letter from her mother—Mary and Pat wrote to each other with the venom and energy of disappointed lovers—was enough to do what perpetual motion, heavy drinking, racking love affairs, and financial and professional setbacks could
never
do; it stopped the formidable engine that was Patricia Highsmith's writing. Sometimes, Pat said, it stopped it for days. Only noise from neighbors—Pat was sound-phobic and instantly converted all sound to “noise”—had anywhere near as disastrous an effect on Pat's work habits as the maternal criticism. And this was criticism from a mother who loved her daughter passionately and said so, critically, at every opportunity.

Dan Walton Coates thought it was “easier to be Mary's friend or other relation than to be her daughter.” Don Coates, Dan's younger brother and the Coates family historian, remembers that “Aunt Mary was a very talented artist,” very “career-minded,” and not at all the “gushing type” of mother. But he wonders if “Pat ever thought that it was Aunt Mary who actually educated Pat as to what a woman could do.” (Yes and no is the answer to that question.) It was Mary's hard work that put Pat through Barnard College—and gave her an allowance, too—at a time when a college education was still considered a privilege for a young woman in America.
²⁵

Everyone in the Coates family was abundantly aware that Mary and Pat's relationship was “not a good one.” Still, like Tommy Tune, Dan Walton Coates was unequivocal: “Mary was very, very proud of Pat.

“[But] I'll tell you, Mary could be and was critical, and she would and did write some very hateful things [to Pat]…. And my father would say, Mary, why in the hell do you want to say something like that? It's hurtful and it doesn't do any good. And Mary would say: ‘Well, that's the way I felt. And Pat ought to know it.'

“Those two,” said Dan Walton Coates, “would burn each other up in the mail.”
²⁶

Sulphur and brimstone are amongst the mildest of the odors that cling to many of the later, surviving letters the Highsmith women wrote to each other: the typewriters on which they were written should have been reduced to smoking slag and quivering springs. These epistles—as successful as smart bombs, as twinned as photographic negatives and their developed prints, and almost as painful as their authors' actual physical meetings—kept the home fires of their bondage burning brightly.

In a carefully controlled letter to Mary (very much foreshortened below), written on 12 April 1966, a year after Camilla Butterfield's stormy tea party in Kensington and the violent “incident” at Pat's Suffolk cottage, and simmering with every resentment it denies (including the inevitable Highsmith touch: a little prophecy of mutual death in the last paragraph), Pat states her case against her mother—her cases, actually. And she delivers a very good idea of what, by now, was the motor that drove these two women to run each other over every single time they met.

“It is a terrible thing,” Pat writes to Mary, “if you think I have resentment toward you, and I shall try once more to explain why I haven't.” And then Pat continues with a long list of burning resentments which trace back to her central complaint—the circumstances of her birth and her mother's remarriage (“You had one divorce, but you might have had four or five.”)—and then works forward again to a long-cherished grudge:

And Pat goes on, resentfully, with another long list of Mary's “sniping remarks” and “illogical” behavior at Bridge Cottage a year earlier, finishing with a description of how Mary always makes her feel: “I am in a state of mind best described as shattered. I feel helpless, baffled, even inarticulate.

“I do not accuse you of it, but it may be you that resent me….

“I hope very much I have made it clear that I have no resentment, not even for the broken promise when I was twelve, which marked a turning point in my life. [Mary, bent on divorcing Pat's stepfather, Stanley, and joining Pat in Texas, sent Pat to Fort Worth for a year, but reconciled with Stanley instead.] If you would get rid of your guilt, it would make things better…because we may both die tomorrow—just by slipping in the bathtub, for instance—and I wanted to say all this to you before it is too late.”
²⁷

And Pat signed this letter “With much love, PAT.”

Mary seems to have retained something of her sense of humor—like Pat's, it was interested in bodily functions—during that disastrous Bridge Cottage visit. As a souvenir, she sent her nephew Dan Coates in Texas ninety-four sheets of “Jeyes hygienic toilet paper,” including an advertising flyer for Jeyes on which she wrote jauntily: “That this T.P. is absolutely inadequate has been proven by me beyond the shadow of a doubt!!!”
²⁸

As late as 1977, Pat was still preoccupied with dramatizing Mary's visit to Bridge Cottage. In a letter to her cousin Dan, who with his wife, Florine, had assumed all the responsibilities for Mary's later, erratic progress, Pat wrote from Moncourt:

Mary's visits to Pat in Europe always seemed to produce some kind of “earthquake.” Six years earlier, in September of 1959, Mary had travelled to New York from Texas to fly with Pat to Paris, where Pat “had a book coming out” with her French publisher, Calmann-Lévy. While Pat was upstairs in their hotel, Mary ran into two French journalists in the lobby who had come to interview Pat. In Pat's version of this encounter—Pat was still burning with indignation nearly two decades later—Mary, “for five minutes or more[,] had tried to convince them that she was me. They took a snap of her to please her. If you, or I, were ever to bring this anecdote up, my mother would first deny that it ever happened; then…she would say that she was only joking…. I think a psychiatrist would put another meaning to it.”
³⁰

A psychiatrist would also put the kind of meaning Pat is talking about to a similar confusion of identity—this time the confusion was Pat's—displayed in a letter Pat wrote to her father, Jay B Plangman, when she was fifty-one years old. Pat was asking for Jay B's help in putting her in “touch with any lawyer in Fort Worth who might be able to handle this problem. The problem is I would like to separate myself from my mother, my mother from me.”
³¹

On Pat and Mary's 1959 trip to Europe together (during which Mary was trying to shake off the effects of a serious depression), mother and daughter travelled pleasantly enough to London and Paris. Then Doris, a woman with whom Pat had recently lived in Palisades, New York, joined them in Paris, precipitating an explosion which cut short Mary's travel with her daughter and sent her off to Rome alone. Mary's post-trip letter to Pat (the merest fragment of which is printed below) is the aggressive passion to Pat's passive aggression.

A forty-four-year-old daughter who collapses into unconsciousness on a friend's doorstep when she hears that her mother is in town on a visit, and then hides her writing “out of instinct” because she is afraid her mother will destroy it, and a sixty-six-year-old mother who thinks her daughter treats her worse than a “second-rate whore” and would put her in “Dachau without a minute's loss of sleep,” have both taken up residence in what Jean Genet called “the universe of the irremediable.” Each one is striking out at the other because she feels attacked in her very core; both use the beard of marriage to cover up Pat's lesbianism, which they both feel is awful. Pat wanted Mary to admit that she alone was responsible for the dreadful “abnormality” of her daughter's sexuality; Mary refused to do so. Mary and Pat continued to drive each other crazy with accusations.

Camilla Butterfield, whose tea party Pat and Mary had so fatally upset, took Pat's “side” in the long, sad case of
Highsmith v. Highsmith
. “Having had one experience of Mary Highsmith,” says Camilla Butterfield, “I certainly didn't want another.” She describes Mary as “very feminine” and “scatty; a type, an American type…really quite mad or
driven
mad by the presence of her daughter.”
³³
Marijane Meaker, who lived with Pat for six months in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1960–61, shared Mrs. Butterfield's assessment of Mary Highsmith. But she added: “Pat…loved her mother very much and her mother was…jealous of all Pat's lovers. They had a very seductive relationship. Her mother was very powerful.”
³⁴

Mrs. Butterfield's dramatic picture of the mad tea party she hosted for the Highsmith women is a portrait of the terrible effect
two
people can have upon each other. It was the collision (and collusion) of mother and daughter that so disturbed the “atmosphere” of Camilla Butterfield's house, not Mary's demeanor by itself. Twenty years later, in May of 1985, Pat wrote in a cahier: “My mother would not have become semi-insane, if I had not existed.”
³⁵
She could easily have reversed the subjects of her sentence.

The intricate relations of this alarming mother-and-daughter duo had an amply archived past and went on to a well-documented future. The careful curators preserving its history were none other than Pat and Mary Highsmith themselves.

Like jailhouse lawyers, Pat and Mary did fervid research on each other's faults and
faiblesses,
kept lists of witnesses (lists, apparently, were in the blood),
^*
and retained each other's letters (scribbled over with corrective explanations) to support their endless grievances. They wrote to each other's friends, complaining and justifying. Mary wrote to Pat's lovers, and Pat wrote to her stepfather (Mary's second husband, Stanley Highsmith), to Mary's closest woman friend (the fashion illustrator Jeva Cralick), and to Mary's doctors—one of whom, Pat noted grimly, was called Dr. Ripley.
³⁶

The Coateses, the Stewarts (Mary's mother's family), and even the Plangman family were caught up in their fierce struggle. Third cousins (Millie Alford, who had another role to play in Pat's life, was amongst them) were enlisted in the battle. The heavens above were regularly appealed to for assistance, and far too many false oaths were sworn on either side. The imaginary courthouse for the Highsmith women's untried lawsuit against each other always had its doors flung open wide, and both of them cried out for the justice they both passionately felt they had been denied.

But
what
justice—and denied by
whom
?

Mary Highsmith, writing as she usually did from her House of Perpetual Trouble to her Daughter of Deepest Shame, still managed to have herself a pretty good time. Saying exactly what she felt came as easily to her as it came awkwardly to her daughter—and Mary never bothered to hold back an opinion.

But in one of her most excoriating letters to Pat, Mary suddenly intermits the name-calling—both Mary and Pat were subject to these constant volte-faces—with these words:

“When you were born, I was the happiest person imagineable [
sic
]. I was going to give you freedom, a free rein to do the things you wanted to do. Something I was NEVER allowed.”
³⁷

This is anguish unadorned: the cri de coeur of a mother who projects her childhood fantasies of liberation on her daughter, and then, because no parental hope ever goes unpunished, lives to watch her bright dreams of fulfillment dissolve in a life-and-death struggle between her and her only child.

Of course, the hostilities of mother and daughter were intermitted—they
had
to be, given the complexity of their feelings—with great, painful bouts of caring, sympathy, and worry for each other's welfare. When the two women weren't accusing each other of something (and even when they were), they were intensely involved in each other's lives. In ways that made the mother experience life as a mirthless joke and the daughter insist that existence was a meaningless jest, Mary and Patricia Highsmith were fatally alike.