Patricia
Highsmith was Tom Ripley without the charm. She was unhappy if an affair was
going well, and stirred up trouble with her multiple women lovers — she could
only write in a state of high tension. She collected snails and loved observing
them, liked their passionless, unconscious way of breeding, thought the French
were practically cannibals for eating them. When she was the most in love,
oddly enough, she thought of strangling her partner; luckily, she expressed her
combination of desire and violence in her writing, not her life. She identified
with Ripley, her most famous creation, and would speak of him and his comings
and goings as if he were a real person, claiming, “I am a man and I love
women.” A vicious anti-Semite, she was also “an equal opportunity offender,” as
one of her friends described her. She disliked almost every minority —
virtually everyone. Like Ripley, she was a social climber and intensely aware
of status; most of her girlfriends were upper middle-class, rich,
well-connected, preferably married. Like Ripley, she constantly fantasized;
even in her journals she seemed incapable of distinguishing between reality and
her inventions. Her most recent biographer, Richard Bradford (the author of
“Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith,” released
this year) points out that many of the affairs minutely recorded in her
notebooks are not based on identifiable women or events; she couldn’t
distinguish between the real and the fictional. She was an epic drinker, drunk
from morning to night. She also liked sex, noting in her diary that she
routinely had it ten times a day with women she picked up in bars. Until she
fell completely apart, she was attractive and chic.
Ripley
is a nobody who bitterly resents his sleazy New York City friends and his low
income as a stockroom clerk for the IRS; he is a petty thief who feels not a
shred of guilt impersonating a tax collector in order to fleece vulnerable
people. When, by chance, he meets Mr. Greenleaf, the rich father of a vague
acquaintance, he pretends to be an Ivy Leaguer and the son’s great friend.
Fooled, Mr. Greenleaf buys Ripley a first-class ocean liner ticket to Europe
and finances a six-week stay in the Italian coastal town of Mongibello (based
on Positano), where his son, Dickie, is living as a self-serious but talentless
painter. Though Dickie’s mother is dying of leukemia, he refuses to return home
to comfort her; after all, he has a villa, a sailboat, a maid and an American
admirer, Marge, and life is well within his means (he also has a modest trust
fund). Tom Ripley’s job is to charm Dickie, to become his best friend and
eventually to persuade him to return to the States and his dying mother.
Although
some of Highsmith’s later books approach the improbable, in this novel all the
details are believable. Dickie is easily bored and Tom keeps the jokes coming;
he is a master of impersonations (especially of old ladies), which he now trots
out to make Dickie laugh. Tom keeps his distance when Dickie is in a mood but is
always available when his friend wants company. He tries to befriend Marge, but
he and she are intensely jealous of each other; she even unjustly accuses Tom
and Dickie of being lovers. The truth is that she loves Dickie but he’s not
attracted to her and has befriended her because she’s the only other American
in the village. For his part, Tom doesn’t want to have Dickie but longs to
become him.
Tom
quite literally becomes Dickie. He murders him and assumes his identity. He
wears Dickie’s clothes, signs Dickie’s checks, even writes letters on Dickie’s
old typewriter. Switching his old New York persona for that of the Europeanized
golden boy Dickie Greenleaf, Tom comes to feel much better about himself:
“”He felt alone, yet not at all lonely. It
was … a feeling that everyone was watching him, as if he had an audience made
up of the entire world, a feeling that kept him on his mettle, because to make
a mistake would be catastrophic. Yet he felt absolutely confident he would not
make a mistake. It gave his existence a peculiar, delicious atmosphere of
purity, like that, Tom thought, which a fine actor probably feels when he plays
an important role on a stage with the conviction that the role he is playing
could not be played better by anyone else. He was himself and yet not himself.
He felt blameless and free, despite the fact that he consciously controlled
every move he made. But he no longer felt tired after several hours of it, as
he had at first. He had no need to relax when he was alone. Now, from the
moment when he got out of bed and went to brush his teeth, he was Dickie,
brushing his teeth with his right elbow jutted out, Dickie rotating the
eggshell on his spoon for the last bite.… He had even produced a painting in
Dickie’s manner.”
In other
words, his impersonation of Dickie is not only as a criminal disguise but a
psychological prop to his own self-hatred. He likes himself more when he is a
rich, handsome heir.
Patricia
Highsmith, who was born in Texas in 1921 and died in Switzerland in 1995, lived
for many years in New York City and in the French countryside near Paris, among
other places. Her first book, “Strangers on a Train” (1950), was made into a
successful film by Alfred Hitchcock starring the astonishingly handsome Farley
Granger. “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1955) was twice made into a movie: 1960’s
“Plein Soleil” (otherwise known to American audiences as “Purple Noon”),
starring the equally handsome Alain Delon; and “The Talented Mr. Ripley”
(1999), with Matt Damon as Tom and Jude Law as Dickie; Gwyneth Paltrow plays
Marge.
Ripley
was such a successful character that Highsmith wrote four more novels about
him. Another successful film, “Carol” (2015), starring Cate Blanchett, was
based on her lesbian novel, “The Price of Salt,” which she wrote under the
pseudonym Claire Morgan in 1952. Highsmith’s agent had suggested she use a
false name if she wanted to keep her career. This was the start of the
Eisenhower years, a conformist era of rabid anti-Communism and Hollywood’s Hays
Code, which censored all dirty words (even “virgin”) and forbade film scenes of
a married couple sleeping in the same bed. Certainly homosexuality was
considered beyond the pale, though a few plays on Broadway tested the limits.
“The Price of Salt” sold nearly a million copies in paperback, and once
Highsmith became known in certain circles as its author, the novel became one
of her main seduction tools in the lesbian bars of the day.
“The
Talented Mr. Ripley,” had it been filmed at the time, would never have gotten
past the censors, since we root for the murderous villain, or at least admire
his nerve, excess and cunning — in the end, he goes unpunished! Even if Tom and
Dickie never go to bed, their relationship (especially on Tom’s part) is very
intense and romantic (we know Highsmith daydreamed about murdering at least one
of her own love interests). The task of making a heinous character sympathetic
is the real work of many novels. Think of the criminal Humbert Humbert in
Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” (1955). Before long, we’re hoping he will seduce
the nymphet, and we rejoice in her mother’s death. By the end of the book, we
know in our bones what it is like to be a pedophile, and what horrified us at
the outset has hoodwinked us. It was very important to Nabokov that the reader
should disapprove of Humbert; he was dismayed when people in the swinging ’60s
found him sympathetic. In the same way, Highsmith overcomes our moral scruples
and makes us like the thoroughly evil Ripley.
I grew
up gay in the 1950s and I had to pretend to my classmates, fraternity brothers
and, later, office mates to be straight. It was a disgrace to be homosexual,
and before the beginning of gay liberation many of us (including me) were going
to shrinks with the sole goal of turning heterosexual. Our psychiatrists (who
were being richly paid) argued that same-sex love was not inborn; it was only,
they said, a symptom of a deeper neurosis caused, for instance, by an absent
father or a stifling mother or by an Oedipus complex gone awry — or something.
Usually it was the mother.
If we
talked of our lovers, we would have to pretend in my case that instead of his
being a 6-foot-3 blond guy named Ralph, the beloved was a 5-foot-3 girl named
Joy. We would invent long stories about our courtship, our First Time, our
interfering parents and so on — and we had to remember all that! I always
contended that since Proust turned his real-life boyfriends into women, the
imaginative exercise of invention and memory was good training for a future
novelist.
Tom
Ripley may not be gay, exactly, but he does first impersonate an Ivy Leaguer,
then a forgotten acquaintance, and finally Dickie himself, copying his
signature, wearing his rings and lightening his hair, all for the benefit of
the Italian police, who are investigating what they believe to be Tom’s death.
The art of impersonation was an essential skill for closeted lesbians and gays
in the 1950s; the convincing details of that art were ruses that Highsmith,
then, knew a lot about. Impersonation also prepared her to be a novelist,
especially one who identified with her male hero.
In the
next volume of the series, “Ripley Under Ground,” (1970), Ripley engages in
another metaphor for a gay “passing” as straight: forgery. He is living in
luxury in the French countryside; his income comes from Dickie’s estate (Tom
has forged Dickie’s will in his own favor). He also receives money from a bogus
art gallery in London that sells fakes of a well-known but dead and mysterious
modern English master. At a certain point, Tom even convincingly disguises
himself as the painter, authenticates the faked canvases, gives interviews to
the press and reassures a suspicious collector. When the collector comes to
Tom’s mansion in France and blows Tom’s disguise, Tom, naturally enough,
murders him. The layers of forgery and impersonation are impressive.
In a
telling scene in “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” Tom reassumes his old identity in
private just to see if he can. “It was a good idea to practice jumping into his
own character again, because the time might come when he would need to in a
matter of seconds, and it was strangely easy to forget the exact timbre of Tom
Ripley’s voice. He conversed with Marge until the sound of his own voice in his
ears was exactly as he remembered it.” Interestingly, after the beginning of
gay liberation in 1969, Highsmith was able to write openly about a male
homosexual character, a painter, in the suggestively named “The Tremor of
Forgery” (1969).
“The
Talented Mr. Ripley” also attests to Highsmith’s knowledge of Europe — the
trains, the hotels, the languages, the towns, the character of the continent
(if there is such a thing). Tellingly, Mr. Greenleaf wants Tom to read Henry
James’s “The Ambassadors” (1903), which is roughly the template for Highsmith’s
novel. James presents an American who is sent to Paris to bring back a wayward
son to the United States and the family business. In the end, the envoy and the
beguiled youngster switch places — not exact but close enough to “The Talented
Mr. Ripley.” James published his masterpiece in 1903, at the beginning of the
20th century. He, perhaps better than any other American novelist, exploited
this international theme, the contrast between Europe and America. Highsmith is
a talented descendant.
The
villagers in Mongibello, as Highsmith portrays them, are agreeable but
discreet, keeping just the right distance from their foreign visitors. The
Americans, by contrast, come off as a bit hysterical, privileged — even
condescending. They follow the rhythms of Mongibello life but are leisured,
richer and waited on; as a result, they are never truly part of Italian life,
despite their efforts to learn the language. As idle expatriates they feel free
to live wherever and however they choose; they are exempt from the local rules
governing family, work, deference and even sexuality. In this arena of freedom,
Ripley, like Highsmith, feels comfortable reinventing himself; he lives in a
world of his own making. Under conditions like these, Highsmith could protect
her misanthropy, indulge her alcoholism and homosexuality; her creature,
Ripley, can move into a new, better identity altogether.
Ripley,
as he progresses, feels more and more fulfilled by his odd relationship with
the deceased Dickie. Tom longs to write Marge saying that she should forget
Dickie, that she should understand that “he and Dickie were very happy
together, and that was that.” He realizes the Italian police (and, later, an
American private eye hired by Mr. Greenleaf) are hot on his trail. “But what
had he said about risks? Risks were what made the whole thing fun,” writes
Highsmith. Pathological and immoral as Tom may be, he certainly let us in on
his brand of fun.
In ‘The
Talented Mr. Ripley,’ a Shape-Shifting Protagonist Who’s Up to No Good. By
Edmund White. The New York Times, March 24, 2021.
“Am I a
psychopath?” Patricia Highsmith wondered, in a diary entry from 1943. The
verdict: “Yes, but why not.” As a child, she had discovered Karl Menninger’s
collection of “deviant” case studies, The Human Mind, and experienced a shiver
of recognition. A more recent discovery, Hervey M Cleckley’s book The Mask of
Sanity, had prompted Highsmith to note a “psychopathic” strain in her efforts
as an aspiring novelist. Asked decades later whether her characters matched
this description, she laughed, then said: “Yes, I would call them that.” What
exactly did she mean? That they were “incurable”, she replied. But on other
occasions, Highsmith emphasised a freedom from convention that she seemed to
admire, and even referred to “my psychopath heroes”. That sense of camaraderie,
or affinity, provides the fuel for her work, and for its enduring and
apparently growing appeal.
She was
born 100 years ago, in Fort Worth, Texas. At the age of four or five, she was
molested by a couple of male visitors, possibly salesmen. Later, her biological
father, whom she barely knew, showed her his pornography collection and kissed
her in a way that was, she wrote, “not exactly paternal”. Her adult
relationships, mainly with women, were volatile and destructive, though in
later years she preferred the company of snails, carrying them in her handbag
and even her bra. Highsmith’s latest biographer, Richard Bradford, has taken
his title, Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires, from one of her better-known
diary entries, a 1947 “New Year’s Toast” to the things she hoped would never
give her “peace”. (They didn’t.) Not long afterwards, her novel, Strangers on a
Train, was published by Harpers and adapted by Alfred Hitchcock, with Robert
Walker becoming the first of the many insidious and indelible on-screen Highsmith
“heroes”. The premise, in which two superficially different men swap the
murders they want to commit, remains the most potent distillation of the
“double” theme explored in virtually all of her subsequent 21 novels, among
them The Price of Salt (nowadays known as Carol), Deep Water, The Cry of the
Owl and the sequence devoted to the con man and killer Tom Ripley.
In the
opening and best-loved volume, published in 1955, Highsmith made her two most
resonant bequests to cultural history. The first descends from the title, The
Talented Mr Ripley, a one-woman rehabilitation of a long-maligned adjective
–“that vile and barbarous vocable”, in Coleridge’s possibly intemperate words.
Highsmith’s formulation has been repurposed for countless headlines, captions and
titles, including not a few bearing her own name. And then there is Ripley
himself, born in Boston in the mid-1930s and orphaned not long after, who
travels to Europe to find a man called Dickie Greenleaf, kills him, rips off
his estate, then builds a life of sorts in northern France. Ripley is among the
standout figures of Fifties American fiction, an unquiet period that also gave
us Sal Paradise, Holden Caulfield, John Galt (from Atlas Shrugged), and The Cat
in the Hat. He also has a strong claim, alongside Norman Bates, Hannibal Lecter
and “Pinkie” Brown, to the title of the psychopath’s psychopath. Ripley is
charming, conscienceless, thin-skinned, acquisitive, status-anxious,
wonderfully dissociated, less a sadist (he only murders when “absolutely necessary”)
than a shape-shifter and social climber who will step on fingers and skulls to
achieve his all-important (but meaningless) destination.
***
The
“Ripliad”, as it is sometimes known, offers a sympathetic record of his crimes.
The grounds for identification are straightforward: Ripley is in peril, his
enemies are abhorrent – gangsters, the idle rich – and the stories are told
from his perspective. “The banality of evil,” Hannah Arendt’s phrase for the
genocidal pen-pusher Adolf Eichmann, seems no less applicable here. Highsmith’s
style is blithe and plain, far removed from the macabre melodrama of later
psychopath narratives by Jim Thompson or James Ellroy, and murder is presented
in terms always more logistical than ethical. Among the factors that Highsmith
confronted when “plotting and writing suspense fiction” – the title of her 1966
primer – were “the speed of a train, police procedure, the fatality of sleeping
pills, limits of physical strength, and the reasonable boundary of police
stupidity or intelligence,” to which one might add the nuances of
passport-tampering and the plausibility of synthetic facial hair.
In
slightly more highfalutin terms, Highsmith’s achievement in the Ripley books
also recalls Freud’s claim that great criminals, as depicted in literature,
compel our interest through the consistency with which they protect their ego
from anything that might diminish it. Their lives are organised around the need
to sustain a grandiose self-image, and when something threatens that, consequences
abound. Richard Bradford misses the point spectacularly when he says that a
social slur depicted near the start of the third instalment, Ripley’s Game, is
not a “convincing” catalyst for his revenge plot. But then descriptions of
Highsmith’s work have a habit of slighting the reality, in praise as well as
complaint. Slavoj Zizek, for example, who seems to be on the payroll of the
Highsmith estate, tried to argue that Anthony Minghella’s artful and
eye-catching adaptation of The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) presented Ripley as
“someone full of psychic traumas”. But Minghella in fact did away with
Highsmith’s backstory – the death of Ripley’s parents and his dreadful
upbringing with an aunt called Dottie – and the subtext of repressed or
thwarted homosexual desire was already present in the novel: “I’m not queer,”
Dickie assures Tom.
It’s true that Highsmith doesn’t indulge in
psychologising. But then she barely indulges in anything, exhibiting little
interest in sex, theology, politics, society. She writes about places insofar
as they provide atmosphere, or plausible settings for misdeeds. That’s why it’s
strange that her admirers have been so insistent that she transcended suspense
writing, or expanded its potential; that she’s more than “just” a crime writer.
You’d be hard-pressed to name a writer of any literary distinction more
comfortable with genre mechanics, as reflected in the frequency with which her
work has been adapted. In recent years, there have been versions of Carol, The
Two Faces of January, The Blunderer and The Cry of the Owl, a second Deep Water
is coming from Netflix this year, and the Ripley sequence has yielded five
films (none of them made by an American), with a Showtime series starring
Andrew Scott as Ripley on its way. Highsmith’s books are hardly
screenplay-blueprints in the manner of Michael Crichton or Dan Brown; they’re
too sly and tonally rich. But Highsmith wrote exclusively in the third person,
and her narratives are defined by a wealth of incident and step-by-step logic.
Minghella’s casting director could hardly read the description of Dickie
Greenleaf’s odious pal Freddie – overweight with carrot-red hair, white skin
and freckles – without thinking immediately of Philip Seymour Hoffman.
***
Ripley
himself had already been memorably embodied by Alain Delon, in Plein Soleil
(1960), and later by Dennis Hopper, in The American Friend (1977) – one of
those loose-cannon performances that supply periodic injections of menace or
malign energy, a tradition that also includes Javier Bardem in No Country for
Old Men and Hopper again in Blue Velvet. But Ripley’s status as archetype or
shorthand was secured in the Minghella version – the first film to use the
character’s name in a title – where he was played by Matt Damon during his early
Tom Cruise-ish period of playing young men extremely good at something – maths
(Good Will Hunting), poker (Rounders), law (The Rainmaker) and, in the
Highsmith instance, “forging signatures, telling lies, impersonating
practically anybody”. Then came John Malkovich, who, in taking the lead in
Liliana Cavani’s adaptation of Ripley’s Game (2002), added Highsmith’s
character to a gallery of literary villains and outsiders he has played over
the decades, including Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons, Lennie in Of Mice and
Men, Mr Hyde in Mary Reilly and Gilbert Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady.
Cavani’s
film wasn’t a hit, but Malkovich’s bored suavity revealed a new dimension. When
he intones, “these Balkan types tend to take strangling quite personally”, or
looks around a train toilet full of corpses and notes, “it never used to be so
crowded in first class”, you’d be hard-pressed not to recall another murderous
mainstay of postwar entertainment. With his banal Christian name, ceaseless
city-hopping and immunity to attempts on his life, Ripley is a Bond who knows
that he’s a psychopath. Bond emerged in 1953, two years before Ripley’s own
sun-kissed debut. Both were depicted – before their early-Sixties big-screen
debuts – in episodes of the CBS anthology series Climax!, and have retained
their allure and essential attitude over several decades of change in mores and
acting style, taste and technology (Malkovich uses a “portable phone”).
Canadian-born Roger Spottiswoode, who directed Tomorrow Never Dies, later made
Ripley Under Ground (2005). This year Ana de Armas will become the first person
to play both a Bond girl (in the forthcoming No Time to Die) and a Highsmith
“heroine” in Deep Water.
Ripley
may not have Bond’s fame, but Highsmith’s influence is certainly pervasive. She
has colonised a sub-genre, as well as a whole tract of human experience.
Wherever you look there’s a Ripley type – Hugh Grant’s character in The
Undoing, say, or the border-crossing poisoner Charles Sohbraj in the
eight-episode BBC series The Serpent. Highsmith’s legacy is at risk of
resembling an Escher staircase. Ben Affleck probably thought he’d landed a plum
role when he was cast as the suburban husband, equally sinned against as
sinning, in Deep Water. Then the déjà vu would have started to kick in: he’d
already played a close relation of that character, in Gone Girl, the 2014 film
of Gillian Flynn’s dazzling Deep Water tribute. Rosamund Pike and Amy Adams
have both recently taken on roles in direct descent from Highsmith’s work for
the second time. (Pike in I Care A Lot and Gone Girl; Adams in The Woman in the
Window and another Flynn adaptation, Sharp Objects.)
At this
point, 26 years after her death, the fate confronting Patricia Highsmith and
her characters is not oblivion but saturation. Whether this will increase our
understanding of this eccentrically gifted writer, or simply keep her name in
lights, remains to be seen.
Patricia
Highsmith’s psychopath heroes. By Leo Robson. New Statesman, March 24, 2021.
It was
a disturbing conjunction: trying to finish an unsavoury new biography of the
crime novelist Patricia Highsmith while at the same time confronting the
Götterdämmerung finale of the Trump presidency, the raucous and rancorous
live-stream mob assault of 6 January on ‘our nation’s Capitol’ (for maximum
effect, the phrase needs to be intoned with baleful majesty – eyeballs big and
hideously bulging). The same ugly question kept intruding: would house-wrecker
Highsmith – everyone’s favourite mess-with-your-head morbid misanthrope – have
relished the day’s cascading idiocy?
As an
embittered expatriate, mind-blitzing drunk and hellacious bigot who spent her
last years sequestered in a Brutalist redoubt in Switzerland writing hate letters
to the newspapers about the pro-Israel policies of the US government and
spewing venom about ‘the Jews and the blacks’, might Highsmith have enjoyed at
least some of the sadism? The bludgeoning of the police, say, with fire
extinguishers or the odd flagpole? The cathartic splitting open of someone’s
head with a heavy object is, after all, one of the methods used by her
murderous anti-heroes to kill the clueless people they are in love with:
witness Tom Ripley’s brain-splatter of an assault – with an oar – on the pate
of pretty Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr Ripley. In Jill Dawson’s vastly
entertaining novelistic riff on Highsmith, The Crime Writer (2016), set in the
early 1960s, when Highsmith was living in rural Suffolk in order to be near an
especially hot (and married) English girlfriend, the fictional Pat kills her
lover’s husband with a handy Black & Decker electric drill. She holds it by
the fiddly bit-end but somehow manages to clobber him, inelegantly yet
definitively, with the big-ass handle-end.
And what
about those zip-ties? I’m guessing Pat would have appreciated the goon-squad
fashion accessories, not to mention the deliciously sick fact that in the heat
of battle, one of the more menacing rioters – proudly sporting bunches of the
little doodads hanging off every belt-loop – made his athletic descent from the
House galleries in search of the satanic Pence and Pelosi accompanied by his
squat, shouting, red-white-and-blue-bandanna-wearing mother. Give ’em hell,
Mommy! We’ll hog-tie and hang ’em!
And
finally – we shouldn’t go there but we can’t help it – the guy in Viking horns
and face-paint. Now, lesbians aren’t supposed to like men at all, especially
not a sapphic swive-hound for the ages like Patricia Highsmith. God, was she
depraved. Prouder of her self-styled ‘erections’ than a Proud Boy. Yes, rilly.
(‘I’m not a woman,’ she was often heard to say.) But wouldn’t even Pat have
found the slender yet muscular barbarian, caped in pelts, inky blue ‘sleeves’
covering both his arms, the tiniest bit enticing? How could she have resisted?
For me, I confess, it was the naked pink torso, weird low-slung pants, the soft
furry chest with its palpable tracery of golden-red hairs (edging down the
abdomen ever closer, dare one say, to the magical fellow’s unseen yet doubtless
militant shaman-sex) that mesmerised. Just the thought of such a girlish
Goth-bod makes me want to smash stuff.
Except I
don’t. I haven’t ever smashed stuff. And maybe Patricia Highsmith – unsuitable
role model though she is – wouldn’t have smashed anything either. Would she
have rampaged with the moron hordes? Waved an AK-47? Defecated on the Capitol
terrazzo? Screeched and pranced around the Rotunda like an inebriated baby
goat? Beaten a policeman to death? I could be wrong, but I don’t think so.
Imagining something and doing it are two different things – or so I, like
Caliban, would like to believe. Thought is free.
Of
course, Highsmith was unsurpassed at depicting such destructive self-abandon,
above all, in the gruesome and surprising acts perpetrated by her fictional
protagonists. Consider her brilliant reveals: the slow build-up of mad,
off-kilter thoughts; the choking bolus feelings of hatred, fright, revulsion;
then the explosive release of force – corporeal, appalling, exquisite –
immediately followed by inrushing panic and dread. Highsmith is the poet
laureate of Oops, I killed him. (And her.) What do I do now? In the 1950s and
1960s, Alfred Hitchcock was her only rival at capturing such vertiginous
changes of state: the lightning-quick slippage from normal to horrific and back
again. Back, that is, to a now nightmarish perversion of normal life from which
you, the killer, realise you’ll never escape, even should the outrage you’ve
just committed go undiscovered. (In classic Highsmith – witness the supremely
twisty Ripley novels – even the most frenzied murders sometimes go unrecognised
as such.) You’re not dead yet, but you’re unquestionably in hell: for ever.
Also
indisputable is the fact that Highsmith was able to dramatise the loss of
control so shockingly because she knew how it felt. Though not herself a
homicidal maniac (as far as one knows), she could imagine what it was like to
be one. Her brain had been arranged for it: she had blown out her own frontal
lobes early on. Despite the celebrity, wealth and critical admiration she
earned over a long and charmed career – her first suspense novel, Strangers on a
Train (1950), published when she was 29, was an immediate bestseller, and she
rolled on from there – her life looks from one angle like the most horrible
botch: a concatenation of private misery and psychic turmoil for which, the
virtuous will conclude, she had only herself to blame. Yes, she had been
subject to an estranging and neglectful childhood: her mother, Mary (née
Coates), supposedly tried to abort her by swallowing turpentine in the last
months of her pregnancy; her grifter father, the feckless Jay B. Plangman,
vanished when she was an infant. (When she met him at seventeen, he seems to
have shown her a stash of pornographic pictures and kissed her a bit too
probingly, just for the hell of it.) Most painful of all: after her
flirtatious, flamboyant utterly dissociated mother – the newly married Mary
Highsmith – suddenly decamped to Manhattan with her second husband, Stanley, in
hopes of landing a well-paying commercial art job, 12-year-old ‘Patsy’,
abandoned and forlorn, had to stay behind for an entire year in the Fort Worth
boarding house run by her grim-to-nutty evangelical granny, the buzz-harshing
Willie Mae Coates. It was – as she never ceased to repine – the ghastliest year
of her life.
Even
without such tutoring in despair, the adult Highsmith seems to have had an
instinctive gift, a shameful genius, for letting moral qualms fall away and her
worst impulses run riot – at least some of the time. As three unflinching
biographies have revealed since her death (not to mention a hair-raising memoir
by one of her former lovers), Highsmith could be hostile, rude and
bloody-minded to a near sadistic degree. She couldn’t forgo the hot and messy
pleasures to be gained by ignoring the guard-rails. It turned her on, it seems,
to watch things smash.
There
was the sexy, suicidal drinking, of course. Highsmith’s alcoholism blighted her
life and eventually transformed her – not entirely figuratively – into a Dorian
Gray-style lesbian fright-bag. Heartbreakingly attractive in her youth (see the
exquisite nude portraits made by her gay photographer friend Rolf Tietgens in
the early 1940s), she looked like a sullen gargoyle by the time she died:
rubbery, bloodshot, wrinkled to the point of cave-in, a calamitous experiment
in DIY self-pickling. Compared with Highsmith in her seventies, her fellow
drunk-dyke genius Elizabeth Bishop looked like a fresh-blooming flower in her
later years – a regular Goop-enhanced Gwyneth.
Then
there was the compulsive sexual promiscuity – a festival of glut, recrimination
and endlessly renewed licentious squalor (I almost wrote splendour).
Intoxicated by couplings both hot and doomed, Highsmith had a penchant for
beautiful married women (often alcoholics themselves); would spy on or stalk
lovers with whom she became morbidly obsessed; and took a vandal’s delight in
destroying any apparently stable relationship she encountered, sapphic or
straight, by seducing one or both partners. She had scores of spooky little
affairs, dead-end romances and inebriated hook-ups, but never shook off the
guilt and self-disgust that inevitably flattened her after the fact.
The
shame Highsmith felt over craving sex with women haunted almost every aspect of
her life, including her literary career. Nothing about being driven in this way
was easy. Much discussed of late has been her second novel, The Price of Salt,
the odd, nervy, yet surprisingly potent lesbian love story she managed to
publish – despite crippling fears that it would destroy her reputation were its
authorship to become known – under the pseudonym Claire Morgan in 1952.
Virtually ignored in hardback, the book gradually became an underground
bestseller as a cheap, pulp fiction-format paperback in the later 1950s and
1960s (Highsmith claimed it sold a million copies). Yet despite the sacks of fan
letters and euphoric little mash notes Pat received from grateful gay girls
everywhere – likewise the fact that thanks to gossipy publishing types her
authorship became known to anyone who cared about such things – the not so
mysterious being known as Claire Morgan couldn’t bring herself to acknowledge
the work as hers, or to dump the pseudonym, for almost forty years.
Not
until 1990, only five years before her death, did Highsmith reluctantly allow
The Price of Salt to be issued at last under her real name, first by
Bloomsbury, then by Norton in the United States. (In Britain, the book was
rechristened Carol; the filmmaker Todd Haynes also chose that title for his
2015 screen adaptation.) Her motives seem to have been financial and punitive:
rackety publishers on the Continent, where her suspense novels had long been
greatly admired, were making pots of cash by rolling out pirate editions with
her name splashed brazenly across the cover. She took down the deadbeats.
Nonetheless, in the excited gaggle of press and television interviews that
followed, her hopelessly conflicted feelings were still all too evident. She
was mortified by the attention the book’s republication drew to her private
life and angrily refused to be baited by nosy journalists seeking revelations
about her sexuality. (No, she was not a ‘lesbian book-writer’, she had written
in an early version of the novel’s afterword: she was a ‘lesbian-book writer’.)
Giving the lie to such pitiful evasions was her startlingly unladylike
demeanour, by now stone-butch and crusty to a cartoonish, if not phantasmagoric
degree.
Sympathetic
readers have long hailed The Price of Salt for having a putatively ‘happy’
ending. Scare quotes seem fitting, however, because, as always with Highsmith,
the novel has more than a few freaky-bewildering moments, some of which become
outright menacing on rereading. (Carol, the glamorous older married woman in
the central romance, can turn weirdly vicious towards Therese, the junior
partner, at almost any moment. In one early flirting scene, having
unaccountably approached Therese from behind, Carol slips her hands around her
neck, prompting in Therese the panicky split-second fear that Carol is about to
strangle her.) But, in striking contrast with the morose ‘twilight women’ one
finds in classic 1940s and 1950s lesbian pulp fiction, condemned by their
depraved sex-urges to lives of misery, loneliness and social opprobrium,
neither of the heroines ends up dead, suicidal, cut off from respectable
society, or worse, engaged to a man. Nothing really threatens their happiness
at the novel’s end: having faced down various obstacles to bliss, they seem
poised to resume their passion in a manner at once buoyant, fearless and
indubitably arousing.
Forty
years on, perversely enough, when Highsmith finally allowed the novel to be
printed under her own name, she was pleased if not smug about the praise she
received for having supposedly anticipated, way back in the benighted 1950s,
the somewhat more ‘gay-friendly’ view of homosexuality on offer in 1991 – when
a few readers, at least, could be trusted not to react with disgust at the tale
of a female couple who fall in love, give each other orgasms, and go mostly
unpunished for it. Yet Highsmith – as tricky as she was troubled – took the
credit here where it wasn’t entirely due. Her doughty British biographer Andrew
Wilson was the first to report that Margot Johnson, Highsmith’s New York agent,
had actually engineered the upbeat dénouement, just as the book was on the
verge of publication (Johnson thought – correctly – it might improve sales).
Wilson’s surprise revelation made immediate sense. How likely was it, after
all, that Pat Highsmith – incorrigible maker of messes, grim connoisseur of
things cracking up and veering off into nightmare – would have chosen to go
with something so alien to her as a loving and non-macabre future for her two
heroines?
Lying,
chicanery, lewd excess – it’s all enough to give lesbians a bad name (not to
mention alcoholics). Although Highsmith always managed to combine her seedy
acting out with an original, prolific, even heroic writing career – and, yes,
the best of the crime fiction is insanely good – readers new to her might
wonder how reading about her life could possibly be enjoyable or instructive.1 Sensational
and salacious no doubt, at times a dark and contorted farce. Yet Highsmith has
been remarkably lucky in her biographers – at least in the canny Wilson and the
fearless Joan Schenkar, the first two scholars to take her on after her death
in 1995. Given the ease with which one might sensationalise, and indeed
anathematise, the blazingly unwholesome Highsmith backstory, both biographers
trod a sensitive and scrupulous path. Neither has received the serious praise
such an accomplishment deserves.
Wilson’s
Beautiful Shadow (2003) was the groundbreaker: quickly yet intelligently
compiled, candid, even-handed, both dispassionate and compassionate in its
review of Highsmith’s agony-rich bad behaviour. He was tactful, too, about her
notoriously outlandish eccentricities, pre-eminent among them being the famous
horde of pet snails, in whose slow, damp, antler-waving sexual activities she
acknowledged taking a more than zoological delight. Alas, having heard so many
times now about Highsmith’s pleasure in snail-fuckery, one might be forgiven
for finding the topic a bit old and tiresome. For would-be Highsmith
apologists, indulgent and undiscerning, the fact that she owned a 300-strong
gang of gastropods and toted little groups of them around Europe in handbags
and coat pockets and sometimes in her bra has no doubt become something to
burble over sentimentally: a smarmy, cornball, that-Pat-was-a-real-weirdo
soul-meme. But when Wilson first brought these snail-darlings onto the world
stage and let them cavort in the silvery slimelight, one had to rejoice in the
sheer revolting magnificence of Highsmithian aberration.
After
Highsmith’s death Wilson seems to have moved expeditiously to get to the people
he needed to interview: a handful of remaining family members in Texas; friends
from Barnard, where she’d gone to college in the early 1940s; puzzled
neighbours in various villages in Suffolk, France and Switzerland to which she
had retreated in later years, hoping to write and drink and die alone; and a
motley assortment of lovers, some of them themselves already pressing at
death’s door. (The honest and clear-sighted Marijane Meaker – then just about
to publish Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s, a chilling recollection of their
passionate early love affair and of meeting Highsmith again decades later in
her unhinged and racist dotage – seems to have been the only serious source he
missed.) The candid and incisive, often strangely comic, oral record Wilson
compiled – Highsmith’s friends were as funny and dark as she was – remains
invaluable.
Schenkar’s
The Talented Miss Highsmith (2009) is something else again: a massive, chatty,
obsessional tome full of idiosyncratic jokes and gob-smacking asides, prolix in
parts, but also an intimate, enmeshing account of Highsmith’s creative life. At
some point, one imagines, Schenkar got snake-bit: like everyone who falls under
Highsmith’s spell, she is also one of her victims. But the book is a bloody
masterpiece. Schenkar doesn’t stint on showing the worst: the farcical Grand Guignol
of Highsmith’s four-year affair with Ellen Blumenthal Hill, for example, who
after one gruesome fight with Highsmith in Manhattan in 1954 tried to kill
herself by downing several martinis and a whopping dose of Veronal. As Hill
started to pass out, the ‘skunk-drunk’ Pat – still blithery with hatred and
rage – neither called an ambulance nor alerted anyone to her lover’s condition;
she simply left Ellen lapsing into oblivion and went out for most of the
night.2
It’s a
bummer to say so, perhaps, but Schenkar offers some of the most searing and
honest writing I’ve read about everything that can go wrong, psychologically
speaking, in lesbian relationships, especially between two fiercely independent
creative women. (Put The Talented Miss Highsmith on a short list with Marina
Tsvetaeva’s Girlfriend Poems and Violette Leduc’s La Bâtarde.) Not that I’m
suggesting heterosexual relationships, or any other kind of erotic pairing, are
less vulnerable to chaos and crack-up; an explosion of mad, melodramatic stupidity
can overtake any couple at any moment. But Schenkar gets the dyke-drama
specifics just right. In the case of Highsmith – and here Schenkar is both
delicate and direct – it was above all the incestuous message delivered over a
lifetime by the treacherous and infantile Mary Highsmith – the archetypal
go-away-a-little-closer Medusa-mother – that doomed her daughter to an
affective landscape of unmitigated pain and conflict when she tried to find
love elsewhere.
Schenkar’s
study has both an astute moral purchase and a great sympathy for Highsmith. I
wish I could say the same of Richard Bradford’s new Life, Devils, Lusts and
Strange Desires. As the ill-advised title might suggest, the book is a sad
mess: shallow, mistake-ridden, voyeuristic in tone. It’s hard to get through
for a number of reasons. Tellingly, there are no scholarly notes or citations:
Bradford’s sole documentation is the occasional page or date reference to
Wilson or Schenkar (about whom he is often churlish), or to the Highsmith
diaries and notebooks held in the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern. One has to
take great gobbets of what he says on faith as there is no way of tracing his
sources. He seems, in any case, to have done very little original research, and
most damningly (as far as I can tell), no new interviews. Any lively quotes or
choice anecdotes almost always turn out to be borrowed or paraphrased from
Wilson or Schenkar. There are proofreading gaffes throughout, including a
shocking number of grammatical errors. (The publisher is Bloomsbury –
Highsmith’s own – yet fact-checking and copy-editing seem close to
non-existent.)
But
Bradford’s responses to Highsmith’s personality and achievement are even more
disturbing. A small but typical example: writing about the plot of The Price of
Salt, he asserts that ‘there’s no hint that either [Carol or Therese] has
previously had a relationship with, or been attracted to, another woman’, an
error so basic that it makes one wonder if he has read the book. (Therese has
long had a crush on one of the Sisters at her convent school; and Carol, as
even those who’ve only seen the movie may recall, has a major ex-lover named
Abby, archly played in the movie by the cigarette-waving sapphic beauty-pizza
Sarah Paulson.)
Bradford
is curiously unwilling to grant Highsmith’s own erotic life much real-world
heft or relate it to any obvious historical context. One of his stranger ideas,
educed on the feeblest of evidence, is that in her diaries and notebooks the
young Highsmith regularly ‘invented’ girlfriends for herself, and that many of
the women who appear there, including her first female lover, Mary Sullivan, a
Manhattan bookseller, were only girlfriends in ‘fantasy’. He hints that she may
never even have met Sullivan. (The discussion of Sullivan, Highsmith and a
mutual friend, the lesbian photographer Ruth Bernhard, that he offers in
support of this theory is frankly incoherent.) But he goes further still: some
of Highsmith’s lovers, he writes, may not have been real people at all.
Interviewed fifty years after the fact, Kate Kingsley Skattebol, Highsmith’s
closest friend at Barnard, could not, he points out, recall her mentioning (let
alone dating) anyone called Virginia when they were at college, even though a
woman bearing that name appears as a major pash in Highsmith’s notebooks of the
time. Why hadn’t she told Skattebol about her? Perhaps, Bradford suggests,
because she didn’t exist. He raises similar suspicions about someone he calls
‘the legendary Chloe’, with whom Highsmith went to Mexico in 1943-44 (a trip
documented in detail in her journals). Indeed, he asks, didn’t the very fact
that diarist Highsmith referred to Chloe and Virginia only by their first names
imply that she had invented them? That they were, in fact, among her first
‘fictional characters’?3
These
vaguely accusatory musings are bizarre. As Schenkar explains in The Talented Miss
Highsmith, Skattebol was straight, and, as she herself admitted, an unusually
naive young woman when she and Highsmith met. Pat, she later realised, had kept
most of her lesbian affairs a secret from her for years. Highsmith, Schenkar
concurs, was a virtuoso at ‘compartmentalising’ her life. And why do this?
Bradford seems oblivious to the fact, banal though it is, that it was dangerous
in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and even 1980s to let one’s homosexuality
become publicly known. It is not so easy to admit to loving members of your own
sex when killjoys everywhere want to knife you to ribbons for it. In the 1940s
and 1950s especially, one lied; one hid things (even from straight friends),
both for one’s own safety and that of others. Highsmith herself was
self-protective to the point of paranoia; real names were not for spilling. Yet
rather than acknowledge the homophobic attitudes of the era or, god forbid, the
necessary but exhausting apparatus of self-concealment known as the closet,
Bradford finds it more plausible to argue that Highsmith kept her sex life
under wraps because her ‘lovers’ weren’t real. He carps at Wilson and Schenkar
for taking Highsmith’s all too credible diary narratives at face value, as if
his two predecessors were simply her credulous dupes.
I dwell
on the fantastication here because it gradually morphs into a wearying
insinuation that one does well to discount just about everything Highsmith ever
said about herself. (Did the young man she claimed she saw one morning on the beach
at Positano – her ostensible inspiration for Tom Ripley – really exist? Might
she have made up those drinks and lunches with Peggy Guggenheim? Was she
prevaricating when she said she met Auden at his home on Ischia? Gotcha, Pat.)
It’s a perversely disabling point of view for a would-be biographer, this
tetchy refusal to credit one’s subject. How to determine even the
non-controversial details of a person’s experience if you are disinclined to
trust anything she ever said about it? Over the course of the book Bradford
becomes oddly derisory about Highsmith’s fiction – each new novel, he
complains, seems more inept and implausible than the last – but he is even more
hostile to the woman herself, in an ultimately tedious, dull-edged and
deadening way. Often enough, she is little more than a cardboard specimen of
cruelty and untruth: ‘a liar and a sadist’.
By the
end, not surprisingly, Bradford seems overtaken by a kind of reductive mania.
If Highsmith’s purported self-revelations are to be taken as more ‘fictional’
than ‘real’ – the flat-character terminology is his own – the opposite, he
concludes, is the case with the actual fiction. Highsmith’s novels are more
‘real’ than ‘fictional’: the direct (if unconscious) transcription of some
taboo truth about herself that she couldn’t reveal any other way. When it comes
to explicating a specific work, he has, indeed, only one tendentious way of
reading it – as a crudely disguised, cognitively compromised, typically
dishonest allegory for whatever mucky-murky affair Highsmith was having at the
time she wrote it. Character X ‘must’ be Highsmith; Character Y ‘must’ be,
well, whatever her name was. If X happens to eviscerate Y in a fit of
rip-’em-up horror, it’s because Highsmith was fighting a secret urge to unleash
similar havoc on the Cynthia-of-the-minute. In The Talented Mr Ripley, for
example – which, along with The Blunderer (1954), Bradford thinks illustrates
the pattern most strikingly – the murderous relationship between Ripley and
Dickie Greenleaf is only a slightly grislier version of that between Pat and
Ellen Blumenthal Hill:
"There is
no evidence that Highsmith deliberately planned to bring her partner’s life to
an end, but it is clear enough that she knew precisely the levels of stability
beyond which Ellen’s precarious psychological state would be ruinously
undermined.
Highsmith
had not clattered Ellen over the head with an oar but her callous disregard for
her fate when she left the apartment on the evening of [Ellen’s] suicide
attempt came close to wishing her dead.
Highsmith
did want Ellen dead, and like Walter [a character in The Blunderer] she was not
a murderer – at least in the sense that she would not fire a shot or deliver a
blow – but she knew that her desertion of the drug-filled Ellen on 1 July was
murder-by-proxy.
It’s all
a bit like someone clattering you over the head with an oar.""
Bradford’s
lurid picture may be accurate up to a point. Highsmith herself recognised the
link between the grotesque acts she dramatised in her fiction and some
long-standing malevolence in her own nature. As she wrote in a journal entry
from 1970, ‘I learned to live with a grievous and murderous hatred very early
on. And learned to stifle also my more positive emotions.’ Wilson and Schenkar,
too, see a continuity between Highsmith’s past, her literary imagination and
the emotional cruelty of which she was capable, in her erotic life in
particular. Schenkar even describes her as ‘killing off’ a real-world lover –
symbolically – when she shows a fictional stand-in taking revenge,
oxymoronically, on a hated beloved. But something about Bradford’s unsubtle
harping on the murder-by-proxy theme, his prosecutorial tone and absence of
counter-balancing sympathy, not to mention his weirdly insistent assertions
that Highsmith wasn’t actually a murderer, leave one baffled by his psychic
stake here. If she was so sordid and pointless a human being, why write about
her?
With
Highsmith, it’s a matter of where one places the emphasis. I feel sorry for
Pat. She was cursed by life and by her drastic sentience about her predicament
(our predicament, that is). Indeed, she had an awareness of evil that was as
visceral, vivid and appalling as that found in the work of the most tragic,
scarified, god-abandoned artists. One can only guess at the causes, but she
seems to have lived a life damned – almost moment to moment – by the psychic
torment one confronts in the works of Swift and Goya: a sense of the absolutely
intolerable. Like them, she came very close to being maddened by the acts of
human predation she saw all around her, most piercingly because she recognised
that she was herself capable of similar depravity. Homo sum: humani nihil a me
alienum puto. It was like suffering from some perpetual, crazy-making,
metaphysical ringing in the ears.
Given
all this, might one not feel – as Schenkar obviously does – some human sympathy
for her? Highsmith didn’t kill anyone. She never broke the windows, kicked down
the doors, shot someone. She never dismembered the corpse. Bradford may be right
that she wrote about killing compulsively both to keep herself from
self-slaughter (she had sentences to write) and to avoid killing someone else.
She wrote as a protective reflex, just as she drank, pursued the wrong people,
and reviled her least favourite human beings. But I think he also has it wrong.
Highsmith had many ways of losing control – of yielding to vicious destructive
impulse – but dreaming of delicious murder wasn’t one of them.
Just as
there is a difference between thinking and doing, there may be a difference
between seeing a mental picture of something awful and wishing for it to
happen. The involuntary image of oneself striking someone dead can invade the
mind in an instant – you see the act as suddenly and clearly as the devil at noontide
– but this is not the same as wanting the act to occur. Highsmith may have seen
the image, but she didn’t welcome it. It wasn’t – pace Freud – a wish. If we
try to imagine her inner life, instead, as one in which unwanted demonic forms
constantly intruded, as an unstoppable hell of morbid ideation, kinetic horrors
crowding in on the mind’s eye, yammering voices urging her on towards mayhem,
her self-restraint may begin to look like melancholy courage. When it came to
full-on Kronos-cannibalism, Highsmith was able to resist. She channelled her
worst thoughts into her art – imperfectly, perhaps, but effectively. And awful
though the vision was, her art remains something we can use. One might even
bless her for it.
Gotcha,
Pat! By Terry Castle. London Review of Books, March 4, 2021.
A special
conversation in honor of the 100th birthday of novelist and Villager Patricia
Highsmith. Greenwich Village, where Highsmith spent her formative years as a
writer, played a crucial role in the development of her peerless writings.
Biographer, friend, and fellow Villager Joan Schenkar shares her knowledge of
Highsmith and tells about the
forthcoming Highsmith diaries.
Joan
Schenkar’s The Talented Miss Highsmith
has been recognized as the “definitive” Highsmith biography, a New York Times
Notable Book, and Lambda Literary Award winner. She lives and writes in
Greenwich Village and Paris.
Village
Preservation, January 21 2021.
