https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/01/20/a-poisonous-person-patricia-highsmith-was-an-enduring-writer

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[                    ]
[20210123_bkp005]

Ripley's creator at 100
A poisonous person, Patricia Highsmith was an enduring writer

She looked into the gulf of mystery that separates people--and bridged
it

Books & artsJan 23rd 2021 edition
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Jan 20th 2021

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PATRICIA HIGHSMITH had a thing for snails. She admired their
self-sufficiency and found it "relaxing" to watch them copulate,
delighted by the impossibility of distinguishing male from female.
She collected them for decades, keeping hundreds at home and scores
in her handbag, which she let loose when bored at dinner parties. Her
affection for snails was matched by her ambivalence towards people,
whom she often found baffling and kept at a distance. When a literary
agent suggested Americans didn't buy her books because they were "too
subtle" and the characters too unlikeable, Highsmith responded:
"Perhaps it is because I don't like anyone."

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Like her beloved gastropods, Highsmith--who was born in Fort Worth,
Texas on January 19th 1921--often hid behind a hard shell. She was
secretive with others and sometimes an enigma to herself. "O who am
I? Reflections only in the eyes of those who love me," she wrote in
1951. But when she died in 1995 she left a considerable trail--22
novels, nine short-story collections and 8,000 pages of diaries and
notebooks--ample material for her biographers, including Richard
Bradford in his new portrait, "Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires".
Her estate plans to publish hundreds of pages from these journals as
a single volume later this year.

Murder is central to Highsmith's stories, but they are not mysteries.
More akin to Dostoyevsky and Kafka than Chandler and Christie, their
drama is mostly psychological. For readers, the thrill of her books,
particularly the early, best-known novels such as "Strangers on a
Train" and "The Talented Mr Ripley", comes not from piecing together
a crime but involuntarily siding with the criminal. Her sympathies
were with misfits, but she liked to demonstrate how even seemingly
ordinary people could go mad. The "nitty gritty of life", Highsmith
once said, "is anger, and a sense of injustice". In spare,
insidiously direct prose, she shows just how natural it might feel to
kill.

She seemed to use her fiction to act out what she couldn't do in real
life. Her novels "are a lifelong autobiography", Mr Bradford writes
(in a book that is more opinionated than scholarly). Prickly and
frequently offensive, Highsmith nevertheless reserved her most
transgressive impulses for the page. Wishing, as a teenager, to steal
a book from a library, she instead made her young heroine do it in
"Crime Begins", one of her first published stories. She regularly
killed her characters in places where she had once had affairs. This,
comments Joan Schenkar in "The Talented Miss Highsmith" (2009), is
because she "thought about love the way she thought about murder: as
an emotional urgency between two people, one of whom dies in the
act."

In Highsmith's books, love is often a fragile illusion, and marriage
borders on farce. Here, too, she was writing from experience. Her
mother, Mary, divorced her father nine days before she was born.
According to Highsmith, Mary often said it was "funny" her daughter
liked the smell of turpentine, because that was what she drank when
trying to abort her. Mary's second marriage was also fractious, and
Highsmith hated her stepfather. In 1978, explaining her penchant for
solitude, the author noted that "Most murders take place within the
family, you mustn't forget that." Published when she was 29,
"Strangers on a Train" turns on a man's desire to kill his father;
Tom Ripley is an orphan.

Through a martini glass, darkly

After graduating from Barnard College in Manhattan in 1942, Highsmith
found freelance work scripting comic books--one of few women in the
industry at the time. This funded her life in New York for years and
seems to have influenced her fiction, which is full of secret
identities, alter egos, hot pursuits and daring escapes. But this
work embarrassed her, and she scrubbed all traces of it from her
archives.

She preferred men in every way but in bed, describing a romp with
Arthur Koestler as a "miserable, joyless episode". Her heroes were
mostly male, she explained in 1984, because men were physically
stronger and freer to roam: "I don't see women leaving the house."
But she empathised with them, too, not least in their desire for
women--"I am a man and I love women," she once confessed in her
diary--though many of her stories have an undercurrent of
homoeroticism. Feminists, meanwhile, were "always complaining about
something". Despite her shame at being a lesbian, she oozed sexual
charisma and had a ravenous carnal appetite. She wrote what may be
the first novel about lesbian love to have a happy ending, "The Price
of Salt" (1952), but she published it under a pseudonym and abjured
monogamy herself, believing it undermined her creativity.

Her star rose rapidly, then steadily declined. None of the four
Ripley sequels matches the darkly brilliant and haunting quality of
the original, published in 1955. Highsmith clearly identified with
her lonely, amoral and painfully self-conscious anti-hero, who is
most at ease when pretending to be someone else. "If you wanted to be
cheerful, or melancholic, or wistful, or thoughtful, or courteous,"
Ripley reflects, "you simply had to act those things with every
gesture."

Like him, she sought exile in Europe, settling finally in a
fortress-like home in Ticino, Switzerland, where she stewed in her
racism and outspoken anti-Semitism and mostly kept to herself. Often
hostile, generally drunk, she pecked at her Olympia typewriter at all
hours. "If she hadn't had her work, she would have been sent to an
insane asylum or an alcoholics' home," a lover told Andrew Wilson,
another biographer. The last person to see her before she died was
her accountant.

Yet on her centenary her piercing view of human relations, brought to
the screen by directors including Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony
Minghella, is as captivating as ever. Shortly before he bludgeons his
friend with an oar, Ripley has an epiphany:

    It struck Tom like a horrible truth, true for all time, true for
    the people he had known in the past and for those he would know
    in the future: each had stood and would stand before him, and he
    would know time and time again that he would never know them, and
    the worst was that there would always be the illusion, for a
    time, that he did know them, and that he and they were completely
    in harmony and alike.

Highsmith's genius was to gaze frankly at the gulf of mystery that
separates people--and at the same time, through the brilliance of her
characters, to bridge it. #

This article appeared in the Books & arts section of the print
edition under the headline "The lives of others"

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