 |
| (click on or tap to see larger) |
She was born in Fort Worth, Texas in the boardinghouse of her beloved grandmother, Willie Mae Coates. Patricia Highsmith was the product of a disastrous relationship: her parents divorced before she was born. Jay Plangman, her biological father, was distraught over his young wife’s pregnancy and encouraged her to terminate it. Highsmith’s mother, Mary, attempted to do so, swallowing turpentine at the suggestion of a helpful friend. Mary decided she did want her child and didn’t want Plangman. The abortion attempt failed, Mary filed for divorce, and Patricia was born unharmed. In later years, Mary would joke about her daughter’s attraction to the smell of turpentine.
When Patricia was three, Mary met and married Stanley Highsmith. Patsy took an instant dislike to her stepfather. For one thing, he corrected her pronunciation of “sesame,” which she thought was pronounced “see-same.” Her grandmother Willie Mae had taught her to read as a baby, and like the cats she would adore throughout her life, Patricia didn’t like to be humiliated. Stanley’s correction destroyed the magical feeling the special word gave her. She never forgot or forgave this transgression. Mary and Stanley’s relationship was troubled and they often fought, another reason Highsmith disliked him. She read voraciously and precociously, devouring Sherlock Holmes stories and the works of the man who shared her January 19th birthday, Edgar Allen Poe. Later she would fall in love with the work of Feyodor Dostoyevsky, Franz Kafka, and Oscar Wilde. Her favorite novel was Moby Dick.
The Highsmiths moved to New York, back to Texas, and again to New York. Both Stanley and Mary worked as illustrators. Eventually, Pat was left with Willie Mae in Texas and resented the abandonment the rest of her life. Her relationship with Mary would always remain stormy. Mary enjoyed her work and wasn’t particularly cut out to be a mother. Her love of career and modern outlook influenced Highsmith profoundly, but it also caused her unhappiness. The upheavals were destabilizing for a sensitive child. Returning to New York as a teen, Highsmith attended the all-girl Julia Richman High School where she was good friends with Judy Holliday (who then had brown hair and the last name Tuvim). She had crushes on many girls and a dawning realization that she was more attracted to them than boys. She began keeping a journal (a habit she maintained her whole life), noting down her thoughts and observations. She frequented Greenwich Village cafés and bars, the Jumble Shop being a favorite.
It was around this time she wrote her first story. She later remembered that it began: “He prepared to go to sleep, removed his shoes and set them parallel, toe outwards, beside the bed.” The words gave her feeling of order and control. The ability to give structure to a jumble of thoughts was important to Highsmith. The dozens of journals and notebooks she filled attest to this. During high school she wrote Crime Begins, a story about a girl who shoplifts. She drew inspiration from an urge she had to steal a library book from school. Thus began her lifelong practice of satisfying urges and desires through fiction. Ever polite and civilized, she was able to experience bad or asocial behavior via the characters she wrote about. Her most famous creation, Tom Ripley, literally got away with murder again and again. It wasn’t always murder her subjects got away with; sometimes they simply didn’t want to be in a relationship or skirted moral codes in some way. Highsmith was constantly scrutinizing human behavior and social mores. In This Sweet Sickness the main character, David Kelsey, lies throughout much of the book, telling his friends he’s visiting his old mother in a nursing home when he’s really cultivating a house he hopes his estranged ex-fiancé will move into. In The Tremor Of Forgery one of the characters may have committed an accidental murder, and the questionable morality hangs over the story like a bad smell. This technique created high tension. The complexity of her mind did not allow for gratuitous, unchecked violence—there always is a veritable labyrinth of consequences and possible repercussions when her characters go astray. She excelled at creating moral gordian knots. She relished the idea of a reader being drawn into sympathy with a character who was capable of terrible things.
She went to college at another all-female school, Bernard in New York. Although she got a degree in literature, she never learned to type. She did this purposely to avoid falling back on a practical skill. She wanted to be a writer, not a typist. She was writing more and more in notebooks, or cahiers, as she liked to call them: ideas for stories, observations, notes. In her wonderful how-to book Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, Highsmith recommends writers always keep a notebook with them, and if they have a day job, make it a small one. During her college days, Highsmith wrote her first major short story The Heroine. It was roundly rejected by magazines for being too disturbing. The story tells of an unbalanced young governess who fantasizes about setting fire to the house of her employers so that she can save their children and appear to be a heroine. Eventually it was published, four years after she wrote it, by Harper’s Bazaar. This would be a trend throughout Highsmith’s career: the uphill battle of getting and keeping publishers. Many of her stories languished for decades. Although she was a writer of undoubted talent and success, in later years she endured humiliating rejections by many American publishers. Edith’s Diary was rejected by Knopf, although it later got good reviews when published by Simon & Schuster. On the other hand, reading the clunky dialogue in Found In The Street, one can see that her talent and judgement had wavered over the years. The characters don’t ring true, nor does their self-consciously pithy, pronoun-lacking dialogue. Perhaps she had spent too much time alone, and forgotten how people speak to one another.
After she graduated from Bernard, realizing it was going to be difficult to get her own work published, Highsmith secured a job writing for the Jewish press. She also wrote dialogue for comic books. After two false starts trying to write a novel, in 1945 she came up with the “germ,” as she called her ideas, for her first successful book, Strangers On A train. Her acquaintance Truman Capote helped secure her a few weeks at Yaddo artist colony, where she was able to make major headway on her book. Capote and Highsmith were not close. In fact, Highsmith later said Capote's generosity had been inspired by his wanting to sublet her apartment. She submitted Strangers On A Train to six publishers when it was half done and they all turned it down. When she completed it, the first publisher she submitted it to snapped it up. The first six didn’t believe she could pull off the bizarre ending she proposed! Highsmith clearly reveled in pushing the boundaries of what a reader found feasible. It is a hallmark of much of her work, and an aspect that makes her stories gripping. Strangers On A Train is about the chance meeting of two very different men. It is an exploration of their respective psyches and worlds. One is a prosperous, but troubled architect, the other a drunken misfit relying on his wealthy mother for handouts. In the story their lives and minds cross paths and dangerously cross-pollinate. Like her most famous book, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Strangers pushes the reader’s ability to discern right and wrong. Once sympathy is gained for the protagonist, Highsmith has all kinds of devilish fun. Both of these books, and several others, have been clamored over for the film rights and made into films of various quality. Highsmith never really liked any of the movies made from her stories—they always fell short.
In the late forties, Highsmith would begin one of her most interesting, personal and insightful books: The Price of Salt. Based on many of her own experiences, the book chronicles the life of a young orphan starting out after college. The protagonist, Therese, is becoming aware that she is attracted to women and begins a relationship with an older, married woman she encounters at her job in a department store. Highsmith had been trying to reign-in her attraction to women, even submitting to psychotherapy to try to become “straight.” The Price of Salt chronicles a woman going through emotional turmoil—attempting to be “normal,” but secretly knowing she is different. Highsmith published the book under a pseudonym and later, when her authorship was revealed, bristled at journalists wanting to know about her personal life. Her history of relationships was stormy and fraught with many troubles, but The Price Of Salt made it clear she never again intended to deny or question her true self. Her disinterest in answering personal sexual questions was not out of shame, but privacy: Highsmith rarely spoke of any aspect of her personal life.
In the early sixties, Highsmith left the United States to live out the rest of her life in Europe. European publishers and readers were more responsive to her work, and Highmith chose to live where she was better appreciated. She lived in England, France and, in the end, Switzerland. Living in quiet villages (they could never be quiet enough—Highsmith abhorred noise) with her cats and snails (the latter at one point multiplied into the hundreds), Highsmith wrote. She had many relationships, some lasting for years, but none were enduring. Highsmith discouraged relationships in Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, saying it was a drain on creativity. She took her own advice. Relationships were difficult for her, as they often are for those who come from dysfunctional families. She did value her friends and human contact, which the hundreds of letters she wrote and received attest to. Highsmith suffered from unchecked alcoholism, and that didn’t make her an ideal mate either. She justified her lack of a “better half” in books like The Tremor Of Forgery and The Cry Of The Owl. The protagonists reject the relationships presented to them and the stories seem to be elaborate explanations as to why. In Crime Begins Highsmith explored an idea that obsessed her (shoplifting) without negative consequences. Her real life was far messier and unhappy—she longed for companionship, but wasn’t able to make it work. Like Robert Forester in The Cry Of The Owl, or David Kelsey in This Sweet Sickness, Highsmith seemed to prefer an ideal fantasy to a flawed reality. These stories and others neatly present her arguments, but they are also profoundly sad. Edith’s Diary chronicles the life of a woman who finds she can only really live and be happy in her diary. Instead of courageously attacking her problems and improving her life, she slips away into fantasy and madness. Highsmith questioned the value of relationships, but also obviously longed for one.
Not surprisingly, Highsmith never resolved the differences with her mother. Mary had been a constant critic of her daughter, and Highsmith could not forgive her mother’s shortcomings. As Mary got older she began suffering from dementia, and eventually cut off contact with Highsmith. Instead of forgiving and sympathizing, Highsmith accepted this cold conclusion to a chilly relationship. Relieved, perhaps, at being let of the proverbial hook. In a short story called The Terrapin, Highsmith wrote of a sensitive, lonely boy whose callous, self-absorbed mother cooks the turtle he befriends and adores. How the boy responds to the mother’s brutality (which I will leave the reader to find out for themselves) is telling. Highsmith didn’t do anything as drastic to her own mother, but her long abandonment of Mary during what was probably a very lonely, frightening and sad time speaks volumes about how bitter she was.
Patricia Highsmith’s writing career spanned fifty years, sometimes with utter brilliance, sometimes a little slap-dash. A slew of uncollected short stories that was posthumously published as Nothing That Meets The Eye is full of wonderful gems like The Mightiest Mornings, and the bizarre Uncertain Treasure. The Mightiest Mornings is about a man who decides he wants a fresh start in life and moves to a town in rural New York on a whim. He befriends a small girl, which spirals into a weird and unsettling tale. Uncertain Treasure similarly takes the reader on a strange and unexpected journey following a man who snatches a bag he believes contains something valuable. Highsmith could write about seemingly anything with equal facility and had an endless, wonderful imagination. Pegged as a suspense writer, her range reaches far beyond that. Its possible she self-censored some of her work feeling it wasn’t what her publishers wanted. Highsmith’s best writing is intelligent, thoughtful, aware, and always interesting.There is a strong sense of the visual; Highsmith once toyed with the idea of becoming a painter. She loved Balthus, Edvard Munch, Francis Bacon and Oskar Kokoshka.
Patricia Highsmith, ravaged by a lifetime of alcoholism and smoking, died in 1995 of lung cancer and aplastic anemia. Her mother Mary had died only four years before, at the age of ninety-five. They hadn’t spoken for the last 16 years, although Highsmith (grudgingly at times) helped pay for her mother’s care. Highsmith had no significant loved-one to leave her several million dollars to, so she left her assets and royalties to the Yaddo artist colony. As always, at the heart of the matter, was hard work and more work. Her one constant and true love had always been her writing. Yaddo had nurtured and helped her, and she wanted to help other writers. Even towards the end, Highsmith continued to use her work to look at life, to think and to wonder. In her stories are fascinating worlds she created, tinkered with and transformed. Highsmith used writing to figure out life and play with her ideas about it. One would think she dreamed up happy fantasies, but her stories often end unhappily. She used her writing to explore possibilities, but it was always based on truth. This is why her work is so powerful—she never relied on mysticism to explain the strangeness of life, it was always painfully truthful, and much of the pain was her own.
©2016 Alice DuBois
For More Information See:
- The Talented Miss Highsmith By Joan Schenkar, Picador, 2011
- Beautiful Shadow By Andrew Wilson, Bloomsbury, 2003
No comments:
Post a Comment