Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith, 1942, photographed by Rolf Tietgens

I saw Andrew Wilson’s biography of Highsmith on a bookshelf yesterday, along with a bunch of the Tom Ripley novels and Strangers on a Train.  I only knew a little about her novels, but I knew they were dark thrillers, but the main image in my mind was of the Matt Damon Ripley.

So I read The Talented Mr. Ripley yesterday and most of the biography today.  The book’s more literary than I expected – I guess I thought of the Ripley series as a movie thing, like Mission Impossible.  But the actual book is more like a Graham Greene ‘Entertainment.’  (whichever one it is where the guy is hiding in the sheds from Mr. Cholmondeley..)  The biography was written dreadfully (lists of statistics to give historical setting, overuse of quotes from critics to try to interpret her novels, poor job of summarizing plots and themes of the novels etc..)  But her story is so fascinating (and the pictures included say so much) that it can’t help being interesting in spite of the writing.

Biographies of writers always impress me in a serious way and shame my laziness.  Mainly because it’s so easy to want to be a writer or make anything at all that lasts, but so few people actually have the drive to sit down, day after day, and do it.  And there are so many things to stop you along the way – failures and successes.  Everyone knows the stories of writers who persevered through failures, and they are impressive: working single-mindedly through years of rejections.  But I’m more in awe of a writer’s ability to work in spite of success.  It requires a ton of ambition and focus to motivate yourself to spend hours and hours on a solitary task when there are so many social outlets to distract you.  And the more successful you are, whether in writing, in your relationships, in your looks or humor, the more social pleasures there are to turn down, and it must be terribly difficult.  Highsmith noticed this: “The plane of social intercourse is not the plane of creation, not the plane on which creative ideas fly.”

The picture above is from the biography and Wilson got it from Highsmith’s papers in a Swiss archive.  It’s  unusual for a biography of a novelist to have a nude photo of the subject, but this one is so intriguing that the story would be much less without it.  It’s a visual sign of the forces in her life: she’s beautiful, a lesbian, promiscious, but completely unhappy and unsatisfied in romance.  She looks so innocent and beautiful but is driven above all else to write dark novels aboout psychopaths.  And all of these charactersitics are related, of course, and it would be easy to construct reasons for everything: because she was a lesbian in a time when it wasn’t accepted she was forced outside conventional society; because of her looks, and later her fame, she could sleep with many people, but because of her childhood, or ambition or the lack of a model of a lesbian marriage, she never was satisfied.  But that’s the drawback of biography – it tempts you to find a story, with cause and effect, where there is none.  We can’t really say why we did something we did ourselves, much less look back fifty years to letters and facts and say she did this because of that.  And of course that’s the appeal of fiction – the author creates the characters and leads you from cause to effect.  But even that can be too tidy, and there are some quotes from Highsmith’s letters in which she repsonds to a publisher or reviewer calling her characters ‘inconsistent’ by saying that inconsistency is what makes them real.

Finally, some interesting tidbits from the biography: Graham Greene was a big fan of hers.  She finished her first novel, Strangers on a Train, at a writers’ colony in upstate NY – she got in with help from a recommendation from Truman Capote; the admissions committee thought she had better writing skills than the ‘more serious’ writers applying; she left her entire estate and future royalties to the colony when she died 50 years later.  She really identified with Tom Ripley – sometimes even signing her name Pat / Tom.  She made a living for five years in her early twenties writing the stories for comic books.