[Marxism] Patricia Highsmith

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22797
Volume 56, Number 11 · July 2, 2009
This Woman Is Dangerous
By Michael Dirda

The Complete Ripley Novels: The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under 
Ground, Ripley's Game, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, Ripley Under Water
by Patricia Highsmith
Norton, 1,456 pp. (boxed set), $100.00

"The essential American soul," wrote D.H. Lawrence in a celebrated 
description, "is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer." Of course, he was 
talking about Natty Bumppo and similar rough-and-tumble frontier 
spirits. By contrast, the amoral Tom Ripley—novelist Patricia 
Highsmith's most famous character—is easygoing, devoted to his wife and 
friends, epicurean, and a killer only by necessity. By my count, 
necessity leads this polite aesthete to bludgeon or strangle eight 
people and watch with satisfaction while two others drown. He also sets 
in motion the successful suicides of three friends he actually, in his 
way, cares about. Yet aside from an occasional twinge about his first 
murder, Ripley feels no long-term guilt over these deaths. (Tellingly, 
he can never quite remember the actual number of his victims.) He was 
simply protecting himself, his friends and business partners, his home. 
Any man would, or at least might, do the same.

Tom, as his indulgent creator tends to call him, first appeared in The 
Talented Mr. Ripley (1955). This was Highsmith's fourth published book, 
preceded by three highly original novels. In Strangers on a Train 
(1950)—later filmed (and softened) by Alfred Hitchcock—two men, hitherto 
unknown to each other, "exchange" murders, Bruno agreeing to kill Guy's 
estranged wife in return for Guy doing away with Bruno's hated father. 
Each will consequently possess a perfect alibi. In The Price of Salt 
(1953, published under the name Claire Morgan) the nineteen-year-old 
Therese falls in love with the married Carol—and perhaps for the first 
time a novel about lesbians ends happily. In paperback this story of "a 
love that society forbids" sold over a million copies. In The Blunderer 
(1954) Highsmith fully established what would become her trademark 
theme: the blurring of fantasy and reality, usually reinforced by some 
sort of folie à deux, in which two very different people, almost always 
men, grow symbiotically obsessed with each other, ultimately to the 
point of madness and mutual destruction. In this case, a successful 
murderer is undone because a blundering fool hopes to emulate him.
Little Bookroom / Savoir Fare London

By the time Highsmith (1921–1995) came to write The Talented Mr. Ripley, 
she was just entering her thirties. Born in Texas to an overbearing 
mother whom she grew to loathe, Highsmith attended Barnard College 
during World War II, where she studied Latin and modern languages, 
edited the school newspaper, and read widely in American and European 
literature. From an early age, she drank hard, fell in and out of love 
with various women (and one or two men), and rather quickly came to 
understand her own severe and private nature. Far more than Tom Ripley, 
she fits that Lawrentian description of being hard, isolate, and stoic, 
especially in her later years, when she grew increasingly cranky and 
notorious for her caustic remarks and prejudices. In her youth, though, 
the novelist was more outgoing and distinctly attractive, albeit in a 
slightly butch way. In Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s her one-time 
lover, Marijane Meaker, describes her as "tall and thin. Black, 
shoulder-length hair, with dark brown eyes. She looked like a 
combination of Prince Valiant and Rudolf Nureyev."

Highsmith lived all her life by her pen and typewriter (an Olympia 
manual), starting off by producing copy for comics and later turning out 
a steady stream of suspense and horror stories, many of which appeared 
in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Her novels never became popular in 
the US. Here she might sell only four thousand copies of, say, Edith's 
Diary (1977)—and ten times that number in France or Germany. Little 
wonder that she preferred to spend her later years in Europe. The 
English-speaking world might casually slot her as a writer of crime 
fiction, but Europeans honored her as a psychological novelist, part of 
an existentialist tradition represented by her own favorite writers, in 
particular Dostoevsky, Conrad, Kafka, Gide, and Camus. (That astute 
critic Brigid Brophy once called her a Dostoevsky "whose gifts include 
humour and charm.") Highsmith's books, after all, explore human souls in 
extremis, chronicle men and women sliding toward breakdown, probe the 
fluid nature of identity, and generally conclude that life is little 
more than an absurdity and a cheat, when not a downright horror.

Such a bleak outlook makes even Highsmith's best work upsetting and, to 
some readers, distinctly unpleasant. Yet she's seldom graphic in her 
brief descriptions of violence and she never depicts the details of 
sexual encounters. The hallmark of her work is a calm, hallucinatory 
intensity built on sentences of unemotional plainness and clarity. Her 
hypersensitive protagonists, logically, inexorably, spiral downhill from 
ordinary anxiety to murderous rage and madness. Like animals keenly 
alert for invisible traps or New Yorkers in the first uneasy months 
after September 11, Highsmith's characters move through their lives with 
an ever-increasing and sometimes justified wariness. Graham Greene 
famously called her "a poet of apprehension" who had "created a world of 
her own—a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time 
with a sense of personal danger."

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My review of Patricia Highsmith:

http://www.swans.com/library/art14/lproy43.html

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