Flashback Remembering novelist Patricia Highsmith, who led a life ahead of her time

Novelist Patricia Highsmith was born 100 years ago this month, but led a life ahead of her time

Patricia Highsmith had just completed her first novel, Strangers on a Train, when she left America for Europe in June 1949. Around the time the photograph to the far right was taken, the 28-year-old – who went on to become one of the most celebrated crime writers of all time – sailed on the Queen Mary from New York to Southampton. She was bitter that she had to travel tourist rather than first class; Noël Coward was making the same journey in style and yet a meeting would prove impossible as she was confined ‘below deck’.

Highsmith’s savings from her work writing comic strips had been eaten up by the therapy sessions she’d undergone in an unsuccessful bid to make herself heterosexual. Before leaving New York, Highsmith had become engaged to author Marc Brandel, whom she met in 1948 at Yaddo, the artists’ colony in upstate New York. Although she admired the British-born Brandel, she found physical relations with him unpleasant. It was, she later related, like ‘steel wool in the face’.

By her late 20s, Highsmith had enjoyed sex with dozens of women, but she had been scarred by growing up in Fort Worth, Texas, with her difficult mother, Mary. When Highsmith was 14, her mother – who had tried to abort her daughter by drinking turpentine – asked her, ‘Are you a les?’ before adding, ‘You are beginning to make noises like one.’

Highsmith felt Europe offered a means of escape from the confines of conventionality. She wrote in her notebook that ‘America is fatally off the mark of the true reality’ and that ‘the

Europeans have it precisely’.

Her first stop was London, where she became smitten with Kathryn Cohen, the wife of her British publisher. She stayed with the Cohens for a fortnight, before she set off alone on a European tour. In Paris, she visited Le Monocle, the infamous lesbian nightclub, after which she noted in her diary, ‘No such dissolute three days in all my life before.’

Highsmith met up with Cohen in Naples in September and soon they became lovers. They travelled to Positano, on the Amalfi coast, which Highsmith would cast as Mongibello in her most famous novel, The Talented Mr Ripley (made into a film starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon and Jude Law). Highsmith’s affair with Cohen was intense but brief – Kathryn eventually died by suicide in 1960 – but the romance of the Amalfi coast stayed with her.

It was in Positano during the summer of 1952 that Highsmith had the inspiration for Tom Ripley, who featured in five of her 22 novels. One morning at the Hotel Miramare, looking down to the beach from her balcony, she saw a young man strolling along the sand. ‘There was an air of pensiveness about him, maybe unease,’ she said. And so her charming murderer was born.

In 1963, Highsmith made Europe her permanent home, settling first in Suffolk before moving to France, and then finally Switzerland, where she died in 1995 at the age of 74. Highsmith’s personal life was messy and despite having a string of lovers, she died alone. She left the bulk of her $3 million estate to Yaddo, where she’d written a large part of Strangers on a Train.

In a poem Highsmith wrote when she was only 20, she fantasised about her future life: she imagined travelling around the world and meeting hundreds of people, yet predicted that she’d still be lonely. ‘I am the forever seeking,’ she said.

Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith by Andrew Wilson (Bloomsbury, £14.99)

The Talented Mr Ripley