A nymphomaniac racist who drank from breakfast till bedtime? Not the Patricia Highsmith that I remember...
Terrible people can write wonderful books, and wonderful people can write terrible books. Yes, it may be unfair, but it is nevertheless a fact of life. Dickens, Tolstoy, Byron and Hardy all led dodgy private lives, but created great works. The Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1920. In the 1930s, he became a cheerleader for Nazism, gave his Nobel Prize medal to Joseph Goebbels, and wrote an obituary of Hitler, in which he declared: ‘He was a warrior for mankind, and a prophet of the gospel of justice for all nations.’ It would be comforting to say that his novels were awful, but they were brilliant: spare, nerve-tingling, and wholly original.
Patricia Highsmith died in 1995, aged 74. Since her death, she has been the subject of two weighty (and exceptionally good) biographies and one memoir. Meanwhile, her novels have grown increasingly popular and well-regarded. Many of them, notably The Talented Mr Ripley and Carol, have been successfully filmed. Andrew Scott is playing Tom Ripley in a forthcoming TV series.
She was, however, no saint, and her latest biographer, Richard Bradford, adopts the role of Crown Prosecutor, or even Witchfinder General. Within the first four pages, he has variously accused her of being an alcoholic who ‘worked hard at remaining drunk from breakfast until bedtime’, a lesbian who rejoiced in breaking up couples and pursuing a ‘busy career as a nymphomaniac’, and a racist who hated Arabs and Jews.
A quick glance under H for Highsmith, Patricia in the index gives one a sense of her biographer’s point of view. After D for ‘drives friends away’, comes this alphabetical rundown of her different character traits: ‘emotional vandal; exhibitionist; infectious evil nature of; knife obsession; lacks feelings for others; leads life of deceit; loutish sense of humour; love of pain; masochism; mean; murderous; preoccupation with the macabre; sadistic nature; self-loathing.’
The outrageous stories Professor Bradford chooses to tell about her have all been told before, by her previous biographers, but are well worth hearing again, like a much-loved album of greatest hits.
She kept up to a hundred pet snails in her handbag, and once smuggled a dozen into England in the bra she was wearing. She liked to eat raw meat, straight off the bone. She once swung her pet cat around in a bag, explaining that she wanted it to enjoy the giddy sensation of being drunk. On another occasion, she battered a large rat to death and threw it through an open window at her startled guests.
She was extraordinarily quarrelsome. When her mother, equally deranged, came to stay with her in Suffolk, they argued so much that Patricia telephoned her local GP saying that they both required sedation, and that she was contemplating murder, as her mother had just threatened to strangle her with a coat hanger.
It’s all a far cry from Jane Austen, and certainly explains why, the first time I met her, at her home outside Paris, she told me, in a perplexed tone of voice, that she had just had friends staying, and had been expecting them to stay two or three more days, but, when she came downstairs in the morning, they had gone. On another occasion, I asked her about revenge. She said she hated the idea. ‘Mind you, the people I really detest seem to come to bad ends anyway. Car crashes and that sort of thing.’
In his endless litany of her shortcomings, Professor Bradford misses out many of her more engaging characteristics. For instance, he barely mentions her sense of humour, which may have been macabre, but was always there, hovering, ready to pounce. ‘A young man asked a father for his daughter’s hand,’ begins one of her short stories, ‘and received it in a box – her left hand.’
She loved the comic novels of Tom Sharpe. In conversation, she would often give a wry smile. I remember her chuckling when I brought up the subject of Lord Lucan. ‘Oh, Lord Lucan, he’s a gem, isn’t he? I’ve got rather fond of him. To think he’s possibly still alive and living well!’ One of her favourite adjectives was ‘amusing’, even if she applied it to subjects other people treated as horrific. In her guest bedroom, there was a book by the pathologist Dr Keith Simpson. ‘Yes, I like the Simpson book. It’s amusing.’
She was a gifted artist, and her paintings and drawings have a gentle innocence about them, quite at odds with her writing. Bradford doesn’t bother to examine this discrepancy. There was also a vulnerability about her, a nervousness beneath the armour. ‘Writers and painters have by nature little in the way of protective shells and try all their lives to remove what they have, since various buffetings and impressions are the material they need to work from,’ she writes in her fascinating handbook Plotting And Writing Suspense Fiction, a revealing work that Bradford dismisses as full of lies.
Nor does Bradford acknowledge her complete dedication to her work. If you are drunk and debauched all day, you cannot write 22 novels and countless short stories (a new small selection of them published by Virago runs to more than 600 pages) as well as 8,000 pages of notebooks.
Bradford’s stated aim is to show that Patricia Highsmith’s novels were what he calls ‘a lifelong autobiography’. He then goes through each of them explaining, with unmerited certainty, who this or that character was in real life. Needless to say, the murderer is usually Highsmith herself.
This may come as a surprise to her readers. Patricia Highsmith’s novels revolve around men. Only one of them – the sublime Edith’s Diary – is seen from the viewpoint of a woman. The characters she used to describe as ‘my psychopath heroes’ are all men who tend to kill in moments of rage, and then live in dread of being found out.
She herself was terrified of killing anyone. Her novels focus much more on the dread of being found out than the actual act of murder. ‘I’ve had two dreams, wildly separated, that I’ve killed somebody,’ she once told me. ‘In one of the dreams, it was a certain person whom I know, an older woman I specially dislike; she’s an American but I dislike her because she’s crooked. But the idea that you’ve done it! It’s the most dreadful feeling to me. Then one dream, I was going in some
place to buy a newspaper and I put some money down but I had the feeling that everyone could tell that I’d killed somebody. Dreadful, really dreadful.’
Needless to say, Bradford often has a hard time trying to equate each fictional character with their real-life counterpart, and tangles himself in knots trying to do so. ‘Tom Ripley is one of the most fascinating exercises in autobiographical fiction ever produced. In all obvious respects he bears no resemblance to his creator,’ he writes, ‘yet when we look at the two of them the parallels are extraordinary and bizarre.’ That poor little word ‘yet’ cannot bear the weight of the contradictions laid on top of it.
You could argue that any fiction has an autobiographical base, as it has to emerge from the singular mind of its author. But Bradford undervalues the power of the imagination, and goes out of his way to diminish Highsmith’s extraordinary ability to create small-town characters outside the scope of her everyday life.
As his biography progresses, you sense that his dislike of Patricia Highsmith’s character – at one point he calls her ‘a liar and a sadist’ – is fuelling an ever-increasing dislike of her books.
Some, it is true, are better than others, but Bradford finds fault even with the finest. He considers The Tremor Of Forgery ‘extraordinarily foul’; Ripley’s Game ‘a masterpiece of incoherence and implausibility’; Deep Water ‘particularly horrible’; Those Who Walk Away ‘infuriatingly directionless’; and Ripley Under Water ‘ ponderous and fatiguing’. Most of her later books he dismisses as ‘some of the most dreadful pieces of suspense fiction ever to go into print’. They possess, he says, ‘a selfish disregard for anything but themselves’, whatever that means.
This book is as snappy as an alligator: not for the first time, a biographer’s subject is also his victim, and those who wish to see Patricia Highsmith devoured will no doubt applaud it. But part of me wonders whether its title – Devils, Lusts And Strange Desires – might not, just as usefully, be applied to Professor Bradford himself.