Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith, by Richard Bradford Frances Wilson
FRANCES WILSON Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith
When it was pointed out to Patricia Highsmith that her characters lacked basic humanity, she reflected on whether it might be ‘because I don’t like anyone’.
A stalker, sadist and nymphomaniacal lesbian, she was soused in gin from dawn to dusk. Her hatreds, which consisted of groups rather than individuals, included Catholics, Latinos, black people, the French, the Portuguese, Koreans, South Asians, Arabs and Native Americans.
She liked the Palestinians, but only because they shared a common enemy in the Jews; she thought the Holocaust should be called the ‘Semicaust’ because the Nazis succeeded in exterminating only half the globe’s Jewish population.
She also liked animals which, she believed, should be fed aborted foetuses as a sign ‘of respect’, and her handbag contained hundreds of snails which she would release at peoples’ houses. Her admiration for snails was born of watching them copulate, a process which involved no emotion or engagement whatsoever.
Flaws aside, there is no denying that Highsmith was, like her most famous invention Tom Ripley, very, very talented.
Her debut novel, Strangers on a Train (1950), was filmed by Hitchcock. Her second novel, a lesbian romance called The Price of Salt (1952), was filmed in 2015 as Carol, starring Cate Blanchett. Her third novel, The Talented Mr Ripley (1955), consolidated her genius. Four further Ripley novels followed.
Tom Ripley, described by Richard Bradford as ‘one of the most fascinating exercises in autobiographical fiction ever produced’, is a fraudster, psychopath and murderer who remains remote from the suffering he causes and gets no evident pleasure from his achievements.
The Ripliad, as the series is known, makes bleak and compulsive reading, and so too does Bradford’s biography.
‘Highsmith has done more than anyone,’ Bradford argues, ‘to erode the boundaries between crime-writing as a recreational sub-genre and literature as high art.’ And Highsmith has done more than anyone to show how character traits that are repellent in the author herself become glamorous and appealing in her fictional counterparts.
Born in Texas in 1921, Patricia was a botched abortion. Highsmith was thrilled to learn her mother had tried to end her pregnancy by injecting turpentine into her own womb. Her parents divorced when she was a baby. When Patricia was three, her mother married Stanley Highsmith. By the time she was eight, murderous hatred of her parents had become a default position.
We know about Highsmith’s inner life because she recorded it all in her diary and in a thrilling set of notebooks she called her cahiers, which provide the main source of this biography. We must not, however, as Bradford reminds us, take these sources at face value.
Highsmith’s private writings contain large doses of fantasy, proving that from an early age she was unable to distinguish reality from fiction.
‘Any idea of any close relationship should be imaginary,’ she explained to herself, ‘like any story I am writing. This way no harm can come to me or any person.’
Her interest in deviant characters began in childhood, and by the time she enrolled at New York’s Barnard College in 1938, Highsmith had cultivated a deviant persona of her own. In a white shirt and tailored suit, with a fag dangling from the side of her mouth, she now embarked on the career as ‘an emotional vandal’ that fuelled her success as a crime writer.
There are so many lovers in these pages that the reader loses both count and interest. Suffice to say that the pattern is largely the same: an instant seduction is followed by a period of infatuation leading to a sadistic psychodrama.
Highsmith had no idea how to love or to be loved, or how to be basically civil, and her enjoyment of breaking up relationships extended to her sleeping with the girlfriend of her agent.
The wonder is that so many women, and a good number of men, were drawn to her. The strangest of her relationships was with Ronald Blythe, the mildmannered celibate and lay reader for the Church of England, now 98, whose most famous book, Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (1969), was a study of the Suffolk town of Aldeburgh.
Blythe, Bradford brilliantly concludes, was a ‘human version of one of her snails’. By the time she died in 1995, leaving behind her a trail of slime, she had also become more snail than human.
Bradford is less concerned with making sense of Highsmith than with making sense of her novels, and in this he succeeds handsomely. Her fiction, we come to see, is much more complex, multi-layered and disturbing than we had previously thought.
As one traumatised lover put it, ‘If she hadn’t had her work, she would have been sent to an insane asylum or an alcoholics’ home… She was her writing.’