This article is part of T’s Book Club, a series of essays and events dedicated to classic works of American literature. Click here to R.S.V.P. to a virtual conversation about “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” to be led by Edmund White and held on April 22.
Who was Patricia Highsmith? Most answers warrant a rebuttal. The writer was a collision of contradictions, a woman for whom every aspect of herself (including being a woman) demanded internal debate. In her private life, she swung dramatically between polar states of desire and disgust. Her personal journals that she kept her whole life — separate from what she called her “cahiers,” or notebooks in which she worked on her fiction — reveal a woman at the mercy of her emotional tides, drawn to the darkest corners of her psyche.
This fraught multiplicity fueled her fiction. Her characters longed to escape the drudgery of selfhood and convention. She seems to have adopted the French writer André Gide’s notion of character, whereby contradiction is our most human quality — consistency, he wrote in his 1925 novel “The Counterfeiters,” “is on the contrary the very thing which makes us recognize that [characters] are artificially composed.” Highsmith’s most enduring creation, the duplicitous Tom Ripley, took this notion to such extremes of moral indifference that he frightened many readers, but his unpredictability rang true for Highsmith, for whom Ripley was a pen-and-ink alter ego. “Every book is an argument with myself,” she wrote, even if she had no desire for resolution. Rather, her work revealed the writer as she was, a multitude of warring selves — the public and the private, the moral and the degenerate, the loving and the conniving. Tellingly, there are three biographies about Highsmith: Andrew Wilson’s “Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith” (2003); Joan Schenkar’s “The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith” (2009); and Richard Bradford’s “Devils, Lusts, and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith,” published earlier this year. Below, an examination of several facets of the complicated writer.
Married to Mother
Highsmith’s mother, Mary Coates, was born in Alabama in 1895 and gave birth to her only child when she was 25 years old. Nothing made Highsmith feel closer to her mother than lighting her cigarette for her. “I’m happy if I can be boss,” the author once wrote of their relationship, which more closely resembled a marriage than anything else. Highsmith stated it even more plainly in a two-line poem from 1940: “I am married to my mother / I shall never wed another.”
Mary, who was a struggling commercial artist (she worked for a period as a fashion illustrator for Women’s Wear Daily, likely instilling in Highsmith her passion for glamorously dressed women), left the biggest impression on her daughter in 1933. That year, Mary — who was in an unstable relationship with Highsmith’s stepfather, Stanley Highsmith, and moved the family between Fort Worth, Texas, and New York City several times — decided to reunite with Stanley in New York. She left Highsmith, then 12, behind in Texas, where Highsmith remained in the care of her grandmother for an entire year. Highsmith thought this an unforgivable betrayal and clung to the incident for the rest of her life, reliving it through her own romantic partnerships. “I repeat the pattern, of course, of my mother’s semi-rejection of me,” she wrote. “I never got over it. Thus I seek out women who will hurt me in a similar manner.”
Highsmith’s relationship with her mother became a decades-long battle for affection and retribution. The two fought so aggressively they once required sedation afterward. Highsmith accused her mother of “trite conversation,” earning a slap on the face, while Mary joked that Highsmith loved the smell of turpentine, which Mary had drunk while pregnant, hoping to miscarry. Highsmith sought vengeance in her writing; she once wrote an outline for a story in which a young girl tenderly puts her mother to bed before taking out a pair of scissors and plunging them into the woman’s heart, smiling.
Beginning in 1964, Mary began writing long-winded letters to her daughter. “[W]e cannot face the future without confronting the past,” she wrote. “It was constantly between us. If it separates us completely — let it. I’ve lost nothing — because I had nothing.” Highsmith would volley back the blame, suggesting that all her character defects, including her queerness, were Mary’s fault. Highsmith pleaded for the letters to cease, but Mary seemingly couldn’t resist continuing the attacks for one more round. In 1974, the year before her house in Fort Worth burned down, forcing her to move into a care facility, Mary penned her last surviving rebuke: “Well, you’ve done it — broken my heart,” she wrote. “Don’t write — I shan’t.”
Macabre Attractions
Throughout her life, Highsmith resisted speaking publicly about her sexuality. She had grown up feeling alienated and confused by her desires, and this played a major part in her love of all things considered “perverse.” Yet that early alienation did not prevent her from embracing her wants as an adult and indulging in the pleasures of promiscuity. She enjoyed infatuations that satiated her appetite for the macabre. In 1948, Highsmith met Ann Smith, a painter and designer, in Provincetown, Mass., and by the end of the day the two were making love among a pile of ropes by a wharf, their efforts impeded only slightly by the bloody cuts covering Smith’s legs — earlier, she had slid down a piling covered in mussels, scraping her legs). Highsmith had helped her wipe off the blood as a prelude to their passion.
From an early age, suicide seemed to haunt Highsmith’s affairs. A girl Highsmith dated in high school told Highsmith of how she’d found her mother with her head in the oven, arriving just in time to pull her out. During her time at Barnard College, Highsmith dated a woman named Virginia whom Highsmith thought looked like the writer Virginia Woolf, and whose cruel affections toward Highsmith became fodder for the latter’s fiction. “Must write something good to calm & satisfy myself,” Highsmith wrote after agonizing over the affair. Years later, Highsmith would become involved with sociologist Ellen Hill, whom the author characterized as “humorless,” and the pair would fight so violently that Hill once tore the shirt off Highsmith’s back. After another fight, as Highsmith was storming out, Hill swallowed a fistful of pills that put her in a coma. She wasn’t the first of Highsmith’s lovers to try taking her own life: Allela Cornell, a boyish painter with whom Highsmith had a brief but intense relationship, attempted suicide — albeit years after dating Highsmith and purportedly over another woman — by drinking nitric acid. She awoke in the hospital expressing regret and a renewed love of life, only to slip into a coma and die the following month.
These sorts of romances could be mirrored in Highsmith’s fiction — thrillers in which seduction was more like a criminal pursuit. After what would turn out to be a life-defining encounter with a beautiful blonde woman at the Bloomingdale’s toy department who would become Highsmith’s muse for Carol in “The Price of Salt” (1952), Highsmith, acting every bit the stalker, secretly followed the woman to her home in New Jersey. “I felt quite close to murder too,” she wrote. “To arrest her suddenly, my hands upon her throat (which I should really like to kiss).” Highsmith must have sensed some dark desperation in the mysterious blonde; according to Wilson’s biography, five months before “The Price of Salt” was published (under a pseudonym), the woman sealed herself in her garage and turned on the car’s engine, gassing herself to death.
A Love of Snails
In 1946, while walking past a New York City fish market, Highsmith spotted two snails locked in a loving embrace. Intrigued, she took them home, placed them in a fishbowl and watched their wriggling copulation, spellbound. As was typical of Highsmith, she was riveted by what others found repulsive or nauseating. “They give me a sort of tranquility,” she said of the gastropods. “It is quite impossible to tell which is the male and which is the female, because their behavior and appearance are exactly the same,” she wrote elsewhere.
Highsmith’s fascination with snails only grew from there. She reportedly kept three hundred of them in her back garden in Suffolk, England, and once brought about a hundred with her to a cocktail party, hidden along with a large head of lettuce in her handbag, which she delighted in showing to surprised guests. Moving from England to France, Highsmith was prohibited by law from bringing her snails into the country, so she smuggled them in under her breasts, fitting up to ten under each.
Snails first slithered into her fiction in 1947, in a short story called “The Snail-Watcher.” In it, a snail enthusiast named Peter Knoppert finds his study has been overwhelmed by the creatures due to their copious breeding, and he is grimly smothered and consumed by them. “He swallowed a snail,” Highsmith wrote. “Choking, he widened his mouth for air and felt a snail crawl over his lips onto his tongue. He was in hell!” Highsmith’s agent deemed the story “too repellent to show editors,” but her friends found Highsmith in her gruesome element amusing.
Disappearing Woman
No matter where Highsmith found herself, she felt she didn’t belong and often fantasized about disappearing. Growing up, she experienced a shyness that could be so overwhelming that it felt “like a physical pain,” Highsmith wrote. When she was older, she traveled widely as a means of escape, living in Mexico, France and England, and completing some of her best work while removed from familiar surroundings.
Her desire to disappear, however, also manifested in ways that were destructive. Around the age of 15, she began to deprive herself of food; years later, she recognized the practice as anorexia, writing about the experience with a similarly emaciated language: “Saving part of anything, living like a rat. Self-depreciation. Lack of food intake in adolescence, to get attention of parents, also to punish myself, for sex reasons etc.”
As she matured, Highsmith found other, more socially acceptable ways to obscure herself, most frequently with drinking. She downed martinis like water and made a habit of mixing liquors to amplify their effect. Some acquaintances questioned whether they had ever known her sober; the designer Phillip Lloyd Powell once said of Highsmith, “She was never visibly drunk. Her darkness would be exuded. She was surrounded by a black cloud. She WAS a black cloud.”
With writing, Highsmith could inhabit the life of another. Her favorite disguise was Ripley, who appeared in five of her novels, and whom she came to think of as her double; she once signed off, “Pat H., alias Ripley.” But fictional lives only offered a temporary fix. “There is no depression for a writer,” she wrote, “but a return to the Self.”
Daughter of the South
If inconsistency was the mark of a believable character, Highsmith practiced this most adamantly in her politics. She was an out (if not necessarily public) queer woman, a supporter of Margaret Thatcher but an opponent of Ronald Reagan, an unapologetic anti-Semite who wrote angry letters spouting racist remarks and a woman who once read the Bible every morning only to turn around in later life and announce her disbelief in God, blaming religion for most of the world’s ills.
The unpredictability of her beliefs could partly be ascribed to her dual upbringing, in New York City’s bohemian Greenwich Village and conservative Fort Worth (where she was born). Highsmith’s Southern roots were a point of pride her entire life — she displayed a pair of Confederate swords in every one of her homes and once named the Civil War general Robert E. Lee as her favorite historical figure. Growing up in Fort Worth, she played with Black children in the alley behind her grandmother Willie Mae Coates’s home, but Coates was horrified to hear that Highsmith shared a classroom with Black children at her school in New York. Highsmith absorbed this hostility, filling her early notebooks with racially prejudicial thoughts. Later in life, she penned letters discouraging the introduction of Black studies at American colleges and blamed Black and Puerto Rican students for the collapse of the U.S. education system: “They take one look at those books,” she wrote, “[and] they say to themselves cripes, I’ll never make it!”
She was even more outspoken about her anti-Semitic views. In 1990, Highsmith wrote an imaginary interview between herself and Yitzhak Shamir, then prime minister of Israel, for a pitch for a German radio show, which refused to air it. As her friend the filmmaker and critic Christa Maerker remembered, “Out of her came something so ghastly that it could be a Nazi text.” “You seem to be courting another Holocaust,” Highsmith imagined telling Shamir. “As you might say, we’ll hold back Holocaust Number Two out of sheer anti-Semitism.”
A generous reader could see Highsmith’s prejudice as politically in favor of the Palestinian cause — she was prepared to leave her entire fortune to the Intifada — but her remarks about Jews and Israel were tinged with an acidic hate that went beyond mere political disagreement. “‘Jew-hater’ is really the proper term for what Patricia Highsmith was,” wrote one of her biographers, Joan Schenkar, in “The Talented Miss Highsmith.” “When she wasn’t calling the Holocaust ‘Holocaust, Inc.,’ she was referring to it as the ‘semicaust’” — implying that Highsmith was disappointed that the Jewish population hadn’t been completely destroyed.
Analyzing the Psychopath
As a child, Highsmith considered Dr. Karl Menninger’s “The Human Mind” (1930), which helped introduce psychiatry to the American masses, to be one of her favorite books. The choice was atypical among her peers, to say the least. While other children read stories of witches and dragons, Highsmith marveled at the abnormalities stirring within every individual. She was fascinated by the mind’s shadowy realms, and this fascination no doubt contributed to her decision, in the late 1940s, to pursue therapy.
Highsmith initially sought help to “get myself into a condition to be married,” she wrote. She wanted to marry Marc Brandel, a friend of hers who wouldn’t stop proposing, but she had some obvious aversions to sleeping with him, later describing their attempts at intercourse as feeling like “steel wool in the face, a sensation of being raped in the wrong place.”
In mid-20th-century New York, analysis was the mark of the intellectual elite. It also promised what was thought to be a legitimate path to curing homosexuality, which “The Human Mind” listed as a perversion akin to pedophilia or satanism. In America, homosexuality was not only a psychological disease but a criminal act. It is unsurprising, then, that Highsmith harbored a soft spot for criminals, who comprised a club of which she no doubt felt herself to be a member.
Highsmith’s analyst Eva Klein Lipshutz concluded that most of Highsmith’s neuroses were caused by her mother; Highsmith was thrilled to receive this diagnosis. Like many psychoanalysts of the time, Lipshutz believed homosexuality could be conquered (she told Highsmith that sex with a man was perfectly normal: “Everyone does it”) and suggested Highsmith join a group of three or four married women who were also in therapy as “latent homosexuals.” “Perhaps I shall amuse myself by seducing a couple of them,” Highsmith wrote.
Eventually, Highsmith dropped analysis. “Bloody angry at having to pay this bill before I leave,” she wrote after her final session. Instead, she found other outlets. In her youth, she had begun diligently recording her dreams and fantasies in her journals — visions of ghostly girls waltzing to Tchaikovsky or girls set on fire in their bathtubs; the ghastlier the better — using them as inspirations for new writing. At least one close friend noticed how Highsmith also found equilibrium when painting or drawing, her inner demons quieted by her studies of shape and form and color. “We’ll never know how much she might have refined and enlarged herself as a visual artist had she chosen to follow that particular calling,” Highsmith’s lifelong friend and fellow Barnard classmate Kate Kingsley Skattebol said. “It was art, even more than love, that released her inborn creativity and showered her with torrents of joy.”
Private Citizen
Highsmith was an intensely private woman. Even in her journals, she felt the need to censor herself. In a pair of entries from 1935, Highsmith wrote, “I cannot write what I want. Suppressions.” And then again, “[Mother] says I am very x and I think so myself for the first time.” Any reference to homosexuality appeared under the opaque acronym N.O.E.P.S. (Notes On Ever Present Subject). She even toyed with the idea of destroying her journals before she died, thankfully deciding against doing so.
Her queerness was an obvious explanation for her privacy. From an early age, Highsmith wondered whether she might be a boy. “I am a walking perpetual example of my contention: as I said brilliantly at the age of twelve, a boy in a girl’s body.” She mirrored her attraction to the androgyny of snails in her own clothes — she liked wearing Brooks Brothers shirts and pants or Levi’s and neckerchiefs. Even a fortune teller in New Orleans told Highsmith’s mother, when her daughter was 27, that Highsmith was meant to have been born a boy, and the story haunted Highsmith.
But Highsmith’s need for secrecy was also symptomatic of the time in which she was living. Paranoia — brought on by living as a queer woman in the 1950s, by McCarthyism and by the Cold War — invaded Highsmith’s thoughts to an extreme degree. Her most successful novels conjured this dread; in the opening scene of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1955), we meet Ripley in a state of suspicion. He senses he is being pursued by a shadowy figure: “There was no doubt the man was after him,” he thinks, thrilled by the pursuit, a coded form of gay cruising, yet fearful of capture and forever seeking escape.
Only in the privacy of her own mind did Highsmith feel she could acknowledge her truest nature. “What do they know,” she wrote in 1942, “of my fury, impatience, frustration, ambition, energy, desperation, loves & hates, and of my ecstasies!? Nothing! & they never can.” Once again, Highsmith refutes herself; she made it her life’s work to put those most secretive selves to paper, laying herself bare.
Rennie McDougall has written for The Observer, Slate, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Lapham’s Quarterly.
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