Belle Ombre is the name that Patricia Highsmith's immortal murderer and con man Tom Ripley gives his illegally acquired house in France, and
Beautiful Shadow is the apt and resonant title Andrew Wilson has chosen for his exemplary biography of a tortured, difficult and outstandingly gifted human being.
Admirers of Highsmith's fiction will not be surprised to learn that her literary heroes included Dostoevsky, Conrad, Camus and Edgar Allen Poe, and that she despised the likes of Agatha Christie: "I think it is a silly way of teasing people, 'who done it'. It doesn't interest me in the least." Along with Edmund Wilson, she didn't care who killed Roger Ackroyd, since the detective novel designed in the form of a puzzle held no charms for her. "Puzzles do not interest me," she stated early in her long and formidably prolific career.
Shadows, most of them decidedly unbeautiful, haunted Highsmith throughout her life. Five months before she was born, her mother, Mary Plangman, tried to get rid of her by drinking turpentine ("It's funny you adore the smell of turpentine, Pat," Mary would tell her years later) and nine days before her birth, her natural parents were granted a divorce. Patsy, as she was called as a child, was always uneasy in the company of her stepfather, Stanley Highsmith, which makes it all the more surprising that she assumed his name when she became a writer.
Mary and Stanley left Fort Worth, Patsy's birthplace, for New York to increase their chances of work, but with the onset of the Depression in the late 1920s they headed back to Texas. On their second visit to New York, they deposited Patsy with her maternal grandmother, Willie Mae Coates, and the young Highsmith experienced the first of many rejections. Wilson writes of the anguished relationship between Mary and Patricia with a fine sense of balance, with the daughter craving love and respect from her unyielding mother for wearying decades. Mary became a Christian Scientist of a particularly blinkered and dogmatic kind, quoting the edicts of Mary Baker Eddy to a girl who wanted nothing more than simple maternal understanding. It proved to be the vainest of vain hopes.
"Are you a les?" Mary asked 14-year-old Patsy, adding, "You are beginning to make noises like one" to make the insult cut deeper. No wonder the adolescent felt guilt and shame about her sexuality, and that her adult life would be spent in a continuous romantic search for the ideal partner. Even in old age, Mary seized every opportunity to chastise her turpentine-surviving and now famous offspring. Pat was a pervert, in her view, and the author of nasty books. There are those who shared, and continued to share, that second judgment, some of them respected critics.
The world depicted by Patricia Highsmith with such clear-eyed precision is a godless place in which the intelligently wicked prosper while the ordinary and harmless perish.
Wilson deftly traces her regard for the amoral and misanthropic back to her lonely formative years. Highsmith started reading books on psychology and psychopathology when she was 10, and from these she progressed to Nietzsche and other writers whose principal concern was the isolation of the individual.
With the publication, in 1950, of Strangers on a Train, discerning readers acknowledged at once that Highsmith was a serious novelist and not a conventional crime writer. In this brilliant debut novel, she creates one of the most complex of her varied assassins - Charles Anthony Bruno, the bored playboy with a penchant for gaudy ties and a determination to commit the perfect murder. Bruno is Tom Ripley in waiting, for where he fails Ripley succeeds.
Highsmith loved Ripley so much that she made him the hero (apt word) of five novels, starting with The Talented Mr Ripley and ending with Ripley under Water. One of the reasons Highsmith was never as popular in her own country as she was in Europe is that many Americans simply couldn't stomach the notion of a charming, civilised murderer who always gets away with it. Ripley should have been sent to the chair a dozen times, but he is still here, still smiling.
Highsmith was incensed when her friend Mary McCarthy revealed that she had never heard of Tom Ripley. She was also unhappy with the film adaptations of her novels, though she did acknowledge the brilliance of Robert Walker's Bruno in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. Only Rene Clement's Plein Soleil (based on The Talented Mr Ripley) came close to catching her peculiar quality - until the last reel, when Alain Delon as Ripley gets his just deserts.
Highsmith's second book, The Price of Salt, appeared under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, because its subject is lesbian love - a topic not exactly favoured in the grim days when Senator McCarthy's voice was bellowing in the land. It was inspired by a chance encounter. The novelist was working in the toy department of Bloomingdale's, the New York department store, when a handsome blonde came in to buy a doll for one of her daughters. Highsmith took her name and address for purposes of delivery, and actually went to the woman's house in New Jersey to see where the object of her fantasy lived. Wilson discovered that she was Kathleen Senn, that Highsmith never met her and that she was an alcoholic who killed herself. When The Price of Salt resurfaced in 1990, it was retitled Carol, and it is now in its rightful place in the Highsmith canon.
The triumph of Wilson's study is that it induces sympathy for a woman who could be vicious and unpleasant on a scale that merits the term Strindbergian. Her countless love affairs - with approximately three men and a legion of women - always ended in disasters of her own devising. She was a drama queen on the grand scale, though she met her hysterical match in Ellen Hill, a sociologist with a glacier for a heart. They were lovers for four years, but remained edgy friends for decades. An evening in their company would make a wreck of the average, mild-mannered guest, who seldom risked a return visit.
Highsmith was a liberal who nevertheless held anti-semitic opinions, and a lesbian who considered the female the lesser of the species. She consumed an ocean of alcohol and was mean with money. Yet, out of the nightmarish details of her frustrated, itinerant existence, Wilson has fashioned a biography that does complete justice to her uneasy spirit. He lets both enemies and friends, admirers and detractors, have their say, and my, how these latter sound off. This is the story of someone who left both destruction and devotion in her wake, and who produced in The Talented Mr Ripley and its first sequel Ripley Under Ground and - my personal favourite - The Cry of the Owl three of the most disturbing, blackly comic novels of the last
century.
Read on...
websites:
www.kirjasto.sci.fi/highsm.htm Introduction to her work books:
Highsmith's relationship with Tom Ripley (right, played by Matt Damon in The Talented Mr Ripley, with Jude Law) was as close as if the pair were real-life friends. "I often had the feeling Ripley was writing it," she wrote of one book, "and I was merely typing." When she won a prize, she added his name to hers on the certificate.
Meanwhile, her flesh-and-blood friends were often treated to Ripley's attentions; a letter to one arrived from "Pat H, alias Ripley", while another received a book inscribed with the words "from Tom (Pat)".
