European critics consider Patricia Highsmith's twenty-two novels and eight story collections literary descendants of Dostoevsky and Kafka, but American readers know her work mainly as fodder for films: Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Ripley Under Ground. She was most at home in the darker corners of her characters' twisted psyches and as often as not her protagonists expressed themselves through murder. Even in her first full-time job she excelled at creating dual lives, scripting comic book heroes Captain Midnight, Spy Smasher, and the Golden Arrow. Her childhood was divided between Fort Worth and New York and her emotions were split between similar extremes: loving and loathing her stepfather and her mother who claimed to have tried to abort her by drinking turpentine. Highsmith said her unhappiest year was when her parents abandoned her with her grandmother at 12, yet throughout her life she seemed to seek the intensity of crisis and discord, pushing her friends to fight and her lovers to leave. One former girlfriend, the portraitist Allela Cornell, killed herself by swallowing nitric acid. Another girlfriend was Marijane Meaker, whose work you may know under her pen names Vin Packer, Ann Aldrich, or M. E. Kerr. A woman who didn't become a girlfriend was the frosty smoldering blond young married mother in Bloomingdales who sent Highsmith into a fever of longing and productivity, resulting in her second novel, The Price of Salt. Please let's end the myth that queer visibility began with Stonewall. This lesbian book, published in 1952, sold nearly a million copies. And unlike Gore Vidal's 1948 gay novel The City and the Pillar, hers has a happy ending. (Though, unlike Gore, she used a pseudonym, Claire Morgan.) Sarah Waters thinks so highly of The Price of Salt she said it alone warranted Highsmith's inclusion in the National Gallery show Gay Icons. Alcoholic, anti-American, anti-Semitic, stingy, and racist, Highsmith lived in Switzerland for more than thirty years and died, intentionally alone, at 74. She left her estate of several million dollars to Yaddo, where she had rewritten her first novel, Strangers on a Train, at Truman Capote's urging.
Do yourself a big favor and buy Joan Schenkar's illuminating and entertaining biography, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith
. As you know, difficult characters often make the most riveting reading. In the wake of the biography's success, Schenkar has just edited Patricia Highsmith: Selected Novels and Short Stories, newly out from Norton.
Don't forget Marijane Meeker's (M.E. Kerr) fascinating memoir about Highsmith's volatile relationship with her in the 50s. Meeker, still writing, would be a fascinating study in lesbian life during its underground heyday. Loved it!
Posted by: lori hahn | January 31, 2011 at 10:36 AM