Published on December 1, 2011
She kept snails as pets and had the reputation of setting them free on her dinner table if the occasion bored her.
She had only complaints about most of the people she dealt with.
She loathed Jews and blacks.
She once welcomed two guests to her house by throwing a dead rat into their bedroom.
She often invited people over to stay with her but usually neglected to serve them any proper food.
She could be extremely mean and rude even towards her close friends.
Not a pleasant lady, right? Well, that was the real-life persona of one of the greatest crime writers in the English language, Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995). She wrote some of the finest psychological thrillers of the second half of the 20th century, yet few people read her in her native country (the US) during her lifetime (she was even without a US publisher at one point!). Most film buffs know the notorious anti-hero she created, the amoral Thomas or Tom Ripley, but few would have read the great novels in which he appeared. That was the paradoxical life of Highsmith.
Highsmith was born in Fort Worth, Texas and part of her formative period as a writer was spent at the legendary artists colony of Yaddo in New York state. She had a notorious love-hate relationship with her mother. Highsmith started her career as a writer of comic books but all her life she preferred to keep this phase of her career under wraps. Fame came to her early with the publication of her first novel, Strangers on a Train, in 1950. The legendary Alfred Hitchcock made the novel into one of his greatest-ever movies the following year and her name became well-known almost overnight.
Highsmith was a ravishing beauty early on, coveted by both men and women alike. But her lesbian tendencies came to the fore soon and that was the theme of her second novel, The Price of Salt, which she dared to publish only under a pseudonym. She would go on to have affairs with dozens of women (and a handful of men too) all through her life and that would influence her writings too - homosexual undertones were evident in most of what she wrote.
In 1955 appeared her most compelling creation, Tom Ripley, in what is generally regarded as Highsmith’s best and most famous novel, The Talented Mr Ripley. A slim volume, it would go on to influence several generations of crime writers and filmmakers. Ripley would appear again in four more novels, with the fifth and last one coming out in 1991. Ripley was the classic anti-hero, a sexually ambiguous psychopath who kills without remorse or guilt anyone standing in his path. But the strange thing is that we are rooting for him all the way and somehow he manages to get away each time, though he is suspected by many people, including the police.
Not surprisingly, Ripley would become the favourite of many auteurs and he is one of the enduring fictional and screen characters. One early big-screen version was 1960's Plein Soleil (titled Purple Noon in the English DVD release) in French with a young Alain Delon taking on the role of Ripley. The film most familiar to modern-day viewers would be the late Anthony Minghella’s stylish and classy version of The Talented Mr Ripley released in 1999; it had Matt Damon as Ripley with an all-star cast around him. Ripley has also been played by actors as varied as Dennis Hopper, John Malkovitch and Barry Pepper over the years.
Highsmith’s writing career flourished in the 1960s and the 1970s, as she produced some of the best work of her career during this time, like the novels The Blunderer, This Sweet Sickness, Deep Water and The Cry of the Owl. She was starting to base herself in Europe by now and she was far more popular there than back in her native country. If one of her crime novels sold 5,000 copies in the US she was sure of selling 10 times that number in Europe.
She also produced dozens of short stories, in several volumes, most of which were disconcerting and disturbing. Her view of the world was skewed and off-kilter – no wonder Graham Greene once famously described her as the “poet of apprehension”. No one could read her stories without a feeling of claustrophobia developing in them.
Sadly, towards the end of her life, Highsmith’s prejudices and biases started becoming more and more obvious. She spent her final years in France and Switzerland – though a very rich author by this time, she became more and more obsessed with money and taxes. But, despite her dislike of most people, she could still find well-wishers willing to look after her and to run her daily errands. Her famous beauty was long gone by this time, ravaged by the passage of years and the toll taken by her heavy drinking, smoking and poor eating habits. Her last few books also showed a drastic decline in quality. Highsmith died of aplastic anemia and cancer in Locarno, Switzerland, aged 74; she had built her last house there, after a lifetime of wanderings.
Two biographers have ventured to examine her life in recent years and their respective books are both extremely readable, albeit in different ways. Andrew Wilson’s Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith (2003) is a conventional cradle-to-grave biography but is probably the more readable of the two. Joan Schenkar’s more acclaimed The Talented Miss Highsmith (2009) adopts a different tack altogether – it is made up of various essays about the various chapters of her life and relies heavily on the numerous cahiers (notebooks) , diaries and notes Highsmith left behind. Many great critics and writers have also examined her works in depth in recent times, including Michael Dirda and Jeanette Winterson. Dirda’s essay in The New York Review of Books on the five Ripley novels, titled “This Woman is Dangerous”, is almost as good as anything Highsmith herself wrote.
How will history regard Highsmith the writer? Probably very near the top as far as crime/thriller writers go, though her many admirers will argue that her stories were much closer to art than mere pulp. Her prose may have been flat and without many frills but the worlds she conjured up were full of dangers at every turn and utterly addictive. Highsmith might have been an unpleasant human being for most of her life but she was also a great chronicler of human lives. Maybe that is how we should remember her.
She kept snails as pets and had the reputation of setting them free on her dinner table if the occasion bored her.
She had only complaints about most of the people she dealt with.
She loathed Jews and blacks.
She once welcomed two guests to her house by throwing a dead rat into their bedroom.
She often invited people over to stay with her but usually neglected to serve them any proper food.
She could be extremely mean and rude even towards her close friends.
Not a pleasant lady, right? Well, that was the real-life persona of one of the greatest crime writers in the English language, Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995). She wrote some of the finest psychological thrillers of the second half of the 20th century, yet few people read her in her native country (the US) during her lifetime (she was even without a US publisher at one point!). Most film buffs know the notorious anti-hero she created, the amoral Thomas or Tom Ripley, but few would have read the great novels in which he appeared. That was the paradoxical life of Highsmith.
Highsmith was born in Fort Worth, Texas and part of her formative period as a writer was spent at the legendary artists colony of Yaddo in New York state. She had a notorious love-hate relationship with her mother. Highsmith started her career as a writer of comic books but all her life she preferred to keep this phase of her career under wraps. Fame came to her early with the publication of her first novel, Strangers on a Train, in 1950. The legendary Alfred Hitchcock made the novel into one of his greatest-ever movies the following year and her name became well-known almost overnight.
Highsmith was a ravishing beauty early on, coveted by both men and women alike. But her lesbian tendencies came to the fore soon and that was the theme of her second novel, The Price of Salt, which she dared to publish only under a pseudonym. She would go on to have affairs with dozens of women (and a handful of men too) all through her life and that would influence her writings too - homosexual undertones were evident in most of what she wrote.
In 1955 appeared her most compelling creation, Tom Ripley, in what is generally regarded as Highsmith’s best and most famous novel, The Talented Mr Ripley. A slim volume, it would go on to influence several generations of crime writers and filmmakers. Ripley would appear again in four more novels, with the fifth and last one coming out in 1991. Ripley was the classic anti-hero, a sexually ambiguous psychopath who kills without remorse or guilt anyone standing in his path. But the strange thing is that we are rooting for him all the way and somehow he manages to get away each time, though he is suspected by many people, including the police.
Not surprisingly, Ripley would become the favourite of many auteurs and he is one of the enduring fictional and screen characters. One early big-screen version was 1960's Plein Soleil (titled Purple Noon in the English DVD release) in French with a young Alain Delon taking on the role of Ripley. The film most familiar to modern-day viewers would be the late Anthony Minghella’s stylish and classy version of The Talented Mr Ripley released in 1999; it had Matt Damon as Ripley with an all-star cast around him. Ripley has also been played by actors as varied as Dennis Hopper, John Malkovitch and Barry Pepper over the years.
Highsmith’s writing career flourished in the 1960s and the 1970s, as she produced some of the best work of her career during this time, like the novels The Blunderer, This Sweet Sickness, Deep Water and The Cry of the Owl. She was starting to base herself in Europe by now and she was far more popular there than back in her native country. If one of her crime novels sold 5,000 copies in the US she was sure of selling 10 times that number in Europe.
She also produced dozens of short stories, in several volumes, most of which were disconcerting and disturbing. Her view of the world was skewed and off-kilter – no wonder Graham Greene once famously described her as the “poet of apprehension”. No one could read her stories without a feeling of claustrophobia developing in them.
Sadly, towards the end of her life, Highsmith’s prejudices and biases started becoming more and more obvious. She spent her final years in France and Switzerland – though a very rich author by this time, she became more and more obsessed with money and taxes. But, despite her dislike of most people, she could still find well-wishers willing to look after her and to run her daily errands. Her famous beauty was long gone by this time, ravaged by the passage of years and the toll taken by her heavy drinking, smoking and poor eating habits. Her last few books also showed a drastic decline in quality. Highsmith died of aplastic anemia and cancer in Locarno, Switzerland, aged 74; she had built her last house there, after a lifetime of wanderings.
Two biographers have ventured to examine her life in recent years and their respective books are both extremely readable, albeit in different ways. Andrew Wilson’s Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith (2003) is a conventional cradle-to-grave biography but is probably the more readable of the two. Joan Schenkar’s more acclaimed The Talented Miss Highsmith (2009) adopts a different tack altogether – it is made up of various essays about the various chapters of her life and relies heavily on the numerous cahiers (notebooks) , diaries and notes Highsmith left behind. Many great critics and writers have also examined her works in depth in recent times, including Michael Dirda and Jeanette Winterson. Dirda’s essay in The New York Review of Books on the five Ripley novels, titled “This Woman is Dangerous”, is almost as good as anything Highsmith herself wrote.
How will history regard Highsmith the writer? Probably very near the top as far as crime/thriller writers go, though her many admirers will argue that her stories were much closer to art than mere pulp. Her prose may have been flat and without many frills but the worlds she conjured up were full of dangers at every turn and utterly addictive. Highsmith might have been an unpleasant human being for most of her life but she was also a great chronicler of human lives. Maybe that is how we should remember her.