Patricia Highsmith's Books

Biography

Patricia Highsmith (1921 – 1995) was born Patricia Plangman in Fort Worth, Texas. She studied English composition and playwriting at Barnard College, New York, aspiring to be a journalist, but that was not to be. Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Time, Fortune, and The New Yorker all turned Highsmith down. She eventually landed a job and, for six years, penned storylines for comic strips.

Yaddo

When she was twenty-seven, she was offered a place at the Yaddo artists’ retreat. Here she wrote her first novel, Strangers on a Train. Alfred Hitchcock later turned it into a movie, cementing her career as a novelist. She went on to publish 22 books and numerous short stories. When she died, Highsmith left her entire estate and future royalties to Yaddo, where she had started her career.

An Unhappy Life

Despite her literary success, Highsmith didn’t lead a happy life. She smoked and drank heavily and suffered from female hormone deficiency, anorexia nervosa, anaemia, Buerger’s disease, and lung cancer. If that wasn’t enough, she also suffered from depression. In her late forties, she wrote in her diary:

“[I] am now cynical, fairly rich … lonely, depressed, and totally pessimistic.”

Perhaps the root of her misery was the lack of a stable relationship with anybody else.

An Unhappy Child

Highsmith’s parents had divorced two weeks before she was born. She claimed her mother had tormented her with tales of a failed abortion.

“She said, ‘It’s funny you adore the smell of turpentine, Pat’. Because she drank turpentine before I was born, trying to have a miscarriage.”

“I learned to live with a grievous and murderous hatred very early on, and learned to stifle also my more positive emotions.” (The Times)

At the age of four, she moved to New York with her mother and new stepfather, Stanley Highsmith, whose surname she took. Her relationship with her mother continued to falter. When she was 12, her mother sent her back to Texas to live with her grandmother for a year. So began a lifelong love-hate relationship with her mother.

An Unhappy Adult

Highsmith had similarly ill-fated personal relationships. She had been engaged but, at the age of 27, concluded that she was a lesbian. Like many intellectuals at the time, she thought that psychotherapy could cure homosexuality. When her therapist suggested that she join a group therapy session for married women who were latent homosexuals, she wrote in her diary:

“Perhaps I shall amuse myself by seducing a couple of them.”

That is what she set about doing, becoming an aggressive seducer and philanderer.

In the 1970s, she wrote a letter to her stepfather in which she likened her sexual encounters with men to:

“…steel wool in the face, a sensation of being raped in the wrong place — leading to a sensation of having to have, pretty soon, a bowel movement… …If these words are unpleasant to read, I can assure you it is a little more unpleasant in bed.”

Her sexual preferences would have been fine, but whilst Highsmith much preferred having sex with women, she didn’t like them very much. The film director Phyllis Nagy described her as “a lesbian who did not very much enjoy being around women.”

Highsmith never enjoyed a relationship that lasted longer than a year.

Contrary Behaviour

Not content with the company of humans, she chose animals instead, keeping snails as pets. On one occasion, she attended a cocktail party in London, carrying a vast handbag containing a head of lettuce and a hundred snails. On another, she smuggled them through French customs by hiding them in her bra. Whether she enjoyed the company of the snails or the response they elicited amongst others is a moot point.

Highsmith held some complex yet nasty views. She supported Amnesty International and publicly expressed her opposition to the displacement of the Palestinian people by the Israelis. Highsmith described herself as a “Jew Hater” and forbade her publisher from selling her books in Israel. She also hated black people and thought menstruating women should not be permitted in libraries.

At public engagements, she could be wickedly funny or take pleasure in derailing events and causing affront. One of her publishers — Gary Fisketjon — said, “She was very rough, very difficult … But she was also plainspoken, dryly funny, and great fun to be around.” Another — Otto Penzler — said she “was a mean, cruel, hard, unlovable, unloving human being … I could never penetrate how any human being could be that relentlessly ugly. But her books? Brilliant.”

Evil Minded Writing

Her complex background and personality spilt over into her writing. She could be cold and mean-spirited. In her novel, A Dog’s Ransom, a poodle called Tina is murdered. Tina was also the name of one of her past lover’s dogs. I’m struggling to think of a better way of offending your ex.

Patricia Highsmith’s books are characterised by unhealthy sexual obsession and a complete disregard for right and wrong.

Obsession

Her first book, Strangers on a Train, introduced the idea of two strangers agreeing to commit murder for one another. Whilst the plot was a clever idea, what sets the book apart is the toxic relationship between the two main protagonists. All of which is underpinned by hints of homoeroticism and self-destructive behaviour.

The theme continues in The Blunderer, which again recounts obsession, social isolation, guilt and murder.

Her most famous creation, Tom Ripley, received his first outing in The Talented Mr Ripley. It is a tale of homosexual obsession, jealousy, self-delusion, isolation and murder.

“Murder is a kind of making love, a kind of possessing.” (The Book Seller)

They say you should write about what you know. If that is true, Ms Highsmith had visited some dark places.