A life transformed to chilling art

Among the myriad appalling high points of Andrew Wilson’s “Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith” is the news that its subject regularly smuggled her pet snails back and forth between England and France by attaching them to her breasts. It is somehow a perfect image of Highsmith, who even in her rather stunning youth nurtured a dark and slimy view of the human condition, and especially of herself, yet managed to give this perspective a twist of Nietzschean triumph -- akin, one could say, to getting the snails through customs.

Wilson’s book is a tour de force, an account so generous and prescient that Highsmith seems to step from its pages like a hologram, in all her contradictory glory. The element of nasty surprise so typical of Highsmith’s novels and stories is abundant in her life: We learn, for example, that her mother, who divorced her father shortly before her birth, tried to abort her by swallowing turpentine. Years later, Mary Highsmith would often tell her Sunday-painter daughter, “Isn’t it funny that you adore the smell of turpentine?”

Wilson has drawn on several decades’ worth of intimate journals Highsmith kept throughout her life, her cahiers, which contained very close descriptions of friends and lovers as well as outlines of her fiction, produced at an astonishing rate even in the most psychologically horrible and physically peripatetic circumstances. He has also tracked down nearly everyone who ever breathed on Highsmith and come away with a stupendous trove of anecdotal material. The result is a rich tapestry of interwoven social worlds and an astute chronological explication of how a life was transformed into art.

Highsmith’s work was her life to a more marked degree than is often the case: She felt dead when she didn’t work, and despite a prodigious sexual appetite and compulsive bonding to women who were, like her mother, cold, withholding and disapproving, Highsmith maintained, most of the time, a staggering daily page count and an unflagging appetite for literary labor.

This biography makes a solid case for Highsmith’s importance even as it charts the rather grim trajectory of her life, from youthful beauty who dated the teenage Judy Holliday to depressed, alcoholic curmudgeon who would, in her cups, pour out her loathing of Jews, blacks and Puerto Ricans. What is clear, and constant, in a life of incessant shifting of houses and countries and lovers is the steady, Germanic discipline of the written word.

Wilson ties the theme of shifting identity found in most of Highsmith’s books to Dostoevsky, Camus and Sartre. And properly so. There is no doubt that Highsmith wrestled with philosophical questions rather alien to genre fiction and that she worked very complex ideas about the nature of consciousness into the texture of narratives of action. In a Highsmith novel, the question of guilt can arise even in the absence of a crime and yet fail to materialize in the brain of a murderer. Nothing is portrayed in terms of conventional morality; Highsmith’s is the world of overturned values and metaphysical emptiness the existentialists discovered inside this one. As Wilson shows, Highsmith’s flat, unexcited, factual style leads the reader into sympathy with “abnormal” psychological states, which are described in the same limpid way as the furnishings of a room.

In her Ripley novels especially, Highsmith plunges us into the schizophrenic perceptions of someone who is and isn’t there, whose adaptivity is that of a sociopathic predator, at the same time someone who acquires the trappings and educated aspect of culture, who dabbles in the arts and really only kills people when he absolutely must -- but he enjoys it, even whooping with laughter in the process. Highsmith said that the first Ripley novel “wrote itself,” that she felt she was taking dictation from the character. Several of Wilson’s sources told him that Highsmith was rather like Ripley, strangely cut off from others, that she hadn’t really lived in the world since the 1950s but inhabited, instead, the imaginary space of her fiction.

Whatever the case, Highsmith’s habit of forcing readers into complicity and identification with a criminal or disturbed mind did not win her much of a following in America, land of happy endings and neat resolutions. One could make the case that her unpopularity may have been in direct proportion to the accuracy of her map of the national psyche. It seems also that in the late 1950s, and for much of the ‘60s, even pedestrian suspense fiction hit a big slump in the United States. Highsmith’s early success with her first novel, “Strangers on a Train,” and her submerged notoriety as “Claire Morgan,” author of the lesbian classic “The Price of Salt,” didn’t translate into mass appeal with subsequent works like “The Blunderer” and “Deep Water.” While certain books, notably “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” did garner serious critical attention, Highsmith’s U.S. sales were never particularly encouraging.

Highsmith’s unusual use of an established genre to express things more typically found in “quality” literature was recognized and lauded early in Europe, however, where she in any case preferred to live; Wilson draws on a chorus of Highsmith’s American editors to demonstrate that, depressingly, even near the end of her life, publishers here routinely rejected her work for its lack of sales potential and often enough out of discomfort with its “amorality” or lack of easy categorization. But the French, Germans, Swiss and Italians loved the odd hybridity of her narratives, as did -- equivocally -- the British.

In her journal she wrote, “There is no moral to my life -- I have none -- except: ‘Stand up and take it.’ The rest is sentiment.” This embattled stance owed much to her rejection by her native country but even more to her rejection by her mother, a commercial artist whose competitive instincts once led her to impersonate her daughter for a bevy of London journalists. Mary Highsmith’s intolerance of Patricia’s lesbianism was a hands-on matter, involving undermining phone calls and letters to Highsmith’s various lovers, as well as the most destructive imaginable communications to Highsmith herself.

Highsmith’s journals often reflected the fear that she was in love with her mother. (It seems, too, that during the one period when she got to know her real father, he attempted to molest her.) Her pattern was set early. By the time she became a student at Barnard she had had numerous crushes and semi-affairs with other girls; in college she was introduced to the Village constellation of lesbian bars and restaurants and tapped into an “underworld” that eventually extended to Fire Island’s Cherry Grove; Provincetown, Mass., and Paris.

In those years of subterfuge and disguise, a nomadic existence wasn’t unusual for gays of either sex “in the arts” -- the scene was forever shifting, from Taxco to Tangiers to scattered points in between. Highsmith’s own sense that she belonged in Europe proved sound, while her selection of lovers proved personally disastrous. However, Wilson’s book makes clear that the symbiotic fuel for Highsmith’s work was a quirky blend of enthrallment and disillusion, frustration at the actual, intoxication with the ideal: The constant change of scenery provided the intriguing backdrops of her narratives, while her serial embroilment with unsatisfactory and feckless lovers furnished her with the psychological dislocations she installed in the heads of her characters.

Wilson’s book is staggeringly well researched, and his account of Highsmith’s literary and philosophical influences (from the obvious Poe to the far less obvious Karl Mannheim and the French American novelist Julian Green), the random sights and encounters that inspired various plots and characters, as well as his discussion of her individual works, their weaknesses and strengths, are marvelously insightful and beautifully worked into one another. This is the best kind of literary biography, doing honor to its subject and all her warts, exactly as Highsmith would have wished.

Marijane Meaker’s “Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s” is a miniature, a semi-affectionate but dry and finally ashen portrait of a love affair. A compressed and crisply written book, it reveals at a more intimate angle Highsmith’s stormy relations with her mother, her wanderlust, her drinking problem, her rigid and consuming relationship to work; it’s a picture of Highsmith in her brash youth, driven, insecure, charismatic, bewilderingly attached to repulsive prejudices as well as contradictory liberal ideas.

Meaker paints a lively, if faintly bleak, picture of lesbian bars, Manhattan cocktail parties, summer houses on Fire Island and an idyll in Bucks County, Pa., that quickly turns troublesome, fraught with petty tensions and the homophobia of neighbors. Within these settings, Highsmith appears a stolid yet mercurial figure, painfully shy but obdurate in her habits, her tastes, alternately vulnerable and imperious. Highsmith was already a legend in the demimonde when Meaker became her girlfriend, and the author is, for much of the book, defensively intimidated, irrationally smitten, possessive, suspicious and to some extent naive, as anyone who thinks every new love is “forever” is naive. Highsmith and Meaker were in love in the worst way: It seems they both ignored certain provocations built into their liaison, notably Highsmith’s simmering desire to return to Europe. Meaker, for reasons never fully explained, had an aversion to going there with her. The relationship begins to fall apart when Meaker sneaks a look at Highsmith’s journal and misreads the word “hitch” as “bitch,” thinking it refers to herself; but Highsmith’s restlessness is a major issue from the beginning, and it’s clear she is sacrificing something essential to stay in the relationship.

In the book’s closing section, Meaker and Highsmith meet again after decades, when Highsmith’s drinking, and her fondness for anti-Semitic blather, are depressingly out of control. One gets the feeling that Highsmith was a different person for different people and may have been bent on leaving a lousy impression with anyone from the past who might presume to judge her. She may have “believed” her most rancid utterances at the time, but as Wilson demonstrates in “Beautiful Shadow,” Highsmith was many people, as most novelists are. At least a few of them probably “believed” the exact opposite. Duality was, after all, Highsmith’s metier. Everything considered, despite the somewhat heavy-handed epilogue, Meaker’s account is tough-minded but finally generous to a woman who could, in her worst moments, be almost as monstrous as any of her fictional characters.

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From Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith

She traced her fascination with duality and ambiguity back to her own childhood, acknowledging that the strands of love and hate which were woven through her character had their roots in her early relationship with her parents. Yet she knew that such dark, murky territory was a fertile breeding ground for her fiction. “Out of this, I shall create, discover, invent, prove and reveal,” she said....

Rejection was something all aspiring writers must face as a reality of the profession, she said. “These little setbacks, amounting sometimes to thousands of dollars’ worth of time wasted, writers must learn to take like Spartans. A brief curse, perhaps, then tighten the belt a notch and on to something new -- of course with enthusiasm, courage and optimism, because without these three elements, you cannot produce anything good.”