This Day in Literary History (Death of Psychological Thriller Author Patricia Highsmith)

 

Feb. 4, 1995— Patricia Highsmith, whose psychological thrillers achieved greater sales, critical acclaim, and understanding in Europe than in her native United States, died at age 74 of leukemia in Locarno, Switzerland.

Since her death 30 years ago, however, a virtual cottage industry about her work has sprung up in the U.S., with at least three biographies, and numerous reprints of her books, appearing.

Whatever fame Highsmith gained at home derived from two novels adapted into classic films by Alfred Hitchcock (Strangers on a Train, 1951) and Anthony Minghella (The Talented Mr. Ripley, 1999). Her pigeonholing as a “crime writer” annoyed her because it said nothing about her profound probing of the human heart.

Beneath the placid surface of American life, discontents, even demons, lurked in her fiction. Many of her intimates agree that Highsmith shared many of these—indeed, if she didn’t have writing as an outlet where she could vent these, she feared that she might go insane.

Outsiders, misfits, manipulators, sociopaths—an entire psychological spectrum can be described in Highsmith’s work. On a podcast I listened to today, one of her later friends said she didn’t doubt that Highsmith herself existed on the autistic spectrum.

More specifically, some see the writer as being a high-functioning case of Asperger’s Syndrome. She possessed many unusual traits, including a terrible sense of direction, hypersensitivity to sound and touching, clumsiness, and depression.

Even before she struggled with alcoholism for much of her adult life, Highsmith had to cope with the revelation that her mother tried unsuccessfully to abort her when she was only four years old.

Even though her collected fiction is considerable—22 novels and eight short-story collections—it’s remarkable how certain themes and motifs reappear obsessively:

*fractured or swapped entities;

*murder;

*madness;

*pairs who bring out depths of evil in each other;

*malignant mothers; and

*guilt.

Just as her characters traffic in aliases, Highsmith resorted to pseudonyms. The most famous, “Claire Morgan,” was adopted for the initial publication of her 1952 celebration of lesbian love, The Price of Salt.  

She used others in letters to the editor that were printed in the Herald-Tribune, where she fulminated against Catholics, neighbors, Frenchmen in general and their bureaucrats in particular—and, most problematically, Jews.

Her characters are frequently doubles and alter egos. More chillingly, her narratives feature complicit characters and readers.

Flashback, December 1999: ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley,’ Neo-Hitchcockian Thriller, Opens

When  the psychological thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley opened in American theaters in December 1999, it seemed, on the surface, like old-fashioned entertainment out of the Fifties, with glamorous rising stars, lush on-location filming in the Mediterranean, and suspense that didn’t veer into geysers of blood.

Old-fashioned, but only up to a point. Certain aspects of the plot and characters wouldn’t have passed muster with the censors back then. Even Alfred Hitchcock, who directed an acclaimed adaptation of a prior novel by Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train, had to bow, at least to an extent, to restrictions set by the Production Code Administration.

The “Master of Suspense,” for instance, had to employ then-current Hollywood “code”—a male character’s obsession with personal appearance and a domineering mother—to suggest that one character was gay. And he could not allow a sympathetic character to resort to blackmail. But the passage of time and changes in social mores permitted a more complicated vision.

Did screenwriter-director Anthony Minghella in Ripley display the editing wizardry and offbeat humor so characteristic of Hitchcock? No. But he had the same obsession with apparel as a signifier of character, and a similar fascination with transgressiveness—in this case, a grifter-turned-serial killer.

Minghella wasn’t the first—and turned out not to be the last—to take a crack at Ripley: Rene Clement’s 1960 French version, Purple Noon, starred Alain Delon, while Netflix mounted an eight-part, black-and-white miniseries starring Andrew Scott that streamed earlier this year on Netflix.

What accounts for this material’s enduring appeal? It touches on motifs and themes that fascinate viewers: wealth, class, obsession, slippery identities, and “doubles”—characters who share traits with each other.

Binding it all together is an amoral villain so compelling that Highsmith ended up tracking his progress in five novels produced over three decades: The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley's Game, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, and Ripley Under Water.

In interviews, Highsmith refused to endorse the idea that her grifter-turned-murderer Tom Ripley was gay or bisexual.

But Ripley’s obsessive attachment to the privileged Dickie Greenleaf and his lack of feeling for any female character lend themselves to this interpretation, so Minghella wasn’t veering too far afield by rendering Tom’s sexuality more explicit.

The screenplay is at pains to increase viewers’ sympathy for and complicity in Tom’s crimes by giving him a motive besides simple avarice. 

At the same time, in contrast to the often heartless Highsmith, Minghella heightens the plight of women by making Gwyneth Paltrow’s Marge less contemptuous of Tom and by inventing an entire new character in Cate Blanchette’s Meredith Logue.

The movie, while dispensing with the novel’s pointed allusion to Henry James’ The Ambassadors (another tale about an American dispatched by a wealthy family to bring their son home), retains the international setting and conflicts so characteristic of the expatriate writer.

This time, however, there’s a twist: the American venturing abroad, Ripley, is not an innocent, but an aesthete whose tastes are facilitated by his talents for mooching, forgery, impersonation, improvisation, and murder.

I can’t tell you all the articles I came across on the Web about Ripley’s sartorial style. It’s almost as if the public (and certainly the fashion industry) is as besotted by the la dolce vita lifestyle of Dickie Greenleaf as Tom Ripley was.

Ripley was nominated for five Oscars, including best supporting actor (Law), adapted screenplay (Minghella), art direction, costume design, and original score. But it should have received more nods, and it has aged well, with some of the best performances ever turned in by Matt Damon, Jude Law, and Gwyneth Paltrow.

In the mid-Fifties, Highsmith anticipated a tendency that became overwhelming within a few decades: the American susceptibility to grifters adept at reinventing themselves.

 More than four decades later, Minghella masterfully captured the utter emptiness of all this frenzied, and criminal, striving: a villain who confesses, to the only person who begins to sound his depths, why he feels so alone even now: “I always thought it would be better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody.”

Quote of the Day (Patricia Highsmith, on January, ‘A Two-Faced Month’)

“January. It was all things. And it was one thing, like a solid door. Its cold sealed the city in a gray capsule. January was moments, and January was a year. January rained the moments down, and froze them in her memory: the woman she saw peering anxiously by the light of a match at the names in a dark doorway, the man who scribbled a message and handed it to his friend before they parted on the sidewalk, the man who ran a block for a bus and caught it. Every human action seemed to yield a magic. January was a two-faced month, jangling like jester's bells, crackling like snow crust, pure as any beginning, grim as an old man, mysteriously familiar yet unknown, like a word one can almost but not quite define.”—American novelist and short-story writer Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995), The Price of Salt (1952)

Last week marked what would have been the 100^th birthday of Patricia Highsmith. For the longest time, she was known for two psychological thrillers adapted into classic films by Alfred Hitchcock (Strangers on a Train) and Anthony Minghella (The Talented Mr. Ripley).

Yet only over time—and especially after intrepid biographers worked mightily through her abundant published and unpublished writings, separating fact from fiction—would the outlines of an author as tortured in her private life as Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, or Shirley Jackson emerge.  

Five years ago, a novel in a far different vein from her best-known novels of suspense, featuring a lesbian romance that she wrote under a pseudonym, was translated to the big screen: The Price of Salt, retitled Carol, directed by Todd Haynes and starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara. 

Leafing through the book recently in a larger anthology of Highsmith’s work, I was much taken by the above description, and thought it would use it while I still had the chance this month.

For a fascinating overview of the multiple treatments of her work by Hollywood, please see this blog post from the American Film Institute from a couple of weeks ago.

Movie Quote of the Day (Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train,” on Our Fearful “Potential”)

Bruno Anthony (played by Robert Walker, on the right in the accompanying image, with co-star Farley Granger): “My theory is that everyone is a potential murderer.”—Strangers on a Train (1951), directed by Alfred Hitchcock, screenplay by Raymond Chandler and Czenzi Ormonde, adapted by Winfield Cook from the novel by Patricia Highsmith

Perhaps like no other film by Alfred Hitchcock, Strangers on a Train, released on this date 60 years ago today, is dominated by the concept of doubles—even starting with the opening sequence of two men, in medium shots of their shoes, walking toward a waiting train, their accidental meeting and their unknown fate. It’s a literal embodiment of the notion of the doppelganger, or “double walker” in German.

The doppelganger is a secret sharer, a second self who enables the fulfillment of one’s darkest impulses—including, as Bruno notes, murder. Most accounts of Strangers have observed that Bruno merely acts on tennis pro Guy Haines’ (played by Farley Granger) repressed wish that his unfaithful wife be killed so he can marry the daughter of a senator.

But the converse is also true: Guy, in effect, has sanctioned Bruno’s “criss-cross” murder scheme (each of them will kill a perfect stranger that the other knows well, meaning that no motive can be tied to the killer). “Sure, Bruno, sure,” he says, attempting to humor this crazy man, not realizing that Bruno now expects the other end of the “bargain” be kept with Guy murdering Bruno’s father.

What else do Hitchcock’s doppelgangers share? Conflicted sexuality, for one. In a movie industry then regulated by a production code that sharply limited any reference to sex outside of a conventional heterosexual marriage, open discussion of homosexuality was forbidden. But, as in his earlier film Shadow of a Doubt as well as the later Psycho, Hitchcock uses a mother’s too-close relationship to a son as code for sexual instincts not sanctioned by society that will explode into violence.

Years before the term came into common use, Hitchcock created a kind of template for the cinema stalker—except that Guy’s unwelcome “shadow self” is not a woman but another man.

In the increasingly complicated relationship between Bruno and Guy, the strong, durable athlete constantly appears as the weaker of the two. Bruno is always prepared to act, whereas Guy’s anxiety about forthrightly telling the police about Bruno only results in a deeper entanglement with the psychopathic socialite.

Like many of the director’s films (The 39 Steps, The Wrong Man, North by Northwest), Strangers on a Train involves an innocent man’s attempt to absolve himself of a wrongful murder charge. The doppelganger device—used in “William Wilson,” a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, Hitchcock’s key childhood influence—allows for the transfer of guilt that makes plausible how the victim can be credibly accused. “But you wanted it, Guy!” Bruno cries out after the tennis pro recoils from news of his estranged wife’s death.

For Hitchcock, raised on the Catholic notion of original sin, the doppelganger demonstrates how thin the line between innocence and gujlt can be, and how comfortable it makes man with his potential for evil.

One last thought: Over the years, one filmmaker after another has attempted to imitate Hitchcock, sometimes very slavishly indeed. (Take a bow, Brian de Palma! You haven’t had a chance to do that in a while, have you?)

But the most successful of these attempts to recreate the spirit of Hitchcock, I think, came in The Talented Mr. Ripley. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that this is another adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel in which the protagonist forms a homoerotic attachment to a male with a fiancée and a seemingly charmed life, or that the doppelganger figures prominently in the course of the action.