From the issue dated February 20, 2004
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Reality Catches Up to Highsmith's Hard-Boiled Fiction
When Patricia Highsmith's final novel, Small g, was rejected in 1994 by Alfred A. Knopf, it left the author without an American publisher and culminated years of declining interest in Highsmith in her home country. Today, Patricia Highsmith is hot. Once belittled as a "dime-store Dostoyevsky," she is now being canonized as a major American artist. Nearly a decade after her death, in 1995, her popularity in the United States is at an all-time high. A collection, The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith, was published by W.W. Norton in 2001, and Nothing That Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories of Patricia Highsmith followed in 2002. Norton also has been steadily reissuing Highsmith's previous books in handsome new trade editions. In a different venue, Matt Damon and John Malkovich have taken their turns playing Highsmith's murderous antihero Tom Ripley in recent movies. Biographers and critics are arriving in increasing numbers. Andrew Wilson, a British journalist, recently gave us the fine, and first full-length, biography, Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith. The novelist Marijane Meaker has provided a memoir, Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s, which recounts her relationship with the author, and several critical studies of Highsmith's fiction are in the works. Highsmith was known in her time as a talented genre writer, a psychological crime novelist with style and penetrating depth of vision. Beginning with her 1950 debut novel, Strangers on a Train -- memorably filmed by Alfred Hitchcock a year later -- she turned out a steady stream of edgy books over more than 40 years of work. Described by Graham Greene as a "poet of apprehension," she occupied a respectable niche in American crime-writing circles. But when American sales of mysteries and suspense writing slowed down in the 1960s, Highsmith was forced to fall back on her solid European reputation. Why the posthumous Highsmith boom? The answer lies, above all, in the author's conflicted identity, and the anxious, conflicted world she rendered. Never at home in her own context, she fits perfectly into ours. Certainly Highsmith's unusual position as a female crime writer has something to do with her resurgence. One of the few women to write crime fiction during the American hard-boiled era, Highsmith provides an unusual counterpoint to the prevailing attitude of aggressive hypermasculinity. And crime has re-established itself once again in the cultural marketplace. But Highsmith wasn't just a female crime writer. She was a gay female crime writer. And she was gay in the United States at a time when homosexuality couldn't even whisper its name. Highsmith's daring second novel, The Price of Salt, written pseudonymously and published in 1952, describes a homosexual affair. It became an underground classic that, says Meaker, "stood on every lesbian bookshelf" during the '50s. Although Highsmith allowed Salt to be republished in 1991 under her own name, she generally kept her sexuality out of public view during her lifetime. Today's attention to Highsmith thus serves to "out" her to many readers -- and outing a well-known writer is always exciting, in a prurient kind of way. Still, tabloid interest in Highsmith's sexuality can't fully account for the renewed interest in her work, either. Highsmith wasn't just gay; she was queer. In her work, as in her life, sexuality intertwines with dark fantasy, crime, and overall strangeness. Highsmith described sex as "the motor" that drove her fiction, but erotic energy gains potency through its links to violence and crime. In Strangers on a Train, for example, a distinctly homoerotic tension pervades the relationship between two men who meet by accident and agree to trade murders. In the superb 1960 novel This Sweet Sickness, the protagonist invents a fully documented alter ego for himself and then gradually slips into it -- and into madness -- after accidentally killing his romantic rival. Today's popular critical methodology known as queer theory might have been invented to describe Patricia Highsmith. They share the same preoccupations. Queer theorists seek to examine not simply homosexuality, but also the "normal" that defines what is deviant or abnormal. Queer theory thereby allows for "queer readings" of works by straight authors who may not explicitly engage gay themes at all. Highsmith's one series character, Tom Ripley, exemplifies ambiguity. He's a genial psychopath, an American of unusually malleable character and deliberately equivocal sexual orientation who, Highsmith wrote, "just doesn't feel guilt in a normal way." When Tom falls in love with another man in The Talented Mr. Ripley, he doesn't want to sleep with him; he wants to be him. So he murders him and steals his identity. Highsmith carefully avoids marking Ripley as gay, describing him instead as "lukewarm toward women," which dovetails nicely with the cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek's description of him in the London Review of Books as a "male lesbian." The same conflicted sense of self manifested itself in Highsmith's life. Before she was born, in 1921, in Fort Worth, her mother tried to abort the pregnancy by drinking turpentine. (Her mother later remarked to her, "It's funny you adore the smell of turpentine, Pat.") Frequently alone and lonely, the young Highsmith awakened into her homosexuality at a time when homophobia ran rampant and unchecked in the United States, and she alternated between a defiant and aggressive openness and a desperate wish to suppress her taboo desires. In the late 1940s she became engaged to a fellow young writer, and even underwent psychotherapy in an unsuccessful effort to overcome her physical distaste for men. Highsmith would have enjoyed the popularity of the new television show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. She had a queer eye for straight guys all her life. Indeed, she looked at her world almost exclusively through male protagonists. "Women are tied to the home," she explained in an interview, while "men can jump over fences." But her preference was due to more than social logistics. Widely accused of misogyny, Highsmith admitted that "I like most men better than I like women." ("But not in bed," she added.) She abandoned the United States in her 40s and moved to Europe, settling first in France and later in Switzerland. Meaker recalls that Highsmith "complained habitually about Americans and women as though she was neither one." The strain of alienation took a toll, and Highsmith slipped in her later years into gnarled, bigoted misanthropy. A deeply unhappy person who had trouble feeling at home anywhere, she spent her lifetime turning her discomfort into art. Queer theory brings sexuality together with politics in the social world, and the two are similarly inseparable in Highsmith's work. She came of age as a novelist during the Red scare and the cold war, when the House Un-American Activities Committee was reaching into people's most private spaces, and Red-baiting and homophobia fed off each other. That put Highsmith doubly in the cross hairs. She had flirted with Communism in college and considered herself a political liberal, although she had trouble sympathizing with causes. "You name the group, she hated them," recalls a friend. The 1950s marked Highsmith for life. The '50s also nourished her paranoid creative vision. Pursuit is a persistent theme in her fiction, but her characters don't know where to run, because they don't know where the threat is coming from. The danger usually originates from within -- and it's inexorable, a guilt that erodes and dissolves the character's psychological mortar. The guilt creates the crime and the punishment in Highsmith's stories, rather than the other way around. Such inversion is the creative signature of a writer whose sexual orientation was, when she lived and wrote, labeled as "inverted" as well. Queer sexuality and social paranoia coil together to form Patricia Highsmith's creative DNA. And it's clear that the politics -- sexual and otherwise -- of her dangerously unstable fictional worlds are a lot like our own. Homosexuals are out, but still the center of political and cultural (to say nothing of religious) debate. And life in today's age of terrorism creates the kind of anxious foreboding that Highsmith evoked again and again. People never know whether something (or someone) might explode next to them. We also live in an era where surveillance is everywhere, and where people live at risk of being turned in and taken away. These times are the closest we've ever come to the '50s, when anxiety boiled beneath the surface of the prosperous facade of American living. We've moved to the creepy neighborhood where Patricia Highsmith lived all her life. Leonard Cassuto is an associate professor of English at Fordham University. His book on American crime fiction, Hard-Boiled Sentimentality, will be published by Columbia University Press next year. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 24, Page B12 |
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education