{"id":11190,"date":"2011-12-29T13:00:22","date_gmt":"2011-12-29T18:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11190"},"modified":"2011-12-25T12:54:27","modified_gmt":"2011-12-25T17:54:27","slug":"after-patricia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/12\/29\/after-patricia\/","title":{"rendered":"After Patricia"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re out this week, but we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2011 while we\u2019re away. We hope you enjoy\u2014and have a happy New Year!<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"

Had Patricia Highsmith and I become partners in crime?<\/p><\/div>\n

Let\u2019s be honest.<\/p>\n

I rue the day I didn\u2019t have my late stepmother whacked.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d rather eat dirt than talk to my larcenous cousins.<\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t forgiven my father for disinheriting me.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t like families.<\/p>\n

Patricia Highsmith (1921\u201395), America\u2019s great expatriate noir novelist (and the subject of my biography, The Talented Miss Highsmith<\/a><\/em>), didn\u2019t like families either. Among twentieth-century writers, only Andr\u00e9 Gide has more damaging things to say about blood ties than Miss Highsmith does, and Gide is a little more succinct: \u201cFamilles, je vous ha\u00efs!<\/em>\u201d But even the Great Counterfeiter himself never went as far as she did on the subject.<\/p>\n

Sitting in the second-floor study of her stone farmhouse in the village of Moncourt, France, her body hunched in front of her scrolled, roll-top desk like a snail confronting its shell, the fifty-one-year-old Patricia Highsmith picked up her favorite Parker fountain pen on a summer\u2019s day in 1972 and confided her feelings about families to her notebook:<\/p>\n

\n

One situation\u2014one alone, could drive me to murder: family life, togetherness.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A year and a half later, Highsmith was circling her wagons again around the same thought by way of a nice, organizing little list. Like almost everything she turned her hand to her, her list\u2014\u201cLittle Crimes for Little Tots<\/span>,\u201d she called it\u2014has murder on its mind, focuses on a house and its close environs, mentions a mother in a cameo role, and is highly practical in a thoroughly subversive way. It\u2019s also vintage Highsmith: the writer who entertained homicidal feelings for her stepfather since grade school looks at six-year-olds and sees only the killers inside them.<\/p>\n

Still, in spite of our shared opinion of family life, in spite of my growing admiration for the extremity of her writing voice (here she is as a coed: \u201cObsessions are the only things that matter. Perversion interests me most and is my guiding darkness\u201d), in spite of the fact that she had the most fascinatingly complicated psychology I\u2019d ever kept company with\u2014living and writing in Highsmith\u2019s cone of watchful darkness was giving me plenty of trouble, harrowing my feelings and upending my sense of myself.<\/p>\n

She was ambivalent and extreme in everything she thought, felt, and did\u2014running the political gamut from communist to fascist to liberal to libertarian and back again, often in the same week. Love and death, or rather, love and murder<\/em> were the motives for her metaphors: she died for love a thousand times in life and killed for it over and over again in her fiction. She approached her many lovers\u2014beautiful, intelligent women but also a few interesting men\u2014with a wedding bouquet in one hand and a headsman\u2019s axe in the other. From the age of twelve, she thought of herself as a boy in a girl\u2019s body, but was insulted when French waiters directed her to the men\u2019s room.<\/p>\n

Then, too, her work habits lent a new dimension to the terms obsession<\/em> and compulsion<\/em>. For decades, five to eight typed pages of a novel or a short story rolled each day from the platen of her favorite coffee-colored Olympia Deluxe Portable typewriter, not to mention the thousands of letters and hundreds of articles. She did countless books of drawings, made sculptures, constructed assemblages. She crafted a great deal of handmade furniture. She gardened, she whittled, she pasted up her own Christmas cards. She had always to be doing something.<\/p>\n

And, just my luck, she was both alcoholic and<\/em> hypergraphic, leaving a trail of crushed hearts, bruised feelings, and total blackouts behind her\u2014as well as eight thousand pages of handwritten notebooks and diaries, sixteen fat press books, countless photograph albums, two hundred and fifty unpublished manuscripts, and thirty published works.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Highsmith<\/p><\/div>\n

Life in Highsmith Country\u2014my residency there would eventually stretch to eight years\u2014was grinding me down. The sheer size of her archives meant I had to go into marathon sessions of reading and thinking around the clock. I interviewed nearly three hundred people in five countries and several North American states. I wrote for fifteen and sixteen hours a day. I developed blurred vision and two small ulcers (which, in case there was any doubt as to their origin, disappeared the day I turned in my manuscript). The tendons in my wrists and thumbs swelled up and stayed that way. My bad back got worse. I complained bitterly\u2014and went on working.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Highsmith\u2019s novels\u2014brilliantly disorienting narratives of such shimmering negativity (Strangers on a Train<\/em>, The Talented Mr. Ripley<\/em>, This Sweet Sickness<\/em>, The Blunderer<\/em>, Deep Water<\/em>, et al.<\/em>) that they are like nothing else in their literary landscape\u2014were exercising their well-known ability to suck another reader into their bottomless vortex of moral relativities, transferable guilts, and unstable identities. And her life\u2014more than a little on the psychopathic side, with an adept\u2019s taste for transgression\u2014was forcing me to turn a coroner\u2019s eye on some dubious tendencies in my own character.<\/p>\n

Who was<\/em> that masked woman toying, however briefly, with the idea of secretly recording a tape-shy witness in crucial conversations about Highsmith? (Alas, it was me, thrilled and<\/em> guilted by the possibility of getting the goods verbatim.) Shouldn\u2019t my own faintly criminal love history have recused me from judging Highsmith\u2019s happy habit of triangulating her affairs: repeatedly seducing her lover\u2019s lovers\u2014and those lovers\u2019 lovers as well? (It should have, but I caught myself smugly judging her all the same.) Why was I, a writer whose belief in privacy is practically a religion, using information for my book from photographs that were taken without Highsmith\u2019s permission? (Because the photos were handed to me and they were interesting is the uncongenial answer.)<\/p>\n

Highsmith\u2019s personal magnetism and dark materials had always exerted a sublunary pull on friends, fans, and lovers. Against their better judgment, some of them told me, they caught themselves acting just like characters in a Highsmith novel. And now I was doing the same thing: conspiring in a version of Highsmithian behavior in order to write my book\u2014well, that was my excuse, anyway. But it was making me very unhappy\u2014with her<\/em>. And the prejudices I was building up against her own gaudy prejudices exhausted me.<\/p>\n

Plus, Highsmith was sending strong signals from beyond the grave\u2014in the form of darkly colored dreams stage managed in Highsmith Country and starring both of us\u2014that she didn\u2019t much care for living with me, either. Our relationship, intolerably intimate, was also alive with all of her favorite ambiguities\u2014no mean feat considering one of us was dead. And I was discovering daily\u2014and in greater detail than I wanted\u2014just how much of her life she\u2019d spent reviling at least four of the groups into which I loosely fit by birth and affinity. (One of these groups was \u201cwomen,\u201d another was \u201cJews.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Highsmith had also managed to provide me with perhaps the most unusual hour of my writing life. After months of steady application to the Highsmith literary trustees in Zurich, I\u2019d finally received permission to read the sulphurous Highsmith diaires, in which, separate from her writing journals, Highsmith had kept close accounts of dozens of her hundreds of love affairs.<\/p>\n

In a celebratory mood, I ordered the diaries up from the cellars of the Swiss National Library, opened one of them at random, and was shell-shocked to find a name I knew very well: the name of the brilliant, elderly, dignified woman who, shortly before her death in the 1980s, had been my play agent in New York. I\u2019d had no idea of her sexual identity and had always preferred to think of my agents as fully-clothed and at their desks. And now, half a world away and burning through the letters of Highsmith\u2019s crabbed handwriting were the richly explicit\u2014and deeply colorful\u2014physical details of this woman\u2019s torrid love affair with Highsmith in the 1940s. It\u2019s a description I\u2019m still hoping to forget.<\/p>\n

And there was something else as well. Highsmith\u2019s default activities\u2014the stalking of her lovers, the rifling of their lives and her own for her fictions, the reordering of chronologies and circumstances in her diaries and journals to suit herself and\/or her imagined posterity\u2014were beginning to remind me of the darker side of the biographer\u2019s art.<\/p>\n

Despite the much-quoted definition of biographers as \u201cartists on oath\u201d (by Desmond McCarthy, the laziest member of the Bloomsbury group), the techniques employed by authors whose business it is to write about the specific gravity of human character are at least descriptively criminal: we stalk our subjects; we treat their lives as crime scenes; we invade their stately homes; we rifle their archives; we elicit and expose their intimacies; and run our imaginations over everything else\u2014all in the ostensible service of the debt Voltaire claimed the living owe the dead: \u201cthe truth,\u201d in each of its manifestations. The shadow of the \u201cpublishing scoundrel\u201d who narrates The Aspern Papers<\/em> hangs over us all.<\/p>\n

But Highsmith\u2019s eccentric behavior and criminal imagination\u2014coupled with a hard look at my own circumstances\u2014ended by persuading me that within the delicate balance of competing truths that biography is always on the verge of upsetting, the living and the dead should be offered a little protection from each other, should offer each other<\/em> a little protection. It is, after all, the premise on which creative partnerships are founded.<\/p>\n

For at some point during my long, excruciating, rivetingly interesting relationship with this dead writer, we had somehow agreed to collaborate in rendering the trespasses of her life and the extremities of her work. By now, enough of her identity has leaked through the porous borders of her writing to perfuse my own, and I\u2019ve been issued a passport to Highsmith Country that can never be revoked.<\/p>\n

You might say\u2014she<\/em> would certainly say it\u2014that Patricia Highsmith and I have become partners in crime.<\/p>\n

Joan Schenkar is the author of <\/em>The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re out this week, but we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2011 while we\u2019re away. We hope you enjoy\u2014and have a happy New Year! Let\u2019s be honest. I rue the day I didn\u2019t have my late stepmother whacked. I\u2019d rather eat dirt than talk to my larcenous cousins. I haven\u2019t forgiven my father […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":118,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1667],"tags":[199,1826,1828,1827,1825],"class_list":["post-11190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notes-from-a-biographer","tag-biography","tag-murder","tag-noir","tag-partners-in-crime","tag-patricia-highsmith"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAfter Patricia by Joan Schenkar<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"December 29, 2011 \u2013 We\u2019re out this week, but we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2011 while we\u2019re away. We hope you enjoy\u2014and have a happy New Year! 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