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Patricia Highsmith

was an Australian novelist and playwright who explored themes of religious experience, personal identity and the conflict between visionary individuals and a materialistic, conformist society. Influenced byF the modernism of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, he developed a complex literary style and a body of work which challenged the dominant realist prose tradition of his home country, was satirical of Australian society, and sharply divided local critics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973.

Early life

Highsmith was born Mary Patricia Plangman in Fort Worth, Texas on January 19, 1921. She was the only child of commercial artists Jay Bernard Plangman (1889–1975) and Mary Plangman (née Coates; September 13, 1895 – March 12, 1991). Her father had not wanted a child and had persuaded her mother to have an abortion. Her mother, after a failed attempt to abort her by drinking turpentine, decided to leave Plangman. The couple divorced nine days before their daughter's birth.

In 1927 Highsmith, her mother and her stepfather, commercial artist Stanley Highsmith, whom her mother had married in 1924, moved to New York City. Patricia excelled at school and read widely, including works by Jack London, Louisa May Alcott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker and John Ruskin. At the age of nine, she became fascinated by the case histories of abnormal psychology in The Human Mind by Karl Menninger, a popularizer of Freudian analysis.

In the summer of 1933, Highsmith attended a girls' camp and the letters she wrote home were published as a story two years later in Woman's World magazine. She received $250 for the story. After returning from camp, Highsmith was sent to Fort Worth and lived with her maternal grandmother for a year. She called this the "saddest year" of her life and felt "abandoned" by her mother. In 1934 she returned to New York to live with her mother and stepfather in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. Highsmith was unhappy at home. She hated her step father and developed a life-long love–hate relationship with her mother, which she later fictionalized in stories such as "The Terrapin", about a young boy who stabs his mother to death.

She attended the all-girl Julian Richman High School where she achieved a B minus average grade. She continued to read widely—Edgar Allan Poe was a favorite—and began writing short stories and a journal. Her story "Primroses are Pink" was published in the school literary magazine.

In 1938 Highsmith entered Barnard College where her studies included English literature, playwriting and short story composition. Fellow students considered her a loner who guarded her privacy but she formed a life-long friendship with fellow student Kate Kingsley Skattebol. She continued to read voraciously, kept diaries and notebooks, and developed an interest in eastern philosophy, Marx and Freud. She also read Thomas Wolfe, Marcel Proust and Julien Green with admiration. She published nine stories in the college literary magazine and became its editor.

Apprentice writer

After graduating in 1942, Highsmith, despite endorsements from "highly placed professionals," applied without success for a job at publications such as Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Mademoiselle, Good Housekeeping, Time, Fortune, and The New Yorker. She eventually found work with FFF Publishers which provided copy for various Jewish publications. The job lasted ony six months but gave her experience in researching stories.

Based on the recommendation from Truman Capote, Highsmith was accepted by the Yaddo artist's retreat during the summer of 1948, where she worked on her first novel, Strangers on a Train. [Page required for first citation. Second citation is superfluous.]

Comic books

In December 1942 Highsmith found employment with comic book publisher Sangor–Pines. She was initially paid $55-a-week for scripting two comic-book stories a day. Highsmith wrote "Sergeant Bill King" stories, contributed to Black Terror and Fighting Yank comics, and wrote profiles such as Catherine the Great, Barney Ross, and Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker for the "Real Life Comics" series. She soon realized she could make more money by freelance writing for comics. From 1943 to 1946, under editor Vincent Fago at Timely Comics, she contributed to its U.S.A. Comics wartime series, writing scenarios for comics such as Jap Buster Johnson and The Destroyer. She also wrote for Fawcett Publications, scripting characters "Crisco and Jasper" and other comics. Highsmith also wrote for True Comics, Captain Midnight, and Western Comics.a situation which enabled her to find time to work on her own short stories and live for a period in Mexico. The comic book scriptwriter job was the only long-term job Highsmith ever held.

Changes

Her father had not wanted a child and had persuaded her mother to have an abortion. Her mother, once after a failed attempt to abort her by drinking turpentine, decided to divorce Plangman. [source is Schenkar pp 63-64. Remove other superfluous source.] although a biography of Highsmith indicates Jay Plangman tried to persuade his wife to have the abortion but she refused. Highsmith never resolved this developed a life-love love–hate relationship with her mother, which she fictionalized in "The Terrapin", her short story about a young boy who stabs his mother to death. [Nonsense. H said she didn\t resent the abortion attempt. Schenker p. 64. She started to hate her mother at age 17. Also she doesn't say so crudely that The Terrapin fictionalizes her love/hate relationship with her mother. Sch 102 ] Highsmith's mother predeceased her by only four years, dying at the age of 95. [Moved abortion story to logical place.]

Highsmith's grandmother taught her to read at an early age, and she made good use of her grandmother's extensive library. [This wasn't in NYC. Too tangential.]

At the age of nine, she became fascinated by the case histories of abnormal psychology in The Human Mind by Karl Menninger, a popularizer of Freudian analysis. [Rewrote close paraphrase. Sch p. 92]

She called this the "saddest year" of her life and felt "abandoned" by her mother. She returned to New York to continue living with her mother and stepfather, primarily in Manhattan, but also in Astoria, Queens. [Unsourced and wrong. They lived in Astoria before sending her back to Fort Worth. They lived in Greenwich Village afterwards.]

Many of Highsmith's 22 novels were set in Greenwich Village. [This doesn't belong here.]

In 1942, Highsmith graduated from Barnard College, where she studied English literature, playwriting, and short story prose. [Information already included.] After graduating from college, and despite endorsements from "highly placed professionals," she applied without success for a job at publications such as Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Mademoiselle, Good Housekeeping, Time, Fortune, and The New Yorker. [Superfluous source. It's just a journalist quoting Schekar.]

When Highsmith wrote the psychological thriller novel The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), one of the title character's first victims is a comic-book artist named Reddington: "Tom had a hunch about Reddington. He was a comic-book artist. He probably didn't know whether he was coming or going." [This is trivia and is tangential.]

Things to add

First lesbian relationship with Mary Sullivan 1940. (Wilson p 78). Put this in sexuality section?

Themes, style and genre

Themes

Highsmith's themes were influenced by Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kafka, and the existentialism of Sartre and Camus. Her biographer Andrew Wilson argues that her work presents an amoral world view in which murderers go unpunished or are only punished by chance. In 1966, Highsmith wrote: "neither life nor nature cares whether justice is ever done or not."

Irrational behavior, abnormal psychology and extreme emotional states are recurrent themes. Biographer Richard Bradford writes, "Issues such as guilt, hatred, self-loathing and unfulfilled longing which Highsmith endlessly contemplated without resolution became the cocktail for her fictional narratives and characters." Critic Russell Harrison states that Highsmith's protagonists often act irrationally because of self-imposed emotional constraints. According to Graham Greene, "Her characters are irrational and they leap to life in the very lack of reason; suddenly we realize how unbelievably rational most fictional characters are."

Highsmith explored issues of double, splintered and shifting identities. Biographer Andrew Wilson states that many of her novels involve a struggle between two men who search out an opposite but defining doppelgänger. Critic Fiona Peters points out that The Talented Mr Ripley and This Sweet Sickness involve protagonists who create false identities. Harrison argues: "the theme of an individual transforming himself or herself, of the willed construction of a personality, once again suggest[s] existentialism’s emphasis on individual choice free of any hint of determinism through history or genetics."

Critic David Cochran sees Highsmith's work as a critique of suburban America: "According to the dominant vision, a family, house in the suburbs and successful job equalled mental health and happiness, whereas the absence of these things led to sickness. But Highsmith consistently worked to break down these oppositions too. Especially in her view of American men, Highsmith subverted many of the ideological bases of the suburban ideal."

Male homosexual desire was a subtext of many of Highsmith's early works. Biographer Joan Schenker states that the typical Highsmith situation is "two men bound together psychologically by the stalker-like fixation of one upon the other, a fixation that always involves a disturbing, implicitly homoerotic fantasy." Highsmith explored lesbian relationships in The Price of Salt. Homosexuality was an important theme in later novels such as Found in the Street (1986) and Small g: a Summer Idyll (1995).

Style

Highsmith mostly wrote in the third-person singular from the point of view of the main character who is usually male. In several novels she alternates the point of view of two leading male characters. In 1966, she explained that a single point of view "increased the intensity of a story" whereas a double point of view brings a "change of pace and mood."

Wilson calls Highsmith's prose style crisp, compact and near transparent. Schenker describes her narrative tone as a "low, flat compellingly psychotic murmur." Wilson describes her tone as amoral, adding: "The mundane and the trivial are described in the same pitch as the horrific and the sinister and it is this unsettling juxtaposition that gives her work such power."

Commentators have variously described the atmosphere invoked by Highsmith's work as one of suspense, apprehension or unease. Graham Greene called her "the poet of apprehension." Peters states: "Highsmith’s forte is anxiety: rather than merely turning the page to discover what happens next – in other words to be held in a state of suspense – her readers are suspended in a haze of dread, anxiety and apprehension."Wilson argues that Highsmith disturbs her readers by manipulating them into identifying with unconventional psychologies: "Highsmith's world is seen through the distorted perspective of an 'abnormal' man, but the style of writing is so transparent and flat that by the end the reader aligns himself with a point of view that is clearly unbalanced and disturbed."

Genre

Highsmith was usually classified as a crime, suspense or mystery writer in the United States, whereas in Europe she was considered a psychological or literary novelist. Peters argues that she does not fit comfortably within accepted genres. Bradford considers The Talented Mr Ripley a precursor to gothic realism. Harrison argues that psychological realism is not prominent in her work and judges The Price of Salt to be one of her most social realist novels. Some of her short stories have been classified as horror.

Leftovers

“Highsmith has done more than anyone to erode the boundaries between crime writing as a recreational sub-genre and literature as high art.” Bradford (2021) Xiii

Not realist: “Psychological realism, however, plays a minor role. More significant is her ability to create in readers states of extreme psychological tension unlike anything produced by her contemporaries.” Harrison ix

The Talented Mrs Ripley. “forged the basis for her long term reputation as a writer.” Parallels with H autobiography. Homoerotic overtones. “It is a superb novel, eroding the boundaries between the popular genre of crime writing and the as yet unestablished field of gothic realism.” Bradford (2021) 110-113.

She does not fit comfortably within accepted genres of crime, suspense, mystery or psychological novels. Peters P 1-5

Her French publisher considered her a writer of psychological fiction, not a crime writer. 261-262. (She preferred to call herself a suspense writer.) Wilson 261-262

Wrote some horror stories. (Green quote).

Poe: Some of her other works of the 1950s and 1960s are “examples of private disturbance distilled into modernisations of Poe.” Bradford (2021) 178-79

“Her protagonists are virtually always Americans. Whether abroad or at home they are always faced with unsettling situations, rootless and, in their different ways, resisting the pull towards 'death by suburbia.'" Peters P 5

David Cochran: “According to the dominant vision, a family, house in the suburbs and successful job equalled mental health and happiness, whereas the absence of these things led to sickness. But Highsmith consistently worked to break down these oppositions too. Especially in her view of American men, Highsmith subverted many of the ideological bases of the suburban ideal.” Peters 45

Tone influenced by the noir crime novels of the 1930s and 1940s. Themes reflect the existentialism of Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kafka, Sartre and Camus. Wilson 4-5

Influences: Dostoevsky especially his struggle with Christianity. Proust. Karl Menninger and Kraft Ebing. Schenker Xv

H wrote that her theme was the individual out of place in this century. Schenker 148

H wrote: “Isn’t it safer, even wiser, to believe that life has no meaning at all.” Bradford (2021)  205

Amoral world view. Murderers go unpunished or are only punished by chance. H:”neither life nor nature cares whether justice is ever done or not.” Wilson 221-23

Many regard H as anovelist of emotions such as guilt. Early novels were influenced by Dostoyevsky, Gide, Sartre and Camus. But not a psychological realist. Harrison ix

“Psychological realism, however, plays a minor role. More significant is her ability to create in readers states of extreme psychological tension unlike anything produced by her contemporaries.” Harrison ix

Irrationality: Graham Greene, wrote that “{h]er characters are irrational and they leap to life in the very lack of reason; suddenly we realize how unbelievably rational most fictional characters are.” [Exactly. H isn’t an existentialist, she is simply saying that people often act irrationally for reasons noone really understands.] Harrison 5

Characters have obsession with consumer goods which acts as a displacement of the object of their extreme emotions and reflects their disocciated personalities. Harrison X

Theses: “Issues such as guilt, hatred, self-loathing and unfulfilled longing which Highsmith endlessly contemplated without resolution became the cocktail for her fictional narratives and characters…” Bradford (2021) 49

She thought the essence of the human condition was eternal disappointment. Wilson 119

Her work is an anatomy of guilt. Schenker 21

“Her work explores the motif of the double or splintered self.” Wilson 7

Themes of suggestive relationships between men, double nature of reality and instability of identity. Schenker  180-81

Her Quintessential themes are “homoeroticism, the lure of the double and the erasure of identity.” Wilson 108

Doppelgänger theme important in her works. A necessary but opposite double like the positive and negative components of an atom. Wilson 132

Influenced by Gides The Counterfeiters. Fakes emotions can be just as intense as real ones. Also idea that characters who acti irrationally or inconsistently are more real that those who are always rational and consistent. Wilson 110-11

Theme: the illusions nature of love. Influenced by Proust. The one we love is a fantasy of our own making. Just as Proust said he should give a different name to all the Albertines he imagined, so H dedicated a novel to all the Virginias. Wilson 79-80

Substitution of fantasy for reality a theme of many of her novels. Wilson 84

Theme is frustrated love and ambition. (Carol, Talented Ripley.) Bradford (2021) 113-14

Basic theme is the two man pattern of paranoid pursuit and ambiguous escape. Schenker 164

Major theme: “the ambiguous feelings of attraction and repulsion experienced by two very different men.” Wilson 89

Misogyny. “Although the contents of her novels have varied over the years, certain elements, adumbrated in her early novels, remained for a long time an important part of her fiction: significant (homoerotic) relationships between men; a negative, at times verging on the misogynist, cast to her treatment of women; and the irrationality of her characters’ actions.” Harrison 13

Transformation: “In The Talented Mr. Ripley, Highsmith also introduces the theme of an individual transforming himself or herself, of the willed construction of a personality, once again suggesting existentialism’s emphasis on individual choice free of any hint of determinism through history or genetics.” Harrison 20

The family: Themes: the existentialist influence, the characters’ obsession with control, the negative image of the family, the ambivalence about sex, and the fascination of commoditie. Harrison 98

Homosexuality. Male homosexual desire was a sub-text of many of Highsmith's early works. Schenker states that the typical Highsmith situation is “two men bound together psychologically by the stalker like fixation of one upon the other, a fixation that always involves a disturbing, implicitly homoerotic fantasy.” Schenker Xiv. Highsmith explored a lesbian relationship in The Price of Salt. Homosexuality was an important themes in her later novels. Harrison 97

Themes of inertia, entrapment within rigid conventional social structures, superiority and abhorrence towards others are repeated throughout her work. Peters 21

Tone of frustration or irritation. Haines is powerless to prevent Bruno intruding on his life. Harrison 18

Tone often described as amoral. Murder is described in the same way as walking a dog or eating breakfast. Wilson 221-23

Tone influenced by the noir crime novels of the 1930s and 1940s. Wilson 4-5

Hs style is crisp, compact and near-transparent. Wilson 79

Her prose tone: “low, flat compellingly psychotic murmur.” Schenker Xiv-xv

Tone: “The mundane and the trivial are described in the same pitch as the horrific and the sinister and it is this unsettling juxtaposition that gives her work such power.” Wilson 5

“Highsmiths world is seen through the distorted perspective of an “abnormal” man, but the style of writing is so transparent and flat that by the end the reader aligns himself with a point of view that is clearly unbalanced and disturbed.” Wilson 89

“Highsmith’s forte is anxiety: rather than merely turning the page to discover what happens next – in other words to be held in a state of suspense – her readers are suspended in a haze of dread, anxiety and apprehension.” Peters 18

Works cited

Bradford, Richard (2021). Devils, Lusts and Strange desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith. London: Bloomsbury Caravel. ISBN 9781448217908.

Harrison, Russell (1997). Patricia Highsmith (Twayne's United States Authors Series, No. 683) (1st ed.). New York: Twayne Publishers. ISBN 0-8057-4566-1.

Mawer, Noel (2004). A Critical Study of the Fiction of Patricia Highsmith: from the Psychological to the Political (Studies in American Literature, Vol 65). Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press. ISBN 0773465081.

Peters, Fiona (2011). Anxiety and Evil in the Writings of Patricia Highsmith. Ashgate Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4094-2334-8.

Schenkar, Joan (2011). The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith. New York and London: Picador St Martin's Press. ISBN 9780312363819.

Wilson, Andrew (2003). Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith. New York and London: Bloomsbury. ISBN 1582341982.

Sources

• Bradford, Richard (2021). Devils, Lusts and Strange desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith. London: Bloomsbury Caravel. ISBN 9781448217908.
• Schenkar, Joan (2011). The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith. New York and London: Picador St Martin's Press. ISBN 9780312363819.
• Wilson, Andrew (2003). Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith. New York and London: Bloomsbury. ISBN 1582341982.