BiographyHigh claims are made for Highsmith. She "superbly carried out Dickens's task of making the crime story literature", Brigid Brophy wrote, while Julian Symons was filled with admiration for her "unremittingly bleak vision".
Not everyone was similarly bowled over, though: she emphatically wasn't "everyone's meat", admitted one of her agents, and, indeed, her novels and stories, masterpieces of misanthropy and futility as they are, do not make comfortable reading. They are products of her self-confessed fascination with the morbid, the cruel, and the abnormal, a fascination going back to her childhood when she read and relished Dr Karl Menninger's The Human Mind while her contemporaries had their noses stuck in The Little House in the Big Woods.
Immersed in madness and maladjustment from the age of nine, she turned these things to striking account in her fiction. But the emphasis on deviance and virulence betokened an unhappy temperament, a state of being at odds with the world which intensified as she grew older.
Patricia Highsmith was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, and grew up partly there and in New York. Her mother divorced her father before Patricia was born, and later married Stanley Highsmith, whose name the author took. Highsmith described her childhood as "a little hell", although it isn't clear what made it so infernal. She wasn't deprived of love or attention; her stepfather does not seem to have been especially disagreeable; she was fond of her grandmother in Fort Worth, with whom she spent a year when she was 12. She was attached to her mother Mary Highsmith (although that fraught relationship, in later years, descended into bile and bitterness, expressed, for the most part, in a searing correspondence). She was an "A" student, and enjoyed summer camp. However, in anti-nostalgic mode, looking back brought her nothing but acrimony and anger. She referred to "damage" and "betrayal".
By the time she was 20 and a student at Barnard College, New York, Patricia Highsmith was writing stories, including one about a boy brought up as a girl; too much should not be read into this, her biographer cautions, even though the author "felt from an early age that she had an unmistakably masculine identity". A further cause of resentment, in old age, was the fact that social pressures had forced her to clamp down on the emotions she felt for her own sex - however, one would have to say that this clamping process was of brief duration. During the greater part of Highsmith's life, a multitude of female lovers came and went; some accompanied her on trips to Mexico or Mallorca, some shared her home for a year or two. All, to a greater or lesser extent, provoked angst and agitation. More than one committed suicide, or attempted suicide. It seems the farouche Highsmith was not an easy companion, either travelling or settled.
Domestic "cosiness" she found insufficiently stimulating - just as, in her fiction, she went out of her way to annihilate the "cosy crime" experience beloved of the reading public. When she came to impose her stamp on the "thriller" conventions, it proved to be not so much a matter of extending the genre, as distorting it. But then, creative distortion was her business.
More at home in Europe than America, she was also by nature attuned to the roman noir with its stylish insouciance and matter-of-fact morbidity; her own work was judged, not unreasonably, to be "too dark for mass consumption". Few would disagree with her agent of 20 years, Patricia Schartle, who claimed that Highsmith's career was highlighted by "by two almost perfect flashes of brilliance" - the plot of Strangers on a Train and the character of Ripley. It's chiefly from these that her impact derives, though later novels such as Found in the Street and The Tremor of Forgery netted her admirers.
From 1951 on, Highsmith lived mostly abroad, in France, England, France again, and finally, Switzerland. Critical and commercial success didn't help to diminish her eccentricities, which included (as well as heavy drinking) secreting pet snails about her person when travelling, and eating raw meat to boost her energy levels. Her ferocious disgust at life in general, expressed in her writing, seems to have bypassed certain areas which most people would find disgusting. It was, perhaps, her affinity with insects which caused her to judge the cockroaches infesting one New York hotel "a good deal more decent than the clientele" - but then, as she said herself to account for the unlikeability of all her characters: "I don't like anyone". With a good many of her acquaintances, the sentiment was mutual.
Andrew Wilson, however, is clearly fascinated by the subject of his biography - and with letters, notebooks, diaries, and innumerable interviewees at his disposal, he has written an expansive, not to say exhaustive, book about a singular woman. He scrupulously records negative as well as positive verdicts on Patricia Highsmith; the two together go to underscore the contradictory nature of her, somewhat rebarbative, personality. She was mean and generous, a misogynist and a lover of women, a liberal and a bigot. She was "a weird, unkind and dissolute person . . . odious . . . a totally horrible woman"; or, on the other hand, she was "caring and warm-hearted". You can take your pick. What's beyond dispute, however, is the alarm occasioned by her increasing peculiarities: you never knew what she was going to do. She might lean towards a candle on a dinner table and deliberately set fire to her hair; or, having invited a couple of guests, enliven their stay by flinging a dead rat through the open window of their bedroom. She was never very sociable and could not be counted on for urbane behaviour, once running away from Edna O'Brien and Brigid Brophy when she met them by chance in Positano. The "literary scene" was anathema to her, although some individual writers gained her approval: Gore Vidal, for example, Margaret Atwood, Ronald Blythe and Graham Greene. (One French newspaper, reviewing Greene's Travels with My Aunt and getting the title wrong, had her doubled over in the street in a paroxysm of laughter: they printed it as Travels with My Cunt.)
Viewing the world around her through "a distorted lens" was a major literary resource for Patricia Highsmith; and Andrew Wilson has written a book which celebrates her considerable achievement as well as disclosing the full extent of the oddity of the author.
Patricia Craig's biography of Brian Moore was published by Bloomsbury last year
Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith By Andrew Wilson Bloomsbury, 534pp. £25