Horror is just another word for soul: Patricia Highsmith
Foto: imago images/Leemage/Sophie Bassouls
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The disaster does not come. It oozes. This literature has learned that from the blood that leaves us. Like anything else that could keep him alive. If these novels wanted to be fairy tales – they told how the grandmother eats the wolf.
The work of Patricia Highsmith (“Der Stümper”, “The Scream of the Owl”) depicts infernal encounters with the Janus head whom we all hide from the world. Just as Bluebeard has his secret chamber, so we have such chambers in us. The fantasies of unlived dreams of violence. In which we become lustful traitors to the rules of morality. Horror, that’s just another word for soul.
An early story tells of a girl who, as a foundling, is raised as girls by nuns and blows up their monastery – in order to finally be a boy. Sentences like the demon itself: “A boy is what happens when a child is not a girl.”
The American Highsmith, born in 1921 in Fort Worth, Texas, had long tried to weigh up her talents. She would have liked to become a painter; but the urge for literature turned out to be stronger. England, Greece and Mexico became stations of “a life that demanded everything from me, but also gave me everything in freedom” before she and her cats retired to a French village and finally to Ticino, Switzerland, where she died in 1995.
The crazy, irritating horror world of Edgar Allan Poe, in which the hanged people dangle in the wind – at Highsmith this gruesome world has become part of everyday life (“The Storyteller”, “The Glass Cell”). Everything is elegant, the silver knives are wiped clean. The confusion is already sitting at the breakfast table.
Above all, the bestselling author created one fictional character that caused a sensation: Tom Ripley. “The Talented Mr. Ripley”, “Ripley Under Ground”, “Ripley’s Game”, “The Boy Who Followed Ripley” are novels that elevated a gentleman criminal to a hero of modern world literature. Alain Delon played this perfect Don Juan of Murder for the cinema with a grandiose, frost-blue disposition, “whose art is to find a blood-stained life worth living – as there are many of these people in reality,” says the author.
Is there anything more boring and artificial than justice? This is what the Highsmith asks with charming, hexical audacity. You read them with your head bowed. And falls for her. Peter Handke writes that this author plays horror like Yehudi Menuhin plays the violin. Everyone in these books says in a friendly manner “Good morning” and at the same time holds the wrench behind his back – ready to strike. Highsmith smiles and always likes to say in a low voice that her favorite bird is the robin, that goes so well with her favorite composer Mozart.
Her first novel caught the attention of two greats: Alfred Hitchcock filmed “Two Strangers on a Train” in 1951, Raymond Chandler wrote the screenplay. German directors (Geissendörfer, Wenders) also repeatedly turned to this master of the black art of murder. Also Pollack, Clement, Chabrol.
The writer has often moved, always on the lookout for more sun, for a new bowl, “like a hermit crab that uses the abandoned shells of strange animals as a dwelling …” She patted her cats and fed her snails, which were named after one of the authors their volumes of mysterious short stories became: »The Snail Researcher«.
She struggled with her homosexuality and remained a “misanthropic bachelor”. She had “given up again shortly before the wedding. I was afraid of being a mother; I would not have had the patience to raise children. ”She had a weakness for friends and cosmopolitanism, and has mercilessly suppressed both. Because both kept them from work in a devastating way. It consisted of writing; eight or nine pages a day, for a lifetime on an old, but at least electric, typewriter.
Like God in heaven, she lets murderers triumph and the well-meaning perish in horror. On the way from word to deed everything becomes hopeless. Neither the amiable, cobweb-ensnared comfortingness of Agatha Christie nor the whiskey-smelling cynical shirt-sleeves of Raymond Chandler, neither the cold sobriety of Ross MacDonald nor the nosy sobriety of Dashiell Hammett only roughly cover what the works of the Highsmith are all about. The motivation for the crime lies in the attempt of their characters to approach another person. All love just a tribal story of sham? “Distance or I’ll kill!” Says Ingeborg Bachmann.
The main characters of many novels, be it Howard Ingham from “The Forger’s Trembling”, Ed Garrett from “Venice Can Be Very Cold” or Rydal Keener from “The Two Faces of January”, and finally the writer of “Edith’s Diary” – es are people whose life is in an intangible crisis. In a reality in which anything can happen to anyone, the decisive factor is not the murder, but the agonizingly delayed consequence of such catastrophes. In a literature in which all evil is incorporated into structures of a fundamentally falsified existence, the clear identification of who is the perpetrator and who is the victim disappears. Nothing at all has to be done anymore, the worst possible twist is always there, and so the novels tend more and more to what Flaubert called his literary dream: “to write a book about nothing”. The real is no longer negotiable because it eludes the influence of morality. “The quiet center of the world” is the characteristic title from very early stories.
It is never spiritual, always material. Never interpreting, always purifying “enumerating”. Narrative and narrative strive for congruence. Nothing should be artificially put under tension by literary technology. Broken wills, slowly flowing language. Here lies the magic that a poet like Peter Handke discovered in Highsmith. He calls their stories “private world wars”. After just a few pages, you feel caught up in a secret that becomes bigger the fewer words it needs for its increasingly gaping abysses. “Stories like billows of smoke,” she writes herself. The murders late, the inspectors pale.
Diogenes Verlag will publish diaries from the estate in autumn. Thousands of sheets were found in a linen cupboard after her death. The place as a signal: be careful, dirty laundry. Because they are also evidence of the anti-Semitic, of hatred, of undisguised darkness. Evidence of a life that left everything creative, and indeed the value of personalities in general, in the work and completely lost itself to what was not presentable in the lived existence. Highsmith always knew this and wrote as early as 1940: “No writer would reveal his hidden life.”
But now it will be published and read, and in addition to the critical analysis – preliminary reports reveal this – there will be again that “management of insults in identity politics” (Bernd Stegemann), which meanwhile routinely attracts attention. And everything that is real is “freed” from ambivalences.
The teaching of Patricia Highsmith: Our soil sways, but that leads to the reinvention of dark, shiny paths. Her work portrays the impossibility of reconciling an idea of life with the reality of life. By getting caught up in the ugly, the hardest, most beautiful of all games begins: not to consider anything as immutable, to no longer rely on anything, to distrust all alleged reliabilities.
A game for which we have to overcome ourselves. Because we would like to give the nobility of a logic to those many coincidences that make us adults, lovers, sensible, alleged world-seekers in life – whose legislators we ourselves are. We are not. There is no existence that makes both free and safe at the same time.
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