A strange and disturbing woman, Patricia Highsmith preferred the company of cats to that of humans. Highsmith was born Mary Patricia Plangman, in Fort Worth, Texas, on January 19, 1921. She was not a desired girl. His parents divorced before his birth. Educated by her maternal grandmother, Will Mae, her mother remarried three years later to Stanely Highsmith, from whom Patricia would take her surname. In 1927 he moved to New York to live with the couple, both graphic designers. His relationship with them was painful and conflictual. Years later, she found out that her mother, Mary Coates, had drunk turpentine during her pregnancy, attempting to induce an abortion. Patricia would take revenge by means of a story titled “The sea turtle”, where a boy stabs his mother.
In that environment of affections contaminated by ambivalence, books burst in like a lifeline. The discovery of Karl Menninger’s psychiatric essays allowed him to delve into the labyrinth of mental pathologies. Since then, she would be attracted to disturbed behaviors, devising a universe where the human being revolves around guilt, lies and crime. At sixteen he wrote his first story, lost today. He studied English, Latin, and Greek literature at Barnard College. For six years, he worked as a comic book writer, living between New York and Mexico.
At twenty-four, he published his first story in Harper’s Bazaar and in 1950 he made his debut with Strangers on a train, which a year later Alfred Hitchcock would adapt to the cinema, with a screenplay by Raymond Chandler. Hollywood altered the plot, as it seemed too disturbing and not exemplary. In 1952 Highsmith published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan the novel The Price of Salt, which tells a love story between two women, which was a provocation for the society of the time. The novel would not reappear until three decades later, with a new title, Carol, and already with the real name of the author. In the epilogue, Highsmith celebrated that his novel had helped thousands of people overwhelmed by a society hostile to their sexual identity.
Misanthropic, lesbian, pessimistic, morbid and leftist, the United States made no secret of its dislike of a writer who questioned her lifestyle. Highsmith then decided to seek a more favorable environment, permanently moving to Europe in 1963. He lived in the United Kingdom, France and, at the end of his life, in the Swiss commune of Tegna west of Locarno, where he died on February 4, 1995. Andrew Wilson wrote his biography, titled Beautiful Shadow, an eloquent expression that brings together the gloom and seduction of an unstable, alcoholic writer, whose brief romance with writer Marijane Meaker represented the only moment of true intimacy with another human being. Highsmith claimed that his mind worked best when he could do without talking to people. A cat or a snail seemed much more pleasant interlocutors.
All his work moves along the narrow line that separates good and evil. His most famous creation is Tom Ripley, the protagonist of a cycle of five novels, which in the cinema has been played by Alain Delon, Dennis Hopper or John Malkovich. With a concise and minimalist style, which is inspired by Maupassant, Highsmith composes a character that consumes the inversion of values postulated by Nietzsche, trampling on traditional morality. His crimes always go unpunished and allow him to move up the social ladder. Ripley is an antihero who combines cunning, charm and seduction. Graham Greene called Highsmith’s world a “closed, irrational and oppressive” orb, capable of producing both fascination and horror. His books are viewpoints built on abysses that fatally attract us.
It would be unfair to restrict the echo of Highsmith’s work to the detective genre. His plots, very black, are not simple intrigues saturated with wit, but sharp explorations of the human heart, particularly those areas where the most harmful passions are brewed. Meaker left us a very eloquent portrait of the writer: “She was tall and thin, with dark hair down to the beginning of the shoulders and bright dark brown eyes that made her look like a cross between the brave prince and Rudolf Nureyev.” Highsmith always despised the peace of bourgeois and morally correct life. Meaker tells us that on New Year’s Eve 1947 he raised his glass saying: “I toast to all demons, to all lusts, passions, greed, envy, loves, hatred, strange desires, real and unreal enemies, for all the armies of memories against which I fight, so that they never let me rest ”.
The writer harbored despicable phobias. Anti-Semitic and misogynistic, she did not hide her hatred of blacks. She adored success and money, and it didn’t cause her conscience problems to emotionally tear her lovers apart. Meaker tells us that he murdered in his novels “the people he loved in real life.” He only believed in work, “solid and sincere”, and in the siesta, fertile provider of occurrences: “a little sleep saves time instead of wasting it. I fall asleep with the problem and wake up with the answer ”. He knew there was always the possibility of failure, but that was what made the job exciting.
Highsmith left us twenty-two novels, seven storybooks, and more than 8,000 pages of journals, but perhaps his most important legacy was reminding us that demons are swarming within us, seeking an opportunity to go outside. We can all become murderers. It only takes the circumstances to combine adversely, unleashing the ferocity inherent in the human condition. Literature, alien to moral evaluations, is only the chronicle of this conflict. Tom Ripley is Macbeth, but without feelings of guilt and with the wit to defeat Birnam Forest.
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