Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires review : Reviewed: The Life of Patricia Highsmith

Item: Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires
Rating: 8
Author: Paddy Kehoe

Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires - The Life of Patricia Highsmith is the third biographical engagement with the troubled life, and it appears on the 100th anniversary of the writer's birth.

There have been two previous biographies, Andrew Wilson's Beautiful Shadow, which appeared in 2003, and Joan Schenkar's The Talented Miss Highsmith, which was published in 2009.

Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law and Matt Damon in The Talented Mr Ripley

In recent times, the work of Patricia Highsmith is best known because of the well-received, largely popular films which have been adapted from her books. Notably, there is The Talented Mr Ripley, directed by the late Anthony Minghella, which appeared in 1999.

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In the story, young slacker Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) finds himself beneficiary of a free trip to Europe where he aims to befriend Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law) a spoiled millionaire playboy, believed to be in Italy.

Tom is struggling to stay one step ahead of his creditors and is effectively running from the law. However, his desperate bid for financial help comes to grief, and the young man is led down a devious side path, one on which he is willing to kill for money.

The 1955 novel on which the film is based was memorably described in The Sunday Times "as haunting and harrowing a study of a schizophrenic murderer as paper will bear." Highsmith wrote five Ripley novels in total, aside from many other novels and short stories. Alain Delon played the eponymous schemer in René Clément's fine film, Plein Soleil, which was also based on The Talented Mr Ripley.

Farley Granger as the tennis player Guy Haines and Robert Walker as the psychopathic Bruno Antony in the Alfred Hitchcock-directed Strangers on a Train

Highsmith's first novel, Strangers on a Train, published in 1950, became an Alfred Hitchcock film the following year, with an impressive box office take of seven million dollars. The story involves two strangers who meet on a train, a young man and a somewhat older gent who is in fact a psychopath.

The psychopath concocts an interesting ruse. Because they each want to see someone wiped out, they should swap their murder plans, and the theory is neither will be apprehended for their crimes. The psychopath commits the first murder, then attempts to force the younger man to fulfill his part of the bargain.

Another scene from Strangers on a Train, starring Farley Granger and Robert Walker

The successful films have followed in tandem with the novels, albeit with script modifications which were not always to Highsmith's taste. German director Wim Wenders based Der amerikanische Freund (The American Friend), released in 1977, on Ripley's Game, which novel had appeared in 1974. It starred the late Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz, moving mysteriously around Hamburg and keeping us all alert with confounding suspense.

The semi-autobiographical lesbian romance The Price of Salt was published under the pen name 'Claire Morgan' in 1952. The novel was re-titled as Carol when issued again in 1990, and Todd Haynes' 2015 film starred Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara.

Patricia Highsmith: subterfuge and infidelity were constants

So much for the cinema legacy and the films whose adjusted or refurbished screen plays appeared to bring occasionally flat prose to life, polishing up the stories and making them eminently suitable for the big screen. How many get beyond the films to actually check out the novels? A good question. Sales rocketed after Hitchcock made his Strangers on a Train, Richard Bradford tells us in his engaging book, but no more than that.

Highsmith was born in Fort Worth, Texas in 1921. Her parents moved to New York when she was six and she attended Julia Richmond High School and Barnard College. At the age of 16 she was editing the school magazine, the first step in the ladder which would bring unbounded fame as a writer of steely, doom-laden tales. Before the books, there was work as a publicist for a deodorant company, followed by a stint as a comic book script-writer.

That devilishly-gifted imagination was a product of the life, and Bradford does not spare us the sordid details and indeed the unhappy childhood which appears to have made Highsmith essentially into a loner for life, despite the many fraught liaisons.

The writer was inclined to seduce married women, or lesbians who were already in relationships, she was pathologically unfaithful. She was, in later years, a serious alcoholic, intoxicated all day and well into the evening. She once toppled onto a display of lit candles, in a stupor, hair ablaze, while dinner guests put out the flames.

Highsmith did have heterosexual affairs and she assured the English novelist Marc Brandel that she would marry him, visiting a psychoanalyst who vowed to "cure" her of her homosexuality. Bradford reveals that she really had no intention of marrying Brandel and that she had nothing but disdain for the psychoanalyst. The biographer attributes Highsmith's profound unhappiness to that dysfunctional childhood, involving a hugely difficult relationship with her stepfather and a disorienting period spent with her grandparents.

She was a fierce anti-Semite and a Holocaust denier who declared that Jews "love to be hated", although many of her lovers were Jewish. The writer also had a snail fetish and carried the creatures around in her handbag, often in their hundreds. (In her story The Snail Watcher, a whole colony of attacking snails suffocate an old man to death.)

Patricia Highsmith died in Locarno, Switzerland in February 1995, aged 74. Her last novel, Small g: A Summer Idyll, was published posthumously the same year. She had projected a final book in the Ripley series, to be named Ripley's Luck, forever the final, tantalising gap in the ouevre. Who knows, it might have been the very best, although the late novels had not offered the best of what she could do in that inimitable pale prose of hers that could so brilliantly conjure dark intrigue.

Also available is Under a Dark Angel's Eye, a choice selection of Patricia Highsmith's short stories from Virago Press. The earliest story is from when the author was still at high school, and the stories are arranged chronologically so that early themes and stages in the writer's development are apparent. Highsmith's extensive back-list is published on the Virago Modern Classics list and the long-established publishing house will celebrate the writer's centenary throughout 2021.

The great Chinese-American author Yiyun Li enthuses about the short stories in the following terms. "If Patricia Highsmith in her novels, holds us hostages in a maze of dark dreams, inexplicable desires, and irrational urges, in her short stories she breaks down the maze, wedges its fragments in our minds, and leaves it to us to rebuild the phantom maze and submit ourselves again to her grip."

Reviewed: Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires - The Life of Patricia Highsmith

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