reviews_and_ramblings | Queer History: Patricia Highsmith (January 19, 1921

Patricia Highsmith (January 19, 1921 - February 4, 1995) was an American novelist and short-story writer most widely known for her psychological thrillers, which have led to more than two dozen film adaptations. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train has been adapted for the screen three times, notably by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. In addition to her acclaimed series about murderer Tom Ripley, she wrote many short stories, often macabre, satirical or tinged with black humor. Although she wrote specifically in the genre of crime fiction, her books have been lauded by various writers and critics as being artistic and thoughtful enough to rival mainstream literature.

Michael Dirda observed that "Europeans honored her as a psychological novelist, part of an existentialist tradition represented by her own favorite writers, in particular Dostoevsky, Conrad, Kafka, Gide, and Camus".

Born Mary Patricia Plangman in Fort Worth, Texas. She lived in her maternal grandmother's boarding house with her mother, and later her step father. In 1927 she moved to New York City with her mother and step father. When Highsmith was 12 years old, she was taken to Fort Worth and lived with her grandmother for a year. 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 step father, Stanley Highsmith. Highsmith's mother Mary had divorced "Patsy's" father (Jay Bernard Plangman) five months before her birth, and he is absent from the family's history after that. The young Highsmith had an intense, complicated relationship with her mother and resented her stepfather, although she took his surname, and in later years she sometimes tried to win him over to her side of the argument in her confrontations with her mother. According to Highsmith, her mother once told her that she had tried to abort her by drinking turpentine. Highsmith never resolved this love-hate relationship, which haunted her for the rest of her life, and which she fictionalized in her short story "The Terrapin", about a young boy who stabs his mother to death.

Highsmith's grandmother taught her to read at an early age. Highsmith made good use of her grandmother's extensive library. At the age of eight, she discovered Karl Menninger's The Human Mind and was fascinated by the case studies of patients afflicted with mental disorders such as pyromania and schizophrenia.

According to her biography, Beautiful Shadow, Highsmith's personal life was a troubled one; she was an alcoholic who never had a relationship that lasted for more than a few years, and was seen by some of her contemporaries and acquaintances as misanthropic and cruel.

She famously preferred the company of animals to that of people, and once said, "My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people."

"She was a mean, hard, cruel, unlovable, unloving person," said acquaintance Otto Penzler. "I could never penetrate how any human being could be that relentlessly ugly."

Other friends and acquaintances were less caustic in their criticism, however; Gary Fisketjon, who published her later novels through Knopf, said that "she was rough, very difficult... but she was also plainspoken, dryly funny, and great fun to be around."

Highsmith was bi-sexual, and never married or had children. In 1943 she had an affair with the artist Allela Cornell (who subsequently committed suicide in 1946 by drinking nitric acid and in 1949), she became close to novelist Marc Brandel. Between 1959 and 1961 she had a relationship with Marijane Meaker, who wrote under the pseudonyms of Vin Packer and Ann Aldrich, but later wrote young adult fiction with the name M.E. Kerr. Meaker wrote of their affair in her memoir Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s. In the late 1980s, after 27 years of separation, Highsmith began sharing correspondence with Meaker again, and one day showed up on her doorstep, slightly drunk and ranting bitterly. Meaker once recalled in an interview the horror she felt upon noticing the changes in Highsmith's personality by that point.

Highsmith was never comfortable with blacks, and she was outspokenly anti-Semitic — so much so that when she was living in Switzerland in the 1980s, she invented nearly 40 aliases, identities she used in writing to various government bodies and newspapers, deploring the state of Israel and the “influence” of the Jews; nevertheless, she had Jewish friends such as author Arthur Koestler, and admired Jewish writers such as Franz Kafka and Saul Bellow. She was accused of misogyny because of her satirical collection of short stories Little Tales of Misogyny.

Highsmith loved woodworking tools and made several pieces of furniture. She kept pet snails; she worked without stopping. In her later life she became stooped, with an osteoporotic hump.

Though her writing — 22 novels and eight books of short stories — was highly acclaimed, especially outside of the United States, Highsmith preferred for her personal life to remain private. She had friendships and correspondences with several writers, and was also greatly inspired by art and the animal kingdom. Highsmith believed in American democratic ideals and in the promise of US history, but she was also highly critical of the reality of the country's 20th-century culture and foreign policy. Beginning in 1963, she resided exclusively in Europe.

Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes, her 1987 anthology of short stories, was notoriously anti-American, and she often cast her homeland in a deeply unflattering light.

Highsmith died of leukemia in Locarno, Switzerland. In gratitude to the place that helped inspire her writing career, she left her estate, worth an estimated $3 million, to the Yaddo colony. Her last novel, Small g: A Summer Idyll, was published posthumously a month later.

Burial: Cimitero di Tegna, Ticino, Ticino, Switzerland

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Highsmith

Highsmith has long been one of my literary icons. When it comes to probing the darkest sides of human nature, no one does it better than she. Strangers on a Train is a much better novel than the Hitchcock movie of the same name (although that was not without its charm, among them the very lovely Farley Granger) and has a much darker resolution. Its homoeroticism, too, is much more explicit than in the sanitized Hollywood film that bears the same name. --Rick R. Reed

On my first casual viewing of the film, The Talented Mr. Ripley, I missed most of the gay content. After reading the book and watching the movie again, I marvel at how anyone could miss it. Ripley is a tragic villain, if there can be such a thing, but such a well-drawn character that you can't help being engaged in the book. --Kyell Gold

Some books (like mine) leave little to the imagine when it comes to sizzling mansex. Others, like THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY, let the heat between the characters simmer and brew, without so much as a word being said or a deed being done. And although this book isn’t strictly a GLBT novel, the sexual tension between Tom and Dickie is electric, and ultimately devastating. I’ve loved this book for a long time, and I was so pleased when the movie came out that instead of dumbing down the homoerotic tension (which Hollywood is so fond of doing), director Anthony Minghella actually turned the gay heat levels all the way up, even given Tom a male love interest other than Dickie! Bravo! --Geoffrey Knight

Queer History: Patricia Highsmith (January 19, 1921 - February 4, 1995)