Illustration by Martin McMurray

A common complaint about biographies of writers is that the work should be able to “stand for itself,” without any cult of personality being formed around the author. However, very few literary personalities are as interesting as Patricia Highsmith, and very few lives are as closely linked with a body of work. Throughout her career, Highsmith sought recognition by her American publishers and readers as more than a genre writer.  She felt that the European audience was more inclined to look beyond such labels. Now that she is no longer here to enjoy the validation, as it so often happens, she may be getting her wish.

Publication of Andrew Wilson’s elegant and immensely readable biography, Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith, continues a revival of interest in Highsmith that began in earnest with the Hollywood release of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” in 1999, four years after Highsmith’s death in Switzerland at the age of 73. (The novel had previously been adapted as “Purple Noon.") Movies have always been lucky for Highsmith, whose writing career was jump-started by Hitchcock’s film adaptation of her first novel, Strangers on a Train. Tom Ripley will return later this year, this time played by John Malkovich in “Ripley’s Game,” adapted from novel three in the Ripley series. In fact, so entranced by Highsmith is Malkovich that he has also taken on the role of producer for the film adaptation of Found in the Street.

Recent publications and reissues from W.W. Norton have included uniform editions of several of the novels as well as The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith and a volume of uncollected stories titled Nothing That Meets the Eye. An Everyman’s Library omnibus volume of the first three (out of five) Ripley novels appeared in the same year as the Matt Damon movie. A first American edition of Small g: A Summer Idyll, Highsmith’s last book, which is set in a gay bar in Zurich, is also expected from Norton, despite having been initially rejected by Highsmith’s U.S. publishers. Adding to the mix, Marijane Meaker, author of the l950s lesbian classic Spring Fire (under the pseudonym Anne Aldrich), paperback crime novels (as Vin Packer), and young adult fiction (as M.E. Kerr), has written a lively and provocative memoir, Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s.

We know from many sources that Highsmith was not an easy person to like. She could be stubborn and opinionated, at best. At worst, she said derogatory things about Jews and Blacks, embarrassing her loyal friends and alienating those less inclined to inquire further. Her later espousal of the Palestinian cause, fueled by her sense that American foreign policy (and American publishing) was dictated by Jewish interests, got her in lots of trouble. Highsmith’s various “ism” problems became more overt as she grew older and drank more. (Meaker likens these tendencies to the ritual behaviors of sufferers from obsessive-compulsive disorder who can’t stop washing their hands.)

Faced with numerous anecdotes of his subject’s misbehavior, what is a biographer to do? Wilson neither dismisses Highsmith’s misdemeanors nor pathologizes them. Approaching the book with some knowledge of Highsmith’s reputation, I was concerned that I might not be much inclined to inquire further. Instead, he tells a fascinating story that illuminates the patterns connecting her life with her art. I came away from it knowing the worst about Highsmith but without losing respect for her many gifts, not the least of which is a unique literary vision that acknowledges the very frailties she clearly saw in herself. In many ways it seems that writing kept Highsmith sane. Only while pushing her most troubled characters ever closer to the abyss was she able to maintain her own sense of equilibrium.

I knew I was in good hands with Andrew Wilson as a biographer from the first paragraph of his introduction, which neatly lays the groundwork for the narrative to follow:

When Patricia Highsmith looked up at the luminous face of the clock on the entrance to Pennsylvania station, New York, she would have seen two stone-sculpted maidens flanking the extravagant timepiece. One figure stared out across Manhattan to signify day; the other, with eyes closed, symbolised night — an appropriate double image for Highsmith herself, a writer fascinated by the concept of split identity. On that particular day — 30 June 1950 — the 29-year-old novelist was in pursuit of her antithesis: a blonde, married woman she had cast as a mannequin in a romantic drama of her own creation. She was going in search of the woman who had, unwittingly inspired her lesbian novel, The Price of Salt.

Readers familiar with The Price of Salt (as I was) will recognize the setting before the book is named. Highsmith wrote The Price of Salt under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. It was republished in 1990 with her approval under Highsmith’s own name. (In the U.K., the republication was called Carol.) A seeming anomaly of this lesbian romance in the context of Highsmith’s other work is that it may be her only book with an unambiguously happy ending. The lovers, Carol (the mannequin) and Therese, in each other’s arms after many mishaps along the way, have the potential for a happy future as well. Happy endings were as scarce in Highsmith’s life as in her fiction, with short-term affairs being the norm.

The happy ending was also an anomaly among gay novels of the 1950s. Meaker notes that Fawcett, her publisher for Spring Fire, told her “it had to end unhappily. Nothing would be okayed that seemed to endorse a perverse way of life.” Psychoanalysis was the fashion — Highsmith eventually took her turn on the couch — and psychoanalysts were bent on “curing” their homosexual clients.

Closer to Highsmith’s own experience were her darker novels featuring the relentless pursuit of an uninterested beloved. Highsmith “stalked” her Carol after a single encounter over the sales counter at Bloomingdale’s (where she had a brief sojourn as holiday help) to Carol’s New Jersey home, but she remained on the outside looking in. Wilson’s straightforward description of The Price of Salt — a novel with a cult audience that may not intersect with Highsmith’s more “traditional” readers — sets a standard for the way homosexuality is treated in the biography: openly but as a non-issue. The same is true of Highsmith’s fiction, where numerous points on the spectrum of human sexuality are present, with no particular fuss over any of it. 

Wilson’s intelligence and investigative skill led him, remarkably, to the story of the real Carol. Likewise, he elicited a wealth of extended conversations with Highsmith’s friends and lovers, covering everything from her years as a student at Barnard to her eventual European “self-exile” in England, Italy and France — where she lived for about 35 years — to her eventual death in Switzerland.

Highsmith was born in Fort Worth and shuttled between Texas (where she lived with her grandparents) and New York (with her mother and stepfather; her mother and father divorced before, and perhaps because of, her impending birth). Wilson tells us enough about the difficulties of Highsmith’s early years to help us understand their effect on the writer, particularly in her troubled relationship with her mother, but moves swiftly into her coming-of-age as a young woman in New York. Interestingly, Meaker’s memoir fills in some of the gaps, showing the continuing influence of Mary Coates Highsmith, who seemed to enjoy bad-mouthing her daughter in telephone conversations with the daughter’s girlfriend (conversations that feature that same Highsmith anti-Semitic tic). Highsmith’s mother was a commercial illustrator by profession, and her daughter also had considerable talent in the visual arts. Throughout her life Highsmith painted and sketched. She may have been more talented, in fact, than her mother, a further source of bitterness.

In Beautiful Shadow, Wilson looks closely at Highsmith’s influences, a task that was made easier, as he notes, by the availability of her faithfully kept notebooks, in which she transcribed many significant passages from other writers. From her earliest writing, those sources of inspiration included Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre and Dostoevsky, for the insight they reveal about the riddle of human identity. Again, Wilson is at home with philosophical discourse and takes his time to parse Highsmith’s gleanings from these early masters. He quotes a passage from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot that Highsmith had copied into her notebook while working on Strangers on a Train, her first novel: “Don’t let us forget that the motives of human actions are usually infinitely more complex and varied than we are apt to explain them afterwards, and can rarely be defined with certainty. It is sometimes much better for a writer to content himself with a simple narrative of events.” Wilson comments: “It is a neat summary of Highsmith’s literary method, and in addition, a wise piece of advice for any biographer.”

Wilson is also a shrewd reader of the psychology that underlies Highsmith’s aesthetics. Talking about Found in the Street, he mentions, for example “the unsettling nexus between mind and matter, the treacherous interplay between the allure of fantasy and the inevitable undercurrent of reality.” Likewise, where Highsmith transcribes Oscar Wilde ("lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art"), Wilson explicates:

The artistic life is a long and lovely suicide because it involves the negation of self; as Highsmith imagined herself as her characters, so Ripley takes on the personae of others and in doing so metamorphoses himself into a “living” work of art. A return to the “real life” after a period of creativity resulted in a fall of spirits, an agony Highsmith felt acutely.

These passages are better at leading readers back to Highsmith’s novels and stories than are his occasional extended plot summaries. Although Wilson is mostly careful about avoiding plot spoilers, these lengthy paragraphs can never equal Highsmith’s calibrated sentences, as suspense is almost impossible to manufacture out of context.

Wilson deserves praise, however, for guiding us through the ups and downs of a writer’s life in careful detail, with an empathetic understanding that many biographers lack. We learn that her books never sold as well in the U.S. as they did overseas, and that her manuscripts for future novels were not always received favorably. Her moves from one agent, publisher or editor to another were frequent and troublesome for all concerned. Perhaps most sadly, her lifelong desire to have a short story accepted for publication in The New Yorker was finally met posthumously. 

Likewise, Highsmith’s personal life was often a roller coaster ride, with many ups and downs but no pinnacle of happy domesticity at any point along the way. Paging through the lovely black and white photographs in Beautiful Stranger, it is easy to see the attraction, on both sides, of many of the women in Highsmith’s life. One married woman (there were others) with whom Highsmith had a particularly intense relationship, Kathryn Cohen, a doctor and former Ziegfield girl, resembles Greta Garbo. Virginia Kent Catherwood, another of Highsmith’s major obsessions, is the picture of the happy ‘50s bride at her Main Line Philadelphia wedding, although she did not manage to stay married very long. Photographed in her early years at Barnard, and later “out and about” in New York, Highsmith herself is strikingly beautiful in a “soft butch” way. Meaker describes her as “tall and thin, [with] black shoulder-length hair ... dark brown eyes. She looked like a combination of Prince Valiant and Rudolf Nureyev.”

Highsmith was better at keeping friends than at keeping lovers. Some of those faithful friends kept an eye on her, as she drank heavily and was generally inclined not to eat. For all her years as a sophisticated European, she had no interest in haute cuisine and was known to prefer her chicken Kentucky fried; she would never be anything other than American. The long years away from the country of her birth could not help but add to a sense of isolation.

In this way, Tom Ripley may represent Highsmith’s fantasy of “the good life.” With his lovely home outside of Paris and his lovely wife, who loves him but also seems to like girls, he has the stability that his creator lacks. The Ripleys collect art — including some forgeries that are better than the originals — and learn to play the harpsichord. In his spare time, which is abundant, Tom reads Isherwood’s Christopher and His Kind and loves the wild gay scene in Berlin (where Highsmith herself had a memorable tryst). And yet, as Tom looks out on the Atlantic Ocean from Kennebunkport, Maine, in a rare visit to the U.S., “The town ... sent a wave of nostalgia over Tom that had almost brought tears to his eyes: white house fronts and store fronts, a freshness in the sea air, sunlight, and American sparrows in trees still heavy with summer foliage — all of which had made Tom think he had made a mistake in leaving America. But this he had put out of his head at once, since it was a depressing and baffling feeling...”

Wilson and Meaker make it clear that Ripley is better than his author at setting aside those troublesome doubts. Their accounts fill in some of the shades on the gray scale of Highsmith’s “noirish” literary life, sending us back to the work with a deeper appreciation — which is about as much as anyone can expect.

Beautiful Shadow is Andrew Wilson’s first book, but he is not new to the biographical impulse. His features have appeared in numerous British publications, and his subjects have included Rupert Brooke and Tennessee Williams.

Wilson and I chatted by email about Highsmith and the biographical process.

You mention in your acknowledgments that Kate Kingsley Skattebol and Charles Latimer were entrusted by Highsmith to steer off the wrong biographer. What made you the “right biographer”? Are you a long-term Highsmith fan? How did you move from journalism to literary biography?

I don’t think there’s any such thing as “the right” biographer for any subject, but obviously some biographers are more empathetic than others. Having access to Highsmith’s unpublished diaries, notebooks and letters helped enormously as I could let her “voice” guide me.

To the outside world — even to those close to her — Highsmith often seemed like quite a “shadowy” person. In interviews, she refused to answer any personal questions and did not want to talk in detail about the source of her fiction or her inspiration. However, in her personal journals one can find, if not a “true” self, at least one that is more substantial. As we all know, writers’ diaries can often be more fictional than their novels, but after checking the details with other archival sources and material from the 100-plus people that I interviewed, I was able to establish that Highsmith’s journals were written without self-conscious artifice. Highsmith kept these journals to help analyze her behavior, behavior which she recognized was, at times, clearly disturbed.

Highsmith was worried that someone would want to write about her while she was still alive. Although she turned down all approaches from biographers — whom at one point she likened to vultures swooping around her — she was happy for someone to embark on an honest assessment of the connections between her work and her life after her death.

My background is in features journalism — writing about books, cinema and people — and although I enjoyed, and still do enjoy, the quick-fix of researching and writing a piece in a short space of time, I yearned to do something more long-term. In 1997, I read The Talented Mr. Ripley and was hooked on Highsmith. I was curious to find out more about the intriguing personality which had produced such a dazzling — and for 1955. such a radical — piece of writing. After a little investigation, I realized that there was no biography of Highsmith. I contacted Highsmith’s literary estate — Diogenes Verlag in Zurich, Switzerland — and tracked down Charles Latimer, who happened to live in London.

The first time I went to see Charles, who very sadly died last year, he quizzed me about Highsmith’s writing. It was, in a way, an informal interview and he sounded me out on a number of subjects. In addition to asking me about my detailed knowledge of the work, I’m sure he also made judgments about my personality. He never asked these questions, but I’m certain that they must have been running through his mind: What was my motivation? Would I have got on with Highsmith had she been alive? Would she have approved of me? Although I like to think that, had we met, Highsmith and I would have become friends (of sorts), I think it’s important for biographers to try to be as “objective” as possible. For instance, I would never work on a biography of someone who was still alive. The biographer-subject bond should be an imaginative one, rather than one that existed in real life.

It would be wrong to say that Kate Kingsley Skattebol and Charles Latimer chose me, as I approached them in the first instance. But they supported me from the onset and I became friends with both of them. Highsmith’s literary estate and her executor, Daniel Keel, were also enormously helpful, granting me unrestricted access to the diaries and allowing me to quote from her unpublished and published works.

Sometimes a biography is the beginning of an author’s being “canonized,” to be followed by other volumes. Do you know of any publication plans for Highsmith’s notebooks and letters?

Highsmith was 15 when she started keeping what she called her “cahiers,”
notebooks measuring 7 by 8-1/4 inches which she would use to jot down germs of inspiration — what she referred to as “Keime” [literally, “germs,” in German]. She kept these journals throughout her life and she regarded them as her most prized possessions. They really do document the complex connections between life and work, make for fascinating reading, and I quote from them at length throughout the biography. There has been some talk about publishing an edited version of these, but I think that this may well be some time off. It’s good news, though, that Highsmith’s books are being republished in the U.S. by W.W. Norton. It seems that, after being neglected in the U.S. for years, the Highsmith renaissance has well and truly begun.

How would you describe the relationship you developed with Highsmith as your subject? What were some of the high points or difficulties along the way?

First of all — and throughout the project — the instinct which drove me on was curiosity. Complete understanding of another human being is impossible, as Highsmith wrote in one of her notebooks. Yet she also realized that it was possible to document a writer’s life by following the author’s day-to-day activities and charting their experiences and moods. As I did so, I became strangely possessive and protective of her. I tried to see situations from her point of view and understand why she behaved, at times, in such an odd and seemingly eccentric manner. Like one of her friends says in the book, Highsmith had a strange interior world — at times she felt cut off from the outside world — and yet this gave her a startlingly fresh perspective.

Although it may sound absurd, on many occasions I felt like Highsmith was watching me from beyond the grave. I remember, at the beginning of the archival research, when I opened one of her diaries for the first time. It was dated from 1942 and its pages were leaf-thin. I turned the cover and found a sinister rhyme inside, to the effect that whoever read her secret journal was cursed. That sent a slight shiver down my spine. Yet I’m sure Highsmith would have thought that hilarious.

There’s no doubt that, as she aged, Highsmith became increasingly misanthropic. One of her friends describes her misanthropy as being of almost Swiftian intensity. At times, she expressed strong racist and anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist views — sentiments which of course I don’t agree with at all — but it’s important to add that her friends, most of whom held liberal or left-leaning views, regarded her as what one of them called an equal opportunity offender. “She said awful things about everything and everybody, but it wasn’t personal,” one of her friends told me. “It was just hot air coming out. It sounds bizarre, but although she said terrible things, she wasn’t really a nasty person.”

Ultimately, however, Highsmith never bored me. I still find her endlessly fascinating and, most probably, always will.

Having read everything, do you have any personal favorites in the body of Highsmith’s work? Anything that seemed most revealing? Any you came not to like?

I have a clutch of favorites: Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr.
Ripley and This Sweet Sickness. I think This Sweet Sickness is key to understanding her life. As one of her lovers told me: “To me, her novel This Sweet Sickness is the one which most closely represents her. Like the book’s hero, she had a perception of her lovers which was different from reality. Without that, we wouldn’t have had the books, but unfortunately, it was a harsh price to pay.’

Highsmith said: “Ripley, c’est moi.” In what ways do you think this is true?

After writing The Talented Mr. Ripley, Highsmith said, “It felt like
Ripley was writing it — it just came out.” I see Ripley as an embodiment of her creative imagination at work, a representation of her unconscious and a symbol of her repressed, and occasionally quite violent, desires. As Charles Latimer told me: “She was Ripley, or, I should say, she would have liked to have been him.”

I was impressed with the openness of Highsmith’s friends, and of Highsmith herself, in talking about her intimate relationships with women, particularly since I have found this not to be the case in biographies of other authors from approximately the same era. To what do you attribute this candor?

I think part of the reason is to do with the fact that we now live in a more honest age where previously taboo subjects such as homosexual relationships can be discussed with the same candor as heterosexual ones.

The other reason was my determination to track down and speak to the women who clearly inspired Highsmith’s fiction. In her notebooks, she referred to these women — her lovers — as her muses, without whom she would not be able to write. Since they played such an important role in her imagination and her life, the issue had to be addressed, but I tried to do it in as unsensational a manner as possible.

What were some of the surprises you encountered as a biographer?

The richness — and vastness — of the Highsmith archival material, held at the Swiss Literary Archive in Berne, Switzerland. If one were to take out the boxes and sit them side by side, the line would stretch to 150 feet in length. Working my way through the archive — which took the best part of a year — was both overwhelming and exhilarating.

I was also amazed that I was able to track down people who, to all extents and purposes, had disappeared. Perhaps my greatest surprise was to find the real identity of the woman who walked into Bloomingdale’s, the Manhattan Department store where Highsmith was working in December 1948, and who inspired the 1952 book The Price of Salt, or, as it was later known, Carol. Making contact with the woman’s daughter — who sent me a gorgeous photograph of her mother — was a real thrill.

What’s next for you?

I’m looking for a subject who is as fascinating, alluring and enigmatic as Highsmith herself — most probably an impossible task.