On the heels of the publication of another look into the life of Patricia Highsmith, Joan Schenkar, her latest biographer, traverses the Greenwich Village area where Highsmith lived, and devised much of her art, in her young adult life.
Although she lived in Europe from the early 1960s on, the neighborhood serves as a fictional backdrop for Highsmith's work late into her career.
Indeed, in her 700-page doorstopper, which gets even deeper into the dark psychology of Highsmith than Andrew Wilson's 2004 biography, Schenkar suggests more emphatically that writing was the misanthropic novelist's last defense against descending fully into criminal madness:
“She was born to murder. She had the mind of a criminal genius.”
More reviews of "The Talented Miss Highsmith" here and here and here. Yes, she was hardly a likeable person, but I find this need of reviewers to separate themselves from Highsmith's personality especially acute among American critics. Schenkar is no exception, and neither is Jesse Kornbluh, who after much explication of his loathing finally gets around to his fascination over Highsmith:
"Unless we are very young or lifelong fools, we do not look to artists -- or their biographers -- for our role models. Their work is enough. And Highsmith's work is a triumph of will and talent over circumstance and pathology -- or perhaps an astute mixture of all of that."
Posts
