Mind-mapping the Highsmith neighborhood

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."

That fabulously creepy Highsmith feeling

One of the underrated pleasures of reading the Wall Street Journal (especially given the grim economic news and the paper's reactionary editorial page) are some of the features in its Saturday Weekend section.

Crime fiction historian Leonard Cassuto's remembrance this weekend of Patricia Highsmith's "Strangers on a Train" gave me some delightfully harrowing recollections of her novel that Alfred Hitchcock adapted for the cinema. Some comparison has been made to our own time, the so-called Age of Terror, with the chilling dawn of the nuclear age that led to mass paranoia and a search for scapegoats that Highsmith loaded into her early works:

" 'Strangers' was her debut novel, but her sense of anxious foreboding was already fully formed in the crucible of Cold War paranoia that surrounded her. For Highsmith, who was gay, that paranoia was shot through with anxiety, for American Cold War politics intertwined with an intense homophobia that branded homosexuals as an official national security risk. Highsmith's creative goal, she wrote in her notebook at the time, was 'Consciousness alone, consciousness in my particular era, 1950.' "

Much of Cassuto's piece is an homage to a female writer who essentially created her own stylistic form, one that was largely disdained and unappreciated in her native land for much of her lifetime:

" 'Strangers on a Train' began Highsmith's career-long tour of the minds of characters who aren't comfortable in the world, and her edgy, original thrillers have always defied easy categorization. Even more popular now than when she was alive and writing, Highsmith stands as an utterly unique genre writer."

I've read about a half-dozen Highsmith novels (but none of the Ripley 5 as yet) and when she steps outside the mind of criminals, like Bruno, she still evokes blood-curdling suspense that is hard to top. My personal favorite is "Tremor of Forgery," but even those rare novels in which no crime is committed, such as "Edith's Diary," her psychological insights are tremendous.

Frightening, deeply unsettling, but tremendous. She broadened the suspense genre as the Cold War period was subsumed by Vietnam, Watergate and the rise of the conservatives, taking in all of these developments.

Highsmith wrote during times in which Americans weren't thrilled about being confronted by their darkest impulses, and they didn't appreciate someone willing to step deep into the shadows to expose them. As Cassuto writes, Highsmith was an amoralist -- "I find the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial, for neither life nor nature cares whether justice is ever done or not."

I'm still waiting for an American novelist of this time to step into that breach. Then again, the power of her work may be precisely because the topics that she explored were considered taboo.