Loving Highsmith
Originally published in The Times: Loving Highsmith
Do you love Patricia Highsmith? So many of us think we do; whether because of her darkly alarming fiction or, more usually, the films made of it: Strangers on a Train (1951), Anthony Minghella's luscious 1999 The Talented Mr Ripley, the beautiful and heartrending Carol by Todd Haynes. Thanks to these, Highsmith has become one of those writers novelists and readers alike claim to adore.
But ask yourself this: which was the last Highsmith novel you read? And what do you know of the woman behind the books?
If the answer is 'she was a complicated lesbian with feral eyebrows', you are in for a treat. Loving Highsmith, a new documentary by the Swiss director Eva Vitija, does exactly what it promises, satisfying Highsmith superfans' curiosity about the love-life of a ground-breaking queer writer, a Garbo-level recluse and, by all accounts, an absolute goer.
The opening sequence of Loving Highsmith encapsulates all the reasons one might fall for its subject. It begins with a tantalising quotation from Highsmith's diary: 'Ideas come to me like birds that I see in the corner of my eye...I may try to get a fix on those birds', followed by a shot of the dashing young author casually strolling along a canal bank with an ink splotch on her jeans pocket and what looks like a knife, then a voice, rattly, low, which one hopes is a lover, saying thoughtfully: 'she had a... strangeness.'
This is our introduction to the hero, in my view, of the documentary, the writer Marijane Meaker, whose two year relationship with Highsmith began in 1959. Meaker was a successful author in her own right, thanks partly to Louise Fitzhugh, her fellow groundbreaking lesbian author who wrote Harriet the Spy; now that would be a documentary. Meaker was in her nineties when her interview was recorded, and her dry, unselfglorifying comments provide, at first, the documentary's backbone. When young, Meaker persuaded her parents to send her to boarding school after reading of students expelled for lesbian activity: ' I wanted to find out if my suspicions were right, and I was one of those.' As young women, she and Highsmith desperately tried to change their sexuality: 'we all tried'. But Highsmith was 'rather notably uninterested in young men', and her attempts to free herself of what Meaker calls the 'good sin' failed.
And how. There were (unlike now) multiple lesbian bars in New York, Paris and London and, as this documentary demonstrates, Highsmith showed extraordinary commitment to sleeping her way through them. Long before she wrote her pseudonymous masterpiece, The Price of Salt (later Carol), her French lover Monique Buffet said she was known in all the 'boîtes lesbienne' in New York; she had the 'courage of the shy', leading to innumerable conquests: 'her own women's festival'. Later, being known as the true author of The Price of Salt must have helped. Over a million copies were sold before, almost forty years later, Highsmith finally admitted publically that she was the author. Imagine the chafing if she had acknowledged it earlier.
When she wasn't seducing, Highsmith was writing: twenty-two novels, nine collections of short stories, journals, notebooks. Although biographers and editors have begun to expose Highsmith's peculiar inner world, there remain countless unpublished words in her semi-private papers. It was after reading these, Vitija tells us, that she decided to make the film, because they made her fall 'in love with Patricia Highsmith herself'.
One of the pleasures of Loving Highsmith is how Vitija fillets the juiciest highlights from the diaries, so that the effect is that of looking up 'lesbian relationships' in the index of a satisfyingly intimate biography, and reading only those sections. Better yet, they're melodically read by the actor Gwendoline Christie, allegedly another superfan. The light shed by these quotations on Highsmith's sexual and gender fluidity, intercut with shots of Matt Damon as Tom Ripley camping it up, then driven to murderousness, is fascinating and revealing. I'd have loved a deeper exploration of this, or of Highsmith's wartime love-affair with the gay German photographer Rolf Tietgens, but this aspect of her extremely energetic sex-life is, perhaps wisely, avoided.
Interestingly, as Loving Highsmith reminds us, for Highsmith the murdering was secondary to, not the point of, of her fiction: 'I never wrote a mystery in my life. I just write a story and sometimes it has violence in it' she comments blithely. In one beautifully-judged snippet, Highsmith is asked to justify Ripley, an entertaining murderer, to a disapproving journalist. 'He's very gay,' says Highsmith, straight-faced.
The Price of Salt is the only novel Highsmith wrote which didn't contain a single violent crime. Vitija is also good on the parallels between it and Highsmith's own life. In December 1948, the somewhat-engaged Patricia Highsmith was selling dolls in Bloomingdales to earn money for twice-weekly therapy, when an elegant blonde woman in a mink coat approached her. It wasn't Carol Aird, let alone Cate Blanchett but, that night, Highsmith planned a novel, adding notes from her own life: 'oh God how this story emerges from my own bones'. American publishers tried to dissuade her; who'd heard of a novel with homosexual, let alone lesbian, characters who ended up neither married in the nick of time, nor attempting suicide? After all, even James Baldwin was advised to burn Giovanni's Room. But Highsmith was too cussed to conform and The Price of Salt, the first ever lesbian novel with a somewhat-happy ending, was a glorious success.
Yet Highsmith never successfully produced a lesbian book again. Why, asks the interviewer?
Because of her family, explains Marijane Meaker. Specifically, her mother.
In Highsmith's case, cherchezing la femme explains a great deal. Her mother was her greatest love; this was unreciprocated. According to her surviving family in Texas, no one ever saw them in the same room, or heard Highsmith's mother asking after her. When her mother told the local preacher that the adult Patricia was the author of The Price of Salt, Highsmith furiously arranged her own legal disinheritance, saying, with unmistakeable sorrow, that this 'would certainly be a relief to me and, I hope, to her.'
Of course Highsmith didn't get over her mother: who does? One of her greatest loves, whom she called 'my Carol', was a well-connected married Englishwoman for whom Highsmith moved to Suffolk, although their painful relationship repeated 'mother's semi-rejection of me'. Then she fled, to an isolated French house where, despite an entourage of excited fans, she could be, mostly, alone.
As Loving Highsmith reveals, Patricia Highsmith was good at Europe; she'd already escaped America once after the publication of The Price of Salt. With intelligence and a light, subtle touch, Eva Vitija juxtaposes Highsmith's characters' lives with her own, undercutting quotations from ex-lovers or the journals with images of Tom Ripley heading to Italy, or old film of air stewardesses and women on horseback.
These provide a wonderfully strong sense of the ladylike world Highsmith grew up in, needed to escape and couldn't keep away from. And they lead to the most entertaining parts of the documentary: interviews with Highsmith's surviving relatives in a house full of rodeo memorabilia. The real family celebrity of this self-described 'basic Texas family' was a feted rodeo announcer, not 'Pat'.
There's a fabulous moment when the relatives discover that 'Pat had an affair with Aunt Millie', founder of a flight attendant school, and to whom she was related. Jaws drop. History is re-examined. If, Highsmith's descendant tells the director, you find more evidence, 'burn it'.
It's when the documentary relies on less compelling material, while dodging other, difficult, subjects, that a feeling of frustration sets in. None of the interviewees talks about what Highsmith was really like; there is no mention of how Highsmith frequently threatened Marijane Meaker with a switchblade, or of the imbalance between Monique Buffet, twenty-seven, adorable in breeches and braces, and Highsmith, sixty-six, by now an extremely tricky, reclusive star. Highsmith wrote to Mary McCarthy, to whom she primarily moaned about tax, 'social life is something like an ingrown toenail'. Alcohol is barely mentioned after an early anecdote about Meaker discovering Highsmith's heavy gin and orange breakfast habit. Instead, there's footage of rodeos and French road-signs, and a great deal of the German experimental actress Tabea Blumenschein.
Tabea intended to star in a 'pirate film' of Ripley; we see her in peculiar Edwardian camp, sailor-hat and 'crazy moustache'; drifting about the desert in a red dress and veil; wearing extreme lipstick and marabou on the bus. Admittedly, by the time they met in 1978, Highsmith was becoming a less enticing subject. In every shot, she looks like she smelt strongly of cigarettes and cat-food and angry isolation. When, by now enormously rich, she moved to Switzerland, she designed the truly hideous house referred to by Buffet as 'le bunker', which resembles a run-down municipal swimming pool where bad things happen. Frustratingly, Loving Highsmith glances over the years of fury about French taxation which led to this final move, or the satisfying fact that the last person Highsmith saw before she died was her accountant.
And what, by this stage, of Highsmith's fiction? Her later novels were famously patchy, but have you read The Blunderer, which immediately followed The Talented Mr Ripley and The Price of Salt? Don't. It's unpleasant, misanthropic, dull; worse, it emits a strong reek of antiSemitism. As, even at this early stage, did Highsmith. Otto Penzler, one of her American publishers, called her 'one of the most odious women he had ever met, a misanthropic, racist alcoholic'. But, other than a fleeting reference to Highsmith's diaries beginning to contain prejudice 'about Jews, Arabs and Blacks' [sic], Loving Highsmith largely ignores her frantic racism, which included the belief that America's welfare crisis was 'caused' by Black people, and the most vocal and frothing antiSemitism. She openly described herself as a 'Jew hater', adopting almost forty aliases to rant about Jewish 'influence' in the newspapers, declared that six million murdered was too few and once popped into a dinner party with a number written on her arm in biro, like a concentration camp victim. That was merely the public version; with lovers (including, presumably, her several Jewish girlfriends) and in her diaries, Highsmith was as foetid an anti-Semite as one could hope not to meet.
Are you feeling it yet? That sense of how quickly admiration can curdle into dislike? If not, you should; it becomes hard not to see yet another shot of her walking alone without thinking: 'good'. And this is the problem with Loving Highsmith. How could Vitija fall 'in love with Patricia Highsmith herself', given what Highsmith was? I always thought I loved Carol the novel; now I could only claim to love Todd Haynes's version, not least because Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett have expunged the image of Highsmith's characters, and therefore herself, from my mind.
In this era of hysteria about cancel culture, we all know that heroes can be repulsively flawed. The real question is whether we each can continue admiring their work. From Roald Dahl to Enid Blyton, Philip Roth to V.S. Naipaul, even the most cursory internet search will educate one about the racist tropes, anti-Semitism and misogyny in many authors' work, let alone in real life, and enable one to avoid or accept them. But, unless one's own vulnerability or concern for others makes one want to look, it's easy to assume the best. Without giving us any of the wider, darker context of its subject, Loving Highsmith doesn't do much more than fan-girl Patsy, making it ultimately an entertaining and gayness-affirming hagiography of a monster. It turns out that loving Highsmith in theory is probably very like how it was in real life: seductively dark and knowing at first but soon, with the least exposure to her character, dangerous, claustrophobic, and smelling horrible.
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