What a Woman Means to Me

an essay  

I wanted to write out my thoughts and feelings on the subject of the late American crime writer Patricia Highsmith in the context of what she and her work means to me in an essay because prose is a more analytical medium than poetry, which is more concerned I think with wit and beauty. I have written a poem on the subject, which you can find in my recent bibliography under the title “A Toxic Woman”, and thought about writing another. But to exorcise this demon I need to understand it, so to speak. Which isn’t to say that I want this essay to be dark or depressing at all. Quite the opposite. I hope that it encourages anyone who reads it to either pick up a book by Highsmith, who was a very entertaining writer as well as one concerned with the darkness of the human condition, or understand why they like one of their own favourite artists or art pieces - be it books, movies, music, Saturday morning cartoons, postcards, whatever - a little better, and thereby enjoy it more. This is why I like DU and have stuck with it down the years despite leaving and coming back several times. At a basic formatting level, it allows for more than “just” poetry; it’s a perfect balance of town and city, the small and the big; small enough to feel like a community, large enough to not feel like a trap.  
 
I discovered Highsmith by chance when I was fifteen. I was obsessed with crime novels at that age because I was a very fearful kid who was terrified of death and violence, so sought to exorcise those fears through exciting stories that were about them. However, I’d reached a point where I needed something a little more directly concerned with those fears than traditional detective fiction, where you have a hero, a crime, a villain to be unmasked, and a neat ending where the villain is either sent away for execution or commits suicide.  
 
The poet WH Auden wrote an essay about this type of fiction called The Guilty Vicarage, in which he discussed how he required certain tropes to be present in all of that type that he read: the stories had to be set in an English country village, had to feature an amateur detective (as opposed to a policeman) as the hero, etc. He described his feeling that these stories were something other than literature, and while on the surface that seems like a slightly elitist remark, what he was getting at I think is that the stories satisfied his subjective rather than objective sense. We all know that Beethoven was an objectively great musician - he composed considerable music even while deaf - but a song by Taylor Swift about breaking up with your boyfriend might connect with you and your personal anxieties more.  
 
The anxiety-addressing book of Highsmith’s that I found in that library, however many years ago, was This Sweet Sickness, in the exact copyrighted edition that I used as the visual accompaniment for “A Toxic Woman”. First published in 1960, the year when Psycho (another great psychological thriller) hit cinemas, This Sweet Sickness is about a scientist hung up on his former fiancée, from whom he drifted apart when he left town to study his chosen field. Learning that she’s moved on and married another man, he uses the wealth from his lucrative career to buy an isolated house in the woods where on weekends he can pretend that she “chose” him, that he didn’t leave town, that she didn’t marry this other (less financially successful; so in the scientist’s eyes perhaps less worthy) man, etc.  
 
The house and the fantasy in and of themselves are fine, but people around the scientist naturally become suspicious as to where this handsome, wealthy, unattached man is spending his weekends. Suspicions which when investigated lead to conflict with an already unbalanced mind, leading to terrifying violence.  
 
Yesterday when I came home The Two Faces of January, a 2014 film starring Viggo Mortensen, Kirsten Dunst and Oscar Isaac, happened to be on television. I’ve been finding that Highsmith has been dancing around my head again recently, and so I sat down to watch the film, which is based on her 1964 novel and named for the literally two-faced Roman god Janus, from whose name we get the month of January. Like This Sweet Sickness, the story involves a psychosexual relationship, this time between three people forming a love triangle: a conman (Mortensen) and his wife (Dunst), and a much lower-level conman who becomes sexually interested in the wife (Isaac); the couple meets Isaac while both parties are pursuing their respective intrigues in early ‘60s Greece, many scenes playing out at ancient historical sites. Love, sex, and deception (and eventually death) among the ruins, if you will.  
 
The film is a lushly photographed, slow-paced, subtly unnerving period piece that I highly recommend, though it has an ending which feels too morally neat and tidy for Highsmith. I haven’t read that particular book of hers, though I plan to just to see if the ending is indeed different from the film’s. At any rate, what these two stories - Sickness and January - illustrate for me is the dangers of human interaction, the lies - both white and black - that we tell each other to achieve certain ends, and the necessity of honesty, at least with ourselves, if we are not to fall into dangerous, destructive behaviours.  
 
Though I didn’t understand this back when I was fifteen, Highsmith’s books are comforting to me because they allow me to safely explore my darker thoughts and feelings, to engage with my fears about fate conspiring to see me destroyed because of an ill-advised word in the wrong person’s ear, murdered because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, or framed for the same reason. Not a lot happens in the books, which confused me as to why I enjoyed them as a kid, who was used to reading about heroes exposing and then directly or indirectly killing villains. That form of literature is still very valuable to me - I love a good Agatha Christie or Stephen King potboiler from time to time - it’s just that no human soul ever just needs one thing, just as no human body ever just needs food, warmth, or shelter; it needs a combination of the three.  
 
Another element that I need to bring up is the sexual side of Highsmith’s stories. They weren’t graphic, simply because they couldn’t be back when a lot of them were written in the ‘50s and ‘60s. It’s revealing and even funny in fact to see how much more direct the sexual content becomes as the social revolution of the ‘60s changed how more and more people thought, and what they were willing to accept. Highsmith wrote a series of five novels, the “Ripliad”, which span her entire career and follow the life of its main character, the appreciator of fine things and murderer Tom Ripley.  
 
The first novel, The Talented Mr Ripley, published in 1955 and famously filmed in 1999 by Anthony Minghella, came out at a time in social history when the word “gay” hadn’t come to mean “homosexual” and so the word that’s used is queer. However, by 1980’s The Boy Who Followed Ripley, Mr Ripley is visiting German gay bars filled with “leather chaps” and descending from the ceiling a golden sculpture of Adonis with “motherfucker” written on it.  
 
Returning to 1955, however, Tom, a “survivor” of emotional abuse by his aunt and legal guardian, is hired by a rich man to bring home his prodigal son, Dickie Greenleaf. Dickie is a playboy living a sun-soaked life of leisure at an Italian resort with his girlfriend, Marge Sherwood. As Ripley gets to know Dickie and benefits from his material wealth, he starts to forget his original, presumed purpose at the resort, while his own feelings about what he wants grow dangerously confused: does he want Dickie’s money, or does he just want Dickie... (Pardon any unintentional innuendoes.)  
 
As you’ve no doubt gathered, unlike in January the love triangle described here is homosexual. Marge becomes jealous of Tom’s increasing closeness to her boyfriend, while also disturbed, and in a scene that sticks with me even after all these years, writes a letter to a friend (a letter that Tom eventually reads) in which she says that she could like him if he was just “queer”, but Tom unnerves her because he doesn’t seem to be, well, anything. He’s quite literally queer, as in strange. He himself jokes to the point of other people’s annoyance with him that he’s tried both men and women, and doesn’t much like either, so he’s giving them both up!  
 
As a teenager, this sense of sexual confusion and otherness and general mental anguish really resonated with me. Growing up LGBT+, you’re either told directly or infer from wider social attitudes that there’s something wrong with you because you’re LGBT+, or even just have feelings that you might not be as conventionally sexual or gendered as your peers appear to be.  
 
Highsmith’s work spoke to a broad cross-section of my fears and anxieties, and somehow, learning that she was a very troubled person in real life only deepened this. I won’t get too much into the morbid details of her personal life since I’d rather focus on the work and also just because we’d be here all day if I did, but the basic facts are that she was a relatively “out” lesbian of the American 1950s, grew up in El Paso, Texas, tended to be very masculine in her appearance and manners (a girlfriend remarked about being embarrassed when she’d see her stand up or hold open doors for other women), and unfortunately descended into a long, bitter, mean-spirited period of alcoholism that came to define her last years.

She was, to put it bluntly, a pretty awful person during this period. The same girlfriend who was once embarrassed by her masculine manners, young adult novelist Marijane Meaker, recalled Highsmith showing up at her home many years after they’d broken up (they’d stayed pen pals), and revealing herself to have become a vile drunk, spewing racist and even sexist and homophobic opinions. She wasn’t the essentially loving person that she remembered, Marijane recalled.  
 
I don’t condone any of Highsmith’s disgusting views, which you can look up for yourself, but I understand them within the context of a person who was driven to write books about how cruel and fateful and filled with miscommunication the world can be, and they only deepen my appreciation for the good things that she gave that world. What this American lesbian of the mid-20th century means to me is that we are all, every human, subject to the whims and circumstances of this world, and the more we appreciate that, the better we can guard ourselves against it.