An American Lion

Scene from Strangers on a Train (1951)

I have often wondered what they will say about me when I’m dead. I hope they say awful things. Nothing else would do.

It’s too bad that Patricia Highsmith isn’t around to enjoy having terrible things said about her:

“She was a horrible human being,” recalls Otto Penzler, one of her publishers. It’s an apt eulogy for a novelist whom Graham Greene, rather more charitably, dubbed “the poet of apprehension,” a 20th century demiurge whose “world we enter each time with a sense of personal danger, with the head half turned over the shoulder.” The first words of Joan Schenkar’s splendid, sinewy new biography, “The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith,” concede the point: “She wasn’t nice,” Schenkar admits; “She was rarely polite.” Yet the “toxic brilliance of [her] trail goes on glowing” 15 years after her death in 1995 — when “she drove a last, devoted visitor from her hospital room and then died unobserved.”

She, of course, is crime novelist Patricia Highsmith, born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, later creator of Tom Ripley — whose exploits, chronicled in the five-volume “Ripliad,” have inspired numerous films, including Anthony Minghella’s 1999 poisoned Venetian valentine “The Talented Mr. Ripley” — and author of “Strangers on a Train,” which Hitchcock adapted in 1951. Misanthropy seeped through her work like blood into terrazzo (one short-story collection even features homicidal pets exacting lethal vengeance on their masters); she hated Jews with rancid fervor; she “seemed to be the sole curator of a Museum of Twentieth-Century American maladies,” suggests Schenkar.

But throughout 22 novels and dozens of short stories (if not her improbable children’s book, “Miranda the Panda Is on the Veranda”), Highsmith revolutionized the field of suspense fiction, perverting and inverting a genre once synonymous with moral education and civic virtue. Her output rebuked the essentially wholesome stories of Chandler and Hammett, in which detectives punish felons, restore order and admonish readers; “Nothing,” Schenkar argues, “could have been more American” than the scenarios Highsmith fashioned in turn: “two men bound together psychologically by the stalker-like fixation of one upon the other.”

Greene noted that Highsmith’s “characters are irrational, and they leap to life in their very lack of reason; suddenly we realize how unbelievably rational most fictional characters are as they lead their lives from A to Z, like commuters always taking the same train.” Biography, too, tends to trundle along settled tracks, departing from the childhood platform, admitting and ejecting passengers at intervals, finally arriving at the terminus of legacy and legend — a linear transit in many ways ill-suited to the reversals and revisions of subjects’ lives. Dispensing with the familiar acorn-to-oak approach, Schenkar instead declares that “[o]bsession … will be the organizing principle of this work,” and exhumes Highsmith via a taxonomy of neuroses.

Actually, Penzler said this:

“She was a mean, hard, cruel, unlovable, unloving person,” said acquaintance Otto Penzler. “I could never penetrate how any human being could be that relentlessly ugly.”

Now THAT’S a eulogy of a life spent making an impact on others. I’d shoot for the moon, but I’d probably just land in the weeds.