Wilde One

Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith. Andrew Wilson. New York: Bloomsbury, 2003. viii + 534 pp.

Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950's. Marijane Meaker. San Francisco: Cleis, 2003. 207 pp.

About halfway through the first full-length biography of the American writer Patricia Highsmith (author of Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and twenty novels), the British journalist Andrew Wilson offers a quotation from Oscar Wilde in one of Highsmith's voluminous notebooks that he contends might serve as an epigraph for the entire life: "I think that the artistic life is a long and lovely suicide, and I am not sorry that it is so" (quoted on 242). A willful program of self-erasure does prove to be the governing trope for an artistic career that, like Wilde's, was conducted mostly away from home (Highsmith lived in Mexico, Italy, England, France, and finally Switzerland), was led apart from any stable sense of identity, and was ended for the most part alone (in 1995, at age seventy-four). "Lying," Wilde also proclaimed, "is the proper aim of Art" (quoted on 298). So neither is it quite the case that Highsmith's rather troubled sexual identity, intensified by her virulently homophobic mother, could be truthfully categorized as lesbian. When The Price of Salt (1952), the first lesbian novel published with a happy ending, was to be reissued in 1984, Highsmith insisted, according to Marijane Meaker, that it continue to appear under her pseudonym, Claire Morgan (1–2). Internalized homophobia, as her publisher contends? More to the point, perhaps, in Highsmith's refusal to come out is her larger refusal to compromise suicidally "the black hole inside herself—clearly a symbol of her creativity," Wilson remarks, with facile categories and labels (216).

As Wilson's painstaking re-creation of much of the historical background of Highsmith's life reminds us, lesbians were "considered monstrosities" throughout her formative years in the 1930s (54). Only with considerable hindsight, therefore, can we understand why most gay women might disgust her later on: "The majority of them, she believed, stupid and dirty [and] socially beneath her . . . merely would-be men who never expected to meet their match" (99). Nonetheless, Highsmith entered into at least twenty same-sex relationships (by my count), starting in high school in New York with Judy Tuvim (the Oscar-winning Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday). Some lasted a few weeks, others several years. That they were all terminal, however, plainly shows that it was real-life attachment that was ultimately suicidal for Highsmith. Women were to be prized more for their fictive value "as muses who would inspire her to create work," since the act of writing alone would stand the test of time (78). Little wonder, then, that the creatural world so often made people dispensable to Highsmith: for example, witness her devotion instead to her trademark Siamese cats, shown in a couple of early eye-catching photographs (a devotion accruing from her failed relationship with Meaker, we learn from her memoir), and later to her colony of snails (which could be smuggled past French authorities under her breasts, according to Wilson's biography).

The comment about lesbians as would-be men also raises the contentious issue of misogyny in both Highsmith's life and her work. In Wilson's account, the actress Heather Chasen asserts that Highsmith "fancied women but I don't think she liked them," while the interviewer Bettina Berch thought that "she loved women too much maybe" (300, 404). No one, however, seems to dispute that in her fiction it was the male characters who captured the greater part of Highsmith's imagination, and possibly because from an early age she viewed herself, in rather snail-like terms, "as having an unmistakable masculine essence secreted away within a female shell" (46). The five Ripley novels are perhaps exemplary in this regard. But even here it would be suicidal to the...