Customer Reviews

The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

She kept 300 snails as pets. She drank a quart of gin a day. She considered robbery worse than murder. She left the United States to live in Europe because of what she called "the Negro problem" --- by which she did not mean discrimination against Negroes, but the civil rights movement that had Negroes demanding their rights.

A houseguest once left her window open; she threw a dead rat inside. She took tips left on restaurant tables. She'd drive 60 miles to get a cheaper spaghetti dinner. She called Hitler's extermination policy a "semicaust", because only half the world's Jews died.

She thought that "life didn't make sense without a crime in it." Her idea of happiness was to write a murder. At 1:30 in the morning, standing in a lover's apartment, she didn't hesitate to call another woman. "I am a man and I love women," she wrote. She liked young blonds, very made up.

A mental health professional, observing her for only a few minutes, pegged her as a psychopath. Another writer described her as "a black cloud." Her own assessment: "If I were to relax and become human, I could not bear my life."

No wonder, then, that Joan Schenkar begins The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith like this: "She wasn't nice. She was rarely polite. And no one who knew her well would have called her a generous woman."

Why would you even think of reading more than 600 pages about such a monster?

Well, because Highsmith wrote a half dozen books --- among them Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley and a wonderfully sexy, though never graphic, lesbian novel called The Price of Salt --- that will be read as long as readers like fiction that equally thrills and chills.

Or you could just be a lover of biographies and sense that, in Highsmith, you will encounter a train wreck of a person like no one you've ever encountered --- and, as if you were a pedestrian looking up at a would-be jumper on a terrace, you won't be able to tear your eyes away.

Or, simply, you want to read a book that is original in form, authoritative in its evidence, and dazzling in its writing. And because I am now leaving description for praise, I should disclose: Joan Schenkar has been a close friend for 35 years. Her value to me is not that she is steady and loyal and easy to be with; it is exactly the opposite. Ms. Schenkar is steely and demanding; she sets the bar high and brooks no fools. I caffeinate before I see her, spellcheck before I hit SEND. In return I get tough-love criticism, dark humor, ideas I find nowhere else. She strikes me as the ideal biographer for Highsmith: brave, original and scary smart --- like Highsmith, but without the defects.

But I'm almost falling into a trap. 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.

I'm going to skip over Highsmith's twisted relationship with her mother, her antipathy for her father and her early efforts to get somewhere as a writer to the core of her art and personality --- her obsession with love as an urgent, alpha emotion destined to end badly. Like murder.

Consider her first novel, "Strangers on a Train", which quickly became one of Alfred Hitchcock's better movies. You know the set-up: If each man commits a murder for the other, there will be no incriminating clues --- the anonymity will yield two perfect crimes. Thisis, says Schenkar, "the quintessential Highsmith situation: two men bound together psychologically by the stalker-like fixation of one upon the other, a fixation that always involved a disturbing, implicitly homoerotic fantasy."

In Highsmith, there's no real artistic development; this "double" plot is one she uses again and again. And it works just about every time, because who else writes --- approvingly --- of "the unequivocal triumph of evil over good"? Her villains aren't exactly villains to her. They're escape artists. That is, everything she wasn't.

Oh, but she tried. Through obsessive relationships --- she once seemed to have five lovers on the hook. Through alcohol. Through a push-pull relationship with her mother. And, most of all, through her writing, her one reliable way of feeling like herself.

Highsmith filled 38 notebooks and 18 diaries, 8,000 unpublished pages. With few exceptions --- she pretended she didn't spend seven years writing stories for comic books --- these are pivotal. As Schenkar notes, "She ratted herself out every chance she got." Schenkar should know. She read every notebook and diary and unearthed a staggering number of Highsmith's lovers. (You're thinking: It takes an obsessive to write a biography of an obsessive. Almost. I'd say: It takes a biographer who has equal parts empathy, imagination and artistry.)

It would be perverse, after all that research, to reduce Highsmith to a conventional biography. So Schenkar abandons chronology. Instead, she backtracks, skips ahead, loops around to trace themes and obsessions in Highsmith's life and work. The result is very much like an amusement park ride, with high-speed turns and dizzying descents. And that would not be perverse but correct: A writer like no other gets a biography like no other.

Complex and detailed and definitive. The previous review covered much of what I feel. Patricia Highsmith had much more recognition in Europe than the USA. Her NY publishers always pitching that no one liked Highsmith, no one identified with her books, there was no one to root for. That's why this country is so dreary. A land of second rate heros and do-gooders. I loved Highsmith's anti-heros. They were much more fun than the conventional boring stars of most American suspense novels. The villain is always more attractive in a Highsmith novel and she was the "queen" of this genre when it came to bad guys getting away with it. The bio is bedside reading for any of her admirers. As for being a nice person - Highsmith was an artist not a hotel manager! Buy the book today.

You buy The Talented Miss Highsmith to learn more about the life and mind behind some of the mid-20th Century's most original mystery/crime fiction, and are rewarded by author Joan Schenkar's much broader revelation of the cultures that nurtured its subject, Patricia Highsmith.
Let's see: urban Texas and a family steeped in Jim Crow southern bigotry, resentment and commercial art; New York of the 1940s and `50s, where millions, like Highsmith, re-invented themselves and stewed up a new kind of sophistication; and post-World War II America's self-image, captured in comic books and pulp fiction - all muscles, good looks and seduction, one step ahead of financial ruin, larcenous or even murderous activity.
Particularly intriguing is Schenkar's dissection of Highsmith's escapes to Britain and Europe - where she and other Americans of her generation sought insulation from their native cultures to assume the trappings of intriguing exotics.
In addition to the fascinating back-stories of Highsmith's crime writing, Schenkar gives us a true picture of American lifestyles in the Truman-Eisenhower era. You'll also learn about those who aided and abetted the ultimately financially successful, but thoroughly unpleasant Miss Highsmith as she startled us with her tales created out of such bizarre, but tolerated, thought and behavior.
I cannot recall when I have had so much adventure following the trail of a biographical subject who had presented herself in one way, only to be revealed by Schenkar in so many others, as she lurked, dodged, sneaked and deceived us throughout her astoundingly long life, eventually to be left out of style by the cultural changes in the country she'd abandoned. Loved the map of Highsmith's New York and the pictures that documented her descent from beauty to visual monstrosity.

The minute I read and heard about this book, I raced out to buy it. I discovered Patricia Highsmith twenty years ago, and think I've read everything she's written (that's in print) and consider her one of the great story tellers.

I settled into my chair prepared for a good long read, and found that what I consider attention span and what Ms. Schenkar considers attention span are two entirely different things. This book jumps ahead, falls back, goes around, and loops back so many times it is dizzying. Thankfully, I've read the excellent Andrew Wilson book on Highsmith or I would have stayed hopelessly lost. The Schenkar book is sort of interesting but doesn't correlate nearly enough the connections between Highsmith's life and her writing.

I don't regret having bought the book because it's a good addition to my Highsmith collection of things. Highsmith was one complicated lady and writer but I think to understand her is more dependent on her fiction.

Among "highbrow" mystery writers, Patricia Highsmith has few peers - and no betters. Her amoral novels take readers into bizarre worlds - one never feels quite as comfortable about human nature after reading Highsmith.

The Talented Miss Highsmith aims at being the definitive Highsmith biography. Author Joan Schenkar deserves an A+ for research. Readers learn that Highsmith left a massive trove of papers and that Schenkar spent years combing those files.

Schenkar did an excellent job of researching Highsmith's family and her childhood. Also, the book explains how the culture of 1940s Manhattan helped shape Highsmith.

For all of the research that went into the book, it rates no better than three stars for several reasons.

One major problem is length. At 559 pages, the book frequently demands too much effort for too little reward. Schenkar badly needed an editor to help her cut the book's length and to stop her from running off on tangents. (For instance, Chapter 33 is a mind-numbing list of some of the "stuff" in Highsmith's archives).

Fans will also be disappointed that Schenkar spends relatively little time on Highsmith's writing. For example, in Schenkar's treatment of Highsmith's The Tremor of Forgery - a much-praised novel - the reader gets just a few paragraphs about the book and almost no analysis. At times, Schenkar is lukewarm on Highsmith's art. Consider: "Her [Pat's] often unlovely prose puts one flat foot in front of the other, levelling every action with the same even tread..." (p. 466).

Schenkar's true focus in The Talented Miss Highsmith is "Pat's" messy personal life and her many lovers. In this account, Pat certainly is unlikeable; she is racist, anti-Semitic, misogynist, alcoholic, and just plain mean. Of course, if Pat was an awful person it is not Schenkar's fault, but readers tire of the accounts of Pat's bad behavior long before the book ends.

In the end, fans will be glad that they read The Talented Miss Highsmith. But we are still waiting for the definitive Highsmith biography.

The Talented Miss Highsmith by Joan Schenkar is an exhaustive biographical study destined to be recognized as the definitive examination of the unusual life led by Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995). Schenkar's research is thorough, wide ranging, well documented and fully consistent with Highsmith's own thoughts, impressions, memories and feelings retrieved from beyond the grave by virtue of the lengthy and detailed journals and diaries she compulsively maintained throughout her adult life.

Instead of giving a strictly chronological account of Highsmith's life, Schenkar divides the book into chapters each of which is devoted to a particular theme. Within each chapter, events occurring at disparate stages in Highsmith's life are discussed in the context of how they relate to the theme at hand. This makes for a fair amount of repetition as various aspects of the same life event are covered within multiple chapters.

Highsmith's life was every bit as strange as the fiction which brought her fame and wealth. A lesbian with countless lovers, she never did find her soulmate. An ambitious, social butterfly in 1940s Manhattan, she ended her days some 50 years later as a reclusive curmudgeon in a tiny town in Switzerland where her main concern was minimizing her tax bill. A chain smoking alcoholic who hated and eventually cut off contact with her own mother, she displayed a lifelong pattern of alienating friends, lovers and business associates with bizarre behavior, callous insults, and stubbornly held ethnic prejudices.

One comes away from this biography with a view of Patricia Highsmith as a profoundly unhappy woman who was selfish, miserly, incredibly self-centered, petty and hateful. Ultimately, it was this inner darkness which enabled her to produce the very dark, disturbing, (dare I say it) Highsmithian fiction which serves as her legacy.

I wasn't a fan of Wilson's *Beautiful Shadow*, and Schenkar's *The Talented Miss Highsmith* definitely throws into relief its weaknesses--the rushed, journalistic plainness; the apparent lack of in-depth research. Schenkar's research is astounding and impressive, and even if PH's background in comics was the only new thing Schenkar unearthed, it would still make *TMH* an improvement on its predecessor. (Although *Beautiful Shadow* definitely wins in the title department.) Her biography is enormously more complex, contextualized, rich, and multilayered.

That said, the fact that the book is chiefly driven by theme rather than chronology (the book *is* structured chronologically, but only in a very loose way) does mean, as others have said, a great deal of repetition, page-flipping, index-hunting, and even a bit of vertigo. For those who haven't read *BS*, reading Schenkar's chronological appendix first is a must. And the prose is highly stylized and effected ("Mother Mary," puns, numerous parenthetical asides), and after the first few hundred pages reading it feels a lot like work.

My chief reservation about the book, though, is Schenkar's open contempt for PH, and the fact that this contempt means that she first downgrades, and then even seems to forget about, Highsmith as writer. Be prepared for multiple descriptions of PH's writing as flat ("as a roller rink"), belabored, and with awkward dialogue. JS implies that the famous praise of PH from Graham Greene was bought and paid for (that is, exaggerated or disingenuous), and so on. It's obvious that PH was an abrasive, mean alcoholic--but JS's contempt for her seems even to extend to PH as a *writer*, and this surprised me. I often asked myself why she had bothered to write a massive biography of someone whom she didn't really consider to be an artist. After finishing it, I re-read *Edith's Diary*, to remind myself that the writer I saw there was generally absent from JS's biography. I still await the biography that will combine this kind of research and detail with an appreciative wish to dwell on PH more fully as a writer who uncomfortably challenged notions of American morality and success.

Joan Schenkar's THE TALENTED MISS HIGHSMITH is, quite simply, a stunning accomplishment. She has done what few others could---or would---dare to do: fully plumb the depths of Miss Highsmith's twisting, twisted mind. To do so, the talented Miss Schenkar has taken a radical (but completely justified) approach to the art of biography. Eschewing the standard birth-to-death format, Schenkar has structured her book around Highsmith's obsessions, which we watch repeating and repeating and repeating through the hell of Highsmith's 70-odd (sometimes VERY odd) years. The reader is offered what feels like a 3-dimensional portrait. The effect is staggering.

As is Schenkar's mastery of her subject. The book is a cornucopia, filled to overflowing with facts, fancies, speculations, erudite footnotes, social and literary history, maps, even an astrological chart. All of this material is skillfully used and deepens our understanding of the woman who gave us STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, DEEP WATER, THE CRY OF THE OWL and other masterpieces of free-floating guilt, anxiety and dread. Schenkar has found exactly the right tone for her book, a darkly comic voice perfectly suited to dealing with the distressed, distressing life she presents.

This is the definitive biography of Patricia Highsmith as well as a landmark of the biographical form. Accept no substitutes. Read it now.

I give this book a single star simply for the research that apparently went into it. However, I cannot recommend the book to anyone. I have never trudged through such a difficult, poorly written book in my entire life. The organization leaves you constantly wondering how this book was ever published, with sentences thrown together like random words on a page. Really, there is no part of the book that leads the reader to the next page let alone the next paragraph. I forced myself to get to the end as quickly as possible because I am not one to give up on a book, although I can't count the number of times I felt like doing so with this book.

As far as a biography, I have also never been subjected so openly to an author's opinion of the person about whom she has written. Page after page it is clear how this author feels about Patricia Highsmith, which is unfortunate because the best biographies allow the reader to form their own opinions. And I was really amazed at the number of times the author denigrated Highsmith's writing, coming from someone who, as I've said, clearly needs a serious editor.

I am not usually one to write a negative review of a book, not being a writer myself, but this was so horrible I felt I had to warn others.

I enjoyed Andrew Wilson's "Beautiful Shadow: A Life Of Patricia Highsmith" immensely. Joan Schenkar's "The Talented Miss Highsmith" offers a dark and troubled view of one of the 20th Century's most interesting artist-writers with a whole new level of complexity. Wilson's book is a fine overview, more of a chronological recap. Schenkar had access to Highsmith's diaries and journals (cahiers), some 8,000 pages of notes in all. The result is a deeply drawn, three-dimensional portrait.

If you are a fan of Patricia Highsmith, or if you've read her well-known novels and felt that gripping tug of character and plot like few other writers have managed to accomplish, "The Talented Miss Highsmith," more than anything else, shows the sheer hard work and dedication that Highsmith poured into her craft. For fuel, she drew on her personal rage and dark view of the world. The result was a series of novels and short stories that have the ability to grind away in your heart, to stick. Schenkar calls it "Highsmith Country." It has a population of one, writes Schenkar, and it's "a territory so psychologically threatening that even her most devoted readers hope never to recognize themselves in its pages."

"The Talented Miss Highsmith" is a portrait of an unsettled, dark, rocky, feisty, irascible, grumpy, quick-tempered, self-centered writer who is not easy to be around (even on the pages, at times). But it's also a portrait of a writer who had the ability to make characters jump off the page--recognizably regular people with dark fixations and churning inner stories that drive the stories forward.

There is so much to learn from Joan Schenkar's in-depth probing of Highsmith's journals. Her early life, her time as a writer for comics, her odd attitudes about cats and dogs, her love of snails, her ability to drink (and drink), her bumpy relationships with agents and editors, and her love affairs with a long string of women (and one or two men). There are also the odd bits about Highsmith's enjoyment from ironing clothes, her affection for the gas dentists administer as painkillers, her endless list-making, her sense of order, her vagabond nature, her hatred of the taxman and many other such details that provide some fascinating glue to the biography.

Schenkar's style is cool, straightforward. Schenkar marvels at Highsmith's talents but this biography is warts-and-all approach. More than anything, "The Talented Miss Highsmith" shows how Patricia Highsmith was the embodiment of contradictions and turmoil.

"She began keeping her cahiers the month she entered Barnard and she started the diaries when she was twenty. The journals gave her an opportunity to continually renew her vows for the only lasting `marriage' she ever made: the union that joined her intense rushes of feeling with her compelling need to commit them to paper. The fact that she repeated those vows dressed more like a groom than a bride and she usually do so in a counterfeit `male voice' (`I am a strong man, like Chaucer, like Shakespeare, like Joe Louis') was merely one of the ways her obsessions colored her work," writes Schenkar.

Reading "The Talented Miss Highsmith" will make you want to go back and reconsider her classics - "Strangers on a Train," "The Talented Mr. Ripley." It might also prompt you to dig up a few lesser-known works, "This Sweet Sickness" or "The Cry of the Owl." I know I'll be looking for a few short stories I missed.

Such dark, compelling stories aren't just pulled from thin air by a writer trying to conjure up something moving. Schenkar shows they are the product of an artist finding a way to express herself, to react to her feelings and emotions and pour those out in print.

Writes Schenkar: "She kept her central would--that terrible certainty that she was cursed at birth and was, really, nobody's child--stubbornly intact (she could not have done otherwise), and she found a foundation of inspiration in it, although not beauty or peace, for a very long time."