The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  And by golly, she swung up on that son of a gun and loped him down the front of the property and rode him around quite a little while. And then she came back and slid off and she was just exhilarated. I mean it was just one of the best things going for her.19

  With admirable contrariness, Pat mostly wore her western shirts, her belts from Texas, and her bolo ties with the fancy slides when she was living in France and Switzerland. And it was only to Paris and Marseille that she brought, as presents for her friend Jeannot’s young stepdaughter, boy’s cowboy shirts from Texas with snap fasteners and pairs of boy’s jeans with fly fronts. This was Pat’s idea of what a twelve-year-old French girl should wear in the conservative South of France. Jeannot’s stepdaughter remembered Pat’s beauty, her mysterious “presence,” and the very “masculine” and “sexist” conversations Pat was always having with Jeannot; and she also recalled the kindness Pat showed her as a child of a difficult marriage. But then she recollected how much she was teased in Marseille by the other children for wearing those “boy’s pants with the zipper in front” that Pat Highsmith had brought her all the way from America’s Wild West.20

  On this particular trip to Texas in 1953, Pat took special care to criticize the “commercialism” of the country music she was hearing on every radio station. She had a point, but her point was personal and contrarian. She was trying hard to reverse the old adage, trying to “take the Texas out of the girl” (herself)—something she was especially prone to doing when the girl herself was actually in Texas.

  Back in New York in January and still drinking like a sailor on leave, Pat waited until March to haul herself up before the court of her conscience, ensuring the severity of her sentence by making her self-indictment the only entry in English amid all the bad Italian at the end of her diary. Like the American Calvinist she continued to be, Pat thought that being poor was her punishment for bad morals and too much drinking. “The last year…nothing made sense. My attitude was have another drink. Nothing makes sense now either (March 16 1954) but as long as one has decided to live, one must always try to ‘do the right thing.’ I did not try last year. I spent my money like a drunken sailor. And the worst was, I knew what I was doing. It serves me jolly well right if I am broke, or if I land in debtor’s prison even…. It does not matter that I have worked pretty hard…. I have been imprudent, irreverent, false to myself, in fact.”21

  Another interpretation might be: Pat was being true to the only “self” she couldn’t bear to acknowledge.

  In New York, Pat’s despair seemed to increase. Lynn Roth, she thought, was tantalizing her, going back to Doris, moving in and out of her life, only to vanish by spring. Pat thought about making a story out of Lynn: a girl who can associate love only with people she sees secretly, “away from her regular girl friend. She is incapable of forming an orthodox relationship with anyone with whom she enjoys going to bed.”22 Instead of writing this story, Pat wrote several long, tortuous, and abstract disquisitions on the impossibility of homosexual love, once again making the personal into something “political.” And Lynn Roth, faithful at least to the complications of homosexual life in mid-century Manhattan, spent the last forty years of her life living with a woman who had been married to one of James Merrill’s lovers. Lynn’s stable relationship never ceased to irritate Pat, who, in a 1967 letter to Lil Picard, was still calling Lynn “the love of my life”—and referring to her lover as “a quiet bore.” By that time, Pat hadn’t been in touch with Lynn Roth for years.23

  In the extremity of her feelings for Lynn, it began to cross Pat’s mind again that she might be going “actually insane,” so she gave herself another of those little quizzes with which she liked to test her sanity. Could she follow “attentively and with interest” a news broadcast on the radio? She could. But she was still “homeless, miserable, where I am, my possessions—scattered, my love gone and yet worse, not entirely gone: she tantalizes me.” She was also suffering with another infected tooth and afflicted—as only an experienced hypochondriac can be—with “the many, many other bodily ailments that remind of Death, the final conqueror.” She compared herself to all the “concentration camp victims” she’d failed to describe on all her visits to DP camps in Europe.24

  It was now that someone told her—she recorded the information with obvious self-reference—that “the manic-depressive affliction is one of the few psychoses that are…nearly impossible to cure.” And it was now that she composed her clear identification with the “other” side of life.

  “Whatever pity I have for the human race is a pity for the mentally deranged, and for the criminals. (That is why they will always be the best characters in whatever I write.)” Normal people “do not need help. They bore me.”25

  Jack Kerouac, one year younger than Pat Highsmith and crisscrossing the United States at about the same time that she was, had already typed out his own identification with the “mad” in 1951: the long, formless, culture-changing riff which would be published as On the Road in 1957. He wrote:

  The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.26

  Kerouac, like many of the Beats, was infinitely more expansive about his experience of life than Pat had ever wanted to be. (Until he, too, aging prematurely and bloated with alcohol, turned to obsessions and anti-Semitism.) It was only William S. Burroughs—older and colder than the other Beats—whose misogyny, repelled examinations of homosexuality, and personal acts of criminality might have resonated with the disaffected Miss Highsmith. Pat and Burroughs could easily have crossed each other’s paths in Texas and Mexico City, where Burroughs “accidentally” blew his wife Joan Vollmer’s head off in 1951.

  It was in this “criminal” mood (but when was Pat not in this mood) that the idea of writing a novel about the “pursuit of evil” (The Pursuit of Evil would be one of her discarded titles for this novel and The Thrill Boys, another one) began to attract her.

  • 21 •

  Les Girls

  Part 5

  Pat once said that Ripley was a name she saw on a sign advertising men’s apparel on the Henry Hudson Parkway. And this is true: in the 1940s and 1950s, Ripley’s was a men’s clothing store in Manhattan on Fifth Avenue. But it is also false: a convenient billboard wasn’t the only origin of Tom Ripley’s name.

  “Comics,” Pat wrote to Kingsley in March of 1953, one year before she started imagining Tom Ripley, “I was determined when I started, were not going to influence my writing. I still believe they haven’t. On the contrary, I might have benefitted more than I did from their stupid but tight plotting.”1 Unwilling to acknowledge influences from popular culture, but always ready to confess to anything that ruffled the surface of her intentions, Pat hid the origin of Ripley’s name in one of her favorite places—her work. She put it into The Talented Mr. Ripley and allowed Ripley himself to give the secret away, casually, as a play on a phrase that every newspaper reader in America would know.*

  Tom Ripley has already murdered Dickie Greenleaf and slipped providentially into Dickie’s name and identity. He is in Rome and is on the verge of being prosecuted for having murdered “himself”: i.e., the Italian police are now looking for the “missing” Tom Ripley, and they suspect “Dickie Greenleaf” of being his possible murderer. Dickie’s “girlfriend” Marge has come to Rome from their village of Mongibello to look for Dickie, and she accosts Tom (who, actor that he is, has to switch back to impersonating his own character of “Tom Ripley”) just as Tom, in his role of “Dickie Greenleaf,” is trying to leave for Sicily. Tom tries to put Marge off with a quickly improvised lie.

  “He laughed, his own unmistakable laugh that Marge knew well. ‘The thing is, I’m expecting somebody any minute. It’s a business interview. About a job. Believe it or not, old believe-it-or-not Ripley’s try
ing to put himself to work.’”2

  Ripley’s Believe It or Not was (and still is) a renowned cartoon, a comics panel, created by Robert Ripley—an incredible figure himself: part commercial artist, part anthropologist, part real-life Superhero—for the New York Globe newspaper in 1918. Each illustrated panel of Ripley’s Believe It or Not tells in a dramatic sentence or two the story of a fantastic but true oddity, culled from a faraway place (or from the New York Public Library on Forty-second Street, where Robert Ripley had a researcher working full-time); and the cartoon itself was eventually syndicated to many American newspapers. By 1936, Robert Ripley was voted the most popular figure in the United States, eighty million Americans a year were reading Ripley’s Believe It or Not, and the phrase “believe it or not” had embedded itself in American household vernacular where it stayed right up through the 1960s. For a country still powered by the American Dream, Robert Ripley’s illustrated course in miracles was virtually required reading.

  In 1931 Ripley’s Believe It or Not was syndicated in its “comics panel” form to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the newspaper Pat’s grandfather, father, and stepfather had all worked for, the paper Pat herself starting reading when she was still a four-year-old in drop-seat overalls in Fort Worth. An avid newspaper reader all her life, not to mention a dedicated clipper of articles, Pat would have seen the Ripley cartoon on her many trips back to Fort Worth.3 During the four months she spent in Fort Worth just before she began to write The Talented Mr. Ripley, she was reading the Fort Worth Star-Telegram every day, complaining about its “biased” news coverage, and giving an interview to one of its reporters.4

  Although the Republican-leaning newspaper Pat read in New York, the New York Herald Tribune, didn’t run the Ripley cartoon, it did make its own contribution to The Talented Mr. Ripley. In the middle of April 1953, Pat cut out an article from the Herald Tribune about a “substitute” murder and pasted it in her cahier. A man from St. Louis, the article said, was presumed dead when “his” burned body was found—and then promptly arrested for murder when someone saw him downing a beer after his own “funeral.”5

  “Believe it…or not” is how Americans would have introduced this story of corpse-substitution to each other in conversation, inflecting the phrase ironically, like a quotation. Which, of course, is what it was: a quotation from a popular phrase in common parlance and countrywide distribution. Pat invoked this phrase when, joining it with the memory of a big billboard on the Henry Hudson Parkway and the love for newspapers which she associated with her earliest attempts to read, she took her favorite character’s surname from a source that had already provided her with so much unacknowledged inspiration: the comics.

  Thomas Phelps Ripley, alive and kicking, would have made a fine subject for a Robert Ripley cartoon himself. “Believe it or not,” a petty grifter with homosexual “attachments” (Ripley is taken up in New York by a man who likes to “sponsor” young men, a character modeled on Myron Sanft, the man at whose Manhattan house Pat had her one and only meeting with Gore Vidal in the 1940s) and a latent talent for impersonation is chosen by a rich man to be the “ambassador” who will bring his prodigal son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from Europe. Instead of discharging his commission, Ripley, disappointed in his Alter Ego–like feelings for Dickie Greenleaf, murders Dickie and Dickie’s best friend, assumes Dickie’s identity and characteristics (and in the process forgets how to “play” himself), and then forges his way into inheriting both Dickie’s trust fund and Dickie’s superior attitude.

  It’s a large part of Ripley’s indistinct charm and unadmitted sexuality that he begins his career by preferring to imitate the boy rather than being, in Noël Coward’s phrase, “mad about the boy”—and Ripley’s is the response of an actor preparing for his most rewarding role. The miraculous American “best” would only be just good enough for Tom Ripley from now on. And it’s an appropriate goal, too, for the American antihero whose name found its way into Pat Highsmith’s most American novel by the most American of means: advertising and a comic strip.

  The American novel itself—apostrophized during this time as “the Great American Novel”—was a renewed subject for discussion in mid-twentieth-century American literary life. Many American writers were thinking about expressing the “soul” of their country in a, or in the, “Great American Novel.” (Although it would be a synaesthetic Russian aristocrat, Vladimir Nabokov, who did it most brilliantly in 1955 in his succès de scandale, Lolita.) Pat Highsmith, whose conversations about art were usually with herself, was no exception: she talked the subject over quite a bit in her notebooks for many years.

  Leviathan! I should like to call my first book. It should be long and deep and wide and high. Thick and rich, too, like America….

  I should have that peculiar early twentieth century spirit that moved our politicians and our people strangely…. I should have the dignity below all of us we never find ourselves. I should answer the question why America chooses to dwell on the surface [and] leave[s] the depths unexplored and vacant, stately chambers and halls of America, awaiting occupancy.6

  Pat told Rosalind Constable, who approved her idea, that “the protagonist of the great American novel might not be on American soil.”7 Rosalind’s response was: “Do you want to write it?”8 But by the time she had this exchange with Rosalind in 1968, Pat had long since finished her version of the Great American Novel.

  Like Henry James, whose The Ambassadors she was partly spoofing, Pat took her best thematic shot—it was an inadvertent one—at a great American novel by setting The Talented Mr. Ripley mostly in Europe. And she seemed to think better of Ripley the character than she did of Ripley the novel. “Good books write themselves, and this can be said from a small but successful book like Ripley to longer and greater works of literature,” she wrote modestly.9 Ripley, she thought, was popular because of the “insolence and audacity” of Ripley himself.10 She gave Ripley all the credit for the book’s success.11

  Pat was often modest, utilitarian, and bluntly practical in discussing her writing, e.g.: “I always say to…publishers who contemplate a reprint [of A Game for the Living], ‘This is my worst book, so please think twice before you buy it.’”12 But for all her carpenter’s explanations in Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction of the practical ways to put a suspense novel together—the careful consulting of “germs,” the diagrams of falling and rising actions, the economical use of leftover scraps of emotional memory, the constant employment of builder’s tropes (“one has often to dovetail the difficulties so they fit and lock”)13—she was never able to judge her own writing very well. Thus, after 1970, The Talented Mr. Ripley does not usually appear on the short roster of works she tentatively ranked as her best.* That roster, anyway, was composed of novels and short stories which couldn’t be cramped into the “suspense” category, and her changeable choices for favorites—like Edith’s Diary or The Tremor of Forgery—were often dictated by how the books had been reviewed or talked about in the press.

  Pat’s often rough and unadorned prose (never more baldly so than in her little handbook on writing, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction) has not made it easy for her to be recognized outside the broadly based “suspense” or “crime writers” genre. In much of her work, the sentences plod along with the dull insistence of a headache. At her best, the metaphors incandesce with her obsessions, but at her worst she has to be read in what Roland Barthes called (in a discussion of the differences in reading nineteenth-century novels and “modern” novels) “two times,” two tempos, two separate reading speeds: one for her flat-footed prose style and the other for the wholly unsettling ground those flat feet are covering. The Austrian writer Peter Handke, a serious Highsmith fan, wrote that when reading Highsmith he felt himself to be “under the protection of a great writer” but he also felt that her “handicraft” was “a means of draining all attention away from the sentences and towards the odd and yet…unstylish…actions of the characters.”14

  Sti
ll, a claim to one of the small allotments in the real estate of the Great American Novel must be made for The Talented Mr. Ripley—and it rests on the instability of Tom Ripley’s character (so like his creator’s) as well as on the Darwinian cruelty (so like his native country’s economic system) with which his narrative unfolds. Thomas P. Ripley has been observed by an author who is as ruthless—and as ruthlessly attached to the American Dream—as he is. When Pat Highsmith gave life to Ripley, she was exposing the black backside of her country’s Zeitgeist.

  Pat always thought a lot about what it meant to be an American (and had just finished reading Tocqueville on the subject when she began to write Ripley). And she thought even more about what it meant to be an American in exile. But she had something less theoretical in mind than investigating the meanings of either of these categories while she was writing The Talented Mr. Ripley. “I did not turn loose of my main idea, which was of two young men with a certain resemblance—not much—one of whom kills the other and assumes his identity.” Once she’d settled on Tom’s traits, she found that his story unrolled in front of her like a well-paved road.

  Pat began taking notes for Ripley (she was calling it “the Third Suspense Novel”) at the end of March 1954. She was making up a “young American, half homosexual, an indifferent painter” with a little income and the kind of innocuous look that would make him a good front for a smuggling gang. “At first, a harmless attractive-to-some, repellent-to-others kind of young man, he becomes a murderer, a killer for pleasure…. Like Bruno, he must never be quite queer—merely capable of playing the part…. His name should be Clifford, or David, Or Matthew…. Or Richard Greenleaf—the boy in the beach in Positano.” Appropriately, Pat began by conflating the identities of Tom and Dickie, starting with a description of both of them and attaching Dickie’s name to it.