The poet of apprehension: Patricia Highsmith's short stories
BIOGRAPHY OF PATRICIA HIGHSMITH
I ’ve been reading Eleven, a collection of some of
Patricia Highsmith’s short stories (two of which I’d read before in other
horror anthologies). Highsmith is an author I’ve long admired, but often from a
distance. Even for people with a cynical view of human nature, her work can be
discomfiting, or downright unpleasant, and this is perhaps truer of her short
stories, which by their very nature are more intense than her novels (such as
The Talented Mr Ripley and its sequels). Unsettling as the full-length books
are, they have breathers that allow the reader to sit back and reflect on the
plot convolutions or simply soak in a place description. But the shorter
pieces, being more concentrated, offer fewer escape routes.
Other masters of the macabre (an obvious example being
Roald Dahl, a contemporary of Highsmith) have a – dare one say it – feel-good
style that makes their stories easy to savour, or at least chuckle at, even if
you aren’t in a particularly wicked mood. Some of Dahl’s best work is marked by
the twist in the tale, which means the reader can first anticipate a delicious
ending and later feel the satisfaction of having experienced a neatly
rounded-off story. Highsmith usually doesn’t provide such comforts. In
contrast, the horror in much of her work comes from the fact that there isn’t a
twist in the tale or a definite ending; that things simply continue to be as
they are – bleak, unresolved. I’m thinking in particular of “The Cries of
Love”, about two elderly women living together in what we assume is an old
person’s home (or possibly a house for the mentally ill) – their mutual
co-dependence, their inability to sleep in separate rooms, and the little acts
of petulance and cruelty they direct at each other (destroying a precious
cardigan, chopping off a braid of hair), which are natural offshoots of this
lonely, parasitic existence. In such a story, the reader might expect a twist
at the end – perhaps an act of supreme, unforeseen viciousness – but the story
simply closes on an almost mundane note, with one of the women looking forward
to Christmas (so she can damage the gifts that her roommate receives). It’s
very depressing, because one sees then that the horror lies not in the
specifics of the women’s actions but in the continuing banality of their lives:
this endless cycle of vindictiveness, childlike sulking, recrimination and
making up is all they have.
This isn’t to say that Highsmith doesn’t trade in more
conventional thriller endings, but when she does it’s usually subtle and
drawn-out – the effect isn’t so much of something suddenly springing out at the
reader as he turns a corner but more that we are dragged along, reluctantly,
towards the corner and to what lies beyond it.
There’s a definite mollusc fetish on view in Eleven,
with two very creepy stories featuring people who become obsessed, in different
ways, with snails: “The Snail-Watcher”, in which a seemingly innocuous hobby
leads, in just a few short pages, to horrific consequences (the stunning
matter-of-factness of the resolution has to be read to be believed); and “The
Quest for Blank Claveringi”, about a professor visiting an island in the hope
of sighting giant snails with shell-diameters of 20 feet. (While on shelled
creatures, there’s also “The Terrapin”, about a little boy, his bad-tempered
mother and the doomed terrapin that has been brought home for dinner.)
Highsmith’s writing can be savage and malicious at
times. If you want to test your morbidity-endurance, try out the collection
Little Tales of Misogyny, the opening story of which begins with the sentence
“A young man asked a father for his daughter's hand, and received it in a box –
her left hand.” Don’t feel sorry for the young lady, she’s rotten to the core,
as many of the women (and most of the men) in this book are. Highlights include
“Oona, the Jolly Cave Woman” (who was constantly pregnant and had never
experienced the onset of puberty, “her father having had at her since she was
five, and after him, her brothers. Even in late pregnancy she was interfered
with and men waited impatiently the half-hour or so it took her to give birth
before they fell on her again”); “The Prude” (who wants her daughters,
granddaughters and great-granddaughters to “Be Pure in Every Way”); “The
Breeder”, about a woman who has 17 children after nine years of marriage; and
“The Fully Licensed Whore, or, The Wife”. The stories are subversively funny,
as their titles suggest, but their critique of social conventions is so
sharp-edged, bitter, even gratuitous at times, that the reader feels uncomfortable
about participating in it. Highsmith seems to actively dislike many of her
characters and relish their misfortunes, which is not the sort of thing one is
accustomed to in satire. My response to this is ambivalent: like I said, I
admire her work but I can’t read too much of it at one go.
But having mentioned the seeming heartlessness of some
of her work, I’d like to recommend a very affecting, empathetic story that also
features in Eleven. “When the Fleet Was in at Mobile” is a little masterpiece
about a timid woman named Geraldine escaping her louse of a husband and trying
to reclaim her freedom. We learn about her past in bits and pieces, and through
allusions, as the story proceeds. There is an unforced gentleness in
Highsmith’s writing as she makes us care for this damaged, perhaps mentally
unstable woman, and it all leads up to a devastating conclusion.
Incidentally Graham Greene wrote the Foreword to
Eleven, and he astutely captures the moral disorder in Highsmith’s fiction:
She is a writer who has created a world of her own – a
world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of
personal danger, with the head half turned over the shoulder, even with a
certain reluctance, for these are cruel pleasures we are going to experience…it
is not the world as we once believed we knew it, but it is frighteningly more
real to us than the house next door. Her characters are irrational, and they
leap to life in their very lack of reason; suddenly we realise how unbelievably
rational most fictional characters are as they lead their lives from A to Z,
like commuters always taking the same train…from Miss Highsmith’s side of the
frontier, we realise that our world was not really as rational as all that.
Suddenly with a sense of fear we think “Perhaps I really belong here”…she is
the poet of apprehension rather than fear. Fear after a time is narcotic, it
can lull one by fatigue into sleep, but apprehension nags at the nerves gently
and inescapably.
In making Tom Ripley attractive – sensitive to beauty,
considerate to others in his everyday dealings, courageous and resourceful and
endowed with an acute awareness of mood and place – Highsmith was not romanticising
villainy; she was presenting a fact of life that moralists prefer to forget.
The qualities that enable people to live an interesting and fulfilling life –
and that make them valuable to others – are not all of one piece, and what are
usually seen as the distinctively moral virtues are not always among them.
Moral virtue is only a part of what makes life worth living, and not always the
most important part.
P.S. At least three wonderful films – Hitchcock's
Strangers on a Train, Rene Clement’sPlein Soleil and the John Malkovich-starrer
Ripley’s Game – are based on Highsmith novels. Maybe David Cronenberg should
adapt one of the snail stories!
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