Patricia Highsmith / The Artist

Young Woman Drawing
Marie-Denise Villers

THE ARTIST

by Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith / La artista

At the time Jane got married, one would have thought there was nothing unusual about her. She was plump, pretty and practical: she could give artificial respiration at the drop of a hat or pull someone out of a faint or a nosebleed. She was a dentist’s assistant, and as cool as they come in the face of crisis or pain. But she had enthusiasm for the arts. What arts? All of them. She began, in the first year of her married life, with painting. This occupied all her Saturdays, or enough of Saturdays to prevent adequate shopping for the weekend, but her husband Bob did the shopping. He also paid for the framing of muddy, run—together odd portraits of their friends, and the sittings of the friends took up time on the weekends too. Jane at last faced the fact she could not stop her colours from running together, and decided to abandon painting for the dance.

The dance, in a black leotard, did not much improve her robust figure, only her appetite. Special shoes followed. She was studying ballet,. She had discovered an institution called The School of Arts. In this five—storey edifice they taught the piano, violin and other instruments, music composition, novel—writing, poetry, sculpture, the dance and painting.

‘You see, Bob, life can and should be made more beautiful,’ Jane said with her big smile. ‘And everyone wants to contribute, if he or she can, just a little bit to the beauty and poetry of the world.’

Meanwhile, Bob emptied the garbage and made sure they were not out of potatoes. Jane's ballet did not progress beyond a certain point, and she dropped it and took up singing.

‘I really think life is beautiful enogoh as it it,’ Bob said. ‘Anyway I'm pretty happy.’ That was during Jane's singing period, which had caused them to crowd the already small living-room with an upright piano.

For some reason, Jane stopped her singing lessons and began to study sculpture and wood-carving. This made the living room a mess of dropped bits of clay and wood chips which the vacuum could not always pick up. Jane was too tired for anything after her days's work in the dentist's office, and standing on her feet over wood or clay until midnight.

Bob came to hate The School of Arts. He had seen it a few times, when he had gone to fetch Jane at 11 p.m. (The neighbourhood was dangerous to walk in.) It seemed to Bob that the students were all a lot of misguided hopefuls, and the teachers a lot of mediocrities. It seemed a madhouse of misplaced effort. And how many homes, children and husbands were being troubled now, because the women of the households -the students were mainly women- were not at home performing a few essential tasks? It seemed to Bob that there was no inspiration in The School of Arts, only a desire to imitate people who had bee inspired, like Chopin, Beethoven and Bach, whose works he could hear being mangled as he sat on a bench in the lobby, awating his wife. People called artist mad, but madness. The students did appear insane, in a certain sense of the word, but not in the right way, somehow. Considering the time The School of Arts deprived him of his wife, Bob was ready to blow the whole building to bits.

He had not long to wait, but he did not blow the building up himself. Someone -it was later proven to have been an instructor- put a bomb under The School of Arts, set to go off at 4 p.m. It was New Year's Eve, and despite the fact it was a semi-holiday, the students of all the arts were practising diligently. The police and the some newspapers had been forewarned of the bomb. The trouble was, nobody found it, and also most people did not believe that any bomb would go off. Because of the seediness of the neighbourhood, the school had been subjected to scares and threats before. But the bomb went off, evidently from the depths of the basement, and a pretty good sized one it was.



Bob happened to be there, because he was to have fetched Jane at 5 p.m. He had heard about the bomb rumour, but did not know whether to believe it or not. With some caution, however, or a premonition, he was waiting across the street instead of in the lobby.

One piano went through the roof, a bit separated from the student who was still seated on the stool, fingering nothing. A dancer at last made a few complete revolutions without her feet touching the ground because she was a quarter of a mile high, and her toes were even pointing skyward. An art student was flung through a wall, his brush poised, ready to make the master stroke as he floated horizontally towards a true oblivion. One instructor, who had taken refuge as often as possible in the toilets of The School of Arts, was blown up in proximity to some of the plumbing.

Then came Jane, flying through the air with a mallet in one hand, a chisel in the other, and her expression was rapt. Was she stunned. Still concentrating on her work, or even dead? Bob could not tell about Jane The flying particles subsided with a gentle, diminishing clatter, and a rise of grey dust. There were a few seconds of silence, during which Bob stood still. Then he turned and walked homeward. Other Schools of Art, he knew, would arise. Oddly, this thought crossed his mind before he realized that his wife was gone forever.

Patricia Highsmith

Little Tales of Misogyny

Little Tales of Misogyny

Patricia Highsmith / The Hand

Patricia Highsmith / Oona, The Jolly Cave Woman

Patricia Highsmith / The Coquette

Patricia Highsmith / The Female Novelist

Patricia Highsmith / The Dancer

Patricia Higsmith / The Artist

Patricia Highsmith / The Mobile Bed-Object

Patricia Highsmith / The Victim

 

The Talented Ms. Highsmith

Norton has reissued A Dog's Ransom and Little Tales of Misogyny from Patricia Highsmith, a Ft. Worth native whose disturbing brand of suspense could be "morbidly comic and surreal" or "traditional and believable," writes Tommi Ferguson.

BY TOMMI FERGUSON,

FRI., AUG. 23, 2002

Patricia Highsmith (1921-95), a Ft. Worth native who spent her writing life in New York and abroad, might be known best for her early thriller Strangers on a Train, made famous by Hitchcock's 1951 adaptation. Though her fiction's commercial appeal would ebb and flow during the next four decades, Highsmith regularly delivered novels and story collections that disturbed, even shocked readers. Renewed interest in Highsmith's fiction came with 1999's The Talented Mr. Ripley, based on her 1955 novel. The film's popularity most likely contributed to the paperback release of two of Highsmith's works, the short story collection Little Tales of Misogyny ($11) and the novel A Dog's Ransom ($12.95), both due out this month from Norton.

Every Man Is A Victim of the Female in Patricia Highsmith’s Little Tales of Misogyny

GENNA RIVIECCIO

July 26, 2017

Deft and merciless in her portrayal of humanity, Patricia Highsmith is little remembered for her short stories so much as her most famous character, Tom Ripley of the semi-eponymous The Talented Mr. Ripley and, more recently, The Price of Salt thanks to its film adaptation into Carol. But with the release of her taut short story collection, Little Tales of Misogyny, in 1977 (in Germany first, of course), Highsmith takes suspense to an entirely different level in showing her readers just how horrifying both genders can be. Over the course of seventeen tales, each one typically brief and to the point for optimal bitingness, Highsmith manages to use the worst elements of the female caricature–whorishness, hen-like demeanors, manipulation–to paint a nightmarish portrait of male-female relationships, and how so often each sex uses the other to the point of abuse.

Patricia Highsmith / Little Tales of Misogyny / Review

IN SHORT: FICTION

 By Ursula Hegi

• April 6, 1986

 (Penzler Books, $15.95.) Punishment is the central theme of this collection of stories about women that was first published in a German translation in the mid-70's.

The titles of the stories give an indication of their content: ''The Mobile Bed-Object,'' ''The Middle-Class Housewife,'' ''The Breeder,'' ''The Fully-Licensed Whore, or, The Wife.'' Patricia Highsmith's women destroy men and, as a result, most of them are punished. Yvonne, ''The Coquette,'' is killed by two of her suitors ''with various blows about the head.'' Claudette, ''The Dancer,'' is strangled by her partner for refusing to sleep with him. Mildred, the bed-object, is dumped into a canal and drowned. ''She had been thrown away, as one might throw away a cricket lighter when it is used up, like a paperback one has read.'' Catherine, ''The Victim,'' wears makeup and platform boots though she isn't even 12; her rapes are portrayed as a direct result of her appearance: ''As time went on, when Cathy complained about rape, her parents paid not much atten-tion. After all, Cathy had been on The Pill.'' Patricia Highsmith is the author of several books, including ''The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder'' and ''Ripley Under Ground.'' In ''Little Tales of Misogyny'' she uses her women characters to perpetuate the worst stereotypes. Her selection of titles certainly indicates that she is aware of the hatred of women that fills the pages of her book, but this awareness does not make up for it. Her tales seem intended to be witty and sarcastic; yet they come across as shallow and vicious.

A version of this article appears in print on April 6, 1986, Section 7, Page 22 of the National edition with the headline: IN SHORT: FICTION.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Little Tales of Misogyny by Patricia Highsmith / Illustrations

Little Tales of Misogyny

by Patricia Highsmith

Illustrations

Patricia Highsmith is most famous for her acclaimed novels The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train. I redesigned Highsmith's cult classic 'Little Tales of Misogyny', originally a paperback, as a hardback with a screen printed cloth cover and original illustrations to lend a greater feel of value and beauty to an otherwise neglected work.

RANDY

 

Patricia Highsmith / Little Tales of Misogyny / Review

Little Tales of Misogyny by Patricia Highsmith review – a mischievous look at the suburban American dream

BIOGRAPHY OF PATRICIA HIGHSMITH

Even the title is not what it seems in these wicked, funny and unsettling stories


Nicholas Lezard
Tuesday 20 January 2015 08.00 GMT

M

y first thought, before I started reading this overlooked collection, was that it would contain examples, informed by second-wave feminism, of men being nasty to women and being punished horribly by Patricia Highsmith. But by the time the 10th little tale rolled around – “The Fully Licensed Whore, or, The Wife” – I had become uncomfortably aware that most of the time it is the women who are ghastly, and often end up being killed off by Highsmith. The book was first published in 1975 in German, under the title Kleine Geschichte für Weiberfeinde, appearing in English two years later. I should have looked closer at that German title: it means, literally, “little tales for misogynists”. This is not a book to teach the misogynists a lesson: it’s something you might give a misogynist on his birthday.

So the wife in the above-mentioned story, who has become pregnant by a man who is not her husband-to-be two months before her wedding, continues having affairs with the gas meter reader (“to limber herself up”), the window cleaner, their lawyer, the doctor, “a couple of maverick husbands in their social circle”, and so on, all the while withholding sexual favours from her own husband, in perpetuity, once the baby has been born. This time, it’s the husband who ends up dead.

As for the other stories, we are given plots resembling twisted fables from Hilaire Belloc, whereby women – who have either too much or too little sex; or are driven mad by religion or the pressures of keeping up with the neighbours or wanting to be creative – come to sticky ends one way or another. In “The Artist”, someone puts a bomb under the School of Arts, in which talentless but eager women are encouraged to indulge their delusions: “A dancer at last made a few complete revolutions without her feet touching the ground, because she was a quarter of a mile high.”

At that point, where I laughed rather loudly, it occurred to me that the best way to appreciate this book would be as a string of extremely black jokes – in which case it works very well. After all, if there is anyone who knows how to jangle our moral nerves, from what often seems like pure authorial mischief, it is Highsmith. The mischief here extends to what at first glance looks like a single-minded assault on her own sex, until it becomes clear that what she is actually attacking is a range of stupid or vicious behaviours; the charge of misogyny is something of a red herring.

When this book first came out, many readers didn’t understand it, or chose not to. However Highsmith, sexually omnivorous, capable of cruelty, was in quite a few ways a character out of a Patricia Highsmith story. She couldn’t have written in any other way, and to criticise her for the well she drew her inspiration from is as unfair as to criticise someone for the face they were born with. This is not to denigrate her skill: every word is chosen with great care; not one is wasted.

Sometimes you need someone with an acidic vision to clear away the grime of familiarity and ease. It is not chance that among her many fans were Graham Greene, Gore Vidal and JG Ballard, or that she was resolutely unappreciated in her native United States. The majority of stories in this volume could be said to be indictments, and utterly merciless ones at that, of the suburban American dream of the mid-20th century. The critic Brigid Brophy called her a Dostoevsky “whose gifts include humour and charm”. I’m not so sure about the charm here, but these stories, once you get the hang of them, are very wicked, very funny and – this being Highsmith’s mission in life, as far as one can tell – very unsettling.

THE GUARDIAN

Short Stories
Little Tales of Misogyny
PATRICIA HIGHSMITH / THE HAND

PATRICIA HIGHSMITH / THE VICTIM

PATRICIA HIGHSMITH / THE MOBILE BED-OBJECT

PATRICIA HIGHSMITH / THE DANCER

PATRICIA HIGHSMITH / OONA, THE JOLLY CAVE WOMAN

PATRICIA HIGHSMITH / THE COQUETTE

PATRICIA HIGHSMITH / THE FEMALE NOVELIST

PATRICIA HIGHSMITH / THE INVALID OR THE BED-RIDDEN

Patricia Highsmith / Little Tales of Misogyny / Review

Patricia Highsmith

The Title Says It All: Little Tales of Misogyny by Patricia Highsmith

This entry was posted on August 13, 2012

http://coreysbook.wordpress.com/2012/08/13/the-title-says-it-all-little-tales-of-misogyny-by-patricia-highsmith/

The title of the book, Little Tales of Misogyny, while glib, is hardly meant to be ironic or misleading. Rather, the title tells you exactly what you’ll be getting from Patricia Highsmith this time around. A more bluntly literal title could not be wished for.

The book really does contain little tales of misogyny–14 such tales in fact, most of which range between 3 and 5 pages each. Furthermore, each does contain some instance of misogyny, but if you’re hoping to find a condensed version of stories you’d watch on the Lifetime network, look somewhere else (I think Nicholas Sparks writes those, for example).

Little Tales of Misogyny is a darkly and mordantly funny book–when it’s not churning your stomach. I should also add it’s morbid and contains the most extreme version of gallows humor since the conclusion of Dr. Strangelove. One story features a young man asking a girl’s father for her hand, and he gives it to him, severed and in a box; if you think I’m giving away the ending, I’m not–that happens in the first paragraph.

Each story follows a simple formula: the heroine is introduced usually in the first paragraph, then her lover saunters in, and finally, through some quirk in his or her personality, tragedy is arrived at, although the climaxes often resemble punchlines to such a degree that you might find yourself laughing at the horror of it all (such as the delightfully  wicked ending to Edith Wharton’s Ethan Fromme, a writer I’m sure Patricia Highsmith had some reverence for).

Patricia Highsmith is the underappreciated master of psychological crime fiction. As testament to that, read her classic stories The Talented Mr. Ripley or Strangers on A Train, both of which were made into popular films (the latter being filmed by Alfred Hitchcock and starred the late-great Farley Granger). One thing that distinguishes Patricia Highsmith from a bevy of other mystery writers is her obsession with the crime itself, and her apparent disregard for justice. If a character is caught or penalized, the act comes as an afterthought as if it were simply thrown in to satisfy her austere critics. In Little Tales of Misogyny, even the tacked-on justice is largely absent.

What we have instead are stories written with great precision and an utter lack of sentimentality, often leading the reader to be pulverized by the final ironies in each tale. All the while, Patricia Highsmith remains almost cruelly detached, writing wonderfully bleak descriptions like:

“There are lots of girls like Mildred, homeless, yet never without a roof–most of the time the ceiling of a hotel room, sometimes that of a bachelor’s digs, of a yacht’s cabin if they’re lucky, a tent, or a caravan. Such girls are bed-objects, the kind of thing one acquires like a hot water bottle, a traveling iron, an electric shoe-shiner, any little luxury of life.”

OR

“She was a bit hairy, one front tooth missing, but her sex appeal was apparent at a distance of two hundred yards or more, like an odour, which perhaps it was.”

Even the titles are unkempt or bloody, such as “The Mobile-Bed Object,” or “The Fully Licensed Whore, or, The Wife.”

Occasionally, Little Tales of Misogyny offers visceral moments as well, such as in the suspenseful story The Dancer, about a dancing duo whose act revolves around the man pretending to strangle the woman, only to gracefully free her in the end, after the catharsis is complete. When he discovers she has had affairs, he alters their routine, and the story ends with the line (spoiler)

“He had strangled her, too tightly for her to cry out. Rodolphe walked off the little stage, and left Claudette for other people to pick up.”

However, when it comes to this novel, I have to do something I am normally

cardinally opposed to, and that is, to judge an artist against themselves. True, Little Tales of Misogyny is better than A LOT of the crime fiction out there, and in many ways the book is truly unique, yet after reading work such as The Talented Mr. Ripley and some of her longer short stories, I have to say I kept thinking in the back of my mind as I read this that Patricia Highsmith could do better. She had done better. In her case, she set the bar high, and no one could reach it, herself included.

What was your opinion of Little Tales of Misogyny by Patricia Highsmith?

Read also

BIOGRAPHY OF PATRICIA HIGHSMITH

• 
  

Patricia Highsmith / The Invalid, or, The Bed-Ridden

Patricia Highsmith

THE INVALID, OR, THE BED-RIDDEN

BIOGRAPHY OF PATRICIA HIGHSMITH

She had suffered a fall while on a skiing holiday at Chamonix with her boy friend some ten years ago. The injury had something to do with her back. The doctors couldn’t find anything, nobody could see anything wrong with her back, but still it hurt, she said. Actually, she was no sure she would get her man unless she pretended an injury, and one acquired when she had been with him. Philippe, however, was quite in love with her, and she need not have worried so much. Still, hooking Phillipe very firmly, plus ensuring a life of leisure – not to say flat on her back in bed, or however she chose to lie comfortably, for the rest of her life – was no small gain. It was a big one. How many other women could capture a man for life, give him nothing at all, not even bother to cook his meals, and still be supported in rather fine style?

Some days she got up, mainly out of bedroom. She was sometimes up when the sun was shining, but not always. When the sun was not shining, or when there was a threat of rain, Christine felt terrible and kept to her bed. Then her husband Philipe had to go downstairs with the shopping net and come back and cook. All Christine talked about was ‘how I feel’. Visitors and friends were treated to a long account of injections, pills, pains in the back which had kept her from sleeping last Wednesday night, and the possibility of rain tomorrow, because of the way she felt.

But she was always feeling rather well when August came, because she and Philippe went to Cannes then. Things might be bad at the very start of August however, causing Philippe to engage an ambulance to Orly, then a special accommodation on an aeroplane to Nice. In Cames she found herself able to go to the beach every morning at 11 a.m., swimming for a few minutes with the aid of water-wings, and to eat a good lunch. But at the end of August, back in Paris, she suffered a relapse from all the excitement, rich food, and general physical strain, once more had to take to bed, her tan included. She would sometimes expose tanned legs for visitors, sigh with memories of Cannes, then cover up again with sheets and blanket. September heralded, indeed, the onset of grim winter. Philippe couldn’t sleep with her now – though for God’s sake he felt he had earned better treatment, having worked his fingers to the bone to pay her doctors’, radiologists’ and pharmacies’ bills beyond reckoning. He would have to face another solitary winter, and not even in the same room with her but in the next room.

‘To think I brought all this upon her,’ Philippe said to one of his friends, ‘by taking her to Chamonix.’

‘But why is she always feeling quite well in August?’ replied the friend, ‘You think she is an invalid? Think again, really, old man.’

Philippe did begin to think, because other friends had said the same thing. It took him years to think, many years of Augusts in Cannes (at an expense which knocked out the savings of a whole eleven months) and many winters sleeping mainly in the ‘spare bedroom’, and not with the woman he loved and desired.

So the eleventh August in Cannes, Philippe summoned all his courage. He swam out behind Christine with a pin in his fingers. He stuck a pin in her water wings and made two punctures, one in each white wing. He and Christine were not far out, just slightly over their heads in water. Philippe was not in the best of form. Not only was he losing his hair, of no importance in a swimming situation, but he had developed a belly, which might not, he thought, have come if he had been able to make love to Christine all the past decade. But Philippe tried and succeeded in pushing Christine under, and at the same time had some difficulty in keeping himself afloat. His confused motions, seen by a few people finally, appeared to be those of a man trying to save someone who was drowning. And this of course was what he told the police and everyone. Christine, despire sufficient buoyant fat, sank like a piece of lead.

Christine was absolutely no loss to Philippe except for burial fees. He soon lost his paunch, and much to his own surprise found himself suddenly well-to-do, instead of having to turn every penny. His friends congratulated him, but politely, and in the abstract.

They couldn’t exactly say, ‘Thank God, you’re rid of that bitch,’ but they said the next thing to it. In about six months, he met quite a nice girl who loved to cook, was full of energy, and she also liked to go to bed with him. The hair on Philippe’s head even began to grow back.

Patricia Highsmith / The Female Novelist

Patricia Highsmith

THE FEMALE NOVELIST

BIOGRAPHY OF PATRICIA HIGHSMITH
TRANSLATED INTO SPANISH

She has total recall. It is all sex. She is on her third marriage now, having dropped three children on the way, but none by her present husband. Her cry is: ‘Listen to my past! It is more important than my present. Let me tell you what an absolute swine my last husband (or lover) was.’

Her past is like an undigested, perhaps indigestible meal which sits upon her stomach. One wishes she could simply vomit and forget it.

She writes reams about how many times she, or her woman rival, jumped into bed with her husband. And how she paced the floor, sleepless – virtuously denying herself the consolation of a drink – while her husband spent the night with the other woman, flagrantly, etc. and to hell with what friends and neighbours thought. Since the friends and neighbours were either incapable of thinking or were uninterested in the situation, it doesn’t matter what they thought. One might say that this is the time for a novelist’s invention, for creating thought and public opinion where there is none, but the female novelist doesn’t bother inventing. It is all starck as a jock-strap.

After three woman friends have seen and praised the manuscript, saying it is ‘just like life,’ and the male and female characters names have been changed four times, much to the detriment of the manuscript’s appearance, and after one man friend (a prospective lover) has read the first page and returned the manuscript saying he has read it all and adores it – the manuscript goes off to a publisher. There is a quick, courteous rejection.

She begins to be more cautious, secures entrées via writer acquaintances, vague, hedged-about recommendations obtained at the expense of winy lunches and dinners.

Rejection after rejection, none the less.

‘I know my story is important!’ she says to her husband.

‘So is the life of the mouse here, to him – or maybe her,’ he replies. He is a patient man, but nearly at the end of his nerves with all this.

‘What mouse?’

‘I talk to a mouse nearly every morning when I’m in the bathtub. I think his or her problem is food. They’re a pair. Either one or the other comes out of the hole – there’s a hole in the corner of the bathroom – then I get them something from the refrigerator.’

‘You’re wandering. What’s that got to do with my manuscript?’

‘Just that mice are concerned with a more important subject – food. Not with wether your ex-husband was unfaithful to you, or whether you suffered from it, even in a setting as beautiful as Capri or Rapallo. Which gives me an idea.’

‘What?’ she asks, somewhat anxiously.

Her husband smiles for the first time in several months. He experiences a few seconds of peace. There is not the clicking of the typewriter in the house. His wife is actually looking at him, waiting to hear what has to say. ‘You figure that one out. You’re the one with imagination. I won’t be in for dinner.’

Then he leaves the flat, taking his address book and – optimistically – a pair of pyjamas and a toothbrush.

She goes and stares at the typewriter, thinking that perhaps here is another novel, just from this evening, and should she scrap the novel she had fussed over for so long and start this new one? Maybe tonight? Now? Who is he going to sleep with?

Patricia Highsmith / The Coquette

Photo by Francesca Lukasik

Patricia Highsmith

THE COQUETTE

BIOGRAPHY OF PATRICIA HIGHSMITH
TRANSTALATED INTO SPANISH

There was once a coquette who had a suitor whom she couldn’t get rid of. He took her promises and avowals seriously, and would not leave. He even believed her hints. This annoyed her, because it got in the way of new temporary acquaintances, their presents, flattery, flowers, dinners and so forth.

Finally Yvonne insulted and lied to her suitor Bertrand, and gave him literally nothing – which was a minus compared to the nothing she was giving her other men friends. Still Bertrand would not cease his attentions, because he considered her behavuiour normal and feminine, an excess of modesty. She even gave him a lecture, and for once in her life she told the truth. Unaccustomed as he was to the truth, expecting falsehood from a pretty woman, he took her words as turn-abouts, and continued to dance attendance.

Yvonne attempted to poison him by means of arsenic in cups of chocolate at her house, but he recovered and thought this a greater and more charming proof of her fear of losing her virginity with him, though she had already lost her virginity at the age of ten, when she had told her mother that she was raped. Yvonne had thus sent a thirty-year-old man to prison. She had been trying for two weeks to seduce him, saying she was fifteen, and mad about him. It had given her pleasure to ruin his career and to make his wife unhappy and ashamed, and their eight-year-old daughter bewildered.

Other men gave Bertrand advice. ‘We have all had it,’ they said, ‘maybe even been to bed with her once or twice. You haven’t even had that. And she’s worthless!’ But Bertrand thought he was different in Yvonne’s eyes, and thought he realized he had pertinacity beyond he common order, he felt this a virtue.

Yvonne incited a new suitor to kill Bertrand. She won the new suitor’s allegiance by promising to marry him, if he eliminated Bertrand. To Bertrand, she said the same thing about the other man. The new suitor challenged Bertrand to a duel, missed the first shot, and then began talking with his intended victim. (Bertrand’s gun had refused to fire at all.) They discovered that each had been given promises of marriage. Meanwhile both men had given her expensive presents and had lent her money during small crises over the past months.

They were resentful, but could not come up with an idea for scotching her. So they decided to kill her. The new suitor went to her and told her he had killed the stupid and persistent Bertrand. Then Bertrand knocked the door. The two men pretended to fight each other. In reality, they pushed Yvonne between them and killed her with various blows about the head. Their story was that she tried to interfere and was accidentally struck.

Since the judge of the town had himself suffered and been laughed at by the townsfolk because of Yvonne’s coquetry with him, he was secretly pleased by her death, and let the two men off without ado. He was also wise enough to know that the two men could not have killed her if they had not been infatuated with her – a state that inspired this pity, since he had become sixty years old.

Only Yvonne’s maid, who had always been well paid and tipped, attended her funeral. Even Yvonne’s family detested her.

Patricia Highsmith / Oona, The Jolly Cave Woman

Patricia Highsmith

OONA, THE JOLLY CAVE WOMAN

BIOGRAPHY OF PATRICIA HIGHSMITH

She was a bit hairy, one front tooth missing, but her sex appeal was apparent at a distance of two hundred yards or more, like an odour, which perhaps it was. She was round, round-bellied, round-shouldered, roun-hipped, and always smiling, always jolly. That was why men liked her. She had always something cooking in a pot on fire. She was simple-minded and never lost her temper. She had been clubbed over the head so many times, her brain was addled. It was not necessary to club Oona to have her, but that was the custom, and Oona barely troubled to dodge to protect herself.

Oona was constantly pregnant and had never experienced the onset of puberty, her father having had at her since she was five, and after having had at her since she was five, and after him, her brothers. Her first child was born when she was seven. 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.

Oddly, she kept the birthrate of the tribe more or less steady, and if anything tended to decrease the population, since men neglected their own wives because of thinking of her, or occasionally were killed in fighting over her.

Oona was at last killed by a jealous woman whose husband had not touched her in many months. This man was the first to fall in love. His name was Vipo. His men friends had laughed at him for not taking some other woman, or his own wife, in the times when Oona was not available. Vipo had lost an eye fighting his rivals. He was only middle-sized man. Ha had always brought Oona the choicest things he had killed. He worked long and hard to make an ornament out of flint, so he became the first artist on his tribe. All the others used flint only for arrowheads or knives. He had given the ornament to Oona to hang around her neck by a string of leather.

When Vipo’s wife slew Oona out of jealousy, Vipo slew his wife in hatred and wrath. Then he sang a loud and tragic song. He continued to sing like a madman, as tears ran down his hairy cheeks. The tribe considered killing him, because he was mad and different from everyone else, and they were afraid. Vipo drew images of Oona in the wet sand by the sea, then pictures of her on the flat stones on the mountains near by, pictures that could be seen from a distance. He made a statue of Oona out of wood, then one of stone. Sometimes he slept with these. Out of the clumsy syllables of his language, he made a sentence which evoked Oona whenever he uttered it. He was not the only one who learned and uttered this sentence, or who had known Oona

Vipo was slain by a jealous woman whose man had not touched her for months. Her man had purchased one of Vipo’s statues of Oona for a great price – a vast piece of leather made of several bison hides. Vipo made a beautiful watertight house of it, and had enough left over for clothing for himself. He created more sentences about Oona. Some men had admired him, others had hated him, and all the women had hated him because he had looked at them as if he did not see them. Many men were sad when Vipo was dead.

But in general people were relieved when Vipo was gone. He had been a strange one, disturbing some people’s sleep at night.