On crime and talent – Terry Castle in LRB:

‘As an embittered expatriate, mind-blitzing drunk and hellacious bigot who spent her last years sequestered in a Brutalist redoubt in Switzerland writing hate letters to the newspapers about the pro-Israel policies of the US government and spewing venom about ‘the Jews and the blacks’, might Highsmith have enjoyed at least some of the sadism? The bludgeoning of the police, say, with fire extinguishers or the odd flagpole? The cathartic splitting open of someone’s head with a heavy object is, after all, one of the methods used by her murderous anti-heroes to kill the clueless people they are in love with: witness Tom Ripley’s brain-splatter of an assault – with an oar – on the pate of pretty Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr Ripley. In Jill Dawson’s vastly entertaining novelistic riff on Highsmith, The Crime Writer (2016), set in the early 1960s, when Highsmith was living in rural Suffolk in order to be near an especially hot (and married) English girlfriend, the fictional Pat kills her lover’s husband with a handy Black &Decker electric drill. She holds it by the fiddly bit-end but somehow manages to clobber him, inelegantly yet definitively, with the big-ass handle-end.
And what about those zip-ties? I’m guessing Pat would have appreciated the goon-squad fashion accessories, not to mention the deliciously sick fact that in the heat of battle, one of the more menacing rioters – proudly sporting bunches of the little doodads hanging off every belt-loop – made his athletic descent from the House galleries in search of the satanic Pence and Pelosi accompanied by his squat, shouting, red-white-and-blue-bandanna-wearing mother. Give ’em hell, Mommy! We’ll hog-tie and hang ’em! And finally – we shouldn’t go there but we can’t help it – the guy in Viking horns and face-paint. Now, lesbians aren’t supposed to like men at all, especially not a sapphic swive-hound for the ages like Patricia Highsmith. God, was she depraved. Prouder of her self-styled ‘erections’ than a Proud Boy. Yes, rilly. (‘I’m not a woman,’ she was often heard to say.) But wouldn’t even Pat have found the slender yet muscular barbarian, caped in pelts, inky blue ‘sleeves’ covering both his arms, the tiniest bit enticing? How could she have resisted? For me, I confess, it was the naked pink torso, weird low-slung pants, the soft furry chest with its palpable tracery of golden-red hairs (edging down the abdomen ever closer, dare one say, to the magical fellow’s unseen yet doubtless militant shaman-sex) that mesmerised. Just the thought of such a girlish Goth-bod makes me want to smash stuff.’

(…)

‘Highsmith is the poet laureate of Oops, I killed him. (And her.) What do I do now? In the 1950s and 1960s, Alfred Hitchcock was her only rival at capturing such vertiginous changes of state: the lightning-quick slippage from normal to horrific and back again. Back, that is, to a now nightmarish perversion of normal life from which you, the killer, realise you’ll never escape, even should the outrage you’ve just committed go undiscovered. (In classic Highsmith – witness the supremely twisty Ripley novels – even the most frenzied murders sometimes go unrecognised as such.) You’re not dead yet, but you’re unquestionably in hell: for ever.’

(…)

‘Despite the celebrity, wealth and critical admiration she earned over a long and charmed career – her first suspense novel, Strangers on a Train (1950), published when she was 29, was an immediate bestseller, and she rolled on from there – her life looks from one angle like the most horrible botch: a concatenation of private misery and psychic turmoil for which, the virtuous will conclude, she had only herself to blame. Yes, she had been subject to an estranging and neglectful childhood: her mother, Mary (née Coates), supposedly tried to abort her by swallowing turpentine in the last months of her pregnancy; her grifter father, the feckless Jay B. Plangman, vanished when she was an infant. (When she met him at seventeen, he seems to have shown her a stash of pornographic pictures and kissed her a bit too probingly, just for the hell of it.) Most painful of all: after her flirtatious, flamboyant utterly dissociated mother – the newly married Mary Highsmith – suddenly decamped to Manhattan with her second husband, Stanley, in hopes of landing a well-paying commercial art job, 12-year-old ‘Patsy’, abandoned and forlorn, had to stay behind for an entire year in the Fort Worth boarding house run by her grim-to-nutty evangelical granny, the buzz-harshing Willie Mae Coates. It was – as she never ceased to repine – the ghastliest year of her life.’

(…)

‘As three unflinching biographies have revealed since her death (not to mention a hair-raising memoir by one of her former lovers), Highsmith could be hostile, rude and bloody-minded to a near sadistic degree. She couldn’t forgo the hot and messy pleasures to be gained by ignoring the guard-rails. It turned her on, it seems, to watch things smash.
There was the sexy, suicidal drinking, of course. Highsmith’s alcoholism blighted her life and eventually transformed her – not entirely figuratively – into a Dorian Gray-style lesbian fright-bag. Heartbreakingly attractive in her youth (see the exquisite nude portraits made by her gay photographer friend Rolf Tietgens in the early 1940s), she looked like a sullen gargoyle by the time she died: rubbery, bloodshot, wrinkled to the point of cave-in, a calamitous experiment in DIY self-pickling.’

(…)

‘The shame Highsmith felt over craving sex with women haunted almost every aspect of her life, including her literary career. Nothing about being driven in this way was easy. Much discussed of late has been her second novel, The Price of Salt, the odd, nervy, yet surprisingly potent lesbian love story she managed to publish – despite crippling fears that it would destroy her reputation were its authorship to become known – under the pseudonym Claire Morgan in 1952. Virtually ignored in hardback, the book gradually became an underground bestseller as a cheap, pulp fiction-format paperback in the later 1950s and 1960s (Highsmith claimed it sold a million copies). Yet despite the sacks of fan letters and euphoric little mash notes Pat received from grateful gay girls everywhere – likewise the fact that thanks to gossipy publishing types her authorship became known to anyone who cared about such things – the not so mysterious being known as Claire Morgan couldn’t bring herself to acknowledge the work as hers, or to dump the pseudonym, for almost forty years.’

(…)

‘ Lying, chicanery, lewd excess – it’s all enough to give lesbians a bad name (not to mention alcoholics). Although Highsmith always managed to combine her seedy acting out with an original, prolific, even heroic writing career – and, yes, the best of the crime fiction is insanely good – readers new to her might wonder how reading about her life could possibly be enjoyable or instructive.1 Sensational and salacious no doubt, at times a dark and contorted farce. Yet Highsmith has been remarkably lucky in her biographers – at least in the canny Wilson and the fearless Joan Schenkar, the first two scholars to take her on after her death in 1995. Given the ease with which one might sensationalise, and indeed anathematise, the blazingly unwholesome Highsmith backstory, both biographers trod a sensitive and scrupulous path. Neither has received the serious praise such an accomplishment deserves.
Wilson’s Beautiful Shadow (2003) was the groundbreaker: quickly yet intelligently compiled, candid, even-handed, both dispassionate and compassionate in its review of Highsmith’s agony-rich bad behaviour. He was tactful, too, about her notoriously outlandish eccentricities, pre-eminent among them being the famous horde of pet snails, in whose slow, damp, antler-waving sexual activities she acknowledged taking a more than zoological delight. Alas, having heard so many times now about Highsmith’s pleasure in snail-fuckery, one might be forgiven for finding the topic a bit old and tiresome. For would-be Highsmith apologists, indulgent and undiscerning, the fact that she owned a 300-strong gang of gastropods and toted little groups of them around Europe in handbags and coat pockets and sometimes in her bra has no doubt become something to burble over sentimentally: a smarmy, cornball, that-Pat-was-a-real-weirdosoul-meme. But when Wilson first brought these snail-darlings onto the world stage and let them cavort in the silvery slimelight, one had to rejoice in the sheer revolting magnificence of Highsmithian aberration.’

(…)

‘Schenkar’s The Talented Miss Highsmith (2009) is something else again: a massive, chatty, obsessional tome full of idiosyncratic jokes and gob-smacking asides, prolix in parts, but also an intimate, enmeshing account of Highsmith’s creative life. At some point, one imagines, Schenkar got snake-bit: like everyone who falls under Highsmith’s spell, she is also one of her victims. But the book is a bloody masterpiece. Schenkar doesn’t stint on showing the worst: the farcical Grand Guignol of Highsmith’s four-year affair with Ellen Blumenthal Hill, for example, who after one gruesome fight with Highsmith in Manhattan in 1954 tried to kill herself by downing several martinis and a whopping dose of Veronal. As Hill started to pass out, the ‘skunk-drunk’ Pat – still blithery with hatred and rage – neither called an ambulance nor alerted anyone to her lover’s condition; she simply left Ellen lapsing into oblivion and went out for most of the night.2 It’s a bummer to say so, perhaps, but Schenkar offers some of the most searing and honest writing I’ve read about everything that can go wrong, psychologically speaking, in lesbian relationships, especially between two fiercely independent creative women. (Put The Talented Miss Highsmith on a short list with Marina Tsvetaeva’s Girlfriend Poems and Violette Leduc’s La Bâtarde.) Not that I’m suggesting heterosexual relationships, or any other kind of erotic pairing, are less vulnerable to chaos and crack-up; an explosion of mad, melodramatic stupidity can overtake any couple at any moment. But Schenkar gets the dyke-drama specifics just right. In the case of Highsmith – and here Schenkar is both delicate and direct – it was above all the incestuous message delivered over a lifetime by the treacherous and infantile Mary Highsmith – the archetypal go-away-a-little-closer Medusa-mother – that doomed her daughter to an affective landscape of unmitigated pain and conflict when she tried to find love elsewhere.’

(…)

‘Wilson and Schenkar, too, see a continuity between Highsmith’s past, her literary imagination and the emotional cruelty of which she was capable, in her erotic life in particular. Schenkar even describes her as ‘killing off’ a real-world lover – symbolically – when she shows a fictional stand-in taking revenge, oxymoronically, on a hated beloved. But something about Bradford’s unsubtle harping on the murder-by-proxy theme, his prosecutorial tone and absence of counter-balancing sympathy, not to mention his weirdly insistent assertions that Highsmith wasn’t actually a murderer, leave one baffled by his psychic stake here. If she was so sordid and pointless a human being, why write about her?’

(…)

‘The involuntary image of oneself striking someone dead can invade the mind in an instant – you see the act as suddenly and clearly as the devil at noontide – but this is not the same as wanting the act to occur. Highsmith may have seen the image, but she didn’t welcome it. It wasn’t – pace Freud – a wish. If we try to imagine her inner life, instead, as one in which unwanted demonic forms constantly intruded, as an unstoppable hell of morbid ideation, kinetic horrors crowding in on the mind’s eye, yammering voices urging her on towards mayhem, her self-restraint may begin to look like melancholy courage. When it came to full-on Kronos-cannibalism, Highsmith was able to resist. She channelled her worst thoughts into her art – imperfectly, perhaps, but effectively. And awful though the vision was, her art remains something we can use. One might even bless her for it.’

Read the review here.

I always thought that Highsmith has not been prosecuted yet, maybe because she was a woman, but apparently now this biography is making a serious attempt at it.

Whatever faults she might have had, probably she had plenty, her fiction is impossible to cancel.

Or you can put it differently, she might have been a bigot, an anti-Semite, a sadist, her books are just too good. It’s not that the art absolves the life the artist lived, it’s because the artist is dead the prosecution doesn’t have a case anymore. What remains is art, history will be lenient when it comes to Highsmith, very lenient.