Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith

I don't know, I guess I read biographies now. Patricia Highsmith was a wild, supremely complicated person who directly antagonized seemingly everyone she was personally or professionally associated with at some point. Super problematic and difficult figure. But man, this overview of her life and work sure made me want to read more than the two novels I've read by her. The way she apparently wove her overall mental state and experiences into her fictional worlds was so fascinating to read about. It seems like diving into her diaries and letters would also be worthwhile, based on the (ample) bits that are present here.

Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) is best known for her disturbing books about sensitive and sympathetic psychopathic murderers (i.e. "Strangers on a Train" and "The Talented Mr. Ripley") - and for the movies they've inspired. Andrew Wilson's biography is fascinating, well researched and convincing; I don't know if I'd want to have dinner with Miss Highsmith, but at least I think I can understand a little "where she's coming from." The author Wilson would probably make a good novelist himself; he understands psychology, without being reductive or a follower of the Phil Donahue School of analysis. In many ways Highsmith was not a happy person, and she held many reprehensible beliefs about human nature and society, but she was a survivor, no show more doubt.

And she liked to read. I understand that, too. Here's Wilson describing Highsmith's fondness for solitary reading in her apartment - when she was in her early 20s:

"She had always been a voracious reader, but now she turned down invitations to dinner in favor of staying at home and immersing herself in the dark imaginative landscape of Thomas Mann, Strindberg, Goethe, Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Baudelaire. The mere thought that she was alone and surrounded by books gave her a near sensuous thrill. As she looked around her room, dark except for the slash of light near her lamp, and saw the vague outlines of her books, she asked herself, 'Have I not the whole world?'"

"Beautiful Shadow" is perhaps somewhat over-detailed, or maybe it just is that Highsmith's life lacks the kind of neat and tidy essence that makes for an elegant biography. On the other hand, Wilson is to be commended for his exhaustive research, AND for his ability to empathize with his subject, even at her most difficult. show less

Patricia Highsmith is still, I suspect, largely unknown in the United States despite the fact that most people will remember the Alfred Hitchcock film, Strangers on a Train (not to mention the 1987 farce based on that film, Throw Mama from the Train), and the 1999 release of The Talented Mr. Ripley, all of which are based on novels by Highsmith. Between 1950 and her death in 1995, she produced twenty-two novels, seven collections of short stories, a book about writing and even a children’s book called Miranda the Panda is on the Veranda.

I have long been a fan of psychological suspense novels but have only recently started to read Patricia Highsmith because, frankly, she is not one of those high-profile writers who are found on the show more bookshelves of every Barnes & Noble or Borders bookstore in which I browse for new material (what that says about chain bookstores is a whole other story). As it turns out, I didn’t know what I was missing, and when I found a copy of Andrew Wilson’s Patricia Highsmith biography, Beautiful Shadow, I found that Highsmith’s personal life was every bit as interesting and as strange as her books.

Highsmith lived most of her adult life in Europe, spending more than a decade in France before moving to Switzerland where she died in 1995. But she was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and that state and her country left permanent marks on her despite the amount of time that she spent criticizing America and its foreign policy from Europe. She was born on January 19, 1921 just nine days after her parents were granted a divorce and, in fact, her birth name was Patricia Plangman not Patricia Highsmith. Three years after her divorce Mary Plangman married Stanley Highsmith, a commercial artist, and it was Stanley’s surname that Patricia was given when she started school in New York City. Highsmith always felt that she had been deceived by her mother regarding her real father and it is one of the many things for which she never forgave Mary.

The real Patricia Highsmith was largely defined by the fact that she was a lesbian although she did sleep with the man to whom she was engaged at one time, novelist Marc Brandel. She cared enough for Brandel to undergo six months of psychotherapy in an attempt to remake herself into a heterosexual but, of course, that effort was doomed to be an unsuccessful one. After graduating from Bernard, and while aiming to become a serious writer, she spent several years writing dialogue and plots for several comic book publishers at the rate of $55 per week. Her friend Truman Capote helped her get a place in Yaddo, a writer’s colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, at which she spent two months working on Strangers on a Train. Although she only ever spent two months there, it was to Yaddo that Highsmith left her entire fortune of some $3 million plus all future royalties paid on her works.

Patricia Highsmith is remembered for the way that her novels were so often told from the point-of-view of a sociopath as he committed murders and other assorted crimes. She did this so well that the reader often found himself sympathizing with the criminal and hoping that he escape justice despite the awful things that he had done. She was capable of describing, in detail, crimes of extreme evilness but she did it in such a direct, logical and detached way that the evil seemed real and almost commonplace. Most of her books have a homosexual undertone and that, along with the utter amorality of some of her leading characters, made it somewhat difficult for her to get her work published in the United States. It seemed easier for her to find willing publishers in Europe and she was always much more popular in Western Europe than she has ever been in her country of birth.

I doubt that I would have enjoyed the company of Patricia Highsmith but I do find her to have been a fascinating woman, one of those people with the kind of flawed personality that lends itself to the creation of great art. I recommend that anyone interested in reading Highsmith’s books read this biography first because of all of the insights it offers into her creative process and choices of subject matter.

Rated at: 5.0 show less

A complex, brilliant person....with a sad end.

Hoping that The Talented Miss Highsmith is better.

Trata-se de uma obra admirável, e dificilmente poderá surgir uma outra que atinja o mesmo nível de acutilância e profundidade na análise que faz da vida de Patricia Highsmith tendo como referência a sua obra literária. Wilson teve algumas condições extraordinárias na feitura do livro, nomeadamente pelo acesso a todo o espólio literário de Highsmith. Durante toda a sua vida, a escritora manteve cadernos de notas onde assentava, diariamente, as suas experiências, o seu dia a dia, as suas reflexões, as leituras; tudo, desde o mais prosaico, como o rótulo de uma garrafa de vinho, até complexas reflexões sobre filosofia, ou profundas sessões de auto-análise. Além disso, manteve ainda cadernos (os seus 'cahiers') que show more serviam para anotar e organizar as suas ideia literárias, sendo que muitas delas se transformaram em romances ou contos publicados, muitas deram em obras que se mantiveram inéditas, e muitas outras não passaram de esboços, projectos, ideias que nunca encontraram concretização.

Como se imagina, trata-se de um material riquíssimo, que permite a Andrew Wilson fazer uma close reading de toda a obra literária de Patricia Highsmith, e de que resulta uma biografia literária muito completa, e que abre perspectivas e avança interpretações não apenas em relação aos grandes temas de Highsmith, mas que desce a pormenores e detalhes, chegando ao ponto de identificar, por exemplo, a origem de determinadas frases dos livros ou os lugares onde se desenrola a acção de algumas sequências.

É impossível resumir aqui um esboço que seja do universo literário e da personalidade, como escritora, de Patricia Highsmith. É interessante notar que dos testemunhos recolhidos resultam muitas vezes perspectivas contraditórias, embora quase todas concordem com uma nítida misantropia, uma angústia, que lhe vinha desde a infância, provocada por uma relação atormentada e dolorosa com a mãe, e uma homossexualidade sempre assumida mas nem sempre de modo muito pacífico. Se as ideias políticas de Highsmith eram algo incoerentes e nem sempre muito simpáticas, o olhar negro que deitou à sociedade contemporânea, particularmente em relação à sua América natal e com a qual manteve sempre uma relação muito difícil (Highsmith viveu a maior parte da sua vida adulta expatriada na Europa), originaram uma obra literária que sempre fugiu ao cânone do policiário, justificado apenas pelo enorme fascínio que o crime lhe suscitava, não tanto enquanto puro exercício de maldade (mas também), mas sobretudo como ponto de ruptura da moralidade com que a sociedade pretende constranger o indivíduo, e do dilema que essa ruptura lhe provoca, ou seja, o modo como ele vive a culpa.

Suponho que esta seja uma obra que interessa sobretudo aos fans de Patricia Highsmith, entre os quais naturalmente me incluo. É no entanto mais do que isso; já nem refiro um comentário ao século XX tal como foi vivido, e sofrido, pelo homem ocidental. Beatiful Shadow é, sobretudo, a história de uma mulher que viveu enormes e dilacerantes angústias e fragilidades, e que as escreveu sob a metáfora do crime e da maldade, com uma escrita rigorosa e simples, que ela trabalhava de forma obsessiva porque era a única maneira que sabia de se salvar de si própria. show less