Joan Schenkar begins her biography of author Patricia Highsmith with a warning: “She wasn’t nice. She was rarely polite. And no one who knew her well would have called her a generous woman.”
Highsmith, the prolific author of crime fiction including “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and “Strangers on a Train,” dwelled on the darker side of human nature. Her personal life, which was marred by depression, alcoholism and criminal tendencies, was equally, if not more complicated, than the lives of the antiheroes she wrote about.
Highsmith came from a family of Texan women with strong personalities and was locked in a lifelong power struggle with Mary, her neurotic mother. Both were “serious drama queens” whose relationship was more reminiscent of a sibling rivalry, which makes sense because Highsmith was raised in her early years by her grandmother. She spent a peripatetic childhood moving several times between Texas and New York City, where she attended an all-girls high school and, later, Barnard.
Then came a stint in psychoanalysis and a sojourn at the famed upstate writers’ colony Yaddo (where she would leave her estate after her 1995 death from leukemia). “In a spring season of hard-drinking colonists, Pat was a standout,” Schenkar writes. On her second day there, she “quaffed almost as many martinis and Manhattans as she had fingers on both hands, added a skinful of wine to her cocktails, and nearly passed out.”
While there, she met the British novelist Marc Brandel, who became her fiancé, though women are the real objects of her affection. There are so many of them, in fact, that she dedicated the manuscript version of her first novel, 1950’s “Strangers on a Train” to “all the Virginias” “because she had slept with several women named Virginia, then slyly changed the paperback dedication to ‘all the Virginians.’ ” In one of the book’s appendices, there is a chart Highsmith created in her twenties to rank and compare her many lovers.
Schenkar’s portrait, drawn from Highsmith’s personal journals and interviews with her associates, is told in a nonlinear way, and it’s often difficult to keep track of events. But maybe that’s the point of a biography about a woman who, with her habit of forging dates in her own diaries, was so inherently unknowable.
The Talented Miss Highsmith
The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith
by Joan Schenkar
St. Martin’s