Patricia Highsmith: Nothing That Meets the Eye

Patricia Highsmith, the US writer who came to fame in 1951 when Alfred Hitchcock filmed her first book Strangers on a Train, is still best known for her studies of the suave sociopath Tom Ripley. It's hard to believe now that the chillingly charismatic Ripley first appeared way back in 1955, resurfacing several more times in book form and then much later in film.

In the mid-70s, Dennis Hopper played Ripley in The American Friend, a version of Ripley's Game, directed by Wim Wenders. In 1999, Matt Damon and director Anthony Minghella turned Ripley into a priss in The Talented Mr Ripley, but thankfully John Malkovich nailed our hero's fastidious malevolence in 2002's Ripley's Game, imbued with a European sensibility by director Liliana Cavani.

It was right that a European director would "get" Highsmith. Her prolific output — 30 novels and collections of stories — has more of a European flavour than American, a cool eye, a detachment, time taken over craft and character as much as plot.

Highsmith spent many years of her adult life in Europe — she died in Switzerland in 1995 — but this collection of stories written between 1938-1982 (many have never before been published) offer a clue as to why she was underestimated in America during her lifetime. She was too subtle.

On the other hand, she has long been exceptionally popular in Britain and Europe, especially Germany, and this collection has been gathered together by her Swiss primary literary editor, with an overall assessment by a German critic.

Sexuality was inevitably a factor in her work. As critic Paul Ingendaay points out in his interesting end-essay, Highsmith hid her gay predilections during her youth, from her parents anyway, and underwent psychotherapy "in order to be 'cured of her condition'."

Whether or not as a result of that short-lived repression — for she went on to have many affairs while still craving solitude — loneliness and despair thread through most of her oeuvre. Misogyny is also present — revenge, Ingendaay suggests, on spurned lovers.

And there is one more word, or human foible, evident in this collection. Writes Ingendaay, "Despite their [the stories'] consistent literary mastery, their central motif can be summed up in a single word: failure."

There are murders, suicides and psychoses aplenty in Nothing That Meets the Eye, but what is also pleasantly present in some stories is a pure quality of compassion. Born Failure is about a gentle man called Winthrop Hazlewood who has been a hardworking financial no-hoper all of his life. When he comes into a windfall, then loses the lot before he gets back home to the celebrations, he is redeemed by the reaction of his wife and neighbours. They love him for what he is.

In The Trouble With Mrs Blynn Highsmith squares off two aspects of elderly women: Mrs Palmer, who is dying in a seaside cottage in England, and Mrs Blynn, the mean-spirited nurse who covets Mrs Palmer's brooch. It is Mrs Palmer's misfortune at her moment of epiphany to die gazing into the "glassy, attentive eyes" of Mrs Blynn.

Man's Best Friend features another loser, a dentist called Dr Edmund Fenton. Fenton's only companion is a German shepherd, Baldur, given to him by a woman he loved as consolation for her rejection. Fenton doesn't relate to the watchful young dog, who he believes is judging him. "He felt the dog was saying as he stared down his long nose: 'You failure, you poor excuse for a man! Now I see you in your proper setting, eating your miserable dinner in your shirtsleeves at the end of a kitchen table'."

Fenton grows ever more depressed, then tries to commit suicide, twice. Both times Baldur saves him, and Fenton's life starts to change. By the time his former love invites Fenton and Baldur to a cocktail party, which goes badly for her, the good doctor is feeling much better about himself. "Baldur looked up at him with a smiling adoration and with understanding," writes Highsmith. "Dr Fenton winked at him."

It's not always so sweet. Mid-life ladies are often the target of Highsmith's scan. Where the Door is Always Open is a day in the awful life of Mildred, a desperate clerk living in New York who is dreading the arrival of her older sister from Cleveland.

Mildred is dashing home with a leaking bag from the delicatessen to get the apartment cleaned up for inspection before dashing back to the station to meet Edith. Everything goes wrong, and Mildred is left defending her existence, as opposed to the alleged idylls of Cleveland. Anyone familiar with sibling rivalry will experience a frisson.

Another highlight, one of many, is The Pianos of the Steinachs, in which a deluded, extremely immature 36-year-old invalid called Agnes Steinach imagines that an arrogant young music student brought to stay at the house by her older piano teacher sister will be her lover. Agnes, dumpy and doughy of flesh, also believes she is as willowy as the maidens depicted in her favourite book, Ivanhoe. The outcome is counter to those wild expectations.

As varied as her characters are — two pigeons are the leads in one dotty story — as well as the predicaments they find themselves in, there are many things to savour here: Highsmith's economy of prose, her dark perception of behaviour and motivation, among them. She can also be extremely funny, macabre and tough. Let's hope she will continue to reach the wider audience she deserves, even though she's not around to savour it anymore.


* Bloomsbury, $59.99
* Linda Herrick is the Herald books editor