| Patricia Highsmith |
PATRICIA HIGHSMITH | THE DARK SOUL OF A WRITER
Patricia Highsmith, whose centenary falls on January 19th this year, has become perhaps one of the most influential writers of all time, with her slick twisted dark tales helping to form the foundation of the modern “psychological thriller”. Novelist and critic Gary Raymond takes a look at what makes her work stand out from the rest.
There is a photograph of Patricia Highsmith, famous to those who have ever been interested in her, taken by her friend (and would-be suitor) Rolf Tietgens when she was twenty-one. She is beautiful, yes, and has the look of a very intelligent, prepossessing young woman. But there is something else in that slight upturn of the mouth – you can barely call it a smile – and the twinkle in the eye. Her hair is mussed and pushed to one side. The shadows across her face feel like they are utterly under her control. But you keep coming back to that expression. Mona Lisa, darkness and light, that look she is holding in the centre of the lens, impossible to define; as biographer Joan Schenkar says of Highsmith in it, she has all the allure of the garçonne. I’d go further: it’s as if she’s holding the inescapable excitement of what it is to read all those dark, sadistic books she will ever write in that single frame. It feels facile to say that in that glance you get how she broke the hearts of so many who fell for her, but somehow it also feels important to her story. Patricia Highsmith, who ended up going on to have something of a reputation for being difficult if not out-and-out misanthropy, was an obsessive whose primary preoccupation was with the darker impulses of the human state. She was interested more in that than she ever was in people, and her dedication to and obsession with these Dostoevskian depths is what made her such a mesmerising writer. And somehow, you can see it all in that photo.