The Talented Miss Highsmith The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith by Joan Schenkar

The Talented Miss Highsmith The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith by Joan Schenkar

This is a very in depth biography of Patricia Highsmith. Joan Schenkar draws from interviews, books, and the 38 Cahiers (spiral bound notebooks) and 18 Diaries of Patricia Highsmith kept at the Swiss Literary Archives. The book itself is 683 pages long with notes, bibliography, index, a map of where she went in Manhattan, diagrams, a timeline of her life, and two extensive sections of black and white photography. It has a feeling of completeness to it.

Patricia Highsmith is best known for her suspense novels and short stories. The most prominent of these is The Talented Mr. Ripley. She also had many of her books turned into films. The most famous film based on her stories is Stranger on a Train directed by Alfred Hitchcock. She won numerous awards both in the United States and internationally.

This book exposes many parts of her life that are not that well known. Patricia Highsmith also wrote the lesbian novel, A Taste of Salt. This book describe Highsmith's many affairs with women both married and unmarried. She was quite passionate and ended up moving from one relationship to the next in short order. Joan Schenkar describes Patricia Highsmith as a driven woman with a predilection for strong drink, younger women, tight control of her money, cats, and odd habits.

One of my favorites parts of the book is the description of Patricia Highsmith as a comic book script writer. Patricia Highsmith tried to hide this all her life. She wanted to be a writer for Vogue and other fashion magazines, or literary magazines like the New Yorker. What she ended up following was the classic path of the mystery writer. First she started by writing comics like The Destroyer, Fighting Yank, and Black Terror. Then she started writing for the pulps (in her case, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine), then she started writing mystery novels. This is the same pattern which Mickey Spillane followed whom she met and did not like.

There are points where this book feels a little bit too revealing. Her family life is one of constant fighting with her mother, Patricia Highsmith has strong prejudices and outright hatreds, and her personal habits can be quite unsettling. She keeps snails, loves cats, hates dogs enough to describe them being killed in her novels, and has a strange sense of humor which is often macabre.

Even when Joan Schenkar describes Patricia Highsmith's success it is not one to be envied. Patricia Highsmith is described as having left the United State having traveled and lived throughout the United States, France, England, Germany, Mexico, and Algeria. She has left her native country, the United States and dies in Switzerland. Her travels have a brooding up and down feeling to them.

Even her professional life is fraught with intrigue and arguing. She jumps from agent to agent always trying to get the best money possible, eventually moving her rights to Europe. She seems to often not like the films made from her books as well.

I cannot say I liked all the parts of the book. There were points where the descriptions became a little unsettling. However, the majority of the book was well written and quite intriguing. This is a very complete and very dark biography of a quirky, talented, and interesting writer with a unique view of the world.

Daily Thoughts 2/10/2010

The lion statues at the New York Public Library, with a mantle of snow during the record December 1948 snowfall. It is snowing heavily outside. I was excused from work because of the snowfall. I can see the whiteness outside the window covering everything. I think this is the first time I have used an image more than once.

Daily Thoughts 2/10/2010

This morning, I did some more of the Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management course online from the American Library Association. I had to turn cookies on in my browser to do my assignment. This time it was about budgets. I like reading the forums. Someone mentioned Better World Books which takes discarded library books selling them for charitable purposes. A percentage of the proceeds goes back to the library. They are a social business venture. http://www.betterworldbooks.com/Info-Discards-Donations-Program-m-4.aspx

I also have been reading more of The Talented Miss Highsmith. Apparently she used to read abnormal psychology books at the Queens Public Library when she was ten. Maybe it was good practice for her writing dark suspense stories. Her childhood was supposed to have been very dark.

While at Barnard College, she is quoted as saying, "I am four people: the Jewish intellectual, the success, the failure, and the fascist snob. These shall be my novel characters." Joan Schenkar, the biographer leaves none of the negative characteristics of Patricia Highsmith out of this biography. There is hatred, vitriol, and angst against a variety of different peoples. The author is trying to present a complete picture of Patricia Highsmith as a person. I especially liked learning that Patricia Highsmith's first job out of college was writing the comic Fighting Yank. There is a certain literary irony in this.

The Talented Miss Highsmith will take me some time to read, it is 684 pages long including notes, photographs, diagrams, selected bibliography, and index.

I am also reading, You Are Not A Gadget A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier. Jaron Lanier is famous for his early work in virtual reality. He is writing about the relation between people and machines. He decries what he calls lock in or how certain programs like Unix or the music program MIDI become very inflexible standards. One idea which he makes clear is that with things like Web 2.0, he views the people in the network as more important than the network itself. He is not a fan of some of the new media ideas.