Highsmith: How the Art of the Commonplace Became the Poetry of the Horrible
J Seymour MacNicely
roman à clef written in 1952 under pseudonym of Claire Morgan is the
book they would not publish except as a lurid looking 25 cent
paperback; something she would not claim to her authorship until
shortly before the end of her life in the mid 1990s; it opens in a
N.Y. department store employee's cafeteria, and it is a revelation for
anyone interested in the craft of writing.
Hannah Arendt's notorious dictum about "the banality of evil" could
not be better illustrated than by Patricia Highsmith in her low-key
killer characters, and not least of course, the "Talented Mr. Ripley."
Highsmith shows how it's to be done; how you take from none but the
most banal, commonplace things in any would-be writer's ordinary day
to day existence and discover the horrible; how the ordinary, the
conformist, the commonplace is ever worthy to be interrupted by mayhem
and murder. Death to the Ordinary! Off with the head of the
Commonplace! And by this it is created and fulilled, the evil art and
beauty of banality, the bourgeois, and the mediocre. For purposes of
fantasy in fiction, what could be sweeter?
Of course the ordinary is the horrible! And a good many people should
find themselves highly insulted by Patricia Highsmith for letting us
know about this. I got my first Highsmith novel by mail two days ago
from Amazon. I got it for 29 cents plus 4 bucks shipping and handling,
a trade paperback edition of her 1957 novel, "Deep Water". Today I
discover it's finally being made into a movie. It's the very question
I've been asking ever since turning about the tenth page, "Why haven't
they made a movie of this?" It makes "Strangers on a Train" and the
Ripley stories look like drag queen chick lit.
Graham Greene could not discover the superlatives sufficient to
describe his respect, awe and fear of her work. She smoked a lot,
drank too much, indulged lusty debauches with both sexes, entertained
few if any close friends and often had snails crawling around inside
her purse. Quite. Rather out of the ordinary or commonplace, don't you
think? Somewhere I read concerning this practice of hers, that it was
just something she did for her idea of fun at boring dinner parties,
whence she would surreptitiously release a snail (or two) to the table-
cloth to commence a long and, for Highsmith, endlessly entertaining
journey toward the closest guest's plate.
Highsmith's passion for snails remains a mystery that really needs
looking into--was she raising them for her own ready supply of
escargot? Keeping them handy just to see they were fed and didn't get
lonely? Or/and was there something sexual and richly perverted about
it? If she kept them in her purse--well then . . . my goodness!
Someone really should get to the bottom of this grand mystery of
modernism before a postmodern Armageddon is upon us and it's got much
too late to find out.
--
JM http://bobbisoxsnatchers.blogspot.com
Just Me
Highsmith in these ostensibly 'literate' newsgroups, for the crissake,
I'll venture to suggest there must be some other place on the web
where you'll encounter people who may just possibly at least have some
inkling of who she is?
John Kennedy Toole died before his time, or he might have seen the
relevance of his title, "A Confederacy of Dunces" to Usenet. You can
read some of his first novel, "The Neon Bible" at Amazon, written when
he was 16 years old. By the time I got to page 10, I realized that for
any other than the French (those among them who can read French), it's
better than Proust. Toole was the American Proust. No question about
it.
And don't come around here with that self-deluded lie on your lips to
say that you know all about Highsmith and that it's Just Me you don't
want to talk with about her. Say that and I'll show you what it's
like to see a Highsmith character come to life. ;-) So don't say it.
Save me the trouble, go out and drown yourself like a rat. ;-)
Haopy New Year ya bunch of Uselessnet functionally illiterate morons.