On Patricia Highsmith

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Why a cluster of essays on Patricia Highsmith? Why now? The simplest answer might be that her work is, as Leonard Cassuto has written, "hot" right now. 1   In 2003 Terry Castle wrote that "the canonization of Patricia Highsmith [had] officially begun." 2 Nine years later it is surely complete. W.W. Norton has reissued all of Highsmith's previously available novels and stories, as well as some unpublished material; The Talented Mr. Ripley, in addition to having been filmed by Anthony Minghella in 1999, now features in the Library of America. 3 Joan Schenkar's 2009 biography The Talented Miss Highsmith sold out in hardcover and has been reissued in paperback, winning a Lambda Literary Award and being nominated for a number of awards in the process, and receiving strong reviews from most of the major American newspapers. 4 2011 saw the release of the second scholarly monograph on Highsmith, and the first to take more than a basic readers'-guide approach, Fiona Peters's Anxiety and Evil in the Work of Patricia Highsmith. 5 And Highsmith surely would have enjoyed the fact that later this year she will join Henry James, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and a handful of other luminaries, in receiving an entire chapter to herself (also written by Schenkar) in the new Cambridge Companion to American Novelists. 6

2003, the year in which Castle's brief but memorable and often-quoted essay on Highsmith in The New Republic was published, was also the year in which two significant books on Highsmith appeared. One was her first major biography, Andrew Wilson's Beautiful Shadow; the other was Marijane Meaker's Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s, based on the celebrated lesbian-pulp author's relationship with Highsmith. 7 However, scholarly attention has generally been spotty, sometimes sharp, but, with the exception of Russell Harrison's workmanlike 1997 monograph Patricia Highsmith, limited to a small number of articles and mentions in book chapters. A number of critics have skilfully utilized Highsmith's texts in work pertaining to Cold War strategies of containment, the psychology of violence and sexuality, the politics of the closet and (in the case of The Price of Salt) the history of lesbian pulp fiction. 8 However, the critical floodgates have not really opened—or are perhaps on the point of doing so now.

How ought we to account for Highsmith's hotness? Here the current upsurge of interest might help little, since Highsmith's cheerleaders, understandably enough, have a tendency to portray her simplistically. For them she is not a writer now popular because her concerns particularly echo those of the U.S. reading public in the last decade, but as a timeless genius now being given overdue recognition. In an ambitiously performative piece of blurbese calling to mind the "self-inciting and self-reporting [...] 'official world'" that is the subject of Mark Seltzer's contribution to this cluster, the cover of Norton's edition of The Price of Salt proclaims that the novel is "Now a Masterwork." 9 But what is it about the mid-century (the period that Highsmith's work seems to exemplify, despite her multi-decade career), and about now, that suddenly seems to make her an avatar of her society? Why, to paraphrase Meaker, does the 1950s suddenly seem to us to be a story of Highsmith?

One reason is relatively mundane: she died. Apart from dying being a prerequisite for canonization, with Highsmith's death in 1995 her prohibition on giving critics and biographers access to her personal papers also expired. Wilson and Schenkar thus had the capability to write the major biographies that have helped bring Highsmith to widespread public attention in the U.S.; Schenkar in particular succeeded in obtaining unprecedented access to Highsmith's personal diaries and notebooks, subsequently writing not only Highsmith's critical biography but also editing and introducing Highsmith's fiction and writing on her for the Paris Review. 10

From another direction, Slavoj Žižek has suggested that the distinctive shade of grey with which Highsmith's moral universe is painted mirrors our own:

Highsmith foreshadows today's therapeutic rewriting of [the] ethical into "Recommendations" which one should not follow too blindly. "Thou shalt not commit adultery - except if it is emotionally sincere and serves the goal of your profound self-realization. . ." Or: "Thou shalt not divorce - except when your marriage in fact breaks down, when it is experienced as an unbearable emotional burden that frustrates your full life." 11

Another reason might be that the national anxiety of the present decade, tinged with apocalyptic paranoia and fear of authoritarianism, mirrors in many ways that of the fifties and early sixties. As Leonard Cassuto has written:

Life in today's age of terrorism creates the kind of anxious foreboding that Highsmith evoked again and again. People never know whether something (or someone) might explode next to them. We also live in an era where surveillance is everywhere, and where people live at risk of being turned in and taken away. These times are the closest we've ever come to the '50s, when anxiety boiled beneath the surface of the prosperous facade of American living. 12

In similar fashion, discussing the success of Mad Men, that poster child for the current mid-century vogue, showrunner Matthew Weiner wrote that in the early sixties as now, "people seemed to be obsessed with the end of the world. I kept seeing it everywhere [...] there was this incredible bleakness." 13 As the Mad Men-inspired cover of the paperback edition of The Talented Miss Highsmith suggests, we might easily make a similar judgment about Highsmith.

We could also suggest that changes in the priorities of humanities scholars have contributed to Highsmith's rising popularity in the academy. Cassuto has gamely linked this popularity to the rise of queer theory, but Highsmith's is not really the first name that comes to mind when queer theory is invoked. Like Colette, a writer whose fortunes, as Rita Felski has written, truly were transformed by the rise of queer theory, Highsmith conceives of sexuality as fluid and (as Michael Trask has suggested elsewhere) identity as performative. 14 However, quite apart from her general unpleasantness, misogyny, racism and anti-Semitism, Highsmith, unlike Colette, was a political conservative who bitterly scorned the utopianism of a bohemian life like Colette's. The deeply unpleasant boyfriend of the protagonist of The Price of Salt is a Greenwich Village bohemian writer who is described as "playing truant" from the bourgeois life he truly desires. 15 In The Talented Mr. Ripley, Highsmith depicts more signifiers of bohemia, Dickie Greenleaf's awful surrealist paintings and Marge Sherwood's writing jag around Europe, as the products of privilege slumming. At its height, queer theory was sometimes a progressive, utopian project, and Highsmith's pessimistic anti-progressivism has perhaps made her less attractive to scholars than a number of other writers. 16

In addition, Highsmith's subversive characters - most obviously Tom Ripley - are sociopaths not because they oppose social norms but because they desperately desire to occupy a position of perfect normativity from which they feel excluded. 17 As a number of scholars have noted, what Ripley wants more than anything is to be the entitled son of privilege he sees represented by Dickie Greenleaf. 18 However, as Mary Esteve points out in the essay she contributes to this collection, critical and cultural theory has traditionally made normativity the prick against which it kicked. By contrast, Highsmith's fiction, Esteve suggests, implies a queer politics fundamentally different from the anti-normative work of a scholar like Michael Warner. 19 But at our own moment it is possible that critical theory is becoming more interested in the grain and feel of living in tension with, and fruitlessly aspiring to inhabit, social norms. As Lauren Berlant writes, while humanities scholars have traditionally "wanted to make transgression and resistance the values against which [their] data were measured," she and other critics are presently becoming more interested in articulating normativity as "a felt condition of general belonging and an aspirational site of rest and recognition in and by a social world." 20 Aspiration to this condition might be described as the primary subject of Highsmith's fiction.

Once again in related fashion, scholars who contribute to this cluster have elsewhere used Highsmith's Cold War work to focus on a hitherto relatively unexamined area of the U.S. mid-century: the impact of the rise of game theory in political circles on everyday life. In this vein, Mark Seltzer has related Highsmith's "games for the living" to Cold War utilitarianism, and Michael Trask has placed Highsmith in conversation with the game theorist Erving Goffman, both joining in a wider critical examination of this general area. 21

Ultimately, however, one of the roles of introducing a cluster such as this is to look to the essays it contains in order to draw lines of comparison and contrast between them and thus give a further sense of the collection's more general contribution to scholarship. Michael Trask's "The Ethical Animal: from Peter Singer to Patricia Highsmith" utilizes Highsmith's animal-filled fiction in order to intervene in a number of problems in the philosophy of animal studies. In particular, Trask enlists Highsmith's work on the side of a utilitarian philosophy of animal rights that is currently out of favor in animal studies. The main current of animal studies grounds our responsibility toward animals in a version of contract ethics based on the idea that there is reciprocity, and thus an implicit contract, in relationships between animals and humans. Animal studies scholars sometimes overlook utilitarian justifications of animal rights, since utilitarians reject such a contract ethics on the grounds that we do not make contracts with animals. For Trask, Highsmith's animal fiction stages just such a debate between utilitarianism and contract ethics, ultimately compellingly arriving "at conclusions that look awfully close to" utilitarianism. 22

In Mark Seltzer's "The Daily Planet," Patricia Highsmith's fiction is the "throughput" of a larger project on what he names "the official world." 23 Drawing on the systems theory of scholars such as Niklas Luhmann, Seltzer argues that such a world "comes to itself by staging its own conditions" - endlessly monitoring, reporting on and thus producing and reproducing itself. It is in this sense what Seltzer calls "self-modeling." Highsmith's role in the essay is, in a fiction populated by sociopaths and filled with artificial worlds, fairgrounds, dioramas and miniatures, both to describe and to theorize this world and, especially, the "flavor of the unearthly" it possesses. 24

Finally, in "Queer Consumerism, Straight Happiness: Highsmith's 'Right Economy,'" Mary Esteve uses Highsmith's pseudonymous and uncharacteristically liberal 1952 novel The Price of Salt as a case study through which to demonstrate how postwar liberal notions of flourishing depend on a self-supporting circular argument. In the novel, Esteve suggests, "two sources of postwar American consternation: the question of same-sex desire's legitimacy and the question of postwar consumer society's legitimacy" are assuaged by having the two legitimate one another: same-sex desire is justified using the logic of consumerism, while consumerism is justified using the logic of erotic desire. 25
One contribution this cluster makes is, adding Esteve's essay to Castle's various pieces, plus one of mine and two by Victoria Hesford, to mark the transformation of Highsmith's once little-known lesbian novel The Price of Salt into one of the author's most taught and studied texts.

More generally, as in her work and life, Patricia Highsmith functions in these essays as a gadfly, a disrupter of categories. A lesbian, she idolized British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who introduced legislation banning the "promotion of homosexuality" in schools into U.K. law. A champion of underdogs like Tom Ripley in her work, in her life she repeatedly made anti-Semitic and racist slurs. For Mary Esteve she disrupts both conventional liberal and anti-liberal versions of emancipatory sexual politics, and for Michael Trask she challenges the political foundations of Animal Studies. Time and again Pat Highsmith emerges as the enemy of pat reasoning. Perhaps, then, this cluster suggests that one more way to account for the rise of Highsmith in the academy is to see her as a troublemaking catalyst for another round of scholarship's perennial task: to challenge its own assumptions and foundations whenever they become too rote.

Tom Perrin is assistant professor of English at Huntingdon College. His work has appeared in American Literature, Novel, the Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. He is currently finishing a book manuscript on the aesthetic project of mid-century U.S. middlebrow literature.

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