January 19, 2021, by Tosh Berman

 

January 19, 2021

It's the fate that Patricia Highsmith shares the same birthday date as Edgar Allen Poe. Two horror writers understood a troubled psyche and how that can cause an atrocity in one's life and fiction. I first discovered Highsmith's work just right before I made a massive trip to Europe in 1986. "The Talented Mr. Ripley" made an impression on me as a realistic study of a sociopath personality. Throughout the years, I felt I have met or known a version of Tom Ripley. They are more common than one thinks. They usually lurk around the fringes of the wealthy and powerful. 

Identity as an issue or subject matter lingers in my mind for many years now. I'm struck by how people adapt to their and other cultures by imitating genuinely not their behavior. Suppose you were not born in a specific class or social placement. In that case, therefore, you either re-do your personality or identity to fit into a social setting. One notices this in the art world, and I have to presume in the music and film world as well. Highsmith work's unique thing is that she doesn't take a moral stand on a crime or the conflicted personality who commits the crime or act of violence. The reader put themselves into the plot, and there is always that creepy feeling that you are in compliance with the crime.  

My father and I didn't have many serious talks, but I remember when I was a teenager, and he told me that I should never feel guilt. If I caused someone harm due to an accident, never feel guilty. Why he brought this up to me is still a mystery. Whenever I read Highsmith, I think of what my dad told me. They're five-years in the age difference, and I suspect if Wallace (my dad) knew Patricia, he would like her. Even though she was not crazy about Jewish people, I guess that there would have been some form of friendship between them. 

Highsmith wrote a book of short stories about animals who commit murder, "The Animal Lover's Book of Beastly Murder." Her love of animals was not on the same plain as cute kitties and smiling dogs; no, her animals have a sinister quality. And she was an animal lover. Highsmith raised and traveled with snails. She would put them in her purse, with some lettuce, to feed themselves on trips.  I suspect that she lived a life without anyone around her. Highsmith wrote characters that were so real, with all the duality aspects of a figure who can't develop or deal with the lack of identity. Murder and violence in her books are, in a funny manner is a transgression of an intimate feeling between two people. When I was in Europe doing the travel thing, I would find her books used mostly in the Penguin editions. I brought them home with me, and reasons I don't know why, but her work makes me feel human.