Patricia Highsmith: a Painful Lesson

Patricia Highsmith was the author of The Price of Salt (1952): the inspiration for the film Carol (2015). It was the first lesbian novel with a happy ending. However, while many adored her, Patricia Highsmith was not known as a particularly cheerful person. The prolific author wrote 22 novels and many short stories over her career – which lasted half a century – but Pat Highsmith was often sluggish when it came to niceties.

Patricia Highsmith, born Mary Patricia Plangman, had a tumultuous relationship with her mother. Pat reported that her mother admitted to trying to abort her by drinking turpentine during the pregnancy. At 12-years-old, Pat was sent to live with her grandmother for a year, which left her feeling deeply abandoned.

The problem with Pat

Patricia Highsmith was anti-semitic, despite multiple, serious relationships with Jewish women. “The American Ellen Blumenthal Hill and French-born Marion Aboudaram were the most passionate and loving of the novelist’s life,” according to Richard Brooks, The Guardian. While there “is no evidence that Highsmith secretly hated these two women,” and “there was a great deal of authentic mutual affection and love,” there are many accounts, from people in her presence, of hatred towards Jewish people. 

The reports are explicit. She downplayed the Holocaust. She caused outrage at dinner parties by straight up saying “I’m sick of the Jews…[and] later offending friends at her house in Switzerland, when after going into her kitchen for a few minutes she reappeared with a concentration camp number written in biro on her wrist.” Richard Bradford, who wrote on Patricia, claims she was a passionate supporter of the Palestinian cause, but there are ways to support Palestine without being anti-semitic. 

Patricia Highsmith could be cruel to those close to her. While Richard Brooks wrote that there is no evidence she “secretly hated” her Jewish partners, she wasn’t consistently respectful or understanding in any relationship. Early in her relationship with Ellen Blumenthal Hill, Patricia wrote in her diary: “The benevolence. The beautiful world. Darling, come to me in a silver dress.” However, a few years later, Pat walked out on a distraught Ellen to sleep with another woman. Ellen then attempted suicide with barbiturates. 

Pat Highsmith liked to shock. Her “party trick,” which she performed at a “swanky London dinner,” according to The Guardian, was arriving with “30 ‘pet’ snails in her handbag which she proceeded to tip out on the table. The snails immediately started their determined looping across the linen tablecloth, leaving behind a lattice of silvery slime. Everyone, including Highsmith herself, pretended not to notice.”

Creative process?

Was Patricia Highsmith merely troubled? Richard Bradford claims Highsmith was an “emotional vandal.” She “went out of her way to ruin the lives of her many lovers in order to generate ideas for plots. Whenever her emotional life looked like settling down – there were kind partners like stolid Doris and elegant Caroline who only wanted the best for her – she would do something appalling to ensure the maximum mayhem.”

As a writer of fiction myself, I don’t understand – if it’s true – how Pat could, or would need to, puppeteer other people’s suffering in order to write a good story. Writers may draw on past experiences, emotions, situations, or stories, but living life as if you’re writing – orchestrating – it, manipulating those around you as part of your creative process, is brutal.

It would require a cruel, yet conscious, emotional distancing from humankind to test real-life human subjects, in painful situations, for an upcoming novel. Writing a book is not justification for causing another person pain. An empathetic writer can hypothesize how a character would feel or act in particular circumstances without acting it out. However, Pat found empathizing with victims of genocide difficult. 

Self-perception

Patricia could empathize with herself. How could somebody reportedly so insensitive write something as romantic and touching as The Price of Salt? Perhaps it was because Pat based the character of Therese Belivet, the young artist inexperienced in both life and love, on herself. 

Therese Belivet isn’t cruel or shocking. The innocent, polite young woman crumbles in the presence of Carol Aird, the older, glamorous, confident woman who stirs something sexual in Therese for the first time. Like Patricia, Therese explained her experience with maternal abandonment when her widowed mother shipped her off to boarding school.

Patricia Highsmith had a deep-seated desire to feel adored, despite emotionally withdrawing from others. She decided to leave her 39 journals, along with correspondence and notebooks, to the Swiss Literary Archive – instead of the Harry Ransom Library in her home state of Texas – because she felt more appreciated in Europe than she did in America. Instead of seeing Patricia Highsmith as the “psychological litterateur” that Europe did, America viewed her as “a cack-handled thriller writer with the unfortunate knack of letting her baddies get off scot-free.” 

Before anybody could abandon Patricia Highsmith in her adult life, she abandoned them first. She leveraged power over those around her: over Jewish people through anti-semitism, over her lovers by subjecting them to cruelty, and over dinner guests. Finally, when her home country questioned her life’s work, Patricia Highsmith simply left it to Switzerland. 

I don’t think Patricia Highsmith was an “evil” woman. I think she was a brilliant writer who inflicted her own pain on other people. Pat was so caught up in her own agony that she refused to see – or care about – the turmoil she caused others, which is something we can all learn from.

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