Murder, She Wrote (Page 3)

If Highsmith was unfair to her agents, she also bore grudges against the US publishing industry, which she believed to be disloyal to her and her huge body of work. She was constantly moving from house to house--Harper & Row, Doubleday, Alfred A. Knopf, the Atlantic Monthly Press and the Mysterious Press--in search of a contract. Editors with whom she worked for years would have to reject projects because publishers didn't know how to market her properly, as she was a hybrid of heady, high art and genre fiction. Gary Fisketjon, her editor at the Atlantic Monthly Press and Knopf, said, "She defied categorization, but was temptingly close to fitting into the category of mystery and she had a cynicism about human transactions that wasn't particularly user-friendly." Fisketjon had to pass on her last novel, Small g: a Summer Idyll, which features a story line about a young gay man who is tricked by his doctor into believing he is HIV-positive. "In the best of all possible worlds it would be published as a young title, but the lunatic right-wing fringe that's running this country wouldn't have that," he said.

Fisketjon's rejection marked the end of the line for Highsmith, who would be without an American publisher for the rest of her life. It was "a final symbolic gesture summing up the uneasy relationship between the displaced writer and the country of her birth," writes Wilson. He cites a lament by Neil Gordon, writing in this magazine, that America "denied her...her painful and complicated insight into guilt and denial--much as her characters deny their guilt. That leaves her, so to speak, denied in the unconscious of our literature much like the guilt is denied in her characters: always present, never cured, never acknowledged and never understood."

The demonstrated lack of enthusiasm by American publishers ultimately wore on Highsmith. Meaker thinks it exacerbated her anti-Semitism, as Highsmith believed most of the publishing industry was Jewish. Highsmith railed against her American publisher Otto Penzler, who removed her dedication to the Palestinians in her novel People Who Knock on the Door, and even her first editor, Joan Kahn at Harper & Row. "Christ, what a little dictator she was! That whole family of Jews thought they were God's gift to publishing...like so many of that tribe," she said to Meaker on their last visit in 1988. Meaker's portrayal of Highsmith can be sympathetic, even tender, but she doesn't shy away from depicting her former lover as a racist and anti-Semite. By contrast, Wilson is more than halfway through his biography before delving into her virulent anti-Semitism. Perhaps it cast a sharper impression on Meaker because she had to put up with her incendiary remarks in person. Meaker became so exasperated with Highsmith's merciless rants during their last encounter that she told her she sounded "like someone with an obsessive-compulsive disorder. You can't go for long without bringing up the Jews, just as someone has to compulsively wash their hands, or go back three steps."

In a way, Highsmith's anti-Semitism is emblematic of everything that was at war within the mind of this extraordinarily conflicted woman. Many of the women she loved, the friends she cherished and the writers who inspired her art were Jewish. Yet her dislike of Jews dates as far back as her elementary school years in New York City, and as she got older and increasingly more paranoid, her anti-Semitism became more acute, possibly a symptom of her neurosis.

Throughout Beautiful Shadow, Wilson makes a daring case for recognizing Highsmith as a political writer, arguing that her grim vision was as shaped by the world's turmoil as it was by her own. With its depictions of people coming undone against the pressures of conformity and harboring various paranoiac fantasies, Highsmith's fiction, he argues, responded to what she perceived as the hypocrisies and perversions of cold war America. It's an interesting argument but something of a stretch: As politically feisty as Highsmith was, and as much as she may have wished to imbue her literature with a political consciousness, she hardly touched on the affairs of the world in her novels and stories. The passion that underlay her opinions--which could seem abitrary at times, and were often as unpredictable as her temperament--was doubtless genuine. She was an avid reader of books and newspapers, and even as she became increasingly isolated, she kept herself apprised of current events. Her zealousness, however, was more an expression of her displaced fury than of altruistic concern for the oppressed. Highsmith was always an armchair activist whose principal weapon was her acid tongue. In fact, her single letter to the editor (a response to William Safire's attack on Gore Vidal's 1986 Nation essay about Israel and the American right) appeared in the International Herald Tribune, under the pseudonym "Edgar S. Sallich of Brione, Switzerland." The neuroses and murderous fantasies of Highsmith's fiction were born of her own internal struggles, particularly with her mother, not of the cold war.

Meaker, who is in a position to know, doesn't remember Highsmith as a politico, per se, just as outspoken. "From what Pat wrote me about her life," she says, "she had never been a part of any political group or movement." Meaker portrays her as a devoted cat lover and dedicated friend, a social creature who balanced work and play with ease. But we also see how prone she was to riling others with bawdy jokes and, especially after a few drinks, provocative, occasionally racist or anti-Semitic comments. Her charms would eventually wear away with age (and a potent mixture of inner rage and alcohol), only to be replaced by unbounded cruelty. Amazingly, her writing never suffered--it only got better.

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