In The Talented Mr Ripley, Patricia Highsmith brought to life one of the most enduring antiheroes readers will encounter.
As he indulges in a life of luxury murdering and swindling in Europe, readers expect chameleonic character Tom Ripley to become a failure.
Now, 69 years after the character appeared in print, before Matt Damon played him brilliantly on screen in 1999, the amoral killer has returned with Andrew Scott in the title role of the new Netflix series, Ripley.
Ripley’s creator was a complex character, to put it mildly.
A self-described “Jew hater,” she once declared that the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered, should be called “the semi-caust” because it only did half the job.
He also stated that if African men “don’t have sex a certain number of times a month, no matter who, they get sick.”
Patricia Highsmith was a brilliant novelist but also cruel to her lovers and described herself as a “Jew hater.” Above: Highsmith in 1993
In The Talented Mr Ripley, Patricia Highsmith brought to life one of the most enduring antiheroes readers will encounter. Above: Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow in the 1999 film of the same name
Highsmith, the great queen of the psychological thriller who her editor described as “relentlessly ugly,” also described murder as “a form of lovemaking.”
She carried 30 snails in her purse and dropped them at dinner parties before watching them slide across her host’s tablecloth.
Highsmith was born Mary Patricia Plangman, in Fort Worth, Texas, on January 19, 1921, 10 days after her parents divorced.
Her mother went on to tell her that he drank turpentine while carrying her in hopes of ruining the pregnancy.
In 1927, Patricia was taken to New York to live with her mother and stepfather, Stanley Highsmith.
The Big Apple experience proved to be short-lived, as she was sent back to Texas to live with her grandfather when she was 12.
As a result, he despised his mother for the rest of his life and even despised her funeral.
Highsmith would later tell a friend: “I repeat the pattern, of course, of my mother’s semi-rejection of me. I never got over it. That’s why I look for women who hurt me in the same way.
As a student at Barnard College in New York in the 1940s, Highsmith’s diaries show that he had become a person of immense ups and downs in both his work and personal life.
The young writer was not afraid to boast of her ability. “I do suspense well,” she wrote in 1942. “The morbid, the cruel, the abnormal fascinate me.”
She said at one point that if she had the choice to save a hungry baby or a kitten, she would rescue the kitten.
The amoral assassin has returned with Andrew Scott in the lead role of the new Netflix series, Ripley
She carried 30 snails in her purse and dropped them at dinner parties before watching them slide across her host’s tablecloth. Above: The author was 21 years old in 1942.
The star-studded cast also includes Dakota Fanning, who plays Marge Sherwood, and Johnny Flynn as Dickie.
A self-described “Jew hater,” she once declared that the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered, should be called “the semi-caust” because it only did half the job.
Highsmith, the great queen of the psychological thriller who was described by her editor as “relentlessly ugly,” also described the murder as “a kind of lovemaking.”
This was because most people were “imbeciles” and that is why babies had to be killed at birth.
Highsmith, who began each day with a breakfast of gin and orange and once got so drunk at a dinner party that she collapsed into the candles and set her hair on fire, was also known for her lust for other women.
Highsmith was also known for her lust for other women.
A diary entry reads: ‘Three nights, three people! She did it to me at least four times.
‘For me, sex should be a religion, I have no other. Sexual love is the only emotion that has really touched me. Hate, jealousy, never… except devotion to myself.
The roll call of his numerous female lovers was a cause of scandal in his time. There was Buffie, Rosalind, Helen, Virginia, Joan, Ellen, Doris, Daisy, to name a few.
She was cruel to many of them. When he broke up with Ellen Hill in 1953, Highsmith left after a fight, leaving her mistress drinking barbiturate-laced martinis. Hill barely survived.
The author is known to have threatened at least one of her lovers with a knife.
Another lover, Marijane Meaker, would later recall: “Pat always used his books to portray and murder the woman he had last dated.
“After we broke up, she murdered me very brutally, in The Owl’s Cry, with a knife, several times.”
One biographer wrote: “Pat thought of love the same way he thought of murder: as an emotional urgency between two people, one of whom dies instantly.”
Highsmith also attempted to enter into relationships with the opposite sex and at one point was on the verge of marrying a man.
He even underwent six months of psychotherapy in hopes of overcoming his aversion.
Marc, her future fiancé, told her that she was sexually “rootless and childish” and that he disliked her.
But Highsmith also disliked men. He said that he preferred to “put my own hands up my skirt,” in reference to the boys he knew in the early years of his life.
A male lover she enjoyed being with was the English writer Ronald Blythe, who was homosexual.
He found her to be a “strange and mysterious woman, a lesbian, but she found men’s bodies beautiful.”
He found professional success in 1950 with his first novel, Strangers on a Train, which was adapted into an Alfred Hitchcock blockbuster a year later.
The book, which set the tone for Highsmith’s portfolio of psychological thrillers, told the suspenseful story of two men who set out to “trade” murders.
In total, he wrote 22 novels and numerous short stories. Other big hits included The Blunderer, Deep Water, This Sweet Sickness and The Cry of the Owl.
Patricia Highsmith photographed at her home in Aurigeno, Switzerland, in June 1985
In total, he wrote 22 novels and numerous short stories. Other big hits included The Blunderer, Deep Water, This Sweet Sickness and The Cry of the Owl.
Only once did she write a specifically lesbian novel. On the advice of her agent, The Price of Salt was published in 1952 under the pseudonym “Claire Morgan.”
Unlike his other novels, The Price of Salt ended happily. In 1984, as the culture became more progressive, she republished it under his own name.
The film was adapted to the big screen in 2015 with the production Carol, with Cate Blanchett in the leading role.
Critic David Sexton wrote of Highsmith: “She had no basic human warmth, no natural affection for what we all share. She says it herself again and again, quite clearly.
Otto Penzler, Highsmith’s editor, said of the novelist when she died in 1995: “She was a mean, cruel, harsh human being, unlovable and unloving.” I could never understand how a human being could be so relentlessly ugly.
But, with admirable honesty, he added: “But his books…brilliant.”