Is Highsmith a noir writer?
crazeecracka asks:
With the popular crime genre traditionally dominated by male writers, detective fiction seems to have been adopted or even reserved for female novelists. However, they have rarely been regarded as ‘noir writers’ being regarded, arguably sexistly, as not being ‘tough enough’... But where does P Highsmith stand as a modern noir writer and, in such a vein, possibly transcending both of the above genres - was this also her ambition/project?
Is Ripley the Casanova of murder?
nilpferd asks:
He is also someone for whom murder fulfils the same emotional need as ‘the act of love’ for Casanova.”
Could you expand on that please - assuming that’s a quote or paraphrase of the Virago introduction. Of the Ripley books I’ve only read TTMR, but my impression in that novel was that the actual act of murder was almost incidental; that it was Ripley’s subsequent acquisition of Dickie’s identity which seemed to trigger the act of emotional fulfilment for him. I felt it was that “criss-cross” aspect, (also key to Strangers on a train), of stepping into someone else’s shoes, thereby shedding his own past, which defined Ripley.
(I realise the character goes on to savour the aesthetics of the act in later books- much as the members of Thomas de Quincey’s gentleman’s club in On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts)
Do you think that the act of murder is the key to Ripley’s soul, as it were?
Sutherland
I'd like to pose a question. Which is Tom's most ingenious murder. The bashing to death of Dickie with an oar is so crude that, as I recall, the film averts the lens. But he's zero on the Hannibal Lecter scale, wouldn't you agree. What he is genius at is slipping the net. It closes round him and then, like McCavity, he's not there.
Professor Sutherland is in error
kultur asks
Are you the John Sutherland who some years back gave a talk on Victorian literature at Rewley House in Oxford ? Mentioning George Eliot’s Middlemarch, a novel I subsequently read after you mentioned the BBC drama- and your friendly comment about being sorry that I hadn’t seen it. Anyway I enjoyed ‘The two faces of January’ a film version of Patricia Highsmith’s novel.
Have you seen this film yet ?
Sutherland
That's me. One of the things you learn if you lecture is that there's always people in the audience (Jane Austen events are worst---lions' dens) who knows more than you do. I recall at that event saying Dorothea Ladislaw is childish and up chirped someone, perhaps you, saying no she's not. Oops. My wife once said she could paper the bathroom with letters beginning 'Professor Sutherland is in error'
The ethics of keyhole peeping
lissameliss asks:
Considering you’ve spent so much time in your career studying Highsmith, reading the accounts of how she disliked intrusions, how much she valued privacy etc, I’m sure you have a strong sense of her state of mind regarding privacy. How do you think she would feel being the subject of a discussion between persons who never knew her, so many years after her life? Do you see hints in her cahiers or writings that suggest she secretly wanted the attention?
P.S. This is a genuine question not a dig at you. I wondered the same after searching out the pad she rented in Positano. I found it hard to marry my desire to see where she had worked, with what I presumed would be her own distaste of my doing so.
Sutherland
It's hard to purge that sense of being a key-hole peeper. You say it 'enriches' your response to the fiction, but the motives are often less worthy. But the fact is 'expose' biography sells. PH's life has been exhaustively done by very good biographers---male and female---and she left her papers to be looked at by posterity.
I find the most distressing chronicle not the letters, or life story, but her appearance. One looks at the beautiful, naked photos of her by Tietjens (sp?) and the photographs of her, bent and withered in older life, and you get a sense of how painful it must be to lose beauty. Check it out on google images and see if you agree.
What did Ms. Highsmith think of the screen adaptations of Strangers on a train and Ripley’s game?
Sutherland
I seem to recall she approved of Hitchcock---even though he turned her harsh ending to mush (isn't the young Angela Lansbury, good though. And the carousel, of course). Her accountant must have loved the Bourne franchise. Others will know better than me.
How to read suspense fiction (or not)
aurathewriter asks:
I wonder if you will include in your discussion Highsmith’s non fiction book ‘How to Write Suspense Fiction’? I found this a wonderfully revealing book - inadvertent as I think the revelations were. Highsmith’s low level of tolerance for noise, for example, and need for control over her surroundings. Also, her misanthropy, which I think is there in many of her novels, is once again starkly revealed. My favourite of Highsmith’s books is ‘Carol’. It is unusually optimistic and benevolent, and describes emotions and feelings (they are not the same) with such nuance and delicacy. I was quite carried away and amazed.
Sutherland
I haven't read it (strange how unembarrassed one is, nowadays, about saying that---there's far too much to read) but I will get it. I think I read Carol (strange how unembarrassed one is about saying that nowadays) but I'll look it up, on your recommendation, after the chat. I'm very fond of the Glass Cell---the most outrageous of 'he gets off with it' plots.
Guardian staff How To Read Suspense Fiction is fascinating. Partly, because it contains some very useful tips. But more, as Laurathewriter says, because it's so revealing about Highsmith, her confidence and her ... strangeness...
The allure of the ‘good bad book’
Tofutowtruck asks
I have several short questions:
- if a new version of ‘The Talented Mr Ripley was made, who would you choose to play Ripley and Tom?
- both you and Highsmith were interviewed on Desert Island Discs, who’s your favourite presenter? Who’s your favourite guest? (I like John Betjeman & Jarvis Cocker) Would you still choose a Franz Ferdinand track?
- if a publisher decided to publish a new Ripley book, who do you think should write it? (Raymond Benson, Anthony Horowitz) Do you think a Charlie Higson ‘Adventures of the teenage Ripley would be a good idea?
- Do you enjoy reading Jack Reacher stories?
Sutherland
I'm doing this just to make sure I'm in communication. I do, in fact, guiltily enjoy Jack Reacher stories. I think Orwell was right when he said there were 'good bad books' and I think Lee Child understands American vigilantism better than many Americans---don't you.
Sutherland
On the casting issue---I think the films get it about right (although Jude Law, who can act when he wants to walks away with the prize). The problem is Tom ages so many decades over the course of the long narrative. But the young Ripley is, I think, a trickster (we first meet him scamming taxpayers, not for the money, principally, but the pleasure in trickery). I see him as school boyish. Who'd be good?
How anti-semitic was Highsmith?
Chris Hale asks
Highsmith according to biographers was aggressively anti-Semitic. I have not detected this in the fiction - have you?
I don't know about 'aggressively'---certainly biographers record some anti-Semitic comments. But no more than can be found in Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene or Muriel Spark. I agree it's uncomfortable but you're right to say it doesn't stain the fiction.
She preferred snails to humans
markrizatt asks:
It has been said that, in the flesh, Highsmith was cold and perhaps even psychopathic. Do you think this can be seen in the way she treats her characters? If she was kinder to them, could her novels still be great?
Sutherland
She preferred snails and cats to humans, she said. I squirm a bit having to talk about this kind of thing---do we expect the writers we love to be, off the page, lovable? It's a perpetual cause of embarrassment but fascinating. But if you want kindness, you'll find it in the dictionary between kindle and kink, but not in PH.
ID531334 asks
If you were forced to pick only short stories to showcase the breadth of Victorian literature, which stories would you choose and why?
Sutherland
Mrs Gaskell, Cousin Phyllis, Wilkie Collins A very strange bed, Eliot The Lifted Veil, H. G. Wells, The Country of the Blind, Dickens The Signalman, etc
Do you have any candidates? I'd be interested
What makes Highsmith unique?
David Atkins asks:
I wonder what you think is the secret behind Highsmith’s style of writing. I have not read any critical works on her novels (too busy absorbed in her writing) but one thing I have noticed is her use of the American vernacular but there must be so much more to it than that......thousands of pulp novels use the American vernacular.
What is it about her that makes her unique?
Sutherland
I thought I'd responded. I think what makes her unique is (I know it's metaphorical) the taste of her fiction. One of her lovers, appallingly, killed herself by swallowing acid. I feel a sharpness on the tongue in PH's fiction. She doesn't like us---no 'dear reader' for PH. Is this too extreme a comment?
What does Crime and Punishment have to do with it?
Bea Wes asks
Do you think The Talented Mr Ripley can be read as a parody of Crime and Punishment? There are perhaps two or three obvious similarities that can be drawn between the two novels, but overall I think they offer a very different reading experience, so I am puzzled by the frequent comparisons of Highsmith to Dostoyevsky. Ripley and Raskolnikov appear to me to have little in common and Highsmith does not dwell and elaborate on at great length on some of the concerns that preoccupy Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment. I seem to have read somewhere that Highsmith admired Dostoyevsky and wanted to emulate his writing style. To my mind, however, what she has created is a good, readable spoof of Crime and Punishment. Would you agree? Or not?
Sutherland
It was, as you clearly know, her favorite novel. But Raskolnikov has that very 19th century thing, 'Conscience'---makes cowards of us all, as Shakespeare says. The striking thing about Tom, wouldn't you agree, is that he's conscienceless. Does that mean he's defective---or clearer headed (less cowardly) than we are. I don't know if you'd agree but PH is one of those novelists who makes you think after you've read
Thomas O’Brien asks:
Do you think it is possible to determine one motive? Are not Tom’s ambitions for social mobility, his perceptions of an unjust and decadent social order and apparent homosexual attraction to Dickie all equally important? I realise other murders are more clearly motivated: Freddie for remaining unpunished; Murchison to continue the fraudulent art scheme; the mafia because “Tom hated the Mafia, their loansharking etc...”.
Sutherland
Murchison (bonked on the head with an excellent Mergau (have I spelled that right?)) is the one I feel most sorry for in the Ripliad. As I say above, and as I understand you as saying, it's the underlying world view---the 'vacancy' (her word) of it---which impresses so strongly in her fiction.
There’s life beyond Ripley
Grimscribe asks:
I fully understand the commercial imperative behind the endless reissues of the Ripley novels, given the fame of the title character and his appearance in numerous film adaptations. But I wonder if you would agree with me that, the first novel in the series aside, the Ripley books do not necessarily represent the best of Highsmith’s work? The Tremor of Forgery, The Two Faces of January, This Sweet Sickness, The Cry of the Owl, The Glass Cell, Edith’s Diary: arguably all of these novels are better than any of the Ripley sequels. I know several other Highsmith devotees who agree. Does it do her legacy a disservice to draw attention again and again to the Ripley books - good though they are - at the expense of all these other excellent non-series titles?
Sutherland
Excellent observation. I think her first novel, Strangers, is her masterwork. A pity that Hitchcock butchered it by making Guy such a nice (and un-homicidal) guy. My other favorite (I wouldn't say it's her best written) is Suspension of Mercy, a couple who live in an idyllic Suffolk village and hate, to the point of murder, their neighbors. Call in Miss Marple. I've lived in a Suffolk village and, as they say in 12-step meetings 'identify'
A question of style
grauniadreader101 writes:
As someone who has only read the Ripley novels, I must be considered a Highsmith novice, so please forgive what might be a stupid question. I found elements of the actual writing quite crude for someone who is considered a serious novelist. It’s been a while since I read the books, but my overall impression was that though the stories were well-plotted and the characters cleverly drawn, Ms. Highsmith’s style was quite basic. The constant repetitions of Tom’s name, for example, (“Tom said…said Tom….asked Tom…Tom went”), struck me as amateurish. Was this a deliberate choice on her part, or am I just missing the whole point?
Sutherland
It's a good question, I think---and the simplest questions are always the most difficult to answer. I would rather sidestep by saying it's not the fine writing which captivates with PH but the world view, and the plot ingenuity (even if Raymond Chandler did think the plot of Strangers was 'ludicrous'). You feel in the novels the force of PH's bleak statement: 'I don't like anyone'.
The sexual enigma
michaelamherst asks:
For me, the brilliance of the Ripley books is the way class is used as a figure for sexuality. So as much as Tom aspires to be rich, upper class and living the life of a multimillionaire he also aspires to the heterosexual norm of a wife. Indeed, I think you could look at heteronormativity as yet another aspect of social snobbery. I find it interesting that Tom does eventually marry even if we believe the marriage mightn’t be wholly physical. He’s not straightforwardly homosexual. My question is to what extent do you think this dichotomy around class and sexuality was conscious on Highsmith’s part?
Sutherland
I'm interested in this issue, as I think all readers of PH must be. She never became clear about whether Tom was gay---although in The Boy who Followed Ripley it's clear that he has bi-sex interests, if not appetites. Does he love Dickie? PH's own sexuality, of course, is contentious. She had no lasting relationships, her gay relationships ended badly (one of them fatally) heterosexual encounter, she said, was like steel wool in the face. Her lesbian novel Price of Salt is, I think, tantalizing
Sutherland
The comment is excellent, if that doesn't sound condescending. The final question is unanswerable. Odd, don't you think, that PH liked living anywhere but 'classless' America---which she found 'hollow'.
The necessity of murder
Evariste asks:
I fail to understand your view that Tom Ripley is ‘someone for whom murder fulfils the same emotional need as “the act of love” for Casanova’. Isn’t it clear that Ripley usually only kills when it is of practical necessity, and that the books themselves describe him as one for whom murder is a distasteful but necessary evil? And isn’t the standout feature of his killing of Dickie in the first book the absolutely unemotional and prosaic nature of the act? Surely what Highsmith was seeking to convey is a personality for which killing is an act on a par with other acts, not one for whom it is a kind of apotheotic experience.
a practical necessity for him. Highsmith went to some pains to claim---as you observe here---that Tom isn't a psychopath. If there are marriages of convenience his are murders of convenience. Would you go along with that?
Sutherland
you're right on necessary homicide. Defining 'necessary' gets us into muddy water though. I wish PH had lived long enough to see and review Breaking Bad---a saga of 'necessary' crime (must look after the family, even if means making crystal meth) which becomes, finally, slaughter for slaughter's sake.
Thomas O’Brien says:
In relation to Dickie’s murder, Tom seems to expend all emotion on the previous page, when he realises he and Dickie were not friends. So much so, the murder portrays a man with the complete absence of emotion, rather than one who is suppressing it. I will be very interested to hear a response to your question.
Sutherland
I'd like to pick up Thomas O'Brien's point. I was struck, last time I read TTMR, how cunningly PH makes Dickie snobbishly offensive to Tom. It's done rather discreetly. Another respondent points to the bluntness of PH's narrative technique, but she can, I think, be subtle. I love the opening vignette, for example, in Belle Ombre (in the second volume, I recall) of Tom killing----what? The carpenter ants burrowing into his beloved antique furniture. As with ants, so with the human race.
Pat, alias Ripley
PullandKick74 asks
The Talented Mr. Ripley is suspenseful from beginning to end. A great turning point was Tom’s feeling of having been betrayed when Dickie turns down traveling to Paris in a coffin. I could have helped Tom murder him! Did Patricia Highsmith ever relate how cunningly effective she was at writing such pathetic, and charming, characters such as Tom?
Sutherland
I like Jeanette Winterson's observation, that Tom is a 'version' of Highsmith herself. She sometimes signed her letters 'Pat, alias Ripley'.
Murder, she said, is like 'making love'. And she seduces you into going along with that outrageous belief. I feel guilty sometimes, closing the book.
Ripley the existentialist
What do you think of Ripley as a the first modern anti-hero? Do you agree with the term ‘anti-hero? I don’t, I think characters are appealing or let’s say, likeable, or not and this depends on the readers’ point of view. How would you describe Ripley’s evolution throughout the Ripliad?
Sutherland
it's interesting that before writing her first novel Highsmith was reading Camus's The Outsider---the classic narrative of feelingless homicide. Even that arch-anti-hero Heathcliff feels occasional remorse (and love). Ripley never does. I think the basis of his crime is not anti-heroism but existentialist: which sounds a bit too pseud's corner, I confess.
Updated
Post your questions for John Sutherland
I’m pleased to announce that John Sutherland will be joining us for a webchat at 1pm on Friday 26 June.
Professor Sutherland has just written an introduction to Virago’s new editions of the Ripley books which is essential reading for anyone interested in Highsmith’s charismatic killer. Tom, says Sutherland, is a very “Puckish murderer”, as well as “curiously snobbish”, using only the best wine bottles to bludgeon his victims. He is also someone for whom murder fulfils the same emotional need as “the act of love” for Casanova.
Sutherland explores how Highsmith makes her readers become complicit in Tom’s crimes, as well as her thinking about psychology, psychopathy and a further range of ideas. It’s fascinating – and you’ll be able to ask him about all of it. But don’t stop there: Sutherland is a man, after all, said to have read no fewer than 5,000 novels when he edited the Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction. There’s no shortage of lines of inquiry, in other words.
John Sutherland has written and edited dozens of books about English literature, including the Oxford Companion to Popular Fiction, a Very Short Introduction to Bestsellers, and Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives.
He has also published a number of more personal books. Last Drink to LA, about his alcoholism and return to sobriety, was published in 2001 (and republished recently by Short Books). In 2005, he wrote an acclaimed volume of autobiography called The Boy Who Loved Books. Last year he published Jumbo, about the elephant who came to stand for all things big. In a few months, Faber will release a book Sutherland has co-written with his son Jack, glorying in the title Stars, Cars and Crystal Meth.
Elsewhere, he was the chair of judges for the Man Booker prize in 2005, he has written numerous articles here at the Guardian as well as for the Times and New York Times, and he is the Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at UCL – about which he also has a lot of interesting things to say.
He’ll be online from 1pm on Friday, but do feel free to get your questions in before then.
Sutherland
The whole noir thing began in France, didn't it, in a spasm of Gallic high-mindedness about low literature. I prefer the broader Orwell category of 'good bad books'. That's to say very good things can be found in books which will never make it to the canon, or whose authors will never win Nobel Prizes. Elmore Leonard, I would say, along with PH, is in the category.