The Talented Miss Highsmith Read Online Free

eponymous pair of London pigeons, Maud and Claud 21 —observed humorously and maliciously—are “simply mates, for two or three years now, loyal in a way, though at the bottom of their little pigeon hearts they detested each other.” Their regular Highsmith-colored day features persistent bird battering by vicious humans and the pigeons’ own coordinated attack on a baby in a pram. Maud and Claud peck the infant’s eye out and flutter away unrepentant and unpunished.
    At day’s end, Maud, the female pigeon, remembers how her mate Claud snatched half a peanut out of her beak and cheated her out of a meal, and how “she couldn’t count on him for anything, not even to guard the nest where there was an egg.” She wonders: “Why did she live with him? Why did she, or they, live here… Why?” And then she settles down to sleep next to Claud in their nook in a wall in Trafalgar Square, “exhausted by her discontent.” 22
    Aside from Tom Ripley’s unconvincing marriage to Heloise Plisson (Heloise is often absent enjoying herself on a cruise ship with a female friend; Tom is usually out having flirtatious fun with the boys); or Edgar and Hortense, the “truly in love” snails of Deep Water whose lengthy copulations are observed so tenderly by the psychopath-in-residence, Vic Van Allen; or Jack and Natalia Sutherland, the young couple in Found in the Street whose marriage is frankly enlivened by their mutual attraction to the same underage girl, the history of Maud and Claud, the two disagreeable pigeons united by hard living and even harder feelings, is the sole portrait of lasting conjugal relations to appear in any Highsmith fiction. And it’s an accurate portrait, too, of the only union imaginable in Highsmith Country: bleak, untrusting, and undependable.
    We might say, as Richard Ellmann said of Oscar Wilde, that Highsmith’s fiction is a record of her feelings of love in that it excludes them so thoroughly. But it would be closer to the experience of Highsmith Country to acknowledge that Pat’s work records her feelings of love by reversing them as faithfully as she did in life. Love, like no other emotion, brought out her ambivalence—and with it the awful rage that glares out so painfully from some of her later photographs.
    Many of the murders in her novels can usefully be thought of as counters on her abacus of love. They substitute for love, they are instigated by love, they replace or react or add up to love. The murderers may change from draft to draft in her manuscripts, and so may the victims, but murder itself continues to be the categorical imperative, the one act which must take place in her work. And murder, in a Highsmith fiction, is almost always love’s partner—while love itself is usually murder’s victim. Only in The Price of Salt —a novel where the murder is confined to the metaphors—is love allowed to live on.
    Pat’s own defeats in the Love Wars were mostly self-defeats. Her doubts about her gender couldn’t have helped. At the age of twelve she was already assessing herself: “I am a walking perpetual example of…a boy in a girl’s body.” 23 In her twenties, she was haunted by what a New Orleans fortune-teller had said to Mother Mary: “You have a boy,” the fortune-teller began and then stopped. “No, you have a girl—but she was meant to be a boy.” After Elizabeth Lyne had teased Pat about having her period, Pat wrote in her diary: “I can’t help my other hormones, can I?” 24 And, having used the word “woman” about herself in a letter to her friend Ronald Blythe, she quickly corrected herself: “if I can call myself that.” 25
    Although she took all the women whose names appear in the crowded diaries of her long, hot summers of 1944 and 1953 as lovers, Pat found it impossible to stay with any of them. Nor did she stay