'The Talented Miss Highsmith': chronicle of an author's lowdown life

'The Talented Miss Highsmith'

by Joan Schenkar

St. Martin's Press, 655 pp., $35

Most biographers stay in the background, content to do the research, then create a coherent narrative from a person's life.

Not so Joan Schenkar, whose new portrait of the mystery writer, Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995), is full of reminders that Schenkar knew one of Highsmith's female lovers, that she doesn't think much of Highsmith's daisy chain of bed companions ("she could never quite let go of one woman before reaching for the next one"), and that Schenkar even used material from photographs that were taken without Highsmith's permission.

"Because the existence of these photographs is a violation of privacy, and because I took information from them for this book," she announces, "I can now add my own name to the list of people inspired to behave badly by Patricia Highsmith."

The pictures in question were taken by a photographer whose obsession with Highsmith's frequently filmed novels ("Strangers on a Train," "The Talented Mr. Ripley") led him to record his impressions of her rooms and possessions while she was gone from her home.

Before her biography is two pages old, Schenkar has informed us that Highsmith wasn't nice, polite or generous, and that "everything human was alien to her." A few pages later, she introduces Highsmith's creepy list of "little crimes for little tots," compiled without explanation in 1973, that includes several plans for children to kill their parents.

Later we learn that Patricia was hysterically anti-Semitic, she had bad table manners, and she drank far more than she ate. She also "loathed the civil-rights movement" and had "a special disgust for feminists."

Is there anything to like about Patricia Highsmith? Her work, perhaps? Schenkar uses so many pages to trash her that it's often difficult to detect the genius behind such classics as "Ripley" (successfully filmed twice) and "Strangers" (which became one of Hitchcock's best thrillers).

To anyone who's looking for a conventional chronology of Highsmith's achievements, Schenkar advises going to the back of the book, where the appendices list the major events of her life. But even this section is incomplete. You'll look in vain for the names of Matt Damon and John Malkovich, among the most famous movie actors to play Highsmith's best-known creation, Tom Ripley.

Schenkar seems more interested in telling tales about Highsmith's obnoxious conduct at European film festivals, her disgraceful treatment of fans and journalists, her talent for forgery, "ventriloquizing" identities and creating pseudonyms.

"The Talented Miss Highsmith" is unquestionably a well-researched biography that is, in its misguided way, a labor of love. But why did Schenkar devote so much time and effort to compiling it? Apparently eager to catalog the most gossipy events of her subject's life, she loses all perspective.