Devils, Lust and Strange Desires by Richard Bradford

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Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith By Richard Bradford Bloomsbury, 2021

Prolific author-biographer Richard Bradford turns his attention to Patricia Highsmith in Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith here in the centenary year of her birth not to renovate her personal reputation - Highsmith was irredeemably odious, with no hidden sainthood for biographers to find - but to highlight her lesbianism. He consults her extensive notebooks and jottings in order to construct and flesh out a timeline of her lovers, and, oddly, the tone of that endeavor throughout is vaguely aggrieved, as though there’s some long-standing historical imbalance to redress. As Bradford attests, Highsmith made no secret of her attractions; they feature prominently in Joan Schenkar’s masterful 2009 biography and in most of the critical writings about Highsmith. Giving them such prominence smacks of giving the biography a topical angle, always a doomed approach to life-writing. 

Equally dicey, when chronicling a novelist’s life, to view everything as notebook jottings. Bradford is all over the terrain on the point, at one point writing flatly “Highsmith’s novels are a lifelong autobiography” while at another point writing, “Few things that happen in her novels relate directly to her personal experience, but each bears her view of the world and how she understood her role in it.” 

Difficult to imagine a novelist whose work doesn’t “bear her view of the world and how she understood her role in it,” but Patricia Highsmith’s novels are most certainly not a lifelong autobiography, as Bradford himself clarifies at other point, saying “it would be simplistic to regard actual characters as models for fictional ones.” 

One thing is clear: if you’re going to claim in your autobiography of an author that the author’s novels are all exercises in autobiography, your readings of that author’s novels should be superbly penetrating, book by book, starting, in Highsmith’s case, with her breakout 1950 debut novel Strangers on a Train and reaching peak form when dealing with 1955’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, the book that won Highsmith her immortality. 

Bradford’s readings of Highsmith often verge on the banal, although they can sometimes raise interesting points. On The Talented Mr. Ripley, for instance, he writes:

It is a superb novel, eroding the boundaries between the popular genre of crime writing and the as yet unestablished field of postwar hard realism. Most significantly it is morally unhinged, causing us to feel all manner of things about Ripley, depending on our inclinations. He is by far the most charismatic individual in the novel. Indeed, he is so well crafted that we begin to feel that the detached, entitled figures upon whom he revenges himself deserve what comes to them.

This is a representative example of the kind of forcefully-phrased muddle that often results when Bradford hunkers down with this author’s novels. The reader is still pondering how a book can erode the boundaries between a thing that does exist and a thing that doesn’t when Bradford hits them with that contention that The Talented Mr. Ripley is a morally unhinged novel when the fact that it’s the exact opposite is vividly illustrated by the fact that it’s Tom Ripley, not the novel, who’s morally unhinged. And those same readers may wonder if a novel can be superb if all its supporting characters are fainéant mannequins - which has certainly been a common complaint from Ripley dissenters over the decades. 

Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires announces its emphasis in its title (and in the US cover illustration, which features perhaps the ugliest photo ever taken of Patricia Highsmith while she was alive): at least one goal here is to write a ‘gay life’ of this famously bristly and repellant author. This is a necessarily reductive aim, not least because it works at cross purposes to all other aims. The Patricia Highsmith presented to readers in these pages is indeed a creature of lust and lies - but too often merely so, reduced to squalid trysts and corrosive dependencies. Her strange desires never entirely defined her, but they define this book.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The National. He writes regularly for The Vineyard Gazette, the Daily Star and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.