At the back end of last
month, just after the tropical heatwave that made it too hot to step out of
doors between the hours of 11am and 7pm, I did a bit of proof-reading for a new
friend in these parts, whose critical biography of Patricia Highsmith is soon
to make the leap from hardback to paperback.
Some of my best films are adaptations of Patricia Highsmith novels: Hitchcock's Strangers On A Train, with its wonderful opening shot (if I remember correctly) of a pair of co-respondent shoes walking along the platform of a railway station; Wenders' The American Friend, with its incomprehensible plot, a guest appearance by the American director Nick Ray, wearing an eye patch, and a customarily brilliant performance by the great German actor, Bruno Ganz; and Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr. Ripley, with its cast of stars who looked so fresh and young back at the end of the last century: Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law.
Nevertheless, I've never
actually read one of her novels, even though one of my best friends has been
collecting her first editions for years. Much of what I knew about the author
came from a re-run a year or so ago on Sky Arts of The South Bank Show, in which Melvyn Bragg
talked to someone with a brutal haircut, a smoking cigarette and the fixed look
of a cross-patch. 
What really roused my
curiosity was her admission that, faced with the choice of rescuing a baby or a
kitten in distress, she would choose the kitten over the babe. At the risk of
losing hundreds or even thousands of followers, I confess that I might be
tempted to do the same: not because I've got anything against babies, but more
because – in spite of having parented one myself – I am not comfortable with
having to deal with their distress. Apart from jouncing them (what a strange
word that is, 'to jounce') gently in my arms and uttering a few soothing words,
I haven't a clue what to do
(to quote those monsters of glam-rock, Sweet). A kitten in my experience generally
stops crying, whereas that's rarely the case with an infant – at least not in
my arms.
So I was happy to offer to
help someone trying to juggle two concurrent deadlines. My own deadline to send
off my mother's memoir was well under control thanks to my daily anxiety list
of to-dos, and I no longer have any monthly cheese pieces to constrain me now
that France Magazine is
sadly no more. So, if you can't find some time as a retired member of the
community, then when can you?
Proof-reading entails a
much closer read than the customary mind-wander or last-thing-at-night
blurry-eyed semi-consciousness before the book crashes to the floor and wakes
you with a start. Quite lidrally, you
have to read every word, so I really found myself getting into the head of a
woman who never seemed to get over an abnormal childhood during which she was
re-housed for a year with her grandparents by her mother and stepfather. She
and her mother 'enjoyed' the kind of long and intense love-hate relationship
that made my own double-edged feelings about my own mother seem puerile. Her
mother lived till she was 95: a long time to be torn by conflicting emotions.
Equally, it became
apparent that her obvious misanthropy was bordering on sociopathic, even
psychopathic. Anyone who could have come up with the kind of twisted plots that
she managed, anyone who could have created in Tom Ripley the kind of evil yet
curiously attractive anti-hero who seems to have served her as an alter-ego,
has got to have had a screw or two loose. It didn't take a degree in psychiatry
to realise that she was seriously disturbed.
I've long classified
myself as a misanthrope – and am toying with the idea of changing my name by
deed-poll to Ms. Ann Thrope (because the joke tickles me as much as losing the
comma in 'here's your book, Mark') – since I hate the carnage and destruction
wrought by humanity. During my lifetime, for example, I have seen the human
population increase by however many billion it is, while the population of
African elephants has decreased from millions to thousands. I yearn for it to
be the other way round, but my wishes are as futile as Canute's attempt to hold
back the tide while seated in a portable throne. Having lived three score years
and getting on for ten now, I'm beginning to lose the will to plod on simply
because the prospect of things getting even worse than they are now is too
dispiriting. There's only so much comfort and compensation that literature,
films, sport, music, friendship and good food can offer.
Although I found that I
could understand and even sympathise with Patricia Highsmith, I couldn't
condone the appalling and positively perverted way, for example, that she
treated her various partners throughout her life. In reading how she would
constantly throw a psychological spanner in the works, I realised that my own
misanthropy is mild in comparison – even if incurable. Unless it's some asshole
in a pick-up truck driving either with a nasty bullying streak or blithe
incomprehension so close to the boot of my car that he might as well open it up
and jump in, my hatred is reserved for humanity as a faceless, seething whole:
the demos that incapacitates the laudable notion of democracy. When it comes to
individuals, whether friends or individuals who have been dealt a terrible hand
by fate or circumstance (unless merited – as in the case of that tailgating
tosspot in a pick-up truck) – I have every bit as much compassion as I do for
the distressed kitten, and possibly more. So perhaps I should describe myself
as a 'paradoxical misanthropist'.
In any case, as a
perennial optimist, my wife doesn't understand me. Fortunately, her
incomprehension doesn't stop her loving me for the miserable pessimist that I
am. No doubt due to the trauma she suffered during her abnormal childhood,
Patricia Highsmith was clearly incapable of conducting a long-term loving
relationship with any one individual. No doubt, too, had she but metamorphosed
into her creation of Tom Ripley, she would have found some twisted way to
dispose of her several limited-term partners.
But don't let me put you
off either her novels or Richard
Bradford's fascinating and beautifully written profile. Like
many sociopaths, Pat's life made for great reading. And, for all the fame and
fortune that she garnered before dying of or with cancer, you can always read
the book with a certain satisfaction in the knowledge that you're not burdened
with either a head or a life like hers. Normality has its place.
