July: Ms. Ann Thrope

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.