By Stuart Mitchner

I’ve been writing the same sort of thing since I was 15 years old — about people who are a little cracked.

—Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995)

The line I’ve quoted is from an August 1991 interview Patricia Highsmith granted the International Herald Tribune shortly before publishing the last novel in the Ripley series, Ripley Under Water (Knopf 1992), which I read in a day, swept along in a fever of morbid anticipation. Whenever that most civilized of psychopaths Tom Ripley is involved, it’s not what happens next that carries you along but the need to know when it will happen and to whom and how, and then how Ripley will get away with it, which he always does. There’s no denying you’re in the grip of the writer Graham Greene called “the poet of apprehension.”

Even before she started writing about “cracked” people, Highsmith was reading Karl Menninger’s The Human Mind, which she found in her parents’ library when she was “8 or 9,” and going through “case histories with footnotes about murders, sadists, crackpots, if they could be cured or not and what the psychiatrist decided to do about them.”

The Photograph

The girl who explored The Human Mind as a child is sizing up the world at 21 from the cover photo of Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks, 1941-1995. The picture was taken in July 1942, around the time she was telling her diary “Each person carries around in himself a terrible other world of hell and the unknown” which in the course of life he may see once or twice, “when he is near death or much in love, or when he is deeply stirred by music, by God or by sudden fear. It is an enormous pit reaching below the deepest crater of the earth, or it is the thinnest air far beyond the moon.”

Go fishing in the diaries and notebooks and you’ll find numerous indicators that you’re sharing the intimate thoughts of the novelist Greene says has you “constantly looking over your shoulder.” If, however, you came of age loving New York City, jazz, books, Times Square, the Village, and White Tower hamburgers, you’ll find a 21-year-old companion who delights in the city and shares your joy right down to lines like this one from October 14, 1942: “Very happy indeed. Had a hamburger at the old White Tower on Greenwich & went for a stroll down Eighth Street.” I may not have anything much in common with the notorious, hard-drinking, sex-crazed femme fatale who it’s said went around toting a handbag full of pet snails, but I’ve walked that late-night walk to the corner of Greenwich and Seventh Avenue South, and even though I had to grow up to “get” Henry James, I feel at one with the writer who fell in love with writing on March 28, 1942: “Read The Ambassadors this A.M. very happy. Want to work — want to write — express somehow what I feel about the thrilling and wonderful impracticability of being in love with it.”

All that said, when I look at the face on the cover of Diaries and Notebooks after reading the passage about the “world of hell and the unknown,” I know that Highsmith has already “been there,” from “the deepest crater” to “the thinnest air.” She’s looking right at me, one eye in the shadows, the other sizing me up the way Tom Ripley sized up his first victim Dickie Greenleaf in the charged moment before attacking him with an oar, clubbing him to death, and heaving his body in the ocean. The seminal murder in Highsmith’s fiction takes place in her 1955 novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, which was in fact inspired by The Ambassadors, wherein a rich American sends an envoy to Europe to rescue a wayward son. While it’s easy to imagine James throwing Ripley out the window after reading the murder scene, my guess is he would find the identity theft plotline fascinating.

The Week of Ripley

The binge began with Steven Zaillian’s dazzling new Netflix series, filmed, brilliantly, in black and white, in striking contrast to the Mediterranean light of the Ripley films that preceded it, which were all shot in glorious color. The murder scene in Zaillian’s Ripley is a visual tour de force, with the sea itself depicted as if roused by the sudden violence of the act, Ripley flung from a boat that seems to be charging through the water with its own malevolent power, the body ultimately propelled to the depths as if shot by a cannon. When Matt Damon’s Ripley kills Jude Law’s Dickie Greenleaf in Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), it’s ugly, awkward, and leaves a bad taste; the same is true in René Clément’s Purple Noon (1960), when the most glamorously unlikely of all Ripleys, Alain Delon, prevails in a clumsy fight.

Highsmith returns to the scene of the crime in Ripley Under Water, a post-mortem for the whole dark driven Ripley enterprise that begins with a prank phone call from an antagonist pretending to be Dickie Greenleaf risen from the ocean depths. The grisly, giggly phone call represents a serious threat from a new neighbor, sending Ripley’s constructive paranoia into overdrive because the caller not only knows Ripley’s story, he’s actually dragging the river for the remains of the man Tom clubbed to death with a wine bottle (of a superior vintage of course) five years before. And when the bagged remains are dumped on Ripley’s palatial doorstep and the gendarmes summoned, Msr. Tom alertly and expeditiously stows the bag in his brown Renault, shares a gin and tonic with his friend Ed, and puts Brahms’s Opus 39 on the CD player, “a series of sixteen brilliant waltzes played on the piano…. Tom felt the drink at once, but he also felt the Brahms making his blood run faster. One rapid and thrilling musical idea followed another, as if the great composer were deliberately showing off.”

So is Highsmith, with her subsequent blending of Brahms and forensics. After the drink, Ripley and his accomplice deal with the bones, the head is missing (“probably rolled off don’t you think? Cartilage dissolved.”) Highsmith shares Ripley’s contempt for the tiresome, pernicious, deeply annoying adversary she’s created. For over 300 pages, she has you lusting for the denouement, a vicarious Tom Ripley following her into the “other world of hell and the unknown.”

A New York Romance

In the end, I’m drawn back to the face on the cover of Diaries and Notebooks, for none of the characters in the Ripley books (or films) are as complex and compelling as Highsmith herself, who would sometimes sign copies to friends “with love from Tom (Pat).” One thing’s certain, the seductive young woman in this photograph has designs on the man taking her picture.

In August 1942, Highsmith mentions posing for a “quite impracticable & wild” photographer named Rolf Tietgens, who, as she puts it in her first entry about him, “eyes me like a wolf.” After showing her the photos, “two of which are good,” Rolf says he wants to go for a walk with her that Sunday, and she’s already wondering if she could “be in love” with him. He’s gay, she thinks she’s bi, and “neither of us will admit it can be the opposite sex, and both of us can excuse ourselves by saying it is not, of course, the opposite sex.” Later: “I should like very much to sleep with him…. Being with him is like reading a wonderful poem — by Whitman, Wolfe, or the First Voice himself. He reads such things into me, but I am mute beside him.”

“The Strangest Day”

On August 16, she writes: “I think this is the strangest day of my life. At any rate I am nearest to falling in love with Rolf T. Met at Lex & 59, rode up to Van Cortlandt park…. It rained like mad & we got soaked. Then we sat in my room and talked. He looked over all my books. Especially liking Blake and Donne. It was actually fun standing there with him & very strange because it was fun — the simple reason is he is the only man who ever knew all about me … So we watched the boats and the lights and he told me all about Hamburg [the setting director Wim Wenders chose for his Ripley film, The American Friend]…. Then we walked to the cobblestoned street that was deserted & stood there over an hour. He kissed me a few times — rather a mutual thing for a change. It was quite wonderful & perfect, and for several moments I could see happiness and read it in the sky like a strange new word written…. So tonight I am new, I am a new person — and who knows what will come of it?”

By October 9, it’s all over (all but a lifelong friendship): “I do not want the lover who refreshes me with the harmony of his voice, the tones in his throat as he reads me Blake, nor do I want the lover who cleaves unto me, whose heart is my heart, whose soul is ever in communion with mine tho we are apart. Give me rather the lover (or the loved) who drives me mad with the antithesis of all your peace, who is not spiritual except in his most ruthlessly physical moods, who never heard of Blake and doesn’t want to — Give me only the beloved with a question and a mystery to solve, who changes faster than I can follow, whose every gesture, breath, movement is an intense delight to me.”

The Barnard Graduate

Finally, I’ll confess that my preferred Highsmith is not the alleged anti-Semite who dedicated Ripley Under Water “To the dead and the dying among the Intifadeh and the Kurds, to those who fight oppression in whatever land, and stand up not only to be counted but to be shot.” The person I’m keeping company with is the Barnard graduate who writes on August 11, 1942: “I am no longer fascinated by the decadent, much less captivated by its color, variety, and sensational possibilities in literature. And oddly enough, it has been the war that made the change. The war makes a writer, perhaps makes everyone, think of what he loves best.”