Today’s post is not the first mention of writer Patricia Highsmith in this blog, and because her novels and stories are among my favorites, it may not be the last. Though you will find little or nothing here about her novels, for anyone who has not had the pleasure of meeting Highsmith’s signature character, Tom Ripley, I strongly urge a trip to the bookstore or the library. (The Talented Mr Ripley makes a terrific start.)
Probably no great secret that Patricia Highsmith was what some might euphemistically describe as a ‘daughter of Sappho,’ but more realistic descriptions would paint her as a dedicated lesbian. Writer and one-time lover of Highsmith, Marijane Meaker published in 2003 a memoir of their two years together, one titled, Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s. This is by no means a detailed biography, nor an account of the literary nuts and bolts in Highsmith’s writing. We get instead a partial glimpse of this well-known writer’s psychological world, much of it as it related to Meaker’s love affair with her.
The book is an up-close look at Highsmith’s alcoholism, and the lover’s jealousy that so often weighed on Meaker. Their time together is set against a backdrop of Greenwich Village, circa 1950s, moving to Fire Island and later to Bucks County, Pennsylvania among a circle of literary friends. The reader is given clear illustration of Highsmith’s racism and anti-Semitism at age 37, evolving over the years from slight to almost rabid in her later years. (Meaker’s final sketches of her former lover as she was in 1992 at age 71 are not in any sense flattering.) But there are wonderful physical descriptions of Highsmith chain-smoking Gauloises and knocking back bottles of wine in her nightly ensemble of black slacks, crisply ironed white shirt with ascot and blazer, on her feet the ever present freshly polished penny loafers.
Meaker is especially skillful in her colorful portrait of the life of urbane lesbians in Greenwich Village of the time. There is something almost historical about her rendering of Greenwich Village streets and restaurants of the period, almost like the uncovering of a time capsule, revealing not only a map of village streets and Fire Island haunts, but also an unclouded view of social mores that characterized the 1950s. Meaker is at her best in these pages.
Reading this book, I felt a resonance with Virginia Woolf’s long 1928 essay, A Room of One’s Own, in which she details what it was like for a woman writer of early twentieth century England. In similar fashion, Meaker describes the constraints a lesbian writer—or just plain lesbian—in New York of the 1950s experienced.
For my money, a very interesting memoir.
Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s by Marijane Meaker
Cleis Press 2003
Photo: Patricia Highsmith 1977 in her Paris apartment.
