What Lies Beneath

Nothing Meets The Eye: The Uncollected Stories of Patricia Highsmith
Patricia Highsmith
Norton

By Ed Siegel
2002 The Boston Globe

   Long before Patricia Highsmith was an unappreciated writer she was an unpublished one.  W.W. Norton has begun publishing the out-of-print work of crime fiction’s most lethal existentialist, following the film version of The Talented Mr. Ripley, and now has taken the even more valuable step of bringing out her unpublished and uncollected work in the aptly named Nothing That Meets the Eye, a fascinating compendium of work full of surprises even to her most devoted fans.
   Chief among them is that before Strangers on a Train was published in 1950 and she became temporarily typecast, or miscast, as a crime writer, Highsmith had quite a tender side. Unlike in the two most recent paperbacks released by Norton, Little Tales of Misogyny and A Dog’s Ransom, not every person you meet along the way is a potential psycho killer. Some of the stories evoke more tenderness than terror.
   But let’s not get carried away. If the Highsmith of the 1940s isn’t as jaded as the Highsmith of the 1980s, the streets running through her small towns and big cities are always capable of being plenty mean. Any of these stories can end tragically, even if most of them aren’t as violent as the stories and novels more familiar to the general public.
   In the first story, The Mightiest Morning, a candidate for the best piece, a New Yorker leaves the city convinced that nirvana lies in a small town he discovers, but is it “an unspoiled paradise” or a hotbed of narrow-mindedness and bigotry? Highsmith might only have been 25 at the time (1946), but her worldview was already sharp and sophisticated, where “the eternal potential and the eternal nothing” become one. Tender perhaps, sentimental never.
   Even at their happiest, Highsmith’s characters are, like Camus’s, “terribly alone” in a pitiless universe. It’s their strivings against those forces that make them such interesting characters and Highsmith such a fascinating writer.
   Mildred’s attempts to make her sister’s visit to New York happy in “Where the Door Is Always Open and the Welcome Mat Is Out,” Lucien’s love of art forgeries in “The Great Cardhouse” (“It had become a contest of faith vs. nonfaith”), Mr. McKenny’s attempt to eke out an existence buying and selling parakeets in “A Bird in Hand” - each in his or her own way is desperately looking for significance in the smallest details of otherwise insignificant lives.
   Which isn’t as nihilistic as it sounds. Highsmith doesn’t make the stories palatable with doses of black humor, but she doesn’t often go to the opposite extreme either, of erecting Sartre-like “no exit” signs. It is the matter-of-factness of her writing that is intoxicating, even liberating.
   For Highsmith, people are capable of heroism only when they can turn their back on the absolutists (“But didn’t you know that nothing is absolute?” asks a pianist who hates the piano in “The Great Cardhouse.” “Why, even my kitten knows that much.”
   Highsmith’s tone is remarkably consistent over the 44 years covered here, although there is one brilliant, somewhat experimental story, 1947’s “The Still Point of the Turning World,” in which she quick-cuts cinematically from one character to another. The story itself makes a series of trips to a public park by a well-off woman and her son a sly delineation of class and sexuality, as if even this baby step out of one’s role threatened chaos. Or as a character asks herself in another story, “Doorbell for Louisa,” “Once a person has become detached from his possessions, his customary duties, his moments of solitude, where is he? What is he?”
   In the earlier stories, such insights can lead to good things happening to good people. As the years go on and Highsmith becomes more jaded, there is a tendency to rely too much on suicide as the only way out of life’s miseries, and when the corpses mount up the effect can seem hollow.
   Still, those same dread-filled instincts also lead to such wonderfully wrought passages as this description of Muzak: “such sick-making music had been coming from the ceiling of the elevator, dulcet strains of violins, calculated to soothe, maybe, but which hadn’t soothed, any more than it would have soothed the mind of a man walking to an execution chamber, music that any fool knew was being played to smooth over something, or to conceal something so horrible that the human mind could not face it.”
   Even more problematic than the sociopaths like the above protagonist are those living on illusions. When illusions are burst in Highsmith’s universe there is hell to pay, particularly in the later stories, like “A Girl Like Phyl” or “Things Had Gone Badly.” In the latter story, a man kills his wife because she becomes too nice and because, ironically, he couldn’t imagine hurting her.
   The real irony, though, is why Highsmith’s stories are so oddly comforting. Perhaps because like many artists — Dostoevsky, Beckett — Highsmith gives voice to those anxieties that we try so hard not to let bubble up to the surface. Her notes from the underground across almost a half century covered in Nothing That Meets the Eye simultaneously make the subconscious smile and the skin crawl.