This Much I Know

My Current Obsession: The Talented Miss Highsmith

I am obsessed with Patricia Highsmith. My reading habits, I confess, have always been obsessive. Whenever I discover authors, if I am moved by a book I go through everything they’ve written.

My obsessions are eclectic. I once read the entire Herodotus, spending weeks immersed in ancient Rome. I similarly went through an obsessive Maupassant phase, and in truth have never really emerged from it. A few years back, I read everything by Ian McEwan, such was my admiration for his writing. Now I’m plunged into the strange world of Patricia Highsmith.

I’m not terribly interested in Highsmith’s life, despite the fascinating and perverse similarities between her troubled personality and the characters she created. She was alcoholic, lesbian, misanthropic, racist, and evidently cold and cruel in her personal relationships. The young author in the nude photo above, and the more mature Highsmith holding the cat below, reveal a woman who — not unlike her protagonists — seemed darkly inaccessible, preferring the company of animals to human contact. An American exiled in Europe, she died in 1995 at age 74 in Locarno, Switzerland.

                      

My obsession with Patricia Highsmith is fixed on her work. Many years ago I’d seen the movie version of The Talented Mr Ripley starring Matt Damon (seen in image below), and had been captivated by the perversity of the plot and, above all, by the psychopathic character of Tom Ripley, a sexually ambiguous conman from Boston who moves to Europe to escape his past.

               

At that time I knew little about Highsmith or her work. I wasn’t aware that an earlier French movie, Plein Soleil, had been based on the same novel. Titled Purple Noon in English, that film featured French movie star Alain Delon (in photo below in a scene from the film) as the evil Tom Ripley. I still haven’t seen the original French film (I will buy the DVD) though I’m told that it’s even better than the excellent Hollywood version. Highsmith evidently regarded Delon’s portrayal as the perfect Ripley, though she disapproved of the French film’s ending suggesting that the clever and elusive Ripley would get caught.

                   

It was entirely by accident that I picked up a copy of The Talented Mr Ripley while recently browsing through the fiction section in the WH Smith bookshop across from the Tuileries. It was, I must admit, with only mild curiosity that I took the book to bed one night and entered the troubled and twisted mind of Tom Ripley. I have since torn through nearly all the Ripley books, sometimes called, somewhat pretentiously, Highsmith’s “Ripliad”. 

I am fascinated by Highsmith’s fiction for two particular reasons — first, for her unique narrative skills; and second, for the choice of France as Ripley’s place of residence. 

I am mapping out my own psychological thriller (based on a true story: the murder of a fabulously wealthy and eccentric French banker) on which I’ll start working once my current book on France is completed. Reading Highsmith not just as a reader, but as a writer, is immensely useful to any literary enterprise in the same genre. The great genius of the Ripley books, needless to say, is the character of Tom Ripley. The casual wickedness of his designs is at once shocking and mesmerizing. But Highsmith, in my estimation, was not a great writer. Her gift was for character creation and plot construction. I am tempted to contrast her talents with those of Ian McEwan, whose novels are justly admired for the disciplined, almost surgical precision of his language. Highsmith doesn’t overwork her prose, she keeps moving. That is not to underestimate her literary legacy. She has, after all, left us the troubling personality of Tom Ripley.

The second reason for my fascination reason with Ripley is that, in the sequels of the Ripliad, we find Highsmith’s amoral protagonist living comfortably with a rich French wife in a small town just south of Paris. In all these novels (Ripley Under Ground, Ripley’s Game, The Boy Who Followed Ripley) the cunning American psychopath plots and schemes from his country house, called Belle Ombre, in the quaint French town of Villeperce-sur-Seine, a few miles outside Fontainebleau. Villeperce is fictional, of course, but it could be any of the small villages on the Seine in the environs of Fontainebleau.

I was at first slightly stunned to discover this. I lived in Fontainebleau for three years — before I’d read any of the Ripley books. Yet all the local places Ripley visits — such as the picturesque town of Moret-sur-Loing — are intimately familiar to me. In Fontainebleau, I lived right across the road from the royal chateau with a magnificent view of its Cour des Adieux. Over those years, I took many photos of that magnificent view, including the one above taken from my terrace.

If only I knew then that Tom Ripley had once lurked in these same precincts, leaving dead bodies in the grotesque trail of his evil machinations. When I next return to Fontainebleau for a visit, I shall be wondering where shallow graves might still remain unearthed. 

Reflections on My Paris Neighbourhood — in 1900

My fascination for the photo above can be explained not only because, dating more than a century ago, it wonderfully evokes the quaint fin-de-siecle romanticism of the Belle Epoque. Taken in 1900 from the pont Alexandre III, the photo shows the opulent pavillions that sprouted like a magnificent 19th century Disneyland along the Seine as part of the 1900 Exposition. The parasoled Victorian women and top-hatted gentlemen in the foreground were presumably visiting the world’s fair. Millions visited Paris that year to behold new-fangled inventions like escalators and sound-recording machines. Oscar Wilde, who would die in Paris later that same year, visited the fair where he made a brief recording of his voice, reading four lines from his poem, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”. 

The photo holds another fasciation for me: it shows my current neighbourhood, the 7th arrondissement, a once-aristocratic enclave located between the faubourg Saint-Germain and Eiffel Tower. The Art Deco building on the Quai d’Orsay where I live today stands roughly where, in the photo, the colossal ice-cream structure was boldly bursting forth on the banks of the Seine in 1900. The fact that my building is 1920s Deco is revealing. Nearly all the edifices built for the 1900 Universelle reflected the Art Nouveau aesthetic of the era — and most, sadly, were torn down after the fair, making way for post-World War I modernity.

The Grand Palais still stands today, along with the Petit Palace en face — both were built as the Exposition’s architectural centrepieces. So does the Gare d’Orsay train station, today converted into the Musée d’Orsay. The Air France building on the Invalides esplanade is another architectural vestige of the Exposition. But gone are all the proud and lavish pavilions along the Seine on the spot where I live today.   

The pont Alexandre III, named for the Russian tsar, was built for the 1900 Exposition with the functional purpose of linking the Grand Palais and the national pavilions on the other side of the Seine. The bridge, needless to say, remains today and is admired as perhaps the most beautiful in the city. I took the photo below in an attempt, only partially successful, to capture the precise viewpoint in the photo above taken more than a century before. In the foreground, modern tourists have taken the place of quaintly Victorian personages, but the same statues and lamps are precisely where they were in 1900 (the photo on the homepage of this blog was taken from the same vantage point). In the background, however, the contrast is stunning. The modest spire just right of the Eiffel Tower belongs to the American Church, built in the 1920s when many American writers and artists were here colonizing the cafés of Montparnasse. The extravagant architectural opulence of 1900 has vanished.

Rare is the day when I do not cross the pont Alexandre, frequently on a walk with Oscar. Each time, I instinctively stop and look back at my neighbourhood along the Seine, thinking about how it once looked a century ago. Today the Eiffel Tower, which itself was supposed to be torn down after its construction in 1889 but was saved by the advent of the radio, remains as an architectural testimony to that proud epoch. 

My neighbourhood can boast intimate associations with great literature of that era, but that too has not been unaffected by the ravages of time. On the Left Bank near the pont des Invalides (just out of view on the left in both photos) lived one of the most flamboyant French aristocrats of the Belle Epoque, count Robert de Montesquiou, a mythic figure for his extravagant devotion to the decadent cult of aestheticism. Two great French novels took inspiration from his personal mythology. In the novel Against Nature, the eccentric protaganist Jean des Esseintes was modelled on Montesquiou. And more notably, Marcel Proust based the character of Baron de Charlus on Montesquiou in his classic work, Remembrance of Things Past. Montesquiou lived in a splendid hotel particulier at 1 avenue de Latour de Maubourg, located about 100 yards down the road from my place. Today, little remains of Montesquiou’s lavish residence. It’s home to a Chinese Cultural Centre whose modern facade doubtless would have horrified the dandified tastes of its aristocratic owner a century ago. 

Paris, it is true, is a city that has changed comparatively little over the centuries. Notre Dame, after all, was constructed nearly a thousand years ago. Yet Paris has also been marked by periods of rupture and transformation. The Second Empire of the late 19th century was one of those periods, when Baron Haussmann demolished the old pre-revolutionary Paris and gave the city the proud imperial dimension with wide boulevards. The Exposition of 1900 was, in many respects, a tribute to that 19th century vision of Paris and its status as the centre of the world. 

We all, I suppose, have to live in our own time.