“Loving Highsmith” in the cinema: How does love life influence art? – Culture

Young Patricia Highsmith had a very active love life. It wasn’t easy for a lesbian woman in post-war New York. Gay nightlife was limited to a few relevant bars, all in the same corner of town. And those who visited these pubs secretly preferred to get off one subway station sooner or later in order not to arouse suspicion. For Highsmith, a native Texan with a Protestant upbringing, discovering the big city and her own sexual orientation was an exciting, but often painful, adventure.

With her novel “Two Strangers on a Train” (1950), which was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock soon after its publication, she had already become a star of the literary world in her late twenties. But that also brought fear of social ostracism. A lesbian writer would have been quickly dropped by major publishers, although Highsmith quickly established herself as a prolific, best-selling author who raked in big bucks. But even her mother, with whom she had a difficult relationship throughout her life, demanded that she live the “right” sexuality – that is, kindly find a man and marry her. Highsmith nevertheless continued to sleep with women, having many partners, especially as a young woman. Just in the secrecy of the lesbian subculture of the 1950s.

In her documentary “Loving Highsmith”, Swiss filmmaker Eva Vitija examines the influence this double life had on her work. At the age of seven, the director spent the summer holidays with her family in the Ticino village of Tegna. Highsmith had emigrated there towards the end of her life, built a bunker-like house and withdrew almost entirely from the public eye. The parents told the director that a famous writer lived in this village, alone with her cats. That sounded “exciting and a bit scary” to the little girl and sparked a lifelong interest in the writer, who died in 1995.

Highsmith documented her love life extensively in her “Cahiers,” as she called the collection of journals and notebooks found in a linen closet in her Swiss home after her death. The director uses these texts, which were first published last year to mark the author’s 100th birthday, as the basis for research for her film and quotes them extensively. “Writing,” Highsmith observed, “is of course a substitute for the life I cannot live, which is denied me.”

Highsmith moved through the West Berlin transvestite clubs, which David Bowie also liked to visit

The director has also spoken to Highsmith relatives in Fort Worth, Texas, as well as three ex-girlfriends. The three women are the American writer Marijane Meaker, the French translator and teacher Monique Buffet and the German actress and artist Tabea Blumenschein. Highsmith met the latter when she was on the Berlinale jury in the late 1970s (she of all people, who hated the film adaptations of her books and therefore tended to think of Hitchcock and Chabrol as idiots) and roamed the West Berlin transvestite clubs at night, which also included David Bowie liked to visit.

The image emerges of a woman who developed her “creepy ideas”, as she liked to call her book ideas, not only but also out of her sexuality, which she never lived out completely freely: stories about obsession, anxiety, madness, but also secret attempts at liberation in a robe of fiction. It’s probably no coincidence that her most famous creation, the talented Mr. Ripley, murders and schemes his way through five novels with almost never showing any sign of remorse or guilt in the traditional sense. A representative figure freed from most social shackles, which she repeatedly characterizes as gay in subtle allusions.

Highsmith also wrote a novel about lesbian love, early in her career. “Salt and its Price” (filmed decades later with Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara under the title “Carol”) was released in 1952 – albeit under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. The book was considered pure provocation. Less because of the affair between two women that is described in it than because of the happy ending: the two women get away with their relationship without being punished in any way.

It was such a taboo in post-war America that Highsmith didn’t publicly acknowledge the book until late in her life. But it must have given her, at least quietly, immense satisfaction in writing the story. Because writing, Highsmith confessed, “is the only way to feel respectable.”

Because writing wasn’t enough for her intoxication, Highsmith drank to numb her inner tension. Her lover Marijane Meaker tells in the film how it took her some time to realize that the orange juice that her friend always drank for breakfast before she sat down at the typewriter was mainly gin with a hint of fruit juice.

Of course, none of these anecdotes are entirely new. And the film doesn’t come close to Joan Schenkar’s (2015) excellent 1,000-page biography of Highsmith, which already contained most of the stories. But it conveys a very precise feeling for Highsmith’s primal conflict, which should not only sound familiar to her, but also to many other people (and whose literary treatment must have made her so successful). As Highsmith put it in her journals, “The most painful feeling is that of your own weakness.”

Loving Highsmith, Switzerland 2021 – Director: Eva Vitija. Camera: Siri Smart. Edition Salzgeber, 83 minutes. Theatrical release: April 7, 2022.