Strangeness on the Page

Patricia Highsmith’s short stories may be considered appealingly macabre. Is there a perversity in joining these two terms? If so, it would be fully in keeping with her fiction.

What does it say about the reader who will be gripped by tales in this collection that from the first paragraphs are clearly leading to death, or deaths, by, for example, creeping vines or the practice of arranging your deceased, stuffed pets as garden statuary?

Highsmith is best known for her novel Strangers on a Train and the series of books featuring sociopathic criminal Tom Ripley, along with their various movie adaptations. But these short stories are Highsmith at her primal best. With sparse prose over a few pages, she prods the reader into the dark corners of the imagination with characters and scenarios at the edge of chilling plausibility, delivering a jolt much like sticking a finger in an electrical outlet.

Her life was not easy. Born in 1921 in Fort Worth, Texas, Highsmith lived off and on in New York City in her youth. She returned after college to find magazine writing assignments, with little initial success. Her career picked up steam following the 1950 publication of her first novel, Strangers on a Train. She suffered depression, alcoholism, and emotionally tortured romances with other women. Highsmith died in Switzerland in 1995.

Andrew Wilson writes in his biography of Highsmith that whenever “she became weary of herself and her environment, she escaped into a rich, if slightly perverse, imaginative world. There she would create an alternative landscape inhabited by strange, irrational characters that represented various aspects of herself.”

The appeal in reading Highsmith’s short stories is, I think, due to her suspension of the most basic literary conventions for constructing characters, plot, setting, and storyline. She was the purest of Modernists in that everything was deconstructed or removed from her stories but the essential facts. Her readers are left to witness the characters floating through an existentialist fog.

Two of the 64 short stories in this collection particularly demonstrate these characteristics.

“The Pond”

The premise of “The Pond” is simple. A recently widowed mother, Elinor, and her young son, Chris, rent a home with a backyard pond. Concerned that her son will fall into the pond and drown, she attempts to have the thick weeds and vines growing from it removed and the water drained.

Ignoring Elinor’s instructions, Chris plays near to and falls into the pond. The unnaturally clinging vines hint that the pond is not just a muddy puddle. This struggle with nature becomes the centerpiece of the story. The narration allows only movement and action, no emotion, no sadness, no interior sense of being, only the superficial facts of Elinor’s hour-by-hour existence and her persistent attempts to remove the pond, a dark scar on the earth, something she cannot reverse (much like her husband’s sudden death).

Highsmith suggests, perhaps, that resisting the trajectory of the natural world, and any sense of being or individuality within it, is futile.

Death is inevitable and beyond one’s control in this existential, unreasoned, unexplainable life.

“The Stuff of Madness”

Penelope Waggoner, in “The Stuff of Madness,” believes it is quite normal to take deceased family pets to the taxidermist and then position the “seventeen or eighteen preserved cats and dogs and one rabbit, Petekin” as statuary in her formal home garden, a self-created necropolis. Christopher, Penelope’s long-exasperated spouse, disagrees: “Wouldn’t any animal, if it were capable of choosing, prefer to be a few feet under the ground, dissolving like all flesh when his time had come?” This sentence is subtle foreshadowing, and prescient.

By story’s end, Christopher is found dead in the garden, self-posed as a statue among family pets, having died by suicide.

Highsmith serves up his death, simply and ironically, as Christopher’s revolt against Penelope for inviting journalists to photograph and write about the garden of stuffed pets in breach of his much-desired privacy. Something primal and long buried is unleashed in Christopher, an “insufferable wrath” that “boiled in him.”

Similar to “The Pond,” this story is constructed with the barest of details, luring readers into the perversity of a successful man ending his life with, what seemed to me, an air of self-satisfaction and of resoluteness at finally taking control over the one thing he could control in his life—the end.

This is peak Highsmith as she draws the reader into the perverse world of the macabre. I was entertained by these short stories and I’m not sure what that says about me.