The Talented Miss Highsmith (Schenkar)
My experience in reading this very thorough and accomplished biography was a disjointed one, because, being in constant competition for my library's electronic version, I lost access several times for a period of weeks each time. This may have unfairly cost Ms Schenkar a star in my rating, because, with her unconventional though effective choice to arrange her biography by subject matter rather than chronology, I did find it difficult to re-orient myself each time I picked it up. (And, e-books being e-books, I didn't discover how to use the extensive chronology at the end until much too late in the process).
One of the things I realized as I was reading is how little of Highsmith's prodigious output I've actually read, not just novels and short stories under her own name but also various types of work to which she never owned or only, as with "The Price of Salt", only relatively late in her career. As a result, I was doing less "matching" than usual between the description of the life and the experience of the work, and was thrown more intensely into the details of the life itself. Blessings on Ms Schenkar for having synthesized the apparently massive legacy of self-documentation, in the form of diaries, "cahiers" and letters (not to mention a voluminous acquaintance ready and willing to speak). What emerges from all that synthesis, I'm sorry to say, is a picture of a truly unhappy and difficult woman who became increasingly anti-social as she aged (or perhaps counter-social, since she didn't exactly isolate herself, just antagonized everybody).
There are some very useful literary insights, especially around the inextricability of sex and death in Highsmith's work, and her invariable tendency to work in pairs of characters (something she shares with Wilkie Collins, I think). And though I can't think of anything in my own limited Highsmith reading that matches the sheer intensity (and viciousness) of her relationship with her mother, just knowing of some of that details of that particular inescapable love/hate does shine a light on Highsmith's darkness (as it were).
Schenkar is blunt in her assessment of Highsmith's stylistic defects: she has a "tin ear" and very little wit. In this, her biographer is her superior. I had to laugh out loud at this particular bon mot about Patricia's girlfriends: "Pat was still not sleeping with Chloe, but she would always prefer the bird in the bush to the bird in her bed."
This was, disjointed or no, a good read, and actually engendered in me a desire to read more of the works written by its subject. That's the mark of a successful biography.
