In Which We Write Our Covert Lesbian Manuscript

Innermost Secrets

by KATE HART

During my last few days at the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern, where I had spent three months reading through the personal letters and papers of the American author Patricia Highsmith, I came across a manuscript fragment in a box marked “unfinished novels.”

Simply titled First Person Novel, this unpublished and loosely autobiographical novel contains a series of a letters that reveal an intense romance between two young women. With the exception of The Price of Salt, a lesbian cult classic that she published under a pseudonym, Highsmith’s treatment of homosexuality in her fiction is coded and evasive. First Person Novel provides a rare, personal glimpse into Highsmith’s experience, as well as those of other gays and lesbians, in the forties and fifties.

I understand your feelings, I understand. And I think I also understand mine. I reserve the right to like whom I like, to be honest with my feelings, and I reserve the duty, also, to curb my feelings and actions, if they are likely to hurt people I care about. In a fictional German village, Juliette Tallifer Dorn writes these extraordinary sentences about her attraction to women in a letter to her husband. Juliette inhabits Highsmith’s own personal predicament in the fifties: she is a “mature woman who cannot keep herself from practicing homosexuality, even if for social reasons she should wish to.” Her sojourn in rural Germany from her family life in the States allows her to reflect on her lesbianism for her bewildered husband, who demands an explanation of her ongoing affairs with women.

In her letters to her husband, Juliette justifies her present fling with a ballet dancer by delving into the past, into her memories and recollections of an adolescent romance that happened nearly twenty years ago, when she met another American girl at a Swiss finishing school. Juliette’s past history, she writes to her husband, is “not the facts you know, but the trail, the chain of crushes and loves, amounting to nothing but memories, but such memories.”

At seventeen, Veronica is “not really pretty,” boyish, and slightly unkempt, but has energy and vivacity, and Juliette is drawn to her on the first day of school as “a sick person’s eyes might wander to a happy, lively bird that has suddenly perched itself on a windowsill.” During a class outing, the two become separated from the rest of their group, when a sudden storm brings them propitiously together. As both of us looked, a long jagged flash of lightning shot down the sky, lighting up everything bright and green, and there was a sound as if a huge rock had been split apart. Verie and I were holding each other`s hands. Then Verie smiled and said, ‘It didn’t get us.’ We kept holding each other’s hand. Verie kept looking at me, her eyes smiling, and her fingers tightened and moved on mine. I wanted to kiss her. Verie moved first, then I a second later. A short, surprised kiss, and then a longer one. And a startled silence between us, and our hands in the same grip – that spontaneous, accidental hand clasp that turned into something else now, a promise, a reassurance, a bond.

As Juliette’s first love, Verie shapes the mold of her future lovers. So much of love is conditioning, and I mean the emotion of love as well as the habits and the means of its expression. I grew conditioned to a physical type like Verie – not too tall, slim, but rounded and much softer to touch than she appeared to be, her short, wavy hair, her firm, round breasts that needed no brassiere, her slender feet braced against my insteps in bed, the slight depressions – favored by Rubens and odd in anyone as slim as Verie – on either side of her spine above the buttocks, little sinks that I could feel in the dark with my fingertips. All this has never left me. They may not all turn up in the same person, but every woman I have liked has had one of the characteristics of Verie in her. After graduating, the pair go on holiday together in Europe disguised as “old school friends.” We had consent and blessing from home. We were gloriously happy. We loved each other and we had each other, and we had the approval of our families … does one ever get over wanting and needing the approval of one’s family? It seemed to us that we had everything…

Their grand tour passes in a glamorous whirl of sightseeing, shopping trips, and late nights in European capitals. The girls’ bond, forged during a freak storm, becomes the still center of this new, transitional world of hotel rooms, trains, cafes, and theatres. I used to look at my face in the mirror in those days, more than ever before or after. The image of myself I remember best is from one evening when Verie and I were dressing to go out in Venice. I leaned toward the mirror to check my make-up: a nineteen year old face, the longish cheeks rounded still, the gray-blue eyes clear and sparkling without a wrinkle around them or a frown above them. Not pretty, I think, not by any means. But it was a nice mouth. And what am I saying in all this? Only that the world was right for me, and it showed in my face and in my expression… At twenty-four, Highsmith wrote in her journal: “in the cases in which I have reached the real persons and have allowed others to reach me, then I do not shy from new company; I am sure of this.”

That the two women will have a future together is never questioned:

We talked of buying a house in California, of starting an art gallery there, since we both liked painting, and we talked also of finding a house somewhere inland from the Cote d`Azur, in some village, and living there. We also talked of a house in Italy. But it was always a house. We were happy and the rest would follow automatically. Verie is unconcerned about their risk of exposure, or the consequences that could follow such a revelation. She lights Juliette’s cigarette and makes a habit of holding her hand in restaurants. In Capri, she talks openly about their relationship to a group of gay men and women, many of whom were married, married to each other, married to someone in Europe or America whom I got the idea they seldom saw. It was all cynical, flippant, wide open and unserious.

But Juliette remains uneasy about being outed, even to such an unconventional social set. When we left, I felt as if we had left behind us thirty five or forty potential enemies, people who knew Verie’s and my innermost secrets, people who would spread it still wider, mentioning names, telling stories, telling of the time Verie kissed me on the lips in Grace Field’s swimming pool, the Canzone di Capri – such a long kiss that people sunning around the rim or drinking drinks had sat up to look at us. Most only smiled. Who cared, after all? But I was nineteen then, and I cared.

In Rome, Juliette’s fears are confirmed. We ran into some friends of Verie`s family in a restaurant. I’ve never spent a more uninteresting or quieter evening. It was quiet – like an unlit bomb. Within a week came a blistering letter from Verie`s mother, which Verie let me read. Verie took it with a careless smile at first, but I noticed she had turned pale. She was shaken to the core and did not want me to see it, but as the days passed, it was impossible for her to hide. We went over what happened with the Tompkins. No, nothing had happened, and no innuendos had been dropped by the Tompkins. It was just a case of their smelling out something, given almost nothing, nothing but the fact we’d been best friends at school and were now traveling together, and – the future art gallery, of course.

Other letters arrive from Verie’s brother, sister, and a former teacher, containing similar messages: she must “break off the relationship” and return home, or, as her mother puts it, “break with us.” Verie begins drinking scotch during the day and into the night. It was a long way from the old Verie, the real Verie, who might have dismissed all this with a wave of her hand and a smile. At least, a few drinks could make her smile, cynically, but it was not Verie`s old smile. There was bitterness in it now. But it was better than no smile at all. She made love to me once, but it was rudely and defiantly – predictably, and that started to break my heart.

Though Juliette has money for them to live on, even enough to start a gallery together, she realizes that Verie does not dread the loss of her inheritance, but something less tangible and more valuable. She was inarticulate about it, I had to guess it, to see it, to face it: she couldn’t face the social blot, after all. I hadn’t realized until the ax fell in Rome that Verie`s world was Baltimore. Even though she didn’t intend to live there, her roots there were deep. If they were cut off, the whole tree would die. It would die of shame. It was curious, it is curious, looking back on it, at Verie who pretended never to give a hang what people thought. The only explanation is her age, twenty. At twenty, one has not the strength, the character one thinks one has. I groped around this, trying to get her to say it – that she was going to give me up. She wouldn’t say it, for the three days I was trying to put the words in her mouth. At last, I said it for her, and Verie corroborated it. ‘Yes.'

The haste with which Verie leaves for home and discards her lover was “the most painful of all” to Juliette. Verie’s blind panic renders her a stranger to her girlfriend. At that time, I couldn’t comprehend the terror that was in Verie. I saw it as a sudden heartlessness, a complete reversal. She looked the same, her voice was the same, her clothes, the scent of her hair, as she bustled about her suitcases, but the inward thing I had loved had fled, flown away like the bird on the windowsill, which I had thought of the day I met Verie, and still could remember. To this day, it doesn’t make sense. The fiasco ending doesn’t make sense, because it wasn’t preceded by enough warning, danger signs. It doesn’t seem to hang together. Yet that was the way it was.

After a long string of failed relationships with women, Highsmith writes in her journals of the “faithlessness” and “transitoriness” of gay relationships, and, conversely, on her feelings of guilt and shame for her “sexual hypocrisy.” Her partner reports that in the fifties, Highsmith began slipping alcohol into her morning orange juice, a sign of her encroaching alcoholism that dogged her for the remainder of her life.

Verie never stopped drinking in Rome, nor does she stop in Baltimore. I can see it, the quantity increasing with her age until it`s a half bottle a day, then three quarters, then a whole, and the same ball of discord, unhappiness, tragedy, hopelessness, rolling along in her with the years. She lives still in Baltimore, and I wonder if the upright citizenry down there are more pleased with her celibacy, her ins and outs of alcoholic institutions in Baltimore and elsewhere, than they would be if we were running an art gallery together in San Francisco? That's a bitter question, but after all, is anybody pleased by what happened? Is anybody happier for what happened?

Highsmith writes in her diary of her dream of dancing with a woman on a midnight river cruise in Mississippi, which she contrasts with the reality of the presence of her male partner: Even in his arms dancing, one feels her in one`s arms dancing. The brain dully occupied with him, dreams with a clarity and a sentiment that stifles the breath, bringing tears.

First Person Novel concludes with Juliette’s similar sense that her love for another woman was built on fantasy, on the impossibility of two women living together as a couple in the middle half of the twentieth century. The loss of Verie – I am as incapable of describing what that was as I was incapable of describing what it was to have found her, to have known her and been with her those three years….It`s all finished. It`s all far back in the past. I have heard of people who cracked up under similar circumstances. At nineteen, as I was, it wasn’t unlikely that I’d crack up. I felt the beginnings…

As I look back, it's all so simple, so absurdly simple: Verie was weak, she did what she had to do, what others told her to do. But at the time it happened, it was a grand tragedy, we were torn apart by cruel fate, cruel Other People who presumably had infinite power over us. It was all not so. It was a dream, all of it.

Kate Hart is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Montreal.

"Gold" - Neon Hitch ft. Tyga (mp3)

"F U Betta (L.A. Club Riots remix)" - Neon Hitch (mp3)

In Which Patricia Highsmith Endures A Depression Equal To Hell

The Inner Life of Patricia Highsmith

by KATE HART

I opened the first of the American author Patricia Highsmith’s notebooks with trepidation one cloudy day in the Swiss National Library. The austere, modernist library building located just outside the historical center of Bern, Switzerland is the improbable final resting place for Highsmith's literary journals, private diaries, manuscripts, and other personal papers. As an American citizen who was born in Texas and who spent most of her life in the United States, Highsmith made the unconventional decision to leave her literary remains to the Swiss government because of the large sum she was offered (she disparaged the University of Texas at Austin’s proposition of $26,000 as merely "the price of a used car").

The record of her life she left behind is extraordinary, totalling more than eight thousand pages, many of which contain incriminating and revealing insights into her complicated and at times alienating life. Highsmith’s death in 1995 sparked two biographies, both of which recount her many tumultuous affairs with women and men — Highsmith herself described her love life as "tortuous" — and cite her frequently homophobic and misogynistic remarks. I was expecting to learn a little too much about one of the most compelling American novelists of the twentieth century.  

What I found by reading through her notebooks written in the postwar period, when she wrote her most celebrated novels The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train, was not the ramblings of a homophobe or a misogynist, but a series of conflicted, even anguished entries about being a lesbian in Cold War America. Highsmith was frustrated, horrified, baffled and intrigued by her sexuality, and at times, defensive and proud of being gay.

It couldn’t have been easy to be queer in the fifties. The cultural and political climate of the U.S. in the postwar period was extremely hostile to homosexuals. Kinsey’s finding that at least 40% of American men had experienced homosexual sex "to the point of orgasm" drove widespread panic about homosexual latency in heterosexuals. The U.S. government fired hundreds of gay and lesbian civil servants owing to what was deemed their threat to national security interests. It was, as Highsmith wrote in an afterword to her lesbian novel The Price of Salt, a time in which "homosexuals male and female in American novels had to pay for their deviation by cutting their wrists, drowning themselves in a swimming pool, or by switching to heterosexuality (so it was stated), or by collapsing – alone and miserable and shunned – into a depression equal to hell."

Highsmith's notebooks written in the fifties reveal her struggle over understanding the social reality of being gay, one which informed her depictions of gay characters in her psychological thrillers involving murders, forged identities and double lives. A few years before she wrote Strangers on Train, which centers on a homoerotic bond and a murder pact between two men, one entry in her journal reads "Yes, perhaps sex is my theme in literature – being the most profound influence on me – manifesting itself in repressions and negatives, perhaps, but the most profound influence."  

Highsmith underwent psychoanalysis in 1948 in an effort to "get myself in a condition to be married," as she wrote in her diary. She was incapable of enjoying sex with men — she wrote that it felt like "steel wool in the face, a sensation of being raped in the wrong place," though she tried it with several men — and so submitted herself to twice-a-week therapy sessions, which were costly enough to force her to take a job as a clerk at Bloomingdale's. Ironically, this effort to turn straight inspired The Price of Salt, in which two women meet in a department store and begin a passionate affair.

It is obvious from reading Highsmith's notebooks that she felt guilty about being gay. Under "Notes on an Ever Present Subject" in her notebooks, Highsmith often focuses on the transience of gay relationships in the fifties, offering stock psychoanalytical stereotypes: "Homosexuals are really very reticent about their affairs. Under a pretence of sanctity, they hide the triviality and transitoriness of their relations. This is their real shame and baseness." Highsmith’s volatile, fleeting relationships with women caused her deep pain: the fear of being rejected and abandoned haunted her for most of her life. This feeling was exacerbated by psychoanalytical literature she read on the subject, which suggested that homosexuals were essentially unfaithful and promiscuous, and therefore unhappy, people.

At Yaddo, where Highsmith wrote the first draft of Strangers on a Train, she wrote in her notebook: "Tonight a heterosexual young man discussed it so plainly and simply: 'Homosexuals aren't particularly faithful.' The root of all their unhappinesses." Highsmith feared that homosexual life in the fifties was one of exclusion from normal life, an exile which could possibly affect her writing about ordinary existence: "Notes on conversation with L.P. at midnight: that homosexuals' writings always lack the knowledge of the pleasure and the pain, the life and death, the sadness and happiness of sexual passion." Highsmith often uses a clinical language in her notebooks to distance herself from her sexuality and to view it as a treatable disease, as she was taught to do in her therapy sessions.

Highsmith intersperses this homophobic commentary on gay life, however, with entries on the social rather than the intrinsic difficulties of being queer. In these, she acknowledges that restrictive social norms forced gays and lesbians in the fifties into positions of secrecy, self-loathing, and despair, and seems very far from the self-hating homophobe of other entries. She writes for instance of "the realized taboo of homosexuality... my realization, even at six, and at eight, that I dared not speak my love, and of course this persisted with its ramifications of social life, guilt. Unfortunate that this is so buried, for consciously I am not in the least ashamed of homosexuality, and if I were normal, and equally imaginative, I should probably consider it very interesting to be homosexual, and wish I'd had the experience."

Highsmith's notebooks also include anguished entries about the limits of gay life in postwar America, of the impossibility of being "married with kids": "Persistently, I have the vision of a house in the country with the blond wife whom I love, with the children whom I adore, on the land and with the trees I adore. I know this will never be, yet will be partially that tantalizing measure (of a man) leads me on. My God and my beloved, it can never be! And yet I love, in flesh and bone and clothes in love, as all mankind."

In one memorable image, she describes dancing with a man on a river cruise at night on the Mississippi, all the while fantasizing about dancing with a nearby woman:

Even in his arms dancing, one feels her in one's arms dancing. The brain dully occupied with him, dreams with a clarity and a sentiment (not being controlled by its logical mechanism) that stifles the breath, bringing tears. One dreams of dancing with her, in public, of a stolen kiss more freely given and taken than any heretofore, in public. One  is utterly crushed with the thought — which had become reality now, here — that one is for eternity an imprisoned soul in one's present body... One knows then too, and perhaps this is no small portion of the sadness, that life with any man is no life at all. For the soul, with its infallible truth and rightness, its logic derived from perfect purity, cries for her one loves, her! 

Highsmith was acutely aware that being gay in the fifties meant living a double life, one which made her feel, at times, hypocritical and unreal. At 24, she wrote "I am troubled by a sense of being several people (nobody you know). There is an ever more acute difference — and an intolerableness — between my inner self which I know is the real me, and various faces of the outside world." Highsmith was shy and often reticent around people, even going as far as to cross the street to avoid meeting acquaintances. She speculated that it was "the sexual hypocrisy in me, of which I've been aware since about thirteen. I may feel, therefore, that I am never quite myself with others, and hating deceit, constitutionally hating it, avoid its necessity." Many heterosexuals also struggled to conform to the sanitized norms of family and domestic life in the fifties.

Highsmith's sense of deceit in concealing forbidden desires was shared by many living under the repressions of Cold War America. In one entry, she writes, "my personal maladies and malaises are only those of my generation, heightened." From Highsmith’s perspective, "sex in America" was on "a very high, thin, and obvious plane," one which was simply not representative of people’s actual sexual or romantic attachments. Highsmith describes this world as one full of illusions and fantasies, even for those happy to live within white picket fences: "All the world is unreality... Therefore, why do my parents assert that I live unreally? ... Theirs happens to be the dream of the heterosexual world which lives undisturbed, untormented, buying and living in houses with the persons they love, as I cannot."

Highsmith’s unique perspective as a lesbian gave her insight into the hypocrisies of postwar life. In response to her mother's accusation that she "doesn't face the world" in her affairs with women she wrote: "since the world faces reality sideways, sideways is the only way the world can be looked at in true perspective." To look at the world "straight" or from a normative perspective was to miss recognizing the unreality of postwar life.  

In this repressive climate, Highsmith was forced to transpose, as one biographer relates, her "forbidden desires into fiction," a technique she borrowed from Proust. She writes of the woman of her fantasy on the river cruise that "I am left to recreate her in the only way I can, the possession of her by molding her in my hands... as an artist. Oh cold comfort of the artist!"

Much like her notebooks, her fiction also contains stereotypical portrayals of homosexuals, as well as more nuanced examinations of the social pressures placed on gays and lesbians. Although most of Highsmith’s gay characters are criminals, her novels also suggest how this criminality results from restrictions placed on homosexuals. By assuming the queer or "abnormal" perspective of a gay man or a lesbian, Highsmith's novels suggest how violence and criminality can proceed from repressive sexual norms. Repressed emotions, as Highsmith suggests in one notebook entry, can lead to murder: "no one murders who has a satisfactory sexual outlet. This I apparently unconsciously did in Bruno and Kimmel." (Two of Highsmith’s queer characters.) In The Talented Mr. Ripley, Tom Ripley kills the man he has fallen in love with when he realizes that they will never be together as a couple. In Strangers on a Train, Bruno loves Guy "more than a brother," and concocts a murder plot that creates an indissoluble bond between them. Highsmith in fact suggests that murder can be a substitute for forbidden or impossible love.

She writes of falling in love with a female customer while working at Bloomingdale’s, but later finds out — when stalking the woman at her New Jersey mansion — that she is married with children. Highsmith writes at this moment of discovery of the impossibility of her love for the woman that she "felt quite close to murder... murder is a kind of making love, a kind of possessing. (Is it not, too, a way of getting complete and passionate attention, for a moment, from the object of one`s affections?) To arrest her suddenly, my hands up on her throat (which I should really like to kiss) as if I took a photograph, to make her in an instant cool and rigid as a statue." Of course, there are straight criminals too in Highsmith’s fiction, who much like their gay counterparts, suffer from forbidden desires in the fifties, such as fantasizing about leaving their wives or husbands, getting off the corporate ladder, or assuming a double identity to create a new life.

For Highsmith, life in the "middle twentieth is a catalogue of various subterfuges and camouflages, sedatives and intoxicants" that average Americans resort to in order to cope with everyday restrictions and pressures. She notes the "sense of chaos and decadence pervading my age. The greatest achievements in my age in writing will be made by students of chaos. Lines fly off in every direction, and where they cross is no point of sanity or security."

In Highsmith's fiction, symbols of Cold War progress, mobility, and expansion often conceal subversive desires and bonds. On the opening page of Strangers on a Train, a train barrels through the Texan desert, a symbol of postwar economic expansion, and at the same time, the site of a sinister murder pact. Highsmith’s prose in her thrillers is similarly rapid and linear as she depicts chaotic events, unlikely alliances, and homoerotic attachments. By assuming the perspective of the abnormal, the criminal, and the queer, Highsmith penetrates the veneer of Cold America, exposing the desires, fears, and anxieties under the surface.

Kate Hart is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She is a writer living in Montreal.

"Slow Walk" - Hurray for the Riff Raff (mp3)

"Daniella" - Hurray for the Riff Raff (mp3)

"Little Things" - Hurray for the Riff Raff (mp3)

In Which We Meet Up With A Former Student Of Her Aunt

Deserved

by ZORA SANDERS

I first read The Talented Mr. Ripley on holiday in New York. While I was there my aunt arranged for me to meet up with an ex-student of hers who is now some kind of lawyer or investment banker or think tank sitter-on-er. In honour of my visit, the ex-student threw a party for me in her Chelsea apartment. We went up to her roof deck and drank cocktails and looked at the city. Beside me a lawyer asked a playwright what he'd written lately, and the playwright said he wouldn't have heard of it and the lawyer said "Try me" and then they exchanged business cards and we all went to some restaurant so expensive I never even saw a menu.

Would I kill for that life? Would I kill to belong to the young, wealthy elite who can afford apartments in Chelsea and for whom class and money are the exact same thing? Tom Ripley would have, Tom Ripley did. If, like Tom, all that stood between me and that life was one person, and that person was alone, with me, in a leaky boat in the Mediterranean, would I kill for it then? 

Reading The Talented Mr. Ripley in New York, I became increasingly sympathetic to Tom. He murders people, sure, but he doesn't do it for sordid reasons, he does it because of his overwhelming longing for the cultured, leisurely lifestyle of the born-wealthy. Is it fair that Tom, a clever, sensitive, intelligent man must devote his life to menial work when all he desires is the freedom to pursue a cultured life, an intellectual life, a life of the mind?

In the first novel of the series, Tom is trying to escape the dingy lower Manhattan of the 50s, where it was still possible to be genuinely poor. Tom wouldn't recognise lower Manhattan today, nor would his creator Patricia Highsmith. For them, Europe was the place that evoked the longing of class envy, but for us it is New York. The city Highsmith spent her entire life trying to get away from. 

Patricia Highsmith was by most accounts a startlingly strange and difficult woman. She made a particular sport of seducing married women and severing their relationships with their husbands. While working in the Bloomingdale's toy department Highsmith saw and became besotted with an older woman buying a doll. Highsmith got her address from her credit card details and went to the woman's home. She followed the woman several times, but never made contact. She wrote The Price of Salt shortly thereafter, rewriting her own experiences and giving her lesbian protagonist a happy ending. 

She disliked people but liked animals, though not dogs (dogs often die in her stories, cats almost never). She kept snails as pets, and reportedly carried half a lettuce covered in snails around in her handbag. Upon immigrating to Europe, she smuggled her pet snails through customs by tucking them under her breasts.  

Patricia Highsmith's mother Mary achieved a degree of gothic horror that parents just don't seem to aspire to anymore. Mary and Patricia disliked each other intensely, though not dispassionately. Mary attempted to abort Patricia by drinking turpentine, something which, if you're going to do, you probably should not later tell your child. And if you are you going to tell your child, you shouldn't start the conversation with "It's funny you adore the smell of turpentine, Pat" as Highsmith's mother reportedly did.

Not unreasonably perhaps, her stories are full of matricidal children. In "The Terrapin", a tormented boy stabs his mother to death after she boils his pet turtle alive. Much of Highsmith's writing appears in retrospect as a drawn-out cathartic scream. Here she could commit the crimes she dreamed of and get away with them. Highsmith identified very closely with Tom Ripley, going so far as to sign some letters 'Pat/Tom'. Through Tom she got her revenge on the people who irritated her, who prevented her from pursuing the kind of life she wrote for Tom.  

In the opening scene of The Talented Mr. Ripley, jumpy, paranoid, petty criminal Tom Ripley is sent, on the strength of a fleeting acquaintance, to Italy to find Dickie Greenleaf and bring him home. It is Tom's first real encounter with the freedom of wealth. Dickie, son of a nouveau riche shipping magnate, lives in the tiny fishing village of Mongibello (Mongey to those who belong) and spends his days painting (badly), eating (too well), swimming, drinking and carousing with the locals. He is the magnanimous American abroad, smiling down from his humbly furnished house by the sea. 

Once Tom tastes this life, he can't willingly go back to the petty crime and dingy apartments he knew before. Especially as Tom is much cleverer than Dickie, much more appreciative of the European lifestyle with its art and culture and style. Dickie is charming and attractive, and most importantly rich: a gift he wears with the infuriating lightness of all those born into unwitting privilege. If youth is wasted on the young, then wealth is most assuredly wasted on the wealthy.  

Tom murders Dickie Greenleaf, a crime usually characterised as one of passion, motivated by Tom's smouldering repressed desire for Dickie. But isn't as simple as that. Probably the worst thing about Anthony Mingella's film is that it simplifies Tom Ripley's motives into "he's a psychopath because he's secretly gay" which is total bullshit. In the novels Tom's sexuality is ambiguous to the point of non-existence. What Tom really lusts after isn't Dickie, it is Dickie's life, his status, his charm, his callous freedom.  

Tom Ripley is tolerated by Dickie and his girlfriend Marge for a while, and even begins to think he's passing for one of them. But he isn't. Money knows money and you can't talk you way in. But you can kill and steal your way in. Is it too much to say that murdering Dickie is an act of class warfare? Or perhaps just a redress to the universe's great unfairness in granting Dickie the gifts that Tom wants so badly? 

Tom murders Dickie, he obtains his fortune, marries an heiress, buys a country house in France, oversees an elaborate art fraud. When forced by circumstance, he murders, he assassinates, he engineers suicides and drownings. But always with the exasperated sigh rather than the howl of rage. Why, he asks himself, can't these people just leave me alone to enjoy my life? If you think I'm being overly sympathetic, in the last book of the Ripliead, Tom is forced to engineer the deaths of a couple after they leave the headless remains of one of Tom's previous victims in a sack on his doorstep, as a kind of "We know what you did last summer." Such people have it coming.  

It would have been so much easier for Tom to have entered the world wealthy. Can we blame him for trying to rectify this accident of birth? I don't. I envy him his tastefully furnished house in the south of France and his classic tailoring and his leisurely routine of reading, learning, thinking. Tom doesn't deserve this life, but Dickie didn't either. Dickie didn't earn a life of privilege, but Tom is willing to kill for it. Who then deserves it more?

If you are going to kill someone, money seems to me a much better reason than passion. Especially if, like Tom, you then put your victim's money to such careful and considered use. The idea of killing for money is considered tawdry in a way that killing for love is not. But if you've ever had a glimpse of what it's like to be truly wealthy, what it's like to have status, you don't forget that feeling of lustful avarice.

Zora Sanders is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Melbourne and the deputy editor of Meanjin Quarterly. This is her first appearance in these pages.

"White Shadow Waltz" - Okkervil River (mp3)

"Rider" - Okkervil River (mp3)

"We Need A Myth" - Okkervil River (mp3)