![]() Tietgens, meanwhile – one of the gay men with whom Highsmith attempted what she described as a ‘not quite successful’ sexual relationship – took nude photographs of Highsmith (he saw her as ‘really a boy’), and used her as a model in several striking surrealist photocollages. Courtesy Keith de Lellis Gallery, New York The Far Away Melody (1945), Rolf Tietgens. As the captions in Miranda the Panda is on the Veranda go from ‘A veil on a snail’ to ‘A monk and a skunk and some junk on an elephant’s trunk’, Highsmith’s jaunty drawings rise to the challenge each time, maintaining a poised and decisive line as the subjects grow more and more absurd. In 1958, she even provided the drawings for a children’s book, in collaboration with her lover, Doris Sanders, who came up with the text. Wherever she went, even after her novels and stories had become her life’s work, she turned out landscapes, window views, drawings of her pet cats and snails, and sketches of her friends and lovers of the time. Naturally left-handed but forced by schoolteachers to write with her right, she continued to draw with her left hand. ![]() ‘I was on the fence ’till I was 23 as to whether I wanted to do drawing or painting or writing’, she recalled in 1991. She was divided between pursuing a career in writing or in art for several years. Her mother, biological father and step-father were all commercial artists, and her first job in New York was writing for a comic-book publisher. Throughout Highsmith’s life, she had close ties to the visual arts. In the best of them, Highsmith demonstrates a spontaneous facility for seeing and shaping the truth of an image, which makes her drawings something more than just a sideline to her writing life. The 106 images chosen for Zeichnungen, none of which had been exhibited or published before, are taken from many hundreds, spread between dozens of sketchbooks, that now reside in her archive in Switzerland. As well as putting fictional painters into her novels on a number of occasions, bringing one form of storytelling into another, Highsmith produced drawings, watercolours and gouaches throughout her life. For a novelist who was so dedicated to the careful elaboration of plot, it must have sometimes seemed an enviable position. ![]() (‘Hitler’s bunker’, a friend called it.)īut the painter also has one advantage over the writer, in the immediacy with which their creations can tell a story. Throughout her life she was attracted to making as a way of imposing order on her surroundings, whether it was in her tool-shed or in her contributions to the design of ‘Casa Highsmith’, the almost windowless house in Tegna, Switzerland, that she helped to design for herself. In 1989, unwell and beset by worries, Highsmith reminded herself in her diary to ‘put more variation in my life, such as drawing & carpentering’. Part of the value of making images and objects, then, is that it allows you to become absorbed in another element. For the writer, the art of the painter is something totally other, and wonderful: a picture can be seen and grasped and understood in an instant, whereas it takes much longer with a book or a short story… While Highsmith claims not to take her own art very seriously (‘I enjoy it when I succeed in a picture and if a friend likes it, I say, “If you like, you can have it”’), she also has a keen sense of what writing and drawing shared, and how they differed:ĭrawing, painting, modelling – in my case also making tables or other things out of wood – means that you live in another element for a while. All arts are one, and all art – ballet too – is a means of telling stories. ![]() Why should it be surprising that many writers enjoy drawing or sculpting? Perhaps some of them also have a go at composing here and there. In perhaps the last piece of writing that she ever completed, the foreword published in German in Patricia Highsmith: Zeichnungen (Diogenes), the book of her drawings and paintings that appeared posthumously in 1995, Highsmith argued for the unity of writing and visual art: Less well known, however, is that the final publication Highsmith oversaw was not about murder or secrecy or guilt, but about drawing. The 21st century – when imposture is at the heart of online life, when self-identification precedes authenticity – seems more and more like the age of Tom Ripley, Highsmith’s greatest creation. Since then, while the stock of some of her literary contemporaries has gone down (think of Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, or Norman Mailer), her reputation as a writer of serious artistic and philosophical achievement has increased. ![]() P atricia Highsmith, who was born 100 years ago this month, was already known as a giant of suspense fiction at her death in 1995. ![]()
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