~by christopher funderburg~
Patricia Highsmith wrote about crime. In interviews, she would often find herself backed into strange corners, giving quotes about why murder is obviously bad while simultaneously being forced to defend the manner in which her novels suspend judgment on their murderous lead characters. Her books almost invariably maneuver audiences into if not sympathy then narrative identification with the depressive, adulterous, narcissistic and judgmental murderers, forgers and conmen driving her stories.
Does the audience want the irredeemable and not even particularly likable Tom Ripley to get away with murdering Dickie Greenleaf? Regardless of what they want, Highsmith positions the plot as his, belonging to him, from his perspective, located within his interior landscape, moving with him, moving the audience with him.
Why?
“…an imaginative writer is very free-wheeling; he has to forget about his own personal morals, especially if he is writing about criminals. He has to feel anything is possible. But I don’t for this reason understand why an artist should have any criminal tendencies. The artist may simply have an ability to understand… I would much rather be an entertainer than a moralizer, but to call murder not a social problem I think is ridiculous; it certainly is a social problem..."
"I once wrote in a book of mine about suspense writing, that a criminal, at least for a short period of time is free, free to do anything he wishes. Unfortunately it sounded as if I admired that, which I don’t. If somebody kills somebody, they are breaking the law, or else they are in a fit of temper. While I can’t recommend it, it is an awful truth to say that for a moment they are free, yes. And I wrote that in a moment of impatience, I remember distinctly. I get impatient with a certain hidebound morality. Some of the things one hears in church, and certain so-called laws that nobody practices. Nobody can practice them and it is even sick to try…"
"Murder, to me, is a mysterious thing. I feel I do not understand it really. I try to imagine it, of course, but I think it is the worst crime. That is why I write so much about it; I am interested in guilt. I think there is nothing worse than murder, and that there is something mysterious about it, but that isn’t to say that it is desirable for any reason. To me, in fact, it is the opposite of freedom, if one has any conscience at all.”
That quote, taken from a 1981 interview with Armchair Detective, is typical of Highsmith. She begins with a provocative but likely true assertion (a writer “has to forget about his own personal morals”) and ends with a defense of her own moral system (“I think there is nothing worse than a murder… that isn’t to say that it is desirable for any reason.”)
Over the course of the quote I’m left with the distinct sense that she started out saying what she really believed but by the end was constructing a defense against the idea that her work somehow proved she supported immoral behavior. That is, her statement begins with bold and true ideas but fizzles out into weak if not entirely contradictory equivocation. Lurking in the answer is the implication that Highsmith, as an author, must differentiate herself from her characters - how is her mind different from a criminal's? (Criminals who are the product of her imagination - criminals who are an expression of her fantasy life.)
At some point, the question seem to have gotten to her. After 15 years of being asked how she dreamed up such intensely detailed and gripping portraits of dangerous humans, she wrote a novel wrapped up in the idea of "How do I do this? Why do I do this?" With A Suspension of Mercy, she seems to be interrogating herself not only about how convincingly she channels the criminal mind, but simultaneously asking "How is my mind different than a writer’s, a normal writer's?" She sees her own work clearly enough to understand that just as a delusional criminal's mind is abberant, so is her artistic thought process.
The novel is about a professional storyteller who fantasizes all day about murdering his wife until he is given a strange opportunity to live out those fantasies; a writer of crime fiction who lives a lie that consumes him.
A Suspension of Mercy, written in 1965, serves as capstone to the classic era of Highsmith's career. Virtually all of her most well-known, frequently adapted and critically admired novels precede it: Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Deep Water, The Blunderer. Cash-in sequels, iffy experiments, off-model short stories, and expressions of creative exhaustion would follow. With Suspension of Mercy, there’s a sense of her looking back at the crime scene and wondering “what have I done?”
It was originally published in the U.S. (of A.) under the title The Story-Teller and from the start, Highsmith draws as many connections as she can between what she does and what a murderer (a certain kind of murderer) does while keeping the connections oblique and their meaning opaque. The title A Suspension of Mercy conjures the phrase “suspension of disbelief” - Aristotle’s idea about the audience’s willingness to ignore the unreality of fiction in order to better engage with it.
The novel observes Sydney Bartleby, a fiction writer living in provincial England (like Highsmith around the time of Mercy's writing) whose career seems to have stalled out. He harbors not-necessarily-coherent fantasies about murdering his wife that he funnels into his scripts for a mediocre detective TV serial that he can’t manage to sell. But then again all of his inner life, murderous or not, gets funneled into his creative life, especially the three novels (the latest of which remains unsold) that he seems to consider his more serious work.
The name "Bartleby" (naturally) references Herman Melville’s intransigent legal clerk who drifts away from life with a gentle non-refusal of everything that is asked of him: “I would prefer not to.” Isn’t that sentiment lurking in the heart of every writer? Get a job, earn some money, give up your absurd dream: “I would prefer not to.” Isn’t that sentiment lurking in the heart of every criminal? Follow the rules, stay in line, don’t disrupt the moral order. “I would prefer not to.”
Bartleby’s unhappy wife Alicia, fed up with his failures and interested in pursuing an affair, makes a bizarre proposal on a whim after sussing out his murder fantasies: she’ll disappear, right then, right there, for as long as she chooses and he can live in his fantasy of a murdered wife. She storms out and Bartleby acts out the fantasy in strange ways: the day after she leaves, he slips an old rolled-up carpet into his car’s trunk at dawn, drives it to the woods and with great effort buries it four feet deep underground.
Alicia’s disappearance (and refusal to reappear even when it becomes national news) draws the attention of the police who are left with virtually no choice but to suspect Bartleby of murder based on his strange behaviors -such as the fantasy-life that he has recorded in his journals as though it is an authentic diary.
It's never clear that Bartleby wants to murder his wife (that it's an honest desire) or whether it is simply the idle fantasy of someone trapped in an unhappy marriage whose job it is to fantasize idly. Certainly, he never appears to be making his fantasies concrete, to be ushering them into reality - in fact, in the early-going the story suggests another more obvious path, a plot not taken: a fiction writer who uses his creative impulse as a cover for plotting his wife's murder.
The truth of his desire, the ambiguity of his impulse to plot and plan murder, gives the book its eerie, unpredictable quality - as with any of Highsmith's main characters, reader identification and narrative perspective is not a simple matter of sympathy. With Highsmith, there's no map for what impulses (critical, moral) an audience is expected to suspend - a well-trained reader of mystery novels might be particularly lost.
The title could refer to his treatment from the community, law enforcement, his social & professional circles once he is under (reasonable) suspicion - any sense of sympathy or charity for Bartleby from his friends and neighbors quickly curdles. But Highsmith gives the phrase an additional concrete meaning: when Bartleby commits an actual murder towards the end of the book, he tries to fix in his mind how he felt at the moment of the killing: nothing really, just a total absence of compassion. A suspension of mercy.
The two kinds of fiction that Bartleby writes (Serious Novels and pulpy genre work), Highsmith could be mistaken for writing. It’s easy to read her into Bartleby as a protagonist (you’re meant to read her into him, I think most would agree) but the sharpness with which she describes Bartleby’s work creates a clear distinction between her work and his.
When we meet Bartleby, his latest manuscript about a young, two-fisted detective is in the process of being rejected by every studio in England. It’s crime fiction, but pointedly un-Highsmithian. His next idea for a serial, The Whip, (inspired by his murder fantasies) at first sounds more up her alley, but the plots (which we are treated to Highsmith describing) quickly devolve into the kind of contrivance and narrative obviousness that she took pains to eschew. Her novels resist reader expectation to a point that they can be frustrating experiences.
Additionally, Highsmith’s imagined shows sound plausibly entertaining and real - she doesn’t tip the hand in her own favor by making them sound absurd. It’s easy to imagine The Whip in particular making for a genuinely enjoyable hour of television. The point doesn’t seem to be that Bartleby and his ideas are terrible - it’s clear that the distinction she wants to draw between herself and her protagonist is not a matter of talent.
Bartleby’s more serious novels are not described in-depth apart from the recent, seemingly unsellable one, The Planners. Again, the fact that it can’t be sold would be a set-up for many genre writers to humiliate the character for taking his “serious” art seriously - popping the balloon of his delusional self-importance. But The Planners as Highsmith describes it sounds reasonably interesting - again, the distinction that Highsmith draws isn’t a matter of talent; it’s a clear-eyed explanation that she doesn’t write "serious" novels - she writes genre fiction.
Interestingly, Bartleby’s first novel is described as having a traditional plot, his follow-up book a little less so and his lastest unsold novel nothing like what a normal audience would describe as plot. Highsmith’s debut Strangers on a Train starts out with a lot of plot, The Blunderer less so - by the time of Deep Water and This Sweet Sickness they no longer resemble traditional crime stories, so far have they pushed her style into unmarked territory. I suppose you could additionally make a case that her work writing for comic book serials like Black Terror and Fighting Yank recalls the tv serial of Bartleby but peering for evidence of biography in a novel so overtly personal is unnecessary.
But to my thinking, knowing an artist’s biography is always unnecessary because all great art is a kind of autobiography, one far more revealing and valuable than an exploration where an artist grew up, what day-jobs they had, a fact-based but nevertheless speculative picture of what their relationship with their parents was like, the bells that sort of thing are required to sound. You can read Highsmith’s biography in A Suspension of Mercy without knowing a thing about her beyond the fact that she wrote crime novels unlike The Whip that were nevertheless serious novels unlike The Planners.
So what did she write then? No, let’s answer that by going more into what she didn’t write. She didn’t write Agatha Christie-inspired cozy mysteries, that’s an accusation she’ll never have to face. She didn’t do detective fiction, though her books are full of hard-nosed detectives acting on hunches that prove to be true-(ish). She didn’t write salacious button-pushing tales of violence that blurred the line between pornography and crime fiction. She didn’t write cop stories or noir, she didn’t write gangster epics or melodramas disguised as stories about petty thieves victim to an unjust system or killers driven mad with jealousy and desire.
Let’s compare her to a contemporary like Jim Thompson with a similar reputation for exploring psychological darkness, another writer known for leaving readers shaken more than amused (two writers known for being neither entertainers nor moralizers.) And after that, we’ll set her next to an author she spoke of frequently, Georges Simenon, who was known for a similar kind of realism (Simenon being an author whose work required far less suspension of disbelief than other lodestars of Highsmith’s era like Cornell Woolrich, David Goodis or Raymond Chandler.)1 More broadly, the oft-imitated Thompson and Simenon additionally represent types of writers that Highsmith is not.
A crime writer like Jim Thompson wallows, there’s an open sore quality to the psychology of his work. His thoughts play like something to which he’s constantly on the verge of succumbing - there’s a desperate intensity felt from the author as much as the stories he describes; his works are arresting because they feel like they were written by someone who might need to be arrested. There’s an overwhelming misery and depravity that seeps out into Thompson’s work and the novels frequently go too far. They contain sections glaringly at odds with the rest of the story: grotesque, demeaning, desperate, vile scenes and subplots and descriptions and asides.
These sections give Thompson’s work a great deal of its heat (they're unforgettable) but they also play like an artist out of control of what they’re doing. Crime fiction is a genre hospitable to this kind of writer, it encourages writers to wallow in the worst of what’s inside of them - it wants alcoholics to get drunk and slide behind the wheel; it’s a genre fueled by lurid, implacable, dark emotions.
Simenon approaches crime fiction with a detective’s antiseptic eye. It’s tempting to say Simenon observes the world with neutrally, but that’s a mistake - just as it would be a mistake to think that a quiet, thoughtful detective working a case is observing the world with neutrality. Both the detective Simenon are making judgments, working according to a moral philosophy even as they remain reserved and refuse to tip their hand.
Easy to overlook because of his buttoned-up style: Simenon is capable of being poetic while maintaining his antipathy for being florid - the poetry he finds is in incisive details like his famous Inspector Maigret being led down a country path by a butterfly or in the hulking, overworked detective stopping to snooze against a low stone wall on a sunny afternoon in some provincial nowhere.
But he doesn’t overwork these details, he observes them. The fleeting, infrequent quality of his poetry adds just enough to his work to allay falling into all the usual by-the-book traps of detective fiction - like Maigret, he goes by the book because it’s the most effective approach, but the book doesn’t matter to him, not in any meaningful sense. He’s a striking and talented writer but there are other writers like Simenon, just as there are other detectives like Maigret. (Bartleby is trying to sell a younger, hipper version to the TV producers when we meet him.)
Highsmith by contrast does something so rare that her work (like the work of all great writers) constitutes its own genre: the analytical wallow. Every bit of the depravity and misery of Thompson is felt with an equal intensity in Highsmith only she never loses control of it: she maintains the antiseptic eye of Simenon while examining psychological viscera which he would never study directly. Simenon also does not write soft-boiled cozy mysteries by any stretch, which makes the contrast between his work and Highsmith’s all the more illuminating: Highsmith’s work is dark and indigestible even by the stiffer standards of darkness and indigestibility.
One of the key figures in the history of the psychological crime novel, there’s a way in which Highsmith could be understood as the Flaubert of crime fiction:2 psychology as a suspension of moral judgment, the novel as its own moral sphere divorced from the moral framework of reality. Emma Bovary does not exist to be judged as a moral creature but to be understood as a human - Tom Ripley or Sydney Bartleby should be approached the same way. (Highsmith surrounds her Emmas with Rodolphes as well - her pusillanimous and shrill secondary characters are not necessarily treated with the moral generosity extended to her blighted protagonists.)
But the psychological terrain Highsmith explores is far darker, less navigable, than even Flaubert’s. In tracking crime, the criminal mind, there are few moral guideposts to orient the artist - this is why the least interesting genre fiction opts to restore the moral order with the ending of the plot: the morally complicated character receives due comeuppance or the anti-hero redeems himself. Many artists are willing to set a single toe on the black acre but retreat once they get a good look at just how dark the darkness out there truly is. Reading Highsmith is like getting lost in the woods but knowing you are with an expert woodsman who can survive if need be and find her way back to the civilized world whenever she sets out to do so. But at the same time, she pushes deep into territory just as unfamiliar to her as it is to you.
As she takes the reader deeper and deeper into the thicket of Sydney Bartleby’s mind, there is a strange irony: we have a sharp and well-defined sense of the false reality in which the character exists (as a character) while losing site of the falseness of the reality Highsmith has created. A believable story about inventing fictions: her story vividly illustrates the dominance of Bartleby’s fantasy life as the reader forgets that they are reading an entirely invented story. The suspension of disbelief on all point of the compass.
In this way, A Suspension of Mercy wends its plot around one of her consistent themes: the resemblance between truth and fiction (not lies). Her interest is in the creation of a living falsehood. Tom Ripley becoming Dickie Greenleaf, Sydney Bartleby living his murder-fantasy, David Kelsey’s dream home in This Sweet Sickness - these are not simply lies, but lived lies. Lies that take on the appearance of reality: fiction. Lies that consume reality.
One of the great tricks of A Suspension of Mercy is in making Sydney dedicated to telling the factual truth at all times. Rather than make up stories to defend his bizarre behavior, he tells the police, neighbors, friends, anyone who cares to ask the exact truth: yes, his elderly bird-watching neighbor did see him loading a rolled up carpet into his trunk. What did he do with it? He drove it out to the woods and buried it. This is true. Of course telling the truth only increase the suspicion that he has murdered his missing wife.
It’s tempting him to label Bartleby a “pathological truth-teller,” except that he assigns motivations to his actions that may or may not be true. When asked why he did these bizarre things, he constructs answers that the reader can never know for certain if they are honest. Highsmith usually writes in the third person, it's a tactic to keep us just outside of her characters’ mental landscapes. Aside from glimpses here and there, she maintains a distance between the reader and someone like Sydney Bartleby’s interior space.
It’s unclear why Bartleby does what he does. He sticks assiduously to the facts when discussing his actions with the police, but the "why" of his actions are elusive and inchoate. At one point, Bartleby muses that all human belief is not really belief but “a matter of attitude,” a disposition more than a way of thinking; that this is the case for the entirety of human moral systems, right down to the illusions of religion.
Highsmith’s novel circles around the idea that understanding art in a moral sphere is impossible. A suspension of mercy is the essence of murder, then committing the act of writing a novel is its inverse: a suspension of judgment. The difference between Patricia Highsmith and Sydney Bartleby is a matter of attitude. One answer Highsmith seems to find for why and how she does what shes does, why and how she writes, is to create a space free of moral judgment.
But she doesn’t let herself off the hook so easily - she takes just as seriously a contrapuntal idea: What if there’s no coherent answer for why we do the things we do, for why fantasize, for what we fantasize about, for why we write, for what we write about; what if it’s all just a matter of attitude? Patricia Highsmith is a writer unusually willing to look this possibility in the face. Is there any way to justify living in a consuming, hysterical darkness even with a cool, analytic mindset? Facing that the answer might be “no” is the secret to Highsmith’s greatness.