Difficult Lives - Hitching Rides

James Sallis

• Publisher: No Exit Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780857302564
• eBook ISBN: 9780857302571
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

Winner of the 2019 H.R.F. Keating Award for the best biographical or critical book related to crime fiction

Originally published by Gryphon Books in 1993, Difficult Lives was one of the earliest attempts to track the legacy of original paperback writers such as Jim Thompson, David Goodis and Chester Himes. The individual essays on these three first appeared in literary magazines.

Difficult Lives visits a rare moment when daylight was showing around the seams of American society and visions quite in contrast to the sanctioned version drifted to the surface in books one bought off racks in drugstores and bus stations -- stark, bonelike, disturbing books.

We're pleased to make Difficult Lives available again, doubling your pleasure by pairing it with Hitching Rides, an equal volume of new essays on other crime writers including Derek Raymond, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Patricia Highsmith and Shirley Jackson.

Patricia Highsmith (1)

The Selected Stories Of Patricia Highsmith

Essay for the Boston Review (USA), 2001

Reject as we will the romantic portrait, insisting on our status as professionals, self-contained factories, literary hired guns, the fact remains that many writers are by nature outriders, social misanthropes of a sort. Just as a certain personality type seems drawn to surgery, so does another find itself early on telling stories to classmates, jotting ideas and thoughts in notebooks meant to hold classroom notes, surreptitiously dropping those first manuscripts in the postbox. A loner and psychologically apart yet committed to communication, often one struggles with oneself and with readers’ expectations as much as with the material to hand. This seems particularly true of writers who simultaneously court and challenge genre conventions, people like Theodore Sturgeon, Chester Himes, Iain Sinclair, Jonathan Carroll, Jack O’Connell. There’s a gravity forever working to draw down both work and worker. With each new day, each new novel or essay, each new paragraph and page, one must convince oneself that this is worth doing – that what one does, matters. Stubbornness, contrariness, become coin of the realm.

Few more stubborn, contrary or self-assuming writers than Patricia Highsmith. Making no concessions to market forces – perhaps, like other highly individualist, idiosyncratic writers, she found herself unable to do so – she pursued a career unparalleled among contemporaries, baffling readers and critics, many of whom finally threw up their hands. Here in the States, when known at all she was known as a mystery writer. Her books fell from and returned to print in odd cycles, as though editors, recognizing her importance, could not quite leave her alone yet were so disquieted by the work, so intimately troubled by it, that, having extended a hand, in sudden doubt they drew it back.

In Europe, where she spent much of her productive life, and where, as with Gallimard’s La Série Noire, genre writing is more likely to be embraced than scorned, Highsmith became widely recognized as simply a novelist, even though, as with many expatriates, America remained her compelling subject.

American literature, of course, bears a heavy heritage of pulpdom, and for the most part prefers lines between low and high cultures solidly drawn. With Strangers on a Train and subsequent meta-mysteries, Highsmith tapped into genre energies, but she inflamed also bare-rubbed spots of the American soul others had agreed to leave alone. Her art records the bursting of blisters that come up when shoes of seem (the salesman measured and assured you they were perfect) don’t fit the feet that be. She pushed things to the very borders of expectation, civility, civilization and reason – even of humanity. Nothing human is alien to me, a Latin scribe wrote. Much that’s human is alien to Highsmith. And if America’s tale has always best been told by outsiders, by the frontiersmen, Tocquevilles and Thoreaus among us, by artists who ritually by sheer force of will turn themselves into outsiders, then Highsmith made herself, or found within herself, the perfect outsider.

Half a century before the term came into general usage, Highsmith’s work was deeply transgressive, transgressive not only of received wisdom, prescribed behavior and social attitudes, but also of agreed-upon notions of fiction. She makes little concession to supposed axioms of character development, proper motivation, the necessary shape of a story. Narrative lines may diverge sharply on the third or fourth page, or in the second paragraph. Story’s end is likely to find us with recomplication in resolution’s place. Characters act, even kill, arbitrarily and without reason, as in Strangers on a Train, while others for similar lack of reason fail to do the simple, obvious things (such as going to the police or withdrawing) that would save them. One wonders if she may not in fact be something of the ultimate realist. Her characters refuse to fulfill our expectations. They dodge and duck, shimmy, signify, dive and resurface, trailing behind them like an insect’s egg case all the complications, swellings, self-contradictions, paper cuts, codicils, boils, blisters, burdens and sudden turns of our lives.

‘She is a writer who has created a world of her own – a world claustrophobic and irrational,’ Graham Greene noted in his introduction to 1970’s The Snail-Watcher, reprinted here. A world without moral endings, as Greene says, dark, and lit by sudden flares of violent action. ‘Nothing is certain when we have crossed this frontier.’

Nothing indeed. Everything in Patricia Highsmith’s world is fluid, runny, out of reach. Touch it and it breaks up, rolls sluggishly away in pieces, like mercury. The malleability of identity itself proves a constant theme. Tom Ripley, who not altogether coincidentally deals in art forgeries, is the primary example, of course. David Kelsey in This Sweet Sickness creates quite literally a house of lies, a kind of stillborn cocoon in which he swaddles himself. Her characters step between lives, move from fantasy to dailyness and back without so much as wiping their shoes at the threshold. Just as Whitman brought out edition after edition of Leaves of Grass in more or less continuous revision, so does America, this great anthology, continually reinvent itself – and so do American lives.

* * *

Always the shape of the life looms like a beggar in the doorway, or mad cousins shut away in Southern attics, behind the work.

Patricia Highsmith was born January 9, 1921, in Fort Worth, Texas, to Jay Bernard Plangman, of German descent, and Mary Coates, of English-Scots descent. Shortly after her birth, the parents separated and divorced; Patricia was raised by her Texas grandmother until the age of six, at which time she joined her mother and stepfather, both commercial artists, in New York. She did not meet her father until age 12 and apparently felt no connection to him. Following a series of separations, Stanley Highsmith and her mother would eventually divorce, though not until after Patricia had graduated from Barnard College and returned to live with them in their Greenwich Village apartment. She wrote scripts for comic books to support herself, turning to more serious literature evenings and weekends.

A story written while at Barnard, ‘The Heroine,’ was published in Harper’s Bazaar and reprinted in O. Henry Prize Stories of 1946. Then in 1948, with the sponsorship of Truman Capote, she attended Yaddo, where she wrote Strangers on a Train, published in 1950, after six rejections, by Harper and Brothers. Down the hall from Patricia at Yaddo was Chester Himes. Alfred Hitchcock filmed the novel in 1951. Though later reclothed by Czenzi Ormonde, the original script of Strangers was written by Raymond Chandler, who, interestingly enough, in a letter to Hitchcock and in these excerpts from his own working notes remarked the story’s implausibility:

It’s darn near impossible to write, because consider what you have to put over: A perfectly decent young man (Guy) agrees to murder a man he doesn’t know, has never seen, in order to keep a maniac from giving himself away and from tormenting the nice young man… We are flirting with the ludicrous. If it is not written and played exactly right, it will be absurd.

During the Fifties and Sixties, while chiefly based in New York, Highsmith traveled to and lived in Europe, Mexico and the American Southwest. Tacit assertion of independence of thought came with publication, in 1952, of a lesbian novel, The Price of Salt. Brought out under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, Highsmith’s second novel was reissued under her own name only in 1991. In 1963 she moved to Europe for good, first settling in England, then France, finally, for the last thirteen years of her life, Switzerland.

Highsmith never had much that was good to say of her parents. Asked in a 1980 interview why she didn’t love her mother, Highsmith replied, ‘First, because she made my childhood a little hell. Second, because she herself never loved anyone, neither my father, my stepfather, nor me.’ The same interviewer asked her if she, with a reputation as a reclusive, had ever attempted to live with someone. ‘Indeed, but it was catastrophic… So, the pleasures of family life, no, thanks.’

In her work there are few successful couples or families. Far more common is the sort of desperate isolation à deux demonstrated by Vic and Melinda Van Allen in Deep Water. Attractions occur only in tandem, it seems, with repulsion. The stronger character fully subsumes the weaker. Couples seldom reproduce (the Van Allens are an exception), and parents are as absent as children. Highsmith’s characters exist as islands, afloat and apart. Tom Ripley is never happier than when shut away from humankind in his train compartment. Highsmith was herself a recluse, living for much of her life alone in an isolated house near Locarno on the Swiss-Italian border. Tom and Heloise in the later Ripley novels do have a workable marriage, true. And Highsmith’s lesbian novels – the marriage of Therese and Carol in her second novel, The Price of Salt, and the extended family of her last, Small g: A Summer Idyll – offer visions of successful alternatives. But for the most part there is a horror of relationships and, especially, of family.

‘Old Folks at Home’ may be the ultimate horror-of-family story. Looking to be good people and hoping in some vague way to fulfill themselves, its upper-middle-class couple adopts, not a child, but an elderly man and wife formerly ensconced in a nursing facility. Gradually they come to realize they’ve forfeited their lives. In order to work, they’re forced to move to a rented office; soon thereafter their house, everything they own, goes up in fire as a result of the old folks’ smoking in bed. Through it all, though, sinking like stones, they retain their good will. ‘We’ll make it,’ they tell themselves again and again.

When in ‘The Kite,’ a rare story including a child, one parent says to another, ‘As long as he hasn’t been – you know,’ meaning not masturbation, as we’re set up to anticipate, but a visit to his sister’s grave, we learn something of the real family values at work. Illusion, the status quo, the silent agreements, must be maintained at whatever cost. It’s not flying too close to the sun that brings Daedalus down, not heat at all, but the bone-chill of pretense.

Of a long-past era when short stories were thought as urgent in their own way as novels, or at very least proper employment for the imaginative writer, Highsmith published seven collections, beginning with Eleven (1970) and ending with Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes (1987), all but the last, posthumous volume brought out in the UK by William Heinemann. Five of the collections are represented here: The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder (1975), Little Tales of Misogyny (1977), Slowly, Slowly in the Wind (1979), The Black House (1981) and Mermaids on the Golf Course (1985).

Early stories have been likened by Russell Harrison, in what is thus far the only book-length study of Highsmith’s work, to those of Carson McCullers. They are indeed of similar impress. Several collections, such as The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder and Little Tales of Misogyny, congeal about some central conceit. Interestingly, the stories demonstrate far greater variety in subject matter, theme and voice than t...

Table of contents

• Praise for James Sallis
• DIFFICULT LIVES
• Introduction to the New Edition
• Introduction
• Portable Worlds: The Original Paperback Novel
• Jim Thompson: Dime-Store Dostoevski
• David Goodis: Life in Black and White
• Chester Himes: America’s Black Heartland
• HITCHING RIDES
• Grubs & Truffles
• Derek Raymond
• James Lee Burke
• Patricia Highsmith (1)
• Patricia Highsmith (2)
• Paco Taibo
• Jim Thompson
• Chester Himes (1)
• Chester Himes (2)
• George Pelecanos
• Jean-Patrick Manchette (1)
• Jean-Patrick Manchette (2)
• Boris Vian (1)
• Boris Vian (2)
• Gerald Kersh
• Charles Willeford
• Shirley Jackson
• Blurb
• About the author
• SELECTED WORKS BY JAMES SALLIS
• Copyright