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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ADAPTATION
AND VISUAL CULTURE
Patricia Highsmith
on Screen
Edited by Wieland
Schwanebeck and
Douglas McFarland
Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture
Series Editors
Julie Grossman
Le Moyne College
Syracuse, NY, USA
R. Barton Palmer
Clemson University
Clemson, SC, USA
This new series addresses how adaptation functions as a principal mode
of text production in visual culture. What makes the series distinctive is
its focus on visual culture as both targets and sources for adaptations,
and a vision to include media forms beyond film and television such as
videogames, mobile applications, interactive fiction and film, print and
nonprint media, and the avant-garde. As such, the series will contribute
to an expansive understanding of adaptation as a central, but only one,
form of a larger phenomenon within visual culture. Adaptations are texts
that are not singular but complexly multiple, connecting them to other
pervasive plural forms: sequels, series, genres, trilogies, authorial oeuvres,
appropriations, remakes, reboots, cycles and franchises. This series espe-
cially welcomes studies that, in some form, treat the connection between
adaptation and these other forms of multiplicity. We also welcome pro-
posals that focus on aspects of theory that are relevant to the importance
of adaptation as connected to various forms of visual culture.
Advisory Board:
Sarah Cardwell, University of Kent, UK
Deborah Cartmell, De Montfort University, UK
Timothy Corrigan, University of Pennsylvania, US
Lars Ellestrom, Linnaeus University, Sweden
Kamilla Elliott, Lancaster University, UK
Christine Geraghty, University of Glasgow, UK
Helen Hanson, University of Exeter, UK
Linda Hutcheon, University of Toronto, Canada
Glenn Jellenik, University of Central Arkansas, US
Thomas Leitch, University of Delaware, US
Brian McFarlane, Monash University, Australia
Simone Murray, Monash University, Australia
James Naremore, Indiana University, US
Kate Newell, Savannah College of Art and Design, US
Laurence Raw, Baskent University, Turkey
Robert Stam, New York University, US
Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Australia
Imelda Whelehan, University of Tasmania, Australia
Shannon Wells-Lassagne, Universite de Bretagne Sud, France
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14654
Wieland Schwanebeck · Douglas McFarland
Editors
Patricia Highsmith
on Screen
Editors
Wieland Schwanebeck Douglas McFarland
TU Dresden Flagler College
Dresden, Germany St. Augustine, FL, USA
Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture

ISBN 978-3-319-96049-4 ISBN 978-3-319-96050-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96050-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018949622
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
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Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
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Cover image: Warner Bros. Pictures/Photofest

Cover design: Laura de Grasse
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Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without the generous support
of a number of people. This includes, most of all, Julie Grossman and
R. Barton Palmer, and the editorial staff at Palgrave Macmillan, especially
Lina Aboujieb and Ellie Freedman.
Moreover, we are indebted to Frank Apel (Kino in der Fabrik),
Jaimey Fisher (UC Davis), and Annette Reschke (Verlag der Autoren),
and we would like to extend a special thanks to Hossein Amini, Hans W.
Geissendörfer, Phyllis Nagy, and Wim Wenders, who not only generously
agreed to be part of this project but were more than willing to share
their Highsmith enthusiasm with us.
v
Contents
1 Introduction: Patricia Highsmith on Screen 1

Douglas McFarland and Wieland Schwanebeck
2 The Dark Side of Adaptation 21

Thomas Leitch
Part I Doubles, Copies, and Strangers
3 “I Meet a Lot of Guys—But Not Many Like You”:

Strangers and Types in Highsmith’s and Hitchcock’s
Strangers on a Train 43
Bran Nicol
4 Strangers on a Park Bench: From Patricia Highsmith to

Alfred Hitchcock to Woody Allen 61
Klara Stephanie Szlezák
5 Tom Ripley’s Talent 81

Murray Pomerance
6 Ripley Under Ground and Its Illegitimate Heirs 99

Wieland Schwanebeck
vii
viii Contents
Part II Queer Encounters
7 Queer Ripley: Minghella, Highsmith, and the Antisocial 121

David Greven
8 The Price of Salt, Carol, and Queer Narrative Desire(s) 139

Alison L. McKee
9 “Easy Living”: From The Price of Salt (78) to Carol (EP) 159
Robert Miklitsch
Part III Aesthetic, Mythic, and Cultural Transactions
10 Adapting Irony: Claude Chabrol’s The Cry of the Owl 177

Douglas McFarland
11 With Friends Like These: Wim Wenders’ The American

Friend as Noir Allegory 193
Christopher Breu
12 Hans Geissendörfer’s Psychological Noir: West-German

Adaptations of Patricia Highsmith Novels 211
Erin Altman and William Mahan
13 Authorship and Scales of Adaptation in Chillers 225

Kristopher Mecholsky
14 The Two Faces of January: Theseus and the Minotaur 243

Catherine Schultz McFarland
Part IV In Conversation with the Adapters
15 Memories of The American Friend 263

Wim Wenders
Contents ix
16 “Highsmith Really Writes Films” 267

Hans W. Geissendörfer
17 “An Interesting Lack of Sentimentality” 271

Hossein Amini
18 “Highsmith Was the Queen of Guilt” 275

Phyllis Nagy
Works by Patricia Highsmith 281
Filmography 283
Index 289
Notes on Contributors
Erin Altman is a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Davis.

Her area of research is applied linguistics, with emphasis on social, cul-
tural, and stylistic approaches to language instruction through the use of
film. She has recently presented papers on the role of cultural identifica-
tion and worldliness in Franz Kafka’s The Great Wall of China and the
development of the ‘Multilingual Subject’ (Kramsch 2009) in the lan-
guage classroom. Her recent and current projects are located in the areas
of systemic functional linguistics, reflective writing, and identity develop-
ment via multilingual and transnational film.
Christopher Breu is a professor of English at Illinois State University,
where he teaches classes in contemporary literature and culture as well as
critical theory. He is the author of Insistence of the Material: Literature in
the Age of Biopolitics (Minnesota, 2014) and Hard-Boiled Masculinities
(Minnesota, 2005). He is also the co-editor of a recent special issue of
Symplokē on ‘Materialism’ and the forthcoming Noir Affect (Fordham,
2019).
David Greven is a professor of English at the University of South
Carolina in the United States. He publishes in the fields of film stud-
ies and nineteenth-century American literature. His books include
Intimate Violence: Hitchcock, Sex, and Queer Theory (OUP, 2017), Ghost
Faces: Hollywood and Post-Millennial Masculinity (SUNY P, 2016), and
Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature
(Routledge, 2016).
xi
xii Notes on Contributors
Thomas Leitch is a professor of English at the University of Delaware.

His most recent books are Wikipedia U: Knowledge, Authority, and
Liberal Education in the Digital Age (2014) and The Oxford Handbook
of Adaptation Studies (2017). He is currently working on The History of
American Literature on Film.
William Mahan is a Ph.D. candidate in the German Department at the
University of California, Davis. His dissertation research is focused on
humanity’s relationship to ghosts of the past in German and Austrian lit-
erature and film from the turn of the twentieth century to the present
day, considering societal changes in government and ideology as well as
technological progress. He has recently published articles on ghosts and
image economies in Christian Petzold’s films in Senses of Cinema, and on
the tourist gaze in Christoph Ransmayr’s travelogue Atlas eines ängstli-
chen Mannes in The Journal of Austrian Studies.
Catherine Schultz McFarland is retired as Professor of Art History at
Flagler College. She did her undergraduate work at Smith College and
her graduate work at Emory University. Professor McFarland has taught
at the Atlanta College of Art and at Oglethorpe University. She focuses
on semiotics, particularly the iconography of mythology, and has pub-
lished on sixteenth-century Flemish painting. She is currently working
on a book on Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
Douglas McFarland is retired Professor of English and Classical
Studies at Flagler College, Saint Augustine, Florida, where he taught
Renaissance literature, Latin and Greek. He has published on six-
teenth-century English and French literature, as well as numerous arti-
cles and chapters on film. He is the co-editor (with Wesley King) of John
Huston as Adaptor (2017).
Alison L. McKee, Ph.D. is a professor in the Radio-Television Film
program (Department of Film & Theatre) at San José State University
in the United States. She specializes in American film history, theory, and
criticism. McKee earned her B.A. and M.A. in English and Ph.D. in film
and digital media, focusing particularly on classical American cinema.
She is the author of numerous works, including The Woman’s Film of the
1940s: Gender, Narrative, and History (Routledge, 2014) and “‘Think
of Me Fondly’: Voice, Body, Affect, and Performance in Prince/Lloyd
Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera” (in Studies in Musical Theatre 7:3
2014).
Notes on Contributors xiii
Kristopher Mecholsky is a scholar of crime narrative and adaptation

who teaches at Louisiana State University, where he earned his doctor-
ate in 2012. His first book (co-authored with David Madden and pub-
lished in 2011) is a critical overview of James M. Cain. Mecholsky has
published essays on film, crime fiction, and the South with Scarecrow,
McFarland, Salem, and LSU Presses, as well as with South Atlantic
Review, The Baker Street Journal, The Faulkner Journal, and others. He
is presently at work on a book on Burt Reynolds and on a longer project
on race and ethnicity in American gangster cinema.
Robert Miklitsch is a professor in the English Department at Ohio
University. He is the editor of Psycho-Marxism (1998) and Kiss the Blood
Off My Hands (2014) as well as the author of From Hegel to Madonna:
Towards a General Economy of Commodity Fetishism (1998), Roll Over
Adorno: Critical Theory, Popular Culture, Audiovisual Media (2006),
Siren City: Sound and Source Music in Classic American Noir (2011),
and The Red and the Black: American Film Noir in the 1950s (2017). He
has essays forthcoming on Young Man with a Horn, Jailhouse Rock/A
Hard Day’s Night, and the 1950s serial killer film.
Bran Nicol is a professor of English Literature and Head of the School
of Literature and Languages at the University of Surrey, UK. He spe-
cializes in twentieth- and twenty-first century fiction, literary and cul-
tural theory, and crime fiction and film. His books include monographs
on Iris Murdoch and D. M. Thomas, The Private Eye: Detectives in Film
(Reaktion, 2013), The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction
(CUP, 2009), and Stalking (Reaktion, 2006), which has been translated
into Italian, Korean and Japanese. He is the editor of Postmodernism and
the Contemporary Novel (Edinburgh UP, 2002) and co-editor of Crime
Culture (Continuum, 2012).
Murray Pomerance is an independent scholar living in Toronto. He is
the editor of numerous series, and author of many books, including The
Eyes Have It: Cinema and the Reality Effect (2013), Alfred Hitchcock’s
America (2013), and the BFI Classics volumes on Marnie (2014) and
The Man Who Knew Too Much (2016).
Wieland Schwanebeck is a Junior Lecturer in the Institute of English
and American Studies at TU Dresden (Germany). His fields of interest
include impostor characters, Gender and Masculinity Studies, British
Film History, and Adaptation Studies. His most recent publications
xiv Notes on Contributors
include the Metzler Handbook of Masculinity Studies (co-ed. with

Stefan Horlacher and Bettina Jansen, 2016), Reassessing the Hitchcock
Touch (ed., 2017), and a forthcoming monograph on the history of
twinship in English literature.
Klara Stephanie Szlezák is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in
American Studies at the University of Passau, Germany. Previously, she
taught at the universities of Regensburg, Osnabrück, and Augsburg.
She is the author of “Canonized in History”: Literary Tourism and 19th-
Century Writers’ Houses in New England (Winter, 2015) and the co-
editor of Referentiality and the Films of Woody Allen (Palgrave Macmillan,
2015). Her other research interests and areas of expertise, besides film
studies, include U.S. preservation history and museum studies, visual
culture studies, as well as Jewish American history and culture.
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Once You Kiss a Stranger pays homage to Hitchcock’s

Strangers on a Train 11
Fig. 1.2 Hitchcock and Highsmith: Partners in crime 13
Fig. 2.1 Walter is intimidated by Kimmel’s shadow (Le meurtrier) 26
Fig. 2.2 Kimmel drawing his knife in two versions of The Blunderer
(Le meurtrier and A Kind of Murder) 28
Fig. 3.1 Robert Walker as Bruno: The outlaw in Washington
(Strangers on a Train) 57
Fig. 4.1 Murderer and victim, gazes averted, are (supposed)
strangers—A prerequisite for the ‘perfect murder’
(Strangers on a Train and Irrational Man) 71
Fig. 5.1 Ripley’s rage and remorse (The Talented Mr. Ripley) 89
Fig. 6.1 Derwatt takes aim at Ripley (The American Friend) 109
Fig. 6.2 Murchison’s death as a travesty of martyrdom
(Ripley Under Ground) 112
Fig. 6.3 Strangers on an elevator (A Gift for Murder) 114
Fig. 7.1 Ripley’s repressed homosexual voyeurism (The Talented
Mr. Ripley) 131
Fig. 7.2 Freddie Miles’s flamboyance (The Talented Mr. Ripley) 134
Fig. 8.1 The original cover art for The Price of Salt (1952) 144
Fig. 8.2 The cover art for the paperback edition (1953) 147
Fig. 8.3 Divisions between and among characters articulated
through mise-en-scène (Carol) 154
Fig. 9.1 Carol touches Therese for the first time (Carol) 164
Fig. 9.2 The frame narrative of Carol echoes that of Brief Encounter 172
Fig. 10.1 Chabrol’s ‘objective subjectivity’ (Le cri du hibou) 186
xv
xvi List of Figures
Fig. 11.1 Jonathan engulfed by late modernism (The American Friend) 199
Fig. 11.2 Jonathan realizes he has been ‘framed’ (The American Friend) 202
Fig. 12.1 Noir aesthetics: The motif of imprisonment (Ediths Tagebuch) 221
Fig. 13.1 The war painting as an expression of sublimated violence
(Chillers) 239
Fig. 14.1 Colette peering down into the Labyrinth as Chester
approaches out of the darkness (The Two Faces of January) 253
Fig. 14.2 Chester runs through the hellish Labyrinth of Istanbul
(The Two Faces of January) 256
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Patricia Highsmith

on Screen
Douglas McFarland and Wieland Schwanebeck
It’s Murder at the Movies!

Patricia Highsmith’s third novel, The Blunderer (1954), opens with a
fateful flight from the movies. Bookstore owner Melchior Kimmel buys a
ticket for a film called Marked Woman,1 even though he is oblivious to its
sexed-up poster and, for that matter, to the film itself (TB 1).2 Kimmel is
merely looking for an alibi, timing his arrival at the theater so that he will
be seen by people before sneaking out again to go through with his plan
for killing his wife. The two existing adaptations of the novel flesh out
the scene in different ways: Claude Autant-Lara’s Le meurtrier (Enough
Rope, 1963) presents Kimmel’s trip to the cinema as a flashback that may
or may not be imagined by Walter, his antagonist, during his own excur-
sion to a movie-theater, and due to the medium’s lack of introspection,
it remains for the viewer to decide whether Kimmel (whose thick-lensed
D. McFarland (*)
Flagler College, St. Augustine, FL, USA
e-mail: dmcfarland@flagler.edu
W. Schwanebeck
TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany
e-mail: wieland.schwanebeck@tu-dresden.de
© The Author(s) 2018 1

W. Schwanebeck and D. McFarland (eds.), Patricia Highsmith
on Screen, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96050-0_1
2 D. McFARLAND AND W. SCHWANEBECK
glasses suggest that he is unlikely to get much pleasure out of anything

visual) is executing a carefully hatched plan, or whether it is the film that
triggers his murderous rage. Andy Goddard’s A Kind of Murder (2016),
by contrast, runs with Highsmith’s original concept, with Eddie Marsan
playing a far more cold-blooded version of Kimmel, who makes sure the
other patrons notice him entering a screening of BUtterfield 8 (1960).
Still, the nexus between going to the movies and committing murder is
equally present here, an impression that is supported by the credits which
are laid over Kimmel’s entrance into the theater: they inform the viewers
that they are watching “a KILLER FILMS production”.
The scene is an apt emblem of Patricia Highsmith’s own rather ambiva-
lent attitude towards cinema, an institution of which she remained notori-
ously suspicious. Not only was she reported to generally dislike the movies
(including those based on her novels), she remained a firm opponent of
television (Schenkar 2009, 275), though both media provided a regu-
lar source of income for her throughout almost half a century. But there
was not much love lost between Highsmith and the adaptation industry;
it arguably remained a passionless marriage of convenience. If Kimmel (a
bookworm reluctantly drawn from his natural habitat) seeks out the movie
theatre to prepare for the kill, Highsmith occasionally did the same in order
to make a killing, and the two endeavors sometimes conflate in her work.
Howard Ingham, the protagonist in The Tremor of Forgery (1969), is a
novelist who travels to Tunisia to try his hand at a movie script (in spite of
knowing that “film scripts, even television plays, were not his forte”, 4),
but he ends up killing someone with his typewriter—an event that appears
to inconvenience him mainly because the typewriter will need a repair job
(TOF 102). Highsmith may have found the dark humor in writing for
the screen, yet her tempestuous reactions to the films based on her works
strongly suggest that the process of being adapted was rather painful to her.
Highsmith’s books have always served as a popular source for
film adaptations. There has been no decade without at least one new
Highsmith adaptation in the United States as well as in Europe since
Alfred Hitchcock turned her debut novel, Strangers on a Train (1950),
into his classic suspense film of the same name (1951). The list of direc-
tors who have adapted Highsmith includes renowned filmmakers like
Liliana Cavani, Claude Chabrol, Todd Haynes, Anthony Minghella, and
Wim Wenders, which means that studying a cinema based on Highsmith
affords plenty of opportunities to assess the work of particular auteurs and
their methods and approaches. These adaptations provide a cross-section
1 INTRODUCTION: PATRICIA HIGHSMITH ON SCREEN 3
of adaptation strategies that reflect shifts in moral ethos, industry prac-

tices, cinematic movements, gender politics, and different media rep-
resentations. The longevity of Highsmith’s popularity as a source for
adaptation opens up the possibility for dialogue between adapters—for
instance, when Claude Chabrol makes a film of The Cry of the Owl (Le cri
du hibou, 1987), he may be more interested in the Hitchcockian motif
of voyeurism than in adapting Highsmith.3 At the most extreme, this
approach produces ‘indirect’ adaptations of her work which go so far as to
obliterate her signature altogether, no doubt encouraged by Hitchcock’s
characteristic appropriation of source material.
In addition to opening up a dialogue between individual filmmak-
ers (rather than just between Highsmith and her adapters), this book
addresses the different adaptive strategies, the evolution of film noir
(including its themes and aesthetics across different time periods and
filmmaking-traditions), queer identity politics, and the fragility of
genre conventions which are simultaneously enacted and subverted in
Highsmith adaptations. While these films owe a considerable intertextual
debt to influential 1950s auteurs like Hitchcock or Douglas Sirk, they do
not simply follow in their footsteps, and thus cannot simply be catego-
rized as new iterations of well-known genres. What we call a Highsmith
adaptation entails a degree of adaptation in a different sense of the word,
as characters like the highly adaptable Tom Ripley (see Schwanebeck
2013), not to mention Highsmith’s various other murderous con men,
adapt to traditional scripts (of identity, class, gender, and genre) but
expose them to be hollow and out of date. Highsmith films reflect this
state of affairs through various adaptive and aesthetic strategies, and their
glossy, period-drama surface is often deceptive. The way they repeatedly
revolve around the notions of (identity) forgery and criminality (themes
which are addressed in various chapters of this book) suggests that there
is, ultimately, something criminal about the very idea of adaptation to
begin with, as Thomas Leitch emphasizes in his opening chapter.
Highsmith’s thematic focus on adaptation itself (especially in the
generic context of film noir) extends to the notions of crime and illicit
desires, which makes the films resonate significantly with paradigms as
diverse as noir, queer cinema, and melodrama. At their core, Highsmith
adaptations are psychological thrillers in which the façade of respectabil-
ity is always threatened with the eruption of violence and the discovery
of skeletons in the closet, and in their own way, they reiterate the rise
of postwar noir with their stories of everymen who allow themselves to
be corrupted when opportunity knocks. In the process of adaptation,

the postwar political subtexts of Highsmith’s heroes may not exactly
have been obliterated—even Wenders’ dreamlike Highsmith homage
The Million Dollar Hotel (2000) is a portrait gallery of America’s for-
gotten, subaltern subjects of the postwar era—yet they are often buried,
palimpsest-like, underneath layers of postmodern playfulness. By a curi-
ous coincidence, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), the
quintessential story of All-American heroism, casts three actors in the
squadron of upright young soldiers who would subsequently play Tom
Ripley.4 There is a certain logical consistency to this curious constella-
tion, not least because the spectrum of the actors’ roles suggests historical
continuity. The men returning from the war would advance to become
the high achievers of the postwar era, yet watching Matt Damon take off
James Ryan’s uniform and put on Tom Ripley’s (borrowed) Princeton
jacket a year later provokes a nightmarish thought that always resonates
as subtext in contemporary melodrama about phonies: “the possibility that
the idea of the unique American individual was not just hiding beneath
a phony mask, but rather no longer existed at all” (Cheever 2010, 7);
an idea that permeates Mad Men (2007–2015) as much as it does Sloan
Wilson’s Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), published the same year as
the first Ripley novel and an intriguing companion piece to the latter.5
This kind of cultural environment produces a characteristic branch of
film noir in the postwar years, on which Highsmith leaves her own char-
acteristic stamp. In typical noir fashion, her novels firmly reject the idea
that the world is, on the whole, morally intact, or that there is any func-
tional narrative of authenticity or a stable moral framework to be found.
In his compelling reading of noir films centered around paintings, Mark
Osteen suggests that noir ultimately reveals all identities to be forgeries
and to be based on “untenable assumption[s] about originality” (2013,
131), and this idea could well be extended to the equally protean and
ruthless characters who permeate Highsmith’s universe. Though the
enigmatic nature of these characters does not allow for straightforward
identification, it certainly makes for intriguing adaptive challenges. Marc
Rosenberg suggests that it is Highsmith’s use of “psychological uncer-
tainty” which makes her novels so attractive for filmmakers (2017, 48);
a view that is echoed in various testimonies of filmmakers that we have
gathered for the final section of this book. The reception of the films is
in itself complicated by the contradictory persona of Highsmith, who has
only recently found her way into serious academic study.
The Unknown Ms. Highsmith

Unlike other famous eccentrics of her generation—say, Truman Capote
(who wrote Highsmith a reference for the artists’ colony Yaddo in
exchange for a stay in her New York apartment)—Highsmith has not yet
been subjected to a biopic, but this may well be just a matter of time. After
all, fictionalized versions of the author have already featured in texts that
must count as Highsmith adaptations in their own right: there is Joanna
Murray-Smith’s play Switzerland (2014), which belongs to the growing
body of postmodern texts about eminent artists who are challenged to
cat-and-mouse games by aspiring young biographers and fans, as well as
Jill Dawson’s novel The Crime Writer (2016), a psychological thriller very
much indebted to Highsmith’s brand of suspense fiction and a number
of her most characteristic tropes. Such fantasies are inspired by the sheer
amount of Highsmith anecdotes which remain in circulation and which
also permeate much of the scholarship devoted to her work. Up until a few
years ago, Highsmith’s biographers were far more prolific than the crit-
ics who investigated her writings: three comprehensive biographies have
appeared since her death in 1995 (Meaker 2003; Wilson 2003; Schenkar
2009). By alluding to Highsmith’s most famous novelistic creation, the
title of Schenkar’s volume (The Talented Miss Highsmith) indicates that
these books tend to conflate the person with the oeuvre. And indeed, the
key to reading Highsmith’s novels and short stories has frequently been
sought in looking at the circumstances of her life, her reportedly diffi-
cult character, and her controversial politics. Some legitimate interest
in Highsmith’s close affiliation with the LGBT community aside, most
of this kind of criticism tends to get caught up in the author’s legend-
ary, misanthropic character disposition. From the vast number of stories
attributed to Highsmith, who spent the last years of her life as a recluse in
Switzerland, emerges the distorted image of a fundamentally ill-tempered
creative mind, part mysterious cat-lady, part Wicked Witch of the West.
She presents us, therefore, with the case of an author nearly overshad-
owed by her public persona: that of the eccentric who enjoyed provo-
cation. The considerable interest devoted to Highsmith in feminist
circles and in the LGBT community may account for some of this, as
biographical approaches to revising the literary canon are part of their
MO. That these attempts never really took off in Highsmith’s case cer-
tainly has to do with her outspoken refusal to write exemplary, positive
female characters and to fully adapt to literary circles and movements.
In her introduction to one of Highsmith’s most overtly political novels,
Edith’s Diary (1977), Denise Mina rejects the idea that the author pur-
sues a proper feminist agenda, deeming her “an equal-opportunities mis-
anthropist” (2015, n.p.). Not only did Highsmith publish a collection
of short stories provocatively titled Little Tales of Misogyny (1974), her
novels keep returning to the central image of the fatal bond between two
men (Mawer 2004, 55–144), to such an extent that some critics have
accused her of being monothematic (Abel 2007, 115). Homoerotic
desire (though not limited to men) permeates her novels as much as
nihilism, murder, and the figure of the con man.
While Highsmith is far from a complete unknown, she remains a
dark horse, and given the popularity of some of her novels and the fact
that she has long turned into a household name and into a shorthand
for a certain kind of moral fabric which informs her writing (a quality
she shares with canonical authors like Franz Kafka), the relative lack of
in-depth research into Highsmith’s work is somewhat surprising. She left
behind 22 novels and 8 collections of short stories and essays, as well as a
few select pieces in other genres, and though she was without a publisher
at the time of her death in the United States, her work has never really
been out of print. New Highsmith adaptations are produced every few
years, yet at the same time, her popularity amongst some of the most
renowned auteurs of world cinema was not necessarily to her advan-
tage. As an authorial ‘brand’ of her own, Highsmith has only recently
resurfaced properly: her novels are on the academic curriculum, count-
less newspaper features have been written about her, prominent writers
like Joyce Carol Oates (2005) and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk (2006)
have come forward to sing her praises, Highsmith adaptations have
actually been advertised as Highsmith adaptations, and a new genera-
tion of thriller writers has voiced its sheer indebtedness to her. Without
Highsmith, no Before I Go to Sleep (S. J. Watson 2011), no Gone Girl
(Gillian Flynn 2012), no Woman in the Window (A. J. Finn 2018), and
no Tangerine (Christine Mangan 2018).6
Academic criticism has also been catching up. The rediscovery of
Highsmith, which coincides approximately with the release of Minghella’s
adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), has produced a number
of critical works, including several monographs (Harrison 1997; Peters
2011; Schwanebeck 2014), a special issue of the journal Clues (Peters
2015), and numerous scholarly articles that subject Highsmith’s nov-
els to close readings with regard to their queerness, their transatlantic
perspective, their twisted morals, and the deceptive nature of “her flat,
spare simplicity” (Bordwell 2015). That most of these scholarly efforts

only came after Highsmith’s death appears baffling, though the fact that
she spent the biggest part of her writing career in a self-inflicted exile in
Europe certainly played a role. Moreover, it was mainly scholars working
in the field of crime fiction who devoted attention to Highsmith, which
was not necessarily to her advantage: her books do not follow the tradi-
tional patterns of detection, and reading them as crime novels in the tra-
ditional sense of the word must necessarily lead to disappointment. Amy
Sargeant’s history of British cinema even lists her as an icon of British
crime fiction (2005, viii), maybe because it seems so obvious to associ-
ate her with the ‘Queens of Crime’ like Agatha Christie or Dorothy L.
Sayers—not that she has much in common with either of them. Her work
puts much more emphasis on the nature of crime and its repercussions,
as well as the moral dilemmas and the psychological disposition of her
murderers. Her novels are about crime, but she is neither interested in
the character of the detective nor in a successful resolution of the mys-
tery in the classical sense. Highsmith’s murderers often go unpunished,
the crime remains unresolved, and her books conclude with nihilistic glee
“that life is little more than an absurdity and a cheat, when not a down-
right horror” (Dirda 2009). Where the crime genre “presents a world in
which crime is identifiable, soluble and explicable”, Highsmith facilitates a
“fastidious dismantling of the conventional categories of guilt and justice”
(Bell 1990, 1–2). This is why John Malkovich’s version of Tom Ripley (in
Cavani’s adaptation of Ripley’s Game, 2002) can confidently assert that
“no one is watching”, for even when the law is watching (as in the final
shot of Hans W. Geissendörfer’s adaptation of The Glass Cell [1978]), it is
incapable of making a difference.7 The only ones who can be relied on to
watch are we, the viewers, whom Highsmith turns into accomplices.
Clearly, there is no comfort zone to which we can return—characters
like Tom Ripley not only illustrate Hannah Arendt’s famous observation
on “the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil” (2006,
252), but they expand it dialectically. Evil happens against the backdrop
of the mundane, and “the switch from bourgeois order to grotesque vio-
lence is always a possibility in her novels” (Knight 2004, 147). This creates
suspense of a kind, though it is a far cry from what is usually understood
by the term in discussions of Hitchcockian cinema. Highsmith’s own man-
ifesto on the topic, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1983), takes its
cue from literary rather than cinematic ancestors like Fyodor Dostoevsky
and Henry James and defines the suspense story as “one in which the
possibility of violent action, even death, is close all the time” (PWSF xi).
The suspense inherent in her fiction occurs on the level of individual psy-
chology and should not be confused for classic cinematic suspense, which
is frequently based on the audience’s privileged authorial viewpoint and
thus on discrepant awareness (see Smith 2000, 18–22). Even though
Highsmith’s use of the term bears little resemblance to Hitchcock’s apo-
dictic ‘bomb under the table’ wisdom, her association with the director
remains integral to her status in cultural memory and has informed her
adaptation history.
Haunted by Hitchcock
Having her debut novel adapted by Alfred Hitchcock was either the
best or the worst thing that could have happened to Highsmith. From
a purely commercial standpoint, the gamble paid off, certainly for
Hitchcock: following the critical and commercial disappointments of
Under Capricorn (1949) and Stage Fright (1950), Strangers on a Train
heralded his most well-received decade as a filmmaker, and is widely con-
sidered one of his definitive masterpieces. Inevitably, the success proved
a double-edged sword for Highsmith. As a young novelist, she certainly
could use the money that Hitchcock paid for the rights, yet Strangers on
a Train proved no exception from Hitchcock’s general rule of diminish-
ing the contribution of the authors. In his conversation with Truffaut,
he simply refers to Strangers as “a novel I selected myself” (1984, 193),
and while much space is dedicated to the difficult collaboration with
Raymond Chandler,8 he does not go into detail regarding the merits
of the book or its author. Highsmith certainly “cannot have been mol-
lified when Hitchcock told her, on meeting her years later, that ‘really
she should pay him to make the film, it would mean so much to her
in terms of later reputation and sales’” (Leitch 2008, 65). Her inevita-
bly complicated relationship with the Hitchcock brand may have inspired
our choice when it came to picking the cover for this book: it is from
Strangers on a Train and shows Hitchcock’s own daughter, Patricia (!),
in one of her few film appearances, observing Bruno’s mock strangula-
tion of Mrs. Cunningham with mixed feelings. Following this demon-
stration of Hitchcockian black humor turned serious, the film’s very own
Patricia H. says, “I thought he was murdering me.”
More than 80% of all Hitchcock films are based on literary sources,
but in the public perception, they simply do not exist as adaptations:
Psycho (1960) is remembered as an Alfred Hitchcock picture, not as a
film based on a Robert Bloch novel.9 However, the 1950s in particular
demonstrate how the Hitchcock factory was in constant demand of new
stories. Hitchcock not only put out one or two films as a director each
year, his new forays into television required a constant influx of material
which had to correspond to what was by then more or less established as
the Hitchcock brand: suspenseful stories about murder, preferably with
a macabre twist. Strangers on a Train put Highsmith on the map and,
according to her own 1989 afterword to The Price of Salt (POS 310),
pigeonholed her as a ‘suspense novelist’, which also meant that she now
qualified for this pantheon of prolific writers. Following the release of
Strangers, Hitchcock approached her to ask for new material, and while
Joan Schenkar notes that these talks “came to nothing” (2009, 320),
Highsmith was not completely off the radar in the Hitchcock universe.
Her novel This Sweet Sickness (1960) was adapted into Annabel, a 1962
episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and yet another example of how
the Hitchcock brand absorbs Highsmith.
Not only was the script for Annabel written by Robert Bloch (another
writer who both benefitted and suffered from his association with
Hitchcock),10 the episode also had John L. Russell, Psycho’s director of
photography, on camera. In addition, Dean Stockwell’s performance as
David Kelsey evokes memories of the characteristic blend of charismatic
handsomeness and nervous tics that Anthony Perkins brought to the role
of Norman Bates—Perkins would later host Chillers (1990), an anthol-
ogy show based on Highsmith’s short stories. Given these credentials,
it is not so surprising that Annabel never really subscribes to the slow
and gradual descent into madness that is at the heart of Highsmith’s
novel, and rather goes for an ending that clearly aims to emulate the cli-
max of Psycho: David leads his colleague Linda into the bedroom to meet
Annabel (whom he has strangulated in the scene before), and Linda’s
reaction on seeing the corpse (whom David, in his madness, believes to
be alive) echoes the moment when Lila Crane finds the mummified body
of Mrs. Bates in her rocking chair. The last cut of the episode hints at
David’s necrophilic urges, and his final line (“From now on, we’re gonna
be together.”) makes Annabel resonate even more with Norman Bates’s
complete fusion with the identity of ‘Mother’. The Gothic overtones of

the material are further emphasized by a subtle change in spelling: This
Sweet Sickness’s Annabelle becomes Annabel, who now carries echoes of
Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee (1849), the quintessential embodiment
of love beyond the grave (Perry and Sederholm 2014, 255).
Highsmith may have found herself overwhelmed by the sheer force
of Hitchcock’s signature, yet it was on the strength of Strangers on a
Train that she continued to receive commissions for TV work through-
out the 1950s, contributing to various anthology shows in the one or
other form. Producers would scout publications like Ellery Queen’s
Mystery Magazine for suitably macabre short stories and then acquire the
rights in order to fill the program slots. During the 1950s, Highsmith
wrote for magazines like Black Mask, though she later dismissed these
efforts (Schenkar 2009, 160), and the turnover was often quite fast: a
1957 issue of Ellery Queen’s included her story The Perfect Alibi, and its
adaptation (penned by future Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry) was
produced the same year for The Fireside Theatre.11
Roddenberry is not the only prominent name amongst the impres-
sive list of personnel with which Highsmith’s career intersected during
these years. John Frankenheimer directed a Highsmith adaptation for
a 1956 episode of Climax!,12 and the same year saw future Academy
Award winner Franklin J. Schaffner direct a one-hour version of The
Talented Mr. Ripley for Studio One, though neither of these exist on
DVD or could be located by us in any archive.13 It remains a woe-
fully unexplored chapter in Highsmith’s career, unlike her gradual rise
to prominence in Europe. In France, for instance, the association with
Hitchcock certainly helped her gain some popularity amongst intellec-
tual circles, particularly amongst the Hitchcock-adoring Nouvelle Vague
filmmakers who were just beginning to graduate from writing criticism
towards making films. While Highsmith’s stories were still featured on
American anthology shows, French directors prepared their big-screen
adaptations of Highsmith, with René Clément’s Plein soleil (Purple
Noon, 1960) being the most prominent effort. Claude Chabrol’s hijack-
ing of the same material for his own version of Ripley, Les biches (The
Does, 1968), must have given Highsmith some idea that their ethos as
adapters was not greatly above that of Hitchcock,14 who had made sure
that Strangers on a Train effectively ceased to be Highsmith’s prop-
erty, as was typical of his adaptive policy: “The resulting film would
subsume the literary original as an artistic and cultural document to
the point that Hitchcock became virtual owner of the work and title.”
(Raubicheck and Srebnick 2011, 25) Tellingly, various subsequent ver-
sions of the ‘traded murders’ plot were marketed not as Highsmith
adaptations but as Hitchcock remakes or homages, with Warner
Brothers making the most of the property and producing several new
versions of Strangers on television and on the big screen. Once You Kiss
a Stranger (1969) may timidly announce in the credits that it was “sug-
gested by a novel by Patricia Highsmith”, but the film has Hitchcock
rather than Highsmith written all over it. Not only does it follow
Hitchcock in making a professional sportsman out of Highsmith’s archi-
tect, it also adopts the previous film’s sanitized happy ending, reunit-
ing the protagonist with his wife and having the Bruno character (here
recast as a woman named Diana) arrested by the police. Once You Kiss
a Stranger’s climactic ‘chased by a dune buggy’ scene (which has no
equivalent in Highsmith) evokes memories of the cropduster sequence
in North by Northwest (1959),15 and Diana’s sadistic harpooning of a
little girl’s beach ball in the very first scene immediately makes it clear
that the film is tipping its hat to Hitchcock (Fig. 1.1). The scene
Fig. 1.1 Once You Kiss a Stranger pays homage to Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train
alludes to the moment in Strangers when Robert Walker bursts a kid’s

balloon with his burning cigarette, and the gender reversal as much
as the change of scenery (from nighttime fairground to the beach in
broad daylight) not only update and somehow revise Highsmith’s (and
Hitchcock’s) story, they also signal a transition from film noir towards a
new type of aesthetics.16
While the focus of this book is, understandably, not exclusively on the
Highsmith/Hitchcock connection, both make for intriguing bed-fel-
lows: the American stranded in Europe and the expatriate Brit who
successfully adapted to the American studio system; two strong person-
alities frequently at odds with potential collaborators. For every author
or screenwriter written out of history by Hitchcock’s authorial signa-
ture, there is a Highsmith putdown leveled at one of the directors who
allegedly ‘mingled’ with her work: there are wildly contrasting accounts
of her reactions towards Wim Wenders’ Der amerikanische Freund
(The American Friend, 1977),17 she is said to have dismissed Dites-lui
que je l’aime (1977), Claude Miller’s adaptation of This Sweet Sickness
(1960), as “kinda crappy” (Wilson 2003, 363), and she rarely held back
when she felt that directors had dressed up her work “in sentimental-
ism and moralism” (Arn 2015). Viewed from this angle, Strangers on a
Train might be a more meta-reflexive story than it has been given credit
for. If detecting, the key operation at work in crime fiction, is akin to
the process of writing and interpreting, as has often been claimed (see
Hühn 1987), then maybe the two strangers who lend each other a hand
in order to commit the perfect murder are, ultimately, ciphers for the
adapter and the one whose work is adapted: one is instrumental to the
work of the other, and the crime cannot be pinned exclusively on either
one of them.
Both Highsmith and Hitchcock were known to toy with the role of
the criminal. In one of the iconic prologues filmed for Alfred Hitchcock
Presents (1955–1965), Hitchcock appears as the sole suspect in a
police line-up, having been arrested on Suspicion, as well as for being
Notorious and a Man Who Knew Too Much: “I’m sorry, sir”, a shamefaced
Hitchcock asserts, “but my family was hungry.” Though Highsmith is
usually not associated with PR stunts of this kind, a 1974 interview for
Swiss television sees her reduplicate the skit and be ‘arrested’ for the
Fig. 1.2 Hitchcock and Highsmith: Partners in crime
crimes committed in her novels (Fig. 1.2), and while Hitchcock acts the
part of the repentant criminal (as is evidenced by his facial expression),
Highsmith retains a smirk that signals to the viewer that she is proud of
her ‘crimes’, after all.18 Her most Hitchcockian endeavor of that v ariety
must surely be A Gift for Murder (1982), a playful Ripley adaptation
produced for British television in which she and her creation exist on the
same plane.
Thus, Highsmith has arguably flirted with these Hitchcockian associa-
tions, with the result that popular culture continues to view her through
the prism of Hitchcock.19 A number of Highsmith films are sold with
the respective stamps of approval on their covers: the DVD of Hossein
Amini’s The Two Faces of January (2014) comes with a quote that prom-
ises “the shivery, sexy suspense of a Hitchcock Thriller”, while the quote
chosen to garnish the DVD of A Kind of Murder goes so far as to pro-
claim that “Hitchcock would be proud”, which suggests that Hitchcock
must be thought of as a kind of father figure to a cinema based on
Highsmith. While her history with Hitchcock cannot be easily dismissed
(indeed, a number of chapters in this book will examine it more closely),
Highsmith’s adaptation history cannot be reduced to the Hitchcock
bond, and the sheer variety of topics and critical approaches gathered in
this volume reflects this.
Structure of This Volume

Patricia Highsmith on Screen provides, in a single volume, essays
devoted to films based on Highsmith’s work, as well as interviews with
Highsmith adapters. The four sections into which individual chapters
have been arranged are preceded by Tom Leitch’s programmatic chapter
on the notion of adaptation as a criminal endeavor. Leitch examines The
Blunderer and its two film versions as a study in the unlicensed, immoral
behavior of maladaptation that is indicative of the forgery and hyper-
adaptability that permeates Highsmith’s novels.
The first section of the book (Doubles, Copies, and Strangers) assesses
the dualisms inherent in her work, and features several essays surround-
ing Highsmith’s complex relationship with Hitchcock and the long
adaptive history of Strangers on a Train. The section also includes two
chapters on Highsmith’s most adaptable and enduring creation, the
murderous con man Tom Ripley, who has enjoyed an incredibly diverse
adaptation history. Ripley is equally present, of course, in the follow-
ing section (Queer Encounters), which is dedicated to queer cinema.
Highsmith adaptations enjoy a very fruitful relationship with the latter,
particularly since Minghella’s Talented Mr. Ripley and Haynes’s criti-
cally acclaimed Carol (2015), both of which are examined in detail here
with regard to their singular status as queer narratives at the intersec-
tion of independent filmmaking and mainstream cinema. The third and
most comprehensive section of the book (Aesthetic, Mythic and Cultural
Transactions) offers comparative and transatlantic perspectives on adapta-
tion. It addresses the mythological intertexts that feed into films like The
Two Faces of January, but also the distinct European brand of noir that
various filmmakers developed on the basis of Highsmith’s novels, par-
ticularly in the 1970s and 1980s. This was the period that saw European
auteurs with transatlantic ambitions (including Claude Chabrol and
Wim Wenders) turn to Highsmith, a constellation that produced some
of these filmmakers’ finest and most successful films, but also the one
or other ‘Europudding’ like the Anglo-French anthology series Chillers,
a seldom-discussed Highsmith adaptation that is analyzed in this sec-
tion of the collection.20 The book concludes with conversations with
Highsmith adapters, who recall their experiences in adapting the novels
of Highsmith and/or knowing her in person: Wim Wenders (who looks
back on the shoot of The American Friend), Hans W. Geissendörfer
(who directed adaptations of The Glass Cell and Edith’s Diary), Hossein
Amini (who talks about his lifelong dream of making a film of The Two
Faces of January), and Phyllis Nagy (who brought The Talented Mr.
Ripley to the stage and who later adapted The Price of Salt into Carol).
The filmography includes a comprehensive list of every existing
Highsmith adaptation, and while this list must inevitably become out-
of-date as soon as a new Highsmith adaptation materializes—a film ver-
sion of A Suspension of Mercy (1965) is reportedly in the works, as is a
TV series based on all five of the Ripley novels, written by Luther creator
Neil Cross21—it is our firm hope that Patricia Highsmith on Screen will
encourage readers to (re-)visit the world of Highsmith, draw attention to
some of the lesser-known aspects of her work, and inspire more research
on her oeuvre and the films that continue to emerge from it.
Notes
1. There is a 1937 film of that title starring Bette Davis and Humphrey
Bogart, but maybe Highsmith took inspiration from 1953’s Wicked
Woman, a minor noir about a femme fatale who (according to the poster
tagline) is “nothing but trouble”, a predicament that The Blunderer’s
male protagonists might be able to relate to.
2. Throughout this book, all of Patricia Highsmith’s novels will be referenced
by an abbreviated form of the title in parentheses. The novels are not part
of the ‘works cited’ lists of the individual chapters, but the bibliographical
appendix contains an overview of all the editions that were used.
3. Chabrol’s own assessment of Strangers on a Train as a critic illustrates
his conviction that Hitchcock’s literary sources were greatly improved
through the adaptation. In his and Rohmer’s classic study, the chapter
on Strangers on a Train begins with an appraisal of Hitchcock’s knack of
“purifying and enriching” his sources (1979, 106).
4. Matt Damon plays the lead in Minghella’s adaptation of the first Ripley
novel, Barry Pepper plays him in the only ‘official’ adaptation of Ripley
Under Ground, and Jeremy Davies is Tom-Tom in The Million Dollar
Hotel, a pastiche of Highsmith influences.
5. Ripley shares a first name and initials with Wilson’s protagonist, Tom
Rath, and the proverbial ‘gray flannel suit’ is a prop repeatedly referenced
in Highsmith’s novels, one that Ripley puts on as matter-of-factly as his
“innocent-looking American smile” (RG 127) whenever he wants to
emphasize his American roots. Don Draper, Tom Rath and Tom Ripley
all use unbridled consumption as a means of combatting their inner hor-
ror vacui; the more Ripley withdraws into marble villas with servants, the
greater his self-confidence.
6. Flynn, the author of Gone Girl, was hired in 2015 to draft a new screenplay
based on Strangers on a Train for director David Fincher (see Kreps 2015),
but the film has yet to materialize. Mangan’s Tangerine has been advertised
as a female spin on The Talented Mr. Ripley (see Patrick 2018), while Finn
has spoken about his “obsession” with Highsmith (Adams 2018).
7. In those rare cases where investigators feature prominently in her novels,
they are no reliable, upright men of the law, but sadists like Lieutenant
Corby (The Blunderer), who enjoys pitting his suspects against each
other. See Peters (2014) for a more comprehensive discussion of
Highsmith’s allegedly amoral universe and the role of the law.
8. For more details on the screenwriting process of Strangers on a Train and
Chandler’s discarded script, see Krohn (2003, 114–116).
9. Hitchcock usually received no credit as a screenwriter on his films
but made vast contributions to the script. Mark Osteen suggests that
Hitchcock “exercised authorship by adapting to what had already been
written” (2014, xxix).
10. Bloch wrote several episodes for Alfred Hitchcock Presents and remained
a prolific author until his death in 1994. Yet Psycho dominates his leg-
acy, and Hitchcock’s signature has effectively supplanted Bloch’s on
this property. The author’s own sequels to his novel, Psycho II (1982)
and Psycho House (1990), were not adapted for the big screen, with the
movie sequels bearing the imprint of Hitchcock’s collaborators: Anthony
Perkins directed Psycho III (1986), and Joseph Stefano (Hitchcock’s
screenwriter) returned to write Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990).
11. The Cellar, produced for the BBC’s Wednesday Thriller in 1965, is a rar-
ity insofar as Highsmith wrote the script herself. The novel Ripley Under
Ground (1970) would later emerge from another, unfilmed teleplay
(Wilson 2003, 263). The Swiss Literary Archives in Bern offer an itemized
list of all her TV and radio scripts (“Patricia Highsmith Papers,” n.d.).
12. In this example, the exact nature of Highsmith’s contribution remains a
mystery, even for Highsmith biographers. A more nuanced discussion of
the problem is offered in Nevins (2011).
13. The first adaptation of Ripley (which was written by Highsmith’s friend
Marc Brandel) has never seen a commercial release on any of the Studio
One DVD compilations, and it could not be located at the Paley Center
for Media, which owns a big collection of Studio One episodes. We are
grateful for any hint where to find a copy of this film.
14. In other parts of the world, unacknowledged adapting and remaking has
led to Highsmith getting written out of the story altogether: Miss Ripley
(2011), the South Korean TV drama about a young woman whose lies
and manipulations gradually catch up with her, may just pass for an inter-
textual homage, but the various South Asian adaptations of Strangers on a
Train certainly do not: the list includes Soch (2002), Chalo Ishq Ladaaye
(2002), Strangers (2007), Visakha Express (2008), and Muran (2011).
We are indebted to Stefan Borsos, who drew our attention to these films.
15. First, there came One False Step, a 1958 episode of 77 Sunset Strip, and
nearly four decades later, Tommy Lee Wallace’s Once You Meet a Stranger
(1996), the teleplay for which is co-credited to Hitchcock’s writers. The
same plot was milked for the 1994 TV movie Accidental Meeting, which,
like Once You Meet a Stranger, casts two women in the main roles. For
a brief assessment of these remakes, see Miller (2017, 101–102). One
could also extend the list of ‘homages’ to include Danny DeVito’s Throw
Momma from the Train (1987), in which the portrayal of the ‘old hag’
echoes Highsmith’s legendary misanthropy, or Woody Allen’s Irrational
Man (2015), in which Hitchcock’s adaptation of Strangers insinuates
itself into a matrix of other influences. The film is analyzed in more detail
in Klara Stephanie Szlezák’s chapter.
16. The film does not invent the scene from scratch, though. In Highsmith’s
novel, Bruno buys a balloon that makes him “feel like a kid again”, and
he contemplates giving it to a boy but ultimately does not (SOT 68).
17. According to Schenkar, Highsmith told friends how much she disliked the
film while remaining polite to the director (2009, 584); other accounts
state that she even sent the director an appreciative letter that he proudly
framed above his desk (Wilson 2003, 361).
18. The Hitchcock episode in question is Number Twenty-Two (1957),
and the Highsmith interview can be located on YouTube (“Patricia
Highsmith Interview auf Deutsch” 2016).
19. In Silver Screen Fiend, Patton Oswalt’s autobiographical account of his
lifelong infatuation with the movies, the author dreams up a long list of
non-existent films “to play in a netherworld movie palace” (Oswalt 2015,
170), and he includes an adaptation of the fourth Ripley novel directed
by Hitchcock.
20. A transatlantic perspective on the Ripley novels and Liliana Cavani’s adap-
tation of Ripley’s Game is offered in Schwanebeck, forthcoming.
21. Cross’s new take on Ripley was announced in 2016, but the series has yet
to materialize (see Littleton 2016). Luther (2010-), Cross’s successful
crime show, does already contain a character named Ripley—ironically, he
is the hero’s most loyal colleague and the moral centre of the show.
Works Cited
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woman-in-the-window-debut-interview.
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. 1963.
London: Penguin, 2006.
Arn, Jackson. “Adaptation: Patricia Highsmith.” Film Comment, 25
November 2015. 20 March 2018. https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/
adaptation-patricia-highsmith/.
Bell, Ian A. “Irony and Justice in Patricia Highsmith.” Watching the Detectives:
Essays on Crime Fiction. Eds. Ian Bell and Graham Daldry. Houndmills and
London: Macmillan, 1990, 1–17.
Bordwell, David. “Deadlier Than the Male (Novelist).” David Bordwell’s Website
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well.net/blog/2015/11/12/deadlier-than-the-male-novelist/.
Cheever, Abigail. Real Phonies: Cultures of Authenticity in Post-World War II
America. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2010.
Dirda, Michael. “This Woman Is Dangerous.” The New York Review
of Books, 2 July 2009. 20 March 2018. http://www.nybooks.com/
articles/2009/07/02/this-woman-is-dangerous/.
Harrison, Russell. Patricia Highsmith. New York: Twayne, 1997.
Hühn, Peter. “The Detective as Reader: Narrativity and Reading Concepts in
Detective Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies 33.3 (1987): 451–466.
Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction, 1800–2000: Detection, Death, Diversity.
Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Kreps, Daniel. “Ben Affleck and David Fincher Sign on to Remake Hitchcock’s
Strangers.” Rolling Stone, 14 January 2015. 20 March 2018. https://
www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/ben-affleck-david-fincher-remake-
hitchcock-strangers-train-20150114.
Krohn, Bill. Hitchcock at Work. London: Phaidon, 2003.
Leitch, Thomas. “Hitchcock and His Writers: Authorship and Authority in
Adaptation.” Authorship in Film Adaptation. Ed. Jack Boozer. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2008, 63–84.
Littleton, Cynthia. “Luther Creator Neil Cross to Pen The Talented Mr. Ripley
TV Adaptation.” Variety, 26 March 2016. 20 March 2018. http://variety.
com/2016/tv/news/neil-cross-luther-the-talented-mr-ripley-1201738375/.
Mawer, Noel Dorman. A Critical Study of the Fiction of Patricia Highsmith: From
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Jefferson: McFarland, 2017.
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Virago, 2015, n.p.
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2011. 14 March 2018. http://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=7013.
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The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.
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London: Bloomsbury, 2003.
CHAPTER 2
The Dark Side of Adaptation
Thomas Leitch
Apart from The Price of Salt (1952), published under the pseudonym
Claire Morgan—and that is a big exception, one to which I will return
toward the end of this essay—The Blunderer, which first appeared in
1954, is Patricia Highsmith’s second novel. Kathleen Gregory Klein has
called The Blunderer “masterful” (1985, 177); Julian Symons included
it in his Sunday Times list of the 100 best mystery novels; and it is one
of four novels reprinted in the Library of America’s volume on crime
fiction written by women during the 1950s. On the whole, however,
The Blunderer has attracted little attention. In the popular reception of
Highsmith, it is overshadowed by Strangers on a Train (1950) and The
Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), the novels that bookend it. Russell Harrison
and Fiona Peters, in their monographs on Highsmith, offer close read-
ings of several representative novels, but neither devotes more than pass-
ing attention to The Blunderer. Noel Dorman Mawer, whose 20-page
chapter on The Blunderer constitutes the novel’s most extended critical
analysis to date, treats it mainly as a further development of the dop-
pelganger theme of her first novel that “mov[es] simultaneously in the
directions of both social criticism and cultural/perceptual relativism”,
T. Leitch (*)
University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA
e-mail: tleitch@udel.edu
© The Author(s) 2018 21

W. Schwanebeck and D. McFarland (eds.), Patricia Highsmith
on Screen, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96050-0_2
22 T. LEITCH
a pattern that “continues in […] The Talented Mr. Ripley” (2004, 114
and 118). Claude Autant-Lara adapted The Blunderer to the screen as
Le meurtrier (Enough Rope) in 1963, and Andy Goddard’s American
remake, A Kind of Murder, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival
in 2016. Neither these adaptations nor the critical commentaries on
Highsmith’s novel, however, take the full measure of the radical model
the novel itself offers for adaptation: copycat crime.
It is surely perverse to think of adaptation as a copycat crime that
seeks to hide its agency under the cloak of the original criminal’s agency.
Even the most cynical authors and commentators who jokingly call adap-
tation a crime presumably do not think of authorship itself as a crime but
as an act of creation, a positive rather than a negative act. Nor does The
Blunderer loom large enough in the popular estimate of Highsmith to
provide a compelling model for adaptation or anything else. This essay
will approach the first of these objections indirectly through the second,
establishing the importance of The Blunderer to Highsmith’s oeuvre in
order to argue the case for considering both adaptation and putatively
non-adaptive creation as criminal actions.
Perils of the Copycat

The Blunderer begins as Newark bookseller Melchior Kimmel, enraged
at his wife Helen’s adultery, establishes an alibi at a local movie theater,
follows a bus carrying her out of town to a rest stop, lures her away from
the bus when she alights, and kills her. The case is still open when Long
Island attorney Walter Stackhouse clips a story about it from his news-
paper, wondering if he can use it in a collection of essays he plans on
“Unworthy Friendships” (TB 8). The day after he dreams that he has
visited Kimmel in his bookstore, he drives on a whim to Newark to visit
the store so that he can meet the man who may or may not have killed
his wife. After a second vivid dream in which, aided by violinist Elspeth
Briess, with whom he has recently begun an affair, he kills his neurotic,
demanding wife Clara at a bus stop, he drops Clara off at the 34th Street
station so that she can visit her dying mother in Harrisburg and follows
her bus to Newark and then to its first rest stop, toying with the possi-
bility of killing Clara in the same way he believes Kimmel killed Helen.
When the bus stops outside Allentown, Walter speaks to one of the pas-
sengers and searches the area for Clara but returns home when he is
unable to find her. The next day a call from Lt. Lawrence Corby, of the
2 THE DARK SIDE OF ADAPTATION 23
Philadelphia Homicide Squad, informs him that Clara has been found
dead at the bottom of a cliff near the rest stop, a presumed suicide. The
behavior of Walter, who “saw himself seizing Clara by the throat, pull-
ing her down the cliff” (114), arouses Corby’s suspicions, especially
after another passenger on the bus identifies Walter as the man he saw
at the rest stop. Corby, whose interest has already been captured by the
unsolved murder of Helen Kimmel, fastens tenaciously on Walter as a
suspect in his wife’s death.
For his part, Kimmel reacts to Corby’s suspicion that “[y]ou two have
a lot in common” (170) with barely concealed outrage. Even before the
investigator leaves, he thinks: “Stackhouse had had the appalling stupid-
ity to leave his trail everywhere, bring it right to his door!” (169). When
Walter returns to the shop and tells Kimmel, “We are both guilty, and
in a sense I share in your guilt. […] You’re my guilt!” (194), Kimmel
refuses to tell him whether or not he killed his wife. Brought in for fur-
ther interrogation, Kimmel refuses to admit his own guilt, and when
Walter appears at the police station looking for Corby, Corby announces
to Kimmel, “This man brought it all down on you, Kimmel! Walter
Stackhouse—the blunderer!” (256) As he walks through Central Park,
Walter, sensing that Kimmel is following him, runs ahead of him, then
leaps on him and kills him. The sudden arrival of Kimmel, however,
makes him realize that he has killed an innocent bystander instead—a
realization swiftly followed by his own murder and Kimmel’s arrest.
Almost from their first meeting, Corby marks Walter as a copy-
cat killer, an unsuccessful imitator of Kimmel’s superior crime. Yet
Walter’s entire progress through the novel could better be described as a
sequence of “ambivalent moments, a blackout of will” (TB 10), that lead
him to drift, not into murder, but into an intimate, unreciprocated, and
lethal identification with a murderer who has already acted out his fanta-
sies. His hopelessly contradictory attitude toward Clara is revealed when
he takes her hand for the last time at the bus station as he drops her off
and feels “a start of pleasure, of hatred, of a kind of hopeless tender-
ness that Walter crushed as soon as his mind recognized it” (96). Much
later, he reluctantly assents to Corby’s request that he meet with Kimmel
and immediately feels that “he had just agreed to walk straight into hell”
(176). Walter acts over and over against his best interests, in defiance of
his own will—or, more precisely, in a way that renders problematic the
very notion of will, as when he contemplates confessing to Corby his first
visit to Kimmel:
24 T. LEITCH
Corby wouldn’t possibly believe he had come by accident, or for the pur-
pose he had come, just to look at Kimmel. Corby would think, well, what
purpose did looking at Kimmel have? Of course it had a purpose, some-
where. No action could be totally without purpose, or without explana-
tion. (224)
Despite his best intentions, every important activity Walter undertakes is

an acte gratuit, a radically unmotivated and discontinuous action of the
sort explored by existentialist writers like Jean-Paul Sartre, André Gide,
and Albert Camus, whose “quasi-aleatory view of human motivation”
(Harrison 1997, 4) exercised a profound influence on Highsmith’s work.
Kimmel, by contrast, feels neither remorse nor moral responsibility for
his crime. From time to time, “[h]e would remember that he had killed
her, and it seemed a quiet but meritorious achievement on his part, an
achievement endorsed by the rest of the world, too, because no one had
ever called him to account for it. The world simply rolled on, as if noth-
ing had happened” (141). So it is thoroughly logical that when Corby
identifies Walter as the blunderer whose witless actions have endangered
Kimmel’s success, Kimmel, as if convinced of his own innocence, shouts
at Walter: “Murderer!” (259) Kimmel regards his crime, successful and
undetected, as a given fact in an orderly universe and Walter’s attempt
to forge a relationship with him through meetings and dreams and spas-
modic thoughts of imitation as the fatal blundering of an interloper into
a safe, comfortable domain reserved for him alone. As Mawer summa-
rizes the final situation: “The murderer feels innocent, the innocent feels
that his desire to kill makes him guilty, and the representative of justice
finds it all irrelevant.” (2004, 116)
Adapting the Adapters

Although neither of them retains the title of Highsmith’s novel, both Le
meurtrier and A Kind of Murder follow the events of the novel closely
and retain most of the leading characters under their own or similar
names. There are inevitable changes—Le meurtrier changes its setting
to contemporaneous France, and A Kind of Murder, filmed a genera-
tion later, emphasizes its retro 1960 setting in New York and Newark,
from the screening of BUtterfield 8 (1960) that Kimmel sneaks out of
to murder Helen to its period wardrobe, hair styles, and automobiles
to the casting of Vincent Kartheiser, who rose to fame playing Pete
Campbell on Mad Men (2007–2015), as Lt. Corby—and some that are

not so inevitable, like the recasting of Walter in both films from attorney
to architect, a nod to Guy Haines’s profession in Strangers on a Train.
Even so, both films trace the relationship between Walter and Kimmel
from Kimmel’s murder of Helen to Walter’s death at Kimmel’s hands.
Both use crosscutting between Kimmel and Walter, often involving
elaborate visual echoes, as a primary tool for establishing the parallels
between them. Both define the two men largely through their relation-
ships with non-human figures—Kimmel’s cat, Walter’s dog, the pigeons
Kimmel feeds in Le meurtrier, and the cigarettes both characters con-
stantly smoke in A Kind of Murder. Both present Kimmel as a bru-
tally determined killer and Walter as a vacillating, equivocal inventor of
imaginary homicidal plots, an uncertain visitor to the territory Kimmel
owns. Both focus on the relationship between Walter’s dreams of mur-
der and Kimmel’s cold-blooded murder. In the end, though, both of
them let Walter off the hook, exonerating him of copycat killing in a way
Highsmith’s novel does not.
In Le meurtrier, Walter first learns of Helen Kimmel’s death when
the police hold up traffic around the rest stop where she has been found
dead to carry out her body as he looks on from his car. Although the
film eventually shows a news clipping Walter has kept about the story,
it is an isolated souvenir; despite the obvious unhappiness of his mar-
riage to Clara, Walter is never shown as keeping a book of clippings for a
future writing project about unworthy friendships. Walter’s moral inno-
cence is emphasized in both positive and negative terms. On his second
visit to Kimmel’s bookstore, Walter assures Kimmel that he would not
judge him for killing his wife but insists that he must know the truth,
distinguishing himself from Kimmel, who first laughs at him, then pro-
fesses outrage and throws him out. Having established Walter’s dis-
interested, fatal passion for the truth as a defining distinction between
him and Kimmel, the film positions him more firmly as an injured
innocent by inventing a scene in which Kimmel, armed with a flash-
light and the damning book order with Walter’s name and date, lets
himself into the darkened house where Walter is sleeping. He searches
the place until he is interrupted by Walter’s dog, whose barking awak-
ens his put-upon master, preparing for a scene from Highsmith in which
Kimmel attempts to use the book order, which proves that Walter had
met Kimmel and presumably knew of his wife’s death before his own
wife died under remarkably similar circumstances, to blackmail Walter.
26 T. LEITCH
Fig. 2.1 Walter is intimidated by Kimmel’s shadow (Le meurtrier)
Although the mounting evidence against Walter soon persuades Corby

that he is guilty, it is Kimmel, not Corby, who lashes out against him
in the one scene the three characters share—this time joined by Tony,
the alibi witness Corby is trying to turn against Kimmel. Most impor-
tantly, Walter never kills anyone—not Clara, not Kimmel, not the inno-
cent bystander in Central Park he takes to be Kimmel in Highsmith’s
novel. Instead, in a wordless climactic sequence that eerily echoes the
film’s opening sequence, a tour de force of unobtrusive pantomime, he
drives from the police station to a chamber-orchestra concert where his
lover Ellie is waiting for him, unaware that Kimmel has followed him,
mounts the outdoor stairs as the music continues, and sees Kimmel
bearing down on him from above. The memorable image of Kimmel’s
towering shadow (Fig. 2.1), perhaps the single most visually striking
shot of the film, recalls both classic noir iconography and the even older
tradition of German expressionism that had been revived as recently as
1962, when Gert Fröbe, who plays Kimmel, had starred in a remake of
Fritz Lang’s 1933 Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr.
Mabuse). Walter struggles in vain against the knife with which Kimmel
stabs him to death, leaving the film to end on a series of shots of Kimmel
surrounded and arrested by the police, Walter lying dead on the stairs,
and Ellie sitting placidly unaware inside.
A Kind of Murder emphasizes Walter’s guilty feelings at the same time

as it exonerates him of true guilt. After Clara makes a suicide attempt
(an episode from Highsmith omitted from Le meurtrier), the doctor to
whom Walter admits that he was unable to persuade Clara to find a psy-
chotherapist tells him, “You should have tried harder”, pinning Walter’s
guilt to Clara’s attempted suicide. Returning home, Clara makes this
connection explicit when she tells Walter, who has greeted her latest,
and so far unwarranted, accusation of his affair with Ellie by announc-
ing his intention of divorcing her: “If you divorce me, I will kill myself.
Then everyone will know it’s your fault. You will have blood on your
hands.” In the moral universe of this film’s Walter, Clara’s suicide would
make him look and feel just as guilty as her murder. That is why, after her
death, he asks his friend Jon Carr: “What’s the difference between wish-
ing someone dead and actually doing something about it?” Incredulous,
Carr replies: “One hell of a difference.” Walter’s rueful response—“I
don’t know. I honestly don’t know anymore.”—characterizes him not
as a participant in the universal moral guilt Highsmith follows her idol
Dostoevsky in exploring, but as an isolated neurotic driven to a psycho-
logical breakdown by his demanding wife’s accusatory suicide. The film
repeatedly uses fragmentary close-ups of the stories Walter, an aspiring
writer, is typing to indicate that he is devising fictional scenarios to vent
his murderous fantasies. Yet it is careful to keep Walter on the safe side of
a bright line between those fantasies and Kimmel’s murderous actions,
so that when Corby insists to his skeptical boss, “Stackhouse is a classic
copycat killer, and Kimmel is a psychopath!”, the audience has no trouble
rejecting the first of these conclusions as erroneous even though the sec-
ond one is right on the money. Ellie’s tearful accusation of Walter repeats
Corby’s fallacy. “This is just too much!” she shouts at him. “I just want
you to swear” that he did not kill Clara, adding, “I can’t get something
you said out of my mind: ‘I have this fantasy she’s no longer there.’” For
Ellie, Walter’s murderous fantasies are proof of his murderous actions:
“You were thinking about it all the time. You were thinking about it long
before you met me.” Despite his confusion, however, Walter remains
clear about the difference between thinking and doing. When Kimmel
rejects his assertion, “We have something in common”, he elaborates:
“You are my guilt. I’m sharing your guilt. I mean, I may have thought
about it, but you did it.” Repulsing Kimmel’s blackmail demand, Walter
28 T. LEITCH
Fig. 2.2 Kimmel drawing his knife in two versions of The Blunderer (Le meurt-
rier and A Kind of Murder)
tells him, “You can’t prove anything.” Kimmel’s response—“Proof is

not the key thing. It’s doubt. Doubt is everything”—turns a legal argu-
ment into a moral argument whose impact on Corby and Ellie is never
matched by an equivalent impact on the audience. Like Le meurtrier,
the film ends on a final affirmation of Walter’s essential innocence, and
the close-up of Kimmel drawing his knife even seems to echo the corre-
sponding shot in the earlier film (Fig. 2.2).
Kimmel stalks Walter through the dark basement beneath the night-
club in which Ellie is reprising the song “I Can’t Escape from You” and
he stabs first Corby, whom he mistakes for Walter, to death, as he snarls,
“Stackhouse, you blunderer! I did it!”, and then the fleeing Walter, who
as he lies dying announces in voiceover: “I have this fantasy that she’s
no longer there. I haven’t done anything. […] We’re all guilty of some-
thing. I’m a writer. I write stories”, before a close-up of a typed sheet
closes the film as fingers type “THE END”. Whatever his temptations,
however completely he may have succumbed to neurotic temptations to
assume guilt for his wife’s death, both films take care to exonerate Walter
from Highsmith’s leading indictment, the charge of copycat crime, a
charge that finds its target not in particular adaptations of The Blunderer,
but in the activity of adaptation as such.
Criminal Adaptations
The accusation that gives Highsmith’s novel its title is an uncannily pre-
cise metaphor for one attitude common toward adaptations, especially the
unauthorized stage adaptations that preceded modern copyright law. This
attitude, typically associated with authors whose work has been adapted,
condemns the adaptation at hand as a pale imitation, fumbling, inept, and
carrying the perilous possibility of stigmatizing the author’s own brand.

A second attitude toward adaptations is modeled by Corby’s insistence
on bringing the two criminals together for a close comparison that weds
them and their actions indissolubly together. This attitude is embodied in
the numberless critical essays that take the form of one-to-one compari-
sons between adapted texts and the texts they adapt, as if those latter texts
provided a privileged context, perhaps the only reasonable context, for
understanding them. A third attitude toward adaptations, often assumed
by adapters, is suggested by Walter’s own bemused detachment from his
actions. Walter may be a blunderer, but he is no murderer, at least not
until the end of his story; he has only sought to understand someone he
has taken more or less unwillingly as a model, dreamed of imitating his
accomplishment, and lived so deeply into his dream that it has taken on
a life of its own. To use a term often applied to adaptation in the popular
imagination, Walter is a parasite who despite his quest for “love as a crim-
inal pursuit” (Schenkar 2009, 328) completes no significant actions, not
even criminal actions, of his own, acts in opposition to his own will at cru-
cial junctures, and cannot even dream his own crime without the model
provided by a more original, enterprising, successful criminal.
Walter is the first of many Highsmith heroes whose criminal adap-
tations to changing circumstances, often involving their identification
with criminal doubles, carry the seeds of their own destruction. Vic Van
Allen, who for years has endured his wife’s serial adulteries in Deep Water
(1957) in self-tormenting silence, adapts to her affair with cocktail pia-
nist Charley De Lisle by drowning him in a neighbor’s swimming pool
during a party. Although Vic has good reason to hate De Lisle, he never
plans the murder but executes it on a whim, another acte gratuit, when
he notices that everyone else has gone inside, leaving them alone in the
pool: “Vic would have loved to grab him by the shoulders and hold him
under, and even as he thought of it, Vic swam toward him.” (DW 98)
As in The Blunderer, rational thought is here subordinated to a kind of
autonomic reaction, an adaptive gesture that is ultimately maladaptive.
In This Sweet Sickness (1960), David Kelsey continues to send love let-
ters to Annabelle Stanton two years after her marriage and leaves his
rooming house every weekend for a house in the country he imagines
he is sharing with Annabelle, a house he abandons only after he kills her
husband, Gerald Delaney, who has discovered the house and confronted
David, demanding that he stop importuning Annabelle. Codependent
tour guide/petty swindler Rydal Keener alternately affronts and rescues
30 T. LEITCH
swindling financier Chester MacFarland when Chester kills a detective

following him on behalf of his mobbed-up creditors in The Two Faces of
January (1964). New York police officer Clarence Duhamell becomes so
enraged by disabled construction worker Kenneth Rowajinski, who has
killed the miniature poodle belonging to Ed and Greta Reynolds in A
Dog’s Ransom (1972) and then sent them a series of anonymous ransom
demands, that his investigation of the case leads him to kill Rowajinski
himself. The Cry of the Owl (1962), The Glass Cell (1964), The Story-
Teller (published in the UK as A Suspension of Mercy, 1965), and Those
Who Walk Away (1967) all resemble The Blunderer in focusing on “the
ways in which the suspicion of murder, or even thinking about the possi-
bilities of murderous actions rather than the banal act itself, tips the uni-
verse ‘off kilter’ for [Highsmith’s] protagonists” (Peters 2011, 123). The
adaptations of all these heroes challenged by extraordinary circumstances
turn out to be maladaptations as disastrous as Walter’s.
Michael Dirda, in a review of a reprinted collection of the five Ripley
novels, aptly observes:
In The Blunderer (1954) Highsmith fully established what would become

her trademark theme: the blurring of fantasy and reality, usually reinforced
by some sort of folie à deux, in which two very different people, almost
always men, grow symbiotically obsessed with each other, ultimately to the
point of madness and mutual destruction. (2009)
The pivotal importance of The Blunderer in establishing Highsmith’s

abiding interest in maladaptive adaptation, adaptations that are criminal,
calamitous, and ultimately self-destructive, has been largely overshad-
owed by commentators’ focus on three other varieties of maladaptation
in Highsmith’s work. The first of these patterns is best represented by
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 film adaptation of Strangers on a Train, in
which Guy Haines, commanded to kill Bruno Anthony’s hated father in
return for Bruno’s gratuitous murder of Guy’s wife Miriam, staunchly
refuses the demands of both Bruno and Highsmith’s novel, sneaks into
the Bruno family home only to warn Bruno’s father about his son, and
suffers the consequences of Bruno’s furious enmity before an accident on
a merry-go-round kills Bruno, whose hand opens in his death spasm to
reveal the cigarette lighter Guy had left behind on the train where they
first met. This MacGuffin, which Bruno had intended to plant at the
scene of Miriam Haines’s murder to incriminate Guy further, now serves
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kestin tämän päivän kurjuuden, miten minun onnistui salata syvä
kärsimyksen! omaisiltani — en tiedä. Tiedän vain, että pienet
sisarentyttäreni, joita suunnattomasti rakastin, näyttivät katseillaan
sanovan minulle: »Mitä etsit sinä, kadotettu enkeli, meidän
paratiisistamme?»
10. SISÄSTÄPÄIN ULOSPÄIN
Näiden hirveiden sisällisten ristiriitojen välittömänä seurauksena oli

täydellinen uupumuksen tila, niin että en vähään aikaan suorastaan
kyennyt jatkamaan taisteluitani. Tällä tavalla olin saavuttanut
jonkinlaisen rauhan, jota pidin myöhäisenä vastauksena rukouksiini,
ja aloin jälleen hiukan toivoa. Aikani oli kokonaan käytettävissäni.
Olimme siksi varakkaita, ettei meidän, kuten useiden
ystävättäriemme, tarvinnut puuttua taloustöihin. Käytin suurimman
osan aikaani lukemiseen, maalaamiseen ja soitantoon, mutta tein
myöskin kävelymatkoja ja oleskelin luonnon helmassa, sillä
rakkauteni luontoon on aina ollut yhtä suuri kuin opinhaluni.
Kuljeskelin pienen pääkaupungin viehättävissä ympäristöissä, milloin
omaisteni kanssa, milloin yksinäni, onnellisessa vapaudessa, josta
Saksanmaan ja varsinkin sen pikkukaupunkien nuoret tytöt ainakin
vielä siihen aikaan saivat nauttia. Oli nimittäin kuulumatonta, että
nuorta säädyllistä tyttöä loukattiin sentähden, ettei hänellä ollut
saattajaa. Sisareni kummasteli usein, kun aamukävelyn tehtyämme
annoin säteilevän iltapäivä-auringon vielä kerran houkutella itseni
ulos. Hän ei voinut tietää, että tarvitsin luontoa sisäisen tasapainoni
säilyttämiseksi, että auringonsäteet, vihreät metsät, kukkivat niityt ja
kaukaiset, siintävät näköalat lohduttivat minua tuhansin tavoin. Olisin
vain tarvinnut paljon enemmän tuota sielun lääkettä, jonka puoleen
luontainen haluni minua veti. Minun olisi pitänyt elää maaseudulla,
tehdä työtä puutarhassa ja pellolla ja askarrella luonnontieteiden
parissa nauttiakseni vielä enemmän luonnon rauhoittavasta
seurasta. Miten tulisikaan kasvattajien ottaa tuollaiset vaistot
huomioon ja tyydyttää niitä! Miten paljon voimia säästyisikään silloin
tulevaisuudelle!
Suhtauduin nuorempaan sisareeni sangen omituisesti. Hän oli

vain vuotta minua nuorempi, olimme saaneet yhteisen kasvatuksen
ja meitä oli pienimpiä yksityisseikkoja myöten kohdeltu samalla
tavalla. Olimme olleet aina yhdessä, perheen ystävät nimittivät meitä
»erottamattomiksi» ja me rakastimme toisiamme sydämellisesti.
Luonteemme olivat kuitenkin aivan vastakkaiset. Hän ei koskaan
kertonut mitään sisäisestä elämästään ja se koski minuun kipeästi.
Minulla ei ollut aavistustakaan, mitä hänen mielessään liikkui niiden
tapausten aikana, jotka aiheuttivat niin suuren vallankumouksen
elämässäni. Tuohon aikaan tekivät tuhannet äänet minussa tuhansia
kysymyksiä elämän kaikista asioista. Tunsin tarvetta avata sydämeni
ja ikävöin samanlaista avomielisyyttä toisen puolelta. Mutta sisareni
käveli kanssani tuntimääriä virkkamatta sanaakaan tai puheli aivan
vähäpätöisistä asioista. Olin siitä syvästi onneton ja pakenin
ystävättäreni luo. Jouduin silloin ensi kerran tekemään kokemuksen,
joka sittemmin on useat kerrat toistunut. Tämä ystävättäreni oli
syynä siihen, että minua soimattiin häilyväiseksi ystävyyssuhteissani
— moite, jota en ansainnut. En tahdo kuitenkaan puolustaa itseäni,
kerron vain, kuinka asia oli.
Se laatuaan aivan erikoinen tunnelma, jonka aikana

ystävyytemme oli solmittu, oli jo häipynyt uusien harrastusten tieltä,
vaikka en itsekään ollut siitä vielä oikein tietoinen. Minun tunteeni oli
valmis jättämään kotelonsa, joka oli sitä verhonnut ja levittämään
siipensä. Ystävättäreni tunne sitävastoin jäi tuolle väliaikaiselle
asteelle, kenties siksi, ettei hänellä ollut voimaa jättää sitä. Hänen
hentomielinen hellyytensä alkoi tuntua minusta vaivaloiselta. Hän ei
päässyt persoonallisten tunteitten yläpuolelle. Kiintymykseni olisi
kestänyt, jos olisin voinut viedä ystäväni mukanani uusille henkisen
kehityksen asteille, suurempaan selvyyteen, rohkeampiin
huomioihin.
Ystävyyden ja rakkauden laita on kai samoin kuin taiteen. Siinä

täytyy olla salaisuutta. Taideteos, joka ei kerta kerralta siihen
syventyessämme anna uusia ilmestyksiä itsestään, lakkaa pian
meitä viehättämästä. Olento, jonka sielu ei alati ammenna meille
uusia aarteita, käy yhdentekeväksi. Todellinen rakkaus, todellinen
ystävyys vaativat alati uuden sisäisen rikkauden paljastamista.
Tunteet eivät voineet minua tyydyttää, kun älyni yhä pyrki uusille
urille. Käsitin loukkaavani ystävättäreni hellää mieltä, hän oli ärtynyt,
vieläpä mustasukkainenkin, kun muka huomasi, että seurustelin
enemmän muiden nuorten tyttöjen kanssa kuin hänen. Olin
pahoillani nähdessäni hänen kärsivän, mutta en voinut auttaa asiaa.
En ollut vielä hetikään saanut rauhaa uskonnollisilta kysymyksiltä.
En voinut koskaan kuulla puhuttavan ehtoollis-sakramentista
tuntematta samaa sisäistä vavistusta kuin ripillepääsy-päivänäni.
Onneksi ei perheeni erittäin ankarasti noudattanut kirkollisia tapoja ja
kesti kauan ennenkuin alettiin puhua uudesta ripilläkäynnistä. Nämä
ajatukset alkoivat kuitenkin jo jonkun verran hälvetä mielestäni. Olin
alkanut intohimoisesti tutkia historiaa ja kirjallisuutta. Olin siihen
aikaan kahden naiskirjailijan, Bettina von Arnimin ja Rahelin
lumoissa. Rahelin vakava, filosofinen, siveä ja suuremmoinen henki
miellytti minua enemmän ja liikutti syvästi mieltäni. Mutta Bettinan
runolliset, tenhoavat haaveet kiehtoivat minut »kesäyönunelmiin».
Hän kehitti mielikuvitus-maailmaani, jonka olin tahtonut
väkivaltaisesti tukahuttaa itsessäni dogmien askeettisen hengen
vaikutuksesta.
Tunsin kuitenkin enemmän kuin koskaan ennen omituista

kaksinaisuutta. Toisaalta olin onnellinen, moninaisilla lahjoilla
varustettu olento, jota odotti rikas tulevaisuus. Toisaalta taas, kun
epäily ja askeettinen henki saivat ylivallan, syytin katkerasti itseäni
kuvitelluista virheistä ja epäilin itseäni.
Tähän aikaan luin ensi kerran teoksen »Wahrheit und Dichtung».

Goethe kertoo samankaltaisista taisteluista nuoruudessaan ja sanoo
päässeensä niistä jättäessään spekulatiivisen suunnan ja
kääntyessään kokonaan sisästäpäin ulospäin. Keskusteluissaan
Eckermannin kanssa sanoo hän samaa: »Jokainen kelvollinen
pyrkimys kääntyy sisästäpäin maailmaa kohden». Nämä muutamat
sanat pelastivat minut. Mihin eivät kirkon mysteeriot kyenneet, sen
teki suurimman runoilijamme kirkas, plastillinen, helleeninen henki.
Päätin tehdä kuten hän: kääntyä sydämen sokkeloista,
hedelmättömästä mietiskelystä kohden maailmaa ja tieteistä
säteilevää valoa, ryhtyä hyödylliseen ja käytännölliseen toimintaan.
Myöhemmin käsitin, mitkä ovat näiden ihmisluonnossa ja

jokaisessa sisältörikkaassa elämässä ilmenevien virtausten
molemmat edustajat runoudessa: Goethen Faust ja Byronin
Manfred.
Terveyteni oli yhä vielä heikko, ja osan parhaista

nuoruusvuosistani vietin vaikeissa tuskissa. Aikaisen kuoleman
ajatus ei ollut minulle vieras eikä peloittava. Luin, miten Ninon
l'Enclos, joka kuoli kuudentoista vanhana, sanoi itkeville omaisilleen:
»Minkätähden itkette. Minähän jätän jälkeeni vain pelkkiä
kuolevaisia.» Nämä sanat miellyttivät minua ja muistelin niitä usein.
Olin tullut hyvin rauhalliseksi ja lempeäksi, iloitsin suuresta sisäisen
rauhantunteestani ja rakastin rauhaa yli kaiken. Omaiseni olivat
leikillään antaneet minulle nimen »Sovittaja», sillä kaikki pienet
perheriitaisuudet yritin sovittaa ja hartain toivoni oli, että minua
ympäröivät ihmiset rakastivat toisiaan ja olivat toisilleen hyviä.
Perhe-elämää suorastaan jumaloin. Usein kun kävelin vanhimman
sisareni, lapsuuteni enkelin kanssa edestakaisin huoneissa, tunsin
suloista nautintoa sisarusten välisestä rakkaudesta. Pienet
sisarenlapseni olivat minulle suunnattoman rakkaat ja olin suuren
osan ajastani heidän parissaan. Rakastin kuitenkin seura-elämänkin
iloja enkä enää taistellut tätä mieltymystä vastaan. Tanssiminen oli
minulle suuri nautinto, kun vain en ollut sairas. Nuorempi sisareni oli
hyvin kaunis ja sai osakseen suurta huomiota. Joskus häntä hiukan
kadehdin, mutta yleensä olin iloinen, että en ollut kaunis, sittenpähän
pelastuin turhamaisuuden vaarasta. Keimailun vikaa ei minussa
ollut; pukuni olivat usein liiankin vaatimattomia ja usein sain kuulla
siitä pilkkaa. Mutta pidin niin halpamaisena herättää ihailua
ruumiillisilla suloilla, että mieluummin olin hiukan naurettava.
Sitäpaitsi ajattelin myöskin, ettei mikään ole moitittavampaa kuin
tunteiden herättäminen, joita ei tahdo jakaa. Jonkun aikaa
senjälkeen, kun olimme astuneet seuraelämään, osoitti minulle
sangen hyvässä yhteiskunnallisessa asemassa oleva, sivistynyt
mies suurta huomaavaisuutta. Seurustelin hänen kanssaan
mielelläni ja hän oli uskollisimpia tanssiaisritareitani, kunnes
muutamista toisten ihmisten huomautuksista ja hänen omasta
käytöksestään tajusin, että hänen tunteensa minua kohtaan olivat
vakavampaa laatua. Aloin heti välttää hänen seuraansa ja olin kylmä
ja ylpeä, kun hän ei näyttänyt ymmärtävän. Vaikka tällainen olikin
vasten luontoani, menettelin mieluummin näin kuin annoin jonkun
pettyä tunteistani.
Avioliiton ajatus oli minulle vielä yleensä vieras. Tuollainen kahden

olennon yhtyminen tuntui minusta pyhältä mysteeriolta. Tunsin, ettei
minulla vielä ollut riittävästi sielunrauhaa syventyäkseni tähän
mysteerioon, ja että tämä oli ilmestys, jonka tulevaisuus varasi
minulle, kun olin käsittänyt, mikä on totuus. Kun tunsin ainoastaan
tämän liiton ihanteellisen, runollisen puolen, muodostin siitä itselleni
sangen ylevän ja kauniin käsityksen. Pidin sitä kahden sielun
yhtymänä kaikessa, mikä niissä on korkeinta ja ylevintä. Lapsellinen
tunteeni nuorta miestä kohtaan, josta olen aikaisemmin puhunut, oli
kuollut niinkuin se oli elänytkin: hiljaisuudessa; sillä oli ollut sijansa
mielikuvituksessa, ei sydämessä. Sitäpaitsi tyydytti minua
täydellisesti elämä perheeni keskuudessa, missä minua niin suuresti
rakastettiin, ja missä minulla oli niin suloisia velvollisuuksia. Olin
tähän aikaan useita kuukausia kahden kesken äitini kanssa, kun
nuorempi sisareni oli matkustanut Casseliin vanhimman, naineen
veljeni luo. Silmäni olivat sangen heikot, ja kun annoin niille paljon
työtä, täytyi minun suoda niille myöskin paljon lepoa. Niinpä
kuuntelin sydämen hartaudella äitini kertomuksia lapsuutensa ajoilta
ja kätkin nuo muistelmat mieleeni. Ne eivät olleet ainoastaan
persoonallisesti mielenkiintoisia, niillä oli myöskin yleinen arvonsa,
ne kun kuvasivat kokonaista ajanjaksoa ja sen sukupolvea. Äitini oli
kasvanut eräässä noista vanhoista ylimysperheistä (Riedeeselin
perheessä), jotka eivät Saksan valtakunnan olemassaolon aikana
olleet tunnustaneet ylemmäkseen kuin keisarin. Eräs Saksan
valtakunnan arvoasema oli perinnöllinen perheessä. Sillä oli myöskin
ruhtinaallisia oikeuksia niissä kaupungeissa, jotka olivat kuuluneet
sen esi-isien alueelle. Sen sukupuu oli tahraton. Kaikki sen jäsenet
omasivat viime vuosisadan ylhäisön sivistyksen ja hienostuksen.
Sen keskuudesta oli lähtenyt naisia, joita oli ihailtu itse Maria
Antoinetten hovissa. He ympäröivät elämänsä vanhassa linnassa
sillä loistolla ja upeudella, joka oli ollut ylhäisön etuoikeus siihen
aikaan saakka, jolloin Ranskan suuren vallankumouksen
torventörähdykset kutsuivat sen ihmisoikeuden tuomioistuimen eteen
vastaamaan asemansa väärinkäyttämisestä. Äitini mielessä oli
sekaisin kuvia tästä häviöön tuomitusta maailmasta ja tulevaisuuden
maailmasta. Ranskan tasavallan ja myöhemmin keisarikunnan
sotajoukot olivat useat kerrat marssineet äitini pienen kotikaupungin
läpi, ja hän oli istunut marsalkka Soult'in polvilla sormien tämän
univormun nappeja. Soult oli ollut linnan ylhäisten asukkaiden
pakollinen vieras. Hän tosin edusti järjestystä, joka oli kokonaan
vastakkainen heidän perintätavoilleen, mutta huolimatta
vastenmielisyydestään, ottivat he hänet kohteliaasti vastaan; heidän
säätynsä tavat velvoittivat olemaan kohteliaita vihollisellekin. Nämä
erilaiset vaikutelmat olivat jättäneet äitini luonteeseen samalla kertaa
sekä ylimyksellisiä että vapaamielisiä piirteitä, jotka säilyivät koko
hänen elämänsä ajan.
Viisitoistavuotiaana vietti hän talvea Casselissa linnan vanhan

valtijattaren luona, joka oli kasvattanut häntä kuin omaa tytärtään.
Hän näki silloin vastakkaisen talon ikkunassa nuoren miehen, joka
usein katseli häntä. Tuttavuutta välittivät vain katseet, ainoaakaan
sanaa ei vaihdettu. Keväällä muuttivat naiset takaisin maalle
vanhaan linnaan. Seuraavana talvena saavuttiin taas kaupunkiin
samaan taloon. Nuori naapuri oli vielä siellä ja näytti ihastuneena
tuntevan viimevuotisen suloisen lapsen, josta nyt oli varttunut kaunis,
nuori tyttö. Hän antoi esittää itsensä, ja kun kevät tuli, erosivat nuoret
toisistaan vain yhtyäkseen pian ainaiseksi. Nuori mies oli
kahdenkymmenenyhden vuoden vanha, tyttö kuudentoista. Vanha
linnanrouva jäi nuoren parin ystävättäreksi, ja minä muistan, että me
lapsina usein kävimme hänen luonaan. Hän oli vanha, pieni, hintelä
nainen, käytti raskasta, harmaata, yltyleensä pitseillä koristeltua
silkkipukua, tuoksui hajuvesiltä ja antoi hiljaa edestakaisin liikkuvien
kamaripalvelijoiden ja -neitojen palvella itseään. Aina kun kävimme
häntä tervehtimässä, saimme makeisia.
Kuunnellessani äitini kertomuksia, ajattelin samaa asiaa, josta

George Sand myöhemmin on puhunut muistelmissaan, että esi-isien
vanhat tavat olisi jokaisessa perheessä pantava huolellisesti muistiin
ja muodostettava niistä jonkinlainen kotikronikka, joka jälkeentuleville
olisi sekä persoonallisesti että yleisestikin mielenkiintoinen…
Silloisen rauhallisen elämäni hämmensi syvä, todellinen tuska,

joka tunkeutui sydänjuuriini saakka eikä ollut pelkkä mielikuvituksen
tuote.
Vanhin sisareni, jota yhä vielä sydämellisesti rakastin, sairastui

vaikeasti, annettuaan elämän neljännelle tyttärelleen. Kolme pitkää
kuukautta kärsi hän hirvittäviä tuskia riutuen vähitellen. Vietin kaiken
aikani joko sairaan vuoteen ääressä tai hänen pienten tyttöstensä
kanssa. Ajatuksissani ei ollut kuin yksi asia: lievittää hänen
kärsimyksiään ja olla hänen apunaan ja lohdutuksenaan.
Epätoivoisena huomasin kuitenkin, että loppu oli lähellä. Silloin
käännyin taas näkymättömän pelastajan puoleen. Öisin, jolloin
valvoin sairaan luona, rukoilin Jumalaa saapumaan avuksemme ja
säästämään hänet. Mutta hän häipyi minulta yhä kauemmaksi,
etäisiin, rajattomiin maailmoihin. Hän ei enää, kuten aikaisemmin,
tuntunut yksilöllisyydeltä: hän täytti koko olevaisuuden, hän oli yhtä
niiden ankarien lakien kanssa, jotka hallitsivat maailmaa. Hänen
vallassaan ei ollut muuttaa kohtaloa, joka väikkyi yllämme. Kuulin
äänen, joka kuten vanhojen fatum huusi minulle: »Alistu!» Makasin
tuntimääriä polvillani, kasvot käsiin kätkettyinä, ja itkin
korvaamatonta menetystä. Meidän täytyi totella. Rakastavan isän
asemasta, joka heltyy hartaasta rukouksesta, kohtasin raudankovan
todellisuuden.
Kuoleva oli jo monta päivää ollut tajuttomana; hän lepäsi

jonkinlaisessa puolihorroksessa ja tuskat olivat poissa. Hän puhui
suloisista asioista ja hänen mielessään näytti liikkuvan kauniita
kuvia. Eräänä iltana tuli hän jälleen tajuihinsa, kutsutti luokseen
pienet tyttärensä ja otti heiltä liikuttavat jäähyväiset. Mutta hän oli
ilon kirkastama eikä varmana ikuisuudesta näyttänyt pelkäävän
ajallista eroa. Yöllä puhui hän enkeleistä, jotka viittoivat hänelle ja
hymyili heille autuaana. Sairaanhoitajatar kumartui kunnioittavasti
puoleeni kuiskaten. »Häntä odotetaan taivaassa, hän on kohta
lähtevä!» Aamupuolella yötä vetäydyin pieneksi hetkeksi lepäämään.
Minua tultiin noutamaan. Kaikki oli ohi. Hän lepäsi vuoteellaan,
kalpeana, vaienneena ainaiseksi, taivaallinen hymy huulillaan.
Polvistuin hänen vuoteensa ääreen, katselin kyynelteni läpi hänen
rakkaita kasvojaan ja eräs ääni minussa kysyi: »Kohtaammeko vielä
kerran toisemme?» Sydäntäni kouristi suonenvedontapaisesti; mutta
rakkaus, jota olin häntä kohtaan tuntenut, huusi minulle: »Totisesti
olet näkevät hänet jälleen!»
Nuorempi sisareni oli saapunut kotiin muutamia päiviä ennen

kuolemantapausta. Hän oli saanut uusia vaikutelmia ja tehnyt uusia
kokemuksia. Minä sitävastoin olin kaikkien kärsimysten ja rasitusten
jälkeen heikompi kuin koskaan ennen. Varsinkin silmäni olivat itkusta
ja valvomisesta niin kipeät, että minun täytyi pitää niillä suojaavaa
sidettä enkä saanut tehdä työtä. Tämä oli kova koettelemus
minunlaiselleni toimeliaalle luonteelle, varsinkin kun surumme vuoksi
olimme kokonaan eristäytyneet muusta maailmasta. Kohtalo lähetti
minulle kuitenkin juuri tähän aikaan erään nuoruuteni viehättävimpiä
elämyksiä. Jo edellisenä talvena olimme tulleet ystäviksi muutamien
varsinaisen seurapiirimme ulkopuolella olevien henkilöiden kanssa.
Teatteri, josta olen jo aikaisemmin kertonut, toimi vain talvisaikaan ja
sen jäsenet näyttelivät kesäisin muilla seuduilla. Lankoni oli
hovimarsalkka ja samalla kertaa teatterin ylijohtaja. Hän oli talvella
tutustuttanut meidät uuteen musiikkitirehtööriin, jonka piti ruveta
antamaan soittotunteja sisarelleni ja minulle. Tämä oli kotoisin Reinin
maasta; hän oli rakastettava, iloinen, lahjakas nuori mies, jollaisia
tapaa noilla onnellisilla seuduilla useammin kuin pohjois-Saksassa,
jossa ihmiset ovat vakavampia ja kylmempiä. Hän oli erinomainen
orkesterisoittaja ja johtaja ja nautti, vaikka olikin vielä sangen nuori,
suurta arvonantoa alaistensa keskuudessa. Hänen ansiostaan
muodostui musiikki todella elämämme keskipisteeksi. Hän asui aivan
meitä vastapäätä erään nuoren näyttelijän kanssa, joka myöskin oli
uusi tulokas, kuvankaunis, vakava, hienosti sivistynyt ihminen, piirsi
viehättävästi, runoili, oli luonteeltaan jalo ja mieleltään herkkä. Nämä
molemmat nuoret miehet viettivät usein iltaa luonamme.
Syvennyimme yhdessä suurten mestarien teoksiin, sitten kirjoitti
jokainen ajatuksensa analysoimastamme kappaleesta, kirjoitukset
luettiin ja erilaisista mielipiteistä keskusteltiin. Luimme myöskin
yhdessä näytelmäkirjallisuuden mestariteoksia ja keskustelimme
osista, joita nuori mies sai esitettäväkseen. Tämä seurustelu, josta
tavallisen seuraelämän pintapuolisuus oli mahdollisimman kaukana,
herätti kuitenkin pahaa verta kaupungin n.s. ylhäisössä. Juorut
pääsivät pian liikkeelle. Me emme niistä välittäneet ja kun
ystävämme sisareni kuoleman jälkeen saapuivat takaisin talvikauden
alkaessa, otimme heidät ilolla vastaan. Elämämme oli hyvin hiljaista
sekä sisareni kuoleman että minun terveyteni vuoksi. Meillä oli siis
kaksinkertainen oikeus kutsua kotimme piiriin ainoastaan sellaisia,
joiden läsnäolo tuotti meille todella iloa ja lohdutusta.
Nautin tästä viehättävästä seurustelusta vapaan sydämen koko

yksinkertaisuudella. Henkinen, vakava seurustelu nuorten tyttöjen ja
nuorten miesten välillä ilman keimailua ja intohimoa, hyvien,
yksinkertaisten luonteiden keskinäinen avomielisyys, on mielestäni
aina ollut elämän ihanimpia lahjoja. En osannut uneksiakaan, että
toisenlainen tunne saattaisi hiipiä tähän läheiseen
tuttavuussuhteeseen. Kuitenkin tapahtui, että ystävämme
musiikkitirehtööri syvästi kiintyi minuun. Äitini hyvyyden
rohkaisemana uskalsi hän puhua tunteistaan. Tämä nimittäin asetti
aina kyvykkäisyyden ja luonteen yhteiskunnallista asemaa
korkeammalle, lupasi raivata esteet tieltä ja pyytää isältäni
suostumusta, jos itse olin taipuvainen. Pitkällä, yksinäisellä kävelyllä
kertoi äiti minulle ystävämme toivomuksista ja tarjoutui auttamaan
meitä. Hämmästyksekseen sai hän minulta kieltävän vastauksen.
Minulla oli vielä sama vastenmielisyys avioliittoa kohtaan kuin
aikaisemminkin, ja melkein säikähdin, kun äitini mainitsi tuon sanan.
En peljännyt sitä, että yhteiskunnallinen asemani olisi alentunut.
Päinvastoin olisi mielikuvitustani pikemminkin viehättänyt
ystävämme »Wilhelm Meister» -elämä. Mutta tunsin olevani vielä
kypsymätön avioliittoon, osaamatta sen paremmin tehdä tiliä, mistä
tuo tunne johtui. Luonteeni oli vielä taipuisa ja vastaanottavainen,
olin — kuten tuollaisia ihmisiä tavallisesti nimitetään — sangen
rakastettava. Kun tuollainen luonne joutuu avioliittoon, valaa toinen
yksilö sen omien kaavojensa mukaan, ja tuloksena on riippuvainen
olento, joka katselee toisen silmillä ja jota toisen tahto ohjaa. Tahi,
jos hän tajuaa oman lakinsa, särkee hän toisen kaavat, on joko
onneton annettuaan liian aikaisin kahlita itsensä tai menehtyy
tuskallisissa taisteluissa.
Mutta käsittäessäni epämääräisesti, etten vielä ollut kyllin
kehittynyt ottaakseni näin tärkeän askeleen, tajusin myöskin selvästi,
ettei nuorta miestä kohtaan tuntemani ystävyys suinkaan ollut
rakkautta.
Tällä kertaa ei minulla kuitenkaan ollut minkäänlaista syytä

ylpeästi vetäytyä kuoreeni kuten viimein. Kysymys oli tehty niin
hellävaroin, että koetin hyvyydellä korvata kärsimyksen, jota
tahtomattani olin aiheuttanut, ja muuttaa ohimenevän
lemmentunteen pysyväiseksi ystävyydeksi. Sainkin ilokseni nähdä
tämän onnistuvan. Ainoa näkyväinen muisto siitä, mitä välillämme oli
tapahtunut, oli hänen Goethen sanoihin säveltämänsä kaunis laulu:
»Ihr verbluhet susse Rosen, meine Liebe trug euch nicht», jonka hän
omisti minulle.
Elämäni suloisen rauhan häiritsi erittäin katkera kokemus, johon

en ollut valmistunut. Eräs veljistäni, jolla ei ollut taipumuksia
mihinkään erityiseen ammattiin, oli toimitettu sotaväkeen. Tässä
suhteessa tehtiin valitettavasti usein erehdyksiä ja rakas isänikin oli
erehtynyt. Veljeni oli kaunis, lahjakas, hyväsydäminen ja käyttäytyi
miellyttävästi, mutta hän oli samalla kevytmielinen, heikko ja
pintapuolinen. Upseerin hyödytön, toimeton elämä oli hänen
perikatonsa. Mutta siihen aikaan, kuten jo sanoin, oli itsestään
selvää, että nuoret miehet, joista ei ollut muuhun, sysättiin
armeijaan. Siellä he saivat veriinsä ylpeyden, joka johtui kokonaan
väärästä periaatteesta, siitä nimittäin, että maan suurin ylpeys oli
muka sen sotajoukko. He kuvittelivat, että sotamiesten opettaminen
koneiksi oli tärkeä ja hyödyllinen tehtävä. He hurjistuivat pikku
kaupunkien kasarmielämän toimettomuudessa ja saattoivat itsensä
häviöön kaikenkaltaisella kilpailulla, joka oli seuraus heidän
asemastaan. Veljeni oli surullinen esimerkki siitä, mihin tällainen
luonnoton ja hyödytön elämä vie. Poloiset vanhempani kärsivät
sanomattomasti saadessaan hänestä viestejä. Hänen
pelastuksekseen tehtiin paljon, mutta kaikki oli turhaa. Minä en
koskaan saanut tietää hänen rikoksensa koko laajuutta, mutta sen
täytyi olla suuri, koska isäni vihdoin hylkäsi hänet eikä tahtonut
kuulla hänen nimeäänkään. Äkkiä ilmestyi veljeni siihen kaupunkiin,
jossa asuimme, hänet oli nimittäin erotettu sotaväestä. Hän ilmoitti
tulostaan kirjeessä, jossa vakuutti katuvansa ja pyysi, ettemme
työntäisi häntä pois. Tämän kirjeen luimme vain sisareni ja minä
sekä se veljistäni, joka asui luonamme, hän kun oli pienen valtion
palveluksessa. Salasimme ennenkaikkea äidiltä tämän surullisen
tapauksen ja päätimme kenenkään tietämättä käydä häntä
katsomassa, kun emme voineet sysätä luotamme veljeä, joka
anovana lähestyi meitä, vaikkakin hänen onnettomuutensa oli hänen
oma syynsä.
Elämässä on hetkiä, jotka sisältävät kokonaisia murhenäytelmiä ja

ovat vihlovampia kuin saattaa kuvitellakaan. Sellainen oli hetki,
jolloin sisareni ja minä eräänä iltana astuimme erääseen maan
tasalla olevaan huoneeseen ja näimme edessämme miehen, jota
emme tunteneet ja joka vapisi kuin pahantekijä. Tuo mies oli
veljemme. Hänen lähtiessään kotoa, olimme vielä pieniä lapsia, ja
hän oli senvuoksi meille kokonaan vieras. Olin tuntenut häntä
kohtaan kaunaa, kun isällä oli ollut niin paljon suruja hänen tähtensä,
mutta se muuttui syväksi, rajattomaksi sääliksi, kun näin hänet.
Olisin uhrannut elämäni pelastaakseni hänet häpeästä, jota hänen
täytyi tuntea seisoessaan siinä nuorempien sisarustensa edessä
kuin tuomiolla. Hälventääkseni hetken katkeruutta, osoitin hänelle
sisaren sovittavaa hellyyttä. Valmistettuamme ennakolta äitiä, kävi
tämäkin tervehtimässä veljeäni ja päätettiin että hän saisi vielä
viimeisen kerran koettaa ja oleskella luonamme jonkun aikaa. Hänen
piti ryhtyä harjoittamaan maanviljelysopintoja agronoomi-tutkintoa
varten ja opiskella senjälkeen kunnollisen maanviljelijän luona.
Lieneeköhän tuskallisempaa ja surullisempaa tunnetta kuin elää

olennon läheisyydessä, joka on veren siteillä meihin kiinnitetty ja
jonka elämä on raskaan rikoksen tahraama. Nähdessäni lasta
nöyryytettävän jonkun hairahduksen vuoksi, olen aina kärsinyt
enemmän kuin hän itse ja vielä enemmän on minuun koskenut, kun
tällaista tapahtui palvelijoille, useinkin vanhoille ihmisille ja
tavallisesti pikkuseikkojen tähden. Mutta elämäni raskaimpia
koettelemuksia oli nähdä veljeni syyllisenä nöyrtyvän edessäni,
ihmisen, joka kaikessa oli vertaiseni. Jos olisin nähnyt hänessä
todellista katumusta, syvää murhetta, joka saa ihmisen syntymään
uudelleen, olisin antanut täyden vallan sisarenrakkaudelleni. Mutta
olin vain liian usein huomaavinani, että hän tunsi itsensä enemmän
ulkonaisten olosuhteiden kuin omantuntonsa nöyryyttämäksi.
Turhamaisuus, joka kuulsi hänen miellyttävän, hienostuneen
käytöksensä läpi, tuntui minusta vastenmieliseltä. Siitä huolimatta
koetin parhaani mukaan herättää hänen sydämessään uudelleen
eloon rakkauden hyveelliseen elämään ja vakavaan työhön.
Kietouduin yhä enemmän velvollisuuksiini kodissa, joita kohtalo oli

sälyttänyt hartioilleni. En toivonut muuta kuin kyetä ne uskollisesti
täyttämään. Äitini, joka tuskin oli parantunut pitkällisestä
hermosairaudesta, loukkasi jalkansa ja oli jälleen kuukausimääriä
vuoteen omana. En jättänyt häntä hetkeksikään, luovuin vierailuista
ja teatterissa käymisestä ja uhrasin kaiken aikani sairaan
hoitamiseen. Jos olisi mahdollista tehdä laskelmia lapsen
rakkaudesta, niin sanoisin, että tänä aikana maksoin äidille velkani.
Veljeni huonot taipumukset nousivat kuitenkin taas pinnalle. Hän
teki kepposen, jonka salasimme äidiltä, mutta joka sai minut siinä
määrin kuohuksiin, että läksytin häntä siitä mitä ankarimmin. Hän
suuttui nuhteistani sen sijaan että olisi tunnustanut ansainneensa ne.
Aloin epäillä häntä. Hänet lähetettiin maalle erään ankaran miehen
huostaan oppimaan maanviljelystä.
Samaan aikaan määräsi tohtori äitini kesäksi erääseen keski-

Saksan suurimmista kylpypaikoista. Ennen matkaamme vietimme
vielä monta iloista hetkeä taiteilija-ystäviemme seurassa, joita emme
kotiin palattuamme enää tavanneet, kun molemmat olivat tehneet
uusia sitoumuksia. Otimme jäähyväiset hiljaisen liikutuksen vallassa
ja erosimme ystävinä. Kiitimme toisiamme molemminpuolisesti, me
emme voineet mistään moittia toisiamme.
Kun lähdimme niin pitkäksi ajaksi pois, sanoimme hyvästi

tuttavillemme, m.m. uskonnonopettajallemme ja hänen perheelleen;
hän oli nyttemmin pääsuperintendenttinä. Suhteemme ei ollut enää
aikoihin ollut sama kuin ennen. Kävin harvoin kirkossa. Olin aikoja
sitten huomannut, ettei se, mitä sieltä sain, minua enää tyydyttänyt.
Etsin uusia ajatuksia ja minulle annettiin siellä siveysopin ohjeita,
joita en nähnyt missään noudatettavan. Kirkossa käymisen sijaan
kirjoitin sunnuntaiaamuisin mietelmän jostakin raamatunkohdasta ja
aloin itsekään sitä huomaamatta muodostaa itselleni omaa filosofista
järjestelmää. Luonnollisena seurauksena tästä oli, että opettajani
vieraantui minusta. Hän oli pahoillaan nähdessään innokkaimman
oppilaansa luopuvan kirkollisista tavoista. En ollut vielä kyllin
vapautunut tunnustaakseni hänelle, mille urille ajatukseni alkoivat
liukua. Sanoessani hänelle hyvästi, huomasin, kuinka välimme olivat
kylmenneet. Tämä koski minuun kipeästi ja minä lähetin hänelle
vihkosen, johon olin kirjoittanut mietelmäni, osoittaakseni hänelle,
että olin tehnyt työtä. Hän lähetti sen minulle takaisin liittäen oheen
muutamia kohteliaita, kylmiä sanoja. — Mutta en voinut kääntyä
takaisin. Minussa olivat toteutuneet Goethen sanat: »Sisästäpäin
ulospäin.»
11. SUURI MAAILMA.
Matkalta kirjoitin onnettomalle veljelleni viimeiset jäähyväissanat,

joihin panin koko sieluni. Kirjoitin hänelle säälin intohimoisella
lämmöllä, joka millä hinnalla hyvänsä tahtoo pelastaa ja uskoo
olevansa kaikkivaltias. Mutta tämäkin oli turhaa. Pahe oli käynyt
ylivoimaiseksi. Me saimme huonoja viestejä; tunsin olevani
kykenemätön enempään ja päätin, etten enää tuhlaa voimiani
toivottoman asian vuoksi. Veljeni matkusti Amerikkaan, missä hän
vähän ajan perästä kuoli.
Me näimme jälleen Reinin ja etelä-Saksan ihanat seudut.

Tapasimme isän ja kävimme hänen kanssaan tervehtimässä eri
paikoissa asuvia ystäviämme. Vihdoin asetuimme kylpypaikkaan,
jonne äitini oli määrätty ja jolla paitsi tehokkaita terveyslähteitään oli
kauniit ympäristöt ja hienon kaupungin ulko-asu. Siellä sain vihdoin
tutustua n.s. »suureen maailmaan», ylhäisöön, jota tulvasi sinne
sivistyneen maailman kaikilta ääriltä. Jo pitkät ajat olin palavasti
halunnut lähestyä tätä seurapiiriä, josta olin muodostanut itselleni
sangen kauniin kuvan. Minusta tuntui, että kosketus siihen
täydentäisi kasvatukseni ja tekisi henkeni ja käytökseni vapaiksi,
kuten toivoin. Pienen pääkaupunkimme seurapiiri ei enää tyydyttänyt
minua. Ikävöin epämääräisesti avarampiin ilmapiireihin. Olin kerran
puhunut tästä ikävästä eräälle henkevälle ranskattarelle, joka jonkun
aikaa oli ollut prinsessojen kasvattajana. Hän tunsi pariisilaisen
»suuren maailman» ja vastasi minulle: »Kysykää auringolta, tähdiltä,
keväältä ja kukkasilta, mikä teiltä puuttuu; »suuri maailma» ei voi sitä
teille opettaa.»
Nuo opettajat tunsin varsin hyvin! Niille olin uskonut salaisimmat

ajatukseni; ne kuiskasivat minulle ilmestyksiä; olin aina elänyt niiden
kanssa salaperäistä elämää, josta ei kukaan tietänyt mitään. Mutta
tarvitsin muutakin: laajemman kentän ajatuksilleni, suuremman
vapauden. Kuvittelin saavuttavani tuon sivistyneemmässä,
hienostuneemmassa seurapiirissä, jolla oli tärkeitä ja monipuolisia
harrastuksia, kuten luulin ihmisillä suurissa kaupungeissa olevan.
Lyhyessä ajassa teimmekin joukon tuttavuuksia, joista toinen aina

seurasi toista. Kylpylaitoksen salissa annettiin loistavia tanssiaisia,
joihin pelin ja huvittelun houkuttelemana kokoontui ainakin
ulkonaisesti paljon loistavampi ja hienompi seurapiiri kuin se, jota
tähän asti olin tottunut näkemään. Oli luonnollista, että lukuisten
tuttaviemme joukossa solmimme läheisempiäkin suhteita. Samassa
hotellissa kuin mekin asui muuan venäläinen kreivitär tyttärineen ja
heistä tuli pian hyviä tuttaviamme. Äiti oli erinomainen nainen,
lempeä ja rakastettava. Tytär oli vasta neljäntoistavuotias, aivan
äidin vastakohta, raisu kasakkatyttö, oikullinen, pirteä ja kuriton. Hän
lyöttäytyi pian meihin siinä määrin, että ilmestyi mihin aikaan
päivästä hyvänsä luoksemme, kutsumatta tai kutsuttuna ja kaikissa
mahdollisissa puvuissa. Usein saapui hän jo kello kuusi aamulla,
hapset hajallaan, yöpuvussa, lautasellinen hyötymansikoita ja lasi
maitoa kädessään, nauttimaan tämän aamiaisensa meidän
luonamme. Sitten alkoi hän pakista jos jotakin, voivotteli nuorta
ikäänsä, joka ei sallinut hänen vielä käydä tanssiaisissa, ja toivotti
kaikki opinnot niin pitkälle kuin tietä riitti. Mutta näiden vähemmän
miellyttävien ominaisuuksien ohessa oli hänessä jotakin
alkuperäistä, avonaista ja jalomielistä. Senvuoksi olimme
kärsivällisiä pikku hurjimukselle, sitäpaitsi tunsimme suurta
kunnioitusta hänen äitiään kohtaan. Tämän venakon luona
tutustuimme erääseen hänen maamieheensä, venäläiseen
diplomaattiin, joka oli jalon ja mielenkiintoisen näköinen mies, noin
kolmenkymmenen tienoilla. Hän käytti kainalosauvoja vaikean
reumatismin vuoksi, johon hän oli sairastunut tehtyään erään
jalomielisen teon. Laivalla, jolla hän oli matkustanut Pietarista
Saksaan virkistymään, oli syttynyt tulipalo ja hän oli syöksynyt
mereen pelastamaan kahta ihmistä. Kreivitär, joka oli tutustunut
häneen jo Venäjällä, puhui hänestä ihaillen. Olin ensi hetkestä asti
hänen henkevän keskustelunsa lumoissa ja samalla vakuutettu siitä,
että asetin hänen seuransa tuottaman huvin kaikkien muiden
huvitusten edelle. Hän ei terveytensä vuoksi koskaan ottanut osaa
yleisiin juhliin, mutta hän asui samassa talossa kuin me, ja niin
näimme hänet usein. Kerran suostui hän kuitenkin pyynnöstämme
lähtemään erääseen maalaisjuhlaan, jonka muuan tuttavamme,
rikas, rakastettava kreolitar pani toimeen. Juhla pidettiin eräällä
kukkulalla, josta näki kauaksi rikkaaseen, kukoistavaan seutuun.
Seurueessa olivat mitä erilaisimmat kansallisuudet edustettuina.
Istuuduin telttakatoksen suojaan, jonka emäntämme oli antanut
pystyttää, iloitakseni rauhassa kauniista näköalasta. Aurinko valoi
tenhoisaa loistettaan rikkaan seudun yli. Ympärilläni kuulin iloista
puheensorinaa kaikilla mahdollisilla kielillä. Kaikki henki nuoruutta,
kauneutta, onnea. Katseeni kiintyi säteilevään kohtaan
taivaanrannalla, sydämeni täytti uusi, sanoin kuvaamaton tunne, olin
kuin sisäisesti kirkastunut ja kyyneleet nousivat silmiini.

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Patricia Highsmith on Screen 1st ed.

Edition Wieland Schwanebeck

Muslim Heroes on Screen 1st Edition Daniel O'Brien

Class on Screen: The Global Working Class in

The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: Representations of Anne

Farm Management 8. ed., international ed. Edition

Bernard Shaw and the Censors: Fights and Failures,

Young People and the Smartphone: Everyday Life on the

A View from a Tall Hill Terry Wieland

Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern Women’s

More information about this series at

Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018949622

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover image: Warner Bros. Pictures/Photofest

1 Introduction: Patricia Highsmith on Screen 1

2 The Dark Side of Adaptation 21

Part I Doubles, Copies, and Strangers

3 “I Meet a Lot of Guys—But Not Many Like You”:

4 Strangers on a Park Bench: From Patricia Highsmith to

5 Tom Ripley’s Talent 81

6 Ripley Under Ground and Its Illegitimate Heirs 99

Part II Queer Encounters

7 Queer Ripley: Minghella, Highsmith, and the Antisocial 121

8 The Price of Salt, Carol, and Queer Narrative Desire(s) 139

Part III Aesthetic, Mythic, and Cultural Transactions

10 Adapting Irony: Claude Chabrol’s The Cry of the Owl 177

11 With Friends Like These: Wim Wenders’ The American

12 Hans Geissendörfer’s Psychological Noir: West-German

13 Authorship and Scales of Adaptation in Chillers 225

14 The Two Faces of January: Theseus and the Minotaur 243

Part IV In Conversation with the Adapters

15 Memories of The American Friend 263

16 “Highsmith Really Writes Films” 267

17 “An Interesting Lack of Sentimentality” 271

18 “Highsmith Was the Queen of Guilt” 275

Works by Patricia Highsmith 281

Erin Altman is a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Davis.

Thomas Leitch is a professor of English at the University of Delaware.

Kristopher Mecholsky is a scholar of crime narrative and adaptation

include the Metzler Handbook of Masculinity Studies (co-ed. with

Fig. 1.1 Once You Kiss a Stranger pays homage to Hitchcock’s

Introduction: Patricia Highsmith

Douglas McFarland and Wieland Schwanebeck

It’s Murder at the Movies!

© The Author(s) 2018 1

glasses suggest that he is unlikely to get much pleasure out of anything

of adaptation strategies that reflect shifts in moral ethos, industry prac-

be corrupted when opportunity knocks. In the process of adaptation,

The Unknown Ms. Highsmith

spare simplicity” (Bordwell 2015). That most of these scholarly efforts

complete fusion with the identity of ‘Mother’. The Gothic overtones of

alludes to the moment in Strangers when Robert Walker bursts a kid’s

Fig. 1.2 Hitchcock and Highsmith: Partners in crime

Structure of This Volume

Peters, Fiona (Ed.). Re-Evaluating Patricia Highsmith. Special Issue of Clues

The Dark Side of Adaptation

© The Author(s) 2018 21

Structure of This Volume