Eva Vitja on researching and reframing Patricia Highsmith in LOVING HIGHSMITH – Nadine Whitney interviews

Swiss filmmaker Eva Vitja’s documentary Loving Highsmith(2022) takes us through the contradictions of famed but reclusive author Patricia Highsmith. Highsmith’s reputation as a difficult, anti-social woman who battled with depression and social ostracism for her sexuality and later with some deeply controversial views is given a new prism through which to view and understand Highsmith’s mercurial nature.

Highsmith is of particular interest to cinephiles because she is one of the most cinematically adapted authors ever – in fact almost everything she wrote has been adapted for the screen and sometimes several times. The Ripliad (Tom Ripley novels) have seen actors from Alain Delon, Dennis Hopper, Matt Damon, and John Malkovich take on the role of the man who “will always get away with it.” Her pseudonymous novel Carol (originally titled The Price of Salt) was adapted by Todd Haynes in his masterwork Carol starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara. The Price of Salt was Highsmith’s second novel — after Strangers on a Train — and her fear of the book being connected to her halted her writing another queer novel until she took ownership of queerness later in life and wrote her final overtly queer novel Small g: a Summer Idyll. which she finished just before her death in 1995.

Patricia Highsmith has been called ‘a lesbian misogynist’ and her reticence to speak about herself has been confused with general misanthropy. Eva Vitja’s documentary gives the viewer access to Highsmith’s unpublished diaries and interviews with her lovers and family to create a new portrait of the woman Graeme Green called “the poet of apprehension.”

Nadine Whitney talks to Eva Vitja about reframing Patricia Highsmith and understanding the depths of her emotions.

Nadine Whitney: What brought you to Patricia Highsmith?

Eva Vitja: My parents took me on holidays to the Italian part of Switzerland where Patricia lived, so I had a connection to her from childhood. My parents told me that there was this very famous author, they probably didn’t say it was a crime author because I didn’t know about crime novels then, living alone with her cats. Somehow this stuck in my mind for a long time. I was really wondering as a little child “Why does she live alone with her cats? Why doesn’t she live with her family?” I didn’t even remember that when I started the project, but I thought maybe this was the very first question I had.

I discovered that all her unpublished writings are in a Swiss archive because she lived there for thirteen years. I started to go to the archive and read the notebooks which were handwritten and that immediately sucked me into the topic. I discovered a woman that was very familiar, that was sympathetic, a very young woman describing all of her feelings and daily thoughts. I felt a connection somehow which had nothing to do with all I knew about her before – about her writing, especially about her image. Highsmith always had this very somber and dark image that quite fit her novels.

NW: In the documentary the point is made that she is a shadow version of Tom Ripley, that there is a connection between the two of them as much as there is a connection between her writing in Carol.

EV: It really brought up many questions for me because I thought how can a person have such a different image to my personal experience of reading her nonpublished writings? Also meeting her friends, of course and her lovers especially. What they told me aligned with what I was reading in her diaries. She was this very sensitive person, not the old witch that was always described in the media. I was asking myself did she change so much during the course of her life, or is the image people know just wrong? How is it that we have two such different people?

For a very long time I wasn’t sure if I could do a film because the rights were very tough to get and I wasn’t sure if anyone would join the project. For two years I was doing research, visiting people, reading Patricia’s unpublished work.

NW: Eventually it came together as a documentary. Loving Highsmith captures Patricia to an extent but she’s still elusive which says a lot about her, she’s hard to pin down. You managed to speak to both Tabea Blumenschein and Marijane Meaker who have similar but different versions of Highsmith as a lover.

EV: Marijane Meaker had a loving image and a loving memory of Highsmith. Marijane Meaker was the first person I contacted because she had written a book about their relationship. It was hard to contact Marijane because her generation didn’t really use digital technology. One of the first things I did in the archive was look into Patricia’s address book, but a lot of people had moved. I tracked Marijane down via the phone book and just called her and it was a very nice chat.

Marijane Meaker told me that she was puzzled by the image that Patricia had as a very old and bitter cat lady, even being antisemitic and so on. She had such a different idea of Patricia as a person and that was the motivation for herself to write the book about the two of them without excluding the darker sides. She really wanted to convey how Patricia was when they were together when they were younger women.
 

NW: The antisemitism is troubling; do we even know where it came from, what the root of that was?

EV: I think it is quite clear where it comes from. Highsmith came from a very Christian background in Texas, so it was probably a product of her upbringing at the time. However, not everyone would sustain antisemitism. She had lots of Jewish friends and lots of Jewish lovers. At some point in her life, it just went in the wrong direction (she also felt slighted by East coast literary editors who she saw as overwhelmingly Jewish).

NW: In the documentary we see that once Patricia has left Texas and is living in New York as a child she goes to a public school and immediately makes friends with a black student which upsets her family greatly.

EV: I wanted to make that point in the film, although it’s not a film about the topic of racism. Patricia’s family had a background in owning slaves in Alabama but in her childhood innocence she didn’t understand racism. It’s very complex. Part of her background is deeply racist and other parts of her family opposed slavery.

NW: Highsmith was phenomenally successful, especially in terms of adaptations. Her first novel is adapted a year after its publication by Alfred Hitchcock in Strangers on a Train (footage from the film appears in the documentary). The only other women authors whose works are as often adapted are Agatha Christie and Daphne Du Maurier. Hoghsmith’s intensely important to the film world which led her to being a Jury President at the 1975 Berlinale. You use Gwendoline Christie’s voice to speak as Patricia. Gwendoline’s voice is so calming and soothing and has the perfect blend of masculine and feminine to represent Highsmith. When she’s reading the dialogue that appears on the screen in animated form, is that handwriting Patricia’s?

EV: Yes, that is her handwriting but made neater. Other than the title, which is a cleaner version, all of that writing is her own.

NW: You do capture the ecstasy and the spirit of Patricia when she was in love. When she was in love, she was almost a wholly different person to when she wasn’t. When she wasn’t with someone, she was more concentrated on her failing health and depression and her feelings of isolation. But when she was in love she was absolutely energised.

EV: It was important to me to get that across because it was so important in her diaries. It was this up and down of being extremely in love and idealising everything about the woman she was in love with and then she went through an extreme drop and feeling of being disappointed.

The whole topic of imagination that appears in love stories at the beginning is so important for her because she was this very imaginative writer. There’s a similarity between writing and relationships; you imagine these things about a person that are so paradisical but there comes a disappointment because at some point a relationship enters reality and loses the fantasy element. The ups and downs were documented in the diary and the notebooks.

NW: It seems that Highsmith was someone who wasn’t interested in the quotidian.

EV: She was very idealistic about relationships.

NW: She was a romantic. She moved countries to be with her married lover ‘Caroline’.

EV: That was one of my biggest surprises because I really didn’t expect to find a romantic when I was starting with a Patricia Highsmith project. That surprise made me want to make a documentary about that quality in Highsmith’s personality. It was a major goal to be able to show that and I think Gwendoline Christie’s voice is a way to make that aspect accessible.

When I started to listen to English voices, I didn’t even know it was Gwendoline Christie, I was just listening to voices through a database. When I heard her, I immediately had the impression that she had a quality that was alive, touching and also fragile. She has such a beautiful tone that had something in common with Highsmith’s voice – she had a very beautiful voice even despite her heavy smoking. Then I looked up Gwendoline Christie and thought “How perfect” because she has so many gender fluid roles which is very pertinent to Patricia Highsmith.

Gwendoline is also a Patricia Highsmith fan which helped. She had met one of Highsmith’s biographers. Her agency wasn’t keen on her doing a small Swiss documentary but her mentor, Simon Callow, was also a huge Highsmith reader, so she was already familiar with Highsmith’s work and wanted to do it.

NW: What would you like audiences to take away from Loving Highsmith about Patricia? What is it that you really want them to know?

EV: I want them to really feel the human being behind these novels and I want them to read the already known literature in a different way, to understand how the biographical influences were immense in her works despite being quite hidden. On first impression you wouldn’t say that her work is influenced by her love life. She wrote that if someone read or found my diaries my life would be read in a new way. It would probably be read through the lens of homosexuality and that would be okay.

She was absolutely right that it would be the case one day, when it was more socially possible, to read her work and life in a very different manner. I think it’s important to know who Patricia was for her works.

NW: Highsmith is an incredibly important figure in gay culture but because she was also intensely private and hated interviews, we don’t really know her. Loving Highsmith is a window into the soul of the “cranky cat lady” that uncovers a new aspect to her psyche.