July 2016 – Snopes

Novelist Patricia Highsmith: A Quirky Introduction

R.T. Smith

Until the release of the film Carol last year, I had given little thought to Patricia Highsmith, who was born Mary Patricia Plangman, in Fort Worth. I had read her novel The Talented Mr. Ripley with interest and mild “guilty-pleasure” enjoyment and thought maybe Graham Greene was onto something when he called her “the poet of apprehension.” When I saw the film version with Matt Damon as Tom Ripley, I was impressed, though skeptical sometimes of the role luck and coincidence play in the storyline. Could the cunning protagonist of this picaresque tale really be so perfectly configured for the ruses he perpetuates? Could he improvise so swiftly, precisely and effectively? It hardly matters, as Minghella has given us a version of Tom even more villainously seductive (and twisted) than the novelist created, and I was willing to suspend my disbelief. No matter how sharp are the edges of his essential “HARM” that press from within the slight camouflaging of Tom’s “CHARM,” I was charmed, intrigued almost (or just barely) to the point of empathy.

I did not realize that Strangers on a Train, the novel from which Hitchcock sculpted his famous film, was also Highsmith’s, her first, but it explores a theme or proposition that runs not just through TTMR, but through Ripley Under Water, Ripley Under Ground and Ripley’s Game. I have not read The Boy Who Followed Ripley, but I expect similar features permeate it. The abiding motif that moves Highsmith’s people and plots concerns the existence of evil and sociopathic behavior melded into the most civilized of people. “Good” people like Guy Haines do bad things; we know that from the media and from Twain’s warning that “virtue is often another name for the lack of opportunity,” but Highsmith is interested in the ways that amoral behavior, right down to regretless murder, can lie dormant in people whose cultivation would seem to leave little room or inclination for smashing a guest with a wine bottle (in the wine cellar) till his legs quit wiggling (a scene clearly nodding to Poe, if not Clue). Recognizing these elements in action, The New Yorker once called her “peerlessly disturbing.”

However, we are familiar with this kind of story by now because of Hannibal Lector. All his Mozart and rare merlot fail to mitigate his, well, appetite for vengeance, as well as the thrill of descending ex nihilo into the lives of the guilty and innocent alike. I didn’t make this connection between Thomas Harris and Patricia Highsmith right away, as Carol (from the novel The Price of Salt, published under the nom de plume Claire Morgan) is not so concerned with this twisted mix, and the villains in that piece are not the focal characters. Hitchcock’s version of Strangers on a Train is a little off track, too, as he compresses the second half of the novel (the hands too soiled for all the perfumes of Araby to cleanse them, that extended regret bit) and focuses, rightly, on a special feature of Highsmith’s story.

That feature is a kind of moral (and mortal) chiasmus: “Hey, stranger, if you agree to kill my intolerable father, I’ll kill your malicious estranged wife, and the police will never suspect, as neither of us has a motive beyond this confidential and unlikely pact.” The problem, of course, lies in the asymmetry: Bruno, the proposer of this vile swap, is one of those cultured and idle (but still boorish, in this case, and off-putting) very rich who are not like the rest of us, and the other is an essentially decent-leaning architect who must be coerced and driven to uphold “his” end of a bargain he never actually agreed to. The premise is engaging, if only for the narrative structure, and Hitchcock’ s trimming and additions (especially the carrousel imagery) fit the concept nicely. Highsmith is more interested in exploring what might drive her protagonist Guy (or Everyman?) to fall under Bruno’s spell and how his act might gnaw and abrade Guy’s soul, agenbite of inwit, so to speak. It’s also hard to fault her vision of the spoiled brat monster who starts the plot in motion.

What does it mean to slip “involuntarily” into crime and out of the moral community? How do minds in the midst of that transaction operate? Interesting question, and prominent in TTMR, but less so in the other Ripley books, after Tom has plenty of blood on his hands, a settled life in France, a healthy cash flow. In the later Ripley books, it’s his involvement with art forgery that interests me. The counterfeit Derwatts and the conspiracy of impersonations and extravagant lies that foist them onto a somewhat deserving cadre of connoisseurs lead Tom to conduct himself as blithely and conniving as a Bunburying Wilde mischief maker. But it all runs to leftover stew in most of the Ripley books, as Highsmith is not a careful stylist (too fond of “thriftily” and worse) or a convincing orchestrator of forensic suspense. The information in the separate books overlaps too much for my taste, but what she is exquisitely configured for are the many delays before the anticipated inevitable other shoe drops. She provides and relishes domestic details, harpsichord lessons, art chat, gardening, sartorial options, travel pointers and culinary details, plus the stolidly agreeable antics of Mme. Annette, the loyal housekeeper, to keep the reader pondering that old question: where’s the beef? Or the body? As Time noted, she is highly skilled at “eliciting the menace that lurks in the familiar surroundings.” Once Tom ceases to be the ambitious young con artist on the make and evolves to the dragon protecting his trove, he loses zest and novelty, and the questions of his conscience are long ossified to givens.

I also read about two dozen of Highsmith’s short stories, which are mostly anecdotal or parable-like, scenarios almost right for Hitch’s TV series, but Highsmith doesn’t very often render the narratives convergent or epiphanic, and the supernatural is seldom invoked. They’re quirky and driven by circumstance, permeated with mood but neither moving nor intriguing. Stories in The Black House and Mermaids on the Golf Course offer more complexity than the other collections, but they still read more like aperitifs than courses. Still, they’re good enough to demonstrate that writing text for comic books didn’t diminish her cunning.

For those who want to know a bit about the author, she was born in Texas, preferred to live in Europe (England, France, Switzerland) and was an actively gay woman in a time when she must have encountered many obstacles, which did not come close to defeating her, though she was often, according to the dense biography, Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith by Andrew Wilson, unhappy. It would be hard not to admire her intrepid nature, and her pursuit of the questions and characters who captured her imagination might have made her apprehensive herself concerning the poor bare forked animal. Her work ethic and dedication to following or breaking conventions according to her own muse, however, were unassailable.

One anomaly among Highsmith’s novels, The Glass Cell (1964), deserves consideration in its sub-genre, the prison novel. It recounts the experiences of the naïve Philip Carter, who is convicted of fraud he did not commit. Once released, he finds that the six years in the calaboose have left him more suspicious and violent than he ever imagined. His creator was a great lover of Kafka, but the transformation of Carter is less allegorical and mysterious and more recognizable.

Before closing the dossier (though there are more Highsmith novels about, and I can’t say I’ll always be able to resist them), I want to recommend another of her books that stands apart from her oeuvre (which includes twenty novels and a battalion of short stories). Her eighth novel, The Cry of the Owl, strikes me as driven more by curiosity concerning a lonely man’s marginal behavior than by moral equations and hypotheses. I actually saw the film in its early and foreign rendition (La cri du hibou) years ago and never even noted the author. After I read the novel, I Netflixed the English film derived from both the French Canadian movie and the novel and liked it very much, despite some inexpert accounts of gunfights and fist fights. (Action scenes are not her strong suit.)

The novel is set in the U.S. (like SOAT) but in the East, rather than Texas, and its protagonist and his travails ring, even half a century later, true enough to be unsettling, especially on a dreary night. And just to remove a needless element of suspense, the title does refer to the folkloric – an owl’s cry predicts something ominous, probably a death. Considering how many owls I hear where I live and how many people die, it seems a fair association to me, but I’m no folklore statistician nor ornithologist.

The larger structure of the story may remind some of SOAT. Here, a gloomy and aimless young man begins spying on a young woman, Jenny, who lives alone in a wooded area. He’s not exactly a stalker, but he derives satisfaction from watching through a window as she cheerily conducts her housework. No aggression and nothing sexual. He almost sleepwalking, desperate for something to distract him from his own depression. She catches him, and with that structural instinct, Highsmith soon reverses the situation, though Jenny’s agenda is more specific than the protagonist’s. So, the criss-crossing again.

Highsmith has in Robert Forester created a decent, damaged, sympathetic character who has no interest in transgression but finds himself. for all his dedication to calm and deliberateness, drawn into irrationality, violence, police business, travesty and tragedy. For all his attempts at meditation and caution, he finds the world given to the Lord of Misrule, and harm follows.

It’s probably no mistake that Robert is reminiscent of Camus’ Meursault; Highsmith was an admirer of the existentialist writers and would very likely have been smitten with both Camus’ signature novel and his play “Le Malentendu.” But what drew me into the story and held me were her renderings of place, weather, mood, fragile details and Robert’s slow-motion, scrupulous mind, understanding too late how much momentum has gathered and is unleashed. It’s a novel of disaffection and helplessness, of disguised bad choices and the long memory of bad luck. A New Yorker critic praised the book for its brand of fear, “the dread of humiliation,” and I was entranced (and shaken in my recognition) by that feature, but I have to admit that I also loved hating Nickie, Robert’s unscrupulous and indefatigable estranged wife. She’s a sniper with memorable and horrifying skills. Jenny is far more sympathetic and intriguing, but now and then it’s a treat to have unsympathetic nasties like Nickie and Jenny’s frustrated paramour Greg.

But it’s time to move on. I have a ghost story I want to read, another Appalachian novel by Robert Morgan, a big book of Walt Kelly’s Pogo cartoons and Audubon’s Missouri River Journals. And I plan to be more whimsical and less driven in some future posts. For now, Sample Highsmith and see if she fits your pistol. Comments are welcome below. A demain.

R. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

Team Trump and Not MY LITTLE PONY: Kidnapping Language

R.T. Smith

(7/19/16)
Most Americans get exercised over plagiarism only when one rock band (like Led Zepp) is suing another over lyrics or melody, or when a scolding note comes home from Hunter’s or Kendle’s teacher, and there are as many popular notions and technical definitions of the offense as there are putative authorities. They almost all seem to have in common intention, some unquestionable textual appropriation and claim of credit by the chronologically second host of the text. In the literatosphere, plagiarism is viewed as theft, and royalties, penalties, reputations, allegiances – all are on the line.

The term is Latin in origin, and its Roman users meant “kidnapped” or “kidnapper” when they said it. This is not a casual concept, maybe not even a misdemeanor, so it’s no wonder that eyebrows and hackles rose when listeners to First Wife Melania Trump’s carefully calibrated values speech at the RNC heard whole paragraphs that echoed (and to some degree duplicated) Michelle Obama’s speech on just such an occasion eight years before. And without crediting the current First Lady. A former Bush speechwriter was quick to say in an interview that, while we want our public figures to be inspired by the speeches of the past, we do not wish that they be dependent upon them. Ms. Trump’s speech fell, to his ear, clearly into the latter category, though she did omit the phrase about treating adversaries “with dignity.” So last night’s speech, while derivative, did not follow the Michelle Obama script exactly. In fact, much of it was less elegant and memorable, but those three passages raise some serious questions.

The gallant Republican defenders said “coincidence, common phrases, accident,” even, “You can find these words in My Little Pony,” while the Democratic kibitzers cried “theft.” And what a peculiar theft it would be, if in fact Melania were thinking, “Gee, that Muslim Obama woman was so right about our hopes for our children and so on,” since her Donald, with his scary-voiced schoolyard “there’s something going on here,” has all but called Obama a clueless traitor and a devil, maybe the Devil. But at least the two parties now have something in common, some of the most heartfelt and captivating sentences in a speech. Is it plagiarism? If this were an academic context, we have web sites we can employ to measure the closeness of particular passages and parameters, as well as precedents, for the teacher or other adjudicator to apply.

What really interests me here are three questions, the first a frivolous thing but mine own. In early modern western literature, allusion, appropriation, citation, downright hijacking played a role in the “next-to-newest new” process of constructing a text. But magpie gathering wasn’t really the invention of Eliot, Joyce and their ilk; the pirated phrases, scenes, character relations in Shakespeare are the subject of a storeroom of dissertations, articles and books, and Melville pillages the Bible and Lear to shore up his whale tale. But Eliot and Joyce were more concerned that their audience “get it,” that they be able to connect the dots, feel the layering, see the wires jumping from enhanced voltage and follow the electricity back to Dante, Milton, Homer and Chaucer. It was part of their project, to hitch their wagons to a star or stars, working with the assumption that the rising tide would float all the boats. Importantly, they ran the old passages of language through the prisms of their imaginations to provide a fresh perspective. Perhaps that’s what the author(s) of Melania’s speech had in mind. But I can almost see the furrowed brows and scowls out there in virtual audienceland. That’s probably not what she was doing, as she (or he or whoever, probably they) provided no apparatus in the text for us to make the link, no pattern of allusion or reference, and instead of refreshment, Ms. Trump’s replication features just a few slips where the power of the rhetoric is diminished by a turn of grammar or an omitted word.

So scrap that. The other questions I would raise are “Who wrote the speech in question?” and in the context of this election, “How big a deal is it?” Tempest in a teapot? Core sample of the campaign, or something in between?

Who? If a fairly a-political, honest and innocent wife just delivered a professionally constructed speech, then we have no significant quarrel with her. She’s a victim. But in an interview the day of the values speech, Ms. Trump told Matt Lauer of CNBC that she wrote the speech herself straight through in one go, read it over and was satisfied that it revealed her life experiences and beliefs. Yet the next day, when the shouts had hit the fan, Farcebook, Twitter and so on, Paul Manafort said that a team of writers interviewed Ms. T. and then cobbled together the speech. Later we got so many conflicting stories that they add up to an epic clusteredit with no real author. Maybe it was a combination, but when I hear two separate explanations so disparate, I suspect one is either mistaken or a lie. I can’t help wondering if we’ll ever know whose lie.

Anyone who maintains that it was all just a freak coincidence needs to be, what, waterboarded? Maybe just a good wrist twist will do. But if (as I suspect) surrogates, mouthpieces, spokesfolk and minions wrote it, they have to be outed and assigned the Walk of Shame. If Melania wrote the speech flash-bang once and done, then she has to bear the onus of dishonesty, face up to it as Joe Biden and many others of us have done for transgressions written or spoken, no matter how long ago. But then William Jefferson Clinton never took back that “never inhaled,” and he slept at a posh address for eight years. So, suppose she shows that she is capable of error and apology, or the ghost writers do, and forgiveness is requested? It would be embarrassing, but it might reveal the best of the Trump package to be a little more honest, accuracy-driven and fair-minded than they now appear.

And compared to “I know more about Isis than the generals,” I’m worth ten billion dollars,” “Mexico will pay for it” and “I never actually said that, I just retweeted it,” why does it matter if Trump’s high-priced wife or her assistants/minions/cribbers slipped in a few nicely lapidary phrases so solid in their emotions and thinking that no one would disagree with them and someone might have actually said them before? Let’s go with the premise that she did not write the speech, which I believe to be the case, though unproven as yet. That Monday night moment was meant to roll out and substantiate the human, familial, gracious and charming (“spectacular looking,” as one Trump surrogate said in an interview) side of Team Trump, the generous and cultured, eloquent and fine arts-educated face of a hit squad that generally “watches the shows” for information, doesn’t read books, consults with itself and is willing to exclude, expel, bomb, waterboard, snarl at or shoot from 5^th Avenue anyone who does not share its agenda and prejudices. And the softening and smoothing almost worked, until the appropriated sentences revealed just how low the operatives of Team Trump were willing to go in order to score points. Rhetorically, it was foolish and cheap, morally it was reprehensible. But these are desperate times, and they call for desperate measures, which everyone in the dirty game understands. When a member of Congress was allowed to shout out with impunity during the State of the Union Address “you lie” to a sitting president, the civilized code of conduct began to fray faster, and the rules of engagement altered.

Someone in the Trumperial Guard, perhaps even the C.E.O. himself, needs to apologize and name the guilty parties so we can move on, try to repair our endangered national dialogue and be guided by our ideal mode of conduct, instead of the ruthless language we’ve been using like a blunt instrument. Forgiveness seems in order, once mistakes are admitted and we know whom to forgive.

But given Trump’s businesslike, bartering mind, perhaps these kidnapped sentiments and sentences will have to be ransomed, as he likes only good deals, fabulous deals you can’t even imagine, the best deals ever, and we have his wife’s (or somebody’s wife’s) word concerning his “word is [his] bond” and of “the strength of [his] dreams.” What else can we suppose he wants? Is it too much for us, to stretch the metaphor to its breaking point sense, like the family of a hostage to ask for a little proof of life?

Dulcimer Redux

R.T. Smith

I was raised a flatlander (“cracker,” we used to say), a mouth-harp wheezer, and did not come to the mountain dulcimer on the porch or in the parlor. Instead, I read of Coleridge’s “Abyssinian maid” with a dulcimer on Mt. Abora (probably a zither akin to the hammered dulcimer Malcolm Dalglish played so well on Banish Misfortune). Read it for a college English class, but before I’d reckoned what sort of music the coke-dream damsel strummed, the folk revival flowed over me like a freshet, and I started listening to the Vanguard albums in which Richard and Mimi Farina played and sang his dulcimer tunes like “Dandelion River Run,” “Pack up Your Sorrows,” “The Falcon” and “Reno Nevada,” not at all the traditional highlands dulcimer repertoire. They employed dulcimers, played with plectrums and fingers, along with guitar and autoharp and backed by a range of sounds from John Hammond’s mouth harp to a celesta and an electric bass. It was all bluesy and Dylanesque, espresso, lyrical/political and supposedly earthy.

Well, I was smitten, and Farina became a hero, especially after I’d read his brilliant (I don’t use it lightly) novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. But by the time I discovered that book, he was already dead. My dulcimer interest, however, expanded quickly to more traditional players like Jean Ritchie and Oskar Brand, and I was no scholar, so I didn’t pursue much about the construction, origins, tunings and styles of dulcimers and their material. But I pushed on, and after I moved to the Blue Ridge for the first time in the seventies, dulcimers began to creep into my writing and my life, and I discovered that I had a grandmother who’d had one, no more discussed than the fiddle my father (a barefoot boy and not the F.B.I. agent he became) had played with the Ku Klux Klan dance band. I bought my first dulcy in 1975 (a three-string Ralph Hodges hourglass model with heart sound holes) and quickly learned to play it badly. The good news is that I’m not deluded on this matter and have become a front row audience member rather than pursuing stage time, since getting real melody out of me is like trying to milk an owl.

In grad school at Appalachian State I learned a bit (more dancing than making or playing) from Willard Watson, and dulcimers abounded, but my knowledge remained sketchy, random, information marbled artfully with misinformation, even though I own a couple of good dulcimer primers. After years of loose ends, what finally set me on the right track was Ralph Lee Smith’s recent The Story of the Dulcimer (U. of TN Press), 2^nd edition. I missed the first one entirely, but edition two has absorbed my attention for the last couple of weeks. Ralph Lee is a scholar, a collector, a devotee and musicological bloodhound, also energetic as a worker bee and smart as a whip.

This book is not for every general reader; sometimes I think it’s not for me. The abundance and intricacy of the variations in design and tuning, the geographical eccentricities, the incremental evolution – it’s a lot to put together with all the dimensions, statistics and photographs of dulcimers, and though it’s not completely accurate to say so, there are nearly no two alike. After all, they are not mass produced but handcrafted, and even before you hear one’s voice responding to skillful fingers, it’s easy to see why so many people are eager to say they are not products or merchandise or toys; they are art, with utility. A hand-hewn cradle can qualify like that, a forged and polished skinning knife. And yet some people aren’t content without a mitigating adjective – “folk art.” If the term “folk” diminishes a noun for you, may God have mercy. . . .

I can say that this book delivers what Brother Ralph promises. It supports claims that the instrument is “a specimen of American folk craftsmanship.” It elucidates what kind of music the implement is capable of producing and the place of that sound in the spectrum of world music. It reveals the crucial role the dulcimer played “in the broader history of the Appalachian frontier.”

So suppose you’re not a player or (not yet) an aficionado? Here’s what I think you’ll come away appreciating. The history of the instrument, as it evolved from the German Sheitholt and became an altogether different instrument when it was taken down the Great Wagon Road into Virginia and then west into the frontier, is fascinating. That history is revealed both in the author’s narrative and in the many photographs of sheitholts and dulcimers throughout the hundred-page volume. I loved reading how the settlement schools like Hindman (where I briefly taught) served as hotbeds and enclaves for the dulcimer, how (but not why) the Scotch-Irish preferred an instrument with a raised and centered fretboard and tuning pegs that were wood rather than metal, flat rather than vertical. Both instruments are zithers and can accommodate various numbers of strings. The possible shapes and materials (from a cardboard box to a wild cherry coffer) are endless. Who sees one, even in a picture, and doesn’t want to stroke it and strum it and be blessed?

Because the photographs are black and white, I can concentrate on the shapes – pegs, frets, strum hollows, scrolls, the overall contours of the creature – instead of (as is my wont) getting caught up in the various colors and grains of the poplar, cherry, spruce, butternut, rosewood, bloodwood, ash. And there are plenty of places to see the wood in full splendor. The B&W images probably help keep the price of the paperback book modest, which I value.

Whenever the technical threatens to get tedious (usually due to my lack of erudition), I crave an anecdote, a stream of narrative to confer a local habitation and a name. The Story of . . . offers several of those. After all, it is a story. I enjoyed the tale of the transaction that took Granny Lee’s instrument to John Blankenbeckler, the account of traveling luthier Uncle Ed Thomas, whose dulcimers sold for about three and a half bucks and whose knowledge of how to make them was never explained, the chronicle of Jethro Amburgey of Hindman who was written up in The Times in the 30’s and the legacy of collector and preserver Henry Mercer who knew early on to value the dulcimer as more than a quirk or a whim. Ferrum’s Roddy Moore’s contribution to the lore and preservation also runs throughout the book, but my favorite narrative tells of Betsey Maggard Creech, who lost her husband Gilbert in the Civil War and traveled with her children to Big Leatherwood Creek near Perry, KY to play a tune at Gilbert’s graveside, then returned home to the Cumberland. Quite a trek, but they say the path shortens when you have a mission.

My only unfilled wish for the book would be a short section of the courting dulcimer, my favorite kind for its ingenious employment. Sometimes a young man might come calling to the homeplace of a sweetheart whose family wanted to allow the couple some private time but who were still wary of the mischief that can kindle when romance is in the air. They might allow the couple to be alone in a room with a courting dulcimer (probably on a table between them). Instead of relying on steady chatter, which is known to falter amid amorous stares, the parents listened to hear that both sets of strings were singing, all hands busy making the music, no idle ones to become the devil’s workshop. I’ve seen only five or six of those devices which help delay the honeymoon till after the vows, and I would love to know more about their history and frequency. Might even derive some satisfaction from knowing if they worked, though I am not choosing sides.

It’s worth noting that Smith makes no claim for The Story of the Dulcimer as definitive. He suggests it be read along with Allen Smith’s Catalogue of Pre-revival Appalachian Dulcimers (U. of MO Press), and I’d add Jean Ritchie’s classic The Dulcimer Book (Oak Music) and Neal Hellman’s Dulcimer Songbook (Oak). And of course, you’ll want an instrument on hand to give the whole session dimensions (Dr. Google can help you find what you want.), including depth and sound, but the images, anecdotes, explanations and examples of Ralph Smith’s account will likely lure you, so to speak, deep into the wildwood flowers of dulcet lore. I recommend the enterprise.