‘The Mobile Bed Object’ by Patricia Highsmith

The title of this bald and brutal story is about as euphemistic as it gets. “There are lots of girls like Mildred,” goes its more characteristic first sentence, “homeless, yet never without a roof – most of the time the ceiling of a hotel room, sometimes that of bachelor digs, of a yacht’s cabin if they’re lucky, a tent, or a caravan. Such girls are bed-objects, the kind of things one acquires like a hot water bottle, a travelling iron, an electric shoe-shiner, any little luxury of life … they are interchangeable.”

Terms defined, Highsmith proceeds to chronicle Mildred’s life, from her leaving home at fifteen to “the danger age” of twenty-three at which the value of a woman in her line of work diminishes. “Want[ing] to continue the same life but with a greater sense of security”, she attaches herself to wealthy, jet-setting Sam Zupp, who provides her with everything but that one big “nest egg” she needs to retire and escape this grim existence. If you’ve read any other of Highsmith’s Little Tales of Misogyny, in which disturbing book this story was collected, you’ll know not to expect a happy ending.

First published in a German translation as part of Kleine Geschichten für Weiberfeinde, Diogenes Verlag, 1975. The collection came out in English under the title Little Tales of Misogyny, Heinemann, 1977 – and reissued as a Virago Modern Classic in 2014. This particular story was published in the New Review in August of the same year

‘Blow It’ by Patricia Highsmith

With all due respect to late-February Boston, summer’s the season I dread: in childhood the season of boredom; in early maturity, of physical assaults, desertions, and extremely bad decisions. I’m fish-belly pale, with one carcinoma already knifed out, and even ten minutes at 29°C are enough to begin scooping gray matter from my dutch-oven skull and reduce me to a monosyllabic zombie shambling more or less in any direction you lead.

If my most memorable warm-weather traumas had been triggered by mechanical rather than organic failure, Alfred Bester’s ‘Fondly Fahrenheit’ would be the seasonal selection.

Instead I thought of this stripped-down barely-a-story, simple enough for even the sun-addled to follow. In the summer an upwardly mobile Manhattanite’s fancy turns to thoughts of a Westchester County home — “white, with a lawn, with grown-up trees” — which proves one egg too many for his juggling to handle.

Highsmith was a diagnostician of gender roles, generally presenting the threat of physical violence as a comorbidity of maleness. But, as ‘Blow It’ demonstrates, the Highsmith-male trinity of presumed competence, prescribed sense of agency, and near-absolute absence of rational motive doesn’t need bloodshed to generate recognizable nightmares. What say let’s climb out of these sweaty clothes and into a dry martini?

First published in The Black House, William Heinemann, 1981; reprinted in The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith, Norton, 2001. Picked by Ray Davis. Davis lives in the blessedly temperate San Francisco area and publishes his own and others’ work to pseudopodium.org from a cool dark basement. You can read his individual Personal Anthology here.

‘In the Dead of Truffle Season’ by Patricia Highsmith

Highsmith’s collection, An Animal-Lover’s Guide to Beastly Murder, is predominantly narrated by animals taking their sweet revenge on some deserving human. The humans are all odious, and the animals Ripley-esque in their desire to right wrongs and (more importantly) perceived slights. The animals are just as prickly as Highsmith’s humans are, and it makes for a collection which is delightfully unhinged.

When authors begin to write dialogue in animal noises, I’ve usually considered it to be a sign to stop reading (the main culprits here are Enid Blyton and late Agatha Christie, and it’s usually dogs.) Highsmith’s truffle-hunting pig Samson carries out conversations which appear on the page like this:

“Oink!—oink oink!”
“Whuff-f!”
“Hwon-nk!”

And

“‘Hwun-nf!—Ha-wun-nf! Umpf!’ Samson had found a good cache and he knew it.”

Highsmith, I will always contend, is a very funny writer who too often worked against rather than with her own off-kilter humour. Each em-dash and italicisation here is lovingly placed. I’m not sorry we didn’t get a longer-form version of the pig-conversations, but how many other writers would commit to the pageantry of this?

Published in An Animal-Lover’s Guide to Beastly Murder, Heinemann, 1975; also available from Norton, 2002

‘The Birds Poised to Fly’ by Patricia Highsmith

With the publication of her diaries this year which, before editing, ran into 8000 pages, it’s clear that Highsmith was devoutly hypergraphic. Likewise, her work is so packed with apprehension and other mischief that it’s easy to miss her characters are also constantly, maniacally and compulsively, writing—letters, signing fake documents and scribbling dodgy wills on the back of cigarette packets and napkins.

It was while reading ‘The Birds Poised to Fly’ that I realised letters have something of a ghostly or phantom presence in Highsmith’s fiction. They often carry the words of a person who is already dead or pretending to be alive. They have little physical presence in the world of things, yet have the potential to wreak havoc in their recipient’s lives, like something of a poltergeist.

In this story a crank, Don, tires of checking his mail box for a message from his lover and, convinced that it may have been posted into the wrong one, breaks open his neighbour’s box. He finds a letter from a woman that his neighbour has ignored, and starts writing to her. Arranging to meet at Grand Central, the man arrives just for a glimpse of her disappointment when nobody turns up.

Highsmith wrote in her guide to suspense fiction that you should start a short story as near to its ending as possible, and here there is a brevity that cleverly suggests whole lives beyond that of this short piece of writing. It’s expansive and the ghosts just keep appearing in different ways.

First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, August 1969, and collected in Eleven by Patricia Highsmith, Grove Press, 1970, now a Virago Modern Classic

‘Where the Door is Always Open and the Welcome Mat is Out’ by Patricia Highsmith

The title is a promise whose unravelling, during a familial visit, is what drives the story forward, but isn’t what makes it linger. A young woman, living in a tiny New York apartment, rushes to prepare for a visit from her sister from Cleveland. Highsmith’s mastery of building tension out of absent-mindedness (did she leave the eggs on the stove or not?) is as enjoyable here as it is in any of her novels, but it’s the moment when Mildred, the city-dwelling sister, rails, mildly and politely, against her sister’s haughty assessment of New York’s unfriendliness that the story’s generosity breaks open. The description of her watching a police parade in the rain is a very beautiful moment: “Why, they even call them New York’s Finest!”

Included in Nothing that Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories, Bloomsbury, 2005 and Selected Novels and Short Stories, Norton, 2010