There’s no success like failure,
and . . . failure is no success at all.

- Bob Dylan

- Failure is measured by fate; by the cards we are dealt. It can be genetic, economic, geographical, sociological, or the luck that comes with a gypsy’s Tarot cards. And up to a point, fate is that reality we carve out of stone; that rubble of rocks we transform into a monument. Yet it is more.

For failure is what we make of it. How we score our achievements very much determines whether the game of life is won or lost. A love-filled room in a housing project can be more precious than real-estate on Rodeo Drive. Yes, in can, if only we will it so – or so goes the gospel of the romantic’s good book.

Patricia Highsmith’s painful but promising short story, “Born Failure” (1953), illustrates this point with literary luster and philosophical insight. The heretofore unpublished piece, collected in “Nothing Meets the Eye,” is a parable of how a pitiful life can take on new meaning. It is the story of a void filled; of a life saved . . . not by success but despite it. Above all, it is the story of Sisyphus embracing his Rock.

Kind Karma

Please don’t confront me with my failures,
I’m aware of them, so aware of them.

- Jackson Browne

“Some men are born to success as the sparks fly upward.” They are Highsmith’s words, the ones with which she opens her distressing story. By the same token, some (like Winthrop Hazlewood, her lead character) are destined to failure. There are souls born aflame as if to ignite the universe, and there are others souls that do little more than flicker in a dark cosmos.

True, mortals can intervene; they can cue their fate a little bit in this or that direction. Sometimes, the gods stand in wonder of how much some make with so little while others make so little with a gift of so much. Still, like a road-beaten Chevrolet, there is only so much mileage in any man’s life engine.

Patricia Highsmith – a Texas-born, European-cultivated novelist – does not divide the world into a neat success or failure story. Hardly. Her psyche will not allow it; her life will not countenance it; and literary manner certainly will not condone anything that simplistic. Rather, reality must be turned on its side so that the tilt makes it difficult to determine which way is up. The story’s hero, “Winnie,” must take stock of himself from that vantage point. And take stock he does, but by a novel measure.

How much bad luck can a middle-aged man endure?

Winnie’s business is failing; his investments are failing; his once wealthy brother is failing, and turns to stealing from him; and Winnie’s creditors are closing in, too. Hell, there’s even water in his basement; it’s turning merchandise into mildew and rust. Bad luck “followed him like a hound dog on a sure trail” is how Highsmith depicts his predicament.

At middle age a man steps back and ponders “all the mistakes he [has] made.” For most mortals this pensive pause in life is of no consequence. It just serves to depress. Maybe that’s why God created women? . . . to help men stay alive despite all their miserable failures. Without them, the specter of suicide might be irresistible. And so it was for Winthrop Hazlewood, who was saved by three women: Rose (a loving fiancée become wife), Sister Josephine (a caring nun), and one writer named Highsmith who knew how to end a story on a humane note.

Inheritance – a strange thing it is. We think of it as a blessing, as when our poor Winnie inherited $100,000 from a long lost uncle. Banknotes can alter the landscape; they can turn tenements into penthouses. Alas, Winnie’s life would be different, successful even.

But there are inheritances and inheritances, such as the ones stored in our genetic banks. The latter kind of inheritance can drive even a rich man to need. Witness the fate of Winnie; a negligent slip of the wrist cost him his newly acquired fortune. At that point, his destiny became manifest; he was a permanent failure.

But wait . . . the creator is not yet done with her creation. Her moral remains to be played out before she takes her Sabbath.

Poverty and charity are cousins. The strain of one runs in the blood of the other. And so, in the end, Winthrop Hazlewood’s charity (e.g., the way he helped orphans) came back many loving fold as his spouse and community breathed new life into him. They rallied to him when life said “die.” Highsmith’s felicity of phrase captures the sentiment well:

He was having another revelation: he saw all his life leading up to this moment, all the years of doubt, of hopelessness, of hard, unrewarded effort, leading up to this moment when all the people who he hadn’t known were really his friends were showing him that he had everything that he could possibly want in abundance.

In ruin comes reward – the reward of charity returning to it source. Call it kind karma? Call it what you will. The point is that failure can be reconfigured. “Winnie felt – he was almost ashamed even to think it about himself – successful.” Oh, the irony of the creator’s work!

When Patricia Highsmith was done twisting her tale, misfortune became memorable. The poor inherited the earth. It would be biblical if only it were not so autobiographical.

Holy Cards

I took my love, and I took it down,
I climbed a mountain and I turned around,
and I saw my reflection in a snow-covered hill, where the landslide brought it down.

- ‘Landslide’
as sung by the Dixie Chicks

Patricia Highsmith’s life was so yin-yang. Ceilings crashed through floors only to be resurrected again.

On the day the Alfred Hitchcock movie of Highsmith’s “Strangers on a Train” (1951) opened, she lay in a bed in Munich and contemplated her death.

That magnificent “outpouring” of herself that so delighted her in “The Price of Salt” (1952) was of no interest to her publisher, Harper & Brothers. The homo-erotic novel would have to find another publishing venue; the author would also have to find a new name, a pseudonym. Just as she was revealing her identity, she was concealing it.

Throughout it all, her artistic creativity was challenged by personal insecurity as many a working manuscript was discarded. Tomes tumbled into trash bins.

For every inch of success in Highsmith’s personal life there is a mile of misery. In her eyes, failure “inevitably” trumped success. Nowhere is that more evident than in the contours of her love life, especially the life she celebrated and suffered with Ellen Hill, the woman with whom she shared a little heaven and a lot of hell around the time she was busy crafting and typing “Born Failure.”

No one who reads Andrew Wilson’s superbly illuminating biography of Highsmith (“Beautiful Shadow,” Bloomsbury, 2003) can walk away emotionally indifferent to the plight of these two women as they passionately kissed and fervently fought during their four-year relationship. At its high, it was inspiring; at its low, it “was worse than being married,” Highsmith wrote in her diary. Love and death (as in Hill’s attempted suicide) danced with them as they journeyed from Munich to Paris to Nice to Barcelona to Positano to Florence to Trieste to Genoa to Gibraltar and finally to a flat in Manhattan.

In “Born Failure,” misery is turned around. Thanks to a touch of literary fancy and a pinch of philosophical foresight, the failed life tastes as sweet as success. In her real life at the time, however, the feat was not so easy. Ellen’s love took its toll on both women. The fits, fists, rage, jealousy, tears, and the veronal pills leading to her suicide-induced coma were more than enough to test the steel of the strongest of women. Could love really be so awful?

Much as love was turned into its opposite in Patricia’s love life, so was failure turned into its opposite in her literary life. Ellen, for all her faults, inspired Patricia (in a variety of ways), perhaps the least of which was the hope infused into the life story of Winthrop Hazlewood. Like Ellen, Winthrop’s life was cursed by demons, though ones of a different order. Where Winthrop transformed his failures, Ellen succumbed to them.

When Highsmith’s “The Blunderer” (1954) was published the year after “Born Failure” was written, it had the mark of Ellen within it. Writes Wilson: “Clara, the neurotic wife, threatens to take an overdose of veronal, but Walter, her husband, ignores her and, like Highsmith, deliberately leaves the house so as to let her kill herself.” And when the book came out, Wilson also notes, it bore the dedication “For L.” – a reference to Lynn Roth, the woman whose love blessed Highsmith’s life after Ellen. “The Blunderer” is thus also a story of failure and how it plays out in life. But that is another book, and hence a topic for another day.

Scratch the skin of a Highsmith short story or novel and soon enough you’ll draw blood – that of Patricia and the people in her circle of life. Sometimes the traces are a tad faint as in “Born Failure”; then again, sometimes they are bold, as in “The Blunderer.” But faint or bold, a woman’s life flows through the pages of her works. Her fiction comes alive in our bosoms as her characters – her Winnies and Claras – resurrect in all their splendor and squalor. Reading a Highsmith piece is like being a voyeur to her life, but just how and in what way is for each reader to discover.

Surely, one can enjoy Patricia Highsmith’s writings without having Andrew Wilson’s rich and revealing biography at her fingertips. For a book, like failure, is what we make of it. And of Highsmith’s works one can make many things, for they open the mind as much as they open our hearts. Even so, Wilson’s biographical lens very much helps to bring Highsmith’s works into sharp (even uncanny) focus.

Wild card: Reading Patricia Highsmith is a bit reminiscent of those holy cards Catholic kids collected in my childhood. I’m thinking of those special ones that bore a trace of the saint’s sacred blood or bone hermetically sealed within them. I gather they don’t do that anymore. Perhaps they ran out of blood or saints, I know not. But as a fallen Catholic, it really doesn’t matter, does it? Today, we sinners can find our saints and smears of their blood on more novel pieces of paper.

Sister Josephine, wherever you are, pray for us.

An Acquired Taste

Life is a long failure of understanding, Mrs. Palmer thought, a long mistaken shutting of the heart.

- Patricia Highsmith

An elderly woman (Mrs. Palmer) lies in bed dying. As she peers into the empty eyes of her nurse (Mrs. Blynn), she greets death while thinking of failure. But it is a failure of the heart – Mrs. Blynn’s loveless heart to be precise – that is synonymous with a wasted life. That is a key lesson from “The Trouble with Mrs. Blynn, The Trouble with the World” (circa 1963).

The “central motif” of the short stories in “Nothing Meets the Eye,” notes Paul Ingendaay in his afterword to the volume, “can be summed up in a single word: failure.” It’s as good as any general assessment. But like all else in Highsmith’s life and writings, nothing is entirely simple, straightforward or “central.”

There are, that is, other centralizing motifs – for example, the joy of risk taking, as in her short story “A Mighty Nice Man” (1940). There is also the theme of crime and passion as in “It’s a Deal” (circa 1963). And then there is the debauchery theme as in “The Mightiest Mornings” (1945-46). Additionally, there is the breakdown of the boundaries/inverted morality motif as in “The Still Point of the Turning World” (1947).

Nonetheless, something is to be said about the failure motif in Highsmith’s writings. In various ways, a good number of the 28 short stories in this poignant collection (1938-1982)[1] grapple with the theme of failure and what to make of it.

Failure need not be fatal. It can be turned on itself. Winthrop Hazlewood’s story teaches that. But when the failure is of the heart, when arteries are clogged and stop the flow of love, then there is nothing but death. Ellen Hill’s tragic life story teaches that.

Patricia Highsmith’s own life – professional and personal – veered wildly back and forth between failure and success. Curiously, success seemed more of a challenge for her, perhaps because it could so readily be divorced from the human spirit. After all, even the celluloid life of “Strangers on a Train” was of little moment if she could not be in the arms of a woman she loved. Is this not the lesson (or a variation of it) of “The Price of Salt”?

At the end of “Born Failure,” Winnie was near penniless. At that failed moment he was nonetheless comforted by a warm blanket of friends, at which time Rose turned to her husband. With a kind of compassion that only a woman could share, she said: “I think today is the happiest day of my life, Winnie.” Head held high, she stood by her man. Hearts had opened. Love had triumphed. End of story? Not quite, for there is always another story, another failure and what to do with it.

Patricia Highsmith’s love is an acquired taste. It is bitter sweet. Maybe that helps to explain why this rebel literary philosopher remains such a mystery . . . as in mystery writer. The real mystery – as her stories, novels, and diaries make all too clear – is that she has yet to take a seat at the canonical table with the likes of Fedor Dostoevsky. Dare I ask?: Is he not a man (a trace) after her own heart?

[1] Other collections include “The Selected Stories of Patricia” Highsmith (W.W. Norton, 2002, foreword by Graham Greene) and “Eleven” (Heinemann, London, 1970) (later published in the U.S. as “The Snail Watcher & Other Stories”).

Ron Collins is a writer who lives in Maryland. His last book (with David Skover) was The Trials of Lenny Bruce (Sourcebooks, 2002). His next book (with Sam Chaltain) is We Must Not Be Afraid to be Free (Oxford Univ. Press, 2006). He is also working on a novel, tentatively titled “Mother’s Day.”

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.