The devilish answer is not in the details or in the stars. It is in the mind of Patricia Highsmith, the author of the ‘Strangers on a Train,’ the 1950 novel with this ill-omened plot. Highsmith’s sins were compounded when Alfred Hitchcock bought the rights to the book that same year and then turned it into a murder movie in 1951. While Highsmith felt that the movie’s revised text diluted the novel’s shocking plot, it was still more than malevolent enough for American movie goers.

Cerebral Evil

What made both the book and its cinematic cousin so sinful was not any mystery; for ‘Strangers on a Train’ is not a “who-done-it?” kind of novel. Nor can its evil be explained by any tampering with evidence or the like. Its evil appeal is cerebral. It is on that count that Patricia Highsmith’s genius, coupled with Hitchcock’s insight, resembles that of Dostoevsky; it is at that conceptual juncture that ‘Strangers on a Train’ tracks ‘Crime and Punishment.’

The reason why our two conspirators – a dapper but malicious Bruno and a charming but naive Guy – consider murdering the other’s enemy is darkly imaginative: they want to throw sand into the gears of the legal system that seeks to prosecute them. If they succeed, they can escape justice. And to that extent, they can, at least in principle, bring the order of law to a grinding halt.

Here is the mischievous logic of the plan as Highsmith first presents it in her novel:

Bruno to Guy: “We murder for each other, see? I kill your wife and you kill my father! We meet on the train, see, and nobody knows we know each other! Perfect alibis! Catch? . . . Airtight alibis!”

The master Hitchcock takes the plan to the next cerebral level in his movie:

Bruno to Guy: “Let’s say that you’d like to get rid of your wife. Just suppose. Let’s say you had a very good reason. Let’s say. You’d be afraid to kill her. You know why. You’d get caught. And what would trip you up? The motive.”

Hence by “swapping” murders (what the cinematic Bruno calls “criss-cross”) they stand to cure the motive problem. This notion of a motiveless crime – “a pure murder, without personal motives!” as Bruno later tags it in the novel – has less to do with the possibility of exonerating criminals than with the idea exposing the senselessness of human behavior.

Crimes without Causes?

Question: What incites or motivates a person to do something?

Answer: Hatred, revenge, jealousy, avarice, fear, or even love.

After all, people don’t just kill people for no reason. There must be some explanation, some logic behind what they do. Crimes, especially capital ones, must be explainable. While this is not a hard-fast requisite of criminal law, it is a condition for rationality in the world of human affairs.

Legally speaking, Charles Anthony Bruno (who P.H. regularly refers to by his surname) is frightfully mistaken if he believes that the absence of any discernable motive will make it impossible to prosecute and convict him. For there is ample circumstantial evidence to send the psychopathic Bruno and the foolish Guy Haines (who P.H. regularly refers to by his first name) to the chair. As for an alibi, the “criss-cross” plan cannot per se guarantee an airtight defense. And given the facts in both the novel and film, the alibi defense all but collapses.

Hence, from the vantage point of the law, properly understood, there is nothing really fail-safe about Bruno’s “perfect crime.” Any reasonably good prosecutor could obtain a conviction, even if Mr. Bruno hired the likes of a Perry Mason as his counsel.

This is not to detract from the chilling suspense of ‘Strangers on a Train.’ Nor is it to say that Highsmith and Hitchcock were hacks. That they did not think like a lawyer should not be held against them in literary circles. By using the law in novel ways, however, they were able to make daring claims about the human condition – claims oddly reminiscent of those made by Albert Camus in ‘The Stranger.’

Strangers on a Page

In the spring of 1946, Albert Camus meandered around in Manhattan. He had come to America on the occasion of the translation of ‘The Stranger.’ Guided by a former girlfriend of Sartre’s who spoke English, he ventured out and about in the magic megalopolis. By day, he spoke at Columbia University and elsewhere. By night, he visited the theatre district, the cabarets, and the Copacabana Nightclub. He even caught a glimpse of Laurence Olivier in Sophocles’ ‘Oedipus Rex.’

Patricia Highsmith also inhabited that part of the world. There is no account, however, of any rendezvous between the two. She never visited the duplex Camus stayed at in Central Park West, and he never visited her apartment in Greenwich Village. And as far as we know, Camus never took his new American girlfriend, Patricia Blake, to L’s – that curious and comfy lesbian bar where Highsmith and her lovers hung.

But their paths did cross . . . on the pages of ‘The Stranger.’ For it was about that very time that Highsmith read the existential narrative, this before she introduced her own “strangers” into the literary world. Camus’ new novel was, she noted in her diary, “a tour de force. It was a piece of brilliant impressionism.” The great Frenchman thus left his mark on the mind of his young Texas-born counterpart, then age 25.

‘The Stranger’ is a story about a man whose indifference to his own existence is viewed as criminal. The lead character, Meursault, is tried for murdering an Arab, though if truth be known he acted in self-defense. During his trial Meursault is existentially glib, a man without the normal kinds of responses to things. For example, toward the end of his trial the prosecutor declares:

Gentlemen of the jury, I would have you note that on the next day after his mother’s funeral [the defendant] was visiting the swimming pool, starting a liaison with a girl, and going to see a comic film. That is all I wish to say.

Even with his life on the line – the guillotine – Meursault remains sinfully strange to the awful end. Strangely enough, that is his real crime.

What is eerie about Camus’ Meursault and Highsmith’s Bruno is their indifference to the world. They are strikingly insensitive. Like savages, they lack belief systems, codes of conduct, and normal feelings about life and death. They do not buy into the rules because they are oblivious to what underlies such conventions, namely, the aim of any social order to instill certain values into the minds and hearts of its citizenry.

In this sense, then, these two characters are strange. Their estrangement proves criminal and, upon reflection, philosophical. There is a certain alienation at play in the works of the two novelists, a remoteness from the hierarchies of value and from the belief systems of the many. If Meursault and Bruno are insensitive, it is because they are alienated. And if they are alienated, it is because their world is governed by unexplainable (“arbitrary and capricious”) forces.

Precisely that view of the world proves liberating for Bruno. Freed of his psychic guilt, he has but to devise a plan to assure his freedom and thereby realize his will – the murder of his father. From that vantage point, Highsmith goes beyond Camus’ insight. That is, Meursault does not act on his alienation, he does not realize its potential for him as a morally-free agent. By homicidal contrast, Bruno does act, and if he is successful he stands to avoid criminal conviction. What trips Bruno up is not his evil way; it is his inability to convince Guy to completely internalize Bruno’s mindset. A weakness born in virtue (Guy’s lingering virtue, that is) thus foils things.

In Camus’ work an unexplainable alienation fosters injustice. So likewise with Highsmith’s novel. The difference between the two fictional works is that in the case of the former the injustice works against the accused (Meursault), whereas in the case of the latter it works against the victims (Guy’s wife, Bruno’s father) whose murderers might never be brought to justice. Think of it as a move from passive to active alienation. Bruno is Meursault with attitude, with vigor, with an unabashed willingness to act murderously on his existential insight. Bruno does not want to get caught in the philosophical mush of alienation; no, he wants to go out into the world and kill.

Bruno’s will, born in Meursault’s estrangement, can be realized if he can rig things so that a motiveless crime becomes the perfect crime. If only he can take motive out of the criminal equation, Bruno can escape criminal prosecution (or so he thinks). He does that by taking reason out of crime. His logic: if there is no reason, their can be no crime. And if there is no crime – or no prosecutable crime – then his will to kill can become manifest. Voila!

The Dark Side of the Moon Cast Eternal

Whereas Patricia Highsmith’s heroes are often murderous rogues, Camus’ tend to be honest victims. For Highsmith, existentialism is seemingly akin to the dark side of the moon cast eternal. That point is driven home forcefully by Terry Castle in her insightful essay (‘The Ick Factor’) in ‘The New Republic.’ Highsmith, wrote Castle, is one of the “darkest American storytellers since Poe.” This psychologically deranged mad woman trades in “toxic sludge.”

There is certainly truth in what Professor Castle posits. Case in point: ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’ (1955). In that sense, Patricia Highsmith is a stalker bent on terrifying her readers. She has an uncanny ability, observes Paul Ingendaay, to find that “extraordinary evil” in humans. Bruno is her horrifying poster child – a monster born in the womb of existentialism. But Highsmith does not see Bruno as a monster. “I love him!” is how she recorded it in her diary for August 3, 1947. She is a woman in love not only with a murderer, but with murder itself.

Strong as Castle’s argument is, I wonder if Highsmith’s existentialism need be cast in Nietzschean negativism. The philosophy deriving from her novels and short stories can, most assuredly, be understood that way. But need it be categorically so?

Highsmith’s ‘The Price of Salt’ (1952) and her short story ‘Born Failure’ (1953), for example, reveal a far more humane side of her existentialism. Both can be seen as containing acts of unexplainable, even motiveless, kindness and love. Both show a world where the sun still sits in the sky, where the Brunos of time have not savaged every man, woman, and child.

This side of Highsmith – tag it subtle, if you wish – may be more interpretive than intentional. Perhaps. Nonetheless, it is there at the core of her thought, at that center buried in the thinking of her mentor, Albert Camus.

Unexplainable Love

The final passages of ‘The Stranger’ show Meursault reflecting on life as he prepares for death. “For the first time,” he says, “I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.” And with heart open he beheld “brotherly” love, and it made him “happy.”

The point? Existentialism, even when in the bosom of Highsmith, need not be vile and vicious; it need not be Bruno like. Alienation need not always ratchet downward to the hollows of Hell. Just as there is unexplainable cruelty, so too there can be unexplainable kindness. A man stops at the horrible site of a roadside wreck, beholds the blood, and lends his love to a dying crash victim. As the ambulance leaves, he gets back in his GMC truck and cries as he drives into the distance. Strange love it is.

Remove the religious, political, moral, and social order, and you will still find men and women capable of senseless love, irrational kindness, and purposeless compassion. Think of it as a ratchet thrusting upward . . . toward the sun.

Given a choice between a romanticism of life and a romanticism of death, some (like Camus) will always side with light over the darkness. There is, I think, a hint of that in several of the works of Patricia Highsmith, too. As for her Brunos and Ripleys, well, let them battle her more loving and life-affirming Carols and Thereses.

Will goodness win out? Who knows? But for me, Camus’ poignant affirmation is enough of an answer:

I do not give the human race more than one chance in a thousand. But I should not be a man if I did not operate on that one chance.

If I were a believer, I would say “amen.”

Bibliography

· Camus, Albert, ‘The Stranger’ (Knopf, 1946)
· Castle, Terry, ‘The Ick Factor,’ The New Republic, November 10, 2003
· Harrison, Russell, ‘Patricia Highsmith’ (Twayne Publishers, 1997)
· Highsmith, Patricia, Nothing Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories of Patricia Highsmith (W.W. Norton, 2002)
· Sprintzen, David, ‘Camus: A Critical Evaluation’ (Temple Univ. Press, 1988)
· Todd, Olivier, ‘Albert Camus: A Life’ (Knopf, 1997)
· Wilson, Andrew, ‘Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith’ (Bloomsbury, 2003)

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.