The Master Of Bad Marriage Noir

I’ve read three Patricia Highsmith novels fairly recently. Since they are her most famous, I decided to stay away from her Ripley novels. I instead focused on some of her early novels. Of the three, Strangers on a Train is probably the most famous because it was made into a Hitchcock film (which I wrote about here). Deep Water has kind of risen into the zeitgeist due to a Ben Affleck film currently streaming on Hulu (my Hulu account is not active, so I have not seen it). The Blunderer is definitely a Highsmith deep cut.

To varying degrees, I enjoyed all three novels. Having now read all three, I found an amusing theme across them. Let me give a brief synopsis of each and see if you can discover it yourself.

Strangers on a Train feature two characters, Guy and Bruno. They just happen to share a car on a train. As they talk, they both discover that they have a problem. Guy’s problem is that he’s in love with a woman named Anne. That’s unfortunate because he is already married to Miriam, an unfaithful shrew of a wife who delights in tormenting Guy and refuses to give him a divorce. Bruno, on the other hand, has serious daddy issues and wants his father dead. Bruno proposes that he will kill Guy’s wife and, in turn, Guy would then kill Bruno’s father. It’d be the perfect crime because there would be no way for the police to connect the other to the murder. Guy assumes that it’s just two men idly chatting on the train. Imagine his shock when his wife is mysteriously murdered. Bruno then pressures Guy into fulfilling his half of the bargain. By relentlessly and ruthlessly applying pressure, Guy eventually buckles and does kill Bruno’s father. Needless to say, it is not the perfect murder and their conspiracy implodes almost immediately.

Deep Water is the story of Vic and Melinda Van Allen. Sleeping in separate rooms, Vic and Melinda have a sexless marriage. Independently wealthy, Vic is seemingly a stolid, placid man interested in nothing more than his small publishing house and his snail collection. Melinda is a party girl that likes to get drunk and carry on barely concealed affairs. They have an agreement that Melinda can have lovers as long as she isn’t completely overt about it. As I’ve said, they are just barely concealed, and their friends show sympathy and concern to Vic and try to convince him that he needs to do something to get Melinda back into the normal marital fold. Vic apparently reaches his limit one night and drowns Melinda’s current lover in a pool. Melinda becomes hysterical and immediately accuses Vic of murder and even hires a detective to discover evidence. Eventually she takes another lover. Vic dispatches him as well. As expected, it does not end well for anyone.

I found The Blunderer to be the most interesting of the three novels (which I wrote about here). Walter Stackhouse is a mild mannered lawyer. He has a neurotic wife named Clara. She is rude, mean, and abusive. She’s driven off all of his friends. She accuses him of having an affair with a music teacher. Her actions do eventually lead him to having an affair with the teacher. Clara finds out and attempts suicide. Feeling trapped in this disaster of a marriage, a news article catches his eye. It’s the story of a man’s wife that mysteriously died in a fall during a rest stop on a bus trip. Clipping and saving the article, Walter even visits the murder suspect to talk to him. When Clara takes a bus trip, Walter follows her. Clara gets off the bus at a rest stop and falls to her death (having once attempted suicide, she’s now successful). When the police investigate, they discover Walter’s news clipping, his visit to the suspected murderer, and the fact that he followed the bus. They immediately begin to suspect that he’s a copycat murderer. The fact is that he’s not, but there is so much evidence against him, nearly all of it of his own doing, that there is no escape for him. Again, as with most noir, it does not end happily for him.

So, those are the major plot points of all three novels. Anyone see a connection?

Yes, shrewish wives! In all three cases, the protagonists are mild mannered professional men (an architect, a book publisher, and a lawyer) that want nothing more than to be happy and in love. In all three cases, they are foiled by wives that make Medusa look tame in comparison. We have women that are openly carrying on extramarital affairs and women that are abusive and suicidal. In two of the novels, men fall in love with meek, mild mannered, loving, caring women that want nothing more than to bring happiness to their men. If only they could get rid of their harpy wives!

All of these novels were written in the 1950s. Especially in this genre, misogyny was kind of a given. It’s amusing to me that it’s a woman that’s writing these novels featuring such horrible women.

One possible explanation for this is that Highsmith was herself an interesting woman. An alcoholic, she was known to be caustic and hostile, preferring the company of animals to people. She was bisexual who apparently preferred to spend time with men but have sex with women. She seemingly didn’t have any long term intimate relationships. In fact, one of her female lovers ended up committing suicide. Being this type of person in the 1940s and 1950s must have been especially difficult.

Could this explain her bleak perspective on heterosexual marriage? Preferring to spend time with men, could she have empathized with their simplistic notions of a successful marriage and seen the apparently more complex demands of women as poisonous to happiness? Was one of the reasons that she had difficulty with long term intimate relationships was that she found women’s behavior to be unreasonable?

Obviously, I have no idea. I just found it interesting that possibly the leading female noir writer wrote so scathingly about wives.