Box Turtle Bulletin

The Daily Agenda for Tuesday, January 19

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From the Mattachine Review, February 1963, page 35.

EMPHASIS MINE:
The following book review appeared in the June 1958 issue of The Mattachine Review:

DIRT TAKES A SWEEP THROUGH ITALY

THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY, by Patricia Highsmith. New York: Coward-McCann, 1955. Reviewed by H. E. P.

How he started on his career is not made at all clear, but when we first meet Tom Ripley he is already a successful extortionist, and before long we see the list of his accomplishments grow and expand to include a remarkably long string of murders. Although at the very beginning the hero (?) himself vehemently denies that he is a homosexual, subsequent events more than suggest that he is not being entirely candid and honest with us, and presently we find him in a typical New York East Side gay bar. Here he meets the father on one of his erstwhile acquaintances and is sent by him to Europe with the ostensible object of bringing the son back to the United States. It is in the course of a leisurely Italian tour — Sorrento, San Remo, Naples, Rome, and places too numerous to mention — that Tom’s character unfolds slowly — perhaps too slowly for some readers. While it soon becomes apparent that Tom is one of the most despicable heels in contemporary literature, the author does manage to elicit from the reader a measure of sympathy for her “hero” — not an easy task by any manner of means. In the process of following Tom’s adventures we meet a series of straightforward and susceptible homosexuals who invariably fall into his wiles, with the possible exception of Dickie Greenleaf, a homosexual with a girl friend — and here some readers will probably feel that the girl friend incident would be more believable were the sex changed. At any rate, the plot thickens, murder mounts upon murder, a case of assumed identity, and the novel comes to a swift end. It would not be fair to reveal the ending, but let us just say that it is not a conventional one at all, though possibly true to life, and that the reader is sure to react strongly to it, either in delight or revulsion.

“The Talented Mr. Ripley” may not be as well written nor as full of suspense as the author’s other novel on the subject of the homosexual and his troubles, “Strangers on a Train,” but this reviewer was unable to lay it down until the last word had been read, and was left wishing for an Alfred Hitchcock to turn his talents to a dramatization of what is a most unusual suspense novel.

Alfred Hitchcock never made the movie, but Anthony Minghella did in 1999. Starring Matt Damon as Tom Ripley, Jude Law as Dickie Greenleaf, and Gwyneth Paltrow as “girlfriend” Marge Sherwood, it was nominated for five Academy Awards. They made a few changes for the movie — Ripley meets Greanleaf’s father at a party instead of a gay bar — but the story is essentially the same, leaving viewers in a state of delight or revulsion, depending.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
► 115 YEARS AGO: The Death of Murray Hall: 1901. The headline in the January 19, 1901, New York Times undoubtedly shocked a lot of people who thought they knew a gregarious Tammany Hall politician pretty well:

Murray H. Hall, the woman who masqueraded as a man for more than a quarter of a century, and the secret of whose sex came out only after her death last Wednesday night at 145 Sixth Avenue [renumbered in the 1920s to 453 6th Ave, between 11th and 12th streets — ed], was known to hundreds of people in the Thirteenth Senatorial District, where she figured quite prominently as a politician. In a limited circle she even had a reputation as a “man about town,” a bon vivant, and all-around “good fellow.” She was a member of the General Committee of Tammany Hall, a member of the Iroquois Club, a personal friend of State Senator “Barney” Martin and other officials, and one of the most active Tammany workers in the district.

She registered and voted at primaries and general elections for many years, and exercised considerable political influence with Tammany Hall, often securing appointments for friends who have proved their fealty to the organization ­ never exciting the remotest suspicion as to her real sex.

She played poker at the clubs with city and State officials and politicians who flatter themselves on their cleverness and perspicacity, drank whisky and wine and smoked the regulation “big black cigar” with the apparent relish and gusto of the real man-about-town. Furthermore, Murray Hall is known to have been married twice, but the woman to whom she stood before the world in the attitude of a husband kept her secret as guardedly as she did.

Hall’s secret was found out when his doctor was called to treat him for an illness he had been suffering for many years. That illness, it turned out, was breast cancer. By the time the doctor made the diagnosis, the cancer had spread to the heart. He died two days later. The Times reported that Hall was a book lover, preferring scientific and medical books, which led to speculation that Hall was trying to treat himself for cancer before finally succumbing. C.S. Pratt, the bookseller who Hall dealt with (and who to whom Hall sold his library three months before his death), had no clue that Hall was anything other than a man.

“He seemed to me to be a modest little man, but occasionally he showed an irascible temper. He would never talk about himself and shunned garrulous and inquisitive companions. In fact, when I met him on the street he was either accompanied by his black and tan dog or some woman or women, strangers to me, who I supposed were clients.”

“During the seven years I knew him I never once suspected that he was anything else than what he appeared to be. While he was somewhat effeminate in appearance and talked in a falsetto voice, still his conduct and actions were distinctively masculine. This revelation is a stunner to me and, I guess, to everybody else who knew him.”

Hall had been quite successful in the rough-and-tumble political world of Tammany Hall:

Why,” continued the Senator, “when the County Democracy was in the heyday of its glory, Murray Hall was one of the bright stars in that constellation. He was the Captain of his election district when he lived and kept an intelligence office between Seventeenth and Eighteenth Street, on Sixth Avenue. That was some years ago, when the district was cut down, making Fourteenth Street the northern boundary. Hall moved so as to be in with his political pals. He used to hobnob with the big guns of the County Democracy, and I knew he cut quite some figure as a politician.

He also cut quite a figure as a ladies man. Married twice, both wives complained that he was “too attentive to other women.” His adopted daughter, Imelda Hall, had no idea about her father’s background. When she testified at a Coroner’s inquest two weeks later, she referred to her father as “he.” The Coroner interrupted to ask, “Wouldn’t you better say ‘she’?” She replied, “No, I will never say ‘she’.”

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
► 95 YEARS AGO: Patricia Highsmith: 1921-1995. The American author most widely known for her psychological thrillers Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley had a psychologically-scarring childhood to match her literary interests. She was born in her grandmother’s boarding house, ten days after her parents divorced. Highsmith later said that her mother tried to abort her by drinking turpentine. Her mother would later taunt her: “It’s funny how you adore the smell of turpentine, Pat.” Her mother remarried three years later and the family moved to New York when Patricia was seven, only to send her back to Texas at the age of twelve. Highsmith never resolved her complicated love/hate relationship with her mother. “I learned to live with a grievous and murderous hatred very early on. And learned to stifle also my more positive emotions.”

After graduating from Barnard in 1942, Highsmith wrote for comic books until 1947. Her first book, 1950’s Strangers on a Train was only moderately successful as a novel, but Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 film adaptation established Highsmith’s reputation for writing disturbing psychological thrillers. Her publisher rejected her second novel, The Price of Salt (1952), due to its unabashedly lesbian story line with a rare happy ending. She published it under a pseudonym with a pulp fiction publisher and sold nearly a million copies. While the book had a happy ending, the real-life story behind it wasn’t so positive; Highsmith based the main character on a woman she met at Bloomingdales, and she stalked her for two months after completing the book.

Her fourth book, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), introduced readers to her recurring character Tom Ripley, an amoral, sexually flexible con artist and murderer who appeared in four more novels between 1955 and 1991. (The book also proved popular with gay readers.) Some thirty short stories and novels followed altogether, many of them brilliant, all of them plumbing the depths of disturbed psyches and opening a world in which murder can seem a perfectly reasonable solution. As one reviewer put it, “Her stories are whydunits rather than whodunits.”

But Highsmith’s life, in many ways, imitated her art, particularly her anti-hero Tom Ripley: she lied, stole, fought, and insinuated herself into love triangles that she then set about destroying. Otto Penszler described her as “a mean, hard, cruel, unlovable, unloving person. I could never penetrate how any human being could be that relentlessly ugly.” A publisher once commented, “She may have been one of the dozen best short-story writers of the 20th century, and she may have been one of the dozen most disagreeable and mean-spirited.”

She had relationships, mostly with women, but they never lasted long. She had a fling with artist Allela Cornell in 1943 (Cornell later committed suicide in 1946 by drinking nitric acid), and between 1959 and 1961 she was involved with lesbian pulp fiction writer Marijane Meaker (who wrote as Vin Packer and Ann Aldrich, see May 27). But as Highsmith grew older and more financially successful, she lived mainly alone and became increasingly eccentric — and not in the most charming sort of way. She raised 300 pet snails that she carried around in her purse, and that she sometimes let out at dinner parties when she was bored. She was intensely anti-Semitic, racist, alcoholic, a “consummate atheist,” and, later in life, fiercely anti-American. While living in Switzerland in the 1980s, she invented nearly 40 pseudonyms while writing to newspapers denouncing the “influence” of Jews. She died alone in a Swiss hospital in 1995 at the age of 74. Her last visitor was her accountant. Her last book, Small g: A Summer Idyll, was published a month later.

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