I pause and catch my breath each time I read Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Tremor of Forgery.  It’s the story of an American writer attempting to finish a novel in Tunisia in the late sixties.  More than that,  it’s about a hard-luck writer/protagonist losing his mind.  I probably first read this novel, like twenty-five years ago, but the apprehension I feel for the reading doesn’t change for me over time.    I think as I get older, I have a better understanding for the loneliness of the characters I read about; like Howard Ingham, the novel’s protagonist.

Ingham has been hired to write a screenplay based in Tunisia.  His producer has paid him an advance to come to Northern Africa to capture the flavor and rhythm of the setting.   I’m thinking the money couldn’t have been that great because Ingham never feels comfortable or confident in his new surroundings. His life is a constant struggle.    He has no friends or familiarity with the culture.  He doesn’t  have any notion for speaking the language.  The only other American he meets, he can’t trust. This guy is right-wing extremist, that broadcasts a phony Fox-type radio show from his nearby bungalow.  The only other English-speaking person he gets close to, has come to Tunisia for the sole purpose of having cheap sex with Arab boys.  "Homosexual relationships had no stigma here," Ingham learns.  His English-speaking friend Jensen brags he can get sucked off for a pack of cigarettes.  I don’t sense anything gay in Ingham’s behavior, but after he meets Jensen, the mood of this novel becomes especially tense.  Things only get worse.

Patricia Highsmith will always be one of my favorite writers!  She is known for writing twisted crime stories. And drinking!  According to her biographers, she was a chronic alcoholic, known for extensive bouts with depression and bitter relationships.  Most of her fights had risen out of same-sex relationships.  Maybe the drinking was one way to cope with her lovers.  So was the writing.  Many of her worst battles seem to transform into pages of her novels.  

Jay’s Note:  Pat looks so beautiful from the pictures taken of her in her college years.  By the time she graduated, she was already selling stories to major magazines.  Her first novel was bought by none other than Alfred Hitchcock to be made into the classic crime thriller Strangers on a Train.  But pictures of her on the other side of thirty look progressively more ghastly.  Her drinking days seem to have assaulted her face.  Bloodshot eyes and burst blood vessels in her nose. I refuse to include the images here.  On Facebook, I often come across “Here's What Your Favorite Child Stars Look Like Now,”  and wish I didn’t.

Pat  shares the same birthday with Edgar Allan Poe.  There must be something to gin and vermouth to get your day started.  Like EAP,  Pat drank all day and every day while at the same time maintaining a relentless writing pace.  I think I can say this:  through her drinking, writing and criminality may have mixed in her head (like a nice Bloody Mary!)   The writers that appear in her books often adopt the same paranoia and hatred for the people around them that she had.  They are always looking over their shoulders.   If they don’t see anyone, that doesn’t mean that someone is not out there planning to hurt them.

Early on in the novel, Ingham is abandoned my his money guy/producer.  The more Ingham tries to make contact, the less he knows.   This is a theme.  Ingham never knows much or learns anything.   This is because this same guy – the producer –  has committed suicide back in the states.  How does Ingham find out about it?  Well, he receives a letter from his lover, Ina,  who is the one to have discovered his producer’s dead body.  We don’t know this for sure, but  Ingham infers she has been sleeping with him.  This guy, Ingham, is all alone.  I could never have fathomed how deep and dark one can sink when I first read the novel.  I was much too naïve. 

Graham Greene, another one of my favorite writers, has said this may be Highsmith’s best novel.  He’s one to know about alienation and apprehension.    I live in Mexicali.  Thank God I have a steady job and can speak the language, so in this respect, I feel very distant from Ingham, but I feel the disconnect.  No matter how close you get to a person, there is a lifetime of experience that will always divide you.  Ingham surrounded by people – a sea of Arabs – he can’t possibly trust.    At one point in the novel, he wakes up to find the door of his hotel room open.  In the darkness he senses an intruder, and Ingham reaches for the the only weapon he can think of at that moment.  He raises his portable typewriter over his head an brains the arab thief.  The intruder stumbles out onto the terrace, and Ingham slams the door shut behind him.  In the darkness of his hotel room, Ingham ponders what just happened, but out of fear he hesitates to open the door.  He hears footsteps and rustling.  He infers a body being dragged away.

This is what we call the sub-context.  When Ingham opens the door, he sees nothing.  When he meets up with various hotel staff the next morning, he doesn’t hear a word.  He doesn’t know if he has killed the man or not?  No one seems to  be interested.  For me, this is when Pat’s writing and killing blur into one. I'm not much of a writer, nor will I ever be one, but that's why I love reading Patricia Highsmith. She's totally committed.   Much of what she lays down on the page grows out of the darker aspects of her own personality and experience. 

Like the drinking, writing is a compulsion for her. She once said, "I'm miserable when I can't write…" Many of her books feature artists as characters.  They share wild imaginations and deep loneliness. Friends and lovers disappear for no reason.   People die in the middle of the night.  Pat knows first-hand what it feels like to bury yourself into your work (and your alcohol) – to the point you forget about your rules and morals.  I appreciated how Pat chose a typewriter to be the murder weapon in Tremor of Forgery.  In life and in the novel, there was probably nothing she was more close to or intimate with.  I sensed Pat cared more for her Olympia Portable Deluxe than the dying Arab.    Writers like criminals, eventually lose touch. They start drinking alone.  Anger and apprehension is what they know.