Murder, She Wrote, by KERA BOLONIK, The Nation, December 8, 2003 Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith by Andrew Wilson Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950's by Marijane Meaker [from the December 8, 2003 issue] "Off the page, [Patricia] Highsmith--who is the subject of two new biographical works--was as disquieting, seductive and complex as any of the people she invented. Both English journalist Andrew Wilson, author of the exhaustive biography Beautiful Shadow, and novelist Marijane Meaker, who has written a memoir of her ex-lover and friend, show that Highsmith was at once spiteful and endearing, erudite and crass, a cantankerous, stingy, alcoholic misanthrope who could charm people with her mordant wit, modesty and disarming vulnerability. Highsmith seemed to revel in these contradictions. She was a refined, brooding butch lesbian who frequented the various West Village underground gay bars during the McCarthy era, but favored the social company of men. She was romantically promiscuous, struggling by turns with feelings of loneliness and claustrophobia that propelled her in and out of relationships. A Texas native, she was a fierce critic of postwar US culture and foreign policy, and would go into self-imposed exile in Europe in 1963. Highsmith was vehemently opposed to US involvement in the war in Vietnam and later became outspoken in her support for Palestinian liberation. For all her solidarity with the wretched of the earth, however, Highsmith harbored a deep admiration for Margaret Thatcher and cast votes in absentia for Richard Nixon, George Bush Sr. and Ross Perot. She was an anti-Semite and a racist, as well as a serious devotee of Jewish writers Franz Kafka and Saul Bellow, and counted many Jews among her close friends, including newspaper columnist Ben Zion Goldberg, Arthur Koestler and artist Lil Picard ... Meaker's portrayal of Highsmith can be sympathetic, even tender, but she doesn't shy away from depicting her former lover as a racist and anti-Semite. By contrast, Wilson is more than halfway through his biography before delving into her virulent anti-Semitism. Perhaps it cast a sharper impression on Meaker because she had to put up with her incendiary remarks in person. Meaker became so exasperated with Highsmith's merciless rants during their last encounter that she told her she sounded "like someone with an obsessive-compulsive disorder. You can't go for long without bringing up the Jews, just as someone has to compulsively wash their hands, or go back three steps." In a way, Highsmith's anti-Semitism is emblematic of everything that was at war within the mind of this extraordinarily conflicted woman. Many of the women she loved, the friends she cherished and the writers who inspired her art were Jewish. Yet her dislike of Jews dates as far back as her elementary school years in New York City, and as she got older and increasingly more paranoid, her anti-Semitism became more acute, possibly a symptom of her neurosis."