The unbearable burden of guilt

Rethinking Strangers on a Train

I’ve always liked Patricia Highsmith but I have to say her first novel, Strangers on a Train, is pretty rough going. Granted she was young and trying to make her mark in New York. Reading her wiki bio, she landed her first paying job with a comic book publisher, contributing to Sergeant Bill King and other long running pulp stories. She obviously wanted to write something bigger, so we got this kind of “Secret Sharer” story between two young men who met on a train and discussed the perfect murder.

It seemed like the perfect scenario. We all know the story from Hitchcock’s classic film that hit the screens in 1951. Patricia had been working on the novel for a couple years before finally getting it published in 1950. Hitch bought the copyright immediately, sensing there was something to be made from it. Being the shithole that he was, he kept his name out of the negotiations so that Highsmith was none the wiser when her agent sold the rights for a paltry $7500. The film had a $1.2 million budget. A year later the trailer appeared with virtually all the credit for this “startling adventure” given to Hitch. If there was any consolation, the film bombed at the box office. Not one of Hitch’s finer efforts. Yet, the story has endured even if few know what it was really about. I didn’t until I read the novel over the weekend.

The chance meeting and murders that followed were actually a small part of the story. Highsmith was more interested in the Conradian relationship between Guy and Bruno, the latter haunting the other as Leggat does the Captain in The Secret Sharer. The double murder, or “criss-cross” as Bruno called it in the movie, was just a set up like the comic book stories she had been writing for throughout the 1940s. This was both good and bad.

The good part was that it made for a compelling read but the bad part was that Patricia got so tangled up in her story that she didn’t quite know how to extricate herself from it.

It was interesting that she chose to make Guy an architect, not the dashing tennis player we see in the movie. Highsmith spent a lot of time on this. I assume she had read The Fountainhead, as there were a lot of similarities between Guy Haines and Howard Roark, right down to the Frank Lloyd Wright references. There was a little of the “Objectivism” that Ayn Rand would develop much further in Atlas Shrugged, but Highsmith steered clear of it for the most part. Patricia seemed to like the order the profession provided. Guy was a straight-laced man whose dream was to build a beautiful white bridge like Robert Maillart. She chronicled the design and construction of several buildings but poor Guy was never fully satisfied, not even with the beautiful Connecticut home he designed for his lovely girlfriend Anne, the woman he so much wanted to be with.

Unfortunately, there was another woman in the way, his estranged wife Miriam back in Metcalf, Texas, where Guy originally hailed from. Shades of Highsmith’s own Texas roots. Miriam had cuckolded Guy and for two long years dragged out their divorce. Here she was now pregnant with another man’s child. A married man to boot and she didn’t want the child to be born fatherless so she insisted they hold onto their empty marriage until the child was born. “That’s not too much to ask, is it Guy?”

Enter Bruno, a stranger he happened to meet on a train heading West. Guy on his way to Metcalf and Bruno to Santa Fe to spend the summer with his mother in pastoral New Mexico. Over a bottle of scotch Guy spilt his whole sordid story. Sensing he could broker a deal, Bruno suggested he would do the dirty work for Guy if he would do a favor in turn, kill his father. Guy treated it as just having too many drinks but then one night while he was down in Mexico visiting Anne, Miriam was strangled on an island that was part of an amusement park. There’s a lot of traveling in this book. At times it almost reads like a Baedeker’s Guide.

Unlike the movie, Highsmith stretched out the timeline over two years. She gave us a tremendous amount of backstory on both Bruno and Guy. There was kind of an Oedipal complex going on between Bruno and his mother in the first half of the book. Bruno was quite proud of the way she had maintained such a youthful figure. No woman could compare to her elegant grace. By contrast, his father was a domineering oaf, who seemed to be quite a few years old than his mother. Yet, the wealth came from his mother’s side of the family. It’s just that she ceded control of the estate to her husband, which Bruno couldn’t stand. He wanted the old man out of the picture. It was his mother who had always lavished attention on him, going on countless trips to the Caribbean and Europe with their socialite neighbors from Great Neck, New York, whom Bruno also despised.

He thought back on how easy it was to kill Miriam. She was faceless to him, like all the other young women he had come across. None could compare to his mother. They were conniving and deceitful. Ridding the world of one of these malicious creatures was a blessing not a curse. He had done Guy a great favor and he felt he didn’t get the appreciation he deserved.

Meanwhile, Guy remained deeply unsatisfied despite rising to the top of his profession at an astonishing young age. He was no more than 30 and here he was being written about in popular magazines. His constant brooding began to test his relationship with Anne. You never understand why it took Anne so long to figure something was askew but I guess Patricia felt love had a way of hiding such faults, which resulted in an interesting substory between Guy and Anne.

She was the daughter of a wealthy New York family as well, but wanted something more out of life than being a socialite and saw in Guy a self-made man, not the playboys that drifted in her circle. She was in some kind of design. Highsmith wasn’t specific other than to say that Anne was the brains of the outfit, working out the connections while her female partner did the design work. She had a good eye for detail and was involved in the design of hers and Guy’s house, which was slowly coming together like one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian houses.

It’s at this point that Bruno reentered Guy’s life and reminded him of the Faustian deal they struck on the train. Unlike the movie, Guy went through with it only to find it didn’t relieve the insufferable guilt he felt in being responsible for Miriam’s death, just compounded it, especially with Bruno nagging him long after the deal was done.

Bruno just couldn’t let Guy go, which took on odd homoerotic tones in the second half of the novel.

This was what made the novel most interesting, as it was pretty rare to even hint at this sort of thing in the 40s. Guy tried to compartmentalize his guilt by making Bruno his secret sharer but when the cad insinuated himself into his life with Anne it became too much to bear. There was just no way to shake Bruno and at one point Bruno actually contemplated killing Anne so that there was no longer anyone standing between Guy and him.

As if to remind herself this was a detective story, Highsmith gave us Arthur Gerard, a crusty private dick hired by the insurance agency, who started putting two and two together. He didn’t believe in the perfect crime despite the Metcalf and Great Neck police having given up on the cases. Bruno and Guy struggled to hold their flimsy storylines together under Gerard’s persistent questioning. This helped the story a bit as I got the sense Patricia was starting to lose control of her narrative.

I never really understood what she was after other than no man can carry his guilt indefinitely and eventually he makes a fatal mistake. I suppose I shouldn’t reveal it for those who may be interested in reading the short novel for the first time but it really didn’t bring the story to a satisfying end the way she later did in her Ripley novels. It just felt she rushed to a conclusion to satisfy her publisher.

The only saving grace was Robert Walker, who captured the caddish persona of Bruno right down to his gold tie tack.

While I understand that Hitch needed to truncate the novel to fit more neatly on screen, he missed a lot of what made the story compelling. It was interesting to see that Raymond Chandler and Czenzi Ormonde were given credit for the screenplay, both seasoned hard-boiled detective novelists, but they didn’t do a very good job pulling this novel together into a more cohesive narrative. They did create much more tense situations but the tennis scene near the end of the movie went on way too long as if they needed to fill ten minutes of screentime and this was the best they could come up with to reach the magic one hour and 40 minute mark.

They also shifted the action entirely to the East Coast with Metcalf being somewhere between Baltimore and Washington, DC, which for some odd reason was where they chose to set their story, and make Anne the daughter of a very British sounding Senator. Not surprisingly, Patricia Highsmith was roiled upon seeing this strange adaptation, leading her to exclaim, “I don’t want to know movie directors!”

Can’t say that I blame her but Strangers on a Train is still awaiting a deft hand to give it the version it deserves. The material is very compelling, you just wish Highsmith had found a way to pull it together in a more satisfying whole, like she did The Talented Mr. Ripley. Alas, we are never satisfied, much like Guy, even if we have lesser burdens to carry.