Patricia Highsmith's Ripley Under Water: Signed Inscribed Association Copy (Bloomsbury, 1991)

NB: Linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 2/10/15.

In September 1991, Patricia Highsmith travelled from her home in Tegna, Switzerland, to London in order to publicise her latest book, Ripley Under Water – her third for Bloomsbury (following 1987's Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes and 1990's Carol) and the last to be published in her lifetime (a final novel, Small G: A Summer Idyll, was published shortly after her death in 1995). One of her publicity engagements was an interview before an audience at the ICA on 27 September, conducted by the crime writer Michael Dibdin – since made available on the British Library website (archiver, incidentally, of Existential Ennui). Later that evening Highsmith signed copies of the Bloomsbury first edition of Ripley Under Water at the late lamented Murder One on Charing Cross Road (and again the following day at Waterstones in Earls Court); but at some point on the day before, 26 September, she inscribed, signed and dated a copy of the book to her publisher, Liz Calder. This copy:

Which I acquired from Suffolk bookseller Claude Cox, and which came with an accompanying letter of provenance, signed by Liz Calder, on Full Circle Editions headed paper – Full Circle being the Suffolk publishing house Calder established in 2009 – the year after she left Bloomsbury – with her husband, Louis Baum, and Genevieve and John Christie.

I wrote about Ripley Under Water, the final novel in the Ripliad, back in 2013 as part of the Great Tom Ripley Reread, when I got my hands on a 1991 London Limited Edition of the book, flat signed by Highsmith. I mentioned then how as a Highsmith and Ripley enthusiast – okay, fanatic – "owning a signed Ripley novel is quite something"; so to have now come into possession of a signed association copy of a Ripley novel – even though it be the same Ripley novel, albeit in a (slightly) different edition – inscribed to such a key figure in Highsmith's life, is properly thrilling. (The book wasn't too expensive either, certainly in comparison to another association copy of Ripley Under Water currently listed on AbeBooks, a 1992 US Knopf edition inscribed to a literary agent and priced at around £250.)

In her accompanying letter, Liz Calder states that she "met Patricia Highsmith during the last years of her life and published several of her books", making note of the time "Highsmith came to London for publication" of Ripley Under Water and how Highsmith "was a gravel-voiced, quite shy but darkly funny woman who loved whisky and cats". Writing in The Oldie the month after Highsmith's death (March 1995 issue, as quoted in Andrew Wilson's 2003 biography of Highsmith, Beautiful Shadow), Calder recalled that publicity trip to London, when Highsmith stayed at Hazlitt's Hotel on Frith Street, Soho:

I collected her there for an evening on the town, and she had discovered that so crooked were the floors that her whisky bottle slid of its own accord down the top of her chest of drawers and she was catching it with glee as it flew off the edge. She kept repeating this trick a bit like Pooh and his balloon. She had a childlike pleasure in simple things.

Ripley Under Water is not the best Tom Ripley novel, nor my favourite (that would be 1974's Ripley's Game, in both cases), but I love the Ripliad as a body of work and Ripley Under Water is an intrinsic part of that series – a sequel of sorts to the second Ripley novel, Ripley Under Ground (1970), with a handful of excellent and memorable sequences which are the equal of anything else in the Ripliad (Tom luring his nemesis, David Pritchard, to a secluded seaside Tangier cafe and then losing his rag with Pritchard and beating him up; Tom and Ed Banbury's gruesome disposal of the remains of the art dealer Murchison; the final fate of David and Janice Pritchard). So I'm delighted to add to my Highsmith collection a unique signed copy of the novel, and especially one with so firm – and firmly dated, not to mention located – a provenance.

I'll be showcasing some more inscribed books over the coming weeks – not by Highsmith, although I do have a couple of other signed books by her I'll be unveiling at some point – but by other authors, some of whom have appeared on Existential Ennui before, and some who have not.

A Tom Ripley and Ripliad Chronology: a Timeline in Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley (Virago, 2015)

NB: Linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 7/8/15.

When a series of novels – especially a series published over an extended period and featuring the same lead character throughout – evolves in the mind of the reader from being merely a diversion or, at the upper end of the scale of interest, a fascination, to becoming a full-blown obsession, the minutiae of the fictional world being depicted starts to assume more of an importance than it perhaps otherwise would (or should). Take a particular passion of mine: the five Patricia Highsmith novels starring Tom Ripley – the Ripliad. Aspects of Tom's world to which I've devoted more thought than is entirely necessary (or healthy) include Tom's politics (leftish, for the most part), the social scene around his home in Villeperce-sur-Seine (agreeable, for the most part, although also snobbish) and the state of Tom's garden at Belle Ombre (a curious one that, when I struggle to summon much interest in my own garden beyond a desire to sit in it on occasion). But probably the facet of the Ripliad I've pondered most frequently is its chronology.

In publishing terms, Highsmith's intermittent series spans thirty-six years, from 1955's The Talented Mr. Ripley to 1991's Ripley Under Water, and the world depicted in each novel reflects the era in which it was written, from the 1950s mise-en-scene of Tom's debut to the presence of CDs and microwave ovens in his swansong. But in the internal chronology of the series, little more than a decade elapses between The Talented Mr. Ripley and Ripley Under Water. We're told in the the novels that Tom is twenty-five years old at the time of Talented; that he's thirty-one in the second instalment in the Ripliad, 1970's Ripley Under Ground; and that the events of Ripley Under Water take place about five years on from Under Ground – which, if Talented is indeed set in 1955, would mean that Under Water is set in 1966. And yet the world outside Belle Ombre's windows marches on through the 1970s and into the early 1990s.

Fellow Ripley enthusiast Craig D noted in the comments to my Tom Ripley Reread post on Ripley Under Ground that he "once read an interview with Highsmith in which she... jokingly [said] that she 'cheated' with the timeline", so I suppose one really shouldn't read too much into the mutable nature of the Ripliad chronology. But of course that doesn't prevent unhinged individuals like myself from dwelling on it – and nor does it stop other folk from offering their own interpretations of it.

One such recent one, the most detailed I've come across – it proffers season as well as year for when each novel is set, plus locales – appears in the 2015 Virago hardback edition of The Talented Mr. Ripley (a copy of which was kindly sent to me by Virago's Editorial Director Donna Coonan, to whom I can only apologise for the ridiculously nitpicky nature of what follows), appended to John Sutherland's new introduction to the novel. On one level it's an entirely reasonable piece of work: each of the dates it gives is informed by the surroundings in each novel – which, as I've noted, reflect the period in which each novel was written – and certainly in the case of Ripley Under Ground and 1974's Ripley's Game, the chronology further reflects the info Highsmith imparts in the latter: that just six months elapse between those two books.

Where the chronology starts to become problematic – at least for a lunatic like me – is in the concrete dates it gives for the four novels post-Talented (which the chronology maintains is "set in early 1955", which is fair enough). For Ripley Under Ground and Ripley's Game, the settings are given as, respectively, "summer 1968" and "late 1968 and early 1969", which tallies roughly with when the novels were written but would make Tom around thirty-eight, as opposed to the thirty-one he says he is. The fourth book in the Ripliad, 1980's The Boy Who Followed Ripley, I don't believe offers any indication of how long after Ripley's Game it's set (I could be wrong; it's two years since I last reread it), but the chronology states it's "set in summer and early autumn 1978", which would make Tom about forty-eight – markedly older than the novel seems to suggest he is. Lastly, the date for Ripley Under Water is stated as "summer and autumn 1988"; that would make Tom an unlikely fifty-eight and mean that thirty-three years have elapsed since the events of Talented.

There's no easy answer to this: Highsmith evidently did cheat, so it's impossible to reconcile the setting and surroundings of each novel with Tom's age in each. But by affixing such (relatively) firm dates to each book, the new chronology practically invites the scrutiny of those of us for whom the Ripliad has become, let's say, an abiding preoccupation.

Still, for the vast majority of the readership, who I imagine tend not to dwell on such things – which is to say they have a firmer grasp on reality and more of a sense of perspective than I seem to – the chronology will doubtless prove to be little more than a momentary diversion. And at least it's not as problematic as the year the otherwise learned Professor Sutherland calculates in his introduction for Tom's birth: 1934. Now how on earth did he arrive at that conclusion...?

Patricia Highsmith's Short Stories: Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes, Signed Inscribed Association First Edition (Bloomsbury, 1987)

Signed books have become an increasingly important aspect of my book collecting over the past couple of years, especially books – first editions usually, but other editions too – signed by my favourite authors; I've been blogging about some of my more recent acquisitions in that regard over the past month or so (periodically). But even more fascinating to me than flat signed – i.e. signature-only – books are inscribed ones, particularly those inscribed by authors to friends or even fellow authors – association copies, in the lingo of book collectors. For me it's not so much who they're inscribed to, although that in and of itself can be interesting – witness the Jack Gerson thriller I blogged about last month, inscribed to Doctor Who actress Mary Tamm – nor the matter of provenance, although in purely collecting terms an association copy does bestow a certain authenticity on a signature and inscription (see here, here and here); it's more the implication that the book was probably one of the author's own copies – that it sat on their shelves for however short or long a period of time, was handled by them, and ultimately given away by them.

I own a good number of such books myself, maybe half a dozen or so of which are by some of my favourite authors: Elmore Leonard, Donald E. Westlake, P. M. Hubbard (with accompanying letter), Gavin Lyall, Anthony Price. And then there's Patricia Highsmith. Highsmith is perhaps the author I admire above all others, but she's not the easiest writer to acquire in inscribed first (or any) edition. Flat signed books, no problem – signed copies of the various limited editions of her novels and short story collections published by Mysterious Press or Penzler Books in the States can be had for as little as twenty quid on AbeBooks, while for just north of £100 it's usually possible to obtain the 1991 signed Bloomsbury/London Limited Editions Ripley Under Water (I myself own one). But inscribed copies? I can see barely ten in total for sale online at present, ranging from over £150 to nearly £6,000.

Two years ago, however, I managed to procure, for a ridiculously low price, an inscribed copy of the 1977 Heinemann edition of the (very) short story collection Little Tales of Misogyny – an association copy, inscribed to two of Highsmith's friends and with a little drawing to boot. It was an extremely fortunate find, and I didn't think I'd easily be able to get my hands on anything like it again – which just goes to show how wrong a body can be, because I've since come into possession of a further two inscribed copies of Highsmith books, both of them again short story collections. I'll deal with what I think is the more extraordinary of the two in a subsequent post, but this one isn't half bad by itself:

A first edition of Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes, published in hardback by Bloomsbury in 1987, jacket design by husband and wife team Frances Newell and John Sorrell – latterly of design charity The Sorrell Foundation – with a cover illustration by Kurt Hoyte, who would go on to illustrate the covers of the 1989–90 Corgi reprints of six Jim Thompson novels. I acquired this copy for a very reasonable price from the secondhand department of Kirkdale Bookshop, a splendid bookshop in Sydenham in south London, not far from where I grew up in Beckenham, although I didn't on this occasion purchase the book in the shop itself; I spotted it online. The inscription, in the spidery hand characteristic of Highsmith in her later years, is on the half title page, like so:

It reads:

For Paul Joyce –

(glad you like this one) –

Best wishes from Patricia Highsmith

8 June 1989

It's my belief that the Paul Joyce of the inscription is this Paul Joyce – photographer, filmmaker and artist. In 1989 Joyce directed a ninety minute documentary titled Motion and Emotion: The Films of Wim Wenders, for which he interviewed Highsmith about The American Friend, Wenders's 1977 adaptation of Ripley's Game (1974). The date of the inscription tallies with the production of Motion and Emotion, which in turn is two years on from the publication of Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes, so if I'm on the right track, that means this was either Highsmith's own copy of the book which she gave to Joyce when they met, or Joyce got her to inscribe his copy.

My suspicion – indeed my personal preference – is for the first scenario, because that would mean the book was in Highsmith's personal library for a couple of years before she handed it on, but either way, and bearing in mind I haven't seen Joyce's documentary, I wonder what the general drift of the conversation was that it should produce a wry comment like "glad you like this one". Did Joyce confess to not liking others of her books?

In any case, I can see just one other signed copy of the Bloomsbury edition of Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes for sale online at present – flat signed, and listed at £150. (There's also a flat signed copy of the 1989 Atlantic Monthly Press edition, listed at £60, which, incidentally, is still more than I paid.) So even if I've got my wires crossed as regards Paul Joyce, it's still quite a remarkable copy of the last collection of short stories to be published in Highsmith's lifetime (there have been a few posthumous collections).

And there are some diverting stories within its pages. Those only familiar with Highsmith's rep as a suspense or crime writer might be surprised by the breadth of the material herein, which ranges from a vignette of a cemetery where towering cancerous growths become a tourist attraction ("The Mysterious Cemetery") to a blow-by-blow account of a whale's war with mankind ("Moby Dick II; or the Missile Whale") to a Pope's attempts to introduce a woman's right to choose into the doctrine of the Catholic Church ("Sixtus VI, Pope of the Red Slipper").

Along the way there's the story of a New York tower block overrun by monster cockroaches ("Trouble at the Jade Towers"), a spot of mild speculative fiction embodied by a woman who lives for over 200 years, draining the resources – financial and emotional – of everyone around her ("No End in Sight"), and a truly apocalyptic climax centring on an American President and First Lady, clearly modelled on Ronald and Nancy Reagan, who distract attention from an Iran-Contra-like scandal by starting World War III ("President Buck Jones Rallies and Waves the Flag").

All this is delivered in typically dispassionate fashion by Highsmith, as she casts an acerbic eye over the world around her. Some of the stories are more memorable than others, and Highsmith's unrelenting misanthropy can become wearying; it's notable how practically the only protagonists who emerge with their dignity intact are those of the non-human variety. But there's no denying the sheer scope of the collection, Highsmith tackling themes as daunting as religion, politics, money, abortion and animal rights and setting her stories on stages as diverse as the USA, post-colonial Africa, South America and the high seas. Perhaps that's why Paul Joyce responded to this book more than others of Highsmith's.

I've added Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes to the Existential Ennui Patricia Highsmith First Edition Book Cover Gallery, but the second signed and inscribed Highsmith short story collection I'll be taking a look at is already represented in said gallery...

The Ripliad: Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley Series of Books Revisited and Rated

Having finally completed the Great Tom Ripley Reread (roughly seven months later than I figured I would, but hey, who's counting? Er, apart from me, evidently), I thought I'd take the opportunity to reflect on Patricia Highsmith's Ripley series as a whole, and revisit the Tom Ripley Quality Graph I proudly – perhaps foolishly, if the first comment on that post is anything to go by – unveiled back in 2011, with a view to seeing where each of the five Ripley novels now resides on it (innit). An absurdly self-indulgent and inconsequential exercise, I realise, but hey: when has that ever stopped me in the past?

First though, for any latecomers, in order of publication the five Tom Ripley novels are:

The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)
Ripley Under Ground (1970)
Ripley's Game (1974)
The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980)
Ripley Under Water (1991)

If you're so inclined, and if you haven't done so already, you can click on each title to read my prolix Ripley Reread piffle – or you can simply take my word for it that those five blog posts are some of the most insightful and critically incisive essays ever written about Highsmith's Ripliad and leave it at that. Ahem. In any case, the Reread was certainly instructive as regards my relative appreciation of each Ripley novel: of the five books, only one remained unchanged in my estimations, and that was mostly because I rate it so highly – unlike some of the other novels in the Ripliad, I'd actually read it at least twice, possibly three times, before this latest Reread – it couldn't really rise any further. Although I suppose it could have fallen... which is what happened to one of the other Ripley novels, as we shall see.

Here's what the Tom Ripley Quality Graph looked like in 2011 (actually, not quite: I've redrawn it – the original was a bit scruffy – although the data is the same):

The Talented Mr. Ripley scored a very healthy 8 – it is, after all, the bedrock upon which the Ripliad is based – then the first sequel, Ripley Under Ground, scored an even healthier 9, and then the high water mark: Highsmith's masterpiece, Ripley's Game, with an unbeatable 10 – unbeatable, that is, if your graph only goes up to 10. Which mine does. Anyway, after that it's a steep decline to The Boy Who Followed Ripley on 7, and another drop to the final novel in the series, Ripley Under Water, on 6.

That was then. Now here's how things look in the wake of the Great Tom Ripley Reread:

Just one book has remained where it was: Ripley's Game, the Ripley novel par excellence. Or so I once believed, because its lofty position is now paralleled by the preceding Ripley book, Ripley Under Ground, which on this second go-through, and in its own way, I found just as compelling as Game. Talented has also moved up one – for me, more so even than Highsmith's 1950 (non-Ripley) debut, Strangers on a Train (and certainly more so than 1954's The Blunderer), it's the first book where her abiding concerns of power, identity, obsession, deception and the nature of evil fully coalesced – whereas the fourth Ripley novel, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, has fallen one place; on this read I found it lacked the urgency of others in the series (although as an aside, I should note that such is my enthusiasm for Ripley that Highsmith could have written an entire novel consisting of Tom gardening, playing the harpsichord and sauntering down the road to George and Marie's bar-tabac and I'd probably have been perfectly happy). Finally, Ripley Under Water – a direct sequel to Under Ground – went up one; on reflection I feel it is a better book than Boy, although still not as good as the first three Ripley novels.

So there you have it. For further thoughts on each book in the series I'll direct you to each of my five individual posts on them – assuming you've read the books, that is; if you haven't, well: you know what to do next. Suffice it to say in closing that to my mind Highsmith's Ripliad is a remarkable achievement: a peerless extended study of a man who literally gets away with murder – who is, as he himself puts it (in Ripley Under Ground), "a font of evil" – and how such a man might live with himself and even, by his own cunning, intellect, force of will and sense of self-preservation, flourish.

The Great Tom Ripley Reread, 5: Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith (London Limited Editions, Signed / Bloomsbury, 1991)

NB: Linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 19/4/13.

And so the Great Tom Ripley Reread – which seemed like such a good idea when I embarked on it, ooh, over seven months ago – reaches the final novel in Patricia Highsmith's Ripliad: Ripley Under Water. And once again I have a very special edition of the book from which to springboard some musings:

This is the London Limited Editions, er, edition of Ripley Under Water, published in 1991 in conjunction with Bloomsbury, who published the regular UK first edition, with a dust jacket illustrated by Elspeth Ross, that same year. Bound in marbled cloth boards under a delicate glassine paper jacket – not shown, although my copy does have its wrapper – it was limited to just 150 copies, each one signed by Highsmith. Curiously, however, this one isn't numbered:

Even though the signature does appear to be genuine, so either the number got forgotten for this copy, or Highsmith ended up signing more than 150 of the buggers. I missed out on an eBay auction for another copy over a year ago – as a consolation prize bagging a terrific signed and inscribed first edition of Little Tales of Misogyny instead – so when this one popped up on eBay, I made damn sure I secured it (as it turned out for under half what the first copy went for). Anyone who's been following this series of posts will hopefully understand that for me, owning a signed Ripley novel is quite something, especially since the cheapest copy currently listed on AbeBooks is £135 (plus postage from America).

Although the four Ripley novels which follow The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) are, loosely speaking, sequels, most of them aren't sequels in the sense that they pick up on plot threads from previous books. The exception is this fifth and final entry in the series, which is a direct sequel to the second book, Ripley Under Ground (1970). Set five years on from that novel – in the mutable timeline of the Ripliad, that is, which means the presence in the narrative of slightly incongruous-for-1975 things like CDs and microwave ovens – it finds Tom besieged by an unhinged American couple, David and Janice Pritchard, who have moved into a house in the area of rural France in which Ripley resides. The Pritchards – David especially, but also Janice – are digging into the death of the art collector Thomas Murchison, who, you'll recall, Tom murdered in Under Ground in order to keep Murchison from revealing that Tom and his English cohorts Ed Banbury and Jeff Constant of the Buckmaster Gallery were up to their necks in an art forgery ring.

Having got wind of this from Cynthia Gradnor, the one-time girlfriend of the artist doing the forging, Bernard Tufts (standing in for the deceased Derwatt), David Pritchard is now seemingly intent on finding the corpse of Murchison, which Tom, enlisting the aid of the aforementioned Bernard (who also subsequently died), deposited in a local river. All of which is explained piecemeal by Highsmith for those who haven't read Under Ground, but even so, unlike that and the other Ripley sequels, with Under Water, it helps enormously here to have read the book it references.

Which isn't to say there aren't references to other parts of the Ripliad too. For instance, one of the methods David Pritchard employs to unsettle Tom is prank telephone calls from someone purporting to be Dickie Greenleaf, the first of Tom's multiple victims (killed, of course, in The Talented Mr. Ripley). Dickie is perhaps the only one of Tom's murders that he feels any kind of remorse for – "The beginning of his troubles", as Tom reflects after the first call: "The first man he had killed, and the only one he regretted killing, really, the only crime he was sorry about." Though he's certain that Dickie is in fact dead, that initial phone call makes Tom physically sick – an atypical response from the usually in-control Ripley.

The presence of an existential threat for Tom makes for a welcome change from the previous book in the series, The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980), in which Tom's role was often quite passive. Highsmith's original idea for what would be her last Ripley novel (she died in 1995) was "Ripley touches madness" (jotted in one of her notebooks, as revealed in Andrew Wilson's 2003 biography Beautiful Shadow), and elements of that notion do make it through to the finished novel: when David Pritchard – or "Prickard", as Tom's wife, Heloise, repeatedly mispronounces it, causing Tom to drily correct her ("Pritchard, dear") – follows Tom and Heloise to Tangier, Ripley lures him to a coastal cafe and beats him up, only just keeping from killing him. By and large, though, Tom acts no more crazy than at any other point in the Ripliad, and considerably less so than in Ripley Under Ground, where he struggled to keep a grip on the freewheeling insanity he'd unleashed.

Of course, Tom is unhinged; at one point, in reference to Pritchard, he muses that he doesn't understand cracked people (the one exception being Bernard), when in fact he himself is by any definition, to put it mildly, highly abnormal: a conscienceless serial killer. Highsmith is performing her usual trick here of never deviating from Tom's viewpoint, so that we unwittingly empathize with him and Pritchard becomes the villain of the piece. In reality, they're as bad as each other; indeed, Pritchard nails Tom when he calls him a "snob crook".

There again, Tom does display some of his more admirable qualities in the book as well. His relationship with Heloise is never more touching than it is here: he twice tells her he loves her – an unusually forthright declaration from the normally reticent Ripley – and a postcard from her makes "his heart jump". (The only hint of his latent homosexuality this time comes courtesy of his reading a biography of Oscar Wilde – in the previous book he was reading Christopher Isherwood – but even there, that was the book Highsmith herself was reading whilst writing Under Water.) Meanwhile, his loyalty to Ed and Jeff, and theirs to him, seems to go beyond simple self-preservation; when Ed volunteers to come over to France to help thwart Pritchard's "anti-Ripley game" (nicely done, Ms. Highsmith), he apparently does so out of genuine friendship.

Still, let's not get too carried away. Ripley is still, as Cynthia Gradnor puts it, "the most evil man I've ever met", adding: "if you consider that a favourable distinction. You probably do." He does some pretty despicable things in Ripley Under Water, not least of which being his gruesome "autopsy" of Murchison's remains when they're delivered by David Pritchard to his house, freshly recovered from the river, complete with "bits of flesh... pale and flabby, [stuck] to the spinal column" – a scene which recalls the similar desecration of Bernard Tufts' corpse in Under Ground. As for Tom's opportunistic solution to the Pritchards' meddling, in its own way that's as cold and calculating as any other of his actions across the Ripliad.

Unexpectedly, I found myself enjoying Ripley Under Water a lot more than I thought I would on this second go-round. I'd previously viewed it as the weakest instalment in the Ripliad, but it actually went up in my estimations; I think I'd put it somewhere just above The Boy Who Followed Ripley on my Tom Ripley Graph now. In fact, having (finally) completed the Great Tom Ripley Reread, I'm of a mind to revisit that graph to see where each of the five Ripley novels now rests on it...