Strangers on a Train
Patricia Highsmith
W.W. NORTON & COMPANY
Independent Publishers Since 1923
Introduction
PAULA HAWKINS
What is it about trains? What is it about them that fires the imagination, that suggests to those of a certain disposition the possibility of danger lurking behind every seat and in every carriage? There is something in the collective experience of a journey that lends itself to storytelling, and then of course the tantalizing proximity to strangers of every stripe. The chance meeting, whether fleeting or prolonged, the accidental brush of hands as the train hurtles around a sharp bend, a casual conversation in the bar car taking an unexpected turn.
In a letter she wrote to her friend Marc Brandel in 1985, Patricia Highsmith confessed to thrilling to the idea that anyone—the most ordinary neighbor, the dullest of coworkers, that unexceptional girl you see every day on the train—might be hiding some terrible secret or harboring a sordid proclivity: “I can’t think of anything more apt to set the imagination stirring, drifting, creating, than the idea—the fact—that anyone you walk past on the pavement anywhere might be a sadist, a compulsive thief, or even a murderer.”
In Strangers on a Train, Highsmith’s exceptionally accomplished debut published when the writer was just twenty-nine years old, she explored this very idea. The novel begins with a chance meeting between two young men, and this fleeting encounter sets in motion a terrible chain of events: their drunken conversation leads to a macabre folie à deux, a good man turned murderous, utterly corrupted by guilt.
The fact that, more than seventy years after its publication, Strangers on a Train has lost none of its power to disturb is evidence of Highsmith’s extraordinary talent. Her novels, of which she wrote twenty-two over the course of her career, feel disarmingly fresh and modern, from their high concepts and economic style to her groundbreaking and frequently shocking device of allowing the reader to occupy the mind of a killer. Decades before we rooted for Villanelle and Amy Dunne, Tony Soprano and Walter White, we were rooting for Highsmith’s Guy Haines.
Highsmith wrote a draft of Strangers on a Train in 1948, during an apparently frenzied two-month period of creativity while she was staying at Yaddo, the artist’s retreat in upstate New York. It is a sign of how important this period was to her that on her death, she left her entire $3 million estate to Yaddo; however, the idea for the book had been percolating for many years. Indeed, she had met her villain—the inspiration for the despicable Charles Bruno—more than a decade earlier, when on a trip back to her hometown of Fort Worth. “When I was seventeen, in Texas,” Highsmith told a BBC interviewer, “I met briefly a very spoiled boy who was very much like Bruno, completely dissolute . . . completely worthless, and he was sort of the genesis of Bruno.”
Highsmith—who had an unhappy childhood, who suffered, as an adult, from depression, anorexia, and alcoholism, who was deeply misanthropic—was not as a writer particularly interested in happiness. Contentment, she suspected, was often a sign of stupidity; well-balanced people must be, at best, mediocre. Nor was she interested in the simplicity of popular morality, but she was fascinated by the idea that all of us carried within the capacity for good and ill, that identity was not fixed but shifting, that a sort of dualism existed in all of us. “There are always two,” she wrote in her notebook in 1947. “One can love two people, the sexes are within all of us, emotions directly contrary do exist side by side.”
This idea, frequently expressed by the author, is a central theme of Strangers on a Train. A good man—kind, responsible, loving, conscientious Guy Haines—corrupted by fear and guilt, suffers a split in his personality; over the course of the novel he becomes someone he barely recognizes, someone he refers to in the third person, as though he were talking about a stranger. “What was he doing here at 1:15 in the afternoon,” Guy asks himself, “growing swimmy on this third martini, making himself incapable of work, assuming he had any? Guy Haines who loved Anne, who had built the Palmyra?”
As Highsmith ratchets up the tension, as Guy’s fear and guilt bloom, so too does his conviction that he is “two people, one of whom could create and feel in harmony with God . . . and the other who could murder.” He sees this other self as “a secret brother,” a discrete part of his identity which he longs to crush.
Ultimately, however, Guy comes to express the view that Highsmith held, that the murdering part of himself is not something externally produced but something that was always inside him. In the end he believes that he had committed a terrible crime “because there had been that measure of perversity within him sufficient to do it, that he had done it because of the worm in the wood.”
This dualism, this push and pull between essential goodness and darker impulses, is mirrored in another of Highsmith’s favorite themes, the relationship of love to hate, the proximity that loathing has to desire. In one of her notebooks, writing about a woman she has met and “almost” fallen in love with, she confesses to murderous feelings about her, fantasizes about putting her hands around the throat she longs to kiss, writing that “murder is a kind of making love, a way of possessing.”
In Strangers on a Train, we see Guy’s feelings for Bruno veer wildly from virulent dislike to affection and even identification with him. At the opening of the book, Guy finds Bruno brash and physically repulsive, and he immediately suspects this man is dangerous: “Bruno could be violent,” he thinks during their first meeting, no ordinary stranger on a train but someone “cruel and corrupt.” And yet during the encounter he describes “a rush of affection for Bruno,” he feels “a burst of companionship.” Later, although he is sick of Bruno, positively loathes Bruno, he suspects that “Bruno had always been able to read him,” and later still Guy muses: “And Bruno, he and Bruno. Each was what the other had not chosen to be, the cast-off self, what he thought he hated but perhaps in reality loved.”
A large part of Highsmith’s talent for getting under the reader’s skin comes from her creation of psychologically believable—if frequently monstrous—characters, whom she then entices us to embrace. However, she has many other tricks up her sleeve, not least the way in which she tells her stories, her pared-back, laconic style, the deceptive one-note pitch at which she recounts the horrifying and the banal alike.
It is uniquely disturbing, as evidenced by one of the book’s most memorable scenes, in which Bruno stalks Guy’s wife, poor ill-fated Miriam, through a carnival. As we follow the hunt, it is through the cat’s eyes that we see the mouse, and we are party to all Bruno’s observations:
“The roller coaster made a tat-tat-tat-tat-tat like a machine gun over their heads. There was a clang and a roar as someone sent the red arrow all the way to the top with a sledge hammer. He wouldn’t mind killing Miriam with a sledge hammer.”
In one breath Bruno observes Miriam looking “ugly and stupid with her mouth open, as if she were being strangled,” while in the next he is musing that “the prospect of a cool row was delightful.”
When it is Guy’s turn to take up the mantle of murderer, there is a similar effect given by his prevaricating over which gun to take with him to do the killing: “The gloves were purple and the flannel bag of his revolver was lavender. Suddenly it seemed fitting he should take the smaller revolver, because of the similar colors.” Such odd and inappropriate thoughts give the killings a sort of dreamlike irrationality, nightmarish and unsettling, the images staying in the mind long after the reader has closed the book.
This propensity to affect and disturb was noted by critics as unusual in a lowly crime writer: the critic Terrence Rafferty, writing in The New Yorker, observed that “popular ficti
on isn’t supposed to work on us this way.” Rafferty’s comment is rather typical of the reception meted out to Highsmith by literary critics and novelists alike, those eager to stress that she cannot be a crime writer—she’s too good for that. And while it is true that Highsmith herself disdained the traditional whodunit (“puzzles do not interest me,” she said), she did place her writing within the scope of popular fiction, stressing that she was “an entertainer” who liked “to tell a fascinating story.”
From a crime writer’s perspective, all talk of Highsmith’s work being “relegated” to the classifications of crime and suspense is irritating in the extreme. The notion that her books do not belong on those shelves, because of the complexity of their characters or the acuity with which they interrogate social mores, is laughable—for this is exactly what the very best crime novels do.
It is why they endure. It is why we find them irresistible.
And it is why we will likely be reading Patricia Highsmith for the next one hundred years, too.
Strangers on a Train
one
The train tore along with an angry, irregular rhythm. It was having to stop at smaller and more frequent stations, where it would wait impatiently for a moment, then attack the prairie again. But progress was imperceptible. The prairie only undulated, like a vast, pink-tan blanket being casually shaken. The faster the train went, the more buoyant and taunting the undulations.
Guy took his eyes from the window and hitched himself back against the seat.
Miriam would delay the divorce at best, he thought. She might not even want a divorce, only money. Would there really ever be a divorce from her?
Hate had begun to paralyze his thinking, he realized, to make little blind alleys of the roads that logic had pointed out to him in New York. He could sense Miriam ahead of him, not much farther now, pink and tan-freckled, and radiating a kind of unhealthful heat, like the prairie out the window. Sullen and cruel.
Automatically, he reached for a cigarette, remembered for the tenth time that he couldn’t smoke in the Pullman car, then took one anyway. He tapped it twice on the face of his wristwatch, read the time, 5:12, as if it meant anything today, and fitted the cigarette into the corner of his mouth before he brought the cupped match up. The cigarette replaced the match inside his hand, and he smoked in slow, steady pulls. Again and again his brown eyes dropped to the stubborn, fascinating ground out the window. A tab of his soft shirt collar began to ride up. In the reflection the dusk had started to create in the window’s glass, the peak of white collar along his jaw suggested a style of the last century, like his black hair that grew high and loose on top and lay close in back. The rise of hair and the slope of his long nose gave him a look of intense purpose and somehow of forward motion, though from the front, his heavy, horizontal brows and mouth imposed a stillness and reserve. He wore flannel trousers that needed pressing, a dark jacket that slacked over his slight body and showed faintly purple where the light struck it, and a tomato-colored woolen tie, carelessly knotted.
He did not think Miriam would be having a child unless she wanted it. Which should mean the lover intended to marry her. But why had she sent for him? She didn’t need him to get a divorce. And why did he go over the same dull ground he had four days ago when he had gotten her letter? The five or six lines in Miriam’s round handwriting had said only that she was going to have a child and wanted to see him. That she was pregnant guaranteed the divorce, he reasoned, so why was he nervous? A suspicion that he might, in some unreachable depth of himself, be jealous because she was going to bear another man’s child and had once aborted his own tormented him above all. No, it was nothing but shame that nettled him, he told himself, shame that he had once loved such a person as Miriam. He mashed his cigarette on the heater’s grilled cover. The stub rolled out at his feet, and he kicked it back under the heater.
There was so much to look forward to now. His divorce, the work in Florida—it was practically certain the board would pass on his drawings, and he would learn this week—and Anne. He and Anne could begin to plan now. For over a year he had been waiting, fretting, for something—this—to happen so he would be free. He felt a pleasant explosion of happiness inside him, and relaxed in the corner of the plush seat. For the last three years, really, he had been waiting for this to happen. He could have bought a divorce, of course, but he hadn’t ever amassed that much spare money. Starting a career as an architect, without benefit of a job with a firm, had not been easy and still wasn’t. Miriam had never asked for an income, but she plagued him in other ways, by talking of him in Metcalf as if they were still on the best of terms, as if he were up in New York only to establish himself and eventually send for her. Occasionally she wrote him for money, small but irritating amounts which he let her have because it would be so easy for her, so natural to her, to start a campaign in Metcalf against him, and his mother was in Metcalf.
A tall blond young man in a rust-brown suit dropped into the empty seat opposite Guy and, smiling with a vague friendliness, slid over into the corner. Guy glanced at his pallid, undersized face. There was a huge pimple in the exact center of his forehead. Guy looked out the window again.
The young man opposite him seemed to debate whether to start a conversation or take a nap. His elbow kept sliding along the window sill, and whenever the stubby lashes came open, the gray bloodshot eyes were looking at him and the soft smile came back. He might have been slightly drunk.
Guy opened his book, but his mind wandered after half a page. He looked up as the row of white fluorescent lights flickered on down the ceiling of the car, let his eyes wander to the unlighted cigar that still gyrated conversationally in a bony hand behind one of the seat backs, and to the monogram that trembled on a thin gold chain across the tie of the young man opposite him. The monogram was CAB, and the tie was of green silk, hand-painted with offensively orange-colored palm trees. The long rust-brown body was sprawled vulnerably now, the head thrown back so that the big pimple or boil on the forehead might have been a topmost point that had erupted. It was an interesting face, though Guy did not know why. It looked neither young nor old, neither intelligent nor entirely stupid. Between the narrow bulging forehead and the lantern jaw, it scooped degenerately, deep where the mouth lay in a fine line, deepest in the blue hollows that held the small scallops of the lids. The skin was smooth as a girl’s, even waxenly clear, as if all its impurities had been drained to feed the pimple’s outburst.
For a few moments, Guy read again. The words made sense to him and began to lift his anxiety. But what good will Plato do you with Miriam, an inner voice asked him. It had asked him that in New York, but he had brought the book anyway, an old text from a high school philosophy course, an indulgence to compensate him, perhaps, for having to make the trip to Miriam. He looked out the window and, seeing his own image, straightened his curling collar. Anne was always doing that for him. Suddenly he felt helpless without her. He shifted his position, accidentally touched the outstretched foot of the young man asleep, and watched fascinatedly as the lashes twitched and came open. The bloodshot eyes might have been focused on him all the while through the lids.
“Sorry,” Guy murmured.
“’S all right,” the other said. He sat up and shook his head sharply. “Where are we?”
“Getting into Texas.”
The blond young man brought a gold flask from his inside pocket, opened it, and extended it amiably.
“No, thanks,” Guy said. The woman across the aisle, Guy noticed, who had not looked up from her knitting since St. Louis, glanced over just as the flask upended with a metallic splash.
“Where you bound?” The smile was a thin wet crescent now.
“Metcalf,” Guy said.
“Oh. Nice town, Metcalf. Down on business?” He blinked his sore-looking eyes politely.
“Yes.”
“What business?”
Guy looked up reluctantly from his book. “Architect.”
“O
h,” with wistful interest. “Build houses and things?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think I’ve introduced myself.” He half stood up. “Bruno. Charles Anthony Bruno.”
Guy shook his hand briefly. “Guy Haines.”
“Glad to meet you. You live in New York?” The hoarse baritone voice sounded false, as if he were talking to wake himself up.
“Yes.”
“I live in Long Island. Going to Santa Fe for a little vacation. Ever been to Santa Fe?”
Guy shook his head.
“Great town to relax in.” He smiled, showing poor teeth. “Mostly Indian architecture there, I guess.”
A conductor stopped in the aisle, thumbing through tickets. “That your seat?” he asked Bruno.
Bruno leaned possessively into his corner. “Drawing room next car.”
“Number Three?”
“I guess. Yeah.”
The conductor went on.
“Those guys!” Bruno murmured. He leaned forward and gazed out the window amusedly.
Guy went back to his book, but the other’s obtrusive boredom, a feeling he was about to say something in another instant, kept him from concentrating. Guy contemplated going to the diner, but for some reason sat on. The train was slowing again. When Bruno looked as if he were going to speak, Guy got up, retreated into the next car, and leapt the steps to the crunchy ground before the train had quite stopped.
The more organic air, weighted with nightfall, struck him like a smothering pillow. There was a smell of dusty, sun-warm gravel, of oil and hot metal. He was hungry and lingered near the diner, pacing in slow strides with his hands in his pockets, breathing the air deeply, though he disliked it. A constellation of red and green and white lights hummed southward in the sky. Yesterday, Anne might have come this route, he thought, on her way to Mexico. He might have been with her. She had wanted him to come with her as far as Metcalf. He might have asked her to stay over a day and meet his mother, if it had not been for Miriam. Or even regardless of Miriam, if he had been another sort of person, if he could be simply unconcerned. He had told Anne about Miriam, about almost all of it, but he could not bear the thought of their meeting. He had wanted to travel alone on the train in order to think. And what had he thought so far? What good had thinking or logic ever been where Miriam was concerned?
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