The Madness of the Complicit
Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train
The debate on whether audiobooks count as “reading” is one I find entirely uninteresting. I admit to some amount of snobbery on this point — for me the ideal reading experience is one where you can read sentences and paragraphs over again, pause to reflect, mark up the margins, look up words in a dictionary. But I need to walk my dog Walter for at least an hour every evening, and after long months with ever-duller podcasts I’ve switched to audiobooks for my walks and been happier for it. The books I choose have to be things I won’t mind not having a paper copy of, as well as books that can survive the occasional distraction. Over weeks of dog-walking I’m slowly digesting a massive biography of Napoleon Bonaparte, but I take frequent breaks from it with novels (I’ve gotten as far as Napoleon’s overthrow of the Directoire in a coup). The most recent of those was Patricia Highsmith’s classic 1950 debut, Strangers on a Train, and I fear I will regret not having a copy to mark up, and quote here.
Patricia Highsmith has been in the air lately — she seems to be one of those authors for whom bursts of interest arise every couple of years or so. Most people probably know her best through the film adaptations of her books, in particular The Talented Mr. Ripley and Carol (based on The Price of Salt). I chose Strangers on a Train to read, not knowing that her diaries were soon to be published (“Got very good work done, even though my hair was flat”, reads one entry, according to Vanity Fair). By all accounts she wasn’t a particularly nice person, and virulently anti-Semetic on top of her basic misanthropy; her love affairs (she was a lesbian) were often acrimonious and violent.
(There are some mild spoilers ahead for Strangers on a Train)
Like most compelling thrillers, the premise has the hook built in. Strangers on a Train begins with two men meeting by chance on (yes) a train: Guy Haines, a genius architect on the brink of getting the commission that will make his career, and Charles Bruno, a generally worthless young alcoholic living off his family’s money. They seem at first like opposites. Guy is private, serious, given to ruminating, and devoted to his work; Bruno is sloppy, loudmouthed, impulsive, and a bit dimwitted. The bored Bruno, desperate for talk and company, manages to pressure his fellow passenger Guy into taking dinner with him in his private compartment (I’m sure I’m not the only one for whom this is something of a travel nightmare). Bruno takes a liking to him, and after a few drinks Guy finds himself confiding in the man, as people sometimes do with those they think they’ll never see again.
Each of them has a person in his life he hates: for Guy, it’s his unfaithful wife Miriam, who is pregnant by another man. She’s refusing to allow the divorce that would free him to marry his beautiful and infinitely patient girlfriend, Anne. Bruno in turn despises his stern father, for all the ordinary reasons that wayward sons hate their fathers. He has a stack of detective novels in his compartment, and before long he brings up his idea for the perfect murder: he could kill Miriam on Guy’s behalf, and Guy could kill his father in return. With no connection between them and no apparent motive for the killings, the murderer would be impossible to trace. And as for the person with the motive? He’d have a perfect alibi — airtight, as Bruno proclaims with delight.
Guy doesn’t want anyone to get murdered. He changes the subject, feeling sullied and disturbed by the conversation. After the two men part, he brushes off Bruno’s excitement as drunken bloviating. But, since this is the opening scene of a thriller, it should surprise no one to discover that Bruno turns out to be entirely serious. A few days later, Miriam is dead.
There’s a generally beloved Alfred Hitchcock film adaptation of the novel, and just from the premise it’s easy to see why he would have been interested. It has so many of the plot strokes characteristic to him: an ordinary man drawn by chance into something horrible, undercurrents of homosexuality, a “perfect crime” that unravels exquisitely and painfully. There’s a memorable scene in an amusement park that must have been impossible for Hitchcock to read without imagining how he would shoot it. But as fine as the movie is on its own merits, after the novel I found it disappointing: he takes the simple path through the story, leaning on the idea of Bruno as a dangerous maniac out to ruin an innocent man’s life. He was also obliged by censors to resist moral ambiguities: the roles of victim and villain are clear and unchanging.
The novel is, more interestingly, obsessed with Guy’s complicity. He didn’t murder Miriam, didn’t arrange for her death — but wasn’t it true that he benefited from it, was freed up to take the career-making project, to marry the beautiful and patient Anne? He is tortured with guilt, and ultimately suffers a complete collapse not of his sanity, but of his identity, his sense of himself as a human in the world. He is both desperate for atonement and terrified of it. Bruno, meanwhile, carries no remorse at all, and only wishes to get closer to Guy and become true partners with the man whom he has forced into his life.
I’ve written before about mistakes in fiction — not quite the same thing as a fatal flaw, but akin to it. At first we think we can pinpoint the moment when things went awry for Guy: his encounter on the titular train. But there are so many other stones on the path. He allowed himself to feel hate for Miriam. He compartmentalized her, tried to keep her separate from his new life, took the train alone so that Anne wouldn’t meet her. He married Miriam in the first place, and did not correctly judge her character. He failed to keep his emotions to himself — or was it that he failed to truthfully reveal them? Either way, through action and inaction he allowed evil into his life:
If he believed in the full complement of evil in himself, he had to believe also in a natural compulsion to express it. He found himself wondering, therefore, from time to time, if he might have enjoyed the crime in some way, derived some satisfaction from it — how else could one really explain in mankind the continued toleration of wars, the perennial enthusiasm for wars when they came, if not for some primal pleasure in killing? — and because the capacity to wonder came so often, he accepted it as true that he had.
A little while ago I watched the movie Michael Clayton, which I’d seen described as a perfectly-plotted movie. Plots with tight control, that pluck their secrets out one by one like feathers, with twists and revelations simultaneously surprising and inevitable, I find immensely satisfying — but the movie didn’t do it for me. I remember thinking about this overworn trope, the madness of the complicit, the idea that participation in a great wrongdoing, even peripherally and indirectly, can drive someone to a mental breakdown. But the same theme in Strangers on a Train hit me hard. Paradoxically, Guy’s sense of justice ultimately damns him. In a remarkable late scene he seeks absolution and offers himself up for punishment, only to find out how unlike other people he is, how frighteningly apathetic the world is to his sins. The novel understands that most people are like Bruno: complicity does not drive them mad. In general we find ways to absolve ourselves. After all, we reason, there wasn’t really anything we could have done.