The Boy Who Followed Ripley

It is hard not to like Tom Ripley.  Handsome, educated, well-dressed and mannered, he pursues a life of leisure the only way it should be pursued: with vigor and determination.  Yes, his lovely French wife at times will baffle the reader with her tolerance (what would a pretty rich girl see in a working-class American who, on more than one occasion, has exhibited a certain physical indifference to her charms?), but perhaps what Heloise Plisson needs is the space afforded her by a well-structured if fundamentally loveless marriage.  Loveless?  Very much so, because the only person for whom Tom Ripley can feel anything akin to love is Tom Ripley.  Which may explain the lens through which we may wish to view the events of this novel. 

We begin one August day in Belle Ombre, that humble French mansion, and Tom's domestic issues with ants, which might lead us to think that he has lixiviated crime from his abiding interest in self- perfection.  But almost immediately we are reminded that Tom is still profiting from the Derwatt controversy, and we know what they say about retired criminals.  Tom's attention is, however, quickly diverted by the appearance of an American teenager by the name of Billy, whom he finds loitering in the vicinity of Belle Ombre.  That Billy more than hints at a knowledge (he stares a little too long at Tom's Derwatts) of the tenebrous reputation of Tom Ripley surprises no one, least of all Tom.  Yet it is Billy's own presence in France – intercontinental truancy is not the most common of occurrences – that makes Tom wonder about the boy's identity.   In our internet age Billy, or whoever Billy really is, could have been traced in a matter of hours.  It takes a couple of days and the perusal of a few newspapers for Tom to make a more than educated guess:

He got up restlessly, went near the window where there was a bit more light, and looked at the People column on the back page of the Trib.  Frank Sinatra was making another final appearance, this time in a forthcoming film.  Sixteen-year-old Frank Pierson, favourite son of the late superfood tycoon John Pierson, had taken off from the family home in Maine, and the family was anxious after nearly three weeks with no word from him.  Frank had been extremely upset by his father's death in July.

It spoils nothing to reveal that Billy and Frank are one and the same (Highsmith apparently subscribes to the anti-whodunit tenets endorsed by, among others, this famous director),  but it is "his father's death in July" that arrests Tom's musings.  John Pierson, you see, had years before been paralyzed below the waist by an assassination attempt clearly inspired (the text admits as much) by the shooting of this politician.  He had coped by burying himself in his work, although without diminishing our pity we note that it is much easier to handle such a situation when you rank among the world's most financially privileged.  His death was mysterious in that he, well, fell off a cliff.  An unrailed cliff where he would watch the sun descend every evening – and off which he could have very easily been pushed.  The death is ruled a suicide, but one domestic employee claims that right before the tragedy she espied none other than Frank lurking nearby.

What happens next does not seem to dovetail with what we know of Tom Ripley.  Usually keen on divorcing himself from scandalous figures, the master of Belle Ombre takes a shine to Frank for reasons that are never elucidated.  Does he empathize with Frank for possibly having killed his father with the same stolid iciness with which Tom once dispatched a close friend?  Is there, as sex-obsessed literary critics love to imagine, a more personal subtext?  Or does Tom simply detect in Frank the banal mendacity of the jilted teenager?  Frank is more than a little infatuated with a coeval called Teresa, although their only carnal experience was woefully unsuccessful.  His account of the events of the day his father died reference this generally forgotten work which could not be any farther from Frank's shallow, untested morals, perfect proof that a bad reader will inflict any interpretation on a text if it suits his purposes.  As Tom contemplates a way to return Frank to his family, who has already set his older brother Johnnie (whose passport Frank pilfered) and a private investigator on his trail, Tom and Frank will become partners – not really in crime but in shenanigans.  One could even imagine that Tom, who comes from a poor family, might take a distinct pleasure showing European culture to his moneyed confederate who cannot be reasonably expected to know much about the world's most glorious continent.  So they traipse across Europe – we will leave it to the curious reader to discover precisely where – and Tom constantly beholds Frank and wonders whether he had the testicular fortitude to murder his own wheelchair-bound father.  A father that really did nothing wrong to his son except ignore him for the sake of accumulating even greater bullion.     

Perhaps the most amazing quality of this series is how intact Highsmith voice remains.  Each segment of the Ripliad was published in a different decade, and yet the works flow as if they were serialized without interruption.  Tom does not age substantially; it is the circumstances and environment around him which vacillate, and he simply responds to their movements.  A much-quoted passage about Tom's lack of contrition will not be rehashed here; suffice it to say that, for all his charm and resourcefulness, Tom Ripley is completely insane.  He is insane because he thinks that what has happened – all the suffering he has caused, all the wealth he has stolen – was the direct result of destiny spurred on by his brilliant schemes.  But what separates Highsmith's most memorable character from other murderous madmen is the noticeable absence of ambition: Tom does not seek renown, does not want for great affluence or power (his marriage to Heloise and the per annum she receives would be enough without his extramarital income projects), and is about as politically and religiously disaffected as an intelligent person can be.  But can we really loathe someone who practices Bach on the harpsichord and reads Goethe?  We might want to ask all those people on Mr. Ripley's conscience.  If, of course, he had one.

Ripley's Game

Jonathan had been imagining Tom Ripley a frequent visitor at Reeves Minot's place in Hamburg.  He remembered Fritz turning up with a small package at Reeves's that night.  Jewellery?  Dope?  Jonathan watched the familiar viaduct, then the dark green trees near the railway station come into view, their tops bright under the street lights.  Only Tom Ripley next to him was unfamiliar.

We all have, gentle Reader, our biases and delusions (despite overwhelming literary evidence to the contrary, until recently I had always thought this actor to be the perfect incarnation of this literary character), even if biases are as much an indication of the dullard as the highly creative mind.  Yet it is rather amazing that one movie critic claimed he had always imagined this actor in the guise of one of English literature's most famous gentleman murderers, a dream fulfilled in this film.  The association seemed particularly egregious given how one of Ripley's victims recalls his assailant:

He had probably already talked about a man in his thirties, with brown hair, a little over average height, who had socked him in the jaw and in the stomach.

The numerous other descriptions throughout Highsmith's novels of the young American socialite and murderer all amount to the same: not bad-looking, fit, a nice fellow, well-dressed and charming in that effusive way that comes naturally to those of immoderate intelligence.  But what he was not was peculiar or remarkable.  One might remember him because "his face stood out among the faces of the French," yet one would probably not be able to determine why one came to that conclusion.  The fact of the matter is that Malkovich was twenty years too old, too bald, and, most importantly, far too eccentric and flamboyant to evoke anything but a caricature of Tom Ripley.   After all, what is easier to portray than over-the-top evil?  Thus the casting of this film is far more accurate: Tom Ripley as a bland and shy everyman who uses such traits to become a master of disguise.  Disguise not of the fake beard and thick glasses stripe, but in the much more subtle vein of being able to cast shadows upon his intentions and motives, to convince people of different truths at different times.  And nowhere is this facet of his unique personality better reflected than in this novel.

The life Ripley has earned for himself – if earned is really the right word – has much of what we have come to imagine as idyllic Europe: a posh mansion in the French countryside; uncluttered days speckled with gardening, reading, language study, good food and, as he himself admits, more than a bit of Sunday painting; a beautiful and unmeddling spouse who cares as little for daily responsibility as he does; and, most importantly for our purposes, a regular stream of side jobs and scams to supplement his in-laws' generous per annum.  Like most people who have gained society's favor through underhandedness, however, Ripley is the target of more than a few wagging tongues.  Everywhere he goes, someone recognizes him from that scandal with Dickie Greenleaf a few years back, perhaps even from the whole Derwatt Ltd. imbroglio.  It is hardly surprising, therefore, that an entire novel could be based on a single insult.  What is unexpected is that the insult could come from the likes of Jonathan Trevanny.  Trevanny, as it were, would seem to embody quite the anti-Ripley.  He is British, not well-off, married to a good woman without any materialistic schemes, a decent father to his only child Georges, and more than a bit underemployed as a framer in a small French village not too far from the Ripley estate.  But Jonathan Trevanny has one trump card: he is terminally ill. 

How can looming death become an advantage?  Well, life is full of important decisions that we often dismiss into the glorious sunset for some other day's agenda.  But if our days are necessarily limited, what then?  And what if we are young enough to feel that nothing of any value has been accomplished in this life?  Were Jonathan Trevanny a good and kind man who only wanted the best for his family, few readers would be able to endure the Jobian hardships that batter him from all sides.  But Jonathan is far from a noble soul.  And at a party Jonathan falls victim to the rumors about Tom Ripley and snorts mockingly in his presence, leading the American parvenu to place Jonathan in a special cage in his mind for further reference.  As his leukemia, or whatever he has, continues to plague him, he receives word through the village grapevine that his doctor may be concealing the true severity of his condition.  Jonathan makes a few meek inquiries and is only met with the blushing reticence found in equal measure in the completely innocent and the utterly guilty.  At the height of his neurosis and doubt, Jonathan is approached by a man whose real name we know to be Reeves Minot.  Minot is a career criminal, and a frequent collaborator of Ripley's, and we proceed to learn much more about why Minot and Jonathan meet than Jonathan could ever figure out, even by the end of the novel.  Nevertheless, what seems like a rather banal plot – asking a dying, bitter man to devalue life even more and take a couple of souls with him to hell – turns into a stupendous contract with evil.  The evil, naturally, being Tom Ripley, who allows Minot one opportunity to prove his mettle before interfering to save Jonathan's life – on a train, no less – an act of mild remorse that furnishes us with an impetus for a breathless, if no less elegant second half-novel.  

There are many marvelous features of Highsmith's novels (including, most superficially, how convincingly she is able to convey a male perspective), but despite many critics' clucks and coos amoral or immoral behavior cannot be counted among them.  As it were, Highsmith is almost a textbook moralist.  Every character who chooses the wrong path receives in short order a lovely comeuppance; those who adhere to stronger values – there are, I confess, not that many such heroes – survive danger more or less intact.  That Jonathan finds killing so easy because he himself feels the tip of the shroud rings true, if true only for the snivelling coward that Jonathan most certainly is.  Making the victims interchangeably evil Mafiosi – today we would probably employ a terrorist or two – reinforces the suggestion that crime merely takes a weak will, opportunity, and some kind of immediate reward.   The one exception to this rule seems to be Tom Ripley.  Tom Ripley, you see, gets away with so many crimes that we begin to doubt his subjection to earthly or heavenly laws.  What begins as a cruel prank devolves into an inexplicably fascinating portrait of what seem to be almost comically opposite men devoted to the same murderous aims.  But are these men all that different?  Sure, the talented Mr. Ripley has money, intelligence, and a sufficiently unsavory reputation for people to stay out of his way; the not-so-talented Mr. Trevanny has none of that, nor does he have any time to shunt his wretched track.  Yet both possess what can be labeled hubris, and what is better understood as an overweening belief in the centrality of their own petty existence.  Tempered, of course, with passages like this:

Jonathan was not worried, because he knew he would hang on, that this wasn't death, merely a faint.  Maybe first cousin to death, but death wouldn't come quite like this.  Death would probably have a sweeter, more seductive pull, like a wave sweeping out from a shore, sucking hard at the legs of a swimmer who'd already ventured too far, and who mysteriously had lost his will to struggle.

Ripley has always struggled to stay afloat because he knows he is expected to drown; Jonathan will struggle only because he does not want simply to crumble and die as befits a person of his cowardice.  And what then is cowardice if not death's early and sustained victory?

Ripley Under Ground

Wickedness has its advantages, we are consistently informed by those who do not believe that our life may end in reward (oddly, the whole notion sounds like a credit card jingle), even if the term wickedness is often supplanted by a close cousin, selfishness.  What does selfishness entail?  To those who believe in nothing except dirt and outer space, selfishness is the natural state of man.  It is how we, the talented, distinguish ourselves from you, the mediocre.  And the world is a better place for it: once we, the talented, find other talented people to reproduce with, and you, the mediocre, die in abject obscurity, poor, sick and childless,  there will be more of us and less of you, so therefore, on average, the world will also be more talented.  Sounds like a great deal (we can imagine a well-groomed and affluent audience jumping to its feet in rabid applause) until we enumerate the factions and political entities that have advocated what is generally termed social Darwinism, but which has a lot to do with eugenics and theories about making the strong stronger and the weak extinct.  These pathetic notions continue to our day in various guises, which should sadden more than surprise us.  How pleasurable it is, therefore, to shed any political chain mail and revel in the adventures of one so-called amoralist in particular and this fine book.

We are about six years past the events of this novel: Tom Ripley has remained in Europe and married a moneyed twenty-five-year-old Frenchwoman by the name of Heloise; people occasionally mention Dickie Greenleaf and Freddie Miles, but mostly as a self-important attempt to link past events to the present; Herbert Greenleaf still writes to the sole heir of his deceased son's trust fund, and has even directed Dickie's cousin Chris to Europe with the implicit hope that Tom can inject some sophistication into Chris's plain world view; and having exhausted Dickie's funds obtained through a forged will and testament, Tom has turned his eye to other money-making schemes, including pinching microfilms from visiting guests and an enterprise called Derwatt Ltd.  Derwatt is a gem of modern fiction because its namesake is an old-fashioned Romantic with modern hues and strokes.  A frightfully serious "saint," a "recluse" in Mexico, and someone who has sacrificed everything for his art, the British painter Philip Derwatt has become something of a sensation in recent years, in no small part to the work of Tom and his confederates:

Tom .... stared at the Derwatt above his fireplace.  This was a pinkish picture of a man in a chair, a man with several outlines, so it seemed one was looking at the picture through someone else's distorting eyeglasses.  Some people said Derwatts hurt their eyes.  But from a distance of three or four yards, they didn't.  This was not a genuine Derwatt, but an early Bernard Tufts forgery.  Across the room hung a genuine Derwatt, "The Red Chairs."  Two little girls sat side by side, looking terrified, as if it were their first day in school, or as if they were listening to something frightening in church.  "The Red Chairs" was eight or nine years old.  Behind the little girls, wherever they were sitting, the whole place was on fire.  Yellow and red flames leapt about, hazed by touches of white, so that the fire didn't immediately catch the attention of the beholder.  But when it did, the emotional effect was shattering.  Tom loved both pictures.  By now he had almost forgotten to remember that, when he looked at them, that one was a forgery and the other genuine.

Nothing is spoiled by revealing that the real Phillip Derwatt drowned himself in Byronic splendor in Greece, also about six years ago.  The connection between Ripley and Derwatt – apart from the fact that the former will imitate the latter on more than one occasion – is never fleshed out to our satisfaction: Tom was also in Greece around the time of Derwatt's alleged suicide, and his smug return there later in the novel is told in sporadic detail, almost as if it were a perfunctory exercise.  In the course of the last few years Tom has certainly made a great deal of money on the phony, if essentially aesthetically equal Derwatts painted by the very unstable Bernard Tufts, a trained painter who did not make a name for himself before a different name made him.  The main profiteers from the Derwatt business are Jeff and Ed, a gallery owner and journalist, respectively, who were, like Bernard, not only close friends with the original painter, but also in many ways his disciples in life and art.  For that reason everyone agrees that the best thing is to have Derwatt continue his oeuvres from the anonymous exile of Mexico.  That is, until a snooping, self-righteous businessman by the name of Murchison begins to make inquiries and finds that Derwatt the exile has a lot of friends who would love to see his fame increased even further. 

The critical dismissal of Ripley Under Ground has been mostly based on the assessment that, compared to its illustrious Ripliad predecessor, not much occurs.  And why, pray tell, should much occur at all?  That Tom spends an inordinate amount of time performing stopgap tasks that beget even more problems reflects the life of a criminal, which is rarely as sexy or dynamic as many films would have you think.  Tom sweats, struggles, fabricates and double talks, and lay outs an extraordinary amount of money given his investment in Derwatt Ltd.  And while both Jeff and Ed are mercenary and faceless in equal measure, it is to Highsmith's credit that Heloise is made complicit almost from the very beginning.  A woman may surely marry the wrong man; but she usually sees his flaws as a personal challenge to her powers of reparation.  In any case, it does not take a woman's intuition to realize that Tom, while smart, attractive, and resourceful, shall we say, to a fault, is not quite what he appears to be.  The sophistication he has absorbed through regimented learning would come much more naturally to an educated European.  Like most criminals who wish to lead a quiet life (as opposed to those who live as dangerously as possible knowing that they will meet a young, violent end) Tom lives in perpetual fear of some facet of his game being compromised by another person's malaise, and as the narrative progresses a few too many people have been let in on his secrets.  This criticism of the novel is particularly well-founded in light of its messy twists once the action transposes itself to Salzburg, home to Mozart and a generous selection of lonely bridges.  Unless you consider, of course, that few human beings, even those as baleful and soulless as Tom Ripley, can really keep too much to themselves.  

The Talented Mr. Ripley (film)

Modern critics will be happy to tell you that the best works of literary (and, for that matter, cinematic) art are those which yield numerous interpretations.  For them, the wonderful thing about modernity's sad indecisiveness is that it parallels their own: nothing has any one meaning, thus stripping the critic of his responsibility to understand a work on its own terms.  You will find the most egregious offenders in this regard among those who read philosophy as if they were reading a novel, chopping and picking at whatever appeals to them to formulate their own theories that, upon closer inspection, turn out to distort and disrupt the original.  Does a poem by Cavafy have the same significance if read by a Greek or a Chinese speaker?  Certainly not; yet Cavafy possesses, as all good writers do, a certain frame of reference that might be simplified as his cultural context, but which in the final analysis is nothing more than his own moral structure.  Regardless of where his readers may hail from, Cavafy will ultimately be judged on his ability to delineate right from wrong and convince us that his particular delineation adds to our knowledge of this difference.  If nothing matters to him, it surely will not be worth a damn to us.  My mentioning Cavafy is not a coincidence, nor are any of the details pertinent to the plot of this film.

Our protagonist is a certain Thomas Ripley (Matt Damon), a moody, artistic youth who obviously has never had the opportunities of many other, far less talented coevals.  His surname might have something to do with this phenomenon whose founder died at the peak of his renown a few years before Highsmith's book was published; yet more important is his Christian name, which in Aramaic means "twin."  What we will witness, with the slow precision of a crime planned years in advance, is the twinning of paths, the old and familiar fable of the double: the first path will be the simple, straight road of guaranteed luxury; the second the sinuous struggle of a very intelligent but impoverished young man.  Ripley is playing the piano at a social function when he is approached by Herbert Greenleaf (James Rebhorn),  a moneyed businessman who assumes quite logically that Ripley's Princeton jacket must mean he went to Princeton, and that if he went to Princeton, he must certainly know his famously wayward son, Dickie Greenleaf.  Ripley's response to Greenleaf's conversation sets the tone for the film: he lies, but doesn't simply agree to his mistake, he moves a step further and knowingly asks, "How is Dickie?"  Those three words grasp Greenleaf's weakness in its totality.  And the consummate businessman does what only very rich and arrogant people are accustomed to doing: he tries to purchase Ripley's services and dispatch him to bring his son back from Europe.  Most young men with an easy past and a bright future might find this assignment somewhat humbling; but most young men with an easy past and bright future also have the indelible tendency of never having enough money to satiate their whims.  This Ripley fellow, however, is different.  He is humbler, more sensitive and artistic, probably close to his money, a responsible youth who will go very far.  So when, from a distance, he sees Ripley embrace a girl outside the club and hand over his Princeton jacket, Greenleaf cannot imagine that the girl is not Ripley's significant other, or that the jacket and Princeton degree actually belong to her boyfriend.  Greenleaf sees only what he wants to see; we, the viewers, see the truth as well, as we will at every step of Ripley's journey.

It turns out that Dickie (Jude Law), being the smart boy he is, has made his way to Italy with a pretty young thing named Marge Sherwood (Gwyneth Paltrow), and his plan is to have no plan at all.  Ripley tracks down the couple, ingratiates himself with the mistake provided by Dickie's father, and soon is sharing in the Byronic decadence that Dickie has so pathetically misidentified as the freedom of youth.  Yet it is on his way to Europe by ship that we first catch a glimpse of Ripley's real intentions.  Upon meeting a young woman named Meredith Logue (Cate Blanchett) – another bored rich person who doesn't quite feel guilty about her easy life as much as annoyed that she knows she should feel guilty – Ripley introduces himself as Dickie.  Should we nod our politically correct heads at his obvious envy of Dickie's privileges?  Should we snicker at the pun on "Tom and Dick," the original form of the catch-all expression, "Tom, Dick and Harry," which was incipiently a reference to two working-class youths from Bow and Whitechapel?  Should we understand Ripley's lie as an attempt to bed Meredith, who is rich and attractive and more than a little naïve?  Were this a more typical tale of the inequalities of postwar Europe and America exemplified by the ideological war of socialism and capitalism, the answers to these questions might all be yes.  But they are not yes.  We are not confronting rich and poor in an allegory of societal malfeasance and Tom Ripley couldn't care less about Meredith or any other woman.  The only person for Tom, you see, is Dickie Greenleaf.

For better or worse, the film runs through the permutations of understanding Ripley's motives with sufficient objectivity.  When Dickie asks what makes Ripley special ("everyone should have one talent") and Ripley replies that he is particularly skilled at "forging signatures, telling lies, and impersonating practically anyone," we are led to believe that Ripley is evil.  Until we realize, perhaps, that deception is a stereotypically feminine trait, and coyness and an unwillingness to give a straight answer the signs of the coquettish woman who will never directly express her desires.  When a loud, hedonistic boor by the name of Freddie Miles (Phillp Seymour Hoffman) comes racing into town, Ripley hasn't the slightest desire to join the jetset, make love to every woman he sees, or stumble about in the drunken bubble of irresponsibility that is the calling card of wealthy foreigners living the sweet life.  No, what he wants is for Freddie to get as far away as possible from Dickie.  Soon enough, Dickie's true character is revealed through not-so-clandestine arguments with the lovely daughter of a local shopowner, his utter lack of ability in anything useful, creative or smart, as well as Marge's running commentary:

The thing with Dickie is that ... when you've got his attention, you feel like you're the only person in the world... it's like the sun that shines on you and it's glorious.  And then he forgets you and it's very cold.

Ripley, of course, being the sedulous listener that he is (all good impersonators are very good listeners), knows all this, but continues to hope that he will prove to be the exception.  And so, the first and most damning crime takes place one beautiful fall day in Sicily (November 7, we learn later from the police report) and Tom finally gets to become Dickie to everyone who didn't know him, exactly, as it were, halfway through the film.  It has taken him that long to find, catch, and replace Dickie, who did not share his interests or affection; and it will take the film's remainder to make sure that no one learns of the switch, that Dickie's foul temper and general lack of culture will make him an easy frame for other misdemeanors, and that even those who knew him would bow their heads in sullen acceptance of his world gone wrong.  But we viewers see the duel, as Meredith and Ripley attend this legendary opera featuring another tragic duel between friends, and we know what Tom Ripley wants: "to be a fake somebody rather than a real nobody."  If only Dickie Greenleaf were somebody worth being.