Beautiful Shadow, Andrew Wilson’s biography of Patricia Highsmith, records that Highsmith attempted heterosexual intercourse with a male partner, Marc Brandel, while undergoing psychoanalytic treatment for her lesbian orientation. The experiment met with little success:

Highsmith’s therapist, Eva Klein Lipshutz…told her that sex with a man was “quite normal. Everyone does it”, but Pat found it physically impossible. “Sexual intercourse”, she wrote in a letter to her stepfather later, explaining the situation with Marc Brandel, “is steel wool in the face, a sensation of being raped in the wrong place - leading to a sensation of having to have, pretty soon, a boewl [sic] movement. If these words are unpleasant to read, I can assure you it is a little more unpleasant in bed. I tried…”

Highsmith’s epistle refers her unpleasure, which is both diffuse (“steel wool in the face”) and dislocated (“raped in the wrong place”), through letter-writing into “words [that] are unpleasant to read” (hence perhaps the typographic disorder of “boewl”). Nothing here is “quite normal”. But what it suggests is that enjoyment of “normal” intercourse entails the synthesis of multiple sensations that otherwise might well be experienced as confusing and disagreeable (Highsmith’s “having to have…a bowel movement” implies an urgent wish to expel the intromitted object). In other words, it is not that the dysphoria Highsmith reports is due to some disordering of affect, owing to some cause which might be able to be disentangled during analysis; rather, “normality”, understood first of all as that which “everybody does”, is called upon to make sense of such initially disordered sensations, to marshall them to the cause of enjoyment.

The protagonist of Highsmith’s This sweet sickness, David Kelsey, is driven to a rage by his associate’s suggestion that his obsession with Annabelle might be entangled with some sexual dysfunction:

The resentment did not leave Wes’s face. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said in a lower tone, “if you ever got that girl, you wouldn’t be able to do anything with her. You’re in such a state - You don’t know it, pal, but you’re all in knots.”

David couldn’t believe his ears for a moment, then it when it dawned on him what Wes meant, it was like an electric charge hitting him. “You dirty liar!” David said between his teeth. He walked past Wes to the front closet, not even hearing Effie’s words behind him, only their high-pitched whine that was like a razor scoring the surface of his brain. “Good night and thanks, Effie,” he said quickly, plunging his arms into his overcoat, opening the door for himself.

The bang of its closing behind him was the sound of delicious finality. The unjustness, the stupidity of it! The vulgarity! The falseness!

David’s devotion to Annabelle, which persists in spite of her marrying another man and having a child by him, is thoroughly counter-factual, both in the sense that it causes him to construct, and flesh out with real actions, an alternative reality in which she has made the right choice and is living a life of comfort, ease and refinement with him, and in the sense that it disengages him from his actual situation, his life in the boarding house with Effie and Wes, which presents itself to him in aspects variously unjust, stupid, vulgar and false.

The purity of David’s love can only be compromised by the normal commerce of human affection, in particular the negotiations over sex and future marital status that comprise the dating scene - he despises these, and all who engage in them. David’s future with Annabelle is non-negotiable, its guarantee is his own will (personified by his alter ego, William Neumeister) that things should be that way. That the Annabelle to whom his Will is so bonded is an introject, a succubus with whom he spends many companionable evenings while the real Annabelle is at home with her dismayingly inferior husband, does not at any moment occur to him. As far as he is concerned, the “real” Annabelle has been abducted from her right place - the place held by the place-holder Annabelle of his counter-factual imagination - and can never be considered to be wholly herself until she has been restored to the proper location.

As the saying goes, neurotics build castles in the air and psychotics try to live in them. David Kelsey’s psychosis functions as an allegory of writing, insofar as writing fleshes out the imaginary structure of loss and longing that crystallises around the introject. Wilson’s biography of Highsmith refers to a famous line from Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, which Highsmith had received as a gift from one of her many lovers: “In Nora’s heart lay the fossil of Robin, intaglio of her identity, and about it for its maintenance ran Nora’s blood”. Wilson adduces a note from one of Highsmith’s diaries: “All my life work will be an undedicated monument to a woman”, although which woman might vary from book to book, or even page to page. To write in this mode, to construct a work that is also a monument, is to engage in an activity analogous to William Neumeister’s purchase and meticulous furnishing of the house that will be his and his Annabelle-introject’s marital home.

What is valuable in This sweet sickness, apart from its disquietingly detailed examination of the mindset of the writer-as-stalker, is the disenchantment with which everything not belonging to the counter-factual scenario is regarded by its protagonist. The perspective of the psychotic obsessive reveals a world out-of-joint, a world whose myriad putative satisfactions cannot be synthesised into the euphoria of “normal” enjoyment, in which all pleasure-seeking activity appears as loss and dissipation. This is the dysphoric world that Kelsey calls The Situation, the cacotopia of Burroughs’s kicking junky. Not the least of Highsmith’s achievements as a writer is to make us feel “[t]he unjustness, the stupidity of it! The vulgarity! The falseness!”