Patricia Highsmith, cigarette in mouth, ready to lay down some keys. / The Guardian
Ignore the World: A Day in the Life of Novelist Patricia Highsmith
TESS IN THE CITY
June 21, 2020
“Obsessions are the only things that matter.” ― Patricia Highsmith
Dubbed “the Poet of Apprehension” by Novelist Graham Greene, Patricia Highsmith is probably best known for Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley (for which she won the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière). She was born as Mary Patricia Plangman but took her stepfather’s last name when her mother remarried. She was born in Fort Worth, Texas but grew up in New York (Manhattan and Astoria, Queens). In 1952, Highsmith published “the first lesbian novel with a happy ending” — The Price of Salt under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. In 1990, Highsmith republished the book as Carol under her own name. The New Yorker notes that The Price of Salt, or Carol, is the only Highsmith novel where “no violent crime occurs.” Highsmith spent much of her life as a recluse despite her many lovers. She died at 74 in Switzerland and left three million dollars of her estate to the Yaddo artist community in upstate New York.
Patricia Highsmith, whose centenary falls on January 19th this year, has become perhaps one of the most influential writers of all time, with her slick twisted dark tales helping to form the foundation of the modern “psychological thriller”. Novelist and critic Gary Raymond takes a look at what makes her work stand out from the rest.
WRITTEN BY: GARY RAYMOND
DATE: 19 January 2021
There is a photograph of Patricia Highsmith, famous to those who have ever been interested in her, taken by her friend (and would-be suitor) Rolf Tietgens when she was twenty-one. She is beautiful, yes, and has the look of a very intelligent, prepossessing young woman. But there is something else in that slight upturn of the mouth – you can barely call it a smile – and the twinkle in the eye. Her hair is mussed and pushed to one side. The shadows across her face feel like they are utterly under her control. But you keep coming back to that expression. Mona Lisa, darkness and light, that look she is holding in the centre of the lens, impossible to define; as biographer Joan Schenkar says of Highsmith in it, she has all the allure of the garçonne. I’d go further: it’s as if she’s holding the inescapable excitement of what it is to read all those dark, sadistic books she will ever write in that single frame. It feels facile to say that in that glance you get how she broke the hearts of so many who fell for her, but somehow it also feels important to her story. Patricia Highsmith, who ended up going on to have something of a reputation for being difficult if not out-and-out misanthropy, was an obsessive whose primary preoccupation was with the darker impulses of the human state. She was interested more in that than she ever was in people, and her dedication to and obsession with these Dostoevskian depths is what made her such a mesmerising writer. And somehow, you can see it all in that photo.
Patricia Highsmith Illustration by Triunfo Arciniegas
What I learned about Patricia Highsmith from writing her biography
By Richard Bradford Ulster University Updated / Tuesday, 2 Feb 2021 15:50
Opinion: how did the author's own life and views chime with works like Carol and The Talented Mr Ripley?
Patricia Highsmith was an animal lover, largely because she regarded them as superior to human beings. On one occasion, she declared that if she came upon a famished infant and a starving kitten, she would not hesitate to feed the latter and leave the child to fend for itself.
Patricia Highsmith's low point – her Diaries and Notebooks reviewed by Richard Davenport-Hines
BOOKS
BY RICHARD DAVENPORT-HINES
November 2021
Patricia Highsmith's journals brim over with the over-emphatic, incomprehensible and rambling ruminations of an old soak. ByRichard Davenport-Hines-
Patricia Highsmith was recently described by a leading American literary critic, Terry Castle, as ‘everyone’s favourite mess-with-your-head morbid misanthrope’ and a ‘mind-blitzingly drunk and hellacious bigot’.
She was also the novelist who achieved early acclaim withStrangers on a Train(1950) and later made the murderous sociopath Tom Ripley into the quasi-hero of five novels.
HAD PATRICIA HIGHSMITH AND I BECOME PARTNERS IN CRIME?
After Patricia
By Joan Schenkar
We’re out this week, but we’re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2011 while we’re away. We hope you enjoy—and have a happy New Year!
Let’s be honest.
I rue the day I didn’t have my late stepmother whacked.
I’d rather eat dirt than talk to my larcenous cousins.
I haven’t forgiven my father for disinheriting me.
I don’t like families.
Patricia Highsmith (1921–95), America’s great expatriate noir novelist (and the subject of my biography, The Talented Miss Highsmith), didn’t like families either. Among twentieth-century writers, only André Gide has more damaging things to say about blood ties than Miss Highsmith does, and Gide is a little more succinct: “Familles, je vous haïs!” But even the Great Counterfeiter himself never went as far as she did on the subject.
I opened the first of the American author Patricia Highsmith’s notebooks with trepidation one cloudy day in the Swiss National Library. The austere, modernist library building located just outside the historical center of Bern, Switzerland is the improbable final resting place for Highsmith's literary journals, private diaries, manuscripts, and other personal papers. As an American citizen who was born in Texas and who spent most of her life in the United States, Highsmith made the unconventional decision to leave her literary remains to the Swiss government because of the large sum she was offered (she disparaged the University of Texas at Austin’s proposition of $26,000 as merely "the price of a used car").
“"Love is what interests me. And love is indivisible from murder" Joanna/Patricia
Fame and appreciation come and go like the tide – one day they’re in, the next they’re out. Patricia Highsmith is no exception and after some years’ ebb following the success of The Talented Mr Ripley, the tide is again on the turn.
What made her so interested in cold-blooded, apparently motiveless killers? Benjamin KunkelNovember 8, 2021
A curious habit of euphemism governs our way of talking about that genre of novel which has mainly to do with killing people. Mystery and crime: So libraries and bookstores advertise the relevant section of their shelves. But life abounds with mysteries; very few of them have to do with the true authorship of gruesome murders. Detective fiction supplies another common designation for novels and short stories about homicide, but, again, detectives also have plenty of other crimes to investigate—not to mention that cops and private dicks haven’t been the automatic protagonists of such fiction for 75 years or so. The main character of Dorothy B. Hughes’s great study of misogyny, In a Lonely Place, from 1947, is the self-justifying serial killer himself; and The Expendable Man, a 1963 novel by the same pioneering writer, focuses on a young Black doctor wrongly suspected of tossing the body of a white teenager into a canal.
The author’s diaries and notebooks chart her early work and love life.
Patricia Highsmith
September 27, 2021
Patricia Highsmith, who published twenty-two novels, including “Deep Water” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” died in 1995, at the age of seventy-four. By the time of her death, she had alienated many of the people in her life, espousing racist, anti-Semitic, and otherwise offensive views, but the eight thousand pages of diaries and notebooks she left behind—an edited version of which will be published this November—depict an engaged, social, and optimistic youth. The following selections begin in the spring of 1948, when the twenty-seven-year-old Highsmith had a two-month residency at the Yaddo artists’ colony. There, she met the British writer Marc Brandel, with whom she began an on-again, off-again relationship, and finished writing her first novel, “Strangers on a Train.” To make money, for several years Highsmith wrote for comics, including those published by Timely, which later became Marvel. In December, 1948, she also found seasonal work in the toy department of Bloomingdale’s, where she sold a doll to Mrs. E. R. Senn, the wife of a wealthy businessman from New Jersey, who became the inspiration for the character Carol, in her novel “The Price of Salt,” which was first published, in 1952, under a pseudonym.
Patricia Highsmith’s Diaries Reveal the Complicated Woman Behind The Talented Mr. Ripley
Plus, personal new books from Emily Ratajkowski, Ai Weiwei, Dwyane Wade, and more.
BY KEZIAH WEIR
OCTOBER 28, 2021
“Should like to do a novel,” wrote 20-year-old Patricia Highsmith in 1941. “Something brilliant of course.” Nine years later she’d publish her first, Strangers on a Train, with The Talented Mr. Ripley and nearly two dozen more to follow. Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks, out from Liveright and compiled by Highsmith’s longtime editor Anna von Planta, provides stunning access to the mind of a notoriously secretive author. In youth, Highsmith juggled parties and mercurial love affairs (“I almost kissed her when we left but not quite”) with a desire for literary greatness. “Got very good work done,” she wrote at age 22, “even though my hair was flat.” She befriended Truman Capote and Jane and Paul Bowles, lauded her pet snails, and eulogized her cat with a poem.
‘Avoid sadists!’: Patricia Highsmith on sex, women and writing Mr Ripley
An extract from the author’s fascinating diaries reveals her innermost thoughts and feelings
Patricia Highsmith
Saturday 13 November 2021
P
atricia Highsmith kept intimate diaries throughout her life, recording her literary success, travels around the world and her many, many love affairs with (usually unavailable) women. Parts of these diaries will soon be published in Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks 1941-1995, compiled by Swiss editor Anna von Planta. The following extracts detail the acclaimed writer’s thoughts on everything from marriage to the meaning of life.
How a Swiss editor wrangled Patricia Highsmith’s messy diaries into a volcanic book
Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995
Edited by Anna von Planta Liveright: 999 pages, $40
The mystery novelist Patricia Highsmith dedicated one of her best-known thrillers, “Strangers on a Train,” to “all the Virginias,” and her diaries are packed with them. It was a popular name in the 1940s, especially among Highsmith’s lovers, and sorting them out was among the easier tasks faced by editor Anna von Planta in the course of a 25-year project: to reveal one of the last century’s most intriguing, complex and misanthropic authors in a single, honest and readable volume.
At 999 pages, “Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995,” out next week, is not exactly lean or economical. It begins when the Texas-born Highsmith was a Barnard undergraduate and charts her booze-fueled odyssey through course work, short-story drafts and serial affairs, mostly with women. After college, she and her prose grow more confident. She publishes “Strangers” in 1950 and “The Talented Mr. Ripley” in 1955; her 1952 lesbian novel, “The Price of Salt,” gains a following for “Claire Morgan,” Highsmith’s pseudonym. She moves to Europe to evade McCarthy-era persecution. And by the 1970s, after she has burned through countless countries, cigarettes and lovers, her journal often erupts in paranoia: “I swing these days between resentment (a sense of being badly treated by other people) and aggressive hatred.”
Yet despite the extremes of mood and tone, this volcano of a book, winnowed from more than 8,000 pages of notebooks and diaries left behind when Highsmith died in 1995, is in fact a model of compression.
It also has a striking immediacy. “Here you are — right in her life as it happens,” Von Planta told me over Zoom from Zurich, where she edits for the Swiss publisher Diogenes Verlag. “In hindsight, you can connect the dots. But you can’t know in the moment. You can only know afterward.” Highsmith’s journals allow us, she says, “to trace her evolution. And she’s so honest and authentic. She doesn’t spare herself — and she certainly doesn’t spare others.”
Von Planta may know Highsmith better than Highsmith knew herself. She and Daniel Keel, Highsmith’s literary executor and founding publisher of Diogenes, were the first people —besides Highsmith’s snooping lovers — to set eyes on the journals in the Swiss home where the author died.
“Daniel and I were looking for unpublished short stories,” she told me. They found “little snippets of manuscripts” and a trunk of her drawings, but the journals were not in plain sight. Von Planta suspected Highsmith would have hidden them in a clean, dry, safe place — like, say, a linen closet. So they located hers. And there, beneath the “beautifully ironed sheets,” was a half-century of private writings.
The thrill of discovery was short-lived. Soon Von Planta had to whip the massive trove into something publishable — a task that Robert Weil at Liveright, the book’s American publisher, calls “herculean.”
“For 15 years, I asked Anna for this book and she always said it was coming,” Weil said. “She didn’t mention there were 8,000 pages.”
Keel died in 2011; Von Planta persevered.
The notebooks were not user-friendly. They were filled with cramped, jittery handwriting and no margins, wedged into the spiral-bound Columbia University notebooks that Highsmith’s close college friend, Gloria Kate Kingsley Skattebol, mailed to her after she moved away from New York.
“We had to have all the material transcribed by two people,” Von Planta continued — one for the spiral-bound work notebooks, another for the mismatched assortment of personal diaries. This alone took two years. She then gave the massive transcription to Kingsley Skattebol, who made corrections and gave Von Planta “indiscreet commentary” about the lovers Highsmith had identified only with initials. Von Planta allowed some to keep their anonymity. One particular Virginia did not: Virginia Kent Catherwood, a married Philadelphia heiress who might have been Highsmith’s first great passion.
Some entries read like taunts to future editors. “Why do I keep writing?” Highsmith asks in 1970. “It is too utterly boring and too much for anyone to plow through after I’m gone.”
Patricia Highsmith’s handwriting, barely intelligible, in a spiral notebook, from “Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995.”
Von Planta first met Highsmith in the garden of a Zurich hotel after Keel had acquired the rights to her novel “Found in the Street.” The year was 1984. “I was barely 27 years old— a junior editor.” But her English was the best in the office, thanks to a yearlong internship with a literary agent in New York.
She found the American novelist sitting at a French metal table. “I extended my hand, European fashion, and she just left the hand dangling, ordered a beer, and fell silent.”
But Von Planta pressed on. She loved the central character in “Found in the Street” — a young girl from the country who comes into her own in Manhattan. But the book’s setting “felt out-of-time, or rather, in a way, like a fairy tale,” because although it was supposed to take place in the 1980s, “it felt like the 1940s or ’50s.”
To Von Planta’s surprise, Highsmith looked up. “Well, I don’t know about the timeless and I don’t know about the fairy tale,” she said. “But in the 1940s I was like this young girl. I lived in New York, in Greenwich Village.”
“Then we started talking,” Von Planta said, “and it went fine. She even laughed.”Back in the office, Von Planta told Keel: “Maybe I’m not the right person for this. Because it took me a long time to get her talking.”
“What? She talked to you?” he said. “It took me ages to get more than a yes or no answer.”
By then, Highsmith had no permanent New York publisher, having been rejected by major presses despite her bestsellers. Keel persuaded her to make Diogenes her publishing home, positioned her as a literary novelist rather than merely a genre writer, and found the prickly novelist an editor with whom she could get along.
Von Planta was well-suited in other ways to edit the diaries. They are written in German, French, Spanish and Italian. “In Switzerland, we can’t go very far without dialect so we learn languages fairly early in our lives,” she says. Her childhood dialect was so distinctive that even standard German was a foreign language. When she was 6 years old, her father, a physician, moved the family briefly to London, which jump-started her mastery of English.
Such fluidity turned out to be essential. Highsmith wrote early entries in German to avoid the prying eyes of her family. In 1954, after her partner, Ellen Hill, had sneaked yet another peek at her diaries, she gave them up altogether, writing only in her notebooks for seven years. Yet the languages she wrote in were not exactly idiomatic. Much of her German resembles English with foreign words.
(Liveright)
The subject of several lengthy biographies, Highsmith isn’t exactly an unknown quantity. We know of her volatile on-and-off liaison with Hill and her tragic entanglement with a married Englishwoman who had a child. But the diaries provide a newfound layer of intimacy. Editing them, especially as Highsmith gets darker and stranger, was an intense experience all its own.
“She got into my head,” admitted Gina Iaquinta, who worked on the American edition. “I was editing the book about this time last year — at the height of the pandemic. And my anxiety went through the roof. She’s so paranoid. She made me paranoid.”
Among the freshest revelations are Highsmith’s intense and enduring relationships with animals. Early on, the human object of her obsession on Monday was likely to be discarded by Tuesday. But Highsmith was not so mercurial with cats. At the end of 1969, she is consumed with grief after the sudden death of her treasured cat, Sammy. She is also eager to leave France for England. Out of this combination came a bitter eulogy: “In a countryside of pigs and people unattractive to look at, I appreciated her beauty especially. Her demands I adore. … It is a final blow.”
Highsmith also had a creepier passion: snails, which she kept as pets throughout her life. ln 1964, traveling between France and England, she smuggled her pet snail collection through customs in her bra. What the journals don’t explain, however, is: Why snails?
“I think it started with a great love — an obsessive love,” Von Planta said, not for the snails but for Kent Catherwood. “They had pet snails together. It bonded them. You share a dog or a cat with your lover. They shared snails.”
Snails also exhibit no outward gender identity until the moment of copulation. This ambiguity may have appealed to Highsmith. There’s a dreamlike entry from 1942, Von Planta told me, when Highsmith appears to meditate on her own sexual identity: “You looked into a cluttered top drawer and you expect to see either a man or a woman reflected in it, and it is very disturbing when you see neither, or both.”
Highsmith had no such trouble categorizing others. By the 1970s, she had broadened the targets of her invective. “She lashes out against Catholics, Jews, America, her neighbors, French people in general, and French bureaucracy,” Von Planta writes in an introduction to that era’s letters. This, too, posed a challenge for Von Planta and her colleagues: Do they omit offensive remarks or remain true to Highsmith? They opted for authenticity, only cutting for redundancy.
After run-ins with French authorities over taxes, Highsmith moved to Switzerland, spending her final years in the village of Tegna.
Von Planta cannot forget her last visit, four months before the author’s death — and her walk from Highsmith’s house back to the train station. “It was a long street with a bend. I was looking back before turning and I thought: She would never stand there.” But there she stood. And in that moment — that frozen, evocative moment, “I knew I would never see her again.”
The moment, as it happened, was not a farewell. It was an invitation, the nature of which she would not understand until she and Keel found the journals. Highsmith gave Von Planta access to her most intimate thoughts. She trusted her to shape them — yet to retain their integrity — before sending them out into the world.
Lord, author of “The Accidental Feminist,” is an associate professor at USC.
Diaries and Notebooks by Patricia Highsmith review – sex, booze and cold-blooded murders
These philosophical, sometimes grumpy journals, unearthed after the doyenne of suspense fiction’s death, shine a light on her dual identities, the contempt she felt for other people and her erotic misadventures
Peter Conrad Sunday 21 November 2021
W
hen Patricia Highsmith looked in the mirror, she saw both a lover and a killer. Early on, the reflected face had a fetching feline allure, but out of sight another facet of Highsmith seemed to belong, she said in 1942, in “a terrible other world of hell and the unknown”. As she aged, what she saw through the “evil distorting lens of my eye” changed: now a gravel-voiced, fire-breathing ogre stared back. Highsmith knew that there are always “two people in each person”, and in 1953 a nightmare confirmed this duality. She dreamed that she was incinerating a naked girl who shivered in a wooden bathtub; the funeral pyre was set with papers, presumably Highsmith’s manuscripts. Waking up, she admitted: “I had two identities: the victim and the murderer.”
Bed-hopping, martinis and self-loathing: inside Patricia Highsmith’s unpublished diaries
From her carefree 20s and countless affairs, to literary success and later-life bigotry and rancour, the author’s extraordinary diaries reveal a woman determined to chart her own course
Emma Brockes Sat 13 Nov 2021 11.00 GMT
In the summer of 1956, Patricia Highsmith was living in upstate New York with Doris Sanders, an advertising copywriter with whom she professed to be in love. The novelist was, at 35, worried about a mid-career slump, although this was more routine anxiety than reality. For the previous seven years, Highsmith had enjoyed a stretch of extraordinary creativity, resulting in the novels that would make her reputation – Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt (published in 1952 under a pseudonym and later republished, under her own name, as Carol), and The Talented Mr Ripley. And, after years of turbulence in her private life, she seemed, finally, to have achieved a measure of tranquillity. She and Doris bought a car. Highsmith started a vegetable garden. Improbably, she joined a church choir.