In âHER DIARIES AND NOTEBOOKS 1941-1995,â edited by Anna von Planta, Patricia Highsmithâs complex life is revealed through her own words. Found posthumously, these 8,000 pages were distilled into 999, providing a deep dive into Highsmithâs thoughts and experiences. Known for her Tom Ripley novels, Highsmithâs diaries unveil a multifaceted personalityâfar more than the antisocial, eccentric image often portrayed. Her writings reflect her struggles with identity, relationships, and societal norms, alongside her prolific writing work. The book offers a rare glimpse into the mind of one of the 20th centuryâs most intriguing literary figures, showing her as troubled and brilliant. Tom Learmontâs review was first published on FirstRand Perspectives.
The poet of apprehension
By Tom Learmont
A book review of HER DIARIES AND NOTEBOOKS 1941-1995 Patricia Highsmith Editor: Anna von Planta; afterword by Joan Schenkar. Weidenfeld and Nicholson 2021.
After Patricia Highsmithâs death, her friend Anna von Planta found eight thousand pages of diaries and notes stashed in a linen cupboard. She distilled Highsmith’s pages into a mere 999, a milestone in understanding 20th-century writing. Most people who have read Highsmith see her as an antisocial, anti-Semitic, croaky old lesbian hermit with a handbag full of pet snails, drinking and smoking herself to death in a Swiss hideaway.
However, as this book reveals, Highsmith is far more complex. Some writers are ahead of their time and wait decades for critical recognitionâHighsmith is long overdue. In her five Tom Ripley novels, she created an adorable psychopath. Graham Greene called her âthe poet of apprehension,â casting a light on the dark corners of the soul. She even claimed that Ripley was partly inspired by her character and once signed herself Pat H, alias Ripley.
She was born in 1921 as the stepchild of Stanley Highsmith. For seventy years, this started a love-hate relationship with her mother, Mary. The future novelist hit puberty in a world where being gay was a felony and lesbians did not exist. At twelve, she wondered if she was a boy born into a girlâs body. As a diarist, she resembles Samuel Pepys in some ways. He also has a passion for women, a tendency to break into foreign languages and a cunning, cutting intellect. But he gives us only a dozen years of secrets â Highsmith delivers an entire adult lifetime and bares her soul.
The young Patricia speaks for herself in Von Plantaâs two-inch thick blockbuster. On a motoring holiday in 1941, she saw Mt Rushmore: As art, it is beyond consideration â as a monument, it is an insult to the majesty of the mountains. She studied English Lit, Ancient Greek and Zoology at Barnard College in New York, perhaps where she learned about snails. Most species could be described as girls born into a boy snailâs body, containing sperm and hundreds of eggs. But mating with another snail is essential for fertilisation. In 1946, when she was still putting bread off the table as a comic book scriptwriter, Pat wrote: Man has no more soul than a garden snail. The point is the snail has a soul, too. Soon, her collection of pet snails had reached thirty molluscs â with boysâ names such as Chauncey.
Snails turned up again this year in the film Deep Water. Adrian Lyne, who directed Fatal Attraction, came out of retirement to film the Highsmith story. It starred Ana de Armas â and Ben Affleck as a snail breeder. Alas, The Hollywood Reporter panned the movie, writing: It manages to drain all the subtlety and psychological complexity from Highsmithâs story of marital warfare, transgression and obsession.
Highsmithâs early diaries record the violent mood swings and self-analysis of a tormented student just out of her teens. If there is a constant theme on nearly every page, it is work, meaning writing. This entry, from April 1941, seems prescient: My appetite is twofold: I hunger for love and thought. Pretty, witty, sipping martinis into the wee small hours with the literati of Greenwich Village, she makes a vivid impression, a networking dynamo and a voracious reader with an encyclopaedic vocabulary.
She is ambidextrous when keying piano or typewriter; when carving wood, doing carpentry, sketching, or painting, she uses her left hand. But the right is reserved for the scrawl that fills most of the eight thousand pages, which are in four languages, which Von Planta had translated into English. The editor must also be commended for the bookâs copious and entertaining footnotes.
Patriciaâs six years as a comic book scriptwriter in New York put bread on the table, but she was more interested in love and her work. And love she did, passionately, sometimes platonically, with gay and straight men. She tried sex with
Arthur Koestler, but both agreed that the spark was missing. The young Highsmith was usually involved in lesbian triangles, which brought out her poetry.
Love is desperation
A necessity
Do I even know you?
Not completely
But I need you completely.
She started a course to âcureâ homosexuality but dropped it when Truman Capote told her she was wasting her time. He helped her to get into a writing residence at the Yaddo Foundation. And there she held her own among hard drinkers. I must have had five martinis or six. Plus two Manhattans. At Yaddo, she met the novelist Marc Brandel, who gave her the title of the book she was writing: Strangers on a Train. He proposed, and she accepted, during the wild champagne celebration after Alfred Hitchcock bought the movie rights. Then she changed her mind. Later, the importunate Marc insisted that he would not mind a sexless marriage. Her diary records: Still, I hesitate and have nightmarish dreams of marriage.
The Price of Salt, about a lesbian passion, was written under the pseudonym Claire Morgan and became a huge bestseller. It was based on an obsession â a suburban lady Highsmith stalked â but failed to follow through. Pat put her name to it when the movie Carol was released. Then came the Ripley novels and films. The notes and diaries cover her life in England, where she bought a house to be near Caroline, a married woman who played her like a fish on a line for twelve years. She settled in France, where she ended up paying double American and French taxation. Finally, she moved to Switzerland. And it was work, work, work all the way, right up to the end in February 1995, when the booze and tobacco finally stopped Highsmith in her tracks. Diary entries are scant by this stage, and her notes are largely concerned with her current novels â and philosophical remarks. She loved to travel and always wrote vivid descriptions of foreign places she had first seen on a plane, train, or bus.
She had a close circle of good friends, including the French film star Jeanne Moreau, and was not a shy recluse. As she grew older, her pessimistic, grumpy attitude got bad publicity. She was pro-Palestinian, but this brought accusations of anti-Semitism that are hard to refute, despite Jewish lovers from her past, male and female. Anna von Plantaâs achievement may not help the reader feel affectionate toward Highsmith, but it will bring understanding and admiration for one of twentieth-century English literatureâs greatest figures.
Her 22 novels light up with the deeper insight of the diaries. At Yaddo, working on Strangers on a Train, she wrote of Bruno, the psychopath: I am so happy when Bruno appears in the novel. I love him! Readers lapped up her five books about the charming Ripley, who had no conscience. This prompts this speculationâcould a Highsmith novel be a dark mirror of the readerâs soul, reflecting just a tiny glint of psychopathy?
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