Edited: Patricia Highsmith’s “Diaries and Notebooks”. Review. – Culture

Your biggest enemy was a dachshund. Patricia Highsmith hated hardly anyone as fervently as her lover’s dog, Ellen Hill, who jumped into bed at night, only ate when his mistress was sitting next to him, tearing down hangers and shitting in the middle of the room in protest. There was still one bite missing from the pile of manuscripts – then she would have strangled him.

“Strange jealousy of the dachshund, because he is also in love with Ellen and expresses the same insecurity, the same need for constant confirmation,” the writer noted in her diary on December 1, 1951, and brought her own insatiability to the point . There was actually no reason to complain. Her debut “Two Strangers on the Train” had brought her remarkable success and advances last year, Alfred Hitchcock’s film adaptation had started, for her second novel “Salt and His Price” about a lesbian love affair she had to change publishers, but she had accommodated it .

Instead of continuing her unpopular job as a comic book writer in New York, she had come to Europe. Because of the sociologist Ellen Hill, she first stayed in Munich for a while, then followed her to Trieste, finally via detours to Paris, with the dachshund in tow. You can see from her notes that she was not satisfied, but shattered by arguments, constant changes of location and way too many Martini. Whether money, love, attention, time to write and, above all, peace and quiet, everything seemed to be lacking.

There is something bulimic about the notes and they create a voyeuristic pull

How it was with Patricia Highsmith’s inner life between 1941 and 1994, what her everyday life looked like and what was going on, can now be found out for the first time in a brilliantly edited selection of her “diaries and notebooks”. The volume begins in New York, reflects her pendulum movements between the USA and Europe from 1951, leads to England, where she tried to become at home between 1963 and 1966 and bred an entire colony of snails, then relocated to France and finally to the Switzerland, where she spent her late years from 1981 and died in 1995.

She was a manic archivist and fan of lists, so it comes as no surprise that her notebooks are 8,000 pages long. They are divided into 38 workbooks with sketches for characters and courses of action, evaluations of readings, materials for projects and 18 diaries with more biographical details and half-baked thoughts. The editor Anna von Planta and her colleagues have managed to turn this mess into a readable book of 1,370 pages. The volume is not only a revealing cultural-historical document, but above all the self-portrait of a dazzling and contradicting writer.

Like a sociologist, Patricia Highsmith conducts field research on her own behalf in her notebooks: even the most catastrophic experience can be exploited for a novel. And although there is something bulimic about the records in their abundance, one gets caught up in a peculiar voyeuristic undertow. Finally, the “diaries and notebooks” also provide a fascinating psychosexual development story and an example of how to deal with gender roles.

So first the bohemian life in New York in the 1940s, which makes up the largest part of the book and comprises almost 700 pages. A city map could be created from the names of the localities alone: ​​lunch at Del Pezzo or Chateaubriand, in the evening at Nino’s, Hapsburg House, Port Arthur, Spivy’s or the Village Vanguard; Carnegie Hall, the Museum of Modern Art, the Wakefield Gallery and the theaters were also among the weekly points of contact.

Highsmith mentions the political escalation only marginally, she is primarily concerned with herself, systematically assimilates all the classics, discovers Flaubert, Kafka, TS Eliot, Julien Green and Sigmund Freud, completes her courses in English, playwriting, Latin and others Subjects at Barnard College and proudly runs the literary magazine Barnard Quarterly. She is amazingly ambitious; a bad grade is an affront to her. In order to practice in foreign languages, some entries are written in German, later French, Spanish and Italian. She succeeds in selling the first stories to magazines: “I am almost overwhelmed, crushed, slain – by all the wonderful things that I still do, do, think, create, plan, love, hate, enjoy, experience”, she records in 1942 full of lust for the future.

As is often the case in diaries, bizarre frictions arise between events of historical importance and private remarks. On September 23 of the same year, Highsmith mentions that the Russians are “fighting the war alone” and fighting over individual floors on the thirty-second day of the siege of Stalingrad. “Have a terrible cold & can barely breathe,” the entry continues and ends with the statement, “I am happy. A long, long happiness” because your application to Times Inc. generated interest. Sleep? No need, instead she spends the nights in bars and ends up in countless beds. She raves about the art critic Rosalind Constable, who shapes her aesthetic sensibilities. Alcohol is always part of what she notices but is not perceived as a major problem.

Men “kissing is always like kissing a fried flounder”

With her slim figure and the dark head of hair, Highsmith is a beguiling figure and casts a spell on men and women. She lives out her sexuality with pleasure, but still perceives it as wrong. “Being creative is the only excuse, the only extenuating factor, for being gay,” she notes in July 1943. A few months later, when her mother says how much she would like to see her daughter with her husband and family, Highsmith confronts him firmly: “But I am not after nature.” The year before, she had said laconically to men: “Kissing them is always like kissing a fried flounder, no matter whose mouth it is.”

Highsmith is still considering a marriage with her gay friend Rolf Tietgens and later with the writer Marc Brandel, perhaps to reassure her mother. The young woman self-critically reflects on the mechanisms of her love stories: she loses pleasure when she believes a lover is all too sure and develops more serious ties with affairs. Above all, triangular relationships become the fuel of their creative work. In 1948 she tried to cure her tendencies with a psychoanalysis. The result is the novel “Salt and its Price”, which she publishes under a pseudonym and which she keeps secret from her parents.

Highsmith has a user-friendly relationship with other people, and the “diaries and notebooks” herald a constant hardening. Despite numerous liaisons, her inner state seems to be tipping over, especially in Europe. As early as 1950 she was even considering therapeutic measures to counter her drinking habits, but then had no strength and let things run for decades. It is true that she keeps making close friendships – with Wolfgang Hildesheimer, who drives her to Ambach in his BMW with red leather seats, with Arthur Koestler, with whom she makes a fatal attempt in bed, “a miserable, joyless episode”, and later with the actress Jeanne Moreau – but already in her mid-thirties she feels like an old woman and is concerned about her privacy.

In a few cases she was denied “a stage” out of editorial duties

The only consolation is the frenzy of creativity: “The sentences in this book fall down on paper like nails. It is a wonderful feeling,” it says in May 1954. Although she has great success as a writer, invents the impostor Tom Ripley and publishes a novel every two years , she hardly comes to rest in her private life. She moves into new houses several times, messes with craftsmen, feels disturbed by neighbors, and develops a deep dislike for France and its tax laws.

The highsmith, who was involved in left student associations in her youth, is becoming more and more reactionary, especially in her political stance. Her increasing anti-Semitic failures, which Joan Schenkar documented with letters in her biography “The Talented Miss Highsmith” (2009), can also be explained by a fundamental paranoia. In the “diaries and notebooks” one notices a general misanthropy in the last third. She actually doesn’t like anyone, she says in January 1967, and would probably dedicate her last works to animals.

The records become more sparse in the 1980s and mostly relate to her work; there are no actual derailments. As faithfully as they wanted to depict her, the editor’s foreword says that in a few cases she was denied “a stage” for editorial reasons. A wise decision, because it would have made scandalous reading and narrowed the picture of Highsmith. The fact that she had literally drunk herself out of her mind and provoked with extremist remarks was already known from Marijane Meaker ‘s memories “My Years with Pat” (2005). As she got older, Patricia Highsmith increasingly resembled one of her nasty characters who could only endure life in the company of cats. She would certainly have poisoned a dog.