If the last several centuries of Western civilization are any indication, writers tend to be odd, unsociable, and occasionally misanthropic types. Several recent literary biographies confirm the trend, revealing in full the self-involved hermeticism of J.D. Salinger, the undisguised misogyny of Philip Roth, and the idle wantonness of Gore Vidal, none of which makes their work any less valuable, of course.
Yet, if a writer can both be worth reading and worth avoiding at a dinner party, the literary subgenre of writers’ collected diaries, journals, correspondence, or other intended-for-private-eyes ephemera should give us pause. At best, such collections often fail to enhance our appreciation of a given writer’s work, and at worst, they inflict real reputational damage.
Such is the case with the new gathering of diaries and notebooks of Patricia Highsmith, whose classic novels Strangers on a Train (1950), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), and Deep Water (1957) firmly established her as among the past century’s most gifted practitioners of the thriller form. A literary giant, yes, but, on the basis of the present volume edited by Anna von Planta, also a grade-A grouch. The jottings, musings, and confessions contained here, distilled from some 18 diaries and 38 notebooks, span more than five decades, but their creator sounds much the same in her 20s as in her 70s: morose, aggrieved, and proudly alone.
This will not come as news to those who know something of Highsmith, who was born in Texas in 1921 and died, having long since become a wandering expatriate, in Switzerland in 1995. She displayed the depths of her preferred state of isolation in a 1978 interview on Thames TV. “I don’t like other people around me,” said Highsmith, who, unmarried and childless, pursued numerous same-sex relationships throughout her life (a side to her character reflected in her well-known pseudonymous 1952 novel, The Price of Salt). “I like to walk around the house quietly,” she continued. “I like to daydream. I don’t like the level on which one has to talk with somebody else in the house, like saying, ‘Are you hungry?’”
Of course, it’s easy enough to ignore Highsmith herself when one spends time with her great novels, but to put up with her personality for somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand pages is to tire pretty quickly of her obsessions, complaints, and grievances.
The entries begin in 1941, with Highsmith, then a student at Barnard College, setting down for posterity foolish political sentiments (“I read [Stalin’s] Foundations of Leninism. Very important, including the tactics”), familial score-settling (“From first acquaintance I had never liked my stepfather”) and her share of sagacious observations (“Nothing makes a woman, or a man either, watch her personal appearance so much as having enemies. She never knows when or where she will encounter them, but she must always be in top condition”).
Yet, even during these early days, Highsmith seems to delight in setting herself apart from the main currents of life, possibly even from people themselves. In one entry from this period, she recalls thinking that nothing on Earth could be “so wonderfully beautiful, so perfect” as a Mozart concerto, unless a person could “somehow be a concerto”; in another, she admits finding alien the basic satisfactions that other writers use as inspiration: “I know I shall never write — never thoroughly understand — the broader channels, deep mother love, love of soil, family ties.” Years later, she confesses: “There must be violence, to satisfy me, and therefore drama & suspense. These are my principles.” To be sure, that’s not exactly a surprising stance for a writer who spent her life chiseling away at thrillers, but there’s something tiresomely ghoulish about it all the same. No matter where she resides, who she sleeps with, or how successful her work becomes, Highsmith can’t help sounding annoyed and embittered. “God, writing is not a healthful pastime! Destroys sleep, health, nerves,” she writes in 1953. Three years later, depressed as she often is in these pages, she notes, “My life, my activities seem to have no meaning, no goal, at least no attainable goal.” And in January 1969, Highsmith, just before her 48th birthday, wonders whether she will ever allow herself to enjoy everyday life, “to take a joy in being conscious,” as she puts it, but if someone hasn’t become well-adjusted by middle age, it’s worth asking if they ever will be.
At times, Highsmith lapses into outright bigotry, expressed in her antisemitism and animus toward the Catholic Church. In 1967, she wishes bombs were dropped on the Vatican as punishment for the church encouraging procreation among its adherents; this seems to have been a particular preoccupation of Highsmith, who, in 1945, said of the word “pregnant” (she feared she might be), “what an ugly word!” In one of the last entries, from 1992, she perversely rejoices in the possibility that AIDS will “prolong the life of humans on earth by a few centuries!” by limiting overpopulation. She seems to have redirected the affection that might have been more properly directed at a child, or at least a long-term, monogamous partner, on the snails and cats she surrounded herself with. She writes melodramatically of the death of her cat Sammy as representing “the kind of grief that cannot be shared by well-meaning friends.”
Money worries, writing struggles, and the ups and downs of assorted affairs fill out this hefty tome. There are good bits about journalists (in Highsmith’s mind, more unseemly than prostitutes because the latter “only sell their bodies, not their minds”) and “punks” who vandalize property (“Is it any achievement to have made a pigsty of Washington Square, New York?”). Such compensations aside, this is a book of diaries and notebooks the main function of which is to demonstrate the foolishness of publishing books of diaries and notebooks. In 1961, the author seemed to reach the same conclusion, musing, after spending two hours of reading 16 years’ worth of her own diaries, that “my life is a chronicle of unbelievable mistakes. Things I should have done, etc. and vice versa. It is not pleasant to face.” She was not wrong.
Peter Tonguette is a frequent contributor to the American Conservative, National Review, and Wall Street Journal.
