Patricia Highsmith Read online

  PATRICIA HIGHSMITH

  HER DIARIES AND NOTEBOOKS

  1941–1995

  EDITED BY

  ANNA VON PLANTA

  WITH AN AFTERWORD BY

  JOAN SCHENKAR

  For

  GLORIA KATE KINGSLEY SKATTEBOL

  and

  DANIEL KEEL

  Would I were greedy as now forever,

  Not for fortune, nor yet knowledge, and not for love—never,

  A muscled horse obedient to ruthless master, art,

  Exultantly racing till he break his heart.

  —NOTEBOOK 12,

  June 20, 1945

  Writing, of course, is a substitute for the life

  I cannot live, am unable to live.

  —NOTEBOOK 19,

  May 17, 1950

  It takes two mirrors for the correct image

  of oneself.

  —NOTEBOOK 29,

  February 23, 1968

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  1921–1940: The Early Years

  1941–1950: Early Life in New York, and Different Ways of Writing

  1951–1962: Living Between the United States and Europe

  1963–1966: England, or The Attempt to Settle Down

  1967–1980: Return to France

  1981–1995: Twilight Years in Switzerland

  AFTERWORD by Joan Schenkar:

  Pat Highsmith’s After-School Education: The International Daisy Chain

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A TIME LINE of Highsmith’s Life and Works

  A SAMPLE of Highsmith’s Foreign-Language Notes

  NOTE on the Journals’ Composition

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  FILMOGRAPHY

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  INDEX of Names and Works

  FOREWORD

  HOW THIS BOOK CAME TO BE

  The last house Patricia Highsmith lived in outwardly looked like a fortress, forbidding and austere, with just two windows facing the street, the openings tiny as arrowslits. In the rare interviews she gave, her one-word answers were dreaded. She refused to authorize a biography during her lifetime. For many years, Patricia Highsmith’s writing was the only way to get to know her. It was all the more surprising when, after her death, a long, neatly arranged row of fifty-six thick journals was discovered tucked in the back of her linen closet: eighteen private diaries and thirty-eight notebooks, providing somewhere around eight thousand pages of personal testimonial.

  For the very first time, fans and scholars can refer to Patricia Highsmith’s personal records to see how she viewed herself. Since Pat started to express herself through writing from a very early age, the emerging portrait spans almost her entire life.

  It seems clear that Patricia Highsmith had long planned to have her notebooks published. The uniformity of the Columbia spiral notebooks she used throughout suggests it, even more so the fact that she kept editing them, making comments, cuts, and date changes whenever rereading. Most importantly, there are written instructions. A slip of paper in Notebook 19 shows that Pat’s college friend Gloria Kate Kingsley Skattebol had at first been enlisted to publish a selection. Pasted to the April 2, 1950, entry, it reads: “A note after rereading all my notebooks—rather glancing through all of them, for who could possibly read them?—(and Kingsley, have some taste, have at least the taste I have in 1950 in weeding out what is already written, and recently written).” At other times, the author considered burning the notebooks or leaving them to the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn. In the end, Pat appointed Daniel Keel the literary executor of her estate, so it fell to him to decide what the author would have wanted to happen with her journals.

  The founder of the Swiss publishing house Diogenes had taken over as Pat’s German-language publisher in 1967. As a young man, Keel had seen Hitchcock’s adaptation of Strangers on a Train and stayed seated in the theater until the author’s name rolled in the credits. He was determined to publish her books in hardcover because he considered them literature, rather than just genre fiction. After her non-psychological-thriller Edith’s Diary hit Der Spiegel’s Bestseller List in 1978, Pat appointed Keel her worldwide representative. When her longtime American publisher, Harper & Row, rejected two of her books in 1983, the uncertainty of her publishing situation in the United States finally prompted her to transfer the international rights to her complete works to Diogenes.

  I first met Pat in 1984, when Daniel Keel placed the manuscript for Found in the Street on my desk and informed me that he had arranged a meeting with the author at a nearby hotel for a few days later—and with that, I was her editor. Pat greeted me coolly, disregarding my extended hand. She then ordered a beer and fell silent. It took me half an hour to get a conversation going about the manuscript, which was set in modern-day New York, but struck me as the New York of the 1950s. By the end of our conversation, she even laughed. Back at the office, I told my boss about the initial awkwardness of our encounter. To my amazement, Keel congratulated me effusively on my success, explaining that it had taken him years to coax more than a yes-or-no answer out of her.

  When Keel and Highsmith reviewed her papers together before her death, the diaries and notebooks were expressly listed as part of her literary estate alongside her remaining unpublished novels and uncollected short stories. Keel recognized the collection as a literary treasure that should be presented as a unified whole, a task he passed on to me as Patricia Highsmith’s longtime editor and later coeditor of her thirty-volume Collected Works (Zurich, Diogenes, 2002–2006).

  EDITORIAL NOTE

  Condensing an estimated eight thousand pages into one volume and doing justice to the material was an immense challenge. First, the handwritten pages had to be transcribed, itself the work of years. Gloria Kate Kingsley Skattebol checked the transcripts against the handwritten, often cryptic originals and added some helpful annotations. Then the sheer amount of material necessitated a culling, to carve out the essence of this “behind-the-scenes” work. As the author herself recognized, it would have been a mistake to reproduce the diaries and notebooks word-for-word, riddled as they are with redundancies, chitchat, indiscretions, and gossip; especially in her twenties, her notes from that period being so much more extensive than in later years, when her journaling had developed its cohesive style. Our selection was based on Pat’s own focal points.

  The book is structured chronologically, broken into five periods based on where Pat was living at the time, from her beginnings in the United States to various locations around Europe in middle age to her final years in Switzerland.

  While earlier notebook entries exist, we chose to begin the book with her first diary entry, written in 1941. From this point onward, Pat essentially maintained a double account of her life: whereas she used the diary to detail her intense, at times painful personal experiences, she used the notebook to process these experiences intellectually and muse on her writing. Pat’s notebooks were workbooks, and a playground for her imagination. They contain style exercises, insights into art, writing, and painting, and what Pat liked to call Keime (a German term meaning “germs”), ideas and whole passages for potential short stories and novels. Her diaries help us better understand the notebooks; they arrange the notebook entries within what seems to be a truthful time frame and personal context. Diary and notebook entries are interwoven and interlocked, the diary entries dated in long form (month, day, year), the notebook entries in numerical form (with slashes), as was Pat’s style. While the two formats can be read independently of each other, when read in tandem they help to gain a holistic understanding—in Pat’s own words—of an author who concealed the personal sources of her material for her entire life, and whose novels are more likely to distract u
s from who she was, than lead us to her.

  In contrast to the notebooks, which are written almost entirely in English, Pat composed her diary entries through 1952 in up to five languages. There seem to have been various reasons for this. Of course, a language enthusiast and autodidact like Pat would want to acquire new languages, particularly given her aspiration to travel the world and cultivate her more urbane sensibilities. Pat was largely self-taught in French, German, Spanish, and Italian, and described the diaries as “exercise books in languages I do not know.” She was an ambitious student, eager to apply and practice what she was learning in her diaries, enjoying the novel means of expression and perspectives on the world each new language offered her. There’s much to suggest that the exercise also served to encrypt some of the more intimate details, protecting them against unwelcome prying eyes.

  Her French and German entries are the most prominent—curious, flawed, and touchingly literary. We provide several examples of her original entries before translation at the end of the book. Foreign-language passages in the diaries have been translated into English but tagged with superscript lettering to indicate the original language: G/GG for German, F/FF for French, IT/ITIT for Italian, and SP/SPSP for Spanish. Commonplace foreign phrases are left as is.

  In editing this collection, we debated whether to indicate omissions. We ultimately decided against it, to avoid bothering the reader with continual ellipses. The reader must, however, bear in mind that what we have printed in this volume represents a mere fraction of Patricia Highsmith’s diary and notebook entries. For instance, we have not included ideas Pat began developing for certain pieces that were ultimately discarded. Pat’s own omissions and minor oversights have been corrected, while details needed for comprehension have been added in brackets. More extensive explanations, including information on names mentioned, were added in footnotes where available; in those cases where we knew no more about someone than what Pat herself wrote, we refrained from adding footnotes that could do no more than repeat her information. Especially in the 1940s, Pat encounters a multitude of people; those with more of a relevance will soon become familiar to the reader, while others might be mentioned a few times only.

  We have reduced all private individuals mentioned in the text to their first names, unless they were already fully named and described in extenso by Highsmith’s biographers. And this regardless of the fact that almost all of them, being of Highsmith’s age or older, are now deceased. Some important private individuals received pseudonyms by the biographers, such as Pat’s longtime English lover in the early 1960s called X by Andrew Wilson and Caroline Besterman by Joan Schenkar; or Camilla Butterfield, a pseudonym used by Schenkar for another 1960s friend. We kept the Schenkar pseudonyms even though both women are deceased. Their families were equally anonymized; in Caroline Besterman’s case, her husband is just referred to as “her husband,” her son as “her son.” We also cut information or refrained from adding it in a footnote when we feared that this might help identify them. Conversely, recognizable public figures Pat introduces, but calls by their initials, are referred to by their full names in brackets, as necessary.

  As these are Patricia Highsmith’s private diaries and notebooks, her views on people and facts are of course personal and tinted by her personal biases and the biases of the times in which she wrote them. Pat was inconsistent and rough around the edges, and some of her disparaging remarks readers will find offensive, especially when, as is frequently the case, they are addressed toward such perennially marginalized groups as Black Americans and Jews. In the earlier entries, the issue is often one of language, when Pat uses expressions that were common at the time but have since come to be considered derogatory and offensive. The author herself was aware of this, as proven by her request to change the word “negro” to “black” for the 1990 new edition of Carol.

  Especially in old age, however, it is increasingly not just Pat’s language but her views themselves that are offensive, rancorous, and misanthropic. We aim to represent them faithfully. Only in a handful of more extreme instances did we feel it our editorial duty to deny Pat a stage for them, in the same way we did while she was still alive. The sources of her resentment are difficult to pinpoint, notably in the case of her growing anti-Semitism, which grows even more of a mystery embedded as it is in a volume in which we learn about the importance for the author of the many Jews she counts among her close friends, lovers, and favorite artists.

  Like most diarists, Pat tended to write more during difficult periods, resulting in a skewed depiction of her life. Other sources confirm that Pat’s life was not, in fact, as dark as it might at times appear in these pages. Additionally, as in any self-portrait, the person we encounter in the diaries and notebooks is of course not necessarily the “real” Pat, but instead the person she considered—or wanted—herself to be. The act of remembrance is also one of interpretation, with regard to herself and others. Many people are familiar with the somber, caustic version of Pat, and this volume will be their first encounter with the author as a cheerful young woman with an optimistic, ambitious eye on her future.

  The compilation presented here is not meant to be read as an autobiography. Instead, our intention in sharing these entries is to let readers discover, in the author’s own words, how Patricia Highsmith became Patricia Highsmith.

  Anna von Planta

  in close collaboration with Kati Hertzsch,

  Marion Hertle, Marie Hesse, and Friederike Kohl

  ZURICH, 2021

  1921–1940

  THE EARLY YEARS

  BORN AN ONLY CHILD in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, Mary Patricia Plangman (known as Pat) grew up as something of a loner. Her parents, Mary Coates and Jay Bernard Plangman, had divorced before she was born, and since her mother, an illustrator, was working, Pat spent the first years of her life in the care of her loving but strictly Calvinist grandmother, who ran a boardinghouse. In 1924, Mary Coates married photographer and graphic artist Stanley Highsmith, an intruder in Pat’s eyes.

  At age three Pat could read, and by age nine her favorite authors included Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and Conan Doyle. She pored over the illustrated anatomy reference her mother used for work and Karl Menninger’s The Human Mind, a compendium of popular scientific studies of abnormal human behavior: “I can’t think of anything more apt to set the imagination stirring, drafting, creating, than the idea—the fact—that anyone you walk past on the pavement may be a sadist, a compulsive thief, or even a murderer.”1

  The family of three moved to New York in 1927, but financial, emotional, and marital crises forced Pat to travel back and forth between her new home and her grandmother’s boardinghouse. At one point, she lived with her grandmother for fifteen months; it was “the saddest year of my life.”2 Pat felt abandoned by her mother, something she would never forgive, especially considering Mary had promised her daughter she would divorce Stanley. The month Pat spent at a girls’ summer camp near West Point, New York, in 1933 didn’t fix things, either. Pat sent daily letters home from camp, and two years later this correspondence appeared as an article in Woman’s World magazine—Pat’s first publication, for which she received twenty-five dollars. This was also the year she met her biological father for the first time; a graphic artist of German descent, he was one of the reasons she decided to learn German.

  Upon returning to New York from Texas, Pat was enrolled at Julia Richman High School, a girls’ school with eight thousand students, most of whom were Catholic or Jewish. During this time, new literary preferences began to crystallize: Edgar Allan Poe (with whom she shared a birthday) and Joseph Conrad. With regard to her own writing, Pat felt drawn to the themes of guilt, sin, and transgression. By the time Pat was just fifteen, she was filling thick composition books with literary sketches as well as observations of the people around her. She also penned her first short stories, some of which appeared in her school’s literary magazine Bluebird. Pat was an intelligent, ambitious, and imaginative teenager,
but, saddled with shame because of her secret same-sex inclinations, she came across to others as serious and withdrawn. Patterns of behavior emerged that would prove characteristic of her later romantic life; for instance, she experimented with her first (platonic) love triangle with two other women, including Judy Tuvim, who later rose to fame as the Tony- and Academy Award–winning actress and comedian Judy Holliday.

  She also proved herself an incredibly diligent student, and in 1938 was accepted to Barnard College. As an undergraduate, she studied zoology, English, composition, Latin, ancient Greek, German, and logic. During her first semester, Pat began to earnestly dedicate herself to journaling. She started her first notebook, which she called a “cahier,” with the words: “A lazy phantom-white figure of a girl dancing to a Tchaikovsky waltz.”

  Those early entries are a colorful mishmash of observations, comments on the books she was reading, thoughts on what she was learning in college, and ideas about economy in writing. At times she used the notebooks to record homework assignments or write short stories for her English professor Ethel Sturtevant, whom she revered, or try her hand at limericks and even sonnets at various stages of her first few crushes. Almost half of the entries are undated, and we have chosen to omit them in this volume, as they provide readers with little more than passing insight into the life of the young Patricia Highsmith.

  1 Patricia Highsmith in a letter to Karl Menninger on April 8, 1989.

  2 Patricia Highsmith in a letter to Nini Wells on March 9, 1972.

  1941–1950

  EARLY LIFE IN NEW YORK, AND DIFFERENT WAYS OF WRITING

  1941