Tea at Trianon: The Mystery of Patricia Highsmith’s Diaries

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, December 15, 2021

The Mystery of Patricia Highsmith’s Diaries

From The New Republic:

The publication of a document like Highsmith’s Diaries and Notebooks would be an event in the case of any major writer. It provokes a special interest in Highsmith’s case, because it is in the nature of diaries and cahiers to engage in precisely the psychological and philosophical reflection, the confession and self-scrutiny, that she systematically excludes from the pages of her fiction and denies her characters. The result of such a revelation, however, is less to clear up than to deepen the mystery of this writer of “mystery novels.”

Highsmith was born in 1921, in Fort Worth, Texas (also the home state of her first homicidal hero, Guy Haines, from Strangers on a Train), as Mary Patricia Plangman. Her parents had divorced before she was born, and she acquired the last name by which we know her in 1924, when her mother, a commercial illustrator, married a graphic designer by the name of Stanley Highsmith. Many of her characters are likewise professional or amateur visual artists of some kind (if not architects or engineers, who must also produce drawings to earn a living), just as Highsmith herself painted and sketched throughout her life. And it is tempting to suppose that in her fiction she adopted something of the anti-introspective mode of visual art, according to which figures can be seen, but not seen into. (No doubt the absence of deep interiority in Highsmith is much of what has lent her novels to successful film adaptation.) Nor should the commercial nature of her parents’ art be ignored, as a possible source ofidentification. At times, Highsmith implies that she writes murder fiction mainly because such books have a reliable market. In her nonfiction manual, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1966), she suggests that “most of Dostoyevsky’s books would be called suspense books, were they being published today,” but that he would be asked to cut his “profound thoughts” in consideration of “production costs.” (Read more.)