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.)

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