Patricia Highsmith's dark genius
Or, murder, snails, and stale doughnuts
Who better to give advice than one of the most miserable, hateful, and sour writers of the 20th century? To discover lasting authentic joy, simply do the opposite of what Patricia Highsmith recommends:
Feeling lousy? Depressed? Like a failure? As if what you’re doing at the moment is futile? Just decide you’re going to feel happy. Enjoy feeling sweaty and dirty in levis that should go to the laundry. Forget your bank account—and your lack of income. Possibly make a martini. But only one. Enjoy that cigarette. And that cup of coffee. Be a perfectionist. Get a real lift from meticulously correcting a spelling mistake in a manuscript that isn’t going to sell. Smile—inside!
All Highsmith’s anguish was channeled into her work, where it worked. (In her life, not so much.) When she was just 27, her book Strangers on a Train was snatched up by Alfred Hitchcock. To have a first novel hit that big could overwhelm a normal person, but the new collection Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995 reveals a woman prewhelmed, oversexed, and six sheets to the wind.
The gorgeous, brilliant, ambitious, amoral author didn’t set out to write thrillers. She wanted to be Dostoyevsky — but she insisted her books “be readable, so readable that the reader doesn’t want to put it down even once.” She did this with diabolical characters and a wit so cold it cracked.
Tom Ripley, better known as The Talented Mr. antihero of four of her 22 novels, stands above all as a charming young man who isn’t a murderer per se, more someone who will occasionally murder if it simply can’t be helped. Before that, though, he takes victims apart with icy observations like
Freddie was the son of an American hotel-chain owner, and a playwright—self-styled, Tom gathered, because he had written only two plays, and neither had seen Broadway.
And
He wore a checked suit of loud English tweed, the kind of pattern, Tom supposed, the English made, reluctantly, especially for such Americans as Rudy Maloof.
To browse Highsmith’s journals is to tour a mind that thinks in these dark definitive statements. “Sometimes writing is like being seen crying at a friend’s funeral,” she’ll write, or “The majority of people cannot handle the brains they have been given.”
She records dozens of lovers and gallons of booze — proudly noting her “famous seven martini” days — interspersed with murderous notes like a handy list of “little crimes for little tots,” such as “setting careful fires, so that someone else will get the blame if possible.”
Oh, and the snails: She kept hundreds of the slimy gastropods as pets, thrilling to “their silence, their modest food demands, their decorative virtue, their strange mating.” In the end, she was, in the words of the critic Terry Castle, “an embittered expatriate, mind-blitzing drunk and hellacious bigot who spent her last years sequestered in a Brutalist redoubt in Switzerland.” (And Castle’s her biggest fan!)
The gap between Patricia Highsmith’s brilliant fiction and her disastrous life may just be the gap between her recommendations:
Advice to a young writer: approach the typewriter with respect and formality. (Is my hair combed? My lipstick on straight? Above all are my cuffs clean and properly shot?) The typewriter is quick to detect any nuance of irreverence and can retaliate in kind, in double measure, and effortlessly.
And how she ended up doing it so well:
How I write these days: (or is anybody interested?) I do everything possible to avoid a sense of discipline. I write on my bed (bed made up, myself fully but not decently clothed), having once surrounded myself with ashtray, cigarettes, matches, a hot or warm cup of coffee, a stale part of a doughnut and saucer with sugar to dip it in after dunking. My position is as near the fetal as possible, still permitting writing. A womb of my own.
Quick quips; lightning
“Murder is a crime. Describing murder is not. Sex is not a crime. Describing sex is.”
— Gershon Legman, U.S. folklorist, describing the state of play in 1949
“Those who welcome death have only tried it from the ears up.”
— Wilson Mizner
“When choosing between two evils, I always like to take the one I haven’t tried before.”
— Mae West
Speaking of...
Nasty writers
Sharp women
That was the 134th issue of GWQ, your weekly blend of etymology and entomology. It was against the law to bring snails into France, so Highsmith would smuggle them home in her bra. If given the choice, pick the non-stale part of the doughnut. The typewriter is still retaliating against Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. “How many times can the heart renew itself?,” Highsmith asked. “Six, seven, eight? Twenty?” Tap the ❤️ below for the answer.