Recently a documentary was shown on NPO 2 about the American writer Patricia Highsmith (1921 – 1995). It was a creditable, but rather brave film in which some of her friends also had their say. It was hardly apparent how quirky, grim, obnoxious, misogynistic, and anti-Semitic (just like Roald Dahl!) Highsmith could behave.
If you want to know more about Highsmith, I can Her Diaries and Notebooks recommend, a book that appeared in 2021 and received little attention in the Netherlands. This is in contrast to the much earlier biography by Andrew Wilson.
This lack of attention for the diaries can be explained: it is a pill of almost a thousand pages. It’s the type of book that you sometimes put down with a sigh only to pick it up again with curiosity after a while. What helped was that I’ve always been an admirer of her work, the psychological thriller.
Those diaries are all the more interesting because Highsmith did not write autobiographical novels and was able to disguise her views and feelings in her characters. The question then remains: how did she really feel about her friends and enemies and how did she experience the most important turns in her life? She is often very frank about this in her diaries.
Illusions were hardly spent on her. In 1954 she wrote: “Existence is a matter of unconsciously eliminating negative and pessimistic thinking. To survive at all, I mean. And this applies to everyone. We are all suicidal, under the skin and under the surface of our lives.”
She had little faith in humanity. “The forces of love and hate in the individual have more or less the same intensity in all times. The only thing that changes is the object. It seems everyone needs a few things (people or an entire race) to hate.”
Also fascinating are the diary entries in which she describes her struggle with her homosexuality. Initially she feels obliged to heterosexuality, and even has a short-lived relationship with the writer Arthur Koestler. “Koestler, efficient as ever, decides to give up having sex with me. He said he didn’t know homosexuality was so ingrained.” The infatuation with all kinds of women – she has known quite a few loves – could not be suppressed.
Yet she had a remarkably unfavorable view of women, so generalized that it would no longer be accepted from men. In a reflection on Jackie Kennedy, she writes: “But women will go to bed with everything to do with power, social status and money. It wouldn’t be half so bad if they did it just for fun, but to marry it is pretty low.” No, then she found prostitutes more sincere, “at least they don’t continue the farce of marriage, like many women who love their husbands no more than their maids – and sometimes even less.”
Caustic and bitter – that’s what many parts of these diaries sound like. It is the same intriguing, cynical coldness that characterizes her work. There is no evidence that she knew Roald Dahl, but I sense a kinship between the two. Fortunately, today’s moral censors have left her work alone.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of March 3, 2023