The more than eight thousand pages of his notebooks reflect the misogyny of writing, the early doubts about his sexuality, his alcoholism and his phobias.
In life she was more than jealous of her privacy. More interested in her cats than her peers, she gained a reputation for misanthropy and maintained an aura of secrecy. But now the darkest, most shocking and controversial profiles of Patricia Highsmith (Fort Woth, 1921- Locarno, 1995) emerge with the publication of ‘Diaries and notebooks 1941-1995’ (Anagram). When the American writer and creator of Ripley died, she left 18 diaries and 38 notebooks stored among the bedding in a closet. There are more than eight thousand pages in which her editor, Anna von Planta, has immersed herself, responsible for the selection of almost a thousand pages that now comes to light and was presented this Tuesday in Barcelona.
His manuscripts illuminate “with all its complexities and contradictions” the hidden area of Highsmith. The Master of Intrigue addresses crucial episodes in her life and talks about her misogyny, her alcoholism, and her phobias. She pours out her forceful and controversial opinions and shows the “kitchen” of her literary universe. She makes it clear that her most famous character, the sociopath Tom Ripley, “is the distilled fruit of her inner demons.”
The texts cover Highsmith’s entire life, from his student days in the United States to his last years in Switzerland. They reveal the author’s youthful doubts about her sexual identity. Her wild nights in New York’s Greenwich Village in the forties, alongside the likes of Judy Holliday and Jane Bowles. She talks about the first glimpses of her literary vocation and the early success of ‘Strangers on a Train’, which Alfred Hitchcock soon brought to the cinema. It addresses her time at the Yaddo artists’ colony, along with Chester Himes and Flannery O’Connor, and her “tidy and convulsive love life”, which partly reflects ‘The Price of Salt’, the lesbian love novel that Highsmith published under a pseudonym to avoid scandal and would retitle her ‘Carol’.
relentless
Highsmith, whom her friend Graham Greene called “the poet of apprehension”, produced tables where she classified and compared her lovers. She was a communist in her youth and at only 21 years old she writes that “I am not interested in people, in knowing them.” “But I am extremely interested in a woman in a dark doorway on Eleventh Street,” she adds. «She doesn’t care about humanity in individuals. I don’t care how their breath smells,” she stated in her diaries. He leaves anti-Semitic, racist and misogynistic comments, such as when he points out that women “remain puppets, they are never alone, they are never comfortable alone, they are always looking for a master, a partner, someone deep down who gives them orders or guidance.” She also lapidary phrases such as “melancholy is the absence of direction”, or that “living satisfactorily is based on being selfless without asking why”.
“Throughout her life Highsmith built herself a breastplate and a mask to protect herself and hide from the world, but she strips both away in these pages and comes across as visceral and raw, with a relentless passion for living and writing – a creator with a stormy inner world and a painfully human woman,” her editors say.
Highsmith was one of the most disturbing and original writers of her generation. A true classic of suspense literature and very well treated by the cinema that she adapted many of her novels, she became universally famous for ‘Strangers on a train’ and the pentalogy dedicated to the character of Tom Ripley.
In addition to ‘Strangers on a Train’, titles such as ‘The Knife’, ‘Carol’, ‘The Talent of Mr. Ripley’, ‘The Sea in the Background’, ‘A Game for the Living’, ‘That Sweet evil’, ‘The cry of the owl’, ‘The two faces of January’, ‘The glass cell’, ‘Imaginary crimes’, ‘The tremor of the counterfeit’, ‘The game of hide and seek’, ‘The American friend ‘, ‘Edith’s Diary’, ‘In Ripley’s Footsteps’, ‘People Knocking at the Door’, ‘Ripley in Danger and Small G: A Summer Idyll’. He also signed the story books ‘Little misogynistic tales’, ‘Bestial crimes’, ‘Mermaids on the golf course’, ‘Catastrophes’, ‘The exquisite corpses’, ‘Birds about to fly’ or ‘A dangerous hobby’ .
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