Patricia Highsmith's womb of her own

If you aren’t a great artist, you’ll find out.

Because of the new Ripley adaptation (which I am not watching), today I am republishing my review of Patricia Highsmith’s diaries.

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Housekeeping

Request for help! Can anyone help me get hold of Angyal, Andrew J. “Robert Frost’s Poetry Before 1913, A Checklist” which was published in Proof 5 : the yearbook of American bibliographical and textual studies (Columbia, J. Faust, 1977)? There seems to not be a copy anywhere in the UK!

I have recently been on the Jimmy’s Jobs of the Future podcast (video) (audio). Here is Jimmy’s Substack also.

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Writing lessons from Highsmith’s Diaries

It is not the least of her achievements that, alongside drinking like a Raymond Chandler character, running through relationships as if they were cigarettes, often sleeping for only three or four hours, sitting in bars all night, staying up to write her journal well past midnight, and slogging it out in a hateful job, Patricia Highsmith managed to write a book at all. The fact that she had one of the great literary careers of the twentieth century is astonishing.

“Your writing is improving marvellously,” her mother told her while she was trying to write her first novel, “but despite your life, not because of it.” The secret to her productivity, which is the perpetual mystery with writers, can be found in her Diaries and Notebooks. Anyone who thinks, as Highsmith said, “If only I’d known how to write a book before I started!” will benefit from them. (Although the book is very long: it is a fraction of the manuscript, but it could have borne more cutting.)

Modern productivity advice has no place here. To make any comparison between Highsmith and the view of productivity that advocates clean living, self care, sleep hygiene, meditation, yoga, healthy diets, early rising, gratitude, temperance, and all the rest of it, would be laughable. Not laughable in a rhetorical “it isn’t worth the candle” sense: I really do think she would laugh, rather cruelly perhaps, at that advice. She is concerned with great art. These diaries are a record of the pursuit of genius. And to high art, there are no shortcuts.

The first thing you need to do if you want to be a great writer is to read. Highsmith read intensively. Not just volume, but depth, and only of the first quality. Proust is never far away. She travels with him often. Dostoyevsky is her master. “He helps me a great deal— with his exclamation marks, his confusions!” She considered Dostoyevsky to be a suspense writer, along with Henry James. She is not a genre writer: she is working in a tradition that joins Dostoyevsky with Wilkie Collins, Henry James with Edgar Allan Poe. Like all great writers, she is an original. “I have my art, and my art alone is true.”

That brings us to motivation. Once you have read and read and read and know you want to write, you need to know why. Her answer is deceptively simple. “It is not conscience that prompts me to write, because I am a writer it is only dissatisfaction with this world.” Dissatisfaction comes in many forms. She is the classic writer at odds with herself and the world. “What is it, underlying all, that creates dissatisfaction? The young person’s fear that he is (basically) not on the right track, his own track, that all may have to be scrapped, the way retraced.”

She was also pretty grumpy about capitalism, lovers who weren’t intellectually stimulating enough were dropped like hot bricks, and she found her job a complete drag. “Where are their moments of reality” she asked of office workers, unable to contemplate their oppressive tedium and fatigue, “at the breakfast table, in bed with their wives? Gardening? Washing their cars? Or are they another species of animal that does not need reality?”