Edith’s Diary
Authors: Patricia Highsmith
‘One of her best novels…
Edith's Diary
is certainly one of the saddest novels I ever read, but it is also one of the mere twenty or so that I would say were perfect, unimprovable masterpieces… My suspicion is that when the dust has settled and when the chronicle of twentieth-century American literature comes to be written, history will place Highsmith at the top of the pyramid, as we should place Dostoevsky at the top of the Russian hierarchy of novelists’
A. N. WILSON,
DAILY TELEGRAPH
‘
Edith’s Diary
is as original, as funny, as cleverly written and as moving as any novel I have read since I started reviewing’
AUBERON WAUGH,
EVENING STANDARD
‘A novel the suspense of which is sane and grounded, alive with an understanding which is altogether without condescension’
SUNDAY TIMES
‘With
Edith’s Diary
, Patricia Highsmith has produced a masterpiece’
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
‘A writer who has created a world of her own – a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger… Miss Highsmith is the poet of apprehension’
GRAHAM GREENE
‘Highsmith is a giant of the genre. The original, the best, the gloriously twisted Queen of Suspense’
MARK BILLINGHAM
‘Highsmith was every bit as deviant and quirky as her mischievous heroes, and didn’t seem to mind if everyone knew it’
J. G. BALLARD,
DAILY TELEGRAPH
‘One of the greatest modernist writers’
GORE VIDAL
‘Highsmith should be considered an essential postwar writer who captured the neurotic apprehensions of her times’
THE TIMES
‘To call Patricia Highsmith a thriller writer is true but not the whole truth: her books have stylistic texture, psychological depth, mesmeric readability’
SUNDAY TIMES
‘Highsmith writes the verbal equivalent of a drug – easy to consume, darkly euphoric, totally addictive… Highsmith belongs in the moody company of Dostoevsky or Angela Carter’
TIME OUT
‘No one has created psychological suspense more densely and deliciously satisfying’
VOGUE
‘Patricia Highsmith’s novels are peerlessly disturbing… bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night’
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
‘For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there’s no one like Patricia Highsmith’
TIME
‘Her novels, with their mysterious non sequiturs, weird pairings and attractions and moments of stifled comedy, have an unearthly sheen all their own… Highsmith was a genuine one-off, and her books will haunt you’
DAILY TELEGRAPH
Patricia Highsmith (1921–1995) was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and moved to New York when she was six, where she attended the Julia Richman High School and Barnard College. In her senior year she edited the college magazine, having decided at the age of sixteen to become a writer. Her first novel,
Strangers on a Train
, was made into a classic film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951.
The Talented Mr Ripley
, published in 1955, introduced the fascinating anti-hero Tom Ripley, and was made into an Oscar-winning film in 1999 by Anthony Minghella. Graham Greene called Patricia Highsmith ‘the poet of apprehension’, saying that she ‘created a world of her own – a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger’, and
The Times
named her no.1 in their list of the greatest ever crime writers. Patricia Highsmith died in Locarno, Switzerland, in February 1995. Her last novel,
Small
g: A Summer Idyll
, was published posthumously, the same year.
Strangers on a Train
Carol (
also published as
The Price of Salt)
The Blunderer
The Talented Mr Ripley
Deep Water
A Game for the Living
This Sweet Sickness
The Cry of the Owl
The Two Faces of January
The Glass Cell
A Suspension of Mercy (
also published as
The Story-Teller)
Those Who Walk Away
The Tremor of Forgery
Ripley Under Ground
A Dog’s Ransom
Ripley’s Game
Edith’s Diary
The Boy Who Followed Ripley
People Who Knock on the Door
Found in the Street
Ripley Under Water
Small g: A Summer Idyll
Eleven
Little Tales of Misogyny
The Animal Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder
Slowly, Slowly in the Wind
The Black House
Mermaids on the Golf Course
Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes
Nothing that Meets the Eye: The Uncollected
Stories of Patricia Highsmith
Published by Virago
978-0-3490-0454-9
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 1977 by Patricia Highsmith
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Copyright © 1993 by Diogenes Verlag AG Zürich
Introduction copyright © Denise Mina, 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
VIRAGO
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
Table of Contents
To Marion
If great writers had an oath it would begin:
First, do not lie
.
Fiction performs many roles in our lives. Some reading does nothing more than keep our eyes busy on a dull train commute. Some reading is cheering and lets us believe, however fleetingly, that life has a narrative arc. The world makes sense, or will, by the time we get to page 343. Some writing lets us identify with characters who are slim, successful and likeable. But truly exceptional writing – writing with a ringing resonance that the reader can feel in their chest long after the book is shut – touches on truth. It does not flinch from the gorgeous-hideous facts of the human experience. Regardless of genre or form, it is touching on truth that gives writing real weight and profundity. Patricia Highsmith is a great writer. Her truths are not always comfortable. They’re not easy to own, but we know them when we read them. We might flinch at what she points out, but we can’t deny it. Truth not only makes fiction more believable, it is what makes reading potentially life-changing.
Lesser writers with Highsmith’s insight might shoe-horn their observations into an implausibly articulate character’s mouth. For Highsmith the story was the thing. She embeds her truths so deeply into the narrative that the reader can often feel them as a realization that they themselves have arrived at. From the comforting lies we tell about our lives in
Edith’s Diary
, the nescient murderer in all of us in
The Tremor of Forgery
, to the prurience of the crime reader in
The Blunderer
, she lets the world unfold gently and envelop us.
Highsmith does try to lie, sometimes. Occasionally she dissembles or spins for the sake of pace or narrative completeness, but she cannot bring herself to lie about the heart of things. Andrew Wilson’s excellent biography
Beautiful Shadow: A life of Patricia Highsmith
quotes Wim Wenders, then trying to secure the film rights to
The Tremor of Forgery
. He said, ‘Her novels are really all about truth, in a more existential way than just “right or wrong”. They are about little lies that lead to big disasters.’
Wilson gives a very clear sense of how this inability or unwillingness to lie haunted and shaped Highsmith’s own life. She believed in personal honesty, relentlessly expressing how she felt at any given time, whatever the consequences. In one incident, awkwardly hosting a dinner party of people she barely knew, her girlfriend at the time recalled, ‘She deliberately leaned towards the candle on the table and set fire to her hair. People didn’t know what to do as it was a very hostile act and the smell of singeing filled the room.’ She found it hard to keep friends. You might not want to go on a long motoring holiday with Highsmith but you should read her.
Possibly because of her misanthropy, she remained a literary outsider all of her life. She was awarded many prizes, was short-listed for the Nobel Prize for Literature, and participated in juries and festivals, but after seeing Susan Sontag speak in Paris she noted in her diary that she shared Sontag’s belief that she ‘did not belong to any group of writers nor would care to’. It is possibly this isolation that gave her such insight. The closer one is to the centre of a consensus, the more coloured one’s assessment of reality is by it. Communists see a world full of collaborators and anti-communists. The fervently religious see angels and demons everywhere. Highsmith was never at the centre of any consensus but her own. Like a depressive, she sees the world in a bright light and through a clean lens. Worse, one feels, she must have often seen herself that way.
In
The Blunderer
,
an unhappily married man, Walter Stackhouse, becomes obsessed with the true-crime story of a man he suspects of killing his wife. Who among us hasn’t become slightly fixated on a true-crime mystery at some point? Who hasn’t speculated about what really happened in a famous case? Whole TV channels and magazine genres are built around the impulse to imagine solutions to real-life crimes. Yet a pall of shame hangs around this prurient interest. Often we disguise it as outrage, disgust or a thirst for justice. In
The Blunderer
Highsmith doesn’t allow us the luxury of that lie. Instead she looks it dead in the eye. She captures that queasy sense of baffled fascination, the thrill at a new development in the case, the weird desire to visit the sites, read more, see pictures. And then she takes it further: Stackhouse’s interest in the story implicates him in a suspicious death. And then she takes it further still: everyone in Stackhouse’s life, from his love life, to his neighbours, to his work, finds out about his shameful interest in the story, compounding the suspicion hanging over him. She brings Stackhouse and the man whose murderous career he has been following together. ‘You are my guilt,’ Stackhouse tells him. What she is really talking about is the relationship between the reader and the author of such tales. The ending, dramatic as it is, perfectly sums up the theme of guilt, transferred and owned.
In
The Tremor of Forgery
, a writer, Howard Ingham, is exiled in Tunisia, waiting for a writing partner to arrive. Graham Greene called this her best novel, saying, rather pompously, ‘If I were to be asked what it is about I would reply “apprehension”.’ Ingham waits and waits, hearing about major developments in his life through delayed letters and three-day-old newspapers. The exhausting tension of his off-stage life makes Ingham, and us, the reader, turn to the details of his present circumstances for succour, leading Ingham to commit an appalling act that fundamentally changes him. She examines how the beliefs we hold dear about ourselves are not innate qualities but contextual and cultural. Ingham’s personal morality slowly melts into the worst of Tunisia. She doesn’t allow us just to observe this, blame him and walk away though. She creates a foil in the playfully named ‘Francis J. Adams’, a pro-American propagandist for ‘Our Way of Life’ or ‘OWL’, who acts as an external conscience with just enough sanctimonious bile to spoil Ingham’s delicious slide.
Ripley, much filmed and imitated, is her most famous creation. But if you really want to wonder at Highsmith you have to read off-road. My own gateway drug for her writing was
Edith’s Diary
. Patrick Millikin, bookseller at The Poisoned Pen, the world-famous crime and mystery bookshop in Scottsdale, Arizona, pressed it into my hand.
An inveterate diary keeper herself, Highsmith gently explores so many unpalatable truths in this book that it can leave an uncomfortable mental residue.
Edith’s Diary
is not just about the fictions involved in diary-writing, it is about the fictions inherent in being part of a family. Universal is the hope that the people we love deeply are not, in fact, total arseholes. Just as universal is the knowledge that sometimes they are. In Highsmith’s hands blind mother-love becomes an analogy for all those self-lies we cherish about our politics, about our values, about ourselves. Again, what sets the book high above others is not just her acerbic observations, not even her spare, taut style, but the framing of these universal truths within a pacy narrative full of apprehension and dread. Edgar Allan Poe was one of her literary heroes. If he had lived after her, Highsmith would certainly have been one of his.
Highsmith has been accused of misogyny or, more kindly, of having a conflicted attitude to her own gender. She responded to the allegation by publishing a book of brutal, satirical short stories,
Little Tales of Misogyny
. Arguably, she was an equal-opportunities misanthropist. It does highlight the nonsensical notion that there are men or women, somewhere, who are in no way conflicted about their gender roles. That somewhere, somehow, there are men and women who are not always secretly wondering what the hell role they’re supposed to be embodying and whether they measure up. Highsmith has to be judged in the context of her time. Gay men and women of that generation inhabited lives constrained in ways that most of us can barely conceive of now. But in
The Price of Salt
(later published as
Carol
), which was first issued under a pseudonym, Highsmith had the audacity to write a tender love story between two women, with a happy ending. It was outrageous at the time. A more acceptable ending for lesbian narratives would have the gay character either die, marry a man or end up committed to a mental hospital. People like Highsmith came out in a deeply hostile world and it must have cost for them personally. We should honour that struggle by seeing their courage in context, because the beneficiaries are our own sons and daughters.
Her famously pared-down style has been imitated often, sometimes in a rather poor, mannered fashion. With Highsmith it is all purpose. She does not want the writing to intervene between the story and the reader. She said, ‘The real joy of the writer – or any other artist – is amusing people.’ And elaborate writing is like watching a child do the splits over and over again: you may be acutely aware that not everyone can do the splits, but that doesn’t make it any more entertaining to watch.
Highsmith’s writing won’t make you feel that everything will be all right in the end. It won’t make you feel taller or thinner or smarter. She won’t just keep your eyes busy for a commute, but she might prompt you to walk out of that job you hate. Her books will thrill you with the truth of things. Her books will make you reckless.
Denise Mina, 2015
