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| Patricia Highsmith: not a people person. Photograph: Lorrie Graham |
Patricia Highsmith, 27 April 1980
This is and edited extract from an article by Sally Vincent entitled Wave from afar, published in the Observer on 27 April 1980
She’d been sitting there for seventeen minutes already, not ordering a drink nor picking over the crudites, just sitting there holding on to her Boots paper bag with a bottle of Dettol peeping out the top, wondering who might be responsible for the hold-up. Exuding tension.
Thank God it wasn’t my fault. No, it was their fault. Definitely. Miss Patricia Highsmith ducks her small chin decisively, lightens the black of her dark, dark look. That’s all right then! She’ll have a gin with water in it and a plain grilled trout. Trout’s a treat. She’ll even sit with the sun on her face for the camera and chunter on amiably about the summer storage of tulip bulbs, it being a suitable topic for the production of a pleasant facial expression.
Miss Highsmith is a small target, clenched over herself, closed into herself but shy, like she’d come out if you called her nicely. Nor is she a lady to mince words while catastrophically expecting. She is not – no, she doesn’t mind saying so – a person deeply enamoured of the human race. She keeps away from it as best she can. She’ll wave if she has to. Add a festive flag of a scarf to her plain woolly and khaki pants, just to show willing. You can work out her age and see her of a piece; a woman on the threshold of her seventh decade who says she has always been on the up-and-up. Straight. A woman who has made her mistakes, trusted those who should not have been trusted, seen only wit and wisdom in individuals with less than sterling character. Not been a good judge.
She keeps out of danger these days. Avoids contact, les folies à deux, mischief like that. And she laughs, tchk, tchk, tchk.
THE GUARDIAN
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