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| Patricia Highsmith by Allela Cornell (1943) |
‘Avoid sadists!’: Patricia Highsmith on sex, women and writing Mr Ripley
An extract from the author’s fascinating diaries reveals her innermost thoughts and feelings
Patricia Highsmith
Saturday 13 November 2021
P
atricia Highsmith kept intimate diaries throughout her life, recording her literary success, travels around the world and her many, many love affairs with (usually unavailable) women. Parts of these diaries will soon be published in Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks 1941-1995, compiled by Swiss editor Anna von Planta. The following extracts detail the acclaimed writer’s thoughts on everything from marriage to the meaning of life.
On homosexuality:
14 May 1961
Homosexuals prefer one another’s company not so much because of a common sexual deviance from what is socially accepted, but because they know that they have all been through the same hell, the same trials, the same depressions – and those who meet have survived. Those not present have killed themselves, or have managed, or decided, or were able to conform. Homosexuals’ friendships or acquaintanceships may appear to be superficial, may be superficial in fact, but that underlying bond remains: and they are blood brothers and sisters, because of what they have suffered.
On women:
7 August 1941
A woman is never, or very seldom, hopelessly in love with one man. She can make a calm choice between the man with the money and the man without, the better father and the bad father, who may be handsomer. The woman, because, chiefly because, she has less imagination, has less passion. She brings less, and she takes less.
8 August 1963
Women have not evolved in the same sense as men have. They really (first things first) want a husband and children. They act upon this wish very early, and acquire them. Why all this complaining afterward? It is for women themselves to make jobs for themselves, to see where they fit into the economic world, or if they fit in at all. There would be jobs for women, if women would give, and if they could be depended upon to give, the major part of their time and energy to them that is what jobs today demand. If a woman asks time off in summer (a long time) to spend with her children on vacation, then she will be given a respectively unimportant job. She has no right to ask for better. Women have not yet come to terms with the fact that they cannot fully combine a home and family with a really demanding job or career outside the home – unless they are able to have servants, as few women are. Women are, alas, showing themselves more infantile and incapable than ever in whining about their lot in 1963.
7 June 1973
Women – they believe they manipulate other people. Actually, they are still puppets, never alone, never content to be alone, always seeking a master, a partner, someone really to give them orders or direction.
On love and sex:
7 August 1941
Sex, to me, should be a religion. I have no other. I feel no other urge, to devotion, to something, and we all need a devotion to something besides ourselves, besides even our noblest ambitions. I could be content without fulfilment. Perhaps I should be better off in such an arrangement.
13 May 1942
Yes, maybe sex is my theme in literature – being the most profound influence on me – manifesting itself in repressions and negatives, perhaps, but the most profound influence, because even my failures are results of repressions in body and mind, which are repressions of sex.
24 September 1943
Sexual love is the only emotion which has ever really touched me. Hatred, jealousy, even abstract devotion, never – except devotion to myself. But love touched me willy-nilly.
3 April 1961
The pattern of quarrels and reconciliations in the very first days of a relationship (however minor the quarrels then) is the pattern that will prevail throughout, grow bigger perhaps, become insufferable, perhaps. The story of MJ [Highsmith’s lover at the time, Marijane Meaker] and myself. Off to a crippled start. The brain washing. The rivalry between two in the same profession. The desperate efforts of one to best the other; and the other’s efforts to preserve the relationship, at any cost. And at the same time saying, “Why am I in this? I’m intelligent enough to see I must get out.” But what is there “out”? The same sort of relationship with someone else? Better to stick it out and to try, say all the marriage counsellors, all the psychologists – in regard to heterosexual relationships.
17 May 1973
Marriage is the easiest way of avoiding sleeping with a man.
On life:
3 April 1961
Each day a conscious struggle to maintain sanity, to appear calm when one is not, an effort to make the smile seem spontaneous – though occasionally it’s genuine. The struggle to appear like everyone else – never anxious, never rushing, never doubting, never feeling melancholic.
29 May 1961
What is life all about? It is the futility and the hopelessness that obsesses and overwhelms the philosophers. If I am lucky, when the darkness closes in, and the senses drop out one by one, there will be a couple of friends standing by, who knew me. This is what life is all about. It’s no different if one has children and passes on the race or the family. Life is about nothing but hopes of contacts. Friendships are the most durable, and really the most profound contacts, though people are often deceived into thinking that the sexual is the most profound. It is pleasurable and it appears to rearrange the emotional structure, but it does not.
19 February 1973
Thoughts after flu. That nearly all people who die in bed die in the same manner and in the same mood – unless they are doped on drugs. A slow failure of energy, a hopelessness. One hears seldom of a fear of death expressed, or any kind of “struggle” against it. There isn’t that much energy left. The more intelligent person perhaps has a few more intelligent thoughts than the average in these last moments, although it takes energy even to think and I doubt if much important thinking goes on. The intellectual dies essentially like the simple peasant.
7 June 1973
Music establishes the fact that life is not real. The joy, the fortitude to live comes from the realisation that life is not composed of realities – and also that one doesn’t even have to worry about this fact.
On herself:
1 October 1954
Happiness, for me, is a matter of imagination – at the happiest moments, lying in bed with a cup of coffee and the Sunday papers, perhaps, I can think myself into gloom and despair in a matter of seconds. The corollary of this is what I really wanted to note: that existence is a matter of the unconscious elimination of negative and pessimistic thinking. I mean, to survive at all. And this applies to everyone. We are all suicides under the skin, and under the surface of our lives.
16 October 1954
On the grudgingness of my chosen partners, and my consequent low estimation of myself, I believe this self-depreciation partly due to my evil thoughts, of murder of my stepfather, for example, when I was eight or less. Also the realised taboo of homosexuality, my realisation, even at six, and at eight, that I dared not speak my love, and of course this persisted with its adult ramifications of social life, guilt. Unfortunate that this is so buried, for consciously I am not in the least ashamed of homosexuality, and if I were normal, and equally imaginative, I should probably consider it very interesting to be homosexual, and wish I’d had the experience. Attitude toward money (and in the 20s, on my own) and recent one of overspending and carelessness. Also toward food during these years. Saving part of anything, living like a rat. Self-depreciation. Lack of food intake in adolescence, to get attention of parents, also to punish myself, for sex reasons, etc.
1 June 1961
Spent two hours reading old diaries of mine, 16 years back. My life is a chronicle of unbelievable mistakes. Things I should have done, etc and vice versa. It is not pleasant to face, especially not pleasant to realise I am still doing the same thing, and now moreover doing it even while trying to put to use the lessons of the past. What is the solution? Avoid sadists. Don’t show how much emotion you have when you have it. Play everything cautiously, with a view of saving yourself. All useless for me. I avoid nothing, I show everything I feel, even without speaking. I play nothing cautiously, and least of all will I ever save myself in an emotional situation.
On Ripley:
1 October 1954
What I predicted I would once do, I am doing already in this very book (Tom Ripley), that is, showing the unequivocal triumph of evil over good, and rejoicing in it. I shall make my readers rejoice in it, too. Thus the subconscious always precedes the conscious, or reality, as in dreams.
Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks 1941-1995 will be published by Orion on 16 November.
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