this Discovery of Patricia Highsmith’s diaries and notebooks In 1995, shortly after his death, it was excellent news for the unconditional supporters of the American writer, who must be intrigued by the tortured psychological past of a writer who has always kept his feelings hidden, hidden in the linen closet of his house in Switzerland. hard.
What literary performer Daniel Keel and publisher Anna Von Planta found among the well-printed pages was a collection of books. 38 notebooks thoughtful commentary on literature, religion, and politics, among many other topics 18 days the author attests to her reading, her constant drunkenness and hangovers, and that very long catalog of female lovers who have love lives and in some cases turn into relationships that do not exceed several years.
And it wasn’t easy to live with a human enemy who only felt safe surrounded by their pets: cats Y snails. Second animals are harder or harder to adopt as a pet than an octopus. And an added fact: her passion for gastropods was such that she hid them in her bra and carried them on plane trips. People weren’t very pleased with him.
long journey to anger
The publication of an original 8,000-page selection was one of last year’s literary events in the United States, which coincided with the centennial of the author’s birth, and At the end of this August, the Spanish translation will be delivered by Anagrama.. The book follows the long journey of a 20-something Highsmith living in bohemian New York, where men fought and women took control of daily life during World War II. There, he acted like a man in the city’s gay scene. sexual predator. As the years went by, she became that rough old woman who, shut herself up like snails, built a bunker in Switzerland with windows through which the sun could not penetrate and almost no one, not even her friends, could enter. It had been sincere before, it was well received. She’s a real drunk witch. But if it were not so, without this cold detachment from humanity, she would not have been able to write her excellent novels or turn that entomological gaze towards evil. And most disturbingly, their killers, without the slightest sense of guilt, seduce us as readers, let’s face it.
mother’s shadow
These diaries may not make us love women, but understand a little better. In them, we see the daughter her mother, Mary, abandoned with her grandmother shortly after she was born to marry her stepfather, Mr. Mary came back for him at the age of six to admit that she tried to bring him down by drinking turpentine. Yet throughout the diary there are many attempts to approach the author, among many other things, to satisfy a mother who, among many other things, is every day becoming more of a “tomboy” and blames her for her early approach to communism. More than 400 journal entries refer to Mary A back and forth from “I always feel happy when I go for a walk with my mom” to recording their numerous arguments or the disturbing “Is it possible to fall in love with my own mom?”
woman against woman
He exclaims in 1948: “I want to change gender. Is it possible?”. Today the answer would be easy, but back then, a Highsmith on a carousel of female loves – “Oh my God, how many women do I want?” – is forced to accept his condition as a pathology: he goes to bed. men and she goes to therapy to ‘heal herself’. Basically, it doesn’t fit the mold imposed by the mother. Thus, in the second of her novels, The Price of Salt, she disguises her authorship under a pseudonym, a then-unheard of lesbian love story with a happy ending, though not a very good novel by far, which explains the biographical background From the author: While on a temporary job at Bloomingsdale, He became obsessed with a client, a wealthy, elegant woman wrapped in furs. In 1990, he bought the book back under his real name with the title ‘Carol’.
misogyny and domination
He falls in love with women but does not love them. “The girls I sleep with are women for me, and I don’t want an intellectual woman,” he says, describing his lack of need to find partners to whom he can count as an equal. They call it misogynist and laugh at the rating of a storybook, ‘Little misogynistic stories’, leading women of course, something unusual in literature. Classify and rate your loved ones, make lists. “I often wonder—he writes—is it love or a sense of domination that I want? Not exactly emotion, but satisfaction. Because it is often nicer than love itself: I can’t imagine domination without love or love without domination”.
As the war ends and women revert to the forcedly happy housewife model promoted by the 1950s and threatened by the anti-American activities committee, the writer feels like an oddball in the United States. They do not know where to put it: too immoral for a black drama writer, too deep for a genre writer. He will go to Europe because they understand him better there. He will live in Italy, France, England and Switzerland, accumulating lovers and minimizing their social space. Fame is brought to the hoof.
Ripley is Patricia
Imagine Ripley, his enduring anti-hero who can be a chameleon-like attractive young man, a very fragile yet extremely calculated person, a psychopathic murderer stigmatized by a class hatred that makes him want to be what he hates most. In fact, for him, there is nothing closer to making love than murder. Highsmith went so far as to repeatedly say that he was Ripley himself. Secret lesbian, a glass of Ripley’s mirror demon twin. He composed five novels with him: ‘Mr. Ripley’s talent’, ‘Ripley’s mask’, ‘American friend’, ‘following in Ripley’s footsteps’ and ‘Ripley is in danger’ (all in Anagram). One of the first books he reached at his grandmother’s house at the age of eight was a treatise on the mental pathologies that marked his literary future. “I often felt that Ripley was typing and I was just his typewriter,” she writes.
the hell we carry
Did Highsmith know that his diaries would be read? Throughout his life, he made little concessions to political correctness, such as removing the adjective “nigger” – “negrata” for the more aseptic “black” from his earlier novels in the 1990s, but generally he knew these were coming. outside. Even his editor, who often queues in his favor, cannot deny the resentment towards his views. Anna von Planta explains in the preface: “We believed it was our duty to reject the stage where only in a few extreme cases the author could express them, just as we did when he was still alive.” And the extent of what it shows, especially the extent of its anti-Semitic comments, is such that it’s hard to imagine the resentment of what didn’t come up.
Without wanting to excuse him, it’s nice to bring here a 21-year-old Highsmith’s diary entry that gives us the key, if not his moral character. yes its incomprehensible complexity Literature: “Every person carries within himself another terrible world, hell and an unknown world. You can rarely see it if you insist on ignoring it, but you might see it once or twice in your life, when you’re close to death or when you’re deeply in love or deeply touched by music. It should be added here: While reading a Highsmith novel.
Erotic fantasy with Carmen Amaya
The multilingual HIghsmith not only mastered French, German, and Italian (some of her journal entries were written in these languages), but also learned Spanish out of a fascination with Carmen Amaya. The description of one of his shows in New York has a significant erotic intensity: “It always blows me away! No dear! ¡[Casi] I can touch your body, taste it on your lips, on your tongue! It fills my blood, it burns me! He held her terribly, dangerously close. […] I felt like I was going to fly like a balloon, I wanted to hug him!” The author first came to Barcelona in 1952. Thirty years later, he describes his meeting with his publisher, Jorge Herralde, who ranked fourth in his catalog: ‘Full sun’ (after Delon’s film ‘The Talented Mr. title adopted by Ripley’).
Source: Informacion
