A glimpse of the real Patricia Highsmith through her diaries and notebooks

There are three ways of knowing Patricia Highsmith. First, of course, she was the author of 22 novels and several story collections published between 1950 and 1995, the year of her death. Then the woman herself: Mary Patricia Plangman, born in Dallas in 1921, long-term resident of New York City, when young a socially and sexually active lesbian, later in life a mostly solitary literary figure in almost constant movement around Europe. Much biographical work has been written about her. And, finally, a revelation: she was the keeper of not only an intimate diary for most of those years, but also workbooks she called ‘cahiers’, all now published in a single volume.

Naturally there are only shades of difference between the three notional women, but each one illuminates the other two. Although the originals of the diaries have been available to scholars for some years, and have already been mined by biographers, for the interested reader this volume of previously unpublished material breaks new ground, providing us with a chance of glimpsing at last the real Patricia Highsmith.

The book, edited by Anna von Planta, runs to roughly 1,000 pages, with a great deal of comment, context-setting and notes. It is arranged chronologically, with the diaries and notebooks appearing together. The diaries are dated in American long form, M D Y, the notebooks in American numerical short form, M/D/Y. There is some overlap of content, but broadly speaking the diaries contain personal thoughts, experiences and dreams, while the notebooks are about books, literature and Highsmith’s own writing.

Although presented in English throughout, long parts of the originals were written in German or French, sometimes in Italian or Spanish. Highsmith’s use of these languages has been described as comprehensible if faulty, so we have to assume the translations here are accurate and sympathetic to the original.