Patricia Highsmith on Writing & Murder: 38 Notebooks and One Fascinating Interview
a problematic writer with an impressive body of work and a dark view of family
Patricia Highsmith kept two sets of journals throughout her life: private diaries, in which she recounted her “her intense, at times painful personal experiences,” and notebooks—or cahiers—which she used “to process these experiences intellectually and muse on her writing.” This is how her longtime editor, Anna Von Planta, describes the journals in the introduction to the 999-page book Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995. (Cahier is the French word for notebook).
“Pat’s notebooks were workbooks,” Von Planta writes, “and a playground for her imagination.” The book provides an intimate glimpse into the mind of an extremely disciplined writer at work over a career that spanned five decades.
Highsmith was a notoriously unlikeable figure: an unapologetic racist and anti-Semite, a deeply unpleasant alcoholic and serial home wrecker (she had a penchant for sleeping with married women). The designer Phillip Lloyd Powell described her as “a black cloud.” In a 2011 article for The Paris Review, Highsmith’s biographer Joan Schenkar, author of The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of of Patricia Higshmith, called Highsmith’s life “more than a little on the psychopathic side, with an adept’s taste for transgression.”
It is perhaps Highsmith’s proclivity for transgression that made her such a capable chronicler of the darker reaches of the human psyche, immortalized in her most famous character, the mercurial and murderous (not to mention famously “talented”) Tom Ripley.
I am of the mind that we need not like a writer or artist as a person in order to appreciate their work. Assuming we never knew them personally, we need not like who they appeared to be in order to admire their artistry. I admire The Talented Mr. Ripley. It is a well-structured, suspenseful, taut work of fiction that has earned its place as a classic of psychological suspense. It offers so many lessons for writers that I teach it in my course, Plotting the Novel.
Highsmith kept her journals under wraps her entire life and considered burning them before her death, but ultimately left it up to Daniel Keel, the executor of her estate, to decide what to do with them. After Highsmith’s death, Keel and Von Planta found 38 journals in a linen closet in Highsmith’s home in Switzerland. The cahiers were all the same spiral bound hardcovers from Columbia University Bookstore.
In 1950, at the age of 29, Highsmith wrote in her notebooks:
Suddenly the writing of novels has become a little game…the main object is to please and to entertain and condense one’s material, that the finished product is but a tiny fragment broken off of the great mass of material, and polished to the highest degree.
Indeed, one thing I enjoy about The Talented Mr. Ripley, and what makes it such an excellent novel to analyze for structure, is how condensed it is. It’s complete but not fluffy, “polished to the highest degree.” Highsmith was a ruthless editor of her own work.
In this same notebook entry, Highsmith continued, “It will be the same if at fifty I can look at a shelf with fifteen of my books on it.” The following year, Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of her first novel, Strangers on a Train, would turn her into a literary celebrity. By the time of her death in 1995, she had published dozens of novels and story collections and written much more. As Schenkar noted,
she was both alcoholic and hypergraphic, leaving a trail of crushed hearts, bruised feelings, and total blackouts behind her—as well as eight thousand pages of handwritten notebooks and diaries, sixteen fat press books, countless photograph albums, two hundred and fifty unpublished manuscripts, and thirty published works.
Highsmith on Writing Routine: 8 Pages a Day
In an illuminating 1978 interview for the British television show Good Afternoon, Highsmith says that she likes to write eight pages a day when working on a novel, ten pages a day when working on a story. “I like to take care of the boring things in the morning and work maybe four to five hours a day.” The boring things, she clarifies, include shopping and writing business letters.
If you have any interest in Highsmith whatsoever, I highly recommend watching this interview with Mavis Nicholson, which begins with run-of-the-mill writer questions (of the do-you-write-by-hand-or-type variety), and ends with Nicholson expertly asking deeply personal questions that seem to make Highsmith uncomfortable, but that she answers nonetheless.
Highsmith on Starting a Novel
As for the story itself, “I think I begin with a certain action…it’s not an entire plot, but I have to go backwards to what came before and forwards in my own thinking…it would be a stretch of action.”
What makes Highsmith’s novels so compulsively readable is that something is always happening. She is deeply interested in motivation—the mind of the murderer is a subject of intense exploration—but she never loses sight of the action. As I remind my students, something has to happen on every page. If characters are thinking instead of doing, things get boring fast. Highsmith is rarely boring. Characters do things. Stuff happens.
Highsmith on Psychopathy and Murder
In the televised interview from 1978, it was only when she began talking about murder—in particular, the murder of a man in the bathroom on a train—that Highsmith smiled and became animated. The same thing happened when she talked about her characters as psychopaths.
At one point, she brought out one of her spiral notebooks, in which she was working through one of the Ripley books. At the time of the interview, she was fifty pages into the new novel. (Watching her move a giant ashtray to lay the notebook on the table reminded me of being a child in the late seventies. There were ashtrays everywhere.)
She also had an interesting take on Ripley, whom she believed American audiences found “amusing.” As for his murders, “Lately, he kills only when he thinks it’s right…I admit his first murder was a very cruel one. In the first book he killed a man just out of resentment and also because he envied his money. That was a very nasty act.”
When the interviewer asked why Highsmith was drawn to characters like Ripley, Highsmith admitted, “Maybe there is some kind of violence in myself, I don’t know, some people say so.”
On living in France
At the time of the interview, Highsmith was living in a small village in France, though she claims not to have been able to speak French very well. She must have been able to speak French passably, though, as she did interviews on French television. “I don’t even like the language,” she says, warming up. She found Parisians in general “unfriendly, cold, very obsessed with money.”
Like most American expats in Europe, Highsmith enjoyed the ease of travel around Europe, the ability to get from one country to another by train. As for her birthplace, “I think Texas is very boring.” But she likes Pennsylvania. Who knew?
On Writing Instead of Socializing
Highsmith said that she chose not to live in a big city because she didn’t want a social life, and a city forces you to have one: “I don’t like going out to dinner…I need my evenings, I love my evenings.” She liked having her time to herself so that she could work. In this regard, she was similar to most successful writers. To write books, you have to carve out the time. Again and again and again, over many days and weeks and months and years, you must choose to spend time with your book-in-progress instead of with other people. Fortunately, this is an easy ask for an introvert.
Highsmith on Love and Devotion
In 1943, at the age of 22, Highsmith writes:
Sexual love is the only emotion which has ever really touched me. Hatred, jealousy, even abstract devotion, never—except devotion to myself.
Highsmith on Friendship, Family (and Murder, Again)
“I have a few friends, and my friendships last,” she said in the televised interview. As for family, she never wanted one. “I don’t like other people around me…I don’t like the level on which someone has to talk with someone else in the house…if I’m alone in the house, everything gets solved.”
At the end of the interview, she revealed how unhappy she was as a child, how miserable her family life was. “There was a big separation when I was twelve years old, another when I was sixteen, another when I was nineteen, at which case I didn’t care anymore.”
When the interviewer questioned how she could live happily without a family, Highsmith pointed out that “most murders happen in the family.”
In the notebooks, she puts it more directly: “One situation—one alone, could drive me to murder: family life, togetherness.”
If you’d like to explore Highsmith further while working on your own novel, join me for Plotting the Novel. In this eight-week course, you will learn how to create suspense in any genre, craft a compelling first chapter and a logical, surprising midpoint reversal, weave subplot into the larger story, maintain urgency, raise the stakes from the inciting action to the climax, and more.
It's incredible that Patricia Highsmith published 30 books, but also wrote 150 unpublished manuscripts if I have that right. So prolific and daunting to anyone working on their first novel! But if a beginning writer can identify, understand and use key aspects, techniques and strategies from the best writers, they have a better chance of success. This is a great post for any writer because it gets one looking at the nuts and bolts they will need to consider after they've decided to write a novel.