These philosophical, sometimes grumpy journals, unearthed after the doyenne of suspense fiction’s death, shine a light on her dual identities, the contempt she felt for other people and her erotic misadventures
When Patricia Highsmith looked in the mirror, she saw both a lover and a killer. Early on, the reflected face had a fetching feline allure, but out of sight another facet of Highsmith seemed to belong, she said in 1942, in “a terrible other world of hell and the unknown”. As she aged, what she saw through the “evil distorting lens of my eye” changed: now a gravel-voiced, fire-breathing ogre stared back. Highsmith knew that there are always “two people in each person”, and in 1953 a nightmare confirmed this duality. She dreamed that she was incinerating a naked girl who shivered in a wooden bathtub; the funeral pyre was set with papers, presumably Highsmith’s manuscripts. Waking up, she admitted: “I had two identities: the victim and the murderer.”
The characters in Highsmith’s novels accordingly come in pairs, doubles who are casualties of a fracture in what she called “the universal law of oneness”. Upright Guy and devious Bruno in Strangers on a Train begin as opposites but end as psychic twins after they exchange homicides. Tom in The Talented Mr Ripley kills the alluring Dickie, then assumes his identity. In the lesbian romance The Price of Salt, matronly Carol and girlish Therese merge, then are sundered by social disapproval: murders, which for Highsmith were “a kind of making love”, are here replaced by orgasms.
Continue reading...source https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/nov/21/diaries-and-notebooks-by-patricia-highsmith-review-sex-booze-and-cold-blooded-murders
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