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5/7/52
With these serious people, these bons vivants, who take so much more seriously their amusements, their aesthetic surroundings, than any artist takes his work or his creative process, the creative process begins to atrophy in their presence, for the curious reason that their pursuit of pleasure is so business like. And once they have it—pleasant café-bars, shopping-centers, an efficient maid, a garden, sunlight, then life, instead of relaxing, becomes shopping, getting repairs done, planning, anxiously, next summer’s vacation: in short, the element of pleasing, of amusement, goes out of the artist companion, and he can no longer find his proper plane. Amusement, entertainment, via writing, disappears in a fantastic world somewhere far away. As is usual, the paradox in this fascinates me.
MAY 8, 1952
More and more often I think back on Joan S., and feel my leaving her for Ginnie was the greatest mistake I ever made, both emotionally, and for my career. There is doubtless something like this in everyone’s life. That is why life on earth is not entirely heaven. Nor entirely hell, thanks to these pleasures snatched, even if paid for so dearly.
10/28/52
The really depressing thing about being depressed is that one’s own thoughts and their obvious courses (into all the little cul-de-sacs of impossibility) are so ordinary. To a much stupider man than myself, the same thoughts would occur, one realizes. And worst of all, the same emotions! A human creature, torn apart on the old rack of indecision and ambivalence of desire, is like any dog hesitating between the fleeing squirrel and the terrified, paralyzed rabbit—and losing both!
8/18/53
It is curious that in the most interesting periods of one’s life, one never writes one’s diary. There are some things that even a writer cannot put down in words (at the time). He shrinks from putting them down. And what a loss! Like a lot of outrageous, apparently senseless losses in nature, due to an assumed superabundance in nature. Even experience is superabundant, but it is at times more difficult to ferret out—that is, in dull times—than in more dramatic times. But the value of diaries is their dramatic periods, when one has “perhaps” shrunk from setting down the weakness, the vagaries, the changes of mind, the cowardices, the shameful hatreds, the little lies carried out or not, which form one’s true character.
9/3/53
An artist will always drink, even when he is happy (that is when he is working well and with a woman he loves) because he will always think of the woman he saw last week, or the woman who is a hundred or three thousand miles away, with whom he might have been happier, or just as happy. If he did not think of this, he would not be an artist, suffering with imagination.
9/28/53
[Allela] Cornell—Why does the artist commit suicide? Because he sees and longs for more intensely than other people what he cannot have—the happy home, the children, the piano, the sunlight on the lawn, the years of satisfying work ahead, each year like the other. The artist cannot make up his mind. The artist is half homosexual. The artist is torn between the partner who challenges and the partner who complies. I am thinking of Cornell, and the Grecian freshness of the world in her childhood, and the successive, warping, educational blights of her adolescence. She loved too much and loved too many, but above all she loved too much. She was wide open, and life, like a tangle of bayonets, guns at cross purposes, loves at cross purposes, hit her right in the heart. She became physically tired with the strain, to the point of delirium and insanity. She came to realize, at thirty, that to be able to paint a beautiful picture did not compensate for the husband or the lover and the children and the domestic, very ordinary peace that was not there. In a moment of exhaustion, when like a suffering Hindu she thought she glimpsed the truth, she drank the nitric acid. It is a beautiful story, really, the first three quarters. Even the last is beautiful in its psychological inevitability. It should be about 250 pages.
5/26/54
Alcoholism for the writer: He carries around his wonderful gift. It is the only sure thing, and it is stronger than any bank. He can sit down any time, and with a modicum of peace of mind, write more beautifully than 999,999,999 people out of 1,000,000,000. So he drinks away the afternoons. The gift is there. It will not go. No, only something else will come: death.
9/21/54
Oh, the imaginative, the too imaginative men, who are always in love, but never requited, only noticed, boasted, their flowers and dedications received! Like Beethoven, Gide perhaps, Goethe, all the impulsive ones, who instinctively want to hitch the tail of their rocket onto something that remains on earth, before they take off into pure space. Such people cannot live without being constantly in love. Requited or not doesn’t matter. It is a sine qua non of their creativity, their happiness of course, and their existence.
I lay with her looking at the stars. I am extremely conscious of the stars, the fact that the Great Dipper, perceived by the Chinese, is flying apart at a fantastic rate, and still, at the time of my death, will be seen to be no further scattered than it is today. Well, with her, it didn’t matter, I knew that she, and I, would be dead, or near it, in another thirty years or less. It didn’t matter, because I had discovered something with her that I had never known before. It was like a secret, a secret of living. It was peace. It was something at the core, beyond life and death, living and dying. It was something happy, because it was true and eternal, even more eternal than those stars. I hope I can be excused for saying more eternal, since we human beings cannot entirely understand the word eternal, anyway. With her, I was suffused with more beauty than I could discover on any trips to Greece or to the Louvre. With her, I knew more pleasure (which is happiness) than I should ever know with Plato, Sappho, Aristotle, or Alfred Whitehead. (Plato! All you say I should have. I had!) Her body between my hands! Her lips accessible turned to me. And that sadness waiting, Ovid, when we were done.
In December 1955, The Talented Mr. Ripley is published by Coward-McCann. The book is well received and nominated the following year for an Edgar Allan Poe Award by the Mystery Writers of America. Despite being back on the road to success, Patricia Highsmith finds herself in a dark place in the new year. At age thirty-five, she suddenly feels old, burned out, unmoored—with the only semblance of stability coming from self-discipline and work. The accolades pouring in from American literary critics for The Talented Mr. Ripley do little to bolster her self-esteem. Well into spring, Pat’s notebook entries revolve around ideas of impermanence, religion, and alcohol.
3/30/55
The making of a book, from the germinating idea. You look ahead, two, four or five hours a day, and progress what seems like one inch on the plot. The brain refuses to advance into thin air, consciously, just as one would refuse consciously to walk off the edge of a precipice above Niagara Falls. Then in the other more relaxed and unaware hours of the day, one does advance. One steps off the precipice. A new stretch is gained. The plot advances. The characters solidify. And one can always depend upon it, the subconscious. The book will grow, as long as one concentrates those two or four hours, as long as one is, oneself, alive and living.