7
THIS COLLECTION OPENS in 1941, when Patricia Highsmith introduces the first of her diaries—Diary 1a—to be kept in tandem with her notebooks. On April 14, 1941, she writes, “Je suis fait[e] de deux appétits: l’amour et la pensée [My appetite is twofold: I hunger for love and for thought].” How much experience is needed, she wonders, in order to write about it? To what extent does one side of this equation feed off the other? [...]
THIS COLLECTION OPENS in 1941, when Patricia Highsmith introduces the first of her diaries—Diary 1a—to be kept in tandem with her notebooks. On April 14, 1941, she writes, “Je suis fait[e] de deux appétits: l’amour et la pensée [My appetite is twofold: I hunger for love and for thought].” How much experience is needed, she wonders, in order to write about it? To what extent does one side of this equation feed off the other? [...]
9
1/6/41
One brazen, conceited, decadent, despicable, retrogressive thought for today: I lost myself in a groundless dream, of life in suspension, and third dimension, of my friends and their types—of persons and faces, nameless, only filling spaces—and each one was quite to be expected, where he was—and the picture—which we call “life” or “experience”—was complete—and I saw myself—filling in exactly where I was expected—with no one looking or acting precisely like me. And I liked myself best of all this little group (which was by no means all the world) and I thought how something would be direfully wanting if I were not there.
1/6/41
One brazen, conceited, decadent, despicable, retrogressive thought for today: I lost myself in a groundless dream, of life in suspension, and third dimension, of my friends and their types—of persons and faces, nameless, only filling spaces—and each one was quite to be expected, where he was—and the picture—which we call “life” or “experience”—was complete—and I saw myself—filling in exactly where I was expected—with no one looking or acting precisely like me. And I liked myself best of all this little group (which was by no means all the world) and I thought how something would be direfully wanting if I were not there.
18
FEBRUARY 17, 1941
I should be more creative, more original at this age. I tremble to think that I am 20 years old. Nothing! Except for confused emotions. I’m not even in love! I have to finish the ideas I’ve already had. Then the others will come like a rushing river.
FEBRUARY 17, 1941
I should be more creative, more original at this age. I tremble to think that I am 20 years old. Nothing! Except for confused emotions. I’m not even in love! I have to finish the ideas I’ve already had. Then the others will come like a rushing river.
23
3/5/41
It has become a platitude that an artist’s life should be hard, should be blood and sweat, tears and disappointment, struggle and exhaustion. This fight, I believe, should be in his attitude towards the world: his difficulty lies always in keeping himself apart, intellectually and creatively, maintaining his own identity at the same time he identifies himself with society. But in his own work, there should be none of this pain. He creates a thing because he has mastered it and is familiar with it. He produces it easily, having once taken his idea in his bosom. A great struggle in composition is apparent in his work, and shows it to be an artificial, foreign, and most of all, a feeble and unsure thing. Great work has come easily: I do not mean fluently, but easily, from this sense of mastery, and has been later if necessary polished and changed at leisure, and cheerfully.
3/5/41
It has become a platitude that an artist’s life should be hard, should be blood and sweat, tears and disappointment, struggle and exhaustion. This fight, I believe, should be in his attitude towards the world: his difficulty lies always in keeping himself apart, intellectually and creatively, maintaining his own identity at the same time he identifies himself with society. But in his own work, there should be none of this pain. He creates a thing because he has mastered it and is familiar with it. He produces it easily, having once taken his idea in his bosom. A great struggle in composition is apparent in his work, and shows it to be an artificial, foreign, and most of all, a feeble and unsure thing. Great work has come easily: I do not mean fluently, but easily, from this sense of mastery, and has been later if necessary polished and changed at leisure, and cheerfully.
29
3/28/41
Just now the world of experience seems more attractive than the world of books I have just stepped out of. I have not closed the door. I have merely left one room and gone into another. I have found a new confidence in myself. I have become a person at last.
3/28/41
Just now the world of experience seems more attractive than the world of books I have just stepped out of. I have not closed the door. I have merely left one room and gone into another. I have found a new confidence in myself. I have become a person at last.
29
4/2/41
Lately I have been wasting time. I have been doing what I should have regarded with the utmost contempt at the age of sixteen. But it has done this for me: It has shown me that an unbookish life can be very useless. It has also shown me how what I have absorbed during my monastic adolescence can be used in a more normal life. And strangely it has made the books more important in one sense: that they are essential not for culture—or background—or scholarship—but to enrich the normal life. These sound like platitudes—at the most, truisms. But it has meant more to me than that, this discovery. I have seen and lived in the real world for the first time in my stupid life.
4/2/41
Lately I have been wasting time. I have been doing what I should have regarded with the utmost contempt at the age of sixteen. But it has done this for me: It has shown me that an unbookish life can be very useless. It has also shown me how what I have absorbed during my monastic adolescence can be used in a more normal life. And strangely it has made the books more important in one sense: that they are essential not for culture—or background—or scholarship—but to enrich the normal life. These sound like platitudes—at the most, truisms. But it has meant more to me than that, this discovery. I have seen and lived in the real world for the first time in my stupid life.
40
5/24/41
That night at the party, when I sat down beside you on the couch and we started talking, you might have been anyone else, any of the other people in the room I talked with that night. I can’t say yet what it was exactly that made you suddenly different. But I loved you then, because you were strange. I loved you when you said good night to me. I loved you all the next day, though I couldn’t sleep, or eat, or read, or even think coherently about you. Then when I did see you, I felt stupid, or I felt that you would think me stupid because I couldn’t take my eyes off you. You were so very offhand and wonderful when I first came. We walked out onto the sidewalk down to a dive of a bar, and sat in a booth. And it was then that something fell away from you like a mantle slipped off the shoulders—perhaps I should say like a screen that conceals something not too attractive. I wish I could say what it was. Because if I knew—if it were simple enough to be discovered, I might be able to forget it. I should at least know what to fight, what it is keeping us apart. Perhaps I was shocked because you seemed to give me too much attention. Perhaps I was silly and didn’t want anyone, after all, that I really might have. I don’t know. But I know that after that wonderful evening before, when you hardly spoke to me, and after that sleepless night and that nerve-shaken day, and the counted hours before I finally saw you again—after all that, the change in you, (or in me) was like the sudden, unwelcome awakening from a glorious dream. An awakening on a Monday morning when, with one’s castle and clouds and the silver sea dissolved into a sordid room, one realizes that one has to get up and dress in the cold night in a few minutes and plod through a weary day.
ugh i just love the way she writes
5/24/41
That night at the party, when I sat down beside you on the couch and we started talking, you might have been anyone else, any of the other people in the room I talked with that night. I can’t say yet what it was exactly that made you suddenly different. But I loved you then, because you were strange. I loved you when you said good night to me. I loved you all the next day, though I couldn’t sleep, or eat, or read, or even think coherently about you. Then when I did see you, I felt stupid, or I felt that you would think me stupid because I couldn’t take my eyes off you. You were so very offhand and wonderful when I first came. We walked out onto the sidewalk down to a dive of a bar, and sat in a booth. And it was then that something fell away from you like a mantle slipped off the shoulders—perhaps I should say like a screen that conceals something not too attractive. I wish I could say what it was. Because if I knew—if it were simple enough to be discovered, I might be able to forget it. I should at least know what to fight, what it is keeping us apart. Perhaps I was shocked because you seemed to give me too much attention. Perhaps I was silly and didn’t want anyone, after all, that I really might have. I don’t know. But I know that after that wonderful evening before, when you hardly spoke to me, and after that sleepless night and that nerve-shaken day, and the counted hours before I finally saw you again—after all that, the change in you, (or in me) was like the sudden, unwelcome awakening from a glorious dream. An awakening on a Monday morning when, with one’s castle and clouds and the silver sea dissolved into a sordid room, one realizes that one has to get up and dress in the cold night in a few minutes and plod through a weary day.
ugh i just love the way she writes
41
5/25/41
It’s so important that people—especially young people write some poetry during their lives. Even if it is bad poetry. Even if they think they do not like poetry or have no talent for writing it, they should write, and even badly, if it is sincere. And really sincere poetry is seldom bad even if the form is not perfect. But the poetry opens a new vista of the world. It is not so much that we see new things, but that we see old things differently. And this experience is invaluable. It is as soul-shaking as the experience of love. It is more ennobling. It makes philosophers and kings.
5/25/41
It’s so important that people—especially young people write some poetry during their lives. Even if it is bad poetry. Even if they think they do not like poetry or have no talent for writing it, they should write, and even badly, if it is sincere. And really sincere poetry is seldom bad even if the form is not perfect. But the poetry opens a new vista of the world. It is not so much that we see new things, but that we see old things differently. And this experience is invaluable. It is as soul-shaking as the experience of love. It is more ennobling. It makes philosophers and kings.
50
6/21/41
We like to say it is love we search our whole life long, or we like to say it is Fame. But it is neither. It is understanding. We seek forever one other human heart we can touch and who can touch ours. We seek indefatigably like a hungry animal. For our heart is forever lonely. Forever alone. And wherever we feel this understanding may be, in a young girl, a young boy, a feeble old man, or a crone of a woman, in a drunkard, in a prostitute, in a madman, in a child, there we will go, and nothing in the world can hold us back.
6/21/41
We like to say it is love we search our whole life long, or we like to say it is Fame. But it is neither. It is understanding. We seek forever one other human heart we can touch and who can touch ours. We seek indefatigably like a hungry animal. For our heart is forever lonely. Forever alone. And wherever we feel this understanding may be, in a young girl, a young boy, a feeble old man, or a crone of a woman, in a drunkard, in a prostitute, in a madman, in a child, there we will go, and nothing in the world can hold us back.
50
6/22/41
There are some people we like instantly, before they have even had a chance to flatter us (which is the greatest encouragement to liking a person), because they have that quality of seeing in us what we desire to be, what we are trying to be, and of not seeing that which we are at the moment. We feel that they understand us, we begin to feel that we have attained what we desire ourselves to be, and being made happy by this we inevitably are very fond of the people who can make us feel this way.
jesus
6/22/41
There are some people we like instantly, before they have even had a chance to flatter us (which is the greatest encouragement to liking a person), because they have that quality of seeing in us what we desire to be, what we are trying to be, and of not seeing that which we are at the moment. We feel that they understand us, we begin to feel that we have attained what we desire ourselves to be, and being made happy by this we inevitably are very fond of the people who can make us feel this way.
jesus