JULY 4, 1951

Tonight I felt fat, old, I heard my heart and felt mortal as mortal can be. It startled me so, I had a hard time getting to sleep. I was alone, a physical body that one day would run down and die and be buried. So I thought. It was dreadful. And unforgettable. Thirty—what a turning point. I remember Natalia’s saying in Capri: “Thirty? You don’t begin to live until you are 30.” Tonight. My movie opened, I believe.

8/31/51

As to plot: to what end is individual man tending? What does he want or aim for? To leave his son with a better established business than his father left him? To die wealthy? To enjoy life as soon as possible, and as much as possible? To win the love of a certain woman? To acquire fame as a scientist? A writer? A musical comedy singer? To visit every country in the world? (No, that passes.) To understand the world as a philosopher? Most people in my book have forgotten, gradually and in the abrasive rush of time, the sharp pricking edges, the arresting colors, of their original ambitions. Their ambitions are like old lost loves, pricking them to dull attention in the middle of a drink, of a conversation, with a dulled recognition. “That is mine,” they realize suddenly, as they would think on seeing a photograph of the girl they once slept with: “She was mine once!” To make a plot of individual objectives and to see them lost and forgotten, that is logically the plot of The Sleepless Night. Carry the reader on as the ambitions carry the characters on for certain periods of time. Then simple life takes over.

10/4/51

Autumns in the heart, and old tragedy, tears, the echo of pain and the hollow echo of a cry aloud in the midst of weeping. I stared at her until I no longer knew her or her name, knew only her form and her bones and the shadows at the sockets of her eyes, and then I began to draw, while the radio played a Chopin étude. Oh how beautifully my pen behaved! The autumn came swiftly, a rising shadow of night, telling me, one day you will no longer be with her, whom you love now, but your hand in drawing, your talent and your desire, your courage, your selflessness, your happiness when you draw, these will always be with you, be you seventy and toothless, poor and alone, but she? She under the light now—I can hear her breathing—she will be gone, and worse, almost forgotten. The tragic chorus chanted in my heart, and I followed the distant play closely, tears coming to my eyes.

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!

Like a virago, she blames me

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.

4/30/55

The irking dissatisfaction of living with someone whom one is not thoroughly in love with, does not love thoroughly and unquestioningly. Ah, that nagging inner question, that defiant exclamation: “Surely I am not fated to live with her the rest of my life! I can’t believe I am fated to live this!” What irks the honest man and the honest artist (a redundant term!) is that inevitably, if he is human and kind, the world—for him will be seen through the eyes of the person whom he does not entirely trust, and whose imperfections (nothing but dishonesties) he has already tried hundreds of times to correct and explain away, without success. To be bound to a warped and dishonest person, to be emotionally bound, is like being compelled to wear distorting glasses the rest of one’s life. An unbearable fate for an artist! The world is difficult enough to bring into perspective, even seen purely!

7/3/55

Maturity descends like a slowly collapsing cake, enveloping the individual, pinning his arms, pinning his legs, making walking difficult. Maturity makes one look at a new landscape and say, “well, it’s not bad, it’s not good—but I wouldn’t know what changes to make in it.” Maturity makes you make allowances for everything, makes you forgive the wrong things (because other mature persons do), makes you much too sensible to attempt the difficult. Makes you stop trying practically everything, because you have had time to see something like it done better somewhere else. Worst of all, maturity destroys the self, and makes you like everybody else. Unless, of course, you have the wisdom to become an eccentric. Maturity on the other hand makes you see so many sides and reasons for everything (a form of truth, to be sure) that the direct response becomes impossible—even to things worth responding directly to.

He was also carrying on a desultory conversation with someone on the other end of the telephone

11/15/55

N.W. [Natica Waterbury]. She will make some desperate marriage at 38, perhaps, which won’t last, but if it lasts two years may give her (or her age will) that poise and confidence in her own special personality, which she so badly needs. She is so far superior to most in an intellectual and idealistic sense. She thinks and questions, and most of us do not, most of us live nearer to the animal level. It is this inquiring and this doubt (with consequent indecision) which I most admire in her and which will always make me love her. It is the big sine qua non of civilization, of the emergence of the human race from the more bestial organisms on earth. She can never be ignoble, whatever happens to her, however the buffetings of life force her to behave. She has that which Shakespeare meant when he compared men to angels.

7/13/56

Life—existence—getting along with people—or even getting along totally with oneself—is a matter of compromise. A platitude. But the wisdom (or the stupidity) depends on the things one compromises with, and also one’s sense of humor, or detachment, or earnestness, in compromising. It is the most important and the most difficult art in the world. But it is for people who have chosen happiness, alone. It is not really for artists, though they have to compromise, too (e.g. when they greet their cranky landladies; or do they always? No). One must either know instinctively when and how much to compromise, or one must have an intellectual system worked out about it. One must compromise the whole way, with a sense of humor and an absolute, beautiful conviction that one is not compromising oneself in doing so; or else one must be grim and equally well defined, saying basically I shall not compromise any more than is necessary for me to keep myself out of jail. But there are times when one should go to jail, prefers to go to jail. This is really the Endless Circle, the rat-race of Twentieth Century America.

1/18/57

My growing problem since 1951: (in Riesman’s terms) from inner-directed (ambitious, idealistic, self-driving, diary-keeping) I have become somewhat other-directed; and this is against my nature, or at least my nature until the age of thirty. Among its manifestations (which irritate the inner-directed side of me) are carelessness about money, looseness of morals in sex and drinking, smoking, abandonment of daily exercises (physical), abandonment of diary keeping, perhaps over tolerance of the mediocre in people and in art (this has its good side and is hard to make a judgment about), laziness (sporadic) about my own work, and a general lowering of sights in my themes. Time something was done about it. Something in between inner and outer, if possible.

9/29/57

On concentrating. (For The Writer possibly). A small matter, concentrating. But how many young writers can do it? It is not a new typewriter, a cushion in the chair, even necessarily stimulating or tranquilizing music playing. For most people, it is a guarantee of privacy. One cannot tell someone how to write a novel, the ingredients. One can only tell if they are not there. Privacy. An expensive thing in the modern world. How many young writers give themselves a chance? It is considered eccentric to like to be alone. Yet for such a short time, either a stay at a country cottage, or absolute quiet for six hours a day produce far more than the trouble costs. Take yourself seriously. Set a routine. Once you are alone, relax and behave as you will. Stand still for a moment and relish the novel sensation of knowing that you are utterly alone and will not be disturbed by a ringing telephone, a baby’s cry, an order from a boss, a groan or a whine from a spouse. Privacy is expensive. Perhaps it costs somebody else something. Relish it. But don’t feel guilty about having it. Take it as your due. Indulge yourself in everything that can possibly contribute to your writing. For instance, in the height of composition, which may last a week, a month, three months, you may not feel like writing personal letters. Don’t write them. Personal letters take something out of you, something of creative energy. It may be also that you cannot read other people’s fiction, however inspiring, or however much you may admire the author and wish to emulate him or her. To read a novel over a period of days means that you carry around in your head an emotionally charged atmosphere, a whole stage full of characters. While you are writing a book, you must carry around your own stage full of characters with their emotional charges. You have no room for another stage.

I am in a state of cowed abeyance, like someone who has been whipped—or laid low after pride.

A time of abeyance for me, I have had small ones before, but none so long or profound as this. A caesura in my life.

11/27/58

By the age of forty, one has amassed so many associations with music, colors, sounds, tastes, words, that it is possible to foresee life becoming unbearable. Every Beethoven sonata drags a nightmare in its wake. Every scent that women wear brings tears and trembling.

It is very, very difficult for me to know what to forgive among people’s vices (mine, too). Where to take a stand and say, finally, this is wrong, and therefore this person or that no longer deserves my love or friendship or anyone else’s. Europeans are better off than Americans in being brought up from infancy with clear ideas on morality—at least compared to Americans. Believing as I do that only out of personal chaos and failure and humiliation can truth and real character come, it is twice as hard for me. When should one’s patience give out? When should one stop believing in the core of goodness in everyone? In this is the whole art of life. And because it is an art, not a science, no one will ever lay down the laws. It is for this reason only that people are different, one from another. It is because of its flexibility that it torments me.

2/11/59

Discipline, solitude and the ascetic life are not difficult for me, but I do not like the feeling of being virtuous that comes when I lead such a life even for two days. I resent feeling virtuous, just as I resent ”virtue” and consider it stupid. Small use—at this point in my life—to remind myself that I am being virtuous in order better to practice an art that is by no means dedicated to virtue.

11/7/60

Lots of writers, especially young writers, think they will put down “everything” in one book. They mean human consciousness (that mystery!), emotions, atmosphere, the whole gamut of existence. When they begin writing their book, they realize how much must be left out, how painfully specialized a work of art has to be to be any good at all. They’ll tell only a fraction of what they want to in each book.

12/18/60

The muse doesn’t come when you beckon. She comes when you’ve tried all day to get something right, and you’re tired and about to go to bed—and then you stay up. She comes when you’ve lost your love. She touches you, she touches your shoulder, and then you know you’re not alone after all.

Yet I can never believe, unless I’m under the influence of drugs, that quarrels are a natural concomitant of the state of being in love or of loving