In August 1965, Patricia Highsmith stated in her notebook (number 28): “Art - any form of art, no matter by whom - is the most courageous attempt to achieve the impossible.
You may fail partially or completely.
What counts is selfless courage. "
One can read this as a key passage in her diaries and notebooks that have now been published. At this point she is already an internationally successful author, especially in Europe, who has left the United States behind and bought a house in Suffolk and a few years later she will settle forever in continental Europe, first in France and later in Switzerland , in Ticino. Twenty years later, she reiterates her statement: "The only thing that makes you feel happy and alive is to strive for something you cannot achieve."
Art - not as a trade, but in the sense of an art religion - is one of three red threads that run through these records, the other two are alcohol and lesbian love. Highsmith's alcohol consumption, it is well known, was enormous, which she was also aware of. “Easy to see why writers drink. There is nothing rational about writing, ”she noted in June 1959. At this point in time, she was thirty-eight years old, she was convinced that she was nearing its end and therefore“ must do as much as possible with the rest of the time ”. In the time that lay ahead of her, she was wrong; As far as the relationship between writing and life is concerned (eternal theme), however, she knew as early as 1952: "These days are confusing because I am not used to simply living."
Anti-Semitic statements deleted
This is not the whole truth, because on the side of life there is the lesbian love that Highsmith lived out not only in the young New York years, but also promiscently later on. In order to keep an overview of all the beloved ones, one has to go back to the register at the end of the volume often enough. Even this promiscuity, however, is not pure enjoyment, but rather full of turmoil, which the author clearly recognizes in her clairvoyant note of September 14, 1954: “The homosexual relationship is anyway so strongly connected to the imaginary (which could be what I will pretend ) that it is impossible for partners to separate as definitively after the end of an affair as heterosexuals do. ”This is why highsmiths affairs end and never end, and the names of all those women whothose who have left her or who have left her drag themselves through her notebooks and diaries for years and decades like the undead. The reader is sometimes forced to take a keyhole perspective, which, miraculously, becomes quite boring in the long run.
About the history: After Highsmith's death, Daniel Keel, the Diogenes publisher and estate administrator, found “a long row of 56 upright notebooks ..., 18 diaries and 38 notebooks, an estimated 8000 pages of personal reports ”. It is obvious that a selection had to be made from these 8,000 pages. Highsmith's German-speaking editor since 1984, Anna von Planta, and her team have done this brilliantly. The edition is outstanding, apart from the tiny size - in the literal sense of the word - that some people not only need reading glasses but also a magnifying glass to decipher footnotes.
In her foreword, von Planta points out that in later years "Highsmith's views themselves were insulting, hateful and misanthropic", especially "in the case of their growing anti-Semitism".
She justifies the fact that these passages do not appear “as our editorial duty to deny her a stage, just as we would have acted when she was still alive”.
You can either accept this problematic position or not, this changes the rank of the edition as little as the fact that omissions have not been marked in the running text (for reasons of redundancy).
Whether it is a matter of censorship or not would have to be checked on a case-by-case basis and would make a longer stay in the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern absolutely necessary.