In Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1966), Patricia Highsmith uses this story to illustrate the question of how a writer can “feel the story emotionally.” She explains that it was difficult for her to project herself into the mind of a woman contemplating suicide because she herself had never been near the edge of suicide. “So I took the easy way out,” she writes laconically, “and did not explain her state of mind. (Never apologize, never explain, said an English diplomat, and a French writer, Baudelaire, said that the only good parts of a book are the explanations that are left out.)” Her strategy certainly worked. In the stories collected here there is no suicide that makes more sense than this one, although it is the only one that is neither explained nor justified.
The gallery of exceedingly Germanic names in “Nothing That Meets the Eye” (Helene Sacher-Hartmann, for example, and Gert and Hedwig von Böchlein, who are all lodgers at the Hotel Waldhaus in Alpenbach) may startle regular Highsmith readers. The writer was somewhat conversant in German, having learned the language in high school given her father’s German heritage. On occasion, she even composed her diary entries in German. During her trip through Europe from 1951 to 1953, Highsmith wrote an additional story, “The Returnees,” which also has a strong overlay of German local color.
“The Returnees” chronicles the disintegration of a couple’s relationship over the course of several years, with attention being paid to both partners, a feature uncommon in Patricia Highsmith’s writing. Moreover, the story, with its postwar ambience and repeated suggestions of German anti-Semitism, is one of the rare examples of historical-political references in her books. The diaries reveal that the author met in Munich in December 1951 a Jewish friend of a friend, whose rapid financial ascent in the postwar era clearly provided the model for the figure of Esther Friedmann in “The Returnees.” Ten months after this encounter, in a Paris hotel room, Patricia Highsmith began to compose her “German story,” which she finished some three weeks later, on October 21, 1952.
It is striking how often the word “failure” occurs in the notes and plot sketches. Considering that most of the stories in the last half of the book revolve around the idea of a bungled and shattered life, they share a common outlook. Patricia Highsmith was a tough-minded writer who believed man capable of extraordinary evil, and she took a dim view of man’s capacity for self-knowledge and self-improvement. Several of the stories included here, however, veer in the opposite direction. They are unexpectedly comforting, uncharacteristically Highsmith, the exceptions that prove the rule. Paradoxically, it is one of these stories, “Born Failure,” that features “failure” in its title.
Patricia Highsmith actually comes close to creating a parable in this story, written in 1953. Winthrop Hazlewood, a small-town retailer, has made pitifully little of his life. He toils away until late into the night to earn a meager income. His good-for-nothing brother robs him, all of his business ventures peter out, and his wares get ruined in a dank basement. Then he inherits one hundred thousand dollars, of which he is entitled to keep eighty thousand. All he has to do is pick up the money at his lawyer’s office in New York. On the ferry that brings him home, his money stashed in his briefcase, Winthrop Hazlewood looks back. The phases of his life flash before his eyes, all marked by ignorance, ineptness, and bad luck, and it seems to him that his only success in his life is in tracking down failure with the sure touch of a divining rod. A merchant who has accomplished little (although he has a happy marriage, and his wife Rose does not find fault with him), Winthrop Hazlewood realizes that the theme that characterizes his existence is failure, in a way the suitable expression of his personality. He comes to believe that the money in his briefcase is almost obscene: “He didn’t deserve it.” While he contemplates his new prosperity and the opportunities now open to him and Rose, tears well in his eyes. He reaches for his handkerchief, and in doing so inadvertently lets the briefcase slip overboard. It falls into the water with a soft thud and sinks.
The story does not conclude here. Nonetheless, this is a critical juncture that enables us to understand the author’s deepest motivations. Highsmith was preoccupied with the theme of failure since her earliest recorded notes. Undated entries in her second notebook, which she kept from November 1939 to July 1940, broach an idea for a novel, namely the “story of a failure.” Failure, according to the young woman recording these notes, “inevitably” occurs more often than success. She then remarks: “A good man, thoughtful, sensitive, eternally optimistic at last sees himself honestly after middle age.” That, in a nutshell, is the portrait of Winthrop Hazlewood, who is capable of self-knowledge and assesses the circumstances of his existence without any self-deception.
I am not suggesting that the author’s early reflections inexorably led to a story that she wrote a full twelve years afterward, but rather that “Born Failure” is the outcome of a similar concern. Her actual plan to write a novel about a failed artist did not materialize. On September 14, 1940, Patricia Highsmith wrote in her notebook that she was exasperated about the “vagueness” of her prose as soon as she prepared to put her ideas into words. She realized what the problem was: Since she was still young, and every depiction of an artist in one way or another contains a self-portrait within it, she simply could not project herself into the role of an aging artist looking back. On September 19, 1940, she gave up on the idea of the artist figure (“too weak and vague”) and determined that she needed to model her characters on real life. In the same note, she quotes her professor at Barnard College, Ethel Sturtevant, who advised her that the ability to create literary characters by invention comes “with experience.”
Regardless of how Patricia Highsmith gained her new self-awareness— her unambitious stepfather, for one, provided a dismal example from an early age—by the time she was thirty-two years old, she wrote a story about the failed Winthrop Hazlewood, depicting his trials and tribulations with precision and economy, and unexpectedly giving an upward turn to his destiny instead of racing it down into the abyss. Far from being mocked and detested, Hazlewood is celebrated and hoisted up onto the shoulders of several men in the cheering crowd. This moment is important. It is less about poetic justice in the conventional sense, and certainly not about the question of whether Hazlewood has truly “deserved” the love of his wife and the friendship and recognition of his neighbors. (Of course he has.) But haven’t other Highsmith figures deserved more than they get? And if so, why do their paths so often lead downhill?
The turning point of “Born Failure,” where she must turn the story into a tragedy or a tale with a happy ending, is critical to our understanding of it. At this moment, readers’ expectations need to be satisfied or disappointed, genre conventions fulfilled or violated, interpretations offered or withheld. In this case, the author opts for a finale that recalls fairy tales: The immense material loss no longer matters; it is nothing compared to the self-reflection that the hero has undergone. And the woman whose husband has just allowed eighty thousand dollars to slip through his fingers pronounces herself happier than ever. Something in Winthrop Hazlewood’s life has apparently been fulfilled.
Likewise, several stories in this volume have what I might call an either/or situation, and they can just as easily conclude with positive or negative outcomes. One example is “A Bird in Hand,” an undated story to which neither the notebooks nor the diaries contain any reference. Placid, harmless Douglas McKenny enhances his meager income with chronic deceit. When a reporter gets wise to him, his very existence is threatened. Highsmith, however, gives a didactic twist to the story. McKenny makes people who have lost their parakeets happy by bringing them new birds and deluding them into thinking that the replacement birds are the ones that had taken wing. The fact that he amasses substantial monetary rewards for his efforts is beside the point. McKenny is friendly to his neighbors; he is a philanthropist of small gestures. “A Bird in Hand,” then, proves didactic in the sense that the basic dec
ency of the man—coupled with his love of animals—greatly outweighs the significance of his deceit.
Another story, “Man’s Best Friend,” written in July 1952, also lets the hero off the hook and allows him to establish a quiet, austere happiness. What matters most in this farcical story of a spurned lover is his ability to reclaim his squandered life. More clearly than in other stories, “Man’s Best Friend” provides us with a clearer understanding of how Highsmith devised her narrative structure. The author remarks on two occasions in her notebooks that the hero, a dentist named Dr. Fenton, who is driven into a corner by his unbearably civilized dog, ultimately commits suicide to throw off the yoke of his absurd moral servitude. The version finally put down on paper, however, goes no further than two suicide attempts, both of which are thwarted by the dog. (Douglas McKenny, in “A Bird in Hand,” also considers taking his life, before rejecting the idea as ignoble.) At the last second, the author shifts the motif of failure from one character to another. The story does not culminate with Dr. Fenton’s demise. Instead, the ending focuses on the woman with whom the dentist was so desperately in love years earlier. Now she has aged badly and become, in Dr. Fenton’s eyes, a caricature of her former self.
In switching back and forth between self-preservation and suicide, between salvation and devastation, Patricia Highsmith is concerned with the total picture, not with narrative components that can be inserted randomly, and most assuredly not with playful calculation. Yet, this existential gravity does not make every conclusion a successful one. Some appear to be deadly serious and rather leaden.
What we learn from the diaries and notebooks, on the whole, strips away any illusions about Patricia Highsmith’s commercial success as a writer. On December 30, 1963, she notes that the sale of the story “The Hate Murders” (retitled “Music to Die By” in this collection)—which she claimed not to “love very much”—to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine marked the end of a seven-month phase of utter financial drought. That was a bitter pill for her to swallow, because the 1960s were a phase of intense, wide-ranging work that included essays and reviews. In ten years, after all, she completed seven novels among which we find some of her best work. However, even fine books like The Two Faces of January and The Glass Cell were first rejected in America, and not until 1968, as Patricia Highsmith stated in an interview, did she begin to find herself in reasonable financial shape. If we keep in mind the emotional turmoil surrounding her stay in England—her girlfriend had a husband and child in London and made only rare appearances in Aldeburgh—the potential for failure in the author’s everyday life takes on daunting dimensions.
A similar turn of events threatens the hero of the story “Variations on a Game,” which was outlined in 1958 but not published until 1973 in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. The misogynistic lines in the story’s conclusion show a certain similarity with the novel The Cry of the Owl, which was written some four years later. In both cases, fingerprints appear on the knife that was used as a murder weapon, and in both instances, the main character succeeds in getting out of a tight spot. The women in both texts have unpleasant fates that await them. In view of the malice with which several of Patricia Highsmith’s female characters are abused and punished, it seems quite plausible that she was taking literary revenge on unreliable friends.
The diaries do not contain a single word about the remarkable story “A Girl like Phyl.” We know next to nothing about it apart from the simple fact that it first appeared in 1980 in the German edition of Playboy. There is occasional mention in the notebooks of the name “Phyllis,” denoting a certain type of young, conservative, and distinguished upper-class woman. Perhaps it is sufficient to say that the story is one of the most impressive in the volume. What it shows us is how disappointments in life create their own framework, and how the unresolved past informs and corrodes the present. The long passage describing the night in the hotel, in which the businessman Jeff Cormack vacillates between curiosity, longing, reticence, and shock, is the product of a consummate author.
—First section translated by Burton Pike,
second section by Shelley Frisch
The recipient of the prestigious Alfred Kerr Prize in literary criticism in 1997, Paul Ingendaay is one of Germany’s most influential and respected literary authorities. Born in 1961 in Cologne, he wrote his dissertation on William Gaddis, and is regarded as one of the leading voices of a younger generation of German critics. Given that the scholarly work on Patricia Highsmith is only in its infancy, Ingendaay is at the forefront of this field. Since 1998, he has been a cultural correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Madrid.
NOTES ON THE STORIES
by Anna von Planta
The files of Patricia Highsmith are so massive that when spread out they are 150 feet in length. The literary papers in a narrower sense contain typescripts of short stories, essays, poems, plays, television scripts, radio plays, workbooks, novels (fragments and manuscripts withdrawn by Patricia Highsmith at the time of their composition as not intended for publication), travel reports, and children’s stories. The author preserved this material in a total of fifteen accordion files. The files “Oldest Short Stories 1945–1955 c.,” “Middle Short Stories,” “Short Stories 1972–74–78– 80–81–82,” and “Short Stories 1983–88” contain over 120 short story typescripts and print versions. Some fifty of them are typescripts or first printed versions of stories that were later included in the seven story collections she published during her lifetime. Of the more than eighty other surviving stories, more than half have presumably never been published worldwide. Hardly any of them have ever appeared in book form.
Patricia Highsmith published her first story at seventeen in The Bluebird, the Julia Richman High School magazine. Until the appearance of her first published novel, Strangers on a Train, she earned her living from short stories, along with writing texts for comics, and secretarial work. For her, these stories were in a double sense a necessity. This was so even if until 1965, when she presumably spoke about it publicly for the first time, she was known only as a writer of novels: “And short stories are absolutely essential to me, like poetry: I write a lot of both. Only a fraction of the stories I have written ever appeared in print.” (Interview with Francis Wyndham: “Sick of Psychopaths,” in The Sunday Times, London, April 11, 1965.) Yet her first volume of short stories, Eleven, which appeared five years later in 1970 after she had published thirteen novels, contained only stories that had previously been published in magazines or anthologies, and which moreover (with few exceptions, like the story “The Heroine,” first published in 1945), had all been written or first printed in the 1960s.
The author’s handwritten notes and assessments on the typescript pages of the unpublished stories indicate that in 1966, Patricia Highsmith was first examining the unpublished typescripts of her short stories. Maurice Richardson wished to include her in an anthology, and her American publisher, Doubleday, was interested in publishing a volume of stories (later, in 1970, to be published as Eleven in Britain and as The Snail-Watcher in the United States, with a foreword by Graham Greene). In 1973, the author was again revising, or discarding, unpublished typescripts: “Lately—last couple of weeks—I am clearing out old files, incredible 300 pages or so of useless, rotten old short stories bit the dust. Good riddance.” (In a letter to her friend Kate Kingsley Skattebol, July 9, 1973.)
Yet hardly any of the short stories she retained were included in her subsequent collections. One reason might be that the volumes that appeared in 1975 and 1977—The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder and Little Tales of Misogyny, as coordinated cycles of short stories dedicated to a central theme—did not lend themselves thematically to the inclusion of the “Oldest” or “Middle Short Stories.” But the next collection, too, the short story volume Slowly, Slowly in the Wind, contains only more recent stories that had been first published in the 1970s, and the subsequent c
ollections also almost always contain her most recent productions.
Part I of this volume of stories from Patricia Highsmith’s papers contains the majority of the short stories preserved in the archives and written between 1938 and 1949. Excluded from the start were those stories that had remained fragmentary, as well as those clearly left in the state of preliminary draft or those that Patricia Highsmith herself called unready or unsuitable for publication. Also not selected were commissioned pieces or detective stories that Highsmith called purely “commercial stories,” which moreover are often only variations of other stories that already appeared in book form. From the remainder fourteen short stories have been chosen for the first part of this book, and fourteen of the best or most representative of the later period 1952–1982 appear in Part II. Most of the unpublished stories are undated. With the exception of the three earliest—“Quiet Night,” “Miss Juste and the Green Rompers,” and “A Mighty Nice Man”—which appeared in the Barnard Quarterly and whose handwritten or typescript versions were not preserved, all the stories in Part I were found in the file “Oldest Short Stories 1945–1955 c.,” to which belong also five stories of Part II (“The Returnees,” “Born Failure,” “Man’s Best Friend,” “A Bird in Hand,” and “The Trouble with Mrs. Blynn, the Trouble with the World”). Most of the stories of Part II, however, are from the file “Middle Short Stories,” with the exception of “The Second Cigarette” and “Two Disagreeable Pigeons,” which are from the file “Short Stories 1972–74–78–80–81–82.” Because of Highsmith’s many travels, moves, and change of agents, the publication history of many stories is obscure, compounded by the fact that there remains so little secondary literature. In addition, the author herself often provided incomplete, false, or contradictory information about the individual stories.
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