Nothing That Meets the Eye (56 page)

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

T
he 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 collections 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.

The editors were able to rely on documents in the Highsmith papers and archives, recently made extensively available, in the Swiss Literary Archives in Berne, for the Afterword and the following record of the publication history. The notebooks and diaries there, which amount to about 8,000 handwritten pages, were particularly useful.

The distinction between notebooks and diaries in Patricia Highsmith's case is by no means absolute. Many diaries contain working notes, while the notebooks record not only ideas for books but also places, names, (encoded) meetings, ordinary daily routines, poems (by herself and others), notes on her reading, quotations, and thoughts about American and world politics. There are thirty-seven notebooks that the author kept between 1938 and 1992, nineteen from the period before 1950, the year of publication of her first novel, Strangers on a Train, and eighteen diaries (1941 to 1984), which contain only sporadic entries after 1954. Altogether, the diaries are far less important than the notebooks, for Highsmith worked these notebooks continually, while the diaries expanded for years without being drawn upon for new projects.

PART I: EARLY STORIES, 1938–1949

“The Mightiest Mornings.” 31 pp. TS (typescript), undated. Written (first as “The Mightiest Mountains”) between July 10, 1945, and February 15, 1946. Unpublished.

“Uncertain Treasure.” Written November–December 1942, first published in
Home and Food
(New York), August 1943, vol. 6, no. 21, pp. 15, 27, 32–34.

“Magic Casements.” 19 pp. TS, undated, written under the alternative titles “The Magic Casements” and “The Faery Lands Forlorn” between ca. December 1945 and the end of February 1946. Unpublished.

“Miss Juste and the Green Rompers.” Written in 1941, first appeared in
Barnard Quarterly,
vol. XVII, no. 4, Spring II, 1941, pp. 19–26.

“Where the Door Is Always Open and the Welcome Mat Is Out.” Two versions, both undated, both unpublished; the first version of 22 TS pp., second, shortened version (titled “The Welcome Mat”) of 17 TS pp., written between February 1945 and April 1947, revised in 1949. This edition is based on the first, longer version.

“In the Plaza.” 28 pp. TS, undated, written in Taxco, Mexico, in April 1948. Unpublished.

“The Hollow Oracle” (untitled by PH, title provided by editor from PH text). 14 pp. TS, undated. Presumably written between September and November 1942. Unpublished.

“The Great Cardhouse.” 19 pp. TS, written August/September 1949. First published in
Story
, vol. 36, issue 3, no. 140, May–June 1963, pp. 32–48.

“The Car.” Two undated TS versions, both 22 pp., one (presumably later) version with corrections of Spanish phrases. A first draft was written in March 1945, which PH revised in December 1962. This edition is based on the corrected (presumably later) version. Unpublished.

“The Still Point of the Turning World.” 20 pp. TS, undated, written between August and November 1947, first published as “The Envious One” in
Today's Woman
, March 1949.

“The Pianos of the Steinachs.” 41 pp. TS, dated by PH 1947, written between ca. December 1946 and May 1947. Unpublished.

“A Mighty Nice Man.” Written in ca. 1940, first published in
Barnard Quarterly
, vol. XV, no. 3, Spring 1940, pp. 34–40.

“Quiet Night.” Two versions; the first version presumably written in New York in 1938 or 1939, first published in
Barnard Quarterly
, Fall 1939, pp. 5–10; twenty-seven years later, in February 1966, PH revised and lengthened the story, which was published as “The Cries of Love” in
Woman's Home Journal
, January 1968, and in book form in PH,
Eleven
, London: Heinemann 1970 (U.S. edition titled
The Snail-Watcher
and
Other Stories
, published by Doubleday, 1970).

“Doorbell for Louisa.” 26 pp. TS, with a handwritten 1973 note by PH, “Cosmopolitan 1948?” while her diary tells of having sold the story to
Woman's Home Companion
on September 3, 1946. Unpublished.

PART II: MIDDLE AND LATER STORIES, 1952–1982

“A Bird in Hand.” 19 pp. TS, undated. Unpublished.

“Music to Die By.” 15 pp. TS, written in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, between December 1962 and August 1963. First published as “The Hate Murders” in
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
, May 1965, pp. 11–22; first published in book form (in French translation) as “Une logique folle” in PH,
Le jardin des disparus
, Paris: Calmann-Lévy 1982. (New title applied by editor from PH text.)

“Man's Best Friend.” 16 pp. TS, undated, written between July 3 and 9, 1952. Unpublished.

“Born Failure.” 18 pp. TS, undated. Written between May 22 and 29, 1953. Unpublished.

“A Dangerous Hobby.” First story outline in June 1959. First published as “The Thrill Seeker” in
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
, August 1960, pp. 10–21; handwritten note by PH on magazine copy, “A Dangerous Hobby.” First published in book form (in French translation) as “L'amateur de frissons” in
Les cadavres exquis
, Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1989 (as “The Thrill Seeker” in PH,
Chillers
, London: Penguin, 1990).

“The Returnees.” 24 pp. TS, undated, written in Munich and Paris between September and October 1952. Unpublished.

“Nothing That Meets the Eye.” 22 pp. TS, undated. Presumably written in April 1964. Unpublished.

“Two Disagreeable Pigeons.” 9 pp. TS, undated, first story outline December 21, 1973. Unpublished.

“Variations on a Game.” 19 pp. TS, undated. First story outline February 1958. First published in
Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine
, vol. 18, February 1973, pp. 22–35. First published in book form (in French translation) in
Photo à l'arrivée
, Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1995.

“A Girl like Phyl.” 29 pp. TS, undated. First published (in German translation) as “Ein Mädchen wis Phyl” in (German)
Playboy
, vol. 8, 1980; first published in book form (in French translation) as “Le portrait de sa mère” in PH,
Le jardin des disparus
, Paris: Calmann-Lévy 1982.

“It's a Deal.” 14 pp. TS, undated. First story outline in October 1963, first published (in German translation) as “Quitt” in
Tintenfass
24, Zurich: Diogenes, 2000.

“Things Had Gone Badly.” 17 pp. TS, undated. First story outline in June 1978. First published in
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
, March 10, 1980, pp. 64–78. First published in book form as “Un meurtre” in PH,
Le jardin des disparus
, Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1982.

“The Trouble with Mrs. Blynn, the Trouble with the World.” 11 pp. TS, undated. Probably written in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, in 1963/1964. First published in
The New Yorker
, May 27, 2002.

“The Second Cigarette.” 19 pp. TS, undated, written (under alternative titles “Twin Story” and “Poynters”) between April 1976 and January 1978. First published (in French translation) as “La deuxième cigarette” in
On ne peut compter sur personne
, Paris: Calmann-Lévy 1996.

Anna von Planta, an editor at Diogenes Verlag in Zürich, was Patricia Highsmith's primary editor from 1985 until her death in 1995. She continues her work with the literary estate.