These philosophical and sometimes grumpy journals were unearthed after the death of the elder of the suspense novel, revealing her dual identity, her contempt for others, and her pornographic misfortune

Last modified on Sunday, November 21, 2021 03.38 EST

When Patricia Highsmith looked in the mirror, she saw a lover and a killer. In the early days, the reflected face had a charming feline charm, but Highsmith said in 1942 that she seemed to belong to "another terrible hell and unknown world" out of sight. As she got older, what she saw through the "distorted lens of evil in my eyes" changed: now with a hoarse voice, the fire-breathing ogre stared back. Highsmith knew that "everyone has two people." A nightmare in 1953 confirmed this duality. She dreamed that she was burning a naked girl shivering in a wooden bathtub; there were papers on the funeral pyre, probably Highsmith's manuscript. After waking up, she admitted: "I have two identities: a victim and a murderer."

Therefore, the characters in Highsmith's novels appear in pairs, and the twins are victims of the break in what she calls the "universal law of unity". Among the strangers on the train, the upright Guy and the cunning Bruno started out as opposed to each other, but ended up as psychic twins after they exchanged murders. Tom in "Mr. Genius Ripley" kills the charming Dickie and then impersonates him. In the lesbian romance novel "The Price of Salt", the housewife Carol and the girl Teresa merged, and then separated by social opposition: Murder, for Highsmith, is "a kind of sex", here is replaced by a climax .

Highsmith sees writing, drinking, and sex as her addictive vices, and like a true decadent, she sees illness as an aesthetic gift: she wrote down the cost of salt when she had chickenpox, and believed The fever made her prose dizzy. After her death in 1995, her diary was unearthed in the linen closet, recording the misfortunes of alcoholism and pornography, casually recording the suicide attempts of women she refused or betrayed; she often encrypted entries in foreign languages, perhaps for alienation and denial Her behavior. In her notebook, a more sober Highsmith analyzed her own neurosis in depth and pondered the physics and metaphysics of the world of nuclear fission in the 1940s. "God and the devil," she suggested in an entry, "dancing hand in hand around every atom." Those positive and negative energies continue to argue among her self-divided individuals, who believe that love is radioactivity released by explosions: salt Carol thought that Teresa had "flyed out of space" and landed on her lap.

The binary division that afflicts Highsmith the most is the issue of gender. As a primitive prank, God or his demonic dual roles divide us into males and females. However, Pat protested and announced at the age of 12 that she was a boy who had been wrongly assigned to a girl. In 1948, Highsmith wrote in her diary "I want to change my gender" and asked sadly: "Is this possible?" Have penis jealousy. At least once she overcame a flaw in her imagination: fantasizing about her current girlfriend, she reported that "I had to go to the bathroom to relieve my big erection." In an ultra-kinky episode, she teases gay photographer Rolf Tietgens by posing as male stickers. "Yes, he treats me like a boy," she smirked, "because my body is hard and straight." She did bravely try to kiss a man, even though it felt like kissing a flounder; she even had a diaphragm, she Describe it as the "sign of a prostitute."

Sharing the same bed with other women, Highsmith assumes masculine duties. "Kiss her deftly," she swaggered. Another time she regretted her partner "I don't know when I will come", and then dealt with dressing up by guessing "She must have done it before!"! When she was most promiscuous, she was like a male slutty, recording his success. Mozart’s Don Juan has his encyclopedia list, and Highsmith drew a chart to rank her lover. She was startled slightly and asked: "Oh my god, how many women do I want?"; like a person with an overburdened hydraulic system, she protested ": "I am not a machine! "

This kind of ruthless cat implies that Highsmith's motive may be both a passionate desire and a desire for power. "Owning a car," she declared at the age of 20, "like a woman who owns her own." The converse is even more so, because the female body she brutally treated was the vehicle she drove. If her conquest defiles herself verbally, the satisfaction will increase: "When she uses swear words, she excites me!" she said after a delightful X-rated frolic. In 1968, Jacqueline Kennedy's affair with Onassis angered Highsmith, and he roared that "women can sleep on everything." However, her problem is not so much misogyny as human misogyny: just like Ripley, the psychiatric aesthetician in her five novels about him, she dislikes humans. In 1942, while walking through Central Park, she transformed her fellow New Yorkers into "amorphous underwater creatures." "I'm not interested in people, I know them," she sneered in another diary.

This should be a disqualification for novelists, but Highsmith’s distinctive existential fable ignores our complex relationships with friends, family, and society as a whole. She found that people couldn't bear it because they were her own version, so she designed a house with almost no windows in Switzerland, where she spent her last years in the haggard mountains. My acquaintances who visited are discouraged from comparing her home to Hitler's bunker.

Desire to surpass humble humans, Highsmith hopes in her diary that she can become a giant, and dream of becoming a god in a more grandiose daydream. "A person needs a wife," she said casually when she moved into her new home, but for family companionship, she prefers gastropods: she keeps snails as pets, then hides them in a bra and smuggles them from France to England , As if she was breastfeeding them. They are squishy and disgusting, and they are reinforced in their shells, just like the increasing number of crustaceans Highsmith himself. She imagined a nuclear disaster that would allow snails to survive and thrive on the radiated earth again.

Many of her short stories are fables of the beasts, realigning the relationship between humans and species that we consider to be inferior. In one scene, a boy slaughtered his mother after cooking a tortoise he had made; in another article, the owner of a German shepherd dog committed suicide because he was ashamed of the noble demeanor of the dog; the third recorded The career of an arrogant cockroach is proud of its luxurious address. Highsmith admires animals because they can’t kill: when visiting Ascona, she saw a slender snake gracefully devouring a live frog-it was a natural process, not Ripley’s unprovoked Execution. When she dedicated a novel to her cat spider, she came closest to empathizing with another creature, only to dispel sentimental tenderness by admitting in a poem that her yellow-eyed pet could not read the tribute.

The dualism that plagued Highsmith formed a wedge in this huge volume. Her diary was scribbled by a grumpy tomboy who turned into a grumpy dragon, nasty, chaotic, and—as her prejudice increased—often annoying. These notebooks are more clear-headed and contain happy love lyrics, easy investigations of European landscapes, and bold philosophical contemplations. Highsmith is curious about the composure of her snail as it slides on the edge of the razor blade, and she is interested in Kierkegaard's account of our anxiety about walking tightrope in life. However, when the Danish theologian "Leap of Faith" entered the unknown world, she refused to follow him. Instead, she challenged by asking God: "Do you have the courage to show me hell?" The deity she chose was savage and deadly, and one of the entries, raging in sin, ended with a pagan prayer-"Shiva Ah! Oh Pluto! Oh Saturn! Oh, Hecate!" But she carefully appeased the established religion, and in a village on the Hudson River, she sang in the local Presbyterian choir.

Ripley collects paintings and plays the harpsichord. Highsmith can both paint and sculpt-usually she makes the best sculpts when angry, using her tools as weapons-and is also fascinated by music. In the notebook, she overheard the rehearsal of the afterlife in Mozart's Requiem, dazzlingly turned the Vienna waltz, and rebuked a young man who wanted to have sex while listening to Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde". The "blasphemy". "Music," she concluded in 1973, "established the fact that life is not true"-for me, this is the most striking sentence in this thousand pages. Elsewhere, she weakened this romantic sublimation. A diary in 1949 asserted that "there is no reality, there is only a stopgap... the system on which people live". The two people living in Highsmith gave contradictory statements. Her side surpassed the world as if Carol and Teresa were in a brief escape. Another Ripley who imitated vengeance condemned the world as a mausoleum and increased its corpse inventory.

Unfortunately, Highsmith’s bold and disturbing novels have been replaced by some recognized excellent film adaptations-Hitchcock’s "Stranger on the Train", Anthony Minghella’s "Mr. Genius Ripley", Wim Wenders’ American Friends (based on Ripley’s game) and Todd Haynes’s Carroll. Although some of her works originally appeared on the dirty pages of Ellery Quinn’s mystery magazine, she has always insisted that her models are Dostoevsky and Kafka, and the notebook shows that she belongs to Near them. But before you read, you should cheer yourself up: Highsmith compares herself to a "steel needle," and her insight is like piercing her body with complacency. She is the murderer and we are all victims.

Patricia Highsmith's diary and notebook are published by Orion (£30). To support The Guardian and The Observer, please order your copy on Guardianbookshop.com. May charge for shipping