This idealism, which was largely based on an economy of means, was from the beginning a component of Patricia Highsmith’s artistic thinking. Hardly less urgent was the far more prosaic problem of keeping her head above water in New York. After graduating from Barnard College in 1942, Patricia Highsmith found a position writing texts for comic books. On the side she had the time to do some minor editing and got assignments to write essays for which she was poorly paid. It was apparent from very early on that writing was her “Lebensmittel,” her means of living, as she noted in her diary in curious but appropriate German. But why, one wonders today, did it take her a good thirty years, until 1970, to first publish her stories in book form in Eleven? And why did she, with few exceptions, leave out her stories written between 1938 and 1949, which comprise the present Part I of her uncollected and mostly unpublished stories?
There is no clear answer to these questions; there are at best hints that require interpretation. Highsmith, who was born in 1921, strove to be independent, worked freelance, and therefore needed money. Whatever she aspired to had to be struggled for. Even when she was a student, we can assume that she had a sharp sense of the commodity value of literature. What she wrote, however, did not always turn out to be marketable, and her native land remained an unreliable partner throughout her life. It may even be guessed that the need for profit and the “impure” conditions under which she wrote her stories—repeated workings of drafts to satisfy editors, shortening the stories, changing the titles, not to mention countless rejections—may have vitiated her own perception of the quality of her writing. The present volume amply proves that her early work contains some remarkable stories.
Highsmith published her first important stories in the student magazine Barnard Quarterly, of which she was editor in chief in her senior year (1942). During her college years, she found the time to work with communist youth groups; read avidly in literature and philosophy; and take courses in Latin, Greek, German, and zoology, as well as writing courses on the short story and plays. She was curious, ambitious, and restless, her schedule always on overload. Surprisingly, the Second World War seems not to have entered her consciousness: Roosevelt’s death in 1945 is noted in her diaries, but no details of the global earthquake that resulted from World War II. Private concerns, on the other hand, are a major theme. Frequently expressed is her sense of oppression, compounded by her need to return every evening to the constricting apartment of her mother and stepfather on the Upper East Side.
Not that she dutifully returned there every night. As a student Patricia Highsmith had an active social life for which she ultimately put even politics aside, and one can deduce from the earliest surviving entries that her mother was pleased neither by the company she kept nor the “masculinization” of her appearance. Remarkably, despite an imposing sequence of lesbian friendships and brief affairs, Patricia Highsmith could not summon up the courage to tell her mother (who suspected something but did not know) the truth about her sexual orientation. She even submitted for a while to psychotherapy in order to be “cured” of her “condition.” It is fortunate that the travesty of a bourgeois marriage, which she and a friend were considering for a long time, was never celebrated.
There is an obvious connection between her writing and her friendships. On the one hand, Patricia Highsmith wanted to earn money with her typewriter; she saw herself—correctly—as the “strong” half of all her relationships. Yet on the other hand, after a successful so-called conquest, she quickly became bored, jealously defending the time she reserved for writing, and complaining in her diary that she needed to endure the adventure of writing by herself. In 1943, after she was hired by the comics publisher Fawcett, she rented her first apartment, on Fifty-sixth Street on the East Side, quite near her parents.
We know from these first few months away from home a number of things about Patricia Highsmith: that she cleverly painted walls and furniture and in the evenings read Kafka; what she ate, how much money she spent; with whom she socialized, with whom she slept and how often. The picture is more diffuse if one tries to grasp her aesthetic ideas, not because they are unclear but because the insights that pour forth incessantly are not always coherent. Patricia Highsmith had not even decided whether she wanted to be a painter or a writer, a question that was not resolved until 1944.
She experimented with both short and long forms. At twenty she already realized that she was not interested in mere storytelling for the sake of plot and tension. Since she had become more reflective, she felt she would need to write less. Moreover, she was more inclined to the novel than to the short story, because she saw no value in even the best stories. Six months later, however, in August 1941, she is “very, very happy” and dreamily thinks of spinning out short stories as delicate as smoke rings. With these kinds of entries, her thinking seems to have drifted completely away from economic considerations. At twenty-six, she comments on her hope to reconcile at some future stage “commercial” and “artistic” writing, an idea that strikes us as profoundly American.
Commercialism as such, in any case, might have discouraged the author in later years from carefully reviewing the stories of this period and selecting some for book publication. She might have been similarly hesitant given the stories’ multiplicity of tones, themes, and stylistic registers. The stories assembled here from posthumous papers in Part I are not mere detective or suspense or animal stories but complex psychological tales—about little girls, middle-aged women and middle-aged men, about accepted and illicit morality. They follow no pattern, no single method. In some cases, they do not even seem to emerge from the same hand.
Looking for the type of character most frequently encountered among the fourteen stories collected in Part I, the reader is in for a surprise. While her novels are mostly about men in their early thirties—the typical Highsmith hero is sensitive, cultivated, well bred, not necessarily handsome but not ugly either, and in no case fat—the young, twenty-five-year-old author finds her most interesting figures in fading women who have to assert themselves in dreary, boring lives. Three stories, which are among the strongest in the collection, present unattached, rather agitated heroines who risk the danger of being run over by the trauma of what has become everyday life. “Where the Door Is Always Open and the Welcome Mat Is Out,” “Doorbell for Louisa,” and “The Still Point of the Turning World” offer three small portraits of souls, written with a mercilessly precise sense of daily routine, surroundings, and weather.
When Mrs. Robinson in “The Still Point of the Turning World” accidentally witnesses a scene on a park bench, she does have an intimation that because of her conventionality and narrow-mindedness she has missed out on much of life. Overcoming her curiosity, she takes her spruce, neatly combed son by the hand and walks past the pair of lovers out of the park. Her last glance as she leaves is the instant in which her character is momentarily revealed: a mixture of envy and pride, longing and self-righteousness.
Patricia Highsmith commented extensively on this story, one in which she repeatedly changes perspective in a way that she otherwise spurned. For one thing, “The Still Point of the Turning World” was written just after the author had separated from an important woman friend. The kiss of the lovers in this story, she wrote, is the kiss of this friend, which she, the author, will no longer experience (and the jealousy that she depicts so brilliantly was at the moment of writing already her own). But she was also happy with her work, and expressed this time and again—in German—in her diary: “God! I feel my power—if I can only maintain the good condition of my mind, my mood!” (This in August of 1947.) And a day later: “Am very happy and full of peace.”
Despite her own sense of accomplishment, Harper’s Bazaar rejected the story. That October, Today’s Woman expressed interest. In November, however, she heard from an editor at the magazine who advised “smoother transitions.” In the pages of her diary the author explodes: “Just what I
did not want!” But she reconsidered and revised the text. In December, the story was sold to Today’s Woman for eight hundred dollars. It appeared sixteen months later, in March 1949, under a different title. Quite a few compromises for eight hundred dollars.
In a certain sense, the two other stories about middle-aged women—“Where the Door Is Always Open and the Welcome Mat Is Out” and “Doorbell for Louisa”—can be read as complementary interpretations of one and the same observation: What happens when a person gives herself over to the dictates of her compulsive work and organizing delusions? If she collapses, who notices it? If she holds out, who rewards her? “Where the Door Is Always Open and the Welcome Mat Is Out” describes a minutely detailed defeat in a struggle against the big city, circumstances, and the clock. But here the woman, who in spite of the best of intentions makes a mess of everything, prefers to hang on to the life she has chosen for herself. Like a hamster on its wheel she will remain frantically in motion until her heart gives out. Louisa Trotte, the main character in the other story, is of a similar stripe. But here, in a story about sacrifice and solidarity, everything turns out well: Louisa’s work is not in vain, but useful and appreciated. At the end, her employer even invites her out for dinner, which Louisa hopes will be at the Plaza Hotel— more than just a hint of a happy ending. And yet the two stories do resemble each other in that their final sentences are totally open to possibility, a kingdom in which the happy are apparently no happier than the failures.
The middle-aged women in Part I have a male colleague and comrade in misery, as in the story “Magic Casements.” Highsmith’s male characters are somewhat more passive and melancholy. Such a person, sad and worked over by life (but not lacking for money), meets a woman who attracts and fascinates him. They start talking in his favorite bar, have a few drinks, seem to understand each other in some intuitive way, make a date on which their exchange seems to reach a note even more intimate. At the next rendezvous on the following day, in a museum, the woman doesn’t show. The man finds out that she has left town. He stays behind, alone.
This is a recurrent theme throughout Highsmith’s stories. Yet their desolate sense of daily routine, briefly interrupted by an enchantment brought on by a meeting of like-minded souls, only to be followed by disappointment—the deadened steps of a figure abandoned to mourning—has been captured in exquisite detail. “Magic Casements” is one of those stories sketched in the notebook with great precision, almost overelaborated, and the actual writing seeks to free the story from a plot that has become too complicated. There is no doubt that Patricia Highsmith’s ambition in her early short fiction was to be a craftsperson, without regard to commercial success.
Some of Highsmith’s older stories slumber in a dim past; others seize a later generation more strongly than they did their first readers, such as they were. The latter is the case with “A Mighty Nice Man,” written about 1940, a story from Highsmith’s college days, and “The Mightiest Mornings.” At the center of both stories is the relationship between an adult man and a small girl he does not know. But the theme of pedophilia (in the 1940s one spoke of the “bad uncle”) plays no role on the surface of “A Mighty Nice Man.” Patricia Highsmith seems above all interested in what the little girl—and later, her clumsily flirting mother—sees in the stranger who owns the fine car. In this sense the story is quite radical. For with her innocent gaze, the child “recognizes” something that adults at best deduce as subtext: the conditions of sexual transaction.
In “The Mightiest Mornings” (1945) several themes are superimposed. There is a rumor that the town’s new arrival, Aaron Bentley, might be having forbidden relations with ten-year-old Freya, herself a social outsider. When the contempt from the town becomes tangible, Aaron and Freya retreat to an attitude of “arrogant innocence.” Aaron soon notices that the notion of guilt directed at him is actually taking root in him. In an almost masochistic form of acceptance, he internalizes the view that the muted majority has of the minority (himself) and he leaves the small town: Aaron imbibes a guilt that is not his and allows it to drive him into action. In the notebook draft, Bentley was sketched as an ambiguous man; in the final story, however, he becomes the early model of all Highsmith heroes who have less to fear from others than themselves.
Given the prevailing views of the era, it does not come as a surprise that the story was rejected several times, first by The Atlantic Monthly, then by Mademoiselle—an example of inspired writing that misses its target market. The present edition offers the first publication ever of “The Mightiest Mornings.” In any event, as far as we can see, Patricia Highsmith enjoyed working on it. “Read Proust,” she noted in her diary in November 1945. “And of course—my story.”
II
Like the stories in the first part of this collection, those in the “Middle and Later Stories” transcend the time in which they were written. It is difficult to fathom why Highsmith did not seek to publish them or what caused her reservations about her own work. Still, the stories managed to survive and were not among the roughly three hundred pages of short fiction that she destroyed after a process of meticulous inspection.
The stories in Part II are collected from the fifties, sixties, and seventies, the decades in which Patricia Highsmith earned a reputation in Europe as a “literary” suspense writer, a category that was highly unusual at the time. Any attempt at greater precision would only obfuscate matters, because she is essentially a writer who defies easy categorization. The texts that appear in the “Middle and Later Stories” encompass the entire range of Highsmith’s writings—psychological narrative, prose farce, crime or suspense story, and ghost and animal story. Moreover, they might also have had a role in helping Patricia Highsmith cope with personal conflicts that unsettled her apparently serene secluded life. They can therefore be read on several levels: as literary narratives, as a testing ground for recurrent motifs in her writing, and sometimes even as encoded diaries, if we couple our readings of the texts with scrutiny of the documentary evidence—the author’s diaries and notebooks—housed in the Swiss Literature Archives in Berne.
It is not very likely that Patricia Highsmith herself would have compiled and prepared for publication such a diverse volume spanning all these decades. However, the work is hardly a violation of her will; on the contrary, Nothing That Meets the Eye can be seen as a liberation—from the self-doubts assailing her as a writer and the conditions under which she earned her living. We may therefore feel justified today in rescuing undeservedly unknown or forgotten texts of considerable quality from the paper grave of her literary estate. Despite their consistent literary mastery, their central motif can be summed up in a single word: failure.
For reasons that I am at a loss to explain in detail, “The Trouble with Mrs. Blynn” strikes me as the jewel of Part II. Readers might be puzzled to find it marked with the Highsmith tag. Nothing uncanny, odd, or abysmal occurs. There is neither quirk nor anomaly to marvel at. Certainly nothing on the order of a murder takes place. The story simply centers on a small, mean-spirited calculation that offers the reader a quick glimpse into the much greater and incorrigible mean-spiritedness of the world.
An old lady is dying. The house in which she lies, a small cottage on the English east coast, has been rented for only a few weeks. Likewise rented: a housekeeper and a nurse. This nurse, the widowed Mrs. Blynn, was herself a former resident of the house. Now, she is watching Mrs. Palmer die. Her steely eyes pass through the text as a leitmotif. Her gaze alights on everything that the dying woman has gathered around her, including an amethyst pin. In Highsmith’s notebooks, we find the following exquisite, solemn statement, dated July 24, 1964: “The world widens when death comes near, all that lies in us is apparent—our lens has widened, and certainly it is too much for the average person.”
The notion that the world “widens” as death approaches and that everything presses to the surface so as to shock those who are
not dying unfolds almost imperceptibly in the story. The pattern strikes us as natural as calm breathing. Quite likely the author experienced little difficulty in identifying with the old lady who lies down to die far from home. Patricia Highsmith herself, shortly after completing the first draft of the novel The Glass Cell in December 1963, moved from Italy to Aldeburgh in Suffolk, in the south of England, to be with a girlfriend. Visiting the place half a year earlier, she described the dreariness and the stormy climate of Aldeburgh in her diary: “It is hard to imagine anyone wintering here by choice, for Aldeburgh alone. For the people here, it is different: they are married to it and cannot get away.”
This inability to get away—because of disease or death—is exactly what underlies “The Trouble with Mrs. Blynn.” The motionless body and the widened lens focus the situation with complete clarity. Everything happens as it is bound to happen. As Highsmith’s notebook reveals, Mrs. Palmer sees in the face of the nurse “a cosmic vision of life and of everything that went wrong with life. The nurse is like misfortune, a failure of understanding, a misreading of goodwill, the shutting of the heart” (November 22, 1963).
The pure, defenseless Mrs. Palmer is joined by another equally virtuous soul in the title story “Nothing That Meets the Eye,” which may have been written at about the same time. This character, however, is altogether different. Whereas Mrs. Palmer sinks into her cushions and shrinks in stature, Helene Sacher-Hartmann seems to bloom in the Austrian winter resort and to make the whole world fall at her feet. The aura she generates deludes everyone she meets. Helene, healthy and sociable, seeks out death with a determination that we might almost call cheery.
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