If you scope the territory, you’ll quickly establish that I’m not the first commentator on record to mention expatriated American writer Patricia Highsmith in the same breath as Dostoevsky. How could I be? Above all, of course, we are thinking primarily of the Dostoevsky of Crime and Punishment, a thunderous and weirdly still novel in which the author commits a theoretical murder by having his antihero do the actual deed. Dostoevsky’s novel has two basic parts or components that might themselves be said to be mimetic of the two kinds of novels Highsmith herself tended to write. First, Crime and Punishment is about the rationalizations and snowballing antisocial animus of a criminal mind in the process of talking itself through a series of fateful transgressions, then it becomes a kind of cat-and-mouse story about this hapless guilt-wracked criminal, Raskolnikov, as he falls under the suspicion of Porfiry, the police inspector, and the two men enter thereafter into a kind of vertiginous dance of entrapment and evasion. We could to a large extent split Highsmith’s novels into two categories: firstly those that detail, often with something close to controlled glee, the aberrant stratagems of twisted minds (Deep Water, A Suspension of Mercy); and secondarily the cat-and-mouse thrillers (Strangers on a Train, A Game for the Living, Those Who Walk Away). The cat-and-mouse thrillers always feature at least one character who is seriously pathological and even the more straight-laced characters in Highsmith are at least a little kinked, often increasingly so as the pressure mounts. The Talented Mr. Ripley, Highsmith’s most popular novel and probably her best, is an exemplary case because it is the novel that best balances and co-mobilizes the two modes that usually find separate vehicles in her work. The subsequent Ripley novels also fit this composite model and Ripley Under Ground is the Highsmith novel closest in spirit and form to Crime and Punishment.
While Patricia Highsmith 1977’s masterpiece Edith’s Diary looks back to the earlier novels about kooks and cranks turned potentially dangerous, it looks immediately back also to A Dog’s Ransom and forward to Found in the Street because it upends standard genre templates with sophistication and panache, and because it focuses on specific American milieus with heightened attention to socioeconomic and sociohistorical factors, implicit here being the fact that it was a birth country to which the author hoped never to return. Edith’s Diary can be seen as a substantial historical novel covering nearly twenty years of American degeneration…if largely from the perspective of increasingly-harried Edith. Highsmith was a queer author who did not usually like to write from the perspective of women, but Edith she puzzles-out and fusses over like a mother, perhaps a useful tactical outboarding of the self. A film that Edith’s Diary reminds me of is Rainer Werner Fassbinder Fear of Fear, a brilliant TV-movie from two years before Edith’s Diary, in which Margit Carstensen’s mental deterioration is fielded within the context of domestic imprisonment and the oppressive scrutiny of family.
In 1955, Edith, her husband Brett, their ten-year-old son Cliffie, and family cat Mildew (née Mildred) are moving from Grove Street in New York City to Brunswick Corner, Pennsylvania, “into a two-story house surrounded by a lawn with two willows in front and a couple of elms and apple trees on the back lawn.” On the surface this would appear to be evidence of a young family taking a modest stab at the American dream, ubiquitously constructed and packaged as this mythological confabulation was in the halcyon days of the 1950s with its postwar boom and its Leave it to Beaver-style social engineering. This particular family is eminently bourgeois but not wealthy. Brett and Edith are both writers, Brett a professional newspaper man. They dream of running a little paper in Pennsylvania and will go on to do so. Of course, the American dream will, while all that other stuff is going on, crash and burn and go up like so much napalm. When we meet her in ’55, at any rate, Edith is a proper milquetoast urban leftie who reads Orwell and reproaches United Fruit et al. in her diary; a “brown leather” diary that is “grainy and tooled with a gold Florentine design.”
Cliffie, markedly ineffectual son and aspiring layabout goon, too big of a fuck-up even to go to Vietnam, may likewise speak to something like maternal ambivalence, especially knowing what we now know about early childhood brain development. After what would appear to be an episode of a little light cat torture prior to Pennsylvania departure—smothering, ironically—we might even be inclined to suspect that Cliffie is something of a budding sociopath and harmer of persons. There are many early indicators that things are a little off. “A vague depression crept through her, crepuscular, paralyzing. Sometimes it was incontrollable, so much stronger than herself that she had wondered, even in the first few weeks she had been in the house, if it weren’t due to a vitamin deficiency or something physical.” Little Cliffie certainly isn’t adjusting especially well post-move, but then he has never been well-adjusted in any sort of way. Mom’s meditations on the subject of Cliffie can be outright malicious. Cliffie has little, worthless thumbs. “His ineffective hands seemed to proclaim that his grip on life or reality was nil.” While Edith and Brett are celebrating Christmas with friends, Cliffie slinks out of the house and proceeds to leap off the Delaware River bridge. He will be fished out by bystanders and returned to his perplexed and enervated parents. The next day, Christmas day, Cliffie will return to the bridge in a superhero costume and for the first time the novel shifts to his perspective. He is terribly proud of jumping off that bridge. As a dissolute man in his twenties, still living in that house in Brunswick Corner with his mother, he will continue to have occasion to recall it as his foremost act.
Left in the lurch by her cavalier, insensitive, and galavanting husband, Edith grows both cranky and eerie in that house and her pen grows more and more wicked and more and more warped. Edith will run this household however passively until the novel’s conclusion in approximately 1973, with Nixon’s resignation and the not terribly peace-with-honour-like pull-out from Vietnam in the background. Subsequent to her husband’s departure, Edith, in her diary, will invent an alternative, happy life for Cliffie, in which he is a hugely successful Princeton grad with a beautiful wife from a good family and, eventually, two adorable children, one of either sex. Our heroine is frazzled and her circuitry badly shot. Franky, she’s now an outright kook, certain of the inevitability of authoritarianism—so why fight it?—and writing outré essays for underground publications, culminating in a satire—or, uh, is it?—on political assassination for the then-still-super-edgy Rolling Stone. “Edith did not want to give herself the consolation of a cheerful hope. Best to expect the worst. And best to pretend that all was going to be well, too. How could one do both?” A diary is a place for a voice that otherwise doesn’t have a place, a voice the is not considered to matter, perhaps like that belonging to a woman who nobody stopped to consider has a right to try and be happy equivalent to that of her in-and-out-at-his-own-convenience husband. It is the voice of a woman subject to campaigns of diminishing paternalism and false bills of goods at every level of the society…at every level of the private and public schizoid singularity.
