Backlisted - Edith's Diary by Patricia Highsmith

Episode Date: November 25, 2019

Patricia Highsmith's novel Edith's Diary (1977) is the book under discussion. John and Andy are joined by writers Karen McLeod and John Grindrod. Plus Andy has been reading Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators in The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot and John talks about Daily Rituals: Women at Work by Mason Currey. This episode was recorded live at Bookseller Crow (https://booksellercrow.co.uk) in South London on Nov 13th 2019.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)4'19 - Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot by Alfred Hitchcock, 10'58 - Daily Rituals: Women At Work by Mason Currey, 16'54 - Edith's Diary by Patricia Highsmith* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale of Planet Fitness ends July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us recording live in one of London's best-loved bookshops, Bookseller Crow in Crystal Palace, lending our Bicardigan shoulders to the fundraising wheel

to help save the shop from the twin grim spectres of a massive hike in rent and the arrival of a 24-7 McDonald's next door. But not tonight, kiddos. Here, for an hour at least, it's 1955 in the small town of New Hope, Pennsylvania. We're already on the third round of scotch and soda and lighting up our fifth cigarette. Now, we had originally hoped to record this episode with the journalist and writer Deborah Orr. She chose the book that we're discussing tonight but sadly Deborah died before we were able to arrange the recording so we'd like to dedicate this episode to her memory.

I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And joining us today are two wonderful guests. First up, the writer and man of the South, John Grindrods. John is the author of Concretopia, a journey around the rebuilding of post-war Britain, which was launched in this bookshop, Bookseller Crow in South London, wasn't it?

It certainly was. That was a very exciting evening. It was all the glamour of Gypsy Hill. And he's also the author of Outskirts, Living Life on the Edge of the Greenbelt, which I talked about on here, in fact, and which the FT described as a lucid evocative book suffused with sadness and anger.

John has been on Batlister before. He joined us for episode 29, which was about Memento Mori by Muriel Spark. I want you to hang on to that name, Muriel Spark. That will be coming back in a minute. He is joined by the novelist and performer Karen McLeod. Karen is the author of In Search of the Missing Eyelash, which was published in 2008 by Vintage and which won a Betty Trask Award. She is creator of comedy character Barbara Brownskirt

quotes the worst living lesbian poet alive and performing today and she tours around the UK at leading theatres and comedy venues. She has written for The Guardian, The Letters Page and The Independent but most importantly she is writer in residence here at Bookseller Crowe.

And Karen organised, was it here? It was right here. Karen organised a Sparky Oaky here in the shop. What was that? Well, it was to mark the 100th year since she was born. Basically, I invited all Spark fans who were authors to come and read five minutes each just in honour of her.

And it worked. And she sort of came into the back office at one point and caused a bit of a stir. Her ghost did anyway. We invoked. John, did you did you perform in the Sparky Oaky? I did. I did. I did a bit of momentum. I couldn't stop myself. So, yeah, the full Brian Blettered was done. And turning from one difficult sociopathic author to another. The book that Deborah all chose and the book that Karen and John are joining us to discuss is Edith's Diary by Patricia Highsmith. First published by Heinemann in the UK.

More about why the UK in a moment, in 1977, and then later that year by Simon & Schuster in the US. It was the 17th novel of Patricia Highsmith's 22. But before we slouch over to the bar and pour another round, Andy, what have you been reading this week? OK, so I've been reading Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators, The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot

by, quote-unquote, Alfred Hitchcock. How many people remember these from the 70s and 80s, the Three Investigators books? That's quite a lot of people, actually. I'm writing an article for slightly fox magazine about these books and um i said that i've been commissioned to do it on twitter and the response that i got from people who remember these books from the 70s was really overwhelming literally dozens and dozens of people coming back to me saying i absolutely love these books

do the panel remember them? Do you remember them? No. Sorry. We used to have them in our book cupboard in my classroom at school. Yes, I definitely remember them. They are, let me tell you, they're probably the crime fiction on which Patricia Highsmith was drawing for a lot of her work. Is that a picture of Alfred Hitchcock on the front of it? No, no. It's Huguenot, an international art thief.

That's a shame. I thought maybe one of the things was rather, like in the pictures, he'd insert himself onto the cover of the jacket of each of the books. Although he may not have had anything to do with the writing of them, I don't know. Well, they were written by a man called Robert Arthur who had stories in magazines like Amazing Stories, the same magazines that people like H.P. Lovecraft were writing for.

And then in 1964, he had a bright idea, which was to go to the film director and television star Alfred Hitchcock and said, I've got an idea for a series of crime novels for young people. How do you feel about fronting them up? And so they came to an arrangement. And so these books are one of the first examples of, I suppose, franchising. And, of course, as I say that, one's instinct is to think, oh, well, they probably weren't very good then.

But in fact, particularly the first dozen or so of these were absolutely terrific the first one was published in 1964 and this is the second one the mystery of the stuttering parrot i don't know if you're familiar with the three investigators but when they offer their services to investigate and solve the crime they have a card that they give to prospective clients and look can you see it there i'm showing it to the people there it is it's always reproduced at the beginning of the book the three investigators we investigate anything first investigator jupiter jones second investigator peter crenshaw

records and research bob andrews so what you've got there is jupiter jones he this is these all these books take place in la he's like a former child star. He is the brains of the operation. Pete Crenshaw is like the hired muscle, right? If there's a punch-up, a Hardy Boys-style punch-up, Crenshaw's your man, yeah? And then Bob Andrews just hangs around at the background clicking his tongue.

Stato, yeah. So I was asking people what they remembered about these books. And the thing that lots of people said was, you know, they remembered certain details of some of the plots. They're really fun. The Stuttering Parrot is like a version of the Maltese Falcon. The L.A. element as well. There's a Raymond Chandler thing going on.

They're very 60s-ish because there's a kind of monkeys element as well. So the three investigators are like a group who all live in the same house together. The secret base is the thing that everybody remembers about the three investigators books. Jupiter Jones's dad runs a salvage business. Nice pause to let that sink in. Sticking to the back streets away from the heavy traffic by the beach he reached the jones salvage yard from the rear it was probably the most colorful junkyard in the country a long tall wooden fence surrounded it and on this fence local artists grateful to mr jones for his generosity had painted many colorful scenes covering the whole back fence of the yard was a painting of

the san francisco fire of 1906 a dramatic scene of burning buildings, horse-drawn fire engines dashing into action and people fleeing with bundles on their backs. Bob rode up to the rear fence on his bike making sure no one saw him and stopped about 50 feet from the corner. There was a spot on the picture where a big spout of red flame was shooting out of a building and a little dog was sitting, looking sadly at it because it had been his home. They had named the little dog Rover, and one of his eyes was a knot in the wood. Bob picked out the knot with his fingernails and reached in to undo a catch. Then three boards swung up and he could wheel his bike inside.

That was Red Gate Rover. And inside they've got like, I was about to say they've got a fax machine, but they haven't because it's 1967 but they they've got all sorts of headquarters was inside a banged up 30 foot mobile home trailer in the junkyard quite hidden from view by all kinds of stuff stacked around it even mr jones didn't know that they had turned the old trailer into a modern headquarters with a dark room a special lab and an office with typewriter telephone desk and tape recorder all the equipment had been rebuilt from junk that came into the yard except the telephone

naturally they paid for that out of money they had made helping around the yard these guys are the best they're basically so it's basically like a cross between raymond chandler and the monkeys and the double deckers that'll that'll there's a like a cross between Raymond Chandler and the Monkees and the Double Deckers. There's a niche reference. But they're like the Double Deckers who solve crimes. I can't give it any higher recommendation than that. They're not currently in print, apart from in Germany, where they have become phenomenally popular.

And instead of the 40 original Three Investigators books, there are now over 150 and jonathan co told me that his books in german translation the audiobooks are voiced by the voice of jupiter jones in the german audiobooks of the dry investigatory or whatever they're called the three investigators and he said as a result, when every gig's in Germany, hundreds of people come to see his things because he normally has his stuff read in German by Jupiter Jones.

So, a rich scene. Mitch, what have you been reading this week? There's a dozen of them, you say? No. In English, there's 40, though many of them are only available on illegal torrents off the internet uh but in germany done for that in germany with your laptop full of illegal downloads of the three investigators john what have you been reading this well i've picked

something that just it's a pure pleasure and i I thought it would work on a live evening published by my friend at the back of the room here, Paul Bagley. It's Daily Rituals, Women at Work by Mason Curry. It's an irresistible format. It's women's working routines in particular in this book, which gives it a kind of an added focus and pathos. And it's not just writers. It's performers. It's film stars, artists, sculptors. And I'm going to give you just three rather than talk about it.

I mean, it's as good a little loo anthology as you're probably ever going to get. I mean, if you're even remotely interested in the ridiculous things that people do. Drugs, a lot of women did drugs. Susan Sontag, Isaac Dyson, they'd take drugs to write. Which drugs? Well, all kinds of different drugs really um yeah amphetamines um what was that what was the isaac dynson yeah she was amphetamines and champagne why not champagne and bang your head on the table there's a great bit here about the Alice Walker went about writing Color Purple. So, in 1982, she published an essay about the Color Purple's genesis that describes what it was like living with the novel's characters for the year or so leading up to that one year of writing. In the beginning, Walker was settled in Brooklyn, but her characters, she wrote, found the big city disagreeable.

What's all this tall shit anyway, they would ask. So Walker packed up and moved across the country to San Francisco. But here too, her characters were unhappy. They needed a setter closer to the small town in Georgia where their story took place. So Walker moved again, this time renting a small cottage in an apple orchard in Boonville, California, a couple of hours north of San Francisco. There, her characters finally started talking to her. We would sit wherever I was sitting and talk, Walker wrote. They were very obliging, engaging, and jolly. They were, of course, at the end of their story, but were telling it to me from the beginning. But then Walker's daughter, Rebecca, who had been staying with her father, Walker's

ex-husband, on the East Coast during all these moves, came to join the author and her characters in Boonville. At first, it was an uneasy detente. The characters, Walker wrote, just quieted down, didn't visit me as much, and took a firm, well, let's just wait and see attitude. Fortunately, they soon returned. Walker's characters decided that they adored her daughter, especially the novel's protagonist, Celie. Walker writes, so just when Rebecca would arrive home from school needing her mother and a hug, there'd be Celie trying to give her both. And it says, Rebecca Walker later became a writer herself, and her version of this story is considerably less rosy. Then a bit of a change, here's Zadie Smith talking about her writing routine. She said, even when Smith does feel the urgency to write, she writes very slowly, she said in 2012.

And I rewrite continually every day, over and over and over. Every day, I read from the beginning up to where I'd got to and just edit it all. And then I move on. It's incredibly laborious. And towards the end of a long novel, crikey, you have to read the whole novel every time you sit down and write. It's intolerable, actually. Poor Zadie. But this, this is a short one.

I love this. Lillian Hellman. This is, every writer probably wants this on the door of their office. This room is used for work. Do not enter without knocking. After you knock, wait for an answer. If you get no answer, go away and don't come back. This means everybody.

This means you. This means night or day. By order of the Hellman Military Commission for Playwrights, court-martialing will take place in the barn, and your trial will not be a fair one. So what's that book called, remind us? It's Daily Rituals, Women at Work. There's sadness, there's happiness, there's madness.

Everything you would expect. What is your routine, John? Well, I'm sort of horrifically untidy, so I always have to flee the house if I want to do any work. And I normally sit in a noisy cafe and play loud music and everything you're told not to do really basically. Does the noise in the cafe do you find that helpful? I do actually I find I'm so easily bored that having a bit of a distraction of stuff going on sort of quietens down that bit of my brain that otherwise would make me just get up and storm out in a huff.

At your own genius. My own tediousness. Karen, do you have a routine? Well, if I am writing that day, I will drink two large cups of tea followed by three coffees and then wait for my partner to leave the house and probably stare at her quite a lot until she does. And then probably because of the coffee and then lie in bed. If I'm writing a sex scene or a difficult scene, I will lie in bed

because I've heard it's easier to write difficult things in bed. That's what Proust did. Really? When Proust was writing a sex scene, that is exactly what he did. He would lie in bed and wait for it to bubble up. Dorothy Parker is one of the funnier ones in there as well because she would

do anything other than write. So she was supposed to deliver on a friday and they they would get a series of of phone calls increasingly anxious phone calls from the new yorker for her piece so on sunday evening she would um tell them that she'd she'd send it over an hour and then about two hours later they'd ring again they say i've torn it up it's good. And that was the moment she'd literally sit down to start writing. It's the kind of deadline, the famous Douglas Adams, you know, I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by. Let's pick this up again shortly. We've got a clip later of Patricia Highsmith talking about her writing routine. But first of all, we're going to hear a clip.

but first of all we're going to hear a clip clip number two nick i listened to several interviews with patricia highsmith and she's a really interesting example of somebody who seems like she's a good interview but then you get to the end of the thing that she's talking about and you realize she's revealed almost nothing yeah so what we've got here is we've got clips from an interview that was done with mavis Nicholson in 1978 and I so enjoyed the whole thing that I've drawn all the clips from that I wonder whether you put great store on your reviews it depends on what publications they're in I suppose and I like reviews that are rather bad sometimes if I mean years ago, one review said that I was very careless with my minor characters.

Well, at least it's more interesting than being praised. But then, would you then look at the books and think, well, I've got to have a look at the minor characters? Yes, I might think, well, I could do better next time. Yeah, but you don't sort of feel anxious about them or wondering what people... No, that's not... No, I don't sort of feel anxious about them, wondering what people...

No, that's not... No, I don't. If the newspapers come to my house or something, I put off looking at them. Lately, it's getting worse. I mean, something can lie there for two weeks before I've got the courage to look at it. I urge people to watch the whole interview

because you can see Mavis Nicholson burn through her first 50 questions in the first 10 minutes. So we're here to talk about Patricia Highsmith and Edith's diary. As John said, we didn't choose the book, but we would all like to say up front that we've all found the experience of reading Edith's diary one of the most intense books in which not much seems to happen I've ever read. John, you were saying to me earlier about how it made you feel. Yeah, I felt personally attacked, I think, all the way through reading it.

I feel like she sort of sets out to unsettle you in that amazing way that she does in her crime novels. She sort of sets out to unsettle you in that amazing way that she does in her crime novels. She sort of sets out to do that, but in a domestic novel. And all of that energy that would go normally into really sort of, you know, unsettling the characters through plot, I feel like is channeled into finding ways under your skin as the reader to make you sort of shudder at maybe you know behavior that you've that you've had that you can see horrible echoes of in this novel karen have you read it before i know you've read a lot of highsmith had you read this before no i hadn't i hadn't come across it at all and i read it very quickly without really speaking to anyone for two days. And I, let's just say it infiltrated my dreams.

And so when I woke up on the second morning, I was pleased to see Penge out the window and not that I thought I was still in the book. It's intoxicating and very odd. And I want to speak to an analyst about it now. Well, thanks for agreeing to do the podcast. Shawnee, what did you think? I completely loved it.

I'd only really read a couple of the Ripleys before and had always thought, you know, I should read more Patricia Highsmith. I mean, the publishing background is really interesting. It was turned down. Can you imagine turning down Patricia Highsmith? But it, the publishing background is really interesting. It was turned down. Can you imagine turning down Patricia Highsmith? But it was turned down by Knopf. Bob Gottlieb, the editor at Knopf, just turned down for the

classic reason, where are we going to put it in the bookshop? No, it doesn't. It's neither of, it's not the kind of book that you normally write. It's not a mystery or a thriller. But it's not quite a literary novel either. Actually, they were proved wrong because Simon & Schuster took it on the reviews. It's one of the best reviews, I think, of all Highsmith's novels.

It got really great reviews in the UK. It was reviewed by people like Oberon Waugh, and it was reviewed by A.M. Wilson. I've got A.M. Wilson's review here. A.M. Wilson. I've got A.M. Wilson's review here. This is one of those reviews that you can see utter delight in editorial and utter despair in marketing. I'll just read you the conclusion of it. One of the saddest novels I have ever read. A perfect, unimprovable masterpiece.

It isn't a murder mystery or a novel of suspense. It is a novel of boredom, w wretchedness self-deception and depression yeah that's shelter advertising yeah so i'm just going to read the blurb on the back of the u.s edition just to set this up for people and then karen's going to read the opening of the book. So everyone here tonight will have started reading Edith's diaries. Edith Howland's diary is her most precious possession. After moving with her family from New York City to suburban Pennsylvania, Edith's husband abandons her for a younger woman,

leaving her trapped in a bleak existence with her degenerate son and his senile uncle. Oh, you have me at senile uncle. As Edith's life turns sour, she retreats into her writing. And while her life plunges into chaos, a disturbing tale of success and happiness blooms in her diary. She invents a happy life. And as she knits for imaginary grandchildren, the real world recedes further still, marking a descent into madness that may well be unstoppable. Originally published in 1977, Edith's diary is a masterpiece of psychological suspense, a harrowing and tautly written tale of an ordinary woman

whose life is slipping out of control. The author of Strangers on a Train and the talented Mr Ripley, get those in quick, Patricia Highsmith, is one of the most original voices in 20th century American fiction. And that thing, John, that you were saying about, there's a very strange flatness to Highsmith's prose, whether in this book or in her other books, which in a sense became her stock in trade

that when the bad things come they may not be the bad things you've been led to believe but you already feel pretty bad on the way there yeah beneath that kind of flatness you can sense a sort of excitement about what she's telling you. You know, you can almost sense her excitement at trying to get these ideas and this plot across and knowing the effect it's going to have on the reader, knowing how well she can kind of play you. And play with the characters as well, right? She likes doing horrible things to the characters in the book, doesn't she? Loves it. Yeah.

Karen, could you just read us the opening? OK. Chapter one. Edith had left her diary among the last things to pack, mainly because she didn't know where to put it. In a crate among the blankets and sheets, in one of her own suitcases, now it lay naked, thick and dark brown,

on an otherwise clear coffee table in the living room. The moving men weren't coming till tomorrow morning. The walls were stripped of pictures, the bookcases of books and the rugs had been rolled up. Edith had been sweeping sporadically, amazed at how much dust could stay under things, even with a good cleaning woman like Priscilla, who had been helping Edith this morning. Now it was nearly 5pm. Brett should be back soon. He'd telephoned an hour ago saying he wouldn't be back as soon as he'd thought because he hadn't been able to find the right drill for his blackened decker

and was going to try Bloomingdale's. And now, Edith thought, today, this evening, was the last evening and night the Howland family would spend on Grove Street. They were moving tomorrow to Brunswick Corner, Pennsylvania, into a two-storey house surrounded by a lawn with two willows in front and a couple of elms and apple trees on the back lawn. That was worth an entry in her diary, Edith thought, and she realised she hadn't even noted the day when she and Brett and Cliffy had found the Brunswick Corner house. They'd been looking for some time, maybe six months. Brett was in favour of the move, with

Cliffy ten years old now. A country environment would be a blessed thing for a child, something he deserved, space to ride a bicycle, a chance to see what America really was, or at least where the same families had been for more generations than most families had been in New York. Or was that true? Edith thought for a few seconds and decided that it wasn't necessarily true.

What do we think about that, about the ending of that, things not necessarily being true? Well, it sort of sets you up for the self-deceit, really. It's what she does, isn't she? Highsmiths, she puts it straight in there. I love the idea that she's seeding. I think one of the things the book is about is what is the truth for these people? What is the truth?

Is the fiction contained in the diary more true emotionally than what Edith tells her friends and her neighbours? what Edith tells her friends and her neighbours, is truth one of the things that you can have too much of if you're going to hold your family unit together? It seems that the different members of this family, perhaps like our own families, are held together with a judicious mixture of telling the truth and not telling the truth. And also that idea about America.

You know, John, Mitch, this is a book about America, right? Yeah, it's 20 years. It goes from 1955 through to 74, really, Watergate. And Watergate is sort of the symbol of a society that is unhappy, that's essentially falling apart. I mean, I think what's so interesting about the book, you know, in the blurb, it says an ordinary woman. Well, she's not that ordinary. She's a freelance journalist. They have hopes and dreams. They move out to the country. They've got political ideals. And gradually, everything goes wrong. She's tormented for reasons that you can't quite understand. She's not a bad person. She's a kind person. I mean, you know, the husband, Brett, is a bit of a dick let's be honest and her son is a psychopath um well or is he no no come on

he's a sadist i mean you know he gets horrible violent fantasies about women masturbating into his sock and thinking about getting a women are masturbatingating into his sock. No, he's masturbating. Oh, I see. He wants to have a doll. He wants to have a blow-up doll because it's easier than dealing with actual human beings. I mean, she was reading Eric Fromm at the time, Highsmith, Art of Loving,

and the nature of destructiveness. And I think there's a lot of sort of psychology in that. But the other thing, apparently, she really was reading and loving was T.S. Eliot. So The Hollow Men, this idea that there was a kind of a hollowing out of culture, that people were empty, are becoming empty. There's a great little review that Emma Tennant gave,

that the book nails the phantoms of our present anxieties and unease, the feeling that life has no point, and a lot of the characters at various times say that life has no point that the bright television jargon which teaches us to pray to gods we do not want the fear of friends are as quickly gone as the foam on the detergent the loss of faith in caring it's it is a book about about the loss of faith you know everything she puts faith in lets her down there's a fascinating thing in the first chapter where the story of where the diary comes from.

She's basically given the diary, this huge book, this huge blank book, given when she was much younger by a much older man who wanted to sleep with her. And so he gave her this as a present. She'd actually asked for a Bible, but he didn't feel he could give her a Bible because it would get in the way of him being able to sleep with her. So he gave her this huge blank book instead. And so in a way,

I sort of feel like the whole book is set up by that idea of what she writes in the diary is replacing, you know, that sort of morality that you might have expected in a sort of suburban American family of that era. She starts to kind of create her own kind of moral universe in this diary that is in place of this Bible that she would have been given. Yeah, and what she writes in the diary is like a souped-up nuclear family, isn't it? So there's a constant reminder to you, the reader, isn't it so there's a constant reminder to you the reader of how the real family falls woefully short of the idealized family that edith and by extension society is aiming for there's a weird

symmetry though isn't there as as she's writing the novel of her life that she really wants her life to be. Patricia Patsy is writing the truth. It's not a kind book. But do you, Karen, do you think Highsmith was a kind writer? I don't think she would have liked that question. She didn't need to be kind. That wasn't her pursuit. Her pursuit was, I think in her mind, was for truth and human truth and far bigger sort of philosophical questions. But for entertainment,

I think she was very aware of entertaining her audience. Can you remember when you first read her? Can you remember the first book of hers that you read? I think it must have been Carol. And I thought I was the only one that knew about it. I'm trying to trace it back but my copy is really old and I think I was at art college and someone told me you've got to read Carol it's got lesbians in it. What? I know and I was like right get me to a bookshop and for a long time I thought I was the only person that had read it because no one was talking about it was it available then I think for years it wasn't available it was published as the price of salt yeah it was in the 90s it was in the early 90s and the silver moon bookshop I was probably bought it there yeah um on Charing Cross Road so i did had no idea that she had all this other

world of writing about her because carol is just a love story you know john do you come to highsmith through film yeah yeah that was how i sort of first heard of her actually that sort of shadow of hitchcock kind of cast its way across her reputation for so many years and I feel like she's only really escaping that through kind of the success of you know Carol actually having been completely different sort of novel that she wrote that becoming quite a counterintuitive way of thinking about Highsmith writing because it doesn't rely on those things that you would naturally think of as the sort of drivers of a Highsmith novel. We should tell people who don't know that, of course, her first novel was Strangers on a Train, which was adapted by, oh, author of the Three Investigators series.

There is method in your madness. Yeah, Alfred Hitchcock for a very famous film in 1951. And in fact, many of her novels were turned into films. So there were films of The Blunderer, The Talented Mr. Ripley. Of course, everybody will know the 1999 Anthony Minghella film, but in fact, it was first made... By Wim Wenders?

No, no, no, no. That was another one, wasn't it? Plain Soleil in 1960. Oh, yes. Is an adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley. And then Wim Wenders made a film called The American Friend, which is kind of in the mid-'70s, which is a weird cobbling together of Ripley's Game

and a bit of Ripley Underground as well. So coming to her through film, and as a writer of thrillers, presumably. Yeah, absolutely. And I think for a long time I didn't realise that she had written anything that wasn't a thriller. You know, because I was aware that she'd written a lot of novels, but I think I sort of gravitated towards the thrillers.

And I think, you know, it's interesting that we are talking about a book of hers that isn't a thriller, because actually she was such a phenomenal exponent of the art of psychological thriller writing. It's almost a shame we're not talking about one of those because there is that thing about sort of talking about the sort of breakout different literary novel of a crime writer rather than talking about their sort of genre works.

I sort of feel it's almost a shame that we're sort of not delving into one of the crime novels. I must say when I was reading this diary, I was thinking, what do people think? Because this is kept in the crime section of an average bookshop. What does somebody think if they get this off the shelf, thinking, ah, it's time for a thrill ride? And they get this remarkably peculiar and flat,

I don't say that as a criticism, In fact, I say it as praise. There's something really brilliantly flat about Highsmith's style as a sort of, I think in this case it's we write, say, as an extension of personality. I kept thinking, why are you telling me this? You mentioned in the bit you read, karen about the black and decker thing yeah i thought that doesn't need to be there that's wrong why is that there yeah there's a in fact it's all part of the skill of it i think it's an odd sort of glint suddenly appears from

the writing it's like there's a point in it where she's taking a tray of Horlicks, I think, up to the uncle who lives in the attic. And she says, took it on a small tray. Now this small tray, it doesn't need to be a small tray, but it's just something that she drops in that become like these tiny, odd, unsettling. How can a tray be unsettling? But it is. is yeah those details are amazing yeah i mean it is watching a mind unspool very slowly and she has that forensic kind of ability she just observes she doesn't load the book full of metaphor and the details are so wonderful early on in the book the beginnings of the intimations that things are not going right. She's been listening to a Brahms waltz, which makes her feel quite relaxed. And then the record ends. When the first side of the record was finished, the silence began to attack Edith like a live

thing, eating away at her brief contentment. This was life, she thought. Back to the ironing, which she now did in the kitchen. Back to thinking of where next she might send the article on recognising red china. A vague depression crept through her, crepuscular, paralysing. herself that she had wondered, even the first weeks that she'd been in the house, if it weren't due to a vitamin deficiency or something physical. But the report of Dr. Carstairs, a local doctor recommended by Gert, just last month had been good. She was not anemic, her weight was normal, if not a trifle under normal, which the doctor thought preferable, and there was nothing wrong with her heart. It was a mental attitude, Edith thought, nothing else. She often consoled herself by thinking that probably everyone in the world who was at all sensitive suffered the same low moments and for the same reasons. Edith had constantly to bolster herself by remembering that

she didn't believe life had any purpose anyway. To be happy, one had to work at whatever one had to work at, and without asking why, and without looking back for results. This plainly demanded good health for a start, and she had that. So why was she discontented periodically for a few hours at a time, unhappy? Edith couldn't answer that. I read another of an earlier novel called Deep Water, but what I noticed she does in Deep Water, which is a more superficially orthodox crime novel,

is those wrong details are one of the things that stack up so that when something bad happens, it happens almost in passing. And you sort of have to go back and read again because it hasn't been given an appropriate emphasis. Cliffy jumping off the bridge. So there's Cliffy jumping off the bridge in this book. But also, you know, there's a murder in this book, which is one of the least mysterious murders in a murder mystery I've ever read, right?

It kind of had to double check. Did you find that as well? Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's, you know, all of that amazing kind of back and forth kind of suspense plotting that you would normally get in Pritchard Highsmith, having it here, from page

one, basically, you know that Cliffy is a psychopath. You know he's going to do something terrible to somebody. You know, by page 17, the person that he's... He's not nice to the cat. He's clearly going to be doing something horrible to, like, one particular person, you know, the uncle when he arrives. You're aware this is happening.

He's constantly drinking, you know, the uncle's drugs, you know, sort of standing over the sleeping uncle, you know, and being called out of the room all the time by his mother. Something very bad is going to happen. And you see that happening for, and I remember sort of thinking when I was about a third of the way through it, well, I can sort of see where this is going and I can't see where we're getting another, like, you know, sort of two thirds of a Patricia Highsmith sort of story where that's going because you're sort of expecting a like a motor of action to come in at some point but don't you think the sort of delaying of Cliffy killing the uncle it got to the point where I was like just

kill him you know there's this I'm waiting for this murder and it made me murderous so I thought that was what she was intending i also like the implication or i got the feeling that patricia this that cliffy for those of you who haven't read it who is the most repulsive character imaginable is patricia highsmith's feeling about all young people of the 60s and 70s. This is what will happen to the youth if they are allowed to masturbate into socks. And watch television. And watch television.

He's the most grotesque character. He's like a sort of horribly despect Ripley, isn't he? He's like, if you take away all of the charm and all of the motivation and all of that kind of quick-wittedness that you have with Riffey, and then you're just left with this inert, nasty, kind of malignant figure, which you get with Cliffy. You seem to be not quite so popular in America, which is where you were born, as you are in Europe.

Am I right in assuming that? Yes, you're certainly right. The Americans rejected, well, Edith Starry Knopf rejected that not so long ago. And it was immediately taken by Simon and Schuster in the United States. Then the Americans rejected the animal stories, the animal lover's book of Beastly Murder, and never published it. And then the Americans rejected Little Tales of Misogyny.

That's not out. Which I enjoyed, I must say, very much. Can you explain it? Is there a reason, do you think? Well, in the American, it's a matter of business, I think, which I don't completely understand, but the Americans feel that short stories, especially, are not good commercially. So why bother publishing them, you know? I wonder if Americans still think that.

I don't know. It's interesting, isn't it? I don't know whether she has had a renaissance in America. I mean, I couldn't see much evidence of it when I looked. Should we say, I'm just going to say a bit about Highsmith herself. If you want to read the full biography of Patricia Highsmith, there's a couple. I read Andrew Wilson's Beautiful Shadow. Brilliant.

Which was published about 15 years ago. Have people read that? You've read that, haven't you? That's absolutely amazing. It's a really great literary biography. It's an unputdownable literary biography. So I found this paragraph in a review of Andrew Wilson's book, and I thought, well, this will do as the biographical summation

of Patricia Highsmith. So she was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in January 1921, and she died, I mean really it seems to me recently I can remember selling her new books. She died in the mid-1990s. She was doing events for Waterstones back in. Yeah that's that's what I remember. Anyway this is here's this paragraph. Highsmith herself led an isolated life with few friends or lasting relationships. She was gay, but struggled with the prejudice of the time and her own internalised homophobia, writing in her notebooks that she didn't feel she could reveal her true self to others. According to Andrew Wilson, she was an alcoholic, and her former publisher, Otto Penzler, called her, quote,

a mean, hard, cruel, unlovable, unloving person. She seemed to prefer the company of animals and snails to people. And apparently once took 100 snails in her handbag to a party in order to have someone to talk to. in her handbag to a party in order to have someone to talk to. Now, my favourite writing by Patricia Highsmith, she is in a book of short stories called Eleven, which is not currently in print.

And it has not one, but two stories about snails. I love the snail stories. And what I'm going to do is, if you don't want to hear spoilers, go forward two minutes, because I'm going to read the final two paragraphs of this story. So it starts, When Mr Peter Knoppet began to make a hobby of snail watching. He had no idea that his handful of specimens would become hundreds in no time. Now that in and of itself is a magnificent opening statement of

intent. Now fast forward to the penultimate paragraph. A snail crawled into his mouth. A snail crawled into his mouth. He spat it out in disgust. He tried to brush the snails off his arms, but for every hundred he dislodged, four hundred seemed to slide upon him and fasten to him again as if they deliberately sought him out as the only comparatively snail-free surface in the room. There were snails crawling over his eyes. And then, just as he staggered to his feet, something else hit him. Mr. Knoppet couldn't even see what. He was fainting. At any rate, he was on the floor. His arms felt like leaden weights as he tried to reach his nostrils, his eyes, to free them from the sealing, murderous snail bodies. Help! He swallowed a snail. This almost becomes funny because of the repetition of the word snail. Anyway, I'll keep going. Choking, he widened his mouth for air and felt a snail crawl over his lips onto his tongue. He was in hell.

He could feel them gliding over his legs like a glutinous river, pinning his legs to the floor. His breath came in feeble gasps. His vision grew black, a horrible, undulating black. He could not breathe at all because he could not reach his nostrils, could not move his hands. breathe at all because he could not reach his nostrils, could not move his hands. Then, through the slit of one eye, he saw directly in front of him, only inches away, what had been, he knew, the rubber plant that stood in its pot near the door. A pair of snails were quietly making love in it. And right beside them, tiny snails as pure as dewdrops

were emerging from a pit like an infinite army into their widening world. I feel Pat might be revealing something of herself in that story about her feelings about how she treats her characters, right? Where do you get your ideas from, Miss Highsmith? Karen, what does this book have to say? What does Edith's diary have to say about the role of women in the period that Highsmith was writing about.

So she's writing from the mid-50s to the mid-70s, which in theory is a period of liberation. Yeah, I felt she was very... Well, Edith was very... ..almost not there a lot of the time. She was going through her motherly duties, really sort of doing basically the barest minimum, I felt, a lot of the time. But also, you know...

She gives up a bit, though, doesn't she? She starts off cleaning everything and then sort of just gradually it becomes... She gets more and more disheartened with feeding George. Yeah, that to me was the most human side of her, how she cared for George, even though she did, you know, start to really resent it. But she still did it until the end. But it was more her mothering, really, with Cliffy that demonstrated how she couldn't quite bring herself to do it, but sort of got food ready. But that was about, you you know she just left him to his own devices the book is basically Patricia Highsmith saying that the the life is in the book is in the writing

and all the rest of it all right she does enjoy a drink and you know there's a lot of drinking and smoking and sort of socializing but it's it's it's not really there. The life is elsewhere and it's sort of... She's just not quite present, I think, as a character and so she's saying really that... It is a critique, I think. Yeah, I agree. Also, it's quite a critique of marriage and all of those sorts of...

I mean, domesticity anyway she was very she was very eccentric domestically wasn't she was sort of cleanliness fetish but also didn't like eating very much there's a great list of stuff that she liked and didn't like in the biography things she did like were barks and matthew passion old clothes sneakers the absence of noise mexican food, fountain pens, Swiss army knives, weekends with no social commitments, Kafka, and being alone. Things she disliked, the music of Sibelius, the art of Leger, live concerts, four-course meals, television sets, the begin Sharon regime, loudmouth people, and those who borrow money, being recognised by

strangers in the street, fascists and burglars. To this list she could have added suicide and acts she regarded as cowardly. Loves snails. Yeah, loves snails. The crime in the book is, and the thing is, as I say this, it sounds really crap. And it's a tribute to Patricia Highsmith's artistry that, of of course it doesn't feel at all crap when you read the novel but the crime is what the expectations of a woman could be

over a 20-year period and so that sense Karen you were saying about how she kind of loses energy and hope you can feel depression beginning to creep in. She can't do things. And you can see that she is a product of her environment, the national environment. That seems to be a big thing in this book for Highsmith.

Vietnam. But also the domestic environment as well, right? Yeah, yeah, totally. There's this split, and I think that's it. It's like the sort of physical Edith gives up and the diary Edith takes on a life. Having grandchildren, which is almost like a repetition of what she's trying to avoid.

And so it's like a hall of mirrors in a weird way. It's ghastly. I use that because I feel like she's coming through me. She would use that word. Because it is her losing her reality. If you look at the diary and see what the aspirations expressed in the impossible dream life of the diary, they're quite depressing too.

That's like me and the two grandchildren. She wants the kind of lifestyle that is being sort of fed to her through television. It's a sort of, you know, well, she gets rid of the husband, he disappears, but she wants the son to have a happy, loving marriage and working in the oil industry in Kuwait. Yes. And having kids and celebrating Christmas. Almost a parody of a sort of 1950s happy family.

That's the thing that is so arrest arresting i think about the book is is that that you you kind of know that it's not going to end well there's a sense of gathering because and it's also it's patricia highsmith so you figure this isn't going to end well for edith but in fact i mean without giving away any spoilers the ending is is sort of quite flat as well i sort of feel like quite often as well, that as you get sort of nearer the end of the book and sort of the second half of the book, those aspirations from the diary,

she begins to try and replicate them in real life in a way that she's not doing in the first half of the book. So there's that whole sequence where she's trying to paint the outside of the house. So the outside of the house looks like this beautiful kind of Keeping Up With The Joneses kind of aspiration. However, the inside of the house is like this beautiful kind of keeping up with the james's kind of aspiration however the inside of the house is getting more and more ramshackle and dirty and awful and also she takes up sculpting and she sculpts she sculpts a much more handsome head of

cliffy yeah then cliffy's actual head which everybody is very impressed by because it's like it's like the kind of cliffy everybody wishes existed, but doesn't. Even Cliffy is impressed by it. And by the end of it, she sculpted the heads of the two imaginary grandchildren as well. But I love the idea within the book as well. You can't tell how talented she is in terms of creativity. terms of creativity in other words she knows that a part of the off the peg aspirational lifestyle is that she should have a an interest in politics and b she should be a creative person but you have no sense of it satisfying her i mean i think one of the things the book is about is about creativity

the diary is the surrogate for a novel for a novel there's one little bit of good writing i think in the diary which is she writes a poem into a into a diary midway through which goes at dawn after my death hours before the sunlight will spread at seven o'clock as usual on these trees which i know greenness will burst dark green shadows yield To the cruel benign Indifferent sun Indifferent will stand the trees In my own garden Unweeping for me on the morning of my death

Same as ever Roots athirst The trees will rest in breezeless dawn Blind and uncaring The trees that I knew that I tended. And that was read at Highsmith's funeral as well. We were talking earlier about writers' routines and as luck would have it, we have a clip of Patricia Highsmith appearing to talk about her routine. As a writer, have you got a very

strong routine in your day? I mean, discipline? If I'm working on a novel, I like to do eight pages a day. And almost the same with a short story. Sometimes a short story one can do 10. And I try to take care of the boring things in the morning and work maybe four or five hours a day. When you say the boring things, what do you mean? Chores like shopping, writing a business letter or things like that. Do you write in freehand or do you type your books? Always on the typewriter. And where do you begin? Do you begin with

the plot of the book or what? I think I begin with a certain action. Say there's maybe a kidnapping in the book or it's not an entire plot but I have to go forwards and then pardon me, I should say I have to go backwards to what came before and then forwards in my own thinking

Told you nothing right? Absolutely nothing, apart from letting Mavis Nicholson know how utterly weary she is of me is when Mavis Nicholson knows how utterly weary she is of me, is when Mavis Nicholson goes, well, do you write with a pen or what? Thinking, oh my god, there's still 15 minutes

on Thames to go. There's a slight risk that we might have made this book sound dull and unpleasant. But it is, like all of Highsmith, I think, it is readable to the point of, you know, you get stuck in, you have to kind of gulp it down. It's extraordinary.

Well, it's very funny in places. And I think, you know, that she can get so much humour out of such a dark set of characters and circumstances is kind of amazing. And it is obviously very kind of bleak humour. There's a fantastic set piece where Cliffy basically has been drunk driving. He mows down a guy, a middle-aged businessman,

one night on his way home, breaks both his legs and Edith forces him to go and visit him. And the visit is absolutely brilliant. So I thought I would read that. Richard Gerber was in bed reading newspapers. A man with a broad head, strong brown hair, growing grey, brawny forearms. He looked up at Cliffy like a perfectly healthy businessman disturbed by a visitor. Morning, Mr Gerber, Cliffy said. I came to say I hope you're feeling better.

Morning, Gerber nodded slightly. Canary sang in a window's sunlight, oblivious of all this. The boy brought some flowers, Dick. I'll get a vase for them, the woman went out. Cliffy didn't know what to say. Walking around a little? Going back to work soon? No, maybe that was a bad idea. Did this guy want to go back to work? Why should he if he was being paid his usual salary? Maybe more if one counted the insurance. I hope you're feeling better, Cliffy said. Richard Gerber looked at him with a hard amusement, with a kind of glint. He had not completely lowered his Trenton standard onto his sheet-covered lap. Cliffy felt the coolness of sweat on his forehead after his first words about Gerber feeling better.

What the hell did Gerber expect? That he'd get down on his knees, beg him to use his influence to get his driving licence back? Was he supposed to promise that he wouldn't ever drive a car again, for instance? Didn't a lot of people hit people by accident in the dark? What the hell were you doing walking along the edge of the road like that? Cliffy could have asked Gerber, were you pissed too, maybe?

I have to pay for it for the rest of my life, I suppose. Hmm, Gerber said, or something like that. Gerber's eyes had not left Cliffy's. Gerber looked like an old German ham, beef animal of some kind. There were creases across his forehead, grey hairs in his eyebrows. A strong guy, stupid too, but damn sure of himself, the way a lot of stupid people were sure of themselves. Cliffy's courage drained, but he stood up straighter,

tossed his paper-wrapped chrysanthemums on the foot of the bed and put his hands on his hips. Just then the woman returned to the room and moved slowly to the bed and took the flowers. Won't you sit down, she said politely to Cliffy. Cliffy knew he had cooked it by tossing the flowers. Old Gerber's face had hardened by a couple of degrees. Here's our fine younger generation, Gerber said. Oh, Dick, the woman shrieked in a soprano like something out of an opera. She had an unusually high voice anyway. Cliffy tossed a smile at her. He's come to see you, said the woman. He didn't have to do that. Cliffy looked for a few seconds into Gerber's steady, unfriendly eyes and realised that

they were both furious, but not furious about the same thing. Their minds were on two different things. I'm sure the boy's sorry for what's happened, the woman said. All right, I'm not sorry, Cliffy retorted at once and turned on his heel toward the door. One forced her on the landing, then he found the stairs and dashed down, the woman behind him, but he was going much faster. Cliffy found himself smiling broadly as soon as he got into the open air. The hell with them. He saw the family car across the street, faced in the direction for home. Edith smiled, seeing his smile. Went all right. Cliffy got in and shut the door. Perfectly all right. Nice guy.

Cliffy didn't look to see if Mrs Gerber was on the front porch as the car drove off. I think Patricia Highsmith thinks there are two types of people in the world, sociopaths and victims. And one of the brilliances of her work is her ability to talk about the sociopathic elements in all our personalities, right? So she invites you to identify with people who then do awful things that you might do if you felt you not could get away with it, but if society gave you permission to do that,

then you might act in that way. Definitely. I feel that you lend yourself to her very easily, and that's why I became quite addicted to her and now feel it again after reading Edith's diary. I wanted to know what happened next, even if what happened next when I turned the page was nothing. I mean, that seems to me one of the great skills of it, to keep it bouncing along. Graham Green famously called her the poet of apprehension. We should wind up. I'm afraid that is all we have time for. Thank you to Karen and John for

pacing us drink for drink. To Nicky Birch for watching our levels, to Unbound for stocking the fridge, and to Jonathan, the team at Bookseller Crow and the literate denizens of Crystal Palace for making us so welcome. Thank you. Bookseller Crow, you can visit Bookseller Crow in Gypsy Hill, stroke Crystal Palace, stroke Norwood, stroke Croydon, stroke South London. But even more exciting, you can order books from them direct. So the next time you want to buy a book from an independent bookseller instead of, say, a tax-dodging organisation, you can go to the Bookseller Crow website and by

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links, clips, suggestions for further reading by visiting our website at batlisted.fm. And we're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter, Facebook or via bound lists. But before we go, I think we'd all like to toast the memory of a brave, unclassifiable, brilliant writer to Deborah Orr, whose idea this book was. To Deborah. Cheers. And make sure you pre-order Deborah's memoir, Motherwell. Well, why don't you pre-order it from bookseller Crow? And then you'll have done several good deeds it's published on january the 23rd by weidenfeld nixon um before we wind up tonight i want to bring a blessing to bookseller crow

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