BOOKS
These secret diaries take us inside Patricia
Highsmith’s brilliant yet twisted mind
Prickly
Patricia
DIARIES
David Sexton
Patricia Highsmith:
Her Diaries and Notebooks:
1941-1995
edited by Anna von Planta
Liveright £30 pp1,024Patricia Highsmith guarded
her privacy fiercely. She
refused to authorise a
biography and gave almost
nothing of herself away in
interview, as I can testify.
In 1990 I spent an hour with
her, trying to ask about Carol,
her only lesbian novel,
published under a pseudonym
in 1952 and just reprinted for
the first time under her own
name. She obviously hated
the whole transaction,
repeatedly checking her
watch, coldly hostile. When I
asked her why she had never
returned to the subject, she
merely said: “An idea never
came to me to do another
such book.” So that was that.
After her death in 1995,
though, a vast personal archive
was found in her fortress of a
house in Switzerland,
consisting of 56 journals — 18
diaries and 38 notebooks,
over 8,000 pages in all.
These writings have now
been assembled into a single
text by Anna von Planta, the
Swiss editor of her collected
works, and structured
chronologically, mingling the
journal and diary entries,
some recording her day,
others working out her ideas,
so that her life and work can
be traced together. Although
over 1,000 pages long, it’s still
only a fraction of the material
available, von Planta admits.
Much has been translated,
incidentally, as Highsmith, a
tireless autodidact, often wrote
her diary in loose French or
German, and sometimes in
Italian and Spanish.
Here then, laid out for us, isthe private life Highsmith
transmuted into fiction, into
those great novels in which
innocence and guilt, good and
evil, meld into one another so
alarmingly, from her first
success, Strangers on a Train
of 1950, to her defining
creation, The Talented Mr
Ripley of 1955, the alter ego she
revisited throughout her
career. It is not a pretty sight,
even before the descent into
misanthropy and rancour that
marred her later years.
Highsmith was born in Fort
Worth, Texas, in 1921, the
single child of parents who
had already divorced. At her
father’s urging, her mother
had tried to abort her by
drinking turps. She did not
meet her father — whose name,
Plangman, she bore into
adulthood — until she was 11.
Patricia distinguished
herself at school. As the
diaries begin, the outlook is
bright. She is 20, a student at
Barnard College in New York,
reading prodigiously,
exploring a new world of
sexual freedom and artistic
ambition, gaining social
success among a sophisticated
group of older, richer women,
while also discovering her
lifelong taste for alcohol in
vast quantities.
Despite remarkable
partying and sleeping around,
she was also both writing
copiously and making
important contacts in
publishing and the arts. In
1948 she met the young
Truman Capote, who
recommended her for a
two-month stay at an artists’
colony, Yaddo, which she saw
as an opportunity to make her
life afresh as a writer —
ultimately she left her entire
estate to the place, in the
absence of family.
At Yaddo, trying to analyse
past mistakes, Highsmith
drew up a remarkable chart
of her partners, reproduced
here, rating them for age,“superior”, “tyrannical”,“unpredictable” and
“untrustworthy”.
As they concede, this is far
from a standard biography.
We learn nothing of Conran’s
ancestry and little of his
parents, beyond that his South
African father, Gerard, was a
rugby-playing City trader, and
his mother, Christina, liked to
draw and admired Heal’s
interior furnishings.
Conran’s schooling atBryanston ended when he was
expelled for “something to do
with girls” (unspecified). At 16
he joined the Central School of
Arts and Crafts, but left without
a degree; he found his creative
mojo when working at the
Festival of Britain in 1951. Here,
at 20, he gazed at the Royal
Festival Hall and saw a symbol
of redemption-through-design
that fired his career. At 22 he
opened his first restaurant,
ironically named the Soup
Kitchen, in Knightsbridge. At
25 he established the Conran
Design Group; when Mary
Quant opened a Kings Road
boutique, it was Terence she
asked to make it fab.
In French provincial
restaurants Terence
discovered “the elegantly
simple china, the robust
glasses, the mannish carafes
and the deluxe peasant food”
he would later feature in his
shops. As Bayley puts it, he
was “happy to take inspiration
where he could”, even if it
meant selling “unlicensed
reproductions” of paintings
from the Kasmin Gallery.
When Habitat opened in
1964, it was a miracle of white
walls, spotlights, ultra-
modern furniture for a new
generation of post-university
homebuyers, and kitchen
accessories such as a mouli or
a pepper mill that became
must-have objects. Despite the
frenzy it generated, Habitat’s
first-year profit was less than
£2,000. But the store was
cloned across England through
the 1960s, and went on to
conquer Paris and New York.
Bayley, the author of bookson style, design and taste, tells
the Habitat story with his
customary polycultural
panache. When planning a
foreign trip, he reveals, Conran
would have an assistant buy
underwear and shirts from
Turnbull & Asser, and lay
them out for his inspection.
“A little bit like the Judgement
of Paris,” Bayley remarks,
“but more fundamental.”
Allusions to mythology also
crop up in the contributions of
Mavity, the former grand
fromage of Conran’s business
empire. He uses Daedalus and
Icarus’s homemade wings to
illustrate Conran’s reckless
expansion in the 1980s, when
his Storehouse group bought
up Mothercare, the whiskery
British Home Stores, the
trendy Richard Shops and
others. It was Conran’s attempt
to colonise middle England,
but he failed to anticipate his
new acquisitions’ resistance to
change; in 1990 he was forced
to step down as boss. He threw
himself into acquiring
restaurants — Kensington
Place, Skylon, Boundary,
Lutyens — and reviving
Quaglino’s, a glossy cavern
popular with royalty in the
1950s, whose main appeal was
the marble-and-brass
staircase down which patrons
descended like Hollywood
stars. The biographer Fiona
MacCarthy described it as “a
deprived child’s dream of
sophisticated living”.
Mavity can’t match Bayley’s
sleek prose, but he’s good at
conveying the experience of
being in a room with Conran
the Barbarian, as he swings a
punch at an irritating colleague
or bawls out an underling for
suggesting staff uniforms
should be made from artificialfabrics. He describes sitting
on a plane beside Conran and
his marketing supremo, John
Stephenson, who had married
Conran’s second wife. During
the flight, Conran explained
to Mavity (“with an almost
gynaecological level of
detail”) that, while he and
Stephenson had both married
Shirley, he had fathered two
children with her, while John
had fathered none.
Among the authors’ many
complaints about their chief
are his lack of gratitude, his
reluctance to encourage
others, his blast-freezing of
relationships and withholding
of approval — things you might
associate with a cold parent or
a manipulative lover. When
Bayley describes the genesis of
his own idea, the Boilerhouse
Project — an exhibition space
in the V&A Museum that tried
to bring functional objects
within hailing distance of the
palace of art — he rails at
Conran for his complaints and
non-involvement, before
exploding into fury: “Who
could countenance working
for a man like Terence, a man
of such fluid principle, of such
fluctuating beliefs, of such
Day-Glo opportunism, of such
sun-dried narcissism,
guilt-less hypocrisy and
Hallelujah Chorus egomania?
... The answer is, an awful lot
of people.”
As the book ends, after
Conran’s death last autumn,
with a flurry of postscripts
and just-one-more-thing
afterwords, you can see its
nature clearly. This is a
328-page chronicle of neglect, a
two-man chorus of rage about
a brilliant, infuriating cult
leader who failed to support
his most stalwart acolytes —
who didn’t respect them
enough, thank them enough
or love them enough. cTa ke a vow Terence and
Shirley Conran in 1955This is a two-
man chorus
of rage about
a cult leader
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