The cat sees everything

Time critic Stephanie Zacharek's Megalopolis review makes a small, big point:

You might want to laugh at Megalopolis; you might be tempted to walk out. And you wouldn’t be wrong to call it self-indulgent. But then, haven’t we had enough movies that are audience-indulgent, seeking only to appease—and never, ever to offend—legions of fanboys and -girls who have very specific ideas about what they want from entertainment? I found myself almost literally leaning closer to the screen during Megalopolis, trying to grasp exactly what Coppola is seeking to communicate. I might have caught about a third of it, at best, but I’ll take a messy, imaginative sprawl over a waxen, tasteful enterprise any day.

Loving Steven Zaillian's Ripley. It's economical, cool and witty. Loving that a new generation is getting into it, even if they don't get it. This series is a product of great thinking.

The only witnesses to Tom are animals and portraits and things that can’t testify. A goat sees something. And the cat. The cat sees everything.

Pat

Patricia Highsmith interviewed by Gerald Peary in 1988:

She owns no copies of films made from her books, not even Alfred Hitchcock's 1951 version of her first novel, Strangers on a Train (1950). "It seems to be entertaining after all these years," she acknowledges. "They keep playing it on American TV, ancient as it is. A few years ago, there were requests to me, 'Can we make this?' I said that I have no rights. Contact the Hitchcock estate, which won't release it for a remake."

Strangers on a Train was sold outright for $7,500, with ten per cent of that to Highsmith's agent. A meager recompense, some would say, but Highsmith disagrees. "That wasn't a bad price for a first book, and my agent upped it as much as possible. I was 27 and had nothing behind me. I was working like a fool to earn a living and pay for my apartment. I didn't hang around films. I don't know if I'd ever seen Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes."

Hitchcock purchased Strangers On A Train through an intermediary so Highsmith's agent wouldn't know who was bidding for it and ask for a larger advance. It's interesting that the author puts so much distance between herself and the director: critics and fans put them hand in glove.

NB: Nice sweater.

Scarlet Ribbons

I've nearly finished Andrew Wilson's biography of Patricia Highsmith. (It gets depressing towards the end as the drinking catches up.) I never write in the margins of a book - it distracts me when I find someone else has done it because my eye keeps flicking to that spot - but I do fold the corner of a page if there's a passage I want to note. Afterwards when I return to the folded corners it's difficult to remember what it was that I considered so important but these, I think, are some of them, from the Bloomsbury hardback edition:

'Pat Highsmith was a very interesting and handsome woman,' remembers Ruth [Bernhard]. 'She looked wild, her facial expression was very intense and I liked her an awful lot. She was very direct, she said what she believed - she was unforgettable.' [p.99]

Julian Green's novel Si jétais vous, or If I Were You, bears a remarkable similarity to The Talented Mr Ripley. [p.91]

'Privacy. An expensive thing in the modern world... Take yourself seriously. Set a routine. Once you are alone, relax and behave as you will... While you are writing a book, you must carry around your own stage full of characters with their emotional changes - you have no room for another stage.' [Highsmith on writing, p.206]

'In the early fifties, the lending library market in America disappeared almost overnight, where suspense and mysteries had received their support,' [Shartle] says. 'Publishers panicked and declined mysteries despite [the] efforts of agents and booksellers who always believed the market would again flourish. But only [Agatha] Christie and Mickey Spillane were selling and it was not until P.D.James that the broad market recovered. Highsmith suffered at that time, in the late fifties and sixties.'

[Highsmith's agent Patricia Shartle, pp.218-219]

'These little setbacks, amounting sometimes to thousands of dollars' worth of time wasted, writers must learn to take like Spartans. A brief curse, perhaps, then tighten the belt a notch and on to something new - of course with enthusiasm, courage and optimism, because without these three elements you cannot produce anything good.' [Highsmith on rejection, p.232]

...But she missed X in London, a feeling of wretchedness which threatened to unbalance her. She wrote in her diary, 'Such unhappiness and loneliness I felt today must be counteracted by work, or I shall go mad.' [p.246]

...Doubleday complained that '[The Tremor of Forgery] sounds too much like a suspense book... It is not a suspense, etc. book, and you know how categorized the Americans are.' [p. 281]

Highsmith's manuscript notebook for Strangers on a Train can be seen here.

Bedside reading

Talked about her a little bit in my Prima Storia interview. Jane Robertson asked me if I was a fan and I blathered on about Highsmith's lesser known The Tremor of Forgery. Yeah, I'm a fan.