Dead Letters: The Handbag

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent

For most of my career I have been refused. Ignored, deceived, shut out, looked through. I had come to think of it as the natural condition of my profession — that the writer and the correspondent stand on opposite sides of a glass, and the glass does not open.

Then, at a literary reception in London in the mid-1960s, Patricia Highsmith agreed to talk to me, and I learned that there are worse things than the glass.

I had gone to the party hoping to get near her. She was, by then, the author of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley — the woman Graham Greene had called the poet of apprehension, the writer who understood, better than anyone alive, the precise moment at which an ordinary person decides to do something monstrous. I expected her to be difficult. Her reputation preceded her like a cold front. I had heard she was rude, that she drank, that she had once set her own hair on fire at a dinner party to see what the other guests would do.

I found her standing alone near the bar, holding a large handbag against her body with both hands, the way one holds something that might otherwise get away. I introduced myself. I braced for the refusal.

"All right," she said. "What do you want to know."

It was not a question. It was a permission, granted with the enthusiasm of a woman agreeing to a dental appointment. But it was permission, and in twenty years of this work it was among the first I had ever received. I got out my notebook with hands that were, I admit, less steady than the moment warranted.

She was a remarkable interview. She talked about evil with the calm of a woman discussing the weather — not evil as a force, she said, but as a decision, available to anyone, at any time, requiring only the right pressure and the removal of the usual reasons not to. She said most people were restrained from murder by nothing more profound than inconvenience. She said her character Ripley was not a monster but a man who had simply stopped paying the tax that the rest of us pay, the small continuous tax of conscience, and had found that no one came to collect. She said all of this in a flat, unhurried American voice, and I wrote it all down, and I thought: this is the best material of my life.

Then the handbag moved.

I want to be precise. The handbag, which she held against her stomach, shifted of its own accord. Something inside it changed position. I looked at it. She saw me look.

"Would you like to meet them," she said. Again, not a question.

She opened the bag. Inside, on a bed of lettuce leaves gone translucent with damp, were perhaps two dozen snails. Live ones. Several were in motion, their horns extended, climbing slowly over one another and over the leaves and toward the rim of the bag, which she watched with an attention she had not given to any human being in the room.

"This is Hortense," she said, indicating one snail among the others by some criterion I could not detect. "And the rest. I don't name all of them. There are too many at home — three hundred, perhaps more. These are the ones I brought."

I asked, because I could not think of anything else to ask, why she had brought them to a party.

"Because they're better company than the guests," she said. "They don't make demands. They don't lie. They don't bore me. And they understand something most people never will." She closed the bag, gently, so as not to dislodge the climbers. "Man has no more soul than a garden snail," she said. "The point is that the garden snail has a soul, too."

I asked if she traveled with them.

She told me she did. She told me she had moved snails across international borders by carrying them on her person — past customs officers who would have confiscated them as agricultural contraband, against her body, where no one would search. She said this with the first genuine warmth she had shown all evening, the warmth of a woman describing a successful conspiracy on behalf of someone she loved.

I had read one of her stories by then — "The Snail-Watcher," about a man whose snail collection breeds beyond all control and eventually covers him, smothers him, consumes him in his own home. I had assumed, reading it, that it was an invention. Standing at that bar, watching her hold the bag against her stomach with both hands, I understood that it was closer to a wish.

I filed the piece the next day. All of it — the evil-as-decision material, the Ripley insight, the snails, Hortense, the soul of the garden snail, the smuggling. It was the strangest and best interview I had ever conducted, and for once I had conducted it with the full cooperation of my subject.

My editor cut everything below the Ripley quote.

"The murder philosophy stays," he said. "Lose the snails."

I asked why.

"Because no one will believe it," he said. "A famous woman carries two dozen live snails to a cocktail party in her handbag and tells you they have souls? They'll think you made it up. They'll think you're padding. Give me the writer. Lose the zoo."

I argued. I told him it was true. He told me that true and believable were different things, and that my job was the second one, and that I had apparently forgotten this somewhere along the way.

The piece ran without the snails. It was a good piece. It was also, I knew, a lie of omission — a portrait of a writer with the single most important fact about her surgically removed, because the fact was too strange for print.

I got the quote. I got all of them. And the best one — the one about the soul of the snail, delivered by a woman holding two dozen of them against her body in a crowded room — I have carried, unpublished, for sixty years, because the one time a writer told me everything, no one would believe what she said.

— F.M.

Fletcher Moody is a literary correspondent. His column, "Dead Letters," covers the stranger truths of literary history. It appears when it appears.