Pedantry and Patricia Highsmith

Anyone who spends his time among old books, as I now do, must be familiar with the phenomenon of the pedant who has pounced gleefully upon the one orthographical error, underlined it in pencil, and put an exclamation mark in the margin as if this single error cancelled out all that the author has to say in the rest of the book. Indeed, one has the impression that such a person has read the entire book with the express purpose of finding such an error; for him, there is no joy quite like it.

I shall not here dilate on the psychology of pedantry, for it does not appear as a disorder in …