Illustration by Jean L. Huens for the Saturday Evening Post. Done for the short story “The Snails,” by Patricia Highsmith.
A while back, viewing a hyper-realistic sculpture of hundreds of snails climbing a beer stein to their doom jarred loose an ancient flake of memory from the cobwebby and calcified ruins inside my skull. It was a memory of a short story from my childhood. It’s funny how strangely strong, yet distorted, these moth-eaten impressions can be. I remembered a story about a man on an island looking for giant man-eating snails and coming to a bad end.
Little bits, which may or may not be accurate… I remembered reading it in a magazine; I remembered an illustration showing the snail; I remembered a long, slow battle to the death between the man and the snail. Oh, I did remember being shocked at the ending. I think the story was written in the first person and I was confused at the death of the protagonist… who was telling the tale?
Now that the memory was jarred loose, it had to be teased out or it would drive me nuts. So, off to the Internet. It didn’t take too many crude search queries to quickly realize that many people had been looking for this same story. It didn’t take much more work to find the name of the story, “The Quest for the ‘Blank Claveringi.’”
I was surprised to read that the story was by Patricia Highsmith, the Forth-Worth born (though she fled quite effectively to Europe) author of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and “Strangers on a Train.” The author had a particular affection for snails – from the book Snail, by Peter Williams:
So attached was the author Patricia Highsmith to snails that they became her constant travelling companions. Secreted in a large handbag or, in the case of travel abroad, carefully positioned under each breast, they provided her with comfort and companionship in what she perceived to be a hostile world.
The story was included in an Alfred Hitchcock collection of tales for youngsters, “Alfred Hitchock’s Supernatural Tales of Terror and Suspense.” That must have been where I read it, not in a magazine. The only problem is that the book seems to have first come out in 1973 and I felt like I was younger than that when I read it. But again, memories are funny, I must have got it wrong.
A quick check of the Richardson Library’s website and I found the book. So I went down there, grabbed it off of the shelves (It was odd looking for the book in the children’s section – it was such a horrific story) and I sat down and read it.
That was the story from my childhood. Of course, a lot of it I didn’t remember, but there can’t be too many tales set on an island with a scientist fleeing from a man-eating snail. If you wonder about the title – “The Quest for the ‘Blank Claveringi,’” the protagonist, Avery Clavering, is fantasizing about getting the new species of giant snail, about the size of a Volkswagen, named after him… though he can’t decide on the genus (thus the “Blank”).
I was wrong about the story being in first person. It is told from the protagonist’s point of view and does go inside his head – that must have been what threw me. The horror of the story is real – the snail is slow, of course, but relentless. The hero can walk faster than the snail, but the island is small and the thing will eventually catch up. He has to sleep sometime.
I enjoyed the story and made a note of reading some more Highsmith. Looking in the front of the book, I discovered that the story was part of a collection called, “The Snail-Watcher and other stories.” The library had that one too, and I checked it out. That collection has at least two horrific snail-related tales… I guess the woman did have a thing for slimy mollusks.
In the front of that collection I found another clue – it said, ““The Quest for the ‘Blank Claveringi’” originally appeared in slightly altered form in The Saturday Evening Post, as “The Snails.”
Back to the Internet. A little searching found that the story was in the June 17, 1967 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. I would have been ten years old then… and that felt about right. I checked the library archive, and they had the 1967 ‘Post in bound form in the archives. The woman at the information desk didn’t seem to understand what I wanted (“Yes, we have magazines… 1967?”) but eventually I was able to get her to go back and retrieve the volume for me. I had to sign a form and give up something (my library card) as collateral to get the tome, and I did.
It was really cool to sit down at a library study station and look through a set of forty-five year old magazines. The ads, the photographs, the illustrations…. pretty damn cool.
I found the story, with an excellent illustration by Jean-Louis Huens. In the white space above the title, someone had written in pencil, “This is what I wanted you to read.” So, I am not the only person on a quest for this story, not even the only one to end up in the archives of the Richardson Public Library.
I took a photo of the illustration with my phone and then sat there and read the story again. Since I had cruised through the Alfred Hitchcock version only a few minutes before, I immediately began to notice differences in the text. At first they seemed minor, only polishings, or rearrangements of phrases. But as I neared the end, the story veered and suddenly it was a completely different tale altogether.
This was probably the version I had read as a ten-year-old child. I seemed to remember another person on the island, and that was only true on the Saturday Evening Post Version. Though the only real significant difference between the two is in the last handful of paragraphs, the thrust of the two plots diverged completely. While the Hitchcock version was an existential tale of the futility of man against the inexorable power of nature, the second was a revenge tale of murder and madness.
I really don’t know why the story was rewritten so savagely, though I think I did like the Hitchcock version (which I assume is the revised tale) a tiny bit better.
At any rate, I checked out two of her books of short stories – The Snail-Watcher and other stories, and Little Tales of Misogyny (a slim volume of very short works about very bad people). I really should not read this kind of stuff. What I am reading is a very strong influence on what I am writing and these stories play into my natural tenancies toward repulsive scribbling.
But it is what it is. As a matter of fact… I have to write something tomorrow for my Sunday Snippets…. Maybe something about giant Volkswagen-sized man-eating snails…. maybe a sequel. What would happen if someone brought a snail back to the mainland?
Snails can reproduce frighteningly fast under the right conditions, you know.
Bill Chance 
“Snails can reproduce frighteningly fast under the right conditions, you know.” — my yard, trees and outside walls of the our house are evidence of this statement!! They reproduce like Tribbles from Star Trek!
I was thinking of an aquarium but you’re right – they can take over a garden or a yard too. Tribbles – a good reference.
I had never heard of this story–thanks very much!
I had wanted to post a link to it, but it doesn’t seem to be anywhere online. It seems to be in a lot of short story anthologies, so it should be at any library. Hope I didn’t post too many spoilers.
I remember reading the story from the magazine, and it fascinated me. Also scared the hell out of me.
I wondered if anyone that read my blog had remembered the story. It seems to have left a mark on a lot of people.
The funny thing is, about a month ago I was thinking of it, only because I remember the picture. Then I saw the picture on your blog, and read the article, and it all came back to me. I remember it being a long story, and I couldn’t put it down.
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Hi, first read this story back in the spring of 1980 as part of either my O level or CSE in English (I did both). It was included in a collection of short horror/supetnatural stories entitled “Could It Be’ and I’m proud to say I still have my copy on my bookshelf. I googled the title ‘The Quest For Blank Claveringi’ purely because I was bored suddenly remembered it which is why/how I stumbled across this delightful blog! That collection, and this story in particular really held a fascination for and for some resson that I cannot explain, it still does!
Thanks for the nice comment. It’s surprising how many people remember this story – it sure made a long-term impression on me.
My parents subscribed to the POST back in the 60s and I would read it from time to time. This story scared the living daylights out of me at age 11. Years later, I did what you did: searched for it in a library collection. I found it, and there was that creepy illustration that you so kindly have reproduced. But it wasn’t until I started looking around for it again today (about 30 years after my last search) that I realized it was written by Highsmith. Fascinating. Thanks for your post, and your POST.
Thanks for the comment! I’m surprised at how many folks remember this story and remember how scary it was. I guess Patricia Highsmith sort of knows what she’s doing.
I only wish that I could read the original magazine version, rather than the alternative version available in her book.
Try your local library – they might have it.
My library is seeking it out for me, and may even be so kind as to send me a PDF eventually. In the meantime, I tried to find out more about the illustrator, and could only come up with this article from a Dutch (or Flemish) Wiki. It’s definitely the right guy, because it mentions that he broke into the US market and did work for the Post, Readers Digest, etc.: http://vls.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-L%C3%A9on_Huens
I also read this article as a child in the Saturday Evening Post, entitled The Snails. I collected brass snails for a long time after that publication and still have them. Would love to reread the story.
Bill – funny, there are a few of us online who have childhood memories of this very story and who engage in detective work to track it down. Here’s mine!
http://alienatedinvancouver.blogspot.ca/2006/12/patricia-highsmith-snails-and-truly.html
(Thanks for scanning the terrific illustration, by the way. I want that on a T-shirt)!
I read it circa 1984 or 5. In which version is it that the snail, out to avenge the murder of its mate, chases the man out into the water and simultaneously drowns him and eats him alive? That’s the one I read. What was the ending of the other one?
It’s been a while and my memory is bad – but I think the version you read is the Hitchcock version. In the Saturday Evening Post version he is only injured by the snail and is then murdered by the other scientist and left as snail food. That’s not quite right, but my memory is hazy.
I’ll have to take a look the next time I’m at the library.
Yes, you’re right. I tracked down the version called The Snails online after I posted this comment, and it ended with him being killed by Stead, the man who somehow missed finding the snails despite years of effort. I must have read the Hitchcock one before and that was MUCH better.
I remember the original story from the Saturday Evening Post. Not sure I read it the year it was published there (1967), as I’d have been 11 at the time. But if I didn’t read it then, it was only a few years after. For some reason I was thinking it had been penned by Bradbury or Heinlein…but that clearly wasn’t the case. Nice work on your short sequel, by the way.
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I too read this when I was young (definitely in the Hitchcock anthology). My memory is that there were two giant snails and he managed to kill one but the other chased him down in the surf at the end. And I had no idea it was Patricia Highsmith until recently!
Yes, that’s one of the endings – the other is quite different. Thanks for the comment – it seems there are a lot of folks that had their youthful innocence messed-with by this story.
English teacher read this to us and we had to finnish with our own endings, why it stuck in my mind for so many years i will never know
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I much preferred the Hitchcock version. Now wasn’t there a story in that Hitchcock collection that was about a henpecked husband who buys an antique door that causes anything to go through it to disappear? He pushes his wife into it and then later at the end of the story is pushed in himself.
That sounds cool – I’ll have to go look again for that collection. There’s a rude National Lampoon story by Chris Miller that uses the same idea except with a birth control device.
Ha! Now I would like to read that.
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