The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  Her sexual life was really almost nonexistent. It’s not a good premise for a book.

  —Barbara Roett, in conversation with the author

  The way your head tipped back when you reached to drop a cigarette’s ashes, the way your hair smelled, of Russian leather, at the exact center above your forehead, the way your voice sounded when your head was light against mine and I embraced you…oh bed was always the unbelievable, the unimaginable, the best.

  —Patricia Highsmith, 1948

  In the Christmas season of 1948 the winter weather in Manhattan was freakishly warm; the warmest ever recorded by the New York Weather Bureau. It wasn’t until mid-December that the first major snowstorms blanketed the city and quickly turned to municipal slush under a day of heavy rains.1 Pat Highsmith—perhaps it was the unseasonable heat—was alight with one of her special “holiday feelings.” She wanted to close her hands (tightly, she thought later) around the throat of a “blondish and elegant” married woman from New Jersey who had just bewitched her from across a crowded room.2

  Kathleen Wiggins Senn (Mrs. E. R. Senn), the woman in question, resplendent in a mink coat, appeared one day in early December in the seventh-floor toy department at Bloomingdale’s department store on Fifty-ninth Street and Lexington Avenue, where Pat, anxious to pay for her psychoanalysis and awaiting the publication of Strangers on a Train, had just taken a sales job for the Christmas rush season.

  Blond, statuesque, with an angled, Saxon profile and “intelligent gray eyes,”3 Mrs. Senn, slapping a pair of gloves suggestively into the palm of one hand, walked slowly and absently up to the doll counter where a mesmerized Pat stood waiting to serve her.4 In a voice that class-conscious Americans like Pat (or like Scott Fitzgerald, who provided this metaphor in The Great Gatsby) would have recognized as being “full of money,” Mrs. Senn ordered a doll sent to her house in Ridgewood, New Jersey, for one of her daughters. The enthralled young salesgirl, Miss Highsmith, filled out the receipt—but her Alter Ego, the canny writer Patricia, quickly memorized the client’s address.

  In a trance of desire, Pat—both parts of her—went straight downstairs to the Bloomingdale’s card shop, bought a Christmas card, signed it with the perfect Highsmith nom de plume, and mailed it off at the post office in Bloomingdale’s basement to Kathleen Senn’s address.

  But the signature Pat put on the card wasn’t a name. It was her Bloomingdale’s employee number.5

  Kathleen Senn never connected the number or the Christmas card with the attractive, flustered salesgirl who waited on her, and she never replied to it. Later, Pat felt grateful for Mrs. Senn’s incomprehension.6 But when she came to reimagine her meeting with Mrs. Senn for The Price of Salt, the novel their meeting catalyzed, Pat supplied the response Mrs. Senn had failed to make. And it is Carol Aird’s reply to the love-struck young Therese Belivet’s cryptic card in The Price of Salt that kindles their burning love affair and all that follows.

  To an imagination like Patricia Highsmith’s, Kathleen Senn’s “routine transaction” in Bloomingdale’s—it lasted, Pat wrote, no more than “two or three minutes” and she never met Mrs. Senn again—had all the features of a sexually charged sadomasochistic fantasy.7 On one side of the Bloomingdale’s counter was the young, poor, seemingly subservient salesgirl; on the other side, the older, wealthy, apparently dominant Venus in furs. Money and class were not the least of the elements in Pat’s stunned attraction for Kathleen Senn; her obsession at first sight struck her like a lightning bolt or like a religious experience. The woman “seemed to give off light…. I felt odd and swimmy in the head, near to fainting, yet at the same time uplifted, as if I had seen a vision.”8

  After her meeting with Mrs. Senn, Pat went directly back to her apartment, wrote up (in what turned out to be both a metaphorical and, later, a real fever) a plot outline for The Price of Salt—“it flowed from my pen as from nowhere—beginning, middle and end” in two hours9—and then fell ill with a disease most often associated with children: chicken pox. “One of the small, runny-nosed children [in the toy department] must have passed on the germ, but in a way the germ of a book too: fever is stimulating to the imagination.”10

  Like François Truffaut, who said he preferred his films “to give the impression of having been filmed with a temperature of 112,” Pat thought “that when you’re feverish, in the medical sense, you are much more vibrant.”11 She would always find high temperatures highly inspiring.

  Pat’s first version of The Price of Salt, written into her Cahier 18 as The Bloomingdale Story and later titled The Argument of Tantalus: or THE LIE, was couched in a voice that was almost her own—“Am so eager to get back to Tantalus! Oh, I shall be myself then!”12—and employed by a character she said was completely herself: Therese, a creative adolescent, an orphan with a mother, a girl “flung out of space,” who “came from my own bones.” But this was not the first time Pat had made use of the self-incriminating “I” in a narrative.

  The Dove Descending (a title culled from T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding”), a seventy-eight-page novel she’d begun with a synopsis in 1944 and left unfinished in its narrative form, is told by a thin, dark, passive girl (“Leonora” in the synopsis, “Marcia” in the narrative), “anesthetized with melancholy and a vague sense of regret,” who has been adopted by her flamboyantly aggressive Aunt Vivian. (There are almost as many orphans and adoptions in Highsmith fictions as there are murders.) Vivian gives Marcia a “strange feeling of being stalked by something, as a person might feel in a jungle. The unknown enemy was my aunt’s silent fury, for I knew no reason for it.”13 So exquisite are the psychological humiliations Aunt Vivian inflicts upon her niece that they become the unintended focus of a narrative meant to concentrate on three male love choices for Marcia. Aunt Vivian’s graphic humiliations of Marcia give us an Early Gothic version of Pat’s worst relations with Mother Mary.

  Pat used a first-person narrator again in her next serious attempt at a lesbian novel, the fifty-nine-page unfinished epistolary narrative The First Person Novel.14 A married woman, Juliette Tallifer Dorn, who has a lesbian lover and a lesbian past (replete with recognizable details from Pat’s own love life), sits in a room in an inn eight miles from Munich (one of Pat’s favorite writing rooms had been in an inn “in Ambach, near Munich, with a ceiling so low I could not stand up at one end of it,” where she had worked on The Price of Salt)15 and thinks through her history of loving women by writing about it for two hours a day to her husband. Pat began this narrative in her twenty-sixth notebook in January of 1961, as the outline for a short story which she called—as she was to call all her unfinished attempts at writing lesbian fiction after The Price of Salt—“Girls’ Book.”16

  It’s a crucial characteristic of her technique as a writer that the sole use Patricia Highsmith ever made of the first-person narrative in her novels was in abandoned drafts of works meant to portray intense relations between women.17 Two of these works are lesbian love stories, and the first of them was the draft that became The Price of Salt. In her 1965 book about writing, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, Pat never revealed the subject of her abandoned first-person fictions. She simply called the first-person singular “the most difficult form,” adding, “I have bogged down twice in first-person-singular books, so emphatically that I abandoned any idea of writing the books.”18

  The wrenching ambivalence Pat felt while she was writing The Price of Salt (after much agonizing, she finally published the work under a pseudonym, Claire Morgan) meant that it was a long time before the manuscript had its publication title. Amongst the evocative names she considered were The Bloomingdale Story, The Argument of Tantalus, Blasphemy of Laughter (“from V. Woolf’s The Waves”),19 and Paths of Lightening.20 Carol, the title Bloomsbury Press gave to The Price of Salt in 1990 when Pat finally allowed her name to be attached to the work in Europe, collapses the novel’s mysteries into a single interpretation.

  Pat used Kathleen Senn’s real name in the first versi
on of The Price of Salt (she was still calling it The Bloomingdale Story)—she couldn’t yet surrender the Senn name up to a fictional disguise21—and began the book’s intensely personal narration in the voice of the adolescent Therese who falls “instantly,” ecstatically, and irretrievably in love with an older woman. Pat was twenty-seven at the time, but to the end of her life she approached love like a teenager.

  “I see her the same instant she sees me, and instantly, I love her. Instantly, I am terrified, because I know she knows I am terrified and that I love her. Though there are seven girls between us, I know, she knows, she will come to me and have me wait on her.”22

  “I set her age at thirty-five,” Pat wrote in her notes about the “older woman” in her novel, “an exciting thirty-five. Already I think how happy her husband must be.”23

  Three months to the day before she started The Bloomingdale Story, Pat had nailed her love colors to the mast in a notebook: “I want to look up to someone, I do not wish to be looked up to.”24 With Kathleen Senn, she got what she wished for—and a little more than that. Mrs. Senn was apparently as interested in death as Pat was, but from a different perspective. The self-sufficient daughter of the owner of an airline company in Massachusetts, a champion golfer and flyer of planes before she was married to the wealthy businessman, Edward R. Senn, and a “very gregarious, empathetic, compassionate” woman, Kathleen Senn was also a troubled alcoholic who had been in and out of psychiatric institutions in New York.25 And sometime during the Halloween holiday of 1951, she walked into the closed garage of her Bergen County house—the house looked something like a castle in a fairy tale26—turned on her car ignition, and killed herself with carbon monoxide gas just as The Price of Salt was being readied for its 1952 publication. She died as unconscious of the effect she’d had on Pat Highsmith as Pat was unconscious of her real-life model’s unhappy end.

  And The Price of Salt, faithful to its wish-come-true inspiration and its magically fevered creation, is pervaded by a tranced and hypnotized, fairy-tale atmosphere of precarious dangers and pursuits; closer in spirit to the sadistic cruelties of the Brothers Grimm than to the delicate perversions of Charles Perrault—even in its smallest details.

  “Therese bit her tongue…. Carol’s fingers slid down her cigarette and the fire burned her. When she got the cigarette out of her mouth, her lip began to bleed.”27

  When Carol and Therese try to take an amorous shower together, Carol twists Therese’s arm, then Therese drags Carol’s head “under the stream of water and there was the horrible sound of a foot slipping.”28

  Even Therese’s first sexual experience with Carol is vaguely weaponized:

  “The arrow seemed to cross an impossibly wide abyss with ease, seemed to arc on and on in space, and not quite to stop. Then she realized that she still clung to Carol, that she trembled violently, and the arrow was herself.”29

  If we consider that The Price of Salt is the only novel Patricia Highsmith wrote in which a murder is not committed,* then Kathleen Senn’s desperate act—without diminishing in any way its real tragedy—comes to seem a little like a central event Pat might first have imagined and then decided to leave out of this novel whose signs of love are so palpably joined to its signals of war and its sense of danger.

  It is at such uncanny intersections of life and art that the awful question arises: Whose life, in the brief encounter Patricia Highsmith had with Kathleen Senn, actually influenced whose? And to what end?

  Pat finished the first version of The Price of Salt—she was now calling it The Argument of Tantalus—on 29 June 1950 “at precisely 2:56 PM,” with the ending that came most naturally to her: the ending that separated the two women. Her feeling for the book approached the sacramental, and her gratitude at finishing it came in a rush of religious language. “Thanks be to God,” she wrote. “Glory be to God, I have finished another book today. In God is all my strength and my inspiration. In God and Jesus’ name is all my courage and fortitude.”30

  Pat said later that the title she finally settled on, The Price of Salt, had come from something she was thinking of in the Bible. She might have been remembering the price paid by Hagar, Lot’s wife, for that last look back at the Sodomites. More likely, though, she was invoking a biblical reference from another work she had once taken to heart—the Gospel text André Gide inserted into The Counterfeiters, his novel about the transgressive love of adolescents: “‘If the salt have lost its flavor wherewith shall it be salted?—that is the tragedy with which I am concerned.’”31

  The Price of Salt allowed Pat to release herself from what was to become her most reliable artistic forgery: the male “voice” of narration and an apparently heterosexual orientation. She never again published another work like it. “How grateful I am at last,” she wrote while working on the manuscript in December of 1949, “not…to spoil my best thematic material by transposing it to false male-female relationship.”32

  On 30 June 1950, the day after she finished her first version of The Price of Salt, Pat, saturated with images from her manuscript and moved by some demiurge of completion, took a train from Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan to Ridgewood, New Jersey, on her way to the address she’d memorized a year and a half before: Kathleen Senn’s address, 315 Murray Avenue.33 It was the beginning of an ineptly comic episode: a “stalking” of the heroine of her own novel.

  Early in June, an accidental meeting with a man from Ridgewood, Carl Hazelwood, had revived Pat’s interest in the actual Mrs. Senn. Hazelwood was to drive Pat out to Ridgewood on her second “stalking” trip there six months later (when Pat found the house deserted and “something of a fairy tale[,] something of a castle”),34 and he joined the long list of young men whom Pat—for a moment—thought she might marry. But as Pat wrote in her diary about Mrs. Senn: “Alas, should I see her, my book would be spoilt! I should be inhibited!”35

  Pat’s instinctively canny separation of her art from her life was followed by a “completely irresponsible desire to drift about picking up strangers, especially girls. Born of confidence & money, of course.”36 Pat had been spending uninspiring nights with casual lovers Billie (a woman) and Sylvia as well as with her serious, off-and-on-again “fiancé,” Marc Brandel. It was only when she’d finished the first version of Salt that she felt secure enough to make the first trip to New Jersey.

  Pat carefully preserved her ticket back from that ride, Ridgewood to New York on the Erie Railroad, on her diary page of 30 June 1950. Just as carefully, she recorded her guilty and self-dramatizing impressions from that day.

  “Today feeling quite odd—like a murderer in a novel, I boarded the train for Ridgewood, New Jersey. It shook me physically and left me limp.”37

  Pat had to fortify herself with “two ryes” before taking the 92 bus in Ridgewood to Murray Avenue. She asked the driver where to go and then, “to my dismay and horror, I heard the entire bus shouting Murray Ave?—and giving me directions!” Feeling exposed and unbalanced by the attention, she took the wrong bus, and then, still embarrassed by the remarks of the passengers, she got off at the wrong stop. “I overshot my mark.” She found herself in a residential area with no sidewalks where “I was a conspicuous figure. I dared not go any further, up the avenue…where she [Mrs. Senn] just might have been on the lawn or porch and I might have betrayed myself with halting too abruptly.”

  Pat wanted only to look, to gaze at the woman whose essence she had been, in the most profound way, living with and re-creating for the past eighteen months while writing The Price of Salt. Like any voyeur, she didn’t want to be “a conspicuous figure” or even to make contact with the object of her obsession. But her timidity was so pronounced that it overcame her mild intention of creeping a little closer. So she hovered on a nearby street and watched recessively as a “pale aqua automobile [came] out of Murray Avenue, driven by a woman with dark glasses and short blond hair, alone, and I think in a pale blue or aqua dress with short sleeves.” But Pat wasn’t at all certain the drive
r was Mrs. Senn—the hair was different—and her identification of the figure was ambiguous. “My heart leapt but not very high.”

  Later, she wrote “a tragic little poem” about the sighting—“if it was one”—and announced that she was determined to conceal “these stirrings” from “Mr. M[arc] B[randel],” whom she was still trying to persuade herself to marry.38

  The whole afternoon was a comedy of errors—more like a failed, farcical rehearsal of transgressive desires than a noirish episode of sexual stalking. Pat was, anyway, a great rehearser and assembler of feelings for her writing, and she carefully described and filed away the humiliation she suffered on this stalking trip to New Jersey. Twelve years later she was able to make use of it in a dazzling novel of misfortune, The Cry of the Owl, whose mild-mannered peeping Tom, Robert Forester, suffers the horrible consequences of having a girl he spies upon fall deeply in love with him.

  Three weeks before she took the trip to Ridgewood, Pat had gone to visit Mother Mary in Hastings-on-Hudson for another rehearsal: she called it steeping “myself in that which I hate, in that rejection, which is what I am about to describe in my book. My mother grows increasingly neurotic—my god!…Yet she insists I do not need an analyst.”39 In her private writing, as she did in this passage, Pat often confused herself with her mother. But in her public writing, she tried to do what she never could do in life: make the best use of her worst feelings.

  The day after she returned from Ridgewood, 1 July, Pat went back to Hastings-on-Hudson to visit Mary again, and she found that trip to be just as unsatisfactory as her ride to New Jersey had been the day before. “Though mother always asks when I am coming out…she wants me really to leave very soon.” 40 Mary was collapsing under the intolerable financial pressure of keeping up a good front. Her fancy house and live-in Filipino “houseboy” in Hastings-on-Hudson were far beyond her means, and all her work opportunities were disappearing. Pat knew—Stanley had told her—that Mary was “ashamed she cannot offer a house with leisure, food, servants, etc. and afraid of what the Southern family will think of her. This reaches serious proportions—so great I am worried that mother may lose her mind, even commit suicide.” 41