Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires

by Richard Bradford

  The day after she first came across Kathleen Senn in Bloomingdale’s, Highsmith went through the account books of the store and found exact details of her name and address: Murray Avenue, Ridgewood, New Jersey. She took a bus out to the district before leaving for Europe and six months after her return did so again, this time recording her feelings in detail, notably describing her love for Kathleen and a desire to murder her (1 July 1950). On the day of the journey she wrote that ‘Today, feeling quite odd – like a murderer in a novel I boarded the train for Ridgewood, New Jersey’ (Diary, 30 June 1950). Leaving the train for the bus she asked the driver about how she might find Murray Avenue, only for the other passengers to repeat the name of the street loudly and offer directions. This terrified her, causing her to feel as if she had been discovered in some shameful and illegal act. Finding Murray Avenue, the first thing she saw was an expensive-looking aqua-blue saloon being driven down the road by a woman with blonde hair wearing sunglasses. She hoped this was Kathleen but, feeling terrified again, hid behind a tree while the car disappeared down the road. On her return to the city later that day she felt that strangers were staring at her, as if they sensed in her something guilty and suspicious.

  Over the following six months she pressed ahead with and constantly revised the draft of The Price of Salt, a mixture of autobiography and fantasy. Highsmith was certainly Therese, a young woman working in a department store in order to launch her career as a theatre set designer. Her mother is a widow, into which we can read Highsmith’s belief that her real father was all but dead, and a religious fundamentalist – Mary’s affiliation with Christian Science translates as strict Episcopalianism in the novel. Carol Aird’s house was, like Kathleen Senn’s, in a respectable district of New Jersey. While Highsmith knew nothing of Kathleen’s marriage, she projected onto it her experience with Virginia Kent Catherwood. Carol, like Virginia, was denied access to her daughter after her husband employed a private detective to find evidence of her secret life as a lesbian. The most exhilarating part of the novel involves Carol’s dealings with the private detective. She offers to pay him for the tapes that disclose her sexual relationship with Therese, even though he tells her that he has stored copies in New York. To ensure that she still has rights regarding her daughter, Rindy, she finishes her relationship with Therese. However, on her return to New York she capitulates to her husband, Harge, aware that even an accusation of lesbianism would compromise her case in court. She agrees to limited visiting rights to her daughter and accepts she will spend the remainder of her life alone.

  This is the point in the draft that Highsmith had reached at the end of 1950. She had incorporated what she knew of Kathleen Senn (which was largely speculative) with thinly disguised versions of her own recent personal history. But now she faced the question of what would happen next. How would the activities and fate of the woman she did not know, but with whom she’d fallen in love, compare with what was happening to her proxy in the novel? At the end of January 1951 Highsmith once more took the train and this time found the exact house on Murray Avenue owned by the Senns. It was quasi-gothic, with turrets and miniature towers, and struck her as a shrunken version of Yaddo. In her diary she wrote ‘I am delighted that my Beatrice [from Dante’s incarnation of beautiful love] lives in such a house’ (21 January 1951) and while she saw nothing of Kathleen, two children were playing on the terrace.

  Highsmith revisited her draft and has Therese and Carol meet again, but after this they part once more. It is only after Therese’s brief unhappy relationship with an English actress – clearly based on Kathryn Cohen – that she decides to return to Carol, who greets her eagerly.

  From her earliest years as a writer, Highsmith recorded in her notebooks an uncanny perception of her real life and its fictional counterpart as aspects of the same narrative. Sometimes she wrote in her diaries and cahiers of people who did not exist and events she’d fabricated, while never admitting she’d made things up. Just as bizarre was her tendency to use her private records as intermediaries between fact and invention; often she seemed to regard her power as a writer as something that would affect the lives of people she knew. She completed the draft of The Price of Salt in autumn 1950 and one has to wonder what her career as a writer might have come to had she learned of what occurred roughly three weeks later in Murray Avenue. At midday on 30 October when her children were at school and her husband at work, Kathleen closed the garage door, started the engine in her elegant aqua-blue saloon and waited in the driver’s seat for the carbon dioxide from the exhaust to suffocate her. Highsmith never knew of what happened to the woman with whom she fell in love in an instant, and who became the inspiration of her second novel. She had, as we have seen, cultivated an obsession with the relationship between writing and murder and had she learned of the fate of Kathleen, she would surely have been filled with contempt for both herself and her new vocation.

  Elsewhere in New York, another writer had been busily remaking fact as fiction. Following their final break-up, Marc Brandel began to learn from mutual friends that Highsmith had been treating their relationship not only as a means of revenging herself against the world of heterosexuals and societal respectability; it became evident that she had also taken particular pleasure in humiliating him as an individual. With remarkable speed he completed and published The Choice (1950). It is a grotesque piece of work involving Nat Mason, a cockroach exterminator, who sends poison pen letters to his clients and, if they are women, steals their underwear. Brandel cleverly implies parallels between Mason’s mixture of sadism and perversion and his ex-fiancée, or at least these would become evident to those who knew Highsmith best. Her mother vomited after reading it. Brandel also peppers traces of Highsmith throughout the triangular relationship between Ned, a comic-book artist, his girlfriend Jill, who bears a close physical resemblance to Highsmith, and Ann, Jill’s lover who is made up of temperamental features of Ann Clark (now Smith) and Highsmith herself. The implication is that Highsmith was capable of infecting those around her with her own essential brand of evil. We might regard Brandel’s novel as unduly malicious but when we look at Highsmith’s behaviour over the next few years it comes across as prescient.

  5

  Carol

  In October 1950 Highsmith was introduced to Arthur Koestler, an international literary celebrity. His closest friend, George Orwell, had died earlier that year. The two of them were the most prominent ‘liberal’ writers brave enough to show that Stalin’s Soviet regime was as brutally authoritarian as the recently defeated Nazi Germany. Koestler read parts of the draft of The Price of Salt, praised the book, made constructive comments and soon afterwards attempted to seduce its author. She slept with him but was appalled that his apparent pleasure in having sex with her was based on sadomasochism. ‘A miserable, joyless episode,’ she wrote. ‘There is a mood of self-torture in me – when it comes to men … And so, hostility, masochism, self-hatred, self-abasement.’ She does not explain why she slept with him, but it is evident that Koestler knew she was gay and was, in a cruel and perverse manner, intent on exploring unknown territory and subjecting her to a form of abasement. Highsmith: ‘Koestler, efficient as always, decides to abandon the sexual with me. He did not know homosexuality was so deeply ingrained, he said’ (Diary, 14 October 1950). She implies, with ‘he said’, that both of them knew he was lying.

  Within a month she decided to embark on her own rather perverse self-destructive antidote to what Koestler had done to her. From October onwards she began to consume vast amounts of wine and spirits on a daily basis and at the end of the month she wrote of ‘taking therapeutic measures against alcoholism. Something must be done.’ We should not regard this as her affirmation that she would dry out. Quite the opposite. She continued to drink, and it became evident that alcohol was more a calculated means of emboldening herself for obnoxious behaviour rather than a latent addiction.

  Soon after entering this curious mantra in her diary she contacted Elizabeth
Lyne, a well-known dress designer and occasional portrait artist whom she’d got to know at the several à la mode cultural events she now attended. Accepting Highsmith’s invitation, Lyne joined her for an afternoon of drinking at Café Society, a bohemian club that targeted its conspicuously downmarket décor to New Yorkers who aspired to membership of the in-crowd – it was known as ‘the wrong place for the right people’. They chatted and eventually Highsmith leaned towards her, described in graphic detail the kind of sexual acts she most enjoyed and asked if Lyne would care to take part. Lyne, amused rather than offended, replied, ‘Come on Pat, snap out of it.’ She meant that her companion was fully aware that she, Lyne, was a married heterosexual who had never shown the slightest inclination towards gay sexuality. The same night Highsmith recorded that Lyne’s response had ‘crushed me’, which is curious since prior to that day she had not indicated, privately or otherwise, that she regarded Lyne as anything other than a casual acquaintance, and it was not as if she felt deprived of lovers, potential or actual. Perhaps, taking her cue from Koestler, she regarded her own sexual desires as a painful endurance that others should accommodate.

  Three weeks later, after Lyne had politely declined her invitation to another soirée, this time at her apartment, Highsmith visited her agent Margot Johnson, ostensibly to discuss a likely publisher for The Price of Salt. In the middle of their exchange she informed Margot ‘on impulse’ that ‘I’d seen Kay G [Margot’s lover] several times, which being behind M’s back, precipitated her breaking with Kay the following morning’ (Diary, 8 December 1950). We cannot be certain of why Highsmith told her agent she had stolen her girlfriend; contrition seems unlikely. Margot seems to have been a tolerant individual, indicating no wish to terminate her contract with her client; or perhaps her decision to keep Highsmith was based on professional astuteness.

  The day after that, at a drinks party in Margot’s apartment, Highsmith propositioned a guest, another literary agent whose name is recorded in the diary as ‘Sonja’. We have an account of what happened later that evening in Margot’s bed, which she appears to have borrowed for sex with Sonja. ‘I had almost forgotten that pleasure beyond all pleasures, the joy beyond all treasures … the pleasure of pleasing a woman…’ (Diary, December 1950). That she had ‘forgotten’ such a pleasure is doubtful given that at this point she was still secretly seeing Kay. Perhaps Kay, by comparison, was a disappointment. Two days later she obtained the telephone number of Sonja’s long-term lesbian partner, phoned her and announced triumphantly that she was, after their extraordinary sexual encounter, ‘in love with her [Sonja]’. She was still drinking heavily, but we have no reason to suspect that all of her diary entries were grotesque exaggerations or inventions.

  Others later testified to her behaviour as dismaying, to say the least. Carl Hazelwood lived in Ridgewood and after being introduced to Highsmith at a party agreed to drive her to New Jersey for one of her attempts to make visual contact with Kathleen Senn, though she kept from him the true nature of her visit. Shortly before her disclosure to Margot that she had stolen her lover, Highsmith asked Hazelwood if he would like to come with her to see De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, a brutally realist account of poverty and desperation in post-war Rome. Neither treated the afternoon as the prelude to a sexual encounter but he remembers that the film depressed her immensely and she wrote in her diary of her horror at ‘People … having to live like dogs’. What stunned Hazelwood most was what happened after they left the cinema and went on to the plush St Regis Hotel, where Highsmith ordered an entire plate of snails, clearing it with the assistance of an expensive bottle of white wine. An insatiable appetite for things, and people, stolen from or denied to others, seemed to have become her modus operandi. Later in life she developed a love affair with snails as pets, careful never to harm the colony of them kept in her garden and treating those who ate them as murderers.

  The antisemitism of her early years is incontrovertible, notably during her time working for Ben Zion Goldberg, but in America in the 1930s and 1940s treating Jews as different in terms of the presiding notion of WASP superiority was not at all unusual, and largely tolerated by Jews themselves as a feature of centuries-old European mores exported to the multi-ethnic New World. Jews took for granted that, like second-generation Italians, Slavs or Chinese, they were unlikely to become members of, say, the most prestigious New England golf clubs. By the late 1940s, however, the true nature of the Nazi regime’s Final Solution was gradually featuring in the American news media. Despite the fact that during the war many US newspapers had played down well-recorded evidence of mass killings, especially in Eastern Europe, the Nuremberg trials of some of the most senior Nazi officers and politicians in 1945–6 along with newsreel footage of the liberated camps soon made it impossible to deny that the regime had implemented a programme which involved the systematic extermination of Jews. As a result, antisemitic prejudices as a social routine gradually became de trop.

  During the same period Highsmith’s references to her friends and lovers as Jews became more frequent. For example, in her description of the ‘pleasure beyond all pleasures’ obtained during her first experience with Sonja, she adds that ‘she is mysterious in a Russian Jewish way, melancholic, devious by nature…’ Caroline Besterman (pseudonym), her lover during the early 1960s, recalls that Highsmith became preoccupied with the fact that all of her dentists were Jews. She did not seem particularly displeased by this but at the same time she would, for no apparent reason, pepper her observations on it with words and phrases she seemed to have borrowed apparently at random from German, most obviously ‘bitte’ and ‘danke’. Sometimes she would launch into passages of poorly constructed syntax and according to Besterman, ‘these lapses into German, there wouldn’t be an afternoon or a lunch that would pass without a German phrase being included … She knew nothing about Germany. This enormous race, intelligent, cultured, which produced without turning a hair instantly a race of maniacs’ (Schenkar, p.278).

  Her earlier cahier of 13 August 1951 suggests otherwise. She discusses the collective aspirations of the Germans before the Second World War, especially their desire to become a purified nation state, a master-race cleansed of the ‘Keime’, the ‘germs’, of ‘unsuitable and infectious’ ethnicities, especially Jews. She writes of herself as being ‘German identified’ and being ‘gassed’ by ‘Jewish dentists’, and of ‘Little Keime – the Element of Dental Gas in the German Nationalism and Psyche’. The experience of being gassed, and brought close to death, had obsessed her since 1949 at around the time that the methods of the Nazi extermination camps were being publicised.

  GAS

  My sensations under gas are really too compelling for me to ignore any longer … a recurrent pattern with cosmic suggestions … I feel all sensations, wisdom, achievements, potentialities, and the stupendous failure of the stupendous experiment of the Human Race. (Cahier, 19 December 1949)

  She identified with the intellectual greatness of Germany and saw herself as being extinguished, as its representative on her father’s side, by Jewish dentists, using gas. Highsmith was not a Holocaust denier. She regretted that the Nazis had not completed the Final Solution and felt that Jews had systematically used the Holocaust to advance their interests at the expense of others.

  In October 1950 Highsmith showed Margot Johnson two versions of The Price of Salt, or to be more accurate, the same novel with two different endings. In one, Therese and Carol wearily accept that their relationship is doomed, and in the other we are shown Therese walking towards Carol, leaving us in little doubt that they will remain together, and that the married woman has accepted that she will lose access to her daughter as a consequence. Johnson faced a dilemma because at that point fictional representations of lesbianism were made up largely of short stories in ‘pulp’ magazines, with a few notable full-length versions such as Pity for Women (1937) by Helen Anderson and Gale Wilhelm’s Torchlight to Valhalla (1938). Such works were treated as the literary equivalent
of mild under-the-shelf pornography, not sufficiently explicit and too badly written to merit the attention of censors. Highsmith’s manuscript would be the first to raise itself above this trashy sub-genre and it was impossible to second-guess the response of publishers, let alone the literary establishment, readers and those appointed by the state to monitor what its literate citizens read.

  It would be too easy to neglect the importance of this moment in the history of Western literature, as Highsmith’s agent pored over a work that dealt with homosexuality directly rather than through insinuations, and treated gays as individuals possessed of intellectual and emotional gravity rather than as sad compounds of their debauched inclinations. Its only notable predecessor was Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) which prompted the editor of the Daily Express James Douglas to write that ‘I would rather give a healthy boy or girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel.’ Hall is explicit in her presentation of lesbianism but there is a sense that she sees it as an affliction that should be tolerated. While the lovers in The Price of Salt are forced to hide themselves, they are not ashamed of who they are, and nor is their creator. Perplexed, Johnson told her client that the ‘happy ending’ was the best option, though she was relying on guesswork rather than informed discrimination, and it turned out that she was wrong, at least in terms of securing a major publisher. Harper & Brothers, who had brought out Strangers on a Train, rejected it after a first reading. Later, in 1951, it was accepted by Coward-McCann, smaller than Harper but still a respectable press, who published it in May 1952 when Highsmith was in Europe. There were several decent reviews, notably in the New York Times who acknowledged it as tackling a ‘high voltage subject … with sincerity and good taste’. Despite the fact that the East Coast literary establishment tolerated it while pretending that it did not exist it sold more than a million copies in paperback during the forty years of its existence under Highsmith’s nom de plume, Claire Morgan. Johnson advised her that admitting to being its author would involve professional suicide. Only in 1990, when Bloomsbury reissued it as Carol, did the name Patricia Highsmith appear on the jacket. During the first five years of its time in print Coward-McCann received, on average, ten to fifteen letters a week asking for them to be forwarded to Miss Morgan. Most were expressions of gratitude to an author who had created a universe in which they might freely live their undercover existence.