Johnson was shrewd in advising Highsmith to adopt a pseudonym. The year before The Price of Salt was published Senator Joseph McCarthy, who would initiate and maintain the purge against all figures sympathetic to liberal-leftist causes, especially in the media, literature and the movies, had declared that homosexuals of both genders were ‘contrary to the normal accepted standards of social behaviour’ and therefore prone to communist inclinations. By the end of 1950 over 150 men suspected of being homosexual had been sacked from their posts in the State Department. In the same year that The Price of Salt was rejected by Harper & Brothers, its closest counterpart went into print, Women’s Barracks (1950) by Tereska Torrès, which was based on the author’s experiences as a member of the Free French Forces in London during the war. McCarthy’s House Select Committee denounced it as ‘promoting moral degeneracy’ and several US states banned it. This served as excellent publicity and during its first five years in print the novel sold four times as many copies as Highsmith’s did over the subsequent forty. The House Select Committee ignored Highsmith’s book, possibly because it maintained a lower profile within the literary world and the media – but even if any of McCarthy’s team had noticed it, they would have found a striking difference between the two novels.
Women’s Barracks might best be described as a precursor of the kind of hardcore realism of the later 1950s, representing the lives of ordinary people with tough honesty. Torrès was a secretary to the office of Charles de Gaulle – and she tells of how becoming part of the war effort encouraged women to follow their sexual instincts with few inhibitions. Later in life Torrès refused to have it reissued in French, fearing that some might see it as a presentation of Free French fighters and workers as frivolous hedonists. By contrast, The Price of Salt invokes the romance-novel tradition of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Brontë’s Jane Eyre. In each, circumstance conspires against the coming together of two people whose love for each other is unconditional, except that Therese and Carol are divided by social mores and prejudices rather than temperamental incompatibility. Moreover, in their case lesbianism seems almost incidental to their exemplification of fidelity bordering on virtue. There is no hint that either of them has previously had a relationship with, or been attracted to, another woman; their involvement with men, particularly Carol’s husband, is presented as an unfortunate outcome of a society that recognises only heterosexual attachments. The only notion of them as sexual radicals going against socially ordained norms is when Carol’s husband employs a private investigator to follow them across America.
Elsewhere, their relationship, particularly when they are in physical contact with each other, is described in a way that was unprecedented. There are echoes of the sensuousness of D.H. Lawrence and of the descriptions of homosexual relationships by Genet and Vidal but no one had dared to offer such an unapologetic portrait of intimacy between two women:
Then Carol slipped her arm under her neck, and all the length of their bodies touched, fitting as if something had prearranged it. Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh. She had a vision of a pale white, shimmering as if seen in darkness, or through water. Why did people talk of heaven, she wondered.
Throughout the novel, sex as selfish gratification is crowded out by evocations of their physical relationship as profound and almost metaphysical:
[…] Therese smiled because the gesture was Carol, and it was Carol she loved and would always love. Oh, in a different way now, because she was a different person, and it was like meeting Carol all over again, but it was still Carol and no one else. It would be Carol in a thousand cities, in a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they would go together, in heaven and hell.
There is a striking similarity between sexuality as presented in the novel, a unique and spiritually uplifting experience between two people at the exclusion of all others, and Highsmith’s records of her affairs in her notebooks. Her relationships, or obsessions, with Rosalind Constable and Virginia Kent Catherwood generated notebook entries which echo the unreserved devotion that Therese feels for Carol, hyperbolic exaltations regarding something so sublime that it almost escapes description. With Virginia, for instance, she writes of how she had given her a ‘oneness’, a ‘timelessness’, that she was ‘the other half of [their] universe … together we make a whole’ (Cahiers, 29 April 1947; 1 September 1947). Similarly, Therese thinks of Carol: ‘And she did not have to ask if this was right, no one had to tell her, because this could not have been more right or perfect.’ The relationship in the novel is incorruptible, strengthened by the apparent determination of those outside it to wreck it, while Highsmith’s unrestrained commitment to her lovers seems always linked to a self-destructive codicil, usually involving a fling with someone else. When the ideal of the transcendent lover faded Highsmith sought refuge in drink, self-loathing and promiscuity.
The Price of Salt was a unique enterprise. It is a fantasy novel designed not to feed the escapist appetites of its readers but rather to reinvent and purify in fiction the life of its author.
Before Hitchcock’s adaptation of Strangers on a Train had appeared in cinemas, Highsmith decided to make use of the payment negotiated by Margot Johnson to fund another trip to Europe, this time by air. The so-called ‘Star-Ribbon-Route’ from New York to Paris Orly had opened in 1946 with the new transatlantic Lockheed Constitution four-engine aircraft, run by Air France, taking almost twenty-four hours to complete the journey. On average, a one-way ticket cost $600, more than $4,500 (around £3,400) by today’s standards, and clearly Highsmith felt that she had become a member of the intercontinental elite.
She left New York on 5 February 1951 and spent just over a week in Paris, mostly in the company of Janet Flanner, The New Yorker’s France correspondent, and the publisher Natalia Danesi Murray. It is worth reflecting on the fact that when The Price of Salt came out as Carol under Highsmith’s name, she commented that it had been written during a period when lesbianism involved ‘hidden lives’ and ‘dark doorways’. This was an accurate conception of how lesbians and gays were treated by society as a whole but it was a misrepresentation of Highsmith’s world in the arts.
Highsmith’s hosts in Paris, Flanner and Murray, were a gay couple who lived in the same apartment. Margot Johnson recommended Highsmith to them as a guest only partly because Strangers on a Train had received good reviews and media promotions for the film were beginning to reach Europe; mainly she indicated that her client had become part of a select, protective network. Gay and lesbian writers within the culture of the arts, literature and publishing certainly did not alienate themselves from straight people – in the end making a good living was their primary consideration – but they certainly went out of their way to secure their own from the kind of prejudice that would inhibit their professional aspirations or cause difficulties in their private lives.
In this regard The Price of Salt is both truthful and biased. Neither Therese, a shopworker, nor Carol, an affluent housewife, entirely dependent on her husband, could rely on a sympathetic network of similarly inclined figures. Highsmith’s feeling that she was part of yet separate from the dilemmas faced by Therese and Carol is what lay behind this otherwise gnomic comment in her diary: ‘I worry that Ginnie [Virginia Kent Catherwood] may feel Carol’s case too similar to her own’ (Diary, 11 October 1950). She was not concerned that Virginia, if she read the book, would feel distraught at being cast as a lesbian – she did not deny this. This cause of Highsmith’s ‘worry’ was that Carol’s situation would further remind her that both of them were outsiders without allies. Virginia, like her fictional proxy, had been spied on by a private detective employed by her husband and faced the prospect of losing her social standing and, worse, her child as a consequence. In the novel Carol at least finds true love in Therese as a compensation for suffering at the hands of a ruthlessly homophobic society, but in the world outside it Virginia is an outcast, without a perm
anent partner and excluded, by circumstances rather than prejudice, from the circles in which lesbians and gays protected each other’s interests. Just as she was completing the novel Highsmith wrote in her diary that ‘I know her so little, my conception of her is absolute, unchangeable’ (28 July 1951). On the surface this reads as nonsensical and self-contradictory: how can one’s ‘conception’ of someone be ‘absolute’ and ‘unchangeable’ when one knows them ‘so little’? She meant that the version of Virginia she had borrowed for the novel was so different from the original that it had become her property. And she felt guilty that the real woman, to whom she had declared her surpassing love, had been left behind, helpless, by the one she had invented. Therese is Highsmith, and at the close of the novel she walks towards Carol, who welcomes her, and we leave the narrative convinced that whatever difficulties the couple will face in the future their commitment to each other will sustain them.
6
Ellen
After eight days in Paris Highsmith flew to London, again an expensive method of travel, indicative of Highsmith’s sense of being close to celebrity status. This time the Cohens did not collect her in their Rolls-Royce, and Highsmith took a taxi to their Chelsea house where she stayed for almost six weeks. Dennis was aware of his wife’s affair with Highsmith and maintained the cool indifference of the liberal aristocrat. Throughout the visit Kathryn seemed distressed, had lost a good deal of weight, and Dennis treated Highsmith with no more than cold courtesy. She showed Kathryn a typescript of The Price of Salt, indicating that it might reignite something of what they had experienced, but Kathryn refused to read it.
In Chelsea Highsmith caught chickenpox, which might have encouraged the Cohens to be more charitable regarding the length of their guest’s stay, but just as importantly she began two closely related pieces of fiction while she was bedridden. One involves a young man who allows his wife to become the mistress of his friend, and the other a man who watches from a distance as his wife, ‘the dearest thing we possess, goes a-whoring’. Highsmith suggested to Kathryn that they might restart their affair, this time with something close to permanence. She wanted Kathryn to come with her to Europe for good and not as an excursion from her marriage. Kathryn told her that the prospect struck her as repulsive and Highsmith departed from the Cohens, for the last time, on 14 April. We will never know of her true feelings for Kathryn but the parallels between the fantasy of Therese/Highsmith in The Price of Salt and Highsmith’s attempt to make them real in her potential relationship with Kathryn are self-evident.
She followed the exact course of her time in Europe with Kathryn for the next six months, with eerie precision. She spent a week in Paris, and then in Marseille, replicating the episode in which she had been alone but had telegraphed Kathryn asking if she would join her later. She timed her subsequent journeys meticulously as replicas of her travels with Kathryn two years before. Not only did she stay in each of the northern Italian cities for exactly the same number of days, consulting her diaries as a guide, she did her best to book tickets for the same departure times of trains. Arriving in Naples she spent a day at her hotel before taking a taxi to the railway station just as she had in 1949 when Kathryn had arrived there from London by train. She spent four further days in the city, as had the two women who were cautiously making use of its cafés and historical buildings to test their sense of each other. This time she visited the same sights alone. A friend of Kathryn’s had driven them to Positano on the Amalfi coast but now Highsmith improvised by using antiquated local railways, the prolonged and rather chaotic journey obliging her to spend only one night in Positano before returning to Naples. She was determined not to disrupt her repeat of the schedule at this stage, because from Naples she and Kathryn had taken a boat to Palermo and there became lovers. When she returned to Naples this time Highsmith made a point of wearing the pink and blue scarf that Kathryn had bought for her in Capri.
Did she love Kathryn? Given that their sexual relationship had lasted little more than a week, in Italy, one has to question whether she meant any more to Highsmith than the many other women with whom she’d had brief encounters. Yet the closer we look at her pre-middle-age affairs the more evident it is that love, for her, had as much to do with fantasised social ambition as emotional commitment. She only truly desired women who came from the kind of social, cultural and intellectual ranking to which she aspired. More significantly she seemed particularly attracted to women who had been born into privilege, rather than those who had reached beyond their lowly origins and earned themselves esteem.
Highsmith wanted to draw Kathryn into the closed circle of lesbianism not only because she hoped to free her from the confinement of heterosexuality. Her desire was also to recruit a figure from above her in the social hierarchy so that sex would perform the levelling function we usually associate with socialism.
After Capri she said goodbye to the ghost of Kathryn and continued with a European Grand Tour of her own, visiting Venice, where she was invited to cocktails on several occasions by Peggy Guggenheim, one of the wealthiest patrons of the arts in Europe and America. Guggenheim owned a palatial apartment in the city and was busy establishing her collection of paintings and sculptures that would eventually rival St Mark’s Basilica as a magnet for tourists. Aside from her interest in the visual arts she had assembled a rolling salon of literary writers, ballet dancers, opera singers and architects that outranked anything in the economically depressed environment of post-war Europe. It invites comparison with Gertrude Stein’s assemblies in Paris of the 1920s, except that Guggenheim made her guests feel more like aristocrats than bohemians. At one of Guggenheim’s gatherings Highsmith conversed at length with W. Somerset Maugham, who seemed more interested in cocktails than the arts, instructing her in detail on how to assemble the finest gin-based drinks.
We know of this only from Highsmith’s notebooks. Schenkar speculates that Buffie Johnson, the New York-based socialite, might have been responsible for introducing Guggenheim and Highsmith to each other, a presumption based only on the fact that Buffie had met Highsmith briefly in New York and had once exhibited her own work at one of Guggenheim’s galleries. Tenuous seems a barely adequate description of the link. According to Highsmith’s diaries and cahiers she received two further invitations to events at the Guggenheim residence and she implies that the two women became sufficiently friendly for them to meet for cocktails at the legendary Harry’s Bar in the city. Truman Capote, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Ernest Hemingway, James Stewart and indeed Peggy Guggenheim are advertised by the bar as customers who made a point of drinking there when in the city, but there are no records of Patricia Highsmith as one of its clients, except in her own notebooks.
Whatever did happen in Venice, Highsmith left the city in the middle of June for Lombardy and then Florence. In July she took the train for Munich, booking into the Pension Olive on Ohmstrasse. Why exactly she chose the capital of Bavaria as her destination remains an unanswered question. Since the 1930s it was known throughout the world as the birthplace and nerve centre of Nazism and by the time Highsmith arrived it was not a particularly charming location. Much of the once magnificent old city had been seriously ruined by British and US carpet bombing in the final year of the war, though compared with Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and notoriously Dresden it had got off relatively lightly, and many of its ancient buildings were being restored rather than bulldozed and replaced with unattractive concrete structures.
Much of Ohmstrasse had survived but the rest of the city would have seemed to her like a gigantic building site. London, which she’d visited twice, was undergoing very gradual rebuilding, with many bombed buildings left largely untouched since the Blitz, but in Munich there seemed to be a manic collective desire to return the place to its former glory. Also, given its recent history, it had become one of the centres for the Anglo-American programme of denazification, principally the investigation and exposure of supporters of the regime who had retained positions of pow
er in the civic and legal infrastructure. By the time Highsmith arrived the Americans and British were shifting their attention to enemies in the East, and the onset of the Cold War had distracted them from the aftermath of the one against Hitler. If individual West Germans were seen as useful members of the frontline state in the new conflict, their previous affiliations were often overlooked. The grand city was energetically returning to its past, architecturally, and, less agreeably, politically.
She did not know anyone in the region and it was by pure accident that she ran into ‘Jo’ (surname undisclosed), a near-contemporary from Barnard, with whom she began an affair almost immediately, and soon after that a ménage à trois with Jo’s lover, Tessa. Highsmith was also taking driving lessons and had enrolled as a pupil with a typing agency. She hoped to support herself in the city by doing part-time work for occupying American forces as a driver and typist, and being able to type her own work would, she assumed, quicken the drawn-out procedure of scrutiny by her agent and editors. In both endeavours, she failed her examinations regularly, though she managed to scrape together enough money to purchase a battered pre-war BMW saloon which she drove without a licence.
Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires Page 9
