Murder and forbidden love: The Price of Salt and the life of Patricia Highsmith
by Deirdre Swain
2021 marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Patricia Highsmith, a fascinating lesbian author. She is the author of The Talented Mr. Ripley and is best known as a mystery and crime novelist. Her second novel The Price of Salt was groundbreaking and unique at the time of its publication in 1952. It is considered to be the first lesbian novel with a happy ending where neither female protagonists end up having a nervous breakdown, dying tragically, facing a hopeless future, committing suicide or settling for a relationship with a man. Earlier lesbian novels, examples of which include The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall and Spring Fire by Marijane Meaker, were required to end in tragedy so that the authorities would not censor them for being obscene.
Patricia Highsmith had an unhappy childhood. She was born in Fort Worth in Texas on 19 January 1921, but she moved around a lot between Texas and New York as a child. She hated her stepfather, Stanley, and by the age of eight, she regularly fantasised about killing him. When she started spending time with her father, Jay Bernard Plangman at the age of 17, she seemed to have a rather incestuous relationship with him. Highsmith describes 1933-34 as the saddest year of her life. This was when her mother told the young Highsmith she was going to divorce Stanley, and both daughter and mother moved from New York back to Texas. However, her mother then left her in Texas with her grandparents and returned to Stanley in New York, leaving Patricia broken-hearted. As a teenager, she felt rejected by her mother who wanted her to “be like other people” and would not accept her as a lesbian. Between the ages of 15 and 19, she suffered from anorexia.
Highsmith was very intelligent and excelled in school. At just age 9 or 10, she started reading psychology books and was fascinated by Dr. Karl Menninger’s The Human Mind. This was when her interest in abnormal psychology was piqued. Her enthusiasm for this subject, as well as the fact that as a child, she felt a great sense of guilt for some unknown reason, had a considerable influence on her writing. She created characters who were driven by the absence or presence of guilt.
As an adult, Highsmith’s sexual relationships were predominantly with women, although she was briefly engaged to a man, Marc Brandel, whom she never married.
Highsmith’s second novel The Price of Salt was published in 1952. After her first novel Strangers on a Train was published, she had been labelled a mystery writer, and she did not want to be known as a lesbian novelist. The decision was therefore taken to publish The Price of Salt under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. The first edition of The Price of Salt was a Bantam Books paperback edition, and the gaudy novel cover was in the style of a “lesbian pulp fiction” novel. Lesbian pulp book covers often presented lesbian relationships as dangerous and questioned whether lesbians could be seen as women. The blurb on the front cover describes Highsmith’s story as “the novel of a love society forbids”, and the New York Times endorses it, stating that it “[handles] explosive material… with sincerity and good taste”.
Highsmith had initially written an unhappy, tragic ending to the novel, but after seeing an alternative, more positive ending that Highsmith had written, her agent persuaded her to use the more optimistic version. Carol is essentially a love story between two women from very different worlds and social classes. It concerns 19-year-old Therese Belivet, a vulnerable and lonely aspiring set designer who is unsure of herself and the direction of her life. She is dating a man named Richard, whom she neither loves nor enjoys being with. Therese has a temporary Christmas job in the toy section of a large department store, which she finds uninspiring and dull. Her life is transformed one day when a customer, an older and alluring woman named Carol Aird, catches her attention. Carol is a sophisticated, wealthy woman in her thirties who is going through a difficult divorce. She buys a toy from Therese for her daughter. Mesmerised by this revelatory encounter, Therese cannot forget Carol, and, having received her address for the purchase, she sends her a department store Christmas card. On receiving the card, Carol arranges to meet Therese. What begins as an unlikely and tentative friendship becomes a forbidden love affair between the two. Carol has been in relationships with women before, but it is Therese’s first time being in one and experiencing the passion of a fulfilling relationship. Unfortunately, this type of romance is by its very definition dangerous. Same-sex couples are viewed as indecent and abhorrent by society. The novel explores the impossibility of a relationship which is both prohibited by society and utterly irresistible.
Patricia Highsmith took inspiration from a real-life event in her own life for this story. In December 1948, she herself was working in the toy department of Bloomingdale’s when an elegant blonde-haired woman wearing a mink coat walked into the shop and bought a doll from Highsmith. Although the chance meeting only lasted a couple of minutes, it was a very significant encounter for the author. When she went home that night, she wrote the plot of the book, The Price of Salt. A few days after coming across the striking woman who had made such an impression on her, Highsmith became ill with chickenpox. She presumed one of the children in the toy department had transmitted the disease to her, but she did not see it as a negative thing. She asserted that the child had passed to her “the germ of a book too: fever is stimulating to the imagination”. However, the story does not end there. Highsmith was in possession of the customer’s address for the purchase delivery. She could not forget this fascinating and intriguing woman, whose name was Kathleen Senn. In the summer of 1950, Highsmith took a train from Pennsylvania Station to New Jersey to the road where Senn lived. She wanted to find Senn and spy on her. As she got closer to Senn’s house, she felt guilty and almost turned back. She saw her in a car passing by. Her description of her feelings in her journal that day are rather disturbing. She describes how “murder is a kind of making love”, and that while she daydreamed about kissing Senn, she also fantasised about strangling her. Highsmith never actually spoke to Senn after seeing her in the department store, but her experience of meeting her and the intensity of the feelings the encounter evoked in her became the basis for the novel, The Price of Salt.
The Bantam 25-cent paperback first edition of The Price of Salt sold over one million copies. There was a huge response to the novel from lesbians around America, and it transformed many people’s lives. She received between 10 and 15 letters twice a week for months after the book’s publication. One letter which particularly touched her was from a woman in a small town who, until she read The Price of Salt, believed she was the only woman in the world who was attracted to other women. The novel was republished as Carol under Highsmith’s real name in 1990.
Patricia Highsmith died on 4 February 1995, 20 years before her book Carol was released as a film, changing people’s lives even still. She only wrote one lesbian novel, and it was an extremely brave undertaking at the time of its publication. The Price of Salt, or Carol, is a classic of lesbian literature.
References
-Highsmith, Patricia (2010). Carol. London: Bloomsbury.
-Wilson, Andrew (2010). Beautiful Shadow: A life of Patricia Highsmith. London: Bloomsbury.
