• 17 •
Part 1
Sometimes, when the day had gone right for her, or the stars were in their proper alignment, or the world wasn’t entirely out of joint, she could eat a peach with such delight that it was an almost sexual experience.
—Caroline Besterman, in conversation with the author
I don’t know why I was very fond of Pat, I don’t exactly know why. I was under a spell, like a bird before a snake.
—Marion Aboudaram, in conversation with the author
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 version 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 driver 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
Pat felt “conscience stricken” and thought about lending her parents a thousand dollars; she was flush from the sale of some stories. But she decided, typically, against becoming her mother’s banker because Mary “resents my success, my ability to organize my life.” 42
On 12 October, Pat finished her second version of The Price of Salt, got deeply drunk, and found that she had her period for the first time “since May or June”—something she ascribed to completing her book. Off the leash at last, she extended her “drunk” into a long, bad binge.
“I am ashamed of my self-indulgent and destructive behavior—which I cannot seem to control. I can blame fatigue but not entirely. Such a deplorable waste of time and money—and I feel I sink as low morally as any of the [Greenwich] Village wastrels of whom I have heard, have known, all my life, without suspecting I could ever be like them.” 43
Pat had spent the spring and summer of 1950, with only a week or two out in August, almost completely absorbed in her revisions of The Price of Salt, the novel she was still calling Tantalus. In May and early June, she was boarding in a fairy-tale setting: an old turreted and towered building in Tarrytown, New York, called the Tarrytown Castle, half an hour up the Henry Hudson Parkway from Manhattan. And she was falling “madly in love with my Carol…. I want to spend all my time, all my evenings with her.” 44She was having dreams full of “homosexual symbols” and other dreams “filled with self-confidence. A strange new atmosphere as if even the mind dreaming it were not mine.” 45
Back in Manhattan, along with her work came heavy bouts of drinking, waves of shame and fear at the thought of publishing a “lesbian” novel that would wreck her career (“I shall try to persuade Margot [her literary agent] that the book should not be published now”),46 and behavior as feverish as that of any of her love-struck protagonists. She experienced a “[t]emporary relief from shame” when her agent suggested she publish the novel under a pseudonym—but she was resolved not to tell “the family” about it.47
Pat continued to work on the manuscript in Provincetown, in New York, and on Fire Island, where she was a resentful and messy guest at the house of Rosalind Constable and Rosalind’s lover, Claude. Rosalind, drinking heavily herself, stumbled across Pat in bed with yet another woman named Anne in what Rosalind called a “house reeking of liquor, fornication, and unmade beds.” It was really, Pat thought, the “cataclysmic end” of her ten-year friendship with Rosalind Constable. But there were compensations: before she left the island, Pat began a secret flirtation with her agent Margot Johnson’s girlfriend, Kay.
While Pat was in Provincetown, Alfred Hitchcock sent her a telegram asking for a meeting. He was “already shooting [the tennis scenes of Strangers on a Train] in Forest Hills.” “He seems to be going…mad over my book,” she wrote in her diary.48 But Pat didn’t rush away from Provincetown to meet the famous director, and she gave no explanation for her behavior.* Perhaps it was shyness; perhaps she was simply focused on her new book and up to her eyes in her always complicated love life. Films, anyway, weren’t a form Pat took very seriously in the 1940s. “Movies in America,” she wrote, “destroy that fine, seldom even perceived sense of the importance and dignity of one’s own life.” 49
Pat wouldn’t have known that Farley Granger, the handsome young actor playing Guy Haines in the tennis scenes Hitchcock was now shooting in Forest Hills, Queens, had the same ambiguous sexuality with which she’d haloed the character of Guy Haines in her novel. Nor would Farley Granger have known what Pat Highsmith’s sexual tastes were. And that was the underworld of homosexuality in mid-twentieth-century America: so darkly lit, no one could see anyone else’s face.
Returning to New York, Pat managed to find yet another woman named Virginia to sleep with and considered, in her practical way, Ann Smith’s invitation to come and live with her in Provincetown: “[P]erhaps her youth…would tend to make me stronger…rather than if I lived with an older person, which is my inclination.” All this happened in July.
Pat began August by relaxing: “Idle-idle-idle-idle—and I love it. All my clothes are clean.” From New York she went to New Hampshire with Mother Mary to stay as a paying guest with the family of farmers Pat and Mary usually stayed with on their New Hampshire trips, the Minots, and she sketched and read while Mary played interminable games of canasta. Back in New York, Pat spent the night with one of her casual lovers, Jeanne T., once again wishing for her favorite Virginia, Ginnie Catherwood—“wife, harlot, sweetheart—all in one! Irresistible!” Margot Johnson’s magazine sale of Pat’s chauffeur story, “Where to, Madame?” for $1,150 made her think of reworking Tantalus (The Price of Salt) and she thought of two more titles for her revision: The Sun Gazer and The Echo.
And then, Pat had a wisdom tooth extracted. It was “a ghastly experience…. I am conscious at the moment of extraction. And gas dreams are the most cataclysmic episodes of my existence.”
Pat’s taste for dental gas was one of her stranger introductions into the feelings she usually associated with love. She suffered from bad teeth all her life, and it affected the way she thought of herself. As an early adolescent, Pat had stifled her attraction for a girl classmate because she assumed, mistakenly, that the girl was jibing at her decaying teeth. It was Pat’s recurrent attempts to repair that decay that led her into “gas dreams.” At thirty-two, agonizing once more over her bad teeth in Trieste, she summed up her problem.
“About twice a week I have bad dreams about my bad teeth, always connected with general inferiority, social and otherwise. With better teeth, I should be quite a different personality.”50
At forty-nine, Pat already had false teeth she could “sleep in and eat corn on the cob” with. At fifty-three, she reported sarcastically to Kingsley: “Just had the remainder of my upper teeth out—isn’t that cheerful news?”51 From late adolescence, Pat had been writing (sometimes in German) about the pain of her frequent tooth extractions, and about the transcendent ecstasy dental gas afforded her. She said the experience of anesthesia—rather like her contemplations of love and murder—allowed her to have “cosmic” feelings.
In December of 1949, shortly after she’d returned to New York from her first trip to Europe (and then went on to New Jersey, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida; she was twitchy as a Mexican jumping bean from her European experiences of art and love), Pat made this enthusiastic entry—one of many on the subject—in her nineteenth cahier.
GAS
My sensations under gas are really too compelling for me to ignore any longer…a recurrent pattern with cosmic suggestions. They have made me feel I was all consciousness that ever existed, that in this black bowl at whose perimeter the bouncing rabbit, the bouncing rubber ball races, I feel all sensations, wisdom, achievements, potentialities, and the stupendous failure of the stupendous experiment of the Human Race.52
Aside from the occasional porcelain filling, some deeply painful tooth extractions in London, and a crown or two that had to be replaced in Europe, most of the serious repair work on Pat’s mouth was done in New York. All of the dentists she saw there were Jews, and she continued to seek out her old New York dentists long after she’d moved permanently to Europe, making appointments with them on her short stays in Manhattan and spending more time with her dentists than she did with any other medical practitioners. Her favorite dentist was Dr. Arnold Gottlieb on Fifth Avenue, and he went on treating her teeth and replacing the last of them, finally, with false teeth well into the 1980s.53 Pat wrote rhapsodically to Kingsley about the “deep curettage” Gottlieb had performed on her and about the upper bridge he’d installed in 1970: “In his way, I think he’s an artist.”54 And she continued to take a relishing pleasure in the gas and in her near-technical familiarity with its administration—for whose details she continued to pump the good doctor. Dr. Gottlieb, Pat said to Kingsley, “doesn’t mind telling you what he is doing.”55
Always able to entertain herself with an array of possible identities (another kind of fun), Pat liked to call herself a “kraut”—and to sprinkle her plain American speech with simple German words and phrases: “Bitte,” she would say, and “Danke.”
“This German thing obsessed her,” says Caroline Besterman. “She would always break into German phrases, terribly badly. These lapses into German, there wouldn’t be an afternoon or a lunch that would pass without German phrases being intruded. Never French, always German. She knew nothing about Germany. This enormous race, intelligent, cultured, which produced without turning a hair instantly a race of maniacs.”56
But if Pat’s affinity for Jewish dentists was yet another example of the subversive Miss Highsmith turning an ordinary exchange upside down—i.e., the “German-identified” Pat being “gassed” by “Jewish dentists” (an idea so offensive that it might actually have appealed to Pat)—she never said so. Still, she was conscious enough of the connection between gas, Germans, and racial superiority (or unconscious enough of it) to make this little note in the section of her cahier that she reserved for her Keime, her “germs”: “Little Keime—The Element of Dental Gas in the German Nationalism and Psyche.” Being fascinating comparison of gaseous dreams of mystical absolute with individual, collective, and national dreams of Germans and Germany as the chosen race.”57
Perhaps Pat’s attraction to dental gas was just another instance of her yearning for a spiritual life in the old German Romantic mode—” those “cosmic suggestions” she talked about—or for leaving her troublesome body behind.58 Or perhaps the appeal of gas was that it produced a more refined “high” than the alcohol she was consuming. Her down-to-earth Texas family—the only people close to her who can bear to use the word “alcoholic”—say that her taste in beer when she was in Texas (Lone Star beer was her choice there) was just as “inexpensive” as her taste in wine: “She would just suck on that grape,” said Dan Walton Coates. “Yeah, everybody understood that Pat was alcoholic [but] you damn sure didn’t want to stir her up about the alcohol.”59
Certainly, the “total anesthesia” of the dental gas allowed Pat to enjoy the kind of intoxication she liked best: the kind that relieved her, if only for an hour, from being Patricia Highsmith.
Restless in Manhattan during the summer of 1950, Pat went back to Fire Island from New York. There, she ran into Jane Bowles, “whose uncustomary fit of working” made Pat feel “vaguely guilty.” She went for drinks at Duffy’s Hotel with the woman Rosalind Constable had found her in bed with—as well as with her agent Margot’s girlfriend and with Carson McCullers and Marc Blitzstein. Nobody could have accused Pat of being idle.
From Fire Island she travelled to Provincetown to stay with Ann Smith, her intermittent lover. Pat usually took up with the lovely Ann as a filler between other, more serious affairs, although she much preferred Ann to her current, official “fiancé” Marc Brandel (who had the bad luck to have introduced her to Ann) and said so.60 Ann’s Provincetown house was without “a tub or hot water,” and Pat worked steadily on another version of Tantalus, “resting only on Sundays [and] pleased with the speed of its going” but “extremely worried about an itch I have developed in the region generally invaded by crabs.”61
Pat may have spent a sexually reckless few months, drowning her anxieties about The Price of Salt in alcohol and dental gas and slipping into beds and bars up and down the eastern seaboard, but in her written references to her body she remained as prim as a prawn.
By the end of October she was drinking so much that she thought about taking “therapeutic measures against alcoholism. Something must be done.”62 Her new friend, Arthur Koestler, who had finished the novel he was working on, was being “very generous” to her professionally, recommending that she have her manuscript typed so that it would come back to her with “a new dignity.” And he did, as he had promised, introduce her to the “Partisan Review crowd.” She met Philip Rahv and William Phillips with Koestler in Greenwich Village at the Brevoort Café one evening in October. Koestler had talked her up so “considerably” that Rahv and Phillips were “ready to read Strangers” and give her reviews to do. And then Calmann-Lévy, Koestler’s French publisher, bought Strangers on a Train, for which, Pat wrote, Koestler “claims credit, though M[argot]J[ohnson] said she’d had requests before.” (Calmann-Lévy’s director, Jeanne-Étienne Cohen-Séat, thought it was Koestler who introduced Pat’s work to his publishing company.)63
But nothing penetrated Pat’s terrors about The Price of Salt for very long. Suffused with shame, she was trying hard to “suspend [her own] judgement of homosexuality until [Koestler] has seen [the manuscript].”64 And she was in the state of mind that preferred almost anyone’s opinion of the novel to her own.65 “These days are on the brink again. The least thing depresses me to the point of suicide.”66
In the beginning of November Pat made a numbered list of the crippling feelings that writing The Price of Salt had brought her. She was suffering for having created what she knew to be (and denied for the rest of her life) a most unusual novel which drew its resonant qualities from its “close truthfulness” to her life. It was a sad reward for all her hard work and a self-administered punishment for all her self-exposure.
“Shame…for what I have done…Plus sense of failure, I have not got it done in the time for spring publication, like Koestler. I shall not have gained in reputation and fame, if it is published not under my name…. Leading to drunkenness, bad behavior, especially before people I care about, like Lyne. Desire to shame myself, too, feel guilty & hang my head.”67
One week later, after spending the evening at Café Society on Sheridan Square with Elizabeth Lyne, the elegant émigrée and chief designer for Hattie Carnegie to whose friendship she became so attached in the 1940s and 1950s, Pat began, aggressively, to cross personal lines. She asked Mme Lyne if she could spend the night in her bed. “Come on, Pat, snap out of it,” retorted Mme Lyne. “Which crushed me,” Pat wrote in her diary.”68 Then Pat went to see The Bicycle Thief, and, just as Death of a Salesman had done, the film harrowed up her fears of poverty. She thought it was “the most depressing picture I have ever seen. People through poverty having to live like dogs.”69 Pat’s violations extended to her diet: she went on a date with Carl Hazelwood, ate a whole plate of snails at the St. Regis Hotel on the sixteenth of November (“How could I!” she wrote) and was drinking so heavily that she had a “blank in memory until around Dec. 5.”
And then, sometime in early December, frustrated that Elizabeth Lyne was late for an evening out with her, she crossed the most dangerous line yet: “on impulse” she went straight to her agent, Margot Johnson, and “told her I’d seen Kay G. [Margot Johnson’s lover] several times, which being behind M’s back, precipitated her breaking with Kay the following Monday.”70
At Margot’s “after the debacle,” Pat, without apparent remorse for purloining her agent’s girlfriend but telling herself that she could perhaps use another short course of psychoanalysis, began to feel a “terrific but slowly growing lust” for another guest at Margot’s apartment, Sonya Cache*—a richly sophisticated Paris-born theatrical and literary agent whose first affair with a woman had been with the writer Josephine Herbst. “Quite by delicious accident,” Sonya Cache joined Pat in bed at Margot’s that evening (Pat had used Margot’s apartment for assignations before), and Pat went lyrically mad for Sonya.
“I had almost forgotten that pleasure beyond all pleasures, that joy beyond all treasures…the pleasure of pleasing a woman…. And her body, her head and hair in the darkness…was suddenly more than Europe, art, Renoir, which she resembled, one of his women, beyond creative satisfaction…. She is mysterious in a Russian Jewish way, melancholic, devious by nature in her mind, witty as a fairy.”71
Sonya Cache had a long-term lover, and Pat was already calculating the odds of their competition: “I believe I shall stack up better than she in a contest, and it may come to that.”72 Then, “a bit tight,” and reminded by love of the pleasures of war, Pat telephoned Sonya’s lover and “announced in a loud clear voice that I was in love with [Sonya].” Pat couldn’t, mercifully, remember the conversation that followed, and anyway, she was still secretly seeing Kay, Margot Johnson’s newly ex-lover. On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, she got “blind drunk” and had a “slight blackout” which made her late to Mme Lyne’s and to a party in Yonkers where she met “a curious little girl, attractive.”73
There was no end to Pat’s destructiveness at this time—to herself and to the relationships of others—as she waited to see what would become of The Price of Salt, the book into which she had poured her most exalted feelings.
As usual, Pat’s creativity was stimulated by destruction. She was reworking two short stories, “Baby Spoon” (another trophy-killer story about the attraction between a professor and his psychopathic student expressed in a theft and in a murder) and “Love Is a Terrible Thing” (a story more representative of Pat’s own state: she was anxious about not hearing from Kathryn Hamill Cohen in London [see “Les Girls: Part 2”] and desperately anxious about what would happen with The Price of Salt). She was hoping, to no avail, to sell both of her new stories to The New Yorker. “Baby Spoon” and “Love Is a Terrible Thing” were eventually published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and Pat gave no sign that she might have borrowed the title “Love Is a Terrible Thing” from The Golden Bowl, the novel by Henry James in which that line is almost an ostinato.
“Love Is a Terrible Thing” was published in 1968 by EQMM as “The Birds Poised to Fly.” It is yet another revenge-and-substitution story, about a man who is waiting for a love letter (just as Pat was waiting for a letter from Kathryn Hamill Cohen in London) from a woman who doesn’t write to him. He breaks into his vacationing neighbor’s mailbox, telling himself that his letter might have been misdelivered, and, using his neighbor’s name, answers a letter he finds in the mailbox from the neighbor’s lovesick female correspondent. He makes a date with the woman in the name of his neighbor, approaches her, apologizes anonymously, and then, leaving her horribly disappointed, walks away weeping for himself. “Love Is a Terrible Thing” is a fair psychological summary of Pat’s own behavior at this time.
The chance meeting with Kathleen Senn in Bloomingdale’s in December of 1948 set off a series of reactions which were so disturbing for Patricia that she had to balance them out by squeezing them into the perfections offered by art—and by death. (There is no clearer example of the dangers and delights of creation than Pat’s own account of how she behaved while writing The Price of Salt.) Thus, the “automatic writing” of the plot of The Price of Salt that “flowed” from her pen was neatly counterweighted by the urge to tighten her hands around Kathleen Senn’s throat: an urge that was overpowering Pat by the time she’d finished her novel. It brought forth her fullest explanation of how the muscles of her life moved her work, and she wrote it down the day after she’d first gone to New Jersey to spy on Mrs. Senn.
I am interested in the murderer’s psychology, and also in the opposing planes, drives of good and evil (construction and destruction). How by a slight defection one can be made the other, and all the power of a strong mind and body be deflected to murder or destruction! It is simply fascinating!
And to do this primarily, again, as entertainment. (Better than Coates did it in Wisteria Cottage.)*
How perhaps even love by having its head persistently bruised, can become hate. For the curious thing yesterday is I felt quite close to murder, as I went to see the house of the woman who almost made me love her when I saw her a moment in December, 1948. Murder is a kind of making love, a kind of possessing. (Is it not, attention, for a moment, from the object of one’s affections?) To arrest her suddenly, my hands upon her throat (which I should really like to kiss) as if I took a photograph, to make her in an instant cool and rigid as a statue.74
Murder was a call that came quite naturally to Patricia Highsmith when she was in the grip of an overwhelming desire. “Murder fills my heart tonight / Like the words of first love,” she’d written in 1947, in a love/jealousy poem to Virginia Kent Catherwood.75If Pat’s brush with Kathleen Senn had been the inspiration for The Price of Salt, then Pat’s affair with Ginnie Catherwood provided many of the solid marital details of that novel—even down to the phallic recording spike driven into the wall of the motel room through which the pursuing detective gathers evidence to take Carol’s child away from her. The same thing had happened to Ginnie Catherwood, and Pat was “worr[ied] that Ginnie may feel Carol’s case too similar to her own.”76 That worry didn’t stop her from publishing Ginnie’s history, however. Publishing personal histories (lightly or largely transformed) was something Pat would do again and again to her friends, her lovers, and to herself. The persistent “neutrality” and “coolness” of her prose was the mark of the metaphorical flatiron she passed over these histories in order to press them, hotly, into the forms of her fictions.
Pat first met Virginia Tucker Kent Catherwood at a party at the end of 1944 given by Rosalind Constable; Rosalind knew Ginnie and her husband through the publishing circles she frequented. Virginia’s husband, the “youthful Main Line socialite and financier” as Time magazine called him, Cummins Catherwood, had inherited fifteen million dollars outright in 1929, as well as a basket of trust funds that paid him an income of nearly a million and a half dollars a year through the Depression.77 By 1941, Cummins Catherwood was backing his cousin in the purchase of a venerable Philadelphia newspaper, the Philadelphia Public Ledger—a strictly Republican paper like the conservative New York Herald Tribune, the paper Pat had been reading every weekday since she was in high school.78
No matter where else Pat’s perverse, unusually criminal imagination went on its travels, the Million Dollar American Dream was where it came to rest. She often placed herself, as she would write to Kingsley, at “that mystical point very near the foot of the rainbow where there is always a pot of gold, and presumably happiness ever after.”79 Virginia Kent Catherwood might have been tailor-made for Pat’s aspirations.
Virginia Catherwood’s’s father, Arthur Atwater Kent, was the American Dream incarnate. A Vermonter whose early interest in automobiles led him to invent, amongst other devices, a distributor to facilitate the ignition of the internal combustion engine, he went on to found the largest radio company in the world, Atwater Kent, which manufactured radios of very high quality. When the fashion for small, cheap radios began, Kent refused to compromise on either the quality or the size of his models. Preferring to do things his way or not at all, he closed his company down in 1936. Virginia’s mother, with whom Pat would optimistically correspond about her wayward daughter, gave Ginnie Catherwood the kind of upbringing Mother Mary would have loved to have given to Pat (or to herself): finishing school, art study in Paris, and a socialite’s wedding.
By June 1946, when Pat and Ginnie Catherwood started their affair, Ginnie had been divorced for five years, had apparently lost the custody of her daughter, and was a serious alcoholic under periodic treatment for addiction. She drank so much that Pat feared for her life—and with good reason. In May of 1947, Ginnie’s drinking caused her to temporarily lose her voice and the sensation in her fingers, a terrifying incident that found its way into the characterization of the alcoholic Charles Anthony Bruno in Strangers on a Train. Ginnie—this would have been the jewel in Pat’s psychological crown—even had another girlfriend, a photographer named Sheila. All the emotional and social tensions calculated to excite Pat were in place, and Pat, maddened with jealousy by Ginnie’s “infidelity,” and finding in her madness the oppositions that always enabled her as an artist, wrote: “There is nothing I would not do, murder, destruction, vile sexual practices. I would also, however, read my Bible.”80
In fact, at the end of her relationship with Ginnie, Pat confined herself to one vile letter to Ginnie about her lover Sheila—and to the obligatory short affair with Sheila herself.81 (And she did keep on reading her Bible.) But Pat’s year with Virginia Kent Catherwood made an indelible impression: as she suffered, her imagination was set drifting, harvesting, and profiting artistically, as it always would do with every turbulent affair she ever had. It was only the calm affairs, like the bucolic relationship she had with “Doris” in Palisades, New York, in 1956–58, that provided Pat with relatively weak artistic results.
With Ginnie, however, the artistic benefits would come later. In early January of 1948, Pat confided to her diary that the seventy pages of manuscript (Strangers on a Train) she’d worked on after her affair with Ginnie collapsed were written “as if I’d had a broken leg, when I wrote them,”82 and she destroyed several of the chapters. But The Price of Salt was a different matter: Pat said the novel could not have been imagined without her love affair with Ginnie, and without Ginnie Catherwood it would surely have been a very different book. While Mrs. Senn may have ignited the imaginative fever from which Pat produced her plot, the structure of Carol Aird’s life, her problematic divorce and troubles with child custody, the pursuing detective, the nature of her relations with Therese—everything in the work that was exciting to Pat—was loosely taken from the life of Virginia Kent Catherwood.
Pat chose not to portray Ginnie’s daughter in The Price of Salt (Carol Aird’s daughter appears only as a photograph), but the child spent some time with Ginnie and Pat. And one afternoon by a swimming pool, Pat took the time to read to the little girl her own favorite story, one written in 1865 by an English don with the kind of uncomfortable attachment to young girls Pat had already noticed in herself. Later, Pat sent a letter to Kingsley about the story: “My highest ambition is to write a kind of Alice in Wonderland. Actually I’d prefer it to scoring another Crime and Punishment.”83
For the rest of her life—especially when writing—Pat Highsmith would bring out the image of Virginia Kent Catherwood whenever she needed it, even though (and probably because) she and Ginnie never spoke again after they separated.84 “The Still Point of the Turning World,” a short story Pat wrote immediately after she and Ginnie broke up in 1947, is a little representation of Pat’s own understanding of the strict moral attitudes and physical jealousies she was left with when she lost Ginnie. Embedded in the tale is another origin story for the homosexual twinnings that would run through her writing. Two little boys, toddlers, Philip and Dickie, fall in infant love in a small Manhattan park in Chelsea and are poignantly separated because Mrs. Robinson, Philip’s mother, is both disdainful of Dickie’s déclassé mother and jealous of her romantic connection with a man who is not her husband. Mrs. Robinson lives in what is meant to be the lovely art deco London Terrace apartments on West Twenty-third Street in Manhattan. Dickie’s mother, palpably poor, uses the park to tryst with her lover-to-be, Lance, while her husband is at work and her child plays. Mrs. Robinson, awash in sexual jealousy and class contempt, takes little Philip away from Dickie and withdraws from the park, forever.
Pat said she was technically interested in the shifting perspective she built into “The Still Point of the Turning World,” but the story’s best feature is its close observation and painful juxtaposition of the romantic and the “real.” It is reminiscent of the skillful economies and heart-piercing disappointments of a Shirley Jackson story.
Although Pat didn’t think Ginnie Catherwood’s drinking habits would allow her to survive ten years beyond the end of their affair, Ginnie did just that. Her irregular trajectory finally brought her to the colorful southwestern United States—to Tucson, Arizona, in fact, where she did not cease to attract interesting women. Ginnie made a last appearance in print (in the press this time, not in a novel) on 29 November 1959, when she was sued for a million dollars by the imposter prince David Mdivani, a man who had awarded himself and his brothers titles when they arrived, impoverished, in America from the Russian state of Georgia. The Mdivani boys were known as “the marrying Mdivanis” for the astonishing number of wealthy women they managed to wed or otherwise strip of their assets. The legal case David Mdivani launched against Ginnie Catherwood was for alienating the affections of his current wife, the great silent film star Mae Murray, “by lavishing her with expensive gifts.”
If Mae Murray, who is rumored to have been the inspiration for the demented movie star played by Gloria Swanson in Billy Wilder’s 1950 film Sunset Blvd., really did have a liaison with Ginnie Catherwood, then we are left with the entertaining possibility—in whichever alternate, postmodernist afterlife these things are worked out—of a literary love affair between Norma Desmond and Carol Aird. And if Pat had known about Ginnie’s relationship with Murray (she didn’t know), her trip to London in 1969 to write a feature article for Queen magazine about another Billy Wilder film, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, might have had better consequences than the rather dull piece of journalism it produced.
Ginnie Catherwood, asked to comment on the false prince’s lawsuit against her, declared, with a prudence which might have served her better had it been exercised earlier, that she had “nothing to say to anyone.”85