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Queer Classics
 | Queer Classics Patricia Highsmith's "The Price of Salt" |
by Ernie McLeod
I’ve been eager to read Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) ever since I saw the seductive film version of her 1955 novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley. Although the film takes liberties with the novel’s plot, both works share dark homoerotic tensions and the sense that, ultimately, we are alone in the world. Highsmith was also the author of Strangers on a Train, which was turned into a more discreetly homoerotic but equally seductive Hitchcock film.
While she’s best known in the U.S. because of these two film adaptations (there have been others, with more to come), her body of work includes some 20 novels – including five Ripley installments – and several story collections. She’s typically classified as a “suspense” writer, a label she rightly frowned upon, since the psychological complexity of her work lifts it above page-turner genre status.
Two of her greatest influences were Dostoyevsky and Henry James, and it shows in her ability to use plot to penetrate her characters’ fascinatingly amoral psyches. Graham Greene crowned her the “poet of apprehension.” Not surprisingly, she’s always been more appreciated in Europe than in the U.S.; Americans tend to find apprehension discomforting, preferring rational explanations and tidy solutions, two things Highsmith consistently refused to provide.
The Price of Salt, published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, is – on the surface – an anomaly in Highsmith’s oeuvre. A (no pun intended), straightforward love story between women, it contains little of the nuanced darkness or delight in transgression that characterizes her other works. Perhaps because the same-sex attraction in this novel is overt rather than implied, Highsmith wasn’t inclined to further push the envelope. Given that lesbianism was generally considered a perversity in the 1950’s, her decision to normalize it was in itself a transgressive act.
In the 1989 afterword to the Naiad Press incarnation of The Price of Salt, Highsmith offers few clues as to how the novel might be viewed in relation to her other fiction. She does, however, talk about the 1948 moment which inspired it. Awaiting the publication of her first novel, Strangers on a Train, she was earning extra money as a Christmas rush-season department store clerk. One morning a woman approached the doll counter where Highsmith was working and, though there was nothing unusual about the transaction, it greatly affected the young writer: “Perhaps I noticed her because she was alone, or because a mink coat was a rarity, and because she was blondish and seemed to give off light. ... But I felt odd and swimmy in the head, near to fainting, yet at the same time uplifted, as if I had seen a vision.”
The “swimmy in the head” sensation may have been partly due to an impending case of chickenpox, but the fantasy took root nonetheless and by 1951 Highsmith had crafted it into a novel. Already feeling unfairly categorized by her publisher as a suspense author, she was understandably even more reluctant to get tagged as a “lesbian-book writer,” hence the pseudonym. (Claire Morgan’s true identity was not officially revealed until 1991.) Her publisher rejected it anyway, but it was released the following year by another publisher, and the pulp fiction paperback version went on to sell close to a million copies.
Significantly, particularly since Highsmith’s writing is hardly known for its cheeriness, The Price of Salt is thought to be the first lesbian novel with a happy ending. No, as Highsmith puts it, paying “for their deviation by cutting their wrists, drowning themselves in a swimming pool, or by switching to heterosexuality ... or by collapsing – alone and miserable and shunned – into a depression equal to hell.” How appropriately ironic that Highsmith mainstreamed a queer relationship while much of the rest of her career was spent queering mainstream relationships.
Patricia Highsmith was born in Fort Worth and grew up in New York. After attending Barnard and penning comic book scenarios for a time, she moved to Europe and spent the remainder of her life in France and Switzerland. By all accounts she was a reclusive, intensely private person, though apparently there is mention of lesbian lovers in her diaries.
In a New York Times Magazine article Frank Rich describes seeing Highsmith in a rare 1980’s TV interview in which she appears as a “forbidding, unsmiling figure in a Burberry trench coat with a pugnacious, pouchy face framed by thick, parted black hair.” The only Highsmith interview I came across confirmed this impression and quoted her saying that, for her, the aftermath of an interview was not unlike recovering from a car accident.
Though Highsmith’s fiction can hardly be called autobiographical (she wasn’t, as far as I know, a psychokiller), I think it’s safe to say her solitary nature informs every sentence. Tom Ripley would be a far less disturbing (and interesting) character if his extreme pathological tendencies didn’t mask a far more universal human condition: loneliness. Only a writer as deviously ingenious as Highsmith could turn loneliness into a thrill-ride.
Maybe that’s why, as much as I appreciated Highsmith’s refusal to pathologize homosexuality in The Price of Salt, I never quite believed in the warm romance between its protagonists. Therese (the inexperienced young store clerk) and Carol (the older, more worldly-wise married woman) somehow seem lonely even as they’re professing their love. The road trip on which they embark is tellingly saturated with chilly rains, and signature Highsmithian details – peaches like “slimy little orange fishes,” milk which tastes of “bone and blood” – creep into the text, creating some disconcerting juxtapositions.
Weirdly, I found Highsmith’s writing depressing only when she was attempting to describe happiness. The Price of Salt’s hopeful conclusion was, for me, poignant because its hopefulness seemed so at odds with the instincts and experiences of its author. In the afterword Highsmith said she never wrote another book like it, adding that she wanted to “avoid labels.”
At the risk of stamping another label on her, she was, as one critic said, “the perfect outsider.” But her great skill was luring readers into her characters’ twisted minds, making us all perfect outsiders, all equally capable of evil. Patricia Highsmith was at her best when she showed us – with surgical precision and a touch of glee – the very worst things inside ourselves.
The talented Ernie McLeod is a native Vermonter looking into gay life as an outsider in Montreal. You can reach him at mcleod@middlebury.edu.