Carol: the women behind
Patricia Highsmith's lesbian novel
Todd
Haynes’s film of Highsmith’s only openly lesbian novel, Carol, is
about to premiere in Cannes, starring Cate Blanchett. Novelist Jill
Dawson writes about the women behind the book
Jill Dawson
Wednesday 13 May
2015 10.40 BST
Patricia Highsmith
was in love many times and with many women – “more times than
rats have orgasms”, to use one of her own more disquieting similes.
She plundered these objects of her desire extravagantly in her 22
novels and hundreds of short stories. Not one glance, not one
feminine gesture or foible of any one of her many girlfriends was
ever wasted, but only once – and spectacularly – did she write
openly about lesbianism. This was her second novel, Carol, first
published as The Price of Salt in 1952, with Highsmith using the
pseudonym Claire Morgan, and now adapted into a Todd Haynes film
starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara (star of The Girl with the
Dragon Tattoo) and just about to premiere at Cannes.
In 1952 Highsmith,
barely 30, perhaps startled by the wayward success of her first novel
Strangers on a Train (conferring instant stardom when the Hitchcock
movie followed a year later), had good reason to be edgy about the
reception The Price of Salt would receive. “Those were the days
when gay bars were a dark door somewhere in Manhattan, where people
wanting to go to a certain bar got off the subway a station before or
after the convenient one, lest they were suspected of being
homosexual,” she wrote, in a postscript to the novel, many years
later.
She showed some
early extracts to her favourite teacher from Barnard College, Ethel
Sturtevant, whose excited reply – “Now this packs a wallop!” –
probably alarmed and reassured the former student in equal measure.
Highsmith’s own publisher Harper & Brothers rejected it, so it
was published first by a small press, and the solution of the
pseudonym Claire Morgan was decided on.
“It flowed from
the end of my pen as if from nowhere,” Highsmith wrote. She also
admitted a specific inspiration: a “blondish woman in a fur coat”,
who wafted into Macy’s in New York to buy her daughter a doll.
Highsmith was working there as a sales-girl during the Christmas
rush. On her day off she took a bus to New Jersey, found the woman’s
house (from the address on the sales slip) and simply walked by it.
There was another
inspiration for the character of Carol: Highsmith’s former lover
Virginia Kent Catherwood, the elegant and well-heeled socialite from
Philadelphia, whose divorce in the 1940s had kept gossip columnists
in New York in a state of scandalised delirium with its lesbian
intrigue. “Ginnie” and Highsmith were lovers in the mid 1940s and
full vent is given in Highsmith’s diary to her powerful desire for
her lover and also, at times, the feelings of murderous vengefulness
that are expressed in all of Highsmith’s writings. Catherwood had
lost custody of her child after a recording made of her in a hotel
bedroom with another woman was used in court against her, a detail
mined for the plot of The Price of Salt in a way that gave Highsmith
pause. In the end the detail stayed, an essential driver to the
narrative, making the love affair between Carol and the younger,
mute-with-longing Therese (based on Highsmith herself) all the more
perilous and poignant.
The cult success of
The Price of Salt came a year later when the paperback edition was
published as a Bantam 25‑cent edition. A mass-market version
with the catchline “The novel of a love society forbids” swiftly
followed. It soon chalked up a million copies. “Claire Morgan”
received a stream of letters at her publisher from women writing:
“Yours is the first book like this with a happy ending!” and:
“Thank you for writing such a story. It is a little like my own
story.” By the time the writer Marijane Meaker met her in 1960,
Highsmith, “a handsome, dark-haired woman in a trenchcoat” was
fully identified as Morgan and the novel “stood on every lesbian
bookshelf, along with classics like The Well of Loneliness; We, Too,
Are Drifting; Diana and Olivia”.
Yet Highsmith
remained ambivalent about the novel. In particular she was worried
about what her 84-year-old grandmother, Willie-Mae, who had raised
her whenever her young mother, Mary, was out of town, would make of
it. Highsmith never lied to her mother and stepfather; she assumed
they knew she was gay. But that didn’t mean she wanted to discuss
it with them, or anybody else. To her girlfriend Meaker, she was
outspoken: “The only difference to us and heterosexuals is what we
do in bed.” Her courage and openness about her sexuality were real
and admirable, not least because it warred with her intensely private
nature. But her anxiety was real, too. She was furious when her
mother, many years later, told her grandmother about the novel,
explaining to an unrepentant Mary that the obvious point of using a
pseudonym was to keep something private.
Two biographies (by
Andrew Wilson and Joan Schenkar) depict Highsmith as troubled,
obsessive and in many ways unsavoury. They chart her alcoholism, her
rudeness, her meanness. They reveal how later in life she frequently
exploded in virulent anti-semitic and racist rants; the increasing
isolation she preferred to live in; her eccentricities – that she
kept snails as pets is one of the few things many people know about
her. Yet love simmers away, deep in the ugly hearts of the most
psychopathic and dangerous of her characters (the obsessive stalking
of David Kelsey in This Sweet Sickness, or the confused infatuation
that turns to murderous hate in Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr
Ripley).
When The Price of
Salt was finally published as Carol by Bloomsbury 40 years later,
Highsmith proved as difficult an interviewee as she had always been.
She saved her honesty for her novels.
• Carol is
premiered at Cannes 2015. Jill Dawson’s novel The Crime Writer,
about Patricia Highsmith, will be published next year.
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