Nom de Plume (32 page)

She recalled being instantly taken with the spritelike Capote, if not his writing, and particularly appreciated his openness about being gay. He was entirely unacquainted with the hang-ups that froze Highsmith and left her struggling with her sexuality. Once he told her that at the age of fourteen, he came out to his parents with a simple, jubilant declaration: “
Everybody is interested in girls, only I, T.C., am interested in boys
!”

Highsmith's second novel, as far as anyone knew at the time, was
The Blunderer
, in 1954; it would be followed a year later by
The Talented Mr. Ripley
, the book that would ensure her reputation and fame. With that accomplishment she established herself as a master of crime fiction—even though she disliked being typecast in a particular genre—and a creator of psychologically complex characters who, beneath their mannered façades, were misfits, deviants, and sometimes psychopaths. The British novelist Graham Greene, a great fan of Highsmith's work, described her as a “writer who has created a world of her own—a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger. Nothing is certain when we have crossed this frontier.” It was a world that often reflected her interior state and her own disturbing obsessions. Perhaps most troubling of all, Susannah Clapp wrote in a 1999 piece in the
New Yorker
, was that “her narratives suggest a seamlessness between bumbling normality and horrific acts. You never hear the gears shift when the terrible moment arrives.”

In truth, Highsmith had published her second novel two years before
The Blunderer
—yet it was not a work she wished to claim credit for. This one was a secret.

The Price of Salt
came out in 1952 under the name of Claire Morgan, who did not exist. Although Highsmith would never again use a pseudonym for any of her novels or stories, this radical narrative demanded a furtive identity. “Oh god,” she said, “how this story emerges from my own bones!” Homoeroticism was pervasive in her fiction, but always obliquely and within the context of troubled, amoral characters. In a scene from
The Talented Mr. Ripley
, relations between Tom Ripley and the object of his fixation, Dickie Greenleaf, begin to take an ugly turn when Dickie walks in on Tom dressed in his clothes:

“Marge and I are fine,” Dickie snapped in a way that shut Tom out from them. “Another thing I want to say, but clearly,” he said, looking at Tom, “I'm not queer. I don't know if you have the idea that I am or not.”

“Queer?” Tom smiled faintly. “I never thought you were queer.”

Dickie started to say something else, and didn't. He straightened up, the ribs showing in his dark chest. “Well, Marge thinks you are.”

“Why?” Tom felt the blood go out of his face. He kicked off Dickie's second shoe feebly, and set the pair in the closet. “Why should she? What've I ever done?” He felt faint. Nobody had ever said it outright to him, not in this way.

“It's just the way you act,” Dickie said in a growling tone, and went out of the door.

The Price of Salt
, however, depicted consensual (and satisfying) romantic love between two women. It was Highsmith's most autobiographical novel, and it laid bare the emotional drives she had worked hard to keep hidden for so long. Moreover, it was the first gay or lesbian novel with a happy ending. This was not pulp fiction. No one went insane, committed suicide, or was murdered. No one “converted” to heterosexuality or found God. This was a breakthrough for the era in which it was written, and surprisingly, the novel was well received by critics. The paperback edition, issued by Bantam a year later, sold more than a million copies. Grateful letters trickled in for years afterward, from both men and women, addressed to Claire Morgan in care of her publishing house. “We don't all commit suicide and lots of us are doing fine,” wrote one fan.

If it was true, as Highsmith wrote in her diary in 1942, that “[a]ll my life's work will be an undedicated monument to a woman,” then
The Price of Salt
was the culmination of that ambition. No wonder it demanded concealment.

The idea for the novel had arisen from a single but transformative moment. In December 1948, in need of cash and feeling depressed, she took a temporary job during the pre-Christmas rush in the toy department of Bloomingdale's in Manhattan. Though she was hired for a month, she lasted only two and half weeks there. She'd gotten the job partly to pay for her psychoanalytic treatment, which she'd begun in a halfhearted effort to “cure” herself of the homosexual urges that alternately tormented her and left her in a manic state of bliss. “When you're in love it's a state of madness,” she said.

One morning, a few days after Highsmith started the job, a beautiful blond woman in a mink coat walked into the toy department, purchased a doll for her daughter, then left the store. Highsmith never saw her again. Yet that brief transaction captivated Highsmith, who had a habit of projecting her fantasies and yearnings onto unsuspecting women she barely knew. “She could be called the balladeer of stalking,” Susannah Clapp noted of Highsmith in her
New Yorker
piece. “The fixation of one person on another—oscillating between attraction and antagonism—figures prominently in almost every Highsmith tale.”

To Highsmith, the woman she'd met “seemed to give off light.” And though it had been a routine encounter in which no flirtation had occurred, she was left feeling “odd and swimmy in the head, near to fainting, yet at the same time uplifted, as if I had seen a vision.” That night, she went home to the apartment where she lived alone and wrote eight pages in longhand, a broad version of the novel's plot. “It flowed from my pen as if from nowhere—beginning, middle and end,” she recalled. “It took me about two hours, perhaps less.” Then she fell ill with chicken pox.

Because this bewitching customer had paid by credit card and asked for the purchase to be sent to her home, Highsmith had the woman's name and address: Mrs. E. R. Senn of Ridgewood, New Jersey. In Highsmith's imaginative retelling, Senn was cast as the seductive older woman, Carol, and Highsmith as the naïve nineteen-year-old shopgirl, Therese. The department store was fictionalized as Frankenberg's. When Carol invites Therese out for lunch, the young protagonist, despite having a boyfriend, feels the first stirrings of love. “An indefinite longing, that she had been only vaguely conscious of at times before, became now a recognizable wish,” Highsmith wrote. “It was so absurd, so embarrassing a desire, that Therese thrust it from her mind.” Some passages in the novel were taken verbatim from the author's own notebooks and diaries. Although the initial writing of the novel came easily to her, the revision stage brought out dark emotions. As the publication date grew closer, Highsmith suddenly crashed, hitting one of the lowest points of her life. She became self-destructive to a terrifying extent, going on drinking binges and feeling more miserable than ever. At the very moment she should have been celebrating a work that she felt proud of, she experienced an agonizing case of writer's remorse. She wanted to withdraw the novel from publication: it was so deeply personal that she feared it would destroy her, both personally and professionally. The use of an invented name was only a mild anodyne for her anxiety. Mostly, she felt sick with worry and shame: “These days are on the brink again. The least thing depresses me to the point of suicide.”

In fact, suicide was the fate of Mrs. E. R. Senn—a grim twist worthy of a Highsmith tale. Married to a rich businessman, the beautiful woman who had aroused Highsmith's ardor was an alcoholic who had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals. She had absolutely no idea that she'd inspired a lesbian love story. In the fall of 1951, Kathleen Wiggins Senn killed herself by carbon monoxide poisoning in the garage of her lavish home in Bergen County.

It wasn't until the 1990 British edition of
The Price of Salt
was released that Highsmith explained in an afterword why she'd decided to publish under a pseudonym. Both her publisher and agent seemed determined to have her keep writing the same books over and over, confining her to so-called crime fiction. After the publication of
Strangers on a Train
, she'd been tagged instantly as a certain kind of writer, even though in her mind it was “simply a novel with an interesting story.” (The reductive business of branding and marketing is unchanged even today.) She found this rather frustrating, and in objecting to being labeled she had her share of supporters.

“Patricia Highsmith is often called a mystery or crime writer,” a newspaper critic noted, “which is a bit like calling Picasso a draftsman.” To Gore Vidal, who shared her expatriate anti-American views, she was simply one of the greatest modernist writers. And the playwright David Hare admired her work because “behind it lies the claim that, once you set your mind to it, any one human being can destroy any other.”

Highsmith knew that her literary genius transcended any single genre, and she detested any kind of categorization. She considered herself a neglected master. “If I were to write a novel about a lesbian relationship,” she wrote in the afterword, “would I then be labeled a lesbian book-writer? That was a possibility, even though I might never be inspired to write another such book in my life. So I decided to offer the book under another name.” She also must have wanted to protect her reputation and nascent career, although she never admitted this outright. (Nor did she wish to upset her eighty-four-year-old grandmother, Willie Mae.)

After all, she noted, those were the days when homosexuals were widely viewed as perverts, 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 be suspected of being homosexual.”

The pseudonym gave her the safety she craved. Because the story of her two characters ends on a sweet, hopeful note, this novel seemed an exercise in wish fulfillment for the author. In her own life, Highsmith almost always experienced thwarted love, painfully brief relationships, and bitter rejections.

In 1959, she began an on-and-off relationship with the author Marijane Meaker, who would also publish under pseudonyms, including Vin Packer, Ann Aldrich, and most famously M. E. Kerr. They met at L's, a lesbian bar in Greenwich Village, and in her memoir Meaker later recalled Highsmith wearing a trench coat, drinking gin neat, and looking like “a combination of Prince Valiant and Rudolph [
sic
] Nureyev.” She admired Highsmith's resistance to societal attitudes toward homosexuality: “I don't care for acceptance,” Highsmith told Meaker, who was in her early thirties at the time and foolishly believed that she had found her life partner. (The relationship would last two years.) They lived together for a time, but Meaker later confessed that if they hadn't had “such good horizontal rapport,” the affair would have ended much sooner.

After breaking up, they stayed in touch—which meant that Meaker had to deal with Highsmith's narcissism by mail instead. “Did I tell you that Bloomsbury liked my latest Ripley so much they gave me an advance that in American money comes to about $115,000?” Highsmith wrote in one letter. “I never got that much for a book. You know, in the U.S. no one really recognizes me, but in Europe I'm often recognized and treated like a celebrity.” In other letters she railed against Jews, adding in one postscript that “USA could save 11 million per day if they would cut the dough to Israel.”

That wasn't all. Immediately after their breakup, Highsmith wrote a novel called
The Cry of the Owl
, in which an “unsuccessful artist” was a thinly disguised version of Meaker. The character was viciously knifed to death for several pages at the end.

B
y 1983, many people suspected that Highsmith had been the author of
The Price of Salt
; although she refused to address the truth in any way, it had become a poorly kept secret. When contacted by Barnard's alumni magazine for an article about her, and asked directly whether she had written the novel, Highsmith replied that the less said about the subject, the better, and left it at that. In the same year, Naiad Press bought the rights to reissue the book, but Highsmith declined to publish it under her own name. Naiad tried to tempt her by offering a $5,000 advance for publishing with full disclosure, or $2,000 for publishing under a pseudonym. She refused to take the bait.

For the 1990 UK edition, Highsmith finally came around to coming out. She had stubbornly resisted even then, but she did consent to putting her real name to the work. The novel was also released with a new title,
Carol.
Although Highsmith had no wish to analyze her decision for the press or the public, the book spoke for itself. Writing it had been an act of courage, even if the author wanted no part in acknowledging that fact. Today, it remains one of her best works, a novel worth reading and revisiting.

Highsmith spent her last thirteen years alone in a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse in southern Switzerland. She died of cancer in 1995, at the age of seventy-four, and her body was cremated. Of the author's final weeks, a neighbor recalled, “There was a tranquillity about her. She seemed to be quite peaceful, and as lucid as could be.”

She liked whips and chains

Chapter 16

Pauline Réage &
DOMINIQUE AURY

N
ot many authors can boast of having written a best-selling pornographic novel, much less one regarded as an erotica classic—but Pauline Réage could. Make that Dominique Aury. No: Anne Desclos.

All three were the same woman, but for years the real name behind the incendiary work was among the best-kept secrets in the literary world. Forty years after the publication of the French novel
Histoire d'O
, the full truth was finally made public. Even then, some still considered it the most shocking book ever written. When the book came out, its purported author was “Pauline Réage,” widely believed to be a pseudonym. Although shocking for its graphic depictions of sadomasochism, the novel was admired for its reticent, even austere literary style. It went on to achieve worldwide success, selling millions of copies, and has never been out of print. This was no cheap potboiler. There was nothing clumsy, sloppy, or crude about it.
Histoire d'O
was awarded the distinguished Prix des Deux Magots, was adapted for film, and was translated into more than twenty languages.

Desclos (or, rather, Aury, as she became known in her early thirties) was obsessed with her married lover, Jean Paulhan. She wrote the book to entice him, claim him, and keep him—and she wrote it exclusively for him. It was the ultimate love letter.

Whips and chains and masks!
Oh, my. When
Histoire d'O
appeared in France in the summer of 1954, it was so scandalous that obscenity charges (later dropped) were brought against its mysterious author. Even in the mid-twentieth century, in a European country decidedly less prudish than the United States, the book struck like a meteor. That the writer had evidently used a pen name provoked endless gossip in Parisian society. Speculation about the author's identity became a favorite sport among the literati: was the author prominent, obscure, male, female, perverted, crazy? The authorial voice was too direct, too cool, to be that of a woman, some argued; others insisted that no man could have offered such a nuanced exploration of a woman's psyche. One thing was certain: the person who wrote this novel had no shame.

Story of O
, the title of the English edition, is an account of a French fashion photographer, known only as O, who descends into debasement, torment, humiliation, violence, and bondage, all in the name of devotion to her lover, René. Over the course of the novel she is blindfolded, chained, flogged, pierced, branded, and more. As the story opens, O is a passive figure who does precisely what she's told:

Her lover one day takes O for a walk in a section of the city where they never go—the Montsouris Park, the Monceau Park. After they have taken a stroll in the park and have sat together side by side on the edge of a lawn, they notice, at one corner of the park, at an intersection where there are never any taxis, a car which, because of its meter, resembles a taxi.

“Get in,” he says.

She gets in.

The book is like an erotic version of those childhood tales in which a character steps accidentally into an alternate reality and is induced into a hallucinatory state. (Paulhan once insisted that “fairy tales are erotic novels for children.”) Think of Alice falling down the rabbit hole, or the magic wardrobe leading to Narnia. That was
Story of O
, albeit with a much darker vision. By the novel's eleventh page, O has been abandoned by her lover at a château outside Paris. Alone, she is subdued, quietly following instructions without resistance. She undresses and is fitted with a locked collar and bracelets and a long red cape. Blindfolded, she cries out as a stranger's hand “penetrated her in both places at once.” Thus begins her odyssey as a sexual slave to the mostly anonymous men and women who have their way with her. “O thought she recognized one of the men from his voice,” Réage writes, “one of those who had forced her the previous evening, the one who had asked that her rear be made more easily accessible.” Willing to do anything with anyone, she reveals an existential longing for release. Aury once observed that “O is looking for deliverance, to thrust off this mortal coil, as Shakespeare says.”

Years after the book was published, Aury offered insight into her protagonist's apparent façade of passive acceptance. “I think that submissiveness can [be] and is a formidable weapon, which women will use as long as it isn't taken from them,” she said. “Is O used by René and Sir Stephen, or does she in fact use them, and . . . all those irons and chains and obligatory debauchery, to fulfill her own dream—that is, her own destruction and death? And, in some surreptitious way, isn't she in charge of them? Doesn't she bend them to her will?”

The novel also featured scenes of women seducing women. Those encounters seemed genuine rather than forced, contrary to accusations that the author had written such scenes to satisfy the “male gaze.” Aury considered herself bisexual and admitted her preference for the female body. Describing her first real-life exposure to male anatomy, she said, “I found that stiffly saluting member, of which he was so proud, rather frightening, and to tell the truth I found his pride slightly comical. I thought that that must be embarrassing for him, and thought how much more pleasant it was to be a girl. That, by the way, is an opinion I still hold today.”

Throughout the story, O readily offers herself. She responds to pain and suffering with acceptance or gratitude. The narrative culminates in an all-night party in which she is led along on a dog leash, naked, wearing an owl mask. After she has had a depilatory, to please her master, a chain is attached to rings inserted into her labia. (Her journey seemed to confirm the French writer Georges Bataille's dictum: “Man goes constantly in fear of himself. His erotic urges terrify him.”) O's response to such terror is absolute surrender, allowing her experiences to lead her into a realm of no pathology, analysis, or consequence. As just about every self-help book advises, opening yourself to the unknown can feel very good. It can transform you. Then again, it can also make you insane.

Depending on your erotic wishes and habits,
Story of O
will disturb you, frighten you, make you angry, make you upset, confuse you, disgust you, or turn you on. Maybe everything at once. Decades after its publication, the novel has not lost its shock value. In 2009, a commentary in the
Guardian
following a Radio 4 program, “The Story of O—The Vice Française,” explained that the late-night timing of the program was apt, because the material was “strong stuff” and might have made people queasy. One listener had remarked, on the air, that hearing excerpts from the book provoked “a rush of blood to the non-thinking parts.”

As the author once revealed, the character O actually began as Odile, the name of a close friend who'd once been deeply in love with Albert Camus. “She knew all about the name and was enchanted,” Aury said. “But after a few pages I decided that I couldn't do all those things to poor Odile, so I just kept the first letter.” Contrary to speculation over the years by feminists, academics, psychoanalysts, and general readers obsessed with the book, the name O, she said, “has nothing to do with erotic symbolism or the shape of the female sex.”

However depraved her novel seemed, Aury had set out to create a profoundly personal work of art, not cheap porn. (“That Pauline Réage is a more dangerous writer than the Marquis de Sade follows from the fact that art is more persuasive than propaganda,” declared an essayist in the
New York Review of Books.
) Aury was making something new, working with conventions as no one had attempted in quite the same way. “Debauchery conceived of as a kind of ascetic experience is not new, either for men or for women,” she explained, “but until
Story of O
no woman to my knowledge had said it.”

Aury seemed an unlikely candidate to produce a book showcasing violent penetration. From childhood she'd been a serious reader, immersing herself in Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, and the Bible. She once boasted of a period in which she'd read and reread the whole of Proust each year for five years. It seemed inconceivable that a woman with such a drab exterior could explore a sexual compulsion that drove her protagonist toward oblivion. Also distinguishing the novel from what one critic called “volumes sold under the counter” were its intricate ideas about human behavior—that “we are all jailers, and all in prison, in that there is always someone within us whom we enchain, whom we imprison, whom we silence,” as she later explained.
Story of O
is about power, the pleasure of having it, and finally the pleasure of letting it go. For her part, the author admitted her comfort with the notion of obedience, at least in certain contexts. “I think I have a repressed bent for the military,” she said. “I like discipline without question, specific schedules and duties.”

Paulhan, the impetus for Aury's cri de coeur, was one of France's leading intellectuals and the publisher of the preeminent literary journal
Nouvelle Revue Française.
His affair with Aury lasted thirty years, until his death in 1968. Throughout their relationship, Paulhan remained married to his second wife, Germaine, who had Parkinson's disease. She was well aware of her husband's philandering, which he expected her to tolerate without protest. And Aury was not his only mistress. After his death, his daughter-in-law remembered him as “quite the ladies' man.” (It's interesting that Aury used precisely the same phrase in recalling her own father.)

When she met Paulhan, Aury was in her early thirties and he was in his fifties. (She was born in 1907; he was born in 1884.) She'd been married briefly and had a son, Philippe. Her father, an acquaintance of Paulhan, had introduced them. At the time, she was hoping to publish a collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French religious poetry, and Paulhan was an editor at the distinguished publishing house Gallimard. She did not describe their meeting as love at first sight. “It was slow, but it went very—efficiently,” she said, recalling her initial impression of him as handsome, charming, and funny. They bonded through shared intellectual passion; during the Nazi occupation of France, while doing work for the Resistance, they became lovers. “Dominique Aury was fascinated by intelligence,” a friend recalled. “The intelligence of Paulhan was obvious. And for her it became a kind of obsession.”

Until her fateful meeting with Paulhan, Aury hadn't yet found the love of her life, and her sexual history was hardly remarkable. “By my makeup and temperament I wasn't really prey to physical desires,” she once said. “Everything happened in my head.” That would explain the electricity between her and Paulhan, which would exert a hold on her for the rest of her life. Although she could talk extensively about sex, her personal life was fairly tame. She did once joke, however, that she'd considered prostitution as a potential vocation: “I told myself that had to be absolutely terrific: to be constantly wanted, and to get paid besides, how could you go wrong?” she said. “And what happens? At the first opportunity, what do I do but turn into a stupid prude!” Yet she had also wondered what it might be like to become a nun—drawn to it, no doubt, by the stern uniform.

Of course, Aury was destined not for prostitution but to live, work, and breathe intellectual society. She toyed with her identity well before
Histoire d'O
was published. At some point during the war, while working as a journalist and translator, she discarded her original name, Anne Desclos, erasing it entirely from her professional and personal life. Almost no one knew that Aury was not actually her own name; she kept that fact a secret. She had chosen “Dominique” for its gender neutrality, and “Aury” was derived from her mother's maiden name, “Auricoste.”

Although it's true that
Story of O
was inspired by Paulhan's offhand remark to Aury that no woman could ever write a “truly” erotic novel, a more compelling motive was her fear, however irrational, that their relationship might end. “I wasn't young, I wasn't pretty, it was necessary to find other weapons,” she later revealed. “The physical side wasn't enough. The weapons, alas, were in the head.” She plunged into the task: writing through the night, in pencil, in school exercise books, while lying in bed, and she produced—three months later—her intimate masterpiece. The first sixty pages, she said, flowed “automatically” and appeared in the book exactly as they had come to her.

The novel was written as a challenge to Paulhan's dare (or assignment, if you want to call it that). “I wrote it alone, for him, to interest him, to please him, to occupy him,” she told the documentary filmmaker Pola Rapaport shortly before her death. Aury never intended the novel to be made public, but Paulhan insisted on it. For her, the manuscript was simply a long letter that had to be written. She hoped this gift would ensure the permanence of their relationship. “You're always looking for ways to make it go on,” she said. “The story of Scheherazade, more or less.”

The content of the novel was graphic, but the author's prose was highly controlled, disciplined, and spare. Her “voice” was at odds with the erotic material, making it hard to dismiss as pornography. For Paulhan, the book was “the most ardent love letter that any man has ever received.” He did not abandon her.

The author said later that
Story of O
, written when she was forty-seven, was based on her own fantasies. She was influenced, too, by her lover's admiration for the Marquis de Sade. Later she described her feverish writing process as “writing the way you speak in the dark to the person you love when you've held back the words of love for too long and they flow at last . . . without hesitation, without stopping, rewriting, discarding . . . the way one breathes, the way one dreams.”