The Talented Miss Highsmith (45 page)

Pat, sick as only an adult stricken with chicken pox can be, was cared for over Christmas by Mother Mary at the family house in Hastings-on-Hudson. Mary annoyed her feverish daughter by trying out some Christian Science healing techniques when all Pat wanted was an aspirin. In Hastings-on-Hudson, Pat drew and painted, fretted about her inability to sell stories, and cued up her holiday reading to her holiday depression: Graham Greene's
Ministry of Fear
and Tolstoy's
War and Peace.
²⁹

During Pat's ninth analytic session in January of the New Year, 1949, Dr. Klein gave her a Rorschach test. Klein said the test showed that Pat had a “raging violence [which was] completely pent-up,” a tendency towards “hypochondriacal” behavior, and a “weak Ego.” No one could argue with that.

Pat was reading, as analysands do when they decide to outsmart their analysts, current Freudian psychiatric theory: books by Helene Deutsch, lent to her by Dr. Klein, and books by Edmund Bergler, chosen by Pat herself. Helene Deutsch, a pupil and then an assistant of Sigmund Freud in Vienna, was the first pschoanalyst to concern herself exclusively with the psychology of women. Bergler, a Freudian who was not well disposed towards homosexuals (in January of 1948, he published an article called “The Myth of a New National Disease: Homosexuality and the Kinsey Report”),
³⁰
developed a theory that might have been made for Pat Highsmith: the hypothesis that humans are psychologically and emotionally attached to unresolved negative feelings which they have formed, subjectively, in childhood.

Meanwhile, Dr. Klein told David Diamond—who repeated it to Marc Brandel, who repeated it to Pat—of her genuine interest in Pat. (
Any
psychiatrist would have been interested in the young Patricia Highsmith, with her handsome array of twentieth-century maladies and her uncanny ability to inhabit and/or mimic aberrant psychological states.) Delighted, Pat transcribed the compliment: “Marc said that Mrs. Klein had told David that she was very much interested in me, that I was so creative in everything I did, etc.”
³¹

It was mostly downhill from there. Pat's typewriter broke, she was “sick of penises,” and, despite a little of what she liked to refer to as “success” with Marc Brandel in bed, she was sexually unhappy with him. For her twenty-eighth birthday on 19 January, Willie Mae sent her five dollars from Fort Worth, but neither Stanley Highsmith nor Jay B Plangman gave her a present. (Jay B almost never sent his daughter presents and left nothing to her in his will.) Before Pat's tenth psychoanalytic session, Mary Highsmith “took the liberty” of calling Eva Klein. She provided the usual explanations of a defensive parent: she had educated Pat “very well,” Pat came from a “good family,” etc., etc. The doctor said Mary was rather “excited” and “tearful” and that Mary had told her she should look into Pat's relations with Lil Picard. But, Pat wrote, “Eva stopped her: ‘If you really want to help, be a little more compassionate,'” she said to Pat's mother. Dr. Klein concluded that Mary felt guilty about Pat's depressions.

In the fall, Mary, hoping for a marriage with Marc Brandel for her daughter, had made a familiar offer to Pat: “‘Oh, if there's a child you can let me raise it.'” Pat's response was: “My blood ran a bit cold. I don't think this is the ideal way to raise a child.”
³²
It was the way Pat herself had been raised. In Pat's next session with Eva Klein, after she'd told Klein that Marc was allowing her to “sacrifice” herself sexually to him, the doctor suggested that Pat should abstain from sex for “three months.” Pat balked at the idea immediately: “That means men and women…. But
women
don't make me feel depressed!”
³³

In the middle of all this, during her thirteenth psychiatric session, Pat made an interesting admission. Contrary to what she would write to her long-suffering stepfather twenty-two years later about the “lingering kisses when I was seventeen in Texas, not exactly paternal” that her father Jay B Plangman had apparently forced upon her,
³⁴
Pat seems to have decided with Dr. Klein that whatever happened between her and her birth father happened when she was “16”—and that the incident was responsible for her barely acknowledged “eating disorder”: “Therefore my culpability, when I was 16, and the reason, why I wanted to eat so little.”

Dr. Klein, scenting victory for the home team, was zealous in pressing her case: “‘I will try to make you want to be kissed by your father,' she said…. ‘You don't hate men…. I will show you that you look for men in your women.'” Klein was making Pat “furious” and that, Pat thought, was “progress.” But Pat had also solipsized the good doctor into her ambivalence. “I love and hate her. Want to give her presents and quarrel with her. Want to arrive drunk. And I want to tell her my passionate feelings for her and her progress with me.”
³⁵

Still, the psychoanalysis was doing something for Pat—but it wasn't quite the something that Dr. Klein had in mind. Pat suddenly wanted to “dominate” a woman again (she did so with Ann Smith), and then she spent a night with Dione, giving her experience the correct analytic spin: “[I]n my current stage of ‘hurting' a girl. Sadistic reaction from these years—those eons—of masochism.”
³⁶

Pat continued to be “embarrassed” whenever Dr. Klein asked her to “free-associate” with words. By her twenty-first visit, Klein was able to tell Pat: “Your sexual feeling is completely connected with attack.” For her twenty-second visit, on 24 February, Pat managed to produce a “castration” dream for Eva Klein. But she promptly asserted her own attitude towards it: “Shame on Eva,” she wrote in her diary, “for taking away my fantasies about having a male penis.”
³⁷
Pat knew what she liked.

But Dr. Klein also went on telling her what she didn't like: her mother, Mary. So Pat began deducing, dutifully, that “my guilt drives me to girls, overcompensation…with Dione and Ann [Smith], Jeanne, I am acting out that with which my mother served me—the loving and leaving pattern, the basic heartlessness & lack of sympathy.” She spoke to her doctor about her early years in Texas, “the hated watermelon parties.”
³⁸
But Pat, still seeing Marc, was also having pregnancy scares and trying to avoid Marc as much as she could. She had no problem lying to him, she said, but she resented his inquiries and wanted to be free of him.
³⁹

It was at this point that Pat began to mount an attack on Eva Klein. By the beginning of May she was writing: “More and more I fear she is a cut & dried Freudian. Her hammerblows of propaganda no longer even sink in properly.”
⁴⁰
Dr. Klein didn't help by providing an unfortunate suggestion; unfortunate, in that it was made to someone who hated crowds and yearned to be the sole focus of her psychiatrist's loving attention.

“At this rate—she [Dr. Klein] decides, I must go into group ‘therapy,' with three or four married women who are latent homosexuals. (Better latent than never, remarks Ann [Smith]. And also reminds me of the alcoholic who joined the A.A. when he ran out of drinking companions.) They sound deadly—all progressing so nicely. Though they still have homosexual dreams occasionally and all usually have lunch together after their jolly double sessions.”
⁴¹

Pat concluded her little summary of group therapy with women by making the decision that would shut the door on her own psychoanalysis.

“Perhaps I shall amuse myself by seducing a couple of them.”
⁴²

By the middle of May, her forty-fifth visit to Dr. Klein, Pat had already delivered the coup de grâce. She had gone back to Dr. Gutheil, the male psychiatrist she had initially rejected, to check up on Eva Klein's credentials. As a deliberate provocation, she reported this to Dr. Klein—and brought about the hoped-for response: “Eva flared up in typically Jewish way after I mentioned seeing Gutheil.”
⁴³
(A former lover of Pat says that whenever Pat was finished with someone, she or he suddenly became “Jewish.”)

Pat's very last visit to her psychiatrist on 24 May, before she sailed to England to visit her new publisher, Dennis Cohen (and to fall in love with his wife, Kathryn), is best represented by the final note she took on her psychoanalysis: “Bloody angry at having to pay this bill before I leave.”
⁴⁴
And she blamed Dr. Klein's fees for the fact that she couldn't afford to buy a first-class ticket on the
Queen Mary
.

Part 1

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 hours
⁹
—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 disguise
²¹
—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 tale
²⁶
—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