Beautiful Shadow (33 page)

     After a holiday romance, Don is overcome with a passion for Rosalind and he is so smitten he wants to marry her. He sends her a letter, but when she doesn’t write back, he becomes convinced that her reply has been delivered to the wrong mailbox. In the first of a series of irrational acts, Don breaks into the box of his neighbour, Dusenberry, and reads a letter he has been sent by lovesick woman, Edith. Don then assumes his neighbour’s identity and writes to her as Dusenberry, arranging a time to meet at Grand Central station. Eventually he receives a letter from Rosalind, refusing his offer of marriage. In a state of madness, he keeps his appointment with Edith, watching her from afar, before walking up to her and saying, ‘I’m sorry’. The story ends with him striding up Lexington Avenue, thinking about the letter he must write to Rosalind, in tears.

     She called the story, which she typed up in mid-November, ‘Love is a Terrible Thing’, which could almost be taken as the subtitle of Highsmith’s own life. ‘The story is so much K and myself,’ she wrote in her diary.
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It was published in 1968, in
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
as ‘The Birds Poised To Fly’, and anthologised in Highsmith’s collection,
Eleven
. ‘Neurotic’ and ‘degenerate’ were the words her family used after she read the story to them; they asked her why she was obsessed with such dark subject matter. The comment was a measure of how little Stanley and Mary understood the source of their daughter’s fiction and its overwhelming power.

During the autumn of 1949, Highsmith continued to write her lesbian novel. Inspired by the Bloomingdale’s incident of December 1948, and her relationships with women such as Virginia Kent Catherwood and Kathryn Hamill Cohen, the book, she realised, took the form of an autobiographical confession. In October, when she showed a page of the novel to a friend, he ‘remarked it was entirely myself,’ she recorded. ‘So it is. Perhaps that accounts for my confidence . . . Have never felt such outpouring of myself – in all forms of writing. A great gush.’
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     The book is written in the same precise, yet unsettling, style as one of her suspense novels, yet it is, essentially, a love story and its plot is a simple one. Therese Belivet is an aspiring stage designer who takes a temporary job in the toy department of a New York department store, Frankenberg’s. One day, close to Christmas, she finds herself attracted to a customer, Carol Aird, a woman who is buying a doll for her daughter. The two meet, fall in love, and then go on a driving trip together across America, a plotline which foreshadows Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel
On the Road
. But they are pursued by a private detective hired by Carol’s husband, in order to amass evidence that can be used against her in divorce, so as to gain custody of their child.

     Carol is clearly an amalgamation of all the qualities Highsmith admired in a woman. Like Kathleen Senn, the woman who walked into Bloomingdale’s, she has blonde hair and grey eyes, while her characteristics – grace, elegance, femininity, and a certain goddess-like unattainability – reflect the personalities of Highsmith’s most alluring muses. Highsmith wrote Therese as a slightly younger and more naive version of herself. Like the writer, Therese is unsure of her real identity, seems insubstantial and defines herself through others, particularly her lovers – ‘all she saw, she seemed to see through Carol.’
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Highsmith also placed her own words, ones that she had previously recorded in her notebooks, straight into the mouth of her fictionalised self. In 1942, she wrote in one of her cahiers, after drinking a glass of hot milk, ‘It tastes organic, of blood and hair, meat and bone. It is alive as an embryo sucked from a womb.’
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In the novel, after Carol gives Therese a glass of milk, Highsmith writes, ‘The milk seemed to taste of bone and blood, of warm flesh, or hair, saltless as chalk yet alive as a growing embryo.’
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     The character of Richard, Therese’s boyfriend, whom she subsequently rejects in favour of Carol, also seems to have been inspired in part by Marc Brandel. Sex between the two writers had always been difficult – Highsmith simply loathed it – and, in the novel, lovemaking is described in the following terms.

She remembered the first night she had let him stay, and she writhed again inwardly. It had been anything but pleasant, and she had asked right in the middle of it, ‘Is this right?’ How could it be right and so unpleasant, she had thought.
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When the character of Richard discovers his girlfriend’s ‘unnatural’ predilections, he writes Therese a letter expressing his disgust, calling her relationship with Carol ‘sordid and pathological’, ‘rootless and infantile’. In May 1950, Marc, too, wrote Highsmith such a letter, ‘telling me I cling to my disgusting, infantile sicknesses as a little girl clings to a doll’.
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     However, Marc, unlike Richard in
The Price of Salt
, ended the note with yet another request that they marry. His feelings for her were much more complex than those of Richard’s for Therese; after a great deal of persuasion from Pat, he was eventually forced to admit that one of the reasons why he felt attracted to her was because she reminded him of one of his brothers. ‘I shall leave it to his psychoanalyst to tell him that he is attracted to me for homosexual reasons, which I have always known,’ she wrote in her diary.
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In addition, he confessed he preferred women who had lesbian tendencies.

     In its early stages,
The Price of Salt
had a working title of ‘The Argument of Tantalus’, a reference to Greek mythology. Tantalus, the son of Pelops and Niobe, was punished for his sins in a variety of ways, all of which Highsmith took to symbolise the agonising position occupied by homosexuals in society; today, the word ‘tantalise’ bears the etymological root of his name. In Hades, Tantalus, desperately hungry and thirsty, was placed near a group of fruit trees, and next to a pool of water. But every time he tried to pick the fruit, the wind would sweep the branches aside, and as he was about to wet his lips, the pool would recede and drain away. Another account has Tantalus sitting before a lavish banquet, knowing that if he were to touch even a morsel of food, a huge stone suspended above his head would crash down and kill him.

     In the same way, homosexuals, as she saw it, were in a no win situation – they needed the love of a member of their own sex to survive, both physically and emotionally. But as soon as they sought this out, they were victimised by society and left fearful of their own desires, unable to conquer their repressed wishes. ‘Those were the days,’ Highsmith wrote in an afterword to the novel when it was reissued as
Carol
five years before her death, ‘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.’
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     Highsmith’s initial idea was to end the novel on an unhappy, tragic note, with Therese and Carol going their separate ways; after all, this was true to her own experience, as none of her relationships had been, so far at least, particularly long-term. It was her agent, Margot Johnson, who in October 1950, after seeing an alternative, more positive ending that Highsmith had written, persuaded her client to choose the more optimistic version. ‘Shall show MJ both versions,’ Highsmith said, ‘and am sure she will prefer the “lift” ending in which T & C go back together.’
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     The choice of the more optimistic denouement – the final scene has Therese walking towards Carol – is, perhaps, even more surprising considering the climate of fear that existed in America at the time. The Republican senator Joseph McCarthy took advantage of the paranoia that was sweeping post-war America to conduct a ‘witch-hunt’ that initially targeted communists, the so-called ‘enemy within’. Tapping into an envy of the intellectual classes, McCarthy, who attacked communists as young men ‘who are born with silver spoons in their mouths’, articulated these ideological societal tensions as a simple war between good and evil, with capitalism and moral certainty clearly on the right side. Political undesirables would have to be culled, he maintained; otherwise civilisation, as the American people knew it, would come to an end. He was so successful at whipping up mass hysteria that, after persecuting communists, he widened his field to include homosexuals. ‘Perhaps as dangerous as the actual communists are the sexual perverts who have infiltrated our government in recent years,’ Republican National Chairman George Gabrielson wrote in 1950 in an official report.
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     Homosexuals, said McCarthy, posed a security risk and as such the Senate had every right to dismiss them from government. This was merely a cover for a wider suspicion of lesbians and gay men. Homosexuality, according to a Senate sub-committee report, was considered, ‘so contrary to the normal accepted standards of social behavior that persons who engage in such activity are looked upon as outcasts by society in general’.
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By April of 1950, ninety-one homosexuals had been sacked from the State Department alone, while gays who worked in any public sector position also felt at risk. McCarthy’s virulent attack on nonconformity lasted until 1954, when he was eventually censured by the Senate. He died three years later, but his influence was widespread. The very existence of homosexuality caused mass moral panic, with magazines declaring it a threat to the nation’s mental and physical health, linking it to murder, crime and drug addiction, while so-called respectable journals such as
Human Events
, whose target audience was made up of professional and business leaders, claimed that gay men and lesbians should be hunted down. ‘By the very nature of their vice they belong to a sinister, mysterious and efficient International [conspiracy].’
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     Highsmith was acutely conscious of the the apocalyptic visions that haunted early 1950s America. In
The Price of Salt
, there are references to bomb shelters, while at one point Therese asks an acquaintance, a physicist, whether he intends to work on the atom bomb. In fact the whole novel could be interpreted as as a critique of McCarthyism. Therese escapes the soul-destroying conformity of the prison-like department store and her stifling relationship with Richard to pursue her dreams of freedom, both personal and sexual, with Carol. But as the two women drive across America they are spied upon and pursued by a private detective, hired by Carol’s husband, and clearly a symbol of the sinister Senator. To Therese, it seemed as though the detective gained a sadistic pleasure from the possibility of separating them.

She had seen just now what she had only sensed before, that the whole world was ready to be their enemy, and suddenly what she and Carol had together seemed no longer love or anything happy but a monster between them, with each of them caught in a fist.
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     Just as McCarthy and his aides resorted to underhand measures to trap their victims, so the detective bugs the women’s hotel room in Waterloo and the tape is then used to blackmail Carol into relinquishing Therese. ‘Everything was very simple this morning – I simply surrendered,’ Carol writes in a letter to her young lover before she finally decides to sacrifice her child for Therese
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. Highsmith writes, ‘It would be Carol, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they would go together, in heaven and in hell.’
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     It may seem tame by today’s standards, but the idea that a novel could end with two women settling down together was in fact extraordinarily radical. ‘Prior to this book,’ Highsmith wrote in her 1990 afterword, ‘homosexuals male and female in American novels had had to pay for their deviation by cutting their wrists, drowning themselves in a swimming pool, or by switching to heterosexuality (so it was stated), or by collapsing – alone and miserable and shunned – into a depression equal to hell.’
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     Lesbian pulp novels, often written for heterosexual men as a form of soft-porn fantasy, were popular from the beginning of the 1950s. But the balance that existed between the expression of sexual freedom and establishment conformity was a fine one. For example, Tereska Torres’ bestselling
Women’s Barracks
, published by Fawcett under its Gold Medal imprint in 1950, and advertised on its cover as ‘The Frank Autobiography of a French Girl Soldier’ became the subject of a Senate investigation into pornography. So, in order to carry on releasing what was, plainly, a highly popular and profitable sub-genre, publishers imposed strict censorship rules on their authors. Lesbian pulp author Ann Bannon says ‘There was some kind of retribution that was essential at the end so that you could let them have a little fun in the meantime and entertain the reader.’
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