The Talented Miss Highsmith (10 page)

Pat had always been anxious about being identified with
The Price of Salt,
and she “stewed”—her word—terribly before and after publishing it. (See “
Les Girls: Part 1.
”) By now, she regularly denigrated the book, attacked her mother for revealing her as the author (Mary Highsmith had spilled the beans to her minister in Texas), and only with the greatest reluctance allowed it to be brought out under her own name in England in 1990. She had had some nervous exchanges in 1985 with Alain Oulman, her editor at Calmann-Lévy in Paris, about the security of her nom de plume Claire Morgan, fearful that her authorship of the work had been leaked in France. (It hadn't, but the critics found “a Highsmith touch” in the book.)
⁴⁴
When Bloomsbury finally republished
Salt
in London in 1990 with the name “Patricia Highsmith” on the front cover, they altered the title of the novel to
Carol
. Some part of
The Price of Salt
always seemed to be in disguise.

The likely reason for Pat's anxiety about the novel is the one she admitted to when she was writing it. She couldn't bear the exposure. She also couldn't resist the temptation of creating the work as a double forgery: in the novel she is both pseudonymous (she published under the name of Claire Morgan) and eponymous (she created the character of Therese from her own experience).

The Price of Salt,
written in the richly figured language of pursuit, betrayal, and murder, trails elements of crime fiction but is most redolent of fairy tale. Its line of force, in Susannah Clapp's felicitous phrase, is “a detection of the heart,”
⁴⁵
and its central criminal act—homosexual love—is the only one the outlaw heroines get away with.

Salt
's beginnings in the toy section of a department store are filled with crude salesgirls who surround the precocious, artistic Therese like “a pack of wolves”
⁴⁶
—a phrase Pat used in her notebook to describe her fellow coworkers at Bloomingdale's department store during her cameo appearance there as a salesgirl in December of 1948. (See “
Les Girls: Part 1.
”) In a reimagining of what had actually happened to her, Pat makes one of the “wolves” steal the “bloody bag of meat” young Therese is saving for her dinner. (Pat's contempt for working-class women is palpable in this book.) Therese is dressed ritually like a “doll” in a hand-stitched bloodred dress by a gnomelike coworker who tries to mother her. Later on, Therese is redressed in a snow-white gown—again she looks like a “doll”—by another mother: her soon-to-be-disappointed prospective mother-in-law. Therese is symbolically wounded (a cut on her leg which she staunches with Kotex) just before meeting Carol, the older Ice Queen, who steals her heart, spirits her away to a kind of castle in the suburbs, feeds her a milky potion (in which Therese can taste blood and bone), asks her three important questions, and then grooms her for a long connubial voyage across the United States in a car.

Therese is courted by several men and another woman, undergoes serious tests of moral courage, and is awarded every single thing her heart desires—including Carol, the Ice Queen, who gives up her daughter for Therese. (And how Pat must have enjoyed writing
that
.) Therese's final reward is Pat's own American Dream, slightly transmuted: a really good chance at becoming a famous stage designer and a large apartment on Madison Avenue with her much older lover.

Because
The Price of Salt
is a Highsmith fairy tale, there are a few irregularities. The two heroines prefer each other to any of their attendant males (or females). The seesaw of their love balances itself on dominance and submission and teeters, refreshingly, back and forth between the two women. The power to say no (always stronger in Highsmith novels than the power to say yes) is slyly applied like an unexpected thumb to a grocer's scale. Blood is in the corner of every smile, and sexual consummations are spied upon, recorded, and offered up as legal threats. The beautiful Carol keeps a gun in the glove box of her automobile. The odor of mother-daughter incest is everywhere.

Carol and Therese's cross-country motor flight from a shadowy male pursuer is the centerpiece of
The Price of Salt
—just as the months-long motor trip of Vladimir Nabokov's brilliant hallucination,
Lolita,
is the spine which compresses the nerves of that novel—and their drive begins, as does Humbert's with his Lo, as an unacknowledged and incestuous honeymoon. Throughout the book, Carol and Therese enact a parody of mother-daughter relations which, in its quieter way, is almost as unsettling as Humbert and Lolita's awful caricature of father-daughter love.

The Price of Salt
is far less conventional in its distribution of justice than Nabokov's tour de force. Nabokov's characters all get what the mid-1950s thought they “deserved” for their behavior—an early and agonizing death, mostly, and no profit from their transgressive pleasures. (Only the reader is allowed to profit from Nabokov's gorgeous prose.)

But
The Price of Salt,
published three years before
Lolita
appeared, is a homosexual love story with an almost happy ending and not, as Pat wrote in the 1990 preface to the edition bearing her name, what the literary code of the time required: a novel with an ending in which the characters “pay for their deviation by cutting their wrists, drowning themselves in a swimming pool, or by switching to heterosexuality.”
⁴⁷
And its pseudonymous, eponymous author actually
fell in love
with the character of Carol and with Carol's relationship to Therese as she was writing about them—a far more subtle and artistic response than falling in love with Mrs. E. R. Senn, the well-dressed bourgeoise whose chance meeting with Pat was the “germ” of
The Price of Salt.
⁴⁸
(See
“Les Girls:” Part 1.
)
^*

But on this spring morning in 1978, says Christopher Petit, Pat “did admit to me at the end that she had written
The Price of Salt
.” And then she made “me promise for about 15 minutes that I wouldn't mention it in the interview or attribute it to her.”

Chris Petit thinks Pat made this unusual declaration “because I'd plied her with cigarettes” and “laid it on” about her work. A year or two ago, he'd managed to get hold of a xeroxed copy of her
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
—“It's not easy to find,” Pat responded, grasping the fact that only a real Highsmith fan would go to that length to read her work—and Petit brought to the interview an American first edition of
Strangers on a Train
for her to sign.

“And that basically was the end of that,” says Mr. Petit, except for “some [of her] pretty wacky political views…. Until the question of the dictionary came up.”

They were talking about Berlin and Petit remarked that “visiting East Berlin is less of a cultural shock” than going to London.
⁴⁹
Always happy to identify a flaw in any country she'd left behind (Pat had moved from England to France ten years before), Pat thought “that was the funniest remark I'd heard in a week. The people in London streets
do
look scruffy, shabby, unwashed even…. Even Regent Street begins to look like Oxford Street.”
⁵⁰

Chris, who had met Tabea through the film circles he frequented, mentioned that he was going back to Berlin shortly. And then it was Pat's turn to pose a question: “In that case,” she said, “perhaps you can do me a favor.”

Enthralled with the idea of herself as mentor (she continued to cherish some unsettling ideas about the education of the young), Pat wanted to improve her friend Tabea Blumenschein's English vocabulary by purchasing a “German-English, English-German dictionary from Foyles, Schoeffler-Weis”
⁵¹
—as she described the tome two weeks later in a letter to Chris Petit's editor at
Time Out,
a letter which suggested that her new friend, the engaging Mr. Petit, was perhaps an imposter and almost certainly a thief—and she wanted Chris to take the dictionary to Berlin and deliver it to Tabea. It was “quite clear” to Chris that Pat was “too mean to pay the postage.”

It was a very large dictionary.

“I…had to not take half my luggage in order to take this dictionary. It was an extremely heavy dictionary. Extremely heavy…And it was pretty clear at the end of the interview that she'd very nicely signed my book but this was the price I was going to have to pay.”
⁵²

So Chris Petit “lugged” the dictionary to Berlin and saw the producer he was supposed to see. And during the meeting, the subject of the dictionary came up somehow, and—that little Highsmithian coincidence again—the producer, who had worked with Wim Wenders on his Highsmith film,
The American Friend,
said: “Oh I'm seeing Tabea next week and you can leave the dictionary with me.” And that's what Chris Petit did, putting an end to the matter. Or so he thought. Then he “went back to London and forgot all about it.”

Until, that is, a call came from his editor at
Time Out.
The editor, says Chris Petit, got directly to the point.

“He'd had this strange letter from Highsmith, accusing me of being an impersonator, an imposter…Because I told her that I'd promised to deliver the dictionary for her and it had never turned up [at Tabea's]…She was, she said, confused as to whether I'd had anything to do with
Time Out
or whether I'd made that up…. God knows what lengths she was going to go to.”

But as a close and admiring reader of Highsmith for many years, Chris Petit thought he did know what lengths Pat was going to go with her bland, insinuating little letter to his editor about “Christopher Pettit [
sic
], who interviewed me (with tape) Tuesday April 4…and seemed happy to do me this favour. The problem is, the dictionary has not arrived. Forgive me for being puzzled…. My London friends were unable to find him in the book.”
⁵³

Still, Petit has been puzzling “for years” about that parenthetical phrase “(with tape).” “I always thought that was the most damning aside,” he says, “the implication being that the interview was probably bogus but I had been prepared to trick myself up with a tape recorder to fool her into believing I was a journalist.”
⁵⁴

Writing an accusatory letter to an editor after an interview is an unusual thing to do, even for a writer like Pat whose short stories and novels drip with poison pens.
^*
(But she did it again when David Streitfeld interviewed her for
The Washington Post
. See: “The Cake That Was Shaped Like a Coffin: Part 1.”)
⁵⁵
Petit thinks there was a “certain glee, perhaps even malice, at the thought of causing trouble. I think it's pretty clear she thought I had run off with, dumped, or lost the dictionary and hadn't owned up. I remember the editor at the time thinking the letter odd.

“I don't suppose he'd had another like it.

“And the source of [her] confusion,” says Petit, “can actually be found in
Strangers on a Train.
”
⁵⁶

When Pat signed Chris Petit's first edition of
Strangers on a Train
at their little tête-à-tête in Islington, she made what was for her an unlikely error. Despite his giving her the correct spelling, and despite her own careful orthography, she misspelled Petit's name, adding an extra
t
to make it “Pettit.” (Perhaps it was a likely error after all: doubling was one of Pat's deeper instincts.) That was how she wrote his name in her notebook; that was how she spelled it in the agitated letters she sent to her London friends and in the letter she sent to the editor of
Time Out
about his employee, the newly criminalized Mr. Petit. Or rather, Mr. Petit's newly criminalized double, “Mr. Pettit.”

Pat's methods of inquiry, under her normal operating modes (suspicion and doubt), were circumlocuitous at best. If she could help it, she never approached anything directly. Chris Petit wondered why she didn't simply call
Time Out
magazine. “It was pretty easy to establish that I worked there.” Instead, “she had all her English friends scouring the phone book under the wrong spelling when they could have looked me up on the
Time Out
masthead. If she hadn't spelt my name wrong she could have saved herself a lot of trouble!”

Six days after this little rent in the fabric of their relations occurred, the matter had been set to rights and Pat was convinced that Christopher Petit wasn't an imposter. Everything was calm again in Highsmith Country. “I think she kind of lost interest when she discovered there was no dark mystery to the fate of the dictionary,” says Chris Petit.
⁵⁷

“Anyway all is cleared up now,” Pat writes cheerily to Petit,
⁵⁸
thanking him for his call to her in France which explained the source of her confusion: her own bad spelling and Tabea's failure to keep her appointment with the producer who was holding the dictionary for her. And she invites Chris Petit to give her a ring when she's next in London. (He did so and had an unnerving beer with Pat and Tabea; Pat had forgotten he was coming, and she and Tabea were “resting” together in bed in television director Julian Jebb's borrowed flat.) And then, palpably playing with fire, Pat and Chris start exchanging letters about the possibility of his optioning a certain novel of hers for film; a novel whose title could easily be the rubric for their recent, racking relations:
The Tremor of Forgery
.