Bv ERNIE MCLEOD

Highsmith (1921-1995) ever
since I saw the seductive film
version of her 1955 novel, The
Talented Mr. Ripley. Although the
film takes liberties with the
novel’s plot, both works share
dark homoerotic tensions and the
sense that, ultimately, we are
alone in the world. Highsmith
was also the author of Strangers
on a Train, which was turned into
a more discreetly homoerotic but
equally seductive Hitchcock film.
While she’s best known

in the U.S. because of these two
film adaptations (there have been
others, with more to come), her
body of work includes some 20
novels — including five Ripley
installments — and several story
collections. She’s typically classi-
fied as a “suspense” writer, a
label she rightly frowned upon,
since the psychological complexi-

I’ve been eager to read Patricia

ty of her work lifts it above page-
turner genre status.

Two of her greatest
influences were Dostoyevsky and
Henry James, and it shows in her
ability to use plot to penetrate her
characters’ fascinatingly amoral
psyches. Graham Greene
crowned her the “poet of appre-
hension.” Not surprisingly, she’s
always been more appreciated in
Europe than in the U.S.;
Americans tend to find apprehen-
sion discomforting, preferring
rational explanations and tidy
solutions, two things Highsmith

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consistently refused to provide.
The Price of Salt, pub-
lished under the pseudonym
Claire Morgan, is — on the sur-
face — an anomaly in Highsmith’s
oeuvre. A (no pun intended),
straightforward love story
between women, it contains little
of the nuanced darkness or
delight in transgression that char-
acterizes her other works.
Perhaps because the same-sex
attraction in this novel is overt
rather than implied, Highsmith
wasn’t inclined to further push
the envelope. Given that lesbian-
ism was generally considered a
perversity in the 1950’s, her deci-
sion to normalize it was in itself a
transgressive act.
In the 1989 afterword to

T the Naiad Press incarnation of

The Price of Salt, Highsmith
offers few clues as to how the
novel might be viewed in relation
to her other fiction. She does,
however, talk about the 1948
moment which inspired it.
Awaiting the publication of her

same time uplifted, as if I had
seen a vision.”

The “swimmy in_the
head” sensation may have been
partly due to an impending case
of chickenpox, but the fantasy
took root nonetheless and by
1951 Highsmith had crafted it
into a novel. Already feeling
unfairly categorized by her pub-
lisher as a suspense author, she
was understandably even more
reluctant to get tagged as a “les-
bian-book writer,” hence the
pseudonym. (Claire Morgan’s
true identity was not officially
revealed until 1991.) Her publish-
er rejected it anyway, but it was
released the following year by
another publisher, and the pulp
fiction paperback version went on
to sell close to a million copies.

Significantly, particular-
ly since Highsmith’s writing is
hardly known for its cheeriness,
The Price of Salt is thought to be
the first lesbian novel with a
happy ending. No, as Highsmith
puts it, paying “for their deviation

scenarios for atime, she moved
to Europe and spent the remain-
der of her life in France and
Switzerland. By all accounts she
was a reclusive, intensely private
person, though apparently there is
mention of lesbian lovers in her
diaries.

In a New York Times
Magazine article Frank Rich
describes seeing Highsmith in a
rare 1980’s TV interview in
which she appears as-a “forbid-
ding, unsmiling figure in a
Burberry trench coat with a pug-
nacious, pouchy face framed by
thick, parted black hair.” The
only Highsmith interview I came
across confirmed this impression
and quoted her saying that, for
her, the aftermath of an interview
was not unlike recovering from a
car accident.

Though Highsmith’s fic-
tion can -hardly be called autobio-
graphical (she wasn’t, as far as I
know, a psychokiller), I think it’s
safe to say her solitary nature
informs every sentence. Tom

Carol (the older, more worldly-'
wise married woman) somehow
seem lonely even as they’re pro-
fessing their love. The road trip
on which they embark is tellingly
saturated with chilly rains, and
signature Highsmithian details —
peaches like “slimy little orange
fishes,” milk which tastes of
“bone and blood” — creep into the
text, creating some disconcerting
juxtapositions.

Weirdly, 1 found
Highsmith’s writing depressing
only when she was attempting to
describe happiness. The Price of
Sa1t’s hopeful conclusion was, for
me, poignant because its hopeful-
ness seemed so at odds with the
instincts and experiences of its
author. In the afterword
Highsmith said she never wrote
another book like it, adding that
she wanted to “avoid labels.”

At the risk of stamping
another label on'*her, she was, as
one critic said, “the perfect out-
sider.” But her great skill was lur-
ing readers into her characters’

Quotable Highsmith:

“I love you, Therese wanted to say
again, and then the words were erased
by the tingling and terrifying pleasure

that spread in waves from Carol’s lips
over her neck, her shoulders,that 
rushed sudde

body.”l1

first novel, Strangers on a Train,
she was earning extra money as a
Christmas rush-season depart-
ment store clerk. One morning a
woman approached the doll
counter where Highsmith was
working and, though there was
nothing unusual about the trans-
action, it greatly affected the
young writer: “Perhaps I noticed
her because she was alone, or
because a mink coat was a rarity,
and because she was blondish
and seemed to give off light. 
But I felt odd and swimmy in the
head, near to fainting, yet at the

by cutting their wrists, drowning
themselves in a swimming pool,
or by switching to heterosexuality
 or by collapsing — alone and
miserable and shunned — into a
depression equal to hell.” How
appropriately ironic that
Highsmith mainstreamed a queer
relationship while much of the
rest of her career was spent
queering mainstream relation-
ships.

Patricia Highsmith was
born in Fort Worth and grew up
in New York. After attending
Barnard and penning comic book

Ripley would be a far less dis-
turbing (and interesting) character
if his extreme pathological ten-
dencies didn’t mask a far more
universal human condition: lone-
liness. Only a writer as deviously
ingenious as Highsmith could
turn loneliness into a thrill-ride.
Maybe that’s why, as

much as I appreciated
Highsmith’s refusal to patholo-
gize homosexuality in The Price
of Salt, I never quite believed in
the wann romance between its
protagonists. Therese (the inexpe-
rienced young store clerk) and

nly the (length or he

twisted minds, making us all per- I

fect outsiders, all equally capable
of evil. Patricia Highsmith was at
her best when she showed us -
with surgical precision and a
touch of glee — the very worst
things inside ourselves. V

The talented Ernie McLeod is a
native Vermonter looking into gay
life as an outsider in Montreal.
You can reach him at

mcleod@middlebury. edu.

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