Forbidden Love
Tác giả/tác phẩm ảnh hưởng nặng nề lên Pat [Patricia Highsmith] là Dos/Tội ác và Hình Phạt. Như… Sến, em gặp ông già rậm râu là mê liền, năm em 13 tuổi!
Trong nhật ký, em coi Dos, là "Thầy", và coi Tội Ác là 1 cuốn tiểu thuyết suspense, trinh thám nghẹt thở.
Thomas Mann phán, Tội Ác là một trong những cuốn tiểu thuyết trinh thám lớn lao nhất của mọi thời.
Cuốn trứ danh của Pat, Những kẻ lạ trên tàu, Strangers on a Train, là từ Tội Ác mà ra. Em phán: "Tôi có ý nghĩ của riêng tôi về nghệ thuật, và nó như vầy: điều mà hầu hết mọi người coi là kỳ quặc, thiếu tính phổ cập, fantastic, lacking in universality, thì tôi coi là cực yếu tính, the utmost essence, của sự thực."
Tzvetan Todorov, khi viết về sự quái dị trong văn chương, đã cho thấy, bằng cách nào tiểu thuyết trinh thám hiện đại đã thay thế truyện ma quỉ của quá khứ, và những nhận định của ông áp dụng rất OK với tiểu thuyết của Pat: “căn cước gẫy vụn, bể nát, những biên giới giữa cá nhân và môi trường chung quanh bị phá vỡ, sự mù mờ, lấp lửng giữa thực tại bên ngoài và ý thức bên trong”, đó là những yếu tố thiết yếu làm nền cho những đề tài quái dị.
GCC biết đến Patricia Highsmith qua phim Plein Soleil, Alain Delon đóng vai Mr. Ripley. Thời còn Sài Gòn. Còn đi học, hoặc mới đi làm.
Sau đó, mò coi truyện.
Mua Eleven, do đọc bài giới thiệu của Grahm Greene.
Truyện trinh thám của PH, theo GCC "khủng" hơn hết, so với các tác giả khác, đúng như Greene viết, bà tạo ra 1 thế giới của riêng bà, mỗi lần chúng ta mò vô, là một lần thấy ơn ớn.
Trong cuốn tiểu sử của bà, Cái bóng xinh đẹp, Beautiful shadow, người viết trích dẫn 1 câu trong nhật ký của bà, và là 1 câu trích dẫn Kierkegaard:
Mỗi cá nhân con người thì có nhiều cái bóng tạo thành những nếp gấp, tất cả những cái bóng đó thì giống người đó, và thi thoảng, có 1 cái bèn chiếm luôn chỗ của người đó.
Nguyên văn câu tiếng Anh, khác 1 tí, so với câu của GCC:
"The individual has manifold shadows, all of which resemble him, and from time to time have equal claim to be the man himself."
Kierkegaard, quoted in Highsmith’s 1949 journal
Miss Highsmith is a crime novelist whose books one can reread many times. There are very few of whom one can say that. She is 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, with the head half turned over the shoulder, even with a certain reluctance, for these are cruel pleasures we are going to experience, until somewhere about the third chapter the frontier is closed behind us, we cannot retreat, we are doomed to live till the story's end with another of her long series of wanted men.
GG
by Grallam Greene
Miss Highsmith is a crime novelist whose books one can reread many times. There are very few of whom one can say that. She is 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, with the head half turned over the shoulder, even with a certain reluctance, for these are cruel pleasures we are going to experience, until somewhere about the third chapter the frontier is closed behind us, we cannot retreat, we are doomed to live till the story's end with another of her long series of wanted men.
It makes the tension worse that we are never sure whether even the worst of them, like the talented Mr Ripley, won't get away with it or that the relatively innocent won't suffer like the blunderer Walter on the relatively guilty escape altogether like Sydney Bartleby in A. Suspension of Mercy. This is a world without moral endings. It has nothing in common with the heroic world of her peers, Hammett and Chandler, and her detectives (sometimes monsters of cruelty like the American Lieutenant Corby of The Blunderer or dull sympathetic rational characters like the British Inspector Brockway) have nothing in common with the romantic and disillusioned private eyes who will always, we know, triumph finally over evil and see that justice is done, even though they may have to send a mistress to the chair.
Nothing is certain when we have crossed this frontier. It is not the world as we once believed we knew it, but it is frighteningly more real to us than the house next door. Actions arc sudden and impromptu and the motives sometimes so inexplicable that we simply have to accept them on trust. I believe because it is impossible. Her characters are irrational, and they leap to life in their very lack of reason; suddenly we realize how unbelievably rational most fictional characters are as they lead their lives from A to Z, like commuters always taking the same train. The motives of these characters are never inexplicable because they are so drearily obvious. The characters are as Hat as a mathematical symbol. We accepted them as real once, but when we look back at them from Miss Highsmith's side of the frontier, we realize that our world was not really as rational as all that. Suddenly with a sense of fear we think, 'Perhaps I really belong here,' and going out into the familiar street we pass with a shiver of apprehension the offices of the American Express, the centre, for so many of Miss Highsmith's dubious men, of their rootless European experience, where letters are to be picked up (though the name on the envelope is probably false) and travellers' cheques are to be cashed (with a forged signature) .
Miss Highsmith's short stories do not let us down, though we may be able sometimes to brush them off more easily because of their brevity. We haven't lived with them long enough to be totally absorbed. Miss Highsmith is the poet of apprehension rather than fear. Fear after a time, as we all learned in the blitz, is narcotic, it can lull one by fatigue into sleep, but apprehension nags at the nerves gently and inescapably. We have to learn to live with it. Miss Highsmith's finest novel to my mind is The Tremor of Forgery, and if I were to be asked what it is about I would reply, 'Apprehension'.
In her short stories Miss Highsmith has naturally to adopt a different method. She is after the quick kill rather than the slow encirclement of the reader, and how admirably and with what field-craft she hunts us down. Some of these stories were written twenty years ago, before her first novel, Strangers on a Train, but we have no sense that she is learning her craft by false starts, by trial and error. 'The Heroine', published nearly a quarter of a century ago, is as much a study of apprehension as her last novel. We can feel how dangerous (and irrational) the young nurse is from her first interview. We want to cry to the parents, 'Get rid of her before it's too late'.
My own favourite in this collection is the story 'When the Fleet Was In at Mobile' with the moving horror of its close here is Miss Highsmith at her claustrophobic best. 'The Terrapin', a late Highsmith, is a cruel story of childhood which can bear comparison with Saki's masterpiece, 'Sredni Vashtar', and for pure physical horror, which is an emotion rarely evoked by Miss Highsmith, 'The Snail-Watcher' would be hard to beat.
Mr Knoppert has the same attitude to his snails as Miss Highsmith to human beings. He watches them with the same emotionless curiosity as Miss Highsmith watches the talented Mr Ripley:
Mr Knoppert had wandered into the kitchen one evening for a bite of something before dinner, and had happened to notice that a couple of snails in the china bowl on the draining board were behaving very oddly. Standing more or less on their tails, they were weaving before each other for all the world like a pair of snakes hypnotized by a flute player. A moment later, their faces came together in a kiss of voluptuous intensity. Mr Knoppert bent closer and studied them from all angles. Something else was happening: a protuberance like an ear was appearing on the right side of the head of both snails. His instinct told him that he was watching a sexual activity of some sort.
Graham Greene
In December of 1948, Patricia Highsmith was a twenty-seven-year-old aspiring writer with a murderous imagination and an outsized talent for seducing women. Her first novel, “Strangers on a Train,” was complete, but it would be more than a year before it was published. A Texas native with thick black hair and feral good looks, Highsmith made a habit of standing at attention when a woman walked into the room. That Christmas season, she was working behind the toy counter at Bloomingdale’s, in Manhattan, in order to help pay for psychoanalysis. She wanted to explore the sharp ambivalence she felt about marrying her fiancé, a novelist named Marc Brandel. Highsmith was a Barnard graduate, and, like many sophisticates at the time, she viewed homosexuality as a psychological defect that could be fixed; yet she had enough self-respect and sexual appetite to reject any attempt to fix her own. When her analyst suggested that she join a therapy group of “married women who are latent homosexuals,” Highsmith wrote in her diary, “Perhaps I shall amuse myself by seducing a couple of them.” She never married Brandel—or anyone else.
One day, a woman in a mink coat drifted into the toy department. Highsmith later recalled, “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.” Like Alfred Hitchcock, Highsmith was captivated by frosty blondes, all the more so if they were married and rich. The shopper, who slapped her gloves into one hand as she scanned the merchandise, made Highsmith feel “odd and swimmy in the head, near to fainting yet at the same time uplifted.” With an abstracted air, the woman, Mrs. E. R. Senn, bought a doll from Highsmith.
That night, Highsmith wrote an eight-page outline for a novel: a love story about Therese Belivet, a diffident nineteen-year-old who lives on her own in New York City, and Carol Aird, a wealthy suburban wife and mother in her thirties. Highsmith conjured what Therese would feel upon catching her first glimpse of Carol: “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.”
Highsmith published the novel, “The Price of Salt,” in 1952, under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. She was understandably wary of derailing her career, but she also may have been uncomfortable with the book’s exaltation of love. Highsmith never wrote another book like it; indeed, her work became known for its ostentatious misanthropy. And for the next four decades she publicly dodged any connection to a book of which she had every right to be proud.
Highsmith was a pared-down, precise writer whose stories rarely strayed from the solipsistic minds of her protagonists—most of them killers (like the suave psychopath Tom Ripley) or would-be killers (like the unhappy husbands in several of her books). “The Price of Salt” is the only Highsmith novel in which no violent crime occurs.
Therese is not an eloquent or self-revealing character, and her dialogue with Carol is sometimes banal. Yet the novel is viscerally romantic. When Therese visits Carol’s home for the first time, Carol offers her a glass of warm milk that tastes of “bone and blood, of warm flesh, saltless as chalk yet alive as a growing embryo.” The two women embark on a road trip, and the descriptions of it read like a noirish dream—stiff drinks, wood-panelled motel rooms, a gun in a suitcase. A detective hired by Carol’s husband pursues the couple, and you can feel Highsmith’s thriller muscles twitching to life.
The love story is at once hijacked and heightened by the chase story. Therese’s feelings, massing at the edge of her perception like the storm clouds out the car window, are a mystery to her. The weight of what goes unsaid as she and Carol talk about the towns they pass or where they might stop for breakfast builds in an almost ominous way. Like a girl in a fairy tale who has been put under a spell, Therese falls silent on the open road: “She did not want to talk. Yet she felt there were thousands of words choking her throat, and perhaps only distance, thousands of miles, could straighten them out.”
When the women at last make love, Highsmith describes it with a sacramental intensity appropriate to the young Therese: “Her arms were tight around Carol, and she was conscious of Carol and nothing else, of Carol’s hand that slid along her ribs, Carol’s hair that brushed her bare breasts, and then her body too seemed to vanish in widening circles that leaped further and further, beyond where thought could follow.” It makes for a stark contrast with the way Highsmith once described an attempt to have sex with a man, which felt to her like “steel wool in the face, a sensation of being raped in the wrong place.”
This month, “Carol,” a film adaptation of “The Price of Salt,” directed by Todd Haynes, opens in theatres. Haynes is known for his meditations on lush mid-century genres: women’s pictures, Technicolor melodrama. Instead of treating such material as kitsch, he teases out emotions that were latent in the originals, showing what once could not be shown. Both “Carol” and “Far from Heaven”—his 2002 homage to the movies of Douglas Sirk—feel like fifties films that somehow eluded the Hays Code. Haynes’s direction largely hews to the conventions of old Hollywood: in “Carol,” there’s a sex scene between the two women, played by Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, but it’s more swoony than libidinous. The characters don’t use the word “lesbian”; the dialogue is mannered. Haynes’s approach suits the novel, which is neither prim nor explicit about the women’s affair.
Our image of the fifties still tends to be shaped by “Father Knows Best” clichés of contentedly conforming nuclear families. But the era offered some surprising freedoms. “The Price of Salt” depicts a world where a suburban matron could take a salesgirl she’s just met out for Old-Fashioneds in the middle of the day—and where two women in love might live together, hiding in plain sight as roommates, more easily than two gay men or an unmarried heterosexual couple might. In a recent interview with Film Comment, Haynes said that the “indecipherability” of lesbianism at the time—the “unimagined notions of what love between women might even look like”—is the engine of Highsmith’s plot.
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Though homosexuality was invisible to most Americans at the time, it was increasingly discussed among intellectuals, many of whom were in the thrall of psychoanalysis. The question most often asked about same-sex attraction was still whether it could be overcome, but people were finally beginning to acknowledge the range of possible sexual identities and behaviors. By 1953, the Kinsey Reports, on male and female sexuality, had been published, broadening the discussion even further.
In 1955, Ann Aldrich, the pseudonymous author of the best-seller “We Walk Alone,” an informal ethnography of lesbian life, observed, “If homosexuality itself is not on the increase, mention of it among people today is far more prevalent than ever before.” Aldrich attributed this higher profile to a “climate of concern with all things psychological.” In her view, “intelligent people are preaching tolerance of inversion”—as homosexuality was sometimes called—even if they “are not regarding the invert as a healthy person.” Aldrich, who was gay, suggested that lesbianism was usually a case of arrested sexual development and an artifact of penis envy or a domineering mother. Psychoanalysts, Aldrich believed, could address the condition, though she acknowledged that “the ‘incurable’ lesbian as I have known her is not usually the tragic heroine of a lesbian novel who lives in abject misery, nor is she the psychotic case material in some psychiatrists’ files.” She added, “While I hesitate to say that she is a thoroughly happy person, at the same time I cannot in all honesty judge her to be an unhappy person.” Despite its carefully couched ambivalence, “We Walk Alone” brought its author hundreds of letters from American women who felt emboldened to ask her where lesbians could find jobs, bars, and other lesbians.
Many of Aldrich’s readers also bought cheap new paperback novels with titles like “Odd Girl Out,” “Dormitory Women,” and “I Prefer Girls.” If these books were partly created for the delectation of men—the cover art often featured smoldering babes in lingerie—they at least made it clear that lesbians existed. Such novels were often written by gay women, who tried to allow their heroines some honest enjoyment within the confines of the genre, which required its busty Sapphists to find real love with a man, go mad, or commit suicide. As Ann Bannon, a former pulp author, notes in her foreword to the 1999 book “Strange Sisters: The Art of Lesbian Pulp Fiction 1949-1969,” she and other writers spoke, in part, “to an audience of women who were starved for connections with others, who thought they were uniquely alone with emotions they couldn’t explain.”
Again and again in Highsmith’s fiction, one character develops a deadly obsession with another. In “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1955), Tom Ripley both desires and resents Dickie Greenleaf, a wealthy scapegrace who is gallivanting around Italy. Ripley bludgeons Dickie to death and—in the ultimate act of erotic ownership—assumes his identity. In “Strangers on a Train” (1950), the oleaginous Charles Anthony Bruno proposes a murder pact to someone he’s just met, then acts on it by killing the man’s adulterous wife, placing the two men in a queasy bond. Walter Stackhouse, the suburban husband at the center of “The Blunderer” (1954), contemplates killing his wife, then gets inescapably entangled with a man who has committed such a crime. The moral compass in Highsmith’s thrillers is always jittery, and passion repeatedly leads people to violence. Joan Schenkar, the author of the artful biography “The Talented Miss Highsmith” (2009), writes, “Pat thought about love the way she thought about murder: as an emotional urgency between two people, one of whom dies in the act.”
There’s nothing like reading the Freudians of the nineteen-fifties to make one wary of glib psychological claims, but it’s not a stretch to say that Highsmith had a terrible mother. Mary Coates Highsmith, a narcissistic beauty and a moderately successful illustrator, taunted and competed with Patricia, her only child. Highsmith loved and hated her mother as a result, and, when Mary divorced her husband and remarried, Patricia resented her stepfather for coming between them. At twenty, Highsmith wrote in her diary, “Could I possibly be in love with my own mother? Perhaps in some incredible way I am.” According to two biographies of Highsmith, her mother liked to tell people that she’d tried to abort Patricia by drinking turpentine. Once, while visiting Patricia in Paris, Mary Highsmith pretended to be her daughter and gave an interview to journalists. She called it a joke, but Highsmith, in a letter to a cousin, wrote, “I think a psychiatrist would put another meaning to it.”
Schenkar characterizes Highsmith’s relationship with her mother as a folie à deux: “They could not bear each other’s company, and they could not leave each other alone.” Surely that relationship contributed to Highsmith’s habit of seducing and philandering, to the conflation of obsessive love and homicidal ideation in so many of her characters, and to a particular strain of perversity in “The Price of Salt.” Carol tucks Therese into bed while giving her that warm, embryonic milk, and the gesture feels bizarrely maternal. (The scene, one of the novel’s best, has an almost witchy feel. Therese downs her drink with fatalistic obedience, and it affects her like a truth potion: her voice rises “suddenly in a babble” as she tells Carol about her secret loneliness.)
The day after Highsmith finished the manuscript of “The Price of Salt,” she decided to track down Mrs. Senn. She had memorized her address—315 Murray Avenue, Ridgewood, New Jersey—from the sales receipt. She took the Erie Railroad from Penn Station; before boarding a bus to Murray Avenue, she drank two ryes to get her courage up. In Senn’s residential neighborhood, Highsmith felt conspicuous, but, as she wrote in her diary, she lingered until she saw “a pale aqua automobile . . . driven by a woman with dark glasses and short blond hair, alone, and I think in a pale blue or aqua dress with short sleeves.” Maybe it was her quarry; maybe not.
If Mrs. Senn established the template for Carol Aird, Highsmith’s passionate affair with a woman named Virginia Kent Catherwood allowed her to fill in the lines. Catherwood was a sexual outlaw with a Main Line pedigree: she had been a Philadelphia débutante. By the time she took up with Highsmith, she was a wealthy divorcée who bore a resemblance to Katharine Hepburn (and, evidently, to Mrs. Senn). Virginia, the daughter of Arthur Atwater Kent, an inventor and the founder of a radio company, had married a banker named Cummins Catherwood, in a wedding that made the society pages. She met Highsmith at a party in New York, and in 1946 they became lovers. They were together for only a year—Highsmith’s affairs rarely lasted much longer than that—but Catherwood remained an ideal. In her diary, Highsmith rhapsodized, “My green and red goddess, my jade and garnet, my moss and hollyberry, my sea and sun, my marrow and my blood, my stop and go baby, I adore you, I worship you, I kiss you, I cherish you, I defend you, I defy you ever not to love me, I caress your nipples with my tongue.”
Highsmith and Catherwood never spoke again after the relationship ended, but Highsmith invoked her frequently in her writing, most notably in the posh, lightly sardonic Carol. Highsmith also stole a critical plot detail from Catherwood’s life for “The Price of Salt.” Catherwood’s husband had hired a detective who recorded his wife and a female lover in a hotel room; the tapes were played in court, and Catherwood, who had a daughter, lost custody. Carol, too, has a child who becomes the object of a custody struggle. Children rarely appear in Highsmith’s fiction, however, and in “The Price of Salt” Carol’s daughter, Rindy, remains an offstage presence. (The movie, which offers a warmer version of Carol, shows her interacting sweetly with her daughter.) Highsmith can’t seem to fully imagine a mother’s longing for her child, but since she’s writing from the perspective of Therese—who can’t quite empathize with motherhood, either—something touching comes through. Therese sees Carol’s melancholy as a mysterious veil that separates them, but readers can sense that it is a simpler, more devastating sorrow. Highsmith writes, “Therese watched Carol’s face as she looked at the picture of the little girl with the white-blonde hair and the serious face, with the taped white bandage on her knee. ‘It’s not a very good picture,’ Carol said, but her face had changed, grown softer.” It is one of the few poignant passages in Highsmith’s body of work.
In May, 1952, Coward-McCann published “The Price of Salt.” Harper & Bros., which had released “Strangers on a Train” two years earlier, turned it down, perhaps because it wasn’t another thriller. Highsmith said later that the novel’s title was a Biblical reference; Schenkar, her biographer, traces it to a fragment of Gospel text in André Gide’s “The Counterfeiters”: “If the salt have lost its flavor wherewith shall it be salted?—That is the tragedy with which I am concerned.” Highsmith was greatly relieved when her agent suggested that she could use a pseudonym. She was not ashamed of her sexuality, but she did not want to be known as a lesbian author. The novel was respectfully reviewed, though a critic at the Times seemed puzzled by its “low voltage” eroticism—possibly because it was more literary than most lesbian pulp. “The Price of Salt” sold exceptionally well—more than a million copies, after it came out as a twenty-five-cent Bantam paperback.
In “Beautiful Shadow,” a 2003 biography of Highsmith, the British journalist Andrew Wilson uncovered new details about Senn, whose first name was Kathleen. The self-possessed, athletic, charming wife of a wealthy businessman, she was also an alcoholic who had been in and out of psychiatric institutions. In 1951, unbeknownst to Highsmith, Senn killed herself in the garage of her Ridgewood home.
The other inspiration for Carol Aird, Virginia Kent Catherwood, made news in 1959, when a playboy named David Mdivani filed a million-dollar lawsuit against her, alleging that she had alienated the affections of his wife, Virginia Sinclair. One newspaper ran the headline “woman took his wife from him,” though it can safely be presumed that few readers understood the full import of this sentence. The media skirted the matter of homosexuality by stating that Catherwood had lured Sinclair away by giving her expensive gifts. (Sinclair was also an heiress.) At one point, a gossip column in the Los Angeles Times described Sinclair and Catherwood arriving together in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel after a ski trip to Sun Valley. The reporter, noting that both women had a “deep ecru” tan, proclaimed, “Very striking—these two blondes!” Mdivani eventually dropped the lawsuit. Catherwood, an alcoholic, died in 1966, at the age of fifty-one.
After “The Price of Salt,” Highsmith published twenty more novels, many of which became movies, and nine short-story collections. She won several literary prizes and was heralded in France. Generally caustic, she made crude remarks about Jews and African-Americans. She continued to bed women and to worship some of them, but she described women in general—and feminists in particular—as “whining.” Her vitriol took eccentric forms: according to Wilson, she once declared that she was repelled by the idea of women reading in libraries while they were menstruating. She loved snails, which she kept by the hundred as pets and took to parties in a handbag, where they clung to a head of lettuce.
“The Price of Salt” was a unique expression of candor in a career built on artifice. In 1949, Highsmith, while working on the novel, wrote in her diary that she was “grateful” not to have to spoil “my best thematic material by transposing it” to a “false male-female relationship.” She tried a few times to write what she called a second “girls’ book,” but abandoned the effort. Perhaps it’s just as well: one of the plots she sketched out, “The Inhuman Ones,” was to be about “the types of female homosexuals who have something missing from their hearts, who really hate their own sex.” For decades, Highsmith denied rumors that she had written “The Price of Salt”; Schenkar reports that Highsmith called the novel a “stinking” book.
In 1990, Highsmith agreed to a new edition, without a pseudonym, and wrote an afterword in which she seemed shyly pleased with the novel’s devoted readership. But it was a youthful book, and a hopeful one, and she was now a sour and rancorous older woman. She spent her final years in a fortress-like house in Switzerland, and died in a hospital in Locarno in 1995, at the age of seventy-four. The last acquaintance to see her was her accountant.
One evening in 1959, a thirty-two-year-old writer named Marijane Meaker was having a drink at L’s, a lesbian bar in Greenwich Village. Meaker wrote lesbian pulp novels for the Gold Medal imprint; her first was “Spring Fire,” published in 1952, under the pseudonym Vin Packer. She had learned—because her editor had insisted on it—to make sure that these stories didn’t end well for their heroines. At the time, paperbacks were often sent to readers through the mail, making them subject to censorship by the postal authorities. Although the novels could depict “perverse” sexuality, they could not be seen to endorse it: those who indulged had to return to the straight and narrow or be punished. (At the conclusion of “Spring Fire,” about two lovers in a sorority house, one of the young women rediscovers her true heterosexuality and moves into a dorm; the other has a car accident and a nervous breakdown.) Meaker was a woman of multiple pseudonyms. She was also Ann Aldrich, the author of “We Walk Alone.”
At the bar, Meaker began talking to an attractive dark-haired woman in a trenchcoat who was drinking gin and smoking Gauloises. It was Highsmith, and to Meaker, who was six years younger, she “looked like a combination of Prince Valiant and Rudolf Nureyev.” By then, Highsmith was a celebrated author—she had won the Grand Prix de la Littérature Policière—and Meaker idolized her. She and the other customers at L’s knew that Highsmith had written “The Price of Salt,” and they loved it for one reason in particular. As Meaker notes, “It was for many years the only lesbian novel, in either hard or soft cover, with a happy ending.”
In the final pages of “The Price of Salt,” Carol has lost custody of her daughter, but nobody has died or been institutionalized. By modern standards, the book’s ending has the pat feel of a Sirk picture, abruptly reuniting lovers for whom the obstacles are enormous. Will Carol really get over relinquishing her daughter? Can the two women truly be left alone to make a life together? Highsmith almost circumvents those doubts; the novel’s last scene has the pull of a torch song. Therese finds Carol in a restaurant, where she’s dining with friends: “It was like meeting Carol all over again, but it was still Carol and no one else. It would be Carol, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they would go together, in heaven and in hell.” Leave it to Highsmith to get hell in there, too. ♦
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