Books |
Patricia Highsmith: The Price of Salt
By
Published: Feb 25, 2020
Category:
Fiction
“Portrait of a Lady on Fire” is a French movie set in the 19th century. It tells a recognition story: two women — one a painter, one about to be married — falling in love. Just the kind of movie cherished in New York and unseen elsewhere — “a subtle and thrilling love story,” the Times critic wrote. The trailer will suggest its visual and narrative power
The movie reminded me of a novel. An unlikely novel, because the author is Patricia Highsmith, known for thrillers that show how easily evil can masquerade as goodness. “The Talented Mr. Ripley” is the book and movie you remember, but I’m thinking of “The Price of Salt,” which she wrote right after Strangers on a Train. It wasn’t a book she intended to write, but she was short of cash and took a job in a department store — and a cool beauty walked in. After she left, Highsmith felt “cool and swimmy” in her head; that night, she wrote an eight-page outline. Her publisher had been pressing her for another suspense novel, but she said that she didn’t regard “Strangers on a Train” as suspense — and she considered this new plot “simply a novel with an interesting story.”
That is so disingenuous. This was the late 1940s and early 1950s, and even in wicked New York, Highsmith notes, “those were the days when people wanting to go to a certain bar got off the subway station before or after the convenient one, lest they be suspected of being homosexual.” So to write a love story about two women — could Highsmith have been completely surprised when Harper & Bros. rejected it? The happy ending: A “specialty” press published “The Price of Salt” — under the byline of “Claire Morgan” — in paperback in 1952.
In 1952, readers quickly snapped up a million copies. They got more than they may have hoped for — in a swift 275 pages, Highsmith creates a world that’s entirely plausible. First, there’s the love story: the push-pull of the flirting, the heart-stopping looks, the thrill of a touch. Then there’s the suspense aspect. Divorce wasn’t no-fault anywhere in America in the early 1950s; it was a time of private detectives and blame. And so, when Carol and Therese take a trip, they’re not alone — Mr. Aird’s private eye follows.
This is not a story without consequences, both in fiction and life. Highsmith heard about some of them:
As she wrote in the afterword to the 1989 edition of “The Price of Salt,” she received “10 or 15 letters a couple times a week and for months on end” following the novel’s original publication. “Many of the letters that came to me,” she wrote, “carried such messages as…‘Thank you for writing such a story. It is a little like my own story…’” [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
What’s the story? It’s Christmas, and money’s tight, so Therese Belivet does what any unemployed 19-year-old stage designer might — she takes a temp job in the toy department of a Manhattan department store. Her days define dreary. The aging sales clerks seem “stricken with an everlasting exhaustion and terror.” As for her customers, they’re also desperate, but for a doll, any doll.
Then Mrs. H.F. Aird walks in.
Calm gray eyes. Blonde. Pale, thin ankles. Suede high heels. Her voice was “like her coat, rich and supple, and somehow full of secrets.”
Therese has a boyfriend, who “talked like any of the people one saw in Village bars, young people who were supposed to be writers or actors, and who usually did nothing.” After ten months, they aren’t growing closer. This isn’t love.
But Mrs. H. F. Aird — what is that attraction?
Therese sends a card that says nothing much. But just sending it is provocative. Carol Aird, 32 and unhappily married and a mother, responds. And so it begins…
The sex? Do not think for a second that this book has appeal only to women who love women — or men who get off on lesbian sex. There is, in fact, almost no sex in the novel.
And that is its power. The book is about two women coming to terms with forbidden love — about wanting to be together and having trouble saying how much they want that, and being scared and having misunderstandings. It’s got all the stuff of a love story between heterosexuals. Just with higher stakes. And an ending that’s surprising…
“I never wrote another book like this,” Highsmith said.
Well, you never read one like this.
——-
To buy “The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith” from Amazon, click here.
To buy “The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, and Ripley’s Game” from Amazon, click here.
To read about Joan Schenkar’s biography, ‘The Talented Miss Highsmith,’ click here.
