Nom de Plume

by Carmela Ciuraru

  Patricia Highsmith was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, and grew up in New York City. She never felt at home in the United States and left permanently for Europe in 1963. Expatriate life suited her well. “My most persistent obsession—that America is fatally . . . off the mark of the true reality, that the Europeans have it precisely,” she wrote in her notebook at age twenty-seven. Her childhood could hardly be described as happy; she despised her equally vicious mother, Mary. Highsmith said that she “learned to live with a grievous and murderous hatred early on.”

  After falling out with Mary in 1974, Highsmith did not see her for the last seventeen years of Mary’s life. (It rankled her that her mother lived to the age of ninety-five.) Among what she considered countless slights and misdeeds, Highsmith deeply resented Mary’s refusal to accept responsibility for her daughter’s character, “or to put it bluntly queerness.” When she was fourteen years old her mother asked, “Are you a les? You are beginning to make noises like one.” This belittling remark served to alienate Highsmith further from everyone around her.

  When she was nearly sixty years old, Highsmith was asked by a reporter why she did not love her mother. “First, because she made my childhood a little hell,” she said. “Second, because she herself never loved anyone, neither my father, my stepfather, nor me.” One of Highsmith’s former lovers once commented that Mary was “high-strung, jealous, and possessive,” and that mother and daughter “enjoyed a certain folie à deux.” Although Highsmith dedicated a few books to her mother, she said that she did it only to impress the woman who found fault with everything she did.

  In her diary, Highsmith described herself as feeling “like a glacier or like stone” until the age of thirty, but that sense of remove would never leave her. She had a lifelong aversion to being touched, and she bristled when someone shook her hand. (Many acquaintances learned never to do this with her.) Highsmith was perpetually anxious about maintaining boundaries with people. She viewed living with a romantic partner as “catastrophic.” Being alone was her preferred state: “My imagination functions better when I don’t have to speak to people,” she said.

  She was well aware that her taut, self-protective carapace had been caused partly by her upbringing and that it was “certainly tied up with the fact I had to conceal the most important emotional drives of myself completely.” Those yearnings were directed toward other women, a fact that drew baffled contempt from her mother.

  Highsmith’s parents divorced a few days before she was born, and five months before the birth, Mary had tried to abort the fetus by ingesting turpentine. “Highsmith” was actually the name of Patricia’s stepfather, who the girl believed was her biological father until she was ten years old. (Her initial surname, Plangman, belonged to her father, but she never used it.) When she learned the truth about her stepfather, she wasn’t terribly shocked, because she’d suspected for a while that he wasn’t her real father. Still, the revelation added another confounding element to her already fragmented sense of identity. The experience of shifting and shedding selves would prove a recurring theme in her work. It was a conundrum she was never able to solve and one that never ceased to fascinate her.

  As a child, Highsmith was reticent, hypersensitive, and self-conscious; she had difficulty forming attachments. By age six, she was aware of an inchoate longing for other girls, which she tried to suppress. An itinerant childhood added to her struggle with (and ambivalence toward) making new friends. But she was a sophisticated and voracious reader, which provided solace. She immersed herself in Dostoevsky, Kafka, Poe, Woolf, and Proust, among others.

  When she was just eight years old, she discovered The Human Mind, the first book by the influential American psychiatrist Karl Menninger. “He writes about pyromaniacs, kleptomaniacs, schizos and so on; their case histories, whether they’re cured or not,” she later recalled. “I found this very interesting, and it was only much later that I realized that it had had such an effect on my imagination, because I started writing these weirdo stories when I was fifteen or sixteen.” The opening sentence of the first story she wrote was, “He prepared to go to sleep, removed his shoes and set them parallel, toe outward, beside his bed.” (Even when she was a teenager, her obsessive-compulsive tendencies were set. These were efforts at control—a coping mechanism in response to the tumult of her early years.)

  She was a lifelong diarist and a relentless maker of charts, sketches, and lists that included ratings of lovers by character trait and category. At her death, she left behind about eight thousand pages from her diaries and “cahiers,” as she called her notebooks. (The diaries were for chronicling personal experiences; the “cahiers” recorded ideas for stories, poems, and other creative endeavors.) These writings were searching, anguished, and intimate. “Every move I make on earth is in some way for women,” she wrote. “I adore them! I need them as I need music, as I need drawings.”

  She struggled with the gap between who she was and who she longed to become: “What and why am I? There is an ever more acute difference . . . between my inner self which I know is the real me, and various faces of the outside world.” Her identity seemed in perpetual flux, and it was quite a lot to manage. “Dostoevsky is criticized for ambivalence, for illogic, contradictions—worst of all, ambivalences in his philosophy,” she once wrote in her diary. “But there are always two. Perhaps this wonderful, magical, creative, public & private number is the mystic secret of the universe. One can love two people, the sexes are within all of us, emotions directly contrary do exist side by side. This is the way I see the world too.”

  On December 31, 1947, she wrote a private “New Year’s Toast”: “[T]o all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envys, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle—may they never give me peace.” Her own happiness, whatever that meant, was not relevant. Nor did anyone else’s well-being matter to her, and in that sense she was a bit like the sociopathic characters in her stories.

  In 1942, Highsmith graduated from Barnard College. Thus began a series of failed job interviews with various magazines. This was (and remains) a common entry-level field for literary college graduates in Manhattan. But no one would have her. Time, Fortune, Good Housekeeping, and Mademoiselle were among the publications that turned her down. Her interview with Vogue was comically disastrous, even though she did have a flair for clothing and usually displayed a distinctive, androgynous style. She was also meticulous about ironing, a domestic task she’d mastered at a young age and found satisfying. Yet for some reason, Highsmith showed up for her much-coveted interview looking like a mess. She appeared at the offices of the world’s most glamorous and prestigious fashion magazine “with a stained and wrinkled blouse, bad hair, and, in the formal 1940s, a head unadorned by a hat,” as her biographer Joan Schenkar noted. She appeared to have rolled out of bed and gone straight to her interview. In her diary, Highsmith was angry about the rejection (which was clearly her fault). “Well, I did wash my hair just before going in,” she wrote. “There’ll come a time when I shall be bigger than Vogue and I can thank my lucky star I escaped their corruptive influences.” Unlikely as it was, she would prove to be right.

  After Barnard, she had a secret life: writing comic strips (story lines and dialogue) for at least seven years. Later, as Schenkar discovered, Highsmith attempted to remove, without explanation, all traces of this extensive work from her archives. Still, she seemed oddly suited to writing comics if you consider that she specialized in superheroes with alter egos—secret lives and clandestine identities that shifted from day to night. One of her few pleasures in life was fiercely guarding secrets about herself, down to the most banal details.

  In 1950, she would publish her first novel, Strangers on a Train. It promptly launched her career. The story—which follows two men, Guy and Bruno, who meet on a train and form a murder pact, as well as a twisted, homoerotic bond—had been rejected by six pub
lishers. Yet upon publication it was an immediate success, and Alfred Hitchcock adapted it into a well-received film. (Highsmith was unhappy that the director had paid only about $7,000 to secure the rights. She never got over it.) The process of getting the script written proved challenging; writers such as Dashiell Hammett and John Steinbeck turned down the project. Raymond Chandler wrote an early draft but was fired by Hitchcock. That was probably for the best, as Chandler admitted that he had struggled with the material. “It’s darn near impossible to write, because consider what you have to put over: a perfectly decent young man (Guy) agrees to murder a man he doesn’t know, has never seen, in order to keep a maniac from giving himself away and from tormenting the nice young man,” Chandler wrote. “We are flirting with the ludicrous. If it is not written and played exactly right, it will be absurd.”

  Other film adaptations of Highsmith’s work over the years included René Clément’s Purple Noon and Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. In the 1980s, a smart, talented young film director named Kathryn Bigelow, who would go on to direct the Academy Award–winning film The Hurt Locker, wrote a script on spec for a Highsmith novel she loved. The project never went anywhere, but Highsmith liked Bigelow very much.

  Truman Capote was responsible for helping the author complete her draft of Strangers on a Train. In the summer of 1948, thanks to his endorsement, Highsmith was awarded a residency at Yaddo, the prestigious writers’ and artists’ colony in upstate New York. Also there that summer were Chester Himes and Flannery O’Connor. Highsmith finally got the space and time she needed to finish the manuscript, despite her two-day hangovers. She was thrilled: “If I cannot give birth in the supreme hospital of Yaddo, where can I ever?” Fifty years later, in a rare magnanimous gesture, Highsmith would show her gratitude to Yaddo by naming it the sole beneficiary of her estate, along with a $3 million bequest.

  She recalled being instantly taken with the spritelike Capote, if not his writing, and particularly appreciated his openness about being gay. He was entirely unacquainted with the hang-ups that froze Highsmith and left her struggling with her sexuality. Once he told her that at the age of fourteen, he came out to his parents with a simple, jubilant declaration: “Everybody is interested in girls, only I, T.C., am interested in boys!”

  Highsmith’s second novel, as far as anyone knew at the time, was The Blunderer, in 1954; it would be followed a year later by The Talented Mr. Ripley, the book that would ensure her reputation and fame. With that accomplishment she established herself as a master of crime fiction—even though she disliked being typecast in a particular genre—and a creator of psychologically complex characters who, beneath their mannered façades, were misfits, deviants, and sometimes psychopaths. The British novelist Graham Greene, a great fan of Highsmith’s work, described her as 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. Nothing is certain when we have crossed this frontier.” It was a world that often reflected her interior state and her own disturbing obsessions. Perhaps most troubling of all, Susannah Clapp wrote in a 1999 piece in the New Yorker, was that “her narratives suggest a seamlessness between bumbling normality and horrific acts. You never hear the gears shift when the terrible moment arrives.”

  In truth, Highsmith had published her second novel two years before The Blunderer—yet it was not a work she wished to claim credit for. This one was a secret.

  The Price of Salt came out in 1952 under the name of Claire Morgan, who did not exist. Although Highsmith would never again use a pseudonym for any of her novels or stories, this radical narrative demanded a furtive identity. “Oh god,” she said, “how this story emerges from my own bones!” Homoeroticism was pervasive in her fiction, but always obliquely and within the context of troubled, amoral characters. In a scene from The Talented Mr. Ripley, relations between Tom Ripley and the object of his fixation, Dickie Greenleaf, begin to take an ugly turn when Dickie walks in on Tom dressed in his clothes:

  “Marge and I are fine,” Dickie snapped in a way that shut Tom out from them. “Another thing I want to say, but clearly,” he said, looking at Tom, “I’m not queer. I don’t know if you have the idea that I am or not.”

  “Queer?” Tom smiled faintly. “I never thought you were queer.”

  Dickie started to say something else, and didn’t. He straightened up, the ribs showing in his dark chest. “Well, Marge thinks you are.”

  “Why?” Tom felt the blood go out of his face. He kicked off Dickie’s second shoe feebly, and set the pair in the closet. “Why should she? What’ve I ever done?” He felt faint. Nobody had ever said it outright to him, not in this way.

  “It’s just the way you act,” Dickie said in a growling tone, and went out of the door.

  The Price of Salt, however, depicted consensual (and satisfying) romantic love between two women. It was Highsmith’s most autobiographical novel, and it laid bare the emotional drives she had worked hard to keep hidden for so long. Moreover, it was the first gay or lesbian novel with a happy ending. This was not pulp fiction. No one went insane, committed suicide, or was murdered. No one “converted” to heterosexuality or found God. This was a breakthrough for the era in which it was written, and surprisingly, the novel was well received by critics. The paperback edition, issued by Bantam a year later, sold more than a million copies. Grateful letters trickled in for years afterward, from both men and women, addressed to Claire Morgan in care of her publishing house. “We don’t all commit suicide and lots of us are doing fine,” wrote one fan.

  If it was true, as Highsmith wrote in her diary in 1942, that “[a]ll my life’s work will be an undedicated monument to a woman,” then The Price of Salt was the culmination of that ambition. No wonder it demanded concealment.

  The idea for the novel had arisen from a single but transformative moment. In December 1948, in need of cash and feeling depressed, she took a temporary job during the pre-Christmas rush in the toy department of Bloomingdale’s in Manhattan. Though she was hired for a month, she lasted only two and half weeks there. She’d gotten the job partly to pay for her psychoanalytic treatment, which she’d begun in a halfhearted effort to “cure” herself of the homosexual urges that alternately tormented her and left her in a manic state of bliss. “When you’re in love it’s a state of madness,” she said.

  One morning, a few days after Highsmith started the job, a beautiful blond woman in a mink coat walked into the toy department, purchased a doll for her daughter, then left the store. Highsmith never saw her again. Yet that brief transaction captivated Highsmith, who had a habit of projecting her fantasies and yearnings onto unsuspecting women she barely knew. “She could be called the balladeer of stalking,” Susannah Clapp noted of Highsmith in her New Yorker piece. “The fixation of one person on another—oscillating between attraction and antagonism—figures prominently in almost every Highsmith tale.”

  To Highsmith, the woman she’d met “seemed to give off light.” And though it had been a routine encounter in which no flirtation had occurred, she was left feeling “odd and swimmy in the head, near to fainting, yet at the same time uplifted, as if I had seen a vision.” That night, she went home to the apartment where she lived alone and wrote eight pages in longhand, a broad version of the novel’s plot. “It flowed from my pen as if from nowhere—beginning, middle and end,” she recalled. “It took me about two hours, perhaps less.” Then she fell ill with chicken pox.

  Because this bewitching customer had paid by credit card and asked for the purchase to be sent to her home, Highsmith had the woman’s name and address: Mrs. E. R. Senn of Ridgewood, New Jersey. In Highsmith’s imaginative retelling, Senn was cast as the seductive older woman, Carol, and Highsmith as the naïve nineteen-year-old shopgirl, Therese. The department store was fictionalized as Frankenberg’s. When Carol invites Therese out for lunch, the young protagonist, despite having a boyfriend, feels
the first stirrings of love. “An indefinite longing, that she had been only vaguely conscious of at times before, became now a recognizable wish,” Highsmith wrote. “It was so absurd, so embarrassing a desire, that Therese thrust it from her mind.” Some passages in the novel were taken verbatim from the author’s own notebooks and diaries. Although the initial writing of the novel came easily to her, the revision stage brought out dark emotions. As the publication date grew closer, Highsmith suddenly crashed, hitting one of the lowest points of her life. She became self-destructive to a terrifying extent, going on drinking binges and feeling more miserable than ever. At the very moment she should have been celebrating a work that she felt proud of, she experienced an agonizing case of writer’s remorse. She wanted to withdraw the novel from publication: it was so deeply personal that she feared it would destroy her, both personally and professionally. The use of an invented name was only a mild anodyne for her anxiety. Mostly, she felt sick with worry and shame: “These days are on the brink again. The least thing depresses me to the point of suicide.”

  In fact, suicide was the fate of Mrs. E. R. Senn—a grim twist worthy of a Highsmith tale. Married to a rich businessman, the beautiful woman who had aroused Highsmith’s ardor was an alcoholic who had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals. She had absolutely no idea that she’d inspired a lesbian love story. In the fall of 1951, Kathleen Wiggins Senn killed herself by carbon monoxide poisoning in the garage of her lavish home in Bergen County.