In the completed novel, there are insinuations that Bruno is homosexual – Highsmith tells us he has no interest in sleeping with women – and his approach to Guy on the train carries homoerotic undertones, which Hitchcock picked up on and emphasised in his film adaptation. Soon, however, our suspicions that Bruno might in some way be attracted to Guy are sidelined by their mutually destructive pact as murderers. Immediately after he has killed Bruno’s father, Guy’s reflection encapsulates the novel as a noir murder mystery: ‘love and hate … good and evil, lived side by side in the human heart.’ Less than a month after the book was published Highsmith entered the following in her cahier.
I am interested in the murderer’s psychology, and also in the opposing planes, drives of good and evil (construction and destruction). How by a slight defection one can be made the other, and all the power of a strong mind and body can be deflected to murder or destruction! It is simply fascinating! (1 July 1950)
The parallels with this passage and Guy’s sense of good and evil as mutually attractive are striking. One has to wonder why she dwells on this and personalises it even after the book has been published. It is not as though she is still struggling with the moral dilemmas of writing the novel.
Highsmith continues:
How perhaps even love by having its head persistently bruised, can become hate. For the curious thing yesterday is I felt close to murder, as I went to see the house of the woman who almost made me love her when I saw her a moment in December 1948. Murder is a kind of making love, a kind of possessing … To arrest her suddenly, my hands upon her throat (which I should really like to kiss) as if I took a photograph, to make her in an instant cold and rigid as a statue. (1 July 1950)
This was written in 1950, but it begs comparison with the description of how Bruno killed Miriam, which she wrote almost two years earlier. The woman in her cahier, Kathleen Senn, was real and would become the inspiration for Highsmith’s second novel. It is bizarre that Highsmith was capable of visiting upon an actual individual, if only in her imagination, the horrible fate to which she condemned her invention.
He sunk his fingers deeper, enduring the distasteful pressure of her body under his so her writhing would not get them both up. Her throat felt hotter and fatter. Stop, stop, stop! He willed it!
Kathleen Senn shopped at the upmarket department store Bloomingdale’s under her husband E.R. Senn’s account, which specified a prestigious address in New Jersey. Kathleen’s father was the millionaire owner of Wiggins Airways and her husband a well-paid executive who worked in New York City. Kathleen would be reborn in Highsmith’s ground-breaking novel about lesbian relationships, The Price of Salt (1952), but Kathleen’s impact on Highsmith as an individual and a writer was overwhelming long before she began to write the book.
In early 1948 Highsmith had taken a job at Bloomingdale’s to supplement her income from her (largely freelance) comic-book output, and to sustain herself in her small Greenwich Village apartment. One day a woman of striking beauty and wealth entered the store and bought several items from her. Highsmith would later reinvent this moment in The Price of Salt. In 1950 Highsmith went out to New Jersey to look for the house of Kathleen Senn, having nurtured the desire to do so for the previous two years. She went through the Bloomingdale’s files to track down this fascinating woman and in effect stalked her, as the two women never actually met again. One cannot ignore the parallels between this and Bruno’s pursuit of Miriam.
For years Highsmith had been obsessed by brief and possibly life-changing encounters between people who had completely different backgrounds – those who would not usually belong in the same social circuit and whose meeting would result in something explosive – emotionally, sexually and often physically. It happened for her with Natica Waterbury, Virginia Kent Catherwood and, for a brief moment, with Kathleen Senn.
Ostensibly, Strangers on a Train, Highsmith’s debut novel, has little in common with her second, The Price of Salt, which was published in 1952 under the nom de plume of Claire Morgan and was reissued in 1990 as Carol, under Highsmith’s name. This was because the novel is a lesbian love story with a happy ending and Highsmith’s agent, Margot Johnson, advised her that it would damage her career to admit to being its author. It was entirely different from the book that had made her name as a writer capable of evoking the horrific and the grotesque. What links the two books, however, is the cahier entry which replicates the feelings and actions of Bruno as he tracks down Miriam, but which refers specifically to Highsmith’s fascination with a woman she’d met for only a few moments. In it she admits that her ‘love’ for Kathleen Senn could mutate into a form of hate and, even worse, to thoughts of murder – specifically strangulation. Highsmith would never physically assault any of her lovers, but her associative confession in the cahier regarding love and hate, making love as a kind of murder and of the ‘cold rigid’ body of the woman about whom she simultaneously fantasised as a sexual partner and a fatal victim, is key to understanding her as a woman and an author.
Not all lesbians of the 1940s and 1950s lived in abject fear of disclosure. In the US and Britain, sexual relations between women were regarded as falling into a grey area between affection and impossibility. Anti-homosexuality laws were targeted at men, specifically at sodomy as a form of violence; women were regarded as incapable of acts of penetration. In the US, many states passed laws in the nineteenth century which specified sexual acts that were regarded as ‘against nature’ and therefore illegal. These laws exclusively involved men as participants. Technically lesbianism was never a criminal offence, because the male-dominated political hierarchy and judiciary were incapable of envisioning sex between women. At the same time, monogamous relationships between women, of whatever type, were treated as a form of social and moral degradation. A publicly exposed lesbian might not, like a gay man, be subject to prosecution and imprisonment, but she might be open to prejudice and alienation. In The Price of Salt the relationship between Carol (Senn) and Therese (Highsmith) is plagued by the activities of a private detective, hired by Carol’s husband to prove that she is a lesbian. This would not send her to prison, but it would weaken her claim to custody of their child.
Highsmith’s affair with Virginia ‘Ginnie’ Kent Catherwood began in 1946, two years after they had first met at Rosalind Constable’s party. Virginia’s own family was outstandingly wealthy but she supplemented this in her marriage to Cummins Catherwood in 1935. Catherwood had inherited fifteen million dollars in 1929 and despite the Depression he maintained an income from deposits of more than one and a half million per year. The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin of 24 April 1935 reported that the bride wore a ‘shimmering white satin’ dress, with ‘three widths of tulle, seven and a half yards long, the veil completely enveloped the satin train’. Less than six years later the couple were divorced and while there is no official documentation of the reason for their separation, Highsmith later told her friend Ann Clark that ‘Virginia lost custody of her child after a recording made in a hotel room and exposing a lesbian affair was played in court’ (Wilson, p.132).
While the account of the trial is based on Ann Clark’s testimony, a version of it features in the relationship between Therese and Carol. In her diary (11 October 1950) Highsmith wrote that ‘I worry that Ginnie may feel Carol’s case similar to her own’ adding that ‘Ann [Clark] knows another woman in the same predicament now.’ A mutual friend of Highsmith and Allela Cornell, David Diamond, informed Highsmith in September 1946 of what had happened to Allela. Following her return from an unhappy trip to Alabama with another woman, unnamed, Allela drank approximately half a pint of nitric acid. She spent two weeks in hospital in excruciating pain (nitric acid burns away the surface of the throat, lungs and stomach) and decided that she did not want to die, telling one of the doctors that she hoped to paint a portrait of him once she recovered. According to Diamond, the doctor put his face into his hands and cried, aware that the damage that she had done to herself was irreversi
ble. She died two days later and following Diamond’s report, Highsmith entered in her cahier (14 October 1946) that ‘[I am] an evil thing.’ This was four years before her much more considered and lengthy reflections on the relationship between love and murder that appeared in her cahier of 1 July 1950. She was building towards these. In September 1947 her relationship with Ginnie began to deteriorate, as Highsmith visited her apartment unannounced and found her in bed with a photographer called Sheila (surname unknown). On 4 September she scribbled a poem in her cahier called ‘Murder Fills My Heart Tonight’ and on the 23rd of the same month she recorded that ‘In the night, alone, awake after sleep, I am insane … without discretion, judgement [or] moral code, there is nothing I would not do, murder, destruction, vile sexual practises [sic] …’ Quite soon afterwards she would channel this combination of sexual and homicidal energy into Strangers on a Train:
Today is a great day; I have written the Murder, the raison d’être of the novel [Strangers on a Train] … something happened today, I feel I have grown older, completely adult … completely satisfied, very happy. I don’t want to marry. I have my good friends … and girls? – I always have enough. (Diary, 22 December 1947)
Months before Highsmith discovered Ginnie in bed with Sheila, she and Ginnie were arguing vehemently and sometimes violently, in that Ginnie had attacked her with her fists. She caused her no injury and Highsmith hardly needed to defend herself, since her lover’s outbursts were fuelled by bouts of drinking. Highsmith wrote that Ginnie was incapable of landing a punch because her hands were shaking so uncontrollably. Below is a description of Bruno’s attack of nerve paralysis following days of drinking.
His face was white, flat around the mouth as if someone had hit him with a board, his lips drawn horribly back from his teeth. And his hands! He wouldn’t be able to hold a glass any more, or light a cigarette. He wouldn’t be able to drive a car. He wouldn’t even be able to go to the john by himself!
Bruno’s murderous instincts were in part a determination to demonstrate his ability to exert power, despite his pitiful, self-destructive failings.
The events in Highsmith’s private life between 1946 (the beginning of her relationship with Ginnie and the death of Allela) and 1950 (the publication of Strangers on a Train, with The Price of Salt in progress) made a significant impression on her as a writer. It would be simplistic to regard actual characters as models for fictional ones, but what is clear is that issues such as guilt, hatred, self-loathing and unfulfilled longing which Highsmith endlessly contemplated without resolution became the cocktail for her fictional narratives and characters – by parts dreadful, fascinating and vile.
On 9 February 1968 she wrote in her diary: ‘Where is Ginnie – without whom The Price of Salt would never have been written …’ The question was rhetorical given that, as she knew, Ginnie had died two years earlier, aged fifty-one, from the long-term effects of alcoholism. But ‘where is she’ is pertinent. Highsmith had spent much of her life as a writer siphoning the emotional catastrophes she prompted, encountered and experienced. So did Ginnie survive for her as a memory or an invention?
4
Yaddo and Consequences
In March 1948 Highsmith applied to become a member of the colony of artists and writers at Yaddo in upstate New York. She had heard of the place from Truman Capote, whom she’d met at a book launch in February. Capote was the newest literary celebrity in New York, having established his reputation with a series of short stories, notably the eerie ‘Miriam’ (from which Highsmith borrowed the name for Guy’s wife) and the novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). He was openly homosexual and during his conversation with Highsmith he suggested that she should spend time at Yaddo, where he had stayed while writing his novel. He explained that the colony, or refuge, provided writers with ‘unconventional inclinations’ the opportunity to exempt themselves from the pressures and prejudices of mainstream society.
Highsmith, on Capote’s recommendation, was accepted and arrived at Yaddo on 10 May 1948. Strangers on a Train was in progress but directionless and unfocused. Three years earlier she had come across Margot Johnson, an influential literary agent, who to her credit had taken the time to read some of Highsmith’s work and sent samples of her fiction-in-progress to the major New York publishers. All had been rejected, including the early first-draft chapters of Strangers on a Train. Yaddo’s influence on her progress, at least in her view, can be judged in terms of her bequest to the institution of three million dollars shortly before her death, which seems generous given that she spent only two months there. During this short period she pressed her sprawling debut draft into a narrative that would horrify and entertain for decades to come.
Originally Yaddo had been a Queen Anne-style country house, built in the mid-nineteenth century – the British Georgian architectural mode endured for wealthy East Coast Americans as a badge of distinction. When it was bought by Spencer and Katrina Trask in the 1880s it was derelict, and they replaced it with a building that blended Tudor, medieval, gothic and Victorian excess. It was a grotesque melange of styles that calls to mind a vastly expanded version of the Bates residence in Hitchcock’s Psycho.
Highsmith remembers it as a place where artists and writers variously addicted to drink, drugs and sex went to dry out, only to find that it encouraged excess. Katrina Trask, who decided that their country retreat should become a hub for artistic inspiration, told her husband that ‘the future is clear to me … At Yaddo they will find the Sacred Fire, and light their torches at its flame. Look Spencer! They are walking in the woods, wandering in the gardens, sitting under the pine-trees, creating, creating, creating!’ (M.P. Waite, Yaddo, Yesterday and Today, p.22). Substitute ‘staggering’, ‘falling’ and ‘collapsing’ for ‘walking’, ‘wandering’ and ‘sitting’ and one has a more accurate picture of Yaddo and its residents in the summer of 1948. Among Highsmith’s contemporaries were the novelist Flannery O’Connor, the English fiction writer Marc Brandel and the black crime writer Chester Himes. Its director, Elizabeth Ames, was, according to Highsmith, ‘a strange, creepy sort of woman, silent and sinister like Mrs Danvers in Rebecca’, and while Ames perpetually spied on her guests, she did not seem to care what they got up to. She installed a dormitory-style routine of breakfast at 8.00, lunch at an equally specified time and a general expectation that guests should spend around eight hours in their rooms in the unremitting pursuit of artistic fulfilment. The result was mass rebellion, led largely by Highsmith, involving in-house drinking sessions and even more chaotic group excursions to nearby Saratoga Springs. Highsmith began this maniacal ritual of evenings out in Saratoga two days after her arrival, apparently laying down a challenge to Himes and Brandel by downing ten Martinis and Manhattans, alternately, adding a dash of gin to each. She wrote to Kate Kingsley Skattebol that she suffered a ‘48-hour hangover’ but carried on undeterred. The newcomer Flannery O’Connor declined invitations to join these self-destructive excursions – she was a devout Roman Catholic with strong opinions on the morality of alcohol – but one night Highsmith left her a bottle of bourbon. A tremendous thunderstorm had been forecast and when the drinkers returned, they found her kneeling on the porch, pointing at a knot in the beam of the porch wood. ‘What are you doing?’ asked Highsmith and O’Connor replied, ‘Look, can’t you see it?! … Jesus’s face.’ The bottle was half empty and Highsmith later commented that ‘ever since then I’ve not liked that woman’ (Interview between Phyllis Nagy and Schenkar, 13 October 2002). Why? Perhaps because in the cahiers and diary entries during these years Highsmith appends her murderous fantasies, vivid descriptions of sexual desire and alcoholic abuse with variations on the phrase ‘then read the Bible’. One suspects that, in her case, recourse to the good book involved a mixture of self-caricature and masochism.
The impact of Marc Brandel on the completion of Strangers on a Train is significant, through it should be stressed that this was unintentional on his part. Brandel’s real name was Marcus Beresfo
rd. He was born in London in 1919, the son of the novelist and esteemed patron of the arts J.D. Beresford. Educated at Westminster School, one of England’s major public schools, he went on to St Catherine’s College, Cambridge. By the time he met Highsmith at Yaddo he had published two acclaimed novels, Rain Before Seven and The Rod and the Staff. Tall, athletically built, with light-brown hair and chiselled cheekbones, he was by anyone’s standards an attractive prospect, which begs the question of why he declared his love for Highsmith, and more importantly why she, for around six months, took his proposals seriously. He asked her to marry him on four occasions and it was not as though she had misled him regarding her prevailing sexual inclinations.
In the course of their first proper conversation during an afternoon together on the banks of the lake at Yaddo she explained to him that she had, for as long as she could remember, been a lesbian and that, at twenty-seven, she had been sexually involved with an extraordinarily large number of women, and that she was having an ongoing affair. On two occasions she spent nights away from Yaddo at a hotel with a woman from New York called Jeanne. She commented later that his response to her disclosures was ‘amazingly tolerant’, which is commendable, but does not explain why he thought he could treat her as something she was not. They had sex before they left Yaddo and her account of this in one of her confessional letters to her stepfather more than two decades later is vividly honest, to say the least. Sex with him, she wrote, felt like ‘steel wool in the face, a sensation of being raped in the wrong place – leading to a sensation of having to have a, pretty soon, a boewl [she meant ‘bowel’] movement’ (1 September 1970). Highsmith’s notebook entries on sex with women focus exclusively on mutual clitoral stimulation, not vaginal penetration, so we must assume that in this instance she regards heterosexual/penetrative sex as something so foul as to stimulate a bowel movement.
Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires Page 6