Nonetheless, she agreed to stay with Brandel later that summer in a house he had rented in Provincetown, Cape Cod, an attractive coastal resort that had earned the reputation as a kind of Greenwich Village-on-Sea, at least for those New York bohemians wealthy enough to rent or purchase a property there. Highsmith arrived in early September to find that Brandel was taking drinks with Ann Clark, who was vacationing from New York at a nearby house. He planned to use Ann as an antidote to the abnormalities of Yaddo. She was cosmopolitan: a painter, designer and ex-Vogue model who would, he assumed, help create an atmosphere of civilised interaction, at least until he and Highsmith were alone. But within a day Ann, who had previously only had heterosexual relationships, agreed to meet Highsmith for a date as soon as the two of them returned to the city. However, even before they left Provincetown, ‘on a little wharf near my deck … we were making love and I was going absolutely out of my mind. I’d never felt anything like that in my life’ (Clark to Wilson, 12 April 2000). Later that month when they met at Ann’s apartment: ‘Considering I’d been in bed with more men than I could remember, I couldn’t believe what was happening. The next morning I said, “I just lost my virginity.” She couldn’t believe I’d never been in bed with a woman before.’ It is not surprising that in the same account to Wilson she treats Brandel with contempt. ‘He was unattractive because of being a sneering and nasty drunk … He launched into his great successes in England with his first novel … [I took] an instant dislike to him.’ The woman who had fallen in love with Highsmith within hours of meeting her regarded her new lover’s suitor as vile. It therefore seems odd that Highsmith herself should continue to countenance Brandel’s obsession with her. In her letter to Stanley she reported that she had sex with Brandel ‘many times … [t]wenty–thirty’. While considering this we should bear in mind the fact that while she was having affairs with Brandel and Ann (and Jeanne) she was also choreographing an equally bizarre relationship, between Guy and Bruno in Strangers on a Train.
Things entered a new level of strange in November 1948 when Highsmith, following the advice of her composer friend David Diamond, enrolled on a course of therapy with the New York psychoanalyst Eva Klein Lipshutz. Lipshutz, a graduate of Columbia, specialised in the analysis and correction of deviation: alcoholism, other forms of addiction and, most prominently, non-heterosexual inclinations and desires. She was well qualified and respected in her profession, which should cause us wonder if, at least in the 1940s, the boundary between expertise and quack diagnosis was secure. After Highsmith explained to her that she had spent virtually all of her adult life sexually involved with other women, Lipshutz informed her patient that like those addicted to violence, alcohol or drugs, a ‘cure’ was available. Lipshutz was a crude Freudian and she spelled out to Highsmith that her relationships with women involved a persistent ritual of loving and leaving them because she was recreating and compensating for her irresolutely mixed feelings of love and hatred for her mother, Mary.
Highsmith was incapable of maintaining a happy relationship with a woman, Lipshutz continued, because in truth she hated all of them, in part subconsciously in that her ‘unnatural’ lesbianism had forced her to sublimate her genuine desire to enter into a conventional heterosexual relationship with a man. Lipshutz’s theory was a distortion of Freud’s ideas on homosexuality which predated pro-gay liberalism by around a century. Freud acknowledged that homosexuals were ‘different’ but that their sense of undergoing an ‘illness’ was due to societal prejudice rather than the nature of their sexuality. He believed that therapy must enable them to come to terms with who they are rather than to treat gay sexuality as something that might be remedied through a psychoanalytical cure. Lipshutz, like many others in the largely conservative psychoanalytical establishment of mid-twentieth-century America, shamelessly refashioned Freud’s theories into a model for conformity, believing it her duty to rectify all manner of deviant inclinations which might threaten the ideals of law, order, patriotism, religion and the secure family.
In her diary Highsmith left sardonic comments following her sessions with Lipshutz. The therapist at one point recommended that she should begin group therapy with four married women who were displaying latent lesbian tendencies and who had come to her for, as they saw it, treatment for feelings that aroused in them a sense of horror and dismay, comparable to homicidal inclinations towards their husbands and children. Highsmith might, Lipshutz indicated, benefit from contact with women who knew they were ill and were terrified of the potential consequences of what they’d become. In her diary she wrote, ‘Perhaps I shall amuse myself by seducing a couple of them’ (6 May 1949).
There is no evidence to suggest that Highsmith regarded her lesbianism as a deformity or a state from which she wished to free herself. She had sometimes had sex with men, but largely out of curiosity and certainly not because she wanted to reconcile herself to a form of normality enjoyed by others. Nowhere in her cahiers and diaries does she record an expression of affection for Brandel, let alone a wish to force herself into desiring him or forming some long-term relationship. She provoked and dismissed his marriage proposals rather than countenancing them as serious possibilities. Similarly, she regarded Lipshutz as farcical and incompetent.
Highsmith was manipulating both of them, not out of aversion, but perhaps because they embodied normality. Brandel was the dashing, esteemed novelist who would be a perfect husband for an aspiring author and Lipshutz would set her on the route to propriety, conformity and the lifestyle that would make her an appropriate partner for Brandel. She was not taking them seriously, but neither did she distance herself from them. By participating in their routines of normality she became the subversive intruder. She wanted to establish a tension, a dynamic between the world of conventional inclinations and morals and a life of perpetual deviancy. Using Brandel and Lipshutz as bastions of the former she could pass between them while experimenting with another spectrum of norms and deviances, levels of proper and murderous behaviour – in her draft of Strangers on a Train.
The novel is told in the third person, but the narrator alternates perspectives, chapter by chapter, between Guy and Bruno. As we shift between the two figures, our predisposed moral sympathies are complicated and compromised. When Bruno approaches Guy on the train with the one-for-one murder proposition, it seems clear enough that the former is deranged and evil while Guy is the decent, ambitious architect dragged into his foul embrace. But as the narrative proceeds the mutual affection between the two men becomes evident. Below is the description of Guy when he is on his way to kill Bruno’s father.
He [Guy] was like Bruno. Hadn’t he sensed it time and time again, and like a coward never admitted it … why had he liked Bruno? He loved Bruno. Bruno had prepared every inch of the way for him, and everything would go well because everything always went well for Bruno.
If there is any doubt that Guy and Bruno’s murderous alliance is founded on homosexual attraction, consider Bruno’s account to Anne of his feelings for her fiancé. ‘There is nothing I wouldn’t do for [Guy]! I feel a tremendous tie with him, like a brother’, and later, ‘if he could strangle Anne, too, then Guy and he could really be together.’ Shortly after Bruno’s death Guy falls into despair: ‘Where was his friend, his brother?’ When the detective Gerard begins to suspect each of them of murder Bruno observes:
Who else was like them? Who else was their equal? He longed for Guy to be with him now. He would clasp Guy’s hand, and to hell with the rest of the world!
The Brandel and Lipshutz episodes were Highsmith’s experiment with lying and pretending. She was deliberately creating a real-life equivalent of the relationship between Bruno and Guy. Like her two creations, Highsmith pretended to respect the behavioural and moral ordinances of the conventional world while leading a secret, more sordid life of her own. True, her masquerade involving Brandel and Lipshutz didn’t include a homicide plot, but when we consider how frequently the word ‘murder’ appears in her notebook
entries on her lesbian relationships it is evident that sexual deviancy – at least from a socially orthodox perspective – overlapped, for her, with notions of killing.
The novel was published by Harper & Brothers on 15 March 1950, having been placed with this esteemed press by Highsmith’s agent Margot Johnson less than a year earlier. The $200 advance was generous enough for a writer who had brought out only a few short stories in magazines, but it disappointed Highsmith. Two days later she hosted a rather overcrowded launch party in her small apartment, attended by her college friend Kate Kingsley Skattebol, her Harper editor Joan Kahn, Margot Johnson and, surprisingly, Virginia Kent Catherwood, with whom she had hardly exchanged a word since their acrimonious break-up in 1948. Journalists from The New Yorker, the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times were there, mainly because Johnson had also succeeded in securing reviews for the book in each newspaper, all of which turned out to be positive. The New Yorker stated that ‘there is a warning on the jacket of this book that will make you think twice before you speak to a stranger on a train … unquestionably the understatement of the year … A horrifying picture of an oddly engaging young man [Bruno] … Highly recommended.’ Mary and Stanley did not attend and there is no record of whether or not they were invited, nor of their response to Highsmith’s new-found fame.
Margot Johnson was working hard to ensure that her celebrity status would endure beyond the impact of her debut novel. Two months before publication she sent review copies to Alfred Hitchcock and several other film-makers. Astutely, she pointed out to Hitchcock the similarities between Highsmith’s novel and his recent production, Rope (1948), which today is regarded as a classic, but at the time received mixed reviews and was only a moderate box-office success. She hoped that Hitchcock would recognise its potential as a chilling improvement on the Rope prototype. Her instinct paid off. Bidding began within days of the launch party, with MGM offering $4,000. Johnson turned them down, contacted Hitchcock and he replied with an offer that he expected would close down the auction: $6,000 for rights in perpetuity and an additional $1,500 for work, by Highsmith, on the script and screenplay. The film was made with extraordinary speed, at least by today’s standards, going from the purchase of rights to completion for box-office release within eight months. In late September 1950 Hitchcock telegraphed Highsmith, asking if she would be willing to help out on set. We do not have a copy of the telegram but it is clear from circumstantial evidence that he wanted her to rewrite her book as a usable screenplay. In July he hired Raymond Chandler, for $2,500 a week, to adapt the novel and this generous amount reflected Hitchcock’s view of the production as a worthwhile investment.
Chandler was the most respected crime novelist of the era and the only one with an established reputation as a script and screenplay writer for films. But Chandler was dismayed by the project, mainly because he could not see how a book so bizarre and disturbing could be made acceptable to the US Board of Censors. He saw it as advocating nihilism, moral anarchy and homosexuality, a licence for murderous compulsion, and he incorporated all of these in his screenplay, effectively issuing a challenge to the censors. A day after Hitchcock received it on 25 September he telegraphed Chandler, informing him of his dismissal. It was then that he contacted Highsmith, but she declined to take part in the adaptation. Next, Hitchcock hired Czenzi Ormonde, and she was responsible for turning the film into something very different from the novel. Guy becomes a bastion of decency, the professional tennis player who is Bruno’s victim rather than his alter ego, the man who, unlike Highsmith’s Guy, refuses to commit murder. The film is disturbing enough, but it is Hitchcock’s candy to Highsmith’s arsenic.
Shortly after she lunched with her Harper editor in June 1949 she decided to sail on the Queen Mary to England to see London, and later went on to continental Europe. Brandel and her mother saw her off at the docks in New York and while she had not informed him that their relationship was over, she had made it clear to Ann Clark that she regarded further sexual contact with him as a vile prospect and that, as an individual, she regarded him with contempt. She was playing out another story of deception in her own life.
The savings from comic-book work and her modest advance meant that she had to sail ‘cattle class’, sharing a cabin with three other women and eating in a cafeteria that seemed stocked with food left over by the wealthier passengers in first class. The night before she boarded the liner she had dined with Marc Brandel and agreed that she would marry him on Christmas Day, 1949. How seriously she took this should be judged in relation to the fact that she had affairs with two women in Europe, and on her return in her diary confessed to a ‘completely irresponsible desire to drift about, picking up strangers, especially girls’ and referred to Brandel as her ‘vile memory’.
Highsmith first met Kathryn Hamill Cohen at a party hosted by Rosalind Constable in New York. Kathryn, an ex-Ziegfeld girl, was twenty-four, beautiful and from a moneyed family. Her husband, Dennis, founded the Cresset Press (later an imprint of Bantam Books) which would eventually publish UK editions of Strangers on a Train, The Blunderer and The Talented Mr. Ripley, but Kathryn had an impressive professional life of her own. Following her early years as an actress, she read medicine at Newnham College, Cambridge, and, before being employed as a hospital physician, she worked as a personal assistant to Aneurin Bevan, the British Minister of Health who was instrumental in the formation of the National Health Service. She was more than Nye Bevan’s secretary; her self-evident intelligence and experience in medicine brought her to the attention of members of the egalitarian, if not quite feminist, Labour government. By the time Highsmith arrived in London, Kathryn was working as a doctor in St George’s Hospital, and lived with Dennis in an elegant Georgian house in Old Church Street, Chelsea, one of the most prestigious districts of the city. Highsmith stayed there with them after arriving by train from Southampton where the Queen Mary docked. The Cohens picked her up from Waterloo Station in their Rolls-Royce saloon, and thereafter Kathryn made use of her contacts in the theatre and the arts to create a daydream for Highsmith. They took lunch with Peggy Ashcroft, one of the most respected classical actresses of the era, and went by train, first class, to Stratford-upon-Avon to see another friend of Kathryn’s, Diana Wynyard, play Desdemona. Afterwards the three of them went for dinner, and back in London Kathryn escorted her guest around the National Gallery and the Tate, where she introduced her to the then director, Sir John Rothenstein.
Kathryn knew from her husband that Highsmith’s debut novel was in press with Harper but she was certainly not, as yet, even a noviciate literary celebrity. They had only met once before, briefly, and in this respect Kathryn’s generosity as a host, which included taking days off work as a full-time clinician, is curious. What occurred soon afterwards indicates that their first encounter in New York involved something more than exchanges on mutual interests in the arts.
At the end of June Highsmith took the ferry for France and spent around ten days in Paris, visiting the openly lesbian club Le Monocle, drinking too much and attempting to fit in with the debauched culture of the Latin Quarter. On 1 July she entered in her diary that ‘I want Kathryn, or Ann [Clark],’ adding that she had an equal longing for a Chloe, who might well have been the mysterious, ghostly presence from her diaries of several years before. On this one occasion she is awarded a surname, ‘Sprague’, but this brings us no closer to the proof of her existence given that there are no external records of a person called Chloe Sprague. Ann and Kathryn were certainly real but by recruiting them into the same universe as Chloe, Highsmith felt that they too were becoming her possessions.
After Paris Highsmith took the train to Marseille, where she stayed with her mother’s cartoonist friend, Jean David, who attempted (unsuccessfully) to seduce her. From Marseille she telegraphed Brandel informing him that their engagement was, on his part, a fantasy and, on hers, repulsive.
Via Venice, Bologna, Genoa and Florence she arrived in Rome in August and tel
egraphed Kathryn asking her to join her in Italy. She agreed to do so and arrived around two weeks later, in September. One has to assume that the two women had talked of a romantic, probably sexual liaison long before this. A professional physician does not leave her job, and her husband, to take a journey to Italy just for the sake of it. The two women spent three weeks together, first in Rome, then in the beautiful coastal village of Positano, followed by boat trips to Palermo and Capri. Highsmith’s diaries indicate that following nervous prevarication for both, they became lovers within a week. After Highsmith’s departure for America from Genoa, they communicated by letter only once, and spoke to no one of their affair. It happened – records show that Kathryn had abandoned her life in London for an encounter with Highsmith in Italy – but her marriage was seemingly unaffected by it.
Its impact on Highsmith is most evident when we read The Talented Mr. Ripley. Kathryn is to Highsmith as Dickie Greenleaf is to Ripley, a relationship involving love, envy and fantasy. Positano, the village they visited on the Amalfi coast, would become the primary setting for the novel (reimagined as the fictitious Mongibello), to which Ripley follows Greenleaf and where he eventually murders him. Once more, Highsmith’s preoccupation with killing and love as intertwined resurfaces. Nothing like this happened between Highsmith and Kathryn, but the book and the real-life events are linked: Highsmith and Ripley are sexual predators, each manipulates the people in their lives and Highsmith transfers this to the relationships between her fictional creations.
In April 1950, shortly after the publication of Strangers on a Train, Highsmith received a letter from Kathryn regretting and ending their involvement. Two days earlier Highsmith had sent a letter to Brandel, affirming finally that their relationship was over – despite having already ended it by telegraph from Italy.
Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires Page 7