The Price of Salt
It is a truism that people will see
only what they are expecting, and reading The
Price of Salt as a lesbian novel almost guarantees that its other
dimensions will be overlooked. The novel should instead be viewed as an enduring
portrait of an era that valued stereotyped gender roles as well as heterosexual
conformity, and the progress of a woman who struggled against these obstacles.
The desire that animates the novel’s heroine, Therese Belivet, is not simply
erotic; rather, she longs for a full self-actualization. Love for another
woman, creative expression, the freedom to define her own purpose—the tangled
strands of Therese’s desires can never truly be separated.
A prolific author of psychological
thrillers such as Strangers on a Train
and The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia
Highsmith was regarded during her lifetime as a brilliant writer and, to say
the least, a very difficult human being: her publisher, Otto Penzler, once
referred to her as “a mean, cruel, hard, unlovable and unloving human being.” One
novel, to my mind her most remarkable, stands aside from her usual subjects of
violence and murder. In 1952, she wrote a story about the relationship of two
women, but wishing to avoid being labeled a lesbian writer, she published The Price of Salt under the pseudonym of
Claire Morgan, and did not acknowledge authorship until 1990, when the book was
republished as Carol.
Highsmith claimed that the story
was substantially written while she was ill with a high fever, and indeed there
is a thematic unity to the novel that supports thinking of it as the product of
a fever dream. Applauded as unique for describing lesbians in a positive light
in the 1950s, The Price of Salt is now
considered primarily a curiosity in a culture assumed to have overcome its
anti-gay bias. While most reviewers present the book as a lesbian novel, a coming
out romance, this narrow interpretation obscures the importance of what ought
to be read as a classic of the American canon.
Therese Belivet is a young woman
with dreams of artistic accomplishment, specifically of becoming a set designer.
Richard, to whom she is almost engaged, also has artistic aspirations but
Therese suspects that he lacks commitment to his painting, and she suspects that,
in the end, he will join his family’s bottled gas business. The novel opens with
Therese working a temporary Christmas job in a New York department store where,
in the person of an aging coworker, she is confronted by her worst fears for
her future:
It was the hopelessness of Mrs.
Robichek’s ailing body…the hopelessness of which the end of her life was
entirely composed. And the hopelessness of herself [Therese], of ever being the
person she wanted to be and doing the things that person wanted to do…. It was
the terror of this hopelessness that made her want to...flee before it was too
late, before the chains fell around her and locked. [p.12]
By placing Therese’s feelings
regarding Mrs. Robichek at the forefront of the novel, Highsmith serves notice
of their importance. The inability to escape her existential condition—indeed
to imagine an escape—adds anger to terror and is reflected in Therese’s
identification with a toy train in the department store:
It was not a big fine train like
the one that ran on the floor at the back of the toy department but there was a
fury in its pumping pistons that the bigger trains did not possess. Its wrath
and frustration on the closed oval track held Therese spellbound.” [p.5]
Highsmith continues to intensify this extraordinary image:
[Therese] felt it cursed the hand that
threw its switch each day…. It was like something gone mad in imprisonment,
something already dead that would never wear out, like the dainty,
springy-footed foxes in the Central Park Zoo, whose complex footwork repeated
and repeated as they circled their cages. [p.6]
Therese has no remedy for the dissatisfaction
that stalks her. Captive to a peculiar enervation, she allows others to make
decisions for her, particularly Richard but also, later, Carol. Yet this same
inertia masks her resistance and protects her from actual compliance that would
lock her into conventional expectations. In a few years, the century will popularize
the concept of alienation to describe Therese’s predicament, but for the meantime
her only ally is her stubborn desire for something real.
Then Carol Aird enters the toy department
looking for a Christmas doll for her daughter. Her appearance startles Therese into
taking the first faltering steps along a path toward her own desire that will
be discouragingly long as well as beset by risks, misunderstandings, and retreats.
In the conventions of a coming out romance, such obstacles are meant to secure
a reader’s interest by postponing the inevitable consummation of the
characters’ affair, and some reviewers fault The Price of Salt for overplaying the game, but this narrow reading
misses the realistically calibrated movement by which Therese becomes her own
person.
Therese begins the story in search
of mothering. An orphan in effect if not in reality, she comforts herself by
whispering the name of a nun, Sister Alicia, who cared for her as a child. She is
reluctantly grateful for the attentions of Mrs. Robichek and Richard’s mother,
Mrs. Semco, despite fearing their fate may be hers. She prays to “[t]he one
beautiful thing in her apartment, the wooden Madonna she had bought the first
month she had been in New York.” [p. 16] On her first visit to
Carol’s home, Therese lies down for a nap and asks for a glass of warm milk.
But even on this first visit, and despite being almost engaged to Richard, Therese
realizes she “had never loved anyone before Carol, not even Sister Alicia.” [p.
50]
In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke says of love that “it
is the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task,
the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely
preparation.” [pp. 48 & 49] We all know this, in the core of our
souls, which is why stories of love, well told or not, will always find an
audience. To succeed at love, Therese will need to ignore the constricting
cultural assumptions that hamstring her gender just as she will need to resist
the lies that condemn homosexuality.
Love as the catalyst for changing a
life is not uncommon in reality or in fiction, and Highsmith delivers a portrait
of evolving feeling that never shifts out of Therese’s viewpoint. Jealous of
Carol’s daughter and her best friend, Therese can plummet from confidence to
the shattering depths of insecurity in the space of seconds. Her growing
affection increases a longing to be known that exists simultaneously with the
need to remain hidden. Therese longs for Carol’s company only to find it
impossible to speak in her presence, so she resorts to writing letters she will
never send. In Carol’s presence, Therese manages only awkward attempts at
revelation. Both women speak a kind of code that disguises true exposure and
allows them to sidestep risky admissions. “Was life, were human relations like
this always, Therese wondered. Never solid ground under foot. Always like
gravel….” [p. 142] Therese has only her stubborn habit of resistance
to protect her need to love.
When Carol suggests that she and
Therese drive across the country, Highsmith places the two women in the archetypal
American metaphor of a journey toward freedom:
[Therese] thought suddenly of the people
working in Frankenberg’s, penned in there at a quarter of ten in the morning,
this morning and tomorrow morning and the next, the hands of clocks controlling
every move they made. But the hands of the clock on the dashboard meant nothing
now to her and Carol. [p. 149]
At first the trip only intensifies
their inability to connect. Carol grows irritated and Therese grows fearful. They
pause to look in the window of a restaurant at a miniature Dutch scene, and
while Carol dismisses the small carvings, Therese appreciates how much work has
gone into the making of such models. Therese starts to tell Carol about the toy
train from the department store, only to suddenly find it impossible to say
aloud how deeply it had affected her.
“I wonder if
you’ll really enjoy this trip,” Carol said. “You so prefer things reflected in
a glass don’t you? You have your private conception of everything. Like that
windmill. It’s practically as good as being in Holland to you. I wonder if
you’ll even like seeing real mountains and real people.”
Therese felt
crushed as if Carol had accused her of lying. She felt Carol meant, too, that
she had a private conception of her, and that Carol resented it. [pp. 157
& 152]
The pressure of everything unspoken
mounts and finally forces Therese to speak. When she does say out loud, “I love
you,” Carol responds immediately. Highsmith’s description of their loving is among
the best ever written; she neither shies away from the physical nor does she
become distracted by body parts. By staying within Therese’s emotional response,
a reader witnesses how thoroughly her life is transformed. The powerful
confirmation of her desire becomes an undeniable wellspring of self-confidence.
Therese asks Carol why she waited so long, and learns that Carol feared taking
advantage of the younger woman, a realistic fear considering the canard of the
era: younger women were seduced into lesbianism by experienced older women.
Earlier, I referred to Rilke in
what may seem a nice reference but not particularly related to the novel. In
fact I was reminded several times of the German poet during The Price of Salt. I can find no
explicit evidence that Patricia Highsmith ever commented on or even read Rilke,
but it is not farfetched to assume an acquaintance since her attraction to
German culture is well documented. His implicit presence in the novel adds to its
spiritual depth and the importance of Therese’s transformation. When Therese feels
herself expanding in “widening circles” it echoes his poem: “I live my life in
widening rings.” In the earlier reference to the trapped toy train, Highsmith also
added an image of pacing foxes in a zoo, and Rilke’s vision of the “The
Panther” looms like a larger shadow in the background:
As he paces in cramped circles,
over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a
center
in which a mighty will stands
paralyzed.
I find Rilke again as the women
continue driving west. In the ninth Duino
Elegy, he writes: “Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,/ bridge,
fountain, gate, pitcher…” Love gives Therese the sensitivity perceive the
countryside infused with a joyful singularity that the poet claims is our
reason for existing.
The West unfolded like a magic carpet,
dotted with the neat, tight units of farmhouse, barn, and silo that they could
see for half an hour before they came abreast of them…. The house smelled like
fresh cold cheese…. [T]here was a picture of a rooster on the wall, made of
colored patches of cloth sewn on a black ground….” [p.172]
This is not the only place where
Highsmith creates emotion by listing objects almost as if she were cataloging
them. Here, perhaps, is the reason she made set design the occupation that
Therese chooses for her life’s work: to highlight the value of the objects
among which our dramas take place.
The
Price of Salt does not end on a road toward the sunset, although Therese
and Carol do reach Colorado. Carol’s husband discovers the nature of his wife’s
relationship with Therese, and Carol returns to New York to face a legal battle
for her daughter while Therese stays in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. In this
unlikely little city, Therese reaches a new stage in her journey toward the
woman she yearns to be. Slowly she becomes aware that Carol will not rejoin
her, but being devastated is not the same as being destroyed, and Therese can make
her own choices now, even change her mind and remake them.
Highsmith takes pains to underscore
that what Therese gains from her progress through the novel is not a
relationship with another woman but a vital understanding and acceptance of
herself. She takes a temporary office job in Sioux Falls, and works on model
sets for a New York director in the evenings. She writes “a deliberately
cheerful message” to Mrs. Robichek:
It seemed false as she wrote it,
but walking away from the box where she had dropped it, she was conscious
suddenly of the energy in her body, the spring in her toes, the youth in her
blood that warmed her cheeks as she walked faster, and she knew she was free
and blessed compared to Mrs. Robichek, and what she had written was not false,
because she could so well afford it. [p. 227]
When Therese does return to New
York and keeps an appointment with Carol in a restaurant, the two women meet on
new ground:
Carol lifted her head, smiling. “My
little big shot. Now you look like you might do something good. Do you know,
even your voice is different?” [p. 242]
The Price of Salt is so unlike Patricia Highsmith’s other novels that I
wonder if she was ever surprised by the remarkable quality of her creation;
perhaps a clue is her choice of nom de
plume: Claire Morgan, a “clear morning.” As I reread the story, I found
myself reliving a time that I remember primarily as a grim, dismal,
embarrassing wasteland. I was impressed by how accurately Highsmith described
the tongue-tied torture of being attracted to another woman, but I was
astonished at how vividly she reminded me that I once dreaded facing a future
as a female. The sea change wrought by the movements of the 1960s brought along
numerous works of fiction but none surpasses the story of Therese Belivet, whose
stubborn courage to pursue what she desired sustained her without the support
of a movement. The Price of Salt
deserves a place in American literature alongside works like Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird, not as a coming
out story but as a coming of age novel. Soon, living memories will be gone and
only the books will testify to a suffocating era that valued conformity over
truth, public custom over individual suffering, bland ignorance over painful
honesty.
Highsmith,
Patricia. The Price of Salt. Mineola,
New York: Dover Publications, Inc. 2015 (1952).
Mitchell,
Stephen, ed., trans. Ahead of all
Parting: The Selected Prose and Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. New York: The
Modern Library. 1999.
Rilke, Rainer
Maria. Letters to a Young Poem.
Watchmaker Publishing. 2012.
