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Patricia Highsmith pioneered happy endings for lesbians in novels.
BY SIDNEY BOKER ’21
Feb. 4 marked the 25th anniversary of American writer Patricia Highsmith’s death. Born Mary Patricia Clangman, Highsmith took her stepfather’s last name for her writing career. She was best known for her psychological thrillers which were neither mysteries nor detective novels. Today she is most known for writing the book that inspired the film “Carol.”
The Independent credits her “dark, intelligent, cynical and perfectly realized stories” to her start in life as “a bright, unhappy child.” Highsmith’s parents separated before she was born, and she had a strained relationship with her mother and stepfather. During this time, she took refuge in books.
Shortly after graduating from Barnard College in 1942, Highsmith contributed to the comic book series “Black Terror” before she began writing novels. Her first novel, “Strangers on a Train,” was published in 1950 after being rejected six times. The novel tells the story of two assassins who meet on a train and agree to trade murders. Like the majority of her works, it involves “gentlemen murderers and psychological intrigue,” and provided Highsmith an outlet to explore “her own obsessions,” according to The New York Times.
Alfred Hitchcock adapted the book into a film of the same name in 1951, bringing Highsmith both literary recognition and enough money to pursue writing full time.
Highsmith is well-known for her series detailing the exploits of the young, sexually and morally ambiguous murderer, Tom Ripley. The first book in the series, “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” won the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, the most prestigious award for detective literature in France. It also received the Edgar Allan Poe Scroll from the Mystery Writers of America. Two of her Ripley installments were made into films in 1960 and 1977.
The Ripley series comprises just four of the 20 novels and seven short story collections Highsmith published, many of which handled similar themes of harmless acts spiraling into violence and inescapable death.
The only book that deviates from this thematic pattern is Highsmith’s novel originally titled “The Price of Salt,” which was later retitled to “Carol,” published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. “Carol” was published in 1952, but was inspired by events from 1948. Highsmith worked at Bloomingdale’s to pay for psychoanalysis to “explore the sharp ambivalence she felt about marrying her fiancé, a novelist named Marc Brandel,” according to The New Yorker. She never married Brandel or anyone else. Highsmith usually had sexual and romantic relationships with women who tended to be older, wealthy and suburban.
At Bloomingdale’s, Highsmith had a chance encounter with a woman in a mink coat, one of two women in her life who inspired the character of Carol Aird.
Aird, a 30-something wealthy suburban wife, is also the love interest for the novel’s protagonist, 19-year-old Therese Belivet. In “Carol,” the two embark on a sultry road-trip affair, running from the detective that Carol’s husband hired to track her.
While the lovers-on-the-run storyline flexes “Highsmith’s thriller muscles,” the novel ends relatively happily. As the New Yorker pointed out, no one had died or been institutionalized at the end of the novel, which was incredibly uncommon for lesbian pulp fiction as a genre, as well as within Highsmith’s own literary repertoire.
“[‘The Price of Salt’] was for many years the only lesbian novel, in either hard or soft cover, with a happy ending,” author Marijane Meaker told The New Yorker.
Ellena Son ’21 agrees. “The trope of sad or dead lesbians in literature and media is so tired and disappointing,” Son said. “It’s really great when writers go against it.”
In 2015, “Carol” was adapted into a critically acclaimed movie.
Highsmith was always more popular in Europe, where she spent the majority of her life, but she still led an illustrious literary career in the U.S. She wrote iconic novels-turned-movies and pioneered literature depicting women in love.
In her personal life, Highsmith was very secretive. However, her diaries and work journals, detailing 60 years of her deeply private life and literary planning across 56 notebooks, will be published in 2021, according to The New York Times.
She “seemed to have anticipated that [her] journals might one day be released,” leaving “instructions to edit out repetition in her notebooks” in her will, The New York Times reported.
Highsmith’s long-time editor Anna von Planta is preparing the diaries for publication. To The New York Times, von Planta said she “aimed to offer an unembellished look at the author, without glossing over the darker aspects of her personality and beliefs,” including outspoken anti-Semitism and racist opinions. Von Planta emphasized that she “won’t censor” these opinions to “show how Patricia Highsmith became Patricia Highsmith.”