breathedout | Entries tagged with patricia highsmith

This week I made quite a bit of progress on The Air You Breathe by Frances de Pontes Peebles, with which I'm now about halfway done (it's long, but reads quickly). I'm still very much enjoying it: the Lapa (Rio de Janeiro) setting is vivid, the sections with older!Dores take the edge off of younger!Dores's teen angst, and the dynamic between Dores and Graça convincingly lives in that codependent-best-friends, yes-we're-lovers-but-only-when-Graça-says-so space that is relatably 17 years old. Predictably I am also very drawn to the relationship between Dores and Vinicius, their guitarist and artistic collaborator, with whom she goes on to have a long, complex relationship and whom she ends up marrying many years after Graça's young death. Thus far I'm impressed with how Peebles is navigating the attachment between a young woman who is primarily erotically invested in other women, but who is also passionately invested, with all of herself, in the making of music, and a man with whom she connects musically on a generative level. Can't think why that would be of personal interest. Ahem. Oh! As befits a story about the samba scene in Lapa in the 1930s, this book also features a character based on João Francisco dos Santos, aka Madame Satã, which is a fun queer-historical cameo although I don't know enough about Santos to know how close the parallel is, and from what I can gather the historical figure was actually in prison during the mid-30s, when the early section of this novel takes place.

In other news: with research assistance from

oulfis—who, just saying, is a great friend to have if you happen to be writing a historical novel set in Canada—I got my hands on a couple articles and a book by Linda J. Quiney: most notably This Small Army of Women: Canadian Volunteer Nurses and the First World War, and "Borrowed Halos: Canadian Teachers as Voluntary Aid Detachment Nurses during the Great War" (Historical Studies in Education 15,1 (2003)). The VAD program trained emergency nursing aids and ambulance assistants, much to the resistance and consternation of the professional nursing community, which was just starting to make headway on gaining respectability as a licensed, skilled profession. As casualty numbers got out of hand, though, even the nurses had to admit that the VAD women (and some men) filled an undeniable need. The Canadian VAD started out the war with a strong preference for candidates who were young, well-educated, middle-class, and of "British heritage" (by this they meant "white, Church of England, Anglo-Saxon"), although 'round about 1916 they did come to the belated realization that, as they were currently fighting a war IN FRANCE, and as it happened they had a whole demographic of francophone people right there in their own country, they might want to compromise their bigotry far enough to, like, get their training manuals translated into French, and extend the olive branch to French-speaking Canadians. Or whatever.

Anyway, Quiney's book isn't particularly excerptible or gripping on its own merits, but it's very useful for my purposes: it goes through the nitty-gritty mechanics of what the training course was like—how many weeks, what the time commitment was, what the curricula looked like, how useful that curricula usually proved on the wards; whether VAD trainees who went abroad usually got hospital training before they went; how the mechanism of securing placement abroad worked; what sorts of tasks VADs were usually given once they were placed; how VAD detachments were structured; comparative statistics for VAD participation from various provinces, how the dynamics evolved between the VADs and the professional nursing establishment, and so on. It's helping me flesh out the details of how my characters came together pre-novel. I also think it squares well with my plans in terms of—the mostly-unsuccessful plot my characters hatch should be a deliberate subversion of the VAD system (for one thing most of them don't fall into all the desired demographic categories, and for another thing they're not trying to go to England or France), but it should also be historically possible. And based on Quiney, I think both things are true. So cool!

I also read a few pages of my old favorite (sort of? Is is a "favorite" if you find a book and its author endlessly fascinating, even if a lot of that fascination comes from qualities that are also horrifying?) The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith, because

greywash and I are doing a reading-and-viewing project on adaptations, and TPoS/Carol is the first pairing we're tackling. Way back when we still lived in our first LA apartment (so 2015, yikes), I was working on a project that would have interwoven the Price of Salt timeline with a timeline of the section of Highsmith's biography leading up to the publication of the novel; I'm super tempted to dig that out again and take a look at it as I revisit. We'll see what ends up happening!

In her thirtieth cahier, shortly after separating from Caroline Besterman in 1968, Pat had written: “To live alone, to feel occasional depression. Much of the difficulty is from not having another person around for whom one puts on a slight show—dressing nicely, presenting a pleasant expression. The trick, the sometimes difficult trick is to maintain one’s morale without the other person, the mirror.”

In Switzerland [in the 1980s], Pat had found a supportive publisher and world representative in Daniel Keel and Diogenes, a German-speaking public eager for her work, and not one person, really, for whom she could perform her “self.”

—Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (Chapter 35: The Cake That was Shaped Like a Coffin, Part 2)

The capping irony: based on all the stories of all the women with whom Highsmith did live over the years, “presenting a pleasant expression” for someone else’s benefit is not something she, in reality, ever seems to have done. On the contrary, she fought cruelly and almost continually with every lover and other housemate she ever had (except, arguably, her last lover, Monique Buffet). Is she here, nearing the end of her life in solitude, remembering the past through rose-colored glasses? Or did she actually perceive herself, at the time, when she was fighting tooth and nail with Ellen Bumenthal Hill, or sleeping with both members of a couple and then informing on them to each other, as acting “pleasant” for her lovers’ benefits? If not for those lovers, would the Highsmith of the 1940s through 1970s have been even meaner and nastier? Or is the pleasantness she recalls here a red herring, and is the truth that she would have simply felt (and now did feel) less herself, somehow, without someone for whom to perform, regardless of the content of that performance?

(This is also interesting to me because, despite also being a bit obsessed with performative self-presentation, I absolutely adore(d) living alone, and usually feel most “myself” when there’s no one else around. Though I also live in the internet age, where being physically alone doesn’t mean I’m devoid of human contact.)

peachpulpeuse asked: i was just thinking about the conversation you lot were having re american road trips, and i realized that even tho the road trip in the price of salt is supposed to be a romantic getaway, or whatever, it gives me the same itchy nervous dried-sweat feeling as the extended road trip/pedo kidnapping in lolita. have you felt the same thing? is it an artifact of creepy road trips (e.g. f&l in lv)?? or is it just that p. highsmith cant help but make you feel anxious and culpable? idk anyway cheers

Yes, definitely. I mean to some extent that anxious dread is very much rooted in the plot, since they’re being tailed and spied on by Carol’s husband’s private detective the whole time, so there’s that uneasy tension between getting away and running away.

The prospect of escape, in particular escape from one’s own identity, is I think always incredibly appealing to Highsmith and I think she herself perceived it as a little too appealing: dangerously appealing, for reasons that become obvious with Ripley. Which makes it intriguing that she plays the tension in the road trip section of The Price of Salt the way that she does: what outcome are we, the readers, supposed to be rooting for here? One is very conscious that in reading a romance novel one is supposed to be rooting for the main couple to stay together, and in this case I legitimately do… but does that mean hoping for Carol to choose Therese over her daughter, staying with Therese and just never returning to New York? Starting a new life from scratch in some little town in the American West, just severing all ties with her previous existence and living in permanent exile, à la the end of Du Maurier’s Rebecca? I mean, that’s sure what Highsmith herself would try to do, over and over again, but I think even she gets why it’s a disturbingly claustrophobic and unsatisfying version of a happy ending. The one that she gives us—where Carol chooses New York and her daughter over Therese and then the court takes the daughter away anyway, so that Carol ends up in a tenuous reconciliation with Therese as a sort of consolation prize—feels maybe more politically depressing but also more genuinely… freeing? At least to me. And I end the book feeling a lot more confident that Therese is going to have the opportunity to develop into her own independent person, than I would have if she and Carol had shacked up in Santa Fe or whatever.

And then too, in the road trip section, the fact that the dynamic between the two women, even on its own, is remarkably… prickly… adds to that sense of unease. Schenkar has this great line about Highsmith, which is that “Whenever Pat fell in love, her first thought was to escape with her new lover and her second thought was to escape from her new lover.” I think there’s definitely a bit of that tension going on with Carol, and perceiving it through Therese’s eyes just adds to the sense of shaky footing. Highsmith herself felt both cruelly abandoned and oppressively hounded by her mother, who was the most enduring and also the most mutually hurtful love of her life; and I think it’s interesting that she sets up this fictional dilemma where, no matter what Carol does, she’ll be both abandoning and pursuing a relationship with a daughter-figure (one eroticized, one not, but the glass of milk scene alone sets up mother-daughter vibes between Therese and Carol). That’s enough to create a prickly dread-feeling for anyone, I think!

But yeah, ahahahaha basically I think everything Highsmith wrote is supersaturated with guilt and anxiety. ISN’T IT GRAND.

So. The Price of Salt (1952). First lesbian pulp with a “happy ending,” meaning in this case that neither of the female protagonists died, went mad, or decided they liked men after all (or, incidentally, chose to elope and cut themselves off from all the other people they love). To many readers—very much including me—the understated ending of Highsmith’s novel feels “more realistic” than either a typical romance-novel Happy Ever After, or the overblown, censorship-enforced, soap-operatic tragedy of pulps like Spring Fire.

( INTERESTINGLY (suicide cw): )

[Note from 2019: I still await, and am tempted to write myself, the Norma Desmond/Carol Aird fanfic. A Yuletide possibility, perhaps.]

The element of terror—anxiety—is important. Perhaps overconsciousness of details—by which an individual tries to fix his place, from which he tries to gain security and confidence, but without success. It is the element of security, that is forever missing; the meaning and importance of life that is missing.

—Patricia Highsmith, preparatory notes for The Tremor of Forgery as found in Joan Schenkar’s The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (Chapter 25: Les Girls, Part 9)

Pat [Highsmith] and Marijane [Meaker] broke up quickly (and then continued to break up slowly) during their six months of cohabitation. Pat … moved in and out of the house so many times, that they had to change moving companies a couple of times to avoid embarrassment.

—Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (Chapter 23: Les Girls, Part 7)

And a follow-up quote from Meaker on the subject: “By then, we didn’t like each other, we didn’t want to be around each other, but in bed it was fire.”

Although Pat’s array of styles and subjects couldn’t be more different from Proust’s exquisite deconstructions of the phantoms of the faubourg, her best long fictions–like demented, demotic chips off the Proustian block–share a serious approach with Proust: the capillarial crawl of a hypervigilant consciousness over a detailed psychological territory, every word of whose narrative is conveyed in a voice cloaked (but not necessarily concealed) by another (but not exactly opposite) gender.

—Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (Chapter 9: Greek Games)

…. what an intriguing comparison. That final observation on gender, in particular!

Pat once said that Ripley was a name she saw on a sign advertising men’s apparel on the Henry Hudson Parkway. And this is true: in the 1940s and 1950s, Ripley’s was a men’s clothing store in Manhattan on Fifth Avenue. But it is also false: a convenient billboard wasn’t the only origin of Tom Ripley’s name.

“Comics,” Pat wrote to Kingsley in March of 1953, one year before she started imagining Tom Ripley, “I was determined when I started, were not going to influence my writing.” […] Unwilling to acknowledge influences from popular culture, but always ready to confess anything that ruffled the surface of her intentions, Pat hid the origin of Ripley’s name in one of her favorite places—her work. She put it into The Talented Mr. Ripley and allowed Ripley himself to give the secret away, casually, as a play on a phrase that every newspaper reader in America would know. […]

“He laughed, his own unmistakeable laugh that Marge knew well. ‘The thing is, I’m expecting somebody any minute. It’s a business interview. About a job. Believe it or not, old believe-it-or-not Ripley’s trying to put himself to work.”

Ripley’s Believe it or Not was (and still is) a renowned cartoon, a comics panel created by Robert Ripley […] in 1918. […] By 1936, Robert Ripley was voted the most popular figure in the United States, eighty million Americans a year were reading Ripley’s Believe It or Not, and the phrase “believe it or not” had embedded itself in the American household vernacular.

—Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (Chapter 21: Les Girls, Part 5)

In December of 1944, writing hard for the comics and grumbling about it, working on the novel she'd been thinking about for two years, The Click of the Shutting, making notes for short stories at night, entertaining more love possibilities than she could possibly handle (a Virginia or two, the socialite Natica Waterbury, an Anne and an Ann, the model Chloe, et al.) and feeling abysmally poor, Pat still kept her eyes on the prize. She framed her desire for the "best" in life in metaphors saturated by the war and couched in the language of the enemy. (Her diary note is in bad German.)

—Joan Schenkar, Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith

As I remarked to Gins earlier: sometimes I read biographies where the subject is like: working a full-time job! going out to parties at night! conducting more love affairs than I, a third party, can keep track of! writing multiple novels! reading a ton and journaling thoughtful responses to their reading! having dinner with their parents! submitting to literary reviews! maintaining a voluminous correspondence with a wide social circle! I MEAN. DID THESE PEOPLE EVER SLEEP?

Though then I remember that there was no internet back then, and it all seems marginally more understandable.

[O]ne day, in the middle of a short filmed interview for German television about the Geissendorfer film Die Glaserne Zelle (The Glass Cell) at her house in Moncourt in 1977, Pat, “quite drunk,” grabbed the cameraman’s white lighting umbrella and began to dance around the room with it, intoning the title song from the musical comedy Singin’ in the Rain, in her deep cigarette-and-alcohol-flavored voice. The celebrated lyricists for Singin’ in the Rain were the very same Betty Comden and Adolph Green who had been [Pat’s friend] Judy Holliday’s young partners in the Revuers at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village—where Pat had gone to applaud them so many times in the 1940s.

At this unexpeted display of high spirits and musical comedy-consciousness from the forbidding Miss Highsmith, the cameraman shooting the television film, Wilfried Reichardt, and the writer doing the interviewing, Christa Maerker, threw their own inhibitions to the wind and happily “joined in” to sing and dance along with Pat.

It must have been quite an international tableau: two filmmakers from Berlin and one soused and happy Texas-American novelist interrupting the shooting of an interview for a German television channel in the novelist’s house in suburban France to perform an American musical comedy number whose words they all knew.

—Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (Chapter 15: Social Studies, Part 1)

On one of her trips “home” to Texas–she was still in her teens–Pat made friends with a married couple in El Paso, a city on the Texas-Mexican border just across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Juárez. The woman, Eddy, was a very masculine horse-trainer, and the man, Ruthie, was an exceedingly effeminate dress designer. They were both homosexual and had married each other, Pat wrote approvingly, for cover. (Eddy and Ruthie’s behavior in gay bars was so outrageous that their marriage was “urgently advisable.”) Even better, Eddy and Ruthie had married in order to wear each others’ clothes. Pat was enthralled.

—Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (Chapter 10: Alter Ego, Part 1)

If Highsmith was in her late teens, the date of this anecdote would have been circa 1938-1940.

And she’s not the only one enthralled by this lavender marriage! I’m slightly desolate that she never wrote Eddy and Ruthie and their queer, clothing-sharing, gay-bar-scandalizing El Paso existence into a novel. (Though given the geography of Highsmith Country, one or both of their fictional avatars would no doubt have ended up dead.)

It was Proust, after all, who wrote that neurosis gives plot to life, and Pat’s own plot, like that of most of her characters, was founded on repetition. She did the same things over and over again. For variation, she tried to do them all at once.

—Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (Introduction: “A Note on Biography”)

No, I shall never be jealous, only die of jealousy.

—Patricia Highsmith, via Joan Schenkar’s The Talented Miss Highsmith: the Secret Life and Mysterious Art of Patricia Highsmith

Her own problem with love was proximity. She could live for love, but she couldn’t live with it. And she really couldn’t bear anything that wasn’t writing for very long.

—Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith

At twenty, when she was a junior at Barnard College living at home in New York City—and just as liable to falling through the crust of the world as she is now [in 1973, at fifty-two]—Pat first wrote about thin ice:

"We live on the thin ice of unexplained phenomena. Suppose our food suddenly did not digest in our stomachs. Suppose it lay like a lump of dough inside us and poisoned us."

Food has disturbed her on and off since she was an adolescent. She wrote to her professor friend Alex Szogyi (he was also a food writer) that food was her bête noire—and she has come to attach many confusions to the act of eating. France, the culinary center of the Western world, means nothing to her: “I don’t even like the food,” she writes from Fontainebleu. She thinks America’s “Nixon” problem is gastric: “the USA [is] suffering a prolonged attack of acid stomach, an irrepressible urge to throw up.” She herself often has the urge to throw up. Her idea of an attractive name for a cookbook is “Desperate Measures.” For a long time now [in 1973], liquids have been her most important nourishment.

—Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (Chapter 1: How to Begin, Part 1)

At various points in her (thus far truly superb) Highsmith biography Schenkar calls Highsmith’s troubled relationship with food “anorexia,” but based on the above I question whether that term is really applicable. Caveat that I’m only sixty pages in and there may be information I’m missing (though I did search the index for relevant terms); but every definition of anorexia I’ve ever encountered has had at its forefront body image and an intense desire to avoid gaining weight, as in these opening paragraphs from the Mayo Clinic:

Anorexia (an-o-REK-see-uh) nervosa — often simply called anorexia — is an eating disorder characterized by an abnormally low body weight, intense fear of gaining weight and a distorted perception of body weight. People with anorexia place a high value on controlling their weight and shape, using extreme efforts that tend to significantly interfere with activities in their lives."

To prevent weight gain or to continue losing weight, people with anorexia usually severely restrict the amount of food they eat. They may control calorie intake by vomiting after eating or by misusing laxatives, diet aids, diuretics or enemas. They may also try to lose weight by exercising excessively.

But what Schenkar is describing above isn’t motivated by weight loss or distorted body image. Rather, it’s the result of a kind of visceral repulsion, and a physical difficulty around the act of consuming food that verges on body horror. This distaste/disgust for food and the act of eating, which both Highsmith and Schenkar describe; this tendency to dwell on the possibility of the body rejecting what we put in it, and on the disturbingly “thin ice” separating nourishment from poison (ironically, Highsmith’s food aversion factored into her turning more and more to actually poisoning herself by replacing food with alcohol); this tendency to overthink the mechanics of eating and digestion until they become revolting; and the semi-panicked sense that one must sometimes resort of “Desperate Measures” in order to consume calories—none of that seems to me to hinge on weight control. From what I’ve read thus far, Highsmith definitely didn’t exercise excessively, unless you mean doing the underpants Charleston with a wide variety of women; and controlling her body shape doesn’t seem to have been a major consideration (and this was a woman who meticulously catalogued her every malady and self-criticism in over 8,000 pages of notebooks and diaries—you’d think we’d know). I mean I get why the word “anorexia” leaps to mind, since I don’t know a better one; but it also seems, in some fundamental way, inaccurate. Highsmith seems to have struggled to eat, rather than struggled not to eat; maybe that’s the real distinction I’m drawing here.

I suppose I would be dishonest not to mention that the Schenkar quote above is one of the most accurate descriptions I’ve ever read of my own difficulties with food.

Always keen on advancement, Pat[ricia Highsmith, already working as a comics scriptwriter at Timely and other companies], tried to write for the high-paying, widely distributed Wonder Woman comic book, but was shut out of the job. This was in 1947, just one year before she began to imagine her lesbian novel, The Price of Salt. Wonder Woman, daughter of Amazon Queen Hippolyta and still the heroine of her own comic book, has a favorite exclamation: “Suffering Sappho!” She lives on the forbidden-to-males Paradise Island with a happy coepheroi of lithe young Amazons, and she arrived in America in 1942, in the form of her Altar Ego, Lieutenant Diana Prince, to help the Allies fight World War II. The thought of what Patricia Highsmith, in her most sexually active period (the 1940s were feverish for Pat) and in the right mood, might have made of Wonder Woman’s bondage-obsessed plots and nubile young Amazons can only be inscribed on the short list of popular culture’s lingering regrets.

—Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (Chapter 2: How to Begin, Part 2)

Inscribed on the short list of popular culture’s lingering regrets, indeed.

And a little bonus anecdote about Highsmith’s time at Timely Comics, which would later become Marvel:

1943: Vince Fago, her editor at Timely, tries to arrange a date for her with another comic book writer, Stan Lee. Neither Lee nor Pat is interested, so Spider-Man (the superhero Stan Lee cocreated) misses his opportunity to date Tom Ripley (the antihero Pat Highsmith created).

Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh. She had a vision of a pale-white flower, shimmering as if seen in darkness, or through water. Why did people talk of heaven, she wondered.

—Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

Original Tumblr tags: #ahahahahaha OH PATRICIA #patricia highsmith #and her #healthy and not at all morbid vision of human happiness

[Highsmith’s] second, pseudonymous work, The Price of Salt (1952), was so marked by her secret obsessions that writing it felt like a birthing. “Oh god,” she enthused, “how this story emerges from my own bones!” In it, she mixed images reminiscent of Grimm’s fairy tales and Lolita (three years before Nabokov published his masterpiece) with a luminous halo of incest and a little light pedophilia to bring to an eager and (mildly) misled public the novel they read as the first popular narrative of successful lesbian love. The Price of Salt sold hundreds of thousands of copies and made Patricia Highsmith uneasy all her life.

—Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith

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Page Summary

Reading Wednesday 2.27.19
Presenting a pleasant expression
Road-tripping & nervous dread in The Price of Salt
Highsmithian ironies
The element of terror is important
Pat and Marijane broke up quickly and then continued to break up slowly
Highsmith and Proust
Pat once said
Her diary note is in bad German
One day, in the middle of a short filmed interview
Eddie and Ruthie
It was Proust
I shall never be jealous
Her own problem with love was proximity
On Highsmith's relationship to food
Patricia Highsmith's brushes with Wonder Woman & Stan Lee
Oh Patricia
(no subject)

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Entries tagged with patricia highsmith

Reading Wednesday 2.27.19

Presenting a pleasant expression

Road-tripping & nervous dread in The Price of Salt

Highsmithian ironies

The element of terror is important

Pat and Marijane broke up quickly and then continued to break up slowly

Highsmith and Proust

Pat once said

Her diary note is in bad German

One day, in the middle of a short filmed interview

Eddie and Ruthie

It was Proust

I shall never be jealous

Her own problem with love was proximity

On Highsmith's relationship to food

Patricia Highsmith's brushes with Wonder Woman & Stan Lee

Oh Patricia

(no subject)