When Highsmith began writing The Price of Salt in earnest in 1949, her publisher and agent were encouraging her to write another book in the vein of Strangers on a Train to “strengthen reputation” as an author of suspense. She published The Price of Salt under a pseudonym. Blasphemy of Laughter would have been a shout-out to Virginia Woolf’s 1931 experimental novel The Waves, but Highsmith biographies are silent on what Paths of Lightening might have meant. The Bloomingdale Story is self-explanatory, while The Argument of Tantalus must have referred to a mythic Greek king who was condemned to spend eternity standing in a pool of water he couldn’t drink, beneath a tree bearing fruit that was forever out of his reach. Highsmith considered several different titles.īefore she settled on The Price of Salt, Highsmith tried out a number of titles ranging from the obvious to the esoteric.
“Oh God,” Highsmith would write in her diary, “how this story emerges from my own bones!” 2. She went home that evening and, in about two hours, sketched out the plot of The Price of Salt.īesides Senn, Highsmith also drew on her doomed love affair with Philadelphia socialite Ginnie Catherwood to flesh out the character of Carol Aird and her steamy romance with Therese Belivet, the young woman she meets in a New York department store. (She wanted the money to pay for psychoanalysis, partly in hopes she could “regularize herself sexually.”) It was there that Highsmith briefly encountered Kathleen Wiggins Senn, a married New Jersey woman whom the novelist would later describe as “blondish and elegant.” The details of the meeting will be familiar to anyone who has read the book or seen Haynes’s 2015 film adaptation: Senn, wrapped in a fur coat and fiddling with her gloves, approached the counter to buy a doll for her daughter, and Highsmith was smitten. The Price of Salt was intensely personal.Īccording to Joan Schenkar’s 2011 biography The Talented Miss Highsmith, The Price of Salt was largely inspired by Highsmith’s stint in the Bloomingdale’s toy department during the 1948 Christmas shopping season. Seventy years after its publication, here are eight things you should know about Highsmith’s groundbreaking romance novel. They might have been surprised to learn they were actually writing to the talented young psychological suspense author whose debut novel, Strangers on a Train, had been adapted by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951.
According to The New Republic, thousands of readers wrote to Highsmith-or, more accurately, to her pseudonym, “Claire Morgan”-to thank her for offering them a love story with a hopeful ending. No such fate awaits Therese Belivet and Carol Aird, the Manhattan shop girl and glamorous socialite whose swoony, steamy romance plays out in The Price of Salt (and later in Todd Haynes’s exquisite film adaptation, Carol). As The Price of Salt author Patricia Highsmith recounted in an afterword to Bloomsbury’s 1990 reissue, gay and lesbian characters usually “had to pay for their deviation by cutting their wrists, drowning themselves in a swimming pool, or by switching to heterosexuality (so it was stated), or by collapsing-alone and miserable and shunned-into a depression equal to hell.” There had been gay and lesbian novels before, but there were usually only three options available to the main character by the end of the book: death, madness, or a life of repression and denial.
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The book was released in 1952-the same year the American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental illness in its first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. When The Price of Salt was first published, it gave LGBTQ+ readers something they had never encountered before: a novel that didn’t punish its main characters for being gay and allowed them at least the possibility of a Happily Ever After.