Beautiful Shadow (31 page)

     Today the therapist’s interpretation of Highsmith’s case seems laughably simplistic and over-dependent on Freudian theory. At the time, however, Highsmith took what Klein had to say seriously, describing each visit to her in a separate section of her diary devoted to analysing her analysis. After her first session, at the end of November, she concluded that the therapy was ‘a way to me’,
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and she soon looked upon the analyst as a mother substitute – ‘the feeling already, that Mrs Klein is my mother’, she wrote.
³⁵
Klein questioned her about her childhood, particularly what happened in 1926, the year in which Highsmith could, according to Vivien De Bernardi, have been sexually abused. ‘Tried to remember the year ’26,’ wrote Highsmith. ‘I have no memory of my parents’ sexuality.’
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     After sitting a Rorschach test and enduring a session of free association, Klein concluded that Highsmith’s basic problem was that she resented her mother. She felt guilty about her hatred of her and, to overcompensate, entered into relationships with other women with whom she then acted out a pattern of loving and leaving. Her experience with Virginia Kent Catherwood typified all her affairs with women. ‘Yes, what I loved in her was, that she was a mother to me,’ wrote Highsmith in her diary. ‘And didn’t she always say that I were a child?’
³⁷

     Klein informed Pat that she’d never been happy, that she actually hated women and loved men and, quite absurdly, interpreted a dream of flushing the lavatory and flooding the bathroom floor as a sign that her patient wanted to flush her mother down the drain like human faeces. Highsmith had, Klein concluded, a ‘basic maladjustment to people and to sex from earliest anal-sadistic years’
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and recommended she start group therapy with four married women who were, Klein, said, latent homosexuals. ‘Perhaps I shall amuse myself by seducing a couple of them,’ Highsmith noted in her diary.
³⁹

     It’s questionable whether the therapy actually helped Highsmith. It certainly forced her to examine the nature of her unconscious – she often dreamt about being a man threatened with castration – which was, after all, the source of her creativity. During the analysis, she also acknowledged that she could not, ultimately, have a so-called ‘healthy’ relationship, as she found it impossible to ‘merge’ with anyone, male or female. But there’s no doubt that Klein’s interpretation of homosexuality as a mental illness, together with Highsmith’s reading of psychiatrist Edmund Bergler – who believed that lesbians were sick and could only be happy if they underwent intensive psychotherapy three times a week for one or two years – left her feeling even more confused.

     It’s ironic then that the therapy which was designed to cure Highsmith of her homosexuality inadvertently brought about the necessary conditions for the creation of a novel about lesbian love. In order to pay for the services of Eva Klein, Highsmith was forced to get a temporary job and in early December, she took a position in the toy department of Bloomingdale’s, the famous Manhattan department store. The experience was a profound one, personally and creatively, as it inspired a book that is both significant in terms of twentieth-century gay literary history and a powerful novel in its own right:
The Price of Salt
, or, as it was later titled,
Carol
.

Chapter 12

Instantly, I love her

1948–1949

On 8 December 1948, a few days after starting at Bloomingdale’s, Highsmith was working in the toy department when in walked an elegant, blonde woman. Pat had never seen her before, but she was immediately infatuated. Not only was she a beautiful and alluring figure, but, according to Highsmith’s diaries, she reminded the writer of Virginia Kent Catherwood. The woman bought a doll for one of her daughters, left her name, address and delivery details and then walked out of the store. The two women never met again but her influence was ineffable and she was reborn, Highsmith later claimed, as the character Carol in
The Price of Salt
.

     When the book was republished under her own name, Highsmith wrote in the afterword, ‘Perhaps I noticed her because she was alone, or because a mink coat was a rarity, and because she was blondish and seemed to give off light.’
¹

     But was there really such a woman? And if so, who was she? When the book was reissued as
Carol
in 1990, journalists questioned Highsmith about her inspiration, but the famously private author refused to divulge any further information. ‘I don’t answer personal questions about myself or other people that I know, anymore than I give out people’s telephone numbers,’ she told Sarah Dunant on BBC2’s
The Late Show
.
²
However, in Highsmith’s diaries she names the woman as a Mrs E.R. Senn, of North Murray Avenue, Ridgewood, New Jersey – in the novel she is Mrs H.F. Aird, also of New Jersey. When I checked the 1952 Ridgewood directory which sits in the reference section of the Ridgewood Public Library, there was an entry for a Mr E.R. Senn, first name Ernest, who worked as an executive in New York City. A scan of the local high school alumnae directory also revealed the names of two ex-pupils who had been born with the name Senn and who could, I thought, have been the children of this marriage. I wrote to both of them and a few weeks later received a letter from a man informing me that unfortunately his father was not the Mr E.R. Senn that I was looking for. Weeks passed and then, one day, I received a reply from one of the Senns’ daughters.

     ‘Can’t tell you what a surprise it was to read your letter and realize the effort you have put into locating me on behalf of my mother!’ it read. Eventually, after months of communication, I arranged a meeting with one of Mrs Senn’s other daughters, Priscilla Kennedy, who was visiting London from America, and who was able to tell me about the woman who captured Highsmith’s imagination back in 1948.

     She was called Kathleen Senn and she lived with her husband, Ernest Richardson, and her family in North Murray Avenue, Ridgewood, then a wealthy suburb of New Jersey. Kathleen Senn was born in 1911, in Denver, Colorado, and her father was Elmer W. Wiggins, owner of Wiggins Airways, which operated out of Dedham, Massachusetts. This is already more than Highsmith knew about her blonde-haired inspiration – she never even knew her Christian name, let alone her background, but if she had, she might easily have fallen in love with her.

     ‘She had been to Skidmore College and she looked like a socialite,’ says Priscilla. ‘She had a maid to do the menial tasks for her in the house and spent time at the country club. She was incredibly self-sufficient, not afraid of anything, but unfortunately she was alcoholic and was in and out of psychiatric hospitals in New York all the time.’
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     After that briefest of brief encounters with Kathleen Senn in Bloomingdale’s, Highsmith came home from work feeling unwell and the next day, on 9 December, she wrote down the plot of a lesbian love story about a young shop girl and an older, more sophisticated woman. ‘I see her the same instant she sees me, and instantly, I love her,’ she wrote in her journal. ‘Instantly, I am terrified, because I know she knows I am terrified and that I love her.’
⁴

     Initially, in this sketch, narrated in the first person, Highsmith called the young shop girl, an eighteen-year-old orphan, Liselle Freyer, and the blonde-haired woman Mrs Sean, of Ridgefield, New Jersey. The older woman asks Liselle out to lunch, where after cocktails, she compliments Liselle on her prettiness. The orphaned girl, although shy, manages to confess that she thinks Mrs Sean is magnificent and they arrange to meet the following Saturday. Mrs Sean picks Liselle up in her car in New York, and they drive back to her house in the suburbs. There, the two women kiss, before Mrs Sean puts her to bed like a child and gives her a cup of hot milk.

     ‘I can envisage an entire book,’ wrote Highsmith, ‘with enough human play on the seventh-floor toy department . . . The toy world within the commercial prison. The captured dream . . . Only parts of it fool the child. The child knows. I saw no delighted child while I was there.’
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     Three days after writing this, Highsmith left Bloomingdale’s. Then on 22 December, she came down with a fever and fainted on the subway. Her therapist, Eva Klein, asked her what she was thinking about as she lost consciousness. ‘About death,’ Highsmith replied.
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She was eventually diagnosed as having chickenpox and over Christmas, her face, body, scalp, upper arms, ears and throat were covered in spots, blood and weeping pus; it looked to her, she said, as if she had just been hit by a shower of flak.

     At her parents’ house in Hastings-on-Hudson, she was confined to bed, but instead of receiving appropriate treatment, she was subjected to her mother’s experiments with Christian Science. ‘Shall I read you some Mary Baker Eddy?’ she asked. ‘Just an aspirin, please,’ Highsmith replied.
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Finally, her case became so serious a doctor had to be called, who although he was aware of Mary Highsmith’s unorthodox approach to treatment, decided to keep his comments to himself.

Highsmith continued with her psychotherapy in early 1949, recording her progress in a diary. Her motivation was to ‘get myself into a condition to be married’,
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but the more she analysed herself, the more she realised that a life with Marc Brandel would be disastrous. Yet she failed to extract herself from the relationship and, over the next few months, she veered wildly between a desperate wish to be married and the sickening knowledge that if she did so, she would not only destroy him, but herself as well. At the end of March, she feared she was pregnant and took a urine sample into a laboratory for analysis. ‘She was hysterical when she phoned to tell me,’ says Ann Clark. ‘I told her she could always have an abortion – I had had one – but thankfully it never came to that.’
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The two women celebrated her pregnancy-free state with a toast of beer. ‘Amazing how good the world can look in one moment!’ wrote Highsmith in her diary.
¹⁰
She was fitted with diaphragm and although she carried on sleeping with Marc, she told him she would see him only a couple of nights a week, not every evening as he wished; yet the day after this decision she agreed to become officially engaged to him. ‘ “You’d better make up your mind whom you love,” ’ Ann told her, ‘ “because you’re wasting a hell of a lot of valuable time.” ’
¹¹
This inability to chose between lovers would cause Highsmith a great deal of emotional disturbance over the next few years. One of the reasons why she found it so difficult to separate herself from Marc was her idealisation of his intellect; she respected the fact that he was a published writer and no doubt felt a little flattered by his interest in her. Highsmith thought of herself as something other than a woman and the psychological dynamic that attracted them was far more complicated than the male-female roles of a traditional relationship. As both of them were artists, Highsmith liked to think that they existed outside the rules, yet ultimately she would learn that a life lived only in the mind had devastating consequences on the emotions.

     During her forty-seventh, and last, analysis session on 24 May 1949, the therapist advised Highsmith not to attach herself to anyone for the next few months; that way, she wouldn’t feel too disappointed if they rejected her. Pat’s last word on the subject, however, took a more pragmatic view: ‘Bloody angry at having to pay this bill before I leave.’
¹²
Pat’s dream of travelling through Europe had finally materialised and the delights of the Continent beckoned.

Europe, and particularly England, had long since captured Highsmith’s imagination. When she was a teenager she had been moved to tears by George Cukor’s 1935 film
David Copperfield
, and after reading
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
by Thomas Hughes, she felt so inspired she wrote a short composition based on the book. In 1947, she noted, ‘My most persistent obsession – that America is fatally . . . off the mark of the true reality, that the Europeans have it precisely.’
¹³
To her, Europe represented sophistication, reverence of the intellect, the source of mind-expanding philosophies, and, above all, freedom. ‘Expatriates,’ she wrote in 1953, ‘are accused of escaping. They seek, on the contrary.’
¹⁴
Her initial impulse to travel to the Continent probably stemmed from her reading, ‘as nearly all her literary interests were embedded in the works of what the politically correct today characterize as dead white European males,’ says Kingsley. ‘One also should not discount the change of scene, recharging her batteries and the appetite for adventure, the opportunity to experience something completely different.’
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