Hissy Cat

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March 31, 2006

The Price Of Salt

I know it's early for for the Paperback of the Week, but since Maud pointed yesterday to an exhibit of Patricia Highsmith's life taking place in Switzerland I thought it would be an opportune moment to share one my favorite lesbian pulp novels-- one of my favorite novels, period-- with anyone who happens to be reading.

Patricia Highsmith wrote The Price of Salt in 1950 and published it in 1951 under the pen name Clare Morgan. It is a strange, beautiful novel; a romance about two women, and a suspence novel, too. It is deliciously moody and strange. I wrote a blurb about Price of Salt on Wikipedia, if you'd like more background info (be kind-- I wrote it either right after or right before I was finishing my thesis, so I was totally cracked out and my spelling is totally cracked out. Also, I just checked that outside link-- which I so did not add-- and it leads to the dumbest review/ essay I have ever read ever. Please don't read it. It will only discourage you/ make you sad.) There are no murderers, but there is a private detective and a cross-country chase and all kinds of issues about identity.

The Price of Salt is one of the four novels I covered in my thesis on lesbian pulps (the other three were Spring Fire, Odd Girl Out, and The Girls in 3-B). This sounds really corny, but I got really attached to Carol and Therese. I lived with them day in and day out for so very long. I miss them.

On a side note, the article Maud linked to I found to be very, very strange. It's titled, first of all, "Patricia Highsmith's secret life revealed." And then there's this:

"We didn't know until now how intense or excessive her love life was when she was young," Ulrich Weber, the curator in charge of the author's literary archive, told swissinfo.

"She experienced her homosexuality and didn't suppress it, as was the case for her fictitious hero, Tom Ripley."

"Excessive"? I find that to be a rather odd remark for a biographer to make about a subject. Or anyone. In any event, Highsmith made no secret of her sexual preferences. In the introduction Highsmith wrote to the Naiad Press reissue of The Price of Salt in 1986 that comes across pretty clearly (I don't know if this essay is included in the 2004 WW Norton reissue of the Price of Salt, which was released under the name Patricia Highsmith, because I don't own and haven't had a chance to take a look, but if not try to get your hand on the old Naiad edition. They're still around in used bookshops and they have that essay which provides some interesting publication history.) Descripitions of her in her youth paint her as a WASPish, butch lesbian. She lived in Greenwich Village, frequented dyke bars, and vacationed on Fire Island. I once heard a radio interview in which Marijane Meaker, a lover of Highsmith's and the author of the lesbian pulp Spring Fire, the memoir Highsmith: A Romance of the Fifties, described Pat as looking like Prince Valiant. It's hard for me to understand what the curator is finding so surprising unless it just never occured to him that even in the 1950s lesbians had lesbian sex.

The article also says nothing about her rabid anti-semitism and racism. I love Highsmith's writing. I think she is a fascinating artist, but she was, by all accounts a very difficult person.

But she also loved her cats.

Posted by hissycat at March 31, 2006 04:16 AM

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