Patricia Highsmith's biographer on why the author's obsession with married women didn't lead to a happy ending
It has met with with a flurry of five star reviews, been hailed a work of art, and even prompted headlines about the supposed sapphic past of its star, Cate Blanchett. Carol is already Oscar-tipped, and the much-hyped film is taking audiences by storm.
But behind this cinematic adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s tale of a lesbian affair in Fifties New York lies a real life story of love and loss. For like one of the film’s central characters, Highsmith herself had a penchant for married women. Her novel, Carol, is an extended love letter to some of the “heterosexual” women she had fallen for.
“All my life work will be an undedicated monument to a woman,” she wrote in her diary in 1942, 10 years before the publication of The Price of Salt, which she penned under a pseudonym before it was finally republished under her own name as Carol in 1990.
The film, directed by Todd Haynes and with a screenplay by Phyllis Nagy, tells the story of the relationship between a young shop girl Therese (Rooney Mara) and a beautiful married sophisticate, Carol (Blanchett). It recounts how the two women fall in love at a time when, in a United States gripped by McCarthyism, same-sex desire was considered not only pathological but anti-American too.
When Highsmith’s book was published in 1952, it was considered to be one of the first novels with a gay theme that had a happy ending. At the time, homosexuals in fiction, Highsmith wrote, “had to pay for their deviation by cutting their wrists, drowning themselves in a swimming pool, or by switching to heterosexuality … or by collapsing - alone and miserable and shunned - into a depression equal to hell.”
Highsmith - who was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, and also wrote The Talented Mr Ripley (published 1955) - took many of the novel’s key elements from her own life. In December 1948, two years before the publication of her first novel, Strangers on a Train, the writer found herself so hard up she had to take a temporary job in the toy department of Bloomingdale’s (the model for the depressing fictional department store Frankenberg’s).
One day, a stunning older woman dressed in a mink coat walked into the shop and bought a doll for one of her daughters, leaving behind her name and delivery details. That night, in a white heat of inspiration, Highsmith went home and wrote out the plot for the novel.
“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.”
As she worked on the novel, she relived one of her most passionate love affairs, with the wealthy American socialite Virginia Kent Catherwood, whom she had first met in New York in 1944. The daughter of A. Atwater Kent, the inventor and radio manufacturer, Virginia had led a gilded life of finishing schools and high society parties. Her debutante ball, in December 1933, was said to be the most lavish party
Philadelphia had seen since since the Depression. Her wedding to the rich banker Cummins Catherwood in Bryn Mawr was extensively covered by the newspapers, and on return from honeymoon the couple lived in a 20-room mansion equipped with garaging for four cars and a swimming pool. Although the couple had a daughter, the romance was short lived, and they divorced in April 1941.
It seems Cummins discovered - and was appalled by - his wife’s homosexuality. As Ann Clark, one of Highsmith’s other lovers, wrote to me when I was researching my biography, “Pat only told me the story once, but apparently Virginia lost custody of her child after a recording made in a hotel room and exposing a lesbian affair was played in court. Of course there is something of this tale in The Price of Salt.”
Indeed, as Highsmith wrote the book, she became increasingly anxious there were too many parallels between Virginia and the character Carol Aird. “I worry that Ginnie may feel Carol’s case too similar to her own,” she noted in her diary in 1950.
Highsmith’s relationship with Virginia only lasted for a year, between 1946 and 1947, but the liaison was intense. The rich, glamorous woman gave her a “oneness” and a “timelessness” that allowed her to enter into a fertile state of creativity, she said. She was, Highsmith wrote in her journals, the “other half of the universe”, and “together we make a whole.”
However, when the relationship broke down - Virginia was an even heavier drinker than Pat and would sometimes attack her with her fists - Highsmith was left feeling psychologically disturbed. “I am troubled by a sense of being several people,” she wrote. “Should not be at all surprised if I become a dangerous schizophrenic in my middle years.”
For six months from November 1948, Highsmith underwent a course of therapy to “get myself into a condition to be married,” as she had started a relationship with the novelist Marc Brandel, son of the British writer John Davys Beresford. The therapy - destined to failure - cost $30 a week, about half the total she was earning from her job penning comic books, and so she had to take a position at Bloomingdale’s in New York.
It was here that Highsmith glimpsed a glamorous married woman, Kathleen Senn, who also inspired the character of Carol. The writer became so obsessed with this mysterious figure that she took a train out to the woman’s house in New Jersey. “For the curious thing yesterday, I felt quite close to murder too,” she wrote, “as I went to see the woman who almost made me love her when I saw her a moment in December, 1948.”
In June 1949, after the breakdown of the relationship with Brandel, Highsmith travelled to Europe to stay at the London home of her British publisher Dennis Cohen, founder of the Cresset Press. Here, Pat fell in love with Dennis’s beautiful wife, Kathryn, who worked as a doctor at St George’s Hospital. Sophisticated and intelligent, Kathryn had been born in America and had worked both as an actress and, briefly, as Aneurin Bevan’s secretary.
During a two-week stay at the Cohens’ house in Old Church Street, Chelsea, Highsmith confessed to her about her tumultuous emotional life and her perceived hormonal problems. “If you were added up,” Kathryn told her, “I think you’d have a little more on the male side - from your reactions to men I mean.”
From London, Highsmith travelled to Paris, and then Italy, from where she wired Kathryn begging for her to join her. The two women met in Naples in September 1949, where they embarked on a short affair. “I feel I am in love with her, really,” Highsmith wrote in her diary after she had returned to America, “as I have not been with anyone, anything like this, since Ginnie.” The relationship, she knew, was doomed - Kathryn returned to her husband, and later, in early 1960, the 54-year-old woman killed herself by taking an overdose of barbiturates.
Suicide and premature death haunted Highsmith’s life like a dark spectre. One lover, Allela Cornell, drank nitric acid, suffering a long and painful death in 1946. In 1953, Highsmith left another lover, Ellen Hill, to attempt suicide after a blazing row (Hill lapsed into a coma but survived).
Following sporadic treatment for her alcoholism, Virginia Kent Catherwood died in 1966 at the age of 51. And, perhaps most poignantly of all, Kathleen Senn - the woman whom Highsmith glimpsed in Bloomingdale’s - killed herself by carbon monoxide poisoning in the garage of her home in October 1951.
Initially, Highsmith envisioned the ending of The Price of Salt to be tragic, with Therese and Carol parting and leading separate lives. But then she showed her agent a more positive version and was persuaded to go with the alternative, in which the women get back together.
Highsmith was conscious of the irony that, while in fiction she could imagine a positive ending for her characters, in real life she had no such luck herself. As she wrote in her diary in early 1951, “Oh, I write a book with a happy ending, but what happens when I find the right person?”
The author - who died in 1995, at the age of 74 - continued to enjoy relationships with a number of women, some of whom were married, throughout her life. Yet these liaisons were defined as much by their underlying tensions and sense of psychological unease as by their passions. “O who am I?” she wrote in her notebook in 1951. “Reflections only in the eyes of those who love me.”
Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith by Andrew Wilson is published by Bloomsbury, £10.99. To order your copy call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk. Carol is in cinemas now