Pat's uncompleted other lesbian themed works & TPOS sequel.
Sept 11, 2015 19:25:10 GMT
WaterLu, gchel, and 3 more like this
Post by inparallel on Sept 11, 2015 19:25:10 GMT
I don't know if many of you are familiar with, or have read Andrew Wilson's biography 'Beautiful Shadow: A Life Of Patricia Highsmith'. It's a very thorough biography depicting Pat's life and works and, it's only fair to say, how the two were so often intertwined. Andrew Wilson, just like Joan Schenkar, had access to Pat's journals at the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern while researching Pat. In his book he quite often mentions unfinished works that Highsmith decided to drop along the way. Some of them seemed to include a considerable amount of lesbian content comparable to the Price Of Salt, unlike Small G. Pat also toyed with the idea of writing a possible sequel to The Price of Salt.
I have been meaning to bring this up for a while now so we can share thoughts on the matter.
Here are two passages that touch on the subject at hand. I will write it all down so that those of you who haven't read/don't own Beautiful Shadow will get the proper context.
Bloomsbury paperback edition, page 234, last paragraph. Chapter 19: THE ULTRA NEUROTIC 1960-1961
In may 1960, she thought about writing a sequel to The Price Of Salt, but as she couldn't figure out how to introduce Therese into the narrative, she concluded that it would be better to think up a batch of new characters. Later in the year, in December, she jotted down thoughts on a possible book written under her pseudonym of Claire Morgan. Each of the seven scenarios would outline one of her past relationships. 'Possibly each story told from older & younger point of view,' she said. 'Complete new beginning and end of each.' Then in January 1961, she sketched the basis for an incomplete, unpublished novel to which she originally gave the working title, 'Girls' Book,' before settling on First Person Novel.
The book comprises the letters and diary of Juliette Tallifer Dorn, a forty-one-year-old Philadelphia-born teacher, living in Geneva with her husband, Eric, an electrical engineer and their seventeen-year-old son, Philip John. Juliette is staying in the fictional town of Gemelsbach for the summer, where for two hours a days she its down and writes the history of her homosexual affairs for the benefit of her husband. 'Should I do my life first or tell about the First Girl?' she asks herself. 'My life being not the facts that you know, but the trail, the chain of crushes and loves, amounting to nothing but memories - but such memories!'
Her first love dated back to childhood, when she was six and the the girl, Marjorie, was ten. 'The important fact is that she was a girl, a female,' Highsmith writes. Then aged ten, she had a crush on another girl, Helen, although neither of them touched one another. 'I knew so well the pleasure, through imagination, knew through it's intensity and through some sense I cannot give a name to that it was tabu, unnatural, that I would be punished for it if caught, and possibly scorned by the object of my affection, if I made any advances to her. This was enough to keep me in check.'
Juliette recounts how at eleven, she was browsing through the psychology section of the local library when she came across the word 'lesbian'; the term sent a chill of fear through her body. Three years later, age fourteen, she caught a glimpse of a girl and immediately fell in love with her, an infatuation that lasted for three years. Then when she was sixteen, she attempted to make love with a nineteen-year-old man, an indifferent experience she didn't particularly want to repeat. By the time she was seventeen, and her parents had moved to switzerland, she knew that she was odd. Like Highsmith, Juliette refused to eat, a condition which eventually resulted in low blood pressure and anaemia. At boarding school, she met another girl, Veronica Miniger, who had a long history of sleeping with other women. But although their affair lasted three years, the relationship came to an end when Veronica's mother discovered the truth about her daughter. The short novel ends with a return to the present and a series of letters from Juliette's latest love interest, Penelope Quinn, a twenty-three-year old ballet dancer.
The book, although fictional, clearly had it's base in Highsmith's own life. In fact, throughout the first quarter of 1961, she looked back on her past affairs for inspiration, noting down the initials of her various lovers and how her life had been affected by them. The heroine herself would be based on none other than Ellen Hill, 'with many of her attractive qualities and few of her faults'. The novel, she said, would draw on her friendships with a range of women, including her first girlfriend, Virginia; Helen (the girl at Barnard); Allela Cornell; Virginia Kent Catherwood, 'the inevitable Lilith. Physical pure and simple'; and possibly Chloe, with whom she had travelled to Mexico, 'although she gave me no roots, and I could not write of her as a love with any feeling'. The objective of the book would be, she said, 'to depict the mature woman (in every sense) who cannot keep herself from practising homosexuality, even if for social reasons she would wish to.'
Highsmith, however, only wrote fifty-nine pages of this lesbian novel. In April 1961, just as she was splitting up from Marijane Meaker, she felt compelled to write a story who had even greater resonances for her own life - The Cry Of The Owl, part of which is set in Lambertville, just across the Delaware river from New Hope. The novel takes as its subject matter the warped relationship between a stalker, Robert Forester and his victim, Jenny Thierolf. The opening scene, in which Highsmith describes the thrill of Robert's experiences as he gazes at Jenny in her fairy-tale style house - it bears a remarkable similarity to the Ridgewood home of Kathleen Senn, the woman Pat had served in Bloomingdale's - one gets the impression that Highsmith was writing about her own voyeuristic pleasures eleven years previously.
This second passage talks about another uncompleted novel of Pat's which may or may not have had a plot evocative of lesbianism/homoerotic desire. Everything seems to imply that it has, but as it touches on the delicate subject of schizophrenia, there's no telling what the outcome would have been. At any rate, there's something Therese Belivet-like to the character of Evelyn...
Bloomsbury paperback edition, page 302, last paragraph. Chapter 24: AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY OFFENDER 1969-1970
In april, Pat channelled her feelings of disjointedness and fractured self-identity into the creation of a story about schizophrenia, which she would name 'One is a number you can't divide'. The story centers on the experiences of a young woman, Evelyn, who sees no meaning in life. After breaking off her engagement with her boyfriend, she goes to see a psychiatrist without success, but on the way back from her appointment she meets a mysterious woman, who gives her a reason to carry on. Although 'One is a number you can't divide' was not published during her lifetime, the tale can be seen as an articulation of Highsmith's deep anxieties and psychological conflicts, as well as her undying belief that she might find salvation through the love of another woman. Despite all evidence to the contrary - a string of unhappy affairs and her inability to live intimately with another person - Highsmith forced herself to believe that one day she would find happiness. But like many of her relationships, the source of her solace was illusory, it's existence fragile and transitory. 'My self-esteem has a duration of not more than twenty-four hours,' she said.
Here it is...so what do you people think ? Why was Highsmith unable to go through with any straightforwardly lesbian themed novel after TPOS? We can only speculate as to why that is of course, she pulled the plug on a lot of novels she had begun to plot, or write back then, many with no lesbian content whatsoever. But we know that she suffered from a bit of internal homophobia, so my guess is it might have affected her writing, she struggled with the idea that people might recognize her as the writer of The Price of Salt and it took so long for her to acknowledge that she had indeed done so. It was clearly a part of herself she would have a hard time disclosing in her books.
As for the sequel to The Price Of Salt... I am torn. I'll always want to spend more time with Carol and Therese, so my "starved" self says:
But my cautious self who loves the story from beginning to end wouldn't dare do anything to the magnificent and delicate sandcastle that is this book ! It's unique and not one bit overdone, and in that sense, I'm happy that it didn't get a sequel and at the same time... who am I kidding, I would have enjoyed a sequel !
I have been meaning to bring this up for a while now so we can share thoughts on the matter.
Here are two passages that touch on the subject at hand. I will write it all down so that those of you who haven't read/don't own Beautiful Shadow will get the proper context.
Bloomsbury paperback edition, page 234, last paragraph. Chapter 19: THE ULTRA NEUROTIC 1960-1961
In may 1960, she thought about writing a sequel to The Price Of Salt, but as she couldn't figure out how to introduce Therese into the narrative, she concluded that it would be better to think up a batch of new characters. Later in the year, in December, she jotted down thoughts on a possible book written under her pseudonym of Claire Morgan. Each of the seven scenarios would outline one of her past relationships. 'Possibly each story told from older & younger point of view,' she said. 'Complete new beginning and end of each.' Then in January 1961, she sketched the basis for an incomplete, unpublished novel to which she originally gave the working title, 'Girls' Book,' before settling on First Person Novel.
The book comprises the letters and diary of Juliette Tallifer Dorn, a forty-one-year-old Philadelphia-born teacher, living in Geneva with her husband, Eric, an electrical engineer and their seventeen-year-old son, Philip John. Juliette is staying in the fictional town of Gemelsbach for the summer, where for two hours a days she its down and writes the history of her homosexual affairs for the benefit of her husband. 'Should I do my life first or tell about the First Girl?' she asks herself. 'My life being not the facts that you know, but the trail, the chain of crushes and loves, amounting to nothing but memories - but such memories!'
Her first love dated back to childhood, when she was six and the the girl, Marjorie, was ten. 'The important fact is that she was a girl, a female,' Highsmith writes. Then aged ten, she had a crush on another girl, Helen, although neither of them touched one another. 'I knew so well the pleasure, through imagination, knew through it's intensity and through some sense I cannot give a name to that it was tabu, unnatural, that I would be punished for it if caught, and possibly scorned by the object of my affection, if I made any advances to her. This was enough to keep me in check.'
Juliette recounts how at eleven, she was browsing through the psychology section of the local library when she came across the word 'lesbian'; the term sent a chill of fear through her body. Three years later, age fourteen, she caught a glimpse of a girl and immediately fell in love with her, an infatuation that lasted for three years. Then when she was sixteen, she attempted to make love with a nineteen-year-old man, an indifferent experience she didn't particularly want to repeat. By the time she was seventeen, and her parents had moved to switzerland, she knew that she was odd. Like Highsmith, Juliette refused to eat, a condition which eventually resulted in low blood pressure and anaemia. At boarding school, she met another girl, Veronica Miniger, who had a long history of sleeping with other women. But although their affair lasted three years, the relationship came to an end when Veronica's mother discovered the truth about her daughter. The short novel ends with a return to the present and a series of letters from Juliette's latest love interest, Penelope Quinn, a twenty-three-year old ballet dancer.
The book, although fictional, clearly had it's base in Highsmith's own life. In fact, throughout the first quarter of 1961, she looked back on her past affairs for inspiration, noting down the initials of her various lovers and how her life had been affected by them. The heroine herself would be based on none other than Ellen Hill, 'with many of her attractive qualities and few of her faults'. The novel, she said, would draw on her friendships with a range of women, including her first girlfriend, Virginia; Helen (the girl at Barnard); Allela Cornell; Virginia Kent Catherwood, 'the inevitable Lilith. Physical pure and simple'; and possibly Chloe, with whom she had travelled to Mexico, 'although she gave me no roots, and I could not write of her as a love with any feeling'. The objective of the book would be, she said, 'to depict the mature woman (in every sense) who cannot keep herself from practising homosexuality, even if for social reasons she would wish to.'
Highsmith, however, only wrote fifty-nine pages of this lesbian novel. In April 1961, just as she was splitting up from Marijane Meaker, she felt compelled to write a story who had even greater resonances for her own life - The Cry Of The Owl, part of which is set in Lambertville, just across the Delaware river from New Hope. The novel takes as its subject matter the warped relationship between a stalker, Robert Forester and his victim, Jenny Thierolf. The opening scene, in which Highsmith describes the thrill of Robert's experiences as he gazes at Jenny in her fairy-tale style house - it bears a remarkable similarity to the Ridgewood home of Kathleen Senn, the woman Pat had served in Bloomingdale's - one gets the impression that Highsmith was writing about her own voyeuristic pleasures eleven years previously.
This second passage talks about another uncompleted novel of Pat's which may or may not have had a plot evocative of lesbianism/homoerotic desire. Everything seems to imply that it has, but as it touches on the delicate subject of schizophrenia, there's no telling what the outcome would have been. At any rate, there's something Therese Belivet-like to the character of Evelyn...
Bloomsbury paperback edition, page 302, last paragraph. Chapter 24: AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY OFFENDER 1969-1970
In april, Pat channelled her feelings of disjointedness and fractured self-identity into the creation of a story about schizophrenia, which she would name 'One is a number you can't divide'. The story centers on the experiences of a young woman, Evelyn, who sees no meaning in life. After breaking off her engagement with her boyfriend, she goes to see a psychiatrist without success, but on the way back from her appointment she meets a mysterious woman, who gives her a reason to carry on. Although 'One is a number you can't divide' was not published during her lifetime, the tale can be seen as an articulation of Highsmith's deep anxieties and psychological conflicts, as well as her undying belief that she might find salvation through the love of another woman. Despite all evidence to the contrary - a string of unhappy affairs and her inability to live intimately with another person - Highsmith forced herself to believe that one day she would find happiness. But like many of her relationships, the source of her solace was illusory, it's existence fragile and transitory. 'My self-esteem has a duration of not more than twenty-four hours,' she said.
Here it is...so what do you people think ? Why was Highsmith unable to go through with any straightforwardly lesbian themed novel after TPOS? We can only speculate as to why that is of course, she pulled the plug on a lot of novels she had begun to plot, or write back then, many with no lesbian content whatsoever. But we know that she suffered from a bit of internal homophobia, so my guess is it might have affected her writing, she struggled with the idea that people might recognize her as the writer of The Price of Salt and it took so long for her to acknowledge that she had indeed done so. It was clearly a part of herself she would have a hard time disclosing in her books.
As for the sequel to The Price Of Salt... I am torn. I'll always want to spend more time with Carol and Therese, so my "starved" self says:
But my cautious self who loves the story from beginning to end wouldn't dare do anything to the magnificent and delicate sandcastle that is this book ! It's unique and not one bit overdone, and in that sense, I'm happy that it didn't get a sequel and at the same time... who am I kidding, I would have enjoyed a sequel !
I heartily approve and what fun it would be to read everyone's version of the K. Senn story! 