Some people say you shouldn’t tempt fate,
and for them I cannot disagree,
but I never learned nothing from playin’ it safe, I say fate should not tempt me.

– Mary Chapin Carpenter

There are pinpoints in time that define our lives. To act at those times – to steal that second – is transformative. But the path to transformation is perilous; it can be either glorious or ruinous, or both. One never knows ‘till she tries. The delight is in the act more than in destiny. By that measure, to live is to choose to live as if nothing else mattered.

A worker in a department store performs a routine act but with an esoteric bent. Think of it as a cryptic message launched into the corner reaches of outer space. By Aphrodite’s providence, it elicits a response: I like it that someone sent me a card, someone I didn’t know. Both the delicate act and the daring response tumble together the lives of two women – one a 19-year-old department-store worker and aspiring stage designer, the other a 32-year-old housewife of means – into places so romantic and erotic as to be addictive.

‘The Price of Salt’ is charming, not simply because it delights but also because it casts a spell over its readers. Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) knew how to mix opposites into a powerful literary potion. Her carefully crafted novel makes one’s head spin as the tale moves along a trajectory from innocence to hopelessness to kindness to seduction to ecstasy to treachery to a reality so sobering as to be spiteful. Nonetheless, the journey proves worth the sacrifice. Or does it? That is the question.

To live against one’s grain

My own responses did not count. The way I felt when I became aroused did not count as sex. My attraction to men did not count as love.

- Charles A. Reich, The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef

Before Stonewall or Prozac, there was a “don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t exist!” culture of concealment, a culture characterized by secret living. That cruel culture was the world of American homosexual women and men circa 1952, when ‘The Price of Salt’ was first published under a pseudonym (Claire Morgan). Women, like the young protagonist (Therese Belivet) never approached married women (like her co-protagonist Carol Aird) with passionate queries like Can I kiss you goodnight?

So many taboos, so few chances to breach them. And yet, these two women – at once cautiously secretive and brazenly open – breached them with wild abandon. They took their chances.

‘And now you make a wish,’ Richard said. Therese wished it. She wished for Carol.

That Carol (blonde, slender, mysterious) was like a secret spreading through her. Once Therese experienced her – the magic of her company, her warmth, and her womanhood – there was no returning to the norms and normals of the day. All she could do while working, or living with her pseudo-boyfriend Richard, or doing anything else was to veer off into an imaginary embrace where words like “darling” teased her psyche. It was life on the euphoric edge. How that life thrilled Therese and Carol.

The gap between their ages, their life situations, and their worlds didn’t much matter. Immense as it was, it could be bridged . . . but only if the girders spanned that man-woman divide of relationships. Otherwise, it seemed a bridge that emptied into an abyss.

Above all else, ‘The Price of Salt’ is cautionary tale about what it means to live against one’s grain. Patricia Highsmith’s genius inheres in her ability to dramatize the costs – personal, professional, legal and societal – of self-actualization. To actualize one’s secret hopes against all odds is life-affirming, though typically the attempt proves life-denying. But why? Why, that is, must the yearnings of pure hearts tempt tragedy if they are to be realized? Why must love be closeted? There are reasons and there are reasons . . . however unsatisfactory them all.

To live against one’s grain. It is an apt metaphor. The lines never change no matter how long or deep one cuts. The grain cannot be altered; it can only be damaged or destroyed. Still, we – straights, lesbians, gays, and others – lie to ourselves about the direction of things. We cut against our life grain in the choices we make about life, love, and a host of other things that matter. Every day presents a new opportunity to out ourselves. And yet we defy our life grain. The observation is less a condemnation than a fact of life, one rooted in fears deeply psychological, sociological, and legal.

The psychology & sociology of love

Highsmith [was] a writer fascinated by the concept of split identity.

- Andrew Wilson

Carol kissed her on the lips, and pleasure leaped in Therese again . . . . Her arms were tight around Carol, and she was conscious of Carol and nothing else. And then her body too seemed to vanish in widening circles that leaped further and further, beyond where thought could follow.

Young love has a distinctive feel, a captivating taste, a sensual sound even. It sees life through romantic frames. The senses are on high alert. Passion is the vernacular of the young, virtue that of the old. It is an insight as old as Plato’s ‘Republic.’ The soul turns to moderation only after time has taken its toll. Predictably, the young rebel against the idea of abandoning that restless, hungry feeling, that eros as the ancient Greeks termed it.

Young love is synonymous with risk-taking, with tempting fate. It is that adrenalin rush of flying without a net. The pound of the heart, not the logic of the mind, controls. The raison d'être is the discovery of that other half that will make one whole. Once made whole, the search for love ends. Our culture, our laws, our morality all demand that it end, no matter how mistaken (or impossible) the choice of that “perfect” mate.

Carol Aird’s crime was that she fell in love. Her crime was compounded by the fact that she fell in love with a woman. Worse still, she pursued a young woman. In society’s eyes, this married mother corrupted both herself and her young lover. That men act so is one thing; that women do so is unpardonable. After all, the societal maxim must be obeyed: marriage is the norm and matrimonial mistakes have to be suffered permanently.

Carol refused that fate as a matter of principle and passion. Once she tasted Therese’s forbidden fruit, she could never go back to her hellish marriage with her hellish husband. That choice, however, had its consequences – ones Highsmith teases out of Carol as her heroine bounces back and forth between ecstasy and misery.

In this sense there is something very tantalizing about this novel. Like Tantalus in Greek mythology who could not drink from the waters of a cool lake for fear it would dry up, the love of Therese and Carol is bound up in torture – the closer one gets to one’s desire, the greater the chances that she will be crushed by the rock of reality. Given this, we might understand why the carefree young would follow a tantalizing path, but why in Zeus’ good name would a sober-minded adult chose a highway to Hades?

Answer: the vast majority of us give up on the tantalizing life with all of his perilous pitfalls. Besides, the bliss of young love is hard to recapture, let alone relive. One day we (or most folks) wake up and resign ourselves to a vow of erotic and emotional numbness. We pledge never again to permit our senses to take flight. We become immune to the sent of cologne on a cozy neck; we cease to be enticed by the feel of a warm palm; we even blind ourselves to the sight of endearing irises. We are beyond tantalization.

The aim of such emotional masochism is to rid life of all young-love’s teasing torments. Those amorous touches, adoring glances, and passionate encounters in cars must be outlawed. Safety, security, and asexuality become our triadic code. Life must not be lived today as it was yesterday.

Was Carol Aird psychologically deranged? Was she a mere victim of her own self-imposed tragedy brought on by perilous flirting? Or was she a strong woman who would not bend to the moral hypocrisy of a male-dominated culture determined to preserve its own power? Or was she a bit of all?

Law versus love

You are so headstrong. Creon has forbidden it.

- Ismene to her sister Antigone

For centuries, man-made law has been repelled by the other. Morality typically trumps equality; liberty usually yields to conformity. It is the way of the world. Blacks, Indians, Jews, “Japs,” “Mexicans,” women, gays, and gypsies – take your pick. The others of history have always been forced to endure the cruelty of a morality designed to obliterate them. In the eyes of the world, says Carol, her love for Therese is an abomination. And what is abominable must be abolished. That is where the law enters into the story.

‘The Price of Salt’ portrays evil through various portals. Perhaps the worst of them all is how the law serves to legitimate malice against life’s others. The tragedy of this novel – the terrifying choices a woman must make if she is to love another woman – is how the law can so readily be invoked to crush the human spirit. It is always there to put the other in her place or, if need be, to cast her out of everyplace. Highsmith put it painfully: the lawyers had been able to break her, to force her to do exactly what they wanted her to do.

It is easy to forget: the law is not some impersonal deus ex machina power. Rather, it is the force of one will over another. Humanity, by contrast, is measured by the extent to which we temper that force by toleration. It is gauged by the degree to which we make the law a humane servant instead of a brutal force. What happens in ‘The Price of Salt’ is a classic example (reminiscent of Sophocles’ ‘Antigone?’) of what can go terribly wrong when law is unleashed in the service of men hell bent on imposing their will on the powerless.

‘The Price of Salt’ was written at a time when divorce law, like other laws, was hostile to women. For all of the sexist jokes to the contrary, it was a body of law that could be tapped to terrify women who did not stay cowered in their societal mold. Hence, when Carol flirted with Therese, she flirted with her own demise. No matter that the wheels of her divorce had previously been placed in motion. The majesty of the law could, nonetheless, be used to ruin her life and that of her lover.

Is there only law and no justice in such a world? It is an old question that can never be raised enough.

Patricia Highsmith’s brilliance can be sensed not only in her disturbing depictions of mankind or in her perceptive portrayals of evil, but in her uncanny ability to discover love in the crevices of our consciousnesses, where against all odds, a bounteous acceptance of the other abides. By transforming that other into us, Highsmith turns the personal into the political. “We the People” thus signifies every loving one of us, no matter whom we love . . . or marry. And when once the other becomes we, law and justice follow. That is the lesson of equality.

The Killing of Georgie

How would [her] world come back to life? How would its salt come back?

– Patricia Highsmith

I’m sitting in a café somewhere falling into the digital depths of my iPod. Rod Stewart’s “The Killing of Georgie” enters my consciousness. As I listen to this distressing song about a gay life gone tragically awry, I pause and look at these words: I never wrote another book like this – Patricia Highsmith, 24 May 1989.

The confession bewilders. Was ‘The Price of Salt’ some kind of literary drive-by? Fate forbid! There had to be more; there had to be some sequel with yet more passion, more insight, and more direction. The end of this novel could not be the end.[1]

Just as it is natural to want more of great writers when they offer none, so, too, it is natural to want them to stay perched on their pedestals. For example, we do not want to know about Highsmith’s ugly secrets. Similarly, we do not want to know that the real-life Carol [2], who first inspired the novel but who never actually knew Highsmith and was not gay, committed suicide shortly before ‘The Price of Salt’ was published. A strange and depressing irony – one of which Highsmith was unaware.

Back at the café, Stewart’s words echo in my ears: You live some, and you lose some. Is that, then, the moral of this story? We must lose some Carols and Georgies to senseless and cruel fates? I’m really not sure if Highsmith’s “happy ending” answer is whimsical or insightful; but it is hopeful. Still, it is a hope paid with a price.

If only the price of salt were not so high.

[2] Virginia Kent Catherwood was the other woman who was the inspiration for the Carol character.

Ron Collins is a writer who lives in Maryland. His last book (with David Skover) was The Trials of Lenny Bruce (Sourcebooks, 2002). His next book (with Sam Chaltain) is We Must Not Be Afraid to be Free (Oxford Univ. Press, 2006). He is also working on a novel, tentatively titled Mother’s Day.

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.