The Pride of 'The Price of Salt'
Find of the week: the 1986 Naiad Press version of Patricia Highsmith's classic lesbian novel.
In my intro newsletter, I mentioned the magic I feel around finding books (or books finding me). This week, that idea manifested as a 1986 Naiad Press copy of the 1953 lesbian novel The Price of Salt.
Most fans of lesbian fiction are familiar with The Price of Salt through Carol, the Todd Haynes film starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, adapted for the screen by Phyllis Nagy. The name change is significant in the book's story and its author, who, until 1991, was on the covers as “Claire Morgan.” It was somewhat of an open secret among sapphics in the know that Claire Morgan was mystery novelist Patricia Highsmith’s pen name for her one-off lesbian pulp — Jane Rule investigated Highsmith’s involvement in a 1984 story called “Erotic Relationships: The Price of Salt” in The Globe and Mail after Naiad Press saved the novel from obscurity and asked Highsmith if they could publish the book on their feminist lesbian press. The press offered $5k if they could print it under “Patricia Highsmith,” and $2k if she stuck with the pseudonym. She took the $2k, stayed pseudonymous and penned an afterword written October 1983.
“The Price of Salt in 1952 was said to be the first gay book with a happy ending. I am not sure this is absolutely true, as I never checked. However, the letters that poured in after the paperback edition in 1953 were amazing, in number and in content, twelve a day sometimes and for weeks at a stretch. Thank you, most of them said, from girls and boys too, the young and the middle-aged, but mostly the young and painfully shy.”
In the ‘80s, she writes, things had improved for gays but “being a homosexual can still cost a person his or her job,” which hints at her deciding to remain unattached to the book publicly. She goes on to discuss how, 30 years after the novel was set, Therese would be “aware of the gay world since the age of twelve, or at whatever age she realized which way her desires were headed.” But “there will always be Carols in a thousand cities,” who marry young and repress their liberation and lesbianism under parental and societal pressure until coming to the truth.
Reading the afterword now, it’s so clearly Highsmith in her style and tone of optimistic cynicism. She worried that, by then, falling in love had become passé — “old-fashioned, dangerous, even unnecessary.” (For more on Highsmith’s own love and sex life, read Joan Schenkar’s The Talented Miss Highsmith and the late Marijane Meaker’s Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s.)
“The Price of Salt was rejected by the first publisher who saw it, accepted by the second. It had ‘serious and respectable’ reviews for its hard-cover edition. Without further reviews, it was a landslide in paperback, when the advertising was by word of mouth. A lot of people must have identified with Carol or Therese. So a book that was at first rejected came out on top. I am happy to think that it gave several thousand lonely and frightend people something to hang onto.”
It wasn’t until 1990 that she took credit for the book in a British re-issue from Bloomsbury, who retitled the book as Carol. One year later, Highsmith put her name on on another Naiad reprint, whose 1984 version had sold a million copies, just as the original pulp had in 1953. In an afterword written May 24, 1989, Highsmith writes about her inspiration for the novel having come from a moment in her life — a brush with a Carol of her own while working in a department store. Inspired, she went home and jotted down notes for what would eventually take shape as something she wasn’t thrilled to be “categorized.”
“If I were to write a novel about a lesbian relationship, would I then be labeled a lesbian-book witer? That was a possibility,even though I might never be inspired to write another such book in my life. So I decided to offer the book under another name. By 1951, I had written it. I could not push it into the background for ten months and write something else, simply because for commercial reasons it might have been wise to write another ‘suspense’ book.”
Highsmith never did write another “book like this,” as she referred to it in the close of the 1989 afterword (in her diaries, she referred to any further attempts at lesbian fiction as “Girls’ Book”). The late Schenkar’s biography details, among other things, the stress of the homophobia Highsmith faced internally and externally, attempting to publish a lesbian novel in 1950. Pat had substance abuse issues and was, by most accounts, a difficult person to be around. Still, many of Highsmith’s other works can certainly be read as queer (for a great read on gender and sexuality in her work read Rox Samer at the LARB), but it was her refusal to shelve The Price of Salt, her want to keep it alive in the world, that helped to validate lesbian literature and press, and inspire generations of writers to write honest depictions of sapphic longing and relating that didn’t end in disaster. (Now more than ever am I curious to visit the Barbara Grier and Donna McBride Naiad Press Collection in San Francisco, which has at least three folders dedicated to “Claire Morgan’s The Price of Salt” and one for Patricia Highsmith.)
As Bonnie Zimmerman writes on the Naiad version’s back cover, The Price of Salt is “an honest novel about lesbian lives.” (It was also, notably, Highsmith’s only book where no one was murdered.) Jane Rule credits The Price of Salt as having been crucial to her fiction career, including her 1964 novel, Desert of the Heart, becoming a classic and beloved film adaptation of its own.
Pat died in 1995, 20 years before Carol was released in theaters, nominated for Oscars, watched every Christmas. If she had lived long enough to see the Kate McKinnon send-up, the memes, the King Princess song “1950” as inspired by her “Girls’ Book” — her LESBIAN NOVEL — I’d like to believe she’d feel proud rather than resigned to having gotten it out of her system.
I have a lot of Highsmith in my library — her work, work about her, her diaries and journals — but this particular addition to my collection is giving me some real pride, one Patricia to another.
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What a score!!!!!!!!!