'Carol', Patricia Highsmith, and How Gay Literature Found Its Voice in The 1950s - Features - Culture - The Independent

7/12/2015
'Carol',PatriciaHighsmith,andhowgayliteraturefounditsvoiceinthe1950s|Features|Culture|TheIndependent
Culture Books Features
'Carol', Patricia Highsmith, and how gay

literature found its voice in the 1950s
Patricia Highsmith's lesbian romance novel 'Carol', now a successful film, was
published in 1952and marked the point when gay relationships in literature
tentatitively started to step out of the shadows.
Boyd Tonkin | @indyvoices | 4 hours ago | 0 comments
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Subtexts: Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett (left) in 'Carol'
When the 2016 season for glitzy film awards gets under way, the
http://www.independent.co.uk/artsentertainment/books/features/carolpatriciahighsmithandhowgayliteraturefounditsvoiceinthe1950sa6763846....
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hosts might consider a special set-design honour for the New

York department stores of the early 1950s. Might the gong for
best period emporium go to Bartocci's, where Saoirse Ronan in
Brooklyn hesitantly adjusts to metropolitan life after arriving off
the boat from Ireland, or to Frankenberg's, where a chance
encounter with Cate Blanchett at the toy counter seals the fate of
Rooney Mara's forlorn salesgirl in Carol? Those films from John
Crowley and Todd Haynes respectively are both tipped,
alongside their stars, for a whole display-cabinet's worth of
trophies. Yet they have much more in common than settings that
evoke, rather brilliantly, the tense and regimented rituals of the
new mass affluence in postwar America.
Most obviously, both films adapt books by gay novelists that
one at the time, the other from a distance of more than half a
century
investigate the life-changing passions that can smash
every neatly dressed shop window of social conformity. Patricia

Highsmith's Carol was published in 1952, the year that Colm
Tibn's heroine migrates from County Wexford. True, Tibn's
heroine Eilis Lacey must
merely
defy family piety and acute
homesickness in order to pursue her romance with an ItalianAmerican plumber, whereas Highsmith's Therese Belivet and
Carol Aird play for higher stakes, against steeper odds.
At the time, mothers accused of lesbian affairs in divorce

proceedings
as happens to Carol
risked the loss of any access
to their children. But Eilis too will lose a kind of home

roots that still tug hard
and Irish
by following her heart. In different
keys, the books and films measure the quiet earthquake of a rebel
love in an anxious time. Both insist that the ultimate sin is, in the
words of a letter Carol writes to her beloved Therese,
to live
against one's grain .
For a writer such as Tibn or a film-maker like Haynes, those

years of the early 1950s have a silken and shadowy allure.
Undergraduate clichs about the transgressive relationship that
subverts a climate of repression will hardly pin it down. Rather,
this is a time when, in fiction in particular, desire and discretion
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News
Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons in 'Brideshead Revisited' (Rex)
walk hand in hand. Not only does the love that dared not speak
its name gradually find a voice. Sometimes, that voice can carry
quite a way.
Carol, first published as The Price of Salt two years after her
debut novel Strangers on a Train, saw the light of day under the
pseudonym of
Claire Morgan . Alfred Hitchcock's film of her
identity-swap thriller had already appeared. To many readers,
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Highsmith's debut carries its own homoerotic subtext
as does
her later classic of murder as a sub-species of romance, The

Talented Mr Ripley. But agents and publishers feared that she
had much to lose by confinement in a gay enclave. Hence the
pseudonym. Still, The Price of Salt triumphed, garnering rave
reviews. According to Highsmith, writing in 1989, a later
paperback edition
sold nearly a million copies . For years
afterwards, grateful fan mail flooded in to
Claire Morgan , from
men as much as women.
Crucially, Carol and Therese's love has a future. Above all, the
happy ending won the devotion of her correspondents.
this book,
its author wrote,
Prior to
homosexuals, male and female, in
American novels had to pay for their deviation by cutting their

wrists, drowning themselves in a swimming pool, or by
switching to heterosexuality . Lesbian pulp fiction thrived, but it

could stay safe from US obscenity laws only if its hapless
heroines met one of those fates.
In Britain, meanwhile, Radclyffe Hall's landmark lesbian

romance The Well of Loneliness
prosecution in 1928
victim of a notorious
re-emerged without hindrance in 1949. An
author such as Mary Renault could, before she turned to the

homoerotic adventures in Ancient Greece that made her a
bestseller, deal fairly frankly with gay themes in The Charioteer
(1953). At that moment, it helped to have a protagonist, like
Renault's Laurie Odell, whose war service put him beyond
puritan reproach. A good war opened doors, and raised defences.
The patrician Gore Vidal's naval exploits grew him an extra skin
when his gay novel The City and the Pillar scandalised
moralising critics in 1948. In contrast, the thoroughly
marginalised James Baldwin, black and gay, sought freedom in
exile in Paris
and put it to trail-blazing use with Giovanni's
Room in 1956.
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Jude Law and Matt Damon in 'The Talented Mr Ripley'
On this side of the ocean, the great English art of Higher

Euphemism continued to bloom. In 1945, Evelyn Waugh could
make Charles and Sebastian's affair the fulcrum of Brideshead
Revisited while leaving enough wriggle-room to make denials of
physical intimacy just about plausible. From Angus Wilson's
Hemlock and After (1952) to Iris Murdoch's The Bell (1958), a
succession of major novels opened the closet door, inch by inch.
Lifelong bliss might have been in short supply (as for
conventionally married couples in the era's fiction). Still, plenty
of protagonists managed to avoid either suicide or conversion. A
lyrical sub-genre of the homoerotic English pastoral bore fruit in
the works of Denton Welch. Post-war reticence framed his work,
but not outright repression. Writing about Welch, his admirer
Alan Bennett remarked that
By the 1960s, it's not only the
Nissen huts that have gone, but an innocence too.
Innocence need not mean ignorance. Gay-themed stories of the

1950s often blossom in the hazily-defined margin between
speech and silence, candour and concealment. In literature, as in
life, prejudice still mandated prudence. Through the early 1950s,
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an anti-homosexual pogrom led by Home Secretary Sir David

Maxwell Fyfe caught high-profile figures such as John Gielgud
and Lord Montagu in its web of prosecutions. In the arts, any
lapse into sexual explicitness still risked the wrath of magistrates
although, in 1959, the newly passed Obscene Publications Act
offered the defence of literary merit.
For all the persecution, the forces of tolerance grew in strength.

With only one dissenting voice, the Establishment paladins of
the Wolfenden Committee recommended in 1957 that
homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private
should no longer be a criminal offence . Even in 1954, Lord

Montagu had been sentenced to 12 months' imprisonment, but
left court to find a cheering crowd outside. In its modest fashion,
the English novel of gay life tiptoed through the Fifties with
steadily-rising confidence. Look at the output of the prolific
Francis King, and you will find circumspection
but not
cowardice.
Gay writers also drew obliquely on their own experience to

fashion romances between star-crossed heterosexual lovers
divided by class, by background, or by a wedding ring. By 1945,
this genre of smouldering passion doused by duty and
convention had reached the steam-fogged perfection of David
Lean's Brief Encounter
drawn from a play by Noel Coward,
Still Life. Coward was not the only gay master of the doomed
straight affair. The whispered anguish of stricken couples
underpins the plays of Terence Rattigan, from The Deep Blue
Sea to Separate Tables. In the latter work, Rattigan had in a first
draft intended that his disgraced Major Pollock should have
ruined himself with young men rather than women.
Back in the US, the anti-Communism of the McCarthy era

widened its net to draw in gay victims
labelled as blackmail
risks or even innate conspirators. In 1950, an investigation led to

the expulsion of 91 gay employees from the State Department.
Yet in the film of Carol, as in Highsmith's life, it was policing by
psychiatry that posed a more immediate threat to the self-
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determination of homosexual women. In the movie, Carol agrees

to a course of psychotherapy to
cure
her of her love and so
safeguard some access to her daughter. In the late 1940s,

Highsmith herself underwent more than 30 psychoanalytic
sessions in New York. For a while, she wished to marry Britishborn writer Marc Brandel, and swallowed the orthodoxy that
such therapy might make her
normal .
It was this pointless rigmarole that indirectly led to The Price of

Salt. In December 1948, the hard-up fledgling author took a job
at Bloomingdale's department store to help pay for her sessions
with the analyst Eva Klein Lipshutz. There, in the toy
department during the Christmas rush, she briefly talked to a
sophisticated older blonde who wanted a doll for her daughter.
That night, Highsmith sketched the story of the novel, which
flowed from my pen as if from nowhere . The mysterious
blonde had left an address. In June 1950, Highsmith took a bus to

the New Jersey suburb where her unknown muse lived: not to
meet, but to observe. Her diary records that she felt
like a murderer in a novel . She went back to stalk
quite odd
Carol , but
never talked to her.
Out of that obsession came a timeless account of an affair that

defies contempt and constraint. It proved that, even in early
1950s, same-sex love could be imagined without a punitive or
tragic denouement. Besides, that place and time bred
unhappiness
especially for women
in various guises. For his
wonderfully illuminating biography of Highsmith, Beautiful

Shadow, Andrew Wilson tracked down the original
Carol . Her
daughter remembered Mrs Kathleen Senn Richardson of

Ridgewood, New Jersey as
of anything , but also as an
incredibly self-sufficient, not afraid
alcoholic ,
in and out of psychiatric
hospitals . What demons of 1950s discontent stalked Kathleen?

Highsmith never knew. Neither, although she lived until 1995,
did the author of Carol ever discover that its coolly elegant
inspiration had, on 30 October 1951, closed her garage doors and
switched on the engine of her car .
Carol
was dead before
Carol ever lived.
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More about: | Patricia Highsmith | Carol | Brideshead Revisited |

Colm Tibn | Cate Blanchett | Noel Coward
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7/12/2015

Culture Books Features

'Carol', Patricia Highsmith, and how gay

Subtexts: Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett (left) in 'Carol'

hosts might consider a special set-design honour for the New

Most obviously, both films adapt books by gay novelists that

investigate the life-changing passions that can smash

every neatly dressed shop window of social conformity. Patricia

defy family piety and acute

At the time, mothers accused of lesbian affairs in divorce

risked the loss of any access

to their children. But Eilis too will lose a kind of home

by following her heart. In different

against one's grain .

For a writer such as Tibn or a film-maker like Haynes, those

Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons in 'Brideshead Revisited' (Rex)

Claire Morgan . Alfred Hitchcock's film of her

identity-swap thriller had already appeared. To many readers,

Highsmith's debut carries its own homoerotic subtext

her later classic of murder as a sub-species of romance, The

sold nearly a million copies . For years

afterwards, grateful fan mail flooded in to

Claire Morgan , from

men as much as women.

its author wrote,

homosexuals, male and female, in

American novels had to pay for their deviation by cutting their

switching to heterosexuality . Lesbian pulp fiction thrived, but it

In Britain, meanwhile, Radclyffe Hall's landmark lesbian

re-emerged without hindrance in 1949. An

author such as Mary Renault could, before she turned to the

and put it to trail-blazing use with Giovanni's

Jude Law and Matt Damon in 'The Talented Mr Ripley'

On this side of the ocean, the great English art of Higher

By the 1960s, it's not only the

Nissen huts that have gone, but an innocence too.

Innocence need not mean ignorance. Gay-themed stories of the

an anti-homosexual pogrom led by Home Secretary Sir David

although, in 1959, the newly passed Obscene Publications Act

offered the defence of literary merit.

For all the persecution, the forces of tolerance grew in strength.

homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private

should no longer be a criminal offence . Even in 1954, Lord

Gay writers also drew obliquely on their own experience to

drawn from a play by Noel Coward,

Back in the US, the anti-Communism of the McCarthy era

risks or even innate conspirators. In 1950, an investigation led to

determination of homosexual women. In the movie, Carol agrees

her of her love and so

safeguard some access to her daughter. In the late 1940s,

It was this pointless rigmarole that indirectly led to The Price of

flowed from my pen as if from nowhere . The mysterious

blonde had left an address. In June 1950, Highsmith took a bus to

like a murderer in a novel . She went back to stalk

never talked to her.

Out of that obsession came a timeless account of an affair that

especially for women

in various guises. For his

wonderfully illuminating biography of Highsmith, Beautiful

daughter remembered Mrs Kathleen Senn Richardson of

of anything , but also as an

incredibly self-sufficient, not afraid