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Alter Ego

Part 1

What, they’re all Jewish, Superheroes. Superman, you don’t think he’s Jewish? Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself.

—Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay

Before Patricia Highsmith wrote “Strangers on a Train” for Alfred Hitchcock, she wrote “Jap Buster Johnson” for me.

—Vince Fago, editor, Timely comics¹

During the three spring months of 1940 when Pat, nineteen years old and still a live-at-home sophomore at Barnard College, was rereading the Dostoyevsky novel she’d relished at thirteen (Crime and Punishment), refreshing herself with André Gide’s seducible adolescents in The Counterfeiters, criticizing Henry James’s The Ambassadors as “overconfident,” casting a competitive eye on the works of Malraux, Nietzsche, Hardy, Mansfield, Dickens, Molière, Goethe, and Dreiser, and deciding that because of her books she had “the whole world” at hand, “[e]ven with all my greed,”² she was also writing this interesting little sentence in her cahier:

“My father is a cartoon of me.”³

Besides teaching high school art in Texas for many years, the shadowy J. B. Plangman—more like a family ghost than a biological father—eked out a living by drawing cartoons for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Something about Jay B’s cartooning seems to have influenced his only child’s entry into the world of comic books. One clue to the connection is how quiet Pat kept about both subjects—her father and the comics; promising herself to “make a serious effort at psychoanalysing my relationship with my father” but instead burying J. B. Plangman “under 6 feet of dull roadbed.” Six feet under was only slightly deeper than she buried the truth about her seven years’ employment as a scriptwriter for comic books during the Golden Age of American Comics.

Still, in early 1940s Manhattan, if you had to pick an apprenticeship with pay for a young writer whose attractions to secrecy, shame, and hero-worship were as all-consuming as Pat Highsmith’s, you couldn’t do better than to choose a job in the comic book business. Comic books were not only at the center of America’s most successful publishing industry, they were also, if you were hoping to be a serious writer, the source of some highly embarrassing employment. And the entire comics milieu—authors, illustrators, publishers, and the improbable characters they were creating—was alive with the same collection of crooks and cons, artists with secret identities and heroes with Alter Egos, with which the talented Miss Highsmith would later populate so much of her fiction.

Decades after she’d stopped writing for the comics, when she was relatively rich and famous and living in Europe, Pat used to respond to the question all authors dread to hear—“And where do get your ideas from, Miss Highsmith?”—by saying that her ideas often came to her “out of thin air.” In the year Pat graduated from Barnard College, 1942, one of the airs du temps blowing through New York City was the secret and often illegal excitements surrounding America’s newest art form, the comic book.

Like millions of American teenagers in the early 1940s, Everett Raymond Kinstler, a polite, good-looking boy with a talent for drawing portraits, was crazy for comic books. Everett was an honors student at the High School of Music and Art in New York City, where his teachers did their best to discourage his taste for popular culture. “That’s not really art,” they reminded him in a slightly elevated version of the lesson parents all over the country were trying to drill into the skulls of their comics-addicted children.

But Everett’s ambitions extended beyond just reading the garish little picture books whose narratives-in-dialogue ballooned above their heroes’ heads, so, shortly before his sixteenth birthday in August of 1943, he answered an ad—it would have been something like the ad for a “writer/research” job that an attractive, desperate-for-work English major from Barnard College had successfully answered six months earlier⁴—for “apprentice inker” at an outfit called Cinema Comics at 10 West Forty-fifth Street in Manhattan. Cinema was one of the many companies producing comic books for the Sangor-Pines comics shop (others were Better, Standard, Cinema, Michel, America’s Best, and Exciting) and Cinema’s office was in the Sangor-Pines headquarters. All of the Cinema comic books were written, lettered, and illustrated (but not lithographed or printed) in the office at West Forty-fifth Street.⁵

“Nowadays,” says Ray Kinstler, the name under which Everett Raymond Kinstler grew up to become one of America’s most prominent portrait painters, “people are impressed that I did Zorro and The Hawkman and The Shadow, but in the 30’s and 40’s…” And here Kinstler repeats what every comics artist, writer, and historian of the Golden Age of American Comics (1938–1954) told me: comic book creators were looked down on as lowly laborers in a deeply disreputable business.

Just how comic books were generally regarded is made clear in this excerpt from an editorial in the Chicago Daily News published on 8 May 1940:

Badly drawn, badly written, badly printed—a strain on the young eyes and nervous systems—the effects of these pulp-paper nightmares is that of a violent stimulant. Their crude blacks and reds spoil a child’s natural sense of color; their hypodermic injections of sex and murder make the child impatient with better, though quieter, stories.⁶

Quality fiction writers were almost as dismissive of the comics as exasperated parents and crusading journalists. In her witty roman à clef about the New York publishing world of the 1940s, The Locusts Have No King (1948), Dawn Powell makes her reticent, scholarly, Greenwich Village–dwelling protagonist transform a vulgar magazine called HAW into a commercial success by commissioning artists from the comics (“Al Capp or Caniff”) to illustrate plots from classic novels.⁷ For Powell, a brilliant social satirist (Gore Vidal called her the “American Thackeray”), “comics” was a code word for ethical and aesthetic decay.

Still, young Everett Kinstler was thrilled when he got that job at Cinema Comics. He was hired by the respected Sangor-Pines editor Richard E. Hughes, the same editor who had hired the attractive Barnard College graduate the previous winter. Mr. Hughes was married to Ned Pines’s daughter (Ned Pines was half owner of the company), and Ned Pines was married to Ben Sangor’s daughter (Ben Sangor owned the other half of the company). The comics were nothing if not tribal.

“Hughes,” says Kinstler, had “a habit of smoking his pipe at the office, a very rubbery lower lip, and the kind of face I like to paint because it had character.” Hughes hired Everett to help ink in comic book “pencils,” the draft drawings made by the “pencillers,” at “fifteen dollars a week, five days a week, a half day on Saturday.” It was big money for a teenager in an era when “lunch was twenty-five cents.” By the end of the year, Everett was earning thirty dollars a week.⁸

When Everett started work, one of “the main comics at Cinema was Fighting Yank,” a Superhero with a blue-blooded, eighteenth-century Alter Ego and a bland, socially leveraged, Anglo-Saxon name: Bruce Carter III. Whenever Bruce Carter III was in trouble, “a mighty figure would appear out of America’s past [wearing, with unfortunate effect, a hat like a portobello mushroom].” It was Bruce Carter I, the Fighting Yank himself: Bruce III’s Revolutionary War hero “ancestor” and Alter Ego.⁹

One of Fighting Yank’s writers—she was typing away in the writers’ bullpen the day Everett was hired—was the twenty-two-year-old Barnard girl Richard Hughes had hired the previous December. She had been taken on to replace a comics writer who was on his way to becoming a distinguished theater and film critic. The writer’s name was Stanley Kauffmann. The Barnard girl was Patricia Highsmith.¹⁰

Sixty years later, Ray Kinstler had a specific, portrait painter’s memory of Pat:

Physically, Pat was deceptive; she had a bony figure, a little bit like Katharine Hepburn, and she must have looked taller than she really was. She had cheekbones. [And Kinstler describes the precise points of Pat’s dark pageboy falling below her ears, the way her hair was loosely parted and lay flat across the top of her head, and her habit of chain-smoking in the office.] She was a type. A lanky, scrubbed type. An American college girl type. I could have pictured her at Smith College.

Patricia reminded me of Spencer Tracy’s remark about Kate Hepburn in a film. Someone had called Hepburn “kinda skinny” and Tracy came back with “Yeah, but what there is is cheerce” [choice].

Sixteen-year-old Everett “had a teenager, heavy crush on Patricia…. I would have done anything for her. In the beginning it was Miss Highsmith this and Miss Highsmith that. ‘Oh, Miss Highsmith, could I do this for you or could I get that for you?’ Later on it was Patricia or Pat. And I think she tolerated me good-naturedly.”

And Kinstler remembers just how Pat’s assignments at Sangor-Pines were determined: they were the result of an exchange between the writer and her editor, Richard E. Hughes.

Hughes would commission a script: ‘Here’s an idea for The Fighting Yank, Patricia. I want one dealing with Nazis and submarines.’ Or Hughes would say: ‘Here’s a three-page insert on the WACS or the WAVES.’ And Pat would have to come up with a synopsis or a scenario [and eventually] come back with a script. Hughes was a very nice man, very gentle, supportive and understanding, and he would do some minor editing on the script. And the script would then be turned over to the artists in the bullpen who would balloon it with six or eight panels to a page, usually six. The opening page would sometimes be doubled out into a splash page [the illustrated title page which introduces comic book stories]. Sometimes the squares would be broken up into vignettes.¹¹

One afternoon, Pat, usually so taciturn at the office, managed to express the desire to drink a Coca-Cola at her desk. Young Everett gallantly offered to bring her the soft drink “from the luncheonette downstairs. She gave me a nickel and I returned with a Pepsi-Cola.” Deeply pleased with his resourcefulness, Everett proudly “told Patricia the Pepsi-Cola was the same price as the Coke but had a few more ounces.”

Pat’s response struck the boy like a blow.

“When you get older, Everett,” Pat said in a coolly measured phrase he never forgot, “you will buy for quality, not quantity.”¹²

Pat’s remark about “quality” had a painful history behind it and an ambitious future in front of it.

For six nervous months after she graduated from Barnard College in June of 1942, and for some years thereafter, Patricia Highsmith failed to be hired by every one of the “quality” magazines to which, like any enterprising literature major, she’d applied for work. Despite impressive recommendations from highly placed professionals like Rosalind Constable (the cultural eyes and ears of the powerful American publisher Henry Luce), Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, The New Yorker, Mademoiselle, Good Housekeeping, Time, and Fortune had all refused to take Pat on after meeting her.

This was the period when magazines were the motor of Manhattan’s literary and social life, publishing and promoting everything that was new. It was also the era when pulp publishing companies and their upscale relations, the “quality” magazine and book publishers, were beginning to encroach on each other’s territories. Quality book publisher Harper & Brothers (later Harper & Row), in an elegantly bracketed promotion of a so-called pulp genre, assigned its senior editor Joan Kahn to oversee the Harper Novel of Suspense, the imprimatur under which all of Patricia Highsmith’s Harper novels, beginning with Strangers on a Train, would be brought out.¹³ Marc Jaffe, from 1948 onwards an editor at the New American Library (itself busily engaged in revolutionizing the paperback novel) says that Harper Novels of Suspense were considered a “literary” category and that he always thought of Highsmith as a “classy mystery writer” whose work belonged in a category “with Josephine Tey, who was, perhaps, a tad more literary.”¹⁴Even Pat’s contemporaries had trouble trying to “place” her writing.

Cross-propagation, conflation, and confusion of “low” and “high” literary genres and categories were rampant in New York publishing—especially because pulp publishers often printed the kind of writing that the more respectable publishers turned down. Weird Tales, an outré pulp magazine of fantasy and horror (and the principal publisher of that master of the macabre, H. P. Lovecraft), gave America’s greatest playwright, Tennessee Williams, his first public exposure when it published his youthful short story “The Vengeance of Nitocris” in 1928. Black Mask Magazine, founded in 1920, was a showcase for “hard-boiled” crime fictions which early on launched both Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and printed established writers like Edna Ferber, Cecil Day-Lewis (writing as Nicholas Blake),¹⁵ Elizabeth Sanxay Holding, Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, Edgar Wallace, Alberto Moravia, Agatha Christie, and the prolific and reclusive Cornell Woolrich, whose story “Murder After Death” Pat would single out in her thinly veiled artistic autobiography, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction.

These same authors also appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, begun in 1941 as a “high-class” pulp venture by two cousins writing under the name “Ellery Queen.” Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine subsequently took over Black Mask Magazine,obscuring the fact that one of Black Mask’s founders was the “Sage of Baltimore,” the caustic American social critic H. L. Mencken, who once defined American Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere might be happy” and wrote a sentence Pat Highsmith would have been happy to endorse at any time in her life: “I have always lived in the wrong country.”¹⁶

Beginning in the 1950s, to Pat’s barely suppressed embarrassment, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine would become the most frequent publisher of her short fictions.¹⁷ One of her worst stories (“The Perfect Alibi,” the first Highsmith story to be published in EQMM, in 1957) and one of her best stories (“The Terrapin,” published in 1961) would appear in EQMM.^* The editors at Ellery Queen’s liked to mix their contributors: in the August 1960 edition of EQMM, Pat’s tale of yet another nerveless psychopath with a taste for symbolic trophies, “The Thrill Seeker,” was printed alongside “The Club,” a story by the great American poet Muriel Rukeyser.¹⁸

At the time Pat graduated from Barnard, popular publishing giants Condé Nast (Vogue, Mademoiselle, Vanity Fair), Henry Luce (Time, Life, Fortune), and William Randolph Hearst (Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Town & Country) were beginning to hire fiction and poetry editors for many of the fashion, style, and news magazines under their vast New York umbrellas. And these editors were giving national exposure to the writers they published. Meanwhile, small literary and political journals—like Partisan Review—were exercising a disproportionate influence on the American intellectual conversation.

With a subscriber base that never exceeded fifteen thousand, Partisan Review, begun in 1934 by William Phillips and Philip Rahv (who liked to refer to the USA as “the United States of Amnesia”), published serious, anti-Stalinist literary writers, many of them from Jewish immigrant families and most of them defenders of high modernism: Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg, Lionel Abel, Delmore Schwartz, Elizabeth Hardwick, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Daniel Bell, Meyer Schapiro, Dwight Macdonald, Alfred Kazin, Arthur Koestler, Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, et al.

Earnestly preparing for her literary close-up, Pat was subscribing to Partisan Review in the 1940s: “The Partisan Review has arrived and I am very proud of it,” she enthused in 1943.¹⁹ But she was unequipped for its fierce intellectual arguments and could never write the kind of fiction PR liked to publish. Still, Pat read PR avidly, and her introduction to the work of Saul Bellow, a novelist whose writing makes profound use of what used to be called “the modern Jewish experience,” probably dates from her discovery of his stories in PR. (It was Bellow’s uncanny ability to reimagine the New York she’d lived in, to bring the alienated European emigrant experience to bear upon it, and to vividly dramatize his moral concerns that caused Pat to write an article for a German paper in 1987 naming Saul Bellow as her “favorite” author and Mr. Sammler’s Planet as his best book. Pat wouldn’t have disagreed with the harsh fictional views Bellow took of the women in his life, either.)²⁰

In 1950, still hoping to be introduced to “the Partisan Review crowd” by her new friend, the novelist Arthur Koestler, Pat was pleased to hear that Koestler had mentioned her name to Philip Rahv.²¹ But what Pat really wanted when she got out of college was something closer to the conventional center of New York power: a staff job at The New Yorker or, at least, an assistant’s position at Mademoiselle.

William Shawn of The New Yorker turned Pat down for a job in June of 1942 after scanning four issues of the Barnard Quarterly containing her stories, reading some “on spec” pieces she’d done for the magazine’s “Talk of the Town” feature, and giving her reason to hope for work as a “girl reporter.” Four months after Pat talked to Shawn, a reader at The New Yorker compounded the insult by rejecting as “sordid” her unsolicited story “These Sad Pillars,” about a man and a woman who scribble notes to each other on subway posts.²² In 1958, Pat was still finding The New Yorker “so forbidding” that she was “afraid even to telephone them for…information” on how to submit an idea for a cover drawing, so she diffidently wrote to ask her editor at Harper & Brothers, Joan Kahn, to do it for her.²³

Vogue joined the chorus of disapproval by refusing to give the newly graduated Pat a position after a particularly disastrous interview. Harper’s Bazaar asked to see “several short stories” and then didn’t take them.²⁴ Mademoiselle, where Carson McCullers’s sister Rita was the fiction editor, invited Pat for a meeting some months later, praised her “references & accomplishments,” put her in their “active file,” but never called her back.²⁵ There were just too many smart English majors with “references & accomplishments” jostling for jobs in wartime Manhattan, and something about Pat—could they have guessed what she was thinking?—put the magazine editors off.

It was the Vogue rejection that did the most damage. (“I’m horribly worried about Vogue. Rosalind told me not to write.”)²⁶ Pat’s well-connected friend the arts journalist Rosalind Constable—Pat was desperate to please her—had taken the trouble to recommend Pat personally to the ladies at Vogue, and Pat showed up for her interview in June of 1942, bright eyed and bushy tailed, but also, apparently, disheveled and décoiffée.

What wayward impulse, it is useful to ask, could have brought a young woman as ambitious and self-conscious as Patricia Highsmith to an interview at Vogue magazine in such a disorderly state? Something, perhaps, about not wanting to conform to the impeccably female image Vogue was showcasing in page after page of its perfectly styled fashion photographs?

Pat’s mother, after all, was a fashion illustrator who had worked on and off for years for Women’s Wear Daily (and had done a cover illustration for Collier’s magazine in 1936).²⁷ From her earliest days Pat was absorbing the grammar of women’s fashions from Mary—although no one would ever accuse Pat Highsmith of dressing like a girl. (Caroline Besterman says that even in a skirt she looked “rather like a sailor.”)²⁸ Pat grew up listening to the shop talk of Mary’s fashion illustrator friends Jeva Cralick and Marjorie Thompson, and Pat and “Cralick,” as she was always called, had an affectionate correspondence that went on for decades. Pat and Mary, too, wrote to each other in letters that feature descriptions of clothing, and Pat’s sole surviving letter from childhood (to her grandmother Willie Mae) includes an extended phrase about her favorite tennis shoes.²⁹

It was probably the size of Pat’s feet—all the Coates family had big hands and big feet, and Pat’s hands and feet were enormous—that provoked her lifelong fascination with shoes. By the end of her life she was slipping those big feet into size 9½ loafers, and her lamb’s-wool-lined moccasins from L.L. Bean, preserved in her archives, really do look like gunboats. Shoes were among Pat’s initial artistic inspirations: the first line of the first story she ever wrote began with a pair of shoes beside a bed (see “Greek Games”).³⁰

Pat’s emotional memory continued to be stimulated by footwear as she got older. In 1942 she remembered a boy from her Astoria childhood because she had given him her “new tennis shoes, much too masculine, I discovered, even for me to play in unselfconsciously.” When the boy died shortly afterward, Pat wondered guiltily: would they “put my shoes into the coffin with him?”³¹ Her first published novel, Strangers on a Train (1950), introduces its two fatal Alter Egos to each other by having Guy “accidentally touch the outstretched foot of [Bruno,] the young man asleep[,]” with his own.³² And Guy’s pointless confession of murder to the oafish, unheeding Owen Markman at the novel’s end is perfectly symbolized by Markman’s “big scuffed brown shoes…. Suddenly their flaccid, shameless, massive stupidity seemed the essence of all human stupidity…and before he knew how or why, [Guy] had kicked, viciously, the side of Owen’s shoe.”³³

Shoes brought death sharply into Pat’s mind once again when, years after her beloved grandmother Willie Mae’s demise, one of her own shoes made her remember that Willie Mae’s feet were shaped like her own feet, and only then, Pat wrote, had she been able to “shed the first real tears for my grandmother.”³⁴ And in Munich, in 1951, the sense-memory of her ex-lover Virginia Catherwood’s shoes pierced her heart with quite another feeling: “O Ginnie, your little black suede shoes, sitting in the hall side by side, so small in the hall, sexy beautiful shoes that made my heart jump and my lips smile…and I could have made love to you in a minute.”³⁵

Twenty years later, shoes were still fascinating her. Pat, staying with Barbara Ker-Seymer and Barbara Roett in Islington, was taken to dinner with her hosts at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand in early November of 1972 by the Barbaras’ two other houseguests, France Burke, daughter of the literary philosopher Kenneth Burke, and her lover, “Sam.” Sam, who sat next to Pat at dinner, says that aside from “worrying” about the huge joints of meat that were arriving at their table with alarming frequency and orating obsessively about some family silver she was intent on extracting from an aunt, Pat’s principal topic of conversation was shoes.

Sam was wearing a pair of Gucci loafers that were too narrow for her feet, and “Pat was VERY involved with this and she took the whole thing very seriously.” Pat liked Gucci loafers too, but suggested that Sam buy them in men’s sizes because only “the men’s sizes were wide enough.” Pat was “quietly peculiar, worrying about silver and shoes,” but about the shoes, she was “quite earnest and very precise,” sizing up Sam’s foot with practiced accuracy and giving her an exact men’s size equivalent.³⁶

Fashion footwear evidently did a lot for Pat—she even said that one of her first reasons for liking Switzerland was that only the Swiss made the kind of shoes that fit her feet³⁷—but shoes weren’t the sole reason Pat was interested in fashion. Fashion, after all, was the glamorous province of beautiful women.

In New York, Pat loved to socialize with women in the world of la mode. She had a twenty-year, deeply attached friendship (ruined forever by their house-owning venture together in Samois-sur-Seine in the late 1960s) with Mme Elizabeth Lyne, the much older designer and painter who created dress lines for Hattie Carnegie. The painter, writer, and performance artist Lil Picard, Pat’s friend for three decades and older than Pat by twenty years, began as a fashion designer and fashion editor in Berlin, made jewelry in Manhattan, and had her own milliner’s studio—the Custom Hat Box—in Bloomingdale’s department store, where Pat was to set crucial scenes for The Price of Salt.

Pat went on to have affairs with a bevy of attractive dress models—blondes of course—and her novels show that she was familiar with the art of dressmaking. In The Price of Salt and in her posthumously published novel, Small g—during whose writing she frequently consulted her dress-designer neighbor in Tegna, Julia Diener-Diethelm³⁸—Pat gives detailed accounts of how fashion and fashions are created. Two of the older women characters in The Price of Salt present its young heroine, Therese, with handmade dresses, and elaborate rituals surround Therese’s fittings for these garments. One of the central relationships in Small g owes something to Pat’s careful observation in Manhattan in 1961 of the “old witch with the button shop on Madison Avenue [who tyrannized] over the younger, more sensitive, more beautiful redheaded girl—who did escape.”³⁹

In her cahiers, as early as 1940, Pat was giving proper dress, and the concealing/revealing/role-playing purposes of it, close attention in both fact and fiction. She always remarked when a jacket or a pair of slacks was “well cut,” when a dress draped nicely over a woman’s shapely torso, or when an attractive girl who was pretending to be seductively rich had a visible hole in the sole of her shoe.⁴⁰

On one of her trips “home” to Texas—she was still in her teens—Pat made friends with a married couple in El Paso, a city on the Texas-Mexican border just across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Juárez. The woman, Eddy, was a very masculine horse-trainer, and the man, Ruthie, was an exceedingly effeminate dress designer. They were both homosexual and had married each other, Pat wrote approvingly, for cover. (Eddy and Ruthie’s behavior in gay bars was so outrageous that their marriage was “urgently advisable.”) Even better, Eddy and Ruthie had married in order to wear each other’s clothes. Pat was enthralled.

“Eddy [the woman] wore beautifully cut jackets with silk shorts and foulard ties. Ruthie [the man] wore open collar sport shirts and loud tweed jackets and also beautifully cut English slacks…. Each would have liked the other’s body for his own to put clothes on…. [T]hey were…finding the greatest pleasure in the world in buying clothes for each other—which neither wore—and which soon were taken back and worn by each respectively—which was what they’d wanted after all.” ⁴¹

Three years before her death, Pat was still thinking about clothes. In an article about Venice written for The Oldie in July of 1992, she lingered lovingly over the wares of her favorite Venetian “haberdashery,” where she liked to buy shirts of unusual colors that were still hanging in her wardrobe: a yellow shirt (yellow, the color of warning signs, was Pat’s favorite hue) and a porter’s yellow and black striped jacket with yellow metal buttons which, Pat reported with the satisfaction of someone who has spent her money wisely, “has worn like iron.” ⁴²

Pat’s own clothing always had a ritually gendered aspect—and left open the question of which gender, too. But her most consistent gift to the women she cared about (including her mother and her editor at Heinemann in London, Janice Robertson) couldn’t have been more feminine: she liked to present them with handbags. Pat gave Janice Robertson a Hermès bag when Robertson left Heinemann in 1972—and, says Janice Robertson, Pat was the only author to remember her with a going-away gift.^*43

It wasn’t until 1983, when Pat made a list for her Swiss publisher Diogenes of “Twenty Things I Like,” that she publicly announced her penchant for wearing old clothes. “Old clothes” was number 9 on her preference list, followed by “Sneakers” at number 10. “Kafka’s writing” was number 20.⁴⁴

During different periods in her life, Pat’s costumes really were costumes: composed expressions of the gender wars she waged within herself and represented in her dress. Her boy’s shirts, men’s trousers, collegiate loafers, tailored jackets, smart vests—as well as the little beaded necklaces and bracelets, the jaunty ascots, the occasional skirt, and the light lipsticks she sometimes applied—kept her suspended between the possibilities she’d acknowledged so “brilliantly” at the age of twelve: “I am a walking perpetual example of…a boy in a girl’s body.” ⁴⁵ At twenty-seven, she was phrasing her dilemma a little more philosophically: “The most beautiful word is ‘transcend.’ By all the laws that are Platonic, I am a man and love women.” ⁴⁶

The term “transgender” hadn’t yet been invented. If it had been, Pat wouldn’t have used it.

At Barnard College, Pat’s riding breeches, hacking jackets, and signature trench and polo coats (she pawned the polo coat and her green Harris Tweed riding jacket, “in which I spent the proudest, happiest hours of my life,” in an “ignominious” moment in December of 1942 when she ran out of cash)⁴⁷ made her memorable; attracting her classmates’ wary admiration and lending a cultivated air of sophistication to her appearance. From her trips to Mexico, she brought back white waiter’s jackets—they suited her very well, says a lover⁴⁸—and the giant woven purses, bolsas, which she carried everywhere and filled with her necessaries: her cigarettes, her writer’s notebooks, her Parker fountain pens (later on, it was Esterbrook pump pens with stainless-steel nibs), and the inevitable little bottle of something with a high alcohol proof.

After she moved to Europe, Pat continued to send for clothes from the United States, ordering her vests and white oxford shirts with the turn-back cuffs shipped from the boys’ department of Brooks Brothers in Manhattan, where she had a charge account, and making sure that her Levi’s and belts came directly from Texas. And she carried her bolsas from Mexico to Europe with her. In Tegna, her attentive occasional next-door neighbor Bert Diener, who drove her to the hospital in Locarno for blood treatments during her final illness, remembered how Pat always carried her bolsa and just what she kept in the “big woven bag: something to read, something to write with, and a little something to drink.” ⁴⁹

Pat’s distinctive “look” is still a subject of conversation for her former lovers. When Caroline Besterman first met Pat in 1962, she was struck by Pat’s good looks and her fashion sense. Pat, says Besterman, was “fantastically, arrestingly good-looking.” Although Pat “was awkward in company [and] handled cigarettes very badly—she looked as though she were mending roads with them, stubbing out her Gauloises most ungracefully—I found her [privately] quite graceful.”

Caroline remembers Pat as

very exotic, the kind of person to whom you would immediately be drawn in a room. And she was still very much in control of her look, always well dressed, her hair was well cut…. Until the later years, Pat always had a certain style, comme les garçons.…The first time I met her, she was in a yellow sailcloth skirt and tight top and she did look rather like a sailor. There was a dash to her…. She always liked to change her clothes and get nicely ready for supper. She always had beads and a bracelet, her things were well cut and elegant.⁵⁰

Pat kept her loyal friend Kingsley; her mother, Mary; and several other members of the Coates family on the hop for four decades, mailing the items she urgently required from the United States: the shirts, the vests, the leather belts, the bolo ties and tie slides, the inevitable Levi’s and loafers, the “bed-clothes,” and those special pens and notebooks which are always part of a writer’s “outfit.” One of the many requests Pat sent to Mary from France—this one came from Samois-sur-Seine in 1969—shows just how pernickety she could be about her dress:

“I wouldn’t mind a Western shirt. I was not mad about the last pattern you sent: I prefer a stripe, or a solid dark blue, for instance…. I think I take neck 14 (inches), therefore size fourteen.

“…The last (brownish-tan) western shirt you sent is a good fit: I have just checked its size: 14; and 32 (sleeve)…. I have plenty of bedding thanks to you. The only thing else I can think of—is a pen, of a decent variety with a point that is not a ball point but a real point.”⁵¹

And Pat paid close attention to how she dressed her favorite characters, too, especially when she was dressing them up to kill someone. In The Talented Mr. Ripley, Tom Ripley, attired without permission in Dickie Greenleaf’s expensive clothes, is caught by Dickie in Dickie’s own bedroom in Mongibello just as Tom has finished miming the murder of Dickie’s “girlfriend,” Marge Sherwood, in a mirror. After he murders Dickie and Dickie’s friend Freddie, and installs himself in a palazzo apartment on the Grand Canal in Venice with Dickie’s money, Tom likes to spend whole

evenings looking at his clothes—his clothes and Dickie’s—and feeling Dickie’s rings between his palms and running his fingers over the antelope suitcase he had bought at Gucci’s…. He loved possessions, not masses of them, but a select few…. They gave a man self-respect. Not ostentation but quality, and the love that cherished the quality. Possessions reminded him that he existed…. It was as simple as that.⁵²

In later Ripley novels, Tom shares Pat’s taste for well-pressed Levi’s, pyjamas with bottoms, and handsome bathrobes from the better men’s shops.

But the desire for conventional success that sent the young, fashion-conscious Barnard graduate to Vogue magazine for an interview in June of 1942 was apparently overtaken by an equal and opposite reaction, something like an undertow in her ambition. And so the girl who was so particular about her clothes, the girl who had already filled hundreds of pages of cahiers and diaries with her reflections on dress and appearance—on the way she looked at the world, on the way the world looked at her, on the way the world would one day look upon her—managed to show up for her appointment at Vogue, New York’s principal style and fashion magazine, with a stained and wrinkled blouse, bad hair, and, in the formal 1940s, a head unadorned by a hat.

Pat’s messy presentation at her Vogue interview is especially suspicious because she was such a sedulous wielder of the steam iron. Like her mother, Mary, who used to go to Pat’s apartment on East Fifty-sixth Street to talk to Pat and when “[t]here would be no satisfactory contact” ended up frustratedly “ironing [Pat’s clothes] until time to go,”⁵³ Pat ironed for satisfaction and she ironed for inspiration. She ironed because pressing freshly washed materials flat and sharpening their creases to a knife-edged perfection gave a little order to the conflicting emotions she dealt with every day.

“She ironed everything herself, she wouldn’t let me take anything to the cleaners,” says Marijane Meaker of her short cohabitation with Pat in Pennsylvania in 1960.⁵⁴ And Caroline Besterman confirms that Pat went right on ironing through the 1960s in England at Bridge Cottage: “She ironed a lot, she loved ironing, she found it soothing.”⁵⁵ Pat used to tell journalists that she got “ideas” for her work at the ironing board—although no Highsmith character was ever dispatched with a blow from a red-hot steam iron.

It was an obviously exasperated Rosalind Constable who telephoned Pat on 17 June 1942 at her parents’ apartment to deliver the bad news from the Vogue interview: “They said you looked like you’d just got out of bed.”⁵⁶ Rosalind made it clear that Pat should have had more sense than to show up “looking as [she] did.” Humiliated because she’d embarrassed Rosalind, Pat set the whole incident down defensively in her diary, dealing with it as she always dealt with rejection: “Well, I did wash my hair just before going in…. There’ll come a time when I shall be bigger than Vogue and I can thank my lucky star I escaped their corruptive influences.”⁵⁷

Pat never said so, but the serial rejections she suffered at Harper’s Bazaar for her story submissions in the 1940s must have been as painful to her as the rejection from Vogue. The forward-looking Harper’s was setting an enviable literary tone for New York. Under, first, George Davis’s and then Mary Louise Aswell’s more or less unbridled fiction editorship, Harper’s was publishing Truman Capote, Jean Cocteau, and Salvador Dalí as well as Carson McCullers, W. H. Auden, Gypsy Rose Lee, and most of the other former inhabitants of George Davis’s roisterous, rented, boardinghouse-to-the-arts on Middagh Street in Brooklyn.⁵⁸

Daniel Bell, the eminent sociologist whose widely influential book, The End of Ideology (1960), gave a name to the tenor of political debate in 1950s America (Edith of Edith’s Diary reads Daniel Bell, so Pat read him as well: her characters always read what she read), says that before William Shawn became its editor The New Yorker was “quite hostile to new fiction, so writers who ordinarily would have been published in The New Yorker went to Harper’s.”⁵⁹ When Mary Louise Aswell took over as fiction editor, Harper’s published Pat’s own superb story “The Heroine,” written while she was at Barnard and rejected by her fellow student editors at the Barnard Quarterly as too “upsetting” to publish. The Harper’s publication of “The Heroine” attracted some interest from the publisher Knopf, which Pat failed—was it insecurity? lack of finished material?—to follow up on.⁶⁰ But that was later, in August of 1945.⁶¹ This was now. Now, Pat was on the outside looking in.

Editor and literary critic Pearl Kazin, Daniel Bell’s wife, former lover of Dylan Thomas, and sister of critic Alfred Kazin (Pat, always interested in surveying the competition, read Kazin’s book about American literature’s golden age, On Native Grounds, and failed to find it brilliant),⁶² worked at Harper’s before she became the chief copy editor at The New Yorker. She says that she, too, had a hand in editing Pat at Harper’s Bazaar. In 2003, Pearl Kazin managed, from her sickbed, to deliver a trenchant summary of the impression Patricia Highsmith had made on her in the 1940s in New York City.

“Terrible,” said Pearl Kazin. Just “terrible.”⁶³

And Daniel Bell gives an idea of how absent from the American literary landscape Pat has always been: “In all the years that Pearl and I were married [since 1960] she never mentioned Highsmith.”⁶⁴ Robert Gottlieb, who had been Pat’s editor at Knopf for A Dog’s Ransom and Ripley’s Game (he found her style “pebbly”), says the same thing: “She seemed to have no presence in New York.”⁶⁵ Her last American editor, Gary Fisketjon at Atlantic Monthly Press and Knopf, agrees: “I never heard of her growing up; she wasn’t even remotely in the lexicon.”⁶⁶ Norman Mailer, two years younger than Pat and, along with Truman Capote, one of the New York publishing sensations of 1948 with his war novel The Naked and the Dead, had a similar response.

“Remind me, Joan,” said Norman Mailer, “what was Highsmith? A high-class detective novelist?”⁶⁷

Pat’s humiliation at not securing a job after she graduated from Barnard—even before she left college she had been anxiously seeking a good position—was intense. She said to herself that she really “didn’t want to see anyone” from Barnard until she had some decent employment. Perhaps her failure to be elected to the honorary academic society, Phi Beta Kappa, had something to do with her humiliation. “Went to school this P.M. and got the shock of my life: D in Logic. My first D of course. Phi Beta Kappa—forever goodby! It upset me terribly more than I had believed it would.”⁶⁸

For decades after she left Barnard, Pat made shamed references to that D in Logic, which had not, after all, killed her chances for a Phi Beta Kappa key: her grades at Barnard were already quite a bit lower than what Phi Beta Kappa required for membership. But a D in Logic (part of her yearlong philosophy course) was another unwelcome point of resemblance to Mother Mary. Pat was always criticizing Mary for being “illogical.”

Shame for not finding a job was certainly the reason Pat quietly skipped her college graduation, slipping into the Barnard Quarterly offices the day before the ceremony, 31 May 1942, and “bringing home my weight in manila envelopes, stationery, etc,” but avoiding her classmates. “Saw no one, tho’ today was S[enior] picnic & tomorrow graduation!”⁶⁹

She got herself excused from the graduation ceremony by writing a false letter saying that she had a job interview at a New Jersey newspaper on graduation day. Pleased with her alibi and even more pleased to be hoodwinking the administration, she wrote in her diary: “Barnard sent me the mark sheet & blanks for diploma by mail, apparently on the strength of my beautiful letter yesterday to [Columbia University president] N.M. Butler.”⁷⁰

But Pat wasn’t so pleased about missing a graduation lunch at Schrafft’s with her circle of intimate classmates, Babs and Peter (a girl) and Helen, at least two of whom, as a matter of course, she’d slept with. And she wasn’t happy at all about not appearing at her graduation. “I had to convince myself that I didn’t want to go.”⁷¹ In the week after graduation, she consoled herself by trying to write like the expatriate American novelist Kay Boyle, whose work she was reading with great attention. Kay Boyle, Pat wrote in her diary in yet another of her attempts at impersonation, “has the style I feel I should naturally continue.”⁷²

After she left Barnard, aside from a little temping work, Pat was forced to accept the only job offer she got: an offer for work researching and writing factual pieces at FFF Publications. She considered this respectable job degrading, and as the work was petering out, she hastened to answer Richard Hughes’s ad for a “writer-researcher” at Sangor-Pines—a job everyone considered degrading. Ever after, Pat would tell prying journalists (if she mentioned the subject at all) that she hadn’t “realized” she was applying to a comic book company for work.⁷³

Pat’s sharp history of failure in the New York job market, where “quality” was both a requirement for success and the reward you received for being a success, made it especially important for the ambitious young writer, living on the fringes of her older friends’ well-remunerated lives, to keep up a good front. It was the counterweight to what she referred to, always, as her “maimed” nature, a nature that needed “crutches.”⁷⁴ “I never fall asleep at night,” she wrote, “without writhing in agony at least twice, remembering something which I imagine horrid that I have done that day, or the day before.⁷⁵ Pierced by insecurities about her family background, Pat brought forth analyses as harsh as punishments whenever she encountered her blood relatives in Fort Worth or in New York; analyses which reinforced her sense of being a “loser” in a wide world of “winners.”

“Marriages, in all of my grandmother’s children, have been to people beneath them, intellectually and culturally, as if the entire family, through want of education or money or both had been permeated with the disease of inferiority.”⁷⁶

Success, expecially in the postwar boom years, always seemed to Pat to be everywhere but in the Highsmith house. Her Deep Southern background, alive with the family mythology of a glorious but defeated Confederacy and a long-gone Southern Way of Life, as well as her birth in what was then considered to be a second-class Texas cow town, couldn’t have helped. (In 1906, the American philosopher-psychologist William James defined success, at that time a more or less Northern notion, as “our national disease”—and memorably called it a “bitch-goddess.” “Bitch-goddess” is a good description of how Pat liked to think of her lovers.) In the winter of 1948, surveying the sullied New York snow in the backyard of her apartment building on East Fifty-sixth Street and immersing herself in critical works about Kafka all weekend, Pat felt she was being swiftly driven “from neurosis to psychosis” by the thought of failure:

“In every direction I turn and move, I am met by failure or a wall impenetrable. The only success I can recall recently is a successful batch of hardened fudge.”⁷⁷

She wasn’t kidding.

After attending a Broadway performance of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in November of 1950, Pat, for the rest of her life, would compare her mother Mary’s perpetually collapsing career as a fashion illustrator to the situation of Willy Loman, the “hero” of Miller’s tragedy, undone by his passive faith in the American Dream. Pat’s private response to Willy Loman’s downfall was completely consistent with her own ambitions and entirely inconsistent with the meaning of Death of a Saleman. “I find I have no sympathy,” Pat wrote in her diary on 17 November 1950, “for the individual whose spirit has not led him to seek higher goals, in the first place, at a much younger age.”⁷⁸

Pat was seeking “higher goals,” and at a “younger age,” too, while she labored away at the comics. During this time Mary Louise Aswell—she and Pat would keep up with each other through lesbian circles when Mrs. Aswell retired with her lover Agnes Sims to New Mexico—sent Pat another rejection letter from Harper’s Bazaar which summed up Pat’s ironic relationship to “quality.” It was the kind of encouraging letter—Mrs. Aswell genuinely admired Pat’s writing and was one of her recommenders to the artists’ colony, Yaddo, in 1948—which usually has the opposite effect on its recipient, implying that while Pat’s toe might be on the literary ladder, her heel was still firmly fixed to the waiting room floor. “Your writing,” wrote Mary Louise Aswell, “has considerable quality, & while this story is not for us, would you let us see some more of your work?”⁷⁹

One of the ways Pat kept her front up and her goals high was to conceal the extent of her participation in the comics trade. She also took the trouble to conceal the nature and even the fact of her first postcollege job, at FFF Publications. Pat had been taken on at FFF Publications to work with the author, newspaper columnist, and editor Ben-Zion Goldberg—already a household name among readers of Yiddish journals in America. Goldberg, the son of a rabbi from Vilnius, had travelled the world reporting and writing on Jewish matters. In 1931, he published a book about sex in religion called The Sacred Fire (1931), and by the mid-1940s he was chairman of the Committee of Jewish Scientists, Writers, and Artists of the United States. (Albert Einstein was the president of that committee.) Goldberg wrote for many papers and journals in both English and Yiddish in Canada and the United States (including The New Republic), and he was active in antifascist organizations. In 1946, he spent six months in Russia meeting with Soviet writers and Jewish political committees.⁸⁰

Ben-Zion Goldberg hired Pat as his editorial assistant at FFF Publications in the last week of June 1942, when she was at the end of her job-hunting rope. (She would eke out the finish of her employment with Goldberg with some temping work at Modern Baby magazine.)⁸¹ He chose her over two hundred other applicants, but Pat was not pleased to be joining the only “club” that would admit her: a publishing company run by Jews who hired her to do research on Jewish history and provide articles to the national Jewish press. The Jewish press was FFF Publications’ primary market. “It’s a lousy, journalistic…job,” she wrote in her diary, “and I’m frankly bored & ashamed of it. Why couldn’t it be on the scarabs of Tutankhamen? Why not the history of the Dalai Lamas?…Why not the story of the philosopher’s stone?”⁸² Pat was afraid Goldberg would “try to Jew me down to eighteen [dollars] a week” and wrote of him contemptuously: “He seems to be of some repute—somewhere.”⁸³ But Goldberg hired Pat at twenty dollars a week, and ten days later he gave her a raise.

So, just her luck, not only was Pat Highsmith—busily scribbling anti-Semitisms in her notebook—researching and providing material for a large part of the North American Jewish press, she had also managed to get herself hired by the son-in-law of the world’s most famous Jewish writer. Ben-Zion Goldberg had been the tutor of the renowned Yiddish fabulist Sholem Aleichem’s youngest daughter, and he married her in 1917.^* Now Goldberg was Pat’s boss: the only person in New York, apparently, who wanted to hire her. The situation was alive with all the convergent ironies of a good Jewish joke. Not for the talented Miss Highsmith, however, who had never heard of Sholem Aleichem.

But then Pat did some research on Goldberg (while she was doing some research for him), and discovered that he’d been arrested for shouting “Scab!” at a political demonstration. She decided this was a pretty good character recommendation, that she “liked Goldberg personally,” and that his “methods are sound.”⁸⁴ And then Pat and Mother Mary started studying Spanish together and going to more galleries, and Pat’s evening life sparkled and scintillated with more sexual and social possibilities. So she settled down to working for Goldberg with something resembling goodwill.

Pat and Goldberg stayed friendly for years (see “Alter Ego: Part 4”), and it was Goldberg to whom she first showed her early attempts at long fiction writing. And when Pat was twenty-six, it was Goldberg who pointed out to her—she said she’d never realized it before—that her perennial “theme” was the relationship between two “ill-matched” men.⁸⁵ When she first gave him her work to read, he said: “There’s something in your writing that intrigues me—a rhythm…an occasional new form…. But it’s inclined to be rocky. Uneven.”⁸⁶

But rather than tell the world that she’d written the “household section for The Jewish Family Year Book” in 1942, and had worked for the well-known Yiddish journalist Ben-Zion Goldberg for six months,⁸⁷ Pat published an article in The Oldie magazine in 1993 (“My First Job”),” describing as her “first job” one of the “filler” jobs she’d taken after her employment with Goldberg and FFF Publications ended: a “fortnight’s” stint as a street pollster for the Arrid Deodorant Company.⁸⁸ For this polling job, the constitutionally shy Pat was required to stand in front of Saks, Macy’s, and Bloomingdale’s department stores and try out advertising slogans on passers-by.

Fifty years on, Pat still remembered the accosting phrases she’d had to repeat to strangers in her disguise as a pollster: “Arrid is the most efficient deodorant in the world today.” “Arrid is the fastest selling underarm deodorant in America and the world.”⁸⁹ She added, making a feeble joke, that she hoped that publishing these phrases so much later didn’t mean she was still advertising Arrid.⁹⁰ But Pat knew very well she wasn’t advertising anything. In 1993, when she published the article in The Oldie—it was late in her life and her anti-Israeli stance had become a propulsive obsession—Pat was hiding the fact that her “first real job” in Manhattan had been a job compiling research for the Jewish press.

Pat used her nineteen-dollar-a-week salary pitching deodorant to move, briefly, to a bed-sitting room in a “respectable house in the East Sixties” (the adjective “respectable” made all the difference to class-conscious Pat) “from [w]here I could walk to my parents’ apartment in East Fifty-seventh Street [also proximate to a “good address”] where I often had dinner which was economical and cheering.” But cheap and cheerful wasn’t what Pat was looking for, and one of the ways she dissembled her financial condition was to rent an apartment in the vicinity of a “quality” neigborhood: the Upper East Side.

Because the stuff of Pat’s hopes and dreams always found its way into her work, the fragile, tentative dream of happiness she put together at the end of the 1940s for the two lesbian lovers Carol and Therese in The Price of Salt depends partially upon Carol securing an apartment on Madison Avenue (an Upper East Side address) and inviting Therese to share it. In the 1940s, Madison Avenue, with its sedate buildings and elegant shops, was well on the way to becoming the ultraexpensive thoroughfare of symbolic achievement and carbon monoxide gas that it is today. Madison Avenue must have seemed like Heaven’s Own Boulevard to the young writer whose birth in her grandmother’s boardinghouse in Fort Worth, Texas, was “mid-wived” by one of the upstairs’ boarders,⁹¹ and whose first six years there were spent close enough to railyard crossings to hear the lonesome freight trains whistling down the tracks.

Pat’s next New York home, a studio apartment at 353 East Fifty-sixth Street, into which she moved in early 1943 and kept, on and off, until 1960 (subletting it briefly to Truman Capote and lengthily and contentiously to the designer Eveline Phimister, lover of her friend the photographer Ruth Bernhard),⁹² was just around the block from her parents’ apartment on East Fifty-seventh Street. She bought furniture for the apartment, painted the walls and bookshelves a greenish blue, and Mary Highsmith came over to help with the painting. While mother and daughter were wielding their paintbrushes, Mary, with her usual disconcerting prescience in anything that concerned her daughter, told Pat that she shouldn’t become like Allela Cornell (the young painter who was about to become Pat’s lover), crying every evening, wanting to be “beautiful,” and doing nothing about it. Mary uttered the word “lesbian” about Allela and Pat was unnerved.⁹³ Pat hung up one of her friend Ruth Bernhard’s exquisite photographs—an arm made of wood, cradling the head of a doll⁹⁴—but Kingsley Skattebol says that the apartment’s “chief attraction was the trompe l’oeil fireplace Pat had cleverly painted on one wall.”⁹⁵ Pat couldn’t afford an apartment with a fireplace, so she made one for herself.

Although the painter Buffie Johnson (see “Social Studies: Part 1”) described Pat’s neighborhood as “posh enough,”⁹⁶ this new apartment fell quite a bit short of “posh.” It did have an unobstructed view out the back window, but it was on the first floor, the backyard was full of the washing of Irish tenants, and there was a fire escape with a ladder just outside her window that provided easy access to her living room.

Still, Vince Fago, Pat’s editor at Timely comics, remembered her apartment (in one of those careful calibrations that social life in Manhattan always requires) just as Pat would have wanted him to: as being “near Sutton Place.”⁹⁷ Sutton Place is the exclusive, expensive enclave of private houses, terraced gardens, and luxury apartment buildings clustered between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-ninth streets, one block east of First Avenue. It was colonized in 1920, when America’s first theatrical agent, the legendary lesbian Elisabeth “Bessie” Marbury,^* and her like-minded lady friends Elsie de Wolfe, Anne Morgan (J. P. Morgan’s daughter), and Anne Vanderbilt began buying up the town houses next to the Burns Brothers coal yard and opening up their new homes to society. Sutton Place has been one of New York’s best addresses for the better part of a century.^*

Pat’s social weakness was the one she always criticized in Mother Mary: the desire to appear before the world surrounded by “the best.” At 353 East Fifty-sixth Street she would have been a couple of blocks from it. And despite her constant complaints about her mother, Pat didn’t seem to want to live very far from her. With the Highsmiths installed on East Fifty-seventh Street, around the corner from Mary was as far away as Pat ever got.

In October of 1947, after Mary and Stanley had moved up the Hudson River to the fancy house they couldn’t afford in Hastings-on-Hudson (Mary, just as intent as her daughter on the American Dream, was thrilled to have a live-in Filipino “houseboy”), Pat admitted in her cahier just how much having a family meant to her work.

“What the young artist loses when he moves away from home may easily outweigh his gained independence. He loses an all important psychological security and framework, which has to do with his state of mind, the all important self. The artist is forever a child in some respects…. Ergo, to write with the free declarations of childhood it is essential sometimes to be in the shadow of the parents’ wings.”⁹⁸

So perhaps the detail Pat recorded so casually in her diary on 16 December 1945 has greater significance than the short sentence she allotted to it. Pat wrote that the plot of Strangers on a Train came to her while she was out for a walk in Hastings-on-Hudson with her parents, Mary and Stanley Highsmith.

On the night of 18 October 1944, Pat was sitting up with a book in bed in her studio apartment, holding the cup of hot milk she always liked to drink before she fell asleep. Two years earlier, she’d described her bedtime drink in a notebook in tropes she would later import to The Price of Salt, making Carol serve Therese a similar cup of milk in similar circumstances.

“Hot milk. How wonderful on autumn idle days, lovely with silent books. I hold a finger-burning cup of it in my hands. It tastes organic, of blood and hair, meat and bone. It is alive as an embryo, sucked from a womb.”⁹⁹

Pat would go on drinking milk, sometimes by the liter, for most of the rest of her life.¹⁰⁰ She wouldn’t have denied the Freudian explanation for her taste, either: the one that begins with the theory that because Mother Mary had left Fort Worth three weeks after Pat was born to look for work in Chicago, she wouldn’t have been able to nurse her infant daughter for very long.

Alone with her book and her ritual tipple in her first real apartment, with its three-quarter couch-bed, “plus a real kitchen, plus a bath with tub and shower,”¹⁰¹ Pat came close to sounding like Walt Whitman. In a long passage in her cahier, she managed to merge with her surroundings, her country, her kind—with everything, in fact, except her own gender. “The sudden feeling tonight, coming to me with a pleasurable start, the kinship, brotherhood, I have with all the lighted homes all over America, stretching behind me four thousand miles westward.”¹⁰²

This feeling of peace and reconciliation on an autumn night in the middle of the Second World War wouldn’t last. It was, anyway, a far cry from Pat’s “normal” feelings of being out of place everywhere—and a very far cry from the artistic theme she would pursue in every single work of fiction she ever wrote.

“What keeps recurring to me as a fundamental of the novel is the individual out of place in this century.”¹⁰³

Alienation has been the house specialty of writers since Cervantes, but nothing could have been more alienating to Pat’s ambitions than her current work as a comic book scriptwriter. The idea that comics were at the center of the American Zeitgeist wouldn’t occur to anyone for several decades—and it never did occur to Patricia Highsmith. But when Pat declared that the novel had to be about an “individual out of place in this century” she had already been writing works about displaced individuals for quite a while: comic book Superheroes whose traits were so alien to their epoch that they required earth-bound Alter Egos for ballast (see “Alter Ego: Part 2”). And Pat’s other writing, the “serious” writing she did at night after work, was stealthily borrowing from her “pulp” scenarios, as though the comic book work were the secret Alter Ego of her serious stories.

Pat—who complained about everything—complained that she was bored writing for comics, but boredom, as she took the trouble to explain some years later, was a state her imagination positively thrived on: “Whenever I become intolerably bored, I produce another story, in my head.”¹⁰⁴

In December of 1944, writing hard for the comics and grumbling about it, working on the novel she’d been thinking about for two years, The Click of the Shutting, making notes for short stories at night, entertaining more love possibilities than she could possibly handle (a Virginia or two, the socialite Natica Waterbury, an Anne and an Ann, the model Chloe, et al.) and feeling abysmally poor, Pat still kept her eyes on the prize. She framed her desire for the “best” in life in metaphors saturated by the war and couched in the language of the enemy. (Her diary note is in bad German.)

“When I work (write), I must have the best, the best cigarettes, a clean shirt, because I am a soldier, who fights, but in this case the enemy is terrible and brave, and sometimes I don’t win.”¹⁰⁵

In August of 1949, on her first trip to London, already planning to seduce her English publisher Dennis Cohen’s brilliant, beautiful showgirl-turned-psychiatrist wife, Kathryn Hamill Cohen, Pat was still holding fast to her conviction of “quality.”

“I shall have the best, in the long run. Not a house with children, not even a permanent thing (what is permanent in life and in art? What ever is permanent except one’s own heartbeat?) but the best will always be attracted to me. For this, I do, most sincerely, thank God.”¹⁰⁶

In June of 1952, from Florence, Pat wrote to Kingsley in New York to explain why she’d gone back to Europe. The subject of “the best”—never far from Pat’s mind—came up again in the letter. The fact that Mary and Stanley Highsmith had left New York State was one of the interesting reasons Pat gave for leaving the United States,¹⁰⁷ but her old obsession with quality was her strongest theme.

“I did not come away with a bitter hatred of American commercialism or bad taste, or any usual complaint…. I cannot imagine going on forever not returning to America. But I can imagine living mostly in Europe the rest of my life…. [T]o have a good time in America costs a lot. It is the opposite in Europe…. [T]o have an elegant good time, with beautiful surroundings, is cheap.”¹⁰⁸

In 1955, three years after her letter to Kingsley about the “elegant good time” she was having in Europe, Pat was back in the United States making her credo of “quality” the central obsession of the character who was to become, crudely speaking, her own fictional Alter Ego: Tom Ripley. (Pat was never “the woman who was Ripley,” but she did give Ripley many of the traits she wished she had, as well as quite a few of her obsessive little habits.) Like Pat, Ripley began as a flunker of job interviews and a failure at self-respect. Like Pat, Ripley found his “quality” of life in Europe.

“The best” is Tom Ripley’s reward for the murder and impersonation of his Alter Ego, Dickie Greenleaf, but it is also Ripley’s goal. “Il meglio, il meglio!”—“The best, the best!”—Tom cries out at the end of The Talented Mr. Ripley when the taxi driver asks him what kind of hotel he wants to go to.¹⁰⁹ Tom means what he says to the taxi driver: he wants only the best. And Pat meant what she said about “quality” that day at Sangor-Pines to young Everett Ray Kinstler.

Pat’s offhand comment to Kinstler when he brought her a Pepsi instead of a Coke, he remembers, “was said in an amusing way. Not that it hit me like that; I was devastated.”¹¹⁰ Perhaps the love-struck sixteen-year-old—his talent was for “telling stories” in portraits, and he was already perceptive about reading character in a face—had caught the operating principle underlying Pat’s response: a deadly serious decision to have “the best” of everything and an unwavering determination to reject those who did not. Pat would continue to wield this principle as both a sword and a shield for the rest of her life.

Years later, when he returned from his tour of duty in World War II, Ray Kinstler happened to come across Pat in a crowded café in Greenwich Village.

“I used to frequent the Village then and sometime in the late 1940s I saw her, recognized her in a café. Of course, I was older—and there’s a big difference between being sixteen and being twenty-two.

“She was sitting at a table…smoking and drinking. I did a double take, but I don’t think she spotted me.

“It seemed to me—I don’t want to use the word ‘seedy’—but it looked to me like she’d changed a lot. Maybe I’d just grown up, but…my recollection was, she just, uh, she just didn’t look as attractive, and that’s not a negative. I was just more grown up…and I saw something in her that didn’t appeal to me. Something about her pushed me back.”

“Just imagine,” said Ray Kinstler, casting his mind back sixty years to the twenty-two-year-old Pat Highsmith waiting upstairs in the Sangor-Pines comics shop on West Forty-fifth Street for his lovelorn younger self to bring her the wrong soft drink. “Just imagine if I’d gotten that Coca-Cola for her what would have happened.”

It only took him a second to come up with the right answer.

“Nothing.”¹¹¹