• 11 •
Part 2
Pat once told a lover that life “didn’t make any sense without a crime in it.”1 Writing for the crime-themed, criminally inclined comic book industry of the 1940s—the only long-term “job” she ever had—must have seemed to her like compounding a felony.
Pat stopped her typing in the office, said a co-worker at Sangor-Pines, only long enough to have a cup of coffee or light up a cigarette.2 Coffee and cigarettes were the twin stimulants of her working days, and all her life she remained an enthusiastic coffee drinker. After she moved to Europe, her letters to her professor friend Alex Szogyi in New York were wreathed in nostalgic reminiscences of staying up all night and talking, their conversations fueled by cup after cup of strong coffee.
Pat linked her earliest memories of coffee with her experience of suspense, mystery, and “story.” She remembered with unusual pleasure the Sunday nights of her childhood in Queens when she sat in the kitchen with Mary and Stanley at nine o’clock to hear the weekly broadcast of the half-hour Sherlock Holmes* serial during which “Sherlock and Watson were always stirring G[eorge] Washington Coffee before beginning their fascinating story.”3 And as she listened to Holmes and Watson advertise their American coffee sponsors, she had a cup of that same coffee with them. And she ate a bowl of Jell-O, too, “which Jack Benny had been advertising an hour before on the radio.” 4 At eleven or twelve, Pat Highsmith was still susceptible to advertising.
But coffee was not the only liquid Pat grew up to drink enthusiastically, and during her year at Sangor-Pines her heavy alcohol intake and subsequent nighttime roistering began to affect her work. (See “Social Studies: Part 1.”) Lending support to her claim that justice didn’t exist—or that if it did, the world wasn’t much interested in it—Pat never suffered from hangovers. She awoke in the morning, says a still-awed lover, fresh as a daisy and ready to write after drinking the liquor-cabinet equivalent of a small pond. Only sleep deprivation interfered with her ferocious will to create.
Sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s, when Pat’s London friends Barbara Ker-Seymer and Barbara Roett were worried enough about her drinking to suspect cirrhosis of the liver, they determined to do something about it. Barbara Roett took charge of the formalities.
“I had an ex-lover, a doctor, Geoffrey [Dove], and I said to Pat, ‘Come, I want you to go to Geoffrey, he’s going to look at your liver.’ I wanted to frighten her. At that time I didn’t know her well enough[;] I really didn’t understand her nature. And so I took her to Geoffrey and we had the results the next day. And to my horror, Geoffrey rang and said, ‘There’s nothing at all the matter with Pat’s liver!’5
Coffee, scientists now tell us gravely, helps to protect the livers of heavy drinkers from cirrhosis. So perhaps it was Pat’s instinct for self-preservation—just as well developed as her instinct for self-destruction—that had kept her drinking coffee with pleasure and purpose since she was “11 and 12 years old.”6
For most of the 1940s Pat smoked Camel cigarettes. (Her doctors told her that her late-life lung cancer had nothing to do with her smoking.) After she came back to New York in the fall of 1949 from her first trip to Europe, she refused to smoke anything but French Gauloise jaune or German cigarettes. And in 1963 in England, reliably perverse in a foreign country, Pat had a short fling with American cigarettes again, finding that her brand choices in Suffolk were limited. There was only one tobacconist in Aldeburgh who carried American cigarettes, and those were Philip Morrises.7 But in the 1940s she was still inhaling Camels by the carton. And in midtown Manhattan, where many of the comics shops and comic book publishers were located, there was plenty of advertising around to remind her to stick with her brand.
The celebrated Camel cigarette sign in Times Square, mounted on the side of the Claridge Hotel on Broadway between Forty-third and Forty-fourth streets, did not escape the attention of the writer who, ten years later, would say she remembered the name “Ripley” from a sign advertising male attire on the Henry Hudson Parkway. (This is rather like James M. Cain’s claim that the origin of Double Indemnity was a lingerie ad.) Every morning on her way to Sangor-Pines from her East Fifty-sixth Street apartment, Pat passed near enough to the Camel sign (a several-stories-high male head, repainted as a soldier after America entered the war, with a cigarette in his hand and “real” smoke billowing out of his mouth) to see it smoking. The sign, erected in 1941 by the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, was one of the more creative displays in the neon-saturated Times Square, and the Camel Man, a superheroic smoker if ever there was one, continued to blow his enormous white smoke rings skyward every four seconds until 1966.
Although the comics company on Forty-fifth Street where Pat started out as a scriptwriter was usually known as Sangor-Pines, it produced comic books for so many publishers that it was often called by the names of the comics companies it packaged: Michel Publications, Cinema Comics, Nedor, Better, Standard Publications, etc. Like everything else that had to do with the comics, Sangor-Pines operated under a multitude of shifting identities.
Bob Oksner, cartoonist and art director at Sangor-Pines in the 1940s, remembers seeing Pat at work on her scripts in the Sangor-Pines writers’ bullpen.8 But the writers’ room had other occupants as well; Pat was never alone there.
Pat’s desk in the seventh-floor Sangor-Pines office was flanked by four other desks, small ones just big enough to set a typewriter on. They were placed about “six to eight feet apart,” and four other writers were seated at them. Three of the writers were men, a Miss Taub worked somewhere else in the office, and, briefly, another woman scriptwriter also named Patricia (Patricia Cher) sat next to Pat. And so for a short time in an industry and an office where women were almost never employed, there were two women named Patricia sitting side by side, typing out scenarios for the comics.9 Coincidentally, doubling was also the theme of the comics stories Pat Highsmith was working on in the office—and the subject of the novel (The Click of the Shutting) she was taking notes for at home.
Later on, space in the writers’ bullpen got tight and Pat was moved around the floor. For a while she shared a corner with Dan Gordon, an illustrator and writer whom she regarded as an “intelligent artist.” (Her editor at Timely comics, Vince Fago, thought Gordon was a “genius.”) Dan Gordon drank. “One can see it in his face,” Pat noted, confident in her judgement, and she flirted with him at work. He made her “feel like a 16 year old girl with Clark Gable,” and the remark about Gable means something: Gone with the Wind (1939) was still her favorite movie.10
In 1943, Gerald Albert, the twenty-six-year-old son of a smart lawyer-turned-pulp publisher who sold his wartime paper allotment to Ben Sangor, got himself a job writing comics for Sangor-Pines a few months after Richard Hughes hired Pat. Albert thinks his job may have been part of the paper-supplying deal his father made with Ben Sangor. However it transpired, Gerry Albert found himself sitting in the writers’ bullpen at Sangor-Pines two seats away from a “tall, dark, serious, attractive, rather remote young woman [with] good features”—like everyone else who met her at this time, Albert emphasizes how “good-looking” she was—named Patricia Highsmith.
Gerald Albert was not the only scriptwriter to find Pat attractive. Leo Isaacs, a freelance writer for Sangor-Pines, fell “passionately” in love with Pat and besieged her with more or less unwelcome sonnets.11 Pat, interested in a clinical way in his emotions (but not in responding to them), took appraising notes on poor Mr. Isaacs’s psychology.
Gerald Albert, who later became a psychotherapist (his leading questions in the office to Pat—“You seem sad”—annoyed her), says he somehow formed the impression that Pat “was a homosexual.” He never heard a word about it at the office, but thinks his feeling may have been prompted by Pat’s rather severe style of dress, or by the “semimasculine disdain for the feminine” which seemed to emanate from her.12
“But,” says Dr. Albert, “what I remember most is her ability to produce an enormous amount of material.”13
The four other Sangor shop writers would come to the office, get their individual assignments from Richard Hughes—the assignments would be for different kinds of stories—and try to bat ideas around with each other, spinning out the time while they tested out their “gimmicks” or their story lines on themselves and on their typewriters. But Pat would come in and start typing—“Just like a machine,” says Gerald Albert, and he said it several times—the moment she arrived at the office. And she wouldn’t quit until it was time to leave. “As a producer of comics, she was a huge producer. And she was constantly producing stuff that was useful.”14
Pat stayed with the Sangor-Pines comics shop as a full-time writer for “a year.” And then she spent the next six years and more as a freelance comic book scriptwriter, sending back material from wherever she was in the world. And wherever she was and whatever else she was writing, Pat was also, as a rule, working on something for the comics. In June of 1949, resentfully crammed into the tourist class of an ocean liner on her first trip to Europe, Pat wrote scripts for Timely comics all the way across the Atlantic.15 Coming back from that same trip in October of 1949, this time in steerage on a freighter where only Italian was spoken, Pat, writing hard on The Argument of Tantalus (the manuscript title for The Price of Salt), was also typing away on comics material for the Fawcett company.16
In Italy, in Mexico, in the South of France, in Germany, on trains and slow boats, Pat did the comics fillers, the scenarios, and the odd text story. The long lead time between the writing and the publication of most comic books made scripting for the comics a good job for a restless traveller like Pat Highsmith. She could write her scripts and scenarios and submit them in advance because the Superhero stories she was writing—the ones that had their own titles—were quarterlies, published only four times a year. America’s Best Comics anthologized many of the stories Pat wrote, and it, too, was a quarterly until 1947.17 Pat worked on a variety of titles and stories for different companies, and she wrote in all the comics genres: “silly animal” comics, historical comics, “indeterminate comics material,” and romance comics (like Betty the Nurse)—which she predictably loathed. But the preponderance of stories she wrote were stories for Superheroes. Superheroes with Alter Egos.
During the year Pat worked at Sangor-Pines, the shop’s most prominent Superheroes were Black Terror and Fighting Yank. But because the Golden Age of American Comics was shining most brightly for young men, Gerry Albert, sitting two desks away from Pat at Sangor-Pines, had no idea that Pat had been given Superhero stories to work on. The few women who found their way into the comics shops of the 1940s (most of them were artists)18 were usually assigned the kind of ancillary material Pat also wrote: the “indeterminate comics material,” the “romance” comics, and the “silly animal” comics. “Silly animals,” imported from stop-motion movie cartoons, had three fingers, prominent ears, and the kind of dialogue writers hated to even think about.
Perhaps with her love of reversing things, Pat’s work on “silly animal comics” was a prompt for the vengeful, homicidal pets she created for her collection of short stories, The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder—but her real concentration at Sangor-Pines was on Superheroes. (And while she was there, she worked for other comics companies on Superhero titles like Spy Smasher, Ghost, The Champion, etc.) Always aiming for “the best,” Pat pressed editors all over town for these assignments. Writing for Superheroes, even sublunary ones like the Black Terror, was about as good as you could get in the comics.
The burgeoning comic book industry into which Pat Highsmith stumbled in 1942 was introduced into the United States by the same small crimes she liked to use to start her plots and feed her imagination: plagiarism and forgery. The prototype for the first “modern” comic book, The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck, appeared as an illustrated supplement in a New York newspaper in 1842, pirated (some publishing practices never change) from an illustrated book in Switzerland: L’Histoire de M. Vieux Bois, by the nineteenth-century Genevan cartoonist Rodolph Töppfer. Töppfer’s book was republished in the twentieth century in Zurich by Daniel Keel, cofounder of the Swiss publishing company Diogenes Verlag. Diogenes Verlag became Pat’s world representative and primary publisher; Daniel Keel is her literary executor.
In short—and with the kind of coincidence that marked her work—comic books began their artistic life in the same country in which Pat Highsmith ended hers: Switzerland. And Rodolph Töppfer, the progenitor of the comic book, and Patricia Highsmith, the comics’ most secretive scriptwriter, were both published by the same Swiss company, Diogenes Verlag.
The fantastic trail cut by early comics publishing through “yellow journalism,” “pulp” fiction, and “soft” pornography—as well as its creative intersection with the diaspora of Eastern European Jews (who did much of the publishing, editing, writing, and artwork of early comics) and with gangster-boss Frank Costello’s Canadian bootlegging business and pioneering feminist Margaret Sanger’s illegal mail-order contraception company—is outside the scope of this book. Perhaps it’s enough to know that Margaret Sanger’s “Dainty Maid” douche bags travelled in the same delivery trucks as Costello’s bootleg liquor—and that these same trucks were also carrying the pulp publications of Harry Donenfeld’s Eastern News/Eastern Color, the parent company for the hundreds of Timely comics Pat would later write—to get a sense of just how appropriate the milieu of comics was for the already criminally inclined imagination of young Miss Highsmith.*19
By 1939, garishly illustrated comic books were appearing on metal magazine racks, wire lines, and serried wooden shelves in every candy store, newsstand, and corner drugstore in the United States. Bound in wraparound covers and stapled in two places, the little magazines rarely varied in cost or style: ten cents was the cover price, and the format was a sixty-four-page, eight-by-ten-inch magazine—just the right size to fit inside a high school history textbook. The wood-grain paper on which comics were printed was so crudely pulped (“pulp” novels were printed on the same paper and took their name from it) that readers could almost count the tree rings and smell the chainsaw oil.
Gertrude Stein, already a fan of the American newspaper comic strips Krazy Kat (Surrealism by another name) and The Katzenjammer Kids (an American rip-off of the naughtiest comic strip boys in Germany, Max und Moritz), had the strips mailed to her in Paris and then passed them along to her equally enchanted friend, Pablo Picasso. In 1934–35, on her first visit to the United States in three decades, Stein, beguiled by the look of comic books, called them in her best faux-naïf manner “square books” and said they showed how Americans can “do the best designing and use the best material in the cheapest thing.”20
At its height, to which it was just beginning to rise when Pat walked into the Sangor-Pines comics shop in December of 1942, the comics industry was the largest publication business in the United States. In 1941, thirty comic book publishers were producing 150 different titles monthly, with sales of fifteen million copies and an estimated readership of sixty million Americans.21 During the early war years, comics, along with cigarettes and candy bars, were sent by the tankerful to Allied forces overseas.22 At the end of the 1940s there were close to forty comics publishers in business, selling 300 titles and fifty million comics a month.23 And by 1953, just as the Golden Age of American Comics was about to turn to brass, one in every three publications bought and sold in the United States was a comic book.24
The first comic books were pasted together from comic strips in newspapers, and comics continued as they began. The stories retained the panel form—like frames in a strip of film—which were then ballooned out by letterers with the (mostly) rudimentary dialogue supplied by the writers. U.S. Post Office regulations required that two pages of “text stories” (stories in prose without illustration) had to be squeezed in amongst the illustrated tales in order to qualify the comics for a mass-mailing rate. All writers for the comics, including Pat Highsmith, had to write pseudonymous text stories, and their scenarios for regular comic book stories went mostly uncredited as well. Text stories were printed under “house” pseudonyms: “Sam Brant,” “Charles Stoddard,” “Tex Mumford,” and “Allen Douglass” are amongst them.25
Unusually, one of the text stories Pat wrote for the comics was apparently published under her own name. The story is supposed to have appeared in a Standard comic book of the 1940s, and a copy of it is said to still be in existence. Given Pat’s perennial Christmas sentiments (“Christmas itself is positively the erupting boil of human guilt”)26 and her lifelong refusal to acknowledge the extent of her comic book work, the way in which her sole signed creation for the comics has been filed could hardly be more fitting. The Standard comic containing this signed Highsmith text story is buried in a warehouse in North Carolina under twenty thousand other uncatalogued comics and one withered pine: a long-dead Christmas tree belonging to the collector of the only comic book in which the name “Patricia Highsmith” was ever printed.27,28
Late in life Pat told interviewers, if she told them anything at all, that she’d spent a few months after she got out of college writing comic book stories for characters “like Superman or Batman.” In the hierarchy of Superheroes, Superman was the first and the best; the model for the hundreds that followed. Black Terror, however, the character Pat was really writing for, epitomized her worst fear: Black Terror was a very second-rate Superhero.
Only his boy sidekick, Tim Roland, knew that the real name and true identity of the Black Terror, two-fisted nemesis of “Our Fascist Enemies,” was Bob Benton, “mild-mannered” neighborhood pharmacist. And only his creator, Pat’s meticulous editor at the Sangor-Pines comics shop, Richard E. Hughes (his real name was Leo Rosenbaum), understood just how closely Bob Benton and his Alter Ego, the Black Terror, were modeled on the comic book characters of Clark Kent and Superman.29
Superman was the creation of two seventeen-year-old carriers of the Zeitgeist from Cleveland, Ohio, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster; both of them were children of Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe. In 1938, six years after they first imagined him, the dogged young duo finally published a story about Superman in a DC comic book. The starkly illustrated myth of the superpowered orphan from another galaxy, the kindly farm family who adopted him, and his mild-mannered second self, Clark Kent, the human shield for Superman’s secret identity, quickly inflamed the imaginations of America’s children—as well as the business instincts of some of New York’s more disreputable publishers.*
“After Superman,” says Stan Lee, godfather of the Superhero Spider-Man and the figure from the Golden Age of American Comics most closely associated with Pat’s favorite employer, Timely comics (now the world-renowned Marvel Comics), “if artists wanted to be successful, they thought, ‘I guess we better give our characters costumes and double identities.’”30 And if those artists and writers had “ethnic” names, they usually provided themselves with the same cover story they gave to their characters: another identity cloaked by an anglicized surname. (Stan Lee’s real name: Stanley Martin Lieber.) In the world of American comics of the 1940s, imitation was the most commercial form of flattery.
Bob Benton/Black Terror was one of a long line of Clark Kent/Superman imitations. Like all copies, he suffers from a deteriorated image; his story is less sharply focused than Superman’s. He follows the common Superhero formula of costume (tights, a cape, an insignia), a series of evil opponents to vanquish, and a boy sidekick to help with the fights. In 1954, in a book called Seduction of the Innocent, the well-meaning, socially concerned, progressive psychiatrist Dr. Frederic Wertham*—subsequently much vilified by comic book fans—had a fine time exposing just what another successful Superhero, Batman, was really getting up to with his boy sidekick Robin (homosexual relations)—and cataloguing the dangers (violence, racism, and sexism) he thought comic books posed to the psyches of America’s children. Black Terror’s own special superpower—the result of his Alter Ego’s life-changing laboratory accident—is his bullet-repelling superskin. But Black Terror’s birth in a pharmacist’s lab could never compare to the glorious emigrant myth propelling Superman: an intergalactic journey to Kansas in a transparent capsule launched by his doomed parents from their dying planet Krypton.
Still, as the splash page of a wartime Black Terror comic tells us, Black Terror could always be counted upon to fight for his country: he went wherever the “Axis octopus rears its deadly head.” Some of the Superheroes who preceded Black Terror did more than that. They went to war against Hitler long before the United States joined the battle—and for the most obvious reason: American Jews were writing and drawing them.*
Like Pat, her mostly youthful confrères in the comics business were underdogs yearning to be top dogs. Like Pat, they had all been schooled in the American Dream. But unlike Pat, many of them had been locked out of the “quality” ends of their chosen professions—for them, it was commercial illustration and advertising—because of ethnic prejudice. Most of Pat’s cohorts in the comics, said Al Jaffee, cartoonist and editor at Timely comics, would have “drifted into the comic-book business [because] most of the comic-book publishers were Jewish.” Will Eisner, cofounder of the world famous Eisner-Iger comics shop and inspired creator of The Spirit, precurser of the graphic novel, agreed: “[T]his business was brand new. It was the bottom of the social ladder. [Those who wanted to get] into the field of illustration found it very easy to come aboard.”31
Most of these young comics artists and writers were steeped in popular culture: detective magazines, science fiction magazines, fantasy and horror magazines, and crème de la hard-boiled crime fiction magazines like Black Mask.* And many of the stories in the magazines they were reading had been infused by their authors’ admiration for the same writers who had illuminated Pat’s youth: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, et al. This dilution of high culture slowly trickled down into the rough, rich mix that was the American comic book in the 1940s, helping to shape its stories and its artwork, however crudely and simplistically. (Pat once described her comics work as being like “writing two ‘B movies’ a day.”)32Dostoyevsky and Kafka, Nietzsche and Poe, Rider Haggard and H. G. Wells, hard-boiled crime fiction, science fiction, pulp romance, and German Expressionist film—anything vividly adrift in the Zeitgeist was vacuumed up and made use of by the four-color, six-panel world of the comic book.
And there was another crucial source comic book creators were drawing on: their own ethnic and religious histories. Siegel and Shuster’s “Krypton” names for Superman and his father, Kal-El and Jor-El, are both derived from the Hebrew nomenclature for “God.” And the story of Moses, the Jewish hero who led his people out of Egypt, and the legend of the sixteenth-century Golem—the giant, incomplete, servant-being created from the clay of the Vltava River by the chief rabbi of Prague to protect his community from anti-Semitic attacks—took on special significance in an era when the very survival of European Jewry was being threatened. The Golem, especially, had all the attributes of a Superhero except one: he was a little lacking in initiative.
“You shall obey my commands,” [said Rabbi Judah Loew to the Golem,] “and do all that I may require of you, go through fire, jump into water or throw yourself down from a high tower.”33
Will Eisner thought the “Golem was very much the precursor of the super-hero” because the Jews “needed someone who could protect us…. against an almost invincible force. So [Siegel and Shuster] created an invincible hero.”34 Cartoonist Jules Feiffer, invoking the Eastern European emigrant background of Siegel and Shuster, provided the wittiest variation on Eisner’s comment: “It wasn’t Krypton that Superman really came from, it was the planet Minsk.”35
When Pat gave her “criminal-hero” Tom Ripley a charmed and parentless life, a wealthy, socially poised Alter Ego (Dickie Greenleaf), and a guilt-free modus operandi (after he kills Dickie, Tom murders only when necessary), she was doing just what her fellow comic book artists were doing with their Superheroes: allowing her fictional character to finesse situations she herself could only approach in wish fulfillment. And when she reimagined her own psychological split in Ripley’s character—endowing him with both her weakest traits (paralyzing self-consciousness and hero-worship) and her wildest dreams (murder and money)—she was turning the material of the “comic book” upside down and making it into something very like a “tragic book.”36 “It is always so easy for me to see the world upside down,” Pat wrote in her diary—and everywhere else.37
In October of 1954, working on The Talented Mr. Ripley and thrilling to the idea of corrupting her readers, Pat said plainly what she was doing.
“What I predicted I would once do, I am doing already in this very book (Tom Ripley), that is, showing the unequivocal triumph of evil over good, and rejoicing in it. I shall make my readers rejoice in it, too.”38
And then, just as plainly, Pat said why she was doing it, giving an account that sounds like Will Eisner’s explanation of how people who are trapped by “invincible forces” might feel compelled to escape into “invincible” Alter Egos.
“The main reason I write is quite clear to me. My own life, however interesting I try to make it by traveling and so forth, is always boring to me, periodically. Whenever I become intolerably bored, I produce another story, in my head. My story can move fast, as I can’t, it can have a reasonable and perhaps perfect solution, as mine can’t. A solution that is somehow satisfying, as my personal solution never can be.
“It is not an infatuation with words. It is absolute day dreaming, for day dreaming’s sake.”39
Certainly, the suggestion that any of her novels could have shared a creative inspiration with comic books would have driven the talented Miss H into conniption fits. And the tenor of her response to the hint that Thomas P. Ripley, her boyish (and goyische) “hero-criminal,” might owe even a fraction of his identity to the Golem of Prague, the Moses who led the Jews through the desert, or the Superman imagined by two Bar Mitzvah boys from Cleveland, Ohio, is only too easy to imagine.*
But Crime and Punishment and The Ambassadors were not the only fictions working away in Pat’s imagination while she was making up Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley, et al. Hundreds, probably thousands of comic book scenarios dramatizing the escape from one identity to another—and the uncomfortably yoked lives of Alter Egos—had already passed through her mind, coloring it, in Emily Brontë’s luminous phrase, “like wine through water.” The inspiration that made a “hero” of a conscienceless killer like Tom Ripley in 1955, and Alter Egos of the high-minded architect and the sodden, psychopathic spawn of a rich man in Strangers on a Train in 1950, was one of the distinguishing marks of Pat’s imagination. But that imagination had not only been infused by Dostoyevsky and Poe, Proust and James and André Gide; it had also been marinating for seven long years in the colorful tropes of the American comic book.40
Pat Highsmith got her culture “high” and—complaining about working for the comics almost as much as she complained about loving women—she also got her culture “low.”
Pat’s late nights in the early 1940s (see “Social Studies, Part 1”) affected her concentration so seriously that six months after she was hired at Sangor-Pines, Richard Hughes called her on the carpet and taxed her with a lack of “enthusiasm” and “precision” in her comics work. (Pat was writing stories for Spy Smasher and Ghost comics and hating them both.) Alas, it’s true, Pat thought; I’m “hopelessly bored.” 41
So, from her typewriter table in the Sangor-Pines office and, in the evenings, from her desk on East Fifty-sixth Street, Pat, who usually managed not to understand just how subversive her work really was, went right on sending drawings, stories, and even cartoons to The New Yorker magazine, which went right on rejecting them.
“The New Yorker, alas, does not like my alcoholic story. ‘Too unpleasant a subject—two people who become alcoholics,’ says Mrs. Richardson Wood. And that it doesn’t move. The N[ew] Y[orker], I thought, made a science of stories that don’t move.” 42
The world of quality publishing was Pat’s longed-for escape from comics writing. She would have been vaguely surprised to learn that the Superheroes whose adventures she was pounding out on her typewriter—Whizzer, Pyroman, the Human Torch, the Destroyer, Captain Midnight, Black Terror, Flying Yank, Spy Smasher, Ghost, the Champion—and the war heroes and adventurers she was also writing for—Jap Buster Johnson, Sergeant Bill King, Golden Arrow43—were all seeking similar (and similarly illusory) escapes themselves, as they changed their clothes or apostrophized their Alter Egos in order to flee their confining circumstances. (Pat’s psychology had always included the refinement of keeping things from itself.) Later, she would offer the same escape to most of her fictional psychopaths, locked up in the double-doored, no-exit cells of their obsessions. That escape, too, was an illusion, but it would borrow more than a little from her “hack writing” about men in tights—and in tight spots.
Many of the comics plots Pat was writing concentrated on men of action who were either chasing or fleeing some aspect of what might be thought of as themselves. They could fly like birds, outrun a speeding train, slither up a skyscraper, change costumes in the blink of an eye, shoot straight, ride fast, or in a pinch drive like hell. Pat would say many times that the reason men and not women were the “heroes” of most of her novels was because men had the capacity for “action.” Men, she said, can “do things…. men can leave the house.” 44 In fact, in the Coates family, it was Pat’s grandmother who “did things” by keeping the family boardinghouse together, and it was Pat’s mother who left the Plangman “house” and marriage and went on to earn most of the money for the Highsmith establishments as well. But logic was never Pat’s strong point.
Always excepting the two female lovers in The Price of Salt and Edith Howland of Edith’s Diary, most of Pat’s women characters are as close to comic book caricatures as a serious novelist can write them. They are vengeful bitches like Nickie in The Cry of the Owl; instinctual sluts like Melinda in Deep Water; blank innocents like Annabelle in This Sweet Sickness; nagging wives like Clara in The Blunderer; fantasy figures like Elsie in Found in the Street; or passive dilettantes like Alicia in A Suspension of Mercy. Pat had no problem (except boredom) with the subordinate roles she and her cohorts were creating for the women characters in their comic book stories. Her usual line on the Second Sex was: “It’s hard for me to see women (as a whole) standing on their own feet. I still see them as sort of in relationship to a man.” 45 Except in the first blush of love, Pat never could imagine a woman with super-powers.
Male characters were a different matter. In the comics Pat was writing for, it was the male Superheroes who are natural-born escape artists. They live in a world of perpetual threat. They spend their time escaping external danger (sometimes their Evil Twins want to kill them; sometimes a Super Criminal is the adversary), eluding the exposure of their feebler Alter Egos, and brooding handsomely in their palaces of secret repose: their Batcaves and their Fortresses of Solitude. Superheroes—in a phrase Pat Highsmith once slipped into a radio interview about the character she called her favorite “hero-criminal,” Tom Ripley—“will always get away with it; [they’ll] always be age thirty-four, one foot in the grave.” 46
Ripley is Pat’s most developed escape artist. In The Talented Mr. Ripley he is in perpetual flight from his enfeebled, giggling, sexually incoherent, impoverished Alter Ego (see “Les Girls: Part 5”). Still, he manages to pull off the escape that every comic book Alter Ego dreams of: the artful dodge of never having to settle into a single self. Orphaned like Superman and Batman, provided with his own Fortress of Solitude (Belle Ombre), Ripley becomes more successful (and less interesting) with each new Ripley novel: a character who rarely questions himself, he can fly anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice, assume any disguise or age or gender, and subsist on very little sleep. His courage fails him only once: he turns “green” with terror at his own wedding.
Certainly, the artistic use of escape had occurred to Pat long before she went to work as a comic book writer. Escape from a fixed identity was not only the theme of every novel that attracted her, it was her own favorite operating principle. (The first thing she always thought of when she fell in love was…leaving town.) Escape as a controlling idea turned up early on in her college short story “The Legend of the Convent of St. Fotheringay” but it was her much grimmer effort, a story called “Uncertain Treasure,” that set the two-man pattern of paranoid pursuit and ambiguous escape which would come to define Highsmith Country.
“Uncertain Treasure” first appeared in print in August of 1943, eight months after Pat started working in the writers’ bullpen at Sangor-Pines. The magazine which printed it was a wartime Greenwich Village journal with the uninspiring title of Home and Food.47 (It was later published in another small journal called The Writer.) “Uncertain Treasure” was the first fiction Pat would publish outside her high school and college journals, the Bluebird and the Barnard Quarterly, and her diaries and cahiers show that it was formed, contoured, and colored by her work for the comics.
Home and Food published “Uncertain Treasure” alongside such unpromisingly titled articles as “Dehydration,” “Rummage and Sew,” “Shoe String Suppers,” and “Canning.” These were the war years, the national belt was being tightened, and canning, the dehydration of food for preservation, and cheap suppers—suppers on a shoestring—were subjects of real interest. Pat had started to write “Uncertain Treasure” while she was still working for Ben-Zion Goldberg at FFF Publications. One of the employees in Goldberg’s office was a cripple, his lurching gait caught Pat’s attention, and she built it into the beginning of a story she was calling “Mountain Treasure.” But when Pat went to work at Sangor-Pines, she reimagined the story over a period of several months, then finished and published it as “Uncertain Treasure.” And because she liked her Sangor-Pines editor Richard Hughes so much, she showed him the story and took his criticism on it.48
Richard Hughes’s own scripts for the comics have been described as exposing “the Faustian bargain” that lurked “behind the calm façade of the normal American home.” 49 Hughes, like Ben-Zion Goldberg before him, was the right reader at the right time for Patricia Highsmith.
The “cripple” of “Uncertain Treasure,” Archie, is reading a “Daily News comic strip” when he notices the “treasure” of the title, an abandoned “khaki utility bag,” on a subway platform. A “smaller man” (he has no other designation) dressed in the crude, bold colors used by comic book illustrators begins to circle the “treasure,” making sounds with his shoes like the onomatopoetic sounds Pat read every day in the page mock-ups for her scripts at Sangor-Pines: “thock-thock.” Archie, afflicted with a speech impediment, a slow mind, and a missing ear (his ear has been replaced with a vivid, visual image: “a daub of white flesh like the opening of a balloon which is tied with a string”) makes the first move: he grabs the bag from the subway platform.
The smaller man takes the bag back from Archie: “Thief!…Dope!” he says. The dialect Pat used is as simple, as tone-deaf, and as classically paranoid as the dialogue she was writing for the comics. “Wh-what the hell am I doin’ bein’ chased by a nut…. Suppose he don’t leave me alone all night! Suppose he don’t never leave me alone!”
Everything in the landscape of “Uncertain Treasure” is aggressively visual and garishly colorful. Pat daubed the details in as though she were holding a loaded paintbrush. Her previous fictions had been mostly imagined in black and white; and when they were not, the introduction of color usually meant trouble—as in the class distinctions insinuated into her short story “Primroses Are Pink” by an argument over the color of a painting.*50
But “Uncertain Treasure” is not burdened by the subtleties of psychology or the shadings of color charts. It is a purely paranoid pursuit dressed up in primary colors. Archie follows the smaller man through a noirishly depicted Greenwich Village like “the inescapable, machinelike figure of a nightmare…after him, now, not the bag, driven by a crazy desire for revenge.” Archie repossesses the bag (the smaller man drops it in terror) and takes it back to his “cube of a room, furnished with a bed that sagged like a hammock” whose walls are covered by “tiny notations, so closely and equidistantly written as to make almost a pattern.”
This “cube” is the first of Highsmith’s fictional fortresses: the prototype for Guy Haines’s solitary rented room in Strangers on a Train (where he dreams of Charles Bruno performing superheroic feats); for Tom Ripley’s fortress-home Belle Ombre, anxiously patrolled by Ripley; for William Neumeister/David Kelsey’s fantasy house in the woods in This Sweet Sickness; and for Vic Van Allen’s garage-bunker in Deep Water with its copulating snails and blood-gorged bedbugs. Archie is the first of Pat’s reclusive males to be caught up in the kind of pursuit she would later deploy to such haunting effect in Strangers on a Train.
When Archie opens the bag, he finds only a riot of comic book colors: “many columns of glossy blue and gold paper and red and yellow and green and gray and mauve and white papers.” They conceal nothing but “penny chocolates and chewing gums” and two dollars in change. The treasure turns out to be valueless; it was the pursuit that mattered.
Perhaps it was the profusion of colored candy at the end of this laborious little tale that got it published in a magazine with the word “Food” in its title—although a recommendation by Rolf Tietgens, Pat’s new friend and Home and Food’s art editor, helped it along. “Uncertain Treasure” has the flatness that is characteristic of much of Highsmith’s work—early and late, good and bad. She gives equal treatment to every object in her field of vision, and her overviews are as uninflected as a depression—are, quite likely, the result of a depression. As early as 1940 Pat was noting that one of the several Virginias in her life “tells me I don’t know when to stop when I write—or what to leave out.”51 In Highsmith Country, everything generally weighs the same, has the same value, and carries the same charge of life—or lack of life. The landscape and characters of “Uncertain Treasure” are no exception.
However it found its way to publication, “Uncertain Treasure”’s criminal intentions and duplicating pursuits, its thick visual impasto and riot of primary colors, were already part of the atmosphere of the Sangor-Pines comics shop. The story reads like both the scenario and the brightly colored panels for a comic book—and the Sangor-Pines office, with its “posters of Black Terror on the walls and various characters who could fly in the air,”52 wouldn’t exactly have been unknown territory to the girl writer looking for a paying job in December of 1942. Alive with the idea of male Superheroes and their Alter Egos, staffed by artists and writers barred from the “quality” professions and shielded by their anglicized aliases, the Sangor-Pines office was much closer to the double nature of Pat’s own imagination than any of the other professional milieux she was trying so hard to enter.
Six days after Richard Hughes hired her at Sangor-Pines, Pat began to expand the character studies she’d started a month and half earlier for The Click of the Shutting, her first long fiction: a novel about an artistic, dependent teenage boy, prone to feelings of inferiority and crushes on other boys, who insinuates himself into the household of a rich and spoiled young man.53 A prototype for Tom Ripley, Gregory was Pat’s first foray into the extended imagining of the lives of Alter Egos (she wrote 385 pages before she gave the novel up as half finished). Just as she had with “Uncertain Treasure,” she worked on the book while she was writing the adventures of her other Alter Egos; the kind who wore tights and capes at night and square-rimmed glasses and sober suits during the day. (See “Alter Ego: Part 4.”)
Pat’s first month at Sangor-Pines—the end of December 1942 to January 1943—was spent in writing factual tales: biographical scenarios for true-life comics. Her initial writing assignment from Richard Hughes must have felt like an extension of her work for Ben-Zion Goldberg and the Jewish press; she was asked to research and write a script for Real Life Comics about Barney Ross, the Jewish welterweight boxing champion, war hero, and ardent advocate for the Zionist state.54
Her second script for Real Life Comics was a “Catherine the Great” story.55 Influenced by her reading of the Russian masters in Constance Garnett’s heroically anglicized translations, Pat’s dialogue for Catherine’s Court belongs more to the Court of St. James’s than the palaces of St. Petersburg.56 Although she gave the Empress Catherine diary-keeping habits like her own and played up her personal bravery, Pat was more at home with the male war hero who was her next assignment: “Hughes made an historical outline of [Eddie] Rickenbacker [the World War I flying ace]—a brilliant outline that I follow now,” she wrote in her diary.”57
As ambitious as she was persevering, Pat was always proposing new ideas for comic book stories, ideas which were sometimes too wayward even for the comics. Her proposal for the life story of the Confederate guerrilla-turned-outlaw Jesse James (a “criminal-hero” from the devastating War Between the States) was too “controversial” for true-life comics. At least that’s what the Real Life Comics editor said when he rejected her Jesse James scenario.58 Another of her proposals was too naïve. In May of 1946, she wanted to do something with a Joseph Conrad novel for Sangor-Pines. Richard Hughes’s cynical assistant, who was “sure our happy intellects would not be interested in”—he quotes Pat here—“‘Conrad’s simplicity and unfailing honesty in his writing,’” wrote back to Pat in the spirit of her future novels: “I can’t imagine anything more difficult to dramatize. After all, honesty belongs among the negative virtues.”59
And when Pat, walking up Lexington Avenue and always on the lookout for work, ran into Jack Schiff, the editor of DC comics (known as the “Tiffany” of comic book publishers because it published Superman) and “gives him some ideas” for comics stories—those ideas, while they apparently got her hired at DC (DC almost never hired women), didn’t get her hired for long.60 Bob Oksner remembered that Pat, typing away in the bullpen at Sangor-Pines (“she wouldn’t let anyone get too close,” Oksner said, echoing everyone else), was also doing some work for DC.61 But Pat usually kept quiet about her attempts to rustle up work at other companies while she was writing for Sangor-Pines—just as she kept quiet about nearly everything that had to do with the comics.
Still, everyone at Sangor-Pines knew that Pat “went home and did serious writing at night,”62 that she was leading a double life. After a long day typing up Superheroes at the office, she would return to her studio apartment at 353 East Fifty-sixth Street, run herself through a wall of water (either a long bath or a short shower), take a restorative nap, and emerge cleansed, rested, and transformed into her Alter Ego: Patricia Highsmith: Girl Writer Working on the Great American Novel. Pat’s life during this time might have made an absorbing comic book itself—but it would have been a comic book suitable for reading by adults only. (See “Social Studies: Part 1.”)
Always essentially divided, Pat’s mind adapted itself easily to her two writing identities. Water would regularly be a transforming and absolving element in her life, and she used her showers and her naps to separate her daylight psychology (the daytime comic book writer) from her nighttime self (the nocturnal author of potentially great books). She knew that her more creative Alter Ego—that part of the double identity she shared with the Super-heroes she was writing for—functioned best in the nighttime hours.
“One other major reason for my preferring to write at night (apart from the obvious one of increased quietude & privacy) is that when I am mildly tired the censor and the constraining factors of sharp consciousness, self doubt and criticism are not functioning well.”63
By 1948, Pat was acknowledging serious separations between “the person I am at night” and “the person I am by day:
Already the great dichotomy between the person I am at night, the person I am by day, even doing my own writing. The nocturnal person is far advanced in thought and imagination. The daytime person still lives and works too much with the world which is not mine. I must get them together and toward the night.64
Night and shadow were natural habitats for Pat, just as secrecy and shame were the default postures of her psychology. Even her attraction to nonhuman creatures was an attraction to creatures of the night (cats and owls) and to creatures who carried their coffins on their backs (snails). In 1990, indulging her passion for Broadway musicals, she would listen over and over again to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music from Phantom of the Opera, writing in her diary that she was “spellbound” by it.65 Phantom’s signature song, “Music of the Night,” sets out in easy images everything Pat thought the night could do for her:
Nighttime sharpens, heightens each sensation
Darkness stirs and wakes imagination.
Pat’s friend Kingsley Skattebol recalls that Pat “was very much at home, she was her best self, in shadowy places. She loved going into dingy beer parlours where she could sit and talk and be herself (whatever that was) in the dark.”66
Pat’s night and day identities—each one rooted in opposition—only began to branch into each other later in her writing life. It was when the boundaries between her “day self” and her “night self” were finally breached that her imaginative life started to break down, muting the resonant echoes and flattening the intense flights and drops which, early on, had issued so fluidly from her creatively doubled identities. The slow erosion of her natural psychological partitions may be one of the reasons her later novels (The Two Faces of January, People Who Knock on the Door, A Suspension of Mercy, Ripley Under Water, and Small g) and some of her themed collections of short stories (Little Tales of Misogyny, The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder, Mermaids on the Golf Course) are more like awkwardly imagined cartoons—or like the cruder comic book plots she was writing in the 1940s—than like the delicate, deeply nuanced renderings of disruption at the heart of her earlier works of fiction.
Kingsley thinks Pat “mortally wounded herself working for the comics. Her style was never the same afterwards.”67 Kingsley is partly right: Pat’s work wasn’t the same after the comics, but it was the form of the work that changed, not the style. While the author of “The Heroine” (1940) appears to be a far more sophisticated writer than the comics-influenced creator of “Uncertain Treasure” (1943), it was with this crude little story that Pat ventured into something like her major theme; working and reworking it for much of the rest of her writing life. Pat was a writer who could rarely distinguish what was good or bad about her own work, but who always seemed to find the conditions she needed in order to produce it. And in the 1940s, Pat Highsmith found much of what she needed working for the comics.
Pat must have mentioned her “serious writing” at the Sangor-Pines office, because it is Gerald Albert, sitting two desks away from her, who says that “everyone” there knew about it—although Pat rarely directed a word about anything to anyone at Sangor-Pines, even to the person sitting next to her. Pat was always too busy typing to talk, too busy churning out the material. Typing was money.
A year before she got the job with the Sangor shop, Pat wrote in her diary: “God damn it to hell I want money and that’s all I want.”68 Money was the repeated reason she gave herself for continuing to write for the comics—and money was always a deadly serious, not to mention an obsessive, subject for Patricia Highsmith. (By August of 1943, Pat, after asking Richard Hughes for another raise, was earning more money than her stepfather, Stanley: fifty dollars a week.)69 But the things Pat told herself she was doing and the reasons she gave herself for doing them didn’t always match. On her own evidence, money was not the only motive that kept Pat Highsmith working for Sangor-Pines.
When she’d been writing at Sangor-Pines for less than a month, Pat was already giving her editor, Richard Hughes, high marks as a boss. “He is a good writer, and he considers this work most seriously.”70 And she was saying to herself that writing for the comics “does me good, because it makes me write rapidly, with a lot of action, and even with a certain style of sincerity—this is necessary.”71
The comics did much more than that for Pat, and it was a crucial part of her divided life that her seven-year apprenticeship in the four-color, six-panel-per-page world of the American comic book would be both a secret she kept for (and, in many respects, from) herself and one of her most important entrées into the eerie, alternate universe by which she was to make her reputation.
Of course Pat adored Dostoyevsky (but didn’t really read him again after her twenties), of course she was attracted by the “perversions” of Gide and Proust and Julian Green,* by the analyses of Freud, and by the classifications of Krafft-Ebing and Karl Menninger. But her cahiers and diaries show that it was only after she went to work at the Sangor-Pines comic shop that her fiction took its sharp turn into the territory of mutually pursuing Alter Egos and obsessed-and-opposed Criminal Others.*
Gerald Albert’s impression of Pat as a nonstop worker in the Sangor-Pines shop was right on the money. Pat seems never to have allowed herself a moment’s reflection when she was typing up her scripts. It exasperated her—words to that effect punctuate her diaries—to put more mental energy than she needed into what she regarded as strictly commercial work.72 Like many of the young artists who wrote for this newly popular storytelling genre, Pat thought of the comics as trash, pulp trash, and her work as “hack” work. And it is true that many comic books were badly drawn, even barely drawn, and very crudely written.
Much of the comic book work in the 1940s was assembly-line work, piece-work, a lot like what went on in New York’s garment industry. Each worker had his (it was mostly his) specialty: the inker, the penciller, the letterer, the colorist, the scriptwriter. And most of the writers, even well-regarded ones like Bill Finger (the writer who cocreated Batman and The Green Lantern), almost never got their names on the stories they wrote. Sometimes (as in the case of Batman’s other creator, the illustrator Bob Kane), even the name of the artist on the story wasn’t the name of the artist who drew it: Kane (real name: Robert Kahn) hired artists like the gifted teenage Jerry Robinson to draw Batman for him.
In short, comic book work was a job done partially, quickly, anonymously and/or pseudonymously, and strictly for the money. Except, of course, when it wasn’t. When it was at its best, it was a whole new art form whose stunningly original creators (Will Eisner, Steve Ditko, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Jack Kirby, Gil Kane [real name: Eli Katz], Bill Finger, Jerry Robinson, et al.) are revered today, and whose formal parameters are still being explored in graphic novels.
But in the 1940s, as Stan Lee said, comics “were the bottom of the cultural totem pole…. No one had any respect for a fella who wrote comic books.” At parties, when people found out what Lee did for a living, they avoided him as though he were “infected.”73
Many comic book illustrators and writers from the 1940s kept quiet about their profession (and still do), and Pat, for whom shame was practically a religious principle and secrecy a profession of the faith, was no exception. So deep was her desire for silence on the subject that she kept no copies of the work she did for comic books.
A natural-born curator and self-recorder, Pat always collected the details of her life. No item, no artifact, was too small to escape her attention: even the matchbooks she took from bars and the maps she got from gas stations were added to her archives. (See “The Real Romance of Objects: Part 2.”) She stashed away stationery and writing implements taken from the hotels she stayed in. She preserved every article written about her work in fourteen large press books. She appears to have kept every piece of paper on which she ever wrote or drew a line.
In an undated folder marked “Incomplete Old Stories,” Pat filed a story called “The Last Unmaidenly Voyage of the S.S.” on which she scribbled, with perfect justification, a critical phrase: “Shape this tripe up.” She never got around to shaping up the “tripe,” but she didn’t consider throwing the story out, either.
Nor did she toss out a number of equally undeveloped drafts of short stories she’d filed away in a folder marked with her then-agent’s name, Margot Johnson. They, too, are far from being ready for publication—but Pat hung on to them all the same. (Eventually she did do some winnowing of the alpine accumulations of her story drafts; what she threw out was the work she thought she couldn’t “shape up.”)
Pat pasted hundreds of photographs—many of them are of attractive women whom no one but Pat could identify, and all the pictures are unlabelled—into her photograph albums, and she kept those albums up to date. In small “business books” she recorded every penny she earned. During the war years, she made lists of every nickel she ever spent and of exactly what she got for her money—right down to the coffee delivered to her in cardboard containers at the Timely comics office in suite 1401 of the Empire State Building.74
Pat felt the necessity—perhaps it was more like a destiny—of hanging on to everything she ever wrote or made. When she gave something away, particularly something she had fashioned with her own hands or offered up with a prematurely full heart, she often regretted the gesture, and sometimes she even tried to get the object back. (See “The Real Romance of Objects: Part 1.”)
But Pat systematically erased from her life every single thing that had to do with comics; she threw away every comic script, every proposal for a comic script, and every scenario for a comic book story she ever wrote. There would have been thousands of pages of comics work to cull—and she culled every one of them. Nor did she keep any copies.
The sole remnant of her long career in comic books appears on a list of French phrases she was trying to memorize. It’s the kind of obsessive little list she made all her life, and I found it, forgotten by her and tucked away, in a book left with a friend.75 On the reverse side of this page of French vocabulary is the fragment of a scenario for a story about an even feebler character than Black Terror—a character called Golden Arrow (murdered parents, a miraculous escape from carnage, a crack shot with gilded arrows, and a horse called White Wind) for whom she had already written a few stories. At the top of the page, Pat drew a radiating golden arrow and made a sketch of a “garçon au parapet” (she was still practicing her French) as an entry point into the script. The drawing is enhanced by a long line of actions Golden Arrow might perform.
“Spice this up with detail,” she reminded herself in the middle of the page—an internal note which she also applied to every single work of fiction she ever wrote.
Pat charted the plot of this comic book scenario just as she later made a chart of her own love life and a kind of chart for the plot of The Price of Salt; and it is almost too easy to explain her affinity for diagrams as the natural response of someone who always felt “displaced.” Sometimes Pat made a diagram just for the fun of it. On the last page of her first cahier is a chart she drew up when she was eighteen years old, showing how a trumpet should be played in the first, second, and third movements of a piece of music. Her pleasure was wholly in the making of the chart; she had no interest at all in learning to play the trumpet.76
On a second list of French phrases folded up with her sketches for Golden Arrow, Pat made a few scribbles for Ghost, a comics “filler” she was writing for. “Fillers” were stories which comics’ publishers ran periodically when they had extra space to fill in an issue. Pat particularly hated writing for Ghost. On this page, she calls the comic book panels “boxes,” as though she couldn’t be bothered to use the professional term “panels.” But her imagination, represented by these scraps of work, seems well suited to the medium of the comic book. She tells the stories graphically and she sees the actions in pictures.77
What didn’t suit Pat—despite that playwriting course with Minor Latham at Barnard College and years of producing silent sentences spoken by comic book characters—was writing good dialogue. Dialogue writing is like perfect pitch; you’re either born with the ability or you are not. Pat was not. Her later attempts to write commercial plays, television scripts, imaginary conversations—anything, in fact, to do with the spoken word—are uniformly awful; as unconvincingly tuned to the sounds of human speech and human rhythm as are most of the conversations in her novels.
A quarter of a century or so after she’d made her little chart for Golden Arrow, in February of 1969, Pat, living in Montmachoux, France, was struggling with an original script for the London theater producer Martin Tickner (“a two-acter, which I call STORIES”). She wrote her friend Lil Picard in New York that she’d “nearly had a nervous breakdown over writing my play. Caused by not knowing what SHOULD go into a play, how to write a play.”78 She had rewritten the script three times in three weeks, from beginning to end; and she would continue to work on it almost through the end of 1969 (including an October working holiday in a villa in the south of Portugal provided by her hopeful producer—of which experience Madeleine Harmsworth, the young lover who accompanied Pat to the villa, said: “I was rather fond of Portugal until then.”)79
Pat would eventually call this play When the Sleep Ends and she wrote the female lead for her friend the English actress Heather Chasen. Chasen says that not only could Pat “not write dialogue…she seemed to have no understanding of women at all.” Chasen thought the character Pat had written for her was violently unsympathetic, and that “the part was unplayable.”80 The work was never produced.
Pat’s best talents were like dedicated bombs: specific to certain targets and not to others. She knew this, but sometimes managed to fool herself into thinking that her secondary talents—her extraordinary gift for hard work and discipline—could overcome the deficit.
In 1946, after four years of writing scripts expressly designed for the panel construction of comic books—each panel a little inked and colored painting of its own—Pat wrote of the short stories she was working on at the same time as her comic book writing: “I think of each story to be written, as a painted picture. I think more clearly in painter’s terms.”81 It was another way of acknowledging what the comics were doing for her.
Pat was much better paid for her comics work than her fellow writers toiling away in pulp fiction, pornography, or lower-end “suspense” and “crime” novels.82 But the shame Pat felt about her comic book writing and about the whole comics milieu of pirated stories, forged identities, false names, and compartmentalized activities makes her persistence in the job much more a matter of like being attracted to like than of poverty being attracted to a good salary.
Sixty-five years later, her lengthy, uneasy, self-embarrassed career as a writer for comic books seems part and parcel of her own internal division and her artistic obsession with doubling; the product of a magnetic attraction of opposites. The talented young woman and the disreputable new graphic narrative form: each one charged with the same affinities, the same embarrassments, and with some of the same uncomfortable secrets.
Still, the money was no small thing. In the 1940s, the novelist Anaïs Nin (whose work Pat first read on a visit to Fort Worth in 1948),83 intent on generating spicy material for her voluminous diaries, was writing pornography-to-order for a United States senator for two dollars a page. Nin cannily contracted the work out to other writers for one dollar a page, making herself a tidy profit. But Pat Highsmith, even cannier than Anaïs Nin (and lacking both Nin’s wealthy husband and Nin’s desire to appear bohemian), was taking home between four and eight dollars for every comic book page she wrote.