The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  The only time I feel that I am cheating time, is when I walk a block, or read or write a sentence, or solve a problem while I hear a clock striking the hour. Then time stands still for a few seconds and one can start off again with a slight advantage.43

  “[E]ternally ashamed of [her] backwardness in mathematics,” given to repeating that “[t]he arts and literature are not enough to live by,” and that “without mathematics,” you can’t really be “civilized,” 44 Pat was obsessed by numbers. Her letters, cahiers, and diaries bristle with figures—financial calculations, numbered lines of tasks, addresses, miles, kilometers, times, dates, body temperatures, red blood cell counts, her IQ (121 in her midteens), etc., etc. Early in her college career, Pat was also making numbered lists of the relative virtues of different religions. She delved into Hinduism (while still under the protection of her mother’s Christian Science), but—ever ambitious and still computing her chances—decided that she couldn’t possibly get ahead in the Western world with that philosophy.45

  Henry David Thoreau, calculating every nail in his cabin on Walden Pond (and going home regularly to lunch with his mother), was no match for Patricia Highsmith in the compulsive counting department.

  Pat’s numbering and tallying went on to the very end of her life. During an interview for Publishers Weekly in 1992, she surveyed the land beyond her Swiss property with a baleful eye—local developers had designs on it—and then treated what must have been her suprised interviewer to the fruits of her survey:

  “They’ve got easily 14 little houses going up there. That means 28 adults, 28 cars, and something like 56 children, and an underground garage. It’s going to be hell.” 46

  But Pat doesn’t begin her first cahier by counting anything. She begins it with a lyrical vision of a “phantom-like girl dancing to a Tschaikowski waltz,” in “selfless-spontaneity” as if “the music had been growing within her and ripening through the years.” It is Pat’s coming out as a writer, and she joins the “phantom-like girl’s” dance and Tchaikovsky’s music to a kind of tribute to Marcel Proust, whose initials are prominently entered and lightly crossed out on the page. It’s as though the youthful Pat were inviting those representatives of the high arts, Tchaikovsky and Proust, to lend inspiration to her maiden effort.

  A more prosaic explanation for this fancy footwork from an ambitious and self-regarding seventeen-year-old might be this one: Pat had recently been given the first volume of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu by Judy Tuvim and Babs Baer, who had been her most envied, most precocious, and most attractive schoolmates at Julia Richman High School—and she simply couldn’t resist the opportunity to show off her newly acquired cultural credential.

  Three years after she started this notebook, Pat was inscribing her first diary: “And here is my diary, containing the body.” 47 She wasn’t kidding. Although she tried to keep her cahiers for notes on writing and her diaries for life notes and sexual encounters, she couldn’t quite keep these divisions separate, and her cahiers and diaries—especially the cahiers—are always begging and borrowing materials from each other. And Pat was always reminding herself in marginal notes that they were doing so.

  But this first notebook, in the partitioned format she would keep all her life, was a nice beginning for the young writer. She would continue as she began, using visions of women and cross-dressed narrative voices to convey the complex mechanism of her fantasies.

  Pat had always been fascinated by the image or the presence of a young girl—even when she herself was still a young girl. On her first trip to Italy in high summer of 1949, sitting in a restaurant in Florence, “a graceful hospitable city…where more beauty is gathered in less space than anywhere else in the world,” 48 she made candid notes on the subject of her feelings for young girls. Then she crossed them out.

  “On regarding a beautiful young girl in a Florence restaurant. Finally, it gets to be the pleasure of the adoration, the fascination one exerts over the young. No longer can we say, it is to give pleasure that is our greatest pleasure. We have become the self-cognisant satyrs.” 49

  Pat yearned after youth and idealized her own past (when she wasn’t complaining about it) all her life. While she was at Barnard, she was already nostalgic for her early adolescence, momentarily forgetting her bitter descriptions of her childhood as an “endless hell on earth.”50 Later, she dotted her cahiers with notes for backward-looking works she would never write, like this one: “A novel of America’s sadness and longing for the remembered childhood neighborhood, for the tranquil past in a Civil War photograph.”51 And she rejoiced in her first trip to Europe because it made her feel “young” again: “for the first time at twenty-eight…it widens one’s interests again, makes one diverse as at seventeen. This closing up! I hate it. It grows on one slowly from nineteen onward, as S. Johnson said.”52

  Withal, it’s hard to imagine that the girl doing the dancing on the first page of Pat’s 1938 cahier might actually be Pat herself. Her self-consciousness was such that she rarely permitted herself spontaneous expressions in public. But of course Pat did think of herself as the dancing girl: a young artist, filled with inspiration, performing alone on the dance floor with the tacit support of her two fairy godfathers, Proust and Tschaikovsky.

  Caroline Besterman, deeply schooled in the languages and literatures of France and Germany, doesn’t believe Pat had a good understanding of the works of Marcel Proust.

  “When Pat talked about Proust…I’d just change the subject because I didn’t understand her understanding. Of course he’s not an easy writer and you’d have to know more than she did about France and French society and the placement of adverbs and the faubourg…. She just didn’t understand.”53

  There is no evidence that Pat’s reading of Proust ever amounted to more than the sum of her college girl remarks about his work (“I can never make a character unless I take him from actual life—with as little changes as possible…even Proust had a germ of reality for his characters. And why not?”).54 Or that she ever got beyond her repeated reworking of Proust’s observation that nothing is more pleasurable than falling back into the arms of someone who is bad for us.55

  Although Pat’s array of styles and subjects couldn’t be more different from Proust’s exquisite deconstructions of the phantoms of the faubourg, her best long fictions—like demented, demotic chips off the Proustian block—share a serious approach with Proust: the capillarial crawl of a hypervigilant consciousness over a detailed psychological territory, every word of whose narrative is conveyed in a voice cloaked (but not necessarily concealed) by another (but not exactly opposite) gender.

  One of the things Pat did with her adolescent energy in college was walking. She often walked herself into exhaustion so she could sleep, and it was these long walks in New York that filled her cahiers with observations—and helped inspire the writing of one of her better college short stories. “Quiet Night,” published in the fall edition of the 1939 Barnard Quarterly (and rewritten with a more explicitly savage ending as “The Cries of Love” in 1966 when her relations with Caroline Besterman were breaking down), came from one of Pat’s rambles in Manhattan’s most genteel and only private park, Gramercy Park, on East Twentieth Street. Pat went there to observe the elderly ladies sitting on the benches, but part of her pleasure must have come from her trespassing. Gramercy Park is surrounded by a high cast-iron fence to which the use of a gate key by a local property owner is the only legal means of entry.

  “Quiet Night”—the story nicely tries to marry love and loathing—puts two old women, Hattie and Alice, together as roommates in a residence hotel. One night, Hattie takes a scissors and deliberately makes slashing cuts in Alice’s favorite sweater. When Alice finds it and accuses her, Hattie dissolves into the first inappropriate fit of laughter to appear in a Highsmith fiction. In the 1939 version of the story, Alice poises herself to cut off Hattie’s long braid—her only glory—as she sleeps. But she fails to do so. (By 1966, Pat was embittered
enough to rewrite the story and make Alice cut off Hattie’s braid.) “Quiet Night,” published posthumously in its earliest version in 2002, shows only Alice’s desire to wreak damage: “Her revenge had to be something that would last, that would hurt, something that Hattie must endure and that she, Alice, could enjoy.” The work’s maturity lies in its affirmation of how united the two women are in the impurity of their feelings.

  All through her college years, Pat’s eyes were creatively filled by what she saw on the streets of Greenwich Village, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan near Columbia University, and on the Upper East Side near the East River. She spent hours riding the metropolitan underground trains between these neighborhoods; the same trains also took her back and forth between rendezvous with her many girl friends (see “Social Studies: Part 1”). Pat’s earliest cahiers are descriptive feasts mixing the contents of subway cars after midnight, the courting habits of adolescents lurking in doorways, and the marginal life of people working along the docks.

  One meets terrifying characters on the subway at one thirty in the morning. The pasty couple hanging one on either side of the Exit doorway, chewing gum, and moon-eyed, plotting their next assignation; the pale fairy in the beige jacket and grey flannels, with the holes in both heels of his socks, smoking, and looking into everyone’s eyes; the prostitute with a mass of yellow curls all over her head like a poodle dog;…the lonely sailor desperate now for a girl…. This is sordid. But it is the bill of fare for New York, my daily scene after a certain hour of the night. It is the same in love and out of love.56

  Pat was more than a walker and a rider in the city. She was someone in whom the visual sense was preternaturally developed; someone stimulated to excitation by what she saw. She stalked with her eyes as well as with her imagination, and she often attracted what she was looking for. The streets of New York performed for her, and occasionally something that she saw kicked over the concealing rocks of her own early sexual history.

  During one mid-September walk in 1940, wrapped in a gray coat—perhaps it was the trench coat her Barnard classmates remember her wearing in college—Pat’s eye caught something going on between “two little girls sitting on the threshold of a door with their feet on the sidewalk.”

  The older was touching the other in some way so that when they saw me pass they drew back and pulled their dresses over their knees. They looked at me then a little embarrassed and I waited a few feet away to watch them a moment. I knew in that moment that something had occurred that they would remember possibly all their lives. Something that would flash into their minds at strange times during childhood and adolescence, that would make them wince and close their teeth in shame—and perhaps when they were older make them smile…. I know all this, of course, because the same thing has happened to me.57

  In 1941, when Pat was a junior at Barnard, F. O. Matthiesen, the brilliant, left-leaning, closeted literary scholar at Harvard University, published his revolutionary study of American literature, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. He and the other scholars in the expanding field of American Studies were beginning to claim a local habitation and a name for American writing and thought. The universities were suddenly alive with the idea of American literature, which until now had always been treated as a parenthesis in the larger sentence of English literature. But Pat, reading American literature (Mother Mary had already accused her of being as egotistical as Theodore Dreiser), had eyes only for European culture and was impervious to the enticements of Greenwich Village—which was undergoing its gaudiest creative flowering since 1914, the year Mabel Dodge’s influential salon at 23 Fifth Avenue closed its doors. New York was now welcoming some of the world’s most creative people: National Socialism and the Second World War had already forced many of the best European cultural thinkers and artists to refugee to the United States. These brilliant emigrants (amongst them Claude Lévi-Strauss, Erich Fromm, and Hannah Arendt) were finding teaching jobs at the University in Exile at the New School for Social Research on West Twelfth Street, seeking out patrons amongst the bohemian rich (Peggy Guggenheim, who herself had just escaped from France in 1941, was under constant siege), and meeting their fellow Europeans and American counterparts in Greenwich Village cafés and bars and bookstores.

  But Pat and Mother Mary, bent on fleeing their bohemian neighborhood, were, in Pat’s senior year at Barnard, looking for apartments on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It was their idea of “quality.” When they finally found an apartment on East Fifty-seventh Street, Pat was thrilled.

  “Saw our future apartment: 345 E. 57th St. Only drawback is the view over yards to homebacks…. The fireplace isn’t real either, but the neighborhood! And the house!”58

  Even when she was in college, Patricia Highsmith always wanted to be someplace else.

  • 10 •

  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 Kin
stler, 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.