The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  “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

  • 11 •

  Alter Ego

  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 i
ts 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