The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  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.”)32 Dostoyevsky 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.