The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  “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 wa
r 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.