The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

56. Cahier 5, 9/10/41.

  57. Cahier 4, 9/15/40.

  58. Diary 3, Feb. 19, 1942.

  10. Alter Ego: Part 1

  1. Jim Amash, “I Let People Do Their Job,” Alter Ego, Nov. 2001.

  2. Cahier 2, 5/22/40.

  3. Ibid.

  4. In her radio interview in New York in 1987 with Don Swaim for the Atlantic Monthly Press publication of Found in the Street, Pat referred to the advertisement she’d read as an ad for a “reporter/rewrite” job and said she thought she might be applying to a newspaper, but then saw, in the office, “posters of Black Terror on the walls.”

  5. Will Murray letter to the author, 6 Aug. 2002.

  6. Quoted in Jamie Coville, “The Comic Book Villain, Dr. Frederic Wertham,” Integrative Arts 10, 2/11/2002.

  7. Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King (South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 1999), p. 279. “He thought suddenly of an ancient Latin fragment called The Pumpkinification of Claudius. The idea amused him. You might try to get Al Capp or Caniff started on a dumb boy named Claud who has the best of intentions but always takes some wrong step that turns him into a pumpkin, he said, and then noting Miss Jones’ blank expression added, ‘Never mind.’”

  8. CWA Everett Ray Kinstler, 10 July 2004.

  9. “The Fighting Yank,” America’s Best Comics 16, Jan. 1946.

  10. “One day in 1943,” Stanley Kauffmann said to me, “I went back to Cinema Comics to go out to lunch with a friend. He said, ‘Would you like to meet your replacement, Pat Highsmith?’ We said hello—and that was that” (CWA Stanley Kauffmann, 9 May 2002).

  11. CWA Everett Ray Kinstler, 10 July 2004.

  12. CWA Everett Ray Kinstler, 1 July 2004.

  13. Kahn would later tell fellow editor Keith Kahla that while Strangers on a Train was a “good book,” its author was a “terrible person.”

  14. CWA Marc Jaffee, 18 July 2003.

  15. In 1958, Cecil Day-Lewis, under his pseudonym of Nicholas Blake, published A Penknife in My Heart, a Harper Novel of Suspense with a crime-switching plot similar to Strangers on a Train. In an author’s note in the paperback edition, he disclaimed all knowledge of Strangers on a Train, and apologized to “Miss Highsmith for being so charmingly sympathetic to the predicament in which the long arm of coincidence put me.”

  16. Quoted in Terry Teachout, The Skeptic: A life of H. L. Mencken (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), p. 125.

  17. Patricia Schartle Myrer letter to author, 17 Feb. 2003.

  18. EQMM, August 1960.

  19. Diary 4, 7/8/43.

  20. Pat selected Bellow as her favorite writer in an essay entitled “My Favorite Writer(s),” sent to Konkret Sonderhefte, Hamburg, Germany, 20 July 1987.

  21. Diary 10, Oct. 13, 1950.

  22. William Shawn letter to PH with opinion attached, 24 Sept. 1942.

  23. PH letter to Joan Kahn, 3 Feb. 1958 (CURB).

  24. Diary 3, Dec. 1, 1942.

  25. Diary 2, May 28, 1943.

  26. Ibid., Saturday, June 6, 1942.

  27. PH letter to DOC, 7 Oct. 1976.

  28. CWA Caroline Besterman, 6 Nov. 2003.

  29. PH letter to Willie Mae Stewart Coates, undated, but probably written when Pat was between eight and ten.

  30. PH, “Between Jane Austen and Philby.”

  31. Cahier 9, 11/23/42, “Sonny—(a real boy of L. Island).”

  32. PH, Strangers on a Train (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), p. 12.

  33. Ibid., p. 279.

  34. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, pp. 19–20.

  35. Cahier 22, 8/7/51.

  36. CWA France Burke and “Sam,” 5 Feb. 2003.

  37. Cahier 22, 1/3/52.

  38. CWA Julia Diener-Diethelm, 1 Apr. 2003.

  39. Cahier 26, 12/1/61.

  40. Cahier 5, Sept. 23, 1941.

  41. Cahier 4, Sept. 1940; this history of Ruthie and Eddy was dropped down in the middle of the cahier without date or further reference, and was marked by PH “Interesting” at a later date.

  42. PH, “Venice: The One and Only,” 6/7/1992 (manuscript).

  43. CWA Janice Robertson, 23 June 2003.

  44. PH, “Twenty Things I Like,” a list made for Diogenes Verlag, 12 March 1983.

  45. Cahier 19, 7/22/50.

  46. Cahier 17, 6/3/48.

  47. Diary 3, Dec. 13, 1942.

  48. Marijane Meaker in her memoir, Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2003), p. 9.

  49. CWA Bert Diener, 1 Apr. 2003.

  50. CWA Caroline Besterman, 6 Nov. 2003.

  51. PH letter to MCH, 1 Nov. 1969, 10:00 P.M.

  52. PH, The Talented Mr. Ripley, p. 249.

  53. SH letter to PH, 3 Mar. 1970.

  54. CWA Marijane Meaker, 1 Feb. 2003.

  55. CWA Caroline Besterman, 19 Dec. 2003.

  56. Diary 2, June 17, 1942.

  57. Ibid.

  58. Sherill Tippins, February House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).

  59. CWA Daniel Bell, 24 Aug. 2003.

  60. Emily M. Morison letter to PH, 8 Aug. 1945, Alfred A. Knopf Archives (HRC).

  61. “The Heroine” was also reprinted in O. Henry Prize Stories, 1946, and in Today’s Woman, Mar. 1948.

  62. Cahier 11, 8/19/44.

  63. CWA Daniel Bell and Pearl Kazin, 24 Aug. 2003.

  64. CWA Daniel Bell, 18 Aug. 2003.

  65. CWA Robert Gottlieb, 6 Aug. 2003.

  66. CWA Gary Fisketjon, 10 Dec. 2002.

  67. CWA Norman Mailer, 23 June 2002.

  68. Diary 1, 1940.

  69. Diary 2, May 31, 1942.

  70. Ibid., June 4, 1942.

  71. Ibid., June 1, 1942.

  72. Ibid., June 6, 1942.

  73. Donald Swaim, Book Beat, interview with PH, WCBS-Radio, New York, 29 Oct. 1987. Pat said the same thing in print interviews.

  74. Cahier 20, 10/23/50.

  75. Ibid.

  76. Cahier 17, 3/8/48.

  77. Cahier 17, 2/23/48.

  78. Diary 10, Nov. 17, 1950.

  79. Ibid., Jan. 8, 1943.

  80. Document of the Jewish Antifascist Committee of the USSR, 21 June 1946, Library of Congress.

  81. Diary 2, Dec. 1, 1942.

  82. Ibid., June 26, 1942.

  83. Ibid., June 24, 1942.

  84. Ibid., July 3, 1942.

  85. PH, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, p. 138.

  86. Diary 2, July 31, 1942.

  87. Ibid., July 7, 1942.

  88. PH, “My First Job,” Oldie, 26 Mar. 1993.

  89. Ibid.

  90. Ibid.

  91. DOC letter to PH, undated.

  92. Pat accused Miss Phimister, her sublettor at 353 East Fifty-sixth Street, of being “a small-time crook” and of “using my stuff”—Pat’s usual reaction to anyone she put in charge of anything belonging to her. PH letter to KKS, 17 May 1951.

  93. Diary 5, 10/6/43.

  94. Diary 5, 12/8/43.

  95. CWA KKS, 14 Nov. 2006.

  96. CWA Buffie Johnson, 24 Dec. 2002.

  97. CWA Vince Fago, 28 Nov. 2001.

  98. Cahier 16, 10/24/47.

  99. Cahier 8, 9/22/42.

  100. CWA Marion Aboudaram, 23 Sept. 2002.

  101. PH letter to Elby Skattebol, 9 Jan. 1983.

  102. Cahier 11, 10/18/42.

  103. Cahier 8, 9/25/42.

  104. Cahier 23, 2/14/55.

  105. Diary 6, 28 Dec. 1944.

  106. Cahier 18, 8/27/49.

  107. PH letter to KKS, 14 June 1952.

  108. Ibid.

  109. PH, The Talented Mr. Ripley (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 290.

  110. CWA Everett Ray Kinstler, 10 July 2004.

  111. Ibid., 20 Sept. 2004.

  11. Alter Ego: Part 2

  1. CWA Marijane Meaker, 5 Dec. 2001.

  2. CWA Everett Ray Kinstler, 10 July 2004.

  3. PH letter to “Elby,” 15 June 1969.

  4. Ibid.

  5. CWA Barbara Roett, 18 May 2003. />
  6. PH letter to “Elby,” 15 June 1969.

  7. Cahier 27, 7/14/63.

  8. Jim Amash letter to the author, 4 Dec. 2004.

  9. CWA Gerard Albert, 15 Jan. 2005.

  10. Diary 4, 24/8/43.

  11. CWA Kingsley Skattebol, 20 May 2002.

  12. CWA Gerald Albert, 15 Jan. 2002.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Diary entries, June 1949.

  16. Diary entries, Oct. 1949.

  17. CWA Jim Amash, 25 Feb. 2007.

  18. Trina Robbins’s influential book, The Great Women Cartoonists, traces the women who made a career in the business.

  19. Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book (New York: Basic, Books, 2004), p. 57, and CWA, Michael Feldman, comics historian and a source for Men of Tomorrow, 20 Sept. 2004.

  20. James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974), p. 393.

  21. Arie Kaplan, “How the Jews Created the Comic Book Industry,” Reform Judaism Magazine 32, no. 1. (Fall 2003).

  22. CWA Jim Amash.

  23. Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow, p. 237. Figures provided by Michael Feldman.

  24. CWA Jim Amash.

  25. Will Murray letter to the author, 6 Aug. 2002.

  26. Cahier 30, 12/16/68.

  27. CWA Jim Amash, also Steven Rowe, 4 Dec. 2001.

  28. Along these same lines is the disappearance of the workbooks of Pat’s Sangor-Pines shop editor, Richard E. Hughes, workbooks whose information would make an important addition to the history of the comics and to this biography. In his workbooks, Hughes meticulously registered both the assignments he gave and the artists and writers who carried them out. On his death, Hughes’s widow passed the workbooks on to his alma mater in New Jersey. In an episode Highsmith herself might have imagined, the university library became a “sick building” and the institution “deaccessioned” many of its holdings—including Hughes’s workbooks, which were sold to a man who does not live in the United States and did not acknowledge to the author his ownership of the workbooks. The history of the American comic book continues to be plagued by incidents like this one.

  29. Comics companies changed their names as frequently as they churned out different Superheroes; thus, Mr. Hughes might be editing comics for Cinema, Better/Standard, or ACG, amongst others, all under the umbrella of the Sangor-Pines shop, which provided the various companies with complete, camera-ready art.

  30. Kaplan, “How the Jews Created the Comic Book Industry.”

  31. Ibid.

  32. Don Swaim interviews PH, Book Notes, WCBS-Radio, New York, Oct. 1987.

  33. Angelo S. Rappoport, The Folklore of the Jews (London: Soncino Press, 1937), pp. 195–203.

  34. Kaplan, “How the Jews Created the Comic Book Industry.”

  35. Jules Feiffer, quoted in the exhibition Masters of American Comics, at the Jewish Museum, New York City, Sept. 15, 2006–Jan. 28, 2007.

  36. Umberto Eco’s useful term in his foreword to Will Eisner’s last book, The Plot: the Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005).

  37. Diary 10, Friday, 6/16/50.

  38. Cahier 23, 10/1/54.

  39. Cahier 23, 2/14/55.

  40. Ripley’s triumph is the opposite of the destiny of Raskolnikov, Dostoyevsky’s surly graduate student with a Napoleonic complex, whose acte gratuite in Crime and Punishment was one of Pat’s favorite crimes. But Raskolnikov’s murders do not transform him into the superman of his dreams; they lead to the pursuit, the confession, and the Christian redemption which Dostoyevsky insisted was his real point in writing Crime and Punishment. Modern readers of Crime and Punishment usually overlook the Christian themes in the novel because the suspenseful deployment of Raskolnikov’s guilt (Pat thought Dostoyevsky should be considered a suspense writer) is so much more compellingly written than the sullen student’s eight-year conversion to Christianity in dreary Siberia by Sonia, the faithful prostitute with the golden heart.

  Pat also made Ripley’s fate the reverse of Lambert Strether’s, the “ambassador” in Henry James’s eponymous novel. Strether must take nothing for himself, must “fail” as an ambassador, in order to do the right thing, while Ripley escapes failure by only doing the wrong thing. Ripley’s operating principle—winner take all—is Pat’s version of Strether’s famous advice to Little Bilham: “Live all you can.”

  41. Diary 4, 6/28/43.

  42. Diary, Apr. 14, 1949.

  43. All of these, according to her multiple diary entries, were Superhero titles Pat wrote for in the 1940s.

  44. Bettina Berch interview with PH, 1984, unpublished.

  45. Ibid.

  46. Don Swaim interviews PH, Book Notes, WCBS-Radio, Oct. 1987.

  47. “Uncertain Treasure,” Home and Food vol. 6, no. 21 (August 1943).

  48. Diary 4, 3/25/1943.

  49. Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow, p. 237.

  50. PH, “Primroses Are Pink” published in the Fall 1937 issue of the Julia Richman High School literary magazine, the Bluebird.

  51. Cahier 4, 8/25/40.

  52. Don Swaim interviews PH, Book Notes, WCBS-Radio, New York, Oct. 1987.

  53. Cahier 9, 12/19/42.

  54. Real Life Comics no. 13.

  55. Real Life Comics no. 18.

  56. PH’s personal library at SLA; translations from the Russian are by Constance Garnett.

  57. Diary 3, 6 Jan. 1943.

  58. Note from Real Life Comics editor “CSS,” 1/2/46, pasted into Diary 6.

  59. Letter from “LHS,” 5/13/46, pasted into Diary 7.

  60. Diary 4, May 14, 1943.

  61. Interview with Bob Oksner by Jim Amash, 4 Dec. 2004 (Collection Jim Amash).

  62. CWA Gerald Albert, 15 Jan. 2002.

  63. Cahier 11, 10/2/44.

  64. Cahier 17, 2/17/48.

  65. Diary 17, Nov. 25, 1990.

  66. CWA KKS, 11 June 2004.

  67. CWA KKS, 21 Apr. 2002.

  68. Diary 2, Jan.–Aug. 1942.

  69. Diary 4, 7/8/43.

  70. Diary 3, Jan. 1943.

  71. Ibid., Jan. 8, 1943.

  72. Numerous diary entries, 1940s.

  73. Terry Gross interviews Stan Lee, Fresh Air, NPR, 4 June 2002.

  74. All these items can be seen in the Highsmith Archives at the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern, Switzerland.

  75. Notebook and two lists, undated, private collection.

  76. Cahier 1, Aug. 21, 1939.

  77. Drawing of “Golden Arrow,” private collection.

  78. PH letter to Lil Picard, 20 Feb. 1969 (UIL).

  79. Andrew Wilson, Beautiful Shadow (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), p. 286.

  80. CWA Heather Chasen, 22 Sept. 2002.

  81. Cahier 14, 12/18/46.

  82. Many comics writers had been pulp writers themselves “and liked the comics even less than they liked the pulps, but needed the comics work because pulps were dying” (CWA Jim Amash).

  83. Diary 9, Apr. 7, 1948.

  12. Alter Ego: Part 3

  1. Westchester County Surrogate Court, adoption papers for Mary Patricia Plangman, filed November 1946.

  2. Ibid.

  3. CWA Everett Ray Kinstler, 10 July 2004.

  4. Diary 2, Jan. 3, 1942.

  5. CWA Don Coates, 20 Apr. 2002.

  6. MCH letter to PH, undated.

  7. Diary 10, Aug. 10, 1950.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Ibid.

  1) Constant self-consciousness—visual and mental—“What does the world—my relatives, etc. etc. think of me?”

  2) Uncoordinated attitudes—M[ary] B[aker] Eddy and spirituality vs. love of show, e.g. when she goes to Texas, she intends to “look like the money.” Yet she will ridicule anyone who avowedly sets his standards by money.

  3) Blank, vague expression when she flatly says something palliative about a situation I know fully—the econom
ic situation at home. Refusal to face facts—to speak forthrightly and seriously on matters both of us know about.

  4) Wrongly placed consideration for others—carrying dishes 2 ft. further toward kitchen at the Minots.

  5) Intellectual laziness. Unwilling to challenge self to utmost for the sheer joy of it on any puzzle or game, though she continually escapes life via games. Veers away from controversial matter once I broach it for mutual discussion.

  6) Thought patterns that are rigid—on the Negro question; homosexuality; “respect for elders” people I call dull, etc. etc.

  11. CWA Marijane Meaker, 1 Feb. 2003.

  12. Diary 4, 7/31/43.

  13. Cahier 29, 11/1/67.

  14. Rolf Tietgens letter to PH, 7 Aug. 1969. Also see photographs of PH by Rolf Tietgens in illustrations.

  15. Diary 4, 6/21/43.

  16. Ibid., May 20, 1943.

  17. According to Fawcett comics expert Paul Hamerlinck, this dialect was later removed by Fawcett’s executive editor, Will Lieberson. The only Jasper comic I have seen, a late one published in 1948, was couched in the president’s, if not the King’s, English.

  18. “Invitation to Death,” “Jap Buster Johnson,” USA Comics, no. 14, Fall 1944.

  19. “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey,” Leslie Fiedler, Partisan Review 15, June 1948.

  20. Desert Island Discs, BBC4, 21 Apr. 1979.

  21. PH letters to Bettina Berch, 7 Jan. and 25 Sept. 1987.

  22. Diary 4, 8/19/43. Also 8/22/43.

  23. Ibid., 5/30/43.

  24. Ibid., 6/21/43.

  25. Ibid., 1/7/43.

  26. Cahier 9, PH transcription of high school journals.

  27. Diary 4, 6/13/43.

  28. Diary 5, 10/15/43.

  29. Diary 4, 6/6/43.

  30. Diary 5, 10/11/43.

  31. Ibid., 10/10–11/43.

  32. Diary 4, 6/6/43.

  33. Diary 5, 9/30/43.

  34. Ibid., 10/18/43.

  35. Diary 4, 9/19/43.

  36. Diary 5, 10/27/43.

  37. Ibid., Oct. 29–30, 1943.

  38. Ibid., 10/27/43.

  39. Ibid., 10/27/43.

  40. Diary 5, 10/15/43.

  41. Ibid., 10/25/43.

  42. Diary 5, various entries, fall 1943.

  43. Ibid., Oct. 11–17, 1943.

  44. Ibid., 11/13/43.

  45. Ibid., Oct. 11–17, 1943.

  46. CWA David Diamond, 18 Dec. 2004.

  47. Ibid.

  48. Ibid.

  49. Ethel Sturtevant letter no. 5, undated letters, 1962–68.

  50. PH, “My Life with Greta Garbo,” 1990.

  51. Ibid.