Today the graphic novel is treated as a respectable cousin of the conventional word-on-page text, but opinion will remain divided as to whether the mid-century comic book was populist fantasy or something more insurgent, an artefact that brought together the immediacies of the movie with the more complex demands of narrative fiction. Gertrude Stein was a fan, and placed a standing order for a monthly delivery of up to fifty comics to her Paris salon, where she would enthral her friends with a taste of something largely unknown in Europe. Pablo Picasso regarded the fantastic stories and images of humans defying the laws of nature and gravity as comparable to surrealism.
By contrast, many of those who saw the comic book as a debased, transitory form of mass consumption were its practitioners. Stan Lee was the most prominent. He was responsible for the characters of Captain America and Spider-Man, but he later disclosed in his autobiography that he had changed his name from Stanley Lieber because he did not wish to leave a detectable trace of himself on works that would make him enormously wealthy. His true ambition was to write the Great American Novel. Highsmith too felt slightly ashamed at having to sacrifice her true vocation, writing, to a form of disposable mass entertainment. Lee and Highsmith occasionally worked together in that they did scripts for one of the best illustrators in the industry, Vince Fago. He noticed similarities between them and arranged a blind date in Lee’s apartment, which came to nothing. Significantly, he thought that they might be well matched as two people disillusioned with their line of work.
One has to wonder if her experience in comic books had some residual effect on Highsmith as a writer of mainstream fiction. Comic scriptwriters were obliged to strip their prose of stylistic conspicuousness. It had to be plain and transparent and Highsmith’s novels are most effective when they allow for the particulars of events and dialogue to come directly to the reader without the messy decorations of literariness. At the same time, we should take note of her preoccupation with characters who feel that they are immune from moral and legal strictures on what may or may not be done, notably Ripley. This is mirrored in the culture of comic-book villains, which feeds the appetite of readers who enjoy the fantasy world of the impossible, often the illegal.
In the meantime, Highsmith continued her unconsummated relationship with Rosalind Constable. Whether Constable was the woman she truly loved or the figure she thought would open a door for her to mainstream literary culture remains open to question. Throughout this period, she continued to send short stories to The New Yorker and other major outlets and, consistently, received rejection slips or was not even replied to. The contrast between her chimerical desire for Rosalind and her actual dance of promiscuity with others is striking.
Allela Cornell was a painter of considerable talent whose work, tragically, has never received full recognition. Perhaps because there is so little of it; she committed suicide by swallowing nitric acid in 1946. She was slim, plain, with short light-brown hair and an unassuming manner. ‘I love Allela, and the God within her … she is the best’ (Diary, 19 August 1943), commented Highsmith, in the hyperbole that would come to mark the beginning of her significant relationships. Cornell’s boyish appearance at once excited and repulsed her, blurring any clear sense of whether she was having sex with a man or a woman. ‘This morning I thought so much about Allela that I had to go to the bathroom to relieve myself of a big erection. Is this disgusting? Am I a psychopath? Yes, but why not’ (Diary, 7 January 1943). In the OED, all cited uses of the word ‘erection’ in print, beginning with Sir Hugh Platt in 1594, refer to the male organ, implying in every instance that men are uniquely the proactive, dominant figures in sex. While Highsmith’s note was private it can be credited as the first by a woman which goes against this.
According to her diaries, Highsmith also became involved with Allela’s lover, ‘Tex’. Schenkar states that Tex’s surname, though missing from Highsmith’s notebooks, is Eversol. It is surely not a coincidence that Wilson interviewed one Maggie Eversol, who was a close friend of Allela but certainly neither her lover nor Highsmith’s. The likeliest explanation is that Highsmith knew, or knew of, Eversol but reinvented her as Tex in her diary as part of a sex triangle. Soon afterwards Patricia began an affair with a woman called ‘Ann T’ who, like Tex, had no surname and whose recorded existence is limited exclusively to entries in her diaries. Which brings us to the legendary Chloe. Blonde, extremely attractive and an occasional model for the Hattie Carnegie fashion and jewellery house, she was also married, a closeted lesbian and an alcoholic. They met at a party held by Angelica de Monocol and thereafter saw each other regularly at launches at Julien Levy’s art gallery.
We have a detailed history of Highsmith’s relationship with her via Highsmith’s diaries. They regularly spent Saturday nights together in Highsmith’s small apartment which her comic-book job had enabled her to rent and thus free herself from Mary and Stanley. For several weeks there was kissing and touching, but no genital contact. When they did have sex, Highsmith observed that ‘[T]he earth didn’t move’ (Diary, 29–30 October 1943). This phrase, regarding the satisfying or unsatisfying nature of a sexual act, was invented by Hemingway in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and entered common discourse almost always as a form of self-mockery.
Chloe is a puzzling figure because she has been effectively brought to life by Highsmith’s biographers who relied entirely on entries in her diaries for corroborative evidence. Rosalind knew of her, but only because Highsmith allowed Rosalind to read accounts of their relationship in her diary, and even here we have to take this on trust. Rosalind never spoke of Chloe to anyone. Again, we only know that she was fascinated by Highsmith’s relationship with her from records in Highsmith’s notebooks. We learn from Wilson that in November 1943 Highsmith sublet her apartment on East 56th Street, sold her wireless and record player to her parents and added the amount they paid her to the $350 she had saved for a trip to Mexico. She knew that the country had been a magnet for writers such as D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Hart Crane and Tennessee Williams, and she wanted to experience something of its allure. It was a region that was the US backdated, where Europe seemed only recently to have left its footprint. In December she and Chloe took the train to San Antonio, Texas, and then on to Mexico City. She spent Christmas evening drinking with Teddy Stauffer, a jazz musician and club owner, and later entered in her journal that her relationship with Chloe was disintegrating. Significantly, Chloe did not accompany her on her drinking session with Stauffer.
Of all the individuals who gave accounts of Highsmith’s life and activities in the early 1940s, in interviews and elsewhere, not one mentions Chloe. If she had a husband, who was he? What was his name? The records of Hattie Carnegie involve no model called Chloe, but perhaps it was a pseudonym. Just as puzzling is the party held by Angelica de Monocol at which they met. The name Angelica de Monocol – hinting at Spanish gentry – sounds like that of an expatriate Manhattan socialite but no record of her existence can be found, except in Highsmith’s diary. Julien Levy certainly had an art gallery but Highsmith’s account of her liaisons there with Chloe are questionable, given that there is no record of Levy ever having been in contact with the author, apart from stories in her diaries. Is it not strange that neither Chloe, nor her husband, spoke to anyone after the conclusion of her relationship with Highsmith in 1943?
Both of Highsmith’s biographers, Andrew Wilson and Joan Schenkar, tell of how she set out alone for the remote town of Taxco in January. Taxco was largely unchanged, at least architecturally, since its foundation in the sixteenth century, following the discovery of silver deposits nearby. Its most notable building is the cathedral-size church of Santa Prisca, which some regard as extraordinarily beautiful and others as a display of Baroque excess. Americans greatly enjoyed the region’s atmosphere of indulgence. Bars were open from early morning onwards and the local custom seemed to be to begin the day with alcohol and continue drinking until they had reached, as Highsmith put it, ‘total oblivion’. She em
braced this socio-cultural routine and regularly remonstrated with herself in her diary for its effects on her attempt to write a novel, one that would remain unfinished and unpublished. She rented a house called La Casa Chiquita, a spacious villa with a pretty red-tiled pitched roof, which might have been imported from one of the more affluent areas of southern Spain. It cost her a great deal of money and it remains unclear how she managed to support herself in this fashion on what she had saved for the trip.
She remained alone in Taxco until March, save for a recently acquired cat, but telegrammed her previous employer Ben Goldberg, indicating that she would welcome a visit from him if he would offer guidance on her novel. He replied that he would be happy to do so and arrived in mid-March, spending three weeks in Mexico, mostly in Taxco aside from a few days he and Highsmith spent together in Acapulco. They flirted – he as a rehearsal for a serious attempt to seduce her, she as an act of heterosexual self-caricature – and he expressed polite but constructive reservations about her book. In this respect, we might treat his restraint as an indication of his hope that she might submit to his advances because by any standards the novel, The Click of the Shutting, is irredeemably bad. The dialogue is leaden and inauthentic, but worse are the descriptive passages, in which syntax circles its subject and eventually loses contact with it. The plot, however, is revealing. It involves two young men: the privileged George Willson, and Gregory Bulick from much further down the social scale, with an alcoholic father and a life that involves the cultivation of fantasies – the most prominent being that he can become a version of George, whom he observes from a distance. Gregory follows George to his prestigious apartment block and utters to himself: ‘I’ll pretend that I live there.’ It is clear to see the bizarre relationship between Ripley and Greenleaf was initiated here, involving degrees of empathy, envy and displaced self-loathing. Ripley is a stalker who wants to become part of Greenleaf’s elevated social circle, and so it is with Gregory and George. But just as significantly the novel, which was never published, tells us a great deal about Highsmith’s rather uneasy perception of herself. We can see how she would refine the George/Gregory interaction to something more specific and dynamic in Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley. However, while in Mexico, she allowed herself numerous digressions involving Gregory’s fantasies about two of his school friends, Charles and Bernard, who seem to be in a homoerotic relationship – or so Gregory imagines – and the mysterious figure of Paul, whom he idolises and fears.
It also becomes evident that Highsmith had lost control of the relationship between invention and credibility, and to this extent her attempt at writing a novel mirrors her diary entries. According to these she received letters from Chloe saying that she wanted to visit her in February and from a lover of Chloe’s, male, who asked for a report on her current mental health and drinking habits. We must take her account of the former on trust but the letter from Chloe’s previously unknown lover defies credibility. Aside from the fact that he is nameless, we have to wonder how he obtained Highsmith’s postal address. Perhaps Chloe supplied it, but if she did, why did he write to Chloe’s separated lesbian lover rather than Chloe herself? The diary, like the unfinished novel, seems to be spun out of projections and imaginings. Gregory is the fictional proxy of Highsmith the diary writer, creator of a composite universe of what he perceived and what he invented. Notably, when Highsmith returned to America at the end of March 1944, she wrote in her diary of how she met up again with Chloe, ‘my alcoholic beauty … in Mexico City. She … is staying on. Her hands still shake as they did in New York – and for the same thing’ (20 March 1944).
In May Highsmith sent a letter to Kate Kingsley Skattebol giving an account of her meeting with Chloe in Mexico City, which is identical, verbatim, to the one which can be found in her diary. Skattebol later remarked that apart from Highsmith’s references to Chloe neither she nor anyone else of her acquaintance had any knowledge of her, anecdotal or otherwise. She was distributing the story of her ‘alcoholic beauty’ as liberally as she could, so that the presence of Chloe would survive in her letters. The fact that none of her correspondents had ever met her is intriguing. Blending the real with the invented to the extent that no one could disentangle the two might well be a suitable programme for a radical creative writing course, patented by Patricia Highsmith.
3
Boarding the Train
In 1946 Highsmith allowed Stanley to officially adopt her, though why she (then twenty-five) or he (then fifty-five) saw this as necessary or suitable remains a mystery. She continued to think of him as someone whose presence she must wearily accept while regarding him with contempt. Perhaps, privately, she saw it as a darkly comic overture to another case of what might happen when a parent is loathed sufficiently enough. Ten months later in 1947 she would begin the draft of her first published novel, Strangers on a Train, the plot of which is driven by Bruno’s determination to kill his father and get away with it. Throughout the two and a half years prior to this, following her return from Mexico, she existed in a state between limbo and exhilaration. As a writer she went nowhere, but in terms of her sexual and social life, frenetic is an understatement.
On 29 September 1944, her main diary entry was on her love life over the previous five months. ‘Loves by the dozen, love affairs by the dozen are all very well. But oh God, when they overlap! If one could merely be clear with one before beginning another, all would be well. It is the overlapping, the overlapping, until where one’s love heart is, is so thickly padded, nothing can any longer be felt.’ Clearly she is troubled, but the clogged self-contradictory phrasing makes us wonder about the nature of her dilemma. Is she contrite regarding her seemingly insatiable promiscuity, or does she simply feel irritated by her apparent inability to keep things in order (‘the overlapping, the overlapping…’), rather like a distracted dealer who fumbles with the pack of cards?
Most of her lovers of that year cannot be properly connected with women whose presence is recorded elsewhere, with the notable exception of Natica Waterbury. The New York Times of 21 September 1937 gives a lavish account of a dinner party held at Lynnwood Lodge in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, to honour the coming out of debutante Miss Natica Waterbury. Very few residents of Elkins Park were worth less than ten million dollars. Lynnwood Lodge (now called Lynnewood Hall) is a sprawling 110-room neo-classical residence then owned by the multimillionaire Widener family, neighbours of Waterbury’s widowed mother, who was herself enormously wealthy. Natica would in the 1950s go on to earn fame as a pilot, photographer, associate of Sylvia Beach (of the legendary Shakespeare and Company) in Paris and one of the few figures of her generation who made no secret of her gay sexuality. Natica’s background is worth noting because it singles her out as a near replica of Virginia Kent Catherwood, who Highsmith first met at a party roughly a month and a half after her diary entry on the ‘overlaps’ between affairs with Waterbury and others. Virginia’s debutante ball was held four years before Natica’s but only a few miles away at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in central Philadelphia. Allegedly, the sixty-piece orchestra alone cost close to $10,000. Earlier in the year Virginia Tucker Kent, as she was then known, was presented at Court to King George V and Queen Mary as an intercontinental deb.
It is difficult to imagine that Highsmith had not seen George Cukor’s Oscar-winning The Philadelphia Story (1940), the most popular movie in the US in 1940–41. It was an adaptation of a Broadway play by Philip Barry, who based it on reports of the 1930s activities of immoderately wealthy families in Pennsylvania/Philadelphia, who seemed to exist in a world of their own. Their lifestyles were more like those of the degenerate Regency aristocracy, plus swimming pools, than the America of the Depression.
Highsmith, like Barry, had a taste for these other-worldly figures. Katharine Hepburn’s Tracy Samantha Lord could have been modelled on Virginia and Natica. For Highsmith they were fantasies made real. Her own existence during this period was far more mundane. She continued to
work in comic books, producing more paintings and drawings than attempts at literary writing, and many regard her visual art as important. After her death, Diogenes Verlag brought out a book called Patricia Highsmith Zeichnungen (1995) offering a small selection of her works. She had admirable talents as a draughtswoman but seemed uncertain of whether to make use of this in representational sketches and paintings or as an anchor for more avant-garde pieces, largely surrealist. One of her 1948 works brings to mind Dalí, with a woman’s trunk mutated into facial expressions: the breasts are eyes, a nose extends from the navel and the waistline carries a pair of smiling lips. She later admitted that during 1944 and 1945 she had considered exchanging her literary ambitions for a career as an artist. In her cahier she wrote that ‘Painting could never have been sufficiently complex and explicit to please me’ (4 December 1947).
It is evident from her entries on painting and drawing that what eventually alienated her from these genres was the absence of a narrative. And in December 1946 she entered into her cahier (16 January 1946) the first whispers of a plot for Strangers on a Train. She was walking by the Hudson with her mother and Stanley, and we must assume that the antagonism between them had some influence on what she wrote as soon as she returned to her own apartment. She imagines a meeting between two figures, and one speculates that ‘An exchange of victims would clear us both by eliminating all possible motivation.’ And she goes on. ‘Yes, we shall let ourselves be caught for the crime, but the police will find no motivation. We shall go free!’ This is the voice of the figure who would become Bruno, who wants Guy to kill his father, in return for Bruno’s murder of Guy’s ghastly wife, Miriam, who is intent on complicating their divorce and preventing his marriage to Anne Faulkner.
Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires Page 5
