The Talented Miss Highsmith (22 page)

But Pat and Mother Mary, bent on fleeing their bohemian neighborhood, were, in Pat's senior year at Barnard, looking for apartments on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It was their idea of “quality.” When they finally found an apartment on East Fifty-seventh Street, Pat was thrilled.

“Saw our future apartment: 345 E. 57th St. Only drawback is the view over yards to homebacks…. The fireplace isn't real either, but the neighborhood! And the house!”
⁵⁸

Even when she was in college, Patricia Highsmith always wanted to be someplace else.

Part 1

During the three spring months of 1940 when Pat, nineteen years old and still a live-at-home sophomore at Barnard College, was rereading the Dostoyevsky novel she'd relished at thirteen (
Crime and Punishment
), refreshing herself with André Gide's seducible adolescents in
The Counterfeiters,
criticizing Henry James's
The Ambassadors
as “overconfident,” casting a competitive eye on the works of Malraux, Nietzsche, Hardy, Mansfield, Dickens, Molière, Goethe, and Dreiser, and deciding that because of her books she had “the whole world” at hand, “[e]ven with all my
greed
,”
²
she was also writing this interesting little sentence in her cahier:

“My father is a cartoon of me.”
³

Besides teaching high school art in Texas for many years, the shadowy J. B. Plangman—more like a family ghost than a biological father—eked out a living by drawing cartoons for the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
. Something about Jay B's cartooning seems to have influenced his only child's entry into the world of comic books. One clue to the connection is how quiet Pat kept about both subjects—her father
and
the comics; promising herself to “make a serious effort at psychoanalysing my relationship with my father” but instead burying J. B. Plangman “under 6 feet of dull roadbed.” Six feet under was only slightly deeper than she buried the truth about her seven years' employment as a scriptwriter for comic books during the Golden Age of American Comics.

Still, in early 1940s Manhattan, if you had to pick an apprenticeship with pay for a young writer whose attractions to secrecy, shame, and hero-worship were as all-consuming as Pat Highsmith's, you couldn't do better than to choose a job in the comic book business. Comic books were not only at the center of America's most successful publishing industry, they were also, if you were hoping to be a serious writer, the source of some highly embarrassing employment. And the entire comics milieu—authors, illustrators, publishers, and the improbable characters they were creating—was alive with the same collection of crooks and cons, artists with secret identities and heroes with Alter Egos, with which the talented Miss Highsmith would later populate so much of her fiction.

Decades after she'd stopped writing for the comics, when she was relatively rich and famous and living in Europe, Pat used to respond to the question all authors dread to hear—“And where do get your ideas from, Miss Highsmith?”—by saying that her ideas often came to her “out of thin air.” In the year Pat graduated from Barnard College, 1942, one of the
airs du temps
blowing through New York City was the secret and often illegal excitements surrounding America's newest art form, the comic book.

 

Like millions of American teenagers in the early 1940s, Everett Raymond Kinstler, a polite, good-looking boy with a talent for drawing portraits, was crazy for comic books. Everett was an honors student at the High School of Music and Art in New York City, where his teachers did their best to discourage his taste for popular culture. “That's not really art,” they reminded him in a slightly elevated version of the lesson parents all over the country were trying to drill into the skulls of their comics-addicted children.

But Everett's ambitions extended beyond just reading the garish little picture books whose narratives-in-dialogue ballooned above their heroes' heads, so, shortly before his sixteenth birthday in August of 1943, he answered an ad—it would have been something like the ad for a “writer/research” job that an attractive, desperate-for-work English major from Barnard College had successfully answered six months earlier
⁴
—for “apprentice inker” at an outfit called Cinema Comics at 10 West Forty-fifth Street in Manhattan. Cinema was one of the many companies producing comic books for the Sangor-Pines comics shop (others were Better, Standard, Cinema, Michel, America's Best, and Exciting) and Cinema's office was in the Sangor-Pines headquarters. All of the Cinema comic books were written, lettered, and illustrated (but not lithographed or printed) in the office at West Forty-fifth Street.
⁵

“Nowadays,” says Ray Kinstler, the name under which Everett Raymond Kinstler grew up to become one of America's most prominent portrait painters, “people are impressed that I did
Zorro
and
The Hawkman
and
The Shadow,
but in the 30's and 40's…” And here Kinstler repeats what every comics artist, writer, and historian of the Golden Age of American Comics (1938–1954) told me: comic book creators were looked down on as lowly laborers in a deeply disreputable business.

Just how comic books were generally regarded is made clear in this excerpt from an editorial in the
Chicago Daily News
published on 8 May 1940:

Quality fiction writers were almost as dismissive of the comics as exasperated parents and crusading journalists. In her witty roman à clef about the New York publishing world of the 1940s,
The Locusts Have No King
(1948), Dawn Powell makes her reticent, scholarly, Greenwich Village–dwelling protagonist transform a vulgar magazine called
HAW
into a commercial success by commissioning artists from the comics (“Al Capp or Caniff”) to illustrate plots from classic novels.
⁷
For Powell, a brilliant social satirist (Gore Vidal called her the “American Thackeray”), “comics” was a code word for ethical and aesthetic decay.

Still, young Everett Kinstler was thrilled when he got that job at Cinema Comics. He was hired by the respected Sangor-Pines editor Richard E. Hughes, the same editor who had hired the attractive Barnard College graduate the previous winter. Mr. Hughes was married to Ned Pines's daughter (Ned Pines was half owner of the company), and Ned Pines was married to Ben Sangor's daughter (Ben Sangor owned the other half of the company). The comics were nothing if not tribal.

“Hughes,” says Kinstler, had “a habit of smoking his pipe at the office, a very rubbery lower lip, and the kind of face I like to paint because it had character.” Hughes hired Everett to help ink in comic book “pencils,” the draft drawings made by the “pencillers,” at “fifteen dollars a week, five days a week, a half day on Saturday.” It was big money for a teenager in an era when “lunch was twenty-five cents.” By the end of the year, Everett was earning thirty dollars a week.
⁸

When Everett started work, one of “the main comics at Cinema was
Fighting Yank
,” a Superhero with a blue-blooded, eighteenth-century Alter Ego and a bland, socially leveraged, Anglo-Saxon name: Bruce Carter III. Whenever Bruce Carter III was in trouble, “a mighty figure would appear out of America's past [wearing, with unfortunate effect, a hat like a portobello mushroom].” It was Bruce Carter I, the Fighting Yank himself: Bruce III's Revolutionary War hero “ancestor” and Alter Ego.
⁹

One of
Fighting Yank
's writers—she was typing away in the writers' bullpen the day Everett was hired—was the twenty-two-year-old Barnard girl Richard Hughes had hired the previous December. She had been taken on to replace a comics writer who was on his way to becoming a distinguished theater and film critic. The writer's name was Stanley Kauffmann. The Barnard girl was Patricia Highsmith.
¹⁰

Sixty years later, Ray Kinstler had a specific, portrait painter's memory of Pat:

Sixteen-year-old Everett “had a teenager, heavy crush on Patricia…. I would have done anything for her. In the beginning it was Miss Highsmith this and Miss Highsmith that. ‘Oh, Miss Highsmith, could I do this for you or could I get that for you?' Later on it was Patricia or Pat. And I think she tolerated me good-naturedly.”

And Kinstler remembers just how Pat's assignments at Sangor-Pines were determined: they were the result of an exchange between the writer and her editor, Richard E. Hughes.

One afternoon, Pat, usually so taciturn at the office, managed to express the desire to drink a Coca-Cola at her desk. Young Everett gallantly offered to bring her the soft drink “from the luncheonette downstairs. She gave me a nickel and I returned with a Pepsi-Cola.” Deeply pleased with his resourcefulness, Everett proudly “told Patricia the Pepsi-Cola was the same price as the Coke but had a few more ounces.”

Pat's response struck the boy like a blow.

“When you get older, Everett,” Pat said in a coolly measured phrase he never forgot, “you will buy for quality, not quantity.”
¹²

Pat's remark about “quality” had a painful history behind it and an ambitious future in front of it.

For six nervous months after she graduated from Barnard College in June of 1942, and for some years thereafter, Patricia Highsmith failed to be hired by every one of the “quality” magazines to which, like any enterprising literature major, she'd applied for work. Despite impressive recommendations from highly placed professionals like Rosalind Constable (the cultural eyes and ears of the powerful American publisher Henry Luce),
Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, The New Yorker, Mademoiselle, Good Housekeeping, Time,
and
Fortune
had all refused to take Pat on after meeting her.

This was the period when magazines were the motor of Manhattan's literary and social life, publishing and promoting everything that was new. It was also the era when pulp publishing companies and their upscale relations, the “quality” magazine and book publishers, were beginning to encroach on each other's territories. Quality book publisher Harper & Brothers (later Harper & Row), in an elegantly bracketed promotion of a so-called pulp genre, assigned its senior editor Joan Kahn to oversee the Harper Novel of Suspense, the imprimatur under which all of Patricia Highsmith's Harper novels, beginning with
Strangers on a Train,
would be brought out.
¹³
Marc Jaffe, from 1948 onwards an editor at the New American Library (itself busily engaged in revolutionizing the paperback novel) says that Harper Novels of Suspense were considered a “literary” category and that he always thought of Highsmith as a “classy mystery writer” whose work belonged in a category “with Josephine Tey, who was, perhaps, a tad more literary.”
¹⁴
Even Pat's contemporaries had trouble trying to “place” her writing.

Cross-propagation, conflation, and confusion of “low” and “high” literary genres and categories were rampant in New York publishing—especially because pulp publishers often printed the kind of writing that the more respectable publishers turned down.
Weird Tales
, an outré pulp magazine of fantasy and horror (and the principal publisher of that master of the macabre, H. P. Lovecraft), gave America's greatest playwright, Tennessee Williams, his first public exposure when it published his youthful short story “The Vengeance of Nitocris” in 1928.
Black Mask Magazine,
founded in 1920, was a showcase for “hard-boiled” crime fictions which early on launched both Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and printed established writers like Edna Ferber, Cecil Day-Lewis (writing as Nicholas Blake),
¹⁵
Elizabeth Sanxay Holding, Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, Edgar Wallace, Alberto Moravia, Agatha Christie, and the prolific and reclusive Cornell Woolrich, whose story “Murder After Death” Pat would single out in her thinly veiled artistic autobiography,
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction.

These same authors also appeared in
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine,
begun in 1941 as a “high-class” pulp venture by two cousins writing under the name “Ellery Queen.”
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
subsequently took over
Black Mask Magazine,
obscuring the fact that one of
Black Mask
's founders was the “Sage of Baltimore,” the caustic American social critic H. L. Mencken, who once defined American Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere might be happy” and wrote a sentence Pat Highsmith would have been happy to endorse at any time in her life: “I have always lived in the wrong country.”
¹⁶