The Talented Miss Highsmith (28 page)

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 Arrow
⁴³
—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.

“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.