The Talented Miss Highsmith (29 page)

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 war 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:

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:

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.

In short, comic book work was a job done partially, quickly, anonymously and/or pseudonymously, and strictly for the money. Except, of course, when it wasn't. When it was at its best, it was a whole new art form whose stunningly original creators (Will Eisner, Steve Ditko, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Jack Kirby, Gil Kane [real name: Eli Katz], Bill Finger, Jerry Robinson, et al.) are revered today, and whose formal parameters are still being explored in graphic novels.

But in the 1940s, as Stan Lee said, comics “were the bottom of the cultural totem pole…. No one had any respect for a fella who wrote comic books.” At parties, when people found out what Lee did for a living, they avoided him as though he were “infected.”
⁷³

Many comic book illustrators and writers from the 1940s kept quiet about their profession (and still do), and Pat, for whom shame was practically a religious principle and secrecy a profession of the faith, was no exception. So deep was her desire for silence on the subject that she kept no copies of the work she did for comic books.

A natural-born curator and self-recorder, Pat always collected the details of her life. No item, no artifact, was too small to escape her attention: even the matchbooks she took from bars and the maps she got from gas stations were added to her archives. (See “
The Real Romance of Objects: Part 2.
”) She stashed away stationery and writing implements taken from the hotels she stayed in. She preserved every article written about her work in fourteen large press books. She appears to have kept every piece of paper on which she ever wrote or drew a line.