The Talented Miss Highsmith (30 page)

In an undated folder marked “Incomplete Old Stories,” Pat filed a story called “The Last Unmaidenly Voyage of the S.S.” on which she scribbled, with perfect justification, a critical phrase: “Shape this tripe up.” She never got around to shaping up the “tripe,” but she didn't consider throwing the story out, either.

Nor did she toss out a number of equally undeveloped drafts of short stories she'd filed away in a folder marked with her then-agent's name, Margot Johnson. They, too, are far from being ready for publication—but Pat hung on to them all the same. (Eventually she did do some winnowing of the alpine accumulations of her story drafts; what she threw out was the work she thought she couldn't “shape up.”)

Pat pasted hundreds of photographs—many of them are of attractive women whom no one but Pat could identify, and all the pictures are unlabelled—into her photograph albums, and she kept those albums up to date. In small “business books” she recorded every penny she earned. During the war years, she made lists of every nickel she ever spent and of exactly what she got for her money—right down to the coffee delivered to her in cardboard containers at the Timely comics office in suite 1401 of the Empire State Building.
⁷⁴

Pat felt the necessity—perhaps it was more like a destiny—of hanging on to everything she ever wrote or made. When she gave something away, particularly something she had fashioned with her own hands or offered up with a prematurely full heart, she often regretted the gesture, and sometimes she even tried to get the object back. (See “
The Real Romance of Objects: Part 1.
”)

But Pat systematically erased from her life every single thing that had to do with comics; she threw away every comic script, every proposal for a comic script, and every scenario for a comic book story she ever wrote. There would have been
thousands
of pages of comics work to cull—and she culled every one of them. Nor did she keep any copies.

The sole remnant of her long career in comic books appears on a list of French phrases she was trying to memorize. It's the kind of obsessive little list she made all her life, and I found it, forgotten by her and tucked away, in a book left with a friend.
⁷⁵
On the reverse side of this page of French vocabulary is the fragment of a scenario for a story about an even feebler character than Black Terror—a character called Golden Arrow (murdered parents, a miraculous escape from carnage, a crack shot with gilded arrows, and a horse called White Wind) for whom she had already written a few stories. At the top of the page, Pat drew a radiating golden arrow and made a sketch of a
“garçon au parapet”
(she was still practicing her French) as an entry point into the script. The drawing is enhanced by a long line of actions Golden Arrow might perform.

“Spice this up with detail,” she reminded herself in the middle of the page—an internal note which she also applied to every single work of fiction she ever wrote.

Pat charted the plot of this comic book scenario just as she later made a chart of her own love life and a kind of chart for the plot of
The Price of Salt;
and it is almost too easy to explain her affinity for diagrams as the natural response of someone who always felt “displaced.” Sometimes Pat made a diagram just for the fun of it. On the last page of her first cahier is a chart she drew up when she was eighteen years old, showing how a trumpet should be played in the first, second, and third movements of a piece of music. Her pleasure was wholly in the making of the chart; she had no interest at all in learning to play the trumpet.
⁷⁶

On a second list of French phrases folded up with her sketches for
Golden Arrow,
Pat made a few scribbles for
Ghost,
a comics “filler” she was writing for. “Fillers” were stories which comics' publishers ran periodically when they had extra space to fill in an issue. Pat particularly hated writing for
Ghost
. On this page, she calls the comic book panels “boxes,” as though she couldn't be bothered to use the professional term “panels.” But her imagination, represented by these scraps of work, seems well suited to the medium of the comic book. She tells the stories graphically and she sees the actions in pictures.
⁷⁷

What didn't suit Pat—despite that playwriting course with Minor Latham at Barnard College and years of producing silent sentences spoken by comic book characters—was writing good dialogue. Dialogue writing is like perfect pitch; you're either born with the ability or you are not. Pat was not. Her later attempts to write commercial plays, television scripts, imaginary conversations—anything, in fact, to do with the spoken word—are uniformly awful; as unconvincingly tuned to the sounds of human speech and human rhythm as are most of the conversations in her novels.

A quarter of a century or so after she'd made her little chart for Golden Arrow, in February of 1969, Pat, living in Montmachoux, France, was struggling with an original script for the London theater producer Martin Tickner (“a two-acter, which I call STORIES”). She wrote her friend Lil Picard in New York that she'd “nearly had a nervous breakdown over writing my play. Caused by not knowing what SHOULD go into a play, how to write a play.”
⁷⁸
She had rewritten the script three times in three weeks, from beginning to end; and she would continue to work on it almost through the end of 1969 (including an October working holiday in a villa in the south of Portugal provided by her hopeful producer—of which experience Madeleine Harmsworth, the young lover who accompanied Pat to the villa, said: “I was rather fond of Portugal until then.”)
⁷⁹

Pat would eventually call this play
When the Sleep Ends
and she wrote the female lead for her friend the English actress Heather Chasen. Chasen says that not only could Pat “not write dialogue…she seemed to have no understanding of women at all.” Chasen thought the character Pat had written for her was violently unsympathetic, and that “the part was unplayable.”
⁸⁰
The work was never produced.

Pat's best talents were like dedicated bombs: specific to certain targets and not to others. She knew this, but sometimes managed to fool herself into thinking that her secondary talents—her extraordinary gift for hard work and discipline—could overcome the deficit.

In 1946, after four years of writing scripts expressly designed for the panel construction of comic books—each panel a little inked and colored painting of its own—Pat wrote of the short stories she was working on at the same time as her comic book writing: “I think of each story to be written, as a painted picture. I think more clearly in painter's terms.”
⁸¹
It was another way of acknowledging what the comics were doing for her.

Pat was much better paid for her comics work than her fellow writers toiling away in pulp fiction, pornography, or lower-end “suspense” and “crime” novels.
⁸²
But the shame Pat felt about her comic book writing and about the whole comics milieu of pirated stories, forged identities, false names, and compartmentalized activities makes her persistence in the job much more a matter of like being attracted to like than of poverty being attracted to a good salary.

Sixty-five years later, her lengthy, uneasy, self-embarrassed career as a writer for comic books seems part and parcel of her own internal division and her artistic obsession with doubling; the product of a magnetic attraction of opposites. The talented young woman and the disreputable new graphic narrative form: each one charged with the same affinities, the same embarrassments, and with some of the same uncomfortable secrets.

Still, the money was no small thing. In the 1940s, the novelist Anaïs Nin (whose work Pat first read on a visit to Fort Worth in 1948),
⁸³
intent on generating spicy material for her voluminous diaries, was writing pornography-to-order for a United States senator for two dollars a page. Nin cannily contracted the work out to other writers for one dollar a page, making herself a tidy profit. But Pat Highsmith, even cannier than Anaïs Nin (and lacking both Nin's wealthy husband and Nin's desire to appear bohemian), was taking home between four and eight dollars for every comic book page she wrote.

Part 3

Like most of the people at work in the comics, Pat Highsmith wasn't working under her real name. Her “real” name—for once, the double-identity joke was on Highsmith—was actually the name she was born with, Mary Patricia Plangman. When the bubble of her “false identity” finally burst, the lateness of the news was almost as shocking to her as the knowledge itself.

It was in November of 1946, while applying for her first passport in a U.S. government office, that Pat learned that her stepfather, Stanley Highsmith, had never actually adopted her. Mother Mary, regally ignoring the legalities of adoption (Pat would have said “as usual” Mary said she did so with the cooperation of the school authorities), had simply registered the six-year-old Patsy in grade school in New York under the Highsmith name and continued to do so right up through college. And so Pat, like many of her male fictional characters, had to be adopted—and for the second time, too, since grandmother Willie Mae had more or less taken charge of Pat's first six years. The documents securing Pat's legal status in New York State are rife with confusion.

In the first of the two files that comprise the adoption papers of Mary Patricia Highsmith (filed with the Westchester County Surrogate Court in November of 1946), “the deponent” (Mother Mary) states that “her husband and her daughter have lived together for over twenty years and that always the relationship between Mr. Highsmith and Mary [Pat is referred to by her first name in the document] was that of father and daughter…. deponent earnestly desires that said relationship become a legal one for all purposes through adoption.”
¹
The Westchester County clerk did not distinguish, as he/she should have done, between Mary Highsmith (mother) and the new Mary Highsmith-to-be (daughter), Mary Patricia. Thus, although Pat signed the adoption papers with her old name, Mary Patricia Plangman, she and her mother, nominally at least, are treated as a single entity in the deposition. It was a case of the law inadvertently following the life.

In the second of the two papers, Pat attests that “I have always looked upon Stanley Highsmith…with daughter-like love and respect and desire now to make him my foster father in the eyes of the law as well [because we have] lived together as one closely-knit family.”
²
Pat would blame Mary bitterly for the necessity of this adoption, as she would blame her for most things. Blaming her mother was a convenience of which Pat never failed to take advantage.

 

Like many people working for the comics—let's imagine Pat back at her desk in the Sangor-Pines bullpen for a moment, cigarette lit, a cup of coffee balanced on the narrow strip of desk next to her typewriter, and Ken Battefield, the “Dickensian-type” artist she liked to chat with at the office,
³
leaning over to give her quiet advice about working for Quality Comics—Pat can both draw and write. She has been sketching, cartooning, and illustrating all her life. It's one of the tastes and talents she inherited from Mother Mary, who, as her daughter would do in later life, paints and draws her own Christmas cards. All through the 1940s, Pat and Mary go to museums and art galleries together, draw together (eying each other's work competitively), and, quarrelling or not, continue to seek each other's company.

“Will be unspeakably glad to see Mother altho' I can't tell her all my problems. She symbolizes all the stability, the femininity, the comfort and warmth of my life. Shall have to take her…for champagne cocktails and a long talk Friday.”
⁴

Pat's cousin Don Coates remembers Pat and Mary in New Hope, Pennsylvania, in 1961 mesmerized by the same dead bird. The bird had fallen to the ground with one of its “little claws stuck up in the air,” and Mary and Pat were making drawings of the tiny corpse in impromptu
nature morte
sessions.
⁵
While they drew, Pat repeated a line from a poem by Dylan Thomas and Mary carefully copied the quotation onto one of her sketches.
⁶

Mary's and Pat's letters to each other are full of references to drawing and painting. In her diaries, Pat records sketching trips with her mother to places as far away as the Minots' farm in New Hampshire, where, in August of 1950, they spent a week, got on “well enough,” slept on “poor mattresses,” and “starve[d] for our eighteen dollars a week.” They had been going to New Hampshire together on little vacations for years, and photographs of Pat and Mary in the New England countryside in 1937 show more than either woman cared to tell. Mary is always dressed to the nines—she had been wearing high heels for so long that the backs of her legs hurt if she didn't put them on, even in the country—and Pat is always dressed as Mary's charmingly androgynous sidekick. (There is more than a suggestion of Batman and Robin—or Black Terror and Tiny Tim—in these photographs. See
illustrations
.)

On this particular trip to New Hampshire, Pat made her usual character notes on the people around her, but it was the farmer's sons who really caught her eye: “One gregarious and jolly, the other taciturn, the unknown.” She saw them as paired opposites, and, as Alter Egos often did, they set her to thinking about murder. “Anyway, here are the characters. Who did the murder?”
⁷
She was hoping to write “a long story in a place just such as this…with some mystery and crime in it.”
⁸

Pat did most of the sketching on this trip, while Mary did most of the canasta playing—which prompted Pat to “list the things I dislike about her.”
⁹
Pat's list neatly summarized some of the traits Pat herself retreated to in middle age (“rigid thought patterns,” “self-consciousness,” “refusal to face facts”).
¹⁰
Pat complained that Mary never praised her drawings, and after Mary's death, when a cousin wrote to ask if she could send one of Mary's early paintings to Pat in Switzerland, Pat ignored the offer. Instead, she queried the cousin about what was currently obsessing her: family genealogy.

At twenty-two, Pat's artwork was as discretely partitioned as everything else about her. Born left-handed, she was forced by her grade school teachers to shift her writing implement to her right hand. (But the teachers forgot to make her
draw
with her right hand.) She got low marks for “handwriting” in grade school, and in 1960, in a story that coincides nicely with the absence of her German-American birth father, Pat told a lover that she “taught herself” to write with her right hand by copying out “German phrases.”
¹¹
Divided between being an artist and becoming a writer right up until the time she left the Sangor-Pines shop at the end of 1943, Pat kept on drawing with her left hand and writing with her right hand for the rest of her life. She split her talents, just as she split her differences. Just as she split everything.

Pat's divisions went even deeper than her talents. Because her chronic anemia was a constant source of worry, she made careful records of her frequent blood tests and kept up a murmur of anxiety about her low red blood cell count (Mary Highsmith was badly anemic, too) and low blood pressure (for which she was always getting “injections”). Like the rest of her, her blood was subject to partitioning and disguise. Pat had type O blood, the blood type of the “universal donor.” The Japanese, perhaps the only people to use blood type for character analysis, regard possessers of O type blood as “warriors.” The Americans, always more interested in stress than in character, discovered that people in the O blood group are most prone to developing ulcers. (Pat suffered severe gastric problems all her life.) For the purposes of blood donation, a person in the O group can receive blood only from another O type, but an O type can still donate to anyone in the ABO blood groups. O blood, in other words, can both disguise itself and remain itself; it mimics other blood types. Right down to her platelets, Pat was capable of doing double duty.

By August of 1943, the month young Everett Kinstler was hired at Sangor-Pines, Pat had published some drawings as well as her short story “Uncertain Treasure” in the magazine
Home and Food
.
¹²
The magazine's art director, Rolf Tietgens, a stylish, gloomy German émigré photographer, was her new friend, and his capacity for melancholy was not relieved by having a steady job. In 1967, Pat remembered: “when I could not too well understand it, being twenty-one and hopeful, [Rolf said] that we are living in the Middle Ages now.”
¹³
At the time, Pat thought that Rolf, a German alien, really shouldn't be criticizing the United States.

Pat hoped to buy a radio with the money she would get for “Uncertain Treasure.” The day she learned the story was going be published, 21 June 1943, she went straight to Rolf's studio to be photographed. It was a commemorative photo session—the triumphant young author on the occasion of her first serious publication—and the photos would be used in
Home and Food
. Pat disliked them. Perhaps this was also the afternoon during which Rolf took a series of nude photos of Pat, photos whose “positives” she got back from him in 1968 and kept for the rest of her life. Much later, two of Rolf's (clothed) photos of Pat would be used on the book jackets of two of her Doubleday publications.
¹⁴
But on this afternoon, Rolf elevated the posing experience for Pat by translating and reading out a “poem by Hölderlin, which sound[ed] beautiful” to her. Pat felt that Rolf loved her “a little,” but he hated the new short story she showed him, “Laval,” and she agreed with him. It needed work.
¹⁵

Rolf introduced Pat to his boyfriend, Frank, and Pat imagined that
he,
at least, was falling for her. Then Pat and Rolf went to dinner alone. They talked about “the Greeks and art,” and Pat wondered how, after such an uplifting conversation, she could go back and work on such “nonsense” as “Bill King.” Bill King—that's
Sergeant
Bill King—was another comic book character Pat had been writing stories for, and Pat was quite right: Bill King is of minor interest. But three weeks earlier, she'd been enjoying the sergeant's exploits enough to comment on them and was even claiming divine inspiration for her work in her diary: “[S]at in the sun and got from heaven a story for [Sgt.] Bill King.”
¹⁶

Sergeant Bill King's story lines are always clear: he must do more damage to the German army than an atom bomb. He outwits, outfights, and outmaneuvers whole squadrons of badly drawn, stereotypically portrayed German soldiers. In writing for Black Terror, Fighting Yank, Sergeant Bill King, and a host of other war heroes and their diminished doubles, Pat entered into another of the many contradictions that would mark her life. She was a woman who couldn't tolerate visible signs of conflict, but she was writing graphic and violent war propaganda with every “heroic” comic book scenario she filed. And because this was wartime America, most of the stories she wrote were pocked and pitted with vulgar racial stereotypings: “Japs” and “Krauts” were the mildest terms used for enemy Asians and Teutons. Pat objected to the stereotyping of Germans, but not to the caricaturing of Japanese, and her later work for Fawcett Publications on the comic book
Crisco and Jasper
(taken from film shorts that feature stop-motion animation puppets) would run along the same lines.
Crisco and Jasper
stories used a Southern Negro dialect so crude that it made the Uncle Remus tales sound like Virgillian idylls.
¹⁷

However bloody-minded Sergeant Bill King's exploits were, they don't begin to compare to the homicidal adventures of the character Pat would start writing for Timely comics in 1944. That character, Everett Johnson (like Tom Ripley, he hails from Boston), is notorious throughout the U.S. Pacific naval fleet for his nom de guerre: “Jap Buster” Johnson. Jap Buster Johnson is a
real
killer, and his mass murders, like those of Bill King, are sanctioned by the circumstances of war.

In every one of his stories, Jap Buster Johnson, stationed on an American destroyer somewhere in the Pacific, mercilessly slaughters an endless rotation of Japanese soldiers, sailors, and pilots. And he has his reasons. Jap Buster's Best Buddy, his closest pal, his almost–Alter Ego, is Dave Nichols. One fateful day, when a Japanese bomber strafes Everett Johnson's and Nichols's aircraft carrier, Dave dies with his boots on. Vowing vengeance, Everett is transformed into an enhanced self, “Jap Buster Johnson”: a war machine who kills the Japanese swiftly, violently, and in their thousands.

And when Jap Buster Johnson takes time off from his daily slaughter to stand on the deck of his destroyer and smoke a reflective pipe—the blood of a thousand bucktoothed, slit-eyed Japanese sailors running a red river underneath his feet—he sees the ghostly image of his Best Buddy Dave's face shimmering out there on the ocean surface just beyond the starboard side of his ship. And that's when Johnson feels he has to say something to Dave, something meaningful. So he looks down into Dave's watery reflection and he dedicates the day's body count to his Best Buddy. “I did it for you Dave old boy,” says Jap Buster Johnson, tenderly. “I wish you had been there with me fellow.”
¹⁸

Jap Buster “did it” for Dave, all right, but—it can't be said too plainly—he also “did it” for the fictional work of Patricia Highsmith. Those classic authors, Dostoyevsky, Gide, Proust, Julien Green, et al., hovering, Pat liked to think (and wanted
us
to think) over her artistic life, weren't the only figures in her universe concerned with suggestive relations between men, the double nature of reality, and the instability of identity. It is possible to see, even in characters as crude as Black Terror and Jap Buster Johnson, how the great themes of the Zeitgeist—also, as it happens, the great themes of American literature—slowly trickled downwards and found a form in comic books—comic books for which Patricia Highsmith was writing.