The Talented Miss Highsmith (6 page)

In fact, Pat's rapid rotation of “selves”—those advances and retreats of the extreme emotional states that composed her character—often appear to be guided by Newton's third law of motion. A student of the classics in her youth, employing a little high Greek at the end of her life (her lone late-life tattoo, hidden under the watchband she wore on her left wrist, was made up of her initials in Greek),
⁶⁶
and deeply involved in her own bodily functions, Pat Highsmith would probably prefer to invoke Galen's theory of an imbalance of “humours” or Richard Burton's “atrabiliousness” (an excess of black bile) to explain her vascillations.

Every strong, positive reaction Pat had seemed to force her into a devastating withdrawal. Psychologically, she veered between attraction and revulsion, self-hatred and self-aggrandizement. Not to mention her simultaneous consciousness (and hypergraphic diary and cahier notations) of all her emotional, spiritual, and physical states at once.

It was an exhausting way to live—like seeing double all the time—and Pat began to feel that all her good work came out of having “enough sleep.” Sleep affected her, she said, like the “resurrection of Christ”
⁶⁷
her attachment to it was sacramental and she “honor[ed] sleep as the highest goddess. She is the source sometimes, she is the fuel always, like love and the sun and food.”
⁶⁸

In
The Price of Salt,
written before she was thirty, Highsmith makes cool, blond, about-to-be-middle-aged Carol tell her teenage lover, Therese, that “all adults have secrets.” In her own midlife, however, Pat rather liked to leave the lid of her personal Pandora's box slightly raised. If you knew how to read her indirectly dropped clues—a few people did—you were often rewarded with some very interesting views. And sometimes, just like the rest of us, she liked to drop little tidbits about herself and her opinions—but never the same tidbits and often not the same opinions—by tailoring her conversation to the milieu, the political leanings, the degree of closeness, and the sexual tastes of her specific and very separate audiences.

Still, in a lifetime of half-revealed mysteries, there was one secret so important that Pat Highsmith kept it entirely to herself. It was a secret that had to do with her work life and she hid it where people often hide the things they are ashamed of: right out there in plain sight, just like Edgar Allan Poe's purloined letter.

For at least seven years—long before and after she was a published writer and far more seriously than has been previously assumed—Patricia Highsmith wrote scripts and scenarios for America's most successful publishing industry: comic book companies. She created dialogue and story lines for dozens of desperate Alter Egos trailing their Superior Selves and Secret Identities through violently threatening terrains and luridly colored fantasies.

If this motif—the threatening terrain, the lurid fantasy, the desperate pursuit of Alter Egos by each other—sounds familiar, it should: it is the central obsession of practically every novel Patricia Highsmith ever wrote, from
Strangers on a Train
to
Ripley Under Water
. But she worked on that obsession in the comics
before
she worked it into her fictions, and, covering her tracks, she obfuscated the comics' titles she wrote for. “Comics like
Superman
and
Batman
,” she sometimes replied when interviewers asked, leaving the impression that “to pay the rent” she'd trifled—ever so briefly in the year after graduating from college—with the lives of those two respectable Superheroes.
⁶⁹

Superman
and
Batman
made good copy, but the truth was much stranger and seven years longer than the little misdirection she gave to the press, and Pat Highsmith—a woman who kept every single artifact associated with her writing for a posterity she fully expected to have—
removed all traces of her lengthy comics career from her own archives
. Almost all traces, that is.

With the (super)heroic aid of many of the great comics creators and historians of the Golden Age of American Comics, I have been able to exemplify Pat's long career in the comics, one of only two art forms native to the United States (the other, for the record, is jazz). We can now add “Black Terror,” “Pyroman,” “Fighting Yank,” “The Destroyer,” “Sergeant Bill King,” “Jap Buster Johnson,” “The Human Torch,” “Crisco and Jasper,” “Real Life Comics,” “Spy Smasher,” “Captain Midnight,” “Golden Arrow,” and a panoply of other comics titles, writers, and artists as well as Dostoyevsky, Proust, Kafka, Gide, Wilde, Willa Cather, Julien Green, Graham Greene, and Edgar Allan Poe to the universe of Pat Highsmith's influences.

Always keen on advancement, Pat tried to write for the high-paying, widely distributed
Wonder Woman
comic book, but was shut out of the job.
⁷⁰
This was in 1947, just one year before she began to imagine her lesbian novel,
The Price of Salt.
Wonder Woman, daughter of Amazon Queen Hippolyta and still the heroine of her own comic book, has a favorite exclamation: “Suffering Sappho!” She lives on the forbidden-to-males Paradise Island with a happy
coepheroi
of lithe young Amazons, and she arrived in America in 1942, in the form of her Alter Ego, Lieutenant Diana Prince, to help the Allies fight World War II. The thought of what Patricia Highsmith, in her most sexually active period (the 1940s were feverish for Pat) and in the right mood, might have made of
Wonder Woman
's bondage-obsessed plots and nubile young Amazons can only be inscribed on the short list of popular culture's lingering regrets.

On the subject of love-and-money—the subject of love
of
money—Pat was impossible. The richer she got, the poorer she felt and the more costive she became. She knew, of course, what she was doing—“My poverty has become a disease, unfortunately one of the mind”
⁷¹
—and her description of the island of Majorca in 1958 illustrates how she often tried to understand a new experience; she measured it entirely in currency: “Deya, Majorca. 60 pesetas to the dollar. 10 to post a letter airmail to USA. Six for a packet of cigarettes. 45 for a good meal. 50 for table bottle of good (RIOJA) wine.”
⁷²

On the subject of love of women, Pat was merely incredible. She appeared to dislike women and said so. Her notebooks are full of disapproving judgements of women as humans and intoxicated statements about them as inspirational love objects. It was an extraordinary position for a lesbian to maintain, but then, the extraordinary was Highsmith's Saturday Night Special.

At a precocious twenty, she wrote this about love:

But she also wrote this:

The emotional experience Pat most often left out of her published fictions was requited love—but her private writings and her life were filled with it. Few writers have been more inspired by love than Patricia Highsmith. She lived for love, she died a thousand symbolic deaths for love, and she killed for love—over and over and over again in her novels.

Her own problem with love was proximity. She could live
for
love, but she couldn't live
with
it. And she really couldn't bear anything that wasn't writing for very long.

Here is Pat at twenty-seven, yearning for her society lover, “Ginnie” Kent Catherwood, one of the several “Virginias” she would take into her bed:

Although she liked to imagine her favorite lovers as goddesses or monarchs, Pat's behavior in love was usually that of a regicide. She approached the queens of her heart with a crown in one hand and a headsman's axe in the other. The love affair with Virginia Catherwood which provoked the luscious paragraph above (a paragraph written as their affair was in its final stages of alcohol and accusation) lasted only a turbulent year, but it continued to generate images for Pat's work for decades. Emotional memory was Pat Highsmith's personal mausoleum, but it was also her best inspiration for making art.

Touchingly certain that the women she slept with were telling her the truth when they said she was the best lover they'd ever had (she set that phrase down in a cahier or diary whenever she heard it, and she seems to have heard it a lot),
⁷⁶
Pat continued to lie to every one of her girlfriends, usually by omitting information they would have considered vital to love's understandings.

She carried on multiple affairs involving various degrees of physicality during many of the “committed” love relationships she had, taking care that none of her myriad women friends—or either of her serious male attachments—would ever learn the truth of her fluctuating feelings or the facts about her sexual adventuring.

Pat thought about love the way she thought about murder: as an emotional urgency between two people, one of whom dies in the act. Love had the driving force of a faith for her—“A sexual love can become a religion, and serve as well”
⁷⁷
—and she always managed to find Satan at the center of it. “The lover (in love) suffers complete upset of all principles. To the man in love, all axioms, and all truths, may be askew.”
⁷⁸

One reason her work is so often characterized as “amoral” is that the moral disorder that love created in her life always made its way into her novels. But even though crime was always on her mind (like Edgar Wallace's enigmatic detector, JG Reeder, she saw evil everywhere), and even though murder was her absolute necessity, Pat's self-hating, self-torturing “hero-criminals” make her—if indeed they make her anything at all—much more of a “punishment novelist” than a “crime novelist.”

A party girl in her Manhattan youth despite her extreme shyness, and very attractive to men as well as seductive to women, Pat had a preference for bowling over both halves of a female couple (another kind of doubling) and extending her charms to their extracurricular lovers as well. In middle age, she began to operate directly on families—including, as it happens, her own. One or two rebelliously feminist ideas came to her while she was forcing herself to sleep with Marc Brandel, the English novelist she was trying to persuade herself to marry. (“I do not feel…that going to bed with him will ever be anything to anticipate with unbridled delight.” “Oh, the unfairness of this sexual business to women!”)
⁷⁹

In the context of her usual thoughts about women, Pat's “feminist” notions couldn't be funnier.

Surprisingly—she is often surprising—Pat Highsmith sang in a church choir as late as the age of thirty-seven, joking that the “only trouble is I can be heard when I sing.”
⁸⁰
Joking aside, she makes many references to God—and many more references to Jesus—throughout her cahiers and diaries. Kingsley Skattebol, her oldest friend from school, thinks Pat wasn't a “God-fearing person, but a God-reverencing one” and that “she attributed to God the custody of her unconscious.”
⁸¹

Pat's strong Southern Calvinist family background and stern moral underpinnings have eluded the notice of previous biographers. Her family's religious history included prominent preachers, interesting apostasies, and a tradition of opposed and opposing religious communities. Much like her overlooked work in the comics, her involvement with religious tenets was another critical part of a life concealed in plain sight. It was responsible for her lifelong preoccupation with Jesus Christ and, to a large extent, for the Big Chill at the center of her work: the one she defined so aptly as “the presence of the absence of guilt.”
⁸²

God was a long argument Pat seemed to be having with herself, and it was an argument she eventually lost. “If I happen to think that I can be a happier person for believing in God, then I shall believe,” she wrote pugnaciously in June of 1940, at an age when most college students are flirting with atheism. (Even her religiosity had a practical side.) By 1947, she was more serious about God and more regular about noting her attendance at His services. “Today yes, no church. I miss it. If I don't go to God for a couple of hours (on Sundays), I like to listen to holy music or words.”
⁸³
At twenty-eight, she was still proclaiming God's central importance:

Twenty years later, having given up on church, Pat, still thinking about what it meant to be a “religious person,” provided a perfect description of herself. “It is not in the nature of truly religious people to join anything,” she wrote in an inadvertently revealing little essay, “Between Jane Austen and Philby,” in 1968. “The religious person is ascetic and lives alone…. Anyway, if one has enough sense of guilt, it is not necessary to belong to a church.”
⁸⁵
No one could explain Highsmith more clearly than Patricia Highsmith—especially if she thought she was writing about someone
other
than Patricia Highsmith.