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.
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.
• 12 •
Alter Ego
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 Hig
hsmith 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
The Talented Miss Highsmith Page 25