The Talented Miss Highsmith Page 19

  Just how comic books were generally regarded is made clear in this excerpt from an editorial in the Chicago Daily News published on 8 May 1940:

  Badly drawn, badly written, badly printed—a strain on the young eyes and nervous systems—the effects of these pulp-paper nightmares is that of a violent stimulant. Their crude blacks and reds spoil a child’s natural sense of color; their hypodermic injections of sex and murder make the child impatient with better, though quieter, stories.6

  Quality fiction writers were almost as dismissive of the comics as exasperated parents and crusading journalists. In her witty roman à clef about the New York publishing world of the 1940s, The Locusts Have No King (1948), Dawn Powell makes her reticent, scholarly, Greenwich Village–dwelling protagonist transform a vulgar magazine called HAW into a commercial success by commissioning artists from the comics (“Al Capp or Caniff”) to illustrate plots from classic novels.7 For Powell, a brilliant social satirist (Gore Vidal called her the “American Thackeray”), “comics” was a code word for ethical and aesthetic decay.

  Still, young Everett Kinstler was thrilled when he got that job at Cinema Comics. He was hired by the respected Sangor-Pines editor Richard E. Hughes, the same editor who had hired the attractive Barnard College graduate the previous winter. Mr. Hughes was married to Ned Pines’s daughter (Ned Pines was half owner of the company), and Ned Pines was married to Ben Sangor’s daughter (Ben Sangor owned the other half of the company). The comics were nothing if not tribal.

  “Hughes,” says Kinstler, had “a habit of smoking his pipe at the office, a very rubbery lower lip, and the kind of face I like to paint because it had character.” Hughes hired Everett to help ink in comic book “pencils,” the draft drawings made by the “pencillers,” at “fifteen dollars a week, five days a week, a half day on Saturday.” It was big money for a teenager in an era when “lunch was twenty-five cents.” By the end of the year, Everett was earning thirty dollars a week.8

  When Everett started work, one of “the main comics at Cinema was Fighting Yank,” a Superhero with a blue-blooded, eighteenth-century Alter Ego and a bland, socially leveraged, Anglo-Saxon name: Bruce Carter III. Whenever Bruce Carter III was in trouble, “a mighty figure would appear out of America’s past [wearing, with unfortunate effect, a hat like a portobello mushroom].” It was Bruce Carter I, the Fighting Yank himself: Bruce III’s Revolutionary War hero “ancestor” and Alter Ego.9

  One of Fighting Yank’s writers—she was typing away in the writers’ bullpen the day Everett was hired—was the twenty-two-year-old Barnard girl Richard Hughes had hired the previous December. She had been taken on to replace a comics writer who was on his way to becoming a distinguished theater and film critic. The writer’s name was Stanley Kauffmann. The Barnard girl was Patricia Highsmith.10

  Sixty years later, Ray Kinstler had a specific, portrait painter’s memory of Pat:

  Physically, Pat was deceptive; she had a bony figure, a little bit like Katharine Hepburn, and she must have looked taller than she really was. She had cheekbones. [And Kinstler describes the precise points of Pat’s dark pageboy falling below her ears, the way her hair was loosely parted and lay flat across the top of her head, and her habit of chain-smoking in the office.] She was a type. A lanky, scrubbed type. An American college girl type. I could have pictured her at Smith College.

  Patricia reminded me of Spencer Tracy’s remark about Kate Hepburn in a film. Someone had called Hepburn “kinda skinny” and Tracy came back with “Yeah, but what there is is cheerce” [choice].

  Sixteen-year-old Everett “had a teenager, heavy crush on Patricia…. I would have done anything for her. In the beginning it was Miss Highsmith this and Miss Highsmith that. ‘Oh, Miss Highsmith, could I do this for you or could I get that for you?’ Later on it was Patricia or Pat. And I think she tolerated me good-naturedly.”

  And Kinstler remembers just how Pat’s assignments at Sangor-Pines were determined: they were the result of an exchange between the writer and her editor, Richard E. Hughes.

  Hughes would commission a script: ‘Here’s an idea for The Fighting Yank, Patricia. I want one dealing with Nazis and submarines.’ Or Hughes would say: ‘Here’s a three-page insert on the WACS or the WAVES.’ And Pat would have to come up with a synopsis or a scenario [and eventually] come back with a script. Hughes was a very nice man, very gentle, supportive and understanding, and he would do some minor editing on the script. And the script would then be turned over to the artists in the bullpen who would balloon it with six or eight panels to a page, usually six. The opening page would sometimes be doubled out into a splash page [the illustrated title page which introduces comic book stories]. Sometimes the squares would be broken up into vignettes.11

  One afternoon, Pat, usually so taciturn at the office, managed to express the desire to drink a Coca-Cola at her desk. Young Everett gallantly offered to bring her the soft drink “from the luncheonette downstairs. She gave me a nickel and I returned with a Pepsi-Cola.” Deeply pleased with his resourcefulness, Everett proudly “told Patricia the Pepsi-Cola was the same price as the Coke but had a few more ounces.”

  Pat’s response struck the boy like a blow.

  “When you get older, Everett,” Pat said in a coolly measured phrase he never forgot, “you will buy for quality, not quantity.”12

  Pat’s remark about “quality” had a painful history behind it and an ambitious future in front of it.

  For six nervous months after she graduated from Barnard College in June of 1942, and for some years thereafter, Patricia Highsmith failed to be hired by every one of the “quality” magazines to which, like any enterprising literature major, she’d applied for work. Despite impressive recommendations from highly placed professionals like Rosalind Constable (the cultural eyes and ears of the powerful American publisher Henry Luce), Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, The New Yorker, Mademoiselle, Good Housekeeping, Time, and Fortune had all refused to take Pat on after meeting her.

  This was the period when magazines were the motor of Manhattan’s literary and social life, publishing and promoting everything that was new. It was also the era when pulp publishing companies and their upscale relations, the “quality” magazine and book publishers, were beginning to encroach on each other’s territories. Quality book publisher Harper & Brothers (later Harper & Row), in an elegantly bracketed promotion of a so-called pulp genre, assigned its senior editor Joan Kahn to oversee the Harper Novel of Suspense, the imprimatur under which all of Patricia Highsmith’s Harper novels, beginning with Strangers on a Train, would be brought out.13 Marc Jaffe, from 1948 onwards an editor at the New American Library (itself busily engaged in revolutionizing the paperback novel) says that Harper Novels of Suspense were considered a “literary” category and that he always thought of Highsmith as a “classy mystery writer” whose work belonged in a category “with Josephine Tey, who was, perhaps, a tad more literary.”14 Even Pat’s contemporaries had trouble trying to “place” her writing.

  Cross-propagation, conflation, and confusion of “low” and “high” literary genres and categories were rampant in New York publishing—especially because pulp publishers often printed the kind of writing that the more respectable publishers turned down. Weird Tales, an outré pulp magazine of fantasy and horror (and the principal publisher of that master of the macabre, H. P. Lovecraft), gave America’s greatest playwright, Tennessee Williams, his first public exposure when it published his youthful short story “The Vengeance of Nitocris” in 1928. Black Mask Magazine, founded in 1920, was a showcase for “hard-boiled” crime fictions which early on launched both Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and printed established writers like Edna Ferber, Cecil Day-Lewis (writing as Nicholas Blake),15 Elizabeth Sanxay Holding, Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, Edgar Wallace, Alberto Moravia, Agatha Christie, and the prolific and reclusive Cornell Woolrich, whose story “Murder After Death” Pat would single out in her thinly veiled artistic autobiography, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction.


  These same authors also appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, begun in 1941 as a “high-class” pulp venture by two cousins writing under the name “Ellery Queen.” Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine subsequently took over Black Mask Magazine, obscuring the fact that one of Black Mask’s founders was the “Sage of Baltimore,” the caustic American social critic H. L. Mencken, who once defined American Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere might be happy” and wrote a sentence Pat Highsmith would have been happy to endorse at any time in her life: “I have always lived in the wrong country.”16

  Beginning in the 1950s, to Pat’s barely suppressed embarrassment, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine would become the most frequent publisher of her short fictions.17 One of her worst stories (“The Perfect Alibi,” the first Highsmith story to be published in EQMM, in 1957) and one of her best stories (“The Terrapin,” published in 1961) would appear in EQMM.* The editors at Ellery Queen’s liked to mix their contributors: in the August 1960 edition of EQMM, Pat’s tale of yet another nerveless psychopath with a taste for symbolic trophies, “The Thrill Seeker,” was printed alongside “The Club,” a story by the great American poet Muriel Rukeyser.18

  At the time Pat graduated from Barnard, popular publishing giants Condé Nast (Vogue, Mademoiselle, Vanity Fair), Henry Luce (Time, Life, Fortune), and William Randolph Hearst (Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Town & Country) were beginning to hire fiction and poetry editors for many of the fashion, style, and news magazines under their vast New York umbrellas. And these editors were giving national exposure to the writers they published. Meanwhile, small literary and political journals—like Partisan Review—were exercising a disproportionate influence on the American intellectual conversation.

  With a subscriber base that never exceeded fifteen thousand, Partisan Review, begun in 1934 by William Phillips and Philip Rahv (who liked to refer to the USA as “the United States of Amnesia”), published serious, anti-Stalinist literary writers, many of them from Jewish immigrant families and most of them defenders of high modernism: Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg, Lionel Abel, Delmore Schwartz, Elizabeth Hardwick, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Daniel Bell, Meyer Schapiro, Dwight Macdonald, Alfred Kazin, Arthur Koestler, Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, et al.

  Earnestly preparing for her literary close-up, Pat was subscribing to Partisan Review in the 1940s: “The Partisan Review has arrived and I am very proud of it,” she enthused in 1943.19 But she was unequipped for its fierce intellectual arguments and could never write the kind of fiction PR liked to publish. Still, Pat read PR avidly, and her introduction to the work of Saul Bellow, a novelist whose writing makes profound use of what used to be called “the modern Jewish experience,” probably dates from her discovery of his stories in PR. (It was Bellow’s uncanny ability to reimagine the New York she’d lived in, to bring the alienated European emigrant experience to bear upon it, and to vividly dramatize his moral concerns that caused Pat to write an article for a German paper in 1987 naming Saul Bellow as her “favorite” author and Mr. Sammler’s Planet as his best book. Pat wouldn’t have disagreed with the harsh fictional views Bellow took of the women in his life, either.)20

  In 1950, still hoping to be introduced to “the Partisan Review crowd” by her new friend, the novelist Arthur Koestler, Pat was pleased to hear that Koestler had mentioned her name to Philip Rahv.21 But what Pat really wanted when she got out of college was something closer to the conventional center of New York power: a staff job at The New Yorker or, at least, an assistant’s position at Mademoiselle.

  William Shawn of The New Yorker turned Pat down for a job in June of 1942 after scanning four issues of the Barnard Quarterly containing her stories, reading some “on spec” pieces she’d done for the magazine’s “Talk of the Town” feature, and giving her reason to hope for work as a “girl reporter.” Four months after Pat talked to Shawn, a reader at The New Yorker compounded the insult by rejecting as “sordid” her unsolicited story “These Sad Pillars,” about a man and a woman who scribble notes to each other on subway posts.22 In 1958, Pat was still finding The New Yorker “so forbidding” that she was “afraid even to telephone them for…information” on how to submit an idea for a cover drawing, so she diffidently wrote to ask her editor at Harper & Brothers, Joan Kahn, to do it for her.23

  Vogue joined the chorus of disapproval by refusing to give the newly graduated Pat a position after a particularly disastrous interview. Harper’s Bazaar asked to see “several short stories” and then didn’t take them.24 Mademoiselle, where Carson McCullers’s sister Rita was the fiction editor, invited Pat for a meeting some months later, praised her “references & accomplishments,” put her in their “active file,” but never called her back.25 There were just too many smart English majors with “references & accomplishments” jostling for jobs in wartime Manhattan, and something about Pat—could they have guessed what she was thinking?—put the magazine editors off.

  It was the Vogue rejection that did the most damage. (“I’m horribly worried about Vogue. Rosalind told me not to write.”)26 Pat’s well-connected friend the arts journalist Rosalind Constable—Pat was desperate to please her—had taken the trouble to recommend Pat personally to the ladies at Vogue, and Pat showed up for her interview in June of 1942, bright eyed and bushy tailed, but also, apparently, disheveled and décoiffée.

  What wayward impulse, it is useful to ask, could have brought a young woman as ambitious and self-conscious as Patricia Highsmith to an interview at Vogue magazine in such a disorderly state? Something, perhaps, about not wanting to conform to the impeccably female image Vogue was showcasing in page after page of its perfectly styled fashion photographs?

  Pat’s mother, after all, was a fashion illustrator who had worked on and off for years for Women’s Wear Daily (and had done a cover illustration for Collier’s magazine in 1936).27 From her earliest days Pat was absorbing the grammar of women’s fashions from Mary—although no one would ever accuse Pat Highsmith of dressing like a girl. (Caroline Besterman says that even in a skirt she looked “rather like a sailor.”)28 Pat grew up listening to the shop talk of Mary’s fashion illustrator friends Jeva Cralick and Marjorie Thompson, and Pat and “Cralick,” as she was always called, had an affectionate correspondence that went on for decades. Pat and Mary, too, wrote to each other in letters that feature descriptions of clothing, and Pat’s sole surviving letter from childhood (to her grandmother Willie Mae) includes an extended phrase about her favorite tennis shoes.29

  It was probably the size of Pat’s feet—all the Coates family had big hands and big feet, and Pat’s hands and feet were enormous—that provoked her lifelong fascination with shoes. By the end of her life she was slipping those big feet into size 9½ loafers, and her lamb’s-wool-lined moccasins from L.L. Bean, preserved in her archives, really do look like gunboats. Shoes were among Pat’s initial artistic inspirations: the first line of the first story she ever wrote began with a pair of shoes beside a bed (see “Greek Games”).30

  Pat’s emotional memory continued to be stimulated by footwear as she got older. In 1942 she remembered a boy from her Astoria childhood because she had given him her “new tennis shoes, much too masculine, I discovered, even for me to play in unselfconsciously.” When the boy died shortly afterward, Pat wondered guiltily: would they “put my shoes into the coffin with him?”31 Her first published novel, Strangers on a Train (1950), introduces its two fatal Alter Egos to each other by having Guy “accidentally touch the outstretched foot of [Bruno,] the young man asleep[,]” with his own.32 And Guy’s pointless confession of murder to the oafish, unheeding Owen Markman at the novel’s end is perfectly symbolized by Markman’s “big scuffed brown shoes…. Suddenly their flaccid, shameless, massive stupidity seemed the essence of all human stupidity…and before he knew how or why, [Guy] had kicked, viciously, the side of Owen’s shoe.”33

  Shoes brought death sharply into Pat’s mind once again when, years after her beloved grand
mother Willie Mae’s demise, one of her own shoes made her remember that Willie Mae’s feet were shaped like her own feet, and only then, Pat wrote, had she been able to “shed the first real tears for my grandmother.”34 And in Munich, in 1951, the sense-memory of her ex-lover Virginia Catherwood’s shoes pierced her heart with quite another feeling: “O Ginnie, your little black suede shoes, sitting in the hall side by side, so small in the hall, sexy beautiful shoes that made my heart jump and my lips smile…and I could have made love to you in a minute.”35

  Twenty years later, shoes were still fascinating her. Pat, staying with Barbara Ker-Seymer and Barbara Roett in Islington, was taken to dinner with her hosts at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand in early November of 1972 by the Barbaras’ two other houseguests, France Burke, daughter of the literary philosopher Kenneth Burke, and her lover, “Sam.” Sam, who sat next to Pat at dinner, says that aside from “worrying” about the huge joints of meat that were arriving at their table with alarming frequency and orating obsessively about some family silver she was intent on extracting from an aunt, Pat’s principal topic of conversation was shoes.

  Sam was wearing a pair of Gucci loafers that were too narrow for her feet, and “Pat was VERY involved with this and she took the whole thing very seriously.” Pat liked Gucci loafers too, but suggested that Sam buy them in men’s sizes because only “the men’s sizes were wide enough.” Pat was “quietly peculiar, worrying about silver and shoes,” but about the shoes, she was “quite earnest and very precise,” sizing up Sam’s foot with practiced accuracy and giving her an exact men’s size equivalent.36

  Fashion footwear evidently did a lot for Pat—she even said that one of her first reasons for liking Switzerland was that only the Swiss made the kind of shoes that fit her feet37—but shoes weren’t the sole reason Pat was interested in fashion. Fashion, after all, was the glamorous province of beautiful women.