The Talented Miss Highsmith Page 26
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.
Those “great themes” were not obvious to everyone—or to anyone, apparently, judging by the unholy stir a little essay published in Partisan Review, the journal Pat was so proudly subscribing to in the 1940s, made when it appeared in 1948. The essay was titled “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey,”19 and it was written by one of the Bad Boys of American Criticism, a maverick young scholar named Leslie Fiedler. Fiedler was indeed a bad boy; he was the first person, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, to apply the word “postmodern” to literature.
Just as Pat was packing up her kit bag for the Saratoga Springs artists’ colony, Yaddo, in June of 1948 for six weeks of public and private drinking, enthusiastic flirtation, and some very serious revisions of the manuscript that would become Strangers on a Train, Fiedler’s explosive essay (it added an extra line to Mark Twain’s masterpiece Huckleberry Finn, because Nigger Jim never did say “Come back to the raft ag’in, Huck honey”) hit American literary life like a bucket of dirty water gleefully hurled against a windshield by a rebellious teenager.
Fiedler’s theory in “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey”—fully presented in his 1960 book, Love and Death in the American Novel—is that American literature was a literature for, by, and about boys; obsessed with death and characterized by the implicitly homosexual pairing of two men (Fiedler noted the frequency of mixed-racial pairings in Twain, Melville, and Cooper) who, hand in hand, “light out for the territory” that is, anyplace without civilizing females. The American novel, according to Fiedler, was vibrant with sexual anxieties about women, who are always portrayed as “monsters of virtue or bitchery, symbols of the rejection or fear of sexuality.”
Fiedler’s essay forever readjusted the American view of just what was really going on in the novels of Mark Twain, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. (In 1979, on the BBC4 radio interview program Desert Island Discs, Pat selected Moby-Dick, Herman Melville’s brilliant, ham-handed, poetic epic of obsessed pursuit, social Darwinism, and extreme Calvinism, as the only book she’d want to take with her to a desert island.)20 And Fiedler’s essay, if you substitute class for race, and Europe (in the Ripley books) or Central Park (in The Blunderer) or the woods of Pennsylvania (in The Cry of the Owl) for the “territory,” also provided a pretty good avant-première of what would go on in the novels of Patricia Highsmith.
Looked at through Leslie Fiedler’s lens, Patricia Highsmith has all the minor marks of the archetypal American writer and two of the major marks as well: She is the most unconscious “gay male novelist” since Ernest Hemingway, and she is as gifted an anatomist of male sexual anxiety as Norman Mailer.
Later, Fiedler turned his theoretical attentions to comic books, as did his contemporary, Gershon Legman, the self-taught American sexologist, folklorist, and social critic. Legman, living in the South of France in the 1970s when Pat was occupying the North, was Pat’s favorite editor of limericks and dirty jokes. And Pat—one of whose ideas of humor was to collect names from the “Sunday Social columns [of the] NY Times, people getting engaged or married…. Barbara Scheetz getting married, e.g., is the low standard I aspire to”21—kept at least one of Legman’s massive editions of limericks in her personal library and consulted it frequently. She would have been as delighted by Legman’s next book, Rationale of the Dirty Joke (with a whole section devoted to dirty jokes about Texas), as Legman himself would have been clinically interested in Pat’s own favorite dirty joke, “The Japanese Wife Joke.” (See “Les Girls: Part 11.”)
In his Freud-influenced pamphlet, Love and Death, published in 1949—much of it was about the comic books of the 1940s during the period that Pat was writing steadily for the genre—the exuberantly eccentric (and steadfastly homophobic) Gershon Legman saw male homosexuality and misogyny every single place he looked.*
Pat’s love life during her year at Sango
r-Pines was like her imagination and her work habits: more or less in a hyperkinetic state.
In May of 1943, she fell in love with a dedicated young painter, Allela Cornell: “I love Allela and God within her…. she is the best! The best soul I could ever find!”22 Holding hands with Allela at the movies made Pat want more of her, in the same way, she said, that she wanted “more and more money.”23 Allela was a slim, spiritually inclined, short-haired girl with round, rimless glasses, a plain face, an earnest manner, and larger problems than Pat could guess at, although the clues were there in letters Allela sent to Pat: “I am destroyed,” she wrote to Pat, “and I don’t know why.”24
Pat didn’t like Allela’s body and was much more excited by thinking “male” thoughts about Allela than by sleeping with her. “This morning, I thought so much about Allela that I had to go to the bathroom to relieve myself of a big erection. Is this disgusting? Am I a psychopath? Yes, but why not!?”25 In 1946, three years after Allela and Pat broke up, Allela drank a bottle of nitric acid—her suicide had nothing to do with Pat—and suffered a lingering and painful death. It was especially poignant because Allela had decided she didn’t want to die after all. Pat, as always, felt guilty for some callous behavior towards Allela and tried to get Allela’s paintings placed in New York galleries. She was unsuccessful in her attempt, but later used Allela’s situation as one of the “germs” for her novel Ripley Under Ground.
Allela Cornell had the good painter’s ability to foretell the future of her human subject in the subject’s present pose, and she did an uncannily predictive portrait of Pat in oils. In the painting, Pat is in a red jacket, with her massive hands wrapped around her torso and her thumbs sticking straight up. A trademark furrow folds the space between her brows. On her face is a fixed, mature, intractable expression—not at all the expression of a twenty-two- or twenty-three-year-old girl—of controlled rage and pain: it’s the terrible frown Pat was always reminding herself to get rid of; the frown her face just naturally fell into. The painting is like the portrait Picasso did of Gertrude Stein: if it didn’t look like Pat when Allela made it, it would look like Pat later on. It did. Pat hung it in every house she ever lived in.
As she always did with a new lover, Pat dreamt of travelling with Allela. Since high school, travelling had been “the most desirable thing on earth” to her.26 She sent Allela her poems and one of the Spy Smasher stories she was writing for Sangor-Pines.27 (She was also writing Pyroman and Sergeant Bill King for Sangor-Pines, and Golden Arrow for Fawcett.) Their communion was more that of two spiritually inclined artists—“Cornell was an idea, born of an x-ray,” Pat wrote—than of a sensual union of the flesh.28 Inevitably, Pat began to sleep with Allela’s other lover, too, an attractive blond woman named Tex whom Pat had noticed riding her bicycle before learning that Tex was involved with Allela. The ensuing jealous scenes made Pat “want to jump out a window.”29
Pat was also seeing a woman named Ann T., who, like Allela and Pat’s coworker at Sangor-Pines, Leo Isaacs, dedicated some poems to Pat; Pat slipped them into her cahier.30 She let Leo Isaacs, who was married, kiss her and instantly regretted the liberty: “I allowed too much. It has to stop.”31 Pat’s good looks and reckless behavior, and the slow sexual burn she emitted, inspired a lot of poetry and stirred many emotions in the people around her.
Like the proverbial pinball, Pat’s feelings occasionally stopped ricocheting around: “Our three lives [Allela’s, Tex’s, and Pat’s] are bound tightly together. We love each other—what will happen now?”32 The triangle was Pat’s favorite form of loving and she never could sustain it. The relationship with Allela unraveled after only five months, in September of 1943.
Pat’s second favorite form of loving—the tantalizing, torturing, withholding kind—was what she moved towards in her next affair: a mostly unconsummated relationship with a beautiful, married-but-separated thirty-year-old Hattie Carnegie model, Chloe. Pat first met Chloe at a party at Angelica de Monocol’s, and continued to meet her at the Manhattan art gallery of Julien Levy, son-in-law of the avant-garde artist and writer Mina Loy. Levy’s gallery on Fifty-seventh and Madison had been a showplace for Modernist works of art in New York for the last twelve years. Pat thought Julien Levy was a “snake” and his wife a “piglet.” Perhaps this opinion was colored by the fact that Chloe was staying with the Levys, and Rosalind Constable told Pat that Julien Levy had a reputation as a “skirt chaser.” Pat wooed Chloe with a bottle of Calvert’s whiskey which she was almost prevented from buying. Liquor store owners still thought Pat was “17 or 18.”33 So did Pat.
Pat and Chloe spent passionate, but unconsummated, Saturday nights together. Chloe’s condition for staying with Pat was kissing but no sex. Pat was thrilled with this (and then she wasn’t), rhapsodizing about the excitements of limited physical contact in her diary. “By God! I remember the days when I was fifteen or sixteen, when the accidental touch of the hand of a girl was a whole heaven!”34 But through her haze of desire, Pat’s assessing eye was still on Chloe: “Like all beautiful women, she prefers talking about herself.”35 Pat and Chloe listened to Pat’s favorite popular songs—a taste that lasted thoughout Pat’s life—at Pat’s apartment on East Fifty-sixth Street: “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” “Why Do I Love You,” and “Make Believe.” Chloe was constantly drunk and wore black underwear. “My god!” thought Pat, as naïve as any schoolboy, when she first saw Chloe drunk and passed out in her lingerie.36 When Pat and Chloe finally did make love Pat’s comment to herself was typical: “[T]he earth didn’t move.”37
Chloe was clever and flattering as well as fragile and beautiful. She read two of Pat’s short stories, “Silver Horn of Plenty” and “Uncertain Treasure,” and told Pat that as a writer she had the same problem as Djuna Barnes: she didn’t know how to end her fictions.38 Chloe also told Pat that “if she were in love with a woman, it would be me, but that she preferred men.” Since Pat had just confessed to her friend Rosalind Constable that “there is something perverted in me; I don’t love a girl any more, if she loves me more than I love her,” Chloe’s attitude suited her very well.39
Almost immediately Pat started to do “good work on the story called The Three [which I am] proud of…as much as of my Uncertain Treasure.” 40 Perhaps “The Three” had something to do with the “three loves” Pat said she had had in the last two years: Rosalind Constable (a beacon of accomplishment in Pat’s dark night of professional struggles), Allela Cornell, and Chloe. Or perhaps it was the three people Chloe said she was in love with just then. Chloe’s withholding was giving Pat the impetus for her work on “The Three,” another story Rolf Tietgens didn’t like. “[T]oo peculiar, not clear, not poetic enough,” he told Pat. What Pat told herself was that Rolf wasn’t always right, that it was time to make use of Leo Isaacs’s critical talents (Leo, her fellow comic book writer, was still in love with her), and that she would send the story to The New Yorker anyway.41 In fact, she sent it to Harper’s Bazaar. It wasn’t published.
“I have to work like a man and I need a woman—but one who loves me strongly and quietly,” Pat wrote in the creative afterglow of yet another physical rejection from Chloe—and after having to listen to yet another love poem read aloud to her by the besotted Leo Isaacs.42
On 12 October 1943, Pat went to East Fifty-seventh Street to have dinner with “the parents” and her cousin Dan Coates, who had been travelling for some time in the East. This was the second time Dan had visited the Highsmiths since August. Mary had to hold the meal back more than an hour for Dan—Pat decided this was evidence that Dan was “destructive” (but she went to a rodeo in Madison Square Garden with him the next day anyway, a rodeo she would carefully describe in The Click of the Shutting)—and Mary and Stanley lectured Pat about “my drinking, my friends (and girl friends) etc.” “The parents ruin me,” she thought. Everyone wondered aloud about what Pat saw in Chloe, whom they thought of as “an unintellectual model.” As usual, Pat was at the center of her family’s conver
sation.
At this dinner with Dan, it was Mary, always hoping for a suitable boyfriend, any boyfriend, for Pat, who taxed her with rejecting “Leo [Isaacs]’s questions like a man who refuses to give insight into his private life. I answered that I could never love a Jew and that, if he tried to discover anything, I wouldn’t see him again.” 43 This was plain enough, but it wouldn’t have stopped Mary’s prodding. The other plain thing—Pat said it to herself and to no one else—was that she didn’t think Leo had “the big dream,” the ambition that “makes real artists.” 44 He was not headed in a direction that would lead to the “best” in life. But Pat didn’t say the plainest thing of all, which was that Leo Isaacs was not the right gender for her.
The next evening, 13 October, Ann T. and Chloe met at Pat’s apartment. Pat always liked to have her lovers meet each other; the geometry of the triangle never lost its appeal. Chloe left first, and then Ann got drunk in order to sleep with Pat. Pat confessed to Ann, a little inopportunely, that “Chloe fills my whole life,” and the day after that, Pat broke up with Ann. (Not, as it turned out, for long.) Pat was still not sleeping with Chloe, but she would always prefer the bird in the bush to the bird in her bed.45 Besides, Pat was still emotionally involved with Allela Cornell, who gained in imaginative and artistic importance the further she receded from Pat’s direct experience. For the rest of her life, Pat would refer to Allela with love, respect, and lingering regret.