The Talented Miss Highsmith (119 page)

 

^*
Not to mention the fact that the comics publishers Pat worked for were also producing pulp novels and magazines with fetching titles like
Spicy Detective Stories, Ranch Romances, Hot Tales,
and (the flirting-with-frontal-nudity)
Pep Stories.

 

^*
The story of how Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's “Superman” was sold out from under them (for $130) in a transaction almost as pitiful as the deal local Indians made when they traded the island of Manhattan for a fistful of beads and a few dollars—and the subsequent tale of how Siegel and Shuster's Clark Kent/Superman was copied in some form or other by every comics shop in New York—is one of the founding fables in the short, violent, utterly absorbing history of the Golden Age of American Comics.

 

^*
Frederic Wertham was the consulting pyschiatrist for Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald at the Phipps Clinic in Baltimore during her incarceration there. He was one of the first psychiatrists to use art therapy for diagnosis and encouraged Zelda in her painting. In gratitude, she gave him eleven watercolors.

 

^*
In 1940, nearly two years before the United States entered the war, Superman hauled Hitler and Stalin before a World Court in a DC comic. In February of that same year, Timely comics' Superhero Sub-Mariner tackled Nazi submarines. And in March of 1941, nine months before Pearl Harbor, the most successful Superhero at Timely, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby's Captain America, made his début on a sensational comic book cover by Jack Kirby (real name: Jacob Kurtzberg) on which Captain America knocked Hitler out of the frame with a well-placed punch to the jaw.

 

^*
A word about
Black Mask. Black Mask
magazine was founded in 1920 by the prominent critics H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan to generate money for their upscale publication,
Smart Set
.
Black Mask
published “hard-boiled” fictions by mostly contemporary writers, many of whom were much better known than Pat, and most of whom went on to publish with
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
when
Black Mask
was folded into it. (Pat's story “The Perfect Alibi” appeared in the March 1957 issue of
EQMM
along with stories by Alberto Moravia and Agatha Christie.) Although
EQMM
was the most consistent publisher of Pat's short fiction for decades, in later life she didn't care to emphasize her “pulp” connection, even as a link to other authors. In 1950, Raymond Chandler, who published his first story in
Black Mask,
had a terrible time trying to make a film script from
Strangers on a Train
for Alfred Hitchcock. In 1977, in the introduction she wrote to a book about Chandler, “A Galahad in L.A.,” Pat deliberately ignored her
EQMM
“pulp” connection to Chandler, mentioning
Black Mask
only to say that it “paid a penny a word,” and alluding only to her more “respectable” film connection with him.

 

^*
The American painter Edward Hopper, who shared Pat's fascination with architecture and alienation, labored for fourteen years as an advertising illustrator. His advertising work influenced his American subjects in much the same way that working for the comics—and sourcing her fictional crimes from newspaper articles—colored Pat's.

 

^*
“Primroses Are Pink” (it exists in a longer, loopier manuscript copy) dramatizes the fatal instability introduced into a marriage when a husband brings home a monochrome painting of a jockey, sends it away to have the jockey's silks properly colored, and then has a disturbing disagreement with his wife about just what color “primrose” actually is: is it American “primrose pink” or the more properly English “primrose yellow”? (The calibrations of class implied in this story were always on Pat's mind anyway—and yellow was her favorite color.)

 

^*
But she hadn't read Julien Green's novel
Si j'étais vous,
which a previous biographer thinks is an influence on
The Talented Mr. Ripley
.

 

^*
With one of her discarded titles for
Strangers on a Train,
Pat gave a name to this territory. The name was
The Other
and she thought it “the best yet” for her book.

 

^*
In 1949, Legman wrote to Raymond Chandler, soon to be the unhappy script adaptor of
Strangers on a Train
for Alfred Hitchcock, accusing him, as Chandler put it, of “homosexualism” in his novels.

 

^*
In Paris, where Pat usually saw Mercedes de Acosta, she also met Germaine Beaumont, the novelist and literary critic who had been Colette's protegée (and perhaps something more). Beaumont, who was an intimate friend of Janet Flanner (and saw Flanner regularly at Natalie Barney's literary salon), admired Pat's novels and wrote about them. Pat never quite grasped the importance of having someone as discerning as Germaine Beaumont approve her work. On 24 September 1966, the publicist for Calmann-Lévy in Paris had to remind Pat about the “[e]xtremely good article concerning
This Sweet Sickness,
written by Mrs. Germaine Beaumont, who is one of your most faithful fans. Since she is herself an excellent writer and a member of the Jury Femina, her appreciation has a great value.” Pat had a similar experience with Edouard Roditi. In 1967 she found herself at Roditi's Paris apartment at 8 rue Grégoire-de-Tours. Again, Pat had no idea of who Roditi—polylingual poet, author of many books, and distinguished translator from ten languages—was. She thought he might be an art critic, tried to guess his age, and noticed only that a “diminutive Arab” (Roditi's lover) was monopolizing his bathroom.

 

^*
Worth more than $4,000 in current buying power in the United States according to Department of Labor statistics—and considerably more than that in Mexico in 1943.

 

^*
The great German-born English writer Sybille Bedford travelled through Mexico with Esther Murphy Arthur in the early 1950s. Pat knew Esther Murphy Arthur and would meet Sybille Bedford in Rome and Paris. Out of her journey, Bedford produced the best book ever written about travelling in Mexico:
A Visit to Don Otavio
(1953).

 

^*
William Spratling, an American architect who settled in Taxco in 1929 and opened a silver shop, designed silver jewelry inspired by pre-Columbian Mexican motifs. He is credited with making Taxco the “silver industry” center of Mexico and is still known as “the Father of Mexican Silver.” Pat, who knew Spratling a little, was impressed:
“Was für ein Mann! Interessante Keime,”
she wrote. “What a man! Interesting germs.”

 

^*
Pat returned the favor, if favor it was (a search of the electronic edition of Eleanor Roosevelt's “My Day” columns couldn't confirm Lazarus's anecdote), in
The Talented Mr. Ripley
. Tom Ripley's best party trick is an impersonation of Mrs. Roosevelt writing her “My Day” column.

 

^*
In September of 1977, Pat took notes for a story, “As If Dead,” about a man who exaggerates his
Who's Who
listing, then commits suicide “after rereading what he might have been, what he felt he
was
.” He is destroyed by his own entry “because it is false…and worse, some people believe it and write him congratulations” (Cahier 34, 9/15/77).

 

^*
Nevertheless, Proust's
In Search of Lost Time
—with its narrator-author consumed by love, loathing, and capillarial investigations of the faubourg's forgeries—shares some fictional territory with Highsmith's demotic dandies and middle-class sociopaths. And its fifth volume—
The Captive & The Fugitive
—reads like a paradigm for the fluctuations of Pat's love life: “[I]t is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since as soon as there is a choice it can only be a bad one.”

 

^*
In a coincidental Manhattan crossing, Fleur Cowles, when she was Fleur Fenton, was responsible for reorganizing
Home and Food,
the little Greenwich Village journal that published Pat's first “professional” story, “Uncertain Treasure.”

 

^*
Caroline Besterman slightly misremembered Eugene Field's poem for children, “The Duel” (the gingham dog and the calico cat sat on a table not a mantle), but she got the sentiment right. The gingham dog and the calico cat “Wallowed this way and tumbled that / Employing every tooth and claw / In the awfullest way you ever saw.” The finale: “Next morning where the two had sat / They found no trace of dog or cat…/But the truth about the cat and pup / Is this: they ate each other up!”

 

^*
A sentiment entirely unreciprocated by Mrs. Simpson, an elegant fashion editor at
Vogue
whose “set” included the decadent jeweler Fulco di Vedura; Johnny Nicholson, owner of the Café Nicholson; and the decorator and wife of Somerset Maugham, Syrie Maugham. Mrs. Simpson's assistant at
Vogue
recalls her wearing “nothing but black dresses and huge jewels” (“Lady Liberty,”
Vogue
, August 2006).

 

^*
At the height of her brief and uncharacteristically intense “Communist period” in 1941, Pat contemplated Ludwig Bemelmans's work and decided that “‘artists' like Bemelmans will still be allowed to work in the Socialist state, that people, out of sheer need for recreation and diversion, will buy his things…. Even though he is not a fine-school artist andthough he does not paint or write things with social significance…. Now Bemelmans is apoor example because his stuff is really the most socially conscious in the world: Café Society & Hotel Society” (Cahier 5, 24/7/41).

 

^*
View
was the Surrealist art and literary magazine started by Charles Henri Ford in 1940.

 

^*
Pat stayed friendly with Mary Sullivan and her longtime companion Rose, writing to one of her Greenwich Village “good eggs,” Rachel Kipness, in 1974 that Mary had just died shortly after a disastrously alcoholic visit to Pat's house in Moncourt, France.

 

^*
Arthur Rimbaud's phrase is:
“Le Poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens.”

 

^*
Strictly speaking, there is no murder in Pat's 1965 novel,
Those Who Walk Away,
but the suicide of Peggy Garrett, the wife and daughter, respectively, of the two male protagonists (one of whom blames the other for her death), predates the action, pervades the work, and is the motive for the incessant pursuits that drive the plot. The murder is there—and it's not there: a very Highsmithian way of seeing. And at the end of
A Suspension of Mercy,
Sydney Bartleby, the writer who has murdered only in fantasy, finally (and unconvincingly) forces his dead wife's lover to take enough sleeping pills to end his life. It's another Highsmith murder which is there—and not there.

 

^*
Alfred Hitchcock made a teleplay of another Highsmith novel,
This Sweet Sickness
, but Pat never met Hitchcock. And
Vertigo
(1958), the Hitchcock film adapted from the
roman policier D'Entre les morts,
by Boileau and Narcejac (Narcejac corresponded with Pat in the 1970s when she lived in the Île-de-France), has an unlucky hero, Scottie Ferguson, who is present at three deaths (two of them of the “same” woman). The voyeuristic themes and accidental deaths surrounding Ferguson's character are suggestive of those with which Pat enveloped the unlucky Robert Forester in
The Cry of the Owl
(1962).

 

^*
Sonya Cache is a pseudonym.

 

^*
Wisteria Cottage,
aka
The Night Before Dying
(1948), is a novel by Robert M. Coates, art critic at
The New Yorker
and presumptive coiner of the phrase “Abstract Expressionism.” Pat's reference to Coates is one of her rare admissions to reading popular fiction. She read popular fiction for competitive reasons and was familiar with all the bestsellers, but she preferred, as with her comic book work, to keep the news about her popular reading out of her cahiers.

 

^*
Joan Kahn (1914–1994) started as a reader at Harper & Brothers in 1946. Cass Canfield quickly offered her an editorship (she chose to be in the crime fiction department), and she began the imprint Harper Novels of Suspense. In latter years, the imprint became Joan Kahn Harper Novels of Suspense and then, simply, A Joan Kahn Book (CWA Olivia Kahn, 13 February 2003).

 

^*
Pat had a different explanation: “An artist will always drink…because he will always think of the woman he saw last week, or the woman who is a hundred or three thousand miles away, with whom he might have been happier, or just as happy. If he did not think of this, he would not be an artist, suffering with imagination” (Cahier 2, 29/3/53).