The Talented Miss Highsmith (27 page)

By 1939, garishly illustrated comic books were appearing on metal magazine racks, wire lines, and serried wooden shelves in every candy store, newsstand, and corner drugstore in the United States. Bound in wraparound covers and stapled in two places, the little magazines rarely varied in cost or style: ten cents was the cover price, and the format was a sixty-four-page, eight-by-ten-inch magazine—just the right size to fit inside a high school history textbook. The wood-grain paper on which comics were printed was so crudely pulped (“pulp” novels were printed on the same paper and took their name from it) that readers could almost count the tree rings and smell the chainsaw oil.

Gertrude Stein, already a fan of the American newspaper comic strips
Krazy Kat
(Surrealism by another name) and
The Katzenjammer Kids
(an American rip-off of the naughtiest comic strip boys in Germany,
Max und Moritz
), had the strips mailed to her in Paris and then passed them along to her equally enchanted friend, Pablo Picasso. In 1934–35, on her first visit to the United States in three decades, Stein, beguiled by the look of comic books, called them in her best faux-naïf manner “square books” and said they showed how Americans can “do the best designing and use the best material in the cheapest thing.”
²⁰

At its height, to which it was just beginning to rise when Pat walked into the Sangor-Pines comics shop in December of 1942, the comics industry was the largest publication business in the United States. In 1941, thirty comic book publishers were producing 150 different titles monthly, with sales of fifteen million copies and an estimated readership of sixty million Americans.
²¹
During the early war years, comics, along with cigarettes and candy bars, were sent by the tankerful to Allied forces overseas.
²²
At the end of the 1940s there were close to forty comics publishers in business, selling 300 titles and fifty million comics a month.
²³
And by 1953, just as the Golden Age of American Comics was about to turn to brass, one in every three publications bought and sold in the United States was a comic book.
²⁴

The first comic books were pasted together from comic strips in newspapers, and comics continued as they began. The stories retained the panel form—like frames in a strip of film—which were then ballooned out by letterers with the (mostly) rudimentary dialogue supplied by the writers. U.S. Post Office regulations required that two pages of “text stories” (stories in prose without illustration) had to be squeezed in amongst the illustrated tales in order to qualify the comics for a mass-mailing rate. All writers for the comics, including Pat Highsmith, had to write pseudonymous text stories, and their scenarios for regular comic book stories went mostly uncredited as well. Text stories were printed under “house” pseudonyms: “Sam Brant,” “Charles Stoddard,” “Tex Mumford,” and “Allen Douglass” are amongst them.
²⁵

Unusually, one of the text stories Pat wrote for the comics was apparently published under her own name. The story is supposed to have appeared in a Standard comic book of the 1940s, and a copy of it is said to still be in existence. Given Pat's perennial Christmas sentiments (“Christmas itself is positively the erupting boil of human guilt”)
²⁶
and her lifelong refusal to acknowledge the extent of her comic book work, the way in which her sole signed creation for the comics has been filed could hardly be more fitting. The Standard comic containing this signed Highsmith text story is buried in a warehouse in North Carolina under twenty thousand other uncatalogued comics and one withered pine: a long-dead Christmas tree belonging to the collector of the only comic book in which the name “Patricia Highsmith” was ever printed.
²⁷
,
²⁸

Late in life Pat told interviewers, if she told them anything at all, that she'd spent a few months after she got out of college writing comic book stories for characters “like Superman or Batman.” In the hierarchy of Superheroes, Superman was the first
and
the best; the model for the hundreds that followed. Black Terror, however, the character Pat was really writing for, epitomized her worst fear: Black Terror was a very second-rate Superhero.

 

Only his boy sidekick, Tim Roland, knew that the real name and true identity of the Black Terror, two-fisted nemesis of “Our Fascist Enemies,” was Bob Benton, “mild-mannered” neighborhood pharmacist. And only his creator, Pat's meticulous editor at the Sangor-Pines comics shop, Richard E. Hughes (
his
real name was Leo Rosenbaum), understood just how closely Bob Benton and his Alter Ego, the Black Terror, were modeled on the comic book characters of Clark Kent and Superman.
²⁹

Superman was the creation of two seventeen-year-old carriers of the Zeitgeist from Cleveland, Ohio, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster; both of them were children of Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe. In 1938, six years after they first imagined him, the dogged young duo finally published a story about Superman in a DC comic book. The starkly illustrated myth of the superpowered orphan from another galaxy, the kindly farm family who adopted him, and his mild-mannered second self, Clark Kent, the human shield for Superman's secret identity, quickly inflamed the imaginations of America's children—as well as the business instincts of some of New York's more disreputable publishers.
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“After Superman,” says Stan Lee, godfather of the Superhero Spider-Man and the figure from the Golden Age of American Comics most closely associated with Pat's favorite employer, Timely comics (now the world-renowned Marvel Comics), “if artists wanted to be successful, they thought, ‘I guess we better give our characters costumes and double identities.'”
³⁰
And if those artists and writers had “ethnic” names, they usually provided themselves with the same cover story they gave to their characters: another identity cloaked by an anglicized surname. (Stan Lee's real name: Stanley Martin Lieber.) In the world of American comics of the 1940s, imitation was the most commercial form of flattery.

Bob Benton/Black Terror was one of a long line of Clark Kent/Superman imitations. Like all copies, he suffers from a deteriorated image; his story is less sharply focused than Superman's. He follows the common Superhero formula of costume (tights, a cape, an insignia), a series of evil opponents to vanquish, and a boy sidekick to help with the fights. In 1954, in a book called
Seduction of the Innocent,
the well-meaning, socially concerned, progressive psychiatrist Dr. Frederic Wertham
^*
—subsequently much vilified by comic book fans—had a fine time exposing just what another successful Superhero, Batman, was
really
getting up to with his boy sidekick Robin (homosexual relations)—and cataloguing the dangers (violence, racism, and sexism) he thought comic books posed to the psyches of America's children. Black Terror's own special superpower—the result of his Alter Ego's life-changing laboratory accident—is his bullet-repelling superskin. But Black Terror's birth in a pharmacist's lab could never compare to the glorious emigrant myth propelling Superman: an intergalactic journey to Kansas in a transparent capsule launched by his doomed parents from their dying planet Krypton.

Still, as the splash page of a wartime
Black Terror
comic tells us, Black Terror could always be counted upon to fight for his country: he went wherever the “Axis octopus rears its deadly head.” Some of the Superheroes who preceded Black Terror did more than that. They went to war against Hitler long before the United States joined the battle—and for the most obvious reason: American Jews were writing and drawing them.
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Like Pat, her mostly youthful confrères in the comics business were underdogs yearning to be top dogs. Like Pat, they had all been schooled in the American Dream. But unlike Pat, many of them had been locked out of the “quality” ends of their chosen professions—for them, it was commercial illustration and advertising—because of ethnic prejudice. Most of Pat's cohorts in the comics, said Al Jaffee, cartoonist and editor at Timely comics, would have “drifted into the comic-book business [because] most of the comic-book publishers were Jewish.” Will Eisner, cofounder of the world famous Eisner-Iger comics shop and inspired creator of
The Spirit,
precurser of the graphic novel, agreed: “[T]his business was brand new. It was the bottom of the social ladder. [Those who wanted to get] into the field of illustration found it very easy to come aboard.”
³¹

Most of these young comics artists and writers were steeped in popular culture: detective magazines, science fiction magazines, fantasy and horror magazines, and crème de la hard-boiled crime fiction magazines like
Black Mask
.
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And many of the stories in the magazines they were reading had been infused by their authors' admiration for the same writers who had illuminated Pat's youth: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, et al. This dilution of high culture slowly trickled down into the rough, rich mix that was the American comic book in the 1940s, helping to shape its stories and its artwork, however crudely and simplistically. (Pat once described her comics work as being like “writing two ‘B movies' a day.”)
³²
Dostoyevsky and Kafka, Nietzsche and Poe, Rider Haggard and H. G. Wells, hard-boiled crime fiction, science fiction, pulp romance, and German Expressionist film—anything vividly adrift in the Zeitgeist was vacuumed up and made use of by the four-color, six-panel world of the comic book.

And there was another crucial source comic book creators were drawing on: their own ethnic and religious histories. Siegel and Shuster's “Krypton” names for Superman and his father, Kal-El and Jor-El, are both derived from the Hebrew nomenclature for “God.” And the story of Moses, the Jewish hero who led his people out of Egypt, and the legend of the sixteenth-century Golem—the giant, incomplete, servant-being created from the clay of the Vltava River by the chief rabbi of Prague to protect his community from anti-Semitic attacks—took on special significance in an era when the very survival of European Jewry was being threatened. The Golem, especially, had all the attributes of a Superhero except one: he was a little lacking in initiative.

“You shall obey my commands,” [said Rabbi Judah Loew to the Golem,] “and do all that I may require of you, go through fire, jump into water or throw yourself down from a high tower.”
³³

Will Eisner thought the “Golem was very much the precursor of the super-hero” because the Jews “needed someone who could protect us…. against an almost invincible force. So [Siegel and Shuster] created an invincible hero.”
³⁴
Cartoonist Jules Feiffer, invoking the Eastern European emigrant background of Siegel and Shuster, provided the wittiest variation on Eisner's comment: “It wasn't Krypton that Superman really came from, it was the planet Minsk.”
³⁵

When Pat gave her “criminal-hero” Tom Ripley a charmed and parentless life, a wealthy, socially poised Alter Ego (Dickie Greenleaf), and a guilt-free modus operandi (after he kills Dickie, Tom murders only when necessary), she was doing just what her fellow comic book artists were doing with their Superheroes: allowing her fictional character to finesse situations she herself could only approach in wish fulfillment. And when she reimagined her own psychological split in Ripley's character—endowing him with both her weakest traits (paralyzing self-consciousness and hero-worship) and her wildest dreams (murder and money)—she was turning the material of the “comic book” upside down and making it into something very like a “tragic book.”
³⁶
“It is always so easy for me to see the world upside down,” Pat wrote in her diary—and everywhere else.
³⁷

In October of 1954, working on
The Talented Mr. Ripley
and thrilling to the idea of corrupting her readers, Pat said plainly what she was doing.

“What I predicted I would once do, I am doing already in this very book (Tom Ripley), that is, showing the unequivocal triumph of evil over good, and rejoicing in it. I shall make my readers rejoice in it, too.”
³⁸

And then, just as plainly, Pat said
why
she was doing it, giving an account that sounds like Will Eisner's explanation of how people who are trapped by “invincible forces” might feel compelled to escape into “invincible” Alter Egos.

“The
main
reason I write is quite clear to me. My own life, however interesting I try to make it by traveling and so forth, is always boring to me, periodically. Whenever I become intolerably bored, I produce another story, in my head. My story can move fast, as I can't, it can have a reasonable and perhaps perfect solution, as mine can't. A solution that is somehow satisfying, as my personal solution never can be.

“It is not an infatuation with words. It is absolute day dreaming, for day dreaming's sake.”
³⁹

Certainly, the suggestion that any of her novels could have shared a creative inspiration with comic books would have driven the talented Miss H into conniption fits. And the tenor of her response to the hint that Thomas P. Ripley, her boyish (and goyische) “hero-criminal,” might owe even a fraction of his identity to the Golem of Prague, the Moses who led the Jews through the desert, or the Superman imagined by two Bar Mitzvah boys from Cleveland, Ohio, is only too easy to imagine.
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