It might have seemed a match made in some celestial pop-cultural realm — Fort Worth-born Patricia Highsmith, the celebrated crime novelist, and Manhattanite Stan Lee, the embodiment of the heroic Marvel Comics Universe. Except for some obstacles.
For one thing, Stan Lee hadn’t yet outgrown his identity as a glorified office boy for a funny-book publishing company, owned by a cousin-in-law. He meant to reserve his actual name, Stanley Lieber, for an imaginary breakthrough as a sure-enough author. For another, Patricia Highsmith was slumming as a comic-book writer, marking time until her serious stabs at fiction might spring her from that stepchild-of-literature racket.
Lieber billed himself as Stan Lee on an early story in proto-Marvel’s Nazi-busting Captain America series. He had nepotized himself into an editorship at Martin Goodman’s Timely Comics — a teenaged upstart, feeling his way about in an industry scrambling to catch up with a rival publisher’s bestselling Superman franchise.
Fellow editor Vincent Fago knew Patricia Highsmith as a contributing writer. Though degreed in English, she had found no welcome in the upscale magazine market. Freelance comics-scripting paid generously enough to allow her time for earnest writing. Fago maneuvered Highsmith into a blind date with Stan Lee.
But the author-to-be of The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train found Lee unappealing, romantically speaking. While preferring the intellectual company of men, she had yet to declare an overriding attraction to women. “And Stan Lee was only interested in Stan Lee,” Fago would recall, years later. Lee, post-retirement, would profess to recall only the name of “Pat Somethin’-or-’Nother,” although he seemed astonished to be reminded that Patricia Highsmith had come nearer writing something like the proverbial Great American Novel than Lee had ever imagined for himself.
Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) was born in Fort Worth to working artists who had parted ways before her arrival. By 1924 the mother had remarried (with another artist, Stanley Highsmith) and moved to New York. At 12, Patricia had been sent back to Fort Worth, here to reside with her maternal grandmother. The author would recall the situation as an abandonment, leavened with the pleasures of the grandmother’s collection of books. Here, she found parallels with her fevered imagination in a psychiatric textbook. No accounting for taste, and entertainment value is where one finds it.
Highsmith’s output includes a cycle of novels portraying a suave predator named Tom Ripley. She seldom spoke of her comic-book background, for that idiom was popularly considered an embarrassment, in an age before Stan Lee’s neurotic Spider-Man and other hung-up Marvel characters began attracting the collegiate intelligentsia of the 1960s. Highsmith took a swipe at the profession in 1955’s Mr. Ripley, when introducing an early victim: “He was a comic-book artist … didn’t know whether he was coming or going.”
Her first novel, Strangers on a Train (1950), benefited from Alfred Hitchcock’s motion-picture version of 1951. She cracked the prose-fiction market for her short stories around the same time.
Highsmith found her greater muse in a persistent “army of memories” — which she characterized in 1947 as “all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real..., with which I do battle.” She added: “May they never give me peace.” In 1970, Highsmith would describe herself as “cynical, fairly rich ... lonely, depressed, and totally pessimistic.” And from 1991: “My imagination functions better when I don’t have to speak with people.”
Highsmith died at 74 in 1995 in Switzerland, long her base of operations. She deeded a $3 million estate and future royalties to an artists-and-writers colony where she had composed Strangers on a Train.
A later publisher, Otto Penzler, would remember Highsmith as “mean, cruel, hard, unlovable, [and] unloving... But her books? Brilliant.” A protègé, screenwriter Phyllis Nagy, found Highsmith “very sweet and encouraging ... and wonderfully funny.”
Such contradictions only reinforce the tense fascination exerted by a unique personality. Marvel Comics’ Stan Lee (1922-2018) often wondered — or marveled, you should pardon the expression — how his funny-book career-by-default had culminated unintentionally in one unified epic novel of words and pictures. In a kindred light, Patricia Highsmith can only have puzzled over how her essential contempt for humanity had given her a perpetually bankable byline.
Or as Stan Lee himself might have resolved the quandary: “Go figure. ’Nuff said.”
