Back in December 2008, I wrote about Patricia Highsmith’s work in comics, and how surprised I was never to have heard of it before. Now that I’ve gotten my hands on a copy of The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith, by Joan Schenkar, I don’t feel quite so ashamed of my ignorance.

Because that’s the way Highsmith would have wanted it.

It turns out she did her best to erase all evidence of her history in comics. And if she didn’t want me to remember her, why feel bad for not doing so?

Here’s what Schenkar wrote about that history:

Pat systematically erased from her life every single thing that had to do with comics; she threw away every comic script, every proposal for a comic script, and every scenario for a comic book story she ever wrote. There would have been thousands of pages of comics work to cull—and she culled every one of them,. Nor did she keep any copies.

It turns out that the only evidence Highsmith kept of her extensive comics work was by accident. On the back of a page of French vocabulary can be found these notes toward a story about the character The Golden Arrow.

There’s plenty of fascinating comic-book info scattered through this biography, including anecdotes by and about Will Eisner, Sam Rosen, Dorothy Woolfolk, Bob Oskner, and others, but the best one has to be this from Timely editor Vincent Fago:

On his eighty-eighth birthday, Vince Fago still remembered Pat Highsmith very well. It was her “beauty,” he said, which struck him first; he thought she was “just amazing,” “a terrific looker.” But Vince was newly and happily married when Pat came to work for him, so he thought he’d introduce Pat to the Timely editor whose post he had taken for the duration of the war, Stan Lee. Lee, now known worldwide as the public face of Marvel Comics (Timely evolved into Marvel) and the godfather of the enduring Superhero Spider-Man, was then a young soldier back in New York on leave from the U.S. Army. Vince Fago took Lee up to Pat’s apartment “near Sutton Place,” hoping to make a “match” between Pat and Stan Lee. But the future creator of the talented Mr. Ripley was not fated to go out on a date with the future facilitator of Spider-Man. “Stan Lee,” said Vince Fago, “was only interested in Stan Lee,” and Pat wasn’t exactly admitting where her real sexual interests lay. Lee, who invokes his failing memory and “murky mind,” remembers only Pat’s name from the incident.

I’m glad to see Stan remembers the rule that a gentleman never tells.

And should this story turn out to be apocryphal, I don’t care—it just sounds so right!