The Return

THE RETURN

What can I say—

What can anyone say

What can possibly be said?

Other than surely—

The only thing that 

Returns & returns again

The moody, pouty—

Youthful look that comes

And goes again for us

We’re the lucky ones—

Beyond all the others

Who know this Return

THE DRESSING GOWN 

“Highsmith’s closest friend
presented me with a gift—

Pat’s old dressing gown”
—Andrew Wilson, Beautiful 
Shadow: A Life of Patricia 
Highsmith
______________

I tried the gown on—
it was like slipping under
the skin of Patricia Highsmith

It was dark blue wool—
with black, blue and
beige stripe cuffs
___________

Its lining was a rather—
fine twill with a soft
tasseled waist cord

Purchased at Harrods—
strands of grey hair still
nestled around the neck
_____________

A strange air of—
otherworldliness even
suggested her nearby

Taking my clothes off—
so I could feel the gown
next to my bare skin
____________

Easing my arms—
through the same soft
dark spaces and

Tying the waist-band—
feeling the nuances of
her gown around me
_________

I looked down at—
my hands and they
were Highsmith’s hands

I picked up a pen—
and I began writing
like she would have
____________

I listened to her—
most intimate thoughts
flowing through me

I felt Tom Ripley—
doing drag there in
that Berlin disco
_________

But it was that—
exquisite feeling of
Pat’s soft dressing gown

Against my own—
naked skin that really
turned me on

Andrew Wilson / Patricia Highsmith

DOING DRAG WITH HIGHSMITH 

—Carl Rollyson, Beautiful Shadow:
A Life of Patricia Highsmith by
Andrew Wilson, Reading Biography
__________________

Doing drag like Ripley does in a gay Berlin disco in Highsmith’s novel The Boy Who Followed Ripley— sets the stage somewhat for something rather seemingly self-indulgent, I must say my dears, for the esteemed biographer Andrew Wilson.

Where on earth did Mr. Wilson dredge up “Pat’s old dressing gown”—and why for heaven’s sake would a biographer even want to try Highsmith’s dressing gown on, my dears?

Was it to get some deeper more-biographical feeling for the brilliant lesbian authoress—slipping it on, for example, in the British Museum stacks or the compy executor’s boudoir or perhaps there in her Swiss estate converted into some kind of Yaddo writer’s getaway?

Or was it perhaps more authorial—slipping on the old night gown to get the feeling for Tom Ripley’s penchant being an imposter posing as somebody else such as in The Talented Mr. Ripley? 

What better way to get to know Tom Ripley than through Patricia Highsmith’s very own dressing gown that she schlepped around the mansion in or typed away in her bedroom-study doing her masterpieces of murder and suspense?

It simply boggles the reader’s imagination to ponder the possibilities of just how deeply a Biographer would want to delve—in order to essentially “do drag” in order to become the biographical Subject herself, right down to the very dressing gown Highsmith slouched around in her cold dark Swiss mansion.

THE BOY WHO FOLLOWED FICTION 

CONTENTS
___________________

PATRICIA HIGHSMITH
TURPENTINE
MOMMY DEAREST
GOTHIC MODERNÉ 
_______________

MONEY 
WRITING
PULP FICTION
THE BOY WHO FOLLOWED FICTION
_______________

MURDER 101
DOMESTICATION OF CRIME
CALM IMMORALITY
OLGA BACLANOVA
____________________

SORDID OFFICE HOURS
DENNY HALL
DOING RIPLEY
CREW TEAM DRAG
________________

PATRICIA HIGHSMITH

“There was not one 
thing I liked about her. 
There was an unredeemable
ugliness to her.”—Otto Penzler, 
Highsmith’s US publisher
____________

My mother drank—
turpentine to abort me

No wonder, my dears—
I turned out to be
________

So disagreeable and—
mean-spirited as well

I was hard, harsh—
unloving & unlovable 
________

Such a Bitch Queen—
full of anger, hatred

Unfriendly, cold—
I was a nasty Kunt

TURPENTINE 

“She was a totally
horrible woman.”
—Otto Penzler, 
Highsmith’s US publisher
_____________

I was pretty good-looking—
when I was a young dyke

I got ugly later on in life—
simply full of ugliness
____________

Hatred for everybody and—
everything around me

It was always there down—
deep inside me I think
________

Have you ever tasted the—
taste of Turpentine, honey?

I did in my Bitch Mother’s—
wretched pregnant tummy

MOMMY DEAREST

“In November, Highsmith
typed out a tally of how
much it cost to keep her
mother in her Fort Worth
nursing home”—Andrew
Wilson, Beautiful Shadow
_____________________

A total of $15,000—
was needed each year

for Patricia Highsmith’s—
hateful, spiteful mother
_________

Mary Highsmith’s pension—
coughed up $7,486 a year

That left a shitty shortfall—
of $7,814 Patricia paid
_________

Patricia wasn’t very pleased—
her own ordinary expenses

For food and clothing weren’t—
as much as her Witch Mother 

GOTHIC MODERNÉ 

“Work is more 
fun than play.”
—Noel Coward
________________

Proust’s Questionnaire—
can be rather revealing

Thirty-seven loaded—
exquisite queer questions
_____________

My idea of happiness—
would be quite simple

To be Tom Ripley—
one novel after another
__________

Who needs Miss Munch—
when one has a Derwatt

There’s nothing like a—
a fake to queer Picasso

MONEY 

“I would have thought 
she was conserving 
rather than mean.”
—Jack Bond
______________

I figured that my money—
had been hard won

Writing Pulp Fiction—
doesn’t pay that much
__________

Suspense/Murder Mysteries—
there’re a dime a dozen

Plus being a lesbian author—
a Sappho feminist writer
___________

Has always got a lot of—
fucking flak from the Fascists

Just look at Amy Lowell—
enduring that bitch Ezra Pound

WRITING

“The reward of art
is not fame or success
but intoxication.”
—Cyril Connolly,
The Unquiet Grave
___________

When I’m plotting—
and writing fiction

I’m very fond of—
coincidences in plots
____________

And situations that—
are almost but not

Quite incredible—
out of nowhere
__________

They just pop out—
of my head…

How else can—
possibly say it?

PULP FICTION

“That is why so many 
bad artists are unable to
give it up.”—Patricia Highsmith
________

Not a very big bedroom—
a nightstand full of books

Mostly paperback books—
beat-up classic fag fiction
___________

I liked them since I was—
a closety gay teenager

Cruising the drug store—
the bus and train stations
_________

Maybe you think that’s—
queer I like Pulp Fiction

You should’ve seen me—
sucking off those sailors

THE BOY WHO FOLLOWED FICTION

“Tom saw blue jeans
and tennis shoes. The 
boy from the bar.”
—Patricia Highsmith,
The Boy Who Followed Ripley
___________

It didn’t turn out to be a—
mugging, the kid was polite

He was goodlooking like—
some young ones are
___________

And so I took him under—
my wing for the usual affair

Menace lurks in familiar—
places like a bulging crotch
__________

My subversive cold logic—
usually puts 2 & 2 together

I was bored anyway, dears—
I needed a cute new trick

MURDER 101

“Murder, in Patricia Highsmith’s
hands, is made to occur almost
as casually as the bumping of a
fender or a bout of food poisoning.”
—Robert Towers, New York
Review of Books
_____________

He was a cute young freshman—
so many of them around campus

The ordinariness of his male—
beauty was rather stunning
___________

I was used to depicting the—
daily lives & mental mind-fucks

You know, like Miss Capote’s—
travails with “In Cold Blood”
_________

Wooing and schmoozing with-
them, milking out the details

Young psychopaths on campus—
surely a dime-a-dozen, honey

DOMESTICATION OF CRIME

“The domestication 
of crime in her fiction”
—Robert Towers, New York
Review of Books
____________

Implicating the reader—
that’s only half the story

The sordid fantasy that’s—
being worked out, dear
__________

It needs daily life and—
ordinariness of details

The daily lives & mental—
processes of psychopaths
_______

It’s like food poisoning—
that tainted cumly taste

There’s nothing fictional—
about being a gay Author

CALM IMMORALITY

“keeping us on his side”
—Frank Rich, NYTimes Magazine
_________

Keeping us on his side—
demonic American hustler

Keeping Tom mock-heroic—
all the way going down
__________

It takes more than just—
the usual str8t Circus Act

It takes a Trapeze Queen—
like a lovely Olga Baclanova
__________

Entertaining a captive—
audience of astute readers

Takes a sociopathic gay—
con man like Highsmith

OLGA BACLANOVA

I suppose you’ll ask me next—
the social significance of it all

Being a Freak shouldn’t be new—
to any of you now however
____________

Whether you’re a Queen Bee—
up there on the swinging Trapeze

Or down here in the gutter—
pearls wallowing in the sawdust
_______________

Tragic beautiful Olga Baclanova—
once Starlette of the Carnival

Up there above the unruly Mob—
heavenly Star of the Circus
__________________

Only to fall from grace down to—
the carnie sawdust of the rubes

Leered at as nothing more than—
a squawking CHICKEN WOMAN!!!
______________

Clucking cross-eyed hopeless—
just another weird Freak

Fallen from heights of Beauty—
down into the depths of Ugly

SORDID OFFICE HOURS

“Savage in the way 
of Rabelais or Swift”
—Joyce Carol Oates
New York Review of Books
______________

Murder happens all the time—
during office hours in Denny

No big mystery, my dears—
it’s like food poisoning
____________

One gags and almost—
Vomits but not quite really

It takes patience and—
performance to do the Trick
____________

Eliciting the exquisite—
menace of young teen meat

There’s nothing quite—
like it psychopathic pricks

DENNY HALL

“For eliciting the menace
that lurks in familiar
surroundings, there’s no
one like Patricia Highsmith”
—TIME
_____________

Amidst all those old—
aging Hitlerjungend faculty

I considered myself lucky—
not to have that haunting
__________

Sullen Schadenfreude—
during the rather ratty Sixties

I preferred Marlene Dietrich—
and her Weimar Swansongs
__________

You know, like down in the—
lovely Reichstag bunker, dear

“I can’t help it” Marlene sang—
“I’m falling in love again…”

DOING RIPLEY

“Bonjour, madame” she
spat at him. She missed
his face, missed him
entirely, and plunged on
toward the Rue St. Merry”
—Patricia Highsmith,
Ripley’s Game
__________________

I never got along with my—
colleague Professor Schlong

Such a petty pompous—
Prick from the Fatherland
____________

I suppose an ex-Nazi had—
to play it straight for Tenure

He couldn’t conceal though—
his haughty Hitler demeanor
_____________

His pompous Nazi prick—
oozing there in Denny Hall

The Faculty Bathroom stunk—
when he took his shit there

CREW TEAM DRAG

“Drag?” Eric gave a 
mystified smile. “Drag
for what? A party?”
—Patricia Highsmith,
The Boy Who Followed Ripley
__________

It was down in the basement—
That’s where it was happening

The Real Party going on—
that Saturday Night back then
_____________

The usual Str8t Frat Party—
Going on up there upstairs

But down in the Basement—
That’s where the Action was
__________

The hunky naked Crew Team—
dancing in drag on tables

Loud music and lots of dope—
male hunks make hot dames!!!!

The Biographer

THE BIOGRAPHER: WRITING THE OTHER

THE BIOGRAPHER
WRITING BIOGRAPHY
   Writing Biography
   The Biographer
   Creating Biography
   Detective Fiction
   The Simple Art Of Biography
THE TIARA
GETTING HIGH ON HIGHSMITH
______________________

THE BIOGRAPHER

“To be some
other person
for a day”
—Amy Lowell,
“The Starling,”
A Dome of Many-
Colored Glass
_____________

It seems like forever—
this impenetrable wall
confining who I am

Living surreptitiously—
thru a rectangular hole
my scrolling window
___________________

It used to be very—
depressing, peering
out of me all the time

But Biography lets—
me be somebody else
for a little while anyway

_________________

WRITING BIOGRAPHY

“…my book is about biography 
as much as it is about Sylvia Plath”
—Carl Rollyson 
____________________

Sometimes it seems—
I’m more interested in 
writing about biography

Than doing biographies—
of different writers, poets,
actors and people
_________________

Writing biography—
studying how other
biographers write

Writing in itself—
seems to write
autobiographically

THE BIOGRAPHER

“I’m miserable 
when I can’t write.”
—Patricia Highsmith
____________

Patricia Highsmith—
had to write or she
felt simply terrible

She was a Stranger—
a Stranger on a Train
who needed an Other
___________

The same with Faulkner—
who simply gave up
writing for editors

When he started—
writing for himself
he became a writer

CREATING BIOGRAPHY

Writing the Other—
the biography of the
Stranger on a Train

Doing the Game—
that Ripley played
debonair Other
________________

Teaching the Boy—
who Followed Tom
Ripley in Europe

The Talented—
Mister Ripley living
his new biography

DETECTIVE FICTION

Doing the Double—
Doppelganger as
Detective fiction

Investigating—
oneself as Other
like Highsmith did
_________________

Creating a series—
of Ripley doubles
through pulp fiction

Studying the way—
nom de plum begins
its own life

THE SIMPLE ART OF BIOGRAPHY

“Fiction in any form
has always intended 
to be realistic.”
—Raymond Chandler
The Simple Art of Murder
_______________

Reading Raymond Chandler’s—
“The Simple Art of Murder”
applied to Biography

Can be rather enlightening—
when it comes to writing
successful suspense fiction
____________

Film is different though—
that’s why Hitchcock ditched
Chandler as Screenwriter

One wonders what Strangers—
on a Train would’ve been
like with Raymond Chandler?

THE TIARA

“ruby, blood-deep; 
sapphire's ice resilience; 
emerald evergreen;
the shy pearl, humility”
—Carol Ann Duffy, 
“The Crown,” for the Sixtieth 
Anniversary of the Royal Coronation
_____________

My Tiara translates a mere queen —
my dears, into being a Queen Bee

Endless gold, choking on itself —
deep well full of faggy fathoms 
________

All those years to drown in —
fickle bride like Marilyn Monroe

Giving head so expertly —
such dutiful Penis Pageantry 
__________

Knowing its blessed weight—
journeying from king to king

Blessed living Queen—
going down on the Treasure
____________

Giving it the royal Treatment—
leaving Hickie for Halo

Not just one Head alone—
but decades of giving Head

GETTING HIGH ON HIGHSMITH

“I’m miserable 
when I can’t write.”
—Patricia Highsmith

If I don’t write, I’m merely existing. I’m an obsessive gay writer, my poems and stories just boil up outta me. They come to me frequently like rats in the dark or suddenly like unexpected orgasms. I’m simply miserable—when I can’t write about things.

Writing is a way of being a voyeur—taking a peek through the keyhole of my imagination into the slimy, dirty, forbidden depths of my unconscious.

I don’t feel fully fleshed out with pity and irony—unless I’m writing. I really don’t like myself most of the time—unless I’ve lost or am losing myself in the travails of some film noir movie like STRANGERS ON A TRAIN or teenage drive-in horror film remake in my sick mind like I WAS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN.

The unconscious for me is like the campy, weird and gothic movie THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL. It’s like Tom Ripley’s home near Fontainebleau—named ‘Belle Ombre’ or beautiful shadow. It’s like Vincent Price’s little surprise party for his guests—a macabre performance of the changeable nature of the double and shadowy splintered self.

Writing was always a near-mystical process for Highsmith, according to Andrew Wilson in his BEAUTIFUL SHADOW: A LIFE OF PATRICIA HIGHSMITH. Not exactly mystical for me—but more along the oneric lines of dreams lingering in my head as I wake up each day.

Usually it happens to me in the morning just when I’m waking up. Ideas about writing don’t really come out of thin air—but they’re more like half-forgotten memories or little pieces of fidgety faggoty flashbacks. 

They’re elusive like something flitting around nervously out of the corner of my eye. It’s like losing your billfold in some kind of strange, recurring dream—usually that’s a hint to me that I’m coming out of a place where I’ve lost my identity. Isn’t that what dreams are—wandering around in some strange but weirdly familiar place. And then while I’m waking up and slowly becoming conscious of myself again—sometimes I get an elusive somewhat closer fix on whatever or whoever I was in lost-billfold lost-identity dream.

Southern Gothicism with its insatiable appetite for the grotesque, the decadent, the macabre and the romance of decay—that seems to simulate my way of dreaming and thinking and writing, I suppose. 

I owe that kind of writerly sensibility Faulkner back there at LSU—when I was struggling through his novels like ABSALOM, ABSALOM and GO DOWN MOSES. 

Page by page—without any CLIFF’S NOTES to guide me. Only my gay intuition that I wanted to cultivate and let grow and somehow luxuriate there in that lush Yoknapatawpha rotting yammer of late night humid slitherings—snaking through the mind of queer Quentin Compson in bed with his Harvard roommate Shreve. 

As the two young men made love and had long conversations at night about the Deep South. How they’d have their own gay séance late at night—even communicating with handsome Bon the Beautiful Sutpen and his gay half-brother Henry Sutpen there in that other dormitory room a century earlier in bed with each other at Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi. 

Who needed to read the bleak existentialist writings of Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kafka, Sartre or Camus—when one had William Faulkner at one’s fingertips? A Southern gentleman guide—talking to me calmly and slowly through his writing all the way from his moody antebellum Rowan Oaks mansion to me in my own LSU dormitory room late at night?

For so long I’d always seen the word FORBIDDEN written in red ink in everything I’d read—or the word STOP right there in the middle of anything that I’d write or type or think.

Dark fantasies had always nourished my nascent gay gothic imagination—along the tacky lines of TRUE CONFESSION, NATIONAL ENQUIRER and TRUE DETECTIVE stories. These pulp fiction stories and gossip articles suggesting murder, sex and violence. 

But I’d always thought and felt that I couldn’t write what I wanted to write. SUPPRESSION was the blank wall I kept running up against. 

It turned out after awhile there hanging around the Huey P. Long Fieldhouse swimming pool that during hot humid afternoons full of cruising and connecting in the showers—that actually Suppression wasn’t a wall at all, but rather a closet door that could be unlocked and opened just for me.

Up until then, I had been like closeted queer Henry Sutpen—a country bumpkin compared to the suave, sophisticated Big Easy cumly Creole culture of Bon the Beautiful. 

I’d been a closeted queer Quentin Compson—stranded and horribly, absolutely marooned in my own flat so-called-straight desert. Without any emotional signposts or enlivening hotspots or secret Fernando’s getaways.

Places that transcended all the usual boring confines, creating some kind of a new more-aware life to live. A waking life with emotional connections to who I was and wanted to be. 

Even though SANCTUARY was just a pulp fiction pot-boiler written to pay the bills according to Faulkner—reading It was like rediscovering the suspense genre all over again. Popular paperback drugstore bus-station fiction back then—wasn’t supposed to work on me that way. 

But like Faulkner’s ABSALOM, ABSALOM and GO DOWN MOSES as well as his other novels—they did the trick. Turning me inside out and upside-down—never ever to be the same again.

Getting high on READING—then getting high on WRITING.

SYLVIA PLATH: A BIOGRAPHY 

SYLVIA AND MARILYN MONROE
SYLVIA AND GIRL-CHATTING
SYLVIA AND HEATHCLIFF
SYLVIA AND CAPOTE
SYLVIA AND TED
SYLVIA AND STELLA DALLAS
SYLVIA AND BETTY GRABLE
SYLVIA AND ARIEL
__________________

SYLVIA AND MARILYN MONROE

“Marilyn Monroe appeared
to me last night in a dream”
—Sylvia Plath
_______________

We were in that empty—
Niagara Falls Bell Tower
after the murder scene

Joseph Cotton helped her—
up off the floor, apologizing
for strangling her to death
_______________

Her handsome lover—
there in the morgue where
she’d fainted in shock

She picked up her lipstick—
and the rest of her spilled
purse on the cold floor

SYLVIA AND GIRL-CHATTING

“Marilyn Monroe “chats” 
with Sylvia Plath. The sex
goddess girl-talks Sylvia.”
—Carl Rollyson, American Isis:
The Life of Sylvia Plath
___________

“Honey, you need a—
decent manicure”
Marilyn said to Sylvia

“Plus a much better—
hairdresser, my dear,
that horrid cut of yours!”
___________

She invited Sylvia—
over for the weekend
with Arthur Miller.

T. S. Eliot was—
there too, fussing
about her WASTELAND.”

SYLVIA AND HEATHCLIFF

“Ted’s friends, who cared
only about poetry, did not
like Sylvia”—Carl Rollyson, 
American Isis: The Life 
of Sylvia Plath
______________

What a grim, gaunt—
bunch of Yorkshire creeps
haunting the moors

Especially Ted Hughes—
such a handsome & hunky
Heathcliff, my dears
____________

Just another one—
of those Mexborough 
moody murderers

Yet Sylvia thought—
she could civilize
the young tough!!!

SYLVIA AND CAPOTE

It was a place of force— 
The wind gagging my mouth”
—Sylvia Plath, “Rabbit Catcher”
________________

At a reading—
given by campy
Truman Capote


Hughes’ sexist—
Homophobia was
quite apparent
_______________

Capote the gay—
Queen flaunting
his homosexuality

Prefiguring Sylvia’s—
forthcoming death
in “The Rabbit Catcher”

SYLVIA AND TED

“Ted Hughes was
baffled by Plath’s
desire to write
popular prose”
—Carl Rollyson, 
American Isis: The 
Life of Sylvia Plath
__________

Ted the brooding—
apparently misanthropic
alarming hoodlum-poet

Sylvia’s ideal butchy—
sullen stud film noir
Male femme fatale
__________

He had all the meanness—
and deadness of modern
Male English Verse

A Yorkshire Killer instinct—
a Mytholmroyd Jack Palance
like in SUDDEN FEAR

SYLVIA AND STELLA DALLAS

“Olwyn suggested Aurelia
was depriving Sylvia of
her place in “our literary
heritage.”—Carl Rollyson, 
American Isis: The Life 
of Sylvia Plath
_________________

How Sylvia strived to—
stir up all the women in
her melodramatic life

Soap Star STELLA DALLAS—
with here ripples in the
vast Tearjerker Sea
________________

Olive Higgins Prouty—
NOW VOYAGER queen bee
Iconic lib Bette Davis

Then Smith & Cambridge—
Sylvia ever so stylishly
The Marilyn Monroe Poet

SYLVIA AND BETTY GRABLE

“She was no Emily Dickinson”
—Carl Rollyson, American Isis:
The Life of Sylvia Plath
______________

Sylvia needed an—
audience to witness
her Oscar performances

Styling herself as—
cheesecake Betty Grable
glamorizing Cambridge
___________

The same with her—
final act on the BBC
performing DADDY

Sylvia was the—
Lady Gaga of the
Eisenhower Republic

SYLVIA AND ARIEL

“In Ted Hughes, in other 
words, Sylvia had created
a monster”—Carl Rollyson
American Isis: The Life 
of Sylvia Plath
__________

Sylvia realized her—
new dramatic dialog
ARIEL was both

The Story and—
Biographical Climax
of her so-called life
__________

She’d created a—
Pulp Fiction Male
Monster DADDY

Shocking the world—
with her new feminist
Electra Complex
__________

The only problem—
was she’d ended up
like Elsa Lanchester

Simply horrified as—
The Nouveau BRIDE OF 
FRANKENSTEIN!!!!