College of One (Neversink)

by Sheilah Graham

  I was pleased that on the master plan the English section was longer than any of the others. When I had confided to A.P. Herbert my longing to learn French, he had remarked, “Why don’t you first learn English?” And now I would read a great deal of English, with a man who was proud of the emphasis his family had placed on education. In the Fitzgerald Section of the Rare Books Department at Princeton, there is the note he wrote for his daughter:

  Variety in American Education

  You went to Vassar

  Your father to Princeton

  Your grandfather Fitzgerald to Georgetown

  Your ″ Sayre ″ Roanoke College, Va.

  Your great grandfather Scott to St. Johns, Annapolis

  Your great-great grandfather to Washington College, Md.—I have his B.A. Diploma dated 1797

  Some of the Keys went to Wm and Mary

  And some of the Tylers to the University of Virginia but I haven’t the data at hand at this moment.

  This is apropos of nothing.

  But it was apropos of a great deal. Education obviously meant as much to Scott as it did to me. He was Princeton, his daughter was Vassar, and I was College of One.

  Bleak House, the fifth book in the English section, was, Scott told me, “Dickens’ best novel.” I knew he knew better than I did, and for years I would parrot: “Bleak House is Dickens’ best novel.” I recently reread the two volumes and found Esther Summerson too good to be real, as I found most of Dickens’ young women, two-dimensional to the point of mawkishness. I liked Mr. Jarndyce, but is anyone ever so completely without any vices whatsoever? In today’s world Lady Dedlock would have claimed her daughter much earlier, without so much groaning on the grave of her love. Bleak House may be Dickens’ best book, but I prefer A Tale of Two Cities, although Lucie is almost a counterpart of Esther. Great Expectations rather frightened me with the terrifying Magwitch, but I loved Pip and was pleased that the boy had received a good education and come out all right in the end. Actually the book of Dickens I have always liked best is David Copperfield—especially the first part, ending with the dirty, tired Copperfield finding his Aunt Betsy, who took him in and gave him shelter and love. Nevertheless I still like to read Bleak House, chiefly because of Miss Flite, Lawyer Tulkinghorn, the Jellybys and their children, the Smallweeds, and the marvelous descriptions of the alleys and the jumbled shops of London.

  I realize now that I liked or disliked the characters in Dickens for the wrong reasons; I have always related to myself. I was not advanced enough in those early days of the education to understand how Dickens had created the characters, or the structure of his novels. I was interested chiefly in the story. I was aware that Dickens was a master of his craft only when Scott told me that he saturated himself in Dickens and Dostoevski before starting a new novel. Before The Last Tycoon he also read Froude’s Julius Caesar.

  It seems incredible that before Scott’s College of One I had not read Vanity Fair, the first of the novels in the curriculum. It was easy to read in the good edition Scott bought me in three volumes with thick paper and strong print. Again my enjoyment was for the simple reason of pleasure. I did not consider the “how” of Becky Sharp. I found her interesting and she was somewhat like me. I much preferred her to the meek Amelia, who was put upon repeatedly without protesting. Becky fought for what she wanted, as I did. Her ambitions had been somewhat different from mine; she had wanted money and position, I had wanted acceptance. Perhaps they are related. The rest of Thackeray I found less absorbing. Even then I realized that Pendennis and The Virginians were not in the same class with Vanity Fair.

  I had read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass at the orphanage. As I always dealt in facts, Alice’s shrinkages and enlargements were worrying, and I hoped they wouldn’t happen to me. I had feared the Duchess, with her strangely wrapped-up head in the Tenniel drawings, and had thought the Cheshire Cat ridiculous. The Mad Hatter’s tea party had interested me only because of its connection with food. Alice with Scott was a totally new experience. He explained the satire, which I had not understood before. I never had much of a sense of humor. Life had always been a serious matter. In spite of some dreadful times, it never really had been for Scott. He laughed at so many things, with a sort of choking amusement. He was always puncturing the pomposity of important people and deriding the sheeplike following of tradition. With Scott I found a way to smile at things that had seemed solemn or frightening. I went even further than Scott. I learned to laugh at myself, which he was never able to do.

  Studying the lists of the books I was to read, I saw there were a few authors with whom I was already familiar. I had not heard of George Moore, but I knew Arnold Bennett. I had met him during my stage career. He was a friend of C.B. Cochran and always came to the opening nights. I had heard of H.G. Wells but had read nothing by him. Compton Mackenzie’s name was familiar because of the articles he sometimes wrote for the London newspapers. The drama and poetry sections might as well have been in Greek, except for Byron, Browning, and Wordsworth. At the orphanage I had won sixpence when I was thirteen for being the first to memorize the segment in Byron’s Childe Harold—

  There was a sound of revelry by night,

  And Belgium’s capital had gathered then

  Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright

  The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men …

  And all went merry as a marriage bell,

  But hush! hark!

  The Shot, then: “On with the dance! let joy be unconfined.” This was on the order of the heroic poems I loved. I remembered Waterloo and Wellington from the history lessons. A line in Vanity Fair was marked by Scott: George Osborne killed at Waterloo and, “Amelia was praying for him while George was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through the heart.” “I can never forget this sentence,” said Scott.

  I had met George Bernard Shaw briefly. Mr. Cochran, who sometimes escorted his “young ladies” to the theater, had taken me to a matinee and Mr. Shaw was sitting immediately in front of us. When I was introduced to the white-bearded satyr he looked at me so fiercely that I was more frightened than thrilled. I knew of Kipling—the Just So Stories, “Mandalay,” and “If.” As for Shakespeare, my knowledge of his work was confined to a few songs from his plays, although at RADA I had stuttered through a scene in Hamlet as the Queen to Charles Laughton’s King and had been eliminated quickly from the role.

  In the other sections, I had read one book by Hemingway. I had been embarrassed when I first came to America by not knowing who Willa Cather was. In London, Randolph Churchill had given me Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma—two volumes, beautifully bound, but I had not read them. Proust. Ah, here was my familiar Proust, all seven volumes. De Maupassant. Johnny had said his stories were naughty, but not as wicked as The Decameron and A Thousand and One Nights. Johnny and I had read them at the Gargoyle Club in London. The Bible I knew. We had read a great deal of it at the orphanage. “Since Autumn 1937,” Scott noted on his “Revised List of 40 Books,” I had read, in addition to Proust, Henry James’s Daisy Miller and The Reverberator, A Farewell to Arms, The Maltese Falcon, plays by Molnar and Wilde, with some technique (for our play), and a life of Wilde.

  Reading the master plan in detail, I realized that a great portion of it would be very hard work. But I was eager to begin. With Scott’s enthusiastic promise that he would help me every step of the way, I was sure I could do it.

  *For longer excerpts from this poem, see Beloved Infidel (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1958), pages 312–14.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE CURRICULUM

  SCOTT DIVIDED THE WELLS OUTLINE OF HISTORY into forty sections, each one interrupted by a novel or a play.*

  READING LIST

  Wells’ Outline 158–184—Vanity Fair

  Thackeray

  ″ 185–205—Man and Superman

  Shaw

  ″ 205–226—The Red and the Black

  Stendhal


  ″ 226–252—Bleak House (1st half)

  Dickens

  ″ 252–285—Seven Men

  Beerbohm

  ″ 285–303—Bleak House (2nd half)

  Dickens

  ″ 303–322—Androcles & The Lion

  Shaw

  ″ 322–344—Henry Esmond

  Thackeray

  ″ 344–375—A Doll’s House

  Ibsen

  ″ 376–387—Sister Carrie

  Dreiser

  ″ 388–412—The Red Lily

  France

  ″ 412–435—Youth’s Encounter

  Mackenzie

  ″ 435–454—Sinister Street

  Mackenzie

  ″ 455–480—The Kreutzer Sonata(out)

  Tolstoi

  ″ 480–501—Death in Venice

  Mann

  ″ 501–523—Madame Bovary

  Flaubert

  ″ 524–546—Custom of the Country

  Wharton

  ″ 546–565—The Brothers Karamazov

  Dostoievski

  ″ 565–597—Tono-Bungay

  Wells

  ″ 599–617—Roderick Hudson

  James

  ″ 617–634—The Pretty Lady

  Bennett

  ″ 634–667—Tess of the D’Urbervilles

  Hardy

  ″ 667–698—How to Write Short Stories

  Lardner

  ″ 699–732—Chéri

  “Colette”

  ″ 733–751—My Antonía

  Cather

  ″ 751–778—The Sailor’s Return

  Garnett

  ″ 778–803—The Financier

  Dreiser

  ″ 803–835—The Titan

  Dreiser

  ″ 835–866—A Lost Lady

  Cather

  ″ 867–893—The Revolt of the Angels

  France

  ″ 893–928—Ariel, or the Life of Shelley

  Maurois

  ″ 929–955—The Song of Songs

  Suderman

  ″ 956–991—The Sun Also Rises

  Hemingway

  ″ 991–1025—Flaubert & Malraux

  ″ 1025–1050—Byron: The Last Journey

  Nicolson

  ″ 1051–1076—South Wind

  Douglas

  ″ 1076–1101—Man’s Fate

  Malraux

  ″ 1102–1128—The Woman Who Rode Away

  Lawrence

  ″ 1128–1152—The Cabala

  Wilder

  1152–1170—Tender Is the Night & Chronology

  Shakespeare

  Because some of the books were out of print—his own Tender Is the Night, which, to amuse himself, he credited to Shakespeare, was impossible to find—Scott made another list with some additions to fill in the gaps. And, to give a feeling of progress to the reading, he added time schedules. I was to read the forty books within ten months, from October to August.

  He started me on the Wells Outline at Book Three, page 158, “The First Civilizations.” He believed it would be simpler if he explained Books One and Two, “The World Before Man” and “The Making of Man.” “You can absorb these prehistoric periods more easily from me than in the reading,” he said, and he was right. Even with his explanations, it was hard to grasp “The Earth in Space and Time,” “The Record of the Rocks,” “Life and Climate,” “The Age of Reptiles,” “The Age of Mammals,” “Apes and Sub Men.” As I scan these chapters now, it is hard to believe they were ever too difficult.

  After the seven sections of “The Early Empires,” Vanity Fair (always on Scott’s lists of “Books I Have Enjoyed Most”) was a sweet pause, something to reach for—I was like a child taking its first step into outstretched arms. Following the twenty pages of “Sea Peoples and Trading Peoples,” Shaw’s Man and Superman with its war between the sexes and “Don Juan in Hell” was another welcome resting place. Scott admired Shaw for his courage in advocating unpopular causes such as socialism and atheism; he spoke of “Shaw’s aloof clarity and brilliant consistency.” I enjoyed Stendahl’s The Red and the Black. Julian Sorel had started life as a poor boy, an opportunist who came to a bad end because of his ambition and scheming. It was something to remember. I was especially interested in Wells’s “Drama and Music in the Ancient World” because of my time on the London stage, although there was nothing similar in the two periods. It was written chattily, rather like my Hollywood gossip column.

  Book Four in the Outline, “Judaea, Greece and India,” was interspersed with Max Beerbohm’s Seven Men. The first of the seven, Enoch Soames, a third-rate writer yearning for immortality, was, Scott explained, a lampoon on the followers of Oscar Wilde. That made the story more interesting.

  Thackeray’s Henry Esmond. I enjoyed the book but found the accompanying slice of Wells’s History, which dealt with Pericles, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, equally interesting. I have always been more drawn to accounts of real people than to fictionalized characters.

  Four Wells sections, “Science and Religion at Alexandria,” preceded my first contact with Theodore Dreiser. “Sister Carrie,” Scott said, “was almost the first piece of American realism.” It was a complicated word for something I told him I found as easy to read as I had found Peg’s Papers in the East End of London. Except for Carrie’s ruthlessness, it somewhat resembled Peg’s Papers, a “penny dreadful” in which the poor factory girl always married the handsome son of the boss, but not until she had been almost “ruined” by the wicked foreman. In 1939 it was difficult for me to believe that when Sister Carrie had been published, in 1900, it had been considered scandalous. When I finally came to read Scott’s Tender Is the Night, the turnabout in the fortunes of Dick and Nicole Diver reminded me of Hurstwood, who was prospering when he met Carrie and who, as she moved up, went down. “Dreiser is rough,” Scott explained. “No social grace at all, but my God, what a storyteller! He’s the best of our generation.” They had met and, as usual when Scott was young and close to an idol, he had to be drunk or he would have felt awkward and tongue-tied. “I had been invited to his house with some other people,” said Scott. “Dreiser was a poor host and it wouldn’t occur to him to offer us a drink, so I brought along a bottle of champagne.” Dreiser’s guests were sitting stiffly around the wall on straight-backed kitchen chairs, like schoolchildren, when Scott arrived. He waved his bottle and yelled, “I consider H.L. Mencken and Theodore Dreiser the greatest men living in this country today.” Dreiser took the news calmly and put Scott’s champagne in his icebox, where it remained.

  There are three embedded tomato pips, a red asterisk, marking the first page of Book Five in the Outline of History. After the education began, I studied while eating my lunch, and several of the books are pocked with bits of food. The history was now as interesting as the novels. “The Rise and Collapse of the Roman Empire,” “Christianity and Islam,” “The Mongol Empires of the Land Ways and the New Empires of the Sea Ways.” Book Eight, “The Age of the Great Powers,” brought us to the period after the First World War and “The Further Outlook of Mankind,” which Wells, with his imagination, and Scott, with his insight, could somewhat foresee.

  I completed the Wells history to the end of the Chronology, which I marked off as I memorized it. At any question I could accurately state that Necho of Egypt defeated Josiah, King of Judah, at the Battle of Megiddo in 608 B.C.; that Genghis Khan took Peking in 1218 A.D.; that Marco Polo started on his travels in 1271 and returned to Venice in 1295; that the Anabaptist rule in Münster fell during 1535; that the Manchus ended the Ming Dynasty in 1644; that the suicide of Clive of India took place in the same year that the American “revolutionary drama” began in 1774. And that Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908. By then I had read the total of forty novels and plays prescribed by Scott.

  To continue with the list, I read two books, The Red Lily and The Revolt of the Angels, by Anatole France, whom Scott admired greatly. When he and Zelda had firs
t arrived in Paris, they had waited outside Anatole France’s house for an hour, hoping he would appear. Another author represented by two novels—Youth’s Encounter and Sinister Street—was Compton Mackenzie, whom Scott had been accused of imitating (and with some justification, Scott admitted) in his first novel, This Side of Paradise. Mencken, to whom Scott had sent a copy, had written: “It derives itself from Mackenzie, Wells, and Tarkington.” Edmund Wilson, as soon as he read the manuscript, reported back to Scott: “It sounds like an exquisite burlesque of Compton Mackenzie with a pastiche of Wells thrown in at the end.”

  Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Flaubert, “who is eternal,” Scott wrote, “while Zola already rocks with age … who consciously leaves out the stuff that Zola will come along presently and say.” Flaubert’s Three Tales—when Scott’s secretary had found a beautifully illustrated edition in a second-hand store in downtown Los Angeles, he gave her the cheaper volume he had already bought. “Flaubert and Conrad,” said my professor, “sometimes took days to polish one sentence.” He wanted his own style of writing as concise as theirs.

  It is interesting that, although Scott in 1939 did not regard Wilde highly, this writer was featured prominently on his curriculum for me. When I read the “Ballad of Reading Gaol,” Scott had me read A.E. Housman’s poems, A Shropshire Lad, first published while Wilde was in prison. It didn’t take any guessing on my part to know why Scott had wanted me to read the two works together; the Wilde poem was clearly an imitation of Housman. My teacher was pleased that I had spotted this. I did not like The Picture of Dorian Gray; the corruption and the portrait made me uncomfortable, as does everything that is not normal, but I liked the plays, especially The Importance of Being Earnest.

  Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country. In Mizener’s biography he states that when Scott met Miss Wharton in Paris he had tried to shock her by telling her that when he and Zelda first came to Paris they had spent two weeks in a bordello, believing it was a hotel. She had crushed him by stating majestically, “But Mr. Fitzgerald, your story lacks data.”