College of One (Neversink)

by Sheilah Graham

  Dostoevski’s The Brothers Karamazov, which had overwhelmed Scott when he had first read it in 1922. A few years later he wrote Mencken that “the influence on Gatsby has been the masculine one of the Brothers Karamazov, a thing of incomparable form.”

  Roderick Hudson, by Henry James, whom I find less fascinating now than when I read him in a pause from Wells. I read six of James’s earlier novels during our College of One. “The others would bore you,” said Scott, “like Tolstoi’s later works—but in a different way. Tolstoi became too mystical, James too complex and intricate.” He told me his critics believed he had been influenced by Henry James, especially in The Great Gatsby. “It’s surprising to read of an influence you were not aware of when writing.”

  Arnold Bennett’s very easy novel, The Pretty Lady; Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles—these girls always seemed to be in trouble. Scott admired Hardy; he “had survived … while Wells and Shaw and all those of that brave company who started out in the nineties so full of hope and joy in life and faith in science and reason” had become complete pessimists. Hardy, Scott told me, had been impressed with This Side of Paradise.

  How to Write Short Stories by Ring Lardner, who had been a close friend of Scott when they were neighbors on Long Island. “The critics have never realized what a good writer he is,” Scott said of Lardner. “He had pride and dignity even when he was drinking himself to death.” Ring, said Scott, would disappear for weeks, and Scott would search for him and take him home to his wife, Alice. Ring, Abe North in Tender Is the Night, was enchanted with the Fitzgeralds, his “Prince Scott and Princess Zelda.”

  On the flyleaf of Colette’s Chéri, Scott had pasted some printed information for me: “Cheri—one of her latest novels—is the only story of a ‘gigolo’ I have ever been interested to read or feel to be true. It is a brilliant work of character portrayal, a comedy in a genre new to us and full of a slightly macabre fascination.”

  Two novels by Willa Cather, My Antonía and A Lost Lady; The Sailor’s Return by David Garnett, whom I envied because of the intellectual atmosphere in which he had grown up; two additional gigantic novels by Dreiser, The Financier and The Titan. I read The Titan in the sweet-smelling garden at the Samarkand Hotel at Santa Barbara during one weekend while I was also reading the portion of the Wells history that concerned princes and foreign policy and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painting. André Maurois’ Ariel: La Vie de Shelley—I was so proud to be able to read it all in French; Suderman’s Song of Songs; my second Ernest Hemingway novel, The Sun Also Rises. “Ernest always has a helping hand for people who don’t need it,” Scott wrote at the end of my copy of Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again, with another comment I cannot quite understand: “Distaste. Marcus’ son had played football at Columbia and in his first year at medical school had dissected a human vagina and sent it for Xmas to his father!”

  Hemingway was the shining hero of American letters during my time with Scott, who was still deeply hurt by the paragraph in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in which the hero remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald’s romantic awe (of the rich) and how he had started a story once that began “The very rich are different from you and me” and how someone had said to Scott, “Yes, they have more money”—and when he had found they were not a special glamorous race “it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.” “It was as though I were already dead,” Scott complained to me.

  The biography of Byron, The Last Journey, by Harold Nicolson was of the same nineteenth-century period as my Wells segment, “The Indian Precedent in Asia” to “The Rise of the Novel to Predominance in Literature.” Malraux’s Man’s Fate, accompanying “The United States and The Imperial Idea” to “The Great War from the Russian Collapse to the Armistice,” was marked by Scott on the flyleaf with an unfinished sentence: “The strongest scene from Pasteur [referring to the Paul Muni film], the inoculated sheep, was lifted from Arrowsmith? Might admire it and be told that …” Norman Douglas’s South Wind; D. H. Lawrence’s The Woman Who Rode Away; The Cabala by Thornton Wilder—Scott had to explain to me the meaning of “cabala.”

  Glancing at my Wells Outline of History recently, I was amused to find inside the back cover a diagram of a football play—Scott’s trademark.

  It was a great deal of reading, by any standard. In a letter to Johnny late in 1939 I told him: “You would be amazed at all the books I have read this past year. It includes seven volumes of Proust, Victor Hugo, Tolstoi, Dostoievski and James Joyce. The best thing about reading is that the more you do it the more you want to do, and the easier the hard reading becomes.” On January 25, 1940, I was writing Johnny:

  My collection of books is growing in my living room. Bookshelves cover all one side and I just had to buy another small case to take care of the overflow … I’ve just finished reading Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives, which is in her simpler manner. She gets pretty screwy later on, devotes pages to repeating words like a stuck gramophone, something like this—“He sat in a chair, chair chair chair he sat in the chair because he always sat in the chair.” That sort of thing could drive you nutty. I think Gertrude Stein is nutty as a matter of fact. But her early stuff is new, bright and fascinating reading … I used to lunch at the studios a lot but now I have a sandwich and a glass of milk at home and read my current book … One day when you have made your pile, I wish you’d come to California. It is quite something to see but I don’t think I’d like to spend the rest of my life here. It is all too much like a painted backcloth.

  I would still have another year in the College of One, but the education was beginning to take. In July 1940 I wrote Johnny: “I am reading a lot of political economy. Baby! [one of Scott’s expressions] the things I didn’t know and still don’t know. Life in Hollywood would be dull but for the reading.” And ten days before Scott died: “I am currently studying ancient Greek history. I am reading about Pericles and the Golden Age of Greece in Plutarch’s Lives. It really is fascinating. I wish I’d had the sense to want to educate myself when I lived in London near all the big museums. I suppose when one is young, one has too good a time to think of developing the mind.”

  Most educators create a master plan of study at the beginning and stick to it, regardless of the needs of the pupil. But not Mr. Fitzgerald. The curriculum grew concrete as it developed. The order was changed when a book was impossible to get or because Scott believed my interest was flagging. There was nothing rigid about the education. It had an organic growth. The four sections of the plan were never considered final and were constantly retyped by Scott’s secretary.

  There was no time limit for the poetry, which was interspersed in the curriculum with biographies and criticisms of the poets, novels, various versions of the Odyssey, and Lord Charnwood’s Lincoln. Scott headed the course: “A Short Introduction to Poetry (with Interruptions).” Rupert Brooke, Swinburne, Tennyson, and others were matched with various critical works, while Browning and Moore’s Esther Waters were read in tandem. At the end I was able to take in aspects of Eliot’s and Rimbaud’s poetry along with Edmund Wilson’s criticism. At one point Scott had me read consecutive chapters of the Odyssey from three different translations (Chapman, Pope, and Butler).

  The poetry was preceded by “A Discussion of Prosody and the most familiar meters”:

  TYPES OF POEMS

  Ballad Short narrative

  Epic Long narrative

  Dramatic Shakespeare

  Lyric A Song

  Ode An address

  Serenade Night song

  Madrigal Morning song

  Elegy or (Threnody) A lament

  Pastoral Country life

  Bucolic

  Eclogue and Epode I never knew

  SOME USUAL FORMS

  Couplet Two lines rhyming

  Heroic couplet Two rhymed iambic pentameter lines like Pope’s Odyssey

  Triolet Three lines rhyming

  Quatrain Four lines rhyming once or twice


  Sonnet Fourteen lines (8 and then 6) used in iambic pentameter with a complete rhyme scheme

  Alexandrine line Rhymed six foot couplet. Used in French Poetry (Racine & Corneille)

  Hyperbole Exaggeration

  SOME TERMS

  A stressed or “long” syllable

  A slighted or “short” syllable

  as alone or monkey or teepee

  The French language has no exact equivalent for this. In English either stress or slight every syllable.

  We break verse into “Feet.” According to the stress, we give these “feet” different names. The most important is the iambus. Alone is called an iambus. Also Oh Yeah! Five iambuses form a line of iambic pentameter (which means five feet in Greek).

  But still the house affairs would call her hence

  (Othello)

  Shakespeare is all written in unrhymed iambic pentameter (except his songs). He takes liberties with it of course, adding an extra syllable sometimes or dropping one or inverting a foot. At the end of a scene he sometimes rhymes a couplet (2 lines).

  OTHER TYPES OF “FEET”

  a dactyl Ex: Perlmutter

  a trochee Ex: Feeble

  an anapest Ex: on a bat

  spondee Ex: Oh God (which can also be an iambus or a trochee, as pronounced).

  A trochaic line:

  Come and kiss me sweet and twenty

  Song of Shakespeare’s

  A dactylic meter:

  This is the forest primeval

  Longfellow

  (The song “Little Wooden Shoes” is dactylic—so are many waltzes.)

  TYPES OF POETIC WRITING

  Rhymed Verse has metrical pattern (feet) and rhyme

  Blank Verse has metrical pattern but no rhyme

  (Ex: Elizabethan blank verse)

  Free Verse has a very loose metrical pattern which it neglects at will. No rhyme.

  Like Whitman or Masters’ “Ann

  Rutledge”

  Ogden Nash Verse Free verse that rhymes

  Prose Poetry Loose terms to denote anything

  Polyphonic Prose from Butcher’s & Lang’s Odyssey to mere flowery language

  Didn’t I tell you not to shut the door

  I told you not to shut the door

  Once we started, the poetry flowed and overflowed through all the hours and days. Again it was not how it was done. Despite Scott’s painstaking explanations, I was less interested in how the poetry was put together than in the actual poems. His examples for the various meters were revealing. Perlmutter—the long wait on the Perl, the two short u’s in mutter; in Hollywood you cannot fail to know a Perlmutter. The example of “feeble,” with the long sound on “feeb”—Scott called some of the producers and writers he met in the studios “Feebs,” also any friends of Scottie’s of whom he disapproved. His anapest, “on a bat,” is not hard to understand. When a man called without leaving his name, Scott said with a straight face, “Oh, that was my old friend Onabat.” His example for a spondee, “Oh God,”—it was his constant expletive. I had never known there were so many types of poetry.

  I was interested in the sonnet. Eddie Mayer had written one to Hedy Lamarr, which had pleased her, and she had consented to dine with him. The evening had fallen rather flat, Eddie told me later, because his producer had called him just before he had left for her home to order him to a conference at ten p.m. I thought of his sonnet when Eddie died in poverty and forgotten by Hollywood a few years ago. I had not realized when Eddie read me his poem that it was a sonnet because it had fourteen lines—eight and six—in iambic pentameter.

  When Scott believed that I understood the meters and the types of poems, we plunged into Keats and, between the poems, read about him in Sidney Colvin’s biography. “If poetry had not gone out of fashion, I would have been a poet,” Scott assured me, adding, “Poets don’t make any money today. I couldn’t afford to be one.” At Princeton he had decided he would write prose on the same fine lines as Keats’s poetry. In the letter on Keats to his daughter, Scott wrote of the “Grecian Urn”: “Every syllable is as inevitable as the notes in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony … It is what it is because an extraordinary genius paused at that point in history and touched it. I suppose I have read it a hundred times … likewise with the ‘Nightingale,’ which I can never read through without tears in my eyes … the ‘Eve of St. Agnes’ has the richest most sensual imagery in English, not excepting Shakespeare. For a while after you quit Keats, all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.” The letter is dated August 1940. I had read and memorized the “Grecian Urn” and the “Nightingale” months before, but we were still discussing them in practically the same language as that of Scott’s letter to his daughter.

  So many of the poets had died young, Scott told me, although Shakespeare had lived to the comparatively ripe age of fifty-two. “He was a good businessman,” said Scott, who was not. “He knew the value of his work to the penny.” Shakespeare, said Scott—who believed that I should never be psychoanalyzed because “all your impulses are so near the surface”—had antedated Freud with the scenes between Hamlet and his mother and the relationship of Ophelia with her father.

  I was surprised when Scott referred to Byron as a minor poet. At the orphanage he had been rated highly. Apparently there were not enough major poets to round out a college curriculum, so some of the minor poets were perforce included. “Byron’s best work,” said Scott, “was his unfinished novel in verse, Don Juan. Goethe described it as a work of boundless genius.” Scott did not agree.

  Never too long with any poem or portion of a book or biography; this was part of Scott’s system—“the little courses,” to keep me interested. Nothing must drag. I must never be bored. In the days of strain with his friends, he had advised me, “Look bored; then they will think you know all about the subject.” Now the faking was over. I really would know—not a great deal, perhaps, but enough to feel confident.

  There are only five poems by Keats listed on the curriculum. In actual fact, we studied thirteen of the works of Scott’s favorite poet: in addition to “The Eve of St. Agnes,” “Isabella or The Pot of Basil”—“Oh misery to take my basil pot away from me; in memory of iambic hours, Scott, 1940,” he wrote on the Keats flyleaf—“Bright Star,” “When I Have Fears,” “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to the Poets,” “Ode on Melancholy,” “Fragment of an Ode to Maia,” “In a Drear-Nighted December,” “The Eve of St. Mark,” “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” on the margin of which Scott explained: “This is the bad form as edited by Leigh Hunt. See below.”

  “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” was followed by the page of Chapman’s Iliad to reinforce the poem. Scott pointed out the mistake of Cortez for Balboa—“Silent upon a peak in Darien.” When an immortal like Keats makes a mistake,” he said, “that too is immortal.” I realized that the more famous you become, the more careful you have to be, not only in your work but in your private life. Scott might have given me an argument on this, as he gave Edmund Wilson in a letter in the early twenties: “Wasn’t it Bernard Shaw who said that you’ve either got to be conventional in your work or in your private life or get into trouble?” He wanted me to compare several translations of Homer—Butcher and Lang, Chapman, Pope, and Butler. The authors used different names for the various gods and places, and to avoid confusion in my mind as I skipped from one to the other, Scott wrote for my guidance:

  NAMES IN POPE AND BUTLER

  Butler uses the Roman instead of the Greek names for the characters. Thus:

  Greek Roman

  Odysseus = Ulysses

  Pallas Athene = Minerva

  Artemis = Diana

  Zeus = Jove (Jupiter)

  Apollo the same Apollo

  Hephaestus = Vulcan

  Lacadaemon = Sparta

  Poseidon = Neptune

  Hermes = Mercury

  POPE uses the Greek name for one charac
ter, the Roman for another. Athene is Pallas—Odysseus is Ulysses, etc.

  Scott had met Gertrude Stein in Paris in 1925. He showed me the letter she had written him after the publication of The Great Gatsby, complimenting him for creating the world of the twenties as Thackeray had created his contemporary times in Vanity Fair. He had liked her. Zelda had not. Miss Stein never bothered much, Scott told me, with the wives of the authors who came to her home. Her companion, Alice B. Toklas, took care of the unfamous women. Zelda, with her compulsion to compete with Scott and her jealousy of his fame, had sulked on the way home after the first meeting and vowed she would not return to the house on the Rue de Fleurus, although she did. Miss Stein spent the Christmas of 1934 with the Fitzgeralds in America and offered to buy two of Zelda’s paintings.

  Swinburne, my teacher informed me, was considered shocking by the Victorians. Some of his poems shocked me in 1939. Of the four Swineburne poems on the list, Scott penciled at the top of “Atalanta in Calydon”: “The fullest and most talented use of beat in the English language. The dancingest poem.” And with “Laus Veneris”: “Notice how this influenced Ernest Dowson. In this, read only as far as you like. When it was published (1868?), it was a great mid-Victorian shocker.”

  My mind, so long sleeping, grasped the musical-sounding words and, after reading them several times, I could not forget them. A letter to Johnny early in the Second World War—he was serving again in the army: “… You would be amazed at how much poetry I know by heart. Keats, Shelley, Shakespeare, Browning, E.B. and R., Wordsworth, Coleridge. I know long verses from these poets. I recite them to myself on the way to the studios—and presto! I’m there.”

  Scott admired Matthew Arnold and believed I would benefit from his critical essays on Keats and Wordsworth. He disagreed with the author’s opinion that Milton would be remembered for the “simple sensuous impassioned poetry” (Milton’s own phrase), and that Keats would be remembered because his poetry was “enchantingly sensuous.” On the margin against this, Scott wrote: “Later ages have entirely disagreed with this. It shows Victorian stiffness and primness in its most unattractive pose.” On the flyleaf of Arnold’s Essays in Criticism, Second Series, “For Sheilah, with love (and annotations),” there were several of the latter. Scott put quotation marks around Arnold’s “Yet I firmly believe that the poetical performance of Wordsworth is, after that of Shakespeare and Milton, of which all the world now recognizes the worth, undoubtedly the most considerable in our language from the Elizabethan age to the present time.” Scott’s comment covered all the left side of the page: