In Axel’s Castle, in Wilson’s chapter on symbolism, I memorized the line Scott had underlined, that one of the principal aims of symbolism was to approximate the indefiniteness of music. You find yourself swaying to such a line. I did not care that these poets were symbolists or romantics, although I memorized this fact against the day of the examinations. What poetry was called didn’t matter to me. I was interested in what it was, and in the lives of Scott’s great poets, who, I was sure, could never be dislodged by passing fashion.
We discussed W.H. Auden and some of the modern poets, although Auden was not in The New Poetry, which Scott gave me in 1940. “Remember,” he wrote on the flyleaf, “this poetry dates from a quarter of a century ago—some of it as far back as 1900. The ‘New Poetry Movement’ started before the rise of prose fiction here and really faded in the 20’s—it had done its work well though as this book proves.” Rupert Brooke and Willa Cather were represented; also T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, Joyce Kilmer (“Trees”), Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell; John Masefield, England’s durable Poet Laureate; a large slice of Edgar Lee Masters; Edna St. Vincent Millay, whom I had met with Deems Taylor in Connecticut; Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Louis Untermeyer, and a host of less familiar names. Except for Eliot, I could never be as drawn to them, or even to Yeats or Dylan Thomas, as to Keats and Shakespeare and Shelley and Wordsworth, who were so much longer ago.
*The entire curriculum as conceived and written by Scott Fitzgerald will be found in the Appendix.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE CURRICULUM CONTINUED
THE THIRD COURSE, “RELIGION AND FICTION,” was the easiest and the shortest. Each section had three parts: religion, a novel, and a section of Thomas Craven’s Masterpieces of Art. The art book is inscribed: “Sheilah from Scott, Christmas, 1939.” It was his last Christmas present to me. Among the important novels on the third list were Portrait of a Lady, Anna Karenina, and Sanctuary. “This is a powerful novel,” Scott remarked of Sanctuary. I was fascinated with the violence and the terrifying rape of Temple Drake by the impotent Popeye and the half-wit Red. Faulkner was born a year after Scott, and they were in Hollywood at the same time, but to the best of my knowledge they never met.
I had read Look Homeward, Angel before I met Scott; a friend had praised it highly, and, as usual, looking for a magical formula, I had rushed to buy Wolfe’s fictionalized autobiography, hoping I would be transformed immediately into a well-read woman. But the author, going on and on and on, had bored me and I had not finished the book. Scott had me attempt Of Time and the River and The Web and the Rock with the same result. Scott believed that Wolfe’s novels were too long and too verbose. When he had said this in a letter to Wolfe, he received a long answer reminding him that it was just as important to be a putter-inner as a taker-outer. But Scott could not dismiss the burly longwinded Mr. Wolfe. He considered him an important American writer.
“Not Ecclesiasticus,” Scott wrote above Ecclesiastes on page 775 of my Bible, the Old and New Testaments in the King James version, designed in 1936 by Ernest Sutherland Bates to be Read as Living Literature. After “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” Scott underlined in the introduction that Hemingway had taken his title The Sun Also Rises from the Preacher’s line “the sun also ariseth.” In paragraph five he underlined the sentence “See, this is new,” commenting in the margin: “Before the age of science and invention.” I memorized all the “times”—a time to weep, to laugh, to mourn, to dance, to love, to hate, for war, for peace. It was as beautiful as Scott had thought when he wrote his daughter in 1938: “Remember when you are reading it that it is one of the top pieces of writing in the world.” At one time he considered titling Tender Is the Night “The World’s Fair,” after Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, which was after Ecclesiastes’ “vanity of vanities.”
The Book of Job appealed to me less, although Scott, to make it somewhat easier for me, had carefully underlined the names of all the Speakers in part four, with the Voice out of the Whirlwind. Job was depressing, with its interminably long pages, part prose, part verse. I had been punished, sometimes unjustly, at the orphanage and I did not enjoy reading of the same treatment for Job, who was a good man. It seemed to me that God was trying Job’s patience much too far. What was He trying to prove?
The Gospel of Saint Mark, Scott informed me, had been used as a source for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Mark seemed mostly interested in miracles, which I have never believed in, although it was a miracle that I was getting the education for which I had prayed. In succeeding years I have reread the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke and thought both the other books were better than Mark. The Song of Solomon was on the master plan, but not on the course for religion. Neither was the Book of Ruth. We read them for the poetry and the prose, not because of any religious fervor on Scott’s part. He had long ago given up his Catholicism. In a letter to Max Perkins about a passage from the Bible in The Beautiful and Damned he said: “I do not suppose any but the most religious-minded people in the world believe that such interludes as the Song of Solomon or the Story of Ruth have, or ever had, even in the minds of the original chroniclers, the faintest religious significance.”
Renan’s Life of Jesus was, as I wrote Johnny, realistic, with its rejection of miracles and the supernatural. It had caused a sensation, Scott told me, when it was published in 1863. “Ernest Renan was originally trained for the priesthood.” He had repudiated his faith, as Scott had, preferring science and facts. In This Side of Paradise: “There were … sword-like pioneering personalities, Samuel Butler, Renan, Voltaire.” His sister Annabel believed these authors had caused Scott to lose his religious faith.
Shaw’s Preface to Androcles and the Lion was a comical addendum to Renan, which was followed by Lewis Browne’s Stranger Than Fiction: A Short History of the Jews, published in 1938. There was only one comment by Scott in this book, which has his name on the flyleaf, dated “Encino 1940—January.” On page 122, underlining the word sports, Scott wrote: “misuse of word—he means sports-conscious.” I also read The Story of Budda and Buddhism by Brian Brown. An ironic underlining by Scott in the book about Buddha: “It is iron’s own rust that destroys it. It is the sinner’s own acts that bring him to Hell.”
The fourth list (part I), “Philosophy and History,” was interwoven with fiction and drama to compensate for the heaviness of the main subjects. The education was getting harder. There was some Wells at the beginning to coincide with Jowett’s Life of Plato, pages 7–20. It was crucial at this point for me to continue. If I survived the philosophy, history, and economics, I would finish the courses. After Chekhov’s short story “The Darling,” I was ready to tackle Plato himself, but only thirty-three pages, in the Apologia. For reasons I have forgotten, Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin was switched with Pierre Louys’ Aphrodite, which was ahead of Swinnerton’s Nocturne, which then had its turn after Lafargue’s Evolution of Property in place of La Peau de Chagrin. Scott, at some time in the future, he told me, would write a modern version of Balzac’s The Wild Ass’s Skin. There were several projects for “the future,” but his future would be his past before the year was out. La Peau de Chagrin, Scott told me, had been imitated by Oscar Wilde in Dorian Gray, a book he despised, with its author.
Maupassant was used as a brain-soother after the difficult four chapters on church architecture marked in Sartell Prentice’s Heritage of the Cathedral. As the subjects became more difficult, the novels, short stories, and plays were easier: Conan Doyle’s medieval novel The White Company; ten short stories from The Decameron; Wycherley’s sweetmeat, The Country Wife; the fascinatingly wicked Liaisons Dangereuses. Soon after Scott’s death I was to win a bet from a Professor of Logic at Oxford University because I knew that Liaisons was by Laclos and he did not. Against a long involved sentence about widows in Balzac’s Succube, Scott wrote, “My god! What a sentence!” After a comment on Pantagruel, Scott margined: “Panurge and Pantagruel are also heroes of Rabelais.” There were Fran
cis Steegmuller’s O Rare Ben Jonson, Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill with Max Beerbohm’s burlesque of Kipling in The Woolcott Reader—“Read all you can”—in conjunction with the same period of history. There were dozens of explanations in Kipling’s Puck, mostly translations of Latin and Roman terms. A centurion was “one who commanded a company of a hundred.” Simple, but I hadn’t known it. A “cohort” was a battalion (a thousand men). The Roman Eagles “correspond to modern flags”; Caesar had “become the name for all those who aspired to be Emperor.” Kipling belonged to Scott’s Princeton days and This Side of Paradise. In The Crack-up, Scott had written: “I have asked a lot of my emotions—one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling.” During my time with Puck of Pook’s Hill, Scott wrote his Princeton roommate, Judge Biggs: “Who’d want to live on like Kipling with a name one no longer owned—the empty shell of a gift long since accepted and consumed?”
Scott divided A.L. Morton’s A People’s History of England into sixteen parts, reinforced with the dates in Wells’s Outline. Morton’s History revolutionized my political thinking. In my schoolbooks the kings had been good and bad but they had ruled by divine right. Their word, until they were deposed or murdered, and even after Magna Carta, was law. I considered Wat Tyler a traitor and justly killed by the nobles of Richard II even though carrying a flag of truce. Morton removed the blinders. The people had been betrayed. It was amazing that they still wanted a monarchy. I had been right at the orphanage in advocating a republic.
It was part of Scott’s method to read the book first, usually making notations or amusing comments, especially in the heavier subjects, to make a break while I plodded through the chapter. Despising the Henri Barbusse version in The New Republic Anthology of the collapse of the Roman Empire, he commented: “The man is made as a hatter—after first being obvious.” And on the next page, Scott pooh-poohed “A single night of Christianity led to the collapse of the magnificent edifice of antiquity,” with “What history!” A non-sequitur message penciled at the back of the Anthology: “Let Richard Whitney out. Let Leopold retell the saddest story ever told. How Darrow wept for him. We’ll organize ten regiments of pansies, parlor-size.”
This was mild compared to his comments on Cowper’s “Loss of the Royal George”: “If this is not horse dung, then Shakespeare never wrote! F.S.F.” And at the end: “It sounds like an insurance report. They may still be able to use the keel!” At the beginning of the appendix to Palgrave’s Treasury, Scott stated: “Compiled by a Protestant Pansy.”
At the end of my Plutarch’s Lives he pasted a color drawing of a tall Grecian girl with a small man at her feet twanging a lyre, underneath which my professor wrote:
Scott and Sheilah thru the ages. She has taken away his Samian wine. He has just finished painting a pediment and is trying to sooth her with a Lydian air (matchless tone, authentic period design, nearly an hour’s continuous entertainment. ADVT.). Her martyred expression is decietful. She is thinking of the cocktail party for Greece at the Skouras’s.
Scott’s inscription inside Greek History by C. B. Newton and E. B. Treat reads: “For S.G. For her proficiency in pre-Socratic Philosophy, Hellenistic Anthropology and Trojan Archeology, from her loving Prof, T. Themistocles Smith, Olym[p]ic Games, 1910.”
Underlining lawyers in Morton’s account of the time of William the Conqueror, Scott wrote: “These were mostly churchmen, mostly unmarried, a rather intense lot!” It was easy to understand Morton’s opinion of the greedy kings and noblemen of the Middle Ages, with Scott’s translation of a popular Latin verse of the time: “The truth is that all the money flies into the hands of the greedy ones.” On the margin next to the revolt of the Lords of the North, “Northumberland, Mortimer and March,” Scott penciled. “The material for Shakespeare’s Henry IV and V.” The Marian persecutions cited by Morton from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, published in 1563, were explained by my painstaking teacher: “i.e. Bloody Queen Mary.” And when Queen Elizabeth withdrew the monopoly of selling sweet wines from her favorite, the Earl of Essex, an act that led to his rebellion, Scott noted: “The truth behind Errol Flynn.” Against the date of 1629, when King Charles was fighting Parliament, Scott mentioned: “Harvard College founded. No Donegals [to whom I had been engaged] in the first class, but a few Cabotts and Lowells.” He had the Harvard date wrong by a year, and of course he had misspelled Cabot and Lord Donegall. Sir Robert Walpole had fallen from office in 1742 and Scott did not overlook this important date: “Princeton founded.”
There was an amusing comment by Scott about the trading situation of England immediately after Waterloo. Commerce with North America and Europe had declined because of war, but one good new market had developed—South America, which was promptly flooded by the British with all sorts of inappropriate goods. I could see Scott smiling as I read the comment penciled at the foot of the page: “English teacups were one thing shipped. Some of the Indians chipped off the handles and strung them on necklaces to wear around their necks!” Another note in Morton, at the time of the first Charles of England: “My first American ancestors, William Godwyn and Phillip Key, emigrated to Maryland about this time.”
Morton—and Scott—went into great detail about the transformation of the working class from the “beef, bread and ale standard of living” to a “potato and tea standard”—“the origin,” said Scott, “of fish and chips.” Morton quoted the politician Cobbett’s denunciation of tea as “a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, an engenderer of effeminacy and laziness, a debaucher of youth and a maker of misery for old age.” Tea?
At the back of my Morton, with Scott dictating, I wrote down the Kings of England from the Normans, the Plantagenets, the Houses of Lancaster and York, the Tudors, the Stuarts, to the House of Hanover and Windsor, Georges I to V, to Edward VIII and the reigning George VI—some of which I had of course already memorized as a schoolgirl.
Ploetz’s Manual of Universal History, a large dictionary of historical names, is not on the curriculum, but Scott had me go through it to reinforce what I was learning. Some of his comments in the Ploetz: Against Arnulf of Carinthia—“Finds perhaps midway in career he’s not the real heir but son of serf. Mother had been neurotic promoting herself.” Next to Karlmann in Aquitaine—“Success after lowpoint.” And penciled against Charles the Fat—“Kills buddy troubadour who insists on chanting.”
The fourth list, part II, included economics. The interrupting novels and drama were mostly about social upheaval—Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (The Nigger of the “Narcissus” and Lord Jim were in other sections). Scott envied Conrad his years at sea before he became a writer. “I have not worked at anything except writing, so I’ve had to create my own experiences.” When people told him of an interesting experience, he often paid them to let him use it in his writing. One of Conrad’s lines repeated by Scott: the battleship “firing into a continent.” In his own writing, Scott told me, he was trying to follow Conrad’s precept, to make the reader see and hear. On Scott’s solid gold bar there was “Ernest’s courage and Joseph Conrad’s art.” As a model to study he ranked Conrad with Keats. Conrad’s Nostromo was on Scott’s list of the ten most important novels. When Conrad was visiting the Doubleday estate on Long Island in the early twenties, Scott tried to show his admiration for him in typical Fitzgerald fashion. He roped in his friend Ring Lardner and they danced with vocal accompaniment on the lawn in front of Conrad’s window. The author, a year from his death, was ill and angry. His terpsichorean admirers were arrested for creating a disturbance. Scott’s regard for Conrad had not diminished in 1939 and 1940, but he had long been cured of Compton Mackenzie, who, he complained, “wrote 2½ good books (but not wonderful novels) and then died”—that is, as far as Scott’s interest in him was concerned.
On the flyleaf of The Octopus Scott wrote: “Frank Norris after writing three great books died in 1902 at the age of just thirty. He was our most promising man and might have gone further than Dreiser or t
he others. He claimed to be a disciple of Zola, the naturalist. But in many ways, he was better than Zola. The time of the events is 1880.” After reading Norris, Scott wrote Max Perkins that he had fallen under the influence of a writer who had completely changed his point of view. “… I think McTeague and Vandover and the Brute are both excellent.” Scott had become enthusiastic about books on social realism in 1922, when he read Salt by Charles Norris, Frank’s brother. He was impressed with John Reed’s story of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, and recommended it to Scottie in 1940, during the time we were discussing it in the College of One. E. E. Cummings’ book, The Enormous Room, and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle—dedicated to the working men of America—were in his early twenties part of Scott’s social-consciousness pattern and were passed on to me in the hope that my strong conservatism would shift to liberalism. It did, with the help of Morton’s History, The Book of Daniel Drew (the robber baron) by Bouck White; E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Edmund Wilson’s chapter on Lenin and literature in The Triple Thinkers, and M. Ilin’s New Russia’s Primer, on the flyleaf of which Scott wrote: “A beautiful, pathetic, trusting book—old and young, rather haunting and inspiring like the things read and believed in youth. A sort of dawn comes up over the book all through—too often it illuminates old shapes that our cynicism has corrupted into nonsense. But if our totem-poles can become their girders, so be it.” And, at the end of the book: “The N.Y. Times carries a story that the author is in Siberia. I hope it’s a canard.”
Russian writers figured prominently in every section of the curriculum. Turgenev, Scott told me, was objective—“as I try to be.” He considered Tolstoi’s War and Peace a man’s book, although I enjoyed it tremendously, even the dissertations on the Napoleonic battles between the chapters about the aristocrats and the serfs of Russia. Dostoevski was my favorite Russian, War and Peace my favorite novel. Chekhov I have always found too vague. I prefer the reality of Ibsen. “You are accepted in a man’s world and able to work in it,” Scott assured me, “because of A Doll’s House.”
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