College of One (Neversink)

by Sheilah Graham

  I have discovered that the more people know, the more they enjoy telling you about it. Not long ago in Paris, for example, I had a fascinating discussion with Edmund Wilson on where you put the comma. I didn’t retain it all, but I found the conversation exhilarating. When I first met Bernard Shaw with C. B. Cochran, I wouldn’t have dared talk with him and even in the year after Scott’s death I was not too confident in discussing my new knowledge. But I continued with my reading. Recently, for example, I have enjoyed John Keats: The Making of a Poet by Aileen Ward; William Shakespeare by A. L. Rowse; W. A. Swanberg’s Dreiser; and The Letters of Oscar Wilde, which I am sure Scott would have enjoyed as much as the Turnbull book of his own letters. I have read Salinger and Camus and Yeats and Dylan Thomas, whose prose (though not his verse) and addiction to hard liquor were so much like Scott’s.

  It isn’t only what you learn as a student, it’s what you do with it in the unshepherded world where there are no familiar tracks, where there is no longer a teacher to pressure or to prod you into reading so many pages a day. With the right groundwork, you can go on by yourself, receiving pleasure from books and ideas for the rest of your life, which was the case with Scott and which has been true for me. And one of these days soon I am going to read Finnegans Wake and Spengler.

  “If you learn to like poetry, it will give you pleasure all your life,” Scott promised me. It has. And the joy of music. Recently I underwent some serious eye operations and had to lie flat on my back for three weeks with both eyes bandaged, with sandbags around my head to prevent the slightest movement. I could reach for my bedside radio and turn the knob fixed at the music station—Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Stravinsky—hour after hour. Time turned back and I was in the living room of my Hollywood apartment listening to the familiar themes of the great composers.

  The books. They are still warm and alive for me. Not long ago when I was moving from the West Coast to the East, and the books were ready for the packing cases, I decided to take some of them with me on the plane so I could put them on my shelves as soon as I arrived. I opened Matthew Arnold’s Essays in Criticism. On the flyleaf I read again: “For Sheilah, with love (and annotations) from Scott. 1940.” What if I crash? I thought. No, it was too dangerous to take the books with me. I hastily removed from my suitcase Arthur Rimbaud’s slim Season in Hell. I couldn’t risk losing that, or Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises with the inscription from Scott: “For Sheilah, from Boris Karloff. Boo!” or Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Not a first edition, but The Jungle couldn’t fly with me either. Keats. What was I thinking of? All the books would have to come by Railway Express as they always had. If anything happened to me in the plane, they would be safe.

  As a good student of the College of One, I have been able to help my children. I am not outside the circle when they discuss books and current events with their college friends. They are not embarrassed by me. My daughter Wendy always asked my advice about the long papers she had to write in high school and college. When she was preparing one paper in high school on the tragedies of Shakespeare, we discussed the project in detail. Afterward she said, “Mother, you know so much.” It was like getting my B.A. Not long ago Wendy and Robert invited a group of graduate students at Columbia to dinner. I decided to make myself scarce and went to a movie, coming back when I thought dinner would be over. They were still eating when I returned, and they insisted that I join them. They asked me questions about Scott Fitzgerald and I was glad to answer them. We discussed politics, poetry, the war in Vietnam. Afterward Wendy said with affection and, I must admit, some surprise, “Mom, you contributed.”

  I had not read much of Virginia Woolf before Wendy chose the aspect of unity in her writings as a thesis for her master’s degree at Columbia. We discussed the project and I became as enamored of that author as my daughter was.

  Like Scott Fitzgerald, my son has always been less interested in the prescribed studies in high school and college. He prefers the dreamlike world of ideas rather than hard facts. I was his editor for Journey Behind the Iron Curtain and he has respect for what I can do in my own area of work. His appreciation of music is far more advanced than mine. The unusual in poetry and painting delights him. The film as a form of art is his special subject. He is twenty years old and searching for new answers in all forms of creation. He is the future. I wish Scott could have known Wendy and Robert, the children of my marriage to Trevor Westbrook. They would have been at ease with each other.

  It is now two and a half decades since the death of the founder of the College of One. I believe he would be pleased that I, his pupil, his guinea pig, have put his ideas on education between the covers of a book. I hope I have communicated his enthusiasm for the project. As Scott was a perennial Princetonian, I am a lifelong standard bearer for the Fitzgerald system of learning. I am immensely grateful that a charming, intelligent man with an inherent magic that could “illuminate old shapes” decided to give me the benefit of what he had learned from books, and from life.

  APPENDICES

  APPENDIX 1:

  THE CURRICULUM

  APPENDIX 2:

  SHORT STORY: “BELOVED INFIDEL”

  AFTERWORD

  WENDY W. FAIREY

  WHENEVER I TEACH THE GREAT GATSBY, AS I HAVE so many times in my forty years in the college classroom, I always wonder if I will tell the students my story. It’s my mother’s story, really. But it’s mine, too, the story of a personal link to the author of the book that tinges every professional comment I make about themes and narrative voice and structure and the other facets of fiction that English professors train their students to look for. I care about all these, to be sure, but I have an intensely private as well as professional understanding of the novel at hand. Or rather, the private and professional strands are so intertwined that I can’t really say where one ends and the other begins. In class I present them as separate. I tell the personal story when I’ve proven to myself that perhaps I don’t have to, when I feel we have satisfactorily “covered” the “material,” as we call it, with professorial dispassion and dispatch. Perhaps the revelation comes in an impulsive moment of warmth for the group of young people before me—I want to be closer to them, to give them something they might find special. Or perhaps there’s been a little sag in classroom energy and I turn to the story to reinvigorate us.

  “Here’s a personal connection that may interest you. My mother actually knew F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was in the last years of his life in Hollywood.”

  I see mild interest in their faces. “She was involved with him,” I say. A variant of this, if the group seems more sophisticated, perhaps a class of graduate students, might be: “She was his lover.” Interest at this point increases, usually mixed with a bit of understandable anxiety that an aging female professor, talking about her mother’s lover, has become unpredictable.

  “Yes, they were together for three and a half years. He died in her living room—stood up and dropped dead of a heart attack. A few days before Christmas 1940.”

  Now I’ve made it vivid.

  “But what interests me the most,” I say, “is that he devised for her an education. The F. Scott Fitzgerald College of One. It was an entire college curriculum—with history and art and music, and even a little economics. But above all poetry and the novel: Dickens, Thackeray, Henry James. We had the books from the College of One in our library when I was a child. Those were the books I read growing up.”

  My private relation to F. Scott Fitzgerald is that he bought the books for my mother that I have loved all my life, the books, it’s fair to say, that turned me into a professor of English literature. I loved the volumes in the College of One, inside and out—their bindings, their pages, their print, their stories—and I lived in them more fully than I can remember living in the world around me. Thus, my F. Scott Fitzgerald story is less that he was my mother’s lover for those three and a half years before I was born, dying dramatically in her living room, releasing
her to go forth and be with other men and become my mother, than that he shaped my life’s reading by having bought her those books. Long before I even knew of her connection to him, they lined the shelves along opposite walls of our den, there for me to take down and carry upstairs to my bedroom and immerse myself in stories that transported me to other times and places. The palm trees and eucalyptus of dusky Southern California gave way to the imagined bustle of Thackeray’s London or the green landscape of David Copperfield’s Suffolk downs. And as soon as I finished one book, perhaps Tom Jones or Bleak House, I would ask my mother to recommend another, thus building the shadow world that I would live in, have lived in all my life.

  So reading and teaching The Great Gatsby entails for me, always, not only the themes of the great American novel with its tragic dreamer hero, believing in the wrong dreams, but also the subtext of my mother’s relationship with Fitzgerald, my mother herself looming as a kind of female Gatsby, a woman who emerged from a Jewish orphanage and made herself up as Sheilah Graham, London chorus girl and Hollywood columnist, suppressing her Jewishness and her early poverty, believing anything was possible, and awesome in the energy of her self-creation, to which she proved faithful to the end. And I also understand Gatsby as myself, someone who has wed her dreams to people, starting with my mother, whom I wanted to believe in as golden and magic. But I am Nick Carraway as well, awed by Gatsby but able to judge him; the levelheaded spectator, who ultimately turns away from a gaudy world to seek something else, a more solid if more ordinary existence. And I link, too, with Fitzgerald, in our shared love for my mother. And with him as a pedagogue, devising his syllabi for the F. Scott Fitzgerald College of One, joining with me in our shared love of Victorian novels. Everything is all mixed together.

  The story of how Lily Shiel, born September 15, 1904, in Leeds, England, and placed in an East End of London orphanage at age six, transformed herself into glamorous Sheilah Graham is one that my mother recounted in no less than eight published works of autobiography. Some focused on her time with Fitzgerald, some were more concerned with her childhood—its poverty and her eight years, from ages six to fourteen, in the orphanage—others drew on her remarkable thirty-five-year career, stretching from the late 1930s into the ‘70s, as one of the “unholy trio” of Hollywood columnists along with Hedda Hopper and Louella O. Parsons. No book tells quite the whole truth—I’m sure there are many buried secrets even now. My mother had emerged from her orphanage with the contradictory qualities of courage and secrecy, optimism and wariness that would guide her to the end of her life. Of all her books, though, College of One seems to me the best and perhaps the most truthful because it conveys the full truth of her love of literature and learning, and at least the essential truth of her love for the man who I believe was her life’s great love and teacher.

  As one of my mother’s two children born some years after F. Scott Fitzgerald died, I came to know her story in pieces and over time. When I look back to my own childhood, I marvel at how lacking I was in curiosity about her earlier life. She was a single parent (having divorced our almost incidental father early on), working to stay at the top of her profession and to raise me and my younger brother, Robert. We lived in an elegant Spanish-style house in Beverly Hills, with pets and bicycles and a Ping-Pong table on the back veranda. I remember the orderly life of the house, the reassuring points of reference in the people who worked there: my mother, whom I always sought out after school, never afraid to interrupt her on my way to play in the high-walled backyard; the housekeeper in the kitchen, making pastry dough or ironing laundry; the secretary typing out my mother’s column in the bookcase-lined den; the Filipino gardener working shirtless among the hibiscus. This was my early life and all the past I ever knew. An avocado tree in the backyard. Family friends. A series of cherished dogs. Then Malibu in the summers for children, dogs, and servants. And our mother, our only relative, the prime mover of it all.

  I learned of my mother’s Dickensian childhood as well as her relationship with Fitzgerald only when I was a teenager and she published the first of her books, Beloved Infidel (1957), which drew its title from a poem Fitzgerald had written for her. The movie version, starring Gregory Peck as Fitzgerald and Deborah Kerr as my mother, appeared two years later. “I had only one life to give my producer,” quipped my mother, “and Jerry Wald ruined it.” She thought the casting all wrong: Peck, too stiff for Fitzgerald (she would have preferred Richard Basehart), and Deborah Kerr, much too ladylike. A better choice, she asserted, would have been Marilyn Monroe, who, if I think about it, had a lot in common with my mother—from their bleak childhoods and savvy reliance on sexiness and wit to their aspirations to be taken seriously and their relationships with major American writers, which were so important to both of them. But however much she embraced this parallel, my mother was in no way ready to reveal all. Neither the book Beloved Infidel nor the movie made any mention of my mother’s five older siblings or of the fact that her family had been turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, in flight like so many others from the pogroms. She had to tell Robert and me about her family in 1959, because one of her brothers, upset at the family’s erasure from her history, revealed the “real Sheilah Graham story” to a London tabloid. I was sixteen. Raised Episcopalian (indeed, one of the few children left in my Beverly Hills public school on Jewish holidays), I was intrigued to find myself, as I put it, “half Jewish,” and went around informing my friends. My mother begged me to show some discretion, though in her later years she gradually became more open, at least among her close friends, about her background.

  Once we children knew about the members of her family, she relished talking to us about them. She also renewed contact with her older sisters—“the thin sister” and “the fat sister,” she dubbed them—who lived two miles from each other in Brighton, England. Beginning in 1960, Robert and I were taken to visit them on our trips abroad, but since these sisters were not on speaking terms with each other, we would have lunch with one and tea with the other. My mother loved them and loved their Jewish cooking. By then, two of her brothers were dead, and she wouldn’t see the one living brother, who had betrayed her to the press.

  Strangely, I never knew the names of my mother’s parents until after her death in 1988, though I had seen their pictures and knew something of their stories. I found her birth certificate among her papers, attesting that Lily Shiel’s father and mother were Louis and Rebecca Shiel. Their names leapt out at me, somehow making those distant figures more substantial. I knew how much my mother had cherished the one photograph she had of her father, a dignified-looking tailor, whose death when she was a baby left his family impoverished. He died on a trip to Berlin to consult doctors about his tuberculosis and is buried there in the Jewish cemetery. My mother visited his grave in the early 1930s and told us about the German children who came around throwing stones and shouting “Juden, Juden.”

  The family moved to Stepney Green in the East End of London, where my grandmother, who hardly spoke English, worked cleaning the public lavatories. As was not uncommon among families in such straitened circumstances, she put my mother and her next youngest child, Morris, in the institution we had known only as “the orphanage” while my mother was alive but that I was able to identify after her death as the Jews’ Hospital and Orphan Asylum in the neighborhood of Norwood. Entering Norwood at six, she had her golden hair shaved to the scalp as a precaution against lice, and to the end of her life she was haunted by the degradation of this experience. When she “graduated” at fourteen, she had established herself as Norwood’s “head girl”: captain of the cricket team and recipient of many prizes, including both the Hebrew prize and a prize for reciting a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The orphanage wanted her to try for a scholarship to become a teacher, but her mother, who was by then dying of stomach cancer, needed her at home.

  It is revealing of the times that all six Shiel children adopted unmistakably “English” names: Heiman became
Henry; Esther changed to Iris; Sarah became Sally; Meyer—the “bad” brother who had taken my mother on his thieving expeditions when she was small—took the name of Jack; Morris became Maurice, the owner of a successful ladies’ clothing shop.

  And Lily? After her mother’s death when she was sixteen, my mother left home to move into her own little flat in the West End. She had a job in a department store demonstrating a toothbrush that cleaned only the backs of the teeth. When the toothbrush company folded, she looked up one of the many gentlemen who had left their cards. At eighteen, she married John Graham Gillam, a kindly older man who proved impotent, went bankrupt, and looked the other way when she went out with other men, but under whose Pygmalionesque tutelage she improved her speech and manners, enrolled in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and changed her name. She became a chorus girl, one of Cochran’s Young Ladies, the English equivalent of the Ziegfeld Girls.

  My mother started writing professionally during her period on the stage. She came home one day to find her husband trying to write an article for the newspapers about Easter eggs. When she suggested he might be wasting his time, he challenged her to think of a better topic. She promptly sat down with a pencil and yellow notepad and wrote “The Stage Door Johnnies by a Chorus Girl.” The Daily Express ran it and paid her two guineas.

  By the time she left England in 1933 to try her fortune in America, my mother had earned a modest reputation as a freelance journalist. She had also written two unsuccessful novels, a credential that allowed her to bluff her way into jobs as a New York staff reporter, getting scoops and writing eye-catching features such as “Who Cheats Most in Marriage?,” a breezy inventory of the men of Western nations. Then, in 1936, she landed the opportunity to go to Hollywood as a nationally syndicated columnist, a position she held for more than thirty-five years.