This, with its following artillery is now a famous critical sentence. Why it is accepted with such authority is a mid-Victorian mystery. Yet—it has affected everyone. I place Keats above him, but I am such a personal critic and may be wrong because of the sincerity of this God damned sentence. F.S.F.
On the next page, with Arnold still giving the top palm of poetry to Wordsworth, Scott harrumphed on the right-hand margin:
Mister Arnold had not read Pushkin—nor seen evidently that Dostoievski (if he knew him) was a great poet. Later you must compare this essay with Wilson’s in The Triple Thinkers.
Arnold, still praising Wordsworth on page 142 of my copy, says in regard to the poet’s morality: “The question how to live is in itself a moral idea.” This was underlined for my special attention by Scott. He penciled on the left margin:
This is Arnold at his best, absolutely without preachment.
On page 145, concerning Epictetus, Scott made another note.
Now he [Arnold] becomes “moral”—nevertheless follow him because this is real thinking through.
At the bottom of the same page:
I’ll bet Arnold got his idea for his poem about his father [“Rugby Chapel”] from this idea of Epictetus.
Scott admired Wordsworth, but not quite as much as Arnold had. Browning’s poem “The Lost Leader,” he told me, concerned Wordsworth’s sell-out to what we now call The Establishment. I can still recite the verse beginning, “Just for a handful of silver he left us, Just for a riband to stick in his coat … They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver …” Wordsworth seemed to have sold himself cheaply—but didn’t everyone, even Scott? Some of his early potboilers to make fast money for Zelda and the Pat Hobby stories that he wrote for Esquire for $200 each were not worthy of his talent. We all have our pieces of silver, I thought, remembering Johnny and me.
On the poetry list there were three poems by Wordsworth, but I asked him to add “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” the first verse of which I had read at the orphanage. Now for the first time, I could feel the tremendous loneliness of the line “I wandered lonely as a cloud.”
Scott’s title This Side of Paradise had been taken from the last two lines of Rupert Brooke’s “Tiara Tahiti”—“Well, this side of Paradise, there’s little comfort in the wise.” As a child, I had grieved with Brooke’s premonition of his death: “If I should die, think only this of me; That there’s some corner of a foreign field, That is for ever England.” “The Great Lover,” on page 124 of The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke bought me by Scott, still has the corner turned down for easy reference, a habit Scott tried to cure me of; to hear him remonstrate, you would think books were human. I loved the boast of the handsome Mr. Brooke: “I have been so great a lover: filled my days So proudly with the splendor of Love’s praise.” The sonnet “Oh, Death Will Find Me” was marked for me by Scott and I learned it although it was not on the poetry list. Neither was “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester.” I read and reread the poem until I too was sitting at the Café des Westens, Berlin, in May of 1913, yearning for England, where “the lilac is in bloom … the poppy and the pansy blow …” The last line, “And is there honey still for tea?” is repeated in one of Zelda’s poignant letters to Scott. Why is this line so sad?
Elizabeth and Robert Browning’s juxtaposition with George Moore’s novel Esther Waters, about the servant girl who struggled to raise her illegitimate son, puzzles me today. George Moore had a special attraction for Scott, and it could be explained by Max Beerbohm’s description of him: “Of learning … he had no equipment at all; for him everything was discovery; and it was natural that Oscar Wilde should complain … George Moore is always conducting his education in public”—which, in a way, Scott did with his vociferous enthusiasms. “Also he had no sense of proportion, but this defect was, in truth, a quality. Whenever he discovered some new master, that master seemed to him greater than any other: he would hear of no other. And it was just this frantic exclusiveness that made his adorations so fruitful … The critic who justly admires all kinds of things simultaneously cannot love any one of them … that kind of writer is often … very admirable. But it is the Moores who matter.” This could have been written about Scott Fitzgerald, who died only seven years after the author of Esther Waters. “Sheilo, this is the only decent edition in English and impossible to get so don’t lend it. Love, Scott,” my professor wrote on the flyleaf of my now battered copy. It is like hearing him speak.
I enjoyed the poems by Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess” and “The Lost Leader,” but, because I am inclined to be sentimental, I preferred Mrs. Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, especially the sonnet “How do I love thee, let me count the ways”; I loved Scott like that. Whenever I learned a sonnet I carefully counted the lines to be sure they totaled fourteen. They always did.
On looking over the curriculum, I was surprised to find only one poem by Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind.” How could this be? I wondered—until I realized that the rest of the selected Shelley poems, to be read with Maurois’ Ariel: La Vie de Shelley, were on the bookmark Scott headed “How to Learn from a Frenchman about an exiled Englishman by an American.” The poems: “Ariel to Miranda”; “To the Moon”; “Best and brightest, come away”; “To a Skylark”; “The Indian Serenade”; “I dreamed that as I wandered by the way”; “Ozymandias”; “Many a green isle needs must be”; “Music, when soft voices die”; “Now the last of many days”; “A Lament”; “One word is too often profaned”; “To Night”; “Love’s Philosophy”; “The sun is warm, the sky is clear”; “When the lamp is shattered”; “Come into the garden, Maud” (actually by Tennyson). And should I lose the bookmark, they were marked by Scott in the indexes of the Oxford Book of English Verse and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury.
On the inside back cover of the Palgrave, Scott wrote for my amusement a tough-guy account of Ode on a Grecian Urn:
A Greek Cup They Dug Up. S’as good as new! And think how long it was buried. We could learn a lot of history from it—about the rubes in ancient history, more than from any poetry about them. Those pictures on it must tell a story about their Gods, maybe, or just ordinary people—something about life in the sticks at a place called Tempe. Or maybe it was in the Arcady Valley. These guys chasing the dames are either Gods or just ordinary people—it doesn’t give the names on the cup. They sure are tearing after them and the dames are trying to get away. Look—this guy’s got a flute, or maybe it’s an obo and they’re going to town, etc. etc.
This was a father teasing his favorite child.
I was not as excited by Shelley’s “Skylark”—“Shelley was a god to me once,” Scott had written Max Perkins—as I was by Keats’s “Nightingale,” which Scott recorded for me one evening. We were walking on Hollywood Boulevard, reciting the poem softly, and happened across a recording place. The original record, declaimed by Scott in deep professorial tones, is at Princeton.
Another Fitzgerald bookmark was headed “Suggestions About Byron.” “The excerpts from long poems are short because of the fine print,” he wrote. “I have never been able to admire but five or six of his short lyrics in comparison to his contemporaries.” With the Harold Nicolson biography I read Childe Harold, “Maid of Athens,” “So We’ll Go No More a-Roving,” “She Walks in Beauty,” and Don Juan.
I was glad to read about Lincoln again in Lord Charnwood’s book, sliced in three, threaded through the Odyssey, Shelley, Walt Whitman, and Rupert Brooke’s “Menelaus and Helen.” There was a book about Lincoln at the orphanage, From Log Cabin to White House. One of Scott’s great-aunts, Mrs. Suratt, had been hanged for her part in the assassination. He was not proud of the relationship, and I was surprised that he told me. Where I came from in England, if any member of your family had been hanged, you simply did not talk about it, although I was aware that many of the great families in England and France had ancestors who had gone to the chopping block or the guillotine. If you happened to have an illegitimate
child by a king—an unmarried mother in the East End was treated like a leper in my day—well, you became a countess and the child was made a duke or duchess. Reading of the great mistresses in College of One, I was fascinated to learn that an illiterate girl like Nell Gwynn could have two sons with Charles II and one would be the Duke of St. Albans. This was a delightful aspect of learning, that you discovered it was possible to misbehave and be rewarded—but only if you associated with aristocrats. No wonder they were so relaxed. They were rarely punished.
My Lincoln was peppered with comments from Scott. When Charnwood compared Jefferson disadvantageously to Hamilton, Scott penciled between brackets: “This is the Tory Charnwood speaking.” There was a message to me at the bottom of the next page, again in reference to Charnwood’s disparagement of Jefferson:
He means that from 1770–1820, our legislation was more progressive than yours, but that later it bogged down—i.e. when Dickens paid his visit.
After another attack:
The above is unfair to Jefferson. The great American line: Washington-Jefferson-Jackson-Lincoln would have been impossible without Jefferson, the French rationalist link.
Scott underlined a reference to Eli Whitney, who had contributed to unemployment by inventing the first cotton gin during a vacation from Yale. “You see,” Scott commented, “it’s always Taft or Don Stewart or Archie MacLeish (Yale men all) who cause trouble!” Scott, underlining compromise (in reference to Henry Clay), brought it into current politics. “Compromise is the word Willkie associated with him on the Information program.” And, on the following page:
This attack on Calhoun is excellent—I fully agree with him and concur with the more generalized statements about the American Period temperament at this point.
Commenting on Charnwood, page 57:
Here we have irony and condescension—and a certain simple misunderstanding thru distance.
Scott sometimes used the films we saw to reinforce a historical lesson. In my Lincoln, underlining “almost boundless western theater” concerning the Civil War, Scott wrote: “Do you remember Quantrell’s Irregular Cavalry we saw in the picture, who operated as far west as New Mexico?” Whenever he could get in a bit about his family he did. On page 280, underlining that General Grant had worked in his father’s leather store “in Illinois and in gloomy pursuit of intoxication,” he noted at the bottom: “In Galena, Illinois, then thought the coming city. My grandfather, a young Irishman, lived there in 1850 before going to St. Paul.” And on page 394: “My father marched with the rebels to Washington and back.” The penciled comments were Scott’s method of making history alive for me, and also to give himself a sense of belonging, through his reading and through his family, to the “dark fields of the republic … borne ceaselessly back into the past.”
Milton’s “L’Allegro” was moved up to give a change of pace from Lincoln and Walt Whitman. I found Milton oppressive; Paradise Lost, a huge battered book with heavily embossed brown covers—where had Frances found it?—and inside, terrifying angels of Hell illustrated by Gustave Doré. Whitman’s role was to reinforce my knowledge of and love for Lincoln. Glancing through the huge Leaves of Grass, I was relieved that only two poems were marked: “O Captain! My Captain!” and “When Lilacs Last.” I liked them well enough, but preferred Edgar Lee Masters’ poignant poem on Ann Rutledge, the young girl who had died before she could marry Lincoln: “Bloom forever, O Republic, from the dust of my bosom.”
Shakespeare as a poet was difficult. With Scott’s help and with deep concentration on the four prescribed sonnets, I understood and loved them and was able to agree with him that this was the best poetry of all, sometimes, not always, even better than Keats. Encouraged by my enthusiasm, Scott revised the curriculum to include passages from Julius Caesar and Henry IV (I).
The poems and plays on the list were a growing delight: Blake’s “The Tiger”; I can never forget John Donne’s “The Ecstasy”—“Where, like a pillow on a bed, a pregnant bank swelled up”—and his “Song” “… teach me to hear mermaids singing.” I was delighted to recognize so many lines from Donne in T.S. Eliot—“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.” Eliot was, in Scott’s boundless praise for what he considered good, “the greatest living poet in any language.” He had read The Great Gatsby three times, Eliot had informed Scott, adding that the book was the first step forward American fiction had taken since Henry James. To have Eliot praise his work so highly sent Scott bounding to the top rung of happiness. Fitzgerald was not like his literary conscience, Edmund Wilson, who has never, it seems to me, judged his own work by the praise or lack of it from others. Scott needed to be told he was a good writer. “They ganged up on me after This Side of Paradise,” he explained, “but the same critics not only praised Gatsby, but some, in retrospect, the first book as well.” Scott was still talking in 1940 of his meeting with Eliot in the mid-thirties at the home of the Turnbulls in Maryland. He had wanted to impress the poet with his knowledge and appreciation of his work. As always, he was intimidated by the proximity to an idol, but he insisted on reading a section of The Waste Land—very movingly, according to Andrew Turnbull. This new kind of conversational verse was as interesting to me as it had been for Scott.
To my astonishment, because I assumed they would be too intellectual for me, I enjoyed Edmund Wilson’s essays in The Triple Thinkers and Axel’s Castle and Mary Colum’s From These Roots. In this Scott, underlining Longfellow’s “A boy’s will is the wind’s will, and the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts,” commented, “My god! His best line.” It was exciting for me to read examples of Verlaine and Rimbaud in French, in the Colum and Wilson books, with the English translations underneath. Scott had his own translation for me of Rimbaud’s “Voyelles” in my copy of Poésies:
A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue vowels
Some day I’ll tell where your genesis lies
A—black velvet swarms of flies
Buzzing above the stench of voided bowels,
A gulf of shadow; E—where the iceberg rushes
White mists, tents, kings, shady strips
I—purple, spilt blood, laughter of sweet lips
In anger—or the penitence of lushes
U—cycle of time, rhythm of seas
Peace of the paws of animals and wrinkles
On scholars’ brows, strident tinkles
On the Supreme trumpet note, peace of the spheres, of the angels. O equals
X ray of her eyes; it equals Sex.
I memorized them all, some in English, some in French, for sheer intellectual joy. Verlaine’s “Il pleure dans mon coeur comme il pleut sur la ville,” and the four stanzas from Rimbaud’s “Bâteau Ivre” ending with “O, que ma quille éclate! O, que j’aille àla mer!” I walked around declaiming the lines as fervently as I had recited poetry and songs at the orphanage. And Eliot’s “I grow old … I grow old … I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled,” and “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea … Till human voices wake us and we drown.” And “Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows.” The imagery affected me as though I had been blind and was seeing for the first time.
At the back of From These Roots, Scott penciled:
Poe influenced Baudelaire (184)
influenced Rimbaud
influenced Lafargue (339)
influenced Eliot.
Verlaine and Rimbaud had led disreputable lives, Scott told me. Verlaine had quarreled with Rimbaud, his disciple, and shot him. He was imprisoned for a year and a half. “Rimbaud deliberately experienced the worst kind of dissipation. He took opium, hoping to break the barriers of human limitation,” Scott said. To write a completely uninhibited type of poetry, Rimbaud wallowed in the depths of degradation. “But only as a young man. Quite early in life he abandoned poetry completely and led a respectable life as a white-slave trader in Africa.” I was never quite sure when Scott was teasing me. It seemed that so many geniuses drank or took drug
s. Edgar Allan Poe had died a dreadful death in Baltimore at the age of forty, “after,” Scott informed me, “he was picked up by the police in a drunken delirium.” I did not dare say it, but I hoped this would never happen to Scott. I was curious about what drunks actually saw when they were having DTs. Scott assured me solemnly he had seen pink rats that were as big as elephants. I did not care for the poetry of Poe; it was too full of gloom and death and ghosts and decaying houses and I did not memorize any of the poems. Scott’s father had introduced him to Poe’s poetry when he was a small boy, with “The Raven” and “The Bells.” In This Side of Paradise, when Amory meets Eleanor he is reciting Poe’s “Ulalume” while she is singing a song based on a Verlaine poem. Scott, who disliked poverty, agreed with Poe’s statement that he would not have the hero of “The Raven” in squalid circumstances because “poverty is commonplace and contrary to the idea of Beauty.” It wasn’t the actual money of the rich that appealed to Scott, although he was always in need of it, but the way people like the Gerald Murphys used it, to give grace to their surroundings.
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.
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