College of One

by Sheilah Graham

  On July 14, 1937—Bastille Day—my mother went to a party at her friend Robert Benchley’s bungalow in the Garden of Allah, where she met F. Scott Fitzgerald, with whom she soon fell in love. Because their time together and her Hollywood years in general are well documented, I will note only what seems salient for this remembrance. One day in 1938 Fitzgerald found my mother struggling to read the first volume of Proust. He took her in hand and drew up the two-year plan of study that became the College of One. My mother spent hours each day reading books and discussing them with her teacher. The curriculum had history in it—the aim was to work up to reading Spengler—and art and music, but above all it was the study and appreciation of literature. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors were the favorites. Keats, Shelley, Swinburne, T.S. Eliot, Dickens, Thackeray, Tolstoy, and Henry James. Fitzgerald and my mother recited the poems together and pretended to be characters of their favorite novels—Grushenka and Alyosha from The Brothers Karamazov, shortened to “Grue” and “Yosh”; Natasha and Pierre from War and Peace (my mother had rebelled against being cast as the worldly, jaded Hélène); Swann and Odette from Proust; Esther Summerson and Mr. Jarndyce or the Smallweeds slumped in their chairs from Bleak House; Becky Sharp and Rawdon Crawley from Vanity Fair, or, for a change, Scott would become fat Jos Sedley.

  It is the story of the education that has brought my mother and Fitzgerald together alive for me, along with a few other of her shared memories of little things: Fitzgerald looking at her “with such love,” with his head cocked to one side, the two of them lying at opposite ends of a sofa with their shoes and socks off and massaging each other’s toes, the two of them at Malibu scooping into buckets the tiny fish called grunion that come onto the beach at night to spawn.

  My mother told Fitzgerald the truth about herself—not just about the poverty and the orphanage, but also about her Jewishness. But it’s as much a part of the story that Fitzgerald abused her trust as that he had first won it. As she puts it in College of One, during his great drinking binge of 1939, he screamed “all the secrets of [her] humble beginnings” to the nurse taking care of him. That same day, my mother and Fitzgerald grappled over his gun, and she made the pronouncement of which I think she was rather proud, “Take it and shoot yourself, you son of a bitch. I didn’t pull myself out of the gutter to waste my life on a drunk like you.” What Fitzgerald had screamed to the nurse, my mother eventually told me, though she never brought herself to write it in any of her books, was that she was a Jew.

  She forgave him, he stopped drinking, and they had a final deeply calm year, immersed in the education project, before he died. Dying in my mother’s living room, twenty-one months before my birth, his death made way for me—for surely there would have been no me if he had lived, and he hovered over our lives as our own personal guardian angel and, strangely, our ghostly progenitor. I read the books he had bought for the College of One and absorbed his politics, which had converted our mother from a conservative to a liberal “in a day.” When we moved east in 1959—my mother restless after a short bad marriage and convinced she could write her column even from a cottage in Connecticut—the library came with us to line the shelves of the den in our new house in Westport. A Fitzgerald scholar once visited to do research on the author’s reading. “Are these Fitzgerald’s underlinings?” he inquired, excited to find such keys to the writer’s intellect and sensibility. “Well, some are Fitzgerald’s,” I replied, home from my nearby boarding school. “And some are mine.” The scholar was horrified, but I had no sense of transgression. The books seemed mine, too, since I had loved and lived in so many of them through all my reading history. They still do, though I no longer enjoy their physical proximity. In 1968 they left their last home with us, my mother’s New York apartment on the Upper East Side. Seeking, I think, to be recognized for her important and “legitimate” contribution to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life and work, she donated the College of One collection to Princeton.

  My mother died on November 17, 1988, two months and two days after her eighty-fourth birthday. Six months earlier she had suffered a massive heart attack following a hip-replacement operation at New York’s Hospital for Special Surgery—for years she had suffered from bad arthritis. After this, her heart half destroyed, she betook herself to her apartment in Palm Beach—her last home of many in her perpetual search to feel at home—hired round-the-clock nurses, and, ever someone to face life’s exigencies with courage and without complaint, she summed up her life as a good one and declared herself ready for death. Often when I spoke with her over the phone, she would quote to me lines of poetry that she and Scott Fitzgerald had read and recited together. She loved the line from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” “I have been half in love with easeful Death,” drawing out that wonderful adjective “easeful” as she intoned it. Another of their favorites that also seemed to give her solace was Swinburne’s “The Garden of Proserpine,” especially its second stanza:

  I am tired of tears and laughter,

  And men that laugh and weep;

  Of what may come hereafter

  For men that sow to reap:

  I am weary of days and hours,

  Blown buds of barren flowers,

  Desires and dreams and powers

  And everything but sleep.

  My mother’s love of poetry, the way its words and cadences suffused her thoughts and emotions and became part of her expression of self, is one of my fondest memories of her. I can only hope that among the many students I have taught over the past forty years, there are those who have found the kind of lifelong joy and enrichment in English prose and poetry as did F. Scott Fitzgerald’s best and only pupil in the College of One.

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