College of One

by Sheilah Graham

  And it almost did not happen. “The Story of an Inebriated Gentleman,” I wrote in the big ledger. And underneath: “Living with him was like sitting on top of a volcano—picturesque but uncomfortable.” It was often more than that. The eruption was sometimes dangerous.

  I was asleep in my Hollywood apartment when the insistent ringing of my telephone brought me sharply awake. Scott had been drinking heavily, and I had decided I would not see him for a while. It made me too unhappy—the sly look on his face, the ether-like smell of alcohol, the subterfuges about the liquor (his favorite hiding place was inside the back of the toilet in his bathroom), the filthy handkerchiefs, the unpressed clothes, the quick anger, the lies, the awful language, although when he was sober he winced if you said “Damn.” I always went back when he stopped drinking, after the agonized drying-out period, during which he was looked after by a series of registered nurses, who fed him intravenously because he could not keep food down. He could eat anything while he was drinking—fudge with crab soup was not unusual—but as soon as he stopped, up it all came. On this morning when the telephone awakened me, I glanced at my bedside clock. It was almost five. “I called the doctor,” said Scott in his soft appealing voice. “He’s getting me the nurse. He gave me a shot and I’m sleepy. Will you come over and wait for her?” Of course I would come.

  It was getting light as I drove over Laurel Canyon into the valley. I parked my car in the courtyard of his house on the Edward Everett Horton estate in Encino. It would be another lovely day, as the birds were remarking in a shrieking chorus. The front door was open. Upstairs in his bed, Scott smiled at me impishly like a precocious boy who has pulled off a trick. He had been writing: his wooden board with the blocks on each side to make a writing desk was across his knees; his hair twirled to a point as he twisted it when he was thinking; a pencil in his hand and one behind his ear; yellow typing paper on the bed and on the floor and the air sour with the smell of alcohol. He yawned prodigiously, and I said, “Why don’t you go to sleep? I’ll wait downstairs for the nurse.”

  “Okay, baby.” I took the desk and the papers and straightened the pillow and the blanket and the sheet. “You won’t leave?” He yawned again settling down in the bed.

  “I’ll be downstairs,” I promised. The top drawer of the mahogany chest near the door was open. A soiled handkerchief did not quite cover his gun. On an impulse I took the gun and slipped it quickly inside my coat. In his present state, it might be dangerous.

  He was like a tiger leaping. We rolled on the floor while he clawed wildly at my hands. He had always seemed physically weak, but now he was strong. My only thought at first: He must not get the gun. Then I became angry, almost mad with anger. My fingers were numb and bleeding. I could not hold the gun much longer. Let the bastard kill himself, who cared? But I wouldn’t stay to see it. I jerked him from me, flung the gun away, and struck his sweating grimly smiling face with all the strength of my open palm and told the son of a bitch to shoot himself and what a good riddance that would be, and then ran down the stairs into my car, swearing and crying.

  “Go on, kill yourself,” I shouted. It would be a release for us all. He was no good to anyone like this—not to himself, to Scottie, or to me. Zelda needed him, but she had had him for a long time and they had destroyed each other.

  But when the morning became afternoon and the anger had gone, I thought of him with the gun and I was afraid. I did not believe he would kill himself, but it could go off accidentally. At six o’clock I telephoned. “He left for the East this morning,” his maid informed me. She was surprised. “Didn’t he tell you? He said he’s never coming back. I’m to stay on the job until I hear from him.” I hung up slowly. Of course, he was going to Zelda. I should not have struck him, I should not have called him dreadful names. He was a proud man and I had humiliated him beyond endurance. But he had not yet sent the maid away. It could mean that he was coming back.

  He was away two weeks and returned at the end of April. He had appeared, like a madman, at the sanitarium in Asheville, North Carolina, had ordered Zelda to pack, and had flown with her to Cuba, where she carried a Bible and prayed continuously, attracting further attention with her old-fashioned clothes—the short long-waisted dresses of the twenties, when they were the gayest, most envied couple, when everything was “… bingo bango … and people would clap when we arose, at her sweet face and my new clothes.” He was beaten up at a cockfight, trying to rescue the bird, while he cradled it in his arms, shouting, “You sons of bitches.” It was all very confused, but somehow they landed at the Algonquin Hotel in New York and Scott was drinking and Zelda was still praying and Scott was in a fight with a waiter and tried to throw him down the stairs, and Mr. Case, the owner, not knowing what else to do, sent Zelda back to the sanitarium and Scott first to Bellevue, then to Doctors Hospital, where he picked himself up one night and returned to California.

  His voice was cold, but if I wanted to see him so badly, he said, I could come, but not yet. He was going into the drying-out period. And then I came and he was blessedly sober. The time was right for a new project. There would be few jobs for him at the film studios until his death, but there would be two projects that would absorb him, that would restore his confidence as a writer: a new novel, about Hollywood—he asked me what I thought of calling it Stahr; and the education of Sheilah Graham, born Lily Shiel. It was later than we knew, but there was still time.

  With Proust as the beginning, the plan for College of One was committed to paper on a long night in mid-May of 1939. We had been to a film preview. As we often did, we were singing as we drove back to Encino. Scott was teaching me the words of a popular song of the late twenties, “Don’t Bring Lulu,” written by a brash young man called Billy Rose. We found the words excruciatingly funny and laughed, singing at the top of our voices. Then we were quiet. Scott seemed pensive. In a low voice he started reciting:

  “Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

  Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

  Bold Lover, never never canst thou kiss,

  Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;

  She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

  For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!”

  He glanced sideways at me to see if I was paying attention. Sometimes I would go off into myself, wondering about us or thinking of my column or a problem with a film star. I was listening. I had never heard this kind of poetry before. “Who wrote it?” I asked. Scott smiled. He was quoting from his beloved Keats. I knew the name, but only vaguely. There had been short poems by Browning at the orphanage: “Oh, to be in England, now that April’s there,” and the verse that ends “God’s in His Heaven, all’s right with the world,” which I hadn’t believed; one verse of Wordsworth that began “I wandered lonely as a cloud”; and all the heroic poetry. But what Scott had just recited was the best there was. “What is it from?” I asked him. It was the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” he replied happily.

  In a famous letter to his daughter dated August 3, 1940, Scott wrote: “Poetry is not something easy to get started on by yourself. You need at the beginning some enthusiast who knows his way around. John Peale Bishop performed that office for me at Princeton … The Grecian Urn is unbearably beautiful with every note as inevitable as the notes in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.” Bishop had lit the flame for Scott at Princeton, and now he was to pass the torch to me. He would show me the way. He carefully parked the ancient Ford in the courtyard at Encino, and we hurried into the house, to the bookshelves in the living room and his volume of Keats. Sitting close beside me, he read me the whole poem, savoring each word. Delighted by my interest, he then recited Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”:

  “Had we but world enough, and time …

  Now, therefore, while the youthful hue

  Sits on thy skin like morning dew,

  And while thy willing soul transpires

  At every pore with instant
fires …”

  Then Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.” The door was open. At last I was to be invited inside. The next morning he gave me the first page of College of One. He had stayed awake far into the night, planning what the courses would be.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE MASTER PLAN

  THERE WOULD BE NO MATH, BOTANY, BIOLOGY, Latin, or French. This education was for a woman who had to learn in a hurry, who wanted to be familiar with what in a broad sense was taught in a liberal arts college. It would embody Scott Fitzgerald’s ideas on what should be taught and his personal method for getting the most from what he considered essential subjects in the shortest possible time. It would take between eighteen months and two years, he estimated. The student would be ready for her diploma in May 1941, after taking written and oral examinations on what she had learned. As the sole graduate of the F. Scott Fitzgerald College of One, class of ’41, I would wear blue stockings and a cap and gown, and I would receive a unique scroll presented with due ceremony by the founder himself. It would also be a reeducation for Scott. He would be taking every course with me. We would study history, literature, poetry, philosophy, religion, music, and art. He was as eager to brush up on his own knowledge as I was to learn from the beginning.

  The first part of the plan had two sections, a sketchy outline and a detailed list of the books I would actually be reading. The various courses were given to me by Scott one at a time as the education progressed, and apparently—unless there really was a copy of the curriculum that was stolen or lost—I returned each section to him as it was completed.

  The courses were tentative and changed as we went along, since the main objective at the beginning was to get the plan on paper, to get started. French Drama (with some instruction), planned as the first course, to occupy six weeks, was postponed and then abandoned after some discussion of Racine. Proust had written about Phèdre in his Remembrance of Things Past, and I was anxious to know what it was about. Scott read me Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. But there were other courses I needed more urgently than I did the French dramatists.

  His knowledge of serious music was much greater than mine, but he needed help for this course. He turned to his newly acquired secretary, Frances Kroll, a gentle slender brunette recently out of college. Her brother, Nathan Kroll, conducted a symphony orchestra, and he decided which of the great composers I should study. Like all women in contact with Scott, Frances was speedily under his spell and was as much his admirer as I was; perhaps she showed more understanding of him in some respects.

  Frances soon became Franny or François. At the beginning, until he was convinced of her complete capitulation, he inconsiderately telephoned her in the middle of the night to moan, “No one is reading me; what’s the point of all this writing?” Or sometimes he awakened her to explain a change in the courses. Later he sent telegrams or left notes. Two have survived:

  Dear Franny—oh how I regret this. Oh how my heart bleads, but the arrival of Great Expec threw off page 2 of my poetry schedule. Oh how my heart bleeds and bleeds.

  S.

  It meant a retyping of the entire poetry course.

  Dear François, this is a development of the earlier chart. It will still just go on one big page, that is if the first column (the English stuff) will. Notice it’s a little different in categories. Am sleeping.

  The time allotment of three weeks only for the Greek and Roman History course surprised me. Scott explained that he was merely giving me a skim-through, a smattering of names, places, and dates. When his daughter was planning to take Greek Civilization and Literature at Vassar, he wrote her: “It seems to me to be a profound waste of time.” At Princeton, Scott had written a parody of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” titled “To My Unused Greek Book”:

  Thou still unravished bride of quietness,

  Thou joyless harbinger of future fear,

  Garrulous alien, what thou mightest express

  Will never fall, please God, upon my ear.

  He was more interested in “Medieval History (500–1500),” although the time allowed was also three weeks. In 1935 Scott had made a careful plan for a medieval novel, tentatively titled Philippe, Count of Darkness. It was to run to 90,000 words. Later he considered rewriting three Philippe stories into a 30,000-word novelette. “He is one of the best characters I have ever drawn,” he wrote Max Perkins in January 1939. Nothing came of it because he decided it would be more profitable for him to write a novel about Hollywood—now tentatively titled The Last Tycoon. He might have changed the title, had he lived. He was never quite sure of it. He explained to me why Stahr’s first name was Monroe; “Jewish parents often give their sons the names of American Presidents.”

  Again, Scott allowed three weeks for “History of France 100 B.C. to 1st World War.” He wrote a poem, “Lest We Forget (France by Big Shots),” for me to fix the rogues, the rulers, and the siècles in my mind, starting with the Gallo-Roman period. I found it a great aid to remembering events and learned it by heart. Among the verses were:

  Brennus, amid Roman wails,

  Threw his sword into the scales …

  Saint Louis was a pious blade

  Who vainly led the last crusade …

  Henry of Navarre, no ass,

  Knew that France was worth a mass.*

  Elie Faure’s courses on architecture and art were dropped. Instead, I learned about capitals, pediments, and the round Roman arches that evolved into the Gothic architecture of the twelfth century in Prentice’s Heritage of the Cathedral.

  “Decorative Art and Furniture” was to have lasted three weeks, but that too was abandoned, and it is only in the last decade that I have known the difference between Sheraton, Chippendale, Louis Quatorze, Regency, Victorian, and Early American furniture.

  According to “Possible Lines of Study,” there were to be six weeks of “Readings in Foreign Literature (excluding French and Russian, Greek, Roman, Italian, Spanish, German)”—what was left? Scott changed the plan later to include the French and Russian authors—in fact, nearly all the foreigners.

  I cannot remember what happened to “Cushman’s Philosophy, with readings,” to take twelve weeks. It is not anywhere on the philosophy course. “Spengler and Modern Philosophers” was to be the culmination of my education, as it had been for Kathleen and her ex-king in The Last Tycoon. “When you have completed Spengler you will know more of history than Scottie at Vassar,” he promised me. After he explained Spengler to me, I wondered whether I could ever read him. How could one man know so much of cultures and civilizations? And how alarming he was, with his prophecies of wars that would ravage Europe, then America, and spiral across the Pacific until Asia was master of the world.

  By now I might have forgotten the order of the courses but for my correspondence with Johnny, in which I gave detailed accounts of my studies (without ever mentioning Scott Fitzgerald, as Scott never wrote of me to Zelda). Johnny would have been unhappy if he had known of Scott’s importance in my life, as Zelda would have been if she had known of my existence. I showed Scott all my letters from Johnny, whom he found enchanting, with the dreams and hopes that never materialized. He read me most of the letters from Zelda. They were beautiful, I thought, with brilliant imagery, although, as Scott pointed out, the unusual prose led to a vast nowhere.

  I quote from a letter I wrote to Johnny on March 3, 1940:

  I am now reading Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus. He debunks the mystical and miraculous part and leaves a good, great and simple personality. I have also re-read the Gospels of Matthew and Mark. I have been going to some Art Exhibitions. There is a fine building in Los Angeles called the Huntington Library. In it are most of the 18th Century painters—Gainsborough, Reynolds, Romney and lovely landscapes by Constable and Turner. What a pity the British let them get away. I have been reading books on art as well. As you have probably guessed, I have been trying to make up for my lack of education. My studies are arranged in little courses. I started with History.
Course No. 2 is dedicated to Poetry. No. 3 to Religion and Fiction. No. 4 Philosophy, History and Economics. No. 5 is Music, with Spengler to follow. Interrupting each course, when possible, are novels and biographies pertaining to or having a background to the subject.

  Another letter to Johnny, dated April 22, 1940: “I am currently reading Morton’s A People’s History of England, which gives the complete story of England from the people’s point of view, not from those above looking down. It gives the reasons for the formation of Parliament and the evolution of the bourgeoisie as a class. It is pretty hard going, but I’m learning quite a lot from it.” This was only a year after the start of College of One, two years after I had sat silent and anguished while Scott, Eddie Mayer, Buff Cobb, and her husband, Cameron Rogers, had discussed in detail Marlborough and the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which had given wartorn Europe thirty years of peace. It had seemed unbearable that they knew more of European history than I did.

  Scott was aware that what I lacked most was a knowledge of history. It was important for me to get a smattering of this inexhaustible subject as quickly as possible. H. G. Wells’s Outline of History is not hard to understand, and this is why he chose it for me. At the same time, it does give a complete account of the major events of the known world to the time of its publication in 1920—a revised edition takes it to 1931. (After the death of Wells in 1946, the history was brought up to date by Raymond Postgate.)