College of One

by Sheilah Graham

  Scott was extremely interested in my reaction to The Communist Manifesto. He might have become a Communist; many intellectuals of the late nineteen thirties veered in that direction and some went all the way. At a small dinner party in Budd Schulberg’s house, Scott had taken his host and Ring Lardner, Jr., into another room and discussed Communism with them for an hour. He was disappointed, he told me later. “Nothing original. They are content to follow the party line.” I was surprised when I read of Scott’s adoration of the rich because during our College of One he was always so vehemently on the side of the poor and oppressed. He detested people like Barbara Hutton, Woolworth Donahue, and especially business tycoons. “I don’t know any businessman I’d want to meet in the next world—if there is a next world,” said Scott. Members of the Communist Party in Baltimore had had several long discussions with Scott, he told me, hoping he would join the Party. Scott writes of Stahr having a fight with the Communist Brimmer in The Last Tycoon. It was probably Scott who had fought the real man with his fists, as ineffectively as Stahr had done. “I could never be a Communist,” Scott assured me. “I could never be regimented. I could never be told what to write.” But the subject was important, and I must be aware of the pros and cons.

  Scott’s library contained two large volumes of Das Kapital, from which I read Section 4 in Chapter 10 of the first volume, on “The Working Day.” Because it was so difficult, Scott interspersed it with Henry James’s Aspern Papers and Beerbohm’s short parody, “A Burlesque of Henry James.” The Beerbohm “Burlesques” were in my [Alexander] Woolcott Reader.

  My understanding of “The Working Day” in Das Kapital was helped by Scott’s translations of Latin, French, and even Russian words. He eliminated the entire first page and a half as completely beyond my comprehension, with the bracketed injunction: “Skip. Begin on following page.” Where Marx writes of the “small thefts of the capitalists from the laborers’ meals and recreation time” and the “petty pilfering of minutes,” Scott commented in the margin: “They do this at M.G.M. in a big way; so the secretaries say.”

  Marx’s “The unity of the ruling classes, landlords and capitalists, stock-exchange wolves and shopkeepers, protectionists and free traders, government and opposition, priest and free thinkers, young whores and old nuns, under the common cry, For the Salvation of Property, Religion, the Family and Society,” elicited from Scott: “Grand prose.” My professor had read all of Das Kapital. “The Working Day” was all I could manage then—and probably now. It was culled from the body of the book because Scott knew I would be interested in the early industrial working conditions of my native England.

  Mein Kampf—Hitler’s alarming bible was not on the curriculum, but Scott gave it to me to read while it was all coming true before our paralyzed eyes and voices.

  An easy course to follow the difficult one: Hendrik Willem Van Loon’s sixty chapters of The Arts, divided by, as Scott noted at the bottom of the “Art Book and Fiction List,” “13 novels, 4 French, 3 Russian, 2 Irish, 2 American, 1 Norwegian, 1 English.” The two Joyces—A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners—were fascinatingly simple, so different from Ulysses, which I tried much later. (Finnegans Wake was impossible.) Scott identified with Joyce, who was to outlive him by one year. They had met at the home of Sylvia Beach during the twenties in Paris, and, as usual when his admiration was enormous, Scott was impelled to create a disturbance. To prove his respect, he threatened to jump out of the window. Joyce, by most accounts cold, arrogant, and in spite of his writings somewhat prudish—as I found Henry Miller to be when I met him in Hollywood—remarked to Miss Beach, “That young man must be mad. I’m afraid he will do himself injury.” It wasn’t always liquor. It was enthusiasm so great that it could not be expressed by words. Scott often bracketed himself with Joyce, asserting they had both aspired to the same heights of craftsmanship. When Mary McCarthy advised Scott to read Kafka during the evening we spent with her and Edmund Wilson, to whom she was then married, he read The Trial and described it “as an influence among the young comparable only to Joyce in 1920–25.”

  There are dozens of notations by Scott in my Joyce novels, mostly his translations from the Latin, and this sometimes discouraged him. In Portrait of the Artist, after translating “Pax super totum sanguinarium globum” to “Peace over all the bloody globe,” Scott commented in brackets: “All this of course is lowsy Latin.” I would not have known. On the flyleaf of Dubliners: “Note especially the story ‘Counterparts’—and the last part of the story, ‘The Dead,’ that ends the collection. Scott.”

  In the Van Loon book, which concerned all forms of art from works of prehistoric man to the impressionism of Debussy, there were two penciled comments. Mine at the beginning: “I am standing on a deserted range at twilight with an empty rifle in my hand and all the targets down. From F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Blue Period.” I was teasing Scott, who had recently shown me his Crack-up stories: he had been worried about my reaction to them. I had thought they were fascinating and beautifully written. Scott’s message to me at the back of the book was a guide for the different phases of art. He was pleased when I told him that I thought Van Loon was condescending to his readers, treating them as children. I was just as pleased when he agreed with me.

  Now Scott divided a course in music appreciation with ten novels and Graeco-Roman history. As we proceeded from Bach and Handel to Chopin and Debussy and from Schubert to Stravinsky, we also read Plutarch, Gibbon, Froude, Suetonius, and Bolitho, as well as the matching sections in Wells. Frank Norris’s McTeague accompanied Mendelssohn’s violin concerto and James’s The Bostonians the Brahms Concerto Number 2 in B flat. With so much more recorded music available today at so little cost, the choice might well have been broader, but in 1940 I was lucky in my College of One to be able to range from the Well-Tempered Clavichord to Der Rosenkavalier and from the Water Music to the Death and the Maiden quartet.

  With the records, I read From Bach to Stravinsky; The History of Music by Its Foremost Critics, edited by David Ewen, and a Music Lovers’ Encyclopedia edited by Deems Taylor and Russell Kerr and compiled by Rupert Hughes. The Encyclopedia contained brief facts about all the composers and all the known musical instruments. In addition, I was instructed by Scott to look up the composers in the large one-volume Columbia Encyclopedia he had bought me.

  It was now necessary to have a record-player. A machine in blond wood arrived from Scott, to match the bookcases, which were also from him. At this time each 78-rpm record cost one or two dollars, depending on the artist, and some of the albums were correspondingly expensive. In those last months of his life Scott had very little money, and the prices of the records often determined the order of buying them. My Chopin records—“Mazurka” and “Études,” recorded by Vladimir Horowitz and Artur Rubinstein’s “Polonaise”—cost two dollars each. Before playing them I read ten pages on Chopin in Ewen, which of course Scott misspelled as Ewan. His spelling for some of the composers in his “Preliminary List”: Bethoven, Menddilshun, Litz. How could he write so well and spell so badly?

  The Debussy records—Stokowski’s “Prélude à l’Après-Midi d’un Faune” and the Heifetz recording of “Le Plus que Lent”—were each $1.50; the Iberia, $5.00. While the Iberia was first on the list, I played it last, because Scott did not immediately have the $5.00 to spare. For Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, with Stokowski conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Concerto in D major with Heifetz, “$14.50 alone” noted my hard-up professor. Von Weber was cheaper: “Invitation to a Dance,” $2.00; the overture to Der Freischutz, $1.50. Rimski-Korsakov’s “The Flight of the Bumblebee” ($1.50) was a favorite of Scott’s. We smiled at the buzzing, as I still do when it is played, usually as a fast encore by the violinist.

  The Haydn Symphony Number 94 (“Surprise,” $5.00), Symphony Number 101 (“Clock,” $8.00), and the String Quartet in D major ($1.00) were accompanied by this note from Scott.

  HAYDN

  I. The big c
hord in 2nd movement after the pastoral goes off like 21 guns.

  II. The sonata to prove that a young lady couldn’t sit through a concert. It ended 9 times and each time she got up.

  III. The Farewell Symphony—each one lights a candle and goes out until only one is left.

  Scott’s list went on to note prices from Handel’s Water Music—$3.50—to $13.50 for Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata. Schnabel’s Quintet in E Flat Major cost $8.00.

  On Scott’s carefully planned list of prices, the records for my music course would cost him about $200. It was a great deal for a man who sometimes had less than $50 in his bank account. If only I had known.

  Music, history, a novel. I had read Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall when it was published in England. But seeing it now, intermingled with Greek and Roman History, I understood the title for the first time, that the wild twenties of Waugh’s England had been a herald of the decline and fall of the British Empire, similar to the orgiastic dissipation of the Romans.

  On page 1 of Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Scott noted: “It is important to remember that Gibbon wrote this history late in the 18th century (1765—1785) before the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution—when men believed that ‘The Age of Reason’ had indeed arrived. Yet the stuff is full of irony—especially when he speaks of the Church and compares the rich men of antiquity to those of his time—to the pretended advantage of the latter.”

  I enjoyed Froude’s Julius Caesar. Previously I had confused Froude with Freud and pronounced the latter “Frood.”

  The extra pages attached to the curriculum—adapted from Spengler, to be studied in connection with readings on the sixth list—were copied exactly from Spengler’s charts at the end of my heavy volume, which I did not read. Like Kathleen’s ex-king in The Last Tycoon, Scott had departed before we got to Spengler. The last page of the curriculum was Spengler’s “Political Development of the Anglo-European World,” with its accompanying mixture of epic poems, Shakespeare, Descartes, Michelangelo, Bach, Voltaire, Kant, Marx, Darwin. And the last segment:

  CIVILIZATION

  (a) 19th Century. From Napoleon to the World War. “System of the Great Powers,” standing armies, constitutions.

  (b) 20th Century. Transition from constitutional to informal sway of individuals. Annihilation wars. Imperialism.

  (c) ???

  The question marks were as though Scott were questioning “I wonder what comes next?” The music course was almost completed when Scott died a few days before Christmas 1940. He had told me at the beginning of the music study that he was saving Beethoven for his old age. It was a strange coincidence that he asked me to play the Eroica Symphony while he was making some notes about football on the Princeton Alumni Weekly. Soon after it ended, Scott suffered his fatal heart attack. There was still an echo of the music in the room with the afternoon sun through the venetian blinds making patterns on his pale face on the dark green carpet.

  I finished the music course, with the history and novels, on my own. But Spengler without Scott was too difficult for me. Everything else in the curriculum was followed faithfully, and a great deal of it has stayed with me—perhaps because of the unusual methods adopted by Scott to insure that I would remember what he taught.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE METHOD

  IN A DISCARDED VERSION OF THE GREAT GATSBY, the hero confesses, “I don’t care how much people talk about me, hate me. Just so I could make them admire me, make everybody admire me.” This was the Scott of 1924. He had matured greatly in the following fifteen years, but he still enjoyed being the focal point of the few parties we attended. I remember at the home of Frances and Albert Hackett he simply took over the party, sliding down the staircase, inventing games, involving everyone there. He still sometimes felt the need to impress, to extend himself, to be different.

  When he decided to give me an education—as the Irish and Scotch pioneers who had struck it rich in the West had done, importing peasant girls to marry, he told me—I soon realized that we would not try to cover the usual courses listed in college catalogues. This education would bear the unmistakable stamp of Scott Fitzgerald. It was not enough to have a good curriculum. There must be a fascinating new system.

  There was a question of time. We were both busy people. How many hours a day could we spend on this extracurricular project? There was the great necessity for us both to earn money, especially Scott. He was always short of cash and always trying to make it in a hurry, to pay his bills, so many of them; to send checks to Zelda’s sanitarium, to her mother in Montgomery, Alabama, when Zelda was well enough to stay with her; to pay for Scottie’s school and clothes, for the cost of her visits to her mother and her friends; then his own living expenses. He paid $60 a month, the top price at the time, to the majestic Negro housekeeper at Encino who created the exotic meals he enjoyed—crab soup, lobster soup, strange salads, frothy desserts, delicious iced tea topped with a sprig of mint. He paid $130 a month to his secretary, which was good pay for a girl in her first job (I was giving mine $25 a week). There were the telephone bills; when he was drinking he would call all over America. The rent: $280 a month at Malibu, $250 at Encino, where we started our College of One. It was a large house with a paneled living room, dining room, and study on the ground floor, as well as a huge kitchen and pantry and a maid’s room and bath. Upstairs was his spacious bedroom with a dressing room, bathroom, and balcony, on which he paced while dictating. On weekends I occupied the spare bedroom, its bathroom papered with ancient maps of the Pacific Islands. Whenever I awakened at night, I could hear him walking up and down, up and down. Sometimes he did not sleep until six in the morning, after all the sleeping pills had finally taken effect. Doctors were always coming for one thing or another. One of the early ones—not Dr. Clarence Nelson, who helped him so much in the last eighteen months of his life—charged him $100 a visit when he came late in the evening. This doctor actually encouraged Scott to drink, and one desperate evening I wrote him a letter.

  The only way to save Scott is to get him to a hospital where he cannot get liquor. Otherwise you know better than I do what will happen to this very fine person. Everything else is utterly futile and you know it. At present, the situation is ridiculous. He has two nurses and one doctor and he is drinking at least a pint of gin a day! It is also stupid for you to regard me as the villainess in the piece because I cannot bear to see him drinking. I shall definitely not see him again. My absolutely last word on the entire unhappy matter is that if you cannot do anything to save him, in the name of God, find someone who can. Please don’t communicate with me in any way.

  Scott was paid well when he worked at the studios, sometimes as much as $1,500 a week. But after the first eighteen months (during which he had been under contract at Metro), and especially following the disastrous episode at Dartmouth, when he was unable to continue with Walter Wanger’s film Winter Carnival, the studio jobs were of brief duration. Usually after a few weeks there would be a problem, a clash with a “feeb”—the producer or director—or the sudden illness that fooled no one. Or he would be fired by executives too content with what Scott described as the “practiced excellence” of hack writers. They were really puzzled by his scripts. When he was hired by 20th Century-Fox to write the film version of Emlyn Williams’ play The Light of Heart, in which John Barrymore was to play a drunken Santa Claus with a lame daughter (he had dropped her when she was a baby), he thought of a better plan than the one he had originally outlined to Darryl Zanuck. One scene I remember was to have the camera pan to the queue waiting to see Santa, and there at the end of the line, Barrymore in his red suit and cap, blind drunk. As with so many of Scott’s film projects, it was never made. When he had presented his new outline to the producer, he was reprimanded: “This is different from what we discussed.” Nunnally Johnson, who was brought in to rewrite the story, remonstrated, “It’s the best script I have ever read.” Joe Mankiewicz, the producer of Three Comrades,
Scott’s sole “credit” in Hollywood, had used the same words, zooming Scott to the heights, but had brought him sharply to earth when he rewrote two-thirds of the script. Scott had been on this project several months and preserved a scrap of his dialogue on the inside back cover of my copy of the Remarque novel:

  PAT: There never was much.

  KOSTER: Yes, there was. I am very sure when he speaks of you and I look into his eyes that there has been everything.

  PAT (faraway): For me too—everything. (Shakes her head in sudden fear.) Oh, God!

  KOSTER: It’s been absolutely right, Pat. Even if things were as bad as you say, I’m glad you and Bob have had this happiness together. Bob’s my son, Pat. It wasn’t in the cards for me to marry and have a home, and one imagined, sometimes, he was my son growing and developing, but it was a pretty bleak world I brought him up in—until you came. Yes, I know you feel that (breathlessly) it hasn’t been hard to give everything, but you’re what the doctor ordered …

  Between studio jobs Scott would write another Pat Hobby story for Esquire; some of these gave him great amusement. I remember his discussing “Boil Some Water, Lots of It.” “This line is said in nearly every movie,” Scott said, laughing. Some of the Pat Hobbies he wished he had never written. “There were two in your last editions,” I wrote Arnold Gingrich of Esquire magazine on December 24, 1940, three days after Scott’s death, “he wouldn’t let me see them and was quite embarrassed when I asked him to show them to me. He said they were terrible. All of the previously published Pat Hobbies he had wanted me to read.” Then, before making a request, I told him about The Last Tycoon.