College of One

by Sheilah Graham

  Some of the volumes that Frances found in second-hand bookshops in downtown Los Angeles were old and shabby-looking. Scott dressed them up in thick red or gold paper and labeled them “Encino Edition.” All of my Henry James was in red; McTeague still gleams with gold, Scott’s favorite gold. He put a new cover on my Morton’s History and titled it “Sex in Glasgow by Pru.” There was further information on the front: “Peg’s Paper 1922–23—Chapter XX—Peg joins the chartists and executes the wicked mill owner Foxy Chamberlain. She marries Hal, the young labor agitator, and becomes class conscious.”

  To help me enjoy the plays and the poetry, Scott initiated a system of what he called “bridges.” He bracketed or underlined familiar or forceful phrases. Passages in King Lear are marked on almost every page. He changed a sentence in Lear to make the meaning clearer: “… and we’ll wear out in a walled prison packs and sects” to “so we’ll outlast in a walled prison packs and generations.” In the margin of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The Blessed Damozel” “… and the lilies lay as if asleep along her bended arm,” Scott wrote: “FSF—and Lily lay along his bended arm as if asleep.” My real name is Lily and he knew this would make me smile.

  Certain phrases and sentences in Shakespeare have been repeated so often that they have become beautiful clichés. These are what Scott would search for and have me learn before embarking on the play or sonnet. In Julius Caesar, I first became familiar with “Beware the Ides of March”; “This is my answer: not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more”; “This was the most unkindest cut of all”; “Cowards die many times before their deaths: the valiant never taste of death but once”—how often I have said this to myself!—and “Friends, Romans, countrymen …” which Scott had first recited when he was five to his father’s friends. “It was my father’s favorite piece,” he said. When he was twelve he had started a history of the United States “with illustrations.” “When a teacher told me that Mexico City was the capital of South America, I knew enough to correct her, although my father told me to agree with her—‘You don’t have to believe it.’ ”

  In Macbeth, many well-quoted lines were highlighted by Scott’s pencil for me to memorize: “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it”; “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand”; “Out, damned spot! out, I say!”; “Yet do I fear thy nature; it is too full o’ the milk of human kindness.” And in Hamlet, “To be or not to be”—the whole of the soliloquy and all of Polonius’s advice to his son and some of Ophelia’s speeches. I memorized them before reading the plays and when I came to the lines I knew, I could relax on them—as if I were resting on a bridge over turbulent water. The well-worn phrases were my friends, and, after catching an intellectual breath, I could continue into the unfamiliar areas, helped by words that had served as a secure handrail.

  Scott employed a slightly different method with lyric poetry. He would repeat certain lines that he loved. The first time he declaimed, “Hid in death’s dateless night,” from Shakespeare’s sonnet “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,” the words had a hard surface that I could not penetrate. Scott’s constant repetition isolated each word, and they opened up for me like the screen in Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, which doubled in size as he declaimed, “God for Harry! England! and Saint George!” Scott’s repetition of a line from “The Eve of St. Agnes,” “The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass,” revived the bitter chill of my winters at the orphanage, and it was I who was limping through the spiky grass.

  “O for a draught of vintage, that hath been Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth” from “Ode to a Nightingale” was such swinging poetry that I couldn’t refrain from saying it over and over as we walked, holding hands, to Schwab’s Drug Store on Sunset Boulevard. “To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy”—I say these lines to myself in planes when it gets bumpy and I am afraid. “For them the Ceylon diver held his breath, and went all naked to the hungry shark; For them his ears gush’d blood” (Nicole’s family in Tender Is the Night had been similar rich parvenus) and “Why were they proud, why in the name of glory were they proud?”—both from “Isabella, or The Pot of Basil.” When Scott extracted the best lines from the body of a poem they caused a “tireless ratiocination” in my mind that made me eager to read the whole poem or play.

  There is one stanza Scott repeated and I learned that can still make me sad, from Keats’ “When I Have Fears”: “When I behold upon the night’s starred face, / Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, / And think that I may never live to trace / Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance.” Keats knew he was dying when he wrote these haunting lines, as Scott knew when he said them to me until they were in my mind forever.

  He did not ask me to memorize the poems, but I was like a girl wanting to please a handsome teacher. “She has a fantastic memory,” Scott confided to Frances. I have always been able to remember what I like. I can pick pieces of information from my mind, as a good secretary knows where to look in the filing cabinet. During the concentrated time of the poetry course, when Scott came in the evening I barely gave him time to greet me with “Hello, Precious,” “Presh,” “Baby,” “Sheilo,” or “Sweetheart.” Then I would stand back a pace and recite what I had memorized that day.

  The system for the music was to play each side of the record three times consecutively, or until I recognized the theme to the point where I could sing it. At first all I heard was a cacophony of sound, but after playing the record several times I was able to extract the composer’s recurring theme in all its forms. Now, instead of greeting Scott with a poem, I sang the music of the great composers. While before I would sometimes get a popular song on the brain—“Top Hat,” “Anything Goes,” “Night and Day,” “Stormy Weather”—now I was da-da-da-ing to Beethoven, Schubert, Bach, Tchaikowsky, Sibelius, and Brahms. These became “our songs.” Scott was soon as familiar with them as I was. He sang them with me, sometimes inventing words to fit the music. He had not cared particularly for concerts, although he had attended some with Zelda and the Gerald Murphys, but now we became regulars at the Hollywood Bowl and the Philharmonic in Los Angeles. It was like finding good friends to hear the live orchestra play the works on my lists.

  Scott loved the Mozart minuets, but because they were so dainty he was shy of admitting this to Mr. Kroll. In the privacy of my Hollywood apartment we danced the minuet—Scott’s quite elaborate version—to the music of Mozart, reaching up with our hands, bowing and curtsying extravagantly.

  We thought Rembrandt was the best painter, in the same rank of genius with Beethoven, Shakespeare, and Keats. My only knowledge of Rembrandt until I studied the art course with Scott had been a statement from Cecil B. DeMille that he had invented the Rembrandt style of camera work in his films—half in shadow, half in light. When we visited the art galleries, Scott was delighted when I was able to recognize the painters before peering at the names. There were many exhibitions at the Los Angeles Museum and we went several times and tried to evaluate the different techniques of Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Brueghel, Manet, Monet, Degas, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Utrillo, Seurat, Renoir, and Picasso. At that time I described people in terms of painting. Dorothy Parker was a Renoir. Robert Benchley was a Frans Hals, Humphrey Bogart was a character in a Hogarth drawing, Donald Ogden Stewart a Grant Wood. Scott was a Dürer. He called me Botticelli’s Venus on the half-shell.

  This education was alive. It had bones and flesh and blood. It was filling the emptiness that had been inside me. I was looking outward and inward. I was adding and subtracting. Like all converts, I became more devout than the apostle. When the vital Screenwriters election—the right versus the left—was to take place soon after one of Scott’s drinking periods and he was feeling shaky, I told him he would go to vote “even if I have to carry you there.” This was miles from not knowing the difference between radical and reactionary. But the real leap forward and
the deep contentment did not materialize until the last twelve months of his life.

  CHAPTER TEN

  1940

  HE WAS ON HIS FINAL BINGE. IT HAD LASTED LONGER than all the others combined—on and off all through the summer of 1939—and it was completely out of control by the beginning of November. The rejection by Collier’s magazine of the first part of The Last Tycoon had shattered him. He had counted on the money. He was glad to have had Scottie with him during the summer, but his nerves were worn to a hairline strand and there had been great tension. After she left—he had needed to borrow money from Gerald Murphy to pay for her Vassar tuition—he seemed determined to drink himself to death.

  I had come to Encino late in the afternoon to find Scott giving his money and clothes to two disreputable-looking men he had picked up somewhere on the road. When I ejected them, he struck me and shouted, “I’m going to kill you.” He searched ineffectually for his gun, which Frances and I had hidden on a top shelf in the cupboard in the kitchen. The nurse Dr. Nelson had sent a few days previously heard the shouting and ran hastily downstairs from his bedroom, where she had been tidying up following his rampage through his clothes to give most of them to his new “friends.” When she tried to pacify him—“Mr. Fitzgerald, please be calm”—he screamed all the secrets of my humble beginnings I had told him, believing they would be safe with him. And because he was immediately ashamed of having betrayed me, he turned on the nurse and kicked her violently on the shinbone. She was terrified, believing she now had a madman to contend with, and, giving me a despairing look, fled. I knew Scott too well by this time to be really afraid. He was being “the bad brownie” he told me his mother used to call him when he misbehaved as a boy. But I knew I must be careful. In his frustration he could become dangerous, and while he guarded the kitchen door to prevent my escape, I called the police without giving my name and told them to come at once, and then he let me go. I almost felt sorry for him. He was so helpless and childish, but I was so ragingly angry all I wanted was to leave as quickly as possible, and this time I would never ever see him again. Soon after I left, he told me later, he tried to commit suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills, but he had become so accustomed to them it had merely resulted in a long and necessary sleep.

  I did not see him again until early January 1940, but I continued my College of One. It had become a way of life for me. It was harder doing it alone, but I had long conversations on the books with Eddie Mayer, Irwin Shaw, Benchley, Buff Cobb, and all the clever people I was seeing again.

  When I returned to Scott, it seemed that we had both come of age. We would have almost a year of quiet happiness. There were no more fights, no more swearing, no more drunkenness, although Miss Kroll is sure that, when I went to Dallas in September for the premiere of Gary Cooper’s film The Westerner, Scott took her brother, Morton, with her to Victor’s restaurant in Hollywood, where he downed a whole bottle of wine. She is sure it was 1940, “because afterwards we went back to his apartment in Hollywood, where he drank some Scotch and I was terribly upset because he had been on the wagon so long.” Nineteen-forty was the only time except in the beginning, at the Garden of Allah, that Scott had an apartment in Hollywood. He had left Encino in May 1940; we had decided the heat of another summer in the valley was impossible. “I was worried that it was the start of another drinking period,” Frances told me. According to Frances, there were some other times in 1940 when Scott drank hard liquor. I am not convinced she has her dates right. Dr. Nelson assured me that to his certain knowledge Scott did not drink in the twelve months before he died. Frances, who adored him, believes that he did. At Encino she had been made to put the empty bottles in a burlap bag and drop them over Coldwater Canyon on her drive home. “When he lived in Hollywood, there was no reason for me to drive over the Canyon, so the bottles were put in an ordinary bag and placed with the garbage in front of the apartment house. He was quite alarmed one evening when you accidentally kicked the bag as you were walking to his car. He was also amused and told me he would have liked to share the joke with you.”

  So it could be true that he was drinking in 1940. If he was, he had won a greater victory than I knew. Previously, once he started to drink, he could not stop. It had been like that all his life. A few drinks today, twice as much tomorrow, and on and on until the collapse. Then the drying out period; sober for a few weeks or a few months; then he started again. But except for the night I was away in September, I saw him many hours of every day, and he seemed completely sober. I often wondered whether he would drink again when The Last Tycoon was finished, and I sometimes hoped he would go on writing it forever. But if Frances is right, it wouldn’t have mattered. It is all right to drink if you can stop when you have had enough. Perhaps he was in control of his drinking then because he had no valid reason to get drunk.

  Like Cooper, the “tall mule skinner,” Scott had sailed into a harbor of sorts in this last year of his life. He had come to terms with himself for almost the first time. It was a calm year, a year of stability. He was not trying to impress anyone; he could relate to the normal. Being admired was not as important to him as finishing his novel. He was no longer fighting what he could not change. He still wrote loving letters to Zelda; they continued until the week before his death. But he had lost the unbearable guilt that had caused him to drink so fiercely whenever he visited her. He knew he had not caused her insanity, as her family had accused him of doing. He knew she would never get much better, but it was possible, the doctors told him, that she could in time live quietly with her mother in Alabama. He would always take care of her and always love and pity her, but it was over and the knowledge brought him peace.

  Scottie was doing better at Vassar. She was off probation. He wrote in March 1940: “I was incredibly happy that the cloud had lifted.” He was proud that she had written a play for the college and two short stories for The New Yorker, although he did not want her using her name of Frances Scott Fitzgerald. It was too similar to his own, and he was not ready for a “hungry generation” to tread him down. It was understood that she would not come to Hollywood again until the book was finished. He now realized that he was unable to cope with the problems of being a father except at long distance. His misgivings that Scottie would become a delinquent daughter were disappearing; her letters were proof of her growing maturity. He was ecstatic when she became an enthusiastic Democrat in her sophomore year. “She has made the vital leap to responsibility,” he exulted.

  I had rarely interfered between them except in my role as buffer, but now I told Scott, “You owe it to your talent to stop worrying over Zelda and Scottie. If you want to be among the great writers, you must have more important output. Keats and Shelley died young, but they had written so many wonderful things. You have wasted so much of your life. You have written stories that have embarrassed you. You must give all the time you have left to your writing.” He put some of this in a letter to Scottie: “I wish now I’d never relaxed or looked back, but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: I’ve found my line—from now on, this comes first. This is my immediate duty. Without this I am nothing.” He would, of course, always be concerned about his wife and his daughter, but he did relinquish a great deal of the anxiety.

  As for me, he knew I had accepted the fact that in all probability we would never be able to marry. He was a conventional man at heart, and he would have preferred to make me his wife. Stahr had not planned to marry Kathleen at the beginning of The Last Tycoon, but he was getting more and more in love with her and this had changed the focus of the novel. Shortly before his death Scott wrote to Max Perkins, asking him to return the chapters he had already sent him, as some of the material was no longer valid and he planned considerable changes. I was no longer “punishing him with my silences.” We loved each other, and that was enough for me. If I lived forever, I could never pay my debt to him for the love and education he was giving me. We had enormous respect for each other. What we had together could not be measur
ed by a wedding ring. I was aware of my good fortune. How many women ever have a Scott Fitzgerald? He could never be promiscuous. He idealized women. It was necessary for him to have the woman, and, especially in the last year of his life, I was the woman. If we could not marry, it was a comfort to him that he was doing something extraordinarily valuable for me in our College of One. I’ve heard teachers say, “If I can reach only one of my pupils, I will be satisfied.” Scott reached the whole class.

  He was annoyed with me once or twice in that last year. He had come to my apartment and discovered I was reading Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book. “But this will make you hate reading,” he stormed, grabbing it from my hands. I had to confess that How to Read a Book was hard to read. He was sarcastic when I told him that Lew Ayres, the actor, had told me on the set of Doctor Kildare that he was plowing through “The 100 Great Books” as lately photographed on three shelves by Life magazine. “He won’t learn a thing from them,” my jealous professor assured me. Without telling me, Scott checked his list against theirs: “5 in the first row, 6 in the second, 10 in the third—a total of 21 books.” I found this list later at Princeton labeled: “Progress in 100 Books.”

  He was happier in that last year because of the months working on “Babylon Revisited” and The Last Tycoon. He had given up the idea of wanting to conquer Hollywood. When he had arrived in the summer of 1937, he had been full of dreams that this time he would beat them, he would force them to make films his way. “Movies can be literate as well as commercial,” he was sure. He had a daring idea. “Why can’t the writer also be the director? One man in control from the inception of the film to the finish.” This is quite usual now, but Scott was laughed at when he suggested it in 1937. The system of relays of writers on each film had disillusioned him long before that last year. It was all beyond his control, and what was the use of writing the best he could when the chances were almost certain that someone would rewrite everything he did? With each job, his enthusiasm had diminished.