Copyright © 2015 by Wendy W. Fairey
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fairey, Wendy W.
Bookmarked : reading my way from Hollywood to Brooklyn / Wendy W. Fairey.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-62872-537-7 (hardback)
1. English fiction--19th century--History and criticism. 2. English fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Fairey, Wendy W. 4. Books and reading—Psychological aspects. 5. Fictitious characters—Psychological aspects. 6. Fellowship. 7. Inspiration. 8. Self-actualization (Psychology) 9. English teachers—United States—Biography. 10. College teachers—United States—Biography. I. Title.
PR861.F24 2015
823’.809--dc23
2014041618
Jacket design by Lynne Yeamans
Cover photo: Thinkstock
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62872-553-7
Printed in the United States of America
For Mary Edith
Contents
From Orphan to Immigrant
David Copperfield
Jane Eyre and Becky Sharp
Daniel Deronda
Isabel Archer and Tess of the d’Urbervilles
The Odd Women and Howards End
To the Lighthouse
A Passage to India and Beyond
Postscripts
Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion
Acknowledgments
From Orphan to Immigrant
Whenever I teach The Great Gatsby, as I have so many times in my forty years in the college classroom, I always wonder if I will tell the students my story. It’s my mother’s story, really. But it’s mine, too, the story of a personal link to the book’s author that tinges every professional comment I make about themes and narrative voice and structure and the other facets of fiction that English professors train their students to look for. I care about all these, to be sure, but I have an intensely private as well as professional understanding of the novel at hand. Or rather, the private and professional strands are so intertwined that I can’t really say where one ends and the other begins. In class I present them as separate. I tell the personal story when I’ve proven to myself that I don’t have to, when I feel we have satisfactorily “covered” the “material,” as we call it, with professorial dispassion and dispatch. Perhaps the revelation comes in an impulsive moment of warmth for the group of young people before me—I want to be closer to them, to give them something they might find special. Or perhaps there’s been a little sag in classroom energy and I turn to the story to reinvigorate us.
“Here’s a personal connection that may interest you. My mother actually knew F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was in the last years of his life in Hollywood.”
I see mild interest in their faces.
“She was involved with him,” I say. A variant of this, if the group seems more sophisticated, perhaps a class of graduate students, might be: “She was his lover.”
Interest at this point increases, usually mixed with a bit of understandable anxiety that an aging female professor, talking about her mother’s lover, has become unpredictable.
“Yes, they were together for three-and-a-half years. He died in her living room—stood up and dropped dead of a heart attack. A few days before Christmas 1940.”
Now I’ve made it vivid.
“But what interests me the most,” I say, “is that he devised for her an education. The F. Scott Fitzgerald College of One. It was an entire college curriculum—with history and art and music, and even a little economics. But above all poetry and the novel. Dickens. Thackeray. Henry James. We had the books from the College of One in our library when I was a child. Those were the books I read growing up.”
My private relation to F. Scott Fitzgerald is that he bought the books for my mother that I have loved all my life, the books, it’s fair to say, that turned me into a professor of English literature. I loved the volumes in the College of One inside and out—their bindings, their pages, their print, their stories—and I lived in them more fully than I can remember living in the world around me. Thus, my F. Scott Fitzgerald story is less that he was my mother’s lover before I was born, dying dramatically in her living room, releasing her to go forth and be with other men and become my mother, than that he shaped my life’s reading by having bought her those books. Long before I even knew of her connection to him, they lined the shelves along opposite walls of our den, there for me to take down and carry upstairs to my bedroom and immerse myself in stories that transported me to other times and places. The palm trees and eucalyptus of dusky Southern California gave way to the imagined bustle of Thackeray’s London or the green landscape of David Copperfield’s Suffolk downs. And as soon as I finished one book, perhaps Tom Jones or Bleak House, I would ask my mother to recommend another, thus building the shadow world that I would live in, have lived in all my life.
So reading and teaching The Great Gatsby entails for me, always, not only the themes of the great American novel with its tragic dreamer hero, believing in the wrong dreams, but also the subtext of my mother’s relationship with Fitzgerald, my mother herself looming as a kind of female Gatsby, a woman who emerged from a Jewish orphanage and made herself up as Sheilah Graham, London chorus girl and Hollywood columnist, suppressing her Jewishness and her early poverty, believing anything was possible, and awesome in the energy of her self-creation, to which she proved faithful to the end. And I
