306
PARTISAN REVIEW
what has happened in life are buried beneath the most irritating narra–
tive style ever invented. Everything in the book is reduced to an event
coming at Miss Graham from the outside; her own part in it gets
squeezed into a few handy mass-magazine fonnulas ("This was wonder–
ful. This was the answer to everything" or "Even now, I wonder, who
looked after me?") -so that the reader is left begging for a little relief
from the specter of those wide-open baby-blue eyes. Nevertheless, merely
from Sheilah Graham's story itself, and from the reconstruction all its
flatly-told facts makes inevitable, one can understand something of what
must have been, what must be, the quality of this remarkable woman.
There is, for instance, the fact that at each crucial moment of her life
some man was waiting, and always just the man needed, to give her
the protection and the training for the next audacious push of her am–
bition-the acme of which, I suppose, was reached in a proposal of
marriage from the Marquess of Donegall, who has one of the oldest
peerages in Britain. She was pretty; she was absolutely devoted to the
climb; but these are somehow not enough to account for her astonishing
career. Beyond them what she clearly had was grace, some midas touch
of the personality. However, what makes her most remarkable of all is
that, with her gift of grace and given her lower-class romance about the
rich and her totally expedient morality, she did not stop with the British
aristocracy, the Marquess of Donegall, her fantasy of having children
called the Earl of Belfast and the Lady Wendy of Chichester. She went
on to an American newspaper career and to Fitzgerald. She never makes
clear what prompted her to this last seemingly unaccountable step. She
says she went to America looking for "love," but love is something no
more easily to be found in New York than in London, and her street
sense must have told her so even if her romantic literary ego no longer
does. She describes a very unpretty scene between Randolph Churchill
and Charlie Chaplin at a posh London restaurant in which Churchill
was overbearing and arrogant and Chaplin was obsequious, and talks
of her own shock at discovering that even genius must bow to the blood.
Years earlier, as a hungry young girl strolling down Piccadilly night after
night, money and titles had seemed the best the world could offer. But
when she got access to them, she wanted something better, something
by whose terms Charlie Chaplin did not have to be patronized nor she
to be a liar. And when she met Fitzgerald in Hollywood, she was able
to decide almost immediately that he was what she wanted. She had
never known anyone like Fitzgerald-writers and literary intellectuals
during her brief stay in New York had intimidated her-but her infalli-
