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W. C. Fields
but he also struggled manfully with the most bilious of the English romanticists. Fields remarked to a friend that he was "probably one of the few people outside an institution who can outline the various plots of Silas Marner" In his avidness to learn he remembered everything. Producers at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who had forcibly restrained him from juggling in David Copper field, were amazed to learn, during a subsequent illness of Fields, that, while delirious, he had quoted Micawber's speeches by the page.
A synthesis of Fields' declarations about his schooling places the length of his attendance at about four years. The figure may be a little high. One of his relatives believes that he turned up for school one Monday in the autumn of his sixth year but that he lasted till only around noon. He never went back, the relative says. There were indications that he found the classroom cramped and the teacher's manner inadequate. Fields once told an actor that he had taught himself to read, but he added that he had also gone to school for four years. Then he eyed the man belligerently, determined to let him make what he could of the muddle. Another of Fields' relatives says that his first scholastic stint did, in truth, last one day but that he returned, from time to time, for further tries. Everyone agrees that, despite his father's unsatisfactory pronunciation, he preferred a life with turnips and beets to the regimentation of school.
One afternoon when he was nine, Fields sneaked into the gallery of a vaudeville house and watched a performance of the Byrne Brothers, jugglers. He was electrified. He ran home and, with several lemons and oranges lifted from the cart, set up shop in the stable. Juggling, he found, was a perverse enterprise. "By the time I could keep two objects going, I'd ruined forty dollars' worth of fruit," he told a friend later. Fields' homework with the fruit opened new vistas of discord between him and his father. Their mutual disapproval ripened fast. Dukinfield would crouch
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