I don't think that would have happened to Fitzgerald had I met him on the autodidact trail. I met Hemingway there and fell in love with him. But did I love wisely or just too well? Would a little class discussion have made me understand why I loved? Would a dialogue have broadened me? Hopelessly Arrogant

One word answers those questions for me, but how do I say it without appearing hopelessly arrogant (there is nothing more embarrassing than appearing as one actually is)? The word is no. Though loving too well may be dangerous when it comes to people, it's hardly a risk in terms of literature. I have felt (and this applies to literature and people) that understanding exactly why we love may take something away from the love.

During my final years of high school, it was a frantic race for me to try to meet the great characters of literature before school could introduce them to me. It was perhaps my greatest pleasure that I got to ''Anna Karenina'' first. And though I didn't take notes on it and wasn't tested on it and didn't discuss it with anyone else, I was still overwhelmed as I read it with the feeling that more of life was being captured on these pages than I'd ever seen captured before. And I think it was the absence of notes and tests and discussions that enabled this much larger feeling to come over me.

If one is longing for a discussion of ideas or other opinions, classmates and teachers are not the only ones who can fill that need. A great many minds from a great many centuries had a great deal to say about almost everything ever written. If Shakespeare is getting on one's nerves, one has only to look to Shaw for company.

But that exchange must be made through the written word, and though the idea of a spoken dialogue has been held in rather lofty estimation since the Greeks got it going, I'm afraid I have one last stand against it. In the American classroom of today, where grades and result take precedence over learning and process, how much of the dialogue that goes on is a true exchange of ideas and how much is saying what one thinks the teacher wants to hear so that just in case one fails the test, the teacher will remember one always participated in the discussion?

The reason I was so concerned about literature (and its proper reception) is that it was my ambition to create a little literature of my own eventually -which was another reason I didn't think college was the place for me. My parents are both professional writers. My father, Oliver Hailey, is a playwright, and my mother, Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey, is a novelist. The only ''B'' my father, an A student, ever received in college was in playwriting. My mother received a ''C'' in her only college creative-writing class and was told by the professor, who was new to the college, that he would have flunked her but he hated to flunk anyone his first year. I felt it was better to be an autodidact as a writer as well as a reader.

I have accused school of enough for the moment. Now it is time for some of the accusations most frequently hurled at the autodidact:

''I see you've mentioned names like Thackeray and Hemingway, but what about Wellington, Washington and Mao? Or Newton, Curie and Edison? Or Euclid? Or language? Or art? What about those subjects, autodidact?''