Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  On December 23, 1889, Millard married the blue-eyed, blond-haired Mary Douglas Toup, eleven years younger than he. Born in October 1866, Mary was the daughter of Sara Jane Kercheval Kennan and Robert A. Toup, both of whose parents were born in Virginia and came to Fleming County, Kentucky, as young adults.89

  Millard and Mary’s third child, John was born at eleven o’clock Sunday morning on October 6, 1895, in his parents’ plain, two-story, white-frame house on Forest Avenue, in Maysville. Blue-eyed and tow-headed, he was christened John Robert after his mother’s father, her brother, and her great-grandfather Kercheval. The least robust of the Marshes’ five children, John was remembered as the child who did not join in outdoor games with other children, but stayed on the sidelines and watched. Also, perhaps because of his frailness, he developed early a reputation for stoicism, independence, and scholarship. His quietness was made more noticeable by the easy gregariousness of his older brother Henry.

  Nicknamed “Little Squire” because he resembled his father, John was the only one of the children who liked to visit his father’s newspaper office. Many of the townspeople even figured that he would grow up to be a newspaperman like his dad.90 Forty-five years later and close to death, John wrote about his memories of the Bulletin one afternoon after he had toured the splendid new offices of the Atlanta Journal. Wondering if the filthy, noisy, bustling old offices did not produce far better newspaper writers than the sophisticated new ones did, he thought about his father’s office and wrote that it was “crowded, cluttered, and dirty enough to produce genius, if my theory is correct. Among my outstanding memories of going there to see Father is the pot of flour paste on his desk, how messy it was and how bad it smelled.”91

  In 1904, after suffering from what appeared to be a mild attack of typhoid fever, from which he seemed to recover, John’s father became very ill on the day after Christmas. In the early morning hours of December 30, he died, apparently of a heart attack, in much the same manner as John would die years later. He died in the same bed and in the same upstairs bedroom where all of his children had been born. He was only forty-nine years old; John, a spindly-legged little boy, was only eight. In Maysville, where Millard had lived all his life, he was admired for his intelligence, modesty, and unselfishness. So many people attended his funeral service at the Christian Church on the bitter-cold Sunday afternoon of January 1, 1905, that some had to stand in the Sunday School room at the rear of the pulpit. In his eulogy, the minister compared him to the biblical character Barnabas, whom Millard apparently tried to emulate, having marked the passages describing Barnabas in his own Bible. The Evening Bulletin announcing his sudden death described him as “a good, kind, gentle, Christian man, generous to a fault and greatly beloved by his colleagues.” Years later, John said that he never forgot the chill he felt in his veins on that cold, windy day as he stood alongside his young mother, brothers, and sisters as they silently watched their loved one’s pine-wood coffin lowered into the hard ground.92

  12

  His father’s death had a profound influence on John. It not only robbed him of a beloved parent and changed his family’s household drastically, but it forced his mother to go to work, and it robbed him of his childhood. Katharine, the oldest child at fourteen, was sent away to a nearby boarding academy for a while, and Henry, the next-oldest at eleven, took various jobs after school to bring in some extra income. Only eight years old, John was given the responsibility of helping his grandmother look after five-year-old Ben Gordon and three-year-old Frances.93 Even though he was just a child himself, he nurtured and protected his siblings as if he were an adult. Unable to remember their father because they were so young when he died, Ben Gordon and Frances grew up thinking of John as their protector. To the end of his life, they went to him for advice. In fact, long after Frances was a grown, married woman with sons of her own, Henry thought that John continued “to baby” her, just as John had done while they were all growing up.94 Years later, Frances hinted at the slight conflicts she occasionally had with Henry when she said: “John always had a feeling for people. My oldest brother always had a career in ballistics and chemistry. He was a scientist. He did not have that feeling for people or understanding of them. And my younger brother loved farm things, and he ended up working in the agricultural department. But John and I were the closest of all the children—we were both interested in people.”95

  As a middle child will often do, John learned to serve as a link between the older and the younger children and between the children and the grownups. His skill at mediation became a hallmark trait that benefited him as an adult. Systematic about everything, when he was around ten years old he adopted what was to become a lifelong habit—keeping meticulous records of nearly everything in his small, neat handwriting. Because of his ability to record and to write, as a teenager he worked placing orders and keeping record books for Miss Anna Frank and her brother George in their retail men’s clothing store on Main Street. They were so fond of him that they helped pay his expenses when he moved to Lexington to attend the University of Kentucky.

  Some people in Maysville credited John’s inner strength and sensitivity to the close relationship he had with his mother during his early illnesses. When he was only three, he came down with scarlet fever. Fearing that the other children would become infected also, his mother sent them to stay with her widowed mother, Sara Jane Kercheval Kennan Toup, who lived in the white house next door with her unmarried sister, Molly Kennan, and Mary’s bachelor brother, Bob. During this separation period while little John, his dad, and his mother were confined to their house, she read to him and played games with him. She also made little puppets out of old socks and rags for each of her children. Every morning and evening, she would stand at the window that faced the house next door and look across the lawn at the window that framed her little loved ones’ faces. Holding her son in one arm and a puppet in the other, she would amuse all the children with her pantomimes.96

  Although John slowly recovered from the fever, he was left extremely thin and frail, with a weakened heart and damaged hearing—conditions that contributed to his lifelong reticence and also made him subject to continual illnesses. Because he was so often sick in bed or convalescing in the house, he turned to books for his entertainment. A little later on, he took to teaching reading and writing to his younger brother and sister.

  13

  With the untimely death of her husband, Mary was left with enormous responsibilities. Never having worked outside her home, she now had to find a way to support herself and her five young children. She also had to look after her aging mother, aunt, and her bachelor brother. For women, opportunities for jobs were limited in those days, and Mary took the first job she was offered. She became a teacher at the First Ward School on West Second Street, down at the far end of Maysville. She had a three-mile walk there and back each day, for although Maysville had a streetcar line, in those days carfare would have been an extravagance for her.97

  Because of her own plight, Mary was sensitive to the suffering of others. Across the street from her school was the January and Woods Cotton Mill. Many of the poor people who worked long hours for a pittance in the mill sent their children to the First Ward School. When Mary realized that nearly every one of these children went all day without having anything to eat, she recruited some volunteer carpenters to build a makeshift kitchen in the basement of the school. Then she organized a group of women to come in every morning to prepare hot meals for the children. This act alone endeared her to many people, and her open and honest affection for children also made her admired and respected. After several years, she was promoted to principal of the Forest Avenue Fifth Ward School, only a short walk from her home.98 She was best remembered as a woman not given to engaging in trivial conversations, complaints, or gossip, and was described as hard-working, soft-spoken, and modest. Dedicated to her family, she never remarried.

  Her belief in God sustained her and made her fearless, optimistic, an
d resilient. She read her Bible daily, and for many years she taught Sunday school classes for young people. She had an indomitable quality—that born fighter’s spirit to keep going on no matter how difficult life got.99

  Remembering her childhood and her mother’s cheerfulness, Frances said later, “I never felt poor. I know people sometimes depress their children, but our mother never did that. She would stay up late at night making and embroidering many dresses for us, and I’d be the prettiest girl at the party. She was that kind of a mother. And she never talked ‘You can’t do this because we haven’t got the money.’ We just knew we didn’t have the money. But we never felt poor.”100

  Eager to foster in her children a love of nature and of books, she taught them all to read before they went to school and to value books as a great source of information. To her credit, all five of her children went on to earn college degrees. When they all were small, she read passages from the Bible to them daily, and she also read Aesop’s fables and other didactic literature. As they grew up, she had them take turns reading aloud from Homer and the Greek tragedians, from Goldsmith, Shakespeare, Gray, Dickens, Austen, and the Brontës.101 She took them to church and to Sunday school every Sunday; and on holidays and birthdays, she took them to visit their father’s grave. She often gathered them together for picnics and long walks, teaching them the names of wildflowers, trees, and birds, and how to note changes in the seasons and weather. For many years, she was Maysville’s official weather observer, an unusual responsibility for a woman in the early 1900s. Her weather reports were published in the local newspaper.102

  Her love for books and music and her reverence for the English language influenced John and Frances; her love for wildlife and nature influenced Henry, Ben Gordon, and Katharine. To all of her children, she passed on her strong sense of independence, loyalty, and responsibility. Despite the loss of their father, the Marsh children grew up loving and being loved, with the warmth and security of a happy childhood. As adults, they remained close to each other.103 Once they began to move away from home, John’s mother started what she called Round Robin letters. She wrote a letter to the oldest child, who in turn wrote a letter and mailed it along with Mrs. Marsh’s to the next child, who would do the same. The “Robins” formed a perpetual network of communication among the family for over two decades—until Mary Marsh’s death in 1950.

  A poignant letter that John wrote to his mother on Thanksgiving Day 1923, when he was twenty-eight years old, indicates that Mary Marsh must have been a remarkable parent. Lonely and sad, missing Peggy, who at that time had left town because she had created more problems for herself, her family, and for him than he thought could ever be solved, he wrote:

  I do have you to be thankful for and there’s no harm in telling. As I get older and see other families and other young people who have grown up in other families, I come more and more to appreciate my own. Looking at it scientifically, and not sentimentally, I can thank you for a home environment which has given me a body that remains healthy in spite of my neglect and abuse and for a mind that is free of so many of the obsessions and unpleasant complexes that so many people acquire in their childhood. I haven’t the bitterness in me that I find in other people because I never experienced neglect or thoughtlessness from you and the unreasoning fears that lurk in the background of so many minds because of forgotten childhood unpleasantness are not lurking in my mind. I appreciate these things and I am thankful for them.

  John had been profoundly influenced in a positive manner by the women in his family. He had grown up watching his mother, grandmother, and aunt struggle to keep their family together. They did it without complaining, blaming, or succumbing to their emotions. He remembered how hard they worked to keep up their homes, doing many of the needed repairs themselves, and how they sewed, gardened, and stored vegetables for the winter. Except for his uncle Bob, a harness maker, and brief memories he had of his grandfather and his father, he had no adult male in his family to learn from. The strong role models in his childhood were all good women, and thus he grew up with a sympathetic understanding of and concern for women. He was sensitive to their needs. Too, he had grown up not only looking after himself but also looking after his younger brother and sister. His natural inclination was to be protective and caring and, of course, that suited Peggy’s dependent personality perfectly.

  CHAPTER

  3

  1912-1921

  REASONABLE AMBITIONS

  Working for Hearst . . . gives greater opportunity for and more encouragement to originality in writing.

  —John Marsh to Henry Marsh,

  22 May 1920

  I feel like a dynamo going to waste. I have possibilities, if energies are just turned in proper channels.

  —Margaret Mitchell to Allen Edee,

  1 August 1920

  1

  IN THE FALL OF 1912, while Peggy was still a chubby adolescent attending Washington Seminary, John moved to Lexington to enroll in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky, where his older brother Henry was already working toward his degree. At that time all residents of Kentucky who met the enrollment requirements were admitted into the university free of tuition.1 But many, like Henry and John, had to work to pay for their books and living expenses.

  Because he was the oldest son, Henry assumed a leadership role with the rest of the children, whom he tried to look after as his father would have wanted him to do. In order for John to room with him and share expenses, Henry moved from Mrs. Frazer’s boarding house, where he had been living, into an apartment on 120 East Maxwell Street, a convenient location halfway between the university and the town. Later, Henry was to say that he saw very little of John except at mealtimes and in the evenings. Once at college, John lost much of his shyness, becoming involved in numerous activities and making many friends. But Henry said later: “We had different sets of friends.” Indicating that John behaved in a typical younger-brother fashion, he added: “He resented help I tried to give and referred to me as his private conscience. We got along all right, but we didn’t have too much to do with one another at school.”2 They never had any classes or campus activities together because John’s studies were in humanities and journalism, while Henry’s were in the sciences.3 During his college years, John courted a classmate, the pretty, red-haired Kitty Mitchell from Bowling Green, Kentucky.4

  He applied for a degree in English, a rigorous program that, at that time, required its majors to read some world literature in its original language. During his freshman year he studied Greek, advanced Latin (concentrating on the study of Livy and Horace), German (which included intensive study of Schiller and modern dramatists), and English composition (which, according to the university bulletin, stressed “accuracy of expression rather than proficiency in style”). He also took physical education and the required military science. His favorite upper-level courses included those in British Romanticism, which focused on Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats; and Victorian Authors, which examined the works of Thackeray, Tennyson, the two Brownings, and Swinburne.5 He studied Shakespeare, the history of the English language, principles of literary criticism, Old English, Middle English, Anglo-Saxon studies, ancient history, and something called “pro-seminary,” a senior course designed to train students in the principles of form and method. It was a required course for all English majors, and the subject of study varied from year to year; John’s class examined the lives and works of Milton and Browning. In addition, he took classes in logic, chemistry, physiology, geology, trigonometry, advanced German, and three courses in journalism. His graduate work included two semesters of advanced composition and two semesters of Principles of English Criticism.

  In addition to his coursework, he participated fully in all the literary and academic clubs. A sign of having reached the pinnacle of social success and intellectual achievement at the University of Kentucky was membership in the Canterbury Club. Only those persons who showed a marked interest
in and talent for story writing, poetry, criticism, and drama were eligible, and no student was admitted who was not unanimously elected. John was a member all four years. He was the associate editor of The Kentuckian, the college yearbook; one of the editors of The Kentucky Kernel, the college newspaper; and a member of the Strollers, a dramatic organization that brought much favorable attention to the university. Also, he belonged to Alpha Delta Sigma, a fraternity for journalists. Although he enjoyed swimming, he was not athletic, nor was he particularly interested in attending athletic events. Because both of his brothers were sports enthusiasts (Ben Gordon played basketball for the University of Kentucky), John went to ball games with them occasionally, but his primary interests were literature and music. Like his mother, he loved the opera.

  2

  Having to support himself, he took a part-time job immediately after he settled in Lexington. He started out as a proofreader for the Lexington Herald, a morning paper; soon he was promoted to reporter. A little later on, he wrote for the Lexington Leader, the evening paper. In those days, the Lexington newspapers started its cub reporters on police beats, for police reporting required the cub to achieve accuracy in securing details, and forced the cub to learn every section of the town and country.6 Back then, newspapers did not highlight news about unsavory characters and deeds as they do now; that kind of information and identification was relegated to columns labeled “Police Report,” and this was John’s beat.

  By covering the police beat, which involved becoming friends with policemen and accompanying them on their night walks and calls, young reporters got to know all the law enforcement people and all the county’s interesting, though shady, underworld figures. And that is how John got to know Belle Brezing, who operated “a gilded mansion for men,” perhaps the “most elegant” and “most orderly of the disorderly houses” in the nation, according to a Time Magazine article noting Belle’s death in 1940. The cub reporters and the policemen covering “the tenderloin section,” so called because of its bribes and handouts, viewed their duty as a choice assignment. Belle’s kitchen always cordially beckoned them in for a delicious meal, quite a treat for a poor college student. In exchange for her culinary offerings, she could depend on the policemen to restore order in case there were fights, or to dispatch drunks, and she could count on the newspapermen to keep silent about certain reports and the names of certain clients.7 It is not unreasonable to think that on many nights young John Marsh sat right alongside a policeman in Belle’s kitchen, enjoyed a fine meal, met many interesting people, and heard many colorful stories—stories that he could not write about in his letters to his mother and sisters. However, he did discuss such matters with his brothers, and later with his wife, who had no knowledge of such places but great curiosity about them.8