Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  Her frequent claims of being just “too weak and too tired” to defend herself against a brutish man are shallow but downright funny. One evening after a dance, she invited her escort into her father’s home to say their goodbyes. Although she rebuffed his advances, she says she was “so tired and weak” that she was “dizzy.” And because she was such “a fwagile li’l fing,” the man lost control of himself, picked her up in his arms, and, she said, “proceeded to caveman me in the old and approved style.”53

  Well, I was so sickened and helpless that I began to cry and begged him to put me down, but he wouldn’t . . . I couldn’t yell because there was no one in the house but Grandma, and she would never have recovered had she entered upon such a scene. I was pretty unnerved by that time, and moreover, I had a particularly feminine curiosity to see what would happen if I did promise [to marry him]. So I said I’d marry him if he would only put me down and not kiss me.54

  To Allen Edee, she clearly exonerated herself in all sexual matters: “Since I left Hamp [Northampton], if ever a man has kissed me or held me in his arms, it has been because he was stronger than I and I had too much pride (or discretion!) to call for aid. Since I left Hamp, no man has been able to penetrate the wall separating superficiality from real feeling.”55 Refusing to take any responsibility for her “carnal sins,” she told him that she had done all she could; she had “drawn a line that men can’t pass except by force.”56 According to her own letters, she had necked with Edee on Sugar Loaf Mountain on several occasions and had had such a good time she missed her curfew, but she reprimanded him for not trusting her or believing her when she told him about how “good” she really was. “I suppose you think I ‘neck’ with every man who takes my fancy. You think that because I liked you and showed that it is impossible for me to pursue successfully my ‘conservative’ career. I’m sorry to disappoint you, honey, but I am doing it—and successfully.”57 Then, just a little later, she wrote Courtenay Ross, “I’m a soulless wretch, and I’m mixed up with five men already.”58

  10

  No matter what she said or wrote about playing fair with men, she often acted thoughtlessly, provoking young men’s interest and then tormenting them with her games of teasing and denying. Behaving in such a way created an imbalance of power in the relationship, giving her the upper hand she needed to feel successful. In 1920, she wrote to Courtenay Ross about going to a fraternity dance with a date who adored her: “I was wearing that ‘lo and behold!’ black evening dress, and I looked better than I ever have. (Pardon conceit, bum, but I did. You see, I gained weight during flu, and black straps look well on good shoulders.)”59 The evening ended with her usual behavior; she righteously defended her honor by saying to her escort: “‘Take your hands off me. I’m not going to marry you. You are too damn sensual.’ Ye gods! I didn’t intend to let that part slip out, for A.B. thinks I am the soul of innocence—and then the fun began!”

  Court, when you’ve liked and trusted a man, it is no pleasant sight to see him lose his head and go wild. It was the evening dress, I guess, and the fact that both straps slipped down at this inopportune time. Anyway, I never had such a hectic time in my life before I got him out. . . . I felt absolutely dirtied up everywhere he touched me. When I at last went up to my room and looked in the mirror, I nearly fainted! One strap had let the dress drop horridly low, giving a wickedly rakish air. My hair was completely down, and I looked for all the world like “Act I, Scene II. Why Girls Leave Home!” I hate men. No, I don’t, there are some decent, clean, self-controlled men.

  Although she dressed beautifully, with her off-the-shoulder gowns, she behaved as if she were annoyed when men “stared lustfully” at her. “Ever know a man who makes you acutely conscious that your dress is too low?” she asked Courtenay. “That’s A.B. I suddenly began to loath [sic] him. I took sidelong glances at him, noting his sensual mouth and closely cropped moustache and meeting his assured, faintly sneering eyes. I hated him. His very nearness made my flesh crawl.”60

  Years after Gone With the Wind was published, Charles E. Wells, a psychiatrist who at that time was associated with the Vanderbilt School of Medicine, wrote an interesting essay on “The Hysterical Personality and the Feminine Character: A Study of Scarlett O’Hara.” Dr. Wells points out that even though “Scarlett sexualized all relationships. . . . it appears likely that she remained sexually frigid throughout her first two marriages, but since she married each of these men with full awareness that she felt no sexual attraction for them, this might be expected. She clearly was not frigid in her sexual relationship with Rhett Butler, her third husband.”61

  Perhaps Peggy was like her Scarlett. Before she fell in love with John, she, too, appears to have enjoyed the adventure of eliciting intimacy more than engaging in physical intimacy itself.62

  11

  In none of her letters in late 1921 does she mention meeting John, but she does mention Red Upshaw, a disreputable, troubled young man who was soon to play an important but brief role in her and John’s life. “I inherited him [from Courtenay Ross] a year and a half ago,” she wrote Allen Edee.63 Not one of her contemporaries could see what she saw in Red, who was described by Helen Turman as “dull and on the gauche side.”64 A college dropout, an alcoholic, and a floater who never held down an honest job or accepted any kind of responsibility, Red had a sociopathic personality that Peggy found strangely attractive. Stephens said that at first none of them, himself included, realized that Red was “dangerously unstable.”65

  Her first date with Red was in the spring of 1920 when he invited her to a Sigma Nu house party at the University of Georgia, where he was a student. Peggy rode the train to Athens to meet him. During this trip, they had a good time until she injured her leg while horseback riding with him and a group of friends.66 After that weekend, they dated frequently until he left Athens for the Annapolis Naval Academy, where he had been readmitted. In June, while he was on his way to Honolulu for the navy’s summer camp, he came to Atlanta to offer her his opal-jeweled Sigma Nu pin. Although she was reluctant to accept it, which indicates that she was not that interested in him at that time, she wrote, “I’m wary of pins entailing obligations,” and she took it on the condition that she could return it when he got home.67 She added, “He objected to this but I was firm. . . . Then I lost the damn thing.” Describing how she ran around to pawn shops frantically looking for a pin to replace the one she had lost, she wrote, “He’s the nicest boy ever and the loss really wouldn’t matter so much to him, but things are so that I can’t tell him.” Apparently, Red did not show up that summer to reclaim his pin or Peggy. She did not hear from him again until the late spring of 1922, after she had struck up a serious romance with John.

  In December 1921, in the midst of all the debutante activities and not long after she had met John and was going to parties with him, she claimed to have cracked some ribs in October, to have rebroken them on Thanksgiving Day, and yet to feel “perfectly all right” physically. “It’s my ‘morale’ that’s the question,” she wrote Edee, describing her black mood. “Just let me get upset or mad or cry or be happy—and bingo! Every muscle seems to go slack and the jolly old pep goes and in the reaction that comes on I’m too exhausted to give a damn. . . . Right now I can step off ten miles and never raise a sweat, but just let Dad begin to fuss at me about something or let me forget and go on one of my old swearing rages and then it’s goodbye for awhile for me! Do you get what I mean?”68

  In this last letter to Edee, she spoke of having two personalities: “Mine was never a tranquil temperament, and to lead a stolid, unemotional existence is no easy task for me!” After she went on some kind of “emotional spree and hated somebody gloriously for a couple hours,” she wrote, “the reaction hits me—it’s like another Margaret coming to the surface. I just don’t care—nothing seems to matter. My reason can plead with my lethargic second self that I’m a damned fool, that I have everything that matters. . . . I have work enough to keep me busy, play enough
to amuse me, and more love than the law ought to allow one girl. And yet, old dear, when the gloom descends, all that isn’t any consolation.”69

  This passage describes her state of mind at the time she met John and as she was dating him. And it helps us understand why she behaved toward him as she did a few months later. Defining her problem herself, she wrote, “I want to love one man and be loved by him above all other women. I want to marry and help my man and raise healthy, honest children. My only trouble is that I can’t love any man enough. I’ve tried—oh, so very hard, but it’s no go.”70

  Oppressed by her domestic responsibilities, sad about her estrangement from her mother’s people, bored with her social obligations, and resentful of always being identified as “Eugene Mitchell’s daughter” or as “Stephens Mitchell’s little sister,” Peggy was restless and unhappy as the fall of 1921 approached. She was not doing anything constructive. She had a date every night and something going on all day, but she was accomplishing nothing. “I feel like a dynamo going to waste,” she wrote Edee. “I have possibilities, if energies are just turned in the proper channels.”71

  CHAPTER

  4

  1922-1924

  A BIZARRE COURTSHIP

  The dramatis personae are Miss Peggy Mitchell, Mr. Red Upshaw, one of her lovers and my room mate, and Mr. Marsh.

  —John Marsh to Frances Marsh,

  27 March 1922

  1

  IN THE BEGINNING OF THEIR FRIENDSHIP, John and Peggy spent many quiet hours together just talking. After parties, they would return to the Mitchell house, where they would sit together on the sofa in the cold front parlor, often talking until dawn.1 Like Scarlett, who knew “she could tell Rhett anything,”2 Peggy knew, early on, that she could tell John anything and he would not make judgments of her. He cared in such a pleasant manner about everything she thought and did that she loved being in his presence. In some ways, he was like an adoring father. Certainly, he was a new breed of admirer for Peggy: self-reliant, intelligent, and understanding. And she marveled at his ability to stay calm during stressful situations. Because she and all her family had such excitable temperaments, she wrote Frances, “I like your family. They don’t get hysterical or emotional.”3

  Unlike her other admirers, he did not put pressure on her to have sex with him. She thought their conversations were stimulating, and she did not behave as coquettishly as she did with others. “John never tried to rape me,” she wrote later. “In fact, he was the only one of my gentlemen friends who didn’t apparently have any dishonorable designs upon me. It used to worry me an awful lot and I wept many tears for fear that I was losing my sex appeal. He confesses at this late date that he desisted only because every one else was doing it and he blandly hoped to shine by contrast.”4

  None of her other suitors valued her in the manner that John did, nor were any of them serious about books or ideas. Not a one of them had his classical education. His knowledge of literature and of other subjects overwhelmed her, and with the responsive curiosity of a bright child who was eager to please, she became his student. Her vocabulary increased and she began to adopt many of his views, particularly his passion for writing with factual and grammatical accuracy.5

  Even though she felt comfortable telling him about her aspirations for literary achievement, she did not let him read any of her manuscripts—at first. But in a short time she grew to trust him and showed him, first, the copybooks that she had filled as a child and kept hidden from everyone except her mother, and then, a little later, her short stories. The fact that she let him read her work indicates her trust in him because not even Stephens, with whom she was close, was ever privy to her writing. Stephens said that she never permitted him to read anything she wrote and that he never read any of Gone With the Wind until it was in typescript.6 The rejection that she had received from the editors to whom she had sent her short stories had devastated her and had made her uneasy about showing them to anyone.7 But John was different. With his education, teaching experience, and background as a reporter, she knew that he was someone who could advise her appropriately. When he praised her work, told her that she had talent, and said that someday she would be famous, she glowed with delight. She began to look to him regularly for approval, which he abundantly provided.

  Their common interest in books and writing gave them much to talk about even though their literary tastes differed. He admired biographies and the classics and preferred nonfiction to fiction.8 She liked popular romances, mysteries, adventure stories, and poetry. “Her taste and style were melodramatic,” wrote Stephens in remembering their childhood. “Action was the big thing for her. And lots of it from the opening lines.”9 Like her father and brother, she regularly read the Atlanta newspapers and the New York Sun; but unlike them, she concentrated on the features section. Until she was grown, she read three youths’ magazines: The Youth’s Companion, Saint Nicholas, and The Chatterbox.10 Her parents had to bribe her, when she was a child, with little monetary rewards to read Shakespeare and some of the other notables. Shortly after she became famous, she confessed:

  Most of my “classical” reading was done before I was twelve, aided by five, ten and fifteen cents a copy bribes from my father and abetted by the hair brush or mother’s number three slipper. She just about beat the hide off me for not reading Tolstoy or Thackeray or Jane Austen but I preferred to be beaten. Since growing up, I’ve tried again to read War and Peace and couldn’t.11

  She thought it was an absurd waste of time struggling to read things that had to be analyzed or explained. Her untutored taste, as she grew up, leaned toward mysteries and verse, which she copied in her scrapbooks, memorized, and recited. Until she went to Smith, her writing, full of dialogue and fast action, was imitative of popular contemporary novels.12

  Early in their relationship, John suggested some books for her to read. But she quickly let him know that she liked to discover books for herself and did not like being told to read something because it was literature. Since one of her attractions, for him, was that she was always herself, he did not try to change her even though he was amused by some of her childish views. Over time, however, John did have an effect on her literary values, primarily by giving her books, reading them aloud with her, and talking to her about them—all activities they enjoyed doing to the end of their life together.13 After dating John steadily for awhile, she became more sensitive about her passion for popular literature. In a letter to Julia Collier Harris on April 28, 1936, Peggy described the literary insecurity she had felt in the early 1920s.

  I used to ride the car to town with your husband quite frequently. And I always had about ten books in my arms. I was dreadfully anxious to impress him with my erudition but it never failed that when he sat down beside me and took a peek at my arm load the titles of my books were The Corpse in Cold Storage, A Scream in the Night, The Clutching Claw. Sometimes I ardently wished I could have swallowed them. When I was laden down with Records of the War of Rebellion (each book weighed three pounds) did he come and sit by me? Never. But just let me have a cargo of mystery murder stories and up he popped and grinned and said “Aha! Ruining your mind again with cheap mysteries.”

  Peggy never left the library with just one book. She always had an armload. She read, not just skimmed, very quickly and throughout most of her adult life, finished a couple of books nearly every day. In addition to light fiction, histories of the South fascinated her. By the time John had met her, she, at twenty-one, had read every book on southern history in the Atlanta Public Library.14

  2

  The flurry of parties and dances did not end with the holidays, and John and Peggy continued to see each other almost daily. Even though she seems to have had many minor illnesses during this period, she did not let her ill health interfere with her hectic social life. Nearly all of her friends were getting married, and she not only attended bridal parties but also hosted many. Her days and nights were packed with bridge luncheons, club meetings, rehea
rsal parties and weddings, teas, and dinner dances. Her life was not like the lives led by the women in John’s family, nor was it the life that he wanted for himself and for her. But he did not complain.

  Within only three months, they had moved into a passionate attachment for each other. “My new Sweetie may be the reason why I haven’t written to you any sooner,” John wrote Frances in late January 1922, “though that isn’t a good reason. It is a fact though that I have spent about as much time with her as the law allows . . . and I have been reveling in the sensation. Peggy and I have reached the stage where we are swapping favorite books and treasured souvenirs of the past having completed the period of exchanging philosophies of life and conversationally turning the pages of family picture albums.”15 Sitting up talking all night until each was “deaf, dumb, and blind!” was her favorite thing to do on dates.16 Unlike many men, who are unable to talk in the sense that most women mean “talk,” John talked—and listened, too. He fulfilled her need for a relationship that centered on something more than sex, although the erotic component of his attachment to her was compelling for him. As he told his brother Henry, it was “clearly a case of love at first sight” for him, but he was too afraid to jeopardize the relationship by forcing his appetites on her. John believed Peggy returned his love, but during all the time that she was seeing him, sharing her innermost secrets, watching him fall deeply in love with her, she was seeing other men.17

  3

  John knew all along that he was just one of the many men who had fallen for Peggy; but because she had led him to believe that she preferred him to all the others, he did not worry—too much. Also, the fact that Stephens and Mr. Mitchell admired him made him feel confident. But his love for Peggy made him vulnerable, especially since he did not want to play romantic games and did not even know how to play them. If she were trying, as she had often done with others, to rile him with her flirtations—trying to elicit jealousy as a sign of his devotion—it did not work. What she did not understand at that time was that in John’s view an excessive display of emotions of any kind was inappropriate behavior and unmanly. Unable to manipulate him as she did the others, she may have resorted to drastic measures to stir up his sense of competition. A few years later in writing to Frances, a more mature Peggy admitted candidly what a tease she had been: