Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  Prior to and during the time Peggy wrote for the Magazine, the Journal had a cadre of good writers who all went on to make names for themselves: Erskine Caldwell, Don Marquis, Laurence Stallings, Ward Morehouse, Ward Greene, Grantland Rice, Morris Markey, Roark Bradford, W. B. Seabrook, and O. B. Keeler, who wrote a biography of the golfer Bobby Jones. Also, there were Frances Newman, who stunned Atlanta in 1926 with her novel The Hard-Boiled Virgin; and Medora Field Perkerson, who wrote two successful mystery novels, one of which was made into a film. Medora’s best-known book was White Columns of Georgia. It was about the state’s antebellum homes and was reprinted several times.45 As Peggy boasted to a friend in 1938, “We sho’ Gawd got a flourishing crop of authors in Georgia now! Not long ago we could only point to Frances Newman and then hastily brag about Uncle Remus. But Now! It looks to me like Georgia’s got another money crop and it’s writers.”46 Not a one of those writers achieved the success that Margaret Mitchell did.

  5

  In early March 1923, when a remorseful Red returned to Atlanta, John greeted him with tension and a sense of doom. Just as he had feared, Red tried to woo Peggy back to him. John was distraught. When she allowed Red to move back into the house with her, her father was so upset he became ill, and John began to suffer physically, too. The strain of having to repress his feelings for Peggy once again made him look older and tired. And although he never talked about his feelings, he had the look of a man who was holding hurt deep inside himself. That look made him seem even more vulnerable.

  In June, he wrote his mother that he was thinking about taking “a cheap and sensible vacation” that he thought would be “wonderful for his health and his disposition.”47 He wanted “a week of unadulterated loafing in the Georgia mountains” because he felt “the need of getting away from people and getting out into the open spaces.” But such a trip was not possible, as he explained in his next letter just a month later:

  I suppose I may as well tell you the unpleasant news now as later on. . . . Peggy is planning to get a divorce. The thing has been on the way for some weeks and the actual break came two weeks ago.

  The thing has been quite wearing on everybody concerned, especially the three of us. . . . My position has been a very difficult one, as you can understand . . . with both of them calling on me constantly, it wasn’t possible for me to cut loose from them entirely, as I wanted to do many times. It would have saved me a lot of worry, perhaps. On the other hand, my “soothing influence” may have been a factor in preventing a more tragic break.48

  Although he could not tell his family what he meant by “preventing a more tragic break,” he meant that statement literally. Red had become so unstable that he could not control his anger and began to abuse Peggy physically. After each of these encounters, he would run away for a while, and then return, begging her to forgive him. At that time, she weighed less than ninety pounds and was defenseless against such a muscular man, well over six feet tall. The first time John saw Peggy’s arm and face swollen and bruised from a beating Red had given her, he was devastated.49

  In her divorce testimony before a jury the following July, she stated that Red had beaten her with his fist so brutally on July 10, 1923, that she required medical attention. On one occasion, he jerked and shook her against a bed, causing her to be bruised all over her body. During another argument a few days later, she testified that he hit her in the eye, causing it to swell and remain closed for several days. At yet another time, he pounded her arm with his fist so hard that her arm became swollen, discolored, and painful.50

  In a strange sense, Peggy bore these bruises proudly, for they were outward signs—proof—that she had indeed tried to sustain her marriage and that the divorce was not her fault. In those days when battered wives were not topics of public discussion, John did not feel comfortable writing to his family about the abuse Peggy had suffered. In his June letter to his mother he wrote only, “Living in an atmosphere of this kind as I have since the first of the year has not been the most pleasant thing one could imagine.” The fact that he mentioned Peggy’s problems at all indicated his need to confide in someone.

  Not only did the Mitchells want to keep secret Red’s physical abuse of Peggy, but they also tried to hide what John called “the last straw.”

  Red’s love of adventure and excitement and his desire to clean up some easy money caused him to embark on a career of “rum-running.” He had been running whiskey into Atlanta from the Georgia mountains for about a week before Peggy found out about it, telling her he was traveling for his company. I was the only one who knew about it, and I wasn’t able to dissuade him he is such a headstrong character when he gets one of his wild ideas in his head.

  The same day Peggy told Red that she could not stand his conduct any longer, the professional bootlegger he was working with double-crossed him and got away with two hundred dollars, his entire capital stock. At that point, Red finally agreed with her that the only hope for either of them was a divorce. As John said, “If they had tried to stick it out together it would have been ruinous for both of them, the ruin possibly taking a tragic form.”51

  On November 14, 1923, she filed for divorce, the first divorce in either the Mitchell or the Fitzgerald family. The staunch Catholics on her mother’s side considered this divorce a public mortal sin. Thoughts of the disappointment her mother would have felt tormented Peggy. No more flippant attitudes from her now; she yearned for approval and protection. The pain she had caused her family, herself, and John by marrying Red enabled her a few years later to write about Scarlett’s being haunted by the thought of her mother’s disappointment in her. Scarlett says to Rhett,

  “Mother was—Oh Rhett, for the first time I’m glad she’s dead, so she can’t see me. She didn’t raise me to be mean. She was so kind to everybody, so good. She’d rather I’d have starved than done this. And I so wanted to be just like her in every way and I’m not like her one bit. I hadn’t thought of that—there’s been so much else to think about—but I wanted to be like her. I didn’t want to be like Pa. I loved him but he was—so—so thoughtless.”52

  Peggy could only write this passage once she had realized her own propensity to thoughtlessness and had experienced the damage it caused herself and others. As she grew to have a better understanding of herself, she was able to transfer her disapproval of her own behavior to Scarlett.

  After her novel became a success, Peggy received letters from psychiatrists praising her for developing such a fascinating study of “a partial psychopath”—Scarlett. In thanking Dr. Hervey Cleckley, a psychiatrist in Augusta, Georgia, for his opinions about Scarlett, whom he described as “a very convincing figure” who had an “inward hollowness and a serious lack of insight,” Peggy wrote: “Such words, coming from a doctor like you, are very flattering to me. Perhaps most authors would not take it kindly that a psychiatrist spoke of one of their characters as a ‘partial-psychopath,’ but I feel distinctly pleased.” She went on to say,

  I have thought it looked bad for the moral and mental attitude of a nation that the nation could applaud and take to its heart a woman who conducted herself in such manner. I have been bewildered and amused, too, when my book has been attacked because I pictured in detail a “passionate and wanton woman.” I thought it would be obvious to anyone that Scarlett was a frigid woman, loving attention and adulation for their own sake but having little or no comprehension of actual deep feelings and no reactions to the love and the attention of others.

  6

  Unable to eat or sleep, Peggy went into a deep depression. On Thanksgiving Day, 1923, John described her condition in a poignant letter to his mother:

  Peggy finally cracked under the strain and had to stop work. The unpleasant experiences she has had the past year wore her down until she was ordered by her physician to knock off and rest for a while. She was rather sick for a while, very close to a nervous breakdown, but she got better and is now in Florida enjoying the warm weather and sunshine. She plans t
o travel for a while and may go on to Cuba. If she does, she has promised to call on Kitty.

  Enclosing some money to help his mother with her Christmas shopping, he apologized for not being able to send more, saying that he was disappointed in collecting some money that he had earned outside office hours. “My remittances are coming in very slowly,” he wrote, but confidentially explained to Henry later that he had given what little he had to Peggy.

  Sad and lonesome, he had dinner alone at the Winecoff Hotel Restaurant, his favorite downtown eating place, where the waitresses, “all middle-aged white women,” thoughtfully looked after him without “unpleasant familiarity.” His meal reminded him of the ones his mother prepared on Thanksgiving when he was a child, and so he wrote his mother:

  I am writing to tell you that I am thankful that I was permitted to be born into your family and for having had a few very happy years as an immediate and actively-participating member of that family, and also for turkey that was cooked just right as a memory I can look back on and be thankful for when the turkey I eat in restaurants and hotels is merely turkey and not an annual event that one looks forward to for days and looks backward to for years.

  Peggy returned to Atlanta from Florida just before Christmas of 1923, and much to everyone’s disappointment she started seeing Red again. For a while it looked as if they were going to get back together. In retrospect, Francesca explained: “She just was not a stable person. It was not that she loved Red or even believed that their marriage would work out eventually. It was that she wanted the world to know that she had tried to save her marriage, that the divorce, which was scandalous in those days, was the last resort. I think she was just trying to make everything look right though she may not have even understood that then. But she kept John torn-up all that time.”54 As before, John handled his pain the only way he knew how—by leaving Atlanta again. After working only eight months at the Journal, he moved to Washington, D.C., to work for the Associated Press. On December 15, 1923, just before he left Atlanta, he wrote to Frances, who was appalled at his switching jobs again. Knowing that she and his mother would be upset with him, he tried to sound as if he were moving to D.C. to advance his career. Faking a jovial mood, he asked her:

  Are you pleased with my becoming an A.P. man? And with my getting all this varied experience? My experience when I have been with the A.P. for a while will fit me to take almost any sort of newspaper job that comes my way. I have been eligible to a city editorship for some time, and when I have added the A.P. experience I will feel qualified for a managing editorship some where.

  Because all of John’s rapid job changes during the years prior to his marriage to Peggy correspond to changes in his relationship with her, there can be no doubt that his move to D.C. was an escape from the pain of seeing Peggy back with Red. At least, that’s what his mother, Frances, and the rest of his family believed.

  In this same letter, dated December 15, he explained that Peggy was back in Atlanta but only to visit her father, brother, and him. Embarrassed and depressed, she thought she could never again live in Atlanta, where she believed she had “ruined” her reputation. Even though she still had a claim on her job and her leave of absence was about to expire, he wrote that he had the “idea that she is going to be compelled to give up the work altogether.” Her mental state must have been gravely impaired at that time because John was never one to exaggerate about anything. He was desperately unhappy during this period because it looked as if he had lost her forever, either eventually to Red or to something else he could not control.

  He explained that she had left Atlanta “with very indefinite plans and a vague idea of going to Cuba,” but had only gotten as far as Daytona, Florida, where she had gotten off the train because she was feeling too bad to go any further. She had stayed there a week and gone on to Miami for two weeks, then come home. Her visit to Miami, he said, “did her lots of good and convinced her that her only hope of getting back her health and strength is to get in a warm climate and stay there six months or a year.” He added, “She is back now, chiefly for the purpose of getting things in shape and working out some plan.” According to a later letter John sent his mother, Peggy never went to Cuba. She never cut herself away from him entirely for very long.

  His letters to his family during this terrible period in his and Peggy’s lives show that she wrote him and called him regularly. She continually poured out her unhappiness to him, refusing to let him get on with his own life and constantly keeping him mixed in her turmoil. She told his brother Henry that John was the only person who loved her “without any if’s, and’s, or but’s.” Once he had moved to Washington, she realized how dependent upon him she had become, and she could not bear his being away from her. She wrote to him often.

  Meanwhile, Mrs. Marsh was having a difficult time understanding her son’s relationship with this married woman, whose behavior she did not approve. Just a month before Peggy was to testify for the first time before a jury deciding her divorce, John wrote his mother,

  I am leading a very retired life these days. I have decided this is the first time in my life when I am permitted to be a gentleman of leisure and I propose to enjoy it. Sleeping until noon and loafing all afternoon has a certain attraction to it, even if one has to work all night in order to make up for it. For the first time in my life also, I am not the least worried by the fact that I know no one here and talk to no one except the men at the office. I don’t seem the least worried about it, and I have actually enjoyed doing nothing but stay at home in the afternoons, reading part of the time, writing occasionally, and sleeping frequently. I sleep until noon and take a nap from three o’clock to five, which ought to be ideal for a lazy man. You see, I have never been lazy, though most of my life ineffectual. I am now striving to become lazy, in the hope that it will be excellent for my shattered nerves and my emaciated physique. I can’t see that I have become any more fatter, though the nerves are better as evidenced by the fact that one day I didn’t smoke but 25 cigarettes.55

  A day or so after writing that letter, he decided to visit his mother, who was now living with Henry and his young daughter Mary in Wilmington, Delaware. Making a valiant effort to be cheerful, he told his mother, “I’m coming a running with my head stuck out in front for some of your strawberry shortcake. I haven’t tasted any in the past two thousand years made the way you can make it.” But he wanted Frances not to make plans for him to go to any dances because “when evening comes I shall probably be too tired to wish to have the responsibility of being interesting to a strange girl. . . . Dances are something I always preferred to train for, and I shall have to start this one tired.” He wanted his mother and sister to know that his plans could change abruptly because he might have to return to Atlanta on short notice. Speaking paternalistically of Peggy and Red, he explained:

  My two children have been going round and round again the past two or three weeks and they have about reached the stage where they either cut each other’s throats or peaceably agree never to see each other again. If things don’t clear up right quick, I may be compelled to make a brief trip to Atlanta to straighten them out. I don’t expect it, and I don’t care to make the trip as I would have only a few hours there, but it may be necessary.56

  John went to Delaware the following weekend. On this visit, he talked more freely to his family than he felt comfortable doing in a letter. He told them about Red’s emotional and physical abuse of Peggy, and what it was doing to all three of them. After listening to him and seeing him so sad, thin, and pale, his mother and sister became even more worried; it was plain to them then that he was so emotionally involved with this woman, who seemed bent on destroying him, that his physical and emotional state was being injured. They tried to reason with him and urged him to break away entirely from Peggy before it was too late. But Mrs. Marsh and Frances knew that their advice had fallen on deaf ears. After he returned to Washington, they decided to visit him there in a few days. But, on June 22, just a
week after Peggy appeared before the jury, he sent his mother an unusually brief but polite letter clearly discouraging her and Frances from making their trip to Washington. What had happened was that Peggy had unexpectedly come to spend the weekend with him. During this visit she told him that she loved him and wanted to be with him always.57

  7

  John stayed in Washington until the end of August, when it was clear to him at last that Peggy had made a clean break with Red, and then he returned to Atlanta. Upon his arrival, he went straight to the Georgia Railway and Power Company and asked for his old job back.58 Then he went to the Mitchells’ house where he found Peggy looking frail, but happy to see him. Although she was much improved, he wrote that she was still not as strong as she should have been and her nerves still were not in the best condition. He wrote his mother, “Apparently she has escaped the internal injuries I was afraid of and should get better steadily.”59

  His mother and sisters did not know what to think about John’s obsession for this young woman who treated him so badly. Peggy was not the kind of girl Mrs. Marsh had expected her son to love and to marry; yet he so obviously adored her.60 They simply could not understand his behavior or Peggy’s.