Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  8

  If Scarlett’s favorite method of repression was procrastination, Peggy’s may well have been illness. When her whole life is spread out like a cloth, a pattern of illnesses emerges. These illnesses appear whenever she felt the pressure of having to meet deadlines or experienced a period of tranquility. Her life had to be filled up, or she suffered from boredom. Hers was never “a tranquil temperament,” and as she had admitted earlier, “to lead a stolid, unemotional existence is no easy task for me!”56 All during John’s nearly five-month ordeal before their marriage, she managed remarkably well. She held down her job, ran the house for her father, dealt with hospital staff and physicians, and cared for John. That kind of tumultuous experience gave her an exhilarating, emotional edge; it was boredom she could not tolerate.

  Just as soon as their married life settled down, John became healthier and happier than he had ever been. He adored his wife and loved his job. But he was busy making a living for them and was not as available to her as he had once been. As Peggy’s letters during 1926 show, her health did not improve in view of her happiness in her new married life and protective environment. Once locked into a tranquil routine, she began to complain, first to Henry, but then to the others in John’s family.

  In early spring 1926, she wrote Henry about not having had anything to eat in eight days except lettuce, tea, dry toast, and a few strips of bacon. She spoke of having nothing but “an increased feeling of irritability and lassitude,” which she blamed on her ankle. “My ankle . . . went bad again for no apparent reason, swelled up and all of that. It was really serious because it was supposed to be well and a recurrence in a spot where you’ve got arthritis isnt so good. The doc slipped me the pleasant news that I’d probably get a permanently stiff ankle out of it and set about finding what caused it all.” She had the notion that something within her system was poisoning her ankle.

  Teeth tonsils etc have been played with and finally they tracked the trouble to my digestion. Said I’d been injudicious in my diet which is a polite way of telling me that I ate two pounds of rare beef a day and nothing else but lettuce. Also, my gin drinkers liver showed up although my life has been comparatively pure during the last year. Any way, my digestion is poisoning my system and ankle is getting it all. So I’m not eating any thing at all these days . . . I feel so light its a wonder I stay on the ground.57

  In April, she had her tonsils removed, following what she claimed was the advice of her specialist, who thought her “dreadful” tonsils were the source of the infection in her ankle.58 “Don’t you let any one ever tell you,” she wrote Frances, “that its ‘a slight operation, no pain at all and you’re up in three days.’ It’s been ten days now and I am just getting to where I can eat and still can’t swallow with out pain.” Almost sounding like a crank, she complained, “Appendicitis was nothing compared with it. I’m waiting patiently to see if it will have any effect on my foot. Seems that I have to watch diet, teeth, tonsils, sinuses, etc. to make sure there’s no poison being put out by any of them and if I still don’t improve, I guess they’ll have to operate on my foot.” She continued,

  I’m on crutches and haven’t touched the floor in three weeks except on the one glorious day the doc told me he might have to fuse two ankle joints together and make it solid for life. I felt somewhat depressed, came home, bought a quart of rye, and took three drinks, threw away my crutches and getting a taxi went calling on all my friends. I had a lovely five hours. I didn’t even know I had a bad foot until I sobered up when John came home and he, poor angel, kindly sat up all night rubbing the blamed thing.59

  Although her ankle was the chief source of her discomfort, it was only one of her many disabilities. If her numerous letters mentioning her many ailments are any indication of the frequency of her speaking about them, we can assume that she talked often about “feeling po’ly.”60 Any man less understanding than John would have been annoyed with such complaints. However, he was so patient and understanding that he may even have reinforced her behavior. She indicated her need for his sympathetic understanding when she thanked his sister for sending her a novel by Storm Jameson.

  I sat up all of one night to read it. The only thing I couldnt understand about it all was Laurence’s relations with her husband for she obviously didn’t love him nor he her. She had no conception of passion nor he of consideration. I can’t imagine anything more distasteful than living with a man who became bored every time you had a pain—but I thank you for comparing me to her—even if I havent her singleness of purpose or her courage.61

  9

  Baffled by her mysterious ankle problem, the specialist who had treated Peggy for several weeks with no success ordered her to stay at home and rest—just the prescription that she wanted. Around the middle of April, she took her second sick leave. Having barely started work on a novel a year or so earlier, she wrote her mother-in-law: “One good thing that this rest will do me—I can do some work on my much neglected novel which has gathered dust for the last year during John and Dad’s death beds [sic] and my getting settled down here. The doctor said I’d be out of work three months in all and I ought to be able to write three novels in that time.”62

  However, settling down to writing was more difficult to do than she had imagined, and she ended up spending more time reading popular fiction than writing. In a letter thanking Frances for sending her books, Peggy shows the kind of light reading material she was consuming: “And have you read ‘Microbe Hunters?’ We liked it so much. And I know, being an ex-young intellectual, that I shouldn’t have liked ‘Show Boat’ but I read it in the magazine installments with my tongue hanging out.”63

  No longer the compulsive writer she had been as a child, she now saw nothing magical or pleasurable about writing. Over and over again she talked about how hard writing was for her. It seems that the more she learned about writing, the more defeated she felt. The more works by good writers she read, the more reluctant she was to write. Years later, in a letter to her friend Clifford Dowdey, also a writer, she explained how she suffered from reading good novels while she was developing her own.

  I am singularly a prey to a disease known in this family as “the humbles.” Everybody’s stuff looks better than mine and a depressing humility falls upon me whenever I read stuff that I wish I could have written. Temporarily the humbles kept me from doing any writing at all.64

  All the reading that she had done for her series on the Civil War generals and for her own pleasure made her feel so intimidated that writing became impossible for her. Even though John praised her work, his high standards for writing had made her more aware of her inadequacies or, at least, what she considered her inadequacies. As an editor, he described himself as “a master flawfinder and a picayunish-emphasizer,” but as his own writing demostrates, he was much more than a mere grammarian.65

  In addition to copyediting her work, John also helped Peggy to formulate her ideas and consistently gave her moral support.66 When she paused in a sentence, he could finish it, and she would say to him, “Yes, that’s what I mean.”67 In her letters and conversations, particularly after she became famous, she said repeatedly that if John had not prodded her to write, she would have been content not to write. In the following passage from a letter to Frances, probably written sometime in late 1925 or early 1926, she shows how John not only prodded her to write but also collaborated with her:

  Among other literary things we’ve been trying to do is a one act skit, to be used by New Wayburn, who is producing the Junior League Follies. Even if he buys it and gives us $500 a piece in hot or cold cash, it won’t be worth the agony I’ve gone thru on the matter. Its all Johns fault, of course, I’d never have taken the matter if he hadn’t insisted.

  The producer of the follies called her one day saying that they needed a skit and asking her to write it. She seemed like the ideal person to do the work because she covered the follies every year for the Magazine even though she had never made the League. Peggy told F
rances,

  And I said, no-can-do, immediately. A while later, I recounted to John my refusal and with out further ado, he called up and told them that Miss Mitchell would be overjoyed (i here quote his exact words) to write the skit and would have it in two days. Since then life has not been worth living. I’d rather die than to have to hand stuff in at a certain set time. Of course, I didn’t have any idea of what to write and neither did John.

  A compulsive worker, John made his point clear.

  He said he wasnt going to see me get fat and lazy and turn down work I could do for no other reason than that I didnt have the energy to do it. So between us we wrote it and its every bit as wretched as it sounds. John is going to take it around to Wayburn this afternoon. I havent the heart to be with John when the axe falls and he’s told its awful. John has such beautiful hopes about my eventually proving a genius. How such hopes persist after we’ve been married so long is beyond my comprehension.68

  After they attended the follies, she added this postscript: “The Junior League Follies was a flop from start to finish. All wet if ever I saw a wet play.”

  10

  By this time Peggy had finished “’Ropa Carmagin,” the novel she had worked on with John while he was convalescing from his attack of hiccoughs and gallbladder surgery, and she had started working on a Jazz Age novel about the adventures of a teenager named Pansy. However, during the remainder of her leave, instead of working on her manuscript, she wrote long letters to Henry, to Frances, and to Mrs. Marsh. Now that John was so wrapped up in his work, the immediate response and approval these letters brought her was more satisfying than ever. Because she had never succeeded in selling any of her short stories, she found letter writing a much more congenial expression of her creativity than trying to attract publishers with her short stories. She adorned many of her letters with character sketches and scenes like this charming vignette she composed in a letter to Mrs. Marsh.

  Madam, I take pleasure in announcing to you that your versatile and talented son has added fried chicken to his other culinary successes. Here to fore, he has contented himself with broiled steak and lamb chops but last night he got his blood up and did the best fried chicken I ever put in my mouth. Usually his cooking has been superintended by me by screaming directions from the bed to the kitchen such as “No, don’t put milk in the okra—put it in the corn! Stir the tomatoe cream soup over a slow fire and pour the cream in gently so it won’t curdle!”

  But yesterday, I was trying out the new crutches which he has just bestowed on me and so I hopped into the kitchen to aid in the slaughter. Frankly, I had never fried a chicken in my life and I don’t recall ever having seen one so cooked but I never believed in removing ones halo of omniscience before ones beloved, so I gave firm instructions about dismembering the fowl and rolling it in flour. I had an awful horror for fear it was meal you rolled the dinged thing in but stuck firmly to flour because it had been my first guess. I hopped nimbly out of the kitchen and back to bed before the actual cooking could begin so that my skirts should be free of the blame should catastrophe over take the unfortunate chicken—also free of spattering grease for John innocently stood on one side of the kitchen and hurled a drumstick into the pan of boiling grease, thereby causing a red hot shower that made him understand what the Christian martyrs went thru with boiling oil. But the chicken was noble and we were so immodestly proud of it that John is thinking of trying his hand at French pastries and layer cake.69

  Clearly, she enjoyed the attention she received from her husband, who pampered her, not only cooking their meals but also carrying her around the apartment in his arms or on his back to keep her from using her crutches.70 She wrote Mrs. Marsh:

  If it hadn’t been for John being John, I could never had endured this enforced rest with the slightest degree of cheerfulness. I should have chewed his ear off and wept on his neck whenever he came home at night. But he’s such a good egg that its not so bad being laid up. I have felt very badly about putting extra work on him—the work of getting supper—for he’s been working so very hard recently. We have been having record breaking heat—one day last week was the hottest in fifty years and there have been two men out at Johns office. That throws more work on him. He dont seem to gain weight but he doesnt lose any and I think if this terrible heat will only stop and another satisfactory man be secured for the office, he’ll get fat. He ought to. He compliments his own cooking by eating prodigiously. It does me good to see it for for so many years he used to feed delicately off a lettuce leaf and a clear soup whenever we went out together.71

  11

  All through the early part of 1926, Peggy continually complained of “feeling fluey” or of having bronchitis, earaches, toothaches, infected sinuses, sore arms, sore breasts, sore eyes, sore shoulders, and long menstrual periods with painful cramps. These complaints may have been a manifestation of her depression, a plea for help or attention. With her life the envy of most of her friends, how could she openly admit she was depressed? Too occupied with problems at work, John did not recognize her state of mind; he just knew she whined a lot. In jest, he wrote Frances, “By now, Peggy has had everything except housemaid’s knees and childbed fever.”72

  Raised with servants, Peggy had a keen aversion to housekeeping. No matter how messy the apartment got, or how dirty the ashtrays were, she never lifted her hand to tidy anything up. Eventually John grew weary of always coming home to find their apartment in a mess, and of having to cook their supper and shop for their groceries. So, in the spring of 1926 he hired old Lula Tolbert as their part-time housekeeper and cook. Knowing how Peggy despised doing domestic work, he realized that sore ankle or no sore ankle, she was never going to keep house, certainly not the way his mother and grandmother had done, and there was no point in ever expecting her to do so.73 Carrie Mitchell had been doing John’s laundry for years, picking it up and delivering it at his apartment once a week, and after he married, she continued to do his and Peggy’s laundry. Despite his financial bind, he considered Carrie and Lula necessities, not extravagances. But after a short time, Lula died, and Annie, a childhood nurse of Peggy’s, took her place. Eventually her father sent Bessie Berry Jordon, his housekeeper and cook, around to the Marshes’ apartment to help out. A loyal and devoted friend, Bessie remained with them for the rest of their lives.

  In early spring 1926, in a letter to Frances, who by now had also decided to give up her newspaper job in Wilmington, Delaware, Peggy wrote, “I am of the opinion that I am through with my job at the Journal. . . . I have no business doing it. We need the money so badly—and this last doctor I’ve had on my foot is the most famous joint specialist on the east side of the Mississippi.”74 This physician told Peggy that she would eventually have to have surgery on the ankle, but until then she needed to keep her foot elevated and in a cast. His orders—“Give that ankle a rest and let’s see if it doesn’t improve!”—gave Peggy, at last, an authentic reason to quit her job. And she did quit. She received her last paycheck on May 3, 1926.75 Confined to the apartment, hobbling around on crutches, she now had little else to do but read, write letters, and visit with Peggy Porter and Annie Couper, the only close friends she had who were still single. They stopped by the apartment nearly every afternoon. But she soon noted that even they had changed, and she became bored with their visits.

  She may have felt some guilt, at first, about not working. But she brushed it aside quickly, particularly after she got angry with Angus Perkerson, probably because he did not want to pay her while she was taking her sick leave. She wrote Frances:

  I considered that Mr. Perk did me a dirty deal, while I was on sick [leave] and not being able to talk, I sent John down to tell him to shove my job up his—well, the place reserved for such things. Perk is a lousy little beast and I’ve gotten so tired working for him. How ever, he sent his wife Medora, out to patch up things and ask me to do Elizabeth Bennet while I was here at home. I don’t know if I will. Lizzie is due tomorrow and I haven’t writt
en a line. I may keep up Lizzie for a while and then let it go but I dont think I’ll go back on the mag. Unless the economic pressure becomes too hard to stand. For one thing, if I quit the dam job then I wont have any thing pulling me back to work and I’ll stay at home long enough to get my ankle well—instead of going back, half cured, because we need the money so dam bad. When I do get well, if I ever do, then I suppose there’ll be time enough to look for another job. I suppose I’ll land one on the “Georgian” tho I dont care for a Hearst paper. And then, again, I’m not so confident on writing for deadlines. I’ve always had a fair amount of time to turn out copy and deadlines rather frighten me. How ever, John wants me to stop work until I’m well, even if we starve and Steve and Father do, too. So I probably will. Dad, of course, wants to lend us some Jack, says he’ll leave it to us when he dies, any way. But I think we’ll try to buck through with out any borrowing for a while. As long as John keeps healthy, I’m not very bothered.76

  12

  Although she wanted to appear tough and independent, Peggy had the classic demanding-dependent personality, and John fitted her needs perfectly. Just a year before she met him, she had thought, “How nice it would be to just lie in someone’s arms like a child, cuddled close against their shoulder, every aching muscle relaxed, every keyed-up nerve loosened, no worry, no responsibility—only peace—to drift and drift.”77 Now that she had that someone to look after her, she had no responsibilities or worries. And, at first, she was happy. She wrote Henry:

  I have never been so happy since I got good sense. I’ve quit work (except for my rent paying colyum) and am freed of the nerve wracking tread mill and the slave driving editor which have been my lot for four years. I regret to say that my main occupation consists of sitting in a bright blue wicker chair, pillowed with scarlet cushions and looking out thru blue ruffled curtains at a tall lombardy poplar that quivers incessantly. I just set and don’t even think. I aimlessly make lace pillows out of scraps and when the girls pile in every afternoon, Annie (my child hood nurse who is now cooking for us) serves tea.78