Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  In this same letter, she explained how aware she was of her own changes in attitudes and lifestyle. She philosophized to Henry:

  How have the mighty Fallen! It seems odd that I who loved action so much—who danced all night and rode all day and, of later years, considered the day wasted when I did not grind out thousands of words of “copy” should be content to sit and look at a waving tree! I suppose its the work of the Lord for I’d have to sit any way and it would be Hell if I were restless as of old. Of course, its largely due to John that things are as they are and he lays himself out to be nicer than usual with flowers and books and love making thoroughly improper in a couple married nearly a year.

  During June, Henry came for a brief visit, and then her dearest friend, Augusta Dearborn, visited her again for a week. Her still-single standbys, Peggy Porter and Annie Couper, came over nearly every day. There were wedding parties to attend for her debutante chum, Libby Carroll, whom Peggy described as “one of those alleged wild young women, whose vocabulary is Rabelais out of Chaucer, conduct Scott Fitzgerald . . . and general outlook on life as sentimental as a prostitute.” She wrote Henry, “She is getting married this week to the only boy she ever met who didnt try to feel her leg during the first five minutes of their acquaintance, so, of course, she is a changed woman.”79

  By the time hot, humid August rolled around, things had settled down again. John was spending long hours at the office working on an annual report and their friends were all going on with their own lives. After three months at home alone, Peggy became very bored. Her letters are no longer filled with funny anecdotes or character sketches. “As you gather, I do little else but read,” she told Frances.

  By this time I’ve gotten fed up on fiction. John brings home large armfuls of books from the library and recently we’ve had every thing from Lombroso’s “Female Offenders” to the “Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine.” Also the “Tertium Organum” and Frank Harris’ “Confessions of Oscar Wilde.” Did you ever read the “Organum?” You must, if you haven’t. I must be ignorant, not to have read it long e’er this. Next to Ring Lardner’s “I Gaspari” (“The Upholsterers”) it is the most humorous (?) reference book on witch craft written in recent years.80

  Because she was in a sour mood, she was not too happy when she learned that Mrs. Marsh and her young granddaughter Mary were coming to visit for a week in mid-August. For their guests, John rented an apartment nearby so that Peggy would not have to entertain them the entire day while he was at work. Even though her foot was in a cast, however, Peggy nobly insisted on giving them a grand sightseeing tour one afternoon. She borrowed her father’s automobile and drove them, slowly and carefully, all around Atlanta. Because her mother’s family still treated her as if she were a disgrace, she was surprised to find John’s mother sympathetic and understanding. Unlike Grandmother Stephens, Mrs. Marsh never interfered with the lives of her children or their spouses. Also, Mrs. Marsh was never one to acknowledge her own illnesses, and she was appalled at the number of physical problems her young daughter-in-law professed to have. She enjoyed hearing about the novel her daughter-in-law had begun, and, thinking what a healthy distraction such work was for Peggy during her confinement, she encouraged her to work hard to finish it.81

  Never one to offer to babysit with any of her friends’ infants, Peggy cared little about having children around. But about John’s niece, she told Frances, “Mary is certainly a well brought up child and I must hang laurels on your mother who not only has a way with her own children but even with her grandchildren. Mary seems to have none of the more heinous sins of childhood—interrupting, begging, whining, tattling and lying.”82

  After their visit, Peggy was exhausted and wanted no more guests for a while. When Frances wrote about coming to Atlanta, Peggy advised her to postpone the visit, not because she did not want to see her sister-in-law but because her nerves were frayed and her ankle was too sore. On August 23, she wrote,

  My disposition wears so thin that I even quarrelled with Aggie Dearborn and Peggy Porter—unheard of happenings and then John would become frightened lest I lure you South just when you were in your most loving and helpful mood, and sink my fangs in the fleshy part of your leg. And then you’d butt me over the head with a portable typewriter and go North to inform the family that I had an ingrowing disposition. Just at present I’m about as pleasant to live with as a porcupine or a snapping turtle.83

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  The letters Peggy wrote during the spring and summer of 1926 indicate that she was moody and cranky and that all she wanted to do was escape into fiction by reading, not by writing. She no longer mentioned working on her book. Instead, she talked about reading every new book that came out. She told Frances she liked Louis Bromfield’s Annie Spragg and thought it seemed to be Norman Douglas out of Thornton Wilder. “Some day,” she wrote, “I intend to commit the crime of visiting Italy and coming home and writing a story about the Younger Generation, instead of an expatriate colony of quaint and curious folks who have no connection with each other except the tenuous thread which is dragged in by the author.”84 She also liked Donn Byrne’s Destiny Bay, “tho how in hell a north of Ireland man, Orange to the bone can write like a south of Ireland man is more than I can understand. As we are a family of long lived and long memoried folk, the battle of the Boyne seems no further in the past than Gettysburg and just as vivid. So naturally my ire rose occasionally at the casual references to the walloping my ancestors got for their genius at always picking the losing side.”85

  Although she was having trouble writing her novel about the adventures of Pansy, she had clear ideas about what constituted a good one. She despised “silly Englishwomen fiction writers . . . with their sappy characters . . . always having babies.” She wrote Frances, “I’ve almost decided to lay off English fiction entirely.” When Frances sent her the new novel Three Kingdoms, Peggy answered promptly, saying, “I reserve my thanks to you for likening me to Laurence Storm until I read it and if she is an ass who has no hot water in her house and a lot of children I’ll make a special trip to Wilmington to brain you.”86 Her main objection was that no matter how wealthy or royal the English characters were, they were all too passive; and no matter how ancient and ancestral their manors were, they were all too gloomy and without household conveniences, like electric lights and indoor plumbing. Having strong views now about sex and marriage and an acute aversion toward the idea of childbirth, she added, “Worse luck, in an English novel, when a girl gets an ‘offer’ no matter how spavined and broken winded the offerer may be, she considers it very seriously and frequently marries him. It is depressing to read about places where men aren’t cheap and where they dont know their proper place and dont ever send girls orchids and daily specials even if they are wild about them.”87

  Even though all her married friends either had babies or were expecting babies, she said repeatedly that she wanted none. After reading Silvia Thompson’s Hounds of Spring, she told Frances she was “SO disappointed” because the character had

  the usual baby. . . . English births are depressing. . . . They seem to be unattended by such refinements as scopalomine or ether and the husbands stand around the delivery room and mutter about cricket. Yes, I’ve said “depressing” six times so far. . . . And evidently birth control hasn’t penetrated to England because the little garments always appear in the chapter directly following the wedding. I’m sure any manufacturer of well known birth control contrivances could start on a shoe string in England and clean up more than a realtor in Florida.

  The lack of hot-blooded romance between the characters was another thing that rankled her. She raved on,

  And English girls seem to be for ever marrying strong, silent, bird witted creatures about whose mental interiors they know nothing. And after fifteen or twenty years it is borne upon them that they know absolutely nothing about their husbands beyond the fact that he says “Hah” when he’s rarely pleased. And English heroines seem to put u
p with so much more crap from their hubbies with out any back talk what so ever. An English husband says severely, “My deah, your conduct isn’t cricket” and wife crawls off and dies instead of gulping a whiskey neat and roaring “Who gives a dam if it isn’t, you S.O.B.?” Yes, I’ve found most of the English novels depressing.88

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  The depression Peggy experienced during her confinement was not new to her.89 As she had done before, she wondered why she, who had so many good things that “many a girl has sold her soul to get,” was not happy. That old feeling of being “a dynamo going to waste” plagued her.90 Her life had changed drastically and its very serenity was unsettling. In this letter, dated Saturday, August 28, 1926, she wrote Frances:

  Alas, all my wild little friends—who kicked the world in the teeth, were carried out of gentlemen’s apartments feet first and considered underwear as unimportant as good manners. They are all falling in love with “nice boys,” stopping drinking and smoking and hanging their legs out of taxi cab windows. Some of them are even wearing bloomers. And they are all as dull and stupid and hopelessly uninteresting and sentimental as prominent club women. I don’t know how I’m going to be amused in the future if they all get pure. . . . At any rate, I resent their reformations because, as I’m pretty much tied to the house, I need their sprightly and unregenerate narratives of how they spent preceding evenings to lighten the burden of my enforced retirement. Peggy Porter is my only hope. I don’t think she’ll ever reform, thank the Lord, for her wildness is mental instead of physical. I suppose J and I unwittingly led the way to respectability. In days gone by, I always prided myself that I had never come home till there was nowhere else to go—and come home under my own power and prided myself, too, on the fact I’d never settle down. And now, the Lord has fixed it for me and settled me. Neither John nor I, for various physical reasons, will ever be able to drink—that is, unless we are fools. And I will never be able to dance any more—or John stay up very late, as he needs all the sleep possible to keep him trim for his job. And we haven’t any money to play poker or shoot craps, at least not enough to make either game interesting. And I haven’t enough clothes to risk any of them playing strip. And any way strip is almost as old fashioned as fuzzy bobs. So, perforce, we’ve become respectable, willynilly. And these wild young things, seeing us happy and loving and penniless and respectable, think it must be wonderful. It’s horrible to think that perhaps you’ve influenced young people into such a life. Instead of talking of their interesting shortcomings and their hangovers, they talk of things obstetrical, pink bed room furniture and how their Beloveds said that their love was pure and holy. I guess this is a moral universe after all and respectability is the punishment of the wild.

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  Now that reading was her chief diversion, Peggy read two or three books in a day, and John had difficulty keeping her supplied with reading material. On his way home from work every evening, he would stop by the library and, trying to remember what she had already read, get more books to take home. When he could not find any new mysteries or fiction, he brought home books on anthropology—her recent interest. The next morning he would lug back to the library the books she had devoured the day before, along with those he had to return because she had already read them. Because he rode the streetcar, this book exchange was an inconvenience, but he, the obliging husband, attended to it daily for months. He also borrowed from friends and urged Frances and Henry to keep sending Peggy books.

  John kept telling her that the supply of reading material was going to give out and that instead of reading so much, she should write a book herself.91 But telling her that was all he had done. He had not had the time to sit with her and talk about ideas. The Power Company had doubled in size since he had begun working for it, now employing some five thousand people, so he was busier than ever.92 Peggy felt neglected and perhaps even unconsciously envious because he enjoyed his work. The job of enlarging his department threw such a heavy load on him that he wrote his mother, “I have heebie jeebies more or less regularly, but I never tackled a job that was more interesting. I feel like I have the biggest opportunity in my entire career and I am trying to make the most of it. I have already gotten another small raise, and I am hoping to get a Club membership out of the Company.”93

  His letters to his family became less frequent during this period, but the few he wrote continue to show his absorption in his work and his grave concern about Peggy’s depressed spirits and illnesses. At a loss as to how to help her feel better, he became convinced at one point that she wanted to take some college courses that year, but that their poverty and her sore ankle kept her from doing so. He told his sister, “The fact that she didn’t get to finish her college work at Smith has always been one of Peggy’s secret sorrows, and I hope I can assist her in getting a college course some day.” Sounding like a father, he added, “If our financial condition and her ankle show any improvement by the end of the first of next year, I may start her out at Oglethorpe at the beginning of the second semester.”94 Her talk about going to college was just that—talk; it was an indication that she was searching for something that would give her an identity, a sense of herself, a feeling of self-esteem. Now that she was no longer immersed in her job at the Journal, her sense of identity was dissolving.

  As early as October 1926, John had taken a part-time job at night, “picking up a little extra money,” he wrote his mother, “to keep the Marsh family in food and lodging and to keep our doctors supplied with closed cars.” He had hoped to have some extra money for Christmas presents that year, but with all their doctors’ bills, his financial condition looked grim. He wrote his mother that “the family wolf had become somewhat gaunt, what with the shortness of his rations, and I decided it was time to do something about it.” He accepted an offer to assist the publicity man for the Atlanta Community Chest in preparing his newspaper stories for the annual campaign, a job that would last only a month. “I put in two or three hours a night down there, and as it pays $30 a week, it is considerable help. I wish it was to last indefinitely.” When that job played out, he picked up another as a freelance publicity agent.

  No one was to send them Christmas presents again this year. “It will make our poverty more unpleasant to have you send us presents when we can’t reciprocate . . . financially we are even worse off than a year ago. Last year we had only debts, and this year we have both debts and expenses, so that we have to live on a basis of the strictest economy, with no margin for anything that isn’t absolutely necessary.”95

  All during that summer and fall, he once again tried to cut down on his cigarette smoking. Trying to reduce his “daily quota of sixty cigarettes,” he said he “frequently wondered if it wouldn’t be better to go on and have tuberculosis of the throat or something instead of insanity, which seems to be threatening at times when I would rather have a cigarette than almost anything else in the world.” Without the nicotine he said he did not maintain his normally high level of tension, was more relaxed and “let down and stupid and sleepy when the evening comes. So much so that I have been afraid on numerous occasions of losing the love and affection of my small wife, who is a human being and is naturally likely to become bored with a husband who nods over his paper within half an hour after supper is over.”96

  Thinking that a new hairdo would cheer her up, John suggested to Peggy that she get her hair bobbed in the popular new style. “If John had his way,” she wrote Frances, “I wouldnt have a hair over an inch long as he likes it slicked down boyish.” Proud of her obstinacy, she explained, “Never have bobbed because every one thought I’d be the first to do it. Never really wanted one till now and I’m not so rabid about it at present.” The only advantage she saw to getting her hair cut was the time it would save her in the morning getting dressed. About her appearance, she added: “One thing that doesnt both [sic] me about our poverty—if I had million dollar clothes, I’d still look like a hat rack because I have to wear high laced shoes on accoun
t of my ankle and no matter what I wear it looks awful. I’m the modestest girl in five states—high shoes, long hair, horn rimmed specs and long skirts!”97

  Actually, as Peggy matured she became more beautiful, and at twenty-six she was lovelier than she had ever been. Her complexion was flawless, her hair was darker and thicker, and her greenish-blue eyes still had that old power to mesmerize. The only difference—and that difference made her even more beautiful—was that her dreamy, lazy moods, her oppressive quietness, and her lassitude gave her countenance an aura of mystery.

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  Leaving his office in the evening, John would go directly to his second job and work another two or three hours. Not seeing him from early in the morning until late at night, Peggy found the days long and lonely. She always waited up for him, no matter how he late he was, and because she hated being alone in the dark, every light in the apartment would be on when he arrived. But one evening in the fall of 1926, John came home to find their apartment dark and Peggy lying on the couch weeping. As he gathered her into his arms, she explained that her cast was bothering her, but he sensed the trouble was more than that. “Well, let’s just take that goddamn thing off!” he said as he went into the kitchen and returned with a hammer and a screwdriver. With dramatic chipping motions, he made her laugh and cry as he broke the cast off.98

  That night was a turning point in their lives. John’s moment of epiphany came when Peggy told him that she had heard that day that Frances Newman’s novel was going to be published before Christmas. Looking at her intently and listening carefully, John came to the realization that his wife’s problem was not her ankle, nor anything else physical. It was something spiritual.