9
For nearly three years, P. S. Arkwright, Georgia Power’s president, had patiently contended with Kelly Starr’s drinking problem and had tried to help Starr—likeable and capable, when sober—get his life straightened out. Arkwright knew well that John was keeping the publicity department afloat—that John was not only doing his own work but also all of Starr’s and was doing it extremely well, without the appropriate recompense or recognition. And that worried him, for he admired John greatly. In the spring of 1930, while Arkwright was making a speech at one of the dams that the Georgia Power Company was just completing in northeast Georgia, Starr arrived noticeably late and drunk. When Starr created an embarrassing situation for his employer by asking him what he meant by a certain statement in his speech, Arkwright astonished everyone present when he fired Starr right on the spot.37
On May 9, 1930, Arkwright announced John’s promotion to manager of the public relations department, one of the most important posts of its kind in the utility field. He called John “one of the ablest and youngest of the men engaged in this particular form of activity.”38
In his new executive position, John had to travel more often, and he had to maintain a good relationship with reporters and editors all over the state, and also in the bordering states. Because they had many friends and acquaintances in the press, he and Peggy had been going to the annual Georgia Press Institute conferences ever since the first one was held in Macon in August 1928.39 It was at that first convention that Peggy met Susan Myrick, the blond, husky-voiced farm editor of the Macon Telegraph and later the associate editor of that same paper.40 Having much in common, the two women established a friendship that, nine years later, became valuable and fascinating to both of them. So for personal and for business reasons, the Marshes looked forward to these meetings. Peggy wrote, “Usually the Meet, held in the smallest towns in Georgia and during the hottest weather is a pleasant, somnolent affair, fish fries alternating with barbecues and, by night, editors and editresses sitting on beds, drinking corn and discussing job printing and the future of literature.”41
In September 1931, just after they had returned from attending one of these gatherings of Georgia editors, John acknowledged his wife’s contribution to his career. In a letter to Frances, he wrote:
Being a power trust propagandist, it is part of my job to attend such gatherings, and the Company likewise pays Peggy’s expenses for such trips, as she is a genuinely valuable helpmate on such occasions and has helped me in the ensnarement of several editors who might have been difficult if I had gone at them singlehanded. (Don’t let this confession fall into the hands of the Federal Trade Commission.)42
Mary Singleton, who worked in the print shop at Georgia Power at that time, described John as “no glad-hander or back-slapper.” Mary said, “He just could not mingle in a crowd, as Peggy could. With her ability to draw people to her and to be entertaining, she made an ideal corporate wife.”43 Her attendance was so vital to the success of these social gatherings that it got to the point where it really did not matter whether John, Joe Kling, or any other representative from Georgia Power was there at all. On occasions when he got tangled in business and could not attend, John asked Joe Kling to escort Peggy to the conferences to help Joe handle the press relations.44 Kling said he felt superfluous with Peggy there.
These annual meetings were scheduled in different towns every summer, and visiting various places gave Peggy and John a chance to study different black dialects and southern colloquialisms. It also gave her ideas and raw material for her novel. For instance, in 1931, the conference met in Dalton, which is in the extreme northwest corner of the state, just a short distance from Tennessee and in the heart of the mountains. The town, completely surrounded by mountains, is in a valley with an altitude nearly three hundred feet less than that of Atlanta. That summer was a sweltering one, and nowhere was the heat felt more keenly than in Dalton. Hardly able to sleep because of the heat the entire time they were there, Peggy used her feelings of discomfort to imagine how the Confederate soldiers felt during their campaign there.45 After they returned home, John wrote his mother:
The most interesting detail of the convention was a trip to Chattanooga, thirty-five miles away, which included a tour of Chicamauga Park, Fort Oglethorpe and Lookout Mountain. The view from the latter was one of the most impressive I have ever seen. . . . Neither of us had ever been there and that tour, and the entire trip, was especially interesting because it was the scene of big events in the Civil War—and in Peggy’s novel.
The line extending northwest through Dalton to Chattanooga, at the southeast corner of Tennessee, was the line of Sherman’s march on Atlanta. The railroad connecting the two places, Atlanta and Chattanooga, was one of the most important lines of communication for the Confederacy, and Sherman’s advance was down this railroad line, a series of engagements being fought at various points through which we passed, as the Southern forces dropped back. Of course, his objective was Atlanta, and when he finally captured it, the South was doomed. Just seeing the places had its usual historical interest and seeing it in the heat of summer gave us a keen sympathy for the men who battled over the section and dragged cannons up the sides of those mountains in July and August.
Suggesting that he had read the entire manuscript as it was at that stage, he added, “One of the most interesting sections in Peggy’s book tells of the approach of the northern army down the railroad line to Atlanta and the first awakenings of fear that the Confederacy might eventually be defeated, as the army fought and dropped back at Dalton, Resaca, Big Shanty, and then Kennesaw Mountain, which put them within 20 miles of Atlanta.”46
After John began providing more and more details about the book, his mother wrote asking him if he realized that he had a great Civil War general in his family. Did he know, she asked, that his great-great-aunt Louisa Kennan was married to General A. P. Hill? In his response John wrote,
I don’t know when I have been more embarrassed. . . . Peggy is threatening to turn me out without a shilling and my only reply is that in our family we had so many Confederate generals, I just couldn’t keep track of all of them. Besides that, he meant more to us as Uncle Powell than as the great A. P. Hill, friend of Lee. (However, if we have any more family skeletons of this bright and shining character in our closets, please let me know about them right away. I may be able to handle the situation this time, but if it should come out on me later that Lee, Stonewall Jackson, or Albert Sidney Johnston was my grandpappy, and me unaware of it, I would never be able to appear in public again.)47
Three days later, Peggy wrote to her mother-in-law saying she had jokingly told John earlier it would matter little how great either of them ever became because they had no Confederate general in their background. Now they had one!
And every body who has any pretensions to being anybody in Georgia has a General just the same as they have bath tubs. I have always admired General Hill so much, since childhood when I heard that he always wore red flannel shirts on the battle field to give the Yankees a better target. And one of the family stories was that of my Grandfather Mitchell, who told how General Hill saved the day at Sharpsburg by riding his men on commandeered flat cars for seventy miles and then marching them at a run sixteen miles and reinforcing Lee just at sun down when the battle was apparently lost. So when the business of “Uncle Powell” was made apparent in your letter, I . . . told John that I was filing for a divorce on the ground of concealment of a Confederate General. I asked Father if that would be legal grounds and he, the cagy lawyer, said that he knew of one case where a woman in Georgia got a divorce because her husband had concealed from her, at the time of their marriage that he was a Republican . . . and that he would look up my case and let me know. However, he said, John was very culpable. Now my life is complete. I shall refer to Uncle Powell anytime any granddaughter of Gordon and Cobb throws her weight about.48
10
In 1931, Atlanta and its neighboring towns suffe
red the most prolonged drought since 1845. The resulting water shortage severely limited the output of the hydroelectric generating stations and forced the Georgia Power Company to buy power from other companies and to produce whatever it could by fuel generation. Georgia Power also had its first serious labor dispute when its electrical workers walked off their jobs in March 1931, in an effort to force Allied Engineers, a utility construction company doing some work for Georgia Power, to sign a union contract. Much public disfavor and ill will resulted from the strike, and a campaign was launched for municipal ownership of Atlanta’s utilities. This effort stirred up a fury with citizens for a while and then faded out of sight when it was pointed out that if the city went into the utility business, it would lose about three hundred thousand dollars a year in taxes paid by Georgia Power. As a result of the strike, the city adopted an ordinance stopping Georgia Power from operating one-man streetcars in downtown Atlanta on the grounds that they created traffic jams and were a hazard. This ordinance was a setback for John, and so was the publicity about the strikers. As the public relations executive, he had to woo the public’s favor all over again.49
This was a difficult period for John. As the economic depression deepened in the 1930s, its effects crept over the population, and Georgia Power also suffered. Thousands of good people lost their jobs through no fault of their own; their employers could not afford to keep them. Concerned about how he was going to keep all of his staff (about thirty people), John would remind them, in his staff meetings, of the hard times and the uncertainty of their jobs. The result was that he depressed everybody’s spirits, thus accomplishing the opposite effect of what he intended. Sadly and reluctantly, he had to let some of his good workers go. Consequently, the morale at work was low, and this bothered him.50 Like many other conservatives, he and Peggy had believed that if people would only be honest and persevere, work hard, and save, they could overcome any obstacles. But now, they were beginning to wonder if individual initiative was all that it took to succeed.
During this difficult time, Peggy spent much of her time nursing her father through illnesses and John, too, had to be hospitalized twice for his ulcer. She was still not well herself and was often confined to bed with back pain as a result of helping her father. She also complained about her eyes; she thought she had strained them from reading so many illegible old records, letters, and faded newsprint.
In spite of the Depression, John received another salary increase in 1932, indicating his value to the company and making him feel that his job was secure for as long as he wanted to keep it. He was finally able to pay all their old medical debts; buy Peggy a new car, a green four-door Chevrolet; move them into a better apartment; and increase the allotment he had been regularly sending his mother.
11
John told Medora Field Perkerson in an interview for the Atlanta Journal’s Sunday Magazine in December 1949 that Peggy had written the greater part of her novel “between 1926 and 1930 . . . but it was not a completed book.”51 He said,
Substantially the story was there in a lot of rough manuscript in so-called chapters, each in a big manila envelope. In these envelopes, along with the original version of a chapter, were many re-writes and notes. I say so-called chapters because, for example, one of the envelopes that she labeled “Road to Tara” contained material which later became four or five chapters of the book. All these many envelopes were stacked on the floor by the typewriter. Notes were scribbled on the outsides and as time went on the envelopes got pretty grubby looking.
The book had no title and the heroine’s name was still Pansy. However, the story of the heroine was fairly well developed now, and even though the narrative had many gaps, the creative job was practically over. John went on to tell Medora,
From 1930 to 1935 she worked on the book only now and then. She had reached the point where most of the creative job was done and there was nothing more to do except the drudgery of turning a rough manuscript into a finished one. If you think you have something good and intend to offer it to a publisher, you don’t mind this hard work, but if you don’t intend even to offer it, why bother?
As a specific example of what remained to be done, he referred to the chapter that summarizes the Reconstruction in Georgia and said that finishing this chapter “meant a lot of research had to be done and then boiled down. Why should she go to all that trouble when she probably would never send the manuscript to an editor?” As John’s remarks to Medora reveal, Peggy had no intention of submitting her book for publication. Her novel was intended only for her and John’s entertainment.
Except for chapters 2 and 3, which John had neatly typed on white paper, most of what she had was poorly typed on yellow paper and amply marked in pencil in her and John’s handwriting. Because she did not work from the front of the story to the end, but wrote the ending first and then worked her way frontward in a haphazard fashion, many of the chapters were not numbered. Because she did not work steadily, she sometimes forgot what she had written earlier and produced additional versions of the same scene. Some sections of the manuscript were over six years old and soiled and torn in places. Some pages were crumpled because they had been thrown away and then retrieved. The large yellow envelopes into which literally thousands of pages had been crammed were in as poor shape as their contents.
Years later, Peggy said that the only times John ever got angry with her were the times she threatened to throw that “old stuff” away.52 However, if she had been serious about throwing the manuscript away she would have done so by the fall of 1932 when they moved into a larger, much nicer apartment, one of the Russell Apartments, at 4 East 17th Street. But she did not throw any of it away.
Unlike their place on Crescent Avenue, this new apartment had large windows, letting in lots of light. And it had heat. “In La Dump,” John wrote his mother, “we battened down all the windows in early fall and never opened them again until spring, preferring foul air to permitting any of our little supply of heat to escape. Here we are forced to throw open all of the windows at least once a day.”53 Peggy painted the dining room in her favorite color, watermelon pink; the living room, apple green; and all the woodwork, white. She used cream-colored lace curtains at the windows and bought an exquisite oriental rug for the living room floor. She wallpapered the bedroom and the bathroom in a floral pattern of bright pinks, creams, and greens.54 From her father’s house, she brought some lovely old pieces that dated to before the Civil War and had somehow survived it. She had some fine Victorian furniture from her Stephens grandparents’ farmhouse, including a walnut wash stand with a marble top. Peggy was particularly fond of this piece and placed it in her living room. This apartment also had a special feature—a glassed-in porch, called a sun parlor in those days. It was furnished with white wicker furniture with colorful cushions in greens, yellows, and pinks. They used this porch, which was about eleven feet by twelve, as their office for the book work, thus keeping their formal living room and dining room neat.
Once settled in her pretty new home, Peggy turned the housekeeping over to Bessie and went right back to her fantasy world of Tara and its inhabitants, whom she loved, particularly the one whom she later sympathetically called “my poor Scarlett.”55 Soon, her new writing area was as untidy as the old one had been. On the floor next to her little typing table, the stack of envelopes containing the manuscript kept growing fuller and taller.
A letter from John to his mother in early December 1932 refers to Peggy’s trouble with her eyes, and it shows that he was still working on the novel too, despite his demanding work schedule.
Right now I am writing on our sun parlor with a window open, on the second of December…. Peggy’s eyes are better and she is beginning to commence to start work on the novel again which means that I am back at my problem of trying to figure out an opening chapter for the book. This time I am approaching the problem by studying the way other novelists get their books going. And in the process am making at least a first chapter acquain
tance with several good books I hadn’t previously read.
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Although they lived in different parts of the country now and all had their own families, the Marsh children were close and kept up with one another. John’s brothers, Henry and Gordon, and their wives made frequent trips to Atlanta and to the Georgia Power cabin near Tallulah Falls, where they enjoyed long weekend vacations. And for years they never missed getting together with John and Peggy to see University of Kentucky-Georgia Tech ball games. While their mother was alive, all of the children circulated the Round Robin letters that they hated to write but loved to receive. Also, they all got together at least once a year for reunions. Every year Mrs. Marsh, who loved to travel, took turns visiting each of them. When they were all gathered together, they did as families do and talked about their children.56 Because Peggy and John were the only childless couple in the large family, they were asked about “their book.” John was always more enthusiastic in talking about it than Peggy. In reminiscing years later, Francesca said,
Writing that book took years. It just sort of grew up and along with them. It was a wonderful pastime for her while she was having trouble with her foot and John wasn’t making much money. And at first, we all believed that Peggy would really write a book. Though to be perfectly honest, after several years passed, not one of us expected a real book to materialize. Whenever we would ask about it, Peggy used to say, “Oh, it’s awful, and I want to throw it away but John gets furious whenever I say that.” Then she’d try to change the subject, and she would shush John from talking too much about it either. They were very close, you know, as childless couples often are. After a while, none of us ever asked them about the book for fear of offending them. Still, whenever we visited them in Atlanta, we saw those envelopes piled high.
Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh Page 26