In a letter to Lois Cole written several months later, Peggy described what had happened that day of the luncheon at Rich’s.
And that day he was here, I’d called up various and sundry hopeful young authors and would-be authors and jackassed them (that is a friend’s phrase) about in the car and gotten them to the tea where they could actually meet a live publisher in the flesh.
One of them was a child who had nearly driven me crazy about her book. I’d no more than get settled at my own work than here she was, bellowing that she couldnt write love scenes and couldn’t I write them for her? Or she was on the phone picking my brains for historical facts that had taken me weeks to run down. As twilight eve was drawing on and I was riding her and some of her adoring girl friends home from the teas, somebody asked me when I expected to get my book finished and why hadn’t I given it to Mr. Latham.
Then this child cried, “Why, are you writing a book, Peggy? How strange you’ve never said anything about it. Why didn’t you give it to Mr. Latham?” I said I hadn’t because it was so lousy I was ashamed of it. To which she remarked—and did not mean it cattily—
“Well, I daresay. Really, I wouldn’t take you for the type who would write a successful book. You know you don’t take life seriously enough to be a novelist. . . . But, Peggy, I think you are wasting your time trying. You really aren’t the type.”89
With that remark, Peggy said, “I got so mad that I began to laugh, and I had to stop the car because I laughed so hard. And that confirmed their opinion of my lack of seriousness.” Deciding then that she would give Latham the manuscript, she said, “My idea was that at least I could brag that I had been refused by the very best publisher.”
After she delivered all the ladies to their own residences, she went directly home and called John at his office to tell him what had happened. She explained that Mr. Latham had asked her again about her manuscript and wanted to read it, and she asked him what he thought she ought to do.90 John said, “Sure, let him have it. It can’t do any harm and at least it will give us the opinion of somebody who would know whether it is worth the trouble of finishing or not.”91 Peggy, greatly agitated by now, was still not sure, and when John came home early from work, they talked some more. He convinced her that she ought to let the publisher have a look at it. Realizing that Latham was to leave by train at 7:30 P.M., they started rushing around the apartment gathering the envelopes and trying to get them into some kind of sensible order.
In a letter to Mother Marsh on April 17, 1936, Peggy described this important evening in her own comical manner:
It wasn’t till I was in the lobby of his hotel that I realized what I looked like, hatless, hair flying, dust and dirt all over my face and arms and worse luck, my hastily rolled up stocking coming down about my ankles. As I progressed toward him in the lobby, I kept dropping envelopes and finally had three bell boys picking them up behind me. I only wish someone had picked up my stockings for I couldn’t pull them up as my hands were occupied. Mr. Latham was a perfect gentleman and kept a straight face and acted as though all authors looked like me. I later heard in a round about way that he said that he never saw so small an author, so large a manuscript, and so dirty a face.92
According to Latham’s own account, around six o’clock, shortly before he was to leave Atlanta, the telephone rang in his hotel room and “Miss Mitchell’s voice came over it, informing me that she was downstairs in the lounge and would like to see me. I went down, and I shall never forget the mental picture that I have of her at that time—a tiny woman sitting on a divan, with the biggest manuscript beside her that I have ever seen, towering in two stacks almost to her shoulders.”93
Talking very quickly lest she change her mind, Peggy explained that the manuscript was rough and incomplete and that some chapters had several versions. And adding that she had no first chapter, she told him, “I hadn’t any idea of letting you or any publisher see it. I wrote it for my own entertainment. However, your comments about southern authors and southern books in our conversation yesterday have aroused my interest, and I am curious to know what you think of this one. You can’t possibly be more surprised at being given it as I am at letting you take it.”94
Excited about securing the manuscript, Latham asked her all sorts of questions, such as how she came to write it and what it was about. “Although many people in Atlanta knew that the book had been undertaken,” he wrote, “no one seemed to have any facts on its theme.” Peggy answered most of his questions, but she could not explain why she had been so secretive about it. Latham wrote:
Why she had been hesitant about letting anyone see it—up to that time it had been shown to no one except her husband—is a question I cannot answer. . . . The book was very close to her. It represented hours of affectionate attention to details, and perhaps she did not wish to run the risk of rejection for publication, as that would have hurt. After all, how sure could she be of a friendly attitude from a northern publisher toward a book about the Civil War by a southerner?95
With limited luggage space, Latham had a bellboy rush out to purchase another suitcase into which he could pack the manuscript. On the train to New Orleans that night, he started reading, and the more he read, the more he realized that “here indeed was a significant novel of the South.”96 Although he read only a small portion, he modestly wrote later that he realized immediately that he was reading something of “tremendous importance. Any publisher would have recognized that fact. I was fortunate to have come along at the right moment.”97 He admitted that the physical condition of the manuscript itself was the worst he had ever seen. “But the mere untidiness of the script could not conceal the enchantment of the story.”98 Because he could not carry the voluminous manuscript around on his three-month tour, which was to end in California, he shipped it from New Orleans to Lois in New York.
Just a few days after he left Atlanta with her manuscript, Latham wrote Peggy a letter telling her how much he enjoyed meeting her. He said that although he had read only a small portion of her manuscript, “what I have read is very reassuring. So then, I shall take it or send it along and deal with it, when I get back, with the care which it deserves. I have the feeling that we are going to keep at this project until a novel is issued that is going to be regarded as a very significant publication.”99
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On April 16, 1935, the day after she received his letter, Peggy typed him a five-page letter. Trying not to sound too anxious, she dedicated the entire first page to their conversation about her offer to help him “unearth authors.” On the second page, she got around to her real concern:
I cannot tell you how pleased your words of commendation made me and how glad I am if the extracts you read interested you. If I had not met you and realized yours is an honest face, I’d be sure you were joking with me. I know the following confession sounds strange, coming from a would-be author, but you must take it at face value. . . . I am oppressed with the knowledge of the lousiness of what I write for even though I may not write well, I do know good writing. . . . I have felt that there was something lacking in me that other authors, real and fancied, possessed, that passionate belief in the good quality of their work. A belief so passionate that they have no qualms about gathering in groups and reading each others stuff. So far, no one but you and my excellent husband, who, after all, did promise “for better or worse” have been the only ones to see that five pound load of manuscript I foisted off on you. God knows, I am neither shy nor shamefaced for, as friends frequently point out, I have all the gentle and retiring qualities of a billy-goat but I do marvel that you thought there was anything at all in my stuff.100
In these early letters, Peggy had no qualms about mentioning John’s reading her manuscript throughout the years she wrote it. Later, however, she would deny it.
In this long letter on April 16, 1935, she explained to Latham that she was “more than a little frightened” of his careful reading of her manuscript and proceeded to give him advance war
ning of its weaknesses. “The first chapter is missing. Second and third chapter are not even satisfactory first drafts. Brief, page and a half explanatory chapter at the end of part one missing (that shoots all of part one to hell and gone).” Parts two and three “stand up pretty well” but were not finished. She was conscious of “a terrible sag of interest and action somewhere between parts 3 and 4,” and said that she had started to rewrite the entire five chapters but her injuries from a car wreck had prohibited her from doing so.
She informed him that there were two versions of part 4, “one having Frank Kennedy die in his bed, the second where he is killed in a brush between Federal troops and Ku Klux Klan. I had not finished this second version. I think this would be very confusing to any reader and I don’t see how you made heads or tails of it.”
A very important chapter, involving Melanie’s extricating Pansy and Ashley from a scandal, was missing in part 4 because, she said, she “had not been strong enough to sit in Miss Jessie Hopkins library and hold ten pound files on my stomach.” Also, a vast amount of political and social background of the early 1850s and the late 1860s was needed in part 4. “The story is appallingly thin on back ground towards the end,” she warned him.
Another item she intended to change was “to right her wrong of making the Southern view appear to advance the notion that only the ladies were valiant” during the Reconstruction period.101
Referring to the fact that some envelopes included three or four versions of the same chapters, she explained, “They were put there for my husband’s convenience in comparing and throwing away.”102 Earlier, she had told Henry that John could always tell her “what was crap,” and that was why she saved all the versions.103 She ended her letter to Latham by saying:
So because of the above listed reasons, I fear that your Macm. readers may have a dreadfully difficult time making heads or tails of the stuff. What do you think? If, after you have read more you find that you get some continuity out of the story, then take it on to New York with my appreciation and thanks. But if on further reading, you find it too scrambled to be intelligible, send it back to me and I will remove the extra versions and where chapters are missing, put in a brief summary of what is contained in those missing chapters.
I leave this in your hands. You decide whether to take it with you or send it back to me for straightening out. No, I do not mind if it is not returned until June. It will take until June for my back to recover enough to sit for hours at a typewriter and perhaps not then, spinal injuries being slow at healing.104
In her closing, she is clear about wanting to get Latham’s opinion, about trusting his judgment. She did not ask him, at this point, to return either of her manuscripts, for she had given him two: “’Ropa Carmagin” and Gone With the Wind, though the latter did not bear its title at that time.
Just as she was about to seal her letter, the morning mailman handed her another letter from Latham, telling her how wonderful he thought her manuscript was and thanking her for helping him in his search for authors. Exuberant about receiving two letters full of warm praise from the publisher, she added a postscript: “Thank you again for your encouraging words. I’m sure they’ll have a more healing affect on my back than all the braces, electrical treatments, and operations the doctors devise…. We hope you unearth a Pulitzer prize winner here [in Atlanta] so it will be necessary for you to come back to Atlanta and stay awhile.”
Little did she, or John, suspect at that moment that her book would win the Pulitzer Prize for being the finest American novel of 1936.
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After those warmly enthusiastic letters from Latham in April, she expected to hear from him regularly. When the end of May rolled around without a word from him, she began to get anxious. By now, she thought, surely he had had time to read her manuscript. Why wasn’t he writing to her? Hoping to jog his memory, she wrote him on May 30, 1935, describing her efforts to find promising authors for him. Not wanting to be pushy, she did not mention being concerned about her own manuscript although she was dying to know what was happening with it.
Her letter did indeed evoke a response, but not the kind she wanted. On June 10, Latham wrote saying that he had just returned to New York and had fallen into Macmillan’s fall sales conference. Because his work had been delayed, he had not been able to read any manuscripts, but he said, “It was very nice of you to keep unearthing all these books for me, and I appreciate it very much.” He did not mention a word about her manuscript.
Terribly disappointed, she imagined the worst possible scenario, the most humiliating kind of rejection. No amount of reassurance from John could calm her. She was utterly dejected. She was convinced that she had made a fool of herself letting the publisher have the manuscript in its poor shape. She knew that he thought she was an incompetent, and, being the nice man he was, he was trying to figure out a nice way to tell her. Ignoring John’s advice to be patient, she decided she would rescue herself by asking Latham to return the manuscript before he had a chance to send it back.
What she did not know was that Latham had sent the manuscript to Lois Cole so that she and his other advisors could read it. About that manuscript, Lois Cole later wrote:
It was physically, one of the worst manuscripts I have ever seen. There was no first chapter, but Chapter Two was neatly typed on white paper. So was Chapter Three. Then came pages and pages of yellow paper, written over in pencil, and often three or four different versions of one scene. Then came more final chapters, then some would be missing entirely. There were two entirely different accounts of Frank’s death. The last chapter was in its final form, for that, she told me later, was written first.
In spite of the difficulties of reading the manuscript, I knew it was one of the most fascinating novels of all time.105
After Latham returned to New York in late May, he completed reading the manuscript himself and then quickly sent it to his friend Charles Everett, professor of English at Columbia University, whom Latham often asked for advice about manuscripts. Having no way of knowing what was going on, Peggy let her worst fears overcome her and, on July 9, she wrote Latham:
I know that when a would-be author is lucky enough to have an editor looking over her stuff, she is a fool to write and ask to have her manuscript back. But that is just what I’m doing because I am very anxious to finish the thing and begin rewriting it. As to why I can’t wait two or three months to start finishing it—that’s a long story which I’ll try to relate shortly. At present, I am out of my spinal brace and can sit up at the typewriter for an hour or so at a time for the first time in seven months. I am one of those clumsy or unlucky people who are always being run into by drunken autoists, sat on by horses, struck playfully with bottles by guests. Or I get influenza or a return of arthritis. Or some of my friends have babies and demand my presence at the birth. The last is far worse than the catastrophes listed before. At present, I am able to work and very anxious to work. However, knowing my past record, I realize that it is only a matter of time before I have an arm in a sling or my skull fractured again. With me, writing is sandwiched in between broken bones and x-rays and, as I am all in one piece at present it looks like flying in the face of Providence not to take advantage of it. So could I have my manuscript back, please?
When I look back on giving it to you I shudder at what I unloaded on you and marvel at my own gall—or thoughtlessness. In the shape it was in I dont see how you made heads or tails of it. Perhaps you didnt! If you have any suggestions and criticisms, I would be most humbly grateful for them if you have time to write me about it. And if you havent the time, I’ll understand. I don’t believe even you can see as many things wrong with it as I do or can think it as rotten as I think it. However, wrong or rotten, I want to finish it.
I have tried to work without the manuscript but have found it impossible as it has been so many months since I even reread it that I can’t pick up the threads again. And besides I was just in the middle of cutting out about ten chap
ters at one place and putting in five chapters at another place. So I am all mixed up. . . .
I hope you do not mind my asking for my stuff and hope you understand. If you don’t, ask Lois Cole. She saw me through innumerable broken bones, arthritis attacks, child births-of-friends and gall-stones-in-the-family.106
Her letter arrived before Latham had received his advisors’ evaluations on the manuscript. Sensing her apprehension, he answered on July 15, “Of course, if you insist on having your manuscript back immediately I will get it from our reader, but I do hope you will not insist but will give me a week or so more.”107 He explained that he had given it to one of their “best and most trusted advisers, a man in whose judgment I have a good deal of confidence.” Latham said that he had taken the liberty of removing from the envelopes what seemed to be duplicate sections or first versions and added, “I hope you don’t mind.” He was unable at that time to give her a final decision but told her, “I am very enthusiastic about the possibilities your book presents. I believe if it is finished properly, it will have every chance of a very considerable success, and for me you have created in Pansy a character who is vital and unforgettable.”108
On the same day that she received Latham’s letter, July 17, she answered it.
By all means keep “Pansy” longer if you feel it necessary. My sympathy goes out to the unfortunate reader who is trying to make heads and tails of it in its present disarranged form. As matters now stand, I am very glad you did not return the manuscript immediately for I would not have been able to resume work on it. Bessie, the black jewel of our kitchen, has meningitis and I have spent my time recently in the ward of our charity hospital savaging interns. Bessie seems to have a good chance for recovery now and, if I don’t get meningitis, too, I should be free to work in a week or so. So keep “Pansy” a while longer if you like.109
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