Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  The task of checking facts and extensively revising sections of the manuscript for the sake of historical accuracy was arduous and time consuming. As John explained to Lois Cole, it was “one of the chief causes of the delay in delivering the final MS to you.”33 In this ten-page typed letter to Lois, dated February 9, 1936, John explained many interesting details about the editing of the manuscript and about how it achieved its final shape. Essentially, what they did was rewrite the whole book, as Peggy told Mother Marsh in January 1936. “Macmillan bought it [the manuscript] when it was in the rough draft stage and wanted to publish it practically ‘as was’ but it was written in so slovenly a manner that I felt I had to rewrite the whole book and in a very short time.” About the sections requiring the most research, John wrote Lois on February 9:

  Originally, she had most of her Reconstruction background material concentrated into two other chapters. These were written before she had done all of her research work and when she was under the impression, as most people are, that Reconstruction arrived with a bang right after the war ended. Her further investigation showed that conditions were relatively pleasant in 1866, by comparison with the worse horror that developed over a period of years. This obviously made it necessary for her to split up the background stuff and string it out through the chapters from 1866 to 1872.

  His coworkers remembered well how distracted John was at his work during this period and how lenient Mr. Arkwright, the president of the company, was with him. Because it was impossible for Peggy to hunt for documentation, to write, and to revise, John helped her with the revision at night and every weekend.34 According to his secretary and his typist, who dealt with him and with that manuscript on a daily basis, John spent hours working on it.35 Every evening after he came home, he scoured the manuscript for errors in spelling and punctuation and for all items that needed documentation. He searched for inconsistencies, anachronisms, and repetitions, and shuffled the scenes into chronological order. Using his pen like a pocket knife, he whittled out whole chapters and carved out scenes within the chapters.36 And all the long, detailed letters sent to Macmillan about preparing the manuscript for production as well as the ones regarding the proofs were from John, not Peggy.

  One huge task alone involved checking the time frames to see if the characters developed correctly chronologically and if babies came at the right time and far enough apart. The fact that Peggy did not write the chapters consecutively made this search even more complicated. The notebooks that John had started keeping in 1927 on the characters’ biographies now became a valuable source of material.37 His notebook on the dialects was also extremely useful at this point in the manuscript’s preparation, for he and Peggy had to be certain that the various dialects were appropriate and consistent throughout the novel. With his habitual tendency to record, John had kept careful track of their research in the matter of dialect, a subject that was so interesting and important to him and Peggy. In the early 1960s, when Stephens Mitchell authorized Finis Farr to write a biography of his sister, he showed Farr the notebook in which John had painstakingly recorded several varieties of regional speech that he and Peggy had discovered. According to Farr, “In his small neat handwriting John drew up a seventeen-page glossary of terms in negro and frontier country speech to help keep the various kinds of dialect consistent.”38

  Prior to publication, when the time came to doublecheck dialect consistency, John’s attention to such details stood Peggy in good stead. Surely, he was speaking for himself as well as for Peggy when he later objected strenuously to a Macmillan copyeditor’s revisions of key dialect words. Perfecting the regional speech of the different characters required painstaking attention and was a time-consuming activity, and he was obviously furious when he discovered what the copyeditor had done. In his long letter to Lois Cole on February 13, 1936, he pointed out all the mistakes that the Macmillan copyeditor had made. Among many other things the copyeditor had changed such words as “mahseff” and “yo’seff,” and other “self” words, to “mahse’f” and “yo’se’f.” John explained that whenever possible Peggy wanted to avoid using two apostrophes in one word, and although she accepted this change, she wanted no further changes in the dialect without her approval.39 This business about where the apostrophes went in words had to come solely from John because he knew how to mechanically express what Peggy wanted. As she explained later, she usually refused to read “any dialect stuff that’s like Uncle Remus. And so do most Southerners. I wanted it easily readable, accurate and phonetic. . . . I sweat blood to keep it from being like Uncle Remus.”40 In her effort to record accurately the talk of her black characters, she spent many long afternoons searching the back country for aged blacks reared in slavery so that she could listen to them talk.41 And neither she nor John wanted a word changed by any Yankee copyeditor.

  4

  However, dialect was not their only concern. They checked words, expressions, and colloquialisms, and they searched for anachronisms as thoroughly as they could by reading hundreds of old letters, memoirs, and diaries. After Gone With the Wind was published, they got furious when a few critics questioned their use of language. For example, soon after the book appeared, Ralph Thompson, a New York Times critic wrote that “there are a good many questionable touches in the dialogue—the word sissy (implying an effeminate man) is put into the mouths of characters a whole generation too early and such expressions as ‘on the make,’ ‘like a bat out of hell,’ ‘Gotterdammerung,’ . . . sound very strange upon the tongues of Civil War Southerners.”42

  Peggy lashed back with venom:

  I do object to his calling attention to inaccuracies which do not happen to be inaccurate. And it annoys me to think that anyone would think me such a fool as to get myself out on a limb about such matters as the “Gotterdammerung” where I could be sawed off so easily. I only put in three weeks checking up on that small statement. Of course, the opera itself was produced several years after the war but the poems were written in the late Forties or early Fifties, I believe. (I haven’t my notes with me and my brain is too addled at present to be absolutely sure.) And after going through all the books in the Library on German folklore and the Wagnerian cycle I found that the phrase “dusk of the Gods” was an ancient one and, Heaven knows, the legend was an ancient one.

  And old time Southerners did travel and practically all of them made the Grand Tour which included Germany. And a few of them in this section did read books, odd though that may seem, and did know music!

  And where he rode me about the word “sissy” . . . I picked up that word and the line in which it was used from a letter, dated in 1861, from a boy to his father, explaining why he had run away and joined an outfit in another section. “I just didn’t want to join any Zouaves. I’d have felt like a sissy in those red pants etc.”43

  When a British critic for the Liverpool Daily Post criticized her for Gone With the Wind’s anachronisms and cited her use of iodine as an example, she fired back that it took her about two weeks to run down all her references on iodine and its uses before and during the Civil War.

  . . . and I did not, if you will read carefully, ever speak of iodine being used as an antiseptic. Iodine as a drug came into use about 1818, I believe. During the war it was used in the treatment of goiter, taken internally for dysentery and externally for erysipelas, was used on “festers,” bruises and wounds. As to whether they were aware of the antiseptic qualities, I cannot say but both Mrs. Gordon and Mrs. Pickett, in writing of those days refer to putting it on wounds, according to the doctors’ orders. They were so ignorant of its properties that they painted the wounded every half hour and blistered them badly. “The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion” gives its uses in dysentery and stomach complaints and remarks, in passing, that the mortality was quite high in dysentery! Many old ladies with whom I discussed war experiences spoke of iodine. I tried to have four references against every statement of this nature in the book and I have more than fo
ur on this one.44

  While they were editing the manuscript, Peggy worried excessivly about the names of characters and places, something that had not concerned her while she was writing the book. Remembering the stir Frances Newman had caused with her novel, she did not want to make the same mistakes, and she took infinite pains to avoid embarrassing anyone by using names of actual people living in and around Clayton County during the time period of the novel. Of course, it was impossible for her to find any names that had not been borne by someone in Georgia at some time. Therefore, the best she could do was to choose ones that did not appear in records in the counties where the characters lived.45 “I spent weeks and weeks in county court houses checking the names of my characters against tax books, from 1840 to 1873, against deed books, against militia muster rolls, against Confederate muster rolls, against lists of jurymen, against wills and titles.”46 Yet, despite all her efforts, she still had a couple of problems with names when the book appeared.

  Also, she fretted about getting the right-sounding name for each character. She changed Ellen O’Hara’s maiden name from D’Antignac to Robillard, and she considered changing Melanie to Melisande or to Permelia but then decided Melanie was best. As she had suggested earlier to Latham, she wanted to replace “Pansy” with a better name; even though Macmillan was satisfied with it, she was not. She explained,

  As to why I chose the name of Scarlett—first, because I came across the name of Katie Scarlett so often in Irish literature and so I made it Gerald’s Mother’s maiden name. Second, while I of course knew of the Scarlett family on our Georgia Coast, I could find no record of any family named Scarlett in Clayton County between the years 1859 and 1873. . . . The name Scarlett was chosen six months after my book was sold. . . . I submitted nearly a hundred names to my publishers and they chose Scarlett,—I may add it was my choice too.47

  Other names she considered included Robin, Kells, Storm, and Angel.48 But she and John knew Katie Scarlett was the right one. When Macmillan agreed and wired back, “Three cheers for Scarlett O’Hara,” she and John immediately starting going through every page of the rough copy changing “Pansy” to “Scarlett.”

  Another name she changed was that of her heroine’s home—Fontenoy Hall.49 For when she changed Pansy to Scarlett, she decided that the Irishness of “Tara” was more in keeping with the Irishness of “Katie Scarlett O’Hara.”

  5

  Around the first of September, Lois Cole requested a photograph of Peggy and a “blurb”—biographical information to be placed along with her author photograph on the inside of the book jacket. John quickly dashed off a blurb, which was edited by Lois and returned for Peggy’s approval. In returning the blurb to Lois on October 3, Peggy wrote: “I was so pleased with your nice remarks about John’s blurb. I was both enchanted and an- noyed at the ease with which he turned it out. And I like the way you all hammered it into shape. I think it sounds swell.”

  But about the photograph of the author that Lois requested, Peggy explained her difficult circumstances. Because of all the anxiety about getting the manuscript finished and all the long hours researching details, she had broken out in sore boils all over her scalp. In order to treat these infected boils, her physician had to shave round spots on her skull, varying from the size of a silver dollar to that of a penny. Metaphorically, the boils seemed to represent a self-fulfilling prophecy, for Peggy had often exclaimed that writing made her beat on her breast and snatch out her hair.50

  I know my face isn’t much as faces go but it usually photographs well, my bones catching the high lights very well. Of course, the photographer has a hard job with my scalp looking as though I had just been rescued from the Indians and not a minute too soon, either. And one side of my face and nose is still a little swollen from the infections which I mentioned. . . . This is just the world’s worst time for me to have a picture taken. If I can’t get a good profile tomorrow, I’ll just give up. It takes hours getting my hair fixed and dried at the beauty parlor and more hours while the poor photographer shoots from all angles (including isosceles) trying to avoid bald spots, Jimmy Durante nose and Marlene D. cheek hollows. All in all, I was six hours at it the other morning, and I cant spare any more six hours.51

  She asked Lois for Professor Everett’s address because she wanted to thank him for his report and the part he played in getting her novel published. As an aside, she told Lois, “He mentioned something about my ‘tempo.’ Till that moment I had been as unaware of my tempo as I am of my gall bladder, so I was deeply impressed. How ever, when ever I turn an especially lousy few pages over to John, he reads them and says, ‘Ha! Some more of your goddamed tempo, eh?’”52 In her most charming and modest manner, she wrote Professor Everett that she was “dazzled” with his kindness and enthusiasm for her book. “It had never occurred to me that anyone except my husband could possibly find it interesting or entertaining.” Unable to ignore his remark about her “tempo,” she wrote,

  I nursed your remark in silence until one day when my husband was reading the manuscript which had just been returned. My husband, I should add, used to teach English at the University of Kentucky and has a reverence for the English language which I do not share. He was reading along and suddenly rushed out onto the porch with a double handful of dangling participial clauses and dubious subjunctives, crying, “In the name of God, what are these?” I said with as much dignity as I could muster that they were tempo and let no dog bark.53

  Peggy relished all the teasing she got from then on about her tempo. Even Bessie got into the act. One day when the meringue on a lemon pie she had made failed, Bessie said, “I guess something went wrong with my tempo.”54

  6

  Meanwhile, John and Peggy continued to struggle over the troublesome first chapter that John had worked on earlier. In a letter of October 30 to Latham, Peggy said that she was still agonizing over the first chapter, particularly the first few pages: “I think they are amateurish, clumsy, and worst of all self conscious. . . . I do not exaggerate when I say that I have written at least forty first chapters in the last two years.” As John explained to Medora Perkerson in the 1949 interview, Peggy actually had about sixty or seventy versions of the first chapter, but ended up using what had been the fourth or fifth chapter as her opening scene.55 John explained that he and Peggy had talked it over and decided, “The book is all about Scarlett. Why not begin with Scarlett?”

  And so the book begins with the now-famous description of Scarlett:

  Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm. . . . In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin—that skin so prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bonnets, veils and mittens against hot Georgia suns. . . .

  The green eyes in the carefully sweet face were turbulent, willful, lusty with life, distinctly at variance with her decorous demeanor. Her manners had been imposed upon her by her mother’s gentle admonitions and the sterner discipline of her mammy; her eyes were her own.

  Since this opening description of Scarlett constitutes a perfect description of Peggy herself as seen through male eyes, it is possible that John wrote or cowrote these lines with Peggy. In that October 30 letter to Latham, Peggy did say, “I’ve covered the opening of the story from every possible angle I could think of and in every style and in every way my husband could suggest.” Therefore, it is possible that John’s suggestions determined the wording of the opening paragraphs as well as other passages in the first chapter that describe Scarlett as the very embodiment of the “Vamp de Luxe” that Peggy herself had been when John first met her. The Tarleton twins even thi
nk they are Scarlett’s favored suitors just as John had thought he was Peggy’s—at first.

  Around the time Peggy wrote to Latham about her frustrations with the first chapter, she had a bit of luck in finding the perfect title for the book—in an anthology of English verse, not in a book of Irish poems, as many believed. In January 1937, six months after the novel was published, Michael MacWhite of the Irish Legation in Washington, D.C., wrote Peggy asking her if she got the idea for the title for her book from James Clarence Mangan’s poem of the same title in his book Poems, published in 1859. Peggy answered that she was familiar with Mangan’s poem but had never read his “Gone with the Wind.” She added that after her novel appeared many people had asked her if Mangan’s poem was the source of her title. “I do not know how I had overlooked this sad and stirring poem,” she wrote, “for I knew ‘Dark Rosaleen’ . . . and others. The truth is I had heard these poems orally and had never had a copy of Mangan’s work in my hands.”56

  Actually she got the title from Ernest Dowson’s poem “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae,” written to a lost love. The poem had long been one of her favorite pieces and in rereading it one late fall afternoon, she was struck by a haunting line in the third stanza. “I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind. . . .” When she read the phrase “gone with the wind” to John, he agreed that it was the perfect title for a book about a way of life, a tradition, and a kind of people that had been swept away forever. Using the phrase differently from Dowson, she applied it in an almost biblical sense. In verses 15 and 16 of the 103rd Psalm, an Old Testament writer eloquently says: “As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind, passeth over it and it is gone, and the place thereof shall know it no more.”