Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  He listed several items that he said Peggy wanted him to mention. She wanted the blurb on the jacket to read “when Appomattox came,” not “when Appomattox fell”; yes, she did want to read the galley proofs, but not necessarily the page proofs unless she had to; she wanted to know what “end papers” are, as Lois had said she was sending her some to autograph; she wished the dedication page to read “To J.R.M.”; she did not have strong feelings about how the sections or parts of the book would be designated but made suggestions; she wanted to know the “extent to which and how a publishing house, like Macmillan, ‘reads copy’ on a MS such as hers.” Then, he asked whether the responsibility for such things as spelling and punctuation rested wholly on the author or whether Macmillan had “folks who go over manuscripts to catch up such disparities.”

  John had not had time to have the very last part of the manuscript typed because Lois was hounding him for it, and he was apparently worried about sending the original draft of that part, that had so much of his handwriting on it.Although John’s intense involvement with the preparation of the manuscript was obvious to all who knew him, in his correspondence with Macmillan he always described himself as a mere secretary and proofreader, eager that all the credit go to Peggy. Thus he wrote:

  She wishes me to express her regrets that the batch of MS mailed you Wednesday was not in as good shape physically as the stuff sent previously. Much of it was pretty badly marked up and cut up but she hopes it was legible. In her effort to get the complete job to you—and I can make affidavit that she worked like a mule, even if it was late—she had quite a number of chapters at the end of the book typed off before they had been given their final editing, and that editing had to be done on the MS, with the young lady propped up in bed doing part of it and with me acting as her amanuensis on the rest.82

  The final editing job on some of part 5 had not been completed, but even though he knew he would be in the hospital, he promised Lois they would send those pages within the week. These corrections, he said, would not affect the story but would merely involve final polishing of words, phrases, and punctuation, as had been done with the rest of the book. He wanted to know whether he could edit in red ink the carbon copies they had of part 5 or whether the pages with revisions had to be retyped. “I write a better hand than she does and I’ll write in the corrections for her to the extent that I can spare the time to help her on this.”83

  About the dialects, he was adamant about not wanting anyone to attempt to straighten out any disparities. He explained that there were numerous intentional disparities in the dialect, and said,

  It would break her heart if someone ironed out the disparities and made it necessary for her to put them back in again. . . . Peggy’s negroes don’t all talk the same. Mammy uses a different dialect from Big Sam, for the reason that a house negro talks differently from a field hand. Dilcey also talks differently from Mammy, and Prissy talks differently from all the other house negroes. . . . Her plan in general has been to make negroes talk like negroes, without at the same time putting every single word into dialect and thereby making it difficult to read. . . . But please don’t try to edit it. No doubt there may be some errors in the dialect which will have to be caught on the proof, but I don’t know of anybody who is qualified to do that job but Peggy herself.

  This is a modest statement from the man who for years had studied dialect and had kept a glossary of black and southern colloquialisms.

  He ended by apologizing for the length of the letter, explaining that its whole purpose was to try to simplify and expedite the completion of this enormous job. He closed, “Peggy is feeling better today, and I hope we may have her well again soon.”

  On February 3, Lois wrote John that the manuscript had arrived safely and was in the hands of the Macmillan manufacturing department in less than ten minutes, but it presented a number of unexpected problems. Did he know, she asked, that in typed pages, it ran just one hundred pages less than Anthony Adverse? “We had not quite expected that!” she announced abruptly. And about Peggy’s trip to New York, Lois said Macmillan had merely taken it for granted that any author of a first and successful novel would wish to have some of the fun connected with that success. But the company was not planning anything. “Of course, if we had realized,” she added, “that Peggy was endangering her health so seriously and drastically by working on the book we would never have asked to have it finished for spring publication.”84

  After she wrote that letter, Lois sent a memorandum about the dedication page to Mr. Lund in the production department.

  Mitchell: GONE WITH THE WIND

  With the front matter which I sent you for the dummy of this book was included a dedication page reading To J.R.M. The author notices that this dedication page was omitted from the dummy and wishes to make sure that it be included in the finished book. I am reassuring her. You will be sure it is not left out, won’t you? There would be trouble—that is the lady’s husband.”85

  Aware that John was in charge of all of Peggy’s business, Lois was beginning to get the notion that he was going to be demanding. She typed his recommendations and sent them to Jim Hale saying that although Alec Blanton did not think the manuscript needed copyediting, the author’s husband did.

  9

  Two days after his operation, John suffered a setback. His kidneys failed to function properly because he had entered the surgery in such a rundown condition from all the work he had been doing for the past year.86 But as days passed, he recovered his strength. From the hospital on February 7, 1936, John wrote his mother: “I feel that I am well along on the road to recovery now. . . . In spite of my pains and aches and weaknesses, I believe the situation has been worse on Peggy than it has on me and just why that child should love me like she does has always been a mystery to me. I didn’t want to be an added burden on her, on top of her other work, so I urged her to not come down here to the hospital oftener than once a day, but she is here several times a day.” He and Peggy must have proofed part 5 while he was in the hospital because Peggy sent a telegram to Lois on February 8 saying, “Part V with revision in the mail this afternoon.” While he was in the hospital, Peggy received a note from Lois about autographing 750 end pages. When she came to visit that evening, she asked him wearily, “John, what in the hell are end pages?”87

  Just when Peggy decided to use her maiden name is not known. In all the previous letters to and from Macmillan, she had signed her name as as “Peggy Mitchell Marsh” or “Margaret Mitchell Marsh,” and this is how letters were addressed to her. But in this memorandum about the autographed end pages, the name “Margaret Mitchell” is underlined. There is nothing in the Macmillan file now that explains how this decision was reached or whose decision it was.

  Even before John returned home to recuperate, while he was still smarting from the last bout he had had with Lois, another message came from her. Having received the completed manuscript, Lois said Macmillan was indeed surprised at the length of the book, which was over four hundred thousand words. They would have to sell the book for three dollars, a high price for those Depression days, instead of $2.50 as they had planned. Unless ten thousand copies were sold, the company would not make a penny. Consequently, they were compelled to ask Peggy to accept a flat 10 percent royalty, with no increase to 15 percent after the sale of ten thousand copies.

  Apparently when the Macmillan editors read the original manuscript, which included many versions for many chapters, they could not or did not estimate the actual length of the completed manuscript. Lois said, “The three people who read it here, who are used to reading manuscripts, judged 250-300,000 words, but in the state it was in, of course, it was hard to tell.”88 Lois’s letter shocked and disappointed John and Peggy, and they wondered what else Macmillan had in store for them.

  On his first day home from the hospital on February 9, 1936, John typed Lois a ten-page, double-spaced letter. Making no mention of his surgery, he wrote, “The old man is still acting as t
he family typist. Peggy is again up and doing, but sitting up to the typewriter for somewhat lengthy letters is one weary load she won’t have to tote as long as I can tote it for her.”89

  Peggy would agree, he said, to the flat 10 percent royalty and wanted that amendment written into the contract as an amendment that did not affect the other provisions of the contract. He wanted a copy sent to her before it was considered final. She wanted to be helpful because she wanted the book to be successful and did not want Macmillan to lose money on her.

  This request for reduced royalties would be reversed in May, but the fact that it was made at all put the first strain on the Macmillan-Marsh relationship, a strain that would be further increased in a few weeks.

  Certainly Macmillan had given the book a fine send-off in the catalogue and in the Publishers Weekly announcement. But, John explained, the publisher’s enthusiasm for the book continued to be somewhat mystifying to Peggy, and she did not wish either Macmillan or the book to suffer by reason of the problem Lois had outlined, although “she says she is sure all her Scotch ancestors must be turning over in their graves tonight while this letter is being written.” He pointed out:

  She does wish to have it understood, however, that the fix you’re in is not of her doing. The Macmillan Company is quite as much to blame for the excessive length of the book as she is. Of course, who’s to blame is more or less immaterial, but she has the impression that you may think she added considerable to the MS which you saw last summer. And she didn’t. The completed MS is shorter, not longer, than what you read last summer.

  If you are now astounded at the length of the book it is only the same feeling Peggy has had about it for several years. For a long time before you ever saw it, she had been saying that it would never be printed unless she found a publisher who was willing to bring it out in two volumes. And she has been in a state of continuous mystification ever since you bought it, because of Macmillan’s insistence that she should do nothing to it but link it together and deliver it to you.90

  He reminded Lois that Peggy expected at the beginning to be told that it would have to be cut, but from the time Peggy got the Macmillan “reader’s report on it and on down until this past week,” Macmillan’s attitude had been that the manuscript they saw last summer was just right, and they never uttered a word about cutting it. He pointed out: “So, with a puzzled expression on her face, she decided that you all must know a lot more about such matters than she did and she has tried to carry out your wishes.” He explained that “surreptitiously, however, she did cut it where she thought that cutting would improve the story. But she never intended to let you know you about it. You had impressed her so strongly with the fact that the original you saw last summer was just what you wanted, she was afraid you might want to break the contract if you ever discovered that she had eliminated even one paragraph.”

  The manuscript they had now, he pointed out, was at least fifty, and perhaps seventy-five or more, typewritten pages shorter than what they had seen the previous summer. And it could and would have been cut even more as she went through it, except for the fact that Macmillan had given her the impression that they did not want it cut. He asked, “Please don’t ask her to cut it now. She is plumb wore out on the thing after her labors of the past several months, and I don’t believe she is physically or emotionally capable of doing the pick and shovel work” that would be involved in such a cutting and revising job. He wrote:

  Here are some of the things which she eliminated from the stuff you saw originally—(1) A chapter more than 30 pages long where Rhett lends Hetty Tarleton some money to buy her mother some horses. Eliminated as wholly extraneous to the story. (2) A long chapter going into detail about what happened after Sherman entered Atlanta. It retarded the action at a time when all interest was concentrated on what was going on at Tara. Essential details were condensed into a few paragraphs and put elsewhere. (3) A 7 or 8 page section in Part V where Mammy finally leaves Scarlett and goes back to Tara. Condensed into 2 or 3 paragraphs. (4) Several pages in which Miss Pitty talks at length about how the Carpetbagger gentleman got her property away from her. Condensed into a few sentences because it seemed to get in the way of the action. (5) Several pages eliminated from the description of the education, etc., of a young lady in the Old South, in the early part of the book, because it seemed to be tediously overwritten. (6) Two rather long sections on what happened to various minor characters after the war. These were greatly condensed and sprinkled here and there where items could be brought in conversation, etc.

  In addition, numerous paragraphs and pages were eliminated throughout the book, either because they were repetitions, tedious, or obstacles to the movement of the story. On the opposite side, the only stuff which was added in was that which was absolutely necessary in making transitions, bridging gaps and filling in the holes, in order to make a connected story. Almost without exception, these fill-ins were only two or three pages long, and many of them were only two or three paragraphs. The balance was very definitely on the side of shortening the book and not lengthening it.

  (My mind was made up not to let this letter run over onto the 10th page, but I seem to have failed. From the length of this and my previous letter, you may get the impression that I wrote Peggy’s long novel. Which I didn’t. I wish I could write as well as she does. Personally, I am much more enthusiastic about the book, in spite of its length, than she is.)

  You may get the impression that she added to the book considerably after you saw it last summer, because of the fact that the book looks different now in some places from how it looked last summer. However, this is due, not to the insertion of fresh material in the story, but to revising and rearranging which had to be done for the sake of historical accuracy. . . .

  Enough of this junk. Maybe we’ll get this job finished some day and then we’ll fling a party.91

  10

  On the evening of February 13, just four days after the disappointing news about the reduced royalties, the first set of proofs arrived from Susan Prink, the Macmillan copyeditor. Anxious to see their work in print, John ripped open the package, and he and Peggy sat huddled together reading. When they first saw the corrections that had been made, corrections that erased all the hard work that they had done to achieve the effect they wanted to achieve, Peggy panicked and cried. John cursed, “The sons-of-bitches have wrecked it all!”92

  The next morning he stayed home from the office and wrote Lois a ten-page typed letter. After his polite preliminary comments, he said, “On every matter where she can conscientiously do so Peggy is willing to waive her own personal preferences” but some few things she felt so strongly about she wanted changed. The most important change, one that would require a lot of resetting, was the use of quotation marks on Scarlett’s thoughts. All the time and effort he had spent in putting this system of quotations had been erased. Item by item, he listed the copyeditor’s mistakes and presented his justification for wanting them corrected.

  Although Rhoda’s, Grace’s, and Margaret Baugh’s skills in grammar and punctuation were excellent, they could not help John proofread because only he understood such matters as how the quotation marks were to be used on Scarlett’s thoughts and Scarlett’s talking to herself. Peggy knew she wanted her book to be lively and easy to read, but her own letters demonstrate that she did not know enough about punctuation to devise the following complicated system that John described in this long letter to Macmillan on February 13, 1936:

  Your editor has struck nearly all of the quotations when Scarlett talks to herself or thinks this and that. Peggy is emphatic in wanting her own style followed on this, and her own style is sometimes quotation marks are used and sometimes they are not. She has deliberately, intentionally made these variations and she wants them followed. There are several good reasons why this should be done—(1) Nearly everything in the book is seen through Scarlett’s eyes. She is constantly talking to herself and “thinking” things. Putting her thinking, or
a considerable quantity of it, into quotation marks makes the book more lively, makes the reader “hear” Scarlett’s conversations with herself, as if she were actually talking. Moreover, it makes her more of an actor. Eliminating the quotation marks, as the editor has done, tends to create the effect on the reader that Scarlett is a thinker, rather than an actor. And Scarlett is no thinker. She prattles away to herself throughout the book, and prattling ought to be in quotation marks. Eliminating all of the quotation marks tends to make the thing look like a stream-of-consciousness book, and that is definitely something Peggy doesn’t want.

  Then, he went on to explain four different methods of punctuating Scarlett’s thoughts, her talking to herself, and her talking to others. “Peggy’s attitude is that the four different methods convey different meaning and feeling. (It may be some of that there tempo your ‘reader’ said she had, much to her surprise.)”

  His message was clear: If the copyeditor could not understand the method, then she should leave the manuscript punctuated and typed as he had sent it. “The foregoing is the most serious matter and the one which will cause the most trouble to straighten out.” Another item that distressed him had to do with the fact that the copyeditor had improved Scarlett’s grammar.

  Scarlett talks colloquially and thinks colloquially, which mean she is frequently ungrammatical. Even in the indirect, third person narration of Scarlett’s thinking, Peggy has used colloquial language. . . . Peggy wants it left colloquial. She feels that if the use and non-use of quotation marks is followed, these colloquialisms will seem more natural. . . . Scarlett’s conversations with herself, if Peggy’s style is followed, will brighten up page after page. Some of the galley we have looks depressingly like a treatise, whereas you find them to be quite animated, by Scarlet’s talking to herself, if you dig into them. You don’t need to be told it is much easier to get readers to dig into books which have plenty of conversation, and how hard to get their attention for books that look solid and heavy.