As you may observe from the postmark, I’m not at home in Atlanta. I’m on the run. I’m sure Scarlett O’Hara never struggled harder to get out of Atlanta or suffered more during her siege of Atlanta than I have suffered during the siege that has been on since publication day. If I had known being an author was like this I’d have thought several times before I let Harold Latham go off with my dog-eared manuscript. I’ve lost ten pounds in a week, leap when the phones ring and scurry like a rabbit at the sight of a familiar face on the street. The phone has screamed every three minutes for a week and utter strangers collar me in public and ask the most remarkable questions and photographers pop up out of drains. . . .9
His planning to visit her was the best news, she told him, that she had gotten since the day she went “on sale.” With childlike enthusiasm, she asked him: “Will you really come to see me?” Free-handed with her flattery, she added, “I can’t tell you how happy that would make me. It was marvelous enough that you said such things about my book but it will be more marvelous if I could meet you, because—and I must fall back on a trite statement—‘I have long been an admirer of yours.’” Always careful to compliment her reviewers on their astuteness, she thanked him for picking up the “parallel between Scarlett and Atlanta,” for no one else had “caught it.” She appreciated his understanding that even though her story “‘bordered on the melodramatic,’” the times of which she wrote “were melodramatic.” She pointed out that it took a person with a southern background to appreciate just how melodramatic they really were and that she had had to tone down many of the actual events to make them sound believable. She loved his defense of Captain Butler.
I never thought when I wrote him, that there’d be so much argument about whether he was true to life or not. His type was such an ordinary one in those days that I picked him because he was typical of his times. Even his looks. I went through hundreds of old ambro-types and daguerreotypes looking at faces and that type of face leaped out at you. Just as surely as the faces of the pale, sly looking boys with a lock of hair hanging on their foreheads were always referred to with a sigh as “dear cousin Willy. He was killed at Shiloh.” (I’ve often wondered why the boys who looked like that were always killed at Shiloh.)
About the matter of Captain Butler, she was caught in a crossfire. The northern critics said he was not true to life; the southerners found him so true that she feared having a lawsuit on her hands despite her protests that she did not model him after any human being she had ever heard of. She asked, “And how did you know I had a ‘memory for what older people had told me?’ Because you have that type and had the same things told to you? Good Heavens, I am running on. And I was only going to say ‘thank-you.’”
With her voice almost ringing off the page, she offered her hospitality: “I’ll give you a party if you want a party or I’ll feed you at home and sit and listen to you talk. My cook’s a good old fashioned kind, strong on turnip greens and real fried chicken and rolls that melt in your mouth. Personally, I’d rather listen to you talk—and thank you—than give you a party.” Her letter made a hit with Brickell. In a short while, Brickell and his wife Norma made a lasting friendship with Peggy and John.
2
Instead of resting the following day, she worked steadily from morning to late evening typing five long letters. All are creatively expressed and give us insight into Peggy’s lively personality and her reaction to fame. “I do think it’s awful,” she wrote George Brett, “when you’ve sent me a check for five thousand dollars that I haven’t had time to buy me a new dress, or have my car overhauled! I didn’t know an author’s life was like this. Life has been such a nightmare recently that it was all I could do to stay on my feet, much less write letters.” With her imagination fired, she explained her “escape” from Atlanta in more dramatic terms and added a bit of fiction: “I’ve started for the back of beyond in the mountains and stopped here because I was going to sleep at the wheel and afraid I’d kill myself in a ditch. When I reach a place where there aren’t any telephones and no newspapers for my picture to be in, I’ll stop and write you a letter to tell you just how much I do appreciate the check and all you and Macmillan have done for me.” She closed with “Good Heavens! The advertising you’ve put behind me! With all those ads and the grand publicity the newspapers have given me, Macmillan could have sold Karl Marx up here in these hills!”10
She wrote a 225-word letter to Hunt Clement thanking him for his fifteen-word telegram. Then, she composed a thousand-word letter to Gilbert Govan, who had begun his review of Gone With the Wind in the July 5 Chattanooga Times with what she called “a grand lead.” He stated, “One of the things which most Northerners say that they cannot understand about Southerners is what they call an obsession with the Civil War. ‘We’ve forgotten about it,’ they say, ‘why can’t you?’”11 She told him that she, too, had heard northerners say those same words hundreds of times: “And I remembered how I looked at them always in a blank confusion, faced with the fact that I couldn’t explain why the war is an ‘obsession’ with us.” She said could not explain then “without taking all night—or writing a book as long as the one I wrote.”12 Then, in her conversational manner of writing, she went on to tell him a story about the night she was having supper with Lois and Allan Taylor:
I asked him [Allan] what prison his kin folks had been in during the war. And he asked me what prison mine had been in. And I asked what the death rate had been in the prison of his kin. And he wanted to know whether pneumonia or small pox accounted for most of the deaths in the jail where my folks were imprisoned. It seemed an ordinary enough conversation to us and we spoke of it all as though we’d been there. But we came out of it suddenly when Lois looked at us curiously and made the same remark you made in your lead, asked the same question.
One of Peggy’s traits that made her so popular was her ability to find something special about an individual and praise that person for it. This trait is strikingly manifested in her letters also. For example, she complimented Govan for recognizing that Gerald O’Hara’s security could never be found apart from the land: “No one else picked that up . . . and that depressed me for while I didn’t hammer on it I meant it for an undercurrent. And I felt, as I suppose all authors are prone to feel, nine tenths of the time, that I had utterly failed in getting my ideas over.” She appreciated his saying that the characters had not been drawn from real life, because “people are picking out Rhett Butlers to such an extent that I may have a law suit on my hands yet for using the grandfathers of certain people who must be nameless. And I have never heard of their darned grandfather. And Melanie has been fitted to a number of people, last of all me.”
She was referring to a piece that Harry Sitwell Edwards, one of the local newspapermen, had written in the Atlanta Journal on July 7. Edwards wrote, “Inevitably, the true novelist writes herself into her story; a bit here and a bit there, in the characters assembled. And sometimes, one of them may reveal her as a whole. In Gone With the Wind . . . the real heroine is Melanie. . . . And Peggy Mitchell is the reincarnation of Melanie.” Her response to that idea is found in her letter of July 8 to Govan: “Being a product of the Jazz Age, being one of those short-haired, short-skirted, hard-boiled young women who preachers said would go to hell or be hanged before they were thirty, I am naturally a little embarrassed at finding myself the incarnate spirit of the Old South.”
The next person to whom she wrote was Julia Collier Harris, who on July 5 had dedicated “From My Balcony,” her long column in the Chattanooga News, to Gone With the Wind. The columnist had sent Peggy a copy of her column and also a copy of Ralph Thompson’s New York Times negative review, on which she had penciled, “Shallow and spiteful.” In her reply of approximately 1,180 words, Peggy wrote how happy and pleased her family was about all the nice things Mrs. Harris had written about her. “Though they would die before admitting it, I’m sure they all feel in the old fashioned Southern way—that a lady’s name appears in pr
int only when she’s born and buried. And I know they had well concealed qualms about seeing my name in print. However, after I took the plunge and was published they rallied to me. . . . And they were so pleased at your column, not only the nice things you said but the way you said them. So I am saying ‘thank you’ for the clan as well as myself.”13
Another letter she wrote while still in the mountains was to Edwin Granberry, who also praised Gone With the Wind in his June 30 column in the New York Evening Sun. This letter is much like the one she wrote to Brickell except that she discloses a bit more dismay at her sudden fame. After explaining that recent events had made her “incoherent from exhaustion,” she went on to thank Granberry for his “kind words about poor Scarlett, for saying that she still keeps your sympathy.”14 While Peggy was writing about Scarlett, it had never occurred to her that such a storm of hard words would descend upon the poor creature’s head. “She just seemed to me to be a normal person thrown into abnormal circumstances and doing the best she could, doing what seemed to her the practical thing. The normal human being in a jam thinks, primarily, of saving his own hide, and she valued hide in a thoroughly normal way.”
Granberry’s compassionate response to Rhett Butler and to Scarlett pleased her no end. One of the first reviewers not only to show sympathy for Scarlett but also to predict the manner in which fans, especially female readers, would adore Rhett Butler, Granberry wrote that “the greatest triumph of the book” was “the creation of the character of Rhett Butler. . . . He is one of the great lovers in all fiction, and no man ever had his heart more broken than he. Miss Mitchell’s objective handling of him rivals Sigrid Undset’s way with her Erling. As we remember, we are never—even in his worst moments of torment—led directly into the mind of Rhett Butler; the author is always able to find an action or a speech which reveals the havoc. (Watch for the moment when Butler opens his shirt to show his step-son the scar.)”15
Singling out that particular passage, Peggy exclaimed that she did not think anybody would “catch up” with her in that aspect of her book.
I could live in his mind so thoroughly that I neglected to write about his mind. And I positively got goose bumps when you referred to the incident of Wade Hampton and the scar on Rhett’s belly. . . . And to say he is one of the great lovers of fiction—well, good heavens! If I hadn’t been so completely certain my book was rotten, hadn’t thought it rotten for so many years, I would be so conceited about that line that I’d be unbearable!
She ended her letter by telling Granberry how happy he had made her and her family: “My reserved and unenthusiastic father simply purred when he read your review—and why not? I wish there was some way I could tell you how much I appreciated everything you said. I wish I could see you because I talk better than I write and perhaps I could make you understand what your review meant to me. And I hope I do see you sometime.”
The next morning, Wednesday, July 9, Peggy wrote one more letter before she and Bessie started back to Atlanta. Perfecting her persona of the suffering servant, she wrote to Stephen Vincent Benét. “I am not in the best condition to write the kind of letter I’d like to write you. . . . I have just made my escape from Atlanta after losing ten pounds since my publication day. . . . My life has been quiet, here-to-fore, quiet by choice and I find all this goings-on very upsetting. So I bolted until things should quiet down.” Then she told him how much his work had influenced her, how much it meant to her, and how her heart sank when she heard he was to review her book. “You were my favorite poet; you had written my most loved book. You knew so much and appreciated good writing so much that I fully expected you to blast me at the top of your lungs. I suppose I should have realized that anyone who can write something great can be generous, too.”16
3
Peggy’s letters demonstrate the force of her conversational powers and her feminine magnetism. She presented herself to men as an ill but modest, charming woman who admired and trusted them so much that she was sharing a part of her joy and her sorrow with each one privately. But Peggy wrote letters to all of her admirers and also to her critics, no matter what their age or gender. Indeed, perhaps no other author in the annals of literary history has spent more time and effort in writing letters explaining herself, her illnesses, and her book, or in giving advice to people she had never met than Margaret Mitchell did. Nearly all of the people who wrote her were sincere, and she responded with sincerity.
Most of her letters ran between five hundred and eighteen hundred words, and all are very personal expressions of her appreciation. Sometimes she would answer questions in greater detail, no doubt, than the recipient had expected; and she would also give bits of advice. For example, when two fourteen-year-old girls wrote asking her to write a sequel making Scarlett and Rhett get back together by using the outline they proposed, Peggy encouraged them to practice writing if they wanted to be good authors. “Keep on writing about things with which you are familiar and things you know best and understand best.”17 These were the exact words that John had said to her a decade earlier.
If she were writing to thank someone who had written a good review, she would practically quote the entire review, commenting on and savoring nearly every line. Inviting responses, her letters were so warm, lively, and generous in spirit that the receiver was obligated to write back. Thus she initiated many friendships with people whom she would not have otherwise known, such as the Edwin Granberrys, the Herschel Brickells, and the Clifford Dowdeys.
Whenever anyone questioned her historical facts, she painstakingly responded, often with John’s help since he enjoyed nailing down requests like that. For instance, a month after Time magazine, in its July 6 issue, published an excellent review of Gone With the Wind, the author of the review, K. T. Lowe, sent Peggy a telegram asking about the desecration of the Atlanta City Cemetery by Federal troops. When his telegram arrived on August 3, she was ill and John wired that the answer would be forthcoming. On August 29, she wrote Lowe a long explanation:
I was, and still am, suffering severe eye strain due to overwork in finishing my book. Even now, I am unable to read or write. This condition has severely hampered me in checking back through my reference works and assembling the authorities for the statement in question. However, with the help of friends, I have been able to get together the data. . . . It never occurred to me that the matter of Federal desecration of Southern cemeteries would ever be questioned. In childhood I heard vivid stories from so many different people who had seen the desecrated cemeteries in Atlanta and other cities. However, I am citing a few authorities.18
Then she proceeded to cite four sources and to quote passages from them.
Looking backward, one cannot help wondering why Peggy wasted so much time writing such long letters. She could easily have gotten her secretary Margaret Baugh to type a standard thank-you note to send to fans and reviewers, for doing so would have enabled her to use her time to rest or to write other pieces for publication. Almost all of the important magazines in the nation solicited her to send stories or articles. At one point, John reported to his mother: “One of the big editors wanted to come from New York to Atlanta to talk things over, after he had been given the usual turn-down, and another one insisted that Peggy send them ‘just anything.’”19 She consistently refused such offers, saying, “I am not well enough to do any writing.”20 She never attempted to write anything of that nature, nor did she ever start work on a new book. She said repeatedly, “I hate writing worse than anything in the world and would far rather scrub floors or pick cotton than write.”21
And yet she spent hours at the typewriter nearly every day for the remainder of her life, expressing herself creatively and vividly in millions of words in her letters. She explained her commitment to letter writing as a matter of moral responsibility: “It is not courtesy to ignore them, certainly not courtesy to send them abrupt letters. . . . They must be answered and answered by me. There are things I have to attend to personally because this happens t
o be my job, whether I like it or not, and I cannot put it upon anyone else. Nor, as I think it over, can I run away.”22
However, Edwin Granberry may have come closer to the truth about her letter-writing obsession in his article about her for Collier’s magazine in March 1937. Commenting on her open, friendly, and gentle writing voice, on her humility and her many references to her debilitating illnesses, he wrote, “Many of [her letters], written under the fervency of emotion aroused by the novel, have the tone of the confessional about them.”23
Peggy’s letters do indeed have that tone, for many of them touchingly disclose her anxieties and her desperate need to be loved, understood, and accepted. In spite of her phenomenal success, she was never able to dispel her fears of failure and rejection. Her need to be admired was overwhelming. Although she loathed the disadvantages that went along with it, she loved being a celebrity, but her insecurity about herself and her book never waned. She truly meant it when she said time and time again: “Heavens knows I never expected the book to get such good reviews or people to be so kind. The book will never seem like a book to me but just that old dog-eared and dirty bunch of copy paper which took up so much space in our small apartment and seemed with each rewriting to get worse.”24
4
By mid-afternoon on July 10, Peggy was back in Atlanta reading the special-delivery letters that she and John had just received from Lois Cole. In her letter to John, Lois wrote that Annie Laurie had told her the previous night that she had closed with David Selznick for fifty thousand dollars cash. “She maintains it is the highest price ever paid for a first novel and is sure that none of the companies could have been pushed any higher. Apparently everyone is anxious to get the contract through and signed in a hurry, and, if all goes well, I should have it forwarded to you tomorrow . . . they want to have everything settled by the middle of next week.”25 The enclosed letter Lois wrote to Peggy said about the same thing but added that Selznick was contemplating doing the picture in color and that he wished to take his time in casting the roles in the best possible fashion. Emphasizing that Annie Laurie had made the best possible deal, Lois went on to say, “Annie Laurie says that they tried to get her down and she tried to get them up, but that was the highest that anyone would go, when it came right down to writing a check. She maintains that it is the biggest price ever paid for a first novel.” Remembering the scolding she had gotten from Peggy earlier about the Macmillan gossips, Lois assured Peggy that they at Macmillan were not talking about the contract “until it was signed and delivered.” The one other thing that Lois mentioned was that Annie Laurie had requested that if they were ever asked what price was paid, they were to say “for something over $50,000, which seems to me,” Lois added, “to be stretching the truth—but what of it! Everyone here is very pleased about the sale, and I hope you are, too. I think it is grand.”26
Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh Page 39