“Just think how silly such conduct makes us appear to Northern people,” she said. “I feel right mortified that Southern people should act that way.” I replied that I did not care what Northern people thought. And I had barely said these words when, with no warning, the heaviest rain I ever saw fell upon us. By the time the bus got to the Red Cross the water in the streets was above our ankles. It rained all day all over the state and in Southern Georgia most of the chicken coops were carried away and they do say that the rabbits were climbing trees to keep from being drowned. It slacked up around six o’clock, and the night issue of the Constitution carried a story that the Millen people were going to church the next morning in a body to thank the Lord for the rain. About a half hour after the Millen folks thanked the Lord, it began to hail and the hailstones were bigger than lemons. I was trying to get to the Red Cross again and fearing that my skull would be fractured at any minute, and it rained and hailed all day. As our old colored janitor said, “It don’t do no good to trifle with the Lord, ’cause if you akse him for somethin’ He likely to sen’ mo’ than you can handle.” As you know, shoes are not too plentiful and no one likes to ruin their shoes by getting them wet. And all over town I heard people saying that somebody ought to take steps about the Millen people and make them stop praying, or else we’d all be stomp barefooted. I was wet and cold so much those two days that I don’t think I’ll ever complain about the heat again.24
3
Well into autumn, as their overseas business was becoming heavier and more complicated, John came down with a high fever, just as he had done in 1940. That time, though, the fever disappeared after he rested a week in the hospital. This time it did not disappear. After four weeks of malaise and fever, he wrote his sister Frances:
I enjoy being lazy when I have sufficient excuse to satisfy my conscience. We must have had some Puritan ancestors, for it is my nature to feel that I must always be busy and even in my recreation I must feel there is some practical benefit in it, that it does me good to play golf et cetera. But when the compulsions of conscience have been removed by an official order to rest, I don’t know anybody who can be any lazier than I can or enjoy it more. I have even been working cross-word puzzles, which are a symbol of luxury and laziness to me and something I never do except when I am laid up sick.25
By the end of October, he felt a little better even though he continued to run a temperature. He was able to do almost a regular day’s work without running the temperature up or being afflicted with the heavy sweating characteristic of undulant fever. His condition was more of a handicap than a disability, he assured his mother, telling her there was nothing for her to worry about. His physician figured that John, who took his lunch downtown every day, had gotten infected by drinking some impure milk somewhere. (In those days, Atlanta did not have a law requiring that all milk be pasteurized.) He told his mother, who had fallen and injured her hand, that Peggy, too, continued to have severe pain whenever she tried to use her right wrist, hand, and arm.26
As the end of the year approached, Gone With the Wind business continued to provide the ailing John with more work than he had the energy to do, and he hired another secretary to help him and Margaret Baugh. Tired as they all were with translating the accounts, they still got excited when they received word from a publisher in Denmark saying that he expected sales to pass one hundred thousand copies by the end of the year. Norway had also checked in with a report of sales of about forty thousand. But not all the news was good. One of the returned American soldiers with whom Peggy had been corresponding during the war wrote her that he had seen an edition in Flemish while he was in Antwerp. Because she had not authorized any edition in Flemish, she had another piracy case on her hands. The good news was that the Dutch piracy case showed signs of being cleared up.27 “This foreign stuff keeps us busy,” Peggy wrote a friend.28
Back to his old grind of working on the book’s business at night and on weekends, John was still running a temperature in December. He fibbed to his mother when he wrote that his condition was no longer serious. In a letter to Lois Cole written shortly before Christmas, Peggy pessimistically acknowledged: “Neither John nor I have done very well in the last six months. He is always so fatigued it frightens me, but there is nothing much to do about it except ‘supportive’ treatment. Perhaps by spring this new drug, streptomycin, will be out of the experimental class and we can try it. As for me, my inability to use my right arm throws too much extra work on John and Margaret. We never seem to get caught up on our work.”29
As the holiday approached, the Marshes abruptly decided to go to Sea Island to rest. To them, the stretch of coast from Savannah southward to Brunswick was the most beautiful, most peaceful place in the world. Their paradisiacal retreat was Sea Island, a tiny, droplet-shaped piece of land across the marsh off the tip of the larger, historic St. Simon’s Island. Although the resorts had boats to rent for fishing, horses for riding, and tennis courts, swimming pools, and golf courses, John and Peggy found simply driving down the long, sandy roads under the huge, moss-covered live oak trees a most tranquilizing experience. “Up at the end of St. Simon’s Island,” she wrote a friend, “there is a stillness of marsh water and trees like the day after creation, and this stillness never fails to have a very soothing effect on this weary and harassed pair.”30
The millionaire manufacturer Howard Coffin had developed Sea Island and built the beautiful Cloister Hotel there in the late 1920s, and the Marshes frequently spent long weekends resting there in the early 1940s. Their only objection to staying at the luxurious hotel was that it did not face the sea or the marshes. They preferred the Cloister apartments in the River House, which was built close to the hotel but right on the edge of a beautiful river that ran through the Marshes of Glynn.31
Ordinarily, Peggy drove them to the islands, but with her right shoulder and arm inflamed with arthritis, she could not drive this trip. So, on Christmas Eve 1945, they boarded the train to Jesup, a little railroad junction town in southeast Georgia, on the Atlanta-Birmingham and Coast Railroad line. At Jesup, they had to change trains to go to Brunswick, about forty-five miles away. A still waterway—the Marshes of Glynn—lay between Brunswick and St. Simon’s, and a station wagon from the Cloister Hotel would meet them at the Brunswick train station and transport them the five or six miles across the bridge to Sea Island.
Their train pulled into Jesup during a driving, cold rainstorm. It was Christmas Eve, late in the evening, and no porters were in sight to help John with their luggage. They had no umbrellas or raincoats, just their overcoats. John handed Peggy the newspaper he had been reading and told her to cover her head and run ahead to the shelter. As he struggled in the blinding rain carrying their two suitcases and his briefcase, he felt a sudden, stabbing tightening in his chest and neck. For a moment, he could not breathe or move. His hat, overcoat, and feet got soaking wet. When he finally made it into the depot, he dropped the bags and sat down. Peggy knew something was terribly wrong, but he assured her that he was all right. Once the train to Brunswick pulled into sight, John had to carry the bags again in the pouring rain. Wet and cold, he became chilled and ashen. He said nothing about the smothering sensation or the chills as they rode silently on to Brunswick. Noticing his labored breathing, Peggy became seriously alarmed.32
By the time they finally got registered and settled into their apartment, John was so sick he stumbled onto the bed. Within seconds, he suffered a massive heart attack. Terrified that he was going to die, she got hysterical as she rang for help. Adding to her terror was the shocking news that the hotel had no doctor—that the island, in fact, the desk clerk apologetically told her, had no doctor. Her helplessness loomed large in her mind as she thought about all those years that John had been taking care of everything for her. He always knew what to do and he did it. And now when he needed her so desperately, she was helpless. Forcing herself to become calm, she listened to the desk clerk say that the best he could do was to have the statio
n wagon driver take them to the hospital in Brunswick.
Somehow the driver, the desk clerk, and Peggy managed to move John, near death, into the station wagon, and they arrived at the hospital in the late-night hours. With John crumpled in the back seat of the car waiting with the driver, Peggy raced up the steps into the hospital, where she found the anteroom bare. The doctors and nurses, even the orderlies, off on their Christmas Day vacation, were nowhere in sight. In pure terror and anger, Peggy stood in the silent, dimly lit corridor and screamed with all her might for help.33
John’s condition was gravely complicated by the delay in his receiving medical attention, and it was astonishing that he survived at all.34 He was so sick that it was three weeks before he could even be moved to Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta. All during the time he lay in the Brunswick hospital, Peggy rarely left his bedside for more than a few minutes. Because the war was on, the shipyards had gobbled up all of the available labor and the hospital was having a hard time retaining even a minimum staff of competent people after the Christmas holiday.35 Thus Peggy did not feel safe leaving him unattended for a moment and refused to do so.
When Margaret Baugh and Stephens arrived on Christmas evening, she told them, “Go back to Atlanta. Look after things for us. I can’t think about anything but John. I’ve got to get him well.” Henry Marsh left for Brunswick shortly after Peggy called on Christmas morning, tearfully telling him the news. Gordon and Frances followed the next day. All of John’s brothers and sisters feared the worst, for they remembered how their father had died suddenly after running a fever for a long time when he was about John’s age.
Francesca recalled later that for someone who had been in the crippling condition Peggy had endured for two years, she responded to the ordeal with remarkable strength. She refused to let the orderlies do anything for John that she could do herself. She took her meals in his room, slept on a cot placed next to his bed, dressed and washed in his hospital bathroom. She asked questions about his medications and got furious with the staff when she thought they were not moving as quickly as they should. Although John could not talk to her, she talked to him, read to him, and told him little funny stories. And throughout each day, she frequently caressed his face as she whispered into his ear that she loved him. Francesca said that Peggy was truly heroic and that it was very moving to see them together in that sad setting.36
As soon as they heard the news, Angus and Medora rushed to the Brunswick hospital. When Medora wanted to know what she could do to help, Peggy asked her to go to the Cloister apartment and get her padded silk bag containing her last two pairs of nylon stockings, scarce commodities during the war. Medora recalled that as Peggy was washing a pair of these stockings several days later, one of them slipped from her hand and slid down the drain of the hospital lavatory, hopelessly snagged in the pipe. When that happened, Peggy uttered a deep groan from the back of her throat and let go of the other stocking. Dropping to her knees, she bowed her head, crying profusely as she sat on the floor. John was not progressing as well as she had hoped, and she must have felt as if he was slipping from her hands as easily as her stocking had slipped, and there was nothing she could do about it. Until that moment when the floodgates broke open, she had held up courageously throughout the ordeal.37
4
Two months later, Peggy had John back in Atlanta and in Piedmont Hospital, where he was slowly edging his way back from death’s door. In responding to Lois Cole’s telegram, Peggy explained:
You know that I am the least optimistic of people. So when I say that I am happy at his good progress and have hope for a decent life for him if he is very careful—then you know that he is doing very well. . . . He was in pretty bad shape when his heart gave out. During the attack his lungs had filled with fluid and, fearing pneumonia, he was given penicillin. He has had no whiff of fever since then, which proves that he did not have undulant fever, for penicillin availeth naught with that disease.38
Although the Atlanta heart specialist whom Peggy selected came highly recommended, he was not communicative and she did not like him. Upon dismissing John from the hospital, the physician left brief written instructions to John to the effect that, once home, he should get up and about, walk up and down the three flights of stairs to his apartment, go on automobile rides, and return to work in April. Trying to proceed accordingly on the first day he got home, John nearly fainted without doing anything more vigorous than sitting up at the table to eat breakfast and standing up to shave. Angry with the physician’s lack of response when she tried to explain John’s worsening condition, she dismissed him and called in Dr. W. C. Waters. Having had a serious heart attack himself, Dr. Waters was much more understanding and conservative.
In a long, undated, typed letter to John’s mother in the early spring of 1946, Peggy wrote about the hectic time she had had since returning from Brunswick.
There was a month or six weeks’ foreign stuff back up waiting for me, all of it of No 1 importance. . . . There were several new contracts . . . and our contracts are something that have to be seen to be believed. Most authors never even look at what they sign and become terrorized when publishers and agents say coldly, “This is our standard contract.” When possible I try to knock the teeth out of anyone who tells me to sign a “standard” contract, for I know they are knaves or fools or both. So our contracts are pretty troublesome. . . . Food shortages keep me shopping half the day; the usual stupidities of people who do not care a hoot if they disturb John by crashing into the house . . . and the foreign stuff keeps rolling along.
She added that when she realized that she had a bed patient on her hands, she did her best to slow down.
Unfortunately, it was like throwing on the brakes when you are doing a hundred and ten, and it took some time to get us slowed. Regardless of the pressures from outside, John comes first and when he is not having a good day, everything stands still. . . . I think these weeks of enforced quiet have done all of us good. Right now I can consider with equanimity my long delayed action in the matter of a piracy in Belgium, when six months ago I would have had the American Embassy in Brussels, lawyers, auditors and possibly the U.S. Marines on the job.39
Stephens, Margaret Baugh, Henry Marsh, Bessie, and Deon—all noted that for as long as any of them could remember, the Marsh household had centered on Peggy’s needs, but now it centered on John’s. They noticed too that Peggy seemed stronger and was determined to do what John had always done for her. His incapacity forced her to grow up at last. Their roles reversed, she became his protector.
With the European sales reports pouring in, she was fierce about getting her royalties from publishers who appeared not to want to pay her. Her motivation stemmed from her desire that John not have to worry about being unable to work again. Although he talked about a complete recovery and about going back to Georgia Power, she knew that his future was bleak. The doctors in Brunswick had told her that he had only a year or two at the most to live.40
Anyone looking at the tremendous volume of paperwork that John Marsh alone handled—the letters, the contracts, and the transactions with accountants, lawyers, agents, and publishers in countries all over the world, from 1936 until 1945—in addition to his work at Georgia Power, can imagine what chronic stress he endured and why his heart gave out. According to Margaret Baugh’s bookkeeping, 1,250,000 copies of the foreign translations had been sold by the spring of 1946, and that was only counting the authorized editions. “God knows how many unauthorized copies are out there!” Peggy snorted sourly. “Let’s crack down on the bastards!”
The first week in May, Macmillan announced that 3,713,272 copies of the American edition of Gone With the Wind had thus far been sold.41 With that kind of achievement, Peggy had secured her immortality.
5
As his convalescence dragged on, John became depressed and was often unable to sleep. For several months, he could not even sit up in bed for very long without becoming exhausted. His craving for nicotine was agon
izing; his helplessness and inactivity were frustrating and dull. He could not shut his mind off. Worried about Peggy, Steve, and Margaret Baugh carrying the full load, he felt useless. “I knew that I must get back on the job,” he later wrote a friend. “Peggy needed me, the Power Company needed me. I had stayed in bed as long as I could, and no damned heart was going to keep me in bed any longer. That period was the worst one.” But then he went on to say, “Eventually I stopped struggling, and I immediately began getting better.”42
As the months passed, John’s condition slowly improved. By springtime, he wrote that the bad news was that weakness and weariness overtook him after the slightest exertion. But the good news was that he had not smoked a cigarette since December 24, and his senses of smell, taste, and hearing were keener than they had ever been. When he gradually became able to sit up for longer periods, he started writing to his family and to a few close friends. These letters are beautifully expressed personal records of his determination to recover, and they are noticeably devoid of any mention of Gone With the Wind business. By acknowledging his destructive “workaholic” habits, he deliberately learned to practice mind control and relaxation techniques to make himself stronger. In the beginning of his recovery, he spent much of his time thinking and talking to Peggy about his childhood and in writing about it. In a nostalgic mood, he wrote a letter to his cousin Mary Louise Nute on October 7, 1946:
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