Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  It is odd how these old recollections are colored by a person’s emotions. Some of the houses and families I remember vividly and others very indistinctly, and nearly always it is because of some liking or disliking. . . . I have sharp and clear recollections of the store on the corner of Commerce and Second Streets which was run by the two old men with squeaky voices. They sold candy out of a barrel, five pieces for a penny, and when I got a penny I would go over there and buy some. One time when Mother sent me there to get some groceries, I took one of her pennies and bought some candy and told her the storekeeper had short-changed me. At the time it didn’t bother me but a few years later when I entered the religious phase it weighed on my mind heavily as a Sin.

  Until his heart attack, John had always been what he called a “natural born sleeper,” and Peggy had been the sleepless one. Now, except for short naps, he hardly slept at all. In the spring of 1946, he wrote Frances:

  I have been compelled to learn some of the tricks by which a person gets off to sleep when he isn’t extremely tired. Among ideas suggested by Peggy was a plan by which a person can slow down his mind from going buckity-buckity and thus making sleep impossible. It was to wander in one’s thoughts down some old familiar street or road, trying to recall each house and all other details of the landscape. I’ve found it not only helpful in getting off to sleep but interesting as well. In these past weeks I have in reverie wandered over Maysville and Lexington more than at any time since I moved away from Kentucky. After a person has worked at it a while, it is remarkable how vividly the old scenes come back.43

  With the wrenching nostalgia that only a person who has had a close brush with death can feel, he wrote his sister how much he loved his family, and the place, and the period of history into which he had been born.

  I doubt that many children have, in addition to their devoted parents, the care of a Grandmother, an Aunty, and an Uncle Bob living just Over Home, plus a kind and wise Grandfather long enough for us older children to know him. . . . We grew up at a time when the world was not only at peace but could truly believe that there would never be any more wars. It is hard to imagine a greater contrast than that which exists between those days and the present. In our days, we needed to worry about nothing beyond what happened up and down Forest Avenue, but the children of today face a really frightening world. . . . I suppose it is natural for a person who has passed fifty to look back on his own childhood as a time of romance and to view the coming generation with alarm.44

  In October 1946, extra stresses were placed on the Marsh household when Deon had surgery. She had been such a help to John and Peggy, and they had gained new appreciation of her from the way she had risen to the situation during John’s illness. While Deon was away, Bessie, though not in good health herself, came in her place, bringing Deon’s little daughter, Jimmie Lee, to help her. “It was like manna from Heaven when she arrived and said she was going to work,” John wrote his mother.

  I suppose that in time Jimmie Lee will inherit us. We were not consulted when Bessie sent Deon to work in her place three years ago. Neither were we consulted when Bessie decided to come back to us during Deon’s illness. I suppose when they get ready, they will turn us over to Jimmie Lee and we will know nothing about it until it has been done. . . . I don’t know how we could have gotten through this trouble without our colored friends.45

  6

  Shortly before Christmas 1946, when it looked as if neither she nor John was ever going to be able to climb the stairs in their apartment building easily, Peggy started looking for a house to buy in their general neighborhood. She found one small house nearby that suited her perfectly, but refused to pay sixty-five thousand dollars for a house that she claimed was worth no more than thirty thousand.

  As John got better, she postponed her search for a house. On February 14, 1947, she wrote to Helen Dowdey: “I don’t go anywhere except to the grocery store and seldom see anyone except Medora Perkerson and frequently Sam Tupper [their neighbor]. Sam says he does not come to see us for love of us but because of the free moving pictures we are showing.” They had always loved going to the movies, and so once John was able to sit up for long periods, Peggy rented a 16-millimeter movie projector and sent the janitor to town every day to get them films. They especially liked old films, such as the old Chaplins. Peggy wrote: “Machine guns rattle every night here or the roar of the motors of 1918 Curtis jennys deafen the neighbors or the tom-toms of ‘South of Pago Pago’ wake the echoes.”46

  The first evening they got the projector, they worked for about two hours trying to get the thing to work. They used “everything including a pickle fork, a jelly spoon, egg beater, a carved backscratcher, an after-dinner coffee spoon engraved ‘Chicago World’s Fair 1893,’ a piece of Jensen silver sent to Peggy by one of her admirers in Denmark,” John wrote his mother. “Both of us, being subnormal in health, would work a while and then stretch out on the divan and pant. Finally around midnight, I had an inspiration. Maybe a coat-hanger, a plain ordinary coat-hanger would do the trick, and strangely enough it did. It is things like this which provide my triumph these days, and I much prefer them to the other type of triumphs.”47

  After informing them that alchohol relaxes the blood vessels and is good for heart complaints when used moderately, Dr. Waters prescribed a little alcoholic drink in the evenings. Around four o’clock every afternoon, Peggy would go across the street to the Piedmont Driving Club with a mason jar in a paper sack and bring it back full of champagne cocktails. They would sip their drinks and eat their supper as they conversed or watched a movie.48 Not optimistic about his future, Peggy told Helen: “I can’t predict how well he will get or when he will recover. . . . I don’t know if he will go back to work or when. We have not even discussed the matter. All our energies have been bent, first, to seeing that he stayed alive at all, next, that he was happy and occupied, and, last, that he improved.”49

  7

  Part of John’s weariness and frustrations with the book’s business came from his having to keep an eye on Macmillan as well as the foreign publishers. He thought that some of Macmillan’s acts were unconscionable. In early 1947, after Margaret Baugh, who was doing the bookkeeping, pointed out a minor problem with royalties from Macmillan, John politely explained the miscalculations to George Brett. The mistake was one that had been made before, but not deliberately either time. After apologizing and saying the adjustment would be made immediately, Brett went on too long when he referred to an old rumor about Peggy’s leaping at the opening bid of fifty thousand dollars when Selznick had been prepared to pay her $250,000. That rumor had always annoyed Peggy because it made her look like a sucker or a yokel who did not realize the value of her work until later and then began complaining about the fifty-thousand-dollar payment.

  In a hazardous burst of energy, John angrily wrote Brett saying that the remarks about the contract were, “at their mildest, slurring.”

  Peggy was offered $50,000 for her motion picture rights in 1936 and she accepted this price . . . she has never been dissatisfied and she has never complained, either publicly or privately. But everybody else seems to complain for her. Everybody else seems to think she ought to be dissatisfied and unhappy about the $50,000. It all carries the suggestion that she would wish to welsh out of a trade which she had made, and we don’t like it. Now you have joined your voice in that chorus.

  He angrily reminded Brett that their dissatisfaction with the motion picture contract did not arise from the amount of money involved, “but from the way Macmillan put a blindfold over Peggy’s eyes and tied her hands behind her back and delivered her over to Selznick.” He bitterly recounted the old complaint that the publisher had misled Peggy and him into believing that Macmillan was her agent, when in fact “Macmillan’s representatives had acted solely to protect Macmillan’s interests, versus Selznick and versus Peggy.”50 All the negative emotions generated by reading and answering Brett’s letter robbed John of his strength. He realized then
that he would never get any healthier if he continued to deal with such matters. He decided to push all Gone With the Wind business away forever. After receiving that letter, Brett had little else to say to the Marshes.

  In a melancholy mood on the eve of his twenty-second wedding anniversary, John thought about how the years had passed so quickly, how they had all “run together in one mass.” He wrote to his mother:

  The endlessness of the labor that had to be done after Peggy’s book hit the jackpot left no time for meditation and recollection; it was a desperate drive to try to keep abreast of the many problems that rose up faster than we could knock them down. However, it was an experience that very few people ever have, and if it did contribute toward breaking down my body it did build up my mental assets. I doubt if there is anybody in the United States who knows as much about international copyright matters as Peggy and I, and Margaret Baugh and Stephens Mitchell. We had some highly expensive and famous New York lawyers employed for a considerable time but eventually we fired them because we had to tell them what to do whenever trouble arose. Of course there is no “profit” in all this knowledge. If some other author asked me to handle his foreign copyright problems, I would shoot him on sight, but there is some satisfaction in knowing that we know some thing which people in general don’t know.

  No other person in the history of literature ever identified his spouse’s success with the sorrow that John Marsh eventually did: “Peggy and I get satisfaction out of the knowledge that she has come through the fire without the catastrophes which are so often the fate of people who acquire sudden fame. . . . We have won our battles but we had to pay a big price. From here on out I aim to make our health and happiness our principal goal, and I hope my good resolutions will not waver when I have regained enough strength to get back in the harness again.”51

  When John made up his mind not to let his illness disfigure his life more than it should, he began to enjoy his confinement, not merely endure it. Once he decided to let Margaret Baugh handle the book’s business almost entirely, he began to get well. When his mother asked him in 1947 if his trouble stemmed from the fact he smoked so many cigarettes, he answered: “Perhaps. . . . For a long time it was believed that it was brought on by too much hard work and worry.”52 He believed his recovery was due to his new-found philosophy, best expressed by William James: “Be willing to have it so. Acceptance of what has happened is the first step in overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.”53

  Later, speaking as a five-year survivor, he advised Edna Daniel, a friend who had just had her first heart attack: “You do not whip heart trouble in an American way. You do it in an Oriental way. You go to Mr. Gandhi’s India and imitate his passive resistance. You go to the Hebrews and learn to say ‘Thy will be done.’You go to the Chinese and by analogy apply the lesson of their proverb ‘When rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy yourself.’”54 He told Edna, “Think of it this way, if you had a broken leg, it would have been put into splints or otherwise immobilized until it had repaired itself. You can’t immobilize a heart, not in this world, but you can ‘take the weight off it’ to some extent. That is why you are being encouraged, by drugs and otherwise, to lead a placid life.”

  John never mentioned reading books about relaxation therapy; apparently, he figured out on his own how to focus his mind to rid his body of tension. He believed strongly in the human body’s regenerative powers. Attempting to upgrade his friend’s spirits, he urged her to relax so that her body could heal itself:

  The mind can soar when the body is being its most placid. Often it does. Do you remember how it floated and sailed, up into the clouds and beyond, when you lay on your back under a tree on a hot summer day and you about the age of fifteen? The most complete relaxation a person ever feels in his whole lifetime, when the smell of the clover and the fragrance of the honeysuckle and the warm touch of the breeze have dulled the senses and the mind goes travelling higher and higher into lands we may never see again. You must have memories like that, so you know for yourself that having the body dulled or unstimulated does not retard the mind. Often it gives it a richness it has at no other time.

  Maybe you are not yet willing to let yourself be lazy. . . . The habits are not easily changed. You could be resenting what you can’t do and letting that hold you back from what you can do. And that might be why your mind seems dull.

  What I can offer you out of my own heartbreak is—Use what you have got. Enjoy it. Don’t let the things you can’t do prevent you from doing, and enjoying the things you can do. . . . Now the situation is—you have everything mental you ever had, plus the broadening and deepening of a great experience.

  8

  At the beginning of his long confinement, when he could not sit up, Peggy read to him from the works of the novelist Angela Thirkell. They enjoyed her books so much that Peggy sent her packages and letters in appreciation, and they developed a friendship with her through correspondence. When he got strong enough to sit in a chair and read for himself, John read Dickens, Carlyle, Williams, James, Emerson, and the works of other philosophers. He became interested in birds, trees, and flowers. Their roles completely reversed now, Peggy brought him armfuls of books on ornithology and horticulture to study.

  The little boy whom she hired to assist him gathered leaves, branches, and flowers from the park for him to examine and identify. He became knowledgeable about trees and birds. His and Peggy’s observations of nature were a highly interesting pastime; they especially enjoyed bird watching. To Margaret Cate, their friend the postmistress at Sea Island, he wrote: “The birds have been merely a part of my ‘discovering’ of my surroundings, noticing things which have been right here before my eyes all of these years but which I have been too busy to notice, finding trees and flowers right outside my window which I never knew were there, and learning by keeping my eyes open that the bird population of our neighborhood is much more varied than I ever knew.”55

  Peggy placed bird feeders at all the windows to attract as many birds as she could from Piedmont Park. And when the birds were having trouble picking up the raisins John fed them, she threaded the raisins on a string for them. He was amused when she decided to remove the feeder in the bathroom window because it made her nervous to have the mockingbirds watch her from their perch on the windowsill a few feet away. She said they gave her a look as if she were intruding. John wrote his sister Frances:

  Ever since I have known Peggy, she has wanted to have her breakfast alone and undisturbed. That suits me because I have never regarded breakfast as a social occasion, and we never eat breakfast together if we can avoid it. However, Peggy now permits the birds to disturb and interrupt her breakfast and apparently enjoys it. She eats her breakfast from a tray on the porch and one of the favorite feeding places is the window sill near where she sits. Before Peggy eats her own breakfast, she puts out fresh feed for the birds. If she doesn’t, she says that the mockers and the cardinals curse at her if they arrive and find no feed waiting for them. Peggy will call to me half a dozen times while she is eating to tell me about new stunts the birds are doing. I never thought anybody or anything would be able to come into her life to this extent.56

  Continuing to let Margaret Baugh look after the book’s business, he went on writing long, thoughtful letters on his observations and philosophy, not ever mentioning Gone With the Wind again. To Mary Hunter, Henry’s wife, who had written him a full account of his mother’s condition after a fall, John wrote: “We men have a habit of writing and talking in generalities but you ladies get down to concrete facts. I have often noticed that difference between my stuff and Peggy’s, and I will give you three guesses as to which one of us can tell the story better.”57

  And yet his letters are more full of observations than Peggy’s, which contain more ancedotes. For example, one day he observed a flight of migratory birds of some kind in the park across the street. They never came close enough for him to identify them, but they were visible for all of one morning.
He guessed that there must have been a thousand of them and they reminded him most of a flock of blackbirds. He wrote to his mother,

  You know how they swarm down on a field which a farmer has just sowed with wheat, go after the wheat and the insects as if their lives depended upon it, then swarm up into the air when something frightens them. They whirl and swoop in an organized battalion and then down to the ground again. The passing automobiles kept them flying up into the air and then diving down again. When they would first take off up the side of one of the little hills in the park and over its crest, they looked like water flowing over a dam.58

  9

  Not until more than a year after his heart attack did John walk down the thirty steps to the ground floor of their apartment house and step foot outside. “My first trip outdoors was yesterday, May Day,” he wrote his mother on May 2, 1947.

  It seems that important events in my life have a way of occurring on anniversaries. My heart attack was on Christmas Eve, I had my bad setback on Lincoln’s Birthday, and I am out of doors again on May Day. As you may remember, Peggy and I originally planned to be married on Valentine’s Day and ended up getting married on the Fourth of July. I suppose that I will die on Whitsuntide or Michaelmas Eve or Septuagesima Sunday and rise from the dead on Resurrection Day.

  Once he was finally able to go for a walk down Walker Terrace and South Prado in the summer of 1947, Peggy bought him a little aluminum seat that folded up. She or Margaret Baugh or Deon would take him walking once a day, and if he got tired, which he often did, he could rest on the chair. After he got seated, the little chair was reasonably comfortable. But sitting down or getting up was tricky because it tipped easily. Thus he told his mother, “There is an element of adventure in my outings as well as exercise.”59