by Anne Edwards
The O’Hara family had much in common with the Fitzgeralds, and had settled in Clayton County at about the same time. And, like Pansy O’Hara, Annie Fitzgerald Stephens had remained in Atlanta until the fire, had nursed the injured soldiers who had fallen or been brought there, had taken her first-born infant back to Jonesboro alone just after the fire, and had remained there, fighting starvation and carpetbaggers, until the men returned from the war. Also, like Pansy, Annie was just a few years younger than the city of Atlanta, and she did indeed think of it as “of her own generation,” and was as proud of the way it had outgrown its crudeness as she was of her own achievements.
As Peggy got deeper into her story, she became convinced that her book could never be submitted for publication even if she were to finish it. Not only was there the problem of Grandmother Stephens, there was, of course, Red Upshaw. The fear of having the characters and incidents in the novel ever associated with real life became almost an obsession with her, and was, in fact, one of her major reasons for refusing to discuss the story with anyone, other than to say that the book she was working on had to do with the Civil War and Atlanta.
As she saw it, then, she was writing only for her own amusement, which made her something of a dilettante. She had no real goal, no deadline, nor could she see any possibility of ever getting paid for her hard work. This situation seemed to suggest that what she was doing was not worthwhile, and the more absorbed she became in her work, the less confidence she had in herself. Despite her disciplined routine, she could no longer say she was a professional writer; she was a housewife with a hobby that had possessed her, and that made her a less competent housewife at that. Had it not been for John’S own excitement over the book, the way he involved himself so enthusiastically in the project, she might have forced herself to discontinue the work, the way one might put a stop to a bad habit. But any talk of this, or of her throwing the manuscript away, incurred John’S wrath — and he was seldom angry at her otherwise. The manuscript had become like a child of theirs, and it meant almost as much to John as it did to Peggy.
Rain deluged the city that spring and Peggy did not dare to venture out on crutches and risk a possible fall. Arthritis had settled in the ankle joint to further complicate and retard her recovery, and the doctors warned her that she might never again walk without the aid of crutches.
In early March, John was given an award at Georgia Power for writing the best advertising copy of the past year. He was proud of his work and of the fact that not only was he paying off his debts, he was taking care of Peggy as a husband should do. Though their financial worries were far from over, he wrote friends and members of his family that he was happier than he had ever thought he would be and, though he never went into specifics, his pride in the fact that Peggy was writing a novel was apparent.
It is to be remembered that John Marsh’s earliest dream was to become a man of literature, and that he had realized at a youthful age that he did not have the talent to succeed as a writer of novels or of nonfiction. Even as a reporter he had failed, but he had slipped quite naturally into copy-editing. Part of the reason he succeeded as a copy editor and failed on the more creative level was because, by his own admission, he was “a master flaw-finder and picayune-emphasizer.” Yet, he had always sought the company of writers and other creative people, and, as with Red Upshaw, people who had stronger and more charismatic personalities than he. For himself, he had no further ambition than to do the best job he could at Georgia Power and, perhaps one day, to become advertising or public-relations director, which would greatly increase his paycheck but would still never make him rich.
Just as he had lived vicariously through Peggy when she was a feature writer for the Journal, he now did so with her work on the novel. His mind was too compartmentalized to think with Peggy’s sweeping vision or in terms of her amazing, labyrinthine story detail. It is difficult to guess how much he might have been able to contribute to her work if he had been faced with a huge pile of those manila envelopes instead of with the ten or so pages that he read through most evenings. He was Peggy’s only sounding board, that is true. But there is no strong evidence that he contributed greatly to the development of the story. A conservative man, somewhat puritanical, he may have influenced her final choices in some scenes. Mainly, though, he made sure her writing was clear, precise, and to the point, and he corrected errors in usage and spelling. It was certainly useful to Peggy, but it was no more than a good editor in a publishing house would consider his or her job. Peggy, of course, being unacquainted with the publishing process, did not know this. She thought herself dependent on John, and, as she was now also financially reliant upon him, her love for him grew out of two emotions — gratitude and need.
Not surprisingly, as her love grew, her confidence in herself and her work was further diminished. She was, she later claimed, “singularly a prey to a disease known in this family as ‘the humbles.’ Everybody’s stuff looks better than mine and a depressing humility falls upon me whenever I read stuff that I wish I could have written.”
In the spring of 1927, Peggy fell into a terrible state of dejection after reading James Boyd’s Marching On, a novel about the Civil War. She put a cover over the typewriter and for three months, in her words, her “life was ruined.” Nothing could get her to sit back down and continue to write. It was hopeless, she cried to John, completely hopeless. She did not write with the intellectual power of Boyd, nor did she understand the Confederate strategy or the Union aims as well as he did. She was writing a book about the great war without taking any of her characters into battle, and she was convinced that it was cowardly for her to avoid such scenes, that it only proved how inadequate she was for the job she was attempting.
John argued that Boyd’s book and hers were not comparable. Hadn’t she said over and over that she was writing about the women who remained at home? Why, then, should she include battle scenes which — even if brilliant — would be gratuitous to the action of the story and, in fact, would disrupt the tremendous narrative drive that seemed to be gaining momentum even when chapters were disconnected? Not convinced, she let her eyeshade gather dust on top of the shrouded typewriter.
Peggy’s “case of the humbles” may have been prolonged by Red Upshaw’s reappearance in Atlanta. Upshaw, she heard, had gone out to the University of Georgia and had visited some of his old professors. He had even suggested that he might want to return for his degree. Through mutual friends, she learned that he was living in Asheville, North Carolina, and that he claimed he was sales manager for Reliance Coal and Oil in that city. It was reported that he was better-looking than ever, drove an even flashier car, and had been seen at a party with one of Atlanta’s prettiest young women, a debutante of the current season. He could not have been in town more than a few days, and he left without contacting either Peggy or John.
On May 3, 1927, Stephens married Caroline Louise Reynolds in a Catholic service that the Journal society reporter said was “marked by impressive solemnity and simple dignity.” It was one of the few times that Peggy had been out in public since her leg injury. Because she was still on crutches, she was not a member of the wedding party. After a wedding trip to New York, Stephens and Carrie Lou, who came from a respectable old Southern family, were going to live on Peachtree Street with Mr. Mitchell, and Carrie Lou would be caring for him and the household as he had always expected his own daughter to do.
A few days after Stephens’s marriage, John took seriously ill and had to spend three weeks in the hospital. The doctors were unable to diagnose his problem, but he had been experiencing a lack of energy and had suffered a loss of equilibrium. His weight had dropped suddenly, and for no apparent reason, from 163 to 145 pounds. They tested him for countless diseases, but neither did they find a cause nor did he improve, and for the first two weeks of his hospitalization he was not able to lift his head from the pillow without experiencing violent nausea.
John’s illness forced Peggy to rally. The
crutches did not stop her from spending all the time she could with him at the hospital. Neither one of them ever lost their sense of humor. She gave him Dracula to read and she wrote Frances that “the book took a holt” of him in so big a way that it frightened “the liver and the lights out of him.” The nurses, she said, thought him delirious because he suggested they get garlands of garlic to keep vampires from him. John claimed the shock was beneficial, and he began to get better.
He was released from the hospital in June and was back at work within two weeks, but the doctors knew only a little more than they had before his hospitalization. The cause of his dizziness was never established, but it did not return, and Peggy’s main objective was to “fatten him up.” Once the crisis had passed, she put on one of John’s shirts, got back into her baggy overalls, pulled on her eyeshade, uncovered the Remington and returned to work. For the time being, her writer’s block caused by “the humbles” was over.
Chapter Twelve
ALITTLE BEFORE 8:00 A.M. on the morning of May 20, 1927, a young man named Charles A. Lindbergh stepped into the cockpit of the small plane that he hoped to fly nonstop from Roosevelt Field, just outside New York, to Paris. Way back in 1919, a New York businessman had put up a prize of $25,000 to go to the first aviator who achieved this feat. Lindbergh was called “Lucky Lindy” and the “Flying Fool,” and, although he had not yet become a national idol, he was a public hero. He was an appealing, modest man, and there was something so startlingly daring in his attempt to make this perilous flight alone in his small craft, the Spirit of St. Louis, that he caught the imagination of the nation. For the first time in nearly a decade, Americans were united in a hope — that Lindbergh would succeed. Through newspapers and radio broadcasts, they followed the young man in the Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic, praying for his safe arrival in France. Peggy and her newspaper friends gathered at the Perkersons’ and listened in suspenseful silence as the news of Lindbergh’s progress was broadcast.
Peggy’s friends were ecstatic when the news broke that Lindbergh had landed at Le Bourget Air Field and was being mobbed by crowds of French admirers, but she herself was not so sure that he had performed “the greatest feat of solitary man in the records of the human race,” as newspaper sellers on the streets shouted in their “extras” a short time later. Nor did she agree that his feat was worthy of the thousands of telegrams being sent him, some, hundreds of feet long and signed individually with as many as 17,500 names. Others had crossed the Atlantic by air, though not alone, and stopping to refuel in Newfoundland. Lindbergh’s accomplishment was that he went nonstop by himself. Peggy admired the man’s feat, but viewed it as little more than a daring stunt flight. Why, then, this sudden idolization of Lindbergh?
Others were able to see what Peggy could not. “For years,” historian Frederick Lewis Allen explained in his fine book, Only Yesterday, “the American people had been spiritually starved, they had seen their early ideals and illusions and hopes one by one worn away by the corrosive influence of events and ideas — by the disappointing aftermath of the war, by scientific doctrines and psychological theories which undermined their religion and ridiculed their sentimental notions, by the spectacle of graft in politics and crime on the city streets and finally by their recent newspaper diet of smut and murder. Romance, chivalry, and self-dedication had been debunked; the heroes of history had been shown to have feet of clay, and the saints of history had been revealed as people with queer complexes.... Something that people needed, if they were to live at peace with themselves and with the world, was missing from their lives. And all at once Lindbergh provided it. Romance, chivalry, self-dedication — here they were.” And they were being dispensed by a humble, modest man who could have been anyone of his millions of admirers, had they been “touched” with his inspiration.
Considering Peggy’s tremendous insecurities, it could never have occurred to her, even in the far reaches of the nightmares she often suffered, that a decade later she would be responsible for fulfilling the same needs in the American public and would be the recipient of that public’s frenzied adulation.
Peggy’s friends knew she was writing a book, but they did not ask many questions, for when they did, Peggy would just laugh, “Oh, it’s a new kind of therapy for my leg.”
She might have been telling a half-truth — as the summer and winter of 1927 passed, her leg grew stronger and, though it was still causing her considerable discomfort, she was able to put away her crutches and go down to Carnegie Library for short periods each week to do some necessary research. The rest of her time was dedicated to the writing of the book, which, she realized, was surely too long even at this stage and desperately needed organization, selection, and cutting. But she did not want to stop the flow of her writing to have John help her do this, for she was terrified that if she tried to read the book from the beginning to the point she had now reached — the death of Pansy’s father, Gerald O’Hara — she might feel compelled to scrap the entire project. As it was, she was not at all sure that she could ever complete it anyway. Here she was, writing a book in which a major part of the plot had to do with a violent marriage and, with nearly 300,000 words already written, the marriage of Pansy and Rhett had not yet taken place.
Then, in the summer of 1928, to add to her difficulties, Peggy was struck once again with “a case of the humbles.”
One afternoon, a friend named Frank Daniel, who reviewed books for the Sunday magazine, came by to discuss with her his current assignment, Stephen Vincent Benét’s epic poem, John Brown’s Body. Peggy was at the typewriter when he arrived, and she quickly covered up her work. Daniel praised Benét’s writing and then insisted on reading passages out loud to her.
“This is the last, this is the last,” he began in his softly cadenced Southern voice. As he read on, Peggy was so moved by the eloquence and horror and superb craftsmanship displayed by Benét in his lengthy Civil War poem that she asked Daniel to stop reading, fearing the final result.
Daniel did not take her seriously and continued, “in spite of the fact,” Peggy later recalled, “that I had flung myself on the sofa and stuck my fingers in my ears and screamed protests. I had to read it all then. The result was that I wondered how anybody could have the courage to write about the war after Mr. Benét had done it so beautifully.”
The cover remained on the typewriter after this incident for another three-month period. John was furious at her lack of self-confidence, but none of his lectures helped to restore it to her. Then, in late November, a Fitzgerald cousin died and Peggy went to Fayetteville for the funeral. When she got home that evening, she took the cover from the Remington and began a chapter on Gerald O’Hara’s funeral.
At this time, she also decided on a new name for the O’Hara family home, “Tara,” a name derived from the Hill of Tara, which was the seat of the high kings of Ireland from ancient times until the sixth century. But she did not take the time now to go back and change all the references to the former name, Fontenoy Hall.
In December, Bessie left the house on Peachtree Street to work full-time for Peggy. It was an extravagance for the Marshes, but Lula Tolbert had quit and neither Peggy nor John was able to take over the household chores. Peggy was not fond of cooking and felt she simply could not manage the shopping. According to Bessie, although her love and dedication to “Miss Peggy” knew no bounds, her first weeks in the Marsh household were less than pleasant.
In a letter to Medora, written years later, Bessie recalled, “Lula B. Tolbert ... told me the likes and dislikes of Mr. Marsh. From her description of Mr. Marsh my first weeks ... with them was hard and frightful. I were so afraid of Mr. Marsh until my clothes would seem to slip like a tight window shade at his appearance. But when I learned that he was an ex-school teacher, that he was rigid, that it was Promptness, Cleanness and good foods that it took to bring out that smile on his face — all was well.”
Through Bessie’s eyes, one can get a clear picture of life at the
Dump. Bessie worked from 8:00 A.M. until after dinner and had Thursday afternoons and, supposedly, most of Sunday off.
I remember once being misunderstood by one of my friend maids. I told her that I were off each Sunday after breakfast. But that the reason I could not go to Church every Sunday A.M. was that Mr. Marsh would sleep some Sundays until 12 o’clock. She asked if they Both slept late. I told her some times Miss Peggy would have her Sunday A.M. breakfast and would slip out to visit her Father, or take flowers to the cemetery [for Maybelle’s grave] and return befor[e] Mr. Marsh awaked.
She said it looks like they would have breakfast together on Sunday A.M.
I said No they never have Breakfast together, that Mr. Marsh lets her rest through the week and she lets him rest on Sundays. That Sundays was Mr. Marsh’s day of rest.
And I thought that this maid friend understood this as I told it. But out of this conversation came a rumor that ... Mr. and Mrs. Marsh were not congenial, that they never eat together. But what I said was they did not eat breakfast together.
Besides Bessie, the Marshes also had Carrie, the Mitchell laundress, come in and collect the wash and bring it back cleaned and pressed every Monday. Bessie received fifteen dollars a week and car fare, and would have received half that amount had she “lived in,” and Carrie’s wage was three dollars a week plus car fare. As John’s salary was about seventy-five dollars a week and they had to allot most of it for their medical bills, food, rent, and utilities, the Marshes were left with almost no money for themselves. Not since their marriage had Peggy been able to buy a new dress. Frances was now married and pregnant and, knowing the austerity of Peggy’s situation, sent her a blue velvet dress from her own wardrobe.