In December, John Marsh suffered a severe attack of hiccoughs that lasted forty-two days. Margaret tried all the home cures she could think of, but by the end of the first week, he was so weak and exhausted that he had to be placed in a hospital. On the forty-second day, when the hiccoughs were finally giving up, John spoke to Margaret of his deep love for her. He spent all of March and April at home recuperating, and in that time he took a great interest in Margaret's work. The date chosen for their marriage was Independence Day, 1925. After their honeymoon, they moved into an apartment that they named "The Dump" at 17 Crescent Avenue. It was the warmest, liveliest small place in Atlanta. It was two cramped rooms, a gallery kitchen, and a bath. Posted on the front door of The Dump were two calling cards, reading: "Miss Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell" and "Mr. John R. Marsh." Margaret liked the shock the cards gave her neighbors. The apartment was the center of their world. On weekends, six or seven people would come over for a supper. They would bring food and booze with them. There just weren't enough chairs for more company.
John did not feel that Margaret had to work. She promised him that when he got a raise, she would quit her job. His raise came, and she gave the newspaper one month's notice. Peggy Mitchell retired from the newspaper business to become Mrs. John R. Marsh. Lula Tolbert was hired to clean, and so Margaret's housekeeping chores were few. She became bored, so, after John left for work one morning, she put on a newsman's green eyeshade, a baggy pair of overalls, and sat down at her typewriter. She set to work on a story she thought would be a novel about " 'Ropa Carmagin," but at less than fifteen thousand words it became a novella.
The story was in Clayton County in the 1880s (No, it was not GWTW), in an area near the
Fitzgerald plantation, and included some of the houses Maybelle had pointed out to her so many
years ago. The heroine was Europa Carmagin, and, in grand opera style, her lover was killed and
her neighbors forced her to leave her home. Once finished, Margaret gave it to John to edit. She
thought it was good, but although John felt the background, the period, and the heroine
fascinating, he did not like the theme. He suggested that Margaret put the story aside and think
about it for a while.
(Here is another direct quote, simply because it is late, I am tired, and I have lost any imagination I may have used for the rest of this bio.)
'Peggy was devastated. She moped about the apartment all weekend. On Monday, after John had gone off to work, she got into the car and drove out toward Jonesboro and Lovejoy, perhaps to see if a visit to the locale of 'Ropa's heartbreak might give her greater insight into the characters of her story, or perhaps without any motive other than putting distance between herself and the forty-five or so manuscript pages that were stacked up beside her typewriter. It was raining and she was preoccupied. When she came unexpectedly to a stop sign, she braked sharply and the car skidded, left the road, and hit a tree. Moments later she stepped out of the vehicle, miraculously unscathed except for a fast-swelling turned ankle.
'A week later, and after competent medical treatment, the ankle proved so painful that she could
not walk. It was X-rayed again but no break could be seen. It was, however, the same leg that had
been injured in her two youthful riding accidents. Muscles had been pulled, and arthritis was
suspected, but neither would have resulted in the crippling pain she suffered. Her ankle was
placed in a cast for three weeks without successful results. Peggy spent several more weeks in
bed, in traction. Bessie came over to help out and made sure that "Miss Peggy" was well taken
care of. Still, the pain persisted and she was bedridden.'
(There. I am still tired, it is still late, and I have a headache, but I will plod on through the years of Margaret's life . . . at least until she writes "Gone With the Wind.")
John would stop off at the library to select novels and other such books for Margaret to read, but soon she ran out of choices. The day she was graduated to crutches, John told her that there was hardly a book left in the library that she hadn't read. "It looks to me, Peggy," he said, "as though you'll have to write a book yourself if you're to have anything to read."
"My God," she later confessed thinking, "now I've got to write a novel and what is it going to be about?"
Again, the green eyeshade and baggy overalls were donned as she sat at her typewriter. She piled some cushions for her leg beneath the table, stuffed her old manuscript into a big manila envelope and put a pile of blank yellow paper in its place. She knew that she had a story to tell, one about women during the war, like her Grandmother and Mrs. Benning. (I am not sure, but I think Mrs. Benning was a woman who took care of her own ten children, and relatives, when her husband died in the war, or something to that extent). She did not have to bother about background, for it had been with her all her life.
(This is interesting and fairly important, so I'll let Anne Edwards do the talking for me again.)
'She had no outline, but her authentic background gave her guidelines and structure. The story would commence with the war and end with Reconstruction, and it would be the story of Atlanta during that time as much as it would be the story of the characters she created. She did not come to the typewriter cold. She knew the story would involve four major characters, two men and two women, and that one of the men would be a romantic dreamer like Clifford Henry; and the other, a charming bounder like Red Upshaw, and that of the women, one would be the essence of noble Southern womanhood, like Mrs. Benning; and the other -- well, she would be a combination of her grandmother and herself, with a strong dash of hussy tossed in. From the beginning, Peggy knew that she wanted this fiery woman to be in love with the good woman's husband, and she always thought of the good woman as her heroine, even though, as she worked on the book, the second woman began to dominate its pages.
'She began at the end because that was how all her Journal stories had been written; from the final denouement came the real thrust of a story. It was a bit like writing a murder mystery. She loved crime stories and read them avidly, and she was sure that their authors did not just amble along hit-or-miss. They had to plan the murder and catch the murderer first, and then go back to the beginning of the story so that they could lead their readers to a logical yet surprising conclusion.
'The memory of that day when Red had gone off to Asheville, presumably for good, had always haunted her, as had the fact that she had never truly come to know the man for whom she had claimed her undying love, Clifford Henry. Caution, of course, had to be applied. Fiction had to be based on some personal experience or observation to be good, but she had to cover her tracks well. Her father's whipping in her childhood was still well remembered, as were his constant reminders when she was working for the Journal of how easy it would be for people to sue her for libel. But, as she say before her typewriter that morning, the possibility that anything she might write would ever be published seemed exceedingly remote. Probably her story would not be good enough to be seen by anyone but John, and if it was, well, she would think about what to do in that event later. With this thought easing her mind, she typed out these words:
'She had never understood either of the men she loved and so she lost them both.
'Peggy did not know it then, but with those words she had inalterably changed the course of her life.'
(That is kind of funny, how she thought that it would never be published, or no one but John would read it. See my section on "The Book" to prove how 'bad' her story really was! That is the end of this direct quote.)
The name Rhett Butler was close to Red Upshaw, both first names sounding similar (say them out loud!) and both of the last names consisting of the same amount of syllables. Both were "masterful, scoundrelly, and of low morals." Both had been expelled from several academies. Both made profit off of others.
Atlanta and Jonesboro were to be the locales. The plantation of her heroine would be more of a farm, not like the stereotypical plantation. She named it "Fontenoy Hall." The first day she wrote two thousand words -- the last scene of the novel -- and read them aloud to John when he came home. He went over the pages and made corrections. Early the next morning, Margaret was up and re-typing the pages with corrections, and jumped right into the book at the stage before the war. She was not sure if that would be her opening chapter or not, but it did not matter. She worked six to eight hours a day, sometimes more. She did not write certain scenes until she was well enough to research them at the library. She kept index-card files for the characters, no matter how minor they were. A few weeks after she began, John wrote to his mother that Margaret was writing a drama that would contain "all of the great elemental experiences of life: birth, love, marriage, death, hunger, jealousy, hate, greed, joy, and loneliness."
As scenes were finished, she would put them in a manilla envelope and label them with such titles as "Family History," "Barbeque at Twelve Oaks," and "The Bazaar." When she could not find anything to write, she would re-write these pages, incorporating John's corrections in with her text.
The name "Pansy O'Hara" was invented for the heroine. Margaret said the character was in no way autobiographical, but the name had been recycled (the first name) from several other stories she had written. Pansy O'Hara and Margaret Marsh had a lot in common, however. But the real person she was based on was her Grandmother Stephens. As Margaret got deeper into the book, she knew it could never be published, for Red Upshaw and Grandmother Stephens were both flawlessly portrayed.
Margaret fell into a state of discouragement after reading James Boyd's Marching On. It was also a novel about the Civil War. She put the cover on her typewriter and for three months, was convinced her "life was ruined." Nothing could convince her to type again. John told her that her book and James Boyd's were not comparable.
On May 3, 1927, Stephens married Caroline Louise Reynolds. It was the first time that Margaret had been out publically. She was still on crutches, and could not be part of the wedding party. After the honeymoon the couple was going to live on Peachtree Street with Eugene, and Carrie Lou would care for him and the household "as he had always expected his own daughter to do."
A few days after the marriage, John was seriously ill and had to spend three weeks in the hospital. Margaret, despite her crutches, spent all the time she could with him. When he was discharged, Margaret was told to "fatten him up," for his weight had fallen from 163 to 145. Margaret once again took up the green eyeshade and the overalls and began to write.
Margaret wrote steadily though the last few months of 1928, and then stopped in the spring of 1929 when the arthritis in her ankle shot up to her wrists and she was not able to type. During this time she went through what she had already written and changed a few details. She changed the name "Fontenoy Hall" to "Tara" (thank God!) by striking out the first name and writing the new name above it.
When she had gone through the whole thing once, she decided to leave it for a while. It filled twenty envelopes and was about six hundred thousand words long. Her major problem was how to kill Frank Kennedy, Pansy's second husband. In one version Frank, never strong, died from exposure on the stormy night of the Shantytown raid. Another was he was killed by a bullet during a Ku Klux Klan raid. Both occur after Pansy is nearly raped. But both versions had one thing in common: Pansy was responsible for his death. She did not like the way she did the first two children, and wrote and rewrote the scenes in which they appeared, but considered Bonnie, Pansy's child from Rhett, well drawn, for even though the scenes were rewritten, Bonnie's portion stayed very nearly the same, as did most of the confrontations between Pansy and Rhett.
(I am still tired, so here is another quote.)
'There were other problems that concerned her. She had modeled the one "bad" woman, Belle Watling, on a famous madam in Lexington whom John had told her about, and, although aging, Belle Breazing was still alive. Pansy's protector, Archie, the ex-convict who had killed his wife, was based on a real man, as was her Jonesboro character, Tony Fontaine, who murders Tara's former overseer. And, of course, there was Red Upshaw and Grandmother Stephens to think about, too. It made no difference to Peggy that Thomas Wolfe, in this newly published and acclaimed Look Homeward, Angel, had so realistically portrayed the people and town of Asheville, North Carolina, that a stranger who had read the book might have been set down on the main street of Asheville, found his way yo the Gant house without asking directions, and could have recognized many passerby. Peggy was terrified of any potential risk of being sued for libel.
'It would have taken about a year to finish the book at this point, but reading it had depressed Peggy severely. The work to be done was tremendous, and if she completed it -- then what? How could she submit it anywhere when she feared lawsuits and dreaded professional criticism? And when she compared her work to that of Glasgow and Fitzgerald and Benét -- how could she dare to think of herself as a true writer? She had worked hard and long hours, but that was not enough to qualify her as a literary figure. And she was sure that the authors she admired had no need of someone like John at their elbow, helping them all the time. Someday, perhaps, she would go back to the book, but at the moment, the entire project seemed to her like little more than a waste of time.'
(This is the end of my direct quote. Poor Margaret! I am glad she changed her mind about the book being 'little more than a waste of time.')
John did not want her to stop writing, but he could not force her to sit and write, so he helped her find places to store the manilla envelopes so they would not be in the way. When this was finished, Margaret's arthritis grew worse. She had several decaying teeth and her tonsils removed, trying to rid herself of the pain. All sweets and starches were removed from her diet. And suddenly, in 1930, the arthritis passed.
John was granted a small raise in 1932, and the Marshes were able to afford a larger, five-room apartment. The second bedroom was turned into an office for John, and Margaret set up her sewing table in the living room and did her typing there. Not long after the move, Red Upshaw arrived with no warning. He came when he was fairly certain that John would be at the office on Monday, October 24, 1932. Red was much thinner but 'as handsome as ever.' He told her about his job with a coal company in North Carolina and was just passing through, but she did not believe him as he asked for a loan in his next breath. It took ten minutes to convince him to leave, and she never told anyone if she had loaned him the money or not. This visit made Margaret worried. If her book was published and Red saw himself in the character Rhett, would another such visit occur?
On February 17, 1934, Annie Fitzgerald Stephens died, leaving a small inheritance to Margaret. That April when Margaret was driving with John, a drunken driver careened into their car, knocking them off the road. John was unhurt, but Margaret's back had to be placed in an elasticized girdle brace to wear under her clothes for a year. She also hurt her foot in the accident. She admitted that the girdle did improve her figure, but sitting at a typewriter was too painful. The old bath sheet was thrown over the typewriter once again.
**Margaret Mitchell (1935-1936)**
Bibliography
Edwards, Anne. Road to Tara - The Life of Margaret Mitchell. New Haven and New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1983.