Harold Strong Latham arrived in Atlanta the day that Margaret could stop wearing her brace in a week. It was April, 1935. Margaret loathed the itchy girdle and the heavy, low-heeled shoes that she had to wear. She was thirty-five, childless, and the glamor of her newspaper days was past, as were the days that she had been a belle. So the doctor's news had put her in high spirits, and she was like the Peggy Mitchell she had left behind once more while she chatted with Latham.
Harold Latham left Atlanta with Margaret's manuscript. Margaret and John discussed her impetuous act. Although John had wanted it published, he was upset about the way she had gone about to do it. There were chapters missing, and some chapters were not worth reading, and others were in several different versions. They needed at least half a year to pull the book into shape, and to give a publisher such a manuscript was unprofessional. He told Margaret that she should telegraph Latham to send the manuscript back. Latham wrote back that he would like to keep it until he had finished reading it, and, judging by some of the chapters, the book had great potential.
Margaret wrote to him about the shortcomings of the book, but, despite that, he took the book to Macmillian in New York. The Marshes told no one that Margaret's book was in New York, because they did not know if it was to be accepted. Margaret had no choice but to push the book out of her mind. Latham had in his possession the only complete copy of the manuscript. But her days were filled, for Eugene had a gallstone operation and Margaret nursed him at the hospital and then in his home on Peachtree Street, as Carrie Lou had her own small boys to look after.
In May, Margaret had her second car accident. She was alone, "as tired," she said, "as a hound at the end of a hunt," and her leg was hurting. The sun was glaring in her eyes, and she saw the car coming out of a side street too late. She swerved sharply and her car jumped a curb and then came to a stop. She was thrown against the steering wheel. The car accident aggravated her old spine and leg injuries, but besides that, she was unharmed.
One evening at home two weeks after the accident, a guest who was carried away in his conversation, grabbed the whiskey bottle to pour himself a drink. The bottle slipped from his grasp and fell onto Margaret's head, knocking her unconscious. She was taken to the hospital, where the doctors stated that she only had a slight concussion and was sent home to rest and recuperate.
Three months had passed since Margaret had given the script to Latham, and on July 9, she wrote to him and asked him to return it, explaining she was one of those "clumsy or unlucky people who are always being run into by drunken autoists, sat on by horses, struck playfully with bottles by guests," or ill with influenza, battling arthritis, or in demand by friends at births of their babies -- the last one she thought worse than all the rest. "However," she wrote, "I realize that it is only a matter of time before I have an arm in a sling or my skull fractured again. With m[e], writing is sandwiched between broken bones and x-rays and as I am all in one piece at present it looks like flying in the face of providence not to take advantage. So could I have my manuscript back please?"
A few days later, she received this reply from Latham:
'Please hold off your request. I am very enthusiastic about the possibilities your book presents. I
believe if it is finished properly it will have every chance of a very considerable success and for me
you have created in Pansy a character who is vital and unforgettable. A number of your scenes
have firmly fastened in my ind. As you have gathered I have taken a very keen interest in your
book and I hope you will not insist on its return before our advisers are through with it.'
Latham questioned the name "Pansy." (Thank goodness!) He told Margaret that he had given the manuscript to Professor C. W. Everett at Columbia University to read and make suggestions. Bessie was ill for a while, but when she showed signs of recovery, Margaret told him that she would be free to work in a week or so.
Macmillian had already started everything, however, and on July 21, Margaret received two wires, one from Lois Cole (who worked at Macmillian) and one from Latham.
'Macmillian terrible excited your book I am most excited of all stop always knew you had world beater even if no one could see it stop company planning great things for the book how soon can you finish it stop allan and jim join their love and congratulations to mine'
Latham wrote:
'My enthusiasm your novel shared by our advisers we would like make immediate contract for its publication $500 advance on signing balance on delivery manuscript account 10% royalty first 10,000 than 15% stop my renewed congratulations and assurance we undertake publication with tremendous enthusiasm and large hopes stop do wire your approval collect that I may send contract immediately'
Margaret first called John at his office, and then took a Luminal tablet, put a cold towel on her forehead, and had a nice, quiet nap. Her 'worse fears and highest hopes had become reality.'
She was reluctant to publish the book, but when John came home she sent telegrams to Lois and Latham, stating her acceptance to Macmillian's proposal to publish her book. Then, she wrote a letter to the latter, asking if she was required to deliver the finished manuscript by a certain date, a condition she feared because she was "especially subject to acts of God" and never knew what injury was to follow the last. She also asked him to send her a copy of the contract so she may review it.
'Peggy concluded her letter with a statement which, true or not, she was to make over and over again in the years to come: "I never expected to get an offer for the book because it was written just to please my husband and myself and to keep me occupied during the months I was lame."'
Latham sent Margaret C. W. Everett's report. He managed to condense her 600 000-word story into five typewritten pages, and he ended this with the following critique:
(I know this isn't too important, and this biography is WAY too long anyway, but it is much shorter than the book, Road to Tara, and this is so interesting I can't stop myself. I suggest that if you were interested enough to read this far, on my eighteenth page of writing, you are interested enough to buy the book!)
'This book is really magnificent. Its human qualities would make it good against any background, and when they are shown on the stage of the Civil War and reconstruction the effect is breathtaking. Furthermore, it has a high degree of literary finish. Take fir instance, in the evacuation of Atlanta, the ridiculous appearance made by the aristocratic Mrs. Elsing in the morning as she drives furiously out of town with her carriage bulging with flour and beans and bacon. Then see Pansy leaving that night -- with a worn-out horse and broken down wagon, and those literally beyond price so that only a strong man like Rhett could have secured them. And at Tara Pansy faces starvation. Yet there is no reference made by the author to the previous scene; it simply marks an increase in tempo. It is perhaps in this control of tempo that the book is most impressive. When the writer wants things to seem slow, timeless, eternal, that is the way they move. But her prestissimo is prestissimo and her fortissimo is FFF. For like King Lear, Pansy learns "There is no worst as long as we can say 'this is the worst.'"
'By all means take the book. It can't possibly turn out badly. With a clean copy made of what we have, a dozen lines could bridge the existing gaps . . . . There really are surprisingly few loose ends, and the number of times one's emotions are stirred one way or another is surprising. I am sure that it is not only a good book, but a best seller. It's much better than Stark Young [author of the recently published Civil War book So Red the Rose] and the literary device of using an unsympathetic character to arouse those sympathetic emotions seems to me admirable.
'The end is slightly disappointing, as there may be a bit too much finality about Rhett's refusing to go on . . . . Take the book at once. Tell the author not to do anything to it but bridge the gaps and strengthen the last page.'
Margaret responded to Latham that she had not expected "so swell a report." She agreed that there was too much finality about Rhett's departure, and added, "I think she gets him in the end." (This was the only time she made such a statement in letters or interviews. The rest of the time she would say that she didn't know.)
She said that she had meant to leave it open to the reader.
There was still the problem of killing off Frank Kennedy. Margaret preferred the version where Frank died of illness to when he was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, because "the Ku Klux Klan material has been worked pretty hard by others." She asked Macmillian if she could complete the book without the Ku Klux version, and if they did not like it that way she could change it back, adding, "The same applies to the remarks written about the ending. If you don't like the way it looks when you get the final copy, tell me and I'll change it. I'll change it any way you want, except to make it a happy ending."
No one at Macmillian liked the name Pansy for the main character. Up North, the word was used to describe 'effeminate' men. But Southerners, Margaret explained, referred to "Pansies as Fairies or by another less euphemistic but far more descriptive term."
(Guess what?!! Another direct quote!)
'For the first time in nearly four months, Peggy was at work on her book. The yellow pages were now even more dog-eared than when Latham had stuffed them into his "please-don't-rain" suitcase. She looked at her work with a different attitude. Professionals had found it good enough to publish. Lavish praise had been given by men and women whom she could respect. Professor Everett's accolades still rang in her ears. She set back to work with new enthusiasm.
'One Saturday morning in early September, John came to her with several pages that she had just rewritten and shook them violently in the hot, still air. "In the name of God, what are these?" he shouted, and then read, according to Peggy, "a double-handful of dangling participial clauses and dubious subjunctives."
'With all the dignity she could muster, Peggy replied, "Tempo," the word Professor Everett had used in referring to her marvelous sense of timing. After that, whenever she turned a couple of especially lousy pages over to John, he would say, "Some more of your goddamned Tempo, eh?"
'The word became a family joke, and even Bessie, when she made her one and only failure of a lemon pie, commented gloomily, "I guess somethin' done gone wrong with my tempo!"
'At the beginning of September, Peggy wrote Harold Latham that she was hard at work and that, for the first time in her life, writing was comparatively easy. According to John, she said there was noting like signing a contract, having a conscience about delivering the goods and burning your bridges behind you, to put a writer to work.'
(That is the end of my wonderful direct quote. I know there are far too many of these, but it allows me to have my own little paragraph of input every once and a while, like now, and lets me turn off my brain for a few minutes at a time.)
Even though the character of Pansy seems to have dominated the book, Margaret still looked at Melanie as the heroine. She even said, "of all the characters she's the heroine of the book though I'm afraid I'm the only one who knows it."
The title of the book was a problem. One possible title was "Another Day," which was Professor Everett's suggestion, but no one really liked this title, nor did they like the only one that Margaret could come up with, which was "Pansy." For about a month the book had been called "Tomorrow is Another Day," after such suggestions from Margaret as "Tomorrow and Tomorrow," "There's Always Tomorrow," "Tomorrow will be Fair," and "Tomorrow Morning." But at the end of October, Margaret wrote to Latham that she was 'inclined to Gone With the Wind, because, taken completely away from its context, it had movement and it could refer either to times that were gone "like the snows of yesteryear, or to the things that passed with the winds of war, or to a person who went with the wind rather than standing against it.'
Latham liked the title, and he also thought the name "Scarlett" would suit the main character. Lois (remember her? She sent Margaret a telegram!) resisted the name because she said, "somebody said it sounds like a Good Housekeeping story." Margaret had found the name in the text of her manuscript. The Scarletts, who were ancestors of the O'Haras, "had fought with the Irish Volunteers for a free Ireland and had been hanged for their pains."
At one point, Margaret suggested her own name, as well as the name "Nancy." Peggy O'Hara and Nancy O'Hara were dismissed because it did not suit the character. Not until after Thanksgiving was Scarlett O'Hara accepted. Margaret had to go thorough every page, changing every Pansy to Scarlett. 'The title was finally agreed upon at the same time. It had come from Ernest Dowson's poem "Cynara," and was the first line of the third stanza -- "I have forgotten much, Cynara! gone with the wind."' Ironically, the phrase had been used in the text of the book. "Was Tara still standing? Or was Tara also gone with the wind which had swept through Georgia?"
Margaret had so much work to do that she was forced to spend two weeks in bed due to sheer exhaustion. John wrote to Lois Cole on her behalf, and in the letter was hostile, and implied that Macmillian (due to the deadline ser) was to blame for her health problems:
'It may be that she will never come to New York and if she comes at all it will be because on the day she gets the train she feels able to come and wants to come. The reasons are partly financial but chiefly physical. After two automobile accidents in less than a year, she is in no shape to undertake anything that puts a strain on her . . . and a trip to New York for the first time in many years would be a major strain. The reason why she had been in bed for the past two weeks is the fact that getting the book delivered to you involved the most prolonged strain she has had to undergo in many years. She hasn't recovered from the injury to her back which she received in the [first] automobile accident and those injuries included injury to the nerves running from the spine at the point she got the twist. Sitting up for hours at a time, day, after day, over a period of weeks, typing, editing the manuscript, handling heavy reference books, etc. was about the worst possible thing she could have done. She stuck it out until the job was finished, except for checking the typewriter copy, correcting errors, etc. which was work I could do under her supervision and then her ailments got her down and the doctor ordered her to bed.
'The doctor thinks she may yet have to have an operation, one which she might have had a couple months ago except for the book and her whole concern is to get herself rested up and postpone the operation at least until the proofs are ready and the job is finished. It won't help her resting a bit if she thinks Macmillian is making plans based on her coming to New York when she may not be able to come . . .'
He went on to promise Lois that the remaining chapters would be finished in a week, which would only leave the final polishing to be done. 'With some surprise, he commented that he did not know that publishing houses had copy editors, but that Peggy did not want anyone to do more than change her commas (she thought now she had used too many in the first half of the book), and no one was to alter the dialect under any circumstances because a house Negro talked differently than a field hand. Peggy, he explained, had tried to make the Negroes talk like Negroes without at the same time putting every single word into dialect and thereby making it difficult to read. The dialect was thus a careful compromise between what he called "true nigger talk" and what could be, from a practical standpoint, translated into type. "Please don't change this," he wrote to Lois.'
'Lois, understandably taken aback by this letter, replied: "I assure you my remarks were prompted by Southern hospitality I learned from my Atlanta friends. I took it for granted that the author of a first and successful novel would wish to have some of the fun connected with the success . . . Had we known Peggy was endangering her health so seriously and drastically by working on the book we would not have asked to have it finished for Spring publication. It could have been put off for a year . . . But once publication was set -- a deadline was inevitably made."'
(That is the end of my very long direct quote.)
The deadline was extended, from May 5 to June 30. And now Lois had a greater problem. Latham was away in Europe for two months, and she was in charge of the manuscript. She had known Margaret had written a long book, but there were so many duplicate chapters that no one could give it a page count. The book was over four hundred thousand words long, even when edited. She wrote Margaret that, because of the length of the book, that it would have to sell for three dollars and not two-fifty as they had planned. And the company could not hope for a profit until ten thousand books were sold. She asked Margaret to change her royalties to 10 percent on all copies, or cut down the book a lot. The odds were against the books selling at the high price of three dollars during the days of the Depression.
From the book was deleted (this is so interesting) a thirty-page chapter in which Rhett loans Hetty Tarleton money to buy her mother some new horses, another long chapter that described in detail what happened after Sherman marched through Atlanta, a seven or eight page section about Mammy finally leaving Scarlett and goes back to Tara, (which was shortened to three paragraphs), and pages describing the education given to a young lady in the South. Margaret also shortened some parts, such as when Miss Pittypat talked at length about how carpetbagger gentlemen got her property away from her, and two long sections about what happened to minor characters after the war. A long two chapter section was written about Reconstruction when Margaret was still in the belief that it had come directly after the war in a snap. But later, she researched and was upset to find it had taken years. The material was therefore spread out over a series of chapters. This made the book seem longer, but it was really shorter now.
Fourteen weeks before the publication, someone realized that there was no author's credit yet.
There was no title page submitted with the book. And another author, Mary Mitchell, was due to
publish around the same time, and they asked Margaret if she would sign herself as Margaret
Marsh. She sent them a title page that read:
Gone With the Wind
by
Margaret Mitchell
And she asked for it to be dedicated:
To J. R. M.
But, unknown to the publishers, the manuscript had a second dedication. You all know the scene where Belle Watling hands some money in gold to Melanie outside of the hospital, wrapped in a handkerchief? Scarlett reads aloud the monogrammed initials on the hanky, "RKB." No one knew what the K would stand for in Rhett's name, but all initials were found in the name of Margaret's first husband, and the man that Rhett was modeled for, Red Berrien Kinnard Upshaw.
**Margaret Mitchell (just 1936)**
Bibliography
Edwards, Anne. Road to Tara - The Life of Margaret Mitchell. New Haven and New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1983.