Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (2 page)

Ellen F. Brown
Richmond, Virginia

John Wiley, Jr.
Midlothian, Virginia

1
This Woman Has Something

M
argaret Mitchell's
Gone With the Wind
has its roots in that Sunday afternoon tradition of visits with family. As the adults whiled away hours on porches and in parlors of their Georgia homes, a young Mitchell listened to stories of the War Between the States, which had ended just thirty-five years before her birth in 1900. She later recalled being swept up and perched “on the bony knees of veterans and the fat slippery laps of great aunts,” where she heard firsthand accounts of battles, disease, deprivation, and loss not “as history nor as remarkable events but just as part of their lives and not especially epic parts.”
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Mitchell also had fond memories of playing on the remains of Civil War–era earthen fortifications that still ringed her hometown of Atlanta and horseback riding with Confederate veterans who spiritedly refought the war, much to her enjoyment.
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“I heard so much when I was little about the fighting and the hard times after the war that I firmly believed Mother and Father had been through it all. . . . In fact I was about ten years old before I learned the war hadn't ended shortly before I was born.”
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Mitchell's mother, Maybelle, was well educated for a lady of her generation and known in Atlanta for her support of women's suffrage. She had high aspirations for her daughter. When as a young girl Mitchell announced that she did not like arithmetic and was not going to school anymore, her mother gathered her in a carriage and set out for nearby Clayton County, which still bore the scars of Union general William T. Sherman's famous March to the Sea in 1864. Across the landscape, lone chimneys rose above burned ruins—“Sherman's sentinels,” as they were known in the South. Maybelle told her daughter how the people who had resided in these houses thought they lived in a secure world, but it had exploded around them, and how Mitchell's own world might explode under her some day. God help her if she did not have some weapon with which to meet the new order. Mitchell's mother was talking about the necessity of a good education and perseverance.
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The young girl took the message to heart.

Eugene Mitchell, her father, was a lawyer. A founding member of the Atlanta Historical Society, he was known for his intelligence and punctiliousness. Under his watchful eye, good manners and taste prevailed in the Mitchell home, along with a love of reading. But appreciation for the finer elements of life did not mean the author's youth lacked childhood pleasures. She and her older brother, Stephens, freely roamed their neighborhood flying kites, playing ball, and racing ponies. Shy as a young child, Mitchell grew into a tomboy with a gift for gab. She enjoyed writing and filled copybooks with short stories—adventure tales, mostly, with lots of action.

In 1912, the family moved from the comfortable Jackson Hill neighborhood overlooking downtown Atlanta to a stately home Eugene had had built on Peachtree Street, one of the city's most prestigious thoroughfares. Mitchell attended high school at Atlanta's Washington Seminary, where she joined the Literary Club and had stories published in the school's yearbook. A description of Mitchell in her senior annual of 1918 portrays her as a vibrant young woman:

Appearance: Swaggering
Hobby: Aviators
Pet Aversion: Civilians
Favorite Expression: “Curses!”
Highest Ambition: To send them away with a smile!
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That spring, she found love. The United States had entered World War I the previous year, and Atlanta teemed with soldiers training at nearby Camp Gordon. Clifford Henry, a young Harvard-educated officer who grew up in New York and Connecticut high society, caught her eye, and over her father's objections, the two became engaged.

After Henry set sail for France in July, Mitchell left Atlanta to attend Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. She had barely settled in to college life when, in late October, Henry died of wounds received in battle. A few months later, word came from home that her mother had fallen ill with Spanish influenza, which was sweeping the globe. Mitchell immediately took a train to Atlanta but arrived too late; her brother met her at the station with the news that their mother had died. After the funeral, she finished her freshman year at Smith, then returned home to keep house for her father and brother. She never resumed her formal education.

Not one to sulk, Mitchell threw her “swaggering” self into the Atlanta social scene. She was a strikingly attractive girl with reddish brown hair and brilliant blue eyes—bluer even than Paul Newman's, according to one of her godsons.
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Just shy of five feet tall and weighing less than a hundred pounds, she charmed people with her quick and mischievous wit. Mitchell's name frequently appeared in the society pages of the local newspapers. A March 1921 notice in the
Atlanta Constitution
described how she and a Georgia Tech student performed a risque´ French apache dance at a charity ball sponsored by a group of Atlanta debutantes. According to the paper, Mitchell “offer[ed] herself and all she was on the altar of charity” with the performance.
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Atlanta dowagers were not amused. The older women were further irritated when Mitchell and several friends insisted that the young guard, having done most of the work for the ball, should have a say in how to spend the money raised. Afterward, when the Atlanta Junior League issued its list of prospective members, Margaret Mitchell's name was not included.

The slight did not faze the spirited and restless Mitchell. In college, she had referred to herself in a letter to a friend as a “dynamo going to waste.”
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That feeling was returning. In September 1922, Mitchell married one of her many beaux, Berrien Kinnard “Red” Upshaw. The marriage was a tumultuous one; rumor had it that Upshaw was an alcoholic and physically abusive. He left town after a few months, and Mitchell turned for comfort to Upshaw's former roommate, John Marsh, who had been best man at their wedding. With his help, she managed in late 1922 to get an interview for a job as a reporter on the
Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine
. Having no newspaper experience, she claimed to have landed the position by telling “outrageous lies about how I had worked on the
Springfield Republican
. . . and swearing I was a speed demon on a Remington [typewriter].”
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She wrote feature articles on a wide range of topics, from profiles of local eccentrics to interviews with famous people visiting Atlanta, including silent screen idol Rudolph Valentino and millionaire murderer Harry K. Thaw. The cub reporter honed her writing skills and established herself as a popular member of the local press and literary scene.

Mitchell obtained a divorce in late 1924. On July 4, 1925, she married Marsh, who was the opposite of Upshaw in almost every way—quiet, methodical, and settled. She was twenty-four, he was twenty-nine. They made a striking pair: her dark-haired, diminutive good looks contrasted sharply with the bespectacled and blond Marsh, who, at more than six feet tall, towered over her. A former college English instructor and newspaperman from Kentucky, Marsh had recently joined the publicity department at Georgia Power Company. The couple moved into a three-room, groundfloor apartment on Crescent Avenue that she affectionately dubbed “the Dump.” Never shy about tweaking society's nose, she posted individual calling cards on their door: “John Robert Marsh” and “Margaret Mitchell.” She continued to work for the
Atlanta Journal
and, in her spare time, tried her hand at fiction writing. She started with a short story about a Jazz Age youth named Pansy Hamilton but abandoned the work after about thirty pages. She next completed a draft of a Civil War–era novella called “'Ropa Carmagin” about a reclusive woman from a wealthy family that had come down in the world. Apparently not satisfied with it, she took no steps to have it published.

The early days of the Marsh marriage were lean. Ill for much of the first year, he ran up a large hospital bill. She, too, had an assortment of medical issues, and it took several years of scrimping to pay the debts they accrued as a result of their poor health. Asking her father for financial support seems to have been out of the question, and according to Marsh's sister, Frances Zane, the couple became used to living a simple life. Zane told of sending Mitchell a hand-me-down blue velvet dress that was accepted with tears of joy.
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In the spring of 1926, a recurring ankle injury aggravated by arthritis led Mitchell to quit her full-time job at the newspaper. On crutches much of the time, she found it too difficult to get around town pursuing interviews and story leads. Over the next several months, as she recuperated at home, she worked on occasional small pieces for the paper, including an advice column. But the “dynamo” ex-reporter soon grew impatient and bored. Her husband brought home armloads of books from the library to keep her entertained; as Stephens Mitchell once said of his sister, “books were her narcotic.”
¹¹
However, she needed something more to occupy her time and mind. She toyed with the idea of finishing her degree at Atlanta's Oglethorpe University but could not afford the tuition or expense of the new clothes she would need.
¹²
She returned to writing fiction. Using a portable typewriter Marsh gave her, she decided to write a novel on a topic close to her heart—the lives of Georgians in the 1860s and 1870s.

Although the book would not find a title for almost a decade, this was the genesis of what would become
Gone With the Wind
. The author set her story amidst the Civil War, but it was not about the war itself. She wanted the heat of the major battles—Manassas, Gettysburg, and Vicksburg—felt through their effects on the home front. The action would take place around Atlanta, a vital crossroads of the Confederacy that found itself in the shadow of Virginia, the major battleground state and home to the Confederate capital of Richmond. She felt that military histories and fictional accounts of the war concentrated too much on the Virginia and Mississippi River campaigns and slighted the 1864 retreat of Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston from Chattanooga to Atlanta, which, to her, had “far more drama than anything else in the whole war.”
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The characters in Mitchell's book would be vibrant men, women, and children—free and slave—who found their world turned upside down and had to deal with hunger, disease, death, and a new world order. At the center of the story would be a spoiled Southern belle named Pansy O'Hara, who reaches adulthood in time to watch her comfortable life at her family's plantation be swept away by war and its aftermath. Pansy will fight for survival and emerge a rich woman but fail to win the affection of Ashley, the man she believes to be her true love. Through various adventures, she will fall for a rapscallion blockade runner named Rhett, who plays with her affections as expertly as she does his. The warm-hearted Melanie, Ashley's wife, serves as Pansy's foil and conscience.

With the plot sketched out in her head, Mitchell started writing the story at its conclusion, a technique she used as a reporter. Working from the end made the rest of the story flow more easily, she claimed, because she knew where it was headed. It also helped her control her characters: “I had every detail clear in my mind before I sat down to the typewriter. I believe . . . that is the best way to write a book—then your characters can't get away from you and misbehave, and do things you didn't intend them to do in the beginning.”
¹⁴

As she sat down to write the last chapter, the logical ending seemed to her an open-ended one that left it up to the reader's imagination whether Pansy and Rhett made a life together. With two such determined characters, she left it to the fates to decide what happened to them.
¹⁵
From the finale, she worked her way backward, not following any set order or formal outline. She skipped around, focusing on whatever part of the story interested her at a given moment. “Suppose I got bored with chapter five—I wanted to write about love, and here I was stuck with the Battle of Atlanta,” she explained. “Why sit glaring at that paragraph when I could go on to chapter sixty and write about love! Very often, your subconscious will work out the problem you've been stuck on, and then you can come back and grab that paragraph when it least suspects it!”
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As she completed her chapters, she placed them in individual manila envelopes. Gradually, piles of envelopes began to clutter up the living room where she worked. They came in handy to prop up an uneven leg on a sofa and as scratch pads for grocery lists and phone messages. When the piles eventually took over their small living room, she moved some of them to the bedroom and others into a hall closet.

Mitchell descended from a family of lawyers who, she claimed, were famous for writing wills so clear and easy to read that a child could understand them. With that model as her guide, she put great effort into developing her story with a mode of writing devoid of literary flair. “I sweat blood to make my style simple and stripped bare,” she said. “I'm sure if I had evidenced any style in early childhood, if would have been smacked out of me with a hair brush!”
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She went to great pains to eliminate verbiage that did not further the plot or develop a character. She relentlessly omitted “pretty words” that did not mean anything, aiming to write so clearly and crisply “that every word could be read from a galloping horse.”
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The process proved a struggle for the loquacious Mitchell, whose natural tendency was toward detailed and colorful language. A chronic rewriter, she struggled over almost every word and sentence. “I don't have that facility for just dashing along,” she said. She labored day and night, whittling pages-long passages to a few lines.
¹⁹
Even after finishing a chapter, Mitchell rarely let it be. She thought it important to let her drafts sit and reconsider them later with a fresh eye. “Put your work up for two months and then when you take it out again,” she advised other writers, “the errors will fairly leap out at you till you wonder why you ever thought it was good.”
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