Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 13, 1994 TAG: 9403060211
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by LUCY LEE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
This book is aptly titled. Marianne Walker's focus is on the lives of Margaret Mitchell, her husband, John Marsh, and the only child of their union, "Gone With the Wind." From the book's conception in 1926 to Mitchell's untimely death 23 years later, it dominated their lives.
Birthing, then tending, this unruly child was a full-time, two-parent endeavor. Walker says that Peggy (Margaret's nickname) had "all the fiery imagination, all the hardy attachment to her environment and all the raw material that a writer needs to create an epic like hers. But she did not have the technical skills, the self-discipline, or the confidence to transform her ideas into a completed manuscript of the quality of GWTW." For these she depended on John.
Although the two were extremely compatible, they were opposites in every way. Peggy was the most popular and fun-loving debutante in Atlanta when John met her. Barely five feet tall and weighing ninety pounds, she was vivacious, flirtatious and exuded sexuality.
John fell in love with her at first sight, describing it as "a soul-shaking, terrifying experience." Over six feet tall, he was a serious, scholarly, hard-working newspaperman from Kentucky who had supported himself since his early teens. Nothing in his experience prepared him for a woman like Peggy.
Shortly after their marriage he launched her writing career by arriving home one night with a stack of yellow copy paper, a second-hand black Remington typewriter, and an oak typing table. "Madam," he said, "I greet you on the beginning of a great new career."
John encouraged Peggy to write what she knew and cared about - the old South and its traditions and people. His advice to "create some great characters first and then let them generate the action for you," was inherent in the book's success. For the next four years, she wrote every day and he edited every night.
Peggy later said that she supposed she got the idea for the book in the cradle. "I spent the Sunday afternoons of my childhood sitting on the bony knees of Confederate Veterans and the fat slick laps of old ladies who survived the war and reconstruction." Along with their stories she tucked away "details of rickrack braid, shoes made of carpet, and bonnets trimmed with roosters' tails."
In 1935 Harold Latham, a vice-president for Macmillan Publishing Co., heard about Peggy's "project" and persuaded her to let him read it. At their first meeting he found ". . . a tiny woman sitting on a divan, with the biggest manuscript beside her that I have ever seen, towering in two stacks almost to her shoulders." When he offered her a contract, a disbelieving Peggy offered to "change it any way you want, except to make a happy ending."
Her main concern was with how the book would be received at home. "I felt that I would curl up like a salted slug if the people in the South turned their faces from my book." She needn't have worried.
It won the Pulitzer Prize and was eventually translated into 27 languages and produced in at least 185 editions. John spent the next decade fighting to protect their foreign rights. That effort added to his other full-time job at Georgia Power Co. did much to harm his already fragile health.
Because of the force with which the book took over their lives, Peggy refused to ever write another word for publication. Instead, she launched a new full-time career: letter-writing. Her chatty, tell-all style and her conviction that it was not courteous to send her fans "abrupt" letters, made for thousands of long, lively letters. She also loved an opportunity to talk about herself and continued writing to numerous friends and family members.
Walker's access to many of these never-before published letters, as well as to John's steady correspondence with his family, is what makes the biography so interesting. We learn a lot about Peggy and John through their own words. My only criticism of this long (554 page) book is that their words are sometimes at odds with Walker's. She is obviously enamored of her subjects and loath to say anything negative.
On August 11, 1949, as the Marshes were walking to a play, Peggy was hit by a drunk driver and died shortly thereafter. John was left with the two-year task of fulfilling his promise to destroy most of her letters, papers, and original manuscript.
John's obituary in 1952 restated his emphasis that the inspiration and talent for the novel were his wife's alone, and his part was chiefly mechanical. But, as Walker continually stresses, it was the efforts of both parents that formed this child. It is a tribute not only to Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh, but also to their love for each other, that they created a child who was so well-loved throughout the world.
- Lucy Lee is a Roanoke writer.
by CNB