Road to Tara

by Anne Edwards

  The story was set in the 1880s in Clayton County, in an area near the old Fitzgerald plantation, and included some of the grim, derelict houses that Maybelle had pointed out to her long ago with the warning that this was what became of people without moral fiber. The heroine, Europa Carmagin, was from such a family; the Carmagins had not been able to regain their antebellum affluence. The garden on the plantation was weed-choked, the fences rotting, the fields worked out, and ’Ropa was in love with a handsome mulatto whose mother had been a former slave on the Carmagin plantation. Under such circumstances, a happy ending was impossible. In grand opera style, ’Ropa Carmagin’s lover was killed and her neighbors forced her to leave her ancestral home.

  When Peggy had completed the novella, she gave it to John to read and edit. She thought she had written a good story, rich in true detail and on a theme — miscegenation — that was important enough to lift the work from the category of “romance” to “literature.” John found the period and the background, and even ’Ropa Carmagin, fascinating, but he did not consider the novella worthy of his wife’s talents and he did not like the theme at all. Nor did he believe ’Ropa’s male lover was a true portrait of a mulatto. He suggested that Peggy put the manuscript aside and think about it some more before he made any notes for her.

  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.

  Peggy gave up “Elizabeth Bennet’s Gossip” because, she claimed, she could not write a word unless it was on the typewriter. John was filled with tender regard and tried to do everything he could to keep her spirits up. She read omnivorously and when her eyes tired John read the latest stories to her from literary magazines such as the American Mercury.

  When she could, Medora dropped over during her lunch break. Augusta came by, and Stephens and Eugene Mitchell were attentive. Peggy didn’t choose to see anyone else but, undaunted, Grandmother Stephens, whose own health was beginning to fail, came regularly, complaining about the shabbiness of the apartment, hinting that had her granddaughter been a better Catholic she might be in better health. Peggy preferred reading most of the day to seeing visitors. With her illness, the beaus and old flames had suddenly disappeared. She was completely dependent upon John.

  On his way home from work, John would stop by the library to select novels, histories, and poetry to fill his wife’s lonely days. They were having serious financial problems, with Peggy’s current medical bills now heaped upon John’s old ones, and neither one of them was in good spirits. John’s health was still far from robust, but Peggy’s depression worried him and he decided some drastic therapy was in order. The day she graduated to crutches, early in 1927, John came home from work with a stack of copy paper and told her that there was hardly a book left in the library that she would enjoy. “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 to thinking, “now I’ve got to write a novel and what is it going to be about?”

  The next morning, after John’s departure, she pulled on her baggy overalls, plunked on her green eyeshade, piled some cushions for her leg beneath the spindly sewing table, stuffed “ ’Ropa Carmagin” into a big manila envelope and pushed it aside, put the stack of blank yellow paper in its place, and sat down. She knew she had a story she wanted to tell, the one she and John had discussed so often about women like her grandmother and Mrs. Benning, the general’s wife. She didn’t have to bother about background, for it had been with her all her life. She did not yet have a plot nor did she know who all of her characters were to be, but, as she sat before her old Remington, the sun from the high windows splashing over the blank page in front of her, she was glad that John’s words had stirred her into a final decision. Now she knew why she had collected all those bits of historical information.

  She had no outline, but her authentic background gave her guidelines and structure. The story would commence with the war and end in 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 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 sat 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 the 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.

  Chapter Eleven

  HAPPY THOUGH she was in her marriage to John, the specter of Red Upshaw had not been exorcised from Peggy’s thoughts, and the memories of the two confrontations she had had with Red before the divorce — the first, when he’d said he was leaving her to go to Asheville; and the last, when he had assaulted her — remained to trouble her. She had confessed to John and Medora some feelings of responsibility where Red’s abuse of her was concerned. It had been wrong to insist on remaining in her father’s house, for one thing; and, for another, she should not have brought up Clifford Henry’s name and he
r own romantic feelings for him on her honeymoon. That had incensed Red, and nothing had been the same between them afterwards. Red had been a brute, there was no denying that. She could never forgive him for what he had done and lived in terror that he might return. Yet, at the same time, she remembered his first departure more vividly than the second — how bruised and battered she had felt as he drove away, even though that time he had not laid a hand on her.

  Indifference, that was the cruelest blow you could receive from a man you had loved; it was worse, even, than hate. Red Upshaw had not fought for her love and, after the beating, when she had armed herself against him, he had not even bothered to appear at the divorce hearing and had never contacted her to apologize for his brutal behavior.

  It was the pain she had felt at Red Upshaw’s indifference, his detachment in doing exactly what she had forced him to do — leave Atlanta — that she used for the basis of the first scene she wrote, but this was a stepping-off point only. She had not given Red the time or chance to display any strength of character, and she had suffered some guilt about this, even though she now thought he was beyond redemption. But her hero had to be redeemable. No matter what kind of scoundrel he was, or how cold or brutal he might be to the woman who was to be his wife, if he was a loving father, he would gain some sort of absolution. So, two of the main characters would be partners in a violent marriage held together by their love for the child of that union. This much of the story was set from the beginning.

  The name Rhett Butler was decided upon with some ease; it is the merging of two rather common Southern surnames. But, the names Red Upshaw and Rhett Butler are also alliterative, the first name of each starting with the same letter, and both names have an equal number of syllables. There were several other similarities that linked the fictitious and real men. Both were “masterful,” “scoundrelly,” and of “low morals,” and both had been expelled from service academies — Rhett, from West Point; Red, from Annapolis. Both had been profiteers, Rhett using the war for profit; Red, Prohibition. Both took their sexual pleasures where they found them; and both were Southerners, but not Atlantans. But it was the volatile spirits of the two men that were most synonymous — the inner violence, the strong passions, the brilliant minds always so self-serving, and the animal magnetism that even faint-hearted women found hard to resist.

  Atlanta and Jonesboro were to be Peggy’s locales. Her heroine’s plantation would be more of a farm, like her mother’s ancestral home, than the stereotypical plantation, and it would be called Fontenoy Hall. She was not entirely satisfied with this name, but it was of her own making and she wanted to be sure that no plantation in Clayton County could be identified. She had read many more books on the Civil War during her months of immobility, but she had always known that her story would not be told from the military point of view but from that of those Southern women who had refused to accept defeat, even when their men were gone and the war lost. Grandmother Stephens’s tales of Atlanta under Hood, with the Yankees closing in; of the fire; and of the terrible days when she had traveled to Jonesboro after the Union soldiers had plundered it, and there had been nothing to eat but a few root vegetables — they all came back to her, as did Mrs. Bennings’s trials in caring for her dying father and all the other women and children and helpless “darkies” left on her plantation while her husband was commanding his troops.

  The first day, she wrote about two thousand words — the last scene of the novel — and when John came home she read them to him, then he read them himself, and they talked about the story and the characters. This time he was not only supportive, he was enthusiastic. He went over her typed pages making notes in the margins and correcting small errors in grammar and usage.

  Peggy was up early the next morning, retyped these pages, incorporating John’s corrections and her own, and then she simply jumped right into the book at an early stage in the story, before the war. She was not sure this would be her opening chapter but, curiously, it did not seem to matter. The history of the period was so clear in her mind that she could pick up the story wherever she wanted and know fairly well what was happening in both Jonesboro and Atlanta at that time. Within a week or so, a pattern for her writing had formed. She worked six to eight hours a day, sometimes more, putting aside certain scenes that needed more research and would therefore have to wait until her leg had healed enough to allow her to go back to the basement of Carnegie Library. Still, this did not stop the flow of the story, nor did the fact that she often wrote scenes with several alternate endings. Contrary to the legend that grew up later, Peggy did not write her book in a nonsequential fashion. After the last chapter was written, she tackled the rest of the story more or less in chronological order, and chapters that were set aside to be researched later had outlines and explanatory paragraphs.

  She kept index-card files for each of her characters, no matter how minor, and in this she was more organized and neat than in her actual writing. Angus Perkerson’s lessons in professionalism had not gone unheard, and when Peggy was at her desk she went at the novelist’s task with the same craftmanship that she had displayed as a reporter.

  Perhaps this was why she wore the green eyeshade and the men’s pants when she was writing — to simulate newsroom conditions. Her approach was entirely businesslike, and the image later evoked, of a tiny, genteel, Southern housewife beneath a counterpane, whiling away her spare hours by writing a novel “for fun,” is a myth. As she wrote, Peggy Mitchell was once again a “working woman,” and she wrote with the same fervor as she had at the Journal and sought John’s praise just as she had once dedicated herself to winning Angus Perkerson’s approval.

  As she wrote, Peggy seemed to be in the presence of, as she described it, “something strange, something headlong and desperate.” The wide range of emotions and experiences that she had known or had had described to her during her childhood and youth, and which had been accumulating within her all her life, suddenly began to dislodge themselves from her mind. But her insomnia, as she recalled the words of the Civil War songs her mother used to sing to her, persisted, and she still had nightmares associated with other bloody, graphic wartime descriptions heard in her childhood.

  Only a few weeks after she began, John wrote his mother that Peggy was writing a drama that would contain “all the great elemental experiences of life: birth, love, marriage, death, hunger, jealousy, hate, greed, joy and loneliness.” Except for this brief mention of it to Frances and his mother, John did not discuss the book with anyone at this point at Peggy’s request. When people came into the house, she would toss a big bath towel over her desk to conceal the manuscript. His belief in her drove her on. She had no deadline, but each night when John came home and asked, “What have you got to read me tonight?” she felt compelled to deliver.

  Within a short time, there was a stack of manila envelopes on the table and floor, each marked with an identification of the contents, like: “Family History,” “Barbecue at Twelve Oaks,” and “The Bazaar.” When a day arrived when she could not seem to go forward or backward in the story, she would take out the pages from one of these envelopes, incorporate John’s notes, and then rewrite the pages for both of them to discuss again. For several months, she wrote in this disciplined, compulsive fashion, often reworking a scene four or five times. A day seldom passed when she was not absorbed in work on the novel.

  Peggy would always deny that any of the characters in the book were based on real people, except in the case of the black girl, Prissy, whom she admitted was patterned on Cammie. But Ashley Wilkes — another combination of two old Southern names — was a highly romanticized portrait of Clifford Henry, who, though not Southern, had also gone off idealistically to war and who had been a poet and a dreamer and a gentleman. And the similarities between Gerald O’Hara’s grief over his wife’s death and Eugene Mitchell’s breakdown when Maybelle died are too striking to be dismissed.

  Though Peggy claimed that the character she named Pansy O’Hara was i
n no way autobiographical, she did have the same first name as the girl in Peggy’s abandoned autobiographical Jazz Age novel and as the girl reporter in the short stories that Smart Set had rejected. No matter what denials Peggy made later, Pansy O’Hara had much in common with her creator; the parallels are there. Both were mavericks, constantly flouting convention and society, and both suffered identity problems caused by strong, righteous, Catholic mothers. Both had to care for their fathers after their mothers’ deaths. Both were flirts and teases, both preferred the game of sex to the act itself, and both of them had been raped by a husband. Both turned their backs on the Catholic church. Both were women who drank in a society that frowned on such “unladylike” behavior, and both had set society against them. Both had had romanticized, unfulfilled first loves, a violent marriage, and a marriage to a steady reliable husband. And both were stronger than all but one of the men they loved. This autobiographical undercurrent gives the narrative a drive that it might otherwise have lacked.

  But Pansy O’Hara was based nearly as much on Annie Fitzgerald Stephens as she was on Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell, and there were enough similarities between the two women so that Peggy was reluctant to expose the book to her grandmother’s sharp eye.

  Peggy’s leg was healing, but slowly, and she was still more or less confined to the apartment. Grandmother Stephens made a point of visiting regularly but, though Peggy and her grandmother finally made up their differences, Peggy never told her about the contents of the manila envelopes, for she was not at all certain that the old woman would appreciate having the most vivid events of her life turned into the stuff of fiction.