Road to Tara

by Anne Edwards

  Peggy wrote back that she had thought she would have no new dress for the Christmas parties and had planned to put a new collar on a blue georgette that had been part of her Upshaw trousseau, when the blue velvet dress arrived. “I adore that type of skirt,” she told her sister-in-law. “The flair makes me look taller. I really did weep but with joy and can hardly wait to get to work taking the waistline up.”

  Although life was not easy for Peggy at this period, she remained in good spirits. Nights out on the town were not missed because friends were often in and out of the Dump, and Bessie was such a good manager that there was always enough food to serve. An invitation to eat some of Bessie’s fried chicken and collard greens was much prized within the Marshes’ circle, and Bessie would buy the poultry at a butcher shop in Darktown, where prices were much lower than in white markets, and carry it to work with her.

  The Dump was so small that Bessie and her employer could not help but become close. While Peggy worked at her typewriter, Bessie remained in the tiny kitchen and, amazingly, never asked her what the book was about. But they did discuss their personal lives. Peggy was still having difficulties with her father, and Bessie, who had worked for “Mr. Eugene” for ten years, understood the causes better than anyone. Bessie was a lean, handsome woman, ten years older than Peggy. A wise, religious person, she brought Peggy closer to the church than any member of her family had succeeded in doing. Bessie also believed strongly in the sanctity of marriage and that a man must be catered to, and Peggy was influenced by her convictions.

  In truth, John Marsh’s pragmatic personality was not always easy to live with. It took special care and tolerance on Peggy’s part. He was in his daily life as he was in his copy-editing, “picayune and flaw-finding.” Already set in his ways, he did not enjoy surprises of any sort, and disliked unfamiliar food and uninvited company. Overnight guests were an anathema to him. Luckily, the Dump was so small that the possibility seldom presented itself.

  Neither of them were good sleepers and it was not unusual for either John or Peggy to be up roaming about the apartment or raiding the icebox at night. This was one reason they gave for not accepting invitations to stay overnight in the homes of friends and family outside of Atlanta (although later Peggy was to accept such invitations on her own). Peggy suffered frequent nightmares and insomnia, and John’s idea of heaven was sleeping until two P.M. and then having Bessie serve him breakfast in bed.

  Peggy wrote prodigiously throughout the final months of 1928, and then stopped abruptly in the spring of 1929. The arthritis in her ankle had suddenly shot up to her wrists and she was not able to use the typewriter. At this time, she pulled out all the envelopes and read their contents, penciling in new corrections and adjusting inconsistencies. She changed Fontenoy Hall to Tara throughout, heavily marking out the name each time it appeared and writing “Tara” above it. She did this, too, on the envelope that held the section of Pansy coming home after the burning of Atlanta, so that it read: “The Road to Tara.”

  When she had been through the whole manuscript once, she decided to put it aside for a while. It now filled twenty envelopes and was about six hundred thousand words long. Scenes remained to be written, mainly those having to do with the war and certain campaigns. She had rewritten and edited and then re-edited the opening chapter many times, and all those pages were together in one envelope, making no sense whatsoever to read. The problem of how to kill off Frank Kennedy, Pansy’s second husband, was not yet solved, and she had written two different endings for this chapter. In one, Frank, never strong, died from exposure during the stormy night of the Shantytown incident. In the other, he is downed by a bullet during a Ku Klux Klan raid. Both occur after Pansy inadvertently goes into Shantytown alone on a buckboard and is nearly raped — a scene certainly culled from Peggy’s own visit to Darktown but dramatizing John and Bessie’s worst fears. Both versions also have the same effect on the story — Pansy is responsible for Frank Kennedy’s death. Although dissatisfied with the way she had handled Pansy’s first two children (she kept rewriting those scenes in which they appeared), Peggy apparently considered Bonnie, Pansy’s little girl by Rhett, well drawn, for the passages with Bonnie remained pretty much the same in each successive draft, as did the majority of the confrontations between Pansy and Rhett.

  John was too busy at the office for them to go over the entire long manuscript together — that would take months. And Peggy was not well enough to do the remainder of the research required for some scenes, nor was she certain how to fill in some of the remaining gaps in her story. She had no idea what the book might be worth as literature. Some scenes — like Gerald O’Hara’s distraction after his wife’s death; Bonnie’s fatal fall from the horse, reflecting her own similar but luckier accident; and Rhett’s near violence toward Pansy before he forces himself on her, bringing back incidents between herself and Red — were hard for her to evaluate. Reality became confused with fiction.

  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, though 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 were Red Upshaw and Grandmother Stephens to think about, too. It made no difference to Peggy that Thomas Wolfe, in his 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 to the Gant house without asking directions, and could have recognized many passersby. 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.

  Peggy and John discussed her decision to put her work aside and, once he saw that there was no way to convince her that she was wrong, he helped her find places to store the stacks of envelopes so that they would not be constantly in the way. No sooner had this been accomplished than Peggy’s arthritis grew even worse. She started on a round of medical consultations and, in an effort to diminish the arthritic pain, she had several badly decayed teeth, and then her tonsils, removed. A nutritionist eliminated all sweets and starches from her diet. The pain persisted and, during the summer, she received shots of small amounts of typhoid vaccine and underwent daily massage and diathermy treatments. Suddenly, as the New Year of 1930 passed and spring approached, the arthritis disappeared.

  Although she had been away from the book nearly a year, John never let her forget that it was unfinished, and he accused her of being ungrateful for her ability to write, a talent he said he would have “given the world to possess.” Years later, when a reporter asked her if she thought she might be inspired to return to her writing, Peggy replied bitterly, “I never met that lady Inspiration yet and I don’t expect I ever will.”

  Certainly Peggy was not inspired in 1930, and she did not work on the book at all that year. Her energies were taken up with helping Grandmother Stephens, who was failing, and her elderly aunts in Jonesboro, who were also old and feeble. Friends, too, took much of her time now that she was no longer an invalid herself. She became involved in all their problems and was always available in an
emergency. Later she claimed she had seen one friend “through three psychiatrists and a couple of neurologists, a divorce, and a happy new marriage.”

  Peggy was avoiding going back to work on the book and both she and John knew it. The blame was placed on all those close associates who required her services in illness and trouble. She ignored John’s hints that she could say no, and did not even seem nettled when a friend commented, “Isn’t it a shame that somebody with a mind like Peggy’s hasn’t any ambition?”

  It looked as though the novel that John had so encouraged her to write and that had created such a closeness between them might never be completed. Such a possibility did not seem to disturb Peggy at this time, but it was the source of great dissatisfaction to John Marsh.

  Chapter Thirteen

  PEGGY TOOK UP the game of bridge because she was at a loss as to what else to do with her afternoons and Mah-jongg depressed her. She also joined the Atlanta Women’s Press Club and, between these two activities, managed to stave off her boredom.

  Never much of a gameswoman, she had chosen bridge because so many intelligent young women in Atlanta played it, and there was always good conversation at these bridge parties. After a luncheon at someone’s home, the guests would draw for bridge tables, and one autumn Saturday afternoon in 1930 Peggy found herself seated across the table from a vivacious young woman named Lois Dwight Cole, whom she had not met before. Lois Cole had recently moved to Georgia to run the Atlanta branch of the Macmillan publishing company’s trade department, and she was living in a rooming house a short distance from the Marshes.

  As the cards were dealt, Lois asked, “Do you follow any particular conventions, partner?”

  Peggy replied solemnly, “Conventions? I don’t know any. I just lead from fright. What do you lead from?”

  “Necessity,” Lois replied, and Peggy broke out in a wide grin.

  Lois Cole later recalled, “On the first hand our opponents bid four spades. My partner held six; I had two and two aces, and we set them five; whereupon we rose, solemnly if improperly, and shook hands across the table.

  “As there was more conversation than bridge, it was soon established that I was the Yankee who had come down to work for Macmillan (everyone knew but it was manners to ask) and that I had gone to Smith where [Peggy] had been for a year. During refreshments, she edged around to me and asked if I would come to supper the following Wednesday with her and her husband, John Marsh.”

  Lois accepted the invitation, was served Bessie’s best fried chicken, collard greens, and biscuits, and listened with delight to Peggy’s tales of Atlanta and comments on books and people. Peggy told her stories “with such fun and skill and with such verve,” Lois later wrote, that she never minded that her hostess was the center of attention the entire evening.

  In a short time, the women became friends, and when Lois Cole married an Atlanta newspaperman, Allan Taylor, later that year, the two couples became a close foursome. Taylor, as both a newspaperman and a Southerner, had a great deal in common with the Marshes. They spent many evenings together and invariably there would be discussions about the Civil War. A typical evening found the couples at supper in the small front room of the Dump, with Peggy and Allan deep in conversation about Atlanta’s trials at the hands of the Northerners. One such night, Peggy asked what prison Allan’s kinfolks had been in during the war. He told her, and then inquired what prison hers had been in.

  “What was the death rate in the prison your kinfolks were in?” she asked.

  He responded with an exact figure, and then wanted to know whether pneumonia or small pox accounted for most of the deaths in the jail where her relatives were imprisoned.

  To the two Southerners, there was nothing at all unusual about this conversation, and they spoke of it all as though from firsthand experience.

  Lois looked at them blankly. “What I cannot understand about Southerners,” she said, “is their obsession with the Civil War. We’ve forgotten it. Why can’t you?”

  “I can’t explain without talking all night or writing a very long book,” Peggy retorted.

  It was about this time that Lois learned from John that Peggy had written a book about the Battle of Atlanta and the city’s rebirth during Reconstruction. Lois had spoken to Medora and to several of Peggy’s co-workers at the Journal and had an editor’s instinct that Peggy Marsh could well have written a book that might be publishable. She prodded Peggy to show her the manuscript, but Peggy would not be swayed, nor would she even discuss any part of the plot, except for its historical background and setting.

  In September, 1930, John was made advertising manager of Georgia Power and, to celebrate, they puchased a year-old, green Chevrolet. This gave them some mobility on weekends but also gave Peggy more responsibility than ever, as friends and family who did not have cars now called upon her in every emergency, large or small. However, the car also gave John the opportunity to “put Peggy back to work.” He organized Sunday outings to include drives to the various Civil War battle sites in and around Atlanta. On seeing them, Peggy would recall stories she had heard, often ones she had included in the book. One blistering hot Sunday in early September, 1931, John took Peggy for a drive to Dalton, and on September 20 he wrote his sister:

  It was especially interesting to us because it was the scene of big events in the Civil War and in Peggy’s novel. Seeing the place in the heat of summer gave us a keen sympathy for the men who battled over the section and dragged cannon up the sides of those mountains in July and August. One of the most interesting sections of Peggy’s book tells of the approach of the northern army down the railroad line to Atlanta and the first awakenings of fear that the Confederacy might eventually be defeated as the army fought and dropped back to Dalton, Resaca, Big Shanty and then Kenesaw Mountain.

  The short day trip refreshed Peggy’s memories of the grim tales once told to her by the old veterans about the Battle of Dalton and, since it was Labor Day weekend and John was free from work, they decided on an impulse to drive on to Chattanooga, where the Confederate withdrawal to Dalton had begun. John’s letter to Frances was the closest either Peggy or he had come to discussing with anyone the contents of Peggy’s book. The trip to Chattanooga did stir Peggy to return to the basement of the Carnegie Library and resume her research. The manila envelopes came out of their hiding places and were once again piled by the typewriter.

  As close as she was to Lois Cole, and even though Lois held an executive position in a publishing company, Peggy would not reveal the contents of the book to her and refused point-blank to show her any part of the manuscript. True, it was in a more confused state now than ever, what with all the new historical material she was inserting, but Peggy’s secrecy regarding her book went much deeper than that. She had a low estimation of her own worth as a writer, and Lois was a professional, dealing with some of the best writers of the time. Peggy’s father, whose approval was so important to her, had told her that writing was “a good enough way for a woman to occupy her time,” but had never been interested to the point of inquiring about the book. He had not thought much of her journalism and he now ventured that he did not “expect that she could be writing anything worth time to read.” John tried desperately to raise her self-esteem, but whatever he did or said could not negate the fact in her mind that it was John who put order and emphasis into her work and that without his constant help, the book would be in even a greater shambles than it was.

  Peggy always claimed that she wrote the book only to amuse John and herself. But, weighing the evidence, that seems unlikely. She had spent several years of her life writing with no clear goal in mind, but now the end was in sight, and the time had come for her to admit the truth to herself, if she had not already done so unconsciously — she desperately wanted her novel published, to prove to her father and to all other detractors that she had talent and ability after all. Otherwise, she would not have bothered so at this stage about the accuracy of every small detail. She now spent day
s and sometimes weeks trying to determine, for example, whether there had been rain or sunshine on the particular date of a scene in the book. She found out all she could about Vicksburg and the defeat at Gettysburg, the Battle of Chickamauga, the bleak days when the Yankees under Sherman were above Dalton at Rocky Face, and all the fighting around Atlanta from May, 1864, until the city fell that September. She knew that if her father ever did read the book, he would be especially critical of any inaccuracies.

  Certainly her insistence on authentic background material for the novel allowed Peggy a forum for her “obsession” — the war and what it must have been like to have lived through it — but, as the pages multiplied and the envelopes continued to bulge, her obsession with the war itself began to ease. At least from the time she became friends with Lois Cole, Peggy was torn between the desire to be published and fears that her best efforts would be rejected, her characters in the novel would be linked with people in her life, her father would become more critical of her, and friends — who were mostly of a literary bent — would be made aware of her failure. And, although John did not discuss the contents of the book with anyone but Frances, and even in her case did so only superficially, he did make it known that Peggy was writing a novel that he considered great and that one day would make people aware of his wife’s tremendous talents.

  John received a small raise in 1932 and, as their debts were almost all paid, the Marshes now felt able to afford a few comforts. They moved into a larger, five-room apartment, filling it with Victorian furniture from Grandmother Stephens.