by Anne Edwards
The problem of who was to be Peggy’s editor on the book had still not been settled. Peggy had always shied away from the topic whenever it was mentioned. Lois had seemed the natural choice, as Latham was an acquisitions editor and did not work on manuscripts as a general rule. But Peggy avoided all overtures from Lois. This was not because she lacked confidence in her friend’s ability, but because of her own insecurity; she feared that Lois would find her to be a literary fraud because of her “deficiencies” in grammar and spelling.
Latham offered her the use of a good editor, whom he would fly down to Atlanta to help her for a few weeks if she so desired. He even intimated that he would break precedent and come himself if that would make her feel more comfortable. Peggy, however, did not want outside help at this stage, before she and John had been over the entire manuscript themselves. She was convinced that without John’s sharp editorial eye and tough criticism both Macmillan and Professor Everett would have rejected the book. Peggy looked up to John as the intellectual in their household. He had graduated from college, had taught English, and his vocabulary was far more extensive than hers, as was his knowledge of grammar and punctuation.
John Marsh’s contribution at this point cannot be overestimated. He functioned as Peggy’s editor and he was a good one, sensitive to just how much more rewriting Peggy had in her. By his own admission he was overly fastidious and, as he had been a copy editor and his handwriting was more legible than hers, he wrote many of the corrections on the final manuscript for her. The deeper they submerged themselves into the work, the more dependent she became upon him. He was not only acting as her editor, but as a teacher and coach.
By October, Peggy’s self-assurance of a month before had begun to desert her. Bridging chapters and cutting others that had been duplicated was a more difficult task than she had anticipated. She had woven her story so tightly that when she cut or inserted anything, the whole picture seemed to fall to pieces like a giant jigsaw puzzle, and getting it back together again was the very devil. When she did, all the cracks seemed to show. It did not help that her father had finally read the material — somewhat reluctantly at that — and had praised its historical accuracy, for he had added that he could not understand why a company would want to invest money in it. She then gave it to Stephens, who would venture nothing more than, “It’s competent.” Her old doubts returned. Completing the book was now a challenge, but she had no great hopes for its success.
Paradoxically, Peggy could seldom refuse a challenge while, at the same time, she was terrified of change. Medora has said that all “the zip and bustle” that had characterized Peggy’s early life, that had led her to “dare marriage with a wild man like Red Upshaw,” and that had made her the newspaper woman she was, “somehow got buried with marriage to John Marsh.” It is true that Peggy had managed to keep her sharp sense of humor, had remained stimulating company, and was still able to tell a story with verve and originality. But in her day-to-day life, she did rely on John enormously for encouragement and support. Medora suggests that John, out of fear of losing Peggy, had done all he could to make her feel beholden to him for saving her from social disgrace after the Upshaw debacle, as well as making her emotionally dependent upon him to such a degree that she could no longer function on her own. In Medora’s opinion, John was “a villain” in Peggy’s life and, about this time, she had a disagreement with him that was never really resolved. Sensitive to this, and yet not willing to give up her friendship with Medora, Peggy began to see her away from the house without John present, although the cause for this arrangement was tactfully ignored.
Medora was distressed by what she saw as the loss of Peggy’s free spirit. But Peggy’s youthful bohemianism and apparent emancipation had been a deception. She had not felt free enough to leave her father’s house when she married Upshaw, and it had been John who had pushed her into becoming a newspaper reporter. True, she had taken to it immediately, but he had never let her try to make a go of it on her own, nor had Peggy resisted his involvement in her work. Medora knew that John had always functioned as Peggy’s copy editor, but even she had no idea how paralyzed her friend felt without his assistance. The book had developed in the same way — John had pressed her into writing it and then had been there to help her along every page of the way. Later, Frank Daniel, who had worked with Peggy on the Journal, was to call the Marshes the “mama and papa” of the book, and that observation had much validity.
Medora, one of the few people who knew that Peggy’s novel was to be published, was ecstatic about the news because she hoped it would bring her friend around once again to being the “bright button and talented independent girl” who had worked with her on the Journal, and that it might finally put “Peggy’s energies to something beside family and illness.” Medora was highly critical of John for having insisted that Peggy leave the Journal, and she later revealed that, after Peggy’s leg had healed, her job had been offered to her again, and that Peggy had turned down the offer because of John’S wishes. As Medora saw it, John was little more than a weight Peggy had to pull, which kept her off the main course.
Peggy was of the opinion that in no other section of the country were so many amateur writers working on books as in the South. A natural kinship developed among them and they looked upon those of their number who eventually achieved publication as literary gurus whose time and experience should be easily available. Peggy knew this from her days as a star reporter and she feared it with mounting anxiety, weaving a web of secrecy about herself and her activities to forestall the inevitable requests for her time and advice. She did not have to be a big success for manuscripts by local fledgling writers to choke her mailbox. People she had met once, or perhaps not at all, would appear at her door. There might even be local reporters looking for a story, and that was the last thing that she wanted, for she did not wish to have to fend off questions about Red Upshaw or to deal with snoopers of any kind. How she and John lived was their own business, as were her writing habits and any plans she might have for another book. She had been happy to scout for Macmillan for a fee, but the idea of reading other people’s unsolicited manuscripts was so hateful to her that she wrote Lois that she and John had decided to ask for fifty dollars from anyone who asked.
As each day passed, another problem would erupt. Peggy’s first estimates of the time it would take to edit now seemed to have been badly miscalculated and she had no idea how she was going to get the work done on schedule; nor did it seem possible to tell Macmillan she needed more time when they had set things in motion based on her original plans.
In all areas of her book except those dealing with actual military strategy — where she had relied entirely on her memories of stories told to her — Peggy’s research had been meticulous. Before the book was sold, she said, “I saw no reason why I should plague my brain by studying ‘military matters’ which I cannot comprehend.” Now, besides reading the accounts by the Civil War generals, she dug up all the notes she had gotten from eyewitnesses interviewed in her reporting days. And then, after clipping and studying every article ever written by Atlanta’s most revered historians, Wilbur Kurtz and his wife, Annie, she turned to them for further help. She had met the Kurtzes only once, on an Historical Society excursion when the three of them had joined in a prank to try to deceive Stephens into believing that a factory-produced Indian carving was genuine Cherokee — and nearly succeeded.
Only two and a half chapters of the book dealt with military matters, but, she said, she wanted to have them “airtight, so that no gray-bearded vet could rise up to shake his cane at me and say, ‘But I know better. I fit in that fight.’” She sent the chapters to Kurtz for his expert advice, along with a lengthy apology saying she knew she was imposing and that she had hated having manuscripts sent to her with similar requests when she was on the Journal, but that he was the only living authority she knew on the subject.
Kurtz obliged — a gesture Peggy never forgot — and, after reading the
excerpts she had sent him, he wrote back that she had made only two errors. One was small — she had placed the Battle of New Hope Church five miles too close to the railroad; and one was rather vital — she had had the final fortifications of Atlanta completed six weeks too soon.
The pressure she felt to finish was too much for Peggy and, before John’s vacation ended, she developed boils, not only over her body, but on her scalp, and the doctor had had to cut away small patches of hair the size of pennies and quarters from around them to prevent the infection from spreading. It didn’t help, and the left side of her face became swollen just when Lois wrote requesting a new photograph for the publicity department. She replied to Lois that it was the worst possible time for a picture to be taken, for her scalp looked as though she had “just been rescued from the Indians, and not a minute too soon either.” But she promised to try to get a good shot the next day, which she knew would mean hours at the beauty shop, and more hours for the “poor photographer trying to avoid the bald spots, Jimmy Durante nose and M[arlene] Dietrich cheek hollows.”
Enclosed with the letter was John’s finished copy for the “blurb” about the book and author that was to appear on the flaps of the book jacket, and a note saying that when it was edited she did not want the reference to Melanie to be eliminated, for, she wrote, “of all the characters she’s the heroine of the book though I’m afraid I’m the only one who knows it.”
The book was now being called “Another Day,” which was Professor Everett’s suggestion, but no one was particularly pleased with that title, nor had Peggy come up with a suitable alternative to the name “Pansy.” When John returned to work early in October, Peggy grew frantic. She had extended her first delivery date from six to ten weeks, which meant the book should be in Macmillan’s hands by the fifteenth of November, 1935. All of the publishing company’s production staff had adjusted their schedules for that date. But Peggy knew she could not possibly have the manuscript ready for them. For one thing, the first chapter, which had defeated her throughout the writing of the book, was still presenting a tremendous problem for her. She knew she wanted to begin with the war looming close, the news of Ashley’s betrothal, the preparations for the barbecue, and the introduction of Pansy, the Tarleton twins (more important in her first drafts than in the final), Gerald O’Hara, and the Wilkes family. But she just did not seem able to come up with the right tone in which to set the scene for what was to follow, and she tried it from every possible angle. Even John offered numerous suggestions, which she trie’d but which fared no better on paper than did her own ideas.
Finally, in desperation, on October 30, she turned to Latham and wrote him that it was “amateurish, clumsy, and worst of all self-conscious.”
She had tried too often and too long on this chapter, and had developed some sort of mental block about it, and she explained to him that she did not exaggerate when she said she had written at least forty first chapters in the past two years, and that whenever she had nothing to do and nothing to read, she had written another first chapter and each one looked worse than the last.
She asked Latham to reread the chapter and tell her “what on earth is wrong with these first pages?” As soon as he received this letter from Peggy, he wrote an interoffice memo to Lois Cole: “Really I don’t know what she is excited about. It is true probably that the first two pages of the manuscript are a little bit slow but from the middle of page three on the interest is held very intensely.” And in his prompt reply to Peggy he wrote:
I at once dropped everything to read it and I am delighted to tell you how admirable I think it is. I think you want to forget this chapter now. It is absolutely all right. From the middle of page 3 to the end it holds interest without any question. The first two or three pages are necessary to set the stage and introduce the characters. I think you have accomplished a great deal on those two pages and I see nothing self-conscious or amateurish about them. They are, it seems to me, good writing and essential, I think to pick up intense interest as soon as you do and I am sure that begins on page 3 and is quite an accomplishment.
Reading this chapter now stirs in me the emotions which your entire book arouse, admiration for your style of writing, for the excellence of your characters and the very human note which predominates in it. I am especially grateful that we are to have the privilege of publishing this novel. I know we are going to do well with it.
He asked her to go on with the balance of the book and not give another thought to the first chapter. In the end, though, these first two pages were not to be the opening of the book, and Peggy was just as torn and confused about what to do about them after she had written Latham as she had been before. Two other important questions were settled at this time, however.
For about a month the book had been called “Tomorrow is Another Day,” the previous title of “Another Day” having been decided against. But then, Peggy’s old friend Sam Tupper, who was now doing book reviews for the Journal, learned that a book by that title had recently been published; at just about the same time, Lois wrote to confirm the fact. For a while Peggy considered “Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” “There’s Always Tomorrow,” “Tomorrow Will Be Fair,” and “Tomorrow Morning,” all titles that she sent on to Lois as suggestions. But at the end of October, she wrote 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 Gone With the Wind, and he also thought the name she now suggested for Pansy had promise — “Scarlett.” Both of these matters he promised to take up immediately with his editorial board.
But even as late as November 4, the title of the book remained in question and the central character was still named Pansy. Lois was resisting the name Scarlett because, she said, “somebody said it sounds like a Good Housekeeping story.” Peggy 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, Peggy even suggested her own name, as well as the name Nancy. Both were dismissed because there was certain to be a Peggy or a Nancy O’Hara. Not until after Thanks-giving was Scarlett O’Hara formally christened. This meant going through every page and catching each reference to her. 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.” Peggy had come upon it while searching desperately through the Bible and all her volumes of poetry for a title. Ironically, she had used the phrase herself to describe Scarlett’s feelings after the burning of Atlanta, when she was fighting her way home on the road to Tara: “Was Tara still standing? Or was Tara also gone with the wind which had swept through Georgia?”
Peggy had not anticipated the amount of work to be done, and pressure mounted as the end of the year approached. Macmillan offered, and she now accepted, the secretarial services of a young woman, Margaret Baugh, who worked in the Atlanta office. John managed a month’s leave of absence from Georgia Power, and his secretary, Rhoda Williams, took on the formidable task of typing the final draft of the manuscript, which by this time was nearly illegible.
Had Peggy not been of a nervous nature, the task she had in putting her manuscript into publishable shape might still have been overwhelming. Basically, the entire book was written by this time, except for short historical links or the bridges where she had cut passages and left her narrative in an uneven state. But, as she had written many of the chapters in several versions, decisions had to be made about which version to retain and, once that had been decided, the manuscript had to be well vetted to make sure nothing that related only to an excised section remained. She also had to flesh out the last chapter.
It was, however, the opening of the book that continued to bedevil her. It was not until a few days before her final relinquishment of the manuscript to Macmillan that she wrote the two pages that were to remain as the opening of the book. The problem was that the first chapter focused almost entirely on the Tarleton twins and by the time she had reached this stage in the writing, they had become minor characters. She needed to introduce Scarlett in the first two pages in such a powerful way that she dominated the scene between the Tarleton twins without being in it for the entire chapter.
The entire editorial process had become a horror to Peggy. Each day she awoke at what she called “can’t see,” not sure she could make it through the day again to “can’t see.” John worked on the grammar and punctuation until late at night. Bessie was functioning as cook-housekeeper-personal maid, trying to keep track of all the pages and sections of the book, making sure “Miss Peggy” ate to keep up her strength, and attempting to keep order in a household in constant turmoil. Preparing the book for publication might have been easier if Peggy had allowed Macmillan to send down a professional editor to work with her, or if she had asked for publication to be scheduled for fall of 1936 instead of in the spring, to give her a full six months more to do the required work. Latham even suggested this in one letter to her, but at the outset she seemed convinced that she could and would do all the editing in time for the Macmillan spring list.
She blamed the delay on the mental block she had on the first chapter, but it seems more likely that the mental block was due to her sudden realization of what she had committed herself to, and a fear that she might not be able to see it through if John was not home every day to assist her. He did, in the end, take more time off to help her in January, when a bargain was pretty well struck between them. No matter how many books she might eventually write — although even at this early stage she vowed she would never write another one — she was first and foremost, Mrs. John Marsh, and, as he was the man in the house, his career was to take top priority. This later was to become an impossibility as the book’s success began to take over their lives. But Peggy tried to maintain the illusion throughout her life, even at a high cost to John’s health, for she insisted he not give up his career and, at the same time, she depended upon him for “almost everything” in her own career. From this point forward, John Marsh was always to hold two jobs as long as he was well enough to work. During the day, he was advertising director of Georgia Power. At night, he handled all foreign matters for his wife, as well as much of her business correspondence, seldom quitting before 2:00 A.M. He appears to have preferred it that way, and Peggy never did anything to persuade him it might be too much.
