Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (54 page)

There were several other topics floating around her head as well. To friend Richard Harwell, a collector of Confederate memorabilia and fellow history enthusiast, Mitchell mentioned an interest in the eccentric Georgia poet Thomas Holley Chivers and the Confederate medical corps in North Georgia during Sherman's assault on Atlanta. She told Harwell she had also made notes on the Confederados, a band of former Confederate soldiers who established a colony in Brazil after the Civil War.
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With her brother, Mitchell discussed the possibility of a detective novel set in the Civil War period that might include a reference to the Ladies Gunboat Association, a fundraising group of Confederate women.
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Marsh thought she was semiseriously considering the play about an author's life that she and Baugh joked about; she certainly had the raw material.

While it seems that Mitchell may have been on the verge of embarking on a new project, something always seemed to pop up to keep her occupied with her firstborn. With the world economy rebuilding, book sales were strong in the United States and abroad, which meant the Marshes had plenty to do keeping an eye on
Gone With the Wind
. When Mitchell received Macmillan's annual royalty statement in 1949, she learned that American readers had bought another 17,400 copies of her novel over the previous year, the vast majority the $1.98 cheap edition but some of the regular three-dollar edition as well. This translated to about $1,400 in royalties—a tidy sum from a twelve-year-old title.
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Overseas, 1948 proved a banner year as well with Mitchell pulling in more than forty thousand dollars from the foreign accounts.
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Although they were glad to be earning something after all the years of hard work on the foreign accounts, the influx of income equated to a tremendous amount of work. The Marshes spent hours reviewing correspondence and sales reports in a variety of languages. And problems continued to creep up that needed her attention. In England,
Gone With the Wind
was out of print because of postwar paper shortages and inflation, and she received complaints from British fans who wanted her to send them copies of the American edition. Hating to have the book unavailable for sale when demand remained strong, she agreed to accept a reduced royalty to get the British edition back on the market.
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In Japan, the status of her copyright had improved after the war. In light of the Allied occupation, Japanese publishers wanting to release American books now had to enter into contracts with authors and pay royalties.* Once again, Mitchell demonstrated her willingness to not hold a grudge and entered into a contract with Mikasa Shobo, one of the Japanese firms that had published her work before the war. The edition was an immediate bestseller, its sales aided by the perception that the book offered valuable insights into American history. It performed so well that the publisher struggled to keep up with demand in the face of an acute paper shortage. All seemed well until Mitchell discovered that the first volumes of the new edition did not contain the proper copyright notice. She fired off a letter to the firm canceling the contract. The publisher apologized immediately, blaming the mistake on his poor English skills. He took extraordinary steps to make things right, including adding the credit to all copies still in stock, running notices in newspapers, and printing special posters for bookstores pointing out the error.
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Mitchell allowed the book to remain in print, but it was another reminder that she could never let her guard down. Like any good parent, she needed eyes in the back of her head.

In June, she received a letter from a Parisian named Madame Henri Pajot, who declared she had written a sequel to
Gone With the Wind
titled “Lady de Tara” and wanted Mitchell's permission to publish it. The Frenchwoman asserted she had altruistic motives for her action: she wanted to please readers who did not approve of the way Mitchell ended her story. Pajot suggested she was well within her rights given that Mitchell had not bothered to write a sequel herself after all these years. Should Mitchell decline to grant permission, Pajot threatened, her French publisher was prepared to go ahead with the project and simply change the names of the characters. The name Pajot rang a bell. Mitchell reviewed her correspondence files and was irritated to discover that the Frenchwoman had proposed a sequel to the author in 1941 and had been denied permission then; it would not be granted now. Mitchell reminded the woman of their earlier correspondence, and warned: “I have successfully prevented dishonest people from using my characters in the past, and I will prevent you and your publisher from doing it too.” As for the argument that Mitchell had waived her sequel rights, the author responded, “This is the same as if I had money in my pocket [for several years] and you and your publisher decided that, as I had not spent it, then you two were entitled to spend it for me.”
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Mitchell described the incident to Latham, admitting these types of battles were taking more and more out of her. “I have had to give so much time, energy, thought—and in some cases to take legal action—to such things that it would have been easier to write six sequels than to circumvent the sequels of well meaning but thick-skulled people, all the way from Korea to Kokomo.”
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Also on the author's mind were her affairs in eastern Europe, where the Soviets were rising to power. As country after country fell behind the Iron Curtain, Mitchell found it increasingly difficult to conduct business in that part of the world. Her Yugoslavian publisher, whom Mitchell described as a “beautiful young Serbian lady,” had lost her publishing business, and her Czech publisher's firm had been nationalized. Wanting to support her many associates who were struggling under Soviet rule, Mitchell packed and shipped boxes of food, vitamins, and clothing for them. She was not sure the items ever reached the recipients but was afraid to ask too many questions. To Wallace McClure, she wrote, “Sometimes when I am out in crowds I find I do not have too much conversation about what is going on in Georgia because I have been wrestling with international financial regulations and wondering about people who cannot possibly escape from the encirclement of Russia.”
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But she did not have any regrets over her foreign entanglements. Dealing with the overseas rights during the war years and the period of rebuilding in Europe had given her “a box seat at the world's biggest show.” She did not know anyone in government service or otherwise who had had the privilege of learning about as many foreign countries as she. “I realize now that my book has taken me to many countries and made many friends for me.”
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And there was the recurrent rumor mill, which Mitchell continued to monitor through her clipping service. She was distressed to receive an article from a Massachusetts newspaper that quoted Granville Hicks, a literary critic and an adviser to Macmillan, as telling an audience that the publisher had taken a chance on
Gone With the Wind
after reading only a single chapter. Mitchell wrote to him, asking that he not repeat the mistake in future presentations. While her sensitivity might seem extreme, the former reporter could never accept the carelessness of those who felt compelled to write a story about her, yet could not be bothered to check the facts. “The story of how Mr. Latham secured the manuscript of
Gone With the Wind
has been printed and reprinted until I would think everyone in the United States had heard it until they were sick of hearing it,” she told Hicks. She did not care so much how the story affected her—it wouldn't really—but she worried his comments would have a “troublesome effect” on young writers who romanticized the life of an author. She thought writing “the hardest work in the world” and did not want her name associated with any story that suggested otherwise.
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Hicks apologized for her being bothered but denied having made such a representation. He recalled having said that Latham knew he had a bestseller after having read a single chapter. He chastised Mitchell for believing everything she read in the newspapers and blamed the “garbled account” of his speech on a public relations man at the college where he had spoken.
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Another error-ridden story appeared that summer, but this time Mitchell could not maintain a polite facade. She was horrified to see a reader-submitted anecdote in
Reader's Digest
that, in her mind, questioned her skill as a writer. The filler piece in the July 1949 issue was headlined “Facts to the Contrary” and claimed there was a discrepancy in the timeline of
Gone With the Wind
, with Ashley Wilkes dying at Gettysburg in July 1863, fourteen months before his wife gave birth to their son in September 1864. As readers of the book (and even those who had seen only the movie) knew, Ashley did not die at Gettysburg, or at any point in the story. Therefore, the entire premise of the comment was faulty. But the rest of the piece made it worse, painting Mitchell as knowingly careless with facts and flippant when a mistake was pointed out:

When the publisher called Margaret Mitchell's attention to the timing, the author was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Well, I know the Yankees will never change the date of the Battle of Gettysburg, and I'm certainly not going to change the date of the Battle of Atlanta.” The publisher moved uncomfortably in his chair. “But—how will we explain it to the public, Miss Mitchell?” Miss Mitchell shrugged. “Let's hope they will be so interested in the story they will overlook the discrepancy of time; if not,” she added, “we'll just say that southern women do things more leisurely.”
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Recalling the months of grueling fact-checking, copyediting, and rewriting she and Marsh had endured in 1935 and 1936, Mitchell was devastated and enraged. She had always been grateful to readers who pointed out mistakes in the text, happy to have them corrected in a future printing, but now a national publication made it appear she did not know her history and, worse, did not care.

Her frustration escalated when on June 17, 1949, she received a letter from the magazine's managing editor, Alfred S. Dashiell, admitting error and professing, not very sincerely, to be “greatly embarrassed.” He explained that the reader who submitted the anecdote was a former Atlanta resident, suggesting that gave the tale an air of credibility. When the magazine sent the woman a draft of the piece and a check for fifty dollars, she proudly showed it to a friend, who pointed out the mistake. The submitter contacted
Reader's Digest
that same day and returned the fifty dollars, but it was too late; the magazine had been printed. Dashiell offered the services of his employees to help with any correspondence Mitchell might receive about the mix-up. Just wrap the letters up and send them along, he suggested cheerfully. He closed with “deep apologies” but did not mention running a correction.
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Mitchell fumed at the inadequate response, offended that the magazine thought she could be pacified so easily. As she explained to Latham,

I was more incensed by their thinking that I would let people like them answer my personal mail than I was by the original error. I wonder why they thought I'd let people who told such a big lie about me have the chance to write some more lies and cover up their errors. They appeared to have no comprehension of any damage they had done me, nor did they appear to care. In fact, they have acted like a hit-and-run driver that had damaged an innocent pedestrian, and have been trying to get away from the scene as fast as possible.
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She vowed she would not let the magazine bully her. “I suppose they don't know that I never have been frightened by people being large or rich and have never ducked out of a fight either. . . . [I] never have any hesitancy about spending money or time when someone has damaged me, as they have done.” Her ire was not only on her own behalf; she thought the anecdote reflected badly on Macmillan. “I resented how they made you look like an ass too, and made The Macmillan Company to be the sort of publisher who would put up with such inaccuracy. (My goodness, Miss Prink wouldn't have let me get away with that!)”

Wearily and angrily, the Mitchell-Marsh family picked up its battle gear once more. She wanted a correction run and was determined to get one. In a letter to Dashiell dated June 21, Stephens Mitchell demanded a retraction and that the correction be worded in such a way “that the truth may be aided in catching up with the lie.”
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The author also took her story to the press to set the record straight. In an interview with the
Atlanta Journal
, she alleged the
Reader's Digest
piece had “professionally damaged” her reputation because it portrayed her as “an author with a flippant view toward accuracy rather than a painstaking researcher's attitude.”
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When the
Digest
story was picked up in the
Milwaukee Sentinel
, Mitchell wrote to editor Buck Herzog, demanding he print a retraction as well. Herzog's reply painted her as unnecessarily alarmed. The editor felt no retraction was necessary because he had attributed the story to the
Digest
and used “[sic]” after the mention of Ashley's death. He also hinted that the entire thing had been a grand publicity stunt for one of his favorite books, which, by the way, he would not mind having the author autograph.
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Mitchell's files do not contain a copy of a response to Herzog.