Chapter 10
As she completed her chapters, she placed them in individual manila envelopes. Gradually, piles of envelopes began to clutter up the living room where she worked. They came in handy to prop up an uneven leg on a sofa and as scratch pads for grocery lists and phone messages. When the piles eventually took over their small living room, she moved some of them to the bedroom and others into a hall closet.
Mitchell descended from a family of lawyers who, she claimed, were famous for writing wills so clear and easy to read that a child could understand them. With that model as her guide, she put great effort into developing her story with a mode of writing devoid of literary flair. "I sweat blood to make my style simple and stripped bare," she said. "I'm sure if I had evidenced any style in early childhood, it would have been smacked out of me with a hair brush!" She went to great pains to eliminate verbiage that did not further the plot or develop a character. She relentlessly omitted "pretty words" that did not mean anything, aiming to write so clearly and crisply "that every word could be read from a galloping horse." The process proved a struggle for the loquacious Mitchell, whose natural tendency was toward detailed and colorful language. A chronic rewriter, she struggled over almost every word and sentence. "I don't have that facility for just dashing along," she said. She labored day and night, whittling pages-long passages to a few lines. Even after finishing a chapter, Mitchell rarely let it be. She thought it important to let her drafts sit and reconsider them later with a fresh eye. "Put your work up for two months and then when you take it out again," she advised other writers, "the errors will fairly leap out at you till you wonder why you ever thought it was good."
From the stories she had heard all her life, Mitchell knew the historical background of the region and the period she wrote about by heart. And so she did not bother with organized research. Yet, throughout the years of writing, Mitchell read about the Civil War era in old newspapers, diaries, government records, and firsthand accounts of life in antebellum Georgia. She also had access to letters between her grandparents written during the war and benefited from articles her father and brother wrote for the Atlanta Historical Bulletin. She would call out for special attention a piece Stephens Mitchell published in 1929 about wartime industries in Atlanta in the 1860s. She rarely made notes on any of what she read, using these historical details more for inspiration rather than literal adaptation. She once said the only notes she took were when an idea came to her in the middle of the night and she did not want to get out of bed to wok on the manuscript.
She was not one for outlines either; much of Mitchell's work went on inside her head. One section in particular frustrated her — a scene in which Pansy flees Atlanta and returns home through the war-torn countryside, only to find her mother dead and the plantation in ruins. "I prowled around it mentally for a long time, looking at it from all angles and not getting anywhere," she said. "I could never write a line of it and never made a try at it, on paper. I didn't seem able to capture the smell of the cedars; the smell of the swamp; the barnyard odors, and pack them into those chapters." But like so many writers, for whom the most unusual and unrelated stimuli — a smell, a remark, or a glimpse of scenery — can trigger a flood of thoughts and words, Mitchell had an epiphany. The words came to her at the Ritz Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where she had accompanied Marsh on a business trip:
I was not even thinking about the story when all this came to me very simply and very clearly. It was cold, wet winter...and yet I could see clearly how dusty and stifling a red clay road in Georgia looks and feels in September, how the leaves on the trees are dry and there isn't any wind to move them and how utterly still the deep country woods are. And there is the queerest smell in the swampy bottom lands at twilight. And I suddenly saw how very haunted such a section would look the day after a big battle, after two armies had moved on.
Now that she had the "atmosphere" she had been trying to capture for so long, the couple cut short their trip so Mitchell could return home and continue writing.
She worked on her manuscript for the next several years at an inconstant pace. She suffered several spells of poor health, including bouts of eyestrain, pleurisy, and "the jitters." Also causing her to pause was "an attack of the humbles" brought on by reading books about the Civil War such as Stephen Vincent Benet's John Brown's Body and Mary Johnston's Cease Firing. Benet, Mitchell said, had caught what she was trying to capture "so clearly, so vividly and so simply" and with such "a heart-breaking beauty" that she could not write for months. Likewise, Johnston had "done what I'd wanted to do and done it so much better that there seemed little use of me trying." Toward the end of the decade, Mitchell wrote a friend that her work on the book progressed at a snail's pace. She reviewed what she had written so far. Much of it seemed silly, and her expectations for ever having the story published were not high.
The novel was substantially complete in 1929. In her own words, Mitchell hit it "a few more licks in 1930 and 1931," then put it out of her mind, not having any particular impetus to add the finishing touches. After that, she "worked on the book only now and then," Marsh later recalled. "She had reached the point where most of the creative job was done and there was nothing more to do except the drudgery of turning a rough manuscript into a finished one."
Excerpted from Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind by Ellen F. Brown and John Wiley Jr. Copyright 2011 by Ellen F. Brown and John Wiley Jr. Reprinted by permission of Taylor Trade Publishing, a division of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.
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