Gone with the Wind (2 page)

Both Scarlett and Rhett are perfect representatives of the type of Southerner who prospered amidst the ruins of a conquered nation. They both collaborated with the occupying army, both prospered by embracing pragmatism and eschewing honor. Rhett and Scarlett are the two characters in the book who let you know what the South will become. Ashley Wilkes and Melanie Hamilton let you know what the South was and will never be again. The practicality of both Rhett and Scarlett make them the spiritual parents of Atlanta. Born of fire, Atlanta was the first Southern city to fall in love with the party of hustle and progress. The burning of Atlanta increased the city's lack of roots and made it even more like Dayton than Charleston. Rhett and Scarlett were masterful at cutting deals and playing the percentages and not looking back, and they bequeathed these gifts to the reborn city itself.

*     *     *

I owe a personal debt to this novel that I find almost beyond reckoning. I became a novelist because of
Gone With the Wind,
or more precisely, my mother raised me up to be a “Southern” novelist, with a strong emphasis on the word “Southern,” because
Gone With the Wind
set my mother's imagination ablaze when she was a young girl growing up in Atlanta, and it was the one fire of her bruised, fragmented youth that never went out. I still wonder how my relationship with the language might be different had she spoon-fed me Faulkner or Proust or Joyce, but my mother was a country girl new to the city, one generation removed from the harsh reality of subsistence farming, and her passion for reading received its shaping thrust when
Gone With the Wind
moved its heavy artillery into Atlanta to fight its rearguard action against the judgment of history itself.

When my mother described the reaction of the city to the publication of this book, it was the first time I knew that literature had the power to change the world. It certainly changed my mother and the life she was meant to lead forever. She read the novel aloud to me when I was five years old, and it is from this introductory reading that I absorbed my first lessons in the authority of fiction. There is not a sentence in this book unfamiliar to me since my mother made a fetish of rereading it each year, and the lines of
Gone With the Wind
remain illustrated in gold leaf in whatever disfigured
Book of Kells
I carry around with me from my childhood. I can close my eyes today and still hear my mother's recitation of it in the same reverential voice she used when she read to me from the Story of Genesis. When she drove me to Sacred Heart School, she could point out areas where the two armies of the Americas
clashed as we moved South along Peachtree Street. She would take me to the spot outside the Loew's Grand theater and show me where she was standing in the crowd on the night that the movie premiered in Atlanta and she saw Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh and Margaret Mitchell enter the theater to great applause. Though she could not afford a ticket, she thought she owed the book the courtesy of standing among the crowd that night. Together, we visited the grave of Margaret Mitchell at Oakland Cemetery and my mother would say a decade of the rosary over her tombstone, then remark proudly that the novelist had been a Roman Catholic of Irish descent. On weekends, she would drive me to Stone Mountain to view the half-finished effigies of Southern Generals on horseback carved into the center of that massive granite outcropping, then off to Kennesaw Mountain and Peachtree Creek where she taught me the battle of Atlanta according to the gospel of Margaret Mitchell. My mother, during these visitations, taught me to hate William Tecumseh Sherman with my whole body and soul, and I did so with all the strength I could bring to the task of malice. He was the Northern General, presented as the embodiment of evil, who had burned the pretty city where I was born. My mother would drive me near the spot where Margaret Mitchell was struck down by a taxicab in 1949 and look toward the skyline at Five Points saying, “Could you imagine how beautiful Atlanta would be if Sherman had never been born?”

But the story of this novel and my mother goes deeper than mere literary rapport. I think that my mother, Frances Dorothy Peck, modeled her whole life on that of Scarlett O'Hara. I think that fiction itself
became such a comfortable country for me because my mother treated the book as though it were a manual of etiquette whose
dramatis personae
she presented as blood relations and kissing cousins rather than as creations of one artist's imagination. She could set our whole world against this fictional backdrop with alarming ease. My mother, the willful, emotional beauty with just the right touch of treachery and flirtation, was Miss Scarlett herself. My father, the Marine Corps fighter pilot, flying off the deck of his aircraft carrier, dropping napalm on the enemy North Koreans an entire world away, played the role of the flashy, contemptuous Rhett Butler. My Aunt Helen was the spitting image of Melanie Wilkes, my mother would inform me as she prepared our evening meal, and my Aunt Evelyn acted just like Sue Ellen. My Uncle James could play the walk-in part for Charles Hamilton, and my Uncle Russ could be the stand-in for Frank Kennedy. My mother could align our small universe precisely with that of
Gone With the Wind
and she could do it effortlessly while stirring the creamed corn. Once she had read the novel, it lived inside her the rest of her life, like a bright lamp she could always trust in the darkness.

Even my young and tenuous manhood was informed by lessons of instruction from her interpretation of the novel and she would fight about it with my father. “No matter what girls say,” my mother would tell me, and this was a recurrent theme broached upon often, “they'd much rather marry a man like Ashley Wilkes than Rhett Butler.”

“I hate Ashley Wilkes,” my father would say. Literary criticism was not an art form conducted at a high level in my family, and I still do not believe my father ever
read my mother's sacred text. “That guy's a pansy if I've ever seen one. Of course, Rhett Butler's a pansy compared to me.”

My mother would sniff and say, “Your father's from Chicago. He doesn't even know what we're talking about.”

Gone With the Wind
presented my mother and people like her with a new sense of themselves. She hailed the book as the greatest book ever written or that ever would be written, a nonpareil that restored the South's sense of honor to itself after the unimaginable hours of war and occupation. I have come across legions of critics that deplored my mother's taste in fiction, but this was my mother and I was heir to that taste, for better or worse. My mother's hurt childhood had damaged something irreparable in her sense of self and I think she won it back by her obsessive identification with Scarlett O'Hara. My mother's family suffered grievously during the Depression, but Scarlett taught that one could be hungry and despairing, but not broken and not without resources, spiritual in nature, that precluded one from surrendering without a fight. When Scarlett swears to God after rooting around for that radish in the undone garden of Tara that she will never go hungry again, she was giving voice to every American who had suffered want and fear during the Hoover years. It was this same Scarlett who gave Southern women like my mother new insights into the secrecies and potentials of womanhood itself, not always apparent in that region of the country where the progress of women moves most slowly.
Gone With the Wind
tells the whole story of a lost society through the eyes of a single woman and that woman proves match enough for a world at war, an
army of occupation, and every man who enters those sugared realms of her attraction. Rarely has a heroine so immoral or unscrupulous as Scarlett O'Hara held the deed to center stage during the course of such a long novel.

Whenever the movie version was released again by MGM, my mother would march all her children to the local theater with a sense of religious anticipation. I remember that feeling of participating in some rite of sacred mystery when the movie began and my mother let herself be taken once again by this singular, canonical moment in Southern mythmaking. She would hum along when the theme from Tara began playing and she would weep at all the right places. I would observe my mother watching her heroine, Scarlett O'Hara, my mother mouthing the words as Scarlett spoke them to Ashley, to Rhett, to Melanie, to the Yankee interloper who desecrated the sanctuary of Tara, and I would be thinking what I think now—that my mother was as pretty as Scarlett O'Hara, that she had modeled herself completely on this fictional creation and had done so as an act of sheer will and homage. I would wonder if anyone else in the theater could see what was perfectly obvious to me—that this movie belonged to my mother; that it was the site of her own invention of herself, the place where she came to revive her own deepest dream of her lost girlhood. The movie version of
Gone With the Wind,
like the book, was a house of worship my mother retired to so she could experience again the spiritual refreshment of art.

Yet it is as a work of art that
Gone With the Wind
has been most suspect. From the beginning, the book has endured the incoming fire of some of the nation's best
critics. It is a book of Dickensian power, written after the dawn of the age of
Ulysses.
Its vigorous defense of the Confederacy was published three years before the German panzer divisions rolled across the borders of Poland. In the structure of Margaret Mitchell's perfect society, slavery was an essential part of the unity and harmony of Southern life before Fort Sumter. No black man or woman can read this book and be sorry that this particular wind has gone. The Ku Klux Klan plays the same romanticized role it had in
Birth of a Nation
and appears to be a benign combination of the Elks Club and a men's equestrian society. Liberal critics took the novel apart from the beginning, then watched as it proceeded to become the best-selling book in American history. Its flaws may have doomed a lesser book, but this one rode out into literary history with Rhett and Scarlett in complete command of the carriage.

*     *     *

Literature often has a soft spot for the lost cause. Defeat lends an air of tragedy and nostalgia that the victors find unnecessary. But history will forgive almost anything, except being out-written. None can explain the devotion that
Gone With the Wind
has inspired from one generation to another, but one cannot let this ardor go unremarked upon either. Because its readers have held it in such high esteem, it has cheapened the book's reputation as a work of art. Democracy works because of the will of the people, but it has the opposite effect when scholars begin to call out those books that make up the canon of our nation's literature.
Gone With the Wind
has outlived a legion of critics and will bury another whole set of them after this century closes.

Gone With the Wind
works because it possesses the inexpressible magic where the art of pure storytelling rises above its ancient use and succeeds in explaining to a whole nation how it came to be this way. There has never been a reader or a writer who could figure out why this happens only to very few books. It involves all the eerie mysteries of enchantment itself, the strange untouchable wizardry that occurs when a story, in all its fragile elegance, speaks to the times in a clear, original voice and answers some strange hungers and demands of the Zeitgeist. I know of no other thousand-page book that reads so swiftly and grants such pleasure. The characters are wonderful, and the story moves with swiftness and bright, inexorable power. The novel allows you to lose yourself in the glorious pleasures of reading itself, when all five senses ignite in the sheer happiness of narrative. The Civil War and its aftermath may not have felt like this at all, but it sure seems that way when one gets carried away in the irresistible tumult and surge of
Gone With the Wind.
This book caught the imagination of Americans and the world as few books ever have or ever will. It demonstrates again and again that there is no passion more rewarding than reading itself, that it remains the best way to dream and to feel the sheer carnal joy of being fully and openly alive.

Gone With the Wind
is a book with many flaws, but it cannot, even now, be easily put down. The book still glows and quivers with life. American letters will always be tiptoeing nervously around that room where Scarlett O'Hara dresses for the party at Twelve Oaks as the War Between the States begins to inch its way toward Tara.

—P
AT
C
ONROY

S
CARLETT
O'H
ARA WAS NOT BEAUTIFUL
, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin—that skin so prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bonnets, veils and mittens against hot Georgia suns.

Seated with Stuart and Brent Tarleton in the cool shade of the porch of Tara, her father's plantation, that bright April afternoon of 1861, she made a pretty picture. Her new green flowered-muslin dress spread its twelve yards of billowing material over her hoops and exactly matched the flat-heeled green morocco slippers her father had recently brought her from Atlanta. The dress set off to perfection the seventeen-inch waist, the smallest in three counties, and the tightly fitting basque showed breasts well matured for her sixteen years. But for all the modesty of her spreading skirts, the demureness of hair netted smoothly into a chignon and the quietness of small white hands folded in her lap, her true self was poorly concealed. The green eyes in the carefully sweet face were turbulent, willful, lusty with life, distinctly
at variance with her decorous demeanor. Her manners had been imposed upon her by her mother's gentle admonitions and the sterner discipline of her mammy; her eyes were her own.