Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (84 page)

It was still the custom for young Southern ladies to ‘come out’ and Margaret made her debut in 1920. She is reported as being lively – a ‘flapper’ even – and unafraid of risk. It was in this spirit that she contracted a disastrous marriage with ‘Red’ K. Upshaw in 1922 (arguably one of the originals of Rhett K. Butler), an ex-football player, a rogue and a bootlegger. He is reported to have raped his wife – not that any such act was criminal at the time. But Mitchell was not prepared to take it and the couple parted, bitterly, after a few months, divorcing in 1924. She went on to make a wiser second marriage with the newspaperman John Marsh in 1925, the best man at her first wedding. This match, unlike the first, worked out. Mitchell retained her birth name for her fiction and used ‘Peggy Mitchell’ for her journalism.

Peggy was a successful local journalist, doing regular columns and interviews for the Atlanta papers. Legend has it that she began writing her ‘Civil War Novel’ while recovering in bed with a broken ankle. Her husband brought her the necessary research materials, and she polished off the work in a few months – then, famously, left it to moulder in a cupboard for six years. There it might have remained for ever were it not that in 1935 Mitchell was assigned to show a Macmillan publishing executive, Harold Latham, around her town. He was scouting for new material and persuaded her to let him see the dilapidated manuscript of
Gone with the Wind
. It was accepted instantly and rushed out, with mammoth publicity, on 30 June 1936. By December, Macmillan was advertising the novel with the slogan, ‘One million Americans
can’t be wrong
. Read GWTW!’ It was a runaway bestseller and won a Pulitzer for its literary excellence, in 1937. The director of Macmillan, a gentleman publisher, awarded all the firm’s employees an 18 per cent bonus.

The novel headed the bestseller list for two years. Mitchell sold the film rights to MGM for $50,000 and
GWTW
was adapted, using the new process of Technicolor, by David O. Selznick, in 1939. Amid huge publicity, the studio recruited the unknown (in the US) British actress, Vivien Leigh, for Scarlett. Clark Gable (very well known in the US) was chosen for Rhett. Selznick kept the main outlines of Mitchell’s plot, although the film softened favourable references to the Ku Klux Klan, with whom, in the novel, Butler proudly rides. The movie was launched in Atlanta in December 1939. It is reckoned in sheer money terms to have been the most successful film of all time and a perennial favourite. Gable’s not giving a damn regularly comes up in movie-great-moment polls.

Margaret Mitchell, now her town’s most famous living citizen, died in 1949 when she was hit by a car, crossing a street, close to her home. The luckless driver was convicted of manslaughter and imprisoned – not so much for the crime as for the local importance of his victim. He was lucky not to be hanged. Peggy was, friends confirmed, chronically careless about crossing streets. Mitchell was never easy with her fame, and
GWTW
is her only published novel during her lifetime. A much inferior work,
Lost Laysen
, written when the author was sixteen, was discovered among her papers and published in 1996. The house on Peachtree Street, where she lived for most of her life and which is now a museum to her memory, is the target of regular arson attempts by those who resent the ‘racism’ of her novel.

Mearnsman.

Lewis Grassic Gibbon – the pen-name of James Leslie Mitchell – is put forward as his country’s great twentieth-century novelist: the Scottish D. H. Lawrence. Gibbon’s reputation substantially rests on
A Scots Quair
(‘quire’ or ‘gathering of sheets’), also called ‘The Mearns Trilogy’ and published in a single volume in 1946. ‘Mearns’ was an ancient name for Kincardineshire, now itself an ancient name after the county reorganisation of 1975. This cycle of novels follows the career of a Scotswoman, Chris Guthrie, from childhood on a croft in the north-eastern coastlands, through the disruption of the First World War and two marriages, to middle age in a soulless
city, ‘Dundon’, which combines ugly features of Aberdeen and Dundee into something uglier than either.

‘Of peasant rearing and peasant stock,’ Gibbon was brought up on a farm near Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire. He left school at sixteen and made a false start as a journalist. It ended with disgrace and attempted suicide when he was discovered fiddling his expense accounts. He then embarked on a ten-year stint in the armed forces, which was largely unprofitable and ruined his digestion for life, but which took him to the Middle East, an experience that profoundly affected the development of his idiosyncratic view of world history. As an RAF clerk, Corporal Mitchell learned methodical writing habits that stood him in good stead when, on discharge in 1929, he became an author. He died of a perforated gastric ulcer – attributable, he always thought, to RAF canteen grub – in 1935 at the age of thirty-four, in the middle of a creative burst that had produced sixteen books (twelve of them novels) in seven years.

Say ‘Scotland’ and few people (and no travel agents) will think of the bleak, windswept, comparatively featureless north-eastern coastal region that separates St Andrews from Aberdeen. The Mearns is not a beauty spot, even to golfers, and has no glamorous historical associations. But for Gibbon, it is elemental Scotland. Dunnottar Castle is a landmark that recurs in the novels and Gibbon often recalls ‘Old Mortality’, the crazed Cameronian in Scott’s novel who haunted the area’s churchyards, devoting his life to the Sisyphean task of keeping legible the mossed-over memorials to the Covenanter martyrs of 1685. Gibbon, in one of his many parts an expert archaeologist, has a similar devotion to old stones. Typically, his narratives open with mistily prehistoric preludes, and his heroes and heroines have mystical attachments to the distinctive red clay and rock of the region, to Stone Age monuments and palaeolithic flints. His extended descriptions of these features of the Mearns landscape constitute his most powerful writing. At the time of his death, Gibbon had not clearly worked out his relationship to Scotland, more particularly to the Scottish tongue. Like the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, he experimented with braid Scots, a literary idiom which – while acknowledging a shared base of Anglo-Saxon – asserts its separateness from English; a dialect which, as the journalist J. L. Mitchell, Gibbon used with the scholarship boy’s swanky virtuosity. For the English reader,
A Scots Quair
often requires access to Jamieson’s
Dictionary of the Scottish Language
.

As a novelist, Gibbon was lumbered with heavy ideological baggage in the form of diffusionism and Clydeside socialism. Diffusionism, a now unfashionable school of anthropology associated with G. Elliot Smith, proposed that civilisation originated in upper Egypt, around three millennia BC. From this
Kulturkreis
the skills of civilised society were diffused by ‘ancient mariners’. (One of Smith’s crazier propositions was
that the aborigines learned their mummification skills from Egyptian merchants.) The crofting practices of north-east Scotland represented an umbilical link with the fertile mud of ancient Egypt. It was here that the traders first landed with their precious cargo. For Gibbon, the ‘independent tenant retainer’ or tenant farmer of the Mearns is the ‘essential Scot’. In this he differs from Scott and Buchan, who took the essential Scot to be the Border reiver. Similarly, Gibbon’s paganism distinguishes him from J. M. Barrie’s cosily Presbyterian Thrums, a town based on the neighbouring Kirriemuir. The diffusionist thesis held that modern civilisation represents a falling away from an original Edenic state.

As it diffuses, culture weakens like ripples in a pool; it is also corroded by urbanisation and disrupted by war. Progress, in the optimistic nineteenth-century sense, is an illusion or, as Gibbon put it in a polemical essay, ‘barbarism is no half-way house of a progressive people towards full and complete civilisation: on the contrary, it marks a degeneration from an older civilisation’. In Gibbon’s diffusionist reading of Scottish prehistory, the agrarian Picts (Gibbon’s ain folk) were infinitely superior to the ‘stupid’ warmongering Celts, possessors of a ‘degenerate, bastardised, culture’ who swept in from the west and north to harass them. For him the Celts are ‘one of the greatest curses of the Scottish scene, quick, avaricious, unintelligent, quarrelsome, cultureless and uncivilisable’.

Superficially this looks like ineradicable lowland prejudice against north-western neighbours – bandits and caterans all. ‘Tink’ (‘Highland bastard’) is the ubiquitous racial slur in the mouths of Gibbon’s rural characters. One looks in vain in his fiction for the romanticised image of the ancient Gael invented by Scott and popularised by Hollywood. Gibbon has an associated distaste for the nostalgic Kailyard sentimentality associated with Ian Maclaren, J. M. Barrie and S.R. Crockett: his Scottishness is sharp-edged, unapologetically bigoted and hard to come to terms with. It is typical that he reserves the highest flights of his lyricism for the smell (‘guff,’ ‘feuch’, ‘whiff’) of shit – the aromatic midden, fragrant farmyard dung and the rich bouquet of freshly manured fields.

The inherent pessimism of diffusionism – its core vision of a fine old civilisation violated by invading tribes of cultureless savages – made sense of the First World War. It also supplied the ideological framework for the trilogy’s progress from croft, through small town, to large industrial city – each step another fall towards darkness. The only remedy held out in the final section,
Grey Granite
(1934), is an angry anglophobic socialism. Gibbon’s work holds up least well where it comes closest to MacDiarmid’s
Hymns to Lenin
. Here, for instance, is Ewan Tavendale, beaten up in his cell by the Duncairn bobbies for leading a strikers’ demonstration:

he lay still with a strange mist boiling, blinding his eyes, not Ewan Tavendale at all any more but lost and be-bloodied in a hundred broken and tortured bodies all over the world, in Scotland, in England, in the torture-dens of the Nazis in Germany, in the torment-pits of the Polish Ukraine, a livid, twisted thing in the prisons where they tortured the Nanking Communists, a Negro boy in an Alabama cell while they thrust the razors into his flesh, castrating with a lingering cruelty and care.

Gibbon’s best work,
Sunset Song
(1932), was concerned with his native region in the period before the First World War and with characters that belonged to a still earlier generation. Much of the power of
Sunset Song
resides in John Guthrie, the heroine’s appalling father. Guthrie batters his son, forcing him eventually to flee to the other side of the world, and rapes his wife, who finally kills herself and her youngest children rather than face the nightly ordeal of the marital bed. The clever daughter Chris, a scholarship girl, is forced to give up education to skivvy for the widowed Guthrie and to labour in his fields. Gibbon wrote nothing more affecting than the description of Guthrie, mortally wounded by falling against a stone, thrashing in his own farmyard, cursing and calling his daughter ‘a white-faced bitch’. Yet at his funeral Chris grieves, reverencing ‘the fight unwearying he’d fought with the land and its masters’. In 1925 Gibbon had married Rebecca Middleton and had one son and one daughter; the family lived in Welwyn Garden City where he fought a different fight.

What, then, are Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s claims to be considered anything other than a talented provincial – the kind of writer D. H. Lawrence might have been had he devoted his lifelong creative energies to promoting the interests of rural Nottinghamshire? In many ways it is easier to make the case against over-valuing Gibbon. A Modernist by period, he attempted no major technical novelty (beyond his decentred narrative and a disinclination to use inverted commas which infuriated some of his stuffier compatriots). He himself declared in 1930 that Scottish literature would have to wait fifty years before it could produce a Virginia Woolf or a James Joyce. When he made the prophecy, he might reasonably have expected to be around to see MacWoolf and MacJoyce. As it is, a huge ‘what if’ hangs over his prematurely ended career. He never had a chance to show how good he really was and whether he had another
Sunset Song
in him.

I think myself I ought to be shot for writing such nonsense.

Few novelists have resisted their publishers’ publicity departments more doughtily than Georgette Heyer. Over a career of some fifty years, sixty volumes and sales in the countless millions, she gave not a single interview. She never hung out with fellow authors – ‘inkies’, as she called them (she herself wore white gloves on social occasions) – and not on account of shyness. She had a visceral distaste for the ‘nauseating’ falsities of book promotion and, as her heroines would have put it, ‘trade’ – even the book trade that made her so enviably rich. She was the daughter of George Heyer, a Wimbledon school-teacher who wrote poetry and did literary translations. The name – whose pronunciation the family had anglicised to ‘hair’, not ‘higher’ – reflects the Russo-Jewish origin of her grandfather, another George Heyer. She began writing stories as a teenager in the company of two friends. Baroness Orczy and Jeffery Farnol were the girls’ favoured authors: Scarlet Pimpernels and Regency vagabonds would stay with her for life.