Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind Read Online Free PDF Page A

fine with him keeping it.
    A week after leaving Atlanta, Latham typed Cole a letter on a train from New Orleans to Austin. Having trouble hitting the keys because the train was moving so fast, he vented that he was killing himself with the travel and the constant stream of engagements. The heat also distressed him: “It is as hot as HELL.” Nevertheless, he was pleased with his trip so far, especially Mitchell’s manuscript. He wanted to know whether Cole agreed that “this woman has something” and asked the associate editor to send her impressions along as soon as she finished reading. Meanwhile, he wanted to play along with Mitchell carefully. Cole still should not let on that she had the manuscript. He instructed her to hold on to his letter for future reference but to make sure its contents remained secret. 51 That same day, Latham also wrote Mitchell again. He assured her that he understood about the unfinished condition of the manuscript and asked her to be patient. Her manuscript had great potential, and he intended to keep at it. 52
    After the manuscript had made its way to New York, Cole took the pile of envelopes home to sort through with her husband’s assistance. Physically, it was a disaster, as Latham had warned. A few of the chapters were typed neatly on clean white paper, but the rest were on yellow pages covered in pencil notations. In many cases, there were lengthy revisions of scenes. For instance, Mitchell apparently had trouble making up her mind about the best way to kill off Pansy’s second husband, Frank Kennedy. In one version, he died of pneumonia after Pansy forced him to go out in a rainstorm to evict a family. Another had him killed by federal troops in a Ku Klux Klan raid. Cole and Taylor organized the chapters and sorted through the duplicates, trying to bring some order to the chaos.
    In a fifteen-page report to Latham, Cole analyzed Mitchell’s work in detail. 53 She presented him an outline of what appeared to be a thirtychapter story, with five chapters missing. Overall, it was in extremely poor condition. The time sequence was hopelessly muddled. Important scenes were missing. Yet, Cole knew right away Macmillan had a winner on its hands. According to her assessment, the atmosphere was exceptionally well done; the plot was almost “sure fire”; the dialogue was “well in character and natural.” As for the characters, she thought Pansy especially good and Rhett “the strongest and most clearly drawn in the book.” Cole’s impressions of Ashley and Melanie were less glowing but still positive. She described him as “shadowy” and her as “almost too good” yet still believable.
    Overall, Cole deemed the characters memorable. Vivid sections of the story remained in her mind long after she finished reading. She liked the ending, praising it as “severely logical in its outline as a Greek tragedy.” She quibbled only slightly with Mitchell’s decision to present Pansy returning to Tara, her family plantation, with a sense of hope for what tomorrow would bring. Cole thought this “implies an insouciance, a callousness, and a hope, which are all out of keeping. Pansy has lost everything she has, and even her limited intelligence must tell her that.” Cole wanted the book to end on that note so there would be no doubt Pansy was doomed. Beyond that, the editor had just two concerns: Would Mitchell be able to bring the story together into an acceptable whole, and was there a market for a novel about the Civil War and Reconstruction? Those concerns aside, the manuscript was too good to pass up.
    Latham wrapped up his scouting trip at the end of May and returned to Macmillan’s Fifth Avenue headquarters. Busy working on the firm’s fall releases, he also wanted to get things moving on Mitchell’s manuscript. He decided to send it to Charles W. Everett, an English professor at Columbia University