Backdrop for Atlanta

GONE WITH THE WIND -- Margaret Mitchell--Macmillan ($3).

Unlike other cities of the Old South, Atlanta, Ga. was a modern industrial community from the start. Staked out just one hundred years ago as a railroad terminal, it soon grew until four important lines crossed there. Its commercial activity had few attractions to Southerners who were trained to the slower pace of plantations, while its pushing, aggressive, competitive life made it distasteful to the leisured aristocrats of Savannah or Charleston. But as an island of industrialism in the drowsy sea of Southern society, Atlanta attracted dissatisfied spirits who were fed up with the old order and wanted change even before the Civil War, became a vast manufacturing centre on which the whole South depended when the War finally broke. And when Sherman captured it the Confederacy was lost.

Last week readers had an opportunity to learn about Atlanta's history in an imposing first novel chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club for July. The work of a young Atlanta newspaperwoman, Gone With the Wind is remarkable in other ways than its extreme length. In its 1,037 pages Margaret Mitchell has pictured pre-Civil War plantation life, the disintegration of Southern society during the War, the siege of Atlanta, the chaos of Reconstruction, the emergence of industrialism with its high-pressure rivalries, employment problems, money standards, as the plantation system gave way; the persistence of older traditions within the new order that was growing up. Born in Atlanta, Author Mitchell has lived there all her "thirty-odd" years, been a feature writer on the Atlanta Journal, is the wife of the advertising manager of Georgia Power Co. She worked on Gone With the Wind for seven years. When a publisher's representative cried to see the manuscript she told him that she was merely "playing around with the idea of doing a novel some time or other" and then showed him a first draft of Gone With the Wind that stood almost shoulder-high.

An old fashioned, romantic narrative with no Joycean or Proustian nonsense about it, the novel is written in a methodical style which fastidious readers may find wearying. But so carefully does Author Mitchell build up her central character of Scarlett O'Hara, and her picture of the times in which that wild woman struggled, that artistic lapses seem scarcely more consequential than Scarlett's many falls from grace. The daughter of a successful Irish immigrant and a kindly, aristocratic mother, Scarlett was a handsome, high-spirited, high-bosomed, green-eyed little devil. Living the artificial life of a plantation beauty, she was accomplished at taking other girls' beaux away from them, breaking up engagements, winning flattery from men by the time she was 15. She fell in love with shadowy Ashley Wilkes, a cultured, sensitive spirit among the robust, hard-riding plantation aristocrats, primarily because she could not get him to pay much attention to her. He was going to marry her friend Melanie, another thoughtful and isolated soul. Scarlett got Ashley alone at an all-day barbecue on a neighboring plantation, asked him to marry her, counting on her looks and his chivalry to make him do it. He refused. Then Scarlett found that her shameless offer and his humiliating refusal had been overheard by a wicked man who despised Southern chivalry. Until this point, after more than a hundred of its many pages, Gone With the Wind is pretty hard going. But in Rhett Butler, Author Mitchell creates a character to match Scarlett, gives her a real enemy to fight. Rhett was as eager for change as Scarlett. He had got a bad reputation for his common-sense bluntness about Southern conventions. He said the Yanks would win the War because they had all the factories and because the immigrants were pouring into the North. He was self-seeking and rude on principle in his recoil from the affected gallantry he saw all around him. When the War broke he became a blockade runner and made money with his unpatriotic speculations. But Scarlett married Melanie's brother for spite, was a widow two months later, moved to Atlanta to be with Melanie, who had married the man they both loved.

She nursed her passion for Ashley through the hard War years, was determined to get him in the end. But Ashley's love for Melanie grew stronger, and both became quiet, strong, kindly, while Scarlett grew more venomous in her disappointment. At the fall of Atlanta, Scarlett, to keep her word to Ashley, took Melanie and Melanie's newborn baby through the retreat to the looted plantation. She found the countryside in ruins, her mother dead, her father mad. She almost starved, had to learn to do all the work that Negroes had formerly done for her. She killed a Yankee, worked like a slave keeping the family alive. After the War, Ashley came back, had to refuse Scarlett again despite his growing love and admiration for her. Scarlett dashed off to Atlanta to sell herself to rich Rhett Butler for money enough to save the plantation from the carpetbaggers. He turned her down. She married a soft-headed Southern gentleman, although he was engaged to her sister, because she wanted his money. Soon she was running a store, making more money with a sawmill run with convict labor, taking up with the despised Yankees, making enemies among her own people.

Her husband got mixed up with the Klan and was killed. Rhett Butler saved the other members, including the courtly Ashley, from hanging. Thereupon Scarlett married Rhett to share his fortune and to learn the secrets of his ruthlessness and success. But Rhett had made the full circle, come to despise money-grubbing even more than he had hated the exaggerated chivalry of the Old South. He put all his hopes in their daughter, was heartbroken at her death, developed a queer, tormented love and hatred for Scarlett. When Scarlett could finally get Ashley she found she did not want him, that her contradictory passion for Rhett meant more to her. But whether she could ever win him again, readers must go through more than Gone With the Wind to find out.

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