BOOK OF THE DAY:
Frankly, My Dear: Gone with the Wind RevisitedBy Molly Haskell Yale University Press 228pp, £16.99 - 'FOR GOD'S sake, go to school and learn something that will stay with you. The strength of women's hands isn't worth anything, but what they've got in their heads will carry them as far as they need to go." Thus Margaret Mitchell's formidable mother advised her academically-reluctant daughter.
And she did it with a dramatic grasp worthy of film producer David Selznick: on the road to Jonesboro, against a backdrop of neglected semi-derelict mansions haunted by impoverished widows and spinsters – a grim reminder of the glory that once was Atlanta.
It was a moment Mitchell never forgot, though she was to spend only a year at Smith College before her mother died and home she dutifully came to take care of a mean-spirited father.
Molly Haskell, herself a Virginian, is eminently qualified to examine the conflict inherent in the ladylike southern persona into which Mitchell retreated after the publication of Gone with the Wind (GWTW), and the woman-as-novelist who, in bringing Scarlett (originally Pansy) O’Hara to life, subverts the ethics and threatens the masculinity of the “dear white honourable paternalistic southern gentleman”. Mitchell understood the paradox deeply-rooted in the female psyche of the time, though she’d be damned if she’d admit it. Later she said she had meant Melanie to be the heroine, not Scarlett at all.
Melanie is indeed brave and good, but we love her because she understands Scarlett and sees through her bad behaviour to the emotional adolescent beneath.
And with what synchronicity the mercurial Vivien Leigh appeared and at what a powerful moment in her own life. As febrile a female talent as ever there was, and quite as driven as her producer Selznick, the black-and-white stills from her screen test for the part of Scarlett elicited from Mitchell the comment: “She looks like a different person every time she’s shown in a different mood.”
Haskell’s central thesis – that the oddly wrought triumvirate of Selznick, Mitchell and Leigh together conspired to create the perfect artistic storm – is explored with incisiveness and verve.
“Something fierce,” she writes, “something beyond normal ambition united the three who were so crucial to the success of GWTW.” On an energy level, their individual psyches were at perfect pitch for the task in hand perhaps?
But credit where credit is due: she also writes informatively on the huge collaborative effort involved in the making of this cinematic triumph. Any number of writers worked on the script, including F Scott Fitzgerald, who said of the novel: “I felt no contempt for it, only pity for those who consider it the supreme achievement of the human mind.”
After the book’s publication to enormous acclaim, the smart money said it was a film no independent studio could possibly hope to make, but Selznick begged to differ. And it was his passion that informed and sometimes inflamed the mammoth project.
His wife said it was like being under siege: “We were in a war and we were in it together.” While this may be overegging the pudding, on Haskell’s evidence, it would seem that, without the overriding, overbearing Selznick at the helm, GWTW would never have achieved that astonishing synthesis of an epic told through a cast of recognisably human characters. It was his “almost fetishistic” attention to detail that made the difference, she argues. At one point, in a frantic letter to Mitchell, he asked: “How should we tie Mammy’s bandana?”
She replied: “I don’t know, and I’m not going out on a limb over a headrag.”
Jeananne Crowley is an actor and writer