NAUSEATING DISCLAIMER:

Once again, I have read far ahead of my posts to you. I’ve written them; I just haven’t posted them! And so, with this increasingly nauseating disclaimer, I will earnestly pledge to catch up. And I’ll even believe it when I say it! So there!

Now, as for tomorrow…..

Seriously now. Even though the following book was read last year, it was a big, homping part of last year. In fact, I tend to think of it as the thing that really stalled my reading/blog progress completely. The pacing of my decade of reading had to pick up after this bohemoth, rather than coasting along as I was before it.

But I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s one of the biggest book adventures I have taken, in ways I will attempt to explain here.

In point of fact, I think the huge final scene in the film was one final attempt to convey the incredibly broad stroke that Mitchell attempts and pulls off with this opus. But I’ll stop now! And start again!

• GONE WITH THE WIND
• by Margaret Mitchell
• [rated by PBS readers as #6! Whew!]
• 959 Pages – Lord, help me!

2/27/20

Well, here is an interesting turn of events! I previously mentioned that this book just popped into my mind when it was time to pick the next one. It popped so much that I didn’t pick it in my usual procedure, but I “picked” it, you know? Seemed like it needed to be read.

To go back, I remember more than a few of my girl friends citing this as their favorite movie ever! Not me. I have never been that interested in Gone With the Wind. I never even considered reading the book. Saw the movie once as a younger person, but the theatre was overly full and I was forced to sit in the front row for all those hours. So I guess you could say that I associated it from then on as a pain in the neck.

Then the next time I met up with it…well, I need to set the scene.

Upon graduating college, my father had given both my older sister and now me the gift of a trip anywhere in the world. The only catch was that it would be with Dad, so that left out all the party places! I chose a photo safari in Africa.

I guess I was thinking Kenya and when I was mailed the itinerary and it said South Africa? Shock didn’t cover it. I hadn’t bargained on this and I felt very uncomfortable from the start. Why couldn’t he have picked another country, for pity sakes?

But when Dad booked a trip, you went. So there he, his then wife and I were. As a treat, he had booked us on the Blue Train from Johannesburg to Capetown, knowing how much I loved trains.

We arrived in the Johannesburg train station and it was a bustlng beehive of activity. Someone whom I didn’t even see, probably a porter of some kind, gestured that the three of us should go into a little quiet room and sit there to wait for our train.

As we sat in there, I wondered why there were only the three of us in this pristine room, while people were packed in and bumping into each other outside. Then I saw it. I looked over at one of the benches. It had a stamp that read Net Blankes, which meant no blacks.

I thought I was going to throw up. I stood up and bolted out of the room and went down to sit by the trains. My dad followed me. I was crying. I honestly never felt that I would ever participate in something so racist. I’m sure that, in unfeeling ways, I have been part of the problem many times, but this was a completely blatant incident.

My dad was great and just sat there with me till our train came. As I recall, Dad’s trifling wife stayed in that room and read her Jacqueline Susann, enjoying the air conditioning. Later, we were in a hopelessly elegant hotel in Capetown for the night. I turned on the TV. There was the very beginning of Gone With The Wind.

As it starts, in very flowery writing (the kind they always used in films of that period), it explained that in 1862, America freed its slaves with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

I couldn’t help reading that and comparing. Apartheid would be exploding there within the year. And all I could think was “1862 we signed it – and we are still not even close to really freeing the classes, races and sexes. How long will it take them?

Looking back, they moved far more quickly than we did. How could they not, when our country is not a country interested in self-reflection. So change is a rocky terrain for us. One that, as a nation, we are loathe to traverse.

Moving from that experience of Gone With The Wind until now, I pick up the book and read the introduction.

Far from the last hideous and endless introduction to Alice, this one is only a few pages and it is by Pat Conroy. He is the perfect author to do it too – well respected, great writer and very Southern.

In the intro he explains what Scarlett O’Hara meant to his mother. How Scarlett was a real person to her and her mother would read the book to him as well as asking herself what Scarlett would do. He waxes rhapsodic about the meaning of the book to Southerners. He says

that, despite the slavery inclusion into this idealized world, this book is too big and too important to be shut down from just that angle alone.

It is really the perfect introduction and it doesn’t even feel optional. It feels like you couldn’t have the book without it. One can feel the problem and what a hard sell this book is now.

I am about 100 pages in and still navigating the waters. From the start, it is a wonderful read. Can’t deny that. Ashley’s getting married and all of that – legendary.

AND! ICK! Every page has darkies and pickaninnies and shit that you just don’t want to be facing!

I do think that the ironic saving grace of this huge epic is that Scarlett is not a nice person or particularly sympathetic. This is a help, really. We are watching her, I suspect as the book goes on, getting her eyes opened over and over again. So that part factors in the balance.

I’m glad to be reading it. Doesn’t pass the restaurant test because it weighs too much to bring anywhere – huge! And though it might take me six months till Tara gets torched, I’m in. But the slavery thing is tough going.

Already full of surprises. But what hasn’t been so far? I do love that!

3/18/20

200 pages into a 1000 page book! Oy.

I want to comment on this book, but it’s strangely hard.

We are presently in isolation due to the pandemic, so up front, this seems like it would be a perfect time to read and make real progress.

Yet, even then, Gone With the Wind is a slow read. I’m not a speed reader by any stretch but even I don’t remember the last time I took a half an hour to read 20 pages!

That said, there is a whole lot in those 20 pages. You are not being gypped, you are being dipped. Dipped into this world and these characters. They are larger than life. And once you can trudge through the slavery part (which never becomes easier), it is a real slice of life brought up around you and baby, you are right there, in the middle of it.

You know, remembering the movie and in reading the book, you realize that Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable were perfectly cast and they both did magnificent jobs. It is

impossible for me to visualize Scarlett and Rhett played by anyone other than those two actors. I generally try not to have movie actors insert themselves into the characters in my head when I’m reading, but this one is unavoidable.

What I’m taking too long to say is that these two mythical characters are all there from the start in the book. Amazingly there. And the themes of pride lost and wanting to feel attractive and the woman who is so wonderful that it makes the other woman sick! I mean, c’mon! That’s entertainment.

My mind seems always “en route” these days. But when I finish 20 pages of Gone With The Wind, I remember it.

That says something. Sometimes it seems pulpy but let’s face it, huge interactional themes are pulpy!

3/28/20

320 PAGES IN – ROUGHLY A THIRD…

As I sit down to write a description of what it feels like to be reading Gone With the Friggin’ Wind, I am at a loss.

Limitations first. It is a world class slog. No question about it. Almost a thousand pages, slow reading for a fast reader and I’m pretty slow!

Because of the length of this, I cannot lie. I’m branching out and reading someone’s memoir and a mystery alongside it. That is just the right amount for me. The three differently paced stories make “Gone” fit in its proper place.

But here’s the thing. The reason Gone fits with other books is because it is so friggin’ good. I have used friggin’ once in this entry and now it has clearly become a habit.

I think that Gone might be the most evocative book I’ve ever read. Its vibrancy overtakes you. The character of Scarlett O’Hara isn’t on a page. She is standing right next to you. You see her! You feel her!

The first 100 pages make you sick – with the happy darkies and the good old days. But then the war starts.

And with that, the lead characters have all been introduced and all of them leap off the page. I don’t really know how Mitchell does it because I never catch her doing it, but her characters sparkle with clarity.

And now, the war is raging and the South is losing and the grim realities of loss – both political and personal, the needs, the hunger, the death, the uncertainty… They have become the central reality as the sick and dying descend on Atlanta.

Once Mitchell has painted her huge, supremely iconic characters, she backs up further and further and ends up painting an entire city in wartime. And surprise! She is equally deft at the micro and the macro! She is amazingly strong at how evenly and vividly she can zoom in or out and the result is an amazingly evocative read.

Having only seen the movie once and back in the Stone Age at that, I thought the end of the movie was Atlanta

going down. It feels like we are almost there now, but then what is to be done with the other 600 pages? Guess I’ll know soon enough.

One thing is for sure. I am a stone cold fan of Margaret Mitchell. This book kicks some major literary ass!

Last thing I want to add. As I write this, we are entering our second week of shelter in place in Sonoma. I feel very adjusted to it at this point, as I can’t help feeling we are here for a while.

Gone With the Wind comes off to great impact in this time and place. The book has so much to do with being trapped in a role and how overnight, everything in your world can change. Tres appropriate, yeah?

4/1/20 – 375 PAGES IN…

I mentioned already that so much of Margaret Mitchell’s grandeur is almost invisible. But now and again, as Scarlett and troupe are leaving Atlanta through fire, a paragraph will quietly rise up and knock me out.

For example, here, as they try to find an escape route, with fires burning all around them:

“As they neared Marietta Street, the trees thinned out and the tall flames roaring up above the buildings threw the street and houses into a glare of light brighter than day, casting monstrous shadows that twisted as wildly as torn sails flapping in a gale on a sinking ship.”

Or a little further down the road, they pass yet another small retreating regiment:

“The detachment came down Marietta Street, between the burning buildings, walking at route step, tiredly, rifles held any way, heads down, too weary to hurry, too weary to care if timbers were crashing to right and left and smoke billowing about them. They were all ragged, so ragged that between officers and men there were no distinguishing insignia except here and there a torn hat brim pinned up with a wreathed “C.S.A.” Many were barefooted and here and there a dirty bandage wrapped a head or arm. They went past, looking neither to left nor right, so silent that had it not been for the steady tramp of feet they might all have been ghosts.”

You feel me? Mighty damned good writing.

4/15/20 – 530 PAGES IN… OVER HALF!!

Wow. I’m not going to lie. I wonder whether the moment will exist on earth that I can exclaim I’M ALIVE and also exclaim I’M FINISHED WITH GONE WITH THE WIND!

But not yet. Not remotely a bad read, just a long one.

A little nugget of a thought has been inching up into my brain as I keep going with this. I am starting to remember how, as little kids, before the Internet, we always read really long books! I had forgotten that forever but it was true. I remember us reading James Michener, Leon Uris – we sought out these huge opuses to read! While this book would have been perfect for that time, I’m meeting it now. So the length is a bit more problematic.

But unlike others I have read from this list, if I was just reading this for my own enjoyment (hard to believe but…), I wouldn’t be abandoning it. You couldn’t pay me to abandon it. It is a great, great story, told really well. It helps me that I thought I knew what happened in this book and I don’t.

I know she gets with Rhett somewhere in there and she fights for Tara till the end. But that previous sentence does not 400 pages make, so on I go.

Last point, we are still sheltered in place. I thought I’d pour into and finish Gone With the Wind if we were here long enough.

But we have been here long enough. And I have made great progress on a lot of home chores in that time. But Gone With the Wind remains a 10-20 page stint a day for me. I want to read more but Gone With the Wind doesn’t want to be read faster for me. I may have to give up most of one year to finish this thing. I hope not. However long it takes, it’s time well spent.

5/4/20 – somewhere over 700 pages…

Have I mentioned that each page of this, I was figuring recently, is about three pages worth of a regular paperback? Big. Ass. Book.

I have never experienced a closer relationship between a writer and her character than Margaret Mitchell and Scarlett. Her writing of this woman is always surefooted. It is that surefootedness that allows the reader to keep looking at this character from every side. You are disgusted with her at times, particularly when it is all about her. And then you must admire her courage when she goes to the hilt, while others cower and urge her to cower as well.

Gone is really a book about war and its effect on the people. Taking you quickly from idealized lives and the excitement to take part in a war to life becoming the never ending tragedy that war always is.

And through it all, the war is defined through the eyes of this amazingly complex, selfish ex-debutante. She is the storyteller and the story observer. The war happens to her. And yet, though she is quite the pawn in the larger sweep of things, she is also the reason to write this, due to Mitchell’s extraordinary sense of her.

Also, I find another interesting crossroads in reading this during the months of shelter in place. There is no outward reason for comparison, but the story rings true in an extra way in that all of the characters are simply trying to cope with these extraordinary and surprising events that are constantly shaping them. This time feels like that to me and so the analogy of postwar uncertainty really rings true.

It should be said that I’m in the 700’s pages, out of almost 1000 and she isn’t together with Rhett Butler yet. He is involved in her life throughout the book, but I’m now seeing that they really eliminated the middle 500 pages to focus on her and Rhett in the film.

No matter. I’m looking forward to them being together. Mitchell really knows this relationship too, so I’m hoping that the old guy Scarlett’s married to now will hurry up and kick the bucket so that we can move forward with the best plot line in here.

Toodles and wish me luck!

5/24/20

I finished it. Wow. Finished it and kissed the book, impulsively. This was a huge adventure to have read.

With 30 pages to go, I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. Not because I didn’t want to. It was just such an epic.

The final “don’t give a damn” that is so easily memorable comes at the end of pages and pages of these two people who loved each other and had no way to say it or come close to each other in any way. By the time he leaves, you just feel achy. What a shame.

I know that Gone has been long and parts of it wince-worthy – the black dialogue alone, if it went too much longer might have led me to burn the book.

But I will never forget it. Mitchell wrote the first solid antihero female character in modern literature that I can remember and no one has ever done it any better.

In the end, Gone isn’t about love, it is about each character’s ability to love. Scarlett can’t. It isn’t in her. Rhett can but never understood how to ask for what he needed. And all of this is not knowable to her until it is way too late.

And how human is that? I feel gratitude for the chance to have seen this war from another point of view.

I know that I will always end up on the reverent side of things when this book is discussed. But I’m anxious to move on now. I’ve lived with this huge story for a long, long time.

Bye Scarlett. Loved ya. But tomorrow’s another day.