Willa Cather's apartment building at 82 Washington Place. Photo Credit: Terese Svoboda.
I fell in love with New York City at dawn decades ago, watching a huge black man in a turban chant for the sun to rise behind Washington Square fountain. Bohemia was mine only a few months out of Nebraska! Willa Cather also quickly fell for the spectacle of the City. After all, men wore top hats to breakfast. But its enormous possibilities exact a price now from its tenants just the way the prairies’ seemingly unlimited opportunities did for the pioneers. All the distractions! All the ways we could fail! But mostly, what prospects! Moving from staid Pittsburgh, Cather chose to live downtown—as I did—for its Bohemian lifestyle, far from the mores of the real Bohemians she’d left behind.
Cather spent her formative years in Red Cloud, Nebraska. Unlike Cather, I am a native Nebraskan, but I too fled to New York. We both feared “we might die in a cornfield”—her words. But I am Bohemian, and have stolen the title of her most famous short story for my most recent novel: Bohemian Girl. She stole her title part of the plot and even some of the lines from the Balfe opera “The Bohemian Girl.” My story concerns a Bohemian girl living in the 19th century West who answers Cather’s tales with her hard-won success. I wrote the book in New York City, not so far from where Cather lived, and I decided this summer to celebrate the expatriate in us by touring all five of her residences.
Like any sane New Yorker, I’m out of town. I have to take the Jitney in from Greenport, a small maritime village at the end of Long Island. Cather too found summer in the City intolerable and left for upstate or Provincetown or New Mexico or New Hampshire or New Brunswick. I don’t think she ever spent the season in New York—I wouldn’t run into her now even if she hadn’t died seventy years ago.
82 Washington Place. Photo Credit: Terese Svoboda
Washington Square Park is a glorious 90 degrees in the shade. The NYU coeds sun themselves nearly naked on the grass, and the fountain is in full force, with kids screaming and the police standing by for possible drownings—or maybe just to enjoy the spray themselves. The wading pool wasn’t there in 1906 when Cather took a studio apartment at 60 Washington Square South, and certainly NYU hadn’t yet gobbled up most of the surrounding buildings, including Cather’s own. Since 2003, the address has been the Helen and Martin Kimmel Center for University Life, with a guard partial to interrogations about I.D. A NYU Prague advertisement blinks its LEDs above him—shades of “The Bohemian Girl.” NYU also came close to demolishing the Lombardi-Romanesque frill of the Judson Memorial Church next door, built to memorialize a missionary to Burma, an institution that originally catered to the Irish and Italian immigrants who, along with Cather, occupied this side of the square. The elite, including Edith Wharton, lived opposite. But Cather’s view wasn’t so bad—her building faced Stanford White’s Arch and “ over yonder, Garibaldi, drawing the sword for freedom,” as Cather put it in her story “Coming, Aphrodite” about living in a Washington Square garret.
60 Washington Square South. Photo credit Terese Svoboda.
As I head for her next apartment at 82 Washington Place, dudes with multicolored tattoos pass me in hordes and I hear drumming from somewhere deep inside the park, a staple entertainment since the Beatnik era. Cather would have heard the clipclop of carriage horses—and the occasional roar of an early model car—which were then allowed passage under the Arch. The year before her move, all the Fifth Avenue front yards were condemned to make room for the increased traffic that forever slows to a crawl where it runs into the park-as-obstacle.
I pause at the park’s edge, with its chess players and sketch artists and note-taking benchwarmers. The environs are perfect for an editor, the job Cather had when she arrived. The Square is still lively, unpredictable, stylish—but she, like many of the editors who live nearby today, wanted to write. A front row seat to the circus of the park might not be the best place to make the switch. Cather moved in just two years.
Willa Cather's table at Mark Twain's 70th birthday at Delmonico's. Cather is third from right.
She settled into what was described as an elegant Beaux-Arts inspired building with her companion of five years, Edith Lewis. Hopefully, I thought, the place would be similar to 76, with its exquisite marble lintel and pale green brick, and not Number 78, peeling badly or 80, suffering major construction. But what’s left of 82 is sans Beaux-Arts anything, there’s just a plaque on the wall that she shares with Richard Wright, who wrote Black Boy in the same location thirty-some years after her tenancy. Trees still shade most of the block, keeping the leafy Village look intact. Not very far away Mark Twain rented an apartment—and she attended his 70th birthday further downtown at Delmonico’s. Around the corner is bustling Sixth Avenue with its two blocks of outdoor bookstands, the Keats & Shelly Cliff Notes guarded by a elderly black man reading Walter Mosley. Psychics, banks, cafes—surely the same lineup in Cather’s time, but not the “Fuck the Fuckers” t-shirt of a passing coed. Cather probably ate at the very popular Gonfarone’s Italian restaurant that flourished nearby at the time. To get to the uptown plays she reviewed, she would have taken the elevated subway that ran alongside Jefferson Market Library, then a courthouse and jail.
One Bank Street now serves as the entrance to Five Bank Street. Photo Credit: Terese Svoboda
Despite my Google map, I’m lost looking for 5 Bank Street, her next address. It doesn’t help that West 4th street crosses West 10th Street and there’s Little West 12th as well as West 12th. After a while, the confusion becomes more sexual, perhaps why Cather and Lewis kept this apartment the longest. What gender is the person walking the two Pekinese in front of me? The small buildings I wander past look turn-of-the-century as befitting their antique-collecting, often gay, inhabitants. A rock garden decorates the base of a parking meter, surrounded by a bamboo fence. Wrong way, says one of the workmen troweling a repair on a brownstone stoop not far from the White Horse Tavern and the Hudson. As I turn back, I notice deliverymen, supers, and construction workers enjoying breaks up and down the shaded streets. How many more would have been outside during Cather’s AC-free era?
The man detailing the inside of his car with the windows rolled must be air-conditioned. At first I think he is stealing the car. At last, staring through his windshield, I spot 5 Bank Street. It turns out to be plaqued too: Cather wrote nine novels at this location, and left only because the building was slated to be torn down for the 7th Avenue subway. Cather’s seven rooms had no central heating, but she did employ a maid and a cook, and disconnected her phone so she could work. She and Edith held at-homes there on Fridays, with written invitations for the likes of Elinor Wylie, Alfred Knopf, and Carl Van Doren. The back of the now defunct St. Vincent’s Hospital faces the building, an institution that must’ve been handy during her frequent illnesses. Two men dicker over the sale of an ex-ambulance parked in its driveway.
Crossing onto 11th Street and heading toward Fifth Avenue, I spot a grand piano on a second floor that seems to be floating from my street-side perspective. At night you can see many of the interiors still have original moldings, 19th century light fixtures, and grand mirrors. Reaching Fifth, I pass the First Presbyterian Church with a tower resembling Magdelan’s at Oxford, and then Cather’s favorite place of worship, the Church of Ascension, chained off now from casual visitors. The neighborhood’s full of doctors, dentists, even PhDs proclaiming themselves on the plaques in front of the buildings—but this time none for Cather.
Cather hated living at 47 Fifth Avenue, but more because of troubles at home than problems with the very respectable Grosvenor Club, whose building still boasts dark wooden paneling in the reception area and wall sconces that look original. NYU has again taken over here, and is in the process of converting it into another residence hall. Posing as an anxious parent doesn’t get me past the construction guard.
Doorman at 570 Fifth Avenue. Photo credit: Terese Svoboda.
Cather, who had shunned attention and favored the simple life, finally moved uptown to 570 Park Avenue. My bus slowly fills with its denizens: nurse attendants, maids, elderly women with alligator shoes and big flowered purses, and a black man in a bespoke suit saying into his cell phone: “A true friend doesn’t do that.” Sixty-third Street, where I disembark, is the bastion of Jimmy Choo and Hermes and plaques remembering the 1922 founding of an insurance company. Money, money, money. The exclusive Colony Club still abuts Cather’s building. Arriving at this address in 1931, she escaped the Depression and World War II with a drawing room large enough for a dinner party of thirty. Now the space is surely worth over six million dollars. I ask its doorman if he knows which apartment was Cather’s and he smiles. So many important people have lived here, he says. And now? I ask. He laughs at my impertinence.
570 Park Avenue. Photo Credit: Terese Svoboda
The Christian Science Church and Reading Room still faces the building’s Park Avenue side, perhaps reminding Cather daily of her first struggle with long-form prose, a biography of founder Mary Baker Eddy that she disowned. The church has been a focus of controversy in the neighborhood for some years because it rents out the ornate interior for events to support itself. “On-Time Elite” reads the media bus beside it. That could have been Cather’s motto, arriving on the literary scene like Amy Tan, with her great stories of immigrants just when the country was curious.
I wave down a cab to take me to a jitney that will bear me back to my summer place. It’s hard to leave the City once you’ve gone to all the trouble to arrive. Eight blocks away, in his 34-room Park Avenue home, Saul Steinberg drew his famous New Yorker map, with Nebraska just a skip and a jump away from Central Park. For those of us who have made that journey, it’s a much longer and willful trip.
Terese Svoboda is the author of five volumes of poetry and four novels, including Tin God (Nebraska 2006); a collection of short stories, Trailer Girl and Other Stories (available in a Bison Books edition); and a nonfiction book, Black Glasses like Clark Kent: A GI’s Secret from Postwar Japan, winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. Her new novel, Bohemian Girl, appears this month.
Jewett's bedroom circa 1900. Photo Credit: The Sarah Orne Jewett House
I was standing in the room Sarah Orne Jewett lived in near the end of her life, looking at the initials she’d carved into the glass pane of her window. It had the wavery old glass of a Revolutionary War-era house, like the shimmer of heat frozen in place. Of the rooms in the house, this was the one that was kept most closely to the way it was when Sarah died, per the wishes of her sister. It retains some of the feeling of being there while she is away, an uncanny sense that she’s stepped out after cleaning her room, and might be back at any moment, arms full of cut flowers.
Jewett's bedroom today. Photo Credit:The Sarah Orne Jewett House
The room was a rich dark green. An antique doll sat with its back to the pillows, spread across the bed, and had the eerie quality of a placeholder for the room’s former resident. A tiny ceramic thimble-sized pen holster was mounted to the wall by the bed. I imagined her reaching for it. It conjured the strongest sense of her life, of all the objects here, of which there were many. I glimpsed from it the pattern of her life, of how tall she’d been, and the drive to write mixed with the amount of time she took to bed. I saw her take the dry pen to the glass and press down, until her initials appeared. That being the other, most vivid impression of her.
Sarah Orne Jewett House, South Berwick, Maine. Photo credit: Alexander Chee
I did not come here to imagine I could somehow understand her work better. I did not come here in place of reading her. I did not come here because it is a fetish of some kind, or any of those other reasons quoted in recent attacks on the custom of writers houses and those who visit them. If I wanted a fetish, it was of the kind for the conjuring of magic, and in that case, that is perhaps what I left with. I came in order to express the affection I feel for a woman who was a trailblazer, who in her own way made room for the writer I am now: Jewett was a Mainer, queer, stylish, of fierce opinions and with a great love of this land. A love that allowed, sadly, some to condemn her work as “regional,” as if being indifferent to place was a quality of some more universal, “better” writer. She spent her life as an unmarried woman of letters, she had no one to show her how to be the person she became–she simply became herself, and in doing so, was able to be a mentor to the young Willa Cather. And a role model in a sense to those of us who claim her now as a hero, after her death. To those who mock writers house visits, I can only say, how nice for you, to live a life where you don’t need heroes. How nice that what you wanted to be always came with some sort of imprimatur of approval from somewhere above you so that you could seek it uncomplicatedly, and not feel like a class traitor, or a gender traitor, or a sexual one. Hurrah for you. After all, there’s just so many ways writers are honored in America after their deaths, it really does get hard to choose. It’s not like the French, who really love literature appropriately, went and made Victor Hugo’s house into a museum or anything.
The Herb Garden. Photo Credit: Alexander Chee
My visit to the Sarah Orne Jewett House was in some ways inauspicious. As I bought my ticket, I discovered I’d missed a talk by the house’s excellent gardener the night before, she the author of finely planted gardens I’d been admiring outside the house, along the entrance walkway and in back. These were all plants mentioned in Jewett’s books, and the guide to them had lovely concise quotes to place each of them for the reader. You would never not know what feverfew looked like after this visit. The library next door, which turned out to be also a place Jewett spent much of her childhood—at a young age, her family moved next door and later moved back—was closed, and so I could not also see that. The famous white rose (famous to those who love Jewett’s work, I’ll add) had no blooms left after the brutal July heat wave, and instead looked a little like someone had lined it up along the wall to be shot, though to be fair, I think all of us felt that way that day.
Garden Guide. Photo credit: Alexander Chee
And so there were moments when I imagined a visit by someone who was like me but better than me, who knew to check ahead for the talk, who came when roses bloom earlier in the summer, or who lived in a country like this one but with expanded library hours.
Photo credit: Alexander Chee
The visit was spontaneous. On a visit to the Maine Historical Society earlier in the week for research my family has been doing into our family history, I found a footnote in the history of my mother’s family saying Jewett had mentioned a distant relation of ours in her autobiographical essay “The Old Town of Berwick.”
I have always believed that Martin Pring must have been the first English discoverer of my native town, when he came to the head of tide water in the Piscataqua River in 1603. Bartholomew Gosnold had sailed along the coast in 1602, and Pring’s pilot was one of Gosnold’s seamen. He brought his two little vessels, the “Speedwell” and the “Discoverer,” of fifty and twenty-six tons burden respectively, in search of adventure and of sassafras bark, which at that time in England was believed to be a sovereign remedy for human ails.
The main branch of the Piscataqua (river of right angles or the great deer drive, as one may choose to interpret it) would lead him to Newichawannock Falls (my place of wigwams), and to Quampeagan (the great fishing place). No doubt there were those who could direct him to this point, for, being in June, it was the time of the salmon fishery at the Newichawannock Falls, to which place all the Indians came to catch and dry their fish for winter use. It was the great fishery for all that part of the country.
I have myself traced for some distance the deep-worn footpath which marks the first day’s trail northward and northeastward, as I have been told by a very old person who has preserved many of the earlier traditions of the town. I have heard that one might walk across on the salmon, which wedged themselves into solid masses in their efforts to leap the impossible high fall near the mouth of Chadbourne’s or the Great Works River…
I wandered the gardens, examined the rose with its empty arms, and then a friendly young woman opened the door, and wearing blue paper safety shoes we would also have to put on, worn in order to protect the carpet and the floors.
The library next door was her home after the age of nine, where she grew to maturity. The home I entered was was where she later returned and died, a place she lived in with her sister Mary, though her heart and much of her life was in Boston, with one Annie Fields, the widow of her editor at the Atlantic, and the woman referred to when people speak of Jewett’s “Boston Marriage.” She wrote long passionate letters to friends, sending sometimes 80 a day, according to the tour guide, and was known to send lilacs down to Boston on the train.
Photo credit: Alexander Chee
The home is a stunning 1774 house, with dramatic, confident architecture punctuated by William Morris carpets of the kind done to resemble needlepoint. My favorite was in fact a reproduction made from a scrap found in the barn. The foundation that runs the house is affectionate toward Jewett, as well as reverent–reverent but not too reverent. Jewett’s first novel, Deephaven, used the house as a setting, and throughout, quotes on small cards set in the rooms punctuate your sense of immersion in her life and the novel. The descriptions of the rooms included are still largely accurate. One amusing one is in her sister Mary’s bedroom, which contains one of the few remaining examples of flocked wallpaper from the 18th century, a process which had glue painted to the wall and red wool dust and mica spread across it, to create in this case flowers like cherry blossoms in relief. After the guide finished her explanation I looked down to the card, to see Jewett’s narrator’s humorous complaint:
The paper was captured in a French prize some time in the last century, and part of the figure was shaggy, and therein little spiders found habitation, and went visiting their acquaintances across the shiny places. The color was an unearthly pink and a forbidding maroon, with dim white spots, which gave it the appearance of having moulded.
Sarah Orne Jewett. Photo Credit: The Sarah Orne Jewett House
Jewett had a sea-captain grandfather, and the house has the eclectic style of a traveler, a curio cabinet all on its own with many rooms. Sarah was the tomboy, Mary the proper one; Mary eventually came to reign as South Berwick’s grand dame. Caroline was the one sister who married of the three, to an Edwin Eastman, and she lived next door in the building that became the library. Her son, Teddy, was much beloved by Sarah and Mary, and we were even shown a room said to be his room. He died just a year after Mary did. Still, the house retains Sarah’s imprimatur. Sarah was a stylish woman and very precise. Her books were all designed by the artist Sarah Wyman Whitman, in an Arts and Crafts style, mostly green covers with gilt, and to see them in the house as you do, you feel the books are of a piece with the place and her sensibility.
Jewett Library. Photo Credit: The Sarah Orne Jewett House
But each of the objects also set me dreaming, which was a bit distracting, as the tour is excellent, and the tour guide is friendly and knowledgeable. I almost heard what she said about the dining room, for example, while I stood there hypnotized by Captain Jewett’s captain’s shipboard liquor cabinet, a wood case full of beautiful gilt-streaked bottles with handwritten labels that said “bourbon,” “gin,” “rum,” “Jamaican rum,” “St. Cruz rum,” and crowned with a set of glasses that seemed ready to use. And when I entered her room itself, which her sister had shut after her death, saying she wanted it always to be as it was, the spell was at its strongest.
Jewett Dining Room. Photo Credit: The Sarah Orne Jewett House
I glanced at her weathered leatherbound copy of Montaigne’s essays, with her French dictionary beside it on a side table. A retractable electric lamp, an early example of electricity, was to light her desk, but looked as if it might extend as far as the bed on its collapsible arm. The initials were cut not only into the wavering ancient glass of her window, but also her desk, and her chalkboards. The guide told us of how she loved her initials. On the desk rested a tiny cartoon she drew as a young woman of them, the S and J as serpents, chasing what looked to be the O in the form of a bonneted girl who was almost outrunning them, her mouth wide in mock horror.
Parsnip Cake. Photo credit: Alexander Chee
Afterward, at a cafe across the street, our waitress insisted we try the parsnip cake. As we’d never heard of it, we did, consuming it quickly. It had a deep yellow color, and a mellow, earthy sweetness. I asked about it and the manager or owner on duty explained that in replacing a beloved carrot cake from their menu, lost to them when the partner left with his recipe, they invented it, only to find the caterer near them making what appeared to be the same cake. When confronted, the caterer denied copying them. “I have been making that cake for years,” she told them. “The society order it. It’s Sarah Orne Jewett’s favorite dessert.”
Alexander Chee is the author of the novels Edinburgh and the forthcoming The Queen of the Night. He currently teaches a seminar on the Graphic Novel at Columbia’s MFA in Writing and lives in New York. For more about him, check him out at Koreanish.
The Vonnegut home in 1962: Vonnegut worked in the low building at the rear with a separate entrance.
I drove right past Kurt Vonnegut’s home in West Barnstable, Massachusetts on my first trip there. I was on the lookout for weather-beaten homes perched on sandy roads down near the beaches of Cape Cod.
After all, in a piece of civic boosterism Vonnegut wrote many years ago for a local magazine, “You’ve Never Been to Barnstable?” he prepared his readers for an anti-climax: “Barnstable Village’s houses— often riddled by termites and dry rot, but good, probably, for a few hundred years more— have been lining both sides of the main street ever since the end of the Civil War, so developers find little room in which to work their pious depredations.”
Pious depredations— there were none in sight— at least not down Scudder Lane where Vonnegut’s two-hundred-year-old, twelve-room house with six fireplaces sits on a corner. Instead, the residents in that neighborhood have turned their whaling-era homes into real charmers, replete with arbor entrances, bouquets of blue hydrangeas everywhere, and painted brilliant, sturdy white to withstand the scrubbing of salt breezes off the ocean. If I were a termite, I’d take a hint.
Kurt and his wife Jane moved to Cape Cod in the early 1950s to live like bohemians. A few summers before, they had spent two months in Provincetown, made famous by the Provincetown Players, the hip jazz clubs and fishing shacks converted into art galleries. This was really living, they decided— really being immersed in the arts. And since Kurt had already thrown over his job as a publicist for General Electric in Schenectady, New York to write fulltime, they sold their little house and made a beeline for Cape Cod.
Their first house was in Osterville, but they hated it, knowing nothing about the community, which turned out to be conservative, not at all arty like Provincetown (which they couldn’t afford). Then a friend in their Great Books club tipped them off to the West Barnstable house, thrilling them with descriptions of the beautiful sunsets.
In addition to the big house, there was a small barn, and a well house for a disused hand pump. A path rambled through waist-high sea broom to a beach of smooth stones. The seller’s asking price was a bargain because, although the house looked great from the road, inside the rooms were plain as a mud fence. Using the Osterville house as collateral, they signed on the proverbial dotted line. For six months they had two mortgages, until they finally sold the house in Osterville and moved to West Barnstable in February 1955.
Kurt and his first wife Jane inside the house in December, 1971. Photo by Anne Bossi
What Kurt and Jane didn’t realize (or perhaps didn’t want to think about) is that it takes money to live, even as free spirits. They were broke all the time. In the winter, Kurt kicked and pounded on the ancient furnace in the basement that wouldn’t work properly. Hard-up for cash, he took copywriting jobs while furiously writing and submitting short stories to Colliers, Ladies Home Journal, Saturday Evening Post and similar magazines.
And then, in 1958, the Vonneguts took-in four nephews after the boys’ parents died thirty-six hours apart from separate causes. All told, there were seven children in the house, until one of the nephews, the youngest, went to live with relatives at the insistence of an aunt who was fed-up with the mayhem.
And there was lots of mayhem. Kurt and Jane’s three children and their cousins were popular and had plenty of friends. Consequently, Kurt found that he was living in the least conducive environment to writing imaginable.
His study was the “L” as the kids called it, a one-story addition that jutted at a forty-five degree angle from the main house. Out there, he wrote, smoked, read aloud from the typewriter in a grumbling voice, drank beer, listened to jazz and thumbed through Playboy. Periodically, he would emerge for a sandwich and then the kids in the kitchen would freeze, waiting to see what kind of mood he was in.
His shouts of, “Quiet down— would you shut the hell up!” often ripped the air.
Vonnegut in the backyard in the summer of 1968. Photo by Anne Bossi.
Once, when he was deep in thought in his study, one of his nephews and a friend exploded an M-80 in the bole of a tree outside his window. Vonnegut, a former infantryman who fought at the Battle of the Bugle, tore out of his study, incensed, and shouted at the neighbor kid, “You! Get the fuck out of here!” It was hard being a bohemian under such conditions.
Nevertheless, Vonnegut wrote his most important novels in the “L”: Sirens of Titan, Cat’s Cradle, Mother Night, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and the work that made him famous, Slaughterhouse-Five.
Two years after the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five, he separated from Jane, moved to New York and thereafter rarely visited the Cape, except uneasily now and then for family occasions. Interestingly, after that, his work was never as good, either.
Charles J. Shields is the author of And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut, A Life forthcoming in November 2011 and Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee (Holt, 2006). He blogs about his experiences as Vonnegut’s biographer at www.writingkurtvonnegut.com
Courtesy of the Atlanta History Center
In 2007, I was assigned by Fine Books & Collections magazine to write a profile of John Wiley, Jr., a collector of Gone With the Wind and Margaret Mitchell memorabilia. Although I was no particular fan of Mitchell then—in fact, I had never read her book—I became enthralled by the stories that John told about the author and the history of her famous novel. He spoke movingly about what she endured in writing her Pulitzer Prize-winning debut and the impact the book’s success had on her life, from the unfortunate contract she signed with movie producer David O. Selznick to the incessant legal battles she fought against international literary piracies. And the story did not end at the author’s death in 1949. To this day, her estate maintains a careful and often controversial watch over the book’s invaluable copyright.
Intrigued, I finally sat down to read Gone With the Wind. Long story short, I was blown away. (No pun intended.) I had always dismissed Scarlett and Rhett’s saga as a trite romance novel. I hereby officially apologize to Miss Mitchell for having doubted her. Mitchell’s novel is beautifully written, historically rich, and compulsively readable. When I finished, I wanted more. The book is over a thousand pages long, and I wouldn’t have complained if it had gone on a thousand more.
I called John and said I wanted to learn more—could he refer me to a book about the amazing history of Mitchell’s novel? I was surprised to hear that no such book existed. John explained to me that while there are several Mitchell biographies and myriad books about Selznick’s movie version of Gone With the Wind, the history of her book had never been written. A few conversations later, he and I decided to fill this hole in literary history together. We developed the idea of writing a “biography” of Mitchell’s novel, covering everything from what inspired her to write her famous story to how the book continues to be a money-making machine in 2011 – its 75th anniversary year.
Our project began with a visit to the Margaret Mitchell House, a museum located in the Atlanta apartment building where Mitchell wrote most of Gone With the Wind. I had never been, and John thought I needed to see the apartment to get a personal feel for who Mitchell was and what her life had been like. He was absolutely correct.
Courtesy of the Atlanta History Center
We spent a lovely afternoon at the Mitchell House on a guided tour. What struck me the most that day was the space, or lack thereof. Mitchell’s tiny basement apartment, which she affectionately dubbed “The Dump,” is only 550 square feet. It consists of nothing more than a modest living room, a miniscule bedroom and bath, and a galley kitchen. The irony was palpable—how on earth had Mitchell managed to produce such a massive tome in such a tiny area? It’s just one of many fascinating aspects to the Margaret Mitchell story.
Courtesy of the Atlanta History Center
Equally fascinating to me is the tale of how the Margaret Mitchell House came to be a museum. While today it is an integral part of Atlanta’s history and tourism scene, John explained to me that that wasn’t always the case. The history of the museum is arguably as fraught with twists and turns as the story it celebrates.
In the decades after Mitchell’s 1949 death, her fame endured. Fans from across the country and around the world made regular pilgrimages to Atlanta to visit Scarlett country and pay their respects to her creator. Until the late 1990s, however, many were disappointed to discover that there was not much to see other than Mitchell’s grave at Oakland Cemetery and a small GWTW exhibit at the Atlanta Public Library. The house in which she was born and two other homes she had lived in were long gone, as was Loew’s Grand Theatre, where the movie premiered in 1939. The apartment building where Mitchell lived while writing most of her book was standing, but was a dilapidated eyesore.
How could this be? Margaret Mitchell herself is partly to blame. She had been opposed to the idea of Atlanta creating any memorial to her life or Gone With the Wind. Respecting her wishes, the Mitchell estate had never made any push to establish one. Yet, there was no denying that Gone With the Wind had done much to put Atlanta on the map, and the city’s reputation suffered from the perception that it was failing to honor its most famous daughter. A few proposals had circulated to restore Mitchell’s apartment as a tourist attraction, but the chances of that happening dimmed throughout the 1980s as the neighborhood surrounding the building underwent a renaissance and property values skyrocketed. The apartment building seemed destined for the wrecking ball.
Everything changed in September 1991 when Mary Rose Taylor, a former Atlanta television news anchor, announced a “Save The Dump” campaign. Money was raised, and restoration began. Fortunately for GWTW fans and those involved with the project, Taylor would prove to have the mettle of Scarlett O’Hara.
The project suffered the first of two debilitating setbacks when, on September 17, 1994, a fire broke out in the building. The top two floors were destroyed, but fortunately Mitchell’s basement unit was largely untouched by the flames. When police ruled the fire arson, rumors flew about who was responsible. Some people suspected that a developer had been upset that the property was not going to a more profitable use. Others suggested there might have been a racial component to the destruction—had the fire been a statement against GWTW? The police never made an arrest. Ultimately, the blaze served to bolster Taylor’s project by drawing attention to the cause. German automaker Daimler-Benz learned of her efforts and stepped forward with a $5 million donation, which it viewed as a goodwill gesture to the people of Atlanta. Taylor determined that the project, like Atlanta, would rise out of the ashes. It was announced that house would open in time for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.
On May 12, 1996, days before the facility was scheduled to be unveiled, arsonists struck again, turning most of the newly refurbished building into a pile of blackened rubble. Though Mitchell’s apartment again managed to escape major damage, it was a crushing blow. The preservationists involved with the project had been looking forward to touting Atlanta’s connection to one of the world’s most famous authors during the Olympic celebration scheduled to begin the following month.
Taylor did not give up and construction began again. The facility finally opened in May 1997 as the Margaret Mitchell House, the “Birthplace of Gone With the Wind.” Author Tom Wolfe delivered the keynote address, calling Mitchell’s novel “one of the great tours de force in literary history.” Although Mitchell’s apartment does not contain any actual items that belonged to the author, it has been recreated with period furnishings. The focal point of the small living room is a diminutive mission-style table on which sits an old typewriter, surrounded by typed sheets of paper, giving the impression Mitchell just stepped away from her work on the manuscript of what would become Gone With the Wind. Today, thousands of visitors tour the facility every year. Many are from overseas, where Mitchell’s book and the film remain hugely popular. This year the Mitchell House, now operated by the Atlanta History Center, has been a focal point of Atlanta’s commemoration of GWTW’s 75th anniversary, an event being celebrated this month.
I made my second visit to the Mitchell House in February of this year for the launch of our book. It was indeed an honor to celebrate that special occasion in such a storied venue. I admit to feeling a tiny bit uncomfortable dissecting Mitchell’s life and work on her home turf—she disliked being written or talked about. I like to think though that she would approve of our project. Gone With the Wind was her pride and joy, and I suspect she’d be happy for its story to be told.1
Ellen F. Brown is an award-winning freelance writer. Her first book, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind: A Bestseller’s Odyssey from Atlanta to Hollywood, co-authored by John Wiley, Jr., offers a behind-the-scenes look at one of the most popular and controversial novels in publishing history. Publishers Weekly selected it as a top pick for spring 2011. Ellen lives in Richmond, Virginia’s historic Fan District with her husband and two sons. You can follow her on Twitter @ellenfbrown.
Adele Griffin's great grandmother Priscilla Goodwyn, penpal of Margaret Mitchell
Tall tales of lost wealth run big in my family. There was Cousin Martha who willed her fortune to her cats. A triple-great grandfather who staked, then surrendered, his house in a straw bet. Not to mention the signed first edition of Gone With the Wind, possibly nabbed by a rogue guest during a family reunion. Never mind that this treasure, if I’m remembering it right, was so curled-edged and spine-split that its worth could only be measured as part of the sentimental lore built up around my great-grandmother’s alleged friendship with its author.
I’d never bought that story, either—though I liked it, since my great-grandmother, Priscilla Goodwyn, was something of a tall tale herself. A bookwormy bluestocking, she followed her glamour-boots cousin Zelda Sayre’s example and in 1920, left behind her hometown of Robinson Springs, Alabama, via strategic marriage. While Zelda nabbed the rising-star novelist, nerdier Priscilla wed Frank Griffin, a scientist from Pennsylvania who got lucky on a patent for the commercial use of rayon. But Priscilla was ill-fit for the role of society matron, and so she took on others: Dean of Women at Swarthmore College, competitive equestrian, more competitive card shark, theater producer who helped back the popular play Harvey—and, it seems, one of Margaret Mitchell’s original fangirls.
A few years ago, my grandmother surprised me with the gift of her mother’s three letters from Mitchell. I was touched by the gesture, if not by the book itself. Like many readers for whom GWTW does not hold a special place, I read it (probably too young) and remember it for the fun of the barbecue, the long slog of war, and dread for any time stuck with that romantic deadweight, Ashley Wilkes. My father was in the Army, so I’d known a different South—and Ft. Bragg, North Carolina runs short on cotillions and plantations. But in the syndicated seventies, I also knew that whenever the movie was on, it could steal away the hours as easy as Scarlett snagged husbands. In its allegiance to the book, the film set my personal standard for lush, sprawling, melodramatic epic.
In contrast, Mitchell’s letters are short, tidy, and scrupulous. Had their author not written one of the best-selling novels of all time, you might even whisper boring. They are certainly fair examples of Mitchell’s crisp journalistic style and economy of word. But yesteryear’s mot juste is often today’s oh mot you didn’t, and a few moments do give pause. I couldn’t help but be mired particularly in the details of letter three, and the phrase “pillars of rectitude,” with all its loaded connotation of the Southern black experience as rendered by a white woman—a debate that has become as much a leitmotif of GWTW as its velvet curtain dress.
There are other bits of interest. Mitchell mentions a cut chapter, where Melanie and Rhett acknowledge each other’s similarities as bearers of “the flag of family tradition.” And within a span of six months, Mitchell’s typed signature closes each letter differently, a shifting, perhaps fragile authorial identity that might be less fraught for a female novelist today.
For all that Windies could parse here, one chord struck me as both fixed and true; my great-grandmother’s celebration of Mitchell’s writing. Within the complicated feminism of that era, it’s a spirited outreach that feels as modern as a linked blog. In the letters we don’t see, my great-grandmother’s delight in Mitchell’s success is writ large, and Mitchell’s appreciative response on the page feels real. If that initial “rebel yell” was a tentative shout-out to a shared, conflicted heritage, it was answered with a generous dose of Southern kinship.
(A post script for the contextually curious: In letters one and two, my great-grandmother is referring to her grandmother, Priscilla Tyler, a stage-trained actor’s daughter and quasi-Miley Cyrus of her day. Much to the horror of some of the country, Priscilla pulled some stand-in duty as First Lady when her father-in-law, John Tyler’s, wife died while he was in office. A century later, it was a conversational opener that might have intrigued Mitchell; presumably, my great-grandmother was betting on it.)
Letter 1 - Envelope
Letter 1 - Letters from private collection. Not for reproduction.
Letter 2 - Envelope
Letter 2 - Letters from a private collection. Not for reproduction.
Letter 3 - Envelope
Letter 3 - Letter from a private collection. Not for reproduction.
Adele Griffin is the acclaimed author of many books for young readers, including Sons of Liberty and Where I Want to Be, both National Book Award finalists. She is also the author of Picture the Dead and The Julian Game. Her new book, Tighter, a reimagining of The Turn of the Screw, is just out from Knopf. Adele lives with her husband and young daughter in Brooklyn, New York. You can follow her on twitter at @adelegriffin.
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