taking it back to 1936 & 1996

"I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken - and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived. "--Margaret Mitchell 

With all this talk I've been doing lately about The Passage being the greatest book of all time, I thought I should do some clarifying. While I do find Cronin's new book to be amazing, there is nothing that could ever be written by a mere mortal that could top the one and only. For me, since the age of 10, there is this book, and then...everything else.

That book, of course, is Gone With The Wind, the finest piece of literature ever written. (If you'd like to challenge me on that, I'd be happy to provide you with a lengthy explantion of why-- more on that later.)

As a child (and, really, almost anyone can back this up) I was literally possessed by the thing. My obsession was so complete and pathological that I'd get into arguments with people about the trivia, I'd buy 2 of every collectible (just in case), I sent a letter to a board game company about three (3!) errors I found in their game, I could recite it from beginning to end (one friend even claimed I'd speak from the movie in my sleep. I don't think I believe this.)

I was an automaton of facts. But it's as if that was the only way I could think of to truly express my love of it. I couldn't describe it, I could only quote, spew, collect, analyze it's own content-- not the depths of what I felt about it.

Catch me on pretty much any day and I could give you a love song about GWTW. I love it for what it is, I love it for what it isn't, I love it as symbol of my own version of The Old South-- which didn't have slavery (unless you count the way I forced my dear Grandmother to drive me all over the state of Georgia looking for GWTW memorabilia) but it did have a kind of charm that can never return.

It was filled with romantic things and all the time in the world to dream about all the good things in life, like iced tea & butter beans and hoop skirts and big canopy trees, and old houses and the way they smell, and the libraries filled with books and the way they smelled. Of powder rooms and perfumes and china and old pictures and endless room to wonder what all those folks' lives had been like. Endless hours to learn how to make a pig out of an acorn and some toothpicks. All the time you needed to get the smell of corn-relish out of the skin of your arms after you'd been stirring the pot that was bigger than you  for as much time as the corn relish needed.

Maybe I was born a writer or maybe I became one in those summers because I was given the room. The Old South of my life was one where everyone had as much time as they needed. I could tell a story every day about how much my extended summers with my grandparents meant to me.

But if you want to boil it down to one thing-- one thing that will always mean what it means-- it's Gone With The Wind. And everyone knew that was mine. And it was, strangely, something we could all do together-- it became all of ours (because I have a tendency to catch people up in my loves vortex). Like Grandma and Me, spinning down the highways and the time my Papoo bought me the ENTIRE 36 plate GWTW collector's plate series and kept it for me, as a surprise for me one day. I only even found out about it after he died, and it seemed like that's how he'd planned it all along.

(He still has a way of doing things like that-- more on him later.)

But in honor of the center of gravity of my childhood, I thought it'd be fun to show you the original Time Magazine review of the novel from July 6, 1936. It was also the inaugural book of the Time Book of the Month Club, the precursor, of course, to Oprah's Book Club.