Having Georgia on my mind for a week
Anne Chisholm
In the mid-1950s, at my sensible and secluded girls' boarding school, there was a sudden craze among the 13- and 14-year- Olds for Margaret Mitchell's glorious block- buster, Gone with the Wind. Our teachers sighed, but sensibly let us get on with it. Kn. weeks I carried the enormous hard- back edition of some 900 pages, bound in two tones of green, around in my regula- tion , book bag, and would surreptitiously heave it on to my desk, cover it with an exercise book and read it during prep. My best friend and I would practise fluttering our eyelashes in imitation of Scarlett O'Hara, and eventually, when at last we had reached the end of the saga, would growl at each other in answer to any com- Plaint, `Frarildy my dear, I don't give a damn., The film, which I saw much later, was romantic and wonderful, but not as won- derful as reading the book, which I never Wanted to open again. Yet it had evidently lodged deeply in my memory. The best part of listening to this new version on tape has been the delicious familiarity of it all: the Southern belles with their 16-inch waists; limp men smelling of bourbon and mint; Iliril) Ashley Wilkes, Scarlett's forbidden t.ruit, with his golden hair; sexually intrigu- Ing Rhett Butler with his red lips under a black moustache; and the sultry Southern atmosphere of 'cotton and slaves and arro- gance'.
It has to be said, though, that the arrival of two enormous, bloated triple-decker Volumes, (Isis Audio Books, f99.99), each one about the size of the hardback I remember, containing 36 cassettes altogeth- er and a total of over 40 hours of listening, is daunting. On the other hand the marathon nature of the Gone with the Wind experience, in any medium, is part of the point, and once the story is under way it rat- tles along at a good clip. The reader, Liza Ross, is American, which is just as well; she is an experienced actress, with a light and flexible voice, and she shifts with effortless- sounding ease between the varieties of American Southern accents she is required to affect without ever sounding like an Old Black Mammy parody, even when the `daricies' are speaking. Her Scarlett O'Hara is flawless; the small, high voice conveys Scarlett's spoiled, imperious but somehow vulnerable nature to perfection.
I had forgotten how well Margaret Mitchell wrote about the Georgia land- scape, with its drifting fruit blossoms in spring and the red earth that turned 'blood- coloured' after rain, and how much solid social and civil war history she managed to build in to her romance without destroying the flow of the narrative. It struck me for the first time how timely, in the late 1930s when it first became a bestseller, was her study of a world on the brink of disaster but resolutely refusing to accept the ugly inevitability of war.
Gone with the Wind remains the best blockbuster ever, the only one perhaps that deserves to last, and maybe in this well- executed taped reincarnation it will find new fans as well as amuse old ones. I some- how doubt, though, whether today's teenagers will be compelled to enjoy it covertly through their headphones while they do their homework.
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