Rhett, We Hardly Knew Ye

When the Margaret Mitchell estate asked Donald McCaig to write a sequel to Gone With the Wind, the single most-swooned-over novel in the American canon, he took some time to decide. This is partly because he was on his way to a sheepdog competition in Canada--McCaig, 67, a distinguished Civil War novelist, runs a sheep farm in Virginia by day. It's also because he'd never read Gone With the Wind.

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But he does possess some of Rhett Butler's cast-iron unflappability. "I haven't read Paradise Lost either," says McCaig, who grew up in Montana and has no trace of a Southern accent. He went ahead and read Gone With the Wind and liked it well enough to undertake a sequel. "I'm not wild about her plot," he says, "but Scarlett O'Hara is to my mind the best woman character in American literature."

McCaig's book, Rhett Butler's People (St. Martin's; 500 pages), isn't the first sequel to Gone With the Wind. Alexandra Ripley published Scarlett in 1991, though she tripped at the first hurdle by moving the action to Ireland. (McCaig hasn't read that book either, or Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone, which retold the story from the perspective of a slave.) McCaig wasn't even the first writer the Mitchell estate approached this round: it had already tried Emma Tennant and Pat Conroy. McCaig's idea was to rewrite the book from Rhett's point of view. "Gone With the Wind has, structurally, an interesting difference from most important novels," he says. "It's that the second lead, Rhett Butler, is mysterious. He goes out of town--nobody says where or why. He makes his money--nobody says where or how. He apparently has no friends except for Belle Watling. And that looked to me to be an unusual opportunity."

Mitchell's people agreed. They handed him the franchise, no strings attached. "The only actual problem they had was with the word nigger," says McCaig, who used it liberally in period dialogue, as did Mitchell. "They had reservations about that to the end, but they didn't kill the book because of it. They didn't want to be embarrassed with the racist brush, you know?"

Mitchell gave Rhett Butler his good looks ("those laughing black eyes"), his bad attitude and his Bond-style omnicompetence. In Rhett Butler's People, McCaig adds a family, a misspent youth and a lot of detail about Rhett's business savvy--it turns out he's like the Bill Gates of cotton. He fills in Rhett's early years and answers some questions about where he ends up. We also see, from Rhett's point of view, his first chance glimpse of Scarlett at a party:

"My God." Rhett moistened dry lips. "She's just like me!"

His heart slowed. He looked away, smiling at himself. It had been a long time since he'd made a fool of himself over a woman.

McCaig's Rhett is a success. He grasps the paradox of the character, which is that he never loses his head in a battle or a business deal and never ceases to make a hopeless ass of himself over Scarlett. He's hardheaded enough to see through the myth of the glorious South but softhearted enough to mourn its passing. When the first Federal shell hits Atlanta, shaking paint chips from the tin ceiling of the bar he's drinking in, Rhett doesn't run for cover. He casually puts his hand over his glass to save his beer.

In our R-rated age, McCaig has a freer hand than Mitchell did in recounting Rhett's amorous athletics and the depredations of postbellum life. ("Let me give you a simple statistic," McCaig says. "The biggest expenditure of the Alabama legislature the first year after the war was for wooden legs. That's how bad it was.") He also adds a bold Confederate scout, who is, McCaig broadly hints, gay. ("How come you never get yourself a gal, Master Jamie?")

Books like McCaig's are one of the oddities of the current literary moment. Last year Geraldine Brooks' March, which fills in the extracanonical adventures of the dad from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, won the Pulitzer Prize. Huckleberry Finn's father and Dickens' Tiny Tim have gotten the same treatment, not to mention the Wicked Witch of the West. Where once they were inviolable, the margins of books have become porous, with characters slipping in and out like naughty teenagers to lead their own lives when it suits them. It's almost as if we've come to distrust the brief, biased glimpses their creators gave us. Like investigative bloggers, we're determined to get the whole story, from all points of view, complete with outtakes and DVD extras.

However much he expands Rhett's horizons, McCaig takes care to leave intact the original details of Mitchell's narrative, though he does take a liberty with history: he moves the 1851 invasion of Cuba to a few years later so Rhett can attend. He also endows Rhett with almost anachronistically enlightened ideas about race. "The original Rhett's racial attitudes were kind of ambiguous," says McCaig. "Some people have had problems with Margaret Mitchell's racial attitudes. Well, she was a Southern writer of her time, and I'm a Southern writer of mine." Apparently Rhett gives a damn about something after all.