‘Tara’ Troubles Disputes Between The Publisher, Author Of ‘Scarlett’ Sequel Leaves Future Of Book Uncertain

Writing a sequel to a passionately loved American novel is no easy task, as the author Alexandra Ripley found when she tried her hand at a continuation of Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” in 1991. The result, “Scarlett,” was pummelled by the critics, even as the public lapped it up so fast that the book recouped its $5 million advance within 90 days and sold 2.2 million copies in hardcover.

Stung by the criticism, though, Miss Mitchell’s estate decided to proceed with more care the next time around. The sequel to the sequel, the estate decided, should be classier, more literary, a book that would dispel the unhappy taste left by “Scarlett.” To that end, the estate hired the distinguished British author Emma Tennant, whose 18 novels include a best selling sequel to “Pride and Prejudice,” and then sold publication rights to St. Martin’s Press, a unit of MacMillan Ltd., for $4.5 million.

But what seemed a felicitous marriage of taste and commerciality has dissolved into a bitter divorce. The first draft of Tennant’s book, “Tara,” was so savaged by St. Martin’s that Tennant felt she could not continue, and St. Martin’s said it would not budge until she did.

In April, she was fired from the project, leaving her with a manuscript she cannot publish and leaving St. Martin’s with no book, no author, and - most worryingly for the company - a huge outstanding advance.

Perhaps the problem was one of literary sensibility, or had to do with the fact that Tennant is British and “Gone with the Wind” so quintessentially American. Perhaps it was a question of mixed signals and clashing personalities. Whatever it was, said Laurence J. Kirshbaum, the president of Warner Books, which published “Scarlett,” the task of writing a second sequel was so fraught with peril as to be nearly unworkable.

“You’re dealing with so many expectations,” he said. “Time only makes the process more difficult because ‘Gone With The Wind’ looms larger and larger in our collective memory as the years go by.”

Tennant, known as a literary author of provocative and unconventional novels, was an unexpected choice for the next sequel. But she was the sort of person the Mitchell estate seemed to want. When Tennant was hired, on the recommendation of her friend Lady Antonia Fraser, and because one of the estate’s lawyers read and enjoyed “Pemberley,” her “Pride and Prejudice” sequel while on vacation, all seemed to be running smoothly.

The contract was unusual: St. Martin’s Press would pay the estate $4.5 million for publication rights, and the estate would pay the 58-year-old Tennant 20 percent of all its earnings in an established schedule at each step of the process. Partly because of Tennant’s foreign contacts, the estate, which is controlled by Miss Mitchell’s two nephews, was able to secure a number of lucrative foreign deals. Publication rights were sold for $750,000 in Germany, $330,000 in Italy, $750,000 in Japan, and $150,000 in France, among other places.

Tennant did not have free creative range: Among other things, the 15-page contract specified that the new novel would “maintain the essential features” of Margaret Mitchell’s tone, viewpoint and characters, and it forbade her from including “acts or references to incest, miscegenation, or sex between two people of the same sex.”

The trouble really began last Thanksgiving, when Tennant turned in her 575-page manuscript, four months early. The manuscript, which Tennant is forbidden to show to anyone, brings Scarlett back to the United States from Ireland, where Ripley’s book stranded her, and describes her up-and-down relationship with Rhett and her continuing entanglement with Ashley Wilkes against the backdrop of her epic struggles to hang on to Tara, her beloved ancestral home.

But at St. Martin’s press, the manuscript went over like a balloon in a needle factory. What was wrong with the book? Just about everything, according to the publisher. Characterization, story line, story telling, setting, and style - “it would need very substantial work on all five of these levels,” Hope Dellon, St. Martin’s senior editor, wrote to Tennant in part of an 89-page memo that has become central to the dispute between the two sides.

The memo systematically and devastatingly sets out the publisher’s objections, ranging from criticisms at Tennant’s frequent use of the word “as” in the opening pages, to her “insipid, watery” characters, to what Thomas J. McCormack, St. Martin’s chairman, chief executive officer and editorial director, found to be an un-American sensibility.

The memo is vituperative to the point of offensiveness, in the view of a number of people sympathetic to Tennant. “It was certainly the roughest editorial reaction to a commissioned manuscript I’ve ever seen,” said Jonathan Lloyd, an agent with Curtis, Brown in London, who represented Tennant on the deal. “It was pure vitriol.”

Tennant was so devastated, she said, that after months of fruitless work she eventually concluded that St. Martin’s had set her with an impossible task in order to force her to quit.

“I was shocked that they felt free to couch their remarks in terms that were so violently hostile,” she said. “In my experience, if a publisher wants to keep a writer, they will say, ‘I feel very strongly that you have X and Y wrong, but you can do this and this and let’s talk.’ There was none of that here; there was no holding back.”