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When Winter Comes to Main Street, a non-fiction book by Grant Martin Overton |
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Chapter 7. The Vitality Of Mary Roberts Rinehart |
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_ CHAPTER VII. THE VITALITY OF MARY ROBERTS RINEHART =i= "The total result ... after twelve years is that I have learned to sit down at my desk and begin work simultaneously," wrote Mrs. Rinehart in 1917. "One thing died, however, in those years of readjustment and struggle. That was my belief in what is called 'inspiration.' I think I had it now and then in those days, moments when I felt things I had hardly words for, a breath of something much bigger than I was, a little lift in the veil. "It does not come any more. "Other things bothered me in those first early days. I seemed to have so many things to write about and writing was so difficult. Ideas came, but no words to clothe them. Now, when writing is easy, when the technique of my work bothers me no more than the pen I write with, I have less to say. "I have words, but fewer ideas to clothe in them. And, coming more and more often is the feeling that, before I have commenced to do my real work, I am written out; that I have for years wasted my substance in riotous writing and that now, when my chance is here, when I have lived and adventured, when, if ever, I am to record honestly my little page of these great times in which I live, now I shall fail." These surprising words appeared in an article in the American Magazine for 1917. Not many months later The Amazing Interlude was published and, quoting Mrs. Rinehart soon afterward, I said: "If her readers shared this feeling they must have murmured to themselves as they turned the absorbing pages of The Amazing Interlude: 'How absurd!' It is doubtful if they recalled the spoken misgiving at all." Few novels of recent years have had so captivating a quality as had this war story. But I wish to emphasise again what I felt and tried to express at that time--the sense of Mrs. Rinehart's vitality as a writer of fiction. In what seem to me to be her best books there is a freshness of feeling I find astonishing. I felt it in K; I found it in The Amazing Interlude; and I find it in her new novel just published, The Breaking Point. The Breaking Point is the story of a man's past and his inability to escape from it. If that were all, it might be a very commonplace subject indeed. It is not all, nor half. Dr. Richard Livingstone, just past thirty, is supposedly the nephew of Dr. David Livingstone, with whom he lives and whose practice he shares in the town of Haverly; but at the very outset of the novel, we have the fact that--according to a casual visitor in Haverly--Dr. Livingstone's dead brother had no son; was unmarried, anyway. And then it transpires that, whatever may have been the past, Dr. Livingstone has walled it off from the younger man's consciousness. The elder man has built up a powerful secondary personality--secondary in the point of time only, for Richard Livingstone is no longer aware of any other personality, nor scarcely of any former existence. He does, indeed, have fugitive moments in which he recalls with a painful and unsatisfactory vagueness some manner of life that he once had a part in. But in his young manhood, in the pleasant village where there is none who isn't his friend, deeply centred in his work, stayed by the affection of Dr. Livingstone, these whispers of the past are infrequent and untroubling. The casual visitor's surprise and the undercurrent of talk which she starts is the beginning of a rapid series of incidents which force the problem of the past up to the threshold of Richard Livingstone's consciousness. There would then be two ways of facing his difficulties, and he takes the braver. Confronted with an increasingly difficult situation, a situation sharpened by his love for Elizabeth Wheeler, and her love for him, young Dr. Dick plays the man. The title of Mrs. Rinehart's story comes from the psychological (and physical) fact that there is in every man and woman a point at which Nature steps in and says: "See here, you can't stand this! You've got to forget it." This is the breaking point, the moment when amnesia intervenes. But later there may come a time when the erected wall safeguarding the secondary personality gives way. The first, submerged or walled-off personality may step across the levelled barrier. That extraordinarily dramatic moment does come in the new novel and is handled by Mrs. Rinehart with triumphant skill. It will be seen that this new novel bears some resemblances to K, by many of her readers considered Mrs. Rinehart's most satisfactory story. If I may venture a personal opinion, The Breaking Point is a much stronger novel than K. To me it seems to combine the excellence of character delineation noticeable in K with the dramatic thrill and plot effectiveness which made The Amazing Interlude so irresistible as you read it. =ii= To say so much is to bear the strongest testimony to that superb vitality, which, characteristic of Mrs. Rinehart as a person, is yet more characteristic of her fiction. There is, I suppose, this additional interest in regard to The Breaking Point, that Mrs. Rinehart is the wife of a physician and was herself, before her marriage, a trained nurse. The facts of her life are interesting, though not nearly so interesting as the way in which she tells them. She was the daughter of Thomas Beveridge Roberts and Cornelia (Gilleland) Roberts of Pittsburgh. From the city's public and high schools she went into a training school for nurses, acquiring that familiarity with hospital scenes which served her so well when she came to write The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry, the stories collected under the title of Tish and the novel K. She became, at nineteen, the wife of Stanley Marshall Rinehart, a Pittsburgh physician. "Life was very good to me at the beginning," said Mrs. Rinehart in the American Magazine article I have referred to. "It gave me a strong body and it gave me my sons before it gave me my work. I do not know what would have happened had the work come first, but I should have had the children. I know that. I had always wanted them. Even my hospital experience, which rent the veil of life for me, and showed it often terrible, could not change that fundamental thing we call the maternal instinct.... I would forfeit every part of success that has come to me rather than lose any part, even the smallest, of my family life. It is on the foundation of my home that I have builded. "Yet, for a time, it seemed that my sons were to be all I was to have out of life. From twenty to thirty I was an invalid.... This last summer (1917), after forty days in the saddle through unknown mountains in Montana and Washington, I was as unwearied as they were. But I paid ten years for them." Mrs. Rinehart had always wanted to write. She began in 1905--she was twenty-nine that year--and worked at a tiny mahogany desk or upon a card table "so low and so movable. It can sit by the fire or in a sunny window." She "learned to use a typewriter with my two forefingers with a baby on my knee!" She wrote when the children were out for a walk, asleep, playing. "It was frightfully hard.... I found that when I wanted to write I could not and then, when leisure came and I went to my desk, I had nothing to say." I quote from a chapter on Mrs. Rinehart in my book The Women Who Make Our Novels: "Her first work was mainly short stories and poems. Her very first work was verse for children. Her first check was for $25, the reward of a short article telling how she had systematised the work of a household with two maids and a negro 'buttons.' She sold one or two of the poems for children and with a sense of guilt at the desertion of her family made a trip to New York. She made the weary rounds in one day, 'a heartbreaking day, going from publisher to publisher.' In two places she saw responsible persons and everywhere her verses were turned down. 'But one man was very kind to me, and to that publishing house I later sent The Circular Staircase, my first novel. They published it and some eight other books of mine.' "In her first year of sustained effort at writing, Mrs. Rinehart made about $l,200. She was surrounded by 'sane people who cried me down,' but who were merry without being contemptuous. Her husband has been her everlasting help. He 'has stood squarely behind me, always. His belief in me, his steadiness and his sanity and his humour have kept me going, when, as has happened now and then, my little world of letters has shaken under my feet.' To the three boys their mother's work has been a matter of course ever since they can remember. 'I did not burst on them gloriously. I am glad to say that they think I am a much better mother than I am a writer, and that the family attitude in general has been attentive but not supine. They regard it exactly as a banker's family regards his bank.'" Most of the work of the twelve years from 1905 to 1917 was done in Mrs. Rinehart's home. But when she had a long piece of work to do she often felt "the necessity of getting away from everything for a little while." So, beginning about 1915, she rented a room in an office building in Pittsburgh once each year while she was writing a novel. It was sparsely furnished and, significantly, it contained no telephone. In 1917 she became a commuter from her home in Sewickley, a Pittsburgh suburb. Her earnings had risen to $50,000 a year and more. "My business with its various ramifications had been growing; an enormous correspondence, involving business details, foreign rights, copyrights, moving picture rights, translation rights, second serial rights, and dramatisations, had made from the small beginning of that book of poems a large and complicated business. "I had added political and editorial writing to my other work, and also records of travel. I was quite likely to begin the day with an article opposing capital punishment, spend the noon hours in the Rocky Mountains, and finish off with a love story! "I developed the mental agility of a mountain goat! Filing cases entered into my life, card index systems. To glance into my study after working hours was dismaying." More recently, Mrs. Rinehart has become a resident of Washington, D. C. Her husband is engaged in the Government health service and the family lives in the Wardman Park Hotel, having taken the apartment of the late Senator Boies Penrose of Pennsylvania. =iii= "Yet, if I were to begin again, I would go through it all, the rejections at the beginning, the hard work, the envious and malicious hands reached up to pull down anyone who has risen ever so little above his fellows. Not for the money reward, although that has been large, not for the publicity, although I am frank enough to say I would probably miss being pointed out in a crowd! But because of two things: the friends I have made all over the world, and the increased outlook and a certain breadth of perception and knowledge that must come as the result of years of such labour. I am not so intolerant as in those early days. I love my kind better. I find the world good, to work and to play in. "I sometimes think, if I were advising a young woman as to a career, that I should say: 'First, pick your husband.' "It is impossible to try to tell how I have attempted to reconcile my private life with my public work without mentioning my husband. Because, after all, it requires two people, a man and a woman, to organise a home, and those two people must be in accord. It has been a sort of family creed of ours that we do things together. We have tried, because of the varied outside interests that pull hard, to keep the family life even more intact than the average. Differing widely as they do, my husband's profession and my career, we have been compelled to work apart. But we have relaxed, rested and played, together. "And this rule holds good for the family. Generally speaking, we have been a sort of closed corporation, a board of five, with each one given a vote and the right to cast it. Holidays and home matters, and picnics and dogs, and everything that is of common interest all come up for a discussion in which the best opinion wins. The small boy had a voice as well as the biggest boy. And it worked well. "It is not because we happened to like the same things. People do not happen to like the same things. It is because we tried to, and it is because we have really all grown up together. "Thus in the summer we would spend weeks in the saddle in the mountains of the Far West, or fishing in Canada. But let me be entirely frank here. These outdoor summers were planned at first because there were four men and one woman in our party. Now, however, I love the open as the men do." =iv= "Writing is a clean profession. The writer gets out of it exactly what he puts in, no more and no less. It is one-man work. No one can help. The writer works alone, solitary and unaided. And, contrary to the general opinion, what the writer has done in the past does not help him in the future. He must continue to make good, day after day. "More than that he must manufacture a new article every day, and every working hour of his day. He cannot repeat himself. Can you imagine a manufacturer turning out something different all the time? And his income stopping if he has a sick headache, or goes to a funeral?" =v= Next to the vitality, the variety of Mrs. Rinehart's work is most noticeable. Her first novel, The Circular Staircase, was a mystery tale, and so was her second, The Man in Lower Ten. She has, from time to time, continued to write excellent mystery stories. The Breaking Point is, from one standpoint, a first class mystery story; and then there is that enormously successful mystery play, written by Mrs. Rinehart in conjunction with Avery Hopwood, The Bat. Nor was this her first success as a playwright for she collaborated with Mr. Hopwood in writing the farce Seven Days. Shall I add that Mrs. Rinehart has lived part of her life in haunted houses? I am under the impression that more than one of her residences has been found to be suitably or unsuitably haunted. There was that house at Bellport on Long Island--but I really don't know the story. I do know that the family's experience has been such as to provide material for one or more very good mystery novels. My own theory is that Mrs. Rinehart's indubitable gift for the creation of mystery yarns has been responsible for the facts. I imagine that the haunting of the houses has been a projection into some physical plane of her busy sub-consciousness. I mean, simply, that instead of materialising as a story, her preoccupation induced a set of actual and surprising circumstances. Why couldn't it? Let Sir Oliver Lodge or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Society for Psychical Research, anybody who knows about that sort of thing, explain! Consider the stories about Letitia Carberry. Tish is without a literary parallel. Well-to-do, excitement loving, with a passion for guiding the lives of two other elderly maidens like herself; with a nephew who throws up hopeless hands before her unpredictable performances, Tish is funny beyond all description. Just as diverting, in a quite different way, is Bab, the sub-deb and forerunner of the present-day flapper. Something like a historical romance is Long Live the King!--a story of a small boy, Crown Prince of a Graustark kingdom, whose scrapes and friendships and admiration of Abraham Lincoln are strikingly contrasted with court intrigues and uncovered treason. The Amazing Interlude is the story of Sara Lee Kennedy, who went from a Pennsylvania city to the Belgian front to make soup for the soldiers and to fall in love with Henri.... But one could go on with other samples of Mrs. Rinehart's abundant variety. I think, however, that the vitality of her work, and not the variety nor the success in variety, is our point. That vitality has its roots in a sympathetic feeling and a sanative humour not exceeded in the equipment of any popular novelist writing in America today. THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASE SOURCES ON MARY ROBERTS RINEHART ''My Creed: The Way to Happiness--As I Found It,'' by Mary Roberts Rinehart. AMERICAN MAGAZINE, October, 1917. ''Mary Roberts Rinehart as She Appears'' by Robert H. Davis, AMERICAN MAGAZINE, October, 1917. ''My Public'' by Mary Roberts Rinehart, THE BOOKMAN, December, 1920. The Women Who Make Our Novels, by Grant Overton, MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY. Who's Who in America. _ |
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