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.
[Illustration: MARY ROBERTS RINEHART]
"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.
BOOKS BY MARY ROBERTS RINEHART
THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASE
THE MAN IN LOWER TEN
WHEN A MAN MARRIES
THE WINDOW AT THE WHITE CAT
THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF LETITIA CARBERRY
WHERE THERE'S A WILL
THE CASE OF JENNY BRICE
THE AFTER HOUSE
THE STREET OF SEVEN STARS
K
THROUGH GLACIER PARK
TISH
THE ALTAR OF FREEDOM
LONG LIVE THE KING
TENTING TO-NIGHT
BAB, A SUB-DEB
KINGS, QUEENS AND PAWNS
THE AMAZING INTERLUDE
TWENTY-THREE AND A HALF HOURS' LEAVE
DANGEROUS DAYS
MORE TISH
LOVE STORIES
AFFINITIES AND OTHER STORIES
"ISN'T THAT JUST LIKE A MAN?"
THE TRUCE OF GOD
A POOR WISE MAN
SIGHT UNSEEN AND THE CONFESSION
THE BREAKING POINT
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.