MARY ROBERTS RINEHART
“I am being very frank,” exclaims Mary Roberts Rinehart. As if she ever
were otherwise! “I have never had any illusions about the work I do. I
am, frankly, a story-teller. Some day I may be a novelist.
“I want to write life. But life is not always clean and happy. It is
sometimes mean and sordid and cheap. These are the shadows that outline
the novelist’s picture. But I will never write anything which I cannot
place in my boys’ hands.”
Thus Mrs. Rinehart in the _American Magazine_ for October, 1917. It is
almost all you need to know to understand her work. Almost, but not
quite. Add this:
“I sometimes think, if I were advising a young woman as to a career,
that I should say: ‘First pick your husband.’”
Mary Roberts (as she was) picked hers at nineteen and was married to him
nearly four months before she became twenty. That was in 1896; dates are
not one of her concealments. In fact, she has no concealments, only
reticences.
She was the daughter of Thomas Beveridge Roberts and Cornelia
(Gilleland) Roberts of Pittsburgh, and had been a pupil of the city’s
public and high schools, then of a training school for nurses where she
acquired that familiarity with hospital scenes which was necessary in
writing _The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry_, the stories
collected under the title _Tish_ and the novel _K._ And then she became
the wife of Stanley Marshall Rinehart, a Pittsburgh physician. And
then----
“Life was very good to me at the beginning,” says Mrs. Rinehart. “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 particle 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.”
She thinks that is how she came to write. She had always wanted to. 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 fore-fingers, with a baby on my knee!” She wrote when the
youngsters 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.”
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 systematized the work of the 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
heart-breaking 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 $1,200. 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 humor 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.”
Sometimes, Mrs. Rinehart, a banker’s family regards his bank as a
confounded nuisance! But that’s when the bank takes charge of the man
and demands an undue share of his time and energy. You have never let
your writing do that. With you it has been family first! Most of the
work of the twelve years from 1905 to 1917 which witnessed your signal
success was done in your home. But sometimes when you had a long piece
of work to do you felt, as you tell us, “the necessity of getting away
from everything for a little while.” So, beginning about 1915, you
rented a room in an office building in Pittsburgh once each year while
you had a novel in hand. It was barely furnished and the most
significant omission was a telephone. There you got through “a
surprising amount of work.” And then, in 1917, you became a commuter.
Your earnings had risen from the $1,200 of that first year to $50,000
and possibly more in a twelve-month. But let us have the story in your
own words:
“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 dramatizations, 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.
“And at last the very discerning head of the family made a stand. He
said that no business man would try to sleep in his office, and yet that
virtually was what I was doing.”
This from a doctor, forsooth! But perhaps Dr. Rinehart never bound up a
cut in the little room just off the front parlor.
Nevertheless he was right. “I am at home as soon as the small boy is, or
sooner,” Mrs. Rinehart proclaims. “And I am better for the change. It
takes me out of the house. The short ride in the train or the motor to
the city detaches me automatically from the grocery list and a frozen
pipe in the garage.
“In the city I have two bright and attractive rooms. My desk is ready;
my secretary is waiting. Sometimes I work all day; sometimes I look over
my mail and go out to luncheon and do not come back.
“Then automatically the train or car going home detaches me from
publishers and autograph hunters and pen and ink and paper. I am ready
to play.”
She lives in Sewickley, a suburb of Pittsburgh. The home is known as
Glen Osborne. She is not an early riser. “I like to let the day break on
me gradually.” After breakfast there are household arrangements. She is
no slave to her typewriter. “I may say that I work every week-day
morning and perhaps three afternoons.” She goes riding, plays golf,
visits the dressmaker the other three. She is a member of the Equal
Franchise Association and of the Juvenile Court Association. There are
long vacations, but what she sees and experiences a-traveling is usually
rendered to her readers. “Thus in the summer we spend weeks in the
saddle in the mountains of the Far West, or fishing in Canada.... 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 men do.” She
writes about it better than many men do.
Mrs. Rinehart, in any account of herself, is certain to record the fact
that she has never done newspaper work, although in recent years she has
done “political and editorial writing.” She was never a newspaper
reporter. The “moral equivalent,” as William James would have styled it,
was, in her case, undoubtedly her hospital experience. Like any young
nurse, she saw “life in the raw,” to borrow the unoriginal but
completely expressive phrase used in her novel _K._ And then she had the
great fortune to marry happily and to become a mother. This is the
secret of her success, and all of it. Young and impressionable, she saw
what life is at its most agonizing, most horrible, most heroic moments.
Still young, but with her thoroughly normal and wholesome nature losing
its plasticity and taking on a definite mold, she found what life can be
in its permanent and most deeply satisfying beauty. Sympathy, genuine
affection and sanative humor were hers in fair measure; when they failed
her momentarily her husband replenished the healing store.
Her first novel, _The Circular Staircase_, was a mystery tale; so was
her second, _The Man in Lower Ten_. They appeared in 1908 and 1909
respectively. Her first play had been produced in New York in 1907. This
was _Double Life_, staged at the Bijou Theater. In conjunction with her
husband, she wrote _The Avenger_ (1908) and much later she collaborated
with Avery Hopwood in the highly successful farce _Seven Days_. This was
first played at the Astor Theater, New York. In 1913, at the Harris
Theater, New York, her farce _Cheer Up_ was put on. “Two plays were
successful,” in Mrs. Rinehart’s opinion.
She has written short stories for all the most popular American
magazines--the _Saturday Evening Post_ perhaps particularly;
_McClure’s_, _Everybody’s_, _Collier’s_, the _American_ and the
_Metropolitan_ are others she enumerates offhand. And her short stories
are among the most excellent produced by a living American writer. Some
of them, unified by possession of the same principal character or
characters, have been published in book form, as _Tish_ and _Bab, a
Sub-Deb_. The stories in _Tish_ relate various escapades of an unmarried
woman of advanced years, the heroine of Mrs. Rinehart’s earlier novel,
_The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry_. Letitia Carberry, “Tish,”
is a person without a literary parallel. Well-to-do, excitement-loving,
curious, with a passion for guiding the lives of two other maidens like
herself, Lizzie and Aggie; with a nephew, Charlie Sands, who throws up
hopeless hands before her unpredictable performances, Miss Carberry is
unique and funny beyond easy characterization. She pokes at the
carburetor with a hairpin, rides horseback in a divided skirt, puts
great faith in blackberry cordial, shoulders a shotgun and mends the
canoe with chewing gum. These things in the tales composing _Tish_; in
_The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry_ we have a story in which
the mystery of extraordinary and scandalous occurrences in a hospital
where Tish is a patient is finally solved by her efforts. Nothing
affords a better exhibition of Mrs. Rinehart’s skill as a story-teller
than this novel. Things that with less skillful handling would be both
ghoulish and shocking, are so related that they strike the reader merely
as bizarre or outrageously laughable, or as heightening the unguessable
puzzle of what is to come. The technical triumph is very great, as great
as that achieved in the last half of George M. Cohan’s play, _Seven Keys
to Baldpate_, where a corpse is lugged about without offending the
observer. _The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry_ is a remarkable
evidence of the lengths to which farce can be carried and remain
inoffensive--and become the source of helpless mirth.
_Bab, a Sub-Deb_, with its account of the doings of a girl who has not
yet “come out,” a sub-débutante, is also unique and, to the extent of
the character’s capacity, just as diverting. Mrs. Rinehart does nothing
by halves, she exploits the possibilities of her people to the top of
their bents--and hers. She exploits--always legitimately--her own
affairs, as in _My Creed_, the autobiographical article in the _American
Magazine_ upon which we have drawn so heavily in this sketch, and _The
Altar of Freedom_, an account of her struggle to part with a son who
felt he must answer America’s call for men in 1917. With gusto she gives
us the account of a vacation trip--see _Through Glacier Park_ or
_Tenting To-Night_. With the heaviest possible charge of sentiment but
never an explosive cap of sentimentality, she puts before us a small
boy, the crown prince of a mythical but completely real kingdom, whose
pitifully circumscribed existence, whose scrapes and friendships and
admiration of Abraham Lincoln, have for their background court intrigues
and the uncovering of treason; read _Long Live the King!_ With complete
self-knowledge comes complete knowledge of others; Mrs. Rinehart can go
straight to the American heart and does it in _The Amazing Interlude_,
that story of Sara Lee Kennedy, who went from a Pennsylvania city to the
Belgian front to make soup for the soldiers. Here is romance so heady
and strong that most readers overlook, purposely and gladly, the
improbability of Henri’s return to Sara Lee and the little house of
mercy after daybreak discovered him, delirious and in a Belgian uniform,
dangling on the German wire. Artistically _The Amazing Interlude_ excels
by its portrait of Harvey, Sara Lee’s fiancé back home, Harvey who
resisted her “call” to service, who brought her back home, whose hard
selfishness as an American and whose lack of comprehension as a man make
him entirely typical of thousands in this country prior to April 6,
1917.
The novel _K._--or story _K._, if we accept Mrs. Rinehart’s disclaimer
as to novel writing--is possibly more representative of her work than
any other single book. It illustrates perfectly her ingenuity in
contriving and handling a plot; for the book ends on page 410 and the
most necessary revelation does not come until page 407. It exemplifies
her finished gift for telling a story; there are no wasted words and in
half a page she can transport you from laughter to tenderness. Half a
page? On page 70 you may see it done in seven lines. The girl Sidney
Page has slipped from a rock into the river, alighting on her feet and
standing neck deep. Rescued by K. Le Moyne, she remarks:
“‘There wasn’t any danger, really, unless--unless the river had
risen.... I dare say I shall have to be washed and ironed.’
“He drew her cautiously to her feet. Her wet skirts clung to her; her
shoes were sodden and heavy. She clung to him frantically, her eyes on
the river below. With the touch of her hands the man’s mirth died. He
held her very carefully, very tenderly, as one holds something
infinitely precious.”
_K._ shows its author’s power to portray character effectively in
sweeping outlines filled in, on occasion, with solid or mottled masses
of color. K. himself is the kind of a person that Mary S. Watts might
have put before us in some 600 closely printed pages. It is a difference
of method merely and while not every one would be able to appreciate the
thousand little touches with which Mrs. Watts drew her hero, Mrs.
Rinehart’s more vigorous delineation is effective at all distances, in
all lights, with almost all readers. She manages in this tale to present
a wide variety of persons and a great range of emotions and she manages
it less by atmospheric details and a single setting--the Street--than by
an astonishing number of relationships between a man and a woman; or, in
the case of Johnny, “the Rosenfeld boy,” and Joe Drummond, a youth and
a woman or girl. It will be worth the reader’s while to note that the
story contains no less than ten such relationships. First there are K.
and Sidney and Joe and Sidney. Then there are Max Wilson and Sidney, Max
Wilson and Carlotta Harrison, Tillie and Mr. Schwitter, Christine Lorenz
and Palmer Howe, Grace Irving and Palmer Howe, Grace Irving and Johnny
Rosenfeld, K. and Tillie and K. and Christine. This is very complicated
and unusual art--if it is not novelizing, then we do not know what
novelizing is. Consider the gamut run. K. and Sidney are the ripe
lovers. Joe’s unrequited love for Sidney is the desperate passion of
immaturity. Max Wilson’s feeling for Sidney is the infatuation of a
nature inherently fickle where women are concerned. Carlotta Harrison’s
love for Max Wilson is the dark passion. The relation between Tillie and
Schwitter goes to the bedrock of human instincts, is a thing Thomas
Hardy might have concerned himself with. It is pathetic; he would have
made it tragic as well; we are satisfied that in her disposition of it
Mrs. Rinehart is sufficiently faithful to the truth of life. Christine
Lorenz and Palmer Howe are the disillusioned married; but in this case,
as Christine said: “‘The only difference between me and other brides is
that I know what I’m getting. Most of them do not.’”
Grace Irving and Palmer Howe bring before us the man and the woman in
their worst relationship in the story, or in life either. Grace Irving
and Johnny Rosenfeld are a picture of thwarted motherhood and a blind
feeling for justice. K. and Tillie are proofs of the reach of friendship
and the efficacy of understanding. K. and Christine give us the woman
saved from herself.
The height--or the depth--to which Mrs. Rinehart attains in this story
is a thing to marvel at, and just as marvelous is the surety with which
she gets her distance. The tenth chapter of _K._ will not easily be
overmatched in American fiction or that of any other country. Here is
Mr. Schwitter, the nurseryman, middle-aged or older, not very
articulate, with a wife in an asylum playing with paper dolls; and here
is Tillie, punching meal tickets for Mrs. McKee, not becoming younger,
lonelier every day, suffering heartaches and disappointment without end.
Mr. Schwitter has proposed a certain thing.
“Tillie cowered against the door, her eyes on his. Here before her,
embodied in this man, stood all that she had wanted and never had. He
meant a home, tenderness, children, perhaps. He turned away from the
look in her eyes and stared out of the front window.
“‘Them poplars out there ought to be taken away,’ he said heavily.
‘They’re hell on sewers.’”
* * * * *
“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 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.”
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 her spoken misgiving at all.
BOOKS BY MARY ROBERTS RINEHART
_The Circular Staircase_, 1908.
_The Man in Lower Ten_, 1909.
_When a Man Marries_, 1909.
_The Window at the White Cat_, 1910.
_The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry_, 1911.
_Where There’s a Will_, 1912.
_The Case of Jenny Brice_, 1913.
_The After House_, 1914.
_The Street of Seven Stars_, 1914.
_K._, 1915.
_Through Glacier Park._
_Tish_, 1916.
_The Altar of Freedom_, 1917.
_Long Live the King!_ 1917.
_Tenting To-Night_, 1918.
_Bab, a Sub-Deb._
_Kings, Queens and Pawns_, 1915.
_The Amazing Interlude_, 1918.
_Twenty-Three and a Half Hours’ Leave_, 1919.
_Dangerous Days_, 1919.
_Love Stories_, 1919.
_Affinities and Other Stories_, 1920.
_“Isn’t That Just Like a Man?”_ 1920.
_The Truce of God_, 1920.
_A Poor Wise Man_, 1920.
_More Tish_, 1921.
_Sight Unseen and The Confession_, 1921.
_The Breaking Point_, 1922.
_Published by George H. Doran Company, New York, except the following,
which are published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston: The After
House, The Street of Seven Stars, K., Through Glacier Park, Tish, The
Altar of Freedom, Long Live the King! and Tenting To-Night._