Читать книгу The Women Who Make Our Novels - Grant M. Overton - Страница 14

Table of Contents

“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.