Had She But Known

by MacLeod, Charlotte;

  This could only be described as hack writing. It is significant that in years to come, when Mary Roberts Rinehart stood atop that seldom attained pinnacle of fame, the short stories she’d written for magazines after she became well known were collected into hardback volumes and resold at extra profits. Those early efforts, however, were left to moulder unwept, unsung, and no doubt quite justly unhonored.

  But the stories sold. Some of them, anyway. At first they didn’t bring in much money. In 1906, according to the Cohn chronology, Mary earned either a little more or a little less than $600. She was using a bankbook left over from before the crash to list her sales and payments, and was not always careful as to dates and amounts. Whatever Mary got was better than nothing, however, and she was learning her craft. Uncle John, shaking his head over one of his niece’s early effusions, had remarked that there was enough plot in it for ten stories. Mary caught the hint and took more care to plan before she wrote.

  Then Mary had another epiphany. Thus far, she had been sending out her stories just as they’d sprung from her pen in the first burst of often-misplaced enthusiasm, only bothering to correct whatever mistakes her young typewriting neighbor had made. But one day, after the postman had brought back a story about the Spanish War for the twelfth time, the discouraged writer read over what she’d written and realized why it hadn’t sold. She did a complete rewrite and sent the revised version to Scribner’s. Their payment was respectable, the lesson was invaluable.

  The techniques of writing can be taught; many have learned them, applied them, and profited from them. This does not mean that people who write are necessarily writers. The genuine writer is a lusus naturae, an aberrant creature to whom getting words down on paper is not an occupation but a necessity. He may write well or ill or some of each. He will write for gain if he can. He will keep on writing when nobody will pay, even if he can’t get anybody to read. The fact that Mary Roberts Rinehart was flying blind during those early years, churning out trash for little cash, did not make her any the less a writer. Though she was hitting too many wrong notes, she was gradually finding her voice.

  Mary didn’t realize it then, but she was somewhat handicapped by not knowing other writers who might have been able to give her helpful bits of information. So far, her only such encounter had been with Willa Cather, who had spent that one year teaching in Allegheny while Mary was doing her nurses’ training. Miss Cather had told Mary that, after she had completed a story, she would lay it aside, sometimes for months on end. Eventually she would take it up again and rewrite the whole text from start to finish.

  That was a valuable tip but Mary had either forgotten it during her arduous stint as a nursing student, bride, and mother, or else had brushed it aside in her fever to put down and send out the clamorous mob of plots and ideas that were rioting in her mind. Anyway, Miss Cather’s method, while a good one, is not for everybody and Mary Roberts Rinehart certainly wasn’t the type to sit around waiting for the muse to show up in its own sweet time. Whatever she wanted, she wanted it now.

  However bright the fires of inspiration might burn, Mary’s Covenanter conscience still wasn’t allowing her to regard her writing as anything more than a spare-time diversion, and she had little time to spare. She was making all her children’s clothes plus a few summer frocks for herself; a doctor’s wife had to keep up appearances however little money she had to do it with. She was seeing new tragedies among her family. Olive’s much-loved little daughter somehow got hold of poison and died. Olive herself was nearly dead from remorse, Cornelia was desolate at the loss of her only granddaughter, and Mary grieved for them all.

  Aunt Sade sent for Mary, wanting professional reassurance that what ailed her was not cancer. She was lying in bed, still as a waxwork; she must not have spoken the dread word above a whisper. People didn’t in those days, for it was too much like ringing the death knell. Mary told the lies that Sade wanted to hear, slipped out to weep in the hallway where her aunt couldn’t see her, then dried her tears and tried to comfort Uncle John.

  John was taking Sade’s decline badly. Though she had been delicate all their married life, it never seemed to have occurred to him that his adored wife could actually die, and be buried, and leave him alone. John would sit by the bed, holding Sade’s cold, slim, white hand as if warning the Grim Reaper to keep away. When he couldn’t stand the silent anguish any longer, he would storm through the grandly furnished house like a desperate, trapped animal.

  Sade died, of course. John brought her body back to Pittsburgh to be buried with the family. She lay in her casket in the Rineharts’ parlor the night before the funeral. Mary must have felt what an inadequate way this was to requite Uncle John for his many kindnesses.

  After Ted’s near fatal experience with the carbolic acid, Mary and Stanley had taken a sitting at a Presbyterian church. This was not the church from which they had been married—here the doctrine was less rigid and the Sabbath was just Sunday. Dressed in the ruffled blouses and knee-length pants that their mother had sewn for them, the three boys walked to Sunday school holding their parents’ hands. They behaved themselves as well as could be expected. They learned to say their prayers every night, kneeling in their nightgowns with mother or father looking on. As children do, the boys also learned to stretch out the number of names on their blessing lists, thus staving off getting into bed for a few minutes longer.

  Alan added a small ritual of his own to the nightly orisons. Mary had noticed that her middle son’s hair had the same fine texture as her late father’s. Since Tom Roberts had gone bald quite early, she advised Alan to massage his scalp every day, for whatever good that might do. Alan was an obedient listener, and he was also something of an efficiency expert. Both parents were deeply touched by the sight of their little boy solemnly intoning his prayers while scrubbing his knuckles over his downy pate.

  CHAPTER 12

  A Toe in the Water; A Foot in the Door

  Mary’s autobiography, when describing those early years, is rife with assurances that her family always came first. She was vehement in asserting that, no matter how brightly her creative fires might be burning, once she heard the slam of the street door and the pounding of footsteps on the stairs (the Rinehart males were all congenital bangers and stompers) she would immediately lay aside her work and become the consummate wife and mother. These protestations might have been thrown in as sops to the mores of the time during which she wrote, when a married woman’s place was still considered to be in the home. Then again, Mary may have been telling the simple truth.

  As any author can testify, creative writing is essentially a solitary profession, best carried on behind a drawn portcullis. Even the slightest interruption can smash one’s concentration with the impact of a physical blow, scattering fragments of exploded imagery all over the room and making further efforts at getting a coherent sentence down on paper impossible until silence reigns again and wits can be regathered for a fresh start. Three little boys clamoring for their after-school milk and cookies, or a doctor husband shouting for his wife to come and hold her thumb on a spurting artery until he could get his needle threaded and his patient sewn back together, would have been powerful incentives for Mary to switch back into her housewife persona.

  Nevertheless, Mary kept on writing. In the beginning she used a small mahogany desk that she’d brought with her from her mother’s house. Finding this inadequate, she moved on to a card table. Once her earnings had topped $1,000, she felt justified in squandering $20 on a flat-topped desk at a secondhand furniture shop. She also acquired the use of a typewriter. This was a Blickendorfer, even then a dinosaur among typewriting machines, with a keyboard unlike that of any other on the market. It belonged to Stanley’s cousin George.

  Uncle George, as the children called him, was a regular Saturday evening visitor. He came for the weekly pillow fight. Between supper and bedtime, George, Stanley, and three wildly excited little boys would rampage through the bedrooms, up and down the s
tairs, snatching pillows off the beds and hurling them at each other in high and raucous glee. Work would surely have been impossible under such conditions, so Mary entertained herself by picking up pillow feathers and practicing on the Blickendorfer. She learned to peck out the letters with one finger of each hand, as many another writer was doing then and would continue to do long after her. She still wrote her original drafts in longhand, but now she could type the revisions for submission to her publishers instead of having to pay the typist down the street.

  Mary never truly mastered the Blickendorfer, however. The master gremlin in her operation was Ted, who found it jolly fun to dash up and bang his wee fist down on three or four keys at once, jamming them together and making work impossible until they’d been patiently untangled. Persistent soul that she was, Mary did manage to poke out a number of short stories and her first book-length serial on that cantankerous old machine before total exasperation set in. She bade a relieved farewell to the Blickendorfer, mended relations with the typist down the street, and thenceforth stuck to her trusty fountain pen.

  That first serial and the two that followed it were, though Mary didn’t realize it at the time, the catalysts that impelled her into the limelight. She’d done them at the urging of Bob Davis, Munsey’s editor, for whom she had already written ten short pieces and with whom she and Stanley became quite friendly. In her autobiography, Mary told an amusing little anecdote about their going to New York and entertaining the Davises for dinner at the Waldorf Hotel. The Rineharts ordered quail for their guests because it seemed such an urbane thing to do. They hadn’t realized what happened to a quail when you took off the feathers. Contrasting the miniature fowls with the stocky trencherman, Mary feared that Bob Davis must have gone away from his expensive meal still hungry. She herself had honored the occasion by wearing an orchid-colored evening gown and an enormous hat freighted with orchid plumes. She expressed a hope that the splendor of her attire had made up for the scantiness of the fare, but it probably hadn’t.

  Anyway, Mary took Bob’s advice about the serial. She was diffident about her ability to sustain a long narrative, but was scheduled to have more gynecological surgery and was unable just then to do much else but sit, so she thought she might as well give it a try.

  Now that they had some extra money coming in, the Rineharts decided to get the children out of the hot city for the summer. They rented a house in the suburbs fully equipped with a porch, a cherry tree, and a gardener named Jackson who was kind and quiet but apparently none too bright. Cornelia Roberts came to visit, and decided it would be fun to gather cherries for the grandchildren. Jackson fetched a ladder and held it for her while she picked.

  Being Cornelia, Mary’s mother was not satisfied to stay on the ladder. She ventured out on a limb. It broke under her by now not inconsiderable weight, she landed on her daughter, who’d been standing directly underneath. Jackson left Mary sprawled on the ground, struggling to get her breath back while he carried Cornelia into the house.

  Neither of the women was badly hurt, it was Jackson who got into real trouble. A night or two after the cherry tree incident, he wandered downtown, got drunk, and shot a woman dead. He was given the death sentence but granted a reprieve; Dr. Rinehart managed to get him freed. Jackson came to thank the doctor afterward but seemed disoriented by what had happened. Mary said the traffic frightened him and he kept wanting to stop strangers on the street and talk to them.

  Little things like a shooting and a squashing weren’t about to stop Mary from working. She wrote most of her serial sitting on that rented porch with a notebook in her lap. She wondered later why she’d chosen to build her plot around a murder in a Pullman car, but the device worked well enough to bring in some real money. She called it The Man in Lower Ten, collected a hefty $400 for her work, and stuffed the carbon into a desk drawer.

  Mary’s serial ran in All-Story magazine from January to April 1906; by the end of its run she’d written some new short pieces and a play. Automobiles were quite the vogue by now; she based her play on an auto race. Her idea was to have a scenic panorama cranked rapidly back and forth across the stage to create the illusion that the cars were really moving. Her script was awful, her auto race a failure. Not until television became part of the American way of life would inane dialogue and mindless car chases capture the fancy of the American viewer. Mary chucked the worthless play aside and wrote another serial.

  She’d hit her stride by now. She tossed off her second effort in a month or so. This time the locale was less exotic, merely a large country house reminiscent of those in which she’d attended a few dances before Allegheny became part of Pittsburgh and all the nabobs moved off to Sewickley. For The Circular Staircase, All-Story gave her $500 and scheduled the serial to run from November 1907 to March 1908. The carbon of her previous effort was already gathering coal dust in a drawer of her twenty-dollar desk, and she dumped this one in on top of the first.

  Now that she’d learned how much better serials paid than short pieces, she batted out a third, The Mystery of 1122. Live Wire magazine paid her $500 and would start running it in February 1908.

  As serials, the three that she’d dashed off in the midst of having her operation, tending her children, running her household, and writing a variety of short pieces brought in some welcome cash but made no great stir. But late in 1907, Uncle John, lonely in Cincinnati, still missing his beloved Sade, came to visit his favorite niece. He’d heard on the family grapevine that Mary had been doing fairly well lately with her little stories. How about showing him something she’d published?

  John Roberts was no gentle critic. Mary didn’t want to risk his censure but how could she refuse? She fished in her desk drawer, took out the by now rather dilapidated carbon of The Circular Staircase, which happened to be on top of the pile, and handed it over. Uncle John sat down to read. He kept on reading until lunchtime, he hurried through his meal and went back to read some more. He finished in the late afternoon, and gave his verdict.

  “That’s a book, Mary. You ought to have it published.”

  Mary didn’t think her story was good enough for a book. John said nonsense, he’d read lots worse. Stanley found the notion of approaching a book publisher quaint and amusing, but supposed it wouldn’t do any harm to try. So the next morning Mary took the bedraggled carbon to a local bindery and asked if it could be made presentable. No problem, said the binder. He trimmed the ragged edges, bound the pages inside a limp cover, stamped the title in gilt letters on the front, and charged her three dollars. Seeing her humble effort in such elegant guise, Mary felt a little more confident about sending it off. But where?

  That problem was also quickly solved. Mary took an Anna Katharine Green mystery novel out of the bookcase, noted the publisher’s name, and addressed her package to Bobbs-Merrill in Indianapolis. She had no great expectation of getting a return on the three dollars she’d paid to the bookbinder. She’d begun to realize how bad most of her work so far had been, how little she actually knew about writing. She had started to study the techniques of authors whom she respected, she reviewed her high school grammar, she wore out one copy of Roget’s Thesaurus and bought another. As to her reckless facility at getting words on paper, that was something Mary couldn’t help. She wrote as swiftly as she thought, darting her fountain pen into the inkwell when the ink in the cartridge wouldn’t flow fast enough to keep up with her hand.

  And this was just in her spare time. There were still the housekeeping, the medical practice, and the family. Even with servants in the house, a conscientious wife and mother had to oversee every task and do her own food shopping. Mary was at the meat market some days after John’s visit, meditating between the relative merits of steaks and chops, when the butcher’s telephone rang. Surprisingly, this call was for Mrs. Rinehart; her husband was on the line. No, none of the boys had had an accident, it was just that Stanley thought she might like to know she’d had a letter from a Mr. Hewitt Howland at Bobbs-Merrill. Should h
e read what Mr. Howland had written?

  Of course he should. Mary braced herself against the gory chopping block and listened.

  “My dear Mrs. Rinehart,” the letter began. “I have read The Circular Staircase not only with pleasure, but with thrills and shivers.”

  Thrills and shivers, indeed! Mary was having them too, had Mr. Hewitt Howland but known. Howland not only wanted to publish her book, he even offered to pay for the right to do so. And he wanted to come to her house, and talk to her about writing more books!

  There was only one thing to do, and Mary did it. She dashed to the telegraph office and wired Mr. Howland to come right ahead. She dashed back to buy steak and ice cream, dashed home, and baked a cake.

  When mother baked a cake, the Rinehart children knew it was a party. But whom was this party for? Mary wasn’t quite sure herself.

  “It’s not really a party,” she told them, “just a special sort of day.”

  “What’s a special sort of day?”

  A day when they had cake and ice cream for dessert, naturally. This was hardly the way to start a serious literary career, but Mary had no time to play author. Those guest room curtains had done well enough for her and Stanley’s visiting relatives, but here was a big, important editor coming all the way from Indianapolis just to see Mary Roberts Rinehart. And that brass bed needed a valance, and what if Mr. Howland showed up tomorrow?

  First on the next day’s agenda was a quick trip to the dry-goods store. Mary bought fresh material, lugged it home, and began to sew. She kept on sewing until late the night before Howland was due to arrive, and the final curtain got hung in the nick of time. What her new editor thought of the bedroom decor was beside the point—what he’d come to see were manuscripts. Had Mrs. Rinehart anything else to show him?