“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.
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