Books: Angry Man's Romance

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"Bring me your first chapter in two weeks," said Tarkington. Roberts dashed home, in a week wrote Chapter I of Arundel. Tarkington thought it was fine. Soon, with $1,000 from Publisher Russell Doubleday (who showed "astounding trustfulness"), Roberts rushed off to the cold discomforts of an Italian "palace" where, by "sitting at a desk, facing a blank wall," he wrote 2,200 words a day. Now & again he would storm out to take furious potshots with his .22 rifle at squirpling sparrows. When Arundel was finished in 1929, Novelist Roberts decided that "the life of a railroad track-worker or a lumberjack may often be easier." But he has been writing historical novels ever since.

January 1930 was the worst possible moment for a historical novel to come out. Amid long and difficult labor pains, the "proletarian" novel was being born. If the hero and heroine spoke bad English mixed with a brave obscenity, they were proletarians. Characters who spoke good English were, by Depression critical standards, the enemies of progress.

In such circumstances Arundel's sale was small, but it was steady. Soon Roberts was working on The Lively Lady, an early 19th-Century story of privateering and Dartmoor jail. Then he went back to the American Revolution. Rabble in Arms was finished in the hungry autumn of 1933. Wrote Roberts in his journal: "Finished the proofs. Broke and almost dead." Said A. Hamilton Gibbs: "A masterly presentation of the period." Murmured Friend Alexander Woollcott: "A fine murmurous forest of a book."

Novelist Roberts still did not have a bestseller. But his publishers began to note something else that pleased them just as much—a steady sale of Roberts books. Roberts was fast becoming something better than a best-seller—a publisher's property. He had started something with his historical novels. Suddenly U. S. readers forgot the proletarians, took up Anthony Adverse, then Gone With the Wind.

Roberts went on writing. Each of his books had a way of leading to another.

Each grew out of research for one that went before. He wrote: "I began to get a sort of broad picture of what had gone on in Maine and New England in the old days. . . . It dawned on me that nobody had ever written it—nobody: not even historians. . . . I believe the experiences of the Northern army are almost without parallel in the history of War; but out of what history can you get an understanding of it? Not out of one damned history. Or out of ten. And if that isn't a show-up for our historians. . . ." Privately he has said with unprintable interpolations: "They ain't telling the truth. The history of America has been —, —, and —I didn't have the faintest idea that we had sacrificed so much truth for intolerance."

In 1937 he published his best-seller—Northwest Passage. In the rise & fall of No. 1 Indian Fighter Major Robert Rogers, Roberts had a dramatic theme. He had also learned a lot about writing. Northwest Passage sold like hot cakes, was bought by M. G. M. for a Spencer Tracy movie.