by Frank Norris
Wilbur did not answer; he was watching the schooner.
“I can’t stay!” cried the other again. “If the patrol should signal — I can’t stop here, I must be on duty. Come back, you can’t do anything!”
“No!”
“I have got to go!” Hodgson ran back, swung himself on the horse, and rode away at a furious gallop, inclining his head against the gusts.
And the schooner in a world of flying spray, white scud, and driving spoondrift, her cordage humming, her forefoot churning, the flag at her peak straining stiff in the gale, came up into the narrow passage of the Golden Gate, riding high upon the outgoing tide. On she came, swinging from crest to crest of the waves that kept her company and that ran to meet the ocean, shouting and calling out beyond there under the low, scudding clouds.
Wilbur had climbed to the top of the old fort. Erect upon its granite ledge he stood, and watched and waited.
Not once did the “Bertha Millner” falter in her race. Like an unbitted horse, all restraint shaken off, she ran free toward the ocean as to her pasture-land. She came nearer, nearer, rising and rolling with the seas, her bowsprit held due west, pointing like a finger out to sea, to the west — out to the world of romance. And then at last, as the little vessel drew opposite the old fort and passed not one hundred yards away, Wilbur, watching from the rampart, saw Moran lying upon the deck with outstretched arms and calm, upturned face; lying upon the deck of that lonely fleeing schooner as upon a bed of honor, still and calm, her great braids smooth upon her breast, her arms wide; alone with the sea; alone in death as she had been in life. She passed out of his life as she had come into it — alone, upon a derelict ship, abandoned to the sea. She went out with the tide, out with the storms; out, out, out to the great gray Pacific that knew her and loved her, and that shouted and called for her, and thundered in the joy of her as she came to meet him like a bride to meet a bridegroom.
“Good-by, Moran!” shouted Wilbur as she passed. “Good-by, good-by, Moran! You were not for me — not for me! The ocean is calling for you, dear; don’t you hear him? Don’t you hear him? Good-by, good-by, good-by!”
The schooner swept by, shot like an arrow through the swirling currents of the Golden Gate, and dipped and bowed and courtesied to the Pacific that reached toward her his myriad curling fingers. They infolded her, held her close, and drew her swiftly, swiftly out to the great heaving bosom, tumultuous and beating in its mighty joy, its savage exultation of possession.
Wilbur stood watching. The little schooner lessened in the distance — became a shadow in mist and flying spray — a shadow moving upon the face of the great waste of water. Fainter and fainter she grew, vanished, reappeared, was heaved up again — a mere speck upon the western sky — a speck that dwindled and dwindled, then slowly melted away into the gray of the horizon.
MCTEAGUE
A STORY OF SAN FRANCISCO
Critics agree that McTeague: A Story of San Francisco, published by Doubleday and McClure in 1899, was Frank Norris’ first great novel. Although reminiscent of works by French realists such as Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant, the novel had its own strongly American voice and continues to intrigue readers and scholars today. An article by Denison Hailey Clift, published in the March 1907 issue of The Pacific Monthly, emphasized Norris’ descriptive realism and noted that he conceived his idea for the novel as early as his student days at the University of California:
At that time he lived at 1822 Sacramento Street, one block and a half above Polk. On his walks daily into town the life of this “accommodation street” fell under his observation, and with a remarkably discerning eye he studied the significant features of that life. In the opening chapter of McTeague the great dentist is made to stand in his office window and gaze down at the thronging life below. Before the fire you, too, could have stood there and seen the same life that the burly dentist saw – the passing butcher-boys and plumber’s apprentices and shop-girls and peddlars calling ‘wi’ game’ and car-conductors and fine ladies come down from the avenue one block above. This office of McTeague’s was no picture of the author’s fancy.
Norris continued to work on the novel while a graduate student at Harvard University and finished it while living in “the wilds of Placer County.” While there, Clift mentions that Norris decided to include a “picture of himself”: “a tall, lean young man, with a thick head of hair surprisingly gray, who was playing with a half-grown Great Dane puppy.”
Critic Frederic Taber Cooper wrote in the November 1899 issue of The Bookman that “Frank Norris is a realist by instinct and by creed,” adding that “it has often been pointed out how each of Zola’s novels is dominated by a central symbol, some vast personification, which is constantly kept before the reader. Similarly, to take but one of Mr. Norris’ novels, the symbol in McTeague is the spirit of greed represented by gold...”
G. H. Montague, in the July 1901 issue of The Harvard Monthly, commented on McTeague’s “powerful, relentless reality,” and outlined its plot:
The central figure is the heavy, sluggish dentist, McTeague, immensely strong, docile and stupid. Into his vegetating existence comes Marcus Schouler, the excitable, loud-talking political heeler, with his pretty blue-eyed little cousin Trina. Upon this tiny young girl, with the marvelous heaped coils of black hair, the dentist bestows an animal love. With chivalrous rococo Marcus gives up Trina, the dentist marries her; and then, in an overwhelming presentation of the modern curse of money, the theme of the book begins to work itself out...Even the minor characters of the story are haunted by the desire for money: the language of the slums is in terms of money. One by one the great curse drags them down to destruction...
McTeague, which noted author Hamlin Garland described as “a mine of inexhaustible riches of observation,” provided material for filmmakers as early as 1916, when directory Barry O’Niel produced the now lost silent film, also known as Life’s a Whirlpool. Eric von Stroheim wrote and directed the next version, entitled Greed, which appeared in 1924, starring Gibson Gowland as McTeague, and ZaSu Pitts as Trina Sieppe. Although mostly panned at the time of its release, the film has since gained in critical stature and in 1991, the Library of Congress selected Greed for the National Film Registry. A 1989 radio adaptation by Karen Kearns featured such well-known actors as, Stacy Keach, Carol Kane, Hector Elizondo, JoBeth Williams, Michael York, Katherine Helman, Ed Asner, and Joe Spano. In 1992, the Lyric Opera of Chicago performed an operatic adaptation of McTeague, composed by William Bolcom with a libretto by Arnold Weinstein and Robert Altman. Tenor Ben Heppner played McTeague, while soprano Catherine Malfitano played Trina.
New York: Doubleday & McClure, 1899, first edition
Norris close to the time of publication
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
A 1902 edition, Doubleday & Page
New York: Doubleday, Page and Co. 1914 edition in dust jacket
New York: Doubleday, Page and Co. 1920. New Edition.
A Poster for Greed, the 1924 adaptation of McTeague, directed by Erich von Stroheim and starring ZaSu Pitts and Gibson Gowland
A scene from the 1924 film adaptation
A scene from the 1924 film adaptation
A scene from the 1924 film adaptation
A scene from the 1924 film adaptation
A scene from the 1924 film adaptation
The poster for the 1924 film adaptation
McTeague’
s Saloon, 1237 Polk Street, San Francisco, named after Frank Norris’ novel
CHAPTER 1
It was Sunday, and, according to his custom on that day, McTeague took his dinner at two in the afternoon at the car conductors’ coffee-joint on Polk Street. He had a thick gray soup; heavy, underdone meat, very hot, on a cold plate; two kinds of vegetables; and a sort of suet pudding, full of strong butter and sugar. On his way back to his office, one block above, he stopped at Joe Frenna’s saloon and bought a pitcher of steam beer. It was his habit to leave the pitcher there on his way to dinner.
Once in his office, or, as he called it on his signboard, “Dental Parlors,” he took off his coat and shoes, unbuttoned his vest, and, having crammed his little stove full of coke, lay back in his operating chair at the bay window, reading the paper, drinking his beer, and smoking his huge porcelain pipe while his food digested; crop-full, stupid, and warm. By and by, gorged with steam beer, and overcome by the heat of the room, the cheap tobacco, and the effects of his heavy meal, he dropped off to sleep. Late in the afternoon his canary bird, in its gilt cage just over his head, began to sing. He woke slowly, finished the rest of his beer — very flat and stale by this time — and taking down his concertina from the bookcase, where in week days it kept the company of seven volumes of “Allen’s Practical Dentist,” played upon it some half-dozen very mournful airs.
McTeague looked forward to these Sunday afternoons as a period of relaxation and enjoyment. He invariably spent them in the same fashion. These were his only pleasures — to eat, to smoke, to sleep, and to play upon his concertina.
The six lugubrious airs that he knew, always carried him back to the time when he was a car-boy at the Big Dipper Mine in Placer County, ten years before. He remembered the years he had spent there trundling the heavy cars of ore in and out of the tunnel under the direction of his father. For thirteen days of each fortnight his father was a steady, hard-working shift-boss of the mine. Every other Sunday he became an irresponsible animal, a beast, a brute, crazy with alcohol.
McTeague remembered his mother, too, who, with the help of the Chinaman, cooked for forty miners. She was an overworked drudge, fiery and energetic for all that, filled with the one idea of having her son rise in life and enter a profession. The chance had come at last when the father died, corroded with alcohol, collapsing in a few hours. Two or three years later a travelling dentist visited the mine and put up his tent near the bunk-house. He was more or less of a charlatan, but he fired Mrs. McTeague’s ambition, and young McTeague went away with him to learn his profession. He had learnt it after a fashion, mostly by watching the charlatan operate. He had read many of the necessary books, but he was too hopelessly stupid to get much benefit from them.
Then one day at San Francisco had come the news of his mother’s death; she had left him some money — not much, but enough to set him up in business; so he had cut loose from the charlatan and had opened his “Dental Parlors” on Polk Street, an “accommodation street” of small shops in the residence quarter of the town. Here he had slowly collected a clientele of butcher boys, shop girls, drug clerks, and car conductors. He made but few acquaintances. Polk Street called him the “Doctor” and spoke of his enormous strength. For McTeague was a young giant, carrying his huge shock of blond hair six feet three inches from the ground; moving his immense limbs, heavy with ropes of muscle, slowly, ponderously. His hands were enormous, red, and covered with a fell of stiff yellow hair; they were hard as wooden mallets, strong as vises, the hands of the old-time car-boy. Often he dispensed with forceps and extracted a refractory tooth with his thumb and finger. His head was square-cut, angular; the jaw salient, like that of the carnivora.
McTeague’s mind was as his body, heavy, slow to act, sluggish. Yet there was nothing vicious about the man. Altogether he suggested the draught horse, immensely strong, stupid, docile, obedient.
When he opened his “Dental Parlors,” he felt that his life was a success, that he could hope for nothing better. In spite of the name, there was but one room. It was a corner room on the second floor over the branch post-office, and faced the street. McTeague made it do for a bedroom as well, sleeping on the big bed-lounge against the wall opposite the window. There was a washstand behind the screen in the corner where he manufactured his moulds. In the round bay window were his operating chair, his dental engine, and the movable rack on which he laid out his instruments. Three chairs, a bargain at the second-hand store, ranged themselves against the wall with military precision underneath a steel engraving of the court of Lorenzo de’ Medici, which he had bought because there were a great many figures in it for the money. Over the bed-lounge hung a rifle manufacturer’s advertisement calendar which he never used. The other ornaments were a small marble-topped centre table covered with back numbers of “The American System of Dentistry,” a stone pug dog sitting before the little stove, and a thermometer. A stand of shelves occupied one corner, filled with the seven volumes of “Allen’s Practical Dentist.” On the top shelf McTeague kept his concertina and a bag of bird seed for the canary. The whole place exhaled a mingled odor of bedding, creosote, and ether.
But for one thing, McTeague would have been perfectly contented. Just outside his window was his signboard — a modest affair — that read: “Doctor McTeague. Dental Parlors. Gas Given”; but that was all. It was his ambition, his dream, to have projecting from that corner window a huge gilded tooth, a molar with enormous prongs, something gorgeous and attractive. He would have it some day, on that he was resolved; but as yet such a thing was far beyond his means.
When he had finished the last of his beer, McTeague slowly wiped his lips and huge yellow mustache with the side of his hand. Bull-like, he heaved himself laboriously up, and, going to the window, stood looking down into the street.
The street never failed to interest him. It was one of those cross streets peculiar to Western cities, situated in the heart of the residence quarter, but occupied by small tradespeople who lived in the rooms above their shops. There were corner drug stores with huge jars of red, yellow, and green liquids in their windows, very brave and gay; stationers’ stores, where illustrated weeklies were tacked upon bulletin boards; barber shops with cigar stands in their vestibules; sad-looking plumbers’ offices; cheap restaurants, in whose windows one saw piles of unopened oysters weighted down by cubes of ice, and china pigs and cows knee deep in layers of white beans. At one end of the street McTeague could see the huge power-house of the cable line. Immediately opposite him was a great market; while farther on, over the chimney stacks of the intervening houses, the glass roof of some huge public baths glittered like crystal in the afternoon sun. Underneath him the branch post-office was opening its doors, as was its custom between two and three o’clock on Sunday afternoons. An acrid odor of ink rose upward to him. Occasionally a cable car passed, trundling heavily, with a strident whirring of jostled glass windows.
On week days the street was very lively. It woke to its work about seven o’clock, at the time when the newsboys made their appearance together with the day laborers. The laborers went trudging past in a straggling file — plumbers’ apprentices, their pockets stuffed with sections of lead pipe, tweezers, and pliers; carpenters, carrying nothing but their little pasteboard lunch baskets painted to imitate leather; gangs of street workers, their overalls soiled with yellow clay, their picks and long-handled shovels over their shoulders; plasterers, spotted with lime from head to foot. This little army of workers, tramping steadily in one direction, met and mingled with other toilers of a different description — conductors and “swing men” of the cable company going on duty; heavy-eyed night clerks from the drug stores on their way home to sleep; roundsmen returning to the precinct police station to make their night report, and Chinese market gardeners teetering past under their heavy baskets. The cable cars began to fill up; all along the street could be seen the shopkeepers taking down their shutters.
Between seven and eight the street breakfasted. Now
and then a waiter from one of the cheap restaurants crossed from one sidewalk to the other, balancing on one palm a tray covered with a napkin. Everywhere was the smell of coffee and of frying steaks. A little later, following in the path of the day laborers, came the clerks and shop girls, dressed with a certain cheap smartness, always in a hurry, glancing apprehensively at the power-house clock. Their employers followed an hour or so later — on the cable cars for the most part whiskered gentlemen with huge stomachs, reading the morning papers with great gravity; bank cashiers and insurance clerks with flowers in their buttonholes.
At the same time the school children invaded the street, filling the air with a clamor of shrill voices, stopping at the stationers’ shops, or idling a moment in the doorways of the candy stores. For over half an hour they held possession of the sidewalks, then suddenly disappeared, leaving behind one or two stragglers who hurried along with great strides of their little thin legs, very anxious and preoccupied.
Towards eleven o’clock the ladies from the great avenue a block above Polk Street made their appearance, promenading the sidewalks leisurely, deliberately. They were at their morning’s marketing. They were handsome women, beautifully dressed. They knew by name their butchers and grocers and vegetable men. From his window McTeague saw them in front of the stalls, gloved and veiled and daintily shod, the subservient provision men at their elbows, scribbling hastily in the order books. They all seemed to know one another, these grand ladies from the fashionable avenue. Meetings took place here and there; a conversation was begun; others arrived; groups were formed; little impromptu receptions were held before the chopping blocks of butchers’ stalls, or on the sidewalk, around boxes of berries and fruit.