by Frank Norris
“I don’t want your congratulations!” the harassed, overworked doctor bellowed. “I don’t want your presentations! I want wood, I want water, and-oh, I want those fifty cases of condensed milk!”
The loss of this condensed milk was a grievance which the doctor could not forget. To the Cubans had been intrusted the duty of transporting fifty cases from Siboney to Caney. The milk never arrived, and I know of one little baby who died in its mother’s arms for lack of it. How many more died, unknown and unnoted? Twenty? A dozen? Six? Hard to say. That one, at least, was not saved is laid to the account of that Cuban relief committee.
Food and workers were alike insufficient to meet the demands of thirty thousand starving people on those first two days. We stayed and worked as long as we could, and a little after noon we rode away in a drenching rain. But for nearly half a mile down the road, as our steaming horses toiled through mud, fetlock deep, the vague murmur of the crowd in the plaza came back to us, prolonged, lamentable, pitiful beyond expression — the cry of people dying for lack of food.
Comida! Comida!
Atlantic Monthly, March, 1899.
The Contextual Pieces
LIST OF ARTICLES, ESSAYS AND REVIEWS
CONTENTS
From: University Chronicle, V. 5, No. 3, October 1902, p.240-245
From: University Chronicle, V.5, No. 4, January 1903, p.324-331
From: The Bellman, Volume VII, No. 157, July 17, 1909, p.862-863
From: Overland Monthly, Volume LX, No. 6, December 1912, p.533-534
From: The Bookseller and Stationer, V. XIX, No. 3, March 1903, p.50
From: The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, V.14, James T. White & Co., 1910, p.347
From: Neale’s Magazine, V. III, No. 4, June 1914, p.415-418
From: The Literary News, V. XXIII, No. 5, May 1902 p.155
From: City and State, V. XIV, No. 3, January 15, 1903, p.56
From: The Bookman, November 1903, p.311-312
From: The Canadian Journal of Medicine and Surgery, V. XIII, No.4, April 1903, p.300-301
From: The Academy and Literature, No. 1644, November 7, 1903, p.491
From: The Harvard Monthly, V. XXVIII, No. 2, April 1899, p.78-80
From: The Literary World, V. XXII, No.26, December 19, 1891, p.491
From: Public Opinion, V. XXXV, No. 13, September 24, 1903, p.409
From: The Park Review, V. IV, No. 3, April 1903, p.137-138
From: The Literary Digest, V. XXV, No. 19, November 8, 1902, p.593
From: The Lamp, V. XXVI, No. 1, February 1903, p.54-56
From: The Book News Monthly, V. XXI, No. 246, February 1903, p.443
From: The Book News Monthly, V. XXI, No. 246, February 1903, p.437-438
From: The Pacific Monthly, V. XVII, No.3, March 1907, p.313-322
From: Public Opinion, V. XXXIV, No. 4, January 22, 1903, p.121
From: The Albany Law Journal, February 1903, p.62
From: Sunset, V. X, No.2, December 1902, p.165-167
From: The Bookman, V.10, November 1899, p.204
From: The Bookman, V.10, November 1899, p.234-238
From: The Critic, V. XLII, No. 3. March 1903, p.216-218
From: The Harvard Monthly, V. XXXVI, No. 2, April 1903, p.57-64
From: The Phi Gamma Delta, V. 25. December 1902, p.157-163
From: The Harvard Monthly, V. XXXII, No. 5, July 1901
From: The Menorah, V. XXXVI, No. 1. January 1904, p.27-31
From: Great Companions, by Edith Wyatt, D. Appleton and Company, 1917, p.48-58
From: The Bookman, V. IX, June 1899, p.356-357
From: Sunset, V. X, No. 3, January 1903, p.245-246
From: The Bookman, V. 16, December 1902, p.334-335
From: The Bookman, V. 13, May 1901, p.245-247
From: Some American Story Tellers, Henry Holt, 1911, p.295-330
From: The World’s Work, V. 5, December 1902, p.2830
From: The Arena, V. 27, No. 5, May 1902, p.547-554
From: Current Opinion, V. 56, No.6, June 1914, p.455-456
From: Literature and Insurgency, by John Curtis Underwood, Mitchell Kennerley, 1914, -178
From: Out West, V. XVIII, No. 1, January 1903, p.49-55
From: The World’s Work, V.5, No. 4, February 1903, p.3133-3134
From: The Outlook, V. 73, No. 3, January 17, 1903, p.152-154
From: The Atlantic Monthly, V. XCI, No. DXLVII, May 1903, p.687-692
From: Current Literature, V. 26, No. 2, August 1899, p.114
From: Current Literature, V. XXXIV, No. 1, January 1903, p.105
From: Literature, No. II, New Series, March 24, 1899, p.241-242
From: Harper’s Weekly, V. XLVII, No. 2412, March 14, 1903, p.433
From: The Philharmonic, V. III, No. 2, March 1903, p.120-121
From: The North American Review, V. 175, No. DLIII, December 1902, p.769-778
From: The Overland Monthly, V. XLV, No. 6. June 1905, p.504-508
From: The Bookman, V. 39, May 1914, p.236-238
From: A Book of Prefaces, by H.L. Mencken, Knopf, 1917, p.70-71
From: A History of American Literature since 1870, by Fred Lewis Pattee, Century, 1915, p.398-400
From: Current Literature, V. LII, No. 2, February 1912, p.227-228
From: The World’s Work, V. V, No. 6, April 1903, p.3276
From: American Literature, by Thomas Ernest Rankin and Wilford M. Aikin, Harcourt, Brace, 1922, p.257-259
From: The Speaker, July 7, 1900, p.394
From: The Vassar Miscellany, V. XXIX, No. 3, December 1899, p.197
From: The Overland Monthly, V. XIX, No.109, January 1892, p.106
From: Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, November 1891, p.647-648
From: The Critic, V. XVI, No. 414, December 5, 1891, p.316
From: Literature: an International Gazette of Criticism, V.3, No. 61, December 17, 1898, p.577-578
From: Munsey’s Magazine, V. XX, No. 4, January 1899, p.653
From: The Speaker, November 17, 1900, p.190
From: The Critic, V. XXXVI, No. 4, April 1900, p.352-353
From: The Critic, V. XLIV, No. 4, April 1904, p.382
From: University Chronicle, V. 5, No. 3, October 1902, p.240-245
“In Memoriam – Frank Norris. 1870-1902
By: H.M., ‘94
It is hard to write of Frank Norris as of one whose work is done; the fact is hard to realise and harder to accept. It is proper, however, that in this journal should appear the tribute we give to the dead, for he was not only a distinguished but a very loyal and enthusiastic son of this University. His work in American letters is for more competent hands than mine to write of. To me he was always a very dear college friend and it is out of the intimacy of those years together that I can speak, with knowledge, of the man he was outside of his books.
Norris was twenty years old when he entered the freshman class of the University in 1890. He was born in Chicago and with the exception of two years abroad, he had lived for most of his life in San Francisco. His earliest bent was toward art. He spent a few years at the Mark Hopkins Institute, if I mistake not, and then went to Paris to study in Julian’s atelier. He learned a great deal about French literature while in Paris, and was unconsciously influenced a good deal by the French view of life — especially the love of beauty and of the pleasant side of existence. He threw himself with zest into the study of mediaeval French armor, costume and architecture. There is a story of his in the Overland Monthly, somewhere in the files of ‘95 or ‘96, which shows the result of this boyish enthusiasm. But he never became an artist, possibly because he did not persevere long enough to reach proficiency. Quite frequently he used to illustrate his own earlier stories; the Blue and Gold of the different years of his college life and later the Overland Monthly show some of his work. It was not very good; his figures were apt to be wooden and the whole effect rather amateurish. His purely decorative work was more successful, though often imitative. I speak o
f this period of his life simply to suggest the influence which this artist life may have had in the development of his genius.
When Norris entered college I doubt if he had any friends here at all — the years of art study had broken off the friendships of the preparatory school. I remember him as a tall thin man, very dark, with hair just beginning to show the gray that was afterward so characteristic, his fashion of wearing a small moustache and side-whiskers giving him a rather foreign appearance that only wore away with longer acquaintance. He was slow in making friends at this time, strangely enough, for he was one of the most attractive men I ever met. When in the latter part of the second term he was named as one of the Bourdon speakers, there was some criticism of the freshman president for putting in an unknown man. Norris never had an opportunity to justify his selection; the sophomore class abducted him three days before the celebration and kept him in Oakland till it was finished. Soon afterward he was asked to join the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, and no man has ever shown so ready an appreciation of this offer of friendship from his fellows or given in return such wealth of comradeship.
Of Norris’s work as a student there is little to be written, of his student life a great deal. Some college president has said that a good part of education is in rubbing against the walls of a great university. Frank Norris’s university education was mostly of this kind. He hated study of the methodical sort and employed every means to avoid it. It may be a disappointment to classical scholars who have noted the effectiveness with which in The Octopus he uses the device so familiar in Homer and Virgil of reiteration of descriptive phrases, to learn that he knew no Greek and had his friends help him with his Latin which he hated heartily. He always passed by a scratch. It is just to say that his preparation had been poor. He liked history and I believe did good work in English literature. Minto and the prose composition of the freshman course in English were an abomination to him. In French he must have taken every course that the University offered, partly because he liked the literature and the genial professor who taught it, but not a little because preparation of recitations was to him unnecessary. He took no philosophy or science, except the two courses of Professor Joseph LeConte and those only for love of the man. Mathematics was his bete noire. As every examination approached he employed a competent tutor with a view of clearing away his entrance mathematics, but failed time after time. He never attained regular standing and never graduated. I remember once finding him in his room working hard and in great distress of mind, in preparation for an examination in algebra. His rather heroic method was to learn by heart the various demonstrations of the text; he simply refused altogether to exert his mind to reason it out.
In everything that went to make up student life outside of class-rooms, he found a keen delight. To him who was always seeking for real life, this and not study was the real life par excellence of the college period, which he would not live again; and so he lived it with all his might. He was always ready for any college prank or celebration and never missed a rush or a football game. Indeed he was an enthusiastic spectator of a game on the campus only a week before his death. His greatest joy in college, however, was in the club life of his fraternity. He was an ideal club man; he had the social gift beyond any man I have known. And all the time he was storing up material for his later work. The character of Annixter in The Octopus in the early part of its development is one of his club friends to the life, and many of the incidents in his books actually happened within the walls of the fraternity house.
With all his distaste for the grind of hard study, however, he was anything but an idler. He read a great deal. It was then, I think, that the influence of Zola began to exert itself. He read much, always of course in the original, and was an enthusiastic admirer of the French realist, refusing even to consider apology necessary for his frequent grossness. It is only in his later work, however, that Zola’s influence can be seen. Norris scribbled quite a bit while in college for the college papers, and occasionally for the Argonaut. I doubt if he wrote anything of particular merit at that time — it was a time of whimsies when he would write his name with a “y,” and of very evident imitation of Richard Harding Davis and of Kipling, in the order named. Exception should be made of his Junior Day farce, which showed effective handling of humorous situations, and especially of Yvernelle, his first ambitious work. Yvernelle was a long poem of mediaeval love and chivalry in the style of Walter Scott, which was brought out in holiday form by Lippincott in 1892. It was the work, I think, of his freshman and sophomore years. To his friends it always seemed a great book, but it is a fact nevertheless that it had only a passing interest for the literary world, a circumstance which, let us hope, merely points to the obsolescence of its literary form.
I cannot now remember whether Norris had fully made up his mind to follow literature until after he left Berkeley in 1894. The succeeding year at Harvard, however, was given to earnest work with this purpose directly in view. He often spoke of the value of that year in teaching him the technique of his art.
What follows of his career is more or less matter of common knowledge. He went to South Africa in 1895 as a correspondent. After his return to San Francisco in ‘96 he began a literary apprenticeship of two years on The Wave, a San Francisco weekly that has since suspended publication. He wrote many short stories, some of remarkable power. Blix and A Man’s Woman are of this period. Moran of the Lady Letty, a vigorous sea-story, attracted the attention of certain New York publishers and through them Norris was sent to Cuba as a correspondent during the operations around Santiago. Then began a connection with the New York house that was but recently terminated. Hitherto he had only been learning his art and trying his powers, “flying kites,” as he expressed it. McTeague, which appeared in March, 1899, was his first work of note and established his reputation at once as a novelist of the first rank. Its fidelity to detail and tremendous force are reproduced in The Octopus, his last published work, which shows, however, a greater refinement of style and an absence of the grossness often present in the earlier work.
A word with regard to his methods of work may be of interest. He was always gathering material and jotting down ideas in a little note book. In working up a theme, he made it a rule to get his impressions at first hand. In preparation for The Octopus he spent several weeks on Gaston Ashe’s ranch in Monterey county. He interviewed C. P. Huntington, and the pen-picture of Shelgrim is the result. When his material was gathered, he worked continuously till his task was done. It was as if he were under the whip. An incident of a week I spent with him in New York in the holiday season of 1899 will illustrate this. We had spent the evening at the theatre and had supper afterwards and then a long chat till after midnight in his big bare room on Washington Square. About two I retired, but Norris, to my surprise, sat down at his table and wrote for another hour on McTeague, which was then literally seething in his brain. He said he had to get his ideas on paper.
I have made no effort to give a critical estimate of Frank Norris’s work — that is for other pens. The purpose of this hurriedly prepared article has been to tell some things that only personal acquaintance would reveal. It is impossible to give more than a faint idea of the personality of the man as his friends knew him. A surpassing personal charm, a ready wit, and a capacity for finding the joy of life — all these were his in full measure. He was always the same to his friends; he never used people as a means of advancing himself, and he never truckled or toadied to the powerful. He was simple and unaffected and always sincere to his friends and enemies alike, a strong friend and an open enemy. His death removes from American letters the most promising personality of recent years, and from among those who loved him a true friend and an “acquaintance tried”
From: University Chronicle, V.5, No. 4, January 1903, p.324-331
The Work of Frank Norris: An Appreciation
By H. Morse Stephens
No one feels more acutely conscious than the writer of this Appreciation of the im
propriety of selecting him to pass an opinion with regard to the work of the late Frank Norris. Mr. H. M. Wright in the last number of the UNIVERSITY CHRONICLE dealt with the personality of his college friend and foreshadowed the idea that another should deal with his position in the world of letters. It may be that the engaging nature described in Mr. Wright’s article had so affected those who knew Frank Norris that they were afraid that personal consideration might injure the impartiality of their appreciation of his writings, and that therefore a stranger to him should have been selected to perform the task of saying something of the work of the brilliant University of California man, whose untimely death shocked and saddened all lovers of American literature from the conviction that with his life had suddenly ended a career that promised a splendid future. This article at any rate contains the impartial judgment of one who enjoyed and carefully studied all the published work of the young Californian and who had looked forward to the possibility of making his acquaintance as one of the attractions of taking up his permanent residence upon the Pacific Coast.
It may be worth while to tell how the writer’s attention was first drawn to the novels of Frank Norris. It was his habit, while a professor at Cornell University, to gather together for a weekly talk upon some subject interesting to them, a group of those students who were among the leaders in the life and thought of the undergraduate body in the University. One evening the request was made by half a dozen students for a talk on Frank Norris, and a copy of McTeague, which had just been published, was produced for discussion. It seemed that the book had been widely read and much disputed over among the reading men at Cornell, some of the boys being wild with enthusiasm over its vigor and others deprecating its subject. After an interval of a week or two, during which every member of the little group of twenty had made himself thoroughly familiar with McTeague, an evening was spent in a fierce controversy upon the lines that have been indicated. The present writer, whose aim was to encourage free and individual criticism and not to deliver an exposition of personal opinion, opened the discussion with a talk on the so-called realistic school of French novelists whose influence was so apparent in McTeague. In the discussion that followed it was obvious that the book had aroused the keenest interest, and that the eternal division between critics of form and critics of matter was being displayed with regard to it. From that time onward the work of Frank Norris was eagerly talked over, and it was apparent that his was a quality which appealed particularly to young minds in the formative period which felt the fresh note with a vividness at least in part obscured to older and more jaded readers of fiction. The earlier works of Frank Norris were procured and read in the light of the discussion over McTeague, and when The Octopus appeared it was triumphantly declared to be a convincing proof of the greatness of Norris by his earlier partisans. As a proof of the hold which his works obtained over this group of Cornell students it may here be added that while San Francisco was to their older companion the city of Bret Harte, it was at least to two of them, who tarried there for a day or two on their way to China, the city of Frank Norris, the scene of Moran of the Lady Letty, of Blix and of McTeague. While but moderately affected by literary reminiscences of Bret Harte and Robert Louis Stevenson, they were full of interest in making out the scenes described by Frank Norris.