by Frank Norris
Such is what we mean by his lack of critical balance. But he cries truths impressively, if not newly. His protest against the venal novelist — that “the People have a right to the truth as they have a right to life, liberty, and happiness,” and that the lying novel is a more potent agent of falsehood than pulpit or press — this is a thing even more needed in America than here. The same may be said of his protest against the empty romance. The essence of romance is not clothes and externals, but the seizing of the spirit of an age. “Ivanhoe” is a huge anachronism in the matter of costume. And why not realism even in the historical novel, he asks? It is a fruitful hint, and there is a fortune for the novelist who can achieve it. But, indeed, did not Thackeray and George Eliot endeavour it? Romance, he exclaims, is everywhere, is under our feet, if novelists could see it. This determination to drag to the surface the romance inherent in the most sordid-seeming matters of modern life was the inspiration of the novel which made him famous. Bearing on his own work, also, is the essay concerning novels with a purpose. They are, he thinks, the greatest kind of novel; but the moment the novelist becomes wrapped up in his purpose, the novel fails. It must be his motive; but his main pre-occupation must be with his story and characters. Surely the truth is that any artist who sincerely develops a piece of life must involuntarily assume an attitude towards life; and in the exposition of that attitude will develop a philosophy of life the more effectual for being unconscious. That is the best “purpose.” But we have said enough to show that here is a book worth reading in right of its artistic energy and earnestness.
From: The Harvard Monthly, V. XXVIII, No. 2, April 1899, p.78-80
“McTeague.” A Story of San Francisco. By Frank Norris. New York: Doubleday and McClure Company.
About Mr. Norris’s second book, McTeague, gather several facts which should be of more or less interest to Harvard men. It was only a few college generations ago that an uncommonly vigorous sketch captured the members of English 22, and was hailed by them as the story of the year. Its writer, graduating with the class of Ninety-five, immediately carried this promising gift of vigor into Western journalism. As staff correspondent of a San Francisco paper, he went to Africa at the time of the Uitlander trouble, was one of four newspaper men whom the Boers sent out of the country after the famous Jameson raid, returned to editorial work in America, then went through the Cuban campaign, and finally settled in New York. A rather unusual amount of experience stands, therefore, behind the production of McTeague, and shows, indeed, in the work; but the underlying plan, it is said, was roughly mapped out, or at least suggested, in the English 22 sketch; and the book is significantly dedicated to Mr. Lewis E. Gates.
Even without these facts the book challenges our attention, by the wide and favorable comment which has met its appearance. By no means faultless, it has a grim, brow-beating quality calculated to leave no reader indifferent. Tales of mean streets and sordid folk are not unfamiliar; but this tale, as by dint of McTeague’s own huge, mallet-like fists, has hammered its way through the crowd to considerable prominence. Several writers, among them Mr. Howells, have given us fairly long articles on the merits of the book; and some of these critics go to the length of saying that Mr. Norris is typical of the coming young men who are to do the things most worth while in American literature. Just here one is sadly tempted to raise the old question as to whether there can be an American Literature — any more than there can be an American language — distinct and inalienable. But putting all temptations aside, and presupposing such a literature, one would be heartily sorry to see Mr. Norris typify it at its best. For though he is a keen observer, with a free, courageous spirit and an excellent narrative gift, he has failed as yet to show that temperament without which no man can “sit in the orchestra and noblest seats” of literature. Not that Mr. Norris makes pretence to a seat there; his own views of the book are said to be creditably modest; it is only the over-eager reviewers and critics who have missed the important fact that McTeague is the product rather of method than of temperament. Its author is distinctly a young man with a method; by which, one may add, he accomplishes a great deal in the way of powerful, relentless reality.
This effective method is hardly backed up, however, by an equally fortunate style. If the style is the man, Mr. Norris is in a rather ticklish state; for haste, or carelessness, or some less tangible effect of journalism, seems to have played the cat and banjo with many details of his technique. A few random sentences, by no means the most unlucky, will illustrate. In a scene between Miss Baker and Old Grannis, “each tried to regain their composure, but in vain.” Again, Augustine’s husband, the spirit-medium, was given to “invoking a familiar whom he called ‘Edna,’ and whom he asserted was an Indian maiden.” These are not the most unpardonable defects in Mr. Norris’s language; and there is small comfort in the thought that perhaps our patriotic American Literature is at liberty to discard the traditions of a grammar servilely called English.
Even in Mr. Norris’s method, which has just been spoken of as highly effective, there are visible flaws. When a writer has deliberately chosen to import reality into his work by the use of everyday, familiar, commonplace facts and objects, he must of course be scrupulous to use them, down to their smallest minutiae, accurately and consistently. It is questionable whether the author need tell us that McTeague was just six-feet-three; but it is beyond question that, if this accurate measurement is once adopted, McTeague ought not to be called — as he is, later — six-feet-two. Or if the mention of a real brand of tobacco, “Mastiff,” and of its market-value, is going to enforce our belief, Mr. Norris should give the true market-value, which is ten cents, and not five. These are absurdly small matters; but they may serve as straws tossed up to show how the wind sits; and if a reader wishes a veritable weathervane, he has only to turn to the passage where Trina takes ether that McTeague may fill her tooth. “He took the sponge away. She passed off very quickly, and, with a long sigh, sank back into the chair. McTeague straightened up, putting the sponge upon the rack behind him, his eyes fixed upon Trina’s face. For some time he stood watching her as she lay there, unconscious and helpless, and very pretty.” Then McTeague’s brute nature stirred and woke, and it was only, we are told, after a terrible struggle for several moments, that his better self triumphed. Then he went to work, put a rubber dam upon the tooth, and had the preparation for filling well under way before Trina woke. Now here Mr. Norris is dealing with a vastly important matter of fact; and as a matter of fact, any human being will begin to come out of the influence of ether almost immediately upon the removal of the cone. So that this conflict between good and evil in McTeague, a conflict which plays an essential part in the development of the story, is simply impossible; it is magnificent, but it is not ether. In a story of fundamentally different structure and system, the impossibility might be overlooked, might be accepted in silence for the sake of what is to follow; but for the very reason that one has temporarily agreed with Mr. Norris’s working scheme, one can neither overlook nor accept this physical untruth.
With all its faults, however, — and they are not few, — this story of San Francisco, straight-away and forceful in the extreme, stamps itself on the memory. It mingles intimately with the wretched crowd, with poor, dull, pitiable folk whose life is a cheap tragedy only half-recognized by the actors themselves. For the comic interludes it has, to be sure, much sympathy; for the Sieppes, and their picnics at Schuetzen Park, and “Owgooste” with his “Fauntleroy costume,” and all the sordid humor of poverty. But its whole meaning is tragic with the curse of Money; and one is always aware that under a thin surface of apparent civilization are working tremendous animal forces, blind instincts and primitive passions. Destiny walks through the action from beginning to end, disguised in the trivial and the common.
It is in the handling of this fate-motive, the obtaining of an inevitable development, that Mr. Norris shows his remarkable constructive skill.
H. M. R.
From: The Literary World, V. XXII, No.26, December 19, 1891, p.491
“Yvernelle”
This “legend of feudal France,” which Mr. Frank Norris has written in close imitation of Sir Walter Scott’s longer poems, has had a holiday form given it by the publishers far beyond its merits. A writer who rhymes war first with car, and soon after with dear, needs instruction, evidently, in English pronunciation. Once in the course of the poem, the incidents of which are purely fictitious, Mr. Norris warms up to his work in his address to Bayard the steed and Sir Caverlaye the rider; generally, however, his muse takes this doggerel pace:
Though her, awearied, you may spurn,
Ne’er to another shah thou turn;
Thou palest now — ha! he it to?
Then listen, traitor, ere you go.
The illustrations, which Messrs. Boyle, Church, Dielman, Will H. Low, Shirlaw, and others have furnished, are of various degrees of excellence. Hut the poorest is so far above the level of the poem that we are ready to bring in an accusation against any publisher who makes so uneven a match of artist and poet. It is almost unnecessary to say that the feudal atmosphere is quite absent from this sheer invention of Mr. Norris’ fancy. — J. B. Lippincott Co. $3.50.
From: Public Opinion, V. XXXV, No. 13, September 24, 1903, p.409
A DEAL IN WHEAT and Other Stories of the Old and New West. By Frank Norris. Cloth, p, $1.50. New York: Doubleday, Page 8: Co.
These stories, fragmentary and dissimilar as they are, are another proof of the loss that the American world of letters, if not of literature, suffered in the early death of Frank Norris. As the sub-title states, they are all stories of the west, both old and new, the west of the cowboy, the miner, and the rancher. The same power of vivid portraiture that characterized his more important work is in evidence here and also his strong Americanism, in spite of his assumed resemblance to the later French realists. The first story in the volume, which gives the title to the collection is one of the least impressive, but it has the quality of dramatic sympathy and insight that marked the two volumes in his unfinished trilogy of the wheat. For the others, it need only be said that they are excellent examples of true realism, which may be described as a species of literary photography combined with the artist’s faculty of discernment and interpretation. The occasional straining for effect and insistence on a particular point of view on the reader’s part that marred some of his longer stories is almost entirely absent here.
From: The Park Review, V. IV, No. 3, April 1903, p.137-138
“The Epic of the Wheat”
The death of the author before the book was published makes every one who reads feel tenderly toward the book. We are sorry that he could not hear the many words of appreciation which must be spoken now. Many had read a large part of the story as it came out in parts and already the power of the book was felt. The atmosphere comes nearer to being American than in any other book of equal strength which we can call to mind.
There is no question about the strength of the writing. The style is almost rugged. There is more polish than in the earlier volume, The Octopus, but there is the same virility. A second book may be a success without being remarkable for development of style. The Pit must be judged by itself but still it is easy to see improvement in the writing.
Jadwin is a powerful creation because he is real. The character is marked by a realism that is not unpleasing. It is the true realism which is identical with true idealism. The two extremes meet. On the one side we so often find the realism that is unnaturally real, on the other is the idealism that is Impossible. Mr. Norris inclines strongly toward the realistic school but especially in his best work he has been able to avoid the extreme. Laura is not a strong character and the result is that the interest centers entirely in Jadwin. The development of his character is finely carried out. From his first almost careless toying with the market until the end when the wheat itself engulfs him in ruin we can follow him step by step. Of all the many novels we might gather together which use a “corner” to advantage this succeeds best. There is a more masterly touch than in “Roden’s Corner” and more of human reality than in “The Market Place.” This was the second in a series of three novels. The series is ended with this. The trilogy is incomplete. We cannot help but wish the third were finished but these two are enough to keep Frank Norris from being forgotten. The year has started off with a record. The race for the most popular novel of the year is a handicap, and the handicap is large.
From: The Literary Digest, V. XXV, No. 19, November 8, 1902, p.593
“An Unfinished Literary Career”
The untimely death of Frank Norris, the Californian novelist, at the age of thirty-two years, calls forth many expressions of regret. “He was undoubtedly one of the most promising of the younger American writers,” says the Springfield Republican; and the St. Paul Dispatch goes so far as to declare: “America has, and has had, no one to measure up with his young man, and nowhere, in Russia, in France, in Italy, is here anything being done with greater precision of truth and greater splendor of imagination.” Mr. Arthur Goodrich, of the editorial staff of The World’s Work, writes in the Boston Transcript: “It is hard to realize that Frank Norris is dead. He seemed always to come out of the springtime, to carry with him the breath of eternal youth. He was just rounding out his career into that hard-earned great success and high usefulness which every one who knew him felt to be his. He was the most virile, the most creative, the most broadly imaginative of the younger writers who were to make the American literature of the next quarter century. Whatever else may be said of his writing, it was living, pulsing, human. The ‘pity of it’ must be doubly felt in the sense of deep personal loss — for no one could know Norris without having a real affection for the man, as well as an admiration for his genius and his high ideals — and in a sense of the national loss to our literature.”
The New York Mail and Express gives the following account of Mr. Norris’s life-work:
“‘So little done; so much to do,” will seem to some lovers of literature as fit an epitaph for Frank Norris as for the empire-builder whose dying words they were. Cecil Rhodes left his structure half finished, and the future years will show whether he was a true architect and built wisely. Norris had laid only the corner-stone of his life-work, and those who believed in him most can only fancy and can never prove the strength and beauty of what now will never be.
“The novelist, dead at the age of thirty-two, was only a boy in his art as in years. But in an age and a country in which imaginative littleness contrasts with gigantic industrial and commercial achievements, he had dreamed great things, and already had begun to work upon the realization of his dreams, as if he had a “ten-league canvas, with brushes of comet’s hair.’
“The worst that his detractors can say of the books he wrote, his kindest critics will admit. His first story that attracted attention, “Moran of the Lady Letty,” was filled with technical flaws. But through them flashed the fresh talent of a new, strong man who was worth watching for his sea pictures, if for nothing else. ‘McTeague’ was crude, prolix; in some passages melodramatic to the point of anticlimax, and in others needlessly repugnant to good taste. But it marked the advent of an author whose worst sins were due to the intense virility of his mentality, and who gave more promise of becoming a real force in American literature than any of the newcomers.
“‘The Octopus’ followed, and proved that a writer was among us who disdained the pseudo-romanticism in fashion, yet did not conceive realism to be a stippled picture of the infinite pettinesses of life. It was no flawless art work. Norris was still under the influence of others. The symbolism of the wheat and the railroad was in the later manner, which was not the best manner, of Zola. But there was in the book a breadth of scheme, a grasp of character, a depth of sympathy with humanity, a sense of color and phrase that made it notable. What there was of Zola in that style was only a sign that he was striving toward something better than his master. He probab
ly would never have written an American ‘Comédie Humaine.’ The Balzacs are few. But his aim was for a fairer, truer portrait-gallery of all the types that compose American life than the Rougon-Macquart series is in France.
“To say that he would have fulfilled the promise that some saw in his books would be only to open futile argument. What he did was only the beginning of his work. Just criticism of a tale is impossible where “Finis’ is written at the end of the first chapter. We can say only that he loved his art and honored it and wrought largely. And that is something in a day when literature is liliputian.”
“The Octopus” was to have been the first of a trilogy of novels dealing with the wheat industry in America. “The Pit,” the second of the three, is running as a serial in the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post. “The Wolf,” the last novel, was planned but not written.
From: The Lamp, V. XXVI, No. 1, February 1903, p.54-56