by Frank Norris
“Second Canto of the Epic of the Wheat”
By A. Schade Van Westrum
When “Moran of the Lady Letty” appeared it was singled out by the discerning critics as a decidedly clever “minor novel.” The public agreed to some extent with the reviewers, then the story passed the way of much current fiction, and its author discovered that, while he had made a beginning, he had his spurs still to win. He wrote “McTeague,” and with it took the deciding step. Frank Norris began to be talked about more seriously as a coming man. “Blix” came and went, an experiment in another field and in another manner. Norris did not return to it. His “Man’s Woman” closed the first period of his career, ended all too soon by death. In this story of an arctic explorer he carried to its extreme limit his conception of the man who achieves, of the strenuous life stripped of all the safeguards that civilization has put around it, of the master who must be brutal for his own sake and that of his followers.
The transition from the first to the second and last period of Norris’s activity is striking. His view broadened, his insight deepened, his grasp strengthened. Social unrest we have always had with us — religious, political, or economic. In our day the discontent takes the economic form. Norris saw the wheat-fields of California and the struggle between the agriculturist and the railroad magnate. Then his glance travelled midway across the continent to the Chicago wheat pit, another stage of the progress from the producer to the consumer; and, last of all, he saw the staple of man’s food nourishing the masses of Europe. The trilogy may well have suggested itself without the aid of Zola’s series of three, which deals, strangely enough, with the oldest social unrest, the religious as well as with the industrial one. Norris began to plan the Epic of the Wheat, which was to be told in three prose narratives— “The Octopus,” dealing with the war between the wheat-grower and the railroad trust; “The Pit,” a narrative of a corner in wheat in the Chicago wheat pit; and, last of all, “The Wolf,” a story of the relief of a European famine by the American grain, which now will never be written.
Norris found his own material; for his method of treatment of it he went direct to Zola, whose influence had been traceable in his earlier work. “The Octopus” is saturated with the Zolaesque manner, its symbolism, its repetitions of attributes and phrases. And, truth to tell, no better model could have been found for the handling of so vast a subject than the Titanic French naturalist. “The Octopus” grew into an epic, forcing attention.
“The Pit” is now added to it, the last work of Frank Norris. The trace of Zola is still perceptible in it here and there, but it is the trace of the school, rather than of the Master; in meaning and atmosphere this story, like “The Octopus,” is strikingly American. The descriptions of the neighborhood of the Chicago Board of Trade, in the early part of the book, may be insisted upon a little too much, but later on one learns to value the technical meaning of this appeal to the memory. When Norris comes to the excitement and rush of the “corner,” his picture is all life and action in scenes now perfectly familiar. Here is the strenuous life in its most modern form told dispassionately, with all the impartiality, the minuteness of observation of the realist, yet with a force that carries the reader along.
The story is remarkably well balanced. Its women are as interesting, as well seen, as its men. Laura Dearborn, who becomes the speculator’s wife, and her younger sister Page are types of the present-day American young woman, while yet remaining individuals. The American woman’s rival, as Paul Bourget came to see when he visited us, is business on an enormous scale, before whose allurement the attractions of women pale into insignificance. Laura Dearborn, self-centred, thrown upon her own resources by her husband’s pursuit of the golden glamour, finds herself; her sister is dealt with in a lighter vein, not unworthy of Mr. Howells in its humor and gentle- sympathy; the culture, which is still an exotic among the mass of our busy men, who look upon its votaries not without suspicion, is cleverly represented by an artist in stained glass. The magnificently true proportions of the story will lead many of its readers at first into a misconception of its vast scale. But its true values will gradually disclose themselves, for it is one of the finest, strongest pictures yet penned of our present day life, with its strong, if hidden, distinction between the male and the female element. And the very excellence of the story makes more poignant the regret over our loss of the most promising of our younger men-of-letters. Norris made his indelible mark upon our literature before he died. He might have served it so much longer in the maturity of his great and studiously cultivated talent.
From: The Book News Monthly, V. XXI, No. 246, February 1903, p.443
“Biographical Sketch of Frank Norris”
It was a distinct, a severe loss to American literature when the hand of death laid Frank Norris low. To the world it meant the passing away of a genius and genius is indeed rare. It meant the going forth of a man who stood for high ideals in novelistic art, of a man who has the literary power as well as the unrelenting resolve to live up to literary ideals that to-day are not lived up to, are only in a few cases possessed.
The career of Mr. Frank Norris is not a distinctively peculiar one save in the steady progress toward the attainment of fame. Until six years ago his life was merely ordinary. At fourteen he went to California from Chicago and after passing three years there he went to Paris and studied art. Then returning to California he spent four years in the university. While there he wrote a play and this seems to have been his first literary attempt of any note. But in his character were developing those high aims and that grasp of greater events and larger sight for affairs. The powers that were to make for might later on, were in their more infantile stages, but they were growing. In 1895 he took a year at Harvard and it was there that he planned “McTeague.” Going back to California, he began as assistant editor of the San Francisco Wave, but the journalistic work did not bring the satisfaction for which he craved. Being inspired by a desire to see some fighting, he went as correspondent to South Africa, but his pro-British sympathies caused him to be warned out of the country. Not before he had contracted a fever, however, the effects of which were apparent in his last illness. It was while still with the Wave that he wrote “McTeague” and later on “Moran of the Lady Letty.” “Blix” and “A Man’s Woman” came later. The inspiration to write an epic of the wheat was next in order, and it is in the first two volumes of this trilogy that Mr. Norris shows his most significant powers. The third of the series, “The Wolf,” was begun before he died, but ere its publication another hand will have to complete it. What he would have done had he lived would probably have been mighty, for “The Pit” shows a strength more forcible and more enduring than “The Octopus” and the vast sweep of imagination, the universatility of sympathy, the sincerity of the man are such that belong only to great men and strong and the one who possesses them with the literary gift additional must needs make a deep impression.
From: The Book News Monthly, V. XXI, No. 246, February 1903, p.437-438
“The Pit”
The deep regret that was and still is being felt throughout this country for the loss of Mr. Frank Norris is in no degree diminished upon a perusal of Mr. Norris’s posthumous novel, “The Pit.” This work is the second volume in the great trilogy so admirably planned and begun by the brilliant young author, a series of novels that was to form an “Epic of the Wheat.” The first volume was “The Octopus” and no one who read it could deny that here was a mighty wielder of the pen, a gifted novelist such as America had not heard the voice of for many years. Mr. Norris was only a young writer, but already he had developed a maturity that placed him far beyond more aged heads and gave him a precedent over many of those of older name and fame. In short, Genius, which had for so long veiled her face in the land of America, as far as the novel was concerned, had once again beamed forth in gladsome greeting and touched her magic wand to one of whom Nature might again stand up and truly say, “This was a man.” For it is not only Fr
ank Norris, the brilliant novelist, who commands our deepest respect and highest admiration, but it is the man whose wonderful personality compels our regard, whose force of character sweeps us into new realms and mightier. a man scrupulously true to his ideals, a man who, laboring unweariedly in his chosen field of high art, swerved not, whom nor fame nor money could lure to paths of lower plane, to fields of greater profit, to the sacrifice of adherence to the cause unto which he had consecrated his powers.
It was no mean task to which Frank Norris applied himself when he sat down to pen an epic of the wheat. It involved problems and intricacies in American economic life that required not only vast breadth of imagination and novelistic grasp, but that called as well for an earnest study of conditions as they exist and an irreproachable accuracy in knowledge of difficult affairs. Not only must American life in its social aspects be satisfactorily portrayed, but the mighty questions of certain financial phases must be perfectly set forth and brought to a fitting issue.
In “The Octopus” Mr. Norris showed the wheat in its growing stages. The farmer who sowed the seed, his anxieties in regard to the weather and the crops, the influence of railroad corporations, the blighting force of the mailed hand upon the country-folk were vividly depicted and the first act in the mighty drama of grain growing, grain buying and grain selling, of importation and exportation, of agricultural industry, speculation and consumption was enacted.
“The Pit” is the second act in the thrilling story. It is the picture of the speculator, of the Board of Trade and never in fiction have we been brought so forcibly face to face with the madness of the Stock Exchange as in this novel. Chicago is the scene of the action, the chief characters are men of business enterprise and wealth, the hero is a multi-millionaire who corners the wheat only to find himself later cornered by the wheat, after a signal triumph and a magnificent fight. he Chicagoan Board of Trade, with the wheat pit in particular, is placed before us, and the contrast between the drama of romance as enacted upon the stage and the immense and more important drama that day by day involves men and money with the terrible reality of its implacable grasp, is irresistibly forced upon us. In the heroine most of all is the contrast set forth; it is in her peculiar double character, her fluctuations from ideality to reality, that we see the startling comparison in all its significance. Laura Dearborn is a creation, she is something new in the woman of fiction, but she is the truest of the true to life. Mr. Norris could make characters; he could make them live before us, he could give us a subtle intimacy with their innermost personalities and give it without lengthy psychological analysis or tedious play with soul problems and tendencies. The effect for which Mr. Henry James is ever striving and barely succeeds in bringing to pass after a number of hours passed in wearisome reading is obtained by Mr. Norris in a page, and an interesting page at that, while the intense grip of situation, the thrilling power of exciting scene make the work of the latter not only satisfying but absorbing from beginning to end. And all this, too, without the sacrifice of artistic skill, without a lapse from good, refined, even elegant style. Mr. Norris’s mode of expression is distinctively his own, but it measures up to a high standard in novelistic art. It has clarity, it has force, it has purity, it has dignity, it has easy flow that makes easy reading. It all causes one to wonder why a man of such unique endowments should have been cut off in his very prime, swept away, as it were, in the very moment of his triumph, in that moment when his full powers lay right at his command, and when he was so industriously striving to put them to best and safest use.
From: The Pacific Monthly, V. XVII, No.3, March 1907, p.313-322
“The Artist in Frank Norris”
By: Denison Hailey Clift
One day, several years ago, I had occasion to climb the narrow, wooden staircase leading up into the editorial sanctum of the Overland Monthly in San Francisco, and while awaiting the Editorial Presence my eyes roamed about the walls of the room. They were plain, unfinished walls, and upon them were hung numerous originals of the drawings that had appeared in the magazine. The character and the workmanship of them have been forgotten long ago, with a single exception. That exception was an oil painting of a blind man.
The picture was a simple one, not over-good in its technique, representing the full figure of a blind man, erect in the center of the canvas, clutching blindly and feverishly for an invisible something. But there was a personality behind the thing that brought it to mind again and again, long after everything else about that room was forgotten. In the big, bold strokes, in the dramatic poise of the body, in the very strength of the conception, there was an element suggestive of the man who was later destined to give us McTeague and The Octopus. For the painting was signed, “Norris.”
This picture marks the beginning of an interesting career. Some ten years earlier a tall, slender young man, with hair prematurely tinged with gray, and with an ardent enthusiasm for art, had climbed those same narrow, wooden stairs and offered the canvas as an illustration for an accepted story. But the painting was left unused, because of its crudity, and until the great San Francisco fire it hung over the editor’s desk, while the young man who made it was recording his name upon the annals of literary fame.
Frank Norris will always be known as a literary craftsman; there are, perhaps, few who know that at one time it was his ambition to become a great artist, and this painting of the blind man is one of his first attempts to express his emotions upon the canvas. So strong was this desire that he spent several years studying art in the Latin Quarter of Paris, under Julien and Bouguereau, until he at last found himself and learned that his life work was to be story-telling.
That suggestion of bigness and boldness that characterized the crude study of the blind man was an expression of Norris’s life and nature. He was essentially a product of the West. He was born and reared in Chicago, and was thus influenced from the beginning by those gigantic forces that he afterwards embodied in his novels. The rush and roar of the city streets, the crash and tremor of traffic, the screech and whistle of the sirens along the lake front, the primordial madness of the wheat pit — these elements got their grip early upon the man and they clung to him throughout his career, until death cut short his work in San Francisco in October of 1902, when he was in the prime of manhood.
From the Middle West Norris moved with his family to the Pacific Coast, and it was while he was but eighteen that he developed a liking for art. The enthusiasms of the youth were encouraged, and he received his first instructions at William’s Academy in old San Francisco. Not content with the narrowness of the scope found here, Norris began to yearn for a life abroad, and after realizing his dream by traveling in England and Wintering in Italy in 1887, he settled in Paris and began to master the rudiments of art.
The mind of the young man was not content with what was laid out for him by the masters; he planned to paint for the Salon a giant canvas, and this great painting was to extend over the side of the immense wall of his room. It was to be a picture of militant figures, of knights, of swords and armor, breathing forth the spirit of chivalry. But the painting was only conceived; it was beyond the ardent youth to execute it; and so the great frame was gradually cut into sections and smaller paintings made upon them.
But the vital thing about Norris’s study in Paris was his awakening to his true career, for the literary instinct was stirring within him, and before long he discovered that painting was not his forte. His hobby was mediaeval armor, particularly that of France, and upon this subject he later became an authority. The first thing he wrote for publication was upon this subject, and was entitled “Mediaeval Armor.” From abroad he sent it to the San Francisco Chronicle, where it was published March 31, 1889, and the future genius received for it the munificent remuneration of nine dollars!
The instinct of the writer, once awakened, remained a living force in Norris’s life. From Paris there began to arrive in the family household in San Francisco packets which were sent with clock-like re
gularity. The packets contained the chapters of a wonderful story, illustrated by wonderful, imaginative paintings, which Frank Norris called Robert d’Artois.
The story, long drawn out into fascinating adventures, was written with no serious intent, but merely for the pleasure of the writing; and to the very end this purpose underlay all of Norris’s work.
This novel was the first story-writing that Norris did. Before this he had often delighted his brother with fanciful tales of soldiery. Perhaps you remember the dedication of The Pit, where Norris speaks of “the memory of certain lamentable tales of the round (dining-room) table heroes; of the epic of the pewter platoons, and the romance-cycle of ‘Gaston Le Fox,’ which we invented, maintained, and found marvelous at a time when we both were boys.”
This reference to “Gaston Le Fox” and the “romance-cycle” is to the early period of Frank Norris’s youth when his mind was inflamed with martial pictures, and he told many wonderful stories to his brother, of the battles of armies, arranged and tabulated, under the leadership of the greatest generals of the world, and all under the command of a marvelous personage, the great “Gaston Le Fox,” whom Norris had designated as the nephew of the Duke of Burgundy.
In the outcroppings of these first stories the mind of the born story-teller was clearly revealed, with a wealth of pictorial imagination, and a mind designed to grapple with tremendous themes, as embodied in the early fancy of this gigantic world-army.
But the story of Robert d’Artois was never brought to an end, for Norris left Paris and returned to California, where he began his career at the State University.
And now the instinct of the story-teller, thoroughly aroused, longed to give itself expression, and Norris’s imagination was already conceiving weird, grotesque tales of the new West. He was early influenced by Zola, Kipling, and Maupassant, and his first work betrays a love for the realism of Zola, seen at its best in McTeague.