by Frank Norris
San Francisco was the field of Frank Norris’s earlier work. Here he found the spirit of a vital new life, the spirit of the land bordering upon the great rolling Pacific, with which the pages of his books are saturated. In a dentist’s office on Polk Street he found a romance of the realistic atmosphere; upon the beauteous, wild-flowered downs of the Presidio, within the sound of the tumbling breakers upon the beach, he found the Elysium for a most sympathetic and beautiful love-story; in the offices of ship’s companies, and from the lips of old sailors along the water-front he came upon rich treasures that he wove into the brilliant fabric of his tales of the new West.
In all his stories he infused the enthusiasm and earnestness of his very lovable personality. Of the six novels that bear his name, three deal directly with life in San Francisco. McTeague, the story of the great, brutal dentist, opens up graphically the little world of Polk Street; Moran of the Lady Letty, that vigorous novel of the sea, marked by epic strength and motive, gives us vivid glimpses of the water-front, with its clanking hawser-chains and its forest of mastheads. Here we are made acquainted with the life-boat station by the Golden Gate. And last of all, in Blix, that adorable little love-story out of the novelist’s own life, we have the city of the Bohemian laid bare, and the pictures of unfrequented corners of the old city, of the wayside haunts of Chinatown and the Mexican Quarter, will always be remembered by those who have come under its spell.
Before San Francisco was visited by the great fire these scenes from the novelist’s books stood just as Norris described them. Day by day the shuffling thousands passed them by, unconscious that they were the same haunts incorporated within the familiar works they had read. Today they are marked among the ashes of a devastated city.
The conception of McTeague came to Norris while he was a student at college. 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. The real scene of the dental parlors stood there, at the corner of Polk and Sacramento Streets. You remember that the room was a corner room, “just over the branch post office, and faced the street,” and all day long the acrid odor of ink came up to the dentist, working close to the window. You could not find there the plain couch, the single chair, the canary bird, the concertina (on which McTeague played his six lugubrious airs of a Sunday afternoon), nor the steel engraving of the court of Lorenzo de’Medici, but the same office was there, just as Norris found it, and another dentist practiced in the same room.
In the third block below, at the corner of a little side street, stood the car-conductor’s “joint.” It was a coffee-joint where, as Norris so realistically wrote, you got steaming hot meals served on cold dishes, and a sort of nauseating suet pudding. Car-conductors frequented the place, and butcher-boys and grocers and clerks from the neighboring stores. One block above, on the way back to Sacramento Street, stood the saloon known as Joe Frenna’s saloon in the novel. And here is where McTeague clashed with his one-time friend, Marcus Shouler. From these scenes Norris, when the book was in its first stages of construction, lived but a few blocks away. The life that he painted was a part of his life, and during the years that it had been before him he had absorbed it so thoroughly that the writing of the novel was accomplished in eighty-nine days.
The novel was conceived while Norris was yet in college at the State University. The middle parts of the book were written while the novelist was taking a graduate course at Harvard University, and the conclusion, with its realistic, grim descriptions of the untamed mining country, was done up in the wilds of Placer County. Perhaps you remember how McTeague left San Francisco immediately after the murder of Trina, and made straight for the Big Dipper mine, where he had spent his youth as a car-boy. When the dentist reached the mine he entered the office, looking for the foreman. There is a description here of the men in that office, and one man is described as “a tall, lean young man, with a thick head of hair surprisingly gray, who was playing with a half-grown Great Dane puppy.” Norris meant this to be a picture of himself, for in this very room the closing chapters of McTeague were penned.
McTeague was wholly a creation of the novelist’s brain. On the other hand, Old Grannis and Miss Baker are characters in real life, both having lived in Cambridge, and having been acquaintances of Norris’s Harvard days. Miss Bates was the real name of quaint little Miss Baker. The weird character of Maria Macapa is also a figment of the writer’s imagination, but her strange response of “Had a flying squirrel an’ let him go” to an inquiry of her name was suggested by a story of a little girl, told Norris by his mother, who always answered thus strangely when her name was asked.
Who that has read Moran of the Lady Letty can ever forget the picture of Ross Wilbur, standing high up by the old red fort at the Presidio, overlooking the wide, wide sweep of the ocean, watching the ship, with all sails set, hurrying out to the open sea with all that he loved lying dead upon the deck? The conception of “Moran” was an epic in strength. Only Frank Norris could have written it. The transformation of a young clubman from a leader of cotillions, with its attendant butterfly life, to a man of bravery and action marks the theme of the book. This story has what Norris was pleased to term “all the roll and plunge of action.” The instinct of the bold lines in the portrait of the blind man are here in evidence, in a powerful, dramatic tale. The romance is redolent with the breath of the flogging trades. The last chapter, where the call of the grim, gray ocean is sounded for Moran, is alive with reminiscences of Emile Zola. But through it all the stamp of Norris’s personality is never lost. He gloried in the untamed thundering of the seas, and reveled in the voice of the whistling trade winds. 0 the giant strength of that last chapter! Stolid with the brutality and realism of Paris and La Fecondite, it combines a tenderness that can never be forgotten. Zola or Hugo might have duplicated it; Dore alone could have painted it.
The same life-boat station and red brick fort stand today as Norris described them; and along the coaling wharves can be found in plenty the Brown Sweaters that lured the young clubman to his fate in the saloon.
In Blix we find the lighter and more delicate shades of Norris’s works, and in all its brilliant pages there is no hint of the somberness and brutality that pervades the atmosphere of Moran and McTeague. The story is a love-idyll, the novelist’s own love-story, and is full of the joyousness of the great out-doors, breathing forth a spirit of freedom and purity that is characteristic of this book alone. In it, more so than in the other books, the lights and shadows of old San Francisco find their truest expression.
You must remember the Chinese restaurant where Condy took Blix, situated where, from the golden balcony, you could see close by the shimmering greensward of Portsmouth Square, and the Stevenson Monument and the Hall of Justice, lifting its gray campanile into the blue above. You could once have stood upon that same balcony, looking out at the historic vista stretched before you, or gazing down upon the wondrous Oriental life surging along the narrow streets. The same tea-tables that Frank Norris wrote about were there, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and jade. The walls about were carved in lacquer, the chairs were ornamented with nacre. And like big balloons hung the orange and gold lanterns from the ceilings. If you so desired, the same, fat, shuffling Chinaman would have brought you teas and candied fruits as he did to the “chums” on that eventful day of the book. And about you (the perpetrators invisible) would have echoed
the crash of the tom-tom and the shrill squeak of a quaint Chinese fiddle.
Luna’s Mexican restaurant stood three blocks below on Dupont. Close by was the big Cathedral, whose somber clock once tolled off the fading hours of the day. Blix and Condy often listened to its chimes. Norris tells us that this place cannot be found by locality. This was true — to Norris. For many a time he wandered through the mazes of the streets of Chinatown, seeking to emerge upon the border of the Mexican Quarter, but inevitably he missed it. It seemed to have had an elusive charm about it for him. The place once stood on the corner of Vallejo Street, an old shaken building, grimy and shambling as the houses of the quarter went. And here is where Condy and Blix enjoyed the episode of uniting old “Captain Jack” with the prim “K. D. B.” by answering the personals in the matrimonial columns of the newspaper and arranging the successful meeting at Luna’s.
“K. D. B.” was wholly a creation of the novelist’s. On the other hand, “Captain Jack” was a personage in real life. Moran of the Lady Letty is dedicated to the character, Captain Hodgson of the life-boat service, who also appears as a character at the close of the novel. Hodgson was an intimate friend of Frank Norris’s, and from him the writer got much of the material that he wove into his novels and short stories.
Do you remember in Blix when Condy, who was eager to write a great book of adventure, got his material from old Captain Jack and then left the Times staff to complete it? To Blix he said, when he told her of his resignation from the Sunday Times, “It’s neck or nothing now. Blix!”
This incident, with many another in the story, is a direct transcript from the novelist’s life. Norris was for many years a special writer on the San Francisco Wave, and at that time he was working on the early chapters of McTeague. Blix was Norris’s future wife, and as the story relates, he left (in real life) the staff of the Wave to complete that grim story of Polk-Street life.
There was another book by Norris, A Man’s Woman, whose imaginative scene might have been laid in San Francisco, but more probably in New York. This is the story of the Arctic explorer, and the wife who fought against the will of her husband. Here, too, is seen the grim strength and force of the writer. He loved to write about great subjects, that were world forces, and the biggest ideas he could find were associated with the Mysterious North, with the tremendous Epic of the Wheat, with the elemental vastness of the Ocean.
When Norris began this book he was reading Perry’s experiences in the Arctic, and from his reading he got a grasp upon the atmosphere of the Northern lands, which, coupled with his powerful imagination, resulted in a realistic, perhaps I might almost say of certain parts, sordid book.
But the great work of the novelist was the wonderful conception of the Epic of the Wheat. He had planned, as he says in the preface of The Octopus, to write three novels, which, “while forming a series, will be in no way connected with each other save only in their relation to (1) the production, (2) the distribution, (3) the consumption of American wheat.”
The first in the series was The Octopus, which won him permanent fame while he lived, and who can tell how long that fame may last? Norris spent a week in the region of his setting, the scene of the Mussel Slough affair, gathering material and technical terms for the book. The story was written for the sake of the story, and not, as has been asserted, because of any prejudice against the Trusts. It was the story interest always first with Norris.
Most of the characters of this book are personages of real life. Annixter, the hero, was an old college chum of Norris’s. When the work was first planned Norris had no idea of making Annixter the hero, but the character grew and developed, and by the sheer force of its creation assumed the first role in the narrative. Osterman is no other than the personality of James Archibald, the war correspondent, with whom Frank Norris was associated throughout the Santiago campaign. Magnus Derrick is a picture of the novelist’s grandfather, and Shelgrim, the railroad magnate, is a character sketch of Collis P. Huntington.
The Pit was the second book in the trilogy, a story of the machinations of the Chicago Wheat Pit. It is tense with the emotions of men who have harked back to primordial instincts. Curtis Jadwin, “the great bull,” a man of iron caliber, is a portrait of Frank Norris’s father. So true to life is the character painted that Wilton Lackaye, in interpreting the part in the dramatized version of the book, worked himself into the role so well that he came to assume the mannerisms of Norris’s father, which was a marvel to the family who watched the personality of the actor in the part of the speculator.
The third book in the series was never written. Not a note had been taken, not a line had been penned, at the time of the author’s death. The story remained a great vast force in the writer’s mind, and before writing it he was planning a trip to Europe and the Old World, to gather his atmosphere and material.
Very few know that Norris, after the publication of The Pit, decided to change the title of The Wolf. But just what he was going to change it to he had not yet determined. The scene of the book was to be laid in Italy, somewhere in the provinces about Genoa. It was to be a story of famine, upon the hills of the stricken city. The theme of the book was to be the idea that the Wheat fulfills its destination as a world-force, despite the machinations of man in the Wheat Pit. At the climax of the tale, when the hillsides were covered with starving, gaunt frames of human beings, looking out across the blue waters of the sea with their dying gaze, there appears upon the far horizon three great, dark vessels from America, with their holds stored with the Wheat. We cannot tell what power might have been infused into this story, for the theme was a tremendous, dramatic one, and Norris was the one American novelist to cope with it. His style was losing the earmarks of Zola and Kipling; this last book would undoubtedly have stood forth as the work of Frank Norris, the man and not the imitator, as his themes were always his own.
Norris did not take his life work too seriously. He smiled at criticism, and heeded it. Nothing discouraged him; he believed in himself, and to the very end he strove to do his work with a spirit of improvement and humility. His motto was, “True happiness is being able to do the work you love.” He had found himself, and he was struggling to give the world the best that he could do. Nothing daunted him, nothing discouraged him. One story, The Statue in an Old Garden, was written while he was yet in college. He began by sending it the rounds, first to the best, and then down to the second-class magazines. But no one had yet heard of the man who signed himself. “Frank Norris,” and the story came back time and again, faithful to its creator. At last it was pigeon-holed, and after the name of its author had become known from one end of the continent to the other it was rewritten and sent forth once more, this time to find a home on the first trip, and be proclaimed a “wonderful thing!”
Norris had a particular knack of getting proper names that seemed to fit the characters. He spent much time in reading the birth and death notices in the newspapers, jotting down any name that seemed to him to indicate a definite personality. By the hour he would read the dictionary, impressing every strange word upon his memory, and storing it away for its fit place when he should begin his novels.
His methods of work were simple. He wrote his manuscripts but once. Before writing a line of a new tale he would first work it out in detail in his head, choosing his characters carefully, and definitely outlining the steps of the story. When he began to write he never hesitated, but moved from scene to scene, from picture to picture, from characterization to characterization, never rewriting, and only reading the tale through to correct slips in grammar and crudities of expression.
In all his novels he entered the significant and telling details of the scenes that he found. You could have recognized unnamed places from his realistic and artistic portrayal, for Norris was a thorough realist, and he adhered faithfully to the principles of his creed. He was an accurate and a keen observer of human life. His books show him to be a man of big thoughts and big ideas; his works reflect the heroi
c of his nature. Often his theme reaches an epic strength; at times he descends (such is his versatility) to the brutal sordidness of things, as in McTeague; yet he is the artist through it all. He grappled with world forces, and he grappled well.
There is one unpublished novel that Norris wrote at the time of his literary beginnings. This book is a story of a college generation, and its title is Vandover and the Brute. The manuscript is at present in New York. The realism of the work is too intense and too true to life to render its publication possible.
Up to the time of his death he was still planning his future work. After the third book of the Epic of the Wheat was completed he was planning to write a great American novel, which should center at its climax around the battle of Gettysburg. Another book that he had in mind was a tale of the people living about Gilroy, in California. For a long time Norris worked among the inhabitants of the place, and he had a love for them and their surroundings that he always wanted to record
But there was a grim, black-shrouded figure stalking near him, and in October of 1902 the voice of Death called to him. His death was the result of fever acquired while he was a correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle in South Africa during the Boer War, at which time he enlisted in the English army for the defense of Johannesburg, and was compelled to leave the country by national interdict. Before this he had served in the Santiago campaign as a war correspondent, and was present at the battle of El Caney.
And so, in the prime of his splendid manhood, with the glamour of an enviable fame encircling him, with six creditable books in his favor, and with a brilliant outlook before him, his life work was brought to a close. It was a pathetic close, for he was loved by all who knew him, and he had just emerged into the best years of life.