by Frank Norris
He died in San Francisco, at his home out on Broderick Street, leaving a beautiful wife and a little daughter to reap what he had sown. Perhaps it was best that San Francisco should have been his last resting place, for he loved the old, Western city, at the edge of the continent, the city that * * * laughed upon her hills out there, Beside her bays of misty blue.
He loved the big, teeming West, with its promise and its romance, far-flung by the blue, shimmering seas. You must remember the description of the bay and the surrounding mountains from the opening pages of Blix, with the white sails of sea-bound ships dipping beyond the Heads. He caught the significance of Tamalpais, towering high into the Summer haze, gaunt and free and gray; he saw the grandeur of the low line of the Berkeley hills as no one had ever seen it before him; he reveled in the closer glories of the Presidio Reservation, where Condy was wont to take Blix, following the shore line past the old fort, and across the windy downs where wild flowers grew in multitudinous profusion, and where the pounding of the surf on the shore comes to the ear like the low drone of mixed melodies. So fine and grand and heroic did Norris perceive this spot to be that many of the characters of his novels are made to delight in it, from the primitive McTeague to the clubmen, Rivers and Wilbur. You have to know the place and you will no longer wonder why.
From: Public Opinion, V. XXXIV, No. 4, January 22, 1903, p.121
AN EPIC OF THE WHEAT
THE PIT. A Story of Chicago. By
Frank Norris.
In this story of the wheat pit Mr. Norris has written his last and best book. His power of comprehending and depicting large movements without ignoring or obscuring the necessary details shows to good advantage, and the mingling of the humorous and the tragic in human affairs, the general incongruity of life, appears in accurate proportion and vivid colors. He has boldly attacked a familiar and difficult – perhaps difficult because familiar-arena in which to array his characters, the wheat pit of the Chicago board of trade. In the character of the speculator, Curtis Jadwin, who attempts to corner the world’s supply of wheat and fails only because the wheat was grown faster than he could buy it, he has had an easy task. Strong but simple-minded, country-bred but the equal of any man on the floor of the board of trade in subtlety and the strategy of the market, his distinguishing traits are so few and so easily seen
that Mr. Norris has not found it a serious matter to present a life-like picture of him. With Laura, his wife, the case is very different. Ambitious, high-bred, complex, craving attention, but with a
strain of the Puritan in her, she might well have battled even the cleverness of Mr. Norris. That he has painted her clearly and impressively without any appearance of straining for effect or overemphasis is the highest tribute that could be paid to the quality of his genius. In her he has drawn a high type of the American woman whose virtues are positive without being strident, and
whose faults are virtues carried to extremes.
It is in his character work that Mr. Norris shows the greatest advance over his earlier manner. It has required fewer strokes of the pencil, less color, less insistence on details of feature and character to present a satisfactory picture. Formerly he seemed to be possessed with the fear that his readers might not see the character exactly as he saw it, a fear that is not entirely absent in some of the descriptive passages of this book. This added lightness of touch is used to advantage in the delineation of the minor personages of the cast. This is especially true of Landry Court, the young broker’s clerk, who, Sheldon Corthell says, always impresses him as “though he had just had his hair cut.” This young gentleman, when Page Dearborn, still in her teens, confides to him that she has frequent fits of brooding melancholy, recklessly responds: “Well, so have I. At night, sometimes-when I wake up. Then I’m all down in the mouth, and I say, ‘What’s the use, by Jingo?’” The artist, Sheldon Corthell, with whom Laura at times almost imagines herself to be in love, is also well portrayed.
The narrative leads easily and naturally from the opening chapter, where the discussion of the latest failure on the board is mingled with the strains of Italian grand opera, through the marriage of Jadwin and Laura and her awakening to the fact that she is really in love with her husband, the gradual enticement of Jadwin into speculation in wheat and the consequent estrangement of the couple, and reaches its climax in the great corner in wheat, which sent the price soaring and brought upon Jadwin’s head the unqualified praise of the farmers and the equally unqualified execration of everyone else and collapsed finally in a smash that buried Jadwin and his fortune and caused the suicide of his closest friend. In describing the break of the corner Mr. Norris is perhaps too insistent that his readers shall understand the situation. The scene is graphic, almost sensational. Jadwin has gone down into the wheat pit in a last vain effort to stay the toppling price that is falling before the inrush of the new wheat from the western farms. “Jadwin was in the thick of the confusion by now. The wheat had broken from his control. For months he had, by the might of his single arm, held it back; but now it rose like the upbuilding of a colossal billow. It towered, towered, hung poised for an instant, and then, with a thunder as of the grind and crash of chaotic worlds, broke upon him, burst through the pit and raced past him, on and on to the eastwards and to the hungry nations.”
The end is tragic in a way, but it is impersonal tragedy. Bankruptcy and poverty are visited upon the daring speculator and his followers, although their courage is apparently unbroken. With indomitable cheerfulness they go back to their gambling as soon as they have recovered their breath, or turn their attention to less risky occupations. In nothing is the conception more typically American and modern than in the last glimpse that we catch of Jadwin, the ruined speculator, rising with his spirit unbroken from the wreck of his fortune.
From: The Albany Law Journal, February 1903, p.62
“The Pit. By Frank Norris”
“The Pit” is the second volume in the “Epic of the Wheat,” planned by the late Frank Norris, the third and last volume of which, unhappily, he never lived to finish. This was to have been entitled “The Wolf,” and was to have been a story of Europe, dealing with the consumption of the wheat and the relief of famine in the Old World, just as the other two volumes dealt with the growth and the distribution of the wheat. “The Octopus” described the war between the wheat growers of California and the railroad trust, and was to our mind one of the strongest novels ever produced by an American, having besides the rare merit of being largely true. “The Pit” is a fictitious narrative of the great Chicago wheat pit, and, all things considered, it is the author’s best work. In “The Octopus” there was too much prolixity, a tendency to overdo, an over-elaboration that marred somewhat the admirable work he there accomplished. In “The Pit “ there are none of these faults, but the talented young author shows a more finished style, an even firmer grasp than in “The Octopus,” and a maturity together with constructive work which has few if many parallels in American fiction. “The Pit” may be described in a word as the story of a woman’s love and its entanglement with a colossal wheat speculation — the American fever for money getting and some of its social effects. The character of Jadwin is an intimate, masterly study of a business man who has learned the game of speculation thoroughly and is willing to sacrifice about everything in order to play it successfully. The young wife, Laura, left to her loneliness and longings for affection and companionship in the midst of her splendid life of wealth and leisure, serves to suggest some of the social problems for which Chicago has become notorious. The book is full of real life, of dramatic action, of admirable description, and the reader is swept on resistlessly by its power. It is a book not only to be read but to be preserved, for it is not likely to be surpassed in many a year.
From: Sunset, V. X, No.2, December 1902, p.165-167
“Concerning The Work Of The Late Frank Norris”
By: William Dallam Armes
Student essays are seldom very good or very ba
d, but about twelve years ago I received one that was both. The descriptions in it were so vivid that the thousands of student papers that I have since read have not effaced them from my memory; but the style was marred by mannerisms and affectations, the essay as a whole lacked unity and consecutiveness, and the best passage in it was an echo of a famous apostrophe by De Quincey, whose work the class was studying at the time. The paper was signed Benjamin Franklin Norris.
In conversation with the writer, a slender, dark, foreign - appearing youth of twenty, I learned that he had recently returned from studying painting in Paris, that he had definitely abandoned that profession, and that he intended to devote himself to literature. I believed he would be successful, for he had what no teacher could give him, great power of invention and a quick eye to discern the picturesque and the dramatic; and the crudities in his style, I thought would soon disappear. But not so. By no means ignorant of his own ability, he was self-sufficient and impatient of criticism, and almost to the end of the chapter each of his papers, no matter what the subject, proved to be a string of almost unconnected pictures, each excellent in itself, but the whole not forming an adequate treatment of the topic. It was not till he submitted an original short story that he attained the highest grade.
While still an undergraduate he began to publish, not only in the student publications, but in local papers and magazines. Shortly after the end of his sophomore year his first book appeared, “Yvernelle,” a mediaeval love poem somewhat in the style of Scott. It was published in suspiciously sumptuous style for the holiday trade, and attracted but little attention. It has merits, but they are not poetic merits. The writer seemed hampered by the verse form; the poem is verbose and the descriptions lack compression and vividness. “Lauth” and several other stories published about the same time show the same tendency to go far afield for subjects, the same reluctance to treat the life of which the writer himself formed a part. “Lauth,” however, was noticeable for the vivid description of the death of Lauth by a bolt from an arbalest.
It was not, I believe, till after he had acted as a special correspondent that Mr. Norris began to portray contemporary life in his stories. Then followed the novels on which his fame will rest— “Moran of the Lady Letty,” “Blix,” “A Man’s Woman,” “M’Teague” and “The Octopus.” The second of these has been termed “autobiographic,” by which is probably meant no more than that it springs more directly from the author’s personal experiences than do any of the others. Conde Rivers is portrayed as a hack writer on a San Francisco paper, as was Mr. Norris himself for a time, grinding out miscellaneous articles hut with an ambition to do good work in short-story writing; and in what is said of him and his methods is to be found the key, I believe, to the excellencies and the defects of Mr. Norris’ own work. Like Rivers, Mr. Norris for a time imitated Kipling, Davis and De Maupassant; like him. “he ‘went in’ for accuracy of detail, ‘bringing in’ to his tales all manner of technical names and cant phrases;” like him apparently he found that the only way he could write a long story was to “shut his eyes to the end of his novel — that far-off, divine event — and take his task chapter by chapter, even paragraph by paragraph;” like him he was completely mastered by a story— “until he should set down the last sentence, the thing was never to let him alone, never to allow him a moment’s peace;” and of any one of his novels, as of “In Defiance of Authority,” could Blix have said, “I suppose it has faults, but I don’t care anything about them. It’s the story itself that’s so interesting. After that first chapter nobody would want to lay the book down.”
In these quotations. I repeat, it seems to me may he found the key to Mr. Norris’ own excellencies and faults, for faults even the most enthusiastic of his admirers will hardly deny his work has. To the end he never freed himself from the influence of greater writers who owe their position in the world of hitters in part to their independence and originality. The coarseness and brutal realism, so out of harmony with his own sweet, gentle nature, is Zola’s; the wearisome repetition of bits of description, often of unimportant, non-significant bits of description, is D’Annunzio’s. To the end he was somebody’s disciple.
The desire for “accuracy of detail” is certainly a praiseworthy one, but accuracy of detail does not necessitate overloading a story with “all manner of technical names and cant phrases.” It simply demands that there be no error in the details, that the gar-board streak he not named when the counter is meant. A profusion of terms unknown to reader, introduced by the writer because he feels that they are unknown to the reader, violates the fundamental principles of good writing. The aim may be realism, but the result is usually exasperation. Chanfrein, tasset, misericorde and euissot are terms more in place in a treatise on mediaeval arms and armor than in “Yvernelle.” The tedious enumeration of M’Teague’s dental tools adds nothing to the portrayal of his character or the development of the plot. The story simply stops while the writer, as the boys say, “shows off.” But no one is deceived, the passage suggests merely a half hour’s chat with a dentist and the diligent use of a notebook. Such “details,” “accurate” though they may be, are tiresome because so utterly unnecessary.
“Shutting the eyes to the end of the novel and taking the task chapter by chapter” certainly would not conduce to unity in the story or to the subordination of everything to one fundamental, formative idea or train of thought. Conde’s book probably suffered from his inability to keep the end in sight. Certain it is that in Mr. Norris’ works there is much irrelevant detail and inconsequential incident. The last art, the art of blotting, was never his. A picturesque scene, a dramatic incident, an interesting anecdote, an odd character attracts him for its own sake and is brought into his story “by the cars,” with apparently no consideration of its effect on the work as a whole. Witness in “M’Teague” the sinking of the toy boat and M’Teague’s difficulty with the billiard ball that he has forced into his mouth but cannot get out: in “The Octopus” the whole Vanamee episode, and in “Blix” the sudden decamping of the tough on receipt of the bogus unsigned dispatch, “All is discovered. Fly at once,” and the education of K. D. B. from the encyclopedia purchased on the instalment plan, the first incident, by the way, from an anecdote by Besant, the second from one by Holmes. Hardly a novel by Mr. Norris is without grave faults in construction.
But when all deductions have been made, how interesting the stories are! How well they open, without long preluding or wearisome “setting!” By a few skilful touches the reader’s interest is at once aroused, and “after that first chapter, nobody would want to lay the book down.” Tin’ endings of the chapters, too, are almost invariably strong and frequently contain an element of surprise that piques curiosity and makes one eager to read on. But the conclusions of the volumes! Who that has read them can ever forget that lone figure on the bridge of the little steamer on the fog-ridden Atlantic quietly giving the order “Due north,” though it bears him away from all that he holds dear; the frenzied struggle of S. Behrman as he is slowly buried in the dark hold of the vessel by the torrent of wheat that he has stolen: or the savage M’Teague handcuffed to a corpse in the horrible loneliness of Death valley?
And the power of it all! None but a writer “completely mastered by a story” could have given us such life-like characters, such telling incidents, such vivid descriptions. Mr. Norris saw what he was writing about and had the ability to make the reader see. Annixter, Blix, Bennett, M’Teague, Moran — what actual, living personages these names seem to evoke! And with what verisimilitude is the gradual amelioration of a character shown, as in Annixter and Rivers, or the gradual deterioration, as the change of the neat, pretty Tina into the slovenly slattern, of the big, good-natured, commonplace M’Teague into the cruel, remorseless brute!
But powerful as Mr. Norris’ work is, to the last it was somewhat crude; excellent as his books are, they impress one as far below what it was in him to do. Had his life been spared he would probably have shaken off t
he influences that too often made his work seem imitative and would have stood erect fairly and squarely on his feet. Then I believe he would have gone far, even into the front ranks. The works he has left give him an honorable place in American literature; but alas! for the books that he had no time to write.
From: The Bookman, V.10, November 1899, p.204
The fashion of writing novels in trilogies, which has lately had such a vogue in France, seems in a fair way to be imported into our own country. Among others who have recently caught the contagion is the young Californian writer, Mr. Frank Norris, whose work is analysed at length elsewhere in this issue. We understand that Mr. Norris has in contemplation a somewhat ambitious scheme for a series of three stories which shall symbolise our national life on a broad scale. The volumes will not be held together by a continuity of plot, but simply by the central symbol, American Wheat, which he has selected as emblematic of American prosperity. The first volume will treat of wheat in the grain, and will portray life on the vast farming lands of the San Joaquin Valley, a region which Mr. Norris revisited last summer, expressly to collect material for his new work. The octopus-like grasp of the Western railroads, adjusting their rates so as to absorb the giant share of the profits, in good years and bad alike, will form an important motif of the book. The second volume shows us the wheat brought to market, and will deal with the gigantic speculations of the Chicago wheat-pit. The third has to do with the final distribution of the wheat; the scene is shifted across the Atlantic to some small continental town in a year of famine, the aim being to show the far-reaching effects of our prosperity, as the wheat rolls eastward, in a vast, unbroken flood, filling the groaning ships and pouring across the ocean, to feed the mouths of hungry Europe. It is a large subject; but Mr. Norris has already shown that he is not afraid of large subjects; and he may be safely trusted to develop it effectively.