by Frank Norris
From: The Bookman, V.10, November 1899, p.234-238
“Frank Norris, Realist”
By: Frederic Taber Cooper
Even if Captains Courageous were really so much below Mr. Kipling’s usual level as some zealous critics have contended, it would still have placed lovers of fiction in his debt, if only for having brought the romance of sailor life again into favour. It opened up a golden opportunity to a host of new writers, and more than one of the younger reputations of today are due to the renaissance of stories of the sea. Morgan Robertson’s Spun Yarn and Joseph Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus are instances which come at once to mind, while a more recent, and in some ways a more significant, example, is Frank Norris’s Moran of the Lady Letty — a book which no less an authority than Mr. Howells has heralded as the forerunner of a new era in American fiction. Impartially considered, Moran is scarcely a masterpiece — just a strong, fresh idyll of the sea, conceived with a reckless disregard for plausibility, but full of the dash of waves and the pungency of salt breezes, and amply redeemed by the brave, frank, loyal character of that “daughter of a hundred Vikings,” Moran herself.
But the real significance of Mr. Norris’s first book lies far less in the plot than in the resourceful vigour of his language and the admirable accuracy of minor details; and more interesting than the undoubted promise that it contains is the promptness with which that promise is being redeemed. Mr. Norris is a young man to have attained his present measure of success, being still in the vicinity of thirty; and the very versatility which his work exhibits is an indication that he is yet engaged in testing his strength and seeking his true path. Three other novels have followed Moran in rapid succession, each offering a fresh surprise and dealing with an utterly different theme, but showing at the same time a steady gain in power along the lines which stamped the first book as a work of sterling merit. McTeague, which immediately followed it, is frankly, brutally realistic; a study of heredity and environment, symbolising the greed of gold, and dominated throughout by the gigantic figure of the dull and brutish dentist, ox-like, ponderous and slow. Blix, which has just been issued in book form, offers a sharp contrast. It is a sparkling little love story, clean and wholesome, the chronicle of an unconscious courtship between a young couple who begin by agreeing that they do not love each other, and then make the dangerous experiment of trying to be simply and frankly good comrades. A Man’s Woman, now running serially in the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Evening Sun, is the most ambitious effort that Mr. Norris has yet made. The central figures are an Arctic explorer, whose heart is divided between two passions, his love for a woman and his ambition to reach the northern pole; and a woman, “a grand, noble, man’s woman,” strong enough to subordinate her own love for him to the furtherance of that ambition. The story abounds in dramatic situations, of an intensity often bordering on the repellent; while the convincing pictures of gruesome suffering amid the desolate ice-plains of the far north cannot fail to be recognised as a remarkable tour de force. Here is a single passage which admirably conveys the flavour of the whole book:
There were six of them left, huddled together in that miserable tent. . . . Their hair and beards were long, and seemed one with the fur covering of their bodies. Their faces were absolutely black with dirt, and their limbs were monstrously distended and fat — fat as things bloated and swollen are fat. It was the abnormal fatness of starvation, the irony of misery, the huge joke that Arctic famine plays upon those whom it afterward destroys. The men moved about at times on their hands and knees; their tongues were distended, round and slate-coloured, like the tongues of parrots, and when they spoke they bit them helplessly.
Yet varied and uneven as these four volumes are, they nevertheless afford a fair criterion of Mr. Norris’s powers and limitations. They prove him, first of all, to be a man who appreciates the dynamic force of words, and who can bend them to his own use — a man who can see life as it is, the earnest, pulsating life of today, and is courageous enough to regard the function of the novel as something higher than a mere pastime for the Young Person. It would be an interesting study, if space allowed, to trace the genesis of Mr. Norris’s style, for many different influences have helped to form it. Somewhere in his writings he says of one of his characters, a young journalist: “He had begun by an inoculation of the Kipling virus, had suffered an almost fatal attack of Harding Davis, and had even been affected by Maupassant,” but was “now convalescing and had begun to be somewhat himself;” and if we do not force the parallel too far, this will apply fairly well to the author of Moran himself; for Kipling, Davis and Maupassant have each left their imprint upon him. To be sure, he “began to be somewhat himself” at a rather early stage; even That Animal of a Buldy Jones, that slight esquisse of the Paris Latin Quarter, which appeared in McClure’s Magazine, bears the unmistakable hall-mark of individuality. Much of his independence, no doubt, is due to his journalistic training and the experiences incidental to it; one can hardly have had a share in such thrilling scenes as Jameson’s raid and the siege of Santiago without gaining a broader view of the relativity of things. But of the writers who have helped to form him, Kipling is one of the most obvious. Like Kipling, Mr. Norris is marked by an exuberant virility; his books are essentially men’s books, his heroines, with the exception of McTeague’s Trina, are essentially men’s women. Yet it is just here that he and Kipling part company, for Mr. Norris has a fantastic ideal of womanhood undreamt of in the philosophy of him who wrote The Vampire.
As for his indebtedness to Maupassant, no one can read far in McTeague without discovering that its author’s literary creed is realism. And yet, paradoxical as it may seem, he has an obstinate and often exasperating vein of romanticism running through all his work. It is his pet failing, his besetting sin, so to speak. A disciple of Zola and of Maupassant, a high-priest, as it were, of Things as They Are, he adheres doggedly to the blunt truth and at times is brutally outspoken, never softening or palliating a thought where he conceives it essential to the fidelity of his picture; occasionally his very imagery verges upon coarseness, as when he describes the ships along the city’s water-front, “their flanks opened, their cargoes, as it were, their entrails, spewed out in a wild disarray of crate and bale and box.” And yet every now and again this same acute, clear-visioned writer will perversely sacrifice not only truth, but even verisimilitude for the sake of a melodramatic stage effect, even at the risk of “an anti-climax worthy of Dickens,” as Mr. Howells has characterised the closing scene in McTeague.
Nevertheless, it is beyond question that Frank Norris is a realist by instinct and by creed. As between the two French masters, however, his realism is less that of the author of Le Horla than it is that of Zola, the Zola of Germinal and PotBouille — a realism with a half-unconscious symbolism underlying it. It has often been pointed out how each of Zola’s novels is dominated by a central symbol, some vast personification, which is constantly kept before the reader. Similarly, to take but one of Mr. Norris’s novels,
the symbol in McTeague is the spirit of greed represented by gold: we find it in the lottery prize which Trina wins; in the huge gilded tooth of the dentist’s sign; in the Polish Jew, Zerkow, “The Man with the Rake, groping hourly in the muck heap of the city for gold, for gold, for gold;” in the visionary gold dishes of Maria Macapa’s diseased fancy, “a yellow blaze like fire, like a sunset;” and finally in the coins on which Trina delighted to stretch her naked limbs at night, in her strange passion for money, and which finally lured both McTeague and his enemy to their death in the alkali desert. Another resemblance to Zola is the swing and march of phrase and sentence; the exuberant wealth of noun and adjective; the insistent iteration with which Mr. Norris develops an idea, expanding and elaborating, and dwelling upon it, forcing it upon the reader with accumulated synonym and metaphor, driving it home with the dogged persistence of a trip-hammer. Here is a passage which, brief as it is, will illustrate this quality:
Outs
ide, the unleashed wind yelled incessantly like a sabbath of witches, and spun about their pitiful shelter and went rioting past, leaping and somersaulting from rock to rock, tossing handfuls of dry, dustlike snow into the air; folly-stricken, insensate, an enormous, mad monster gambolling there in some hideous dance of death, capricious, headstrong, pitiless as a famished wolf.
So far, Mr. Norris has shown small interest in psychological problems — in self-questioning, introspective men, in neurotic, high-strung women, the product of our complex modern civilisation. It is only in A Man’s Woman that he has verged upon analytic methods; and even here his characters are too simple and primitive to give him sufficient scope. To save the woman he loves from fancied danger, Bennett sacrifices the life of his best friend as ruthlessly as that of the fractious horse which he fells with his geologist’s hammer. Had they been every-day, commonplace people, the shadow of that friend’s death would have lain between them, barring the way to happiness. Bennett and Lloyd brush it aside with an ease that savours of the stone age. His characters are none of them troubled with an over-refinement of sentiment; they are for the most part normal beings, with a healthy animality about them, rugged, rough-hewn men, and dauntless, self - sufficient women. He deals by preference with primitive characters, dominated by single passions. He paints upon a broad canvas and with bold strokes, and his figures often have something of the Titan about them. From Buldy Jones to Bennett, his favourite heroes are cast in this giant mould, big of bone and strong of sinew, with square-cut head and a salient “prognathous” jaw. Such an one had Captain Kitchell, in Moron of the Lady Letty; so, too, had McTeague:
A young giant, carrying his huge shock of blond hair six feet three inches from the ground; moving his immense limbs, heavy with ropes of muscle, slowly, ponderously. His hands were enormous, red and covered with a fell of stiff, yellow hair. His head was squarecut, angular; the jaw salient, like that of the carnivora.
Bennett, too, the savage, indomitable Bennett, is of the same brotherhood: “His lower jaw was huge, almost to deformity, like that of a bull-dog, the chin salient, the mouth close-gripped, the great lips indomitable, brutal. The forehead was contracted and small, the forehead of men of single ideas, and the eyes, too, were small and twinkling, one of them marred by a sharply defined cast.”
In dealing with women, it is Norris’s wont to paint pleasanter pictures, but here, too, he dwells mainly on physical attributes. He never wearies of describing their features, the colour of their hair and eyes, the odour of their neck and arms, their “whole sweet personality.” It is curious to see what a fascination woman’s hair seems to have for Mr. Norris; it fairly haunts him like an obsession. He dwells upon it constantly, lingeringly; it is the one great charm of each and all of his heroines, and he never lets us lose sight of it for an instant — they are forever smoothing it, braiding it, putting it up or down; it enters into and lends a colour to their every mood. Moran Sternerson has “an enormous mane of rye-coloured hair,” which “whipped across her face and streamed out in the wind like streamers of the northern lights.” Travis Bessemer, in Blix, “trim and trig and crisp as a crack yacht,” also has yellow hair, “not golden nor flaxen, but plain, honest yellow;” “sweet, yellow hair, rolling from her forehead.” Lloyd Searight, in A Man’s Woman, has auburn hair, “a veritable glory; a dull red flame, that bore back from her face in one grand, solid roll, dull red like copper or old bronze, thick, heavy, almost gorgeous in its sombre radiance.” Even small, delicate, enremic Trina McTeague has “heaps and heaps of blue-black coils and braids, a royal crown of swarthy bands, a veritable sable tiara, heavy, abundant, odorous. All the vitality that should have given colour to her face seemed to have been absorbed by this marvellous hair.”
But it is not alone the scent of feminine hair and neck and arms on which Mr. Norris likes to dwell; his pages are redolent with smells of all sorts and conditions — a veritable carnival of odours. McTeague’s dental parlours exhaled “a mingled odour of bedding, creosote and ether”; in Blix, the Chinese quarter suggests “sandalwood, punk, incense, oil and the smell of mysterious cookery.” Here again is the fragrance of the country in midsummer, as set forth in A Man’s Woman:
During the day the air was full of odours, distilled as it were by high noon. The sweet smell of ripening apples, the fragrance of warm sap and leaves and growing grass, the smell of cows from the near-by pastures, the pungent ammoniacal suggestion of the stable back of the house, and the odour of scorching paint blistering on the southern walls.
And as a companion-piece to the foregoing, here is an unsavoury bit from the same volume, a glimpse into Bennett’s tent in the Arctic regions, redeemed by the dramatic suggestion of the closing words:
The tent was full of foul smells: the smell of drugs and of mouldy gunpowder, the smell of dirty rags, of unwashed bodies, the smell of stale smoke, of scorching sealskin, of soaked and rotting canvas that exhaled from the tent cover — every smell but that of food.
It is his gift of depicting the physical side of life, the smells and sounds and tastes of the external world around us, which makes Mr. Norris so convincing, even when he gives free rein to his imagination. He recognises with great frankness the potent part that the senses still play in our modern social cosmogony; and he seems to enjoy pointing out that in spite of our boasted civilisation, La Bete Humaine is still very near the surface in these end-of-the-century days. He prefers, when possible, to isolate his men and women, to get them away from the veneer of modern refinement and set them face to face with nature and their own passions. He delights in “the great reach of the ocean floor, the unbroken plane of the blue sky, and the bare green slope of land — three immensities, gigantic, vast, primordial,” scenes where ‘‘the mind harks back unconsciously to the broad, simpler, basic emotions, the fundamental instincts of the race.” He is nearly always at his best when describing the elemental, unchanging aspects of nature; the “golden eye of a tropic heaven,” “the unremitting gallop of unnumbered multitudes of grey-green seas;” the “remorseless scourge of the noon sun” in the alkali waste of Death Valley, where “the very shadows shrank away, hiding under sage-bushes,” and “all the world was one gigantic, blinding glare, silent, motionless.” Best of all, perhaps, is such a picture as this of the limitless desolation of the Arctic ice fields:
In front of the tent, and over a ridge of barren rock, was an arm of the sea, dotted with blocks of ice, moving silently and swiftly onward; while back from the coast, and back from the tent, and to the south and to the west and to the east, stretched the illimitable waste of land, rugged, grey, harsh, snow and ice and rock, rock and ice and snow, stretching away there under the sombre sky, forever and forever, gloomy, untamed, terrible, an empty region — the scarred battlefield of chaotic forces, the savage desolation of a prehistoric world.
The rugged amplitude of passages like these has led more than one critic to advise Mr. Norris in all seriousness to leave the life of the city and confine himself to the mountains, the ocean and the plains, wherein they insist that his true strength lies. This verdict, however, is open to serious question: it is true that Mr. Norris’s strength lies in depicting life on a gigantic scale, and he has turned instinctively to these wild regions because here at least he is untrammelled, with limitless space for his spacious canvas and broad, sweeping strokes; and, nevertheless, it is an equally stupendous task, and one requiring much the same talents, to portray humanity on a large scale, the thronging crowds in the streets, pushing and eddying, the whirl and bustle of the department stores, the ceaseless traffic along the busy arteries of trade, all the motley, complex life of a great city. It is just here that Zola stands unrivalled; it is here that so many others have tried and failed. Herrick, in The Gospel of Freedom, and Payne, in The Money Captain, have tried to do it in part for Chicago. Norris, in McTeague, has given good earnest of what he is capable of doing for San Francisco. He is admirable at grasping and depicting the physiognomy of a street or of a room, so as
to give you the illusion that you must have known them well yourself in some unremembered period of the past. McTeague’s dental rooms, with the stone pug-dog and steel engraving of the Court of Lorenzo di Medici, “bought because there were a great many figures for the money;” the Bessemers’ stiff little parlour, in Blix, “peopled by a family of chairs and sofas robed in white druggets,” with the inevitable bunch of gilded cat-tails in the inverted section of a painted sewer-pipe; the Chinese tea-rooms and Luna’s restaurant, where Blix and Condy loved to end the day, with “the solemn rites of a supper Mexican” — these and many like them are pictures drawn in indelible colours, which we could not forget, though we tried never so hard.
American life is growing more tense, more strenuous, year by year. There are titanic forces at work here among us as well as in the far north — the clamorous spread of population, the pitiless laws of competition, the growing powers of the trusts, grinding and fashioning our social fabric with a power as steady and relentless as the vast floes which Bennett saw crushing and grinding the ponderous blocks of northern ice. Here is Mr. Norris’s true field; he has already shown how he can grapple with huge problems; let him confine himself to depicting the hourly struggle of man against man in the social and industrial world. He has many of the qualifications needful: it rests largely with himself to determine whether he will become an enduring figure in the development of a representative American fiction.
From: The Critic, V. XLII, No. 3. March 1903, p.216-218