by Frank Norris
“The Work of Frank Norris”
By: Hamlin Garland
The three books on which the fame of Frank Norris already rests are these— “McTeague,” “The Octopus,” and “The Pit.” “McTeague,” as its name implies, is an exhaustive study of two or three persons — one of which is a profound characterization. “The Octopus” is a presentation of sociologic conditions in California, and “The Pit” is a social and sociologic study of Chicago.
I began my acquaintance with Norris over the pages of “McTeague.” The amazing particularity and unfailing interest of this grim story led me to a belief that its author could do anything — even write a “Trilogy of Wheat.” Once a very wise and gentle man listened to a plan which involved several volumes — and at the end said quietly — very quietly: “Admirable — only be sure you don’t lose interest in your plan.” I thought of this when Norris outlined his scheme for the trilogy. It is to be forever incomplete, not because the author lost interest in its final volume, but because he is dead, and his master, Zola, is dead, and “The Wolf” remains only a title in Norris’s last preface.
In the place of this third volume we may set “McTeague” — or rather it should come first, and “The Octopus” and “The Pit” be moved up the line — for there is no need of apology in dealing with “McTeague. In it is some of the best work Norris ever did, and as a whole it stands as a sort of preparation work — a superb thesis on the individual, leading to a consideration of the sociologic — the epic.
It is the study of a poor, badly equipped young man who painfully gains a certain place in society and, struggling blindly and brutishly, fails to maintain it, — a lonely, harmless creature, dull, gross, and good-tempered, to whom law is a menace and poverty a never - absent, hellward-sloping gulf just at his feet. He has few helpers and no brethren, but has many enemies. He is at once tragic and comic. His history is of a kind with Daudet’s “Jack” and Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary.” It is inexorable in its unrelenting lifelikeness. It is one of the most masterly studies in our literature, but the reader is forced at the end to ask “Of what avail this study of sad lives?” for it does not even lead to a notion of social betterment. It is gray, gray and cold, in tone. It ends in a desert, with two of its chief characters locked in death-grapple.
Norris’s interest was not that of the ethical teacher, the reformer who turns on the light. He rejoiced in McTeague and Trina as terms in a literary theorem. Their sufferings lead to no conclusions. They are in the book because they appealed to his dramatic sense, his love for character. This book is without direct prototype. You may say it reminds you of Flaubert in treatment, or of Zola in theme, but in reality it is without fellow. Its originality is unquestionable. There are flaws in it, but they do not-seriously detract from its essential greatness. It is vital and compelling on every page.
In “The Octopus” the intention is frankly sociologic. A map prefaces the story, a cast of characters is thrown upon a screen. The author is in the country and concerned with wide horizons rippling with vast wheat-fields; he is dealing not with a few persons huddled into a flat, but with proud landowners in combination against a giant corporation. McTeague was a blind fighter, but the farmers in “The Octopus” are immense land lords, oppressors in their own right, banding together for purely mercenary reasons; had they all been really fighting for life, as was the poor engineer turned tiller of the soil, the book would have been heart-wringing. In every chapter WHEAT is taken for the motive, the ever-recurring refrain. The impersonal is uppermost; individuals are subordinated, inexorably crushed, or senselessly exalted as in life by blind forces.
At times the attempt to apply the methods of Zola is too apparent. We weary of adjectives which seem to have been taken directly from “La Terre.” The motive is too insistent, the impersonal ceases at times to interest. The use of the refrain is Wagnerian, but it loses in effect at times. Perhaps it is not a trick, but it certainly is an artifice and legitimate enough. Reference to Trina and McTeague was often made in words to the same effect — in “The Octopus” the dead bride of Venamee, Hilma Tree, Annixter, Behrman are announced by almost exactly the same phrases — wonderfully good phrases too — precisely as Wotan and Siegfried are announced by the same trumpet flares, varied to the flow of the orchestral score. This gives unity to the structure of the novel and produces a most vivid and powerful impression on the mind of the reader, but it also adds formality and fixedness – restricting free development. In the case of Magnus Derrick the artifice proved not merely ineffectual but practically impossible, for his was a dynamic characterization. He grew. Even Annixter (one of the most individual of all Norris’s characters) breaks away from his old self. The phrase departs so widely from the original that it ceases to be recognized.
I do not know that I object to this repetition, but I do consider the constant use of adjectives in the style of Hugo and Zola a disfigurement. Their use was a survival of his boyish idolatry of the two men who labored to make the French language something more than the mincing periphrasis of court intriguers. “McTeague” may be said to partake of the method of Balzac. “The Octopus” certainly was founded upon “Germinal” and “La Terre.” But there his indebtedness ceased — for McTeague, and Annixter and Trina and Derrick — for the throngs of marvellously realized characters in each of these books we are indebted to the keen eyes, the abounding insight, and the swift imagination of a born novelist. Norris studied life, or rather he absorbed it, without effort and conscious design. “McTeague” is a mine of inexhaustible riches of observation. A second or third reading gives increasing wonder as to how the boy acquired so much knowledge and so much discernment.
It is not necessary to apologize at any point for Norris. It is not necessary in criticising some mistakes of judgment in “The Octopus” to say “He will become a great novelist.” He was a great novelist. “The Octopus” is a bitter and sweeping arraignment of impersonal conditions — a sort of inexorable clash of forces, and while it rose higher on some sides than “McTeague,” it fell below it on others — but it showed Norris’s power in another way. It demonstrated his ability to transfer his scene as well as his characters. He was not bound to the slums of San Francisco. As he knew Polk Street, so he seems to present the San Joaquin Valley and its life, and this knowledge stood him in full hand. His first novel was worthy of his great plan. It is fairly tremendous.
He now permitted himself a greater display of power. He laid the scene of the second number of his Epic of the wheat in Chicago. But here again he knew his ground. His boyhood had been spent in the great city of the Wheat Pit. He knew certain phases of it as the keen-eyed youth saw it, and he studied it later with definite purpose, with the eyes of the novelist, in preparation for his last book, “The Pit.” I saw a great deal of Norris during the time when this story was forming in his brain, and I confess I was more uneasy than he. He smoked his pipe and made merry and discussed everything else under the sun — and appeared quite at ease. He said he knew that it was, in a way, the most important test of his powers, and yet he seemed not to be taking pains. He appeared almost too confident of his powers.
But “The Pit” is a worthy successor to “The Octopus.” It is sunnier and more hopeful than “McTeague,” and less cumbrous and set of form and phrase than “The Octopus.” It is, in fact, a superb study of Chicago on certain well-defined sides. THE WHEAT is there, of course, by design, and is to my mind too much insisted upon, but the impersonal does not submerge and dissolve the characterization. It is there as a sound, a wind in the trees, a reminder, but the characters move to and fro, acting and reacting on each other, quite freely, quite naturally. The great speculator, Jadwin, is a most admirably drawn type of Western business man — worthy to be put beside “Silas Lapham.” Laura Dearborn, if she has not the subtlety of emotional experience of Mr. Howells’s Marcia Gaylord, is quite as vital. She does not convince at all points, but as a whole she is Norris’s most important study of a woman.
&n
bsp; “The Pit” does not pretend to be a society story of Chicago,-and it is unduly bleak on that side, — but as a presentation of the strong forces finding expression in its business centres it is thus far unrivalled. Henry Fuller’s “Cliff Dwellers” is its worthiest companion-piece. The projected final volume, “The Wolf,” would have been a more difficult problem than either of those preceding it, for it not merely prospectively dealt with foreign material, but it involved a succession of incidents rather than a dramatic clashing of interests. Norris would have written it had he lived, but its working-out offered peculiar dangers, it seems to me.
Thus far the reader will get only the grim side of Norris, but in “Blix,” fortunately, is the author as his intimate friends knew him, boyish, fun-loving. He was the best company in the world. His eyes glowed with humor. His face shone with roguery and good cheer. His antic manner was never coarse, and his jocular phrases were framed in unexpected ways. He was always and constantly interesting, and to be in his company was to find the world better worth while.
Youth makes a savage realist, for youth has boundless hope and exultation in itself. When a man begins to doubt his ability to reform, to change by challenge, he softens, he allows himself to pity. Norris in “The Pit” is more genial, that is to say, more mature, than in “McTeague” and “The Octopus.” He was thirty-two and successful. He was entering on a less inexorable period. He was not written out, as perhaps Stephen Crane was; on the contrary, his mind was glowing with imagery. His ideals were fine, his life without stain, and his small shelf of books will stand high in the library of American fiction.
From: The Harvard Monthly, V. XXXVI, No. 2, April 1903, p.57-64
“Frank Norris”
By: Ernest Bernbaum
The life of Frank Norris is of interest, not only as exemplifying the kind of career which many of our literary men are following, but also as helping to explain some aspects of the works of this very remarkable American novelist. Frank Norris was born in 1870 in Chicago; at the age of fourteen he went to California; at seventeen, in order to study art, he journeyed to Paris. In 1890 he returned, spent four years at the University of California, and one year at Harvard, where he graduated in 1895. The remaining seven years of his short life were crowded with varied activity: at first he was a journalist in San Francisco; after the Jameson raid, he went to the Transvaal, but, for a too energetic expression of his political sympathies, he was driven out by the Boers; thereafter he was a war correspondent in Cuba; at the end of the Spanish-American war he settled down to the less exciting but quite as arduous occupation of a “reader” for a publishing house in New York City; at the age of thirty-two he suddenly died. It is convincing testimony to his power and industry that in such a busy career he wrote two or three novels of so praiseworthy a kind that his early death has been justly lamented as a great loss to American literature, — a loss similar to that of Harold Frederic and Stephen Crane. And in any judgment of the work of Frank Norris it ought to be remembered that he was no leisurely student of humanity, but an overworked member of one of the busiest professions, that of the journalist.
Frank Norris was, however, something more than a journalist: he was a man who, without vanity, had an earnest faith in his own mission. His purposes as a novelist may best be understood from a passage in his critical essays (for which, as well as for biographical details, I am indebted to the “Estimate of Frank Norris,” by his associate, Mr. Arthur Goodrich), wherein he writes as follows: —
“To make money is not the province of a novelist. If he be the right sort, he has other responsibilities, heavy ones. He, of all men, cannot think only of himself and for himself. And when the last page is written, and the ink crusts on the pen-point, and the hungry presses go clashing after another writer, the new man and the new fashions of the hour, he will think of the
grim long grind of the years of his life that he has put behind him and of his work that he has built up, volume by volume, sincere work, telling the truth as he saw it, independent of fashion and the gallery gods, holding to these with gripped hands and shut teeth, — he will think of all this then, and he will be able to say, ‘ I never truckled, I never took off the hat to Fashion and held it out for pennies. By God, I told them the truth. They liked it or they didn’t like it. What had that to do with me? I told them the truth; I knew it for the truth then, and I know it for the truth now.’ And that is his reward — the best that a man may know; the only one really worth the
striving for.”
“Sincere work,” take it all in all, that of Norris certainly was, — to be ranked on that account above such catch-penny compounds of bad history and lame English as “Richard Carvel,” and such mixtures of provincialism and vulgarity as “David Harum.” Its purpose was to depict contemporary American life with absolute fidelity, never to shrink from the ugly, but never deliberately to avoid the beautiful, always to be true to the facts and honest in drawing their meaning from them.
To what extent this high purpose was carried out, may be seen in “McTeague.” A draft of that novel was submitted by Norris to his instructor in English Composition at Harvard, who is said to have told the young man that it was “too grim and horrible to make a piece of literature,” — a specimen of the criticism which had been directed against “McTeague” from that day to this. The academic criticism, by the way, seems not to have angered the author: “McTeague” is dedicated to a distinguished Harvard professor. The book was finished when Norris was hard at his journalistic work in San Francisco, and it displays everywhere the keen observation of the trained reporter whose daily occupation brought him an intimate knowledge of the life of the Californian metropolis. Those who have lived among similar surroundings recognize the fidelity of the descriptions; those who have not, may gain from “McTeague” a true impression of Western city life. Here is not the San Francisco which one generally meets in literature and which is mainly a picturesque hell of drinking saloons, Chinese “opium joints,” and gambling dens. Nor is here the San Francisco of which Bret Harte once wrote, —
“Serene, indifferent to fate
Thou sittest at the Western gate,” —
lines which moved Mr. Kipling to retort in “From Sea to Sea” that “there is neither serenity nor indifference to be found in these parts.” There is neither serenity nor indifference in “McTeague.” Its scene is laid in and about those stuffy “dental parlors, exhaling a mingled odour of bedding, creosote and ether,” which are the home of McTeague, on a street lined with small shops, noisy from morning until night, populated by tradesmen, “shop girls, drug clerks, and car-conductors.”
The successful description of so unpleasant an environment would merely be good journalism were that the best of “McTeague.” What makes this book, in spite of youthful crudities, distinctly a work of literature is the characterization of the “young giant, carrying his huge stock of blond hair six feet three inches from the ground, moving his immense limbs, heavy with ropes of muscle, slowly, ponderously,” — the dentist McTeague. A big, ugly brute, dull-witted, good-natured enough unless his terrible animal passions be roused, this man is of unpromising stuff for the “hero” of a novel. The “heroine” seems at first sight more attractive; but her prettiness quickly fades, and her meanness grows under adversity into an overpowering greed which eventually leads to murderous tragedy wherein McTeague slays his wife in revolting fashion. The other characters, — the vulgar, “smart,” loquacious Marcus Schouler, the discarded suitor of Trina; and the amusing Sieppe family, — to mention only the most important, — are equally real and equally lacking in personal attractiveness. How was it possible for any writer to make such people interesting? Norris achieved that seeming impossibility by drawing his characters with all the sympathy which a faithful adherence to the truth would allow, by showing in McTeague and the rest not only those qualities which were base and brutal, but also those which were universally human.
“McTeague” is, to be sure, not a dainty book, no
t a book from which to draw a sense of love or happiness or gentle humor. There are pages which even its admirers could wish omitted, such, for instance, as those containing the much-condemned scene at the theatre. Other passages, not needlessly gross, must fall on the sensitive reader like a blow. — such passages as this, where McTeague is clumsily trying to express his passion for Trina:
“‘Say, Miss Trina,’ said McTeague, ‘what’s the good of waiting any longer? Why can’t us two get married?’
Trina still shook her head, saying ‘ No ‘ instinctively, in spite of herself.
‘Why not?’ persisted McTeague. ‘Don’t you like me well enough?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then why not?’
‘Because.’
‘Ah, come on,’ he said, but Trina still shook her head.
‘Ah, come on,’ urged McTeague. He could think of nothing else to say, repeating the same phrase over and over again to all her refusals. ‘Ah, come on! Ah, come on!’
‘Suddenly he took her in his enormous arms, crushing down her struggle with his immense strength. Then Trina gave up, all in an instant, turning her head to his. They kissed each other, grossly, full on the mouth.”
These inarticulate “Ah, come on’s,” those gross kisses “full on the mouth,” are painfully disagreeable to those who read exclusively the sentimental and romantic. The only, the triumphant justification of such work is its unflinching truth to life. Those who would banish it from our literature, those who would deem a nice fastidiousness the touchstone of literary taste, are enemies of the art they profess to honor; for only so long as the novel deals with all the phases of life, — from the most noble to the most ignoble, — will it retain that universality of interest without which fiction is impotent for good or evil. The man who wrote the passage quoted above knew very well with what disgust most readers would receive that kind of writing, and how readily they would go to other novelists to read idyllic scenes, where lovers possess a ready flow of graceful language, and never, never “kiss grossly, full on the mouth.” But Norris had the courage to write what he saw and felt to be true; and if, in his anxiety not to cast a false haze of beauty on what is really hideous, he sometimes failed to see the beauty which may dwell beneath a semblance of ugliness, the worst which can be said is that he had the defects of his virtues.