by Frank Norris
Before leaving “McTeague,” a word or two ought to be said of its style. Two influences seem to have affected it, — one derived from Norris’ personal admiration for the powerful and imposing, the other from his journalistic training. The former led him to the use of large, resounding phrases, often well suited to the magnitude of the subjects which he treated; the latter led to that verbosity which may be tolerated only in newspaper writing. Not only in “McTeague,,” but also in ‘‘The Octopus” and “The Pit” there is a superfluity of adjectives and a needless repetition of phrases and sentences which makes one regret that Norris did not reduce the length of his manuscripts by a vigorous use of the blue pencil. Rhetorical blunders and even occasional grammatical errors are to be found, — confirming the impression that all this work, though noble in design, was executed in too much haste.
In “McTeague” Norris had dealt powerfully with the ruin of an individual; in “The Octopus” he wrote the tragedy of a community. The story is based on actual events: in the San Joaquin valley of California trouble had arisen between the railroad company and the great wheat-growers; corporate greed had goaded the farmers to acts of violence; the destruction of homes and the death of their owners was the ultimate result. Here, then, was an opportunity for the man who intimately knew the actors and the scene, who sympathized with the victims, and who had imaginative insight into the deeper meaning of the conflict. As a result of this fortunate combination of the man and the subject, Frank Norris produced his greatest work, — one of the most noteworthy novels of contemporary literature.
The background of “The Octopus” is painted with that large brush and those striking colors which its author loved and used best. Scenes so widely different as the meeting of the farmers at the ranch of Magnus Derrick, the dance in Annixter’s barn, the “hold-up” of the train by the desperado Dyke, the nightly visits of Vanamee to the old mission garden, and the bloody battle between the ranchers and the railroad men, — scenes of rough gayety, or of mystic loveliness, or of terror and death, — are equally well done. Their cumulative effect is such that one seems to breathe the atmosphere of modern California, that one comes to feel not only its crude, energetic power, but also its beauty and the lingering romance of its older days. More clearly than in “McTeague,” Norris here showed that he was quite as able and willing to depict the beautiful as the repulsive.
Figures moving on so gigantic a stage might easily, in the hands of a less powerful writer, have come to look like pigmies; but the characters of “The Octopus” are worthy of great environment. These men are the fit owners of their vast domains, — men of huge stature, stirred by great passions, planning big enterprises. To enumerate them is here impossible; the “list of principal characters,” which Norris prefixed to his novel, and which mentions only those who have an active part in the story, names more than twenty, — enough, that is to say, to furnish characters for three or four ordinary novels. If a story which, like Hauptmann’s “Die Weber,” is really that of a community rather than that of an individual, may be said to have a hero, Annixter is the man. In many ways he resembles the type which seems especially to have interested Norris; McTeague, and Bennett in “A Man’s Woman” (a novel of inferior quality), and Cyrus Jadwin in “The Pit,” are all masterful men, dominant either in brute strength or in will-power. Annixter is the best drawn of them all. And Annixter’s love for Hilma Tree introduces a heroine who is as true to life as Trina and incomparably more lovely. Together they seem embodiments of the best Western manhood and womanhood.
In this tragic history, Norris saw a deep meaning, which cannot be more clearly stated than in his own words: —
“Men — motes in the sunshine — perished, were shot down in the very moon of life; hearts were broken; little children started in life lamentably handicapped; young girls were brought to a life of shame; old women died in the heart of life for lack of food. In that little isolated group of human insects, misery, death, and anguish spun like a wheel of fire. But the wheat remained. Untouched, unassailable, undefined, that mighty world force, that nourisher of nations, wrapped in Nirvanic calm, indifferent to the human swarm, gigantic, resistless, moved onward in its appointed grooves. Through the welter of blood at the irrigation ditch, through the sham charity and shallow philanthropy of famine relief committees, the great harvest of Los Muertos rolled like a flood from the Sierras to the Himalayas to feed thousands of starving scarecrows on the barren plains of India.”
To follow the course of this beneficent “nourisher of nations” from its growth in California, through its distribution in the wheat-pit of Chicago, to its consumption in a village of Western Europe, — to write what he called “The Epic of the Wheat,” — was the novelist’s plan. “The Octopus” and “The Pit” were written; “The Wolf,” the last volume of the series, had not yet been begun, death preventing the complete execution of the great design.
Although the powerful expression of a large idea, “The Octopus,” like all the work of Morris, has serious faults. One wonders what could have made Mr. Howells write: “What I feel, and wish others to feel, in regard to it is the strong security of its most conscientious and instructed art.” “Security of art” is precisely what Norris had not yet attained. He looked upon the world with searching, unprejudiced eyes; he saw some of the great principles which sway individuals and society; he wrote of these with the enthusiasm of a young man. But he failed to select his materials so carefully, to blend them so surely, as the “secure artist.” In “McTeague” he came nearest to artistic harmony: although he treated the episode of old Grannis and Miss Baker a little too romantically, from the technical point of view, this is his best book. In “The Octopus” he showed, in two ways, more lack of “secure art.” On the one hand there is a failure instinctively to feel that the realistic method rigorously excludes the melodramatic: such a scene as the death of Behrmann, who is smothered by the wheat which he unrighteously gained, is quite out of place. Poetic justice ought not to be appealed to by the realist. On the other hand, the mystic story of Vanamee, so beautiful in itself (again excepting crudities of detail), is not skilfully interwoven with the web of the plot; it impresses one as superfluous, which really it is not. The trouble is that Norris, feeling in Californian life the older spirit of romantic dreaminess side by side with the modern spirit of activity, failed to bring them to bear upon each other, — made them, in other words, two instead of one. Your “secure artist” rarely errs in such matters.
Furthermore, one feels in reading Norris that though he honestly purposed to write only what he felt to be true, he was sometimes led to write what he knew not of. “A Man’s Woman” is a lamentable failure because it was written with only one eye on the real world and the other on a rather foolish theory. Likewise “The Pit,” his last and by no means his best work, is good only so far as it deals with Cyrus Jadwin and the wheat corner; whenever it passes to the characterization of women like Laura Dearborn, or to Chicago society in general, it becomes extremely unconvincing. The story of Laura, moreover, like the story of Vanamee, has slight connection with the main plot; there is insufficient motivation, and almost no influence of one set of characters upon the other. In short, the author of “The Pit” imagined more than he observed.
When one remembers that the artistic ability of Norris was at its best in “McTeague,” the work which he planned and partly wrote in college, before entering his busy life in the world, one cannot help feeling that many of the faults of his later works were due to hasty execution. The novelist must have time for reflection as well as opportunity for observation: a journalistic career gives the latter but destroys the former. Had Norris lived another thirty-two years, had success given him a chance to leave his hack-work, he would probably have attained that security of artistic method which was his principal deficiency. Even without it, his honesty of purpose, his true observation of Western city and country life, and his forceful expression of large ideas, make such works as “McTeague” and “
The Octopus” noteworthy examples of the best contemporary American fiction.
From: The Phi Gamma Delta, V. 25. December 1902, p.157-163
“A Golden Bowl Broken”
By: William Allen Wood
It was a strange coincidence that Zola and his most successful imitator should die within a few days of one another. I do not say imitator to disparage the work of our brother in Phi Gamma Delta, Frank Norris, but to glorify it. I mean he used the same methods as Zola — that he had the epic strength and the independence of the much misunderstood Frenchman, and that he employed the same means of expressing his large conception of things. Zola was in the meridian of his powers while Mr. Norris was but approaching the fulness of strength that was so unmistakably foreshadowed in his early work, and was developing with each new product.
I believe I have read all Mr. Nome’s books except “The Pit,” though it has been some time since I read any one of them. “Moran of the Lady Letty” is a fanciful sea tale of narcotic imagining, a sort of prose “Ancient Mariner,” though a pipe dream in its romantic leaning, rather than an opium performance. “Blix” is a jolly love story of two young Californians, a charming, healthy, wholesome girl and a bright and entertaining newspaper man who was the right kind of chap for an interesting and healthful association with that kind of girl. “McTeague” is the powerful life-story of an uncouth California dentist. It is a very disagreeable tale, but its merits drew wide attention both to the book and the author. It was a relief from the swashbuckling and the superficial psychology of the “popular” novelist. The realism of McTeague is intensely vivid, without the sacrifice of action, however. It will appeal to the student of literature, but he who reads for the sensuous emotional pleasure will do well to let it alone. “A Man’s Woman” did not please particularly. It is the story of an arctic explorer and a nurse who became his wife. The principal human interest, as I remember, lay in the conflict between her wifely and her womanly (according to Norris’s idea) emotions — whether she should selfishly keep him at home for herself, or permit him to go on another dangerous expedition towards the pole for the benefit of science. “A Man’s Woman” was a disappointment after the expectations aroused by “McTeague.” “The Octopus,” his last work published in book form, was the largest conception of its author, so far as we are now able to say. I know of nothing American that approaches it in magnitude of outline. “The Octopus” is the first book of what was to be a trilogy dealing with the production, the distribution, and the consumption of wheat. All the economic and social phenomena attending the different processes were to be expressed as fully as possible. The work as planned is a tragedy which occupies the stage of human experience to its greatest depth. It covers all the intermediate ground between the grossly material and the elusively psychic. It is worthy of deepest regret that it was only two-thirds finished.
A book, or series of books, must indeed be large in conception to do all the things Norris had planned for his trilogy. The union of comparatively accurate historic and economic realism with romance and with other phases of social realism (social in the narrower sense) comprehends more of life than the novelist ordinarily cares to try to include in one consecutive work. This combination takes the ability of a literary giant to accomplish successfully, and, in view of his performance, I think we may fairly claim for Mr. Norris the distinction of being a literary giant. He called his trilogy an “Epic of the Wheat.” “The Pit,” the second story, is now running serially in a weekly periodical. “The Wolf” was not yet begun. A short description of “The Octopus” would give but a meager idea of the many-sidedness of the story, so l shall not attempt a description. “The Octopus” shows a contemplated work approaching in proportions the extensiveness of Zola’s quadrilogy, the first book of which is “Fecondite” (Fruitfulness). In most respects, however, the work would better correspond with Zola’s trilogy of Lourdes, Rome and Paris.
“The Octopus” has many of the virtues and many of the failings of the Zola books: the magnificence and daring of outline; the sheer strength and virility of expression; the originality of the work and its sincerity; the generally sound philosophic basis; the vitality of the feeling aroused in the reader; the pathos and grandeur, the dramatic force and somber poetic beauty of the experiences involved in the struggle for existence and position — and the need of condensation and “editing”; the occasional tinge of melodrama; the frequent intrusion of the background into the foreground; the too primordial humanness and too elementary nature of the emotional element; the almost complete sacrifice of gentleness and joy to strength and seriousness. A writer in the Bookman says of “The Pit”: “In it Mr. Norris has remained true to his scheme. Wheat, the central symbol, chief source of the nation’s growth and wealth, is visible in every page, but subordinated and in the background. The interest of the story is concentrated, not upon symbols, but on the central characters — flesh-and-blood characters, such as Mr. Norris never before succeeded in drawing. * * * There can be little question that, as a drama of mad speculation, ‘The Pit’ is the nearest approach to Zola’s ‘Argent’ that has yet been made in English.” So, those of us who have not yet commenced this latest product, have yet before us the pleasure of reading what is probably the greatest and most finished work of Norris.
Brother Norris was born in 1870, in Chicago, whence moved to California in 1886. Young Norris had the idea of becoming an animal painter, so he was sent to Paris in 1887. He studied in the “Atelier Julien” until 1889, when he gave up the notion of being an artist. He returned to America to enter California, and graduated there in the class of ‘94. After a year at Harvard, he went to South Africa as correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle. He had a part in the Uitlander insurrection, acting as dispatch rider for John Hays Hammond, and was once in the saddle for eighteen consecutive hours. He had a fever from this exposure, and came near dying in the hospital at Johannesburg. Forced by the Boer government, after the raid, to leave the Transvaal, he returned to San Francisco, where, in 1896, he took the editorship of an illustrated weekly paper, The Wave. To this he contributed his first long story, “Moran of the Lady Letty,” which was then published under the title “Shanghaied.” It was in 1897 that he wrote “McTeague.” The story contains 125,000 words and was written in a little less than three months, though he was collecting the material for it over a period of two years. While at work on this book, he spent the time at the Big Dipper mine in Placer county, California, which is mentioned in the story. When not engaged in writing, he lived the hardy miner’s life and spent much physical energy cutting a trail between the Big Dipper and the Iowa Hill mines. By this kind of existence he maintained the proper balance between his physical and his mental powers. His own life was largely epical, and to Mr. Howells must be given credit for first using the expression “epical conception of life” in connection with him. Going east in 1898, Norris became a member of McClure’s staff, and acted as correspondent for McClure’s Magazine through the Santiago campaign of the Spanish-American war. Since then he has been working at literature, mostly in New York.
A few weeks ago, after revising the proof sheets of “The Pit,” which will be published as a book early next year, he started with his wife from New York for a trip around the world. He intended to start from San Francisco on one of the tramp steamers that carry wheat to the Mediterranean, and to collect material for the last book of the trilogy. The health of Mrs. Norris interfered, however, and he purchased a ranch in California, where he and his wife settled for the winter. He wrote to a friend that it was so wild he “could shoot bears from his front door.” Suddenly he was taken with appendicitis, and, after an operation, he died in a San Francisco hospital on October 25.
Lately Brother Norris has been contributing a department, “Salt and Sincerity,” to The Critic. That conservative publication says of him, “The death of Mr. Frank Norris is a distinct loss to American literature. He was only thirty-two years of age at the time of his death, but he made a profo
und impression both in America and England.” In a letter to the editor of The Critic, Mr. Hamlin Garland says, “He was the handsomest, bravest, brightest man of letters I ever knew. He looked at things American in a large way, and his work was sincere and very strong. And yet great as ‘The Octopus’ and ‘The Pit’ are, they were only the first fruits of a tremendous creative energy. But after all is said, I come back to the keen sorrow that seizes me as I remember his face, beautiful in its cheery, blithe fashion as Edwin Booth’s was in its somber fashion. Norris was to me one of the most enviable of all the men I knew * * *. His winning personality captivated every one who chanced to meet him. His going is a great loss to American literature. He was a man of blameless life, high ideals and great achievement.” The World’s Work pays this tribute: “He was a very noble man — strong and gentle and brave and true. The memory of him is so precious a possession to those who lived with him that they will carry it as an uplifting influence all their lives long.”
The idea of Norris’s artistic career and his creed as a man was to be true. A while ago he wrote, “To make money is not the province of the novelist. If he be the right sort he has other responsibilities, heavy ones. He, of all men, can not 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. 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 this is his reward — the best that a man may know; the only one really worth the striving for.”