by Frank Norris
Vandover recovers from his temptation. “What had been bashfulness in the boy developed in the young man to a profound respect and an instinctive regard for women. This stood him in good stead throughout all his four years of Harvard life.”
After this, when he returned to San Francisco to study painting, to live alone with his indulgent and devoted father and to rove around in the life of the city, he was gradually corrupted by the standards of the young business and professional men about him.
“In company with Geary and young Haight he had come to frequent a certain one of the fast cafes of the city. . . . This time there was no recoil of conscience, no shame, no remorse. . . . After all one had to be a man of the world. . . . Thus it was that Vandover by degrees drifted into the life of a certain class of young men in the city. . . . The brute had grown larger in him.”
III
The women of the novel are sketched, not elaborated. They are Flossie, a girl of the professional underworld; Ida, a most moving figure, an innocent girl, a little foolish and wild, with the repute of being fast; and Turner Bavis, a “nice” girl by whom Vandover is attracted. Turner, incompletely as she is sketched, has a charm that recalls Blix. Besides she has a character. She has “ideas,” and these “ideas” are not mere figments of conversation but dynamic in making her own future. Her reality is heightened not only by the admirable realization of the San Francisco scene about her, but of the period of the nineties, the time of cotillions and of large sleeves, accurately expressed with considerable grace.
The direction of the story of “Vandover and the Brute” is along the path of its hero’s struggle with the temptations of a modern city. The author of the preface marvels “at the courage” which prompted Frank Norris to write a novel “whose love element is hardly more than a sketch.” Without stopping to comment on the fact that this is true of numbers of powerful and absorbing novels from “Pere Goriot” to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” one must observe that it is not the “love element” which constitutes the force of any other of Frank Norris’ novels. Indeed there hardly exists in his writings a breath of that special magic understanding that says:
“My bounty is as boundless as the sea.”
The interest of the book, as of his other books, is less in the intensity of its record of the individual romance of a man’s and a woman’s devotion, than in the large and radical presentation of a social picture.
IV
The nature of the book, then, is that of a very able social criticism. In this the novel has a force that makes it impossible for you to close the volume, once you have opened it, until you have finished its last word.
Charles Norris says the story ran away with the author. It is true. One knows well enough that life would not have been so consistent, or at least not so unremitting in its punishments, nor so violent in its ironies. Debasing dissipation may turn persons literally into groveling beasts. Indeed, while most mature people know this from scientific statement, and undoubtedly the more people who know it, the better, it seems impossible to believe that the most miserable victims of self-indulgence, however evil, are deprived permanently of the power of grammatical speech. Instantly, however, one has made any such objection one regrets it. A posthumous book, especially one issued under the present circumstances, should not be blamed for any lapse. Like Hamlet’s father it has gone to eternity with its faults unconfessed to its creator, who for aught we can know to the contrary, had he been sought, might have washed them all away. One is too grateful for another book of Frank Norris to cavil at faults.
This is, in a peculiar sense, a book of Frank Norris. There seems no better way of telling its quality, always as difficult to express for a volume as for a personal presence. It has something so clear-sighted, and at once so hardy, and so concerned with the humanities. It never loses sight of the community point of view. But perhaps its most holding force is its sincerity — the thing in the author’s style that makes its pages, as Pope says:
“. . . pour out all as plain, As downright Shippen, or as old Montaigne.”
None but the mean can dislike this power of honesty. Something is the matter with all those who do not welcome and honor it, whatsoever be its message.
This is Frank Norris’ finest power. Another characteristic, and lesser but strongly attractive faculty of his is plainly revealed in this book. I mean the faculty of improvisation, the ability to create and introduce a lifelike, remarkable and original situation. In this kind, the shipwreck of the coast steamer in “Vandover” is one of his most arresting performances, perhaps the most sheerly exciting he ever wrote.
Sincerity is a quality Frank Norris could not lose. But the best force of his natural gift for forthright expression as well as the most interesting development of his faculty for improvisation were somewhat deflected for me in the last works from his pen by the obvious fact that these compositions were on the whole too planned, too much built upon predetermined lines of construction, and not enough developed and grown from within by the natural life of each as a creation.
It has always seemed unfortunate to one of their interested readers that either Frank Norris or Arnold Bennett ever heard of a trilogy. Zola’s success in the form has, I believe, led sincere Anglo-Saxons into error in this regard. The determination to produce a certain fixed number of novels on a given theme appears more characteristic of what Hazlitt called “a bookmaker” than of what he called “an author” — and to be a little too arbitrary and preordained for a successful result from the natural temperaments of writers in the English language.
If the texture of “Vandover” suffers from the lack of training as a writer which Frank Norris gained in his later years, especially in his Harvard experience, it is strengthened, I believe, in some respects in being written so freshly and obviously from the author’s own native endowment, and in ending with his own natural completion like “MacTeague” and “Blix,” uninfluenced by the tendency to standardization which makes “The Octopus” and “The Pit” more like manufactured articles.
“Vandover and the Brute” ends with a touch, an intimation of truth about the result of sin, which says neither too much nor too little. It is a book one is glad to have not only as a good novel which gives to the end its author’s sincere convictions and news about human life, but as the work of an American writer whose sustained, conscientious career all his readers must admire.
From: The Bookman, V. IX, June 1899, p.356-357
“Two Recent Revivals in Realism”
By: Nancy Huston Banks
The passing of morbid realism has never ‘ been quite so complete as the healthy-minded hoped it would be, when it was swept out of sight five or six years ago by the sudden on-rush of works of ideality and romance, which arose like a fresh, sweet wind to clear the literary atmosphere. In this resistless new movement toward light and hope and peace, these black books were cast aside and forgotten, and there was fair hope for a time that the celebration of the painful and the unclean had passed from fiction forever.
But now, just as hope approached security, two novels appear, surpassing almost all examples of realism in modern story-writing, and rivalling the utmost efforts of the ancients in this peculiar respect. It is said that Aristophanes makes reserved mention of certain matters which one of these tales discusses with freedom; but the current novel reader’s acquaintance with Aristophanes is too remote for that precedent to do much toward lessening this recent shock. It is also urged in extenuation of the other of these two extraordinary works, that Flaubert and Balzac made studies for publication along the same lines, but — to a good many normal minds — their having done so does not alter the fact that there is an appreciable difference be — tween the artistic description of a subject in the dissecting room and the actual presentation of it face to face.
And this is what both these new realistic novels do in their somewhat different ways. Both are despairing utterances of the pain of the world, the tragedy of living. Both stories deal exclusivel
y with hopeless conditions of mental, moral and physical disease; both are written with convincing brilliancy and power; both have enough bitter wit to deepen the unlifting gloom; both fail to offer a remedy for the horrors they drag the screen from.
Much alike on these points, the books are markedly unlike on others. For example, Mr. Norris has woven his story with a double thread, whereas Mrs. Dudeney’s has but one. Mr. Norris now and then leaves the lead of his motive, going wholly outside and beyond it to touch the untouchable, without any apparent purpose or result — other than the repulsion of the reader. Mrs. Dudeney’s work, on the contrary, is never coarse, notwithstanding the fearless direction with which she follows her theme. Mr. Norris’s manner is hard and cold, making scarcely any appeal other than keen intellectual appreciation. Mrs. Dudeney, on the other hand, writes with sympathy so complete, so tender, so exquisite as to justify — if any writing could-the telling of such untellable truths. sympathy, too, in her choice of subject, ‘ for the woman whose sufferings and sins are the motive of her work is a victim rather than a criminal, and worthy of respect throughout; while the female miser of Mr. Norris’s story, who suffers and makes others suffer merely in order that she may save money, is a most ignoble figure from first to last.
And yet after pointing out all these differences and resemblances it would be hard to say which of the two books is more absorbingly interesting. McTeague seizes and holds in a vise-like grasp that is almost painful from the beginning to the end of the story of this monster of a dentist and his pretty, shallow, vulgar little wife, whose avarice wrecks their lives — for the love of money is the root of all evil in Mr. Norris’s book. The Maternity of Harriett Wicken holds quite as firmly, though less fiercely, and makes the heart ache hopelessly for the beautiful innocent young woman who has done no wrong, until the consequences of ancestral disease and corruption and crime crush her to the wall — for the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children of the third generation in Mrs. Dudeney’s book.
But, having so conceded the fine quality of the works, the strength and vitality of the stories, it becomes permissible to regret the misuse of such eminent power, to protest against the intrusion of the clinic into fiction, and to question the success of the books as fiction. To discuss these regrets and protests and questions in detail would be to thresh old straw, and yet recurrence to the old contention seems to be demanded by the unexpected revival of realism in its most unendurable form, which these two notable recent novels appear to foreshadow.
From: Sunset, V. X, No. 3, January 1903, p.245-246
“Books and Writers”
By: C.S.A.
Perhaps the little world of letters in the west feels the sudden taking away of Frank Norris more, if anything, than the greater world outside. Here he had his beginning, here his schoolfellows and working mates, here he lived and planned and accomplished, and won recognition, too. Here he was a prophet with honor, and the praise that came to him here incited and inspired him to greater work in a larger field. Keen wit and close seeing were notable features of his short stories that were published in a San Francisco weekly. They were studies of city and country, characteristic bits of life, with pictures of real men and women, and phases of society, distinctively Californian. And this in my judgment, this realistic picturing of western life, was all Norris ever aimed to do, and what he did, and did wondrously and peculiarly well, despite all critics who are saying they were hoping for better things. That he was capable and equipped for more good writing I admit, but I don’t overlook his product. All of us, his one-time friends, regret it was not more, but we are proud of the little legacy, and rejoice in having known and honored this bright, kindly, ambitious man. For he was ever all human, and truth and kindliness; and the making “a family happier for his presence,” was apparently his creed and life, as if the words of the task of Stevenson’s Christmas sermon were hanging in illumined text in the “closet of his soul.”
“One More Tribute to Frank Norris”
By: Gelett Burgess
“The House With the Blinds,” originally printed in the San Francisco Wave, is one of the best examples of what may be called the intermediate stage of the late Frank Norris’ work. His earlier fiction, contributed to the Overland Monthly, while clever and often strong, was slightly imitative and showed the effect of his admiration for Kipling’s style and manner. A little later the charm of Stevenson laid upon Norris the spell that produced the adventure-story entitled “Moran of the Lady Letty.” But in the year 1897, while he was assistant editor of the Wave, Norris’ talent was forced to an energy that was hitherto lacking, and he responded in a brilliant series of sketches written during the intervals of his routine of duty. Hardly a week passed in which he did not contribute a piece of short fiction that clearly showed how rapidly he was learning his trade of story writing. “The Third Circle,” “A Case for Lombroso,” “A Reversion to Type,” “The House With the Blinds” followed in quick succession, varied, when Norris was hard pressed, with chapters from his unfinished “M’Teague.” Page 5 of the old Wave was ardent reading in those days!
This was Frank Norris’ season of experiment; he was feeling his way toward style, plot, construction and that graphic force which became more and more compelling with every book. The city of San Francisco — the “city where things happen,” as he used to say, lay open to his eager quest. He played with the town as a child plays with a new toy. Here he saw romance, mystery, tragedy and comic drama woven like threads of gold in a ledge of quartz. He delved and pecked at the nuggets and, in his few odd moments, he hammered them into such strange shapes as “The House With the Blinds.”
It was perhaps the “unsolved mystery” that appealed to him most in those days; next to this, implacable fate working itself out in tragic climax, and degeneration of the larger sort. Such motives run through his terse, virile, swiftly told sketches. They are suggestions for plots, or notebook memoranda, rather than finished tales. His nuggets always have a crude, fierce, barbaric quality, not minted into artistic form. Yet in each of these tales is a character to remember, animated usually by some primitive instinct or passion, strikingly informed with reality.
Frank Norris was by instinct a story teller. He forged chains that held, and had at this time neither time nor patience for filing and polishing. He was in the very effervescence and riot of enthusiasm, and it was fortunate for him that he was writing for perhaps the only periodical in the United States which would dare to print such fiery, sanguine essays.
From: The Bookman, V. 16, December 1902, p.334-335
“Frank Norris”
By: Frederic Taber Cooper
It is a sad coincidence that Zola’s death should have been followed so soon by that of his most earnest disciple in this country, Mr. Frank Norris. When he left New York recently, after revising the last proofs of his forthcoming novel, The Pit, Mr. Norris intended to start with his wife on a journey around the world, sailing from California in one of the many tramp steamers that carry wheat to the Mediterranean. Incidentally, he expected to collect material for the third volume of his trilogy, The Wolf. Mrs. Norris’s health, however, necessitated a change of plans, and he settled down for the winter on a ranch, where, as he recently wrote to an Eastern friend, he “could shoot bears from his front door.” Here he was suddenly stricken down with appendicitis, dying in a San Francisco hospital on October 25.
There is no danger of making an overstatement in saying that Mr. Norris is a serious loss to American letters. Although barely thirty-two years old, he had achieved enough to show that his talent was not of the meteor order, no mere flash in the pan, burning out with his first book. On the contrary, he has left at least two volumes which are likely to endure, and which gave promise for the future unsurpassed in brilliance by any American writer of his years. In looking back over Mr. Norris’s career, one cannot help being struck with the almost feverish impatience that he showed to reach his highest goal, to do his biggest, most ambitious work witho
ut delay. It seems now almost as though some premonition reached him of the exceeding brevity of time allotted him. Yet with this impatience was coupled an admirable restraint, an indefatigable industry. Having once determined that Realism was the true creed, he adhered to it in the face of strong temptations. It is not generally -known that the nucleus of McTeague was written as part of the university work during Mr. Norris’s term of post-graduate study at Harvard, and that it was conscientiously elaborated and polished for four years before the public were allowed to see it. Moron of the Lady Letty, the author’s one bit of almost pure romanticism, was dashed off in an interval of relaxation, and became his first published book. Its popular success suggested that an easy avenue to fortune lay open along that line, for Norris had a lively gift for inventing stories of the blood-and-thunder order, and often amused his friends by reeling off sword-and-buckler plots by the yard. In his published work, however, he conscientiously adhered to his creed, and only occasionally made concession to his inborn love of romanticism — a weakness that he frankly admitted. When a friend once expostulated with him for the gross improbability of the closing chapter of McTeague, where the murderer, fleeing from justice into the burning heat of an alkali desert, carries with him a canary, that continues to sing after thirty-six hours without food or water, Mr. Norris frankly admitted the absurdity, but said that he could not resist the temptation, for the scene made such a dramatic contrast. “Besides,” he added whimsically, “I compromised by saying that the canary was half-dead, anyhow.”
As already stated, Mr. Norris was an avowed disciple of Zola, and there can be no doubt that the influence of Rome and Paris and Fecondite did him serious harm. Even the fully ripened power that produced Les Quatre Evangiles could not make the principal characters anything more than lay figures, animated pawns with which to work out certain specified sociological problems on a vast human chess-board. The same defect, in magnified proportions, was responsible for the failure of Norris’s Octopus. Certainly the fault did not lie with the underlying scheme of his Trilogy of the Wheat, unless the inherent bigness of the scheme was in itself a mistake. A characteristic of Norris was his love of big ideas, his insistence upon some great central symbol that would bind a novel together into one firmly knit whole. In McTeague the symbol is gold; the whole book is filled with a flood of yellow light — the floating golden discs that the sunlight through the trees casts upon the ground; the huge golden tooth that swings before McTeague’s dental parlor; the golden dreams of the crazed Mexican girl; the hoarded gold that finally causes Trina’s death. But probably not one reader out of a hundred grasps the idea that lurked somewhere in Mr. Norris’s brain, that McTeague was a California novel, and gold the most fitting symbol he could devise for that State.