by Frank Norris
Later on he grew more ambitious. A single State no longer satisfied him. What he wanted was a symbol which should sum up at once American life and American prosperity. His friends are still fond of telling of the day when he came to his office trembling with excitement, incapacitated for work, his brain concentrated on a single thought, his Trilogy of the Wheat. “I have got a big idea, the biggest I ever had,” was the burden of all he had to say for many a day after.
It would be an unkindness to dwell’ upon the brilliant promise of this Trilogy, and the undisguised disappointment felt by those who had the most confidence in Norris when The Octopus appeared, if it were not for the fact that what he failed to do then he has done, and done brilliantly, in his second volume, 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 on 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. In all his earlier books there is something unpleasantly primordial, Titanic, monstrous about his heroes and heroines. In The Pit he gives evidence that somehow and somewhere he had lately been gaining a truer insight into the hearts of his fellow-men, and especially his fellow-women. And this insight he has used in his new book without in any way detracting from the central plot — a gigantic attempt to corner the world’s supply of wheat, to force it up, up, up, and hold the price through April and May and June, until finally the new crop comes pouring in and the daring speculator is overwhelmed under the rising tide, “a human insect, impotently striving to hold back with his puny hands the output of the whole world’s granaries.” 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.
From: The Bookman, V. 13, May 1901, p.245-247
“Frank Norris’s ‘the Octopus’”
By: Frederic Taber Cooper
There is a character at the outset of Mr. Norris’s new volume, the poet Presley, who is haunted by the dream of writing an epic of the West. His ambition is to paint life frankly as he sees it; yet, incongruously enough, he wishes to see everything through a rose-tinted mist — a mist that will tone down all the harsh outlines and crude colours. He is searching for true romance, and, instead, finds himself continually brought up against railway tracks and grain rates and unjust freight tariffs. All this is quite interesting, not because Presley is an especially important or convincing character, but because it is so obviously only another way of stating Mr. Norris’s favourite creed: that realism and romanticism are, after all, convertible terms; that the epic theme for which Presley was vainly groping lay all the time close at hand if he could but have seen it, not merely in the primeval life of mountain and desert, and the shimmering purple of a sunset, but in the limitless stretch of steel rails, in the thunder of passing trains, in the whole vast, intricate mechanism of an organised monopoly.
No one is likely to quarrel seriously with this position. There certainly is a sort of epic vastness and power in many phases of our complicated modern life when treated in a broad, sweeping Zolaesque fashion — in the railroad, the stock exchange, the department stores when they are set before us like so many vast symbols, titanic organisms, with an entity and a purpose of their own. It is only when we come down to details, the petty, sordid details of individual lives, that realism and romance part company. Yet no one knows better than Mr. Norris that it is these very details which give to every picture of life its true value and colour, and he himself has often given them to us with pitiless fidelity. There are few writers of to-day who could cope with him in giving the physiognomy of some mean little side-street in San Francisco, of painting with a few telling strokes a living picture of some odd little Chinese restaurant, of making us breathe the very atmosphere of McTeague’s tawdry, disordered, creosote-laden dental parlour, or the foul, reeking interior of Bennett’s tent on the ice fields of the far North. It is a trifle exasperating to find a man who can do work like this deliberately choosing every now and then, after the fashion of his poet Presley, to look at life through rose-coloured glasses, instead of adhering fearlessly to the crude colours and the harsh outlines. It was this tendency which betrayed him into the melodramatic ending of McTeague; in real life the big, dull-witted dentist would probably have perished miserably in a gutter or a garret, if he had succeeded in evading the hangman; but it suited Mr. Norris’s purpose better to apotheosise him, to drive him out into the midst of the alkali desert, forming, as it were, the one human note in a sort of vast symphony of nature. In the present work there is nothing quite so glaring, yet we detect the same underlying spirit. It is felt not alone in the vein of mysticism which runs through the book, the whole episode of Vanamee, the lonely, half-distraught shepherd invoking the spirit of his lost bride across the wide expanse of prairie. It is felt still more in the lack of vivid character drawing in The Octopus, in a certain blurring of the outlines, that suggests a composite photograph, in the substitution of types for individuals. In more than one way Mr. Norris is farther away from real life in The Octopus than he was in A Man’s Woman, just as in that novel he was farther away than in McTeague.
The truth is that The Octopus is a sort of vast allegory, an example of symbolism pushed to the extreme limit, rather than a picture of life. Mr. Norris has always had a fondness for big themes; they are better suited to the special qualities of his style, the sonority of his sentences, the insistent force of accumulated noun and adjective. This time he has conceived the ambitious idea of writing a trilogy of novels which, taken together, shall symbolise American life, not merely the life of some small corner of a single State, but American life as a whole, with all its hopes and aspirations and its tendencies, throughout the length and breadth of the continent. And for the central symbol he has taken wheat, as being quite literally and truly the staff of this life, the ultimate source of American power and prosperity. This first volume, The Octopus, dealing with the production of wheat, shows us a corner of California, the San Joachin Valley, where a handful of ranchmen are engaged in irrigating and ploughing, planting, .reaping and harvesting, performing all the slow, arduous toil of cultivation, and at the same time carrying on a continuous warfare against the persistent encroachment of the railroad, whose steel arms are reaching out, octopus-like, to grasp, encircle and crush one after another all those who venture to oppose it. It is quite likely that Mr. Norris has been careful of his facts, that he has some basis for his presentment of the railway’s acts of aggression, the unjust increase of freight tariffs, the regrading of land values, the violent evictions — in short, that his novel is well documented. From the symbolic side, however, the literal truth is unimportant. The novel typifies on a small scale the struggle continuously going on between capital and labour, the growth of centralised power, the aggression of the corporation and the trust. But back of the individual, back of the corporation, is the spirit of the nation, typified in the wheat, unchanged, indomitable, rising, spreading, gathering force, rolling in a great golden wave from West to East, across the continent, across the ocean, and carrying with it health and strength and hope and sustenance to other nations — emblem of the progressive, indomitable spirit of the American people. Such, at least, seems to be Mr. Norris’s underlying thought, and he has developed it in a way which compels admiration, even from those who find The Octopus as a story rather disappointing. Especially deserving of cordial praise is the manner in which the two underlying thoughts of his theme are kept before the reader, like the constantly recurring leitmotivs of a Wagnerian opera. First, there is the motiv of the railroad, insistent, aggressive, refusing to be forgotten, making its presence felt on every page of the book — in the shrill scream of a distant engine, in the heavy rumble of a passing freight train, in the substantial presence of S. Behrmann, the local agent, whose name greets us at the outset of the st
ory in large flaring letters of a painted sign on a water-tank, “S. Behrmann has something to say to you,” and whose corpulent, imperturbable, grasping personality obtrudes itself continually, placid, unyielding, invincible. Now and then we have a clear-cut picture of the road itself, as in the graphic, ghastly episode of an engine, ploughing its way through a flock of sheep, which had somehow made their way through the barbed-wire fence and wandered upon the track.
The pathos of it was beyond expression. It was a slaughter, a massacre of innocents. The iron monster had charged full into the midst, merciless, inexorable. To the right and length, all the width of the right of way, the little bodies had been flung; backs were snapped against the fence-posts; brains knocked out. Caught in the barbs of the wire, wedged in, the bodies hung suspended. Under foot it was terrible. The black blood, winking in the starlight, seeped down into the clay between the ties with a prolonged sucking murmur. . . . Abruptly Presley saw again in his imagination the galloping monster, the terror of steel and steam, with its single eye, cyclopean, red, shooting from horizon to horizon; but saw it now as the symbol of a vast power, huge, terrible, flinging the echo of its thunder over all the reaches of the valley, leaving blood and destruction in its path; the leviathan, with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil, the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power, the Monster, the Colossus, the Octopus.
And, secondly, there is the motiv of the wheat underlying that of the railroad, yet ever present and unchanged throughout the long and fluctuating struggle.
Men — motes in the sunshine — perished, were shot down in the very noon 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, undefiled, 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.
Such, in brief, are the purposes of Mr. Norris’s book. It is full of enthusiasm and poetry and conscious strength. One can hardly read it without a responsive thrill of sympathy for the earnestness, the breadth of purpose, the verbal power of the man. But as a study of character, a picture of real life, of flesh and blood, it must be frankly owned that The Octopus is disappointing. A few of the characters are good, they promise at first to win our sympathies — characters like the slow, tenacious German, Hooven; the tall, commanding figure of Magnus Derrick, the “governor,” to whom life was one huge gamble; the coarse-fibred, combative young farmer, Annixter, with his scorn of “feemales” and his morbid concern over the vagaries of a stomach which would persist in “getting out of whack.” But, taken as a whole, the characters do not wear well; they come and go, love and suffer and die, and their joy and their misery fail to wake a responsive thrill. An exception, however, must be made in the case of S. Behrmann. He, at least, is consistently developed and consistently hated. From first to last he has appeared invincible, out of reach of law, of powder and shot, of dynamite. And the final episode, where he is struck down at the very summit of his ambition, caught in a trap by his own wheat, and pictured writhing, struggling, choking to death miserably in the dark hold of the ship, beaten down and lashed by the pitiless hail of grain as it pours with a metallic roar from the iron chute, is a chapter tense with dramatic power — a scene for which a parallel must be sought in the closing pages of Germinal or the episode of the man-hunt in Paris. Whatever shortcomings The Octopus may possess, this one chapter goes far toward atoning for them. It gives a glimpse of Mr. Norris at his best, and holds out a hopeful promise for the future volumes of the trilogy.
From: Some American Story Tellers, Henry Holt, 1911, p.295-330
“Frank Norris”
By: Frederic Taber Cooper
It is barely a decade since Frank Norris was putting the final touches to the volume which was destined to be his last novel, and clarifying his ideas upon literature and life in a series of essays entitled “Salt and Sincerity.” There have been so many changes in American fiction during these intervening ten years; so many younger reputations have waxed and waned, that the work of Norris, taken as a whole, has been thrown into an unjust and misleading remoteness. We are apt to think of him as belonging to a bygone generation, as an influence which after showing a brief potentiality suddenly withered once and for all. As a matter of fact, Norris’s influence has never for an hour been dead. In a quiet, persistent way, it has spread and strengthened, leavening all unsuspectedly the maturer work of many of the writers who have since come into prominence. And the best way in which to realize the nearness of Norris, in point of time and of spirit as well as the dormant strength which his early death prevented from ever fully awakening, is to glance back and briefly consider some of the conditions of American fiction at the time when he began to write.
During the closing years of the nineteenth century, or to be more specific, from 1897 to 1902, the period of Norris’s activity, there were easily a score of new writers who leaped suddenly into prominence on the strength of a single book. The volumes that come casually to mind and may be regarded as fairly representative are Winston Churchill’s Richard Carvel, Robert Herrick’s Gospel of Freedom, Mrs. Wharton’s The Greater Inclination, Booth Tarkington’s Gentleman from Indiana, Brand Whitlock’s Thirteenth District, George Horton’s Long Straight Road, Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Morgan Robertson’s Spun Yarn, Harry Leon Wilson’s The Spenders, Owen Wister’s The Virginian, Jack London’s Son of the Wolf, — the list might be stretched to twice the length. In glancing over this array of names, the various associations and contrasts they offer strike one to-day as exceedingly odd. Certain of these reputations seem now curiously stunted; certain others loom up unexpectedly large; but in spite of the unforeseen readjustments that time has wrought, the significant fact remains that Norris in his lifetime dwarfed them all. At the time of the appearance of The Octopus and The Pit, there was not a single volume produced by this younger group, with the possible exception of The Virginian, that even approached them in breadth of view or bigness of intent. And when we measure the ten years’ growth in individual cases, when we compare the promise of The Gospel of Freedom or The Greater Inclination with the accomplishment of Together or The House of Mirth, then the fact is suddenly forced home to us, how much greater growth that same ten years would have shown in the best craftsman and the bravest, biggest soul of them all. One realizes now that even in his last and maturest books, Norris had not fully found himself, that he was still in the transition period, still groping his way tirelessly, undauntedly towards self-knowledge. He had adopted the creed of naturalism ardently, refashioning it to suit the needs of a younger, cleaner civilization, a world of wider expanses, purer air, freer life. And even while he wrought, he witnessed the apparent downfall of that very creed in the land of its birth, saw its disintegration beneath the hands of its chief champion. It is impossible to read Norris’s works without perceiving that from first to last there was within him an instinct continually at war with his chosen realistic methods; an unconquerable and exasperating vein of romanticism that led him frequently into palpable absurdities, — not because romanticism in itself is a literary crime, but because it has its own proper place in literature, and that place is assuredly not in a realistic novel. How this inner warfare would eventually have worked out; what compromises, innovations, iconoclasms would have paved the way to full maturity of accomplishment, it is of course impossible now even to guess. But one thing is certain: Norris would have found that way; and when found, it would have proved not merely big,
rugged, compelling, but also clean as the open, wind-swept spaces that he loved, and fine as gold that has no dross.
The expressed views of any novelist on the principles of his art have a value far out of proportion to their critical acumen. We may agree or not with Marion Crawford’s The Novel, What It Is, or with Maupassant’s preface to Pierre et Jean, with Zola’s Roman Experimentale or The Art of Fiction, by Henry James; their principles may be quite right or quite wrong; the important fact in each case is that they have betrayed to us the principles in accordance with which they themselves wrought. They have given us penetrating searchlights into the secrets of their methods, the sources of their strength and their weakness. This is why, in a critical examination of the writings of Frank Norris, his collected essays entitled The Responsibilities of the Novelist not only cannot be ignored but form the natural and obvious starting-point.