by Frank Norris
It is well to add quickly that these essays will serve merely as a starting-point and nothing more. If they were the measure of Morris’s value, if they represented not only what Norris believed that he was trying to do but what he actually succeeded in doing, he would be of considerably lesser magnitude and his influence would have ended long before this. They are exceedingly uneven, some of them revealing a surprisingly deep and far-reaching understanding of the methods and purposes of serious fiction, while others again show nothing excepting certain curious personal limitations, a sort of mental astigmatism. In a number of them, such as “ A Problem in Fiction,” one feels that Norris was not so much telling the general public the views that he had long and clearly held, but rather that he was making interesting exploration trips into his own mind and trying by a tour de force to reconcile the contradictory instincts and impulses that he encountered there. It may be said in passing that these essays contain some curiously bad writing to come from the pen possessing the strength and brilliance and lyric quality of Norris at his best. It seems almost as though he were saying: This is not my real work; it is only a side issue. I cannot stop to worry about form and style. All I want to do is to convey the idea with sufficiently comprehensible journalistic fluency. I am in a hurry to get back to my new big novel, the biggest and the best I have ever done! This was, quite literally, Norris’s attitude towards fiction in general and his own in particular. The novel to him was the literary form of supreme importance, the most potent and far reaching:
The Pulpit, the Press and the Novel — these indisputably are the great molders of public opinion and public morals to-day. But the Pulpit speaks but once a week; the Press is read with lightning haste and the morning news is waste paper by noon. But the novel goes into the home to stay. It is read word for word; is talked about, discussed; its influence penetrates every chink and corner of the family. . . . How necessary it becomes, then, for those who, by the simple art of writing, can invade the heart’s heart of thousands, whose novels are received with such measureless earnestness — how necessary it becomes for those who wield such power to use it rightfully. Is it not expedient to act fairly? Is it not, in Heaven’s name, essential that the People hear, not a lie, but the Truth?
Such was Norris’s firm conviction regarding the modern novel: an instrument of vast and at times dangerous power; and the novelist’s responsibility he looked upon as a solemn trust. He had only scorn for writers who shifted and spun around like weather-cocks to meet the wind of popular favor; and he insisted that the true reward of the novelist, the reward that could not be taken away from him, was to be able to say at the close of his life:
“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.”
The essay on “The Novel with a Purpose” is the sanest, wisest, most important chapter in this volume. It shows how thoroughly Norris understood the principles of epic structure in fiction, how faithfully he had learned the one big lesson that Zola had to teach, and how wisely he had taken to heart the warning contained in the great Frenchman’s later blunders. The novelist’s purpose is to his story “what the keynote is to the sonata. Though the musician cannot exaggerate the importance of the keynote, yet the thing that interests him is the sonata itself.” In like manner the purpose in a novel is important to the author only as a note to which his work must be attuned; “the moment that the writer becomes really and vitally interested in his purpose his novel fails.” And Norris proceeds to illustrate “this strange anomaly,” by imagining Hardy writing a sort of English Germinal, setting forth the wrongs of the Welsh coal-miners. “It is conceivable that he could write a story that would make the blood boil with indignation. But he himself, if he is to remain an artist, if he is to write his novels successfully, will, as a novelist, care very little about the iniquitous labor system of the Welsh coalminers. It will be to him as impersonal a thing as the key is to the composer of a sonata.” Now all this is absolutely right; indeed, so simple and elemental an axiom of structure that one wonders why, at the close of the nineteenth century, it was still necessary to put it into words at all, — why it was that even the unthinking general reader could not feel instinctively the fatal inferiority of Mrs. Humphry Ward to Zola; the inferiority, for that matter, of all of the Frenchman’s work subsequent to Le Docteur Pascal to almost all his work preceding it. Yet, as a matter of fact, even Norris himself did not perceive this truth in its fullness until after the appearance of Fecondits. He had not seen how far astray Zola had already drifted in Paris; he did not see that he himself, in The Octopus, was being drawn into the same disastrous current. But he did see later, in time to show in The Pit the dawn of a new light. And that is why the following quotation is not merely a reiteration of the point already made about Hardy and the Welsh miners but has an interest all its own:
Do you think that Mrs. Stowe was more interested in the slave question than she was in the writing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Her book, her manuscript, the page-to-page progress of the narrative, were more absorbing to her than all the Negroes that were ever whipped or sold. Had it not been so, that great purpose-novel never would have succeeded.
Consider the reverse — Fecondite, for instance. The purpose for which Zola wrote the book ran away with him. He really did care more for the depopulation of France than he did for his novel. Result — sermons on the fruitfulness of women, special pleading, a farrago of dry, dull incidents, overburdened and collapsing under the weight of a theme that should have intruded only indirectly.
It is rather painful to turn from the broad sanity of views like these, views that Norris arrived at through his intellect, to certain others that he reached through his emotions, — such, for instance, as his views upon romantic fiction. If we have ever had a writer in this country who owes every last atom of importance that is in him to the realistic creed, that writer is Frank Norris. And for that reason it sounds like the basest kind of ingratitude to find him speaking of “that harsh, loveless, colorless blunt tool called realism.” The plain truth is that Norris never understood in any of their accepted senses the meaning of the terms, romance and realism. At the time when A Man’s Woman was still running serially in the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Evening Sun, Norris said in a letter to a critic who had objected to his “ exasperating vein of romanticism,” “For my own part, I believe that the greatest realism is the greatest romanticism and I hope some day to prove it.” In “A Plea for Romantic Fiction,” he gave the following topsy-turvy, irrational, irresponsible definition:
Romance, I take it, is the kind of fiction that takes cognizance of variations from the type of normal life. Realism is the kind of fiction that confines itself to the type of normal life. According to this definition, then, Romance may even treat of the sordid, the unlovely — as, for instance, the novels of M. Zola. Zola has been dubbed a Realist, but he is, on the contrary, the very head of the Romanticists.
Now Norris might just as well have defined White as that pigment which we use to paint the rare and precious things of life, and Black as that which we choose for all common every-day things, cups and saucers, table linen, wheel-barrows and cobble-stones. Shoe-polish, he might have added, is generally considered black but really it is the most dazzling of all possible varieties of white. This sort of thing is definition run mad, arrant nonsense leading nowhere. There are several perfectly legitimate definitions of the two chief creeds in fiction, any one of which Norris might have adopted, any one of which would have been intelligible to the public at large. There is, for instance, that very simple distinction drawn by Marion Crawford, making realism a transcript of life as it is, and romance, of life as we would like it to be. But Norris is right in one thing: realism and romance do exist side by side everywhere and all the time. Where he missed the truth is in this: that t
he difference between the two is not one of material fact, of a different series of episodes, but simply of a different attitude of mind. Two people can look at a sunset, and one of them may say, “With what magic trickery has Nature’s brush decked out the heavens with a new and marvelous color scheme!” And the other may with equal right reply, “The refraction of solar radiation through a finely attenuated aqueous vapor does produce some rather pretty effects.” You have a perfect right to go into raptures over the infinite power of Creation which produced Niagara Falls; but the man who “ didn’t see what prevented the water from tumbling over” was equally within his rights, — and he was a pretty good realist. Water itself may be looked at romantically as the god Neptune, or realistically as H2O, — and if you cannot see that the chemical fact is the greater wonder of the two, then there is no use in trying to convert you.
Frank Norris was of the number of those whom it was hopeless to try to convert. He could not or would not understand that while a novelist has a perfect right to look upon life either literally or imaginatively he has not the right to do the two things simultaneously. There is a character presented almost at the outset of The Octopus, a poet by the name of Presley, who admirably illustrates the chief shortcoming of Norris’s work. He 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 colors of actuality. He is searching for true romance, and instead finds himself continually brought up against the materialism of railway tracks and grain elevators and unjust freight tariffs. All this is of interest to us, not because Presley is an especially important or convincing character, but because he is so obviously introduced as a means of stating once again the author’s topsy-turvy theory that realism and romanticism are convertible terms; and that the epic theme for which Presley is vainly groping lies all the time close at hand, could he only see it, not merely in the primeval life of mountain and of desert, the shimmering purple and gold of a sunset, but in the limitless stretch of steel rails, the thunder of passing trains, the whole, vast, intricate mechanism of organized monopoly.
Now, of course, there is an epic vastness and power in many phases of our complicated modern life; and the only possible way in which to handle them adequately is by using a huge stretch of canvas, and blocking them in with broad, sweeping, Zolaesque brush strokes. But epic vastness has no logical connection with romanticism; its very essence lies in some huge, all-pervading, symbolic figure, some personified Idea, seen vaguely in the background, behind a closely-woven web of human actualities. Here and there, it may be, the seeds of romance will take root and spring up, in spite of all precaution, like tares among the wheat, — and they are inevitable in the case of a writer who, like Norris, has a tender indulgence for the tares. This was his pet failing, his besetting sin, — a curious paradox when one stops to consider how wonderfully clear, the greater part of the time, his vision was. He knew in his inmost soul that what counts most in honest workmanship is fidelity to life, the real, actual life as it is lived day by day by average, commonplace human beings. “It still remains true/’ he once wrote, “that all the temperament, all the sensitiveness to impressions, all the education in the world will not help one little, little bit in the writing of a novel if life itself, the crude, the raw, the vulgar, if you will, is not studied.”
And in this respect he practised what he preached, studying the crude, the raw, the vulgar; doggedly adhering to the blunt truth, never softening or palliating a thought where he conceived it essential to the fidelity of his picture. Occasionally, his very imagery verged upon coarseness, as where he described 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 what magic effects this fearlessness of words produced; how prodigiously Norris succeeded in making us see! There have been few novelists who could vie with him in the ability to sketch the physiognomy of some mean little side-street in San Francisco, to picture with a few telling strokes some odd little Chinese restaurant, to make us breathe the very atmosphere of McTeague’s tawdry, disordered, creosote-laden dental parlor, or the foul, reeking interior of Bennett’s tent on the icefields of the far North. And yet, every now and again, this same acute, clear-visioned writer would 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 characterized the closing scene in McTeague. When a friend once expostulated with Norris for the gross improbability of that chapter in which a 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^ he frankly admitted the absurdity, but said that he had been unable to resist the temptation, because the scene offered such a dramatic contrast. “Besides,” he added whimsically, “I compromised by saying that the canary was half-dead, anyhow.”
Norris’s debt to Zola, already referred to, is too obvious to have need of argument. Everywhere, from his earliest writings to his last, in one form or another, it stares us in the face, compelling recognition. Like Zola, his strength lay in depicting life on a gigantic scale, portraying humanity in the mass; like Zola, he could not work without the big, underlying Idea, the dominant symbol. In McTeague, the symbol is Gold, the most fitting emblem he could devise to personify the State of California. The whole book is flooded with a shimmer of yellow light, — we see it in the floating golden disk that the sunlight, through the trees, casts upon the ground; in the huge gilded tooth of the dentist’s sign; in the lottery prize which Trina wins; 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 golden dishes of Maria Macapa’s diseased fancy, “ a yellow blaze like fire, like a sunset”; and again in the hoarded coins on which Trina delighted to stretch her naked limbs at night, in her strange passion for money, — the coins which finally lured McTeague and his enemy to their hideous death in the alkali desert. In the Epic of the Wheat, as we shall see more specifically when we come to examine The Octopus in detail, the central symbol had become an even vaster, more relentlessly dominant element. 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 seething with a single thought, the 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 thereafter.
Another obvious debt that Norris owed to the creator of Les Rougon-Macquart is his style: the swing and march of phrase and sentence; the exuberant wealth of noun and adjective; the insistent iteration with which he 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, admirably illustrates this quality:
Outside, 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, dust-like snow into the air; folly-stricken, insensate, an enormous, mad monster gamboling there in some hideous dance of death, capricious, headstrong, pitiless, as a famished wolf.
And again, in accordance not only with Zola but with the entire Continental school of realism, Norris delights in dwelling upon the physical side of life. With the exception of The Pit, the characters in his books are none of them possessed of an over-refinement of sentiment; they are normal beings with a healthy animality about them, rugged, rough-hewn men and dauntless self-sufficient women. He dealt by preference with primitive natures, dominated by single pas
sions. His favorite heroes are cast in a giant mold, big of bone and strong of sinew, with square-cut heads and a salient, “prognathous” jaw. Such was Captain Kitchell, in Moran of the Lady Letty; such also was 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 square-cut, angular; the jaw salient, like that of the carnivora.
Bennett also, in A Man’s Woman, 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 was Norris’s wont to paint pleasanter pictures. But here too he dwelt mainly on physical attributes. He never wearied of describing their features, the color of their hair and eyes, the fragrance of their neck and arms, their “whole sweet personality.” It is curious to see what a fascination woman’s hair seems to have had for Norris; it fairly haunted him like an obsession. He dwelt upon it constantly, lingeringly; it is the one great charm of each and all of his heroines, — they are forever smoothing it, braiding it, putting it up or down; it enters into and lends color to their every mood. Moran Sternerson has “an enormous mane of rye-colored 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 somber radiance.” Even small, delicate, anaemic 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 color to her face seemed to have been absorbed by this marvelous hair.”