by Frank Norris
But it is not alone the redolence of woman’s hair on which Norris likes to dwell; his pages diffuse a veritable carnival of odors. McTeague’s dental parlors give forth “a mingled odor of bedding, creosote and ether”; in Blix the Chinese quarter suggests “sandalwood, punk, incense, oil and the smell of mysterious cookery.” Here again is the fragrance of the country in midsummer:
During the day the air was full of odors, distilled as it were by high noon. The sweet smell of ripening apples, the fragrance of warm sap and leaves and growing grass, the smell of cows from the nearby pastures, the pungent ammoniacal suggestion of the stable back of the house, and the odor of scorching paint blistering on the southern walls.
And as a companion-piece to the foregoing, here is an unsavory little paragraph, giving a glimpse of the starving occupants of a wind-buffeted tent in the Arctic regions, — a paragraph redeemed only by the dramatic suggestion of the closing words:
The tent was full of foul smells: the smell of drugs and of moldy gunpowder, the smell of dirty rags, of unwashed bodies, the smell of stale smoke, of scorching sealskin, of soaked and rotting canvas that exhaled from the tent cover, — every smell but that of food.
One does not have to read far into Norris before discovering the strong underlying note of primevalism in him, the undisguised delight that he took in pointing out that, in spite of our boasted civilization, La Bete Humaine is still rather close to the surface, our veneer of conventionalism sadly thin. He welcomed eagerly the nature revival in literature: “Mr. Seton and his school . . . opened a door, opened a window, and mere literature has given place to life. The sun has come in and the great winds, and the smell of the baking alkali on the Arizona deserts and the reek of the tar-weed on the Colorado slopes; and nature has . . . become a thing intimate and familiar and rejuvenating.” In his own books, he preferred, wherever possible, to isolate his men and women, to get them away from the artificiality of pink teas and ballrooms, and set them face to face with the open sky and their own passions. He delighted in “the great reach of the ocean floor, the unbroken plane of the blue sky, and the bare, green slope of land, — three immensities, gigantic, vast, primordial,” scenes wherein “the mind harks back unconsciously to the broad, simpler, basic emotions, the fundamental instincts of the race.” He was nearly always at his best when describing the elemental, unchanging aspects of nature; the “golden eye of a tropic heaven,” the “unremitting gallop of unnumbered multitudes of gray-green seas “; the “remorseless scourge of the noon sun “ in the desert waste of Death Valley, where “the very shadows shrank away, hiding under sage-bushes,” and “all the world was one gigantic, blinding glare, silent, motionless.” Better than any of these is the following picture of the limitless desolation of the Arctic icefields:
In front of the tent, and over a ridge of barren rock, was an arm of the sea, dotted with blocks of ice, moving silently and swiftly onward; while back from the coast, and back from the tent, and to the south and” to the west and to the east, stretched the illimitable waste of land, rugged, gray, harsh, snow and ice and rock, rock and ice and snow, stretching away there under the somber sky, forever and forever, gloomy, untamed, terrible, an empty region — the scarred battlefield of chaotic forces, the savage desolation of a prehistoric world.
Such, in brief, are the materials and the methods of Norris’s art as a novelist: big words, big phrases, big ideas, an untrammeled freedom of self-expression. He could not be true to himself, if hampered by a narrow canvas. That is why it is as incongruous to look to Frank Norris for short stories as it would be to set a Rodin to carving cherry pits, or a Verestschagin to tinting lantern slides. Yet it does not follow that the short tales rescued from the magazine files and collected under the title A Deal in Wheat, were not worth preservation. On the contrary, they are full of keen interest to the student of fiction. No one but Norris could have written them; every page testifies to the uncrushable vitality of the man. But to call them short stories is to misname them. They impress one as fragments, rather splendid fragments; trials of the author’s strength, before he launched forth upon more serious work. Take, for instance, the opening story which gives the title to the volume. It was palpably written for practice, a sort of five-finger exercise in preparation for Norris’s last volume, The Pit — and from this point of view it possesses a definite interest. But taken as a story, it is at once too long and too short. He attempted to cover altogether too much ground; he might, with advantage, have brought it to a conclusion some pages sooner, — and yet, when the end is reached, there remains a sense of incompleteness. In the whole collection there is just one story that stands out unique and forceful, “A Memorandum of Sudden Death.” This memorandum is a fragment of a journal supposed to be written by a wounded soldier, one of a small company of troopers who have been relentlessly trailed, day after day, by a band of hostile Indians, through desolate miles of sand and sagebrush until the final attack is made. If we agree to overlook the improbability of the whole thing; if we grant that a man with one or two bullets in him, and with his comrades all dead or dying on the ground beside him, could go on recording passing events with the accuracy, the minuteness, the astounding atmosphere of this story, then we must admit that it is Norris’s nearest approach to the artistic unity of the short-story form.
Of Norris’s longer stories, Moran of the Lady Letty was the first to don the dignity of print, although the greater part of McTeague antedates it in point of actual composition. It is a fact not generally known that the nucleus of McTeague was submitted as part of the required theme work during Norris’s period of post-graduate study at Harvard University, and that it was conscientiously elaborated and polished for four years before it was finally given to the public. Moran, the author’s one frankly romantic story, was dashed off in an interval of relaxation. Its swift popularity suggested that an easy avenue to fortune lay open to him; for Norris had a lively gift for stories of the blood-and-thunder order, and often entertained his friends by reeling off extemporized sword-and-buckler plots by the yard. But from the beginning he took fiction too seriously to debase it; and even Moran has a certain primitive bigness about it, a rhythm of northern runes, a spirit of ancient sagas. There are whole chapters conceived with reckless disregard of plausibility; but that does not make it any the less a strong, fresh idyl of the sea, full of the dash of waves and the pungency of salt breezes, — full also of health and vitality and clean hearts, and amply redeemed by the brave, frank, loyal character of that “daughter of a hundred Vikings,” Moran herself. It is probable that in this volume Norris had no underlying motive, no central idea beyond the wish to tell a story; and yet one likes to think that, consciously or unconsciously, he embodied in Moran his ideal of the muse of fiction, the spirit of the novel of the future. Listen for a moment to his own description of this spirit as given in one of his later essays:
She is a Child of the People, this muse of our fiction of the future, and the wind of a new country, a new heaven and a new earth is in her face and has blown her hair from out the fillets that the Old World muse has bound across her brow, so that it is all in disarray. The tan of the sun is on her cheeks, and the dust of the highway is thick upon her buskin, and the elbowing of many men has torn the robe of her, and her hands are hard with the grip of many things. She is hail-fellow-well-met with every one she meets, unashamed to know the clown and unashamed to face the king, a hardy, vigorous girl, with an arm as strong as a man’s and a heart as sensitive as a child’s.
Read these words once again and ponder on them; then go back to Moran of the Lady Letty and see if you do not find in it a hitherto unguessed amplitude, a gladder sense of the joy of living, a deeper pathos in the absolutely right, the artistically inevitable tragedy with which it ends.
Of McTeague almost enough has been said already. It is the most frankly brutal thing that Norris ever wrote; its realism is as unsparing as d’Annunzio’s, though its theme is cleaner. It is a remorseless study of heredity and e
nvironment, symbolizing the greed of gold and dominated throughout by the gigantic figure of the dull and brutish dentist, ox-like, ponderous and slow. Necessarily, it is a repellent book; and yet there is about it that curious attraction which certain forms of ugliness possess when they attain a degree of perfection amounting to a fine art. McTeague does not begin to show the breadth of purpose or the technical skill of The Octopus or The Pit; yet there are times when one is tempted to award it a higher place for all-around excellence. There is a better balance between the central theme and the individual characters, — or to state it differently, between the underlying ethics and the so-called human interest. If Norris had never written another book, he would still have lived in McTeague, just as surely as George Douglas Brown still lives in The House with the Green Shutters.
Blix, which came next in point of time, offers a sharp, even an astonishing, contrast. It is a sparkling little love story, clean and wholesome, the chronicle of an unconscious courtship between a young couple who begin by agreeing that they do not love each other, and then try the dangerous experiment of attempting to be simply and frankly good friends. There is an effervescence, an irrepressible bubbling up of youthful spirits, a naive good comradeship quite free from the embarrassment of sex consciousness, all of which gives to the volume a special piquancy of actuality. One feels that if it were possible to ask Frank Norris a few leading questions about Blix, he would have answered, as Marion Crawford answered apropos of The Three Fates, and with something of the same wistfulness, “ The fact is, I put a good deal of myself into that book.”
A Man’s Woman is, of all Norris’s novels, the nearest approach to a failure, the one that shows the greatest gulf between purpose and accomplishment. The central figures are an Arctic explorer whose heart is divided between two passions, love and ambition; and a woman, “a grand, noble man’s woman,” strong enough to subordinate her own love for him to the furtherance of that ambition, the discovery of the North Pole. The story abounds in strong situations of an intensity often bordering on the repellent; and the convincing pictures of helpless isolated humanity, agonizing amidst the desolate ice-plains of the far North, cannot fail to win an honest, even though grudging, recognition. But the book as a whole is keyed a trifle too high; it is overweighted with too ponderous words and phrases, with too tense and too sustained a pressure of emotions. One feels that people could not go on living and keep their sanity, if life were such a constant blare of passions, such a crude, raw presentment of primitive humanity, born out of time, — the Stone Age transferred to the twentieth century. And yet, like all of Norris’s work, it has its lure, its compelling force. We will not open the book again, we will not read another line! And yet, wait a moment, — our eye has just caught another passage, — listen to this:
There were six of them left, huddled together in that miserable tent, . . . Their hair and beards were long, and seemed one with the fur covering their bodies. Their faces were absolutely black with dirt, and their limbs were monstrously distended and fat — fat as things bloated and swollen are fat. It was the abnormal fatness of starvation, the irony of misery, the huge joke that Arctic famine plays upon those whom it afterwards destroys. The men moved about at times on their hands and knees; their tongues were distended, round and slate-colored, like the tongues of parrots, and when they spoke they bit them helplessly.
Here in a single paragraph we have the dominant flavor of the book. You may like it or you may not; yet who but Frank Norris could have written it?
It remains now to speak briefly of The Octopus and The Pit, the opening volumes of the trilogy which Norris was destined never to finish, just as Zola was destined never to finish his tetralogy, Les Quatre Evangiles. It is not surprising that, in this Epic of the Wheat, Norris had undertaken a task for which he was hardly ripe, that he was attempting a feat beyond his years and his stature. The vast canvas, the colossal theme, the multitudinous, thronging incident, the crowded stage, — these, we have seen, are Norris’s necessary materials, — not throngs of people but of things, immensities of prairie and ocean and sky. But a man must grow slowly to his full attainment; and Norris showed a feverish impatience to attain at a bound heights that he should have been glad to reach after twenty years of slow and sure toiling. Zola had a lifetime of work and two-score volumes behind him before attempting to sum up the complex life of a whole city in a single volume, Paris. Norris, with the experience gained in four volumes and barely eight years of work, wished to sum up the life of a whole continent. The Octopus is a vast allegory, an example of symbolism pushed to $he extreme limit, rather than a picture of real life. With the two succeeding volumes, it was destined to portray American life as a whole, — not merely the life of some small corner of a single State, but America in its entirety, with all its hopes and aspirations, from the Canadian to the Mexican border, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And for the central symbol he chose Wheat, as being quite literally the staff of this life, the ultimate source of American power and prosperity. This first volume, dealing with wheat in the field, shows us a corner of California, the San Joaquin valley, where a handful of ranchmen are engaged in irrigating and plowing, 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 slowly crush, one after another, whoever ventures to oppose it. In a broader sense, it symbolizes the hold that capital has upon labor, the aggression of the corporation and the trust upon the rights of the individual. But back of the individual, stronger than the trusts, is the spirit of the people, the dauntless energy of the nation, typified by the Wheat, — a perennial, exhaustless fruition, a mighty, resistless tide, rising, spreading, gathering force, rolling onward in vast, golden waves throughout the length and breadth of the continent, bearing with it the promise of health and strength and prosperity. Such is the underlying scheme, the nucleus of The Octopus; and the manner in which the technical difficulties have been overcome and the intricate structure reared compels wondering approval even from such readers as find the human story in the book somewhat disappointing. Especially admirable is the way in which Norris’s double theme, his twofold symbolism, is kept constantly before the reader like two recurrent and interwoven leitmotive of a Wagnerian opera. First, there is the motif of the railway, visible symbol of corporate greed, insistent, aggressive, refusing to be forgotten, making its presence felt on every page, — through the shrill scream of a distant engine, the heavy rumble of a passing freight train, the substantial presence of S. Behrmann, the local agent, whose name greets us at the outset of the story in huge flaring letters of a painted sign upon 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 are brought face to face with the road itself, as, for instance, in the grim, gruesome episode of an engine plowing its way through a flock of sheep which have somehow forced an opening in a barbed-wire fence and strayed 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 left, 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 long 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 For
ce, the iron-hearted Power, the Monster, the Colossus, the Octopus.
And simultaneously we have the second motif of the Wheat, underlying that of the railroad and, in a measure, subordinated to it, yet always with an unspoken suggestion of final triumph:
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 scare-crows on the barren plains of India.