by Frank Norris
Such, in brief, were the plan and purpose of Norris’s Octopus, a book saturated with the quenchless enthusiasm of youth and conscious strength. One cannot read it without a responsive thrill at the breadth of purpose, the earnestness, the astounding verbal power of its author. But considered as a study of character, a picture of flesh-and-blood humanity, it must be frankly owned that The Octopus is as much further away from actuality than A Man’s Woman as that book was further away than McTeague. 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-fibered, 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, suffer and die; and their joy and their misery fail equally to reach our heart-strings. And of course the reason is simple enough: it is impossible to magnify any one thing vastly excepting at the expense of something else; it is impossible throughout an entire volume to make a Colossus out of a steam-engine or a wheat-field by the simple expedient of calling men and women “human insects,” “motes in the sunshine,” without at last making us feel that these men and women are rather small, rather insignificant, rather like the ants that we carelessly tread under foot. I think that Norris came to realize his mistake, — at all events, in The Pit he pictured humanity on a relatively bigger scale. It is true that here again that term, “human insects,” occasionally recurs; that here again the Wheat is the central symbol, a vast world power, chief source of the nation’s growth and wealth. But the reason why The Pit, considered as a human story, has a stronger, more direct appeal is that the symbolism is kept further in the background, the interest focused more directly on the central characters. And these characters, especially the women, are simpler, and in a measure truer than those of his earlier volumes; they have less of the primordial and the titanic in their composition and considerably more of the average, every-day foibles and weaknesses. One feels that somehow and somewhere he had gained a deeper insight into the hearts of the men and women about him; and that this was what Owen Wister had in mind when he wrote, “In The Pit Norris has risen on steppingstones to higher things.” And yet The Pit is just as much a structural part of the whole design of Norris’s trilogy as was The Octopus; it has that same inherent epic bigness of theme; — a gigantic attempt to corner the. entire world’s supply of wheat, to force it up, up, up, and hold the price through April, and May, and June, — and then finally the new crop comes pouring in and the daring speculator is overwhelmed by the rising tide, “ a human insect, impotently striving to hold back with his puny hand the output of the whole world’s granaries.”
Such are the books which Norris, with feverish impatience and tireless nervous energy, produced in the few short years that fate allotted him. They stand to-day as the substructure of a temple destined never to be finished, the splendidly rugged torso of a broken statue. That is the way, the best, the truest, the only way, in which to think of Norris’s place in American fiction, — as only a partial fulfilment of a rarely brilliant promise. Had he lived to attain his full stature, there is small doubt that he would have given us bigger, stronger, more vital novels than the younger American school has yet produced.
From: The World’s Work, V. 5, December 1902, p.2830
“The Death of Mr. Frank Norris”
The death of Mr. Frank Norris, which occurred on October 25th, in San Francisco, at the age of thirty-two, was a definite and serious loss to American literature. The work that he had already done was considerable and important; for the two books that he finished of the great trilogy of novels that he had planned are original and vigorous contributions to the best class of our fiction. Other writers, some by choosing historical and some by choosing social subjects, have interpreted various phases of American life; but he had a larger conception of it — a conception that included its vast economic significance — perhaps than any other writer of fiction. He stood firmly, too, at a time of sensational “successes” in fiction, to his artistic convictions. Many a writer of real ability has been dazzled and has suffered a change of ideals because of the financial success of cheap work; but he held true with an heroic persistence to the best that was in him. He knew that he could write a swashbuckling romance, and he was ambitious for success and he was eager, too, for the financial rewards of his work. He could at any time have made a much larger income by writing sensational books, but he worked on, year after year, unswerving and content with the nobler aim.
After practising his art in his earlier stories, which all showed originality, and after outgrowing certain obvious faults that marked his youthful works, he had, while still young, found a great subject. The strong grasp of his imagination and his mastery of his art were just beginning to show themselves. Here was a man, then, who, having done most noteworthy and, we think, lasting work in his youth, died just as he was reaching the easy command of his powers. The pity of it comes keenly to those who look out over American literature now in the making and see so little genuinely original work.
To those who knew Mr. Norris, his death brings a deeper loss than the premature close of a brilliant literary career. He was a strong and lovely personality. His youthful and beautiful face, crowned with gray hair, wore a smile for all his friends. He was associated with the publishers of this magazine from the beginning of their career as publishers of books; and he showed such a rare genius for friendship that to them the loss to literature is swallowed up in the loss of a friend and companion. He carried with him always an atmosphere of cheerful earnestness. 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 and worked with him that they will carry it as an uplifting influence all their lives long.
From: The Arena, V. 27, No. 5, May 1902, p.547-554
“The Trust in Fiction: A Remarkable Social Novel”
By: B. O. Flower
A Book Study.
I.
In “The Octopus,” Mr. Norris has produced a novel of American life exhibiting the strength, power, vividness, fidelity to truth, photographic accuracy in description, and marvelous insight in depicting human nature, together with that broad and philosophic grasp of the larger problems of life, that noble passion for justice, that characterizes the greatest work of Emile Zola, without that sexualism or repulsive naturalism which the French writer so frequently forces upon his readers, and which is so revolting to the refined and healthy imagination.
“The Octopus” is a work so distinctly great that it justly entitles the author to rank among the very first American novelists. All the characters are real, living men and women, in whose veins runs the red blood of Nature. With one exception, each individual thinks, speaks, acts, and lives in harmony with the nature attributed to him. A noble consistency pervades the volume. Even individual inconsistencies are such as we all find in our own lives. The exception referred to is found in the pitiful sophistry accredited to the great railway magnate, Shelgrim, in which he seeks to shift from his head and the heads of the responsible directors, to the insensate railroad, the blame for the frightful and widespread ruin — the wanton slaughter of brave, loving, and industrious fathers, brothers, and husbands, the destruction of once happy homes, the driving of men to crime and of women and girls to starvation and ruin — that was the direct result of calculating and premeditated deception and gross injustice, rendered possible only by bribery and wholesale corruption. When Shelgrim refers to the despoiling of the farmers of their homes, and to the death and ruin that had marked the recent tragedy, as due to the insensate railroad or to blind forces, and not to corrupt individuals, when he compares the railroad with the growing wheat, which unconsciously supplies the world with life-giving bread but is without responsibility for its benefi
cence, he not only insults the intelligence of the poet, but belittles himself in a way quite inconceivable by the utterance of such palpable sophistry. Nor is it imaginable that Presley, even though sick, distraught, and on the verge of nervous collapse, would for a moment have been impressed by such shallow twaddle and false similes. No; Shelgrim was no man to father such pitiful and absurdly fallacious reasoning before a free and intelligent man, though he doubtless did inspire precisely such utterances from the editors of his hireling press and the advocates paid by the railroad to retail such inane talk to voters too sodden and brutalized by long hours and hard toil to be able to see clearly or reason logically.
With this single exception the dramatis persona of the volume think, speak, act, and live in exactly the way you and I, given similar characters, temperaments, and environment, would have thought and acted.
But “The Octopus” is far more than a strong, compelling, and virile story of American life: it is one of the most powerful and faithful social studies to be found in contemporaneous literature. It is a work that will not only stimulate thought: it will quicken the conscience and awaken the moral sensibilities of the reader, exerting much the same influence over the mind as that exerted by Patrick Henry in the House of Burgesses of Virginia, and by those noble utterances of James Otis, Samuel Adams, and John Hancock just prior to our great Revolutionary struggle.
“The Octopus” is founded on a piece of actual history, stern, tragic, and ominous — the “Mussel Slough Affair” — in which the farmers of the San Joaquin Valley were dispossessed by the railroad company, and in their attempt to protect their roof-trees several persons were cruelly murdered. Though, perhaps, in some respects the author cannot be said to have painted the action of the railroad company as darkly as the cold facts of history would warrant, he has on the whole shadowed forth the central facts in a striking manner; while his marvelous descriptive power enables him to bring the case before the reader in so vivid a way that the scenes will long linger — gloomy and disquieting pictures — in memory’s halls.
The dark deeds connected with Mussel Slough are typical of many tragic passages that have marked the rise, onward march, and domination of corporate greed — as, indeed, the story is thoroughly typical of the mighty struggle between the people and the trusts.
The tragedy of Spring Valley, Illinois, so vividly related by Mr. Henry Demarest Lloyd in his “A Strike of Millionaires against Miners,” and the dark and criminal history of the Standard Oil Company, as described by Mr. Lloyd in his “Wealth vs. Commonwealth,” are other typical illustrations that will suggest themselves to thoughtful readers as expressing the same savage, brutal, unjust, lawless, and demoralizing spirit that has marked the aggressive march of corporations, monopolies, and trusts.
It remained for Mr. Norris, however, to present in a bold, striking, and powerful romance a concrete illustration, true in spirit, method, and detail, of the conflict that has been waged between the trusts and the people.
II.
The novel opens in the great San Joaquin Valley, one of the world’s mighty wheat-fields, where ranches are like principalities, where not a single blade is seen turning the soil, but battalions of plows moving forward with military precision, simultaneously turning hundreds of furrows. Here it is that the standing wheat is cut, threshed, and sacked by a single great machine. Here it is that fanning is carried forward on as colossal a scale as is to be found on the face of the globe.
And into this valley, lured by seductive railroad pamphlets, many men of wealth have come to call from the brown earth her golden harvest, even as some of them had previously called forth gold and silver from the fastnesses of the Sierras.
The circulars of the railroad company had been framed, as later events proved, cruelly to deceive the settlers. They read:
“The Company invites settlers to go upon its lands before patents are issued or the road is completed, and intends in such cases to sell to them in preference to any other applicants and at a price based upon the value of the land without improvements. In ascertaining the value of the lands, any improvements that a settler or any other person may have made on the lands will not be taken into consideration; neither will the price be increased in consequence thereof. . . . Settlers are thus insured that in addition to being accorded the first privilege of purchase, at the graded price, they will also be protected in their improvements. . . . The lands are not uniform in price, but are offered at various figures from $2.50 upward per acre. Usually land covered with tall timber is held at $5.00 per acre, and that with pine at $10.00. Most is for sale at $2.50 and $5.00.”
The fact that the land mentioned as being above $2.50 an acre was the timbered land, which was usually held to be worth $5 an acre, while that covered by valuable pine trees was $10 an acre, appeared fair and reasonable. Such land was valuable from the very start, while the wide sterile plains of the valley were worthless until improved, cultivated, and in many cases irrigated; and the pledge that improvements should not be considered when the price of land was given seemed to deceive the honest farmers. The railroad had not yet received the title to the land. When it did the settlers should have the opportunity to buy on the favorable terms.
With this promise Magnus Derrick, the most commanding figure among the ranchers, popularly known as “the Governor” throughout the valley, and his favorite son, Harran, had taken up a vast tract containing tens of thousands of acres and known as the Los Muertos Rancho. Annixter, a college graduate who had come into a fortune, had secured the Quien Sabe Rancho, while Osterman, another young man of means, had secured another immensely fertile property. Old man Broderson and other farmers had come into the valley, bringing their all, staking everything on these new homes. Buildings rapidly rose, as extensive as the means of the ranchers would enable them to erect. Drains and irrigating ditches were made that cost fortunes to dig; and the desert was transformed as by magic into fields of gold that later fed the world.
From the first the railroad had proved to be an “organized appetite.” It had carried out the policy of charging in freight tariff “all the traffic would bear.” A State Commission had been elected, which it had been believed would be loyal to the people; but here, as everywhere else, were the evidences of the corrupting touch of the railroad corporation. The Commission had made a rate so absurdly low that no road could carry the freight except at a loss. The road refused to abide by the schedule, claiming that it amounted to confiscation. The courts upheld the railroad and ruled that, as they had no power to make rates, the only thing to be done was to put the rates back to the old exorbitant figure.
In the opening chapters we find the leading ranchmen assembled at the home of Magnus Derrick in consultation. Many things had recently occurred to exasperate the farmers. That very day Magnus and Harran Derrick had discovered their car-load of new plows, ordered months before, side-tracked at Bonneville. They had just arrived in time for work, as the autumn rains had set in; but while making the arrangements to have them taken to Los Muertos, S. Behrman, the representative of the railroad, appeared, reminding the farmer that it was a rule of the railroad that all freight had to go to the terminal point and then be shipped back to its destination. This rule was to give the railroad the advantage of the exorbitant short-haul rates; and therefore, though the plows were badly needed, though they were sidetracked at their destination, they could not be touched until they were taken to San Francisco and re-shipped back to Bonneville. And this incident was only one of a number of occurrences in which the greed and unjust aggressions of the railroad were exasperating the farmers. The action of the Commission and the judgment in regard to rates of the wheat tariff satisfied the ranchers that the company’s corrupting influence was being exerted in every department of the State government; and some one suggested that they fight the devil with fire — that, as they had exhausted every honorable and legitimate means of warfare, they should now meet the railroad on its own field and secure a commission of their own through
bribery.
Magnus Derrick repels with indignation this proposition, but the others urge that no other hope .remains to the farmers but to secure the nomination of two commissioners who can be relied upon as being loyal to their interests. A certain Mr. Darrell, in the southern part of the State, they believe to be such a man, and for the other they settle upon Magnus Derrick’s elder son, Lyman, now a rising lawyer in San Francisco. Young Derrick, unfortunately for the Farmers’ League, has political ambitions. He aspires to be Governor, and two years before received assurances of favor from the great railroad company, provided he would be loyal to them. This, of course, was not known to the League. Finally the election came off, and the ranchers’ board was triumphantly elected.
In the meantime rumors are circulated that the road is at last ready to grade the land. The farmers have been impatient to get the title to their land, and at first hail the news with satisfaction. They have taken the land, which would have been a drug at $2.50 an acre, but, by draining, irrigating, planting with trees, and improving by the erection of fine buildings, they have raised its value to fully $15 an acre. Soon the rumors of the regrading of the land are coupled with the intimation that the railroad company, in violation of its pledge, proposes to charge the settlers a price quite equal to the worth of the land with all its improvements.
The dramatic first act of the story closes with a ball at the new barn of Annixter, where all the country is well-nigh present. It is a highly sensational and thrilling time, culminating with telegrams being handed to the ranchers by which they are informed that the company demands from $20 to $27 an acre for their holdings — a price that will mean worse than ruin to them.