by Frank Norris
From this time on the movement is swift and the action frequently highly dramatic. The raising of Annixter from the plane of self-absorption and low ideals to that of exalted manhood, under the reforming influence of a noble woman’s love; the ruin of Dyke through the road’s advancing the rate on hops, and the tragic aftermath; the work of the new railroad commission; the visit of Lyman and the tremendously dramatic scene in the home of Magnus Derrick, in which the betrayer of the people is denounced and disowned by Magnus — all are vividly described. Then comes the great rabbit chase and picnic gotten up by Osterman, followed immediately by the supreme tragedy, when the officers, at the instigation of the railroad, begin evicting the farmers from their homes, while the latter resist to the bloody end.
Then the scene is shifted to San Francisco, and we catch a glimpse of Shelgrim and are present at a banquet given by one of the millionaire directors of the railroad, where the costliest of imported wines and viands of the rarest are served; while without poor old Mrs. Hooven, widowed by the railroad, and her little daughter, starving and sick, are begging for a crust of bread.
After a last glance over the San Joaquin Valley we find ourselves on the steamer that is loading with wheat for famine-stricken India; and here we come face to face with one of the strongest situations in modern fiction. The highly dramatic death of S. Behrman, weird, uncanny, and terrible, is as great a piece of work as Victor Hugo’s vivid description of Gilliatt’s struggle with the octopus, in his “Toilers of the Sea.” S. Behrman, the smooth-tongued, remorseless, relentless man, who is at once the type of the soulless and cruel railroad corporation and its efficient tool, rising to opulence through the wheat that he has plundered from honest industry, is at last swallowed up, crushed, suffocated, destroyed by that same wheat.
III.
“The Octopus” is a work of genius. Not only is it a powerful romance of compelling interest — thrilling, dramatic, and so graphic that its various shifting scenes stand out clear-cut and unforgettable, but as a social study it possesses a historical value equaled by few works of fiction. It is, broadly speaking, typically historical not only of the great railroad corporation, whose story is so well known on the Pacific Coast, but of the railroad corporations of the United States, and of the trusts in general.
It is part of the settled policy of the complacent tools and servants of corporate power to seek to discredit all such pictures, even though they know full well that for more than a quarter of a century the baleful influence of corporate greed has been felt throughout the length and breadth of the land, not only in the levying of unjust tributes on the poor but in the debauching and corruption of government in all its ramifications. “The Octopus” shows in a vivid manner how this supreme tragedy — this lowering of the political ideals from the fundamental demands of justice, honesty, and freedom to subserviency to capitalistic aggression — has been accomplished in the United States. It is very easy for apologists and beneficiaries of corporate corruption to seek to discredit such pictures as “fiction.” The facts on which this novel is based, however, were a terrible reality; and the methods by which the great railroad power became well-nigh omnipotent on the Pacific Coast have been indicated by the publication of letters of C. P. Huntington to General Colton. These communications, it will be remembered, were made public in the famous suit brought in Santa Rosa, California, to decide whether the widow of General Colton had been fairly dealt with by the railroad company, in whose confidential service the General had long been engaged In these letters we have a startling revelation of how the railroad magnates tampered with officials, how they made and unmade committees, how they worked in Congress through the press, how neither Governors, Congressmen, statesmen, members of the Cabinet and judges, the Associated Press, nor the editors of the country escaped the argus eyes of the railroad officials.
The bribery by the wholesale issuance of railroad passes and the enormous sums of money needed to “fix things” or “convince” legislators — these and other things are more or less baldly set forth in these memorable letters, in which Thomas Scott and C. P. Huntington figure as warring chiefs.
And when we turn from the Pacific slope the same facts meet the eye everywhere. The amazing admissions of Jay Gould before the investigating committee of the New York Legislature in 1873 startled the nation for a brief period, and the report of this committee was a sickening revelation of gigantic corruption. The exorbitant prices paid by our own all too complacent Post Office Department for the rental of cars and the hauling of mails have been for years a national scandal. It was this shameful plundering of the people for the railroads, permitted by the Post Office Department, that called for the following impressive words in the halls of the United States Senate from one of the Eastern Senators:
“The fact is, Mr. President, that the great power of these corporations who control everything, who are powerful enough to make and unmake public men, is so omnipotent that no executive officer has been found in the last twelve years, except in the single case of Postmaster-General Vilas, who has attempted to reduce the compensation for mail transportation; and within six months after he had left the Department every economy that he introduced had been wiped away, and the companies received not only what they had received before but their compensation was increased. Never, during my long service in this body, except in this one instance, have I known of a Postmaster-General making a bona fide effort to control this railroad extortion, which every one knows to exist.”
The recent exhibition of the subserviency of the machinery of justice in New York City to the New York Central Railroad is another striking illustration of the facts that Mr. Norris so eloquently emphasizes in his novel.
But it must not be imagined that “The Octopus” is primarily a social study. It is above all a great literary creation. The author is at all times the artist. Only on rare occasions, like the following for example, do the characters moralize. Here, however, we have the great California manufacturer, Cedarquist, thus referring to the supreme peril of the Republic:
“If I were to name the one crying evil of American life, ... it would be the indifference of the better people to public affairs. It is so in all our great centers. There are other great trusts, God knows, in the United States, besides our own dear P. and S. W. Railroad. Every State has its own grievance. If it is not a railroad trust, it is a sugar trust, or an oil trust, or an industrial trust, that exploits the People, because the People allow it. The indifference of the People is the opportunity of the despot. It is as true as that the whole is greater than a part, and the maxim is so old that it is trite-^it is laughable. It is neglected and disused for the sake of some new ingenious and complicated theory, some wonderful scheme of reorganization, but the fact remains, nevertheless, simple, fundamental, everlasting. The People have but to say ‘No,’ and not the strongest tyranny, political, religious, or financial, that was ever organized could survive one week.”
Mr. Norris unfolds a mighty drama, which concerns our own time. He paints colossal pictures so vividly that there is small need for didactic moralizing about them. One feels from the first that he is in the presence of a great artist, a man of real genius; and though there is more of shadow than of sunshine in the highly dramatic romance there are many passages of great beauty. The descriptions of Nature and her marvelous works, the portraying of Vanamee, and the wonderful transformation of Annixter are typical examples of the beauty and poetry that abound in this volume.
“The Octopus” is a novel that every reader of The Arena should possess. If it is impossible for you to procure more than one work of fiction this season, my advice — my unhesitating advice — is to buy “The Octopus,” read it aloud to your family, and then lend it to your neighbors. In so doing you will be helping to awaken the people from the death-dealing slumber that has been brought about by the multitudinous influences of corporate greed, controlling the machinery of government and the opinion-forming agencies of the Republic.
From: C
urrent Opinion, V. 56, No.6, June 1914, p.455-456
“Frank Norris’s Werewolf”
Vandover was anything but a Fortunate Youth. For one thing, he was created by the late Frank Norris, and that pioneer of American ultra-realists did not give happy lives to the children of his brain. Like a perverted sun dial, he marked only the shady hours. “Vandover and the Brute” was written nearly twenty years ago, almost simultaneously with “McTeague.” The manuscript – the author’s first draft — was lost at the time of the San Francisco earthquake and has recently come to light and been published by Doubleday, Page and Company. The story is a variation of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” in which also Mr. Hyde triumphs. Vandover is a rich San Francisco youth who studies at Harvard, becomes something of a dilettante and very much of a libertine, wastes his money and health in riotous living and finally becomes a day-laborer subject to attacks of lycanthropy — that is, of that mania in which the sufferer believes himself to be a wolf, kills people and drinks their blood. The “Brute” of the title is Vandover’s worse self, the self which finally kills his better nature and drives him mad. As has already been said, the book is a first draft, and Norris would have changed and improved it had it been published during his lifetime. “There are characters stressed at the beginning,” says the New York Evening Post, “who unaccountably drop; there are incidents that shed no light on the central theme of the book; there are currents that lead us to look for crises never fulfilled, gross improbabilities, patches of empurpled realistic description, the crude horrors of a literary youth fed on Zola and the Goncourts, and an ending loosely melodramatic.” But the book has its value to all who are interested in the history of English realism and in the career of its brilliant and ill-starred author. In the review already quoted we read:
“The unflinching moral conviction of the book lifts it to a place not far below ‘McTeague as a powerful private study, and as a demonstration of Norris’s ability, even at twenty-five, to strain out the essential subjective significance in the bare outlines of commonplace life and make it searchingly intense. Like McTeague,’ private study that it is, it has rudiments of the epic spirit of the social studies of the wheat trilogy. Undoubtedly this quality also is derived from Zola, whose greater novels never lacked an epic touch. The novel’s very faults claim relationship with Norris’s later merits. The irrelevancies, as some of the scenes in the low-class “Imperial’ café, and the gross melodrama, as the attacks of lycanthropy, were to be pruned away. His realism, asserting its sincerity, was to learn to add artistic restraint to unblending grasp of ugly fact, and control itself into quietude of tone. The merits of this first book show the inborn genius of the most promising figure in the literary quarter-century, surpassing Stephen Crane in sturdiness and absence of nervosity; and its defects, compared with his later achievement, give us a new basis for tracing the growth of the skill and vision that were to fade at thirty-two.”
From: Literature and Insurgency, by John Curtis Underwood, Mitchell Kennerley, 1914, -178
“Frank Norris”
“Literature is of all arts the most democratic. It is of, by and for the people in a fuller measure even than government itself. ... It is the people who after all make a literature. If they read the few, the illuminate, will write. But first must come the demand, . . . from the people, the Plain People, the condemned bourgeoisie. The select circle of the elite, the ‘studio’ hangers-on, the refined, will never, never, clamor they never so loudly, toil they never so painfully, produce the Great Writer. . . . The more the Plain People read they will discriminate. It is inevitable, and by and by they will demand something better. It is impossible to read a book without formulating an opinion about it. . . . The survival of the fittest is as good in the evolution of a literature as of our bodies, and the best ‘academy’ for the writers of the United States is after all the judgment of the people exercised throughout the lapse of a considerable time.” The Responsibilities of the Novelist, 1901. Salt and Sincerity.
The rise of The Saturday Evening Post is a case in point. So with the rest of the muck-rate magazines and the new school of virile out-of-doors fiction — for men and boys first, women and girls incidentally, patriots and progressive critics of American literature and life, first last and all the time — that is gradually letting light into our dark places.
The democracy of Frank Norris is as genuine and uncompromising as that of Mark Twain. At the same time it is more progressive.
It was not for nothing that Frank Norris was born in Chicago. It was not for nothing that his family took the trail westward and that he emigrated to California while he was yet in his teens. It was not for nothing that he followed still farther afield the call of the vanishing frontier which he has himself delimitated in one of the strongest and most suggestive essays of the book quoted above; that he saw his share of the world — the white man’s and the Anglo-Saxon’s share; that he saw it steadily and saw it whole; that he found his theory of life in the open, in the wilds and in the great grain fields of a continent, as well as in its great cities, before he set himself to realize it on paper, and to interpret America to itself and the rest of the world as no other twentieth century writer has yet begun to do.
And in his later interpretation of life, in The Octopus and the rest of the unfinished Trilogy of the Wheat it is the voice of the Plain People, of the American business men, of Big Business in its broadest and highest range, of the Anglo-Saxon adventurer, merchant, trader, farmer, manufacturer, banker, common carrier, seaman, yeoman, trailsman, statesman, through the centuries, that strikes the keynote decisively, successfully, representatively and with increasing power.
One does not have to read The Responsibilities of the Novelist to realize that Frank Norris, like the best and biggest of the men and women he represents, is for the Square Deal progressively on the broadest possible basis. There is an epic breadth of scope and power of purpose in The Octopus and The Pit that reduces life to its prime factors, that transcends national and racial as it does mere individual and local interests, and that is a new thing in literature.
And in the earlier work as well, in Blix, in Moran of the Lady Letty, in McTeague, in A Man’s Woman, there is an elemental insistence on the reality of Romance in the modern world, on its immanence in the workaday lives of the millions, for all who have eyes to see it, that is equally characteristic of the man and of his origin.
In this as in most things he is his own critic. He writes so he who runs may read and be moved to come and read again. The following quotation from his last book of critical essays states in set terms what his whole life and life work exemplifies:
“Lately we have been taking Romance a weary journey across the water. . . . Would you take her across the street to your neighbor’s front parlor (with the bisque fisher boy on the mantel and the photograph of Niagara Falls in glass hanging in the front window) would you introduce her there . . . she might be awkward . . . and knock over the little bisque fisher boy. Well she might. If she did you might find under the base of the statuette, hidden away, tucked away — what? God knows. But something that would be a complete revelation of my neighbor’s secretest life.
“So you think Romance would stop in the front parlor and discuss medicated flannels and mineral waters with the ladies? Not for more than five minutes. She would be off upstairs. . . . She would find a heart-ache (maybe between the pillows of the mistress’ bed) and a memory carefully secreted in the master’s deed box. She would come upon a great hope amid the books and papers of the study table in the young man’s room and perhaps — who knows — an affair, or, Great Heavens! an intrigue, in the scented ribbons and gloves and hair-pins of the young lady’s bureau . . . and this very day in this very hour she is sitting among the rags and wretchedness, the dust and despair of the tenements of the East Side of New York. . . .
“You will not follow her to the slums for you believe that Romance should only amuse and entertain you, singing sweet songs and touching the harp of s
ilver strings with rosy tipped fingers. If haply she should call to you from the squalor of a dive . . . crying, ‘Look! Listen! This too is life. These too are my children! Look at them, know them and, knowing help!’ . . . you would answer: ‘Come from there, Romance. Your place is not there.’ And you would make of her a harlequin.”
And again he says: “There is more significance as to the ultimate excellence of American letters in the sight of the messenger boy devouring his Old Sleuth and Deadwood Dick and Boy Detectives with an earnest serious absorption, than in the spectacle of a ‘ reading group ‘ of dilettanti coquetting with Verlaine and pretending that they understand him.”
And again: “I have no patience with the theory of literature that claims that the Great Man belongs only to the cultured few. You must write, so the theorists explain, for that small number of fine minds who because of education, because of delicate, fastidious taste, are competent to judge.
“I tell you this is wrong. It is precisely the same purblind prejudice that condemned the introduction of the printing press because it would cheapen and vulgarize the literature of the day. A literature that cannot be vulgarized is no literature at all and will perish just as surely as rivers run to the sea. The things that last are the understandable things . . . understandable to the common minds, the Plain People.”
In any general and detailed consideration of the literature of insurgency — insurgency against machine-made conditions and tendencies and methods of thought and action — practically the whole of The Responsibilities of the Novelist might be quoted. Next to The Octopus, The Husband’s Story and The Reign of Gilt, there is hardly a book published in America during the last ten years, that has so direct and inspiring a message for the Plain People of America of all sorts, sexes, classes, present or previous conditions of servitude, for whom Frank Norris and David Graham Phillips wrote.