by Frank Norris
Norris had the training of a newspaper man in a generation later than Mark Twain’s, when life in this country had evolved itself into a more complicated machinery of existence than that of the days when the older man crossed the continent before the Civil War.
Both men lived in San Francisco at formative periods of their lives and literary careers. Both felt, and sooner or later realized, the transcontinental energy, the primitive democracy, the intense and uncompromising hatred of shams and conventional tradition, that still characterize in many ways the world’s greatest mining camp and seaport. Both were fitted by temperament and by training to see life as it is, here and to-day, on broad-gauge lines, and to concern themselves with the most direct and vital view of it.
Norris was the better trained journalist, largely because journalism in America, from New York to San Francisco, has specialized itself during the last fifty years, as journalism has never been specialized before.
During the same period journalism, beneath its superficial sensationalism and vulgarity, throughout the Anglo-Saxon world has managed to realize its kinship to the literature that lasts, and to develop itself accordingly. The work of Norris, Phillips and Kipling alone testify sufficiently to this.
Stress has been laid on the influence of Zola on Norm’s method and cosmic grasp of his subject. It is highly probable that if Zola had never existed, Norris would nevertheless have written The Octopus and The Pit much as he did elect to write them.
The influence of Kipling and of Stevenson in waking up the modern world to the fact that Romance is alive, here and to-day, for each and every one of us who has eyes to see it, is less evident, superficially, in these two books. Spiritually and intrinsically it is far more to the point.
Point of view and method both, in both these books, as well as in the rest of their author’s work, is far more Anglo-Saxon than Latin. More than either, in the last analysis, it remains essentially and triumphantly American and democratic.
Norris worked out his own literary salvation and immortality beginning as an American and a newspaper man. This is evident in his own words, also from The Responsibilities of the Novelist.
“Hard to be original — Great Heavens! when a new life comes into the world for every tick of the watch in your pocket — a new life with all its complications and with all the thousand and one other complications it sets in motion! Hard to be original! when of all those billion lives, your own is as distinct, as individual, as original as though you had been born out of season in the Paleozoic age and yours the first human face the sun ever shone upon.
“Go out into the street and stand where the ways cross and hear the machinery of life clashing in its grooves. Can the utmost resort of your ingenuity evolve a better story than any one of the million that jog your elbow . . . turn your eyes inward upon yourself down, down to the heart of you; and the tread of the feet upon the pavement is the systole and diastole of your own being . . . different only in degree. It is life, and it is that of which you have to make your book — your novel — life, not other people’s novels. Or look from your window and a whole literature goes marching by clamoring for leaders and a master hand to guide it.”
Norris failed to find leaders here at home, and like the Americans that crossed the plains to the Pacific and the pioneers of all time, he made himself one. With him American fiction and American literature definitely crosses the great plains and the Great Divide and assumes lasting transcontinental proportions. Bret Harte was as local as regional, as provincial in his point of view as was Joaquin Miller, or as Sophie Orne Jewett and Mr. Howells. Not so Norris.
He traveled, he prospected, too keenly, too widely, in the flesh and in the spirit, before he reached his full power, to remain as those others remained, representative of a section or a sectional point of view; and the story of his genesis and his evolution is as intensely and representatively American as the best of his completed works.
Blix, first published as a serial in The Puritan in 1899, when its author was still unknown to the American reading public at large, is not only a thoroughly charming idyl of modern American and Californian life; it is also a remarkably interesting study in origins.
It begins at the breakfast table of Travis Bessemer and her father, near the top of the Washington Street Hill in San Francisco. Condy Rivers, associate editor of the San Francisco Daily Times, Sunday supplement, drops in unexpectedly for tea that night; unexpectedly, because, though he is a newspaper man, he is at the same time a promising writer of short stories, afflicted with a temperament of the absentminded brand, and he has seen Travis three or four times already during the week just passed, like every other week for the last year and a half.
Condy is twenty-eight; Travis (later christened Blix by him, because she has always been “ just that — bully and snappy and crisp and bright and sort of sudden “) ten years younger. Condy has been a little brother of the rich for years; he has a weakness for poker and generally loses more than he wins on the rare occasions when he is in funds.
Blix is about to come out socially and is not at all eager to do so. They have flirted mildly for some time. On this particular Sunday evening flirtation has lost its savor. They begin to discover that they are in deadly danger of boring one another.
Blix makes up her mind definitely and on the spot about something that has happened recently. She also lets Condy know about it. She announces that she is not going to come out. “It’s not . . . that I’m afraid of Jack Carter and his dirty stories; I simply don’t want to know the kind of people that have made Jack Carter possible ... as for having a good time I’ll find my amusements somewhere else. . . . And whether I have a good time or not, I’ll keep my own self-respect . . . the whole thing tires me . . . I’m not going to break with it because I have any ‘ purpose in life ‘ or that sort of thing. . . . I’m going to be sincere and not pretend to like people and things I don’t like.” . . .
As an initial step in the banishment of pretense they stop flirting, and find that they are beginning to have a much better time than they ever had before.
Blix interests herself in Condy’s work. She sees things the way he sees them, and they both see them as Kipling does. He takes her to the docks and aboard ship when he goes to write his Sunday specials, and he writes better short stories than ever.
They discover Chinatown, they go fishing in the country, they take long walks together. Blix learns to play poker and makes Condy promise to play with her and no one else when he feels that he must play.
She wins all his money, whenever he has any to spare, till his appetite for the game wears off. They manufacture a romance in real life from two advertisements in the personal column of a San Francisco paper; they personally conduct it to Luna’s Mexican restaurant through the medium of the mails; later they see it come true, and become very good friends with both parties.
One of them has been boat steerer on a New Bedford Whaler, has ridden in the Strand in a hansom with William Ewart Gladstone, has acted as ice pilot on an Arctic relief expedition, has fought with the Seris on the lower California Islands, and sold champagne made from rock candy, effervescent salts and Reisling wine, to the Coreans — among other phases of a checkered and adventurous career.
Out of these experiences Condy pieces together the frame-work of his first novel. This leads to an offer of a sub-editorship by the Centennial Company of New York at the time when Blix has completed preparations to make her home for the time being with an aunt of hers in New York, and to study medicine there.
“There in that room, high above the city, a little climax had come swiftly to a head, a little crisis in two lives had suddenly developed. The moment that had been in preparation for the last few months, for the last few years, the last few centuries, behold it had arrived.
“‘Blix do you love me?’
“Suddenly it was the New Year. Somewhere close at hand a chorus of chiming church bells sang together. Far off in the direction of the wharves where the grea
t steam-ships lay, came the glad, sonorous shouting of a whistle . . . from point to point, from street to roof top and from roof to spire, the vague murmur of many sounds grew and spread and widened, slowly, grandly; that profound and steady bourdon, as of an invisible organ swelling, deepening and expanding to the full male diapason of the city aroused and signaling the advent of another year. . . .
“It was the old year yet when Condy asked the question; in that moment’s pause while Blix hesitated to answer him, the New Year had come . . . only for a moment. Then she came closer to him and put a hand on each of his shoulders.
“‘Happy New Year, dear,’ she said.”
Here is democracy in excelsis, and some initial suggestion of that cosmic breath and truth of imagery which, in The Octopus, has never yet been equaled in fiction.
In Moran of the Lady Letty the influence of Stevenson is more noticeable; in McTeague and A Man’s Woman, that of Zola. The first book starts, as Jack London’s Sea Wolf does, with the adventures of a San Francisco club man, a weakling physically, who finds himself shanghaied on board a Pacific trading schooner. Moran and the Lady Letty come into the tale as the captain’s daughter of a Norwegian timber bark that lies dismantled in mid-ocean. Moran is emphatically a man’s woman. She is neither beautiful nor romantic in the conventional sense of the two words. She is six feet high, and broad in proportion, with a mane of yellow hair, a personality that is in some respects suggestive of a young Valkyrie, and a keen eye for the main chance.
Her father dies from injuries received during the storm that disabled his ship. Thereafter she makes it her business to make a real man out of the club man; and after various adventures with a crew of Chinamen and other hard characters, she succeeds reasonably well.
The book does not conclude with the conventional happy ending any more than Stevenson’s Treasure Island does. It is considerably shorter than The Wrecker, which may have inspired it in part, and may be compared to both the other books without disparagement to any or all concerned.
In A Man’s Woman, 1900, like The Pit, Norris scored a partial failure. The book begins with a relentlessly realistic account of the sufferings of an American polar expedition. The leader comes back crippled as a result of exposure, and the rest of the story is concerned with his unsuccessful efforts to avoid a marriage with the girl with whom he was in love before he started.
Even in his crippled state the hero retains characteristics of the frontier and the rough stone age from which he hails; there are single episodes in the book that take us back directly into the primitive and the elemental, and that demonstrate conclusively the author’s growing power to hammer his material into shape, and to drive the impression of it indelibly into the minds of his readers.
In McTeague, 1899, he begins to hammer in the impression on the first page, with the first sentence. “It was Sunday, and, according to his custom on that day, McTeague took his dinner at two in the afternoon at the car-conductor’s coffee-joint in Polk Street. He had a thick gray soup; heavy, under-done meat, very hot, on a cold plate; two kinds of vegetables; and a sort of suet pudding, full of strong butter and sugar. On his way back to his office, one block above, he stopped at Joe Frenna’s saloon and bought a pitcher of steam beer. It was his habit to leave the pitcher there on his way to dinner.
“Once in his office, or as he called it on his sign board ‘Dental Parlors,’ he took off his coat and shoes, unbuttoned his vest, and, having crammed his little stove full of coke, lay back in his operating chair at the bay window reading the paper, drinking his beer, and smoking his huge, porcelain pipe while his food digested, crop full, stupid and warm. By and by, gorged with steam beer, and overcome by the heat of the room, the cheap tobacco, and the effects of his heavy meal he dropped off to sleep. Late in the afternoon his canary bird in its gilt cage, just over his head, began to sing. He woke slowly, finished the rest of his beer — very flat and stale by this time — and taking down his concertina from the book-case where in week days it kept the company of seven volumes of Allen’s Practical Dentist, played upon it some half-dozen very mournful airs.”
Of this concertina and this canary bird we shall hear more later. They are at once symbols and vital phases of McTeague’s nature, and parts of the plot.
Superficially the resemblance of Zola’s method and material is apparent, but there is more than mere realism for realism’s sake here. One may justly compare the portrait of McTeague in his operating chair to any in Rembrandt’s gallery of scenes of squalor, and find more in it, as life to-day means more than it did in Rembrandt’s time, and as fiction in a master’s hands transcends painting in its breadth and depth of suggestion and appeal.
There is atmosphere of more than steam beer, cheap tobacco and coke fumes in these first thirty lines. It is possible for the reader of some experience to feel immediately that here is life in a very real and significant aspect, that the apparent grossness of material and statement is only the sign for something significant that the book promises to reveal.
For the rest of the Plain People for whom Norris wrote — anyone competent to say “Why I know, or I’ve lived with people just like that “ — the interest grips one from the first chapter to the last.
In the next two pages one learns that McTeague is a primitive product of an artificial environment. Ten years before he had been a car boy at the Big Dipper mine in Placer County. He goes away as the assistant of a traveling dentist, and makes himself also a dentist by main strength. “McTeague was a young giant carrying his 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; they were hard as wooden mallets, strong as wires, the hands of the old time car boy. Often he dispensed with forceps and extracted a refractory tooth with his thumb and finger.”
It was in the nature of things and the exigencies of dental practice that McTeague should fall in love with Trina Sieppe. This comes about through the intervention of Marcus Shouler, the dentist’s one intimate friend, who occupies a room on the floor above. Marcus is the assistant in Old Grannis’s dog hospital, just off Polk Street, four blocks above. His cousin Trina has fallen out of a swing at a picnic and broken ‘off a front tooth.
She comes to McTeague to have the damage repaired and we hear much about proximate cavities, hook broaches, corundum burrs, dental necrosis, palatine surfaces, dowels, bayonet forceps, hoe-excavators and other minutiae of the dentist’s art.
In the midst of this unromantic setting a romance in real life develops. McTeague keeps one of Trina’s teeth wrapped up in a bit of newspaper in his waistcoat pocket. The time comes when it is a positive anguish to him to hurt her.
“Trina was very small and prettily made. Her face was round and rather pale; her eyes long and narrow and blue like the half open eyes of a little baby; her lips and the lobes of her tiny ears were pale, a little suggestive of anaemia; it was to her hair that one’s attention was most attracted. Heaps and heaps of blue black coils and braids, a royal coil 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 absolved by this marvelous hair.”
McTeague kisses Trina while she is under the influence of ether. When she comes to, he asks her to marry him off hand, and she becomes violently sick. The dental sittings come to an end, he goes to a picnic with her and her family and Marcus. Marcus, who has been sweet on Trina himself, decides to be magnanimous and pull out when he sees how his friend is affected. McTeague can neither eat nor sleep. Trina becomes impressed with his primitive masculinity, and their marriage becomes inevitable when she learns that she has won a lottery prize of five thousand dollars on a ticket bought by chance.
Shortly after her marriage Trina begins to become a miser. Her money is invested at six per cent. with her uncle Oelberman who owns a big toy store in the Mission district. She begins to earn three or four dolla
rs a week by making toy animals for Noah’s arks. At the cost of severe mental and moral agony she deducts two hundred dollars from the five thousand to pay for her trousseau and the other initial expenses of housekeeping. Thereafter her one aim and purpose in life is to keep her five thousand intact and to add to it.
McTeague quarrels with Marcus about her. After a time he learns that he can no longer practice as a dentist because he has not graduated from a dental college, and the law forbids. He fails to find employment with a firm of dental manufacturers; his instruments and his few household goods have to be sold. So is the huge gilded tooth that hung outside his window and which was Trina’s wedding present to him.
Trina refuses to let a cent of her five thousand dollars be touched; they move into poorer quarters; she develops a talent for concealing from him the truth about the smallest and most necessary expenditures; she refuses to allow him car fare when he is looking for work; she continues to save little by little, while they are both living on her interest and her earnings as a toy maker.
McTeague begins to drink, and Trina begins to turn her savings into gold and to play with it and fondle it as the miser of tradition does. McTeague develops a habit of putting the ends of her fingers into his mouth and biting them till the blood comes when he wants money. When she has amassed more than four hundred dollars, he steals it and runs away.
He comes back when it is all gone and he is starving. Trina refuses to give him a cent. She has sold his concertina in his absence. He finds himself absolutely without resources. Unexpectedly, through an accident which he witnesses, he gets a job as piano-handler for a music store at six dollars a week.
He lives alone with his canary bird for some months and misses his concertina. He finds it by chance in the second hand department of the store. He knows that Trina has sold it. He pays down as deposit the four dollars that he has in his pocket and sets out to get the balance of the eleven dollars needed to buy it back from Trina.