by Frank Norris
And the reason and the purpose of it all is found in the author’s own summary on the last two pages of the book.
“Yes, the Railroad had prevailed. The ranches had been seized in the tentacles of the Octopus; the iniquitous burden of extortionate freight rates had been imposed like a yoke of iron.
“The monster had killed. ... It had slain Annixter at the very moment when painfully and manfully he had at last achieved his own salvation and had stood forth resolved to do right, to act unselfishly, and to live for others. It had widowed Hilma in the very dawn of her happiness. It had killed the very babe within the mother’s womb, strangling life ere yet it had been born, stamping out the spark ordained by God to burn through all eternity.
“What then was left? . . . suddenly Vanamee’s words came back to his mind. What was the larger view, what contributed the greatest good to the greatest number? What was the full round of the circle whose segment only he beheld! In the end . . . good issued from this crisis, untouched, unassailable, undefined.
“Men — motes in the sunshine — perished. . . . But the WHEAT remained. . . . 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 scarecrows in the barren plains of India.
“Falseness dies; injustice and oppression in the end of everything fade and vanish away. Greed, cruelty, selfishness and humanity are short-lived; the individual suffers but the race goes on. Annixter dies, but in a far distant corner of the world a thousand lives are saved. The larger view always and through all shams and wickedness, discovers the Truth that will, in the end, prevail, and all things surely, inevitably, resistlessly, work together for good.”
Concerning McTeague and The Octopus, Mr. Howells writes in The North American Review for December, 1902: “McTeague was a personal epic, the Odyssey of a simple semi-savage nature adventuring and experiencing along the social levels which the story kept. ... I wish now to affirm . . . to testify to the value which this extraordinary book has from its perfect simple fidelity, from the truthfulness in which there is no self-doubt and no self-excuses.
“But with all its power McTeague is no such book as The Octopus, which is as the Iliad to its Odyssey.
“It will not be suggesting too much for the story to say that there is a kind of Homeric largeness in the play of the passions moving it. They are not autochthons these Californians of the great Wheat farms, choking in the folds of the Railroad, but Americans of more than one transplantation; yet there is something rankly earthy and elemental in them which gives them the pathos of tormented Titans. The story is not less but more epical in being a strongly interwrought group of episodes.
“The play of an imagination fed by a rich consciousness of the mystical relations of nature and human nature, the body and soul of earthly life, steeps the whole theme in an odor of common growth. It is as if the Wheat sprang out of the hearts of men in the conception of the young poet who writes its Iliad, and who shows how it overwhelms their lives and germinates anew from their depths. His poem of which the terms are naked prose, is a picture of the civilization, the society, the culture, the agricultural California which is the ground of his work. It will be easily believed that in the handling nothing essential to the strong impression is blinked; but nothing, on the other hand, is forced.
“As I write and scarcely touch the living allegory here and there, it rises before me in its large inclusion, . . . the breadth, and the fineness, the beauty and the dread, the baseness and the grandeur, the sensuality and the spirituality, working together for the effect of a novel unequaled for scope and for grasp in our fiction.”
In The Pit (1903), the second volume of the unfinished trilogy, we have the story of Curtis Jadwin, who tries to corner wheat, and who succeeds for a time, till the demand that supply invariably breeds, and the growth of the wheat itself, break him. After his failure he goes back to the country and begins life over again. He wins back his wife, who has married him more for his money than himself, and in the end he is a better man than before. Jadwin himself and Page Dearborn, his wife’s sister, another man’s woman of the type that Norris, like Mark Twain, liked and understood, are done excellently; and with the Cresslers, Landry Court, Gretry and Mrs. Wessels, Page’s aunt, they represent a part of the actual life of Chicago to-day that any American who has lived in Chicago six months cannot fail to recognize.
With Laura Jadwin and Sheldon Corthell, the artist who is in love with her, the author has less sympathy and less success.
The technical side of the making and breaking of the wheat corner, the whole atmosphere and movement of the Chicago stock exchange, is presented with an admirable clearness and an intensity of interest that has never been equaled in fiction here or abroad. Beside this phase of The Pit, Zola’s L’Argent and minor American novelizations of the workings of Wall Street are inconsiderable.
At the same time, The Pit must be reckoned as a comparative failure. By itself, if published before The Octopus, it might or might not have attracted notice as an unusual book and a remarkably effective handling, with realism within its province. Published, as it was, in the natural order of the trilogy, it is completely overshadowed by The Octopus, as any story of mere traders and trading must remain inferior to an epic that deals adequately with cosmic forces; and it serves its purpose chiefly as a connecting link between the actuality of what Norris lived to accomplish, and the vision of what he was not destined to do.
There is no great loss without some small gain. The comparatively restricted interest among Frank Norris’s own countrymen in his life and work up-to-date has spared the world much of the literary post-mortem gossip, private letters and other material immature and insignificant, in one way or another unfit for publication, which morbid curiosity and commercialized journalists and publishers combine to inflict on long suffering humanity.
A Deal in Wheat (Doubleday Page & Company, 1909), The Third Circle (John Lane Company, 1909), in which the title story and “ A Caged Lion” are especially notable, “Yvernelle” a narrative poem in three cantos (Lippincott’s, 1892), “The Joyous Miracle (Doubleday Page & Company, 1906) are all that the family and the friends of Norris permitted us to see until the publication of “Vandover and the Brute” in the Spring of 1914.
Concerning this novel, written in 1895 at Harvard while “McTeague” was still under way, similar to the latter in general tenor and method, almost equally strong in remorseless realism in spots, suffering in many places from the lack of revision that the better known book received; concerning its romantic history; its supposed loss in the San Francisco earthquake and fire, its recent discovery and final identification, Charles G. Norris, the novelist’s brother, has told us all that is essential and much besides in the preface to the book and in a biographical pamphlet published at the same time by Doubleday Page &Co.
From these sources those interested in Norris as man as well as artist, may learn much about his personal qualities, his manner of work, his intense preoccupation with reality and its adequate interpretation in the modern novel, that has hitherto been denied them. Any careful reading of these two foot notes to this author’s life will go far to confirm the impression that among the mob of modern writers of American fiction who are frankly out for quick profits and small returns in the literary sense, and beside the inner circle of novelists of culture that prides itself on its barren exclusiveness and false pretense, Frank Norris stands, in this new century of American literature, so far unrivaled, unassailed and unassailable.
His ideals and his power, his broad and deep humanity, his intimate and specialized acquaintance with life and its meaning in America to-day, are set forth unmistakably in The Responsibilities of the Novelist and The Octopus. The world has achieved few or no works of literature in the first decade of the twentieth century of its Christian era that it can less afford to spare. In the rec
ent history of American art and letters, America and the world has lost much in the comparatively early deaths and unfinished careers of Wolcott Balestier, Stephen Crane, Harold Frederic and David Graham Phillips. The same may be said of Frank Norris without reserve and with even greater regret.
Summarized briefly from a two-inch article in a contemporary encyclopaedia, we learn that Benjamin Franklin Norris was born in 1870 and died in 1902, that he studied art at Paris in 1887-89, that he was a student in literary courses at the University of California and at Harvard, that he was a correspondent of the San Francisco Chronicle in South Africa at the time of the Jameson raid, that later he was a war correspondent in Cuba, and that he was the literary adviser of a New York publishing house at the time of his death.
It is evident from the mere summary of this brief and stirring career, from the accounts of the few who were privileged to know him personally, and from the literary work that he had already achieved at the time of his death, at the age of thirty-two, that the making of a master in world-fiction was here. That he did achieve one masterpiece is unquestionable. That he was in the very flood-tide of his powers when he died, that he had fitted himself into the environment best suited for the further development of his talents, seems equally beyond dispute.
That he stands as he is, a personality in American literature only comparable with Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, will be freely debated. Time will tell. It is only ten years since his death, and even in France, that home of Latin lucidity and startling frankness of artistic expression, an equal lapse of time, or longer, is required to admit a dead painter or sculptor to the comparative immortality of the Louvre.
One thing about Norris is unmistakable. In his hatred of sham, of pretense, of special privilege of any sort, he is fully as democratic, as sincere, as American, as Mark Twain. At the same time, his hatred is less partisan, less prejudiced, less handicapped by the bitterness that clouded the latter days of the great humorist. Norris, as one reads him, seems almost absolutely devoid of the sense of humor, but his interest in life and his sense of proportion are so vast, so comprehensive, so intense, so true that one reads him without missing this. For it is the province and the essence of the humorist to express contrasts; of the master novelist to harmonize and interpret the law that lies beneath them.
One feels instinctively, as one reasons with the full possession of one’s reasoning powers, that Norris sees life quite as clearly as Mark Twain does: clearer in the mass and as uncompromisingly in all essentials; in the aggregate more fully and progressively, as he is himself the product of a later generation and of conditions equally characteristic of the American at his best.
As a product of more modern and, in many ways, more reactionary conditions, and as a progressive optimist to his last day and hour, Frank Norris deserves to be ranked slightly higher in the human scale than Mark Twain; and it is quite possible that in the long run his work will be remembered longer.
From: Out West, V. XVIII, No. 1, January 1903, p.49-55
“A Significant Literary Life”
By: Bailey Millard
Looking down into a rift of the preen Californian hills near Gilroy, by a winding woodland trail that leads away from towns and temptation, is a little log cabin that to the stranger expresses no more of meaning than any other crude structure he might chance upon in the near-by skyland country of Santa Cruz. But to me this log cabin is a mute memorial of a significant literary life, just beginning to shape itself clearly and largely, and, in the very hour of that bright beginning, borne away on a sudden wind out of the land we know into the land we know not save by faith.
The cabin on the heights was the chosen retreat of Frank Norris, a young man whom the world of letters could ill afford to lose; for he was a conspicuously alert and apt student in the modern school of fiction. He had struck a note that vibrated far. He had typified the West after the most vital, the most searching, the most earth-gripping of European literary models — models in which every one must recognize the saliency, the movement, the color, the virility of human life. The single room of the log cabin was piled full of literary promises. Now it is empty. Norris never wrote there. He would be writing there now, but Death said, “No.”
The young writer, from whom we had all come to hope so much, had done little that could satisfy the artistic conscience of a man to whom intellectual and spiritual growth was the essential fact of life and work. But the color of the soil was in his pages and the blood and bones and viscera of humanity as he found it — the wholesome and the unwholesome, the pleasant and the repellant — painted with a painstaking brush. His creations, even though imperfectly individualized, were far better than the work of many others who made use of their own insufficient literary forms and set forth their own trivial estimates of life with their own weaknesses of presentation. I know several rather prominent men of a certain literary Weissnichtwo who would give years of their lives for such power as Frank Norris had and such fame as he won.
What Norris had written up to within a short time of his death, at the still unripe age of thirty-two, had been from the point of view of the earnest literary student, the Bohemian and the young man of the world. It was often morbid and nearly always essentially material, with none of the spirituality one finds in such great artists as Hardy and Eliot. It came from the young man enthusiastically devoted to his Zola and his Kipling, the young man who loved the stirring sight of the flying wedge, the breathless bucking of the center, the burly mid-waist tackle and the heavy fall; the young man who loved the gleam of the guns, the infantry tramp, the crash of the conflict, the sweat of the fight.
And undeniably the infantry tramp was heard in his work, as well as the surging bugle note of the strenuous realist. It is the swing of that infantry tramp and the insistent blast of that bugle that carry the Norris fiction over the great marshes of prolixity, through the mires of indecency and the sloughs of sodden brutality encountered in his pages. Many another writer with his obvious faults never could have won; but his sweeping scheme, his grip of character and his genuine humanity won for him where a less vigorous and less sympathetic fictionist would have failed.
The Norris painted by some of the critics and biographers is not a man to inspire deep sentiment, but the portrait was often loosely drawn and from fancy, not from life. Let me tell you of the Norris that I knew. Tall, straight, clean-limbed, with a fine, smooth, likeable face, big, brown, frank eyes, with an easily kindled smile lurking in them, and the freely frosted hair of a man of fifty. The grey of the hair gave a strangely romantic interest to the boyish face, and in a roomful of average men the eye of the visitor — and particularly the feminine eye — invariably would be drawn to Norris. A gentle habit of speech, an easy manner and an elusive and at times barely palpable foreign air, were coupled with a charm of presence such as I have seen in few men. Yet he could be outspoken enough, and he was not without some of the small vices you are always likely to find in a catholic man and never in a prig. In other words, he did not pose nor preach and was never afraid to say or do the thing that would not look well in his biography. He was a man’s man and a woman’s man, and what better word shall I say of him?
Norris was of Middle-West birth, but, let me hasten to add, not of Middle-West ideas. He was born in Chicago in 1870, and his well-to-do parents had taken him to Europe at the age of eight, on which great occasion he had written an unusually precocious bit of literature descriptive of his travels, beginning with: “The time of departure has now arrived. ‘Is this a dream?’ said I.” Which highly original phrases were often quoted by his elders to get a rise out of Frank, which they did unfailingly.
The Norrises came to California in 1884, and Frank was sent to school at Belmont, San Mateo county. There he played football so furiously that his left arm was broken in two places. He gave up the game, but he loved it ever afterward. He wanted to be an artist, so he went to Virgil Williams, in San Francisco, to learn to draw. Then his mother sent him to a Paris art schoo
l. In Paris he studied mediaeval history so feverishly that art was sent into the background, and jousts and tourneys filled up his young life. An article descriptive of the Museum of Artillery in Paris, published in a San Francisco paper, was his first real essay in literature. He loved to prowl about the armor-stands of the Museum, and one day, when the watchman was out of the hall, he delighted his romantic soul by pulling on a set of rusty armor and brandishing an old sword, becoming a very fierce and terrible knight of the middle ages for five minutes, and a very terrified young modern when the angry keeper returned of a sudden, and, with a light wooden cane, put to rout the warrior with the sword.
The French studies led to a long and labored effort in rhymed couplets, depicting in the style of Scott a story of feudal France called “Yvernelle.” It was published in a little book which I have read and do not care to read again. In later years Norris, who recognized his lyrical limitations and had decided to shun the muse, said of “Yvernelle” that he was trying hard to live it down.
Back again to California and this time to Berkeley. Much hard “digging” to gain a freshman’s footing and much hard climbing to mount the sophomoric heights. Like all men who have the making of master artists in them he hated mathematics, and algebra was his especial abomination. Latin he likewise loathed, acquiring little, and of Greek nothing. His somewhat reserved nature and foreign flavor made him few college friends at the first, but the sunniness of student life thawed him, and his fair, open face, honest eyes and charming ways, eventually brought him many friends.
In his university days he wrote many short stories, nearly all in the Kipling manner. His first published tale, “The Son of the Sheik,” appeared in print in his freshman year, and was a creditable piece of work for a man of twenty-two.