by Frank Norris
The second story in the trilogy which Norris planned shows a still greater advance on the work which preceded it. There are signs of immaturity in “The Pit.” The lighter phases of life with which it deals are not always touched with a light hand; Norris had still much to learn in the delicate art of social portraiture. But in the handling of his main theme “The Pit” shows the touch of a master. There is a current in the story which is almost irresistible, and which mounts at times to the height of a flood. Such power is not common anywhere in the literature of the world, and it has very rarely appeared in this country. No such searching study of the absorbing, tyrannical, destructive fascination of speculation has ever before appeared. In its vivid description of relentless energy, made up of a thousand details, each one of which contributes to the impressiveness of the general effect, one is no longer reminded of Zola, from whose influence Norris had evidently broken away, but of Balzac. There is no imitation of the method of the older writer on the part of the younger writer; but there is the same thoroughgoing, searching study of all the phenomena contributing to a tremendous impressiveness in the total result.
“The Pit,” which bears the imprint of Messrs. Doubleday, Page & Co., will be widely read for its human interest; it ought to be widely read for its searching exposure of one of the perils which menace American growth and manhood in the country. It would be premature to hail “The Pit” as the great American novel. It has evident faults; but its insight, its power of imagination, and its tremendous energy ought to silence those who have been ready to declare that the material of great art does not exists on this continent; and it will confirm the hopes of those who believe that there is to be another literary development in America in the near future not less characteristic of the hope of the New World than was the fine, aspiring, noble-minded literature of a past generation.
From: The Atlantic Monthly, V. XCI, No. DXLVII, May 1903, p.687-692
Excerpted from: “Lady Rose’s Daughter: The Novels of Mr. Norris”
By: Harriet Waters Preston
…It seems odd indeed to turn from the staid elegance and essential artificiality of the novel of patrician manners (which hath its perennial charms, no less, for the savage republican breast, and which Mrs. Ward manages about as well, after all, as any other living writer) to the two most impressive and memorable works of fiction recently published in America; I mean The Octopus and The Pit” by the late lamented Frank Norris. The very names of these books are boldly sensational, chosen deliberately, as it would seem, to attract the democracy of the reading world. Their action takes place far down, — at the very roots of organized society. They deal with the most primitive, humble, and universal of human needs, – the production of that daily bread which is the staff of man’s life in the body. How the grain on which our common sustenance depends is planted in hope and harvested in fear, only to be exploited far away, at great commercial centres, by speculators who supply or deny it, for their own selfish gain, to the multitudes who toil at the base of the social pyramid, – such was the broad theme which Mr. Norris proposed to himself in his Epic of the Wheat.
For a good while after the first appearance of The Octopus, not much was said aloud about the book. It was a thing painful to read and disquieting to remember; moreover, it was confessedly but the fragment of a more comprehensive scheme. I am not sure that The Octopus can in any proper sense of the term be called a romance. It is a vision, a revelation, an eruption of the subliminal verities, a peep into the red crater over which we lightly walk. It is also, in some sense, a manifesto and a prophecy. It has no central plot, although it quivers from end to end with the throes of human tragedy, like the soil of a volcanic region, in an unquiet time. I may record my own impression — based on some personal acquaintance with the scene of the drama — that the tremendous indictment which it brings against one among the monster monopolies at whose aggrandizement we all tremble, is absolutely just; and that there is no case of cruelest oppression, no phase of the mournful and manifold ruin so passionately portrayed that has not its grim parallel in contemporary experience. But the San Joaquin valley is, after all, only a small corner of earth, – a secluded spot fenced in by mountain walls, — and it seemed that allowance ought to be made for the fact that Mr. Norris had dreamed an epic, and had in him, beyond a doubt, the makings of no mean poet. For all his unflinching grasp of ugly fact, his candor of spirit, and the controlled quietude of his prevailing tone, one felt that the first number of his trilogy had been conceived upon heroic lines, and invested with a more or less colored atmosphere. Moreover, the final catastrophe of the tale, so daringly imagined, so novel in its horror, and yet so fit, — the doom of the coarse villain, who was, after all, but the instrument of a securely defended syndicate of iniquity, — appeared to exemplify a justice more poetic than probable.
But when, after the silence of a year or two, Mr. Norris took up his pen again in The Pit, and resumed his gallant crusade, one saw, at a glance, how the youthful paladin had altered and matured. He had dropped the dithyrambic note, and in this which was destined to remain the last word of his grave parable he speaks as a seer no longer, but as a man of the Western world, – alert, collected, fearless, and with powers fully ripe.
The Pit is the Chicago wheat-pit; and the sometime dreamer of the far Californian valley with its fathomless fecundity and the daze of its perpetual sunshine holds his own without effort amid the din of our biggest marketplace, and evinces a nervous grasp of its most complex affairs. And it is not the victim of the monopolist for whom he is pleading now so much as for the monopolist himself whom he warns of his own soul’s peril.
The Pit is a better constructed and more efficiently handled narrative than its predecessor, but it is also more like other books. The love story that runs through it seems a deplorably common one, until we come, at the very end, to the unexpectedly sane and hopeful resolution of the trite intrigue. The actors in the piece are all rather vulgar, — at best but half taught and superficially civilized. Nevertheless — and it is to my mind one of Mr. Norris’s chief points of distinction as a writer — there is nothing vulgar in his manner of portraying them. He does not gloat or smack his lips — as how few of our native novelists can wholly refrain from doing! — over the inordinate splendors of their new found luxury. He reports the faulty grammar of their loose though graphic speech quite simply, — with no airs of patronizing apology, or affected appeal to remote academic tribunals. These are his own kindred whom he sees attacked by a strange madness, and in peril of a deeper than the wheat-pit through their overmastering greed for anyhow-gotten riches. What matters it how they dress or talk if only they be rescued and rehabilitated? The solemnity of the issues involved and his own concentrated moral conviction make all questions of mere taste appear trivial in the author’s eyes; and he moves through the lake-side palaces of Chicago with a detachment as complete and a ton as admirable as were ever Mrs. Ward’s in any ducal mansion of them all!
For to those piercing young eyes of the great writer we have lost it was given for one moment, before their light went out, to see this teeming and formless American life of ours “steadily” and to “see it whole.” It lay bare to his brief clairvoyance with all its vast resources and capacities in flux, its immense potentiality for both good and evil; above all with those heavy obligations to the race and the future, attaching to the focal place from which it can move no more, in the intricately woven web of the world’s unified fate. The vision faded and the Illuminé passed on, even before he could render intelligible to his countrymen the whole of what he saw. But his broken message remains full of import, and it is idle to indulge in unavailing regret over the part that was never spoken. A fitting motto for the unfinished trilogy might be found in those ringing lines, familiar to us all of the elder generation, — the manliest perhaps ever penned by the cloistered sage from whom the author of Lady Rose’s Daughter derived by natural inheritance her first, and her best inspiration: –
“Ch
arge once more then, and be dumb
Let thy comrades when they come,
When the forts of folly fall
Find thy body by the wall.”
From: Current Literature, V. 26, No. 2, August 1899, p.114
“General Gossip of Authors and Writers”
Frank Norris, a reading from whose much-talked-of book, McTeague, is given on another page of this number of Current Literature, was born in Chicago, in 1870. His father removed to California in 1886, from whence, in furtherance of an early ambition to become an animal painter, he was sent to Paris in 1887. Here he studied in the “atelier Julien” until 1889, when he abandoned the idea of becoming an artist, and returning to this country entered the University of California, graduating in the class of ‘94. Mr. Norris also took a “finishing year” at Harvard in the class of ‘95, after which, in the same year, he went to South Africa as correspondent of the San Francisco Chronicle, where he became involved in the Uitlander insurrection, acting as “dispatch rider” for John Hays Hammond. During this experience he was in the saddle eighteen consecutive hours, contracted fever from exposure, and nearly died in a hospital at Johannesburg. Obliged by the Boer Government to leave the Transvaal after the failure of the raid, he returned to San Francisco in 1896, where he assumed the editorship of the illustrated weekly, The Wave. Coming East, in 1898, he became a member of McClure’s staff, acting as correspondent for McClure’s Magazine all through the Santiago campaign in the late war with Spain. He again contracted the fever in Santiago after the surrender, but recovered and resumed work for the McClure’s, in which connection he still continues.
Mr. Norris has been writing almost without interruption since 1890. Moran of the Lady Letty was contributed as a serial to The Wave during his editorial connection with that paper. McTeague was written in the fall of 1897 at the Big Dipper Mine in Placer County, California (the same mine mentioned in the book). Mr.-Norris chose the spot because of its isolation (it is twenty miles from the railroad, and the country very wild), and, although he was two years collecting the material for it, he wrote the story in two months and a half, during which time, when not at work on the novel, he lived a miner’s life, and for exercise and diversion, used to work on cutting a trail between Big Dipper Mine and Iowa Hill, localities familiar to readers of McTeague.
Mr. Norris apparently believes little in style and “fine writing,” his main object being to make a character alive and the scene vivid. His plan in writing novels is a connected series of pictures, one picture to each chapter, believing style will take care of itself if the writer has anything to say that is worth while. Mr. Howells, in a review of McTeague in Literature, spoke of its “epical conception of life.” The epical form, Mr. Norris thinks, the one most adapted to interpretation of American life and character, and it is his intention to write along these lines in the future.
Despite the success of McTeague it is interesting to note the becoming modesty of the following: “I have faith in the possibilities of San Francisco and the Pacific Coast,” writes Mr. Norris, “as offering a field of fiction, not the fiction of Bret Harte, however, for the country has long since outgrown the ‘red shirt’ period. The novel of California must be now a novel of city life, and it is that novel that I hope some day to write successfully.”
From: Current Literature, V. XXXIV, No. 1, January 1903, p.105
“Frank Norris, the Man”
By: Arthur Goodrich
Norris the man: to his friends how much more that means than Norris the novelist, how much more than any words can express! The finely-chiselled, almost boyish, face with its contrasting heavy crown of white hair has brought good humor and a new sense of human kindness to us so often that we cannot believe it will not come again. “Sincerity, sincerity, and again sincerity” was his personal habit, as well as his literary creed. His thought, his feeling for great human problems went into his books. In his everyday life, in his personal contact with his friends, he was a simple, direct, quiet, happy fellow, who shared with you your good nature, for nothing else than good nature was possible near him. Often there would suddenly come an impulsive mood that was boyish in its playfulness. I remember sitting at my desk one day, so hard at work that I didn’t know he had come up behind me, until I felt hands covering my eyes, as in school-boy play, and a disguised voice demanding my guess of who he was. And after I had been unsuccessful three times, he withdrew his hands with a boyish chuckle at my failure.
If a difficulty arose he did not worry, and when it was solved he was as glad as a child let loose to play. One day when he went fishing with a mutual friend, he became so excited that he impulsively declared he would have a cottage near the shore for his next summer’s outing and fish all summer. No one ever heard an irritable word from Norris, and the only time I ever saw a crease in his brow was once when he was bemoaning his own lack of business ability and foresight. He was as modest and democratic as he was lacking in any self-consciousness. He was just a frank, forthright, earnest seeker after truth, his broad sympathies alert to say a kind word or to hear one, considerate in a most delicate way of people’s feelings, always saying the pleasant thing, and always absolutely meaning it. “Wearing the white flower of a blameless life,” gentle as a child, vigorous with healthy manliness, with high ideals and quiet humility, naive in his simplicity, in everything he did he “meant intensely and meant good.” He had beauty in his heart and believing something with all his might, he put it forth arrayed as he saw it, the lights and shadows falling upon it on his page as they fell upon it in his heart, and neither that beauty which he has left on printed page, nor that which his open heart showed to all who knew him, “shall pass away out of the world.”
From: Literature, No. II, New Series, March 24, 1899, p.241-242
“A Case in Point”
By: W. D. Howells.
The question of expansion in American fiction lately agitated by a lady novelist of Chicago with more vehemence than power, and more courage than coherence, seems to me again palpitant in the case of a new book by a young writer, which I feel obliged at once to recognise as altogether a remarkable book. Whether we shall abandon the old-fashioned American ideal of a novel as something which may be read by all ages and sexes, for the European notion of it as something fit only for age and experience, and for men rather than women; whether we shall keep to the bounds of the provincial proprieties, or shall include within the imperial territory of our fiction the passions and the motives of the savage world which underlies as well as environs civilisation, are points which this book sums up and puts concretely; and it is for the reader, not for the author, to make answer. There is no denying the force with which he makes the demand, and there is no denying the hypocrisies which the old-fashioned ideal of the novel involved. But society, as we have it, is a tissue of hypocrisies, beginning with the clothes in which we hide our nakedness, and we have to ask ourselves how far we shall part with them at his demand. The hypocrisies are the proprieties, the decencies, the morals; they are by no means altogether bad; they are, perhaps, the beginning of civilisation; but whether they should be the end of it is another affair. That is what we are to consider in entering upon a career of imperial expansion in a region where the Monroe Doctrine was never valid. From the very first Europe invaded and controlled in our literary world. The time may have come at last when we are to invade and control Europe in literature. I do not say that it has come, but if it has we may have to employ European means and methods.
It ought not to be strange that the impulse in this direction should have come from California, where, as I am always affirming rather than proving, a continental American fiction began. I felt, or fancied I felt, the impulse in Mr. Frank Norris’ “Moran of the Lady Letty,” and now in his “ McTeague “ I am so sure of it that I am tempted to claim the prophetic instinct of it. In the earlier book there were, at least, indications that forecast to any weather-wise eye a change from the romantic to the realistic temperature, and in the later
we have it suddenly, and with the overwhelming effect of a blizzard. It is saying both too much and too little to say that Mr. Norris has built his book on Zolaesque lines, yet Zola is the master of whom he reminds you in a certain epical conception of life. He reminds you of Zola also in the lingering love of the romantic, which indulges itself at the end in an anticlimax worthy of Dickens. He ignores as simply and sublimely as Zola any sort of nature or character beyond or above those of Polk Street in San Francisco, but within the ascertained limits he convinces you, two-thirds of the time, of his absolute truth to them. He does not, of course, go to Zola’s lengths, breadths, and depths; but he goes far enough to difference his work from the old-fashioned American novel.
Polite readers of the sort who do not like to meet in fiction people of the sort they never meet in society will not have a good time in “McTeague,” for there is really not a society person in the book. They might, indeed, console themselves a little with an elderly pair of lovers on whom Mr. Norris wreaks all the sentimentality he denies himself in the rest of the story; and as readers of that sort do not mind murders as much as vulgarity, they may like to find three of them, not much varying in atrocity. Another sort of readers will not mind the hero’s being a massive blond animal, not necessarily bad, though brutal, who has just wit enough to pick up a practical knowledge of dentistry and to follow it as a trade; or the heroine’s being a little, pretty, delicate daughter of German-Swiss emigrants, perfectly common in her experiences and ideals, but devotedly industrious, patient, and loyal. In the chemistry of their marriage McTeague becomes a prepotent ruffian, with always a base of bestial innocence; and Trina becomes a pitiless miser without altogether losing her housewifely virtues or ceasing to feel a woman’s rapture in giving up everything but her money to the man who maltreats her more and more, and, finally, murders her.