by Frank Norris
This is rendering in coarse outline the shape of a story realised with a fulness which the outline imparts no sense of. It abounds in touches of character at once fine and free, in little miracles of observation, in vivid insight, in simple and subtle expression. Its strong movement carries with it a multiplicity of detail which never clogs it; the subordinate persons are never shabbed or faked; in the equality of their treatment their dramatic inferiority is lost; their number is great enough to give the feeling of a world revolving round the central figures without distracting the interest from these. Among the minor persons, Maria Macapa, the Mexican chorewoman, whose fable of a treasure of gold turns the head of the Polish Jew Zerkow, is done with rare imaginative force. But all these lesser people are well done; and there are passages throughout the book that live strongly in the memory, as only masterly work can live. The one folly is the insistence on the love-making of those silly elders, which is apparently introduced as an offset to the misery of the other love-making; the anti-climax is McTeague’s abandonment in the alkali desert, handcuffed to the dead body of his enemy.
Mr. Norris has, in fact, learned his lesson well, but he has not learned it all. His true picture of life is not true, because it leaves beauty out. Life is squalid and cruel and vile and hateful, but it is noble and tender and pure and lovely, too. By and by he will put these traits in, and then his powerful scene will be a reflection of reality; by and by he will achieve something of the impartial fidelity of the photograph. In the mean time he has done a picture of life which has form, which has texture, which has color, which has what great original power and ardent study of Zola can give, but which lacks the spiritual light and air, the consecration which the larger art of Tolstoy gives. It is a little inhuman, and it is distinctly not for the walls of living-rooms, where the ladies of the family sit and the children go in and out. This may not be a penalty, but it is the inevitable consequence of expansion in fiction.
From: Harper’s Weekly, V. XLVII, No. 2412, March 14, 1903, p.433
“The Last Work of Frank Norris”
Time will no doubt undo the effect of death in taking the gifted young novelist from his task, so far as to relieve his last book from the appearance of challenging the primacy of his earlier and more masterly achievements. It is the present misfortune of his fame that the second drama of the three which he imagined for his greatly designed trilogy of The Wheat should follow haltingly upon the first with a pace which the third shall never come to help it mend. But it will be all the more the care, as it should be the generous will, of those who read The Pit to remember that we have had The Octopus, and that we were to have had The Wolf, in which the story of the food and famine of the world was, and was to have been, fully told. The first of these three was adequate, and the second is not adequate, but it is more adequate than it seems in the incomplete perspective. One may fancy in it the faltering of the hand unconsciously prophetic of fate, the impatience of him who fights with numbered days; for as Lowell said of Keats, “as w« turn the leaves, they seem to warm and thrill our fingers with the flush of his warm senses, and the flutter of his electrical nerves, and we do not wonder he felt that what he did was to be done swiftly.”
The book has the pathos of this apparent haste, and yet looked at with due reflection it has not the effect of a hastily imagined thing. The material is less picturesque and less dramatic than that of the book dealing with the growth and garnering of the wheat in the fields which were robbed as well as reaped. There is no such episode as the struggle of the farmer, gun in hand, with the railroad, but the descent into the Pit of the great Bull who has been destroying himself in his reckless play with the suffering of millions of men and women and children, is no mean incident, and the novelist has wrought it into fiction both strong and fine. The pity of the thing is that go much of the book relates to the unimportant society side of the business, to the half-cultured, half-ignorant, wholly egotistical woman who stands for the heroine, when its sole heroine should have been The Wheat. The author has not sufficiently mastered her personality, though he has almost done it, to let us feel that he feels her essential vulgarity; he has not shown us a rich nature depraved by the reckless game of the man fighting and tricking the hapless un-hungered for the bread in their mouths, but a cheap nature ready to betray him for the flatteries and caresses of another cheap nature. The tragedy is not in the domestic story of Laura and Curtis Jadwin, but in that of the poor old Cresslers, who are dragged down with their wreck, and are sacrificed against their wills and principles to the insensate ambition of Jadwin. Before the story is finished, one has quite ceased to care for either of the Jadwins, whether she was ruined through her greedy vanity or he through his ruthless lust of power. Let her go with the meretricious esthete who makes love to her; let him fall under the feet of his enemies in the Pit; we cannot care, and we are not interested to know that they really go to a new scene to rehabilitate their unessential lives.
Perhaps if the author had taken time to think out his material a little more thoroughly he would have found a hint in it of immense importance to our imperfect civilization, a truth known dimly and dumbly to those who suffer the worst harm from the facts. It is not alone the luxury of our Jadwins which is vulgar; it is the Jadwins themselves who are vulgar, by whatever other names they call themselves in Chicago or New York, or by whatever difference of social circumstance they distinguish themselves from one another. It is for such brute state as theirs that the earth groans with harvests and her children with hunger, and we have not quite an assurance from the novelist that he senses their vulgarity. He leaves us to fear that somehow the woman’s beauty, and the man’s courage have blinded him. Yet there are passages and touches throughout the book that testify to his insight and his ability to paint the make as the well as the manner of his people. There is excellent characterization in his work, and occasionally a robust and powerful dramatization. For him it is too late to inquire whether the savage mock-splendor of the Chicago which he portrays has not held for him the glamour that it may have worn for him in his earlier years, and whether he has not approached it with less detachment than he kept in dealing with the facts of his California story, which he saw with maturer eyes; but for the critic of his work, and for the student, the suggestion may have value.
The book wants balance, as we have hinted, and it is overweighted with fact of the less rather than the greater importance; it should have toppled, if at all, to the side of the wheat gambler — not the wheat gambler’s wife. Where the work is with the scenes in the grain exchange, the Pit, it is always masterly, from that first glimpse of the Pit in the beginning, to that battle-piece at the last where Jadwin breaks with tradition and convention, and he, the great Bull, enters the arena in person, and fights the Bears to his death. In these moments, and such as these the book magnificently succeeds, but there are other moments when it is as true and still finer, such as those when it reveals the prim, pure, high nature of a girl like Page Dearborn; the gentle, motherly goodness of Mrs. Cressler; the flat, kind, commonplace of Mrs. Wessels. For the rest, one could have wished the material had been scanned by the severer eye of the author’s later experience. It is on the society side that it is weak; it is not so weak on the social side; and on the human side it is worthy to stand with the author’s greater work: not on the same level, indeed, and yet not fatally below it, as nine-tenths of our other fiction must. On what may be called the physical side, it is wonderful. You can see, hear, feel those people.
From: The Philharmonic, V. III, No. 2, March 1903, p.120-121
“Frank Norris And ‘The Pit’”
Whether or not Frank Norris, the lamented young novelist, who died a few weeks ago, was greatly influenced by the method and purposes of the great French realist, Zola, as Mr. Howells suggested in a recent North American Review, there is little doubt that the scope of his proposed trilogy of the “Wheat,” which included its production in California, its distribution in Chicago and its consumption in Europe,
had an epic largeness that was like the vast literary conceptions of the great Frenchman; and if “The Octopus” with its railroad-ridden farms of California, and “The Pit,” with its howling “bears” and devastating “corners” in Chicago, and the projected “Wolf” with its European cries of famine and curse of greed, had been finally achieved and fused into the imagined trilogy, the very conception would have helped to make the work great in American fiction.
It was evidently the purpose of Mr. Norris to leave behind the personal and local tragedy as he found it in “McTeague” his vivid story of San Francisco life, and to lay hold of a great industrial and commercial movement that was at least national in its workings. And he himself seems to have believed that he was peculiarly fitted by his own life experience to write along these great lines; for he was born in Chicago and lived there the first fifteen years of his life; he had then gone to California and grown up into a full knowledge of the scenes and conditions he has so powerfully painted; later he became fully familiar with the industrial and social conditions in Europe; and then again he returned to California to renew his intimate acquaintance with the phenomena of a vast corporation gripping a whole people with the tentacles of a merciless greed. And it was there he died.
Mr. Howells says his personal impression of the young novelist was that he had abounding strength and courage to carry out his great design; and even with only two of the three projected volumes finished, the reader feels a good deal of the largeness of the achievement, its literary skill, its strong-winged imagination, its throbbing sympathy with the inarticulate masses, its dramatic sense, and its pathos. “The Pit” has for its dominating but finally wretched figure, Curtis Jadwin, who by his daring and luck and hard discipline is able to “swing a corner” and hold a nation’s food supply in his grasp. Subordinate to him but helping to intensify this central type are Sam Gretry, the broker; Landry Court, the scrupulous young trader; the Cresslers, and old Hargus; these revolve about the great speculator in La Salle street. And then there is the love element that permeates the whole story with fuller influence than in “The Octopus” — Laura Jadwin, the wife, a creature of mind and mood, one that men will perhaps be inclined to love, even if women do not all approve. Companionless in her great house, with everything to command but nothing to love, she draws upon the most charitable sympathies of the reader, and makes him wonder if some other ending than the one in the book might not have been at times in the author’s mind. Among the various phases of Chicago life portrayed in fiction, this book doubtless contains one of the most vivid and realistic, and makes the early death of the ambitious novelist a matter of genuine regret.
From: The North American Review, V. 175, No. DLIII, December 1902, p.769-778
“Frank Norris”
By: W.D. Howells
The projection which death gives the work of a man against the history of his time, is the doubtful gain we have to set against the recent loss of such authors as George Douglas, the Scotchman, who wrote “ The House with the Green Shutters,” and Frank Norris, the American, who wrote “McTeague “ and “The Octopus,” and other novels, antedating and postdating the first of these, and less clearly prophesying his future than the last. The gain is doubtful, because, though their work is now freed from the cloud of question which always involves the work of a living man in the mind of the general, if his work is good (if it is bad they give it no faltering welcome), its value was already apparent to those who judge from the certainty within themselves, and not from the uncertainty without. Every one in a way knows a thing to be good, but the most have not the courage to acknowledge it, in their sophistication with canons and criterions. The many, who in the tale of the criticism are not worth minding, are immensely unworthy of the test which death alone seems to put into their power. The few, who had the test before, were ready to own that Douglas’s study of Scottish temperaments offered a hope of Scottish fiction freed the Scottish sentimentality which had kept it provincial; and that Norris’s two mature novels, one personal and one social, imparted the assurance of an American fiction so largely commensurate with American circumstance as to liberate it from the casual and the occasional, in which it seemed lastingly trammelled. But the parallel between the two does not hold much farther. What Norris did, not merely what he dreamed of doing, was of vaster frame, and inclusive of imaginative intentions far beyond those of the only immediate contemporary to be matched with him, while it was of as fine and firm an intellectual quality, and of as intense and fusing an emotionality.
I.
In several times and places, it has been my rare pleasure to bear witness to the excellence of what Norris had done, and the richness of his promise. The vitality of his work was so abundant, the pulse t of health was so full and strong in it, that it is incredible it should not be persistent still. The grief with which we accept such a death as his is without the consolation that we feel when we can say of some one that his life was a struggle, and that he is well out of the unequal strife, as we might say when Stephen Crane died. The physical slightness, if I may so suggest one characteristic of Crane’s vibrant achievement, reflected the delicacy of energies that could be put forth only in nervous spurts, in impulses vivid and keen, but wanting in breadth and bulk of effect. Curiously enough, on the other hand, this very lyrical spirit, whose freedom was its life, was the absolute slave of reality. It was interesting to hear him defend what he had written, in obedience to his experience of things, against any change in the interest of convention. “No,” he would contend, in behalf of the profanities of his people, “that is the way they talk. I have thought of that, and whether I ought to leave such things out, but if I do I am not giving the thing as I know it.” He felt the constraint of those semi-savage natures, such as he depicted in “Maggie,” and “ George’s Mother,” and was forced through the fealty of his own nature to report them as they spoke no less than as they looked. When it came to “ The Red Badge of Courage,” where he took leave of these simple aesthetics, and lost himself in a whirl of wild guesses at the fact from the ground of insufficient witness, he made the failure which formed the break between his first and his second manner, though it was what the public counted a success, with every reason to do so from the report of the sales.
The true Stephen Crane was the Stephen Crane of the earlier books, the earliest book; for “Maggie” remains the best thing he did. All he did was lyrical, but this was the aspect and accent as well as the spirit of the tragically squalid life he sang, while “The Red Badge of Courage,” and the other things that followed it, were the throes of an art failing with material to which it could not render an absolute devotion from an absolute knowledge. He sang, but his voice erred up and down the scale, with occasional flashes of brilliant melody, which could not redeem the errors. New York was essentially his inspiration, the New York of suffering and baffled and beaten life, of inarticulate or blasphemous life; and away from it he was not at home, with any theme, or any sort of character. It was the pity of his fate that he must quit New York, first as a theme, and then as a habitat: for he rested nowhere else, and wrought with nothing else as with the lurid depths which he gave proof of knowing better than any one else. Every one is limited, and perhaps no one is more limited than another; only, the direction of the limitation is different in each. Perhaps George Douglas, if he had lived, would still have done nothing greater than “The House with the Green Shutters,” and might have failed in the proportion of a larger range as Stephen Crane did. I am not going to say that either of these extraordinary talents was of narrower bound than Frank Norris; such measures are not of the map. But I am still less going to say that they were of finer quality because their achievement seems more poignant, through the sort of physical concentration which it has. Just as a whole unhappy world agonizes in the little space their stories circumscribe, so what is sharpest and subtlest in that anguish finds its like in the epical breadths of Norris’s fiction.
II.
At the other times
when I so gladly owned the importance of this fiction, I frankly recognized what seemed to me the author’s debt to an older master; and now, in trying to sum up my sense of it in an estimate to which his loss gives a sort of finality for me, I must own again that he seemed to derive his ideal of the novel from the novels of Zola. I cannot say that, if the novels of Zola had not been cast in the epic mould, the novels of Frank Norris would not have been epical. This is by no means certain; while it is, I think, certain that they owe nothing beyond the form to the master from whom he may have imagined it. Or they owe no more to him, essentially, than to the other masters of the time in which Norris lived out his life all too soon. It is not for nothing that any novelist is born in one age, and not another, unless we are to except that aoristic freak, the historical novelist; and by what Frank Norris wrote one might easily know what he had read. He had read, and had profited, with as much originality as any man may keep for himself, by his study of the great realists whose fiction has illustrated the latter part of the nineteenth century beyond any other time in the history of fiction; and if he seemed to have served his apprenticeship rather more to one of them than to another, this may be the effect of an inspiration not finally derived from that one. An Italian poet says that in Columbus “the instinct of the unknown continent burned;” and it may be that this young novelist, who had his instincts mostly so well intellectualized, was moved quite from within when he imagined treating American things in an epical relation as something most expressive of their actual relation. I am not so sure that this is so, but I am sure that he believed it so, and that neither in material nor in treatment are his novels Zolaesque, though their form is Zolaesque, in the fashion which Zola did not invent, though he stamped it so deeply with his nature and his name.