by Frank Norris
“The Octopus,” Norris’ greatest work, is distinctly Hugoesque. By imitating his masters, Stevenson, when at last he found himself, became “the greatest of the stylists.” Norris followed the same plan intentionally, if one can judge by “The Mechanics of Fiction.” His own individuality was developing rapidly, however, all the while he was following his preceptors.
Throughout all his works, from the curiosity that caused the hero of “Moran” to speak to the man in the sweater to the end of “The Pit,” we find him more interested in the whirl of things, in forces, than in men.
But perhaps the most noticeable characteristic of his style is his point of view that life is better than literature, that striving for “sincerity, sincerity, and again sincerity.”
Norris’ climaxes often, strike one like blows, yet if we examine them, we can find nothing unnatural in the abruptness.
For him everything had a particular odor— “aroma” and “redolent” are favorite words, a peculiarity which has a specially pleasing effect in his description of women. A more mechanical characteristic is his habit of repeating certain phrases again and again, though at times the insistence is not so happy as in others. The local color in his books and tales is faultless. One can still have tea in the identical room where Blix and Condy agreed to be chums; Luna’s is flourishing, and who can pass Polk street without looking for the big gold tooth? In a great measure the local color for “The Octopus” was gotten upon a large ranch near Tres Pinos, although in the book Los Muertes is located near “Bonneville” (Tulare.) Annixter is drawn largely from the owner of this ranch, whose wife served to some extent as a model for Mrs. Derrick.
From his essays, however, it is evident that Norris never regarded local color as other than a means to an end. But his fidelity to life does not stop even at actual names and incidents.
“There was the inevitable Studebaker” wagon; in “Moran” the ambergris was to go to Langley & Michaels; McTeague gave up Yale Mixture for Mastiff tobacco. The incident in “The Octopus” of the plows which, coming from the East, had to pass Bonneville, go to San Francisco, and then be returned to the farmers at the short haul rate, is founded on fact. The very climax of this, his masterpiece, is but an account of the Mussel Slough affair, which occurred in Tulare County, California, in 1878.
By some, “Moran,” Norris’ first novel, is ranked among his best work. Despite its faults, it certainly has “all the roll and plunge of action.” Even here we find traces of his later style; for instance: the habit of repeating, and the sudden climax, and his sense of smell.
The forces in “McTeague” are much more clearly defined than those in “Moran.” Trina’s avarice had its source centuries before her birth in the Swiss mountains, among the race that saved they knew not why — saved merely to save. With the dentist, too, heredity is a power, though his fall is more of a reversion to his former life than a deterioration.
That wonderful picture of the growth of miserliness in Trina proves Norris to have been a sincere student of what he describes as “The Mechanics of Fiction.” A sentence suffices for the first mention of her niggardliness, next it occupies a paragraph, then a page, and finally, working its way into the details, permeates the entire story. No less powerful is the description of the effects of alcohol on the ex-car boy.
Although the brutalities of “McTeague” exceed those of “Moran,” and the impression the book leaves is far from pleasant, it has, like all Norris wrote, much humor, often coarse, often over-drawn, like the character work, but still enough to relieve the general gloomy tone at the time of reading, at least. And despite Boston, in that story of the Polk street dentist, among the coarseness and cruelty and melodrama, Norris found romance.
Despite Norris’ gift, that of the born story-teller, of knowing what points to omit and what ideas to inject, the character of Condy Rivers in “Blix” is the best picture of the early Frank Norris we can have. Realism leads him to introduce many ideas into the Love Idyl, in one way or another, that he actually “worked up” into stories, among them his first mention of the wheat.
Even here there is another force than love — the force of the swinging cycle of fate, the whirl of things.
“There, in that room, high above the city, a little climax had come swiftly to a head, a crisis in two lives had suddenly developed. The moment that had been in preparation for the last few months, the last few years, the last few centuries, behold! it had arrived.”
In “A Man’s Woman,” also, love is not the only power. Each of the two main characters has an antagonistic force, the Arctic region for Bennett and the enemy for Lloyd. Here, too, we have glimpses of the machine of the gods.
“For an instant Lloyd saw deep down into the black, mysterious gulf of sex — down, down, down, where, immeasurably below the world of little things, the changeless, dreadful machinery of life itself worked, clashing and resistless in its grooves. It was a glimpse fortunately brief, a vision that does not come too often, lest reason, brought to the edge of the abyss, grow giddy at the sight, and reeling, topple headlong.”
The keynote of the story, however, lies in this:
“God, Man and the Work — the three elements of our entire system, the universal epitomized in the tremendous trinity.”
It is curious that Norris, who had so much individuality, should have held the idea, brought forward in the essay, “Novelists to Order,” in “The Responsibilities of the Novelist,” that “every child contains in himself the elements of every profession, every occupation, every art, every industry,” and that the developing of a novelist or soldier or business-man is a mere matter of specialization. Perhaps he was led to this belief by his professional view that characters are subservient to “the whirl of things in which the author chooses to involve them,” and by the fact that he used himself for two of his principal characters — Condy and Presley.
The article published in the S. F. Argonaut, “In Defense of Dr. Lawlor,” shows what a friend Norris was — a friend stanch enough to stand by a man when he was down, and more, to fight for him against every daily paper in San Francisco. Some of Norris’ best short stories are in the book called “A Deal in Wheat.” though that from which the collection takes its name is inferior to most of the others. Of the tales of the “Three Black Crows,” undoubtedly the best is “The Dual Personality of Slick Dick Nickerson.” Though good, these stories are obviously too reminiscent of Kipling’s trio to be ranked among Norris’ distinctive work. Some of the others are not as good, perhaps, as -many that have not found permanent homes. But the best thing in the book, and probably the best of all Norris’ short work, is “A Memorandum of Sudden Death.” So artfully written that one almost doubts it is fiction; it has for its subject a gradually contracting power, an idea we find in all of Norris’ best work, reduced to an actual physical force.
Theoretically and practically, Norris defended the novel with a purpose. The purpose of “The Octopus” is found in Cedarquinst’s speech when he first meets Magnus Derrick: “We are both of us fighters, it seems, Mr. Derrick * * each with his particular enemy. We are well met, indeed, the farmer and the monied adventurer, both in the same grist between the two millstones of the lethargy of the public and the aggression of the trust; the two great evils of America.” And he adds: “Presley, my boy, there is your epic poem to hand.”
The influence of Hugo was at its greatest when “The Octopus” was written. Vanamee’s dream realized Annixter’s coming to himself, and the rise of the wheat, all on the same night, is Hugoesque. That Dyke should rob the train carrying Hilma and Annixter on their wedding trip, is Hugoesque. S. Rehrman’s escape from bomb and revolver, his death in the Wheat, and Presley’s passage on the ship carrying his body, is Hugoesque. The very complexity of the plot reflects the Frenchman’s hold on the young Westerner.
Like nearly all Norris’ work, “The Octopus” is episodical, and the interests are diverse. In Vanamee, we have mysticism. We have a problem in Minna Hooven’s fat
e. We have delicate suggestiveness in the story of Angele; we have brutality in Dyke’s fight. We have satire in the picture of society and its fakers, and the literature of the “little toy magazines.” There is the broad humor and tragedy of the Epic of the West in the dance at Annixter’s barn, and above all are the two conflicting forces, the railroad and the wheat.
Nowhere are forces more apparent than in Norris’ chef d’oeuvre; even Presley was compelled to recognize in his interview with Shelgrim, that the conflict in “The Octopus” is between forces, not men.
“Men were nothings, mere animaculae, mere ephemerides that fluttered and fell and were forgotten between dawn and dusk. Vanamee had said there was no death. But for one second Presley could go one step further. Men were nought, death was nought, life was nought. Force only existed — Force that brought men into the world — Force that crowded them out of it to make way for the succeeding generation — Force that made the wheat grow — Force that garnered it from the soil to give place to the succeeding crop.”
The engine— “the galloping monster, the terror of steel and steam, with its single eye, cyclopean, red, shooting from horizon to horizon * * * the symbol of a vast power, huge, terrible, flinging the echo of its thunder over all the ranches of the valley, leaving blood and destruction in its path; the leviathan, with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil, the soulless Force, the iron-hearted power, the monster, the colossus, the Octopus.”
“Men — motes in the sunshine — perished, were shot down in the very noon of life; hearts were broken; little children started in life lamentably handicapped; young girls were brought to a life of shame; old women died in the heart of life for lack of food. In that little isolated group of human insects, misery, death, and anguish spun like a wheel of fire.
“But the Wheat remained, untouched, unassailable, that mighty world force, that nourisher of nations, wrapped in Nirvanic calm, indifferent to the human swarm, gigantic, resistless, moved onward in its appointed grooves. 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 scare-crows on the barren plains of India.”
Not till the time of “The Pit” was Norris freed from his masters. Here there is but one coincidence that shows the influence of even Hugo — the crash of the market coming on Laura’s birthday. In spite of his emancipation, and the book’s greater popular success, “The Pit” is inferior to “The Octopus.” This is due, not to the handling of the subject, but to the subject itself.
Norris’ style and temperament are better adapted to an Epic of the West than to a story of a nerve center like Chicago, a style that treats of forces as Norris’ does, loses its power the farther it enters the artificiality of our so-called civilization. We have only to consider Norris’ books individually to see this. And the forces of “The Pit” are the farthest from the soil of any he writes of. The principal force of the book is the conflict between the wheat and the man who would control it, obviously less powerful than such a Titanic struggle as the conflict in “The Octopus.” And while the actual grain is a living force all through “The Octopus,” in the later book it is, for the most part, merely an excuse for gambling, until the climax, when it crushes Jadwin.
“All those millions and millions of bushels of wheat were gone now. The wheat that had killed Cressler, that had engulfed Jadwin’s fortune and all but unseated reason itself, the wheat that had intervened like a great torrent to drag Laura’s husband from her side and drown him in the roaring vortex of the Pit, had passed on, resistless, along its ordered and pre-determined courses, from West to East, like a vast Titanic flood; had passed, leaving death and ruin in its wake, but bearing life and prosperity to the crowded cities and centers of Europe.”
“This huge, resistless nourisher of nations — why was it that it could not reach the people, could not fulfill its destiny, unmarred by all this suffering, unattended by all this misery?”
Frank Norris developed rapidly. At the time of his death, in his thirty-third year, he had written six books, all with exceptional vigor and power. One of them has been called great. He saw his responsibilities and fulfilled them with such sincerity, originality, broadness of view, and depth as could only lead him to heights not often attained.
As it is, the name of Norris is an important one in American letters. Who can say what it might have been?
From: The Bookman, V. 39, May 1914, p.236-238
Almost simultaneously with the publication of the posthumous novel Vandover and the Brute, Messrs. Doubleday, Page and Company are issuing a little pamphlet of very delightful reminiscences of the late Frank Norris, written by his brother, Charles G. Norris. These memories begin at a time when Frank Norris, then seventeen years old, and intending to be an artist, went to France, and enrolled as a student at the “Atelier Julien” in Paris. There he remained two years and became absorbed, not in art, but in chivalry. The reading of Froissart’s Chronicles was his daily recreation. He became so imbued with the spirit of mediaevalism that once with much amusement he pointed out an error in Scott’s Ivanhoe in which one of the characters is described as wearing a certain kind of armour that was not in use until a hundred years later; a mistake that was as obvious to him as if some one to-day should depict Cardinal Richelieu in a frock coat and a top hat.
Frank Norris’s earliest ventures into literature, his brother tells us, were more to provide a vehicle for his illustrations than for any interest he had in writing itself. Thus it was that his first novel. Robert d’Artois, was written — a crude, amateurish effort that indicated nothing of his real talent. But at that he loved story-telling, and his imagination was keen. Charles Norris’s earliest recollections are of the endless and involved stories of love and chivalry that his big brother wove about certain lead soldiers. There were several thousand of these soldiers, and every captain and lieutenant was named, and had a history of his own. In these stories there was an utter disregard of historical accuracy and sequence. Thus the Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, the Cid and Khedive, Machiavelli and Corbullo the Saxon, all lived and had their being together in this miniature world of lead. Frank would spend hours fashioning wonderful cannon out of the thick handles of his paint brushes, and the sides of cigar boxes. These were painted ivory black with red trimmings and christened “The Spitfire” and “The Peacemaker.” He drew maps of the two countries at war, “Sparta” and “Rome,” dividing them into provinces, with rivers and mountains, roads and railways.
At that time the Norris family were all in Paris. When the rest of the family returned to California, leaving Frank to continue his art studies, Frank began writing Charles a novel in which all their favourite characters reappeared revolving about Charles, who was described as the nephew of the Duke of Burgundy. The story was written in the second person on closely ruled note-paper; one sheet slipped inside another, and the whole fastened together with a small loop of red or blue string, in the upper left hand corner. It came to America in chapters, rolled up inside French newspapers to save postage. Every installment was profusely illustrated with pencil sketches, mostly of Charles as an esquire, a man-at-arms, an equerry, and finally as a knight. Plots and episodes from the works of Scott, Francis Bacon, Frank Stockton, and others were lifted bodily, sometimes the actual wording was borrowed. There was one sentence: “The night closed down dark as a wolf’s mouth,” that years later Charles found again in the opening of a chapter of Quentin Durward. Before these adventures were finished Frank returned to America. He left the heroine lashed to a railway track, and Charles locked in a neighbouring switchman’s tower. The story was never concluded, but it was to that time in the young lives of the brothers that he referred in his dedication of The Pit.
In memory of certain lamentable tales of the round (dining-room) table heroes; of the epic of the pewter platoons, and the romance-cycle of “Gaston’s le F
ox” which we invented, maintained, and found marvellous at a time when we both were boys.
Frank was nineteen when he came home. He began to prepare for the entrance examinations to the University of California. When he was studying for them be elected to ‘write a three canto poem in the metre of Scott’s verse. It was, in his brother’s estimation, the first,
writing of merit that he did. While still in Paris, he had written a short article on the armour of the fifteenth century and illustrated it, but it was no such serious attempt as was the poem. “Ancient Armour” appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle in March, 1889, and Frank received nine dollars — the first money ever earned by his pen — for it. The poem was called Yvernelle and was published by Lippincott. He sent some of his pen-and-ink sketches with it, but these were returned. Probably, in the opinion of the publishers, the drawings were not good enough. Eventually some of the pictures for Yvernelle were done by Mr. Will Low. While he was in college Frank began to take his writing seriously. Naturally, his reading of fiction became critical; and at that time he was never without a yellow paper-covered novel of Zola in his hand. He loved Kipling, too, and Richard Harding Davis, and considered William Dean Howells a novelist of the first order.
One of Frank Norris’s first stories, “Son of a Sheik,” was written while he was a sophomore, and published in the San Francisco Argonaut. Another story, “Lauth,” appeared in the Overland Monthly. During the early part of 18094 — his last six months at the University of California — a series of stories, under the general heading of Outward and Visible Signs, made their appearance in the Overland, and in August of the same year, “The Caged Lion” was published in the Argonaut. But he was never able to sell anything to the Eastern magazines. The manuscripts he sent invariably came back. While he was still an undergraduate at the University of California he began McTeague. He wrote the greater part of that novel during his year of postgraduate work at Harvard, but before completing it he began Vandover and the Brute. About this time he was carrying a black note-book, in his inside coat pocket, in which ‘he jotted down a heterogeneous collection of notes of his own observation; a well-turned sentence, a good name, the possible title of a book. One of these entries read: “The hands of the village clock closed like a pair of shears, and cut the night in twain.” This book was his greatest treasure. Years after he said that keeping it taught him the difference ‘between seeing life subjectively and objectively. No one, he believed, could become a writer until he could regard life and people, and the world in general, from the objective point of view. Once Charles read part of this note-book, and was soundly kicked for his impertinence. But years after he came upon many of these same notes in Frank’s work, amplified and adapted.