by Frank Norris
From: A Book of Prefaces, by H.L. Mencken, Knopf, 1917, p.70-71
I have heard argument that he [Theodore Dreiser] is a follower of Frank Norris, and two or three facts lend it a specious probability. “McTeague” was printed in 1899; “Sister Carrie” a year later. Moreover, Norris was the first to see the merit of the latter book, and he fought a gallant fight, as literary advisor to Doubleday, Page & Co., against its suppression after it was in type. But this theory runs aground upon two circumstances, the first being that Dreiser did not actually read “McTeague,” nor, indeed, grow aware of Norris, until after “Sister Carrie” was completed, and the other being that his development, once he began to write other books, was along paths far distant from those pursued by Norris himself. Dreiser, in truth, was a bigger man than Norris from the start; it is to the latter’s unending honour that he recognized the fact instanter, and yet did all he could to help his rival. It is imaginable, of course, that Norris, living fifteen years longer, might have overtaken Dreiser, and even surpassed him; one finds an arrow pointing that way in “Vandover and the Brute” (not printed until 1914). But it swings sharply around in “The Epic of the Wheat.” In the second volume of that incomplete trilogy, “The Pit,” there is an obvious concession to the popular taste in romance; the thing is so frankly written down, indeed, that a play has been made of it, and Broadway has applauded it. And in “The Octopus,” despite some excellent writing, there is a descent to a mysticism so fantastic and preposterous that it quickly passes beyond serious consideration. Norris, in his day, swung even lower — for example, in “A Man’s Woman” and in some of his short stories. He was a pioneer, perhaps only half sure of the way he wanted to go, and the evil lures of popular success lay all about him. It is no wonder that he sometimes seemed to lose his direction.
From: A History of American Literature since 1870, by Fred Lewis Pattee, Century, 1915, p.398-400
For Frank Norris (1870-1902) more may be said, though undoubtedly he has been judged by his contemporaries more by what he dreamed of doing and what, perhaps, he might have done had he lived than by his actual accomplishment. He had had unusual training for the epic task he set himself. He had been born in Chicago and had spent there the first fifteen years of his life, he had been educated in the San Francisco high school, at the University of California, and at Harvard, then for a year or two he had studied art in Paris. Later he was war correspondent of the San Francisco Chronicle, then editor of the San Francisco Wave, then special war correspondent for McClure’s Magazine during the Spanish War.
When he began to write fiction, and he began early, he was an ardent disciple of Zola, a realist of the latter-day type, a teller of the Truth as Zola conceived of the Truth. “Mere literature” was a thing outworn, graces of style and gentleness of theme belonged to the effeminate past. A masculine age had come to which nothing was common or unclean provided it were but the Truth. Like Crane, he was eager, excited, dominated by his theme until it became his whole life. He could work only in major key, in fortissimo, with themes continent-wide presented with the Kipling vigor and swing.
In his earlier work, Vandover and the Brute, McTeague, and the like, he swung to the extreme of his theory. To tell the truth was to tell with microscopic detail the repulsive things of physical life. There are stories of his that reek with foul odors and jangle repulsively upon the eye and the ear. The short fiction “A Man’s Woman” is an advance even upon Zola. It is Truth, but it is the truth about the processes of the sewer and the physiological facts about starvation:
The tent was full of foul smells: the smell of drugs and of moldy gunpowder, the smell of dirty rags, of unwashed bodies, the smell of stale smoke, of scorching sealskin, of soaked and rotting canvas that exhaled from the tent cover — every smell but that of food.
McTeague is a brutal book: it gets hold of one’s imagination and haunts it like an odor from a morgue. So with certain scenes from Vandover and the Brute. One sees for weeks the ghastly face of that drowning Jew who, after the wreck of the steamer, was beaten off again and again until his mashed fingers could no longer gain a hold. True to life it undoubtedly is, but to what end?
Norris’s master work was to be his trilogy, the epic of the wheat, the allegory of financial and industrial America. He explained his purpose in the preface to The Pit:
These novels, while forming a series, will be in no way connected with each other save by their relation to (1) the production, (2) the distribution, (3) the consumption of American wheat. When complete they will form the story of a crop of wheat from the time of its sowing as seed in California to the time of its consumption as bread in a village of Western Europe.
The first novel, The Octopus, deals with the war between the wheat grower and the Railroad Trust; the second, The Pit, is the fictitious narrative of a “deal” in the Chicago wheat pit; while the third, The Wolf, will probably have for its pivotal episode the relieving of a famine in an old world community.
He lived to complete only the first two, and it is upon these two that his place as a novelist must depend. They represent his maturer work, his final manner, and they undoubtedly show what would have been his product had he been spared to complete his work.
The two books impress one first with their vastness of theme. The whole continent seems to be in them. They have an untamed power, an elemental quality, an unconfined sweep that is Russian in its quality. They are epics, epics of a new continent with its untold richness in corn and wheat, its enmeshing railroads, its teeming cities of the plain, its restless human types — new birth of our new soil. The excitement and the enthusiasm of the novelist flow from every page. To read long is to be filled with the trembling eagerness of the wheat pit and the railroad yard. The style is headlong, excited, illuminated hotly with Hugo-like adjectives. Through it all runs a symbolism that at times takes full control. The railroad dominates The Octopus, the wheat The Pit as fully as the hemp dominates Allen’s Reign of Lam. The books are allegories. The Western farmer is in the grip of an octopus-like monster, the railroad, that is strangling him. The ghastly horror of the locomotive that plows at full speed through a flock of sheep is symbolic of his helplessness.
To the right and left, all the width of the right of way, the little bodies had been flung; backs were snapped against the fence-posts; brains knocked out. Caught in the barbs of the wire, wedged in, the bodies hung suspended. Under foot it was terrible; the black blood, winking in the starlight, seeped down into the clay between the ties with a long sucking murmur. . . . Abruptly, Presley saw again in his imagination the galloping monster, the terror of steel and steam, with its single eye, cyclopean, red, shooting from horizon to horizon; but saw it now as the symbol of a vast power, huge, terrible, flinging the echo of its thunder over all the reaches 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.
Garland in such pictures as “Under the Lion’s Paw” tends to arouse his reader to mutiny, to the cry “This thing must stop!’’ Norris fills him with shuddering horror and leaves him unnerved.
Tremendous energy the novels undoubtedly have and truth too, so far as it goes. They have imaginative power of no inferior type and an ardor that is contagious. It was worth while to have written them: they picture for all time a unique phase of American life, but it is no great loss to our literature that the two were not expanded into a long series. In the higher sense of the word they are not literature; they are remarkably well done newspaper “stories.” Like most of the work of his group of writers, they are journalistic in pitch and in intent: stirring narratives, picturesque presentings of unusual material, timely studies in dynamic style. But literary art is founded upon restraint, reserve, poise. These stories lack finish, concentration, and even, at times, good taste. Everywhere full organ, everywhere tenseness, everywhere excitement. A terrible directness there is, but it tends no whi
ther and it comes to no terminus of conclusion.
Norris unquestionably lacked knowledge of many of the most fundamental areas of human life. He was too insistently modern. Like the mere journalist, he was obsessed with but a single thought: the value of the present moment. He lacked a sense of the past, personal background, inner life, power to weigh and balance and compare, and, lacking these, he lacked the elements that make for the literature of permanence.
From: Current Literature, V. LII, No. 2, February 1912, p.227-228
“The Persisting Influence of Frank Norris”
Not long over a decade ago a young Californian novelist came to his office one day “trembling with excitement, incapacitated for work, his brain seething with a single thought” — a great American trilogy, an Epic of the Wheat! It was Frank Norris, one of the most powerful writers America has yet produced; the subject of a deeply appreciative and significant chapter in Frederic Taber Cooper’s book of collected essays, “Some American Story Tellers.” Norris lived to complete only two volumes of his projected trilogy, “The Octopus” and “The Pit,” symbolizing the growth of the wheat and its distribution. The tragedy of its consumption he left almost untouched. But these two novels stand to-day, says Mr. Cooper, “as the substructure of a temple destined never to be finished, the splendidly rugged torso of a broken statue.”
It is unjust and misleading, in Mr. Cooper’s opinion, to think of Frank Norris as belonging to a bygone generation, or as a brief potentiality which withered suddenly once and for all. “As a matter of fact,” he writes, “Norris’s influence has never for an hour been dead. In a quiet, persistent way, it has spread and strengthened, leavening all unsuspectedly the maturer work of many of the writers who have since come into prominence.” Particularly it may be found in the novels of Robert Herrick, David Graham Phillips and Ellen Glasgow; in the development of “an epic sweep and comprehension, an epic sense of the surge of life and the clash of multitudinous interests.” But Frank Norris in his lifetime “dwarfed them all.” Had he lived to attain his full stature, he would have given us “bigger, stronger, more vital novels” than any of his successors.
Before his death, Norris had time to formulate a little his ideas on literature and art in a series of essays entitled “Salt and Sincerity.” Here was no flippancy, no smartness, no suggestion of pose. Novel-writing to Frank Norris was the most serious thing in life; and he expressed himself thus concerning “The Responsibilities of the Novelist”:
“The Pulpit, the Press and the Novel — these indisputably are the great molders of public opinion and public morals to-day. But the Pulpit speaks but once a week; the Press is read with lightning haste and the morning news is wastepaper by noon. But the novel goes into the home to stay. It is read word for word; is talked about, discussed; its influence penetrates every chink and corner of the family. . . . How necessary it becomes, then, for those who, by the simple art of writing, can invade the heart’s heart of thousands, whose novels are received with such measureless earnestness — how necessary it becomes for those who wield such power to use it rightfully. Is it not expedient to act fairly? Is it not, in Heaven’s name, essential that the People hear not a lie but the Truth?”
There is something Whitmanic in his further assertion that the greatest reward of the novelist is to be able to say at the close of his life: “I never truckled; I never took off the hat to Fashion and held it out for pennies. By God, I told them the truth. They liked it or they didn’t like it. What had that to do with me? I told them the truth; I knew it for the truth then, and I know it for the truth now.”
In one of his later essays, Norris gives his conception of the muse of American fiction, again in a spirit thoroughly Whitmanic. He writes:
“She is a Child of the people, this muse of our fiction of the future, and the wind of a new country, a new heaven and a new earth is in her face and has blown her hair from out the fillets that the Old World muse has bound across her brow, so that it is all in disarray. The tan of the sun is on her cheeks, and the dust of the highway is thick upon her buskin, and the elbowing of many men has torn the robe of her, and her hands are hard with the grip of many things. She is hail-fellow-well-met with every one she meets, unashamed to know the clown and unashamed to face the king, a hardy, vigorous girl, with an arm as strong as a man’s and a heart as sensitive as a child’s.”
Norris’s debt to Zola was indisputable and great. “Everywhere,” says Mr. Cooper, “from his earliest writings to his last, in one form or another, it stares us in the face, compelling recognition. Like Zola, his strength lay in depicting life on a gigantic scale, portraying humanity in the mass; like Zola, he could not work without the big, underlying Idea, the dominant symbol. . . . If we have ever had a writer in this country who owes every last atom of importance that is in him to the realistic creed, that writer is Frank Norris.” Yet Norris himself considered realism a “harsh, loveless, colorless, blunt tool,” and foresaw the final word on Zola which would name him a romanticist. Irrational and topsy-turvy as it may seem, he believed with all his strength that “the greatest realism is the greatest romanticism,” and he hoped some day to prove it.
Mr. Cooper makes an interesting review of Norris’s early experimental stories. “Big words, big phrazes, big ideas,” he says of them; “an untrammeled freedom of self-expression. He could not be true to himself, if hampered by a narrow canvas. That is why it is as incongruous to look to Frank Norris for short stories as it would be to set a Rodin to carving cherry pits or a Verestschagin to tinting lantern slides.”
Norris will always be known as the author of “The Octopus” and “The Pit.” He was hardly old enough or ripe enough to execute his vast conception; yet he undertook the work with feverish haste and impatience. Mr. Cooper comments:
“‘The Octopus is a vast allegory, an example of symbolism pushed to the extreme limit, rather than a picture of real life. With the two succeeding volumes it was destined to portray American life as a whole, -not merely the life of some small corner of a single State, but America in its entirety, with all its hopes and aspirations, from the Canadian to the Mexican border, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And for the central symbol he chose Wheat, as being quite literally the staff of this life, the ultimate source of American power and prosperity. This first volume, dealing with wheat in the field, shows us a corner of California, the San Joaquin Valley, where a handful of ranchmen are engaged in irrigating and plowing, planting, reaping, and harvesting, performing all the slow, arduous toil of cultivation, — and at the same time carrying on a continuous warfare against the persistent encroachment of the railroad, whose steel arms are reaching out, octopus-like, to grasp, encircle and slowly crush, one after another, whoever ventures to oppose it. In a broader sense, it symbolizes the hold that capital has upon labor, the aggression of the corporation and the trust upon the rights of the individual. But back of the individual, stronger than the trusts, is the spirit of the people, the dauntless energy of the nation, typified by the Wheat, — a perennial, exhaustless fruition, a mighty, resistless tide, rising, spreading, gathering force, rolling onward in vast, golden waves throughout the length and breadth of the continent, bearing with it the promise of health and strength and prosperity.”
In the following episode we find the dominant motif of “The Octopus” ever recurrent, — the Engine plowing its way through a flock of sheep which have strayed upon the track:
“To the right and left, all the width of the right of way, the little bodies had been flung; backs were snapped against the fence-posts; brains knocked out. Caught in the barbs of the wire, wedged in, the bodies hung suspended. Under foot it was terrible; the black blood, winking in the starlight, seeped down into the clay between the ties with a long sucking murmur. . . . Abruptly, Presley saw again in his imagination the galloping monster, the terror of steel and steam, with its single eye, cyclopean, red, shooting from horizon to horizon; but saw it now as the symbol of a vast power, huge, terrible, flinging the
echo of its thunder over all the reaches 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.”
Subordinate, “yet always with an unspoken suggestion of final triumph,” is the motif of the Wheat. The farmers — the growers — revolt against the Railroad:
“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.