by Frank Norris
As indicative of the seriousness with which Frank was now beginning to regard his work, I remember that he kept a black notebook, in his inside coat pocket, in which he set down a heterogeneous collection of notes of his own observations: a well-turned sentence, a good name, the possible title of a book. One of these entries, I remember, 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 afterward he told me 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, — until he could remain detached, out side, maintain the unswerving attitude of the observer. I read part of his notebook once, and got soundly kicked for my impertinence, but years afterward I came upon many of these same notes in his work, amplified and adapted.
In 1895 he came back to San Francisco, and in October sailed for South Africa to write a series of articles for a syndicate of newspapers. His plan was to start at Capetown, go north to Johannesburg, trek through Matabeleland, thence onward to the Nile, and down the river to Cairo. A happy accident took him to Africa at this time. No sooner had he set foot on Boer soil than trouble with the English began to brew. By the time he reached Johannesburg, the famous Jameson’s raid had been projected. Delighted at the possibility of war, Frank enlisted in the English army for the defense of Johannesburg, and had the supreme satisfaction of being assigned regular accoutrements, a rifle, a number of rounds of ammunition, and above all a horse! Reading his journal of those days one catches his tremendous excitement when news from Jameson and his six hundred men was hourly awaited. He describes with what gratification he received an invitation to Christmas dinner from John Hays Hammond. But this festive meal nearly caused him a long imprisonment, for with the collapse of the raid, Hammond and many others identified with the uprising were thrown into jail, their lives at the mercy of the Boer government. My brother was given thirty days to get out of the country.
He was unable to obey this order however. Almost immediately he came down with African fever, and was very close to death. A scarcity of provisions in Johannesburg sent bread up to seven dollars a loaf, and in a short time his letter of credit was exhausted. At this point there are many empty pages in his journal. He confessed to me afterward that he was too weak from fever to remove the cap of his fountain pen. Finally there occurs this entry:
“I’m out to sea, I’m out to sea!
’Tisn’t half as fine as I thought it would he!”
He returned to San Francisco in the spring of 1896 to spend months in an effort to regain his shattered health. Of the fever he never entirely rid himself; it recurred at intervals during the remaining six years of his life, and when he was stricken with appendicitis, it supplied the complication that resulted in his death.
For the following two years his literary work was almost entirely associated with the Wave, of which John O’Hara Cosgrave was then the editor. Every week Frank wrote either an article, a sketch or a short story for this periodical. In looking over his output at this time one cannot but marvel at the amount of material he turned out, and the activity of his creative faculty.
In the summer of 1897, Frank went up to the “Big Dipper Mine,” in Placer County, California, to complete “McTeague.” It was there that the closing chapters of the book were written. The death of Trina in the kindergarten had been written some three years earlier. The scene of the chapter immediately following this incident in the book is laid in the very spot where the novel was being completed: the Big Dipper Mine, on Iowa Hill, near Colfax.
The author describes McTeague as entering the office of the mine, to ask the superintendent for employment.
“The dentist approached the counter and leaned his elbows upon it. Three men were in the room, — a tall, lean young man, with a thick head of hair surprisingly gray, who was playing with a half grown Great Dane puppy.. — ..”
This was Frank himself. One of the other men was his college chum, the owner of the mine, who was afterward to furnish the material for the character of Annixter, in “The Octopus.”
Nothing could be more characteristic of the whimsical humor of Frank Norris than this casual introduction of himself into his story. He was describing the room in which he was writing, with utter faithfulness. He came in due time to himself and included his own person in the picture.
The manuscripts of his two novels, “McTeague” and “Vandover and the Brute,” began their eastern visits, and their author commenced to write “Moran of the Lady Letty,” the first chapters of which appeared in the Wave before more than a part of the book was written. In “Blix” he draws an amusing caricature of himself at this period of his life and the “Captain Jack” of that book, was the Captain Joseph Hodgson to whom “Moran” was dedicated. Hodgson was in charge of the United States Life Saving Station near the Presidio, in San Francisco, and Frank used to read the early chapters of “Moran” to him, getting him to criticize his nautical phraseology, and help him with the actual seamanship.
When the story was half-completed, Frank started East to write up the Mardi Gras festivities in New Orleans, but he got no farther than St. Louis when the summons to New York, — for which he had long been waiting in one form or another — arrived.
This was a letter from John S. Phillips, a member of the firm of the Doubleday, McClure Company, who had read as much of “Moran” as had appeared up to that time. Recognition had been won, it remained only to fulfill expectations. “Moran” was published in September of the same year,” McTeague” the following spring, and “Blix” six months later. “Vandover,” strongest of them all, was not in accord with the spirit of the day in literature, and in this time of rapid production, it was easy to ignore its claim.
The remaining four years of his life were packed with varied events. In that time he published six novels; he went as a war correspondent through the Santiago campaign, and again all but died with a return of the treacherous fever; he married; and a little daughter was born to him.
Four months before his death, he returned to San Francisco, still in the very prime of his youth, successful and yet fired with splendid new ambitions for his work. It is of these last days that I wish finally to speak. We were constantly together at this time and developed an intimacy we had never before reached. It was then that he told me of the last novel of the trilogy of “The Wheat,” to which “The Octopus” and “The Pit” belonged. Not one word of this book was ever written. It was not to be called “The Wolf,” however, as was announced. Its pivotal episode was to deal with a famine-stricken country of Europe, and the timely appearance, from across the sea, of three huge American schooners, — wheat-ships, — loaded to their capacity with the great crop that, in spite of the quarrels of farmers and railroads, and in spite of the manipulation of the bulls and bears on the stock market, was to fulfill its destiny as “the nourisher of nations.”
But the great book he was burning to write was to centre about the battle of Gettysburg, the biggest and most vital event in American history, and this book would undoubtedly have been the great American novel if his handling of it had been as big as its theme. Just as the wheat stood to him as a great world-force, so the battle of Gettysburg represented the very spirit of America. It was to have been a tremendous novel in three parts, a great trilogy, each part dealing with one of the days of the battle, a work that would have taken him years to write.
I cannot close this sketch of Frank Norris without a word concerning his unfailing sense of humor, his modesty and simplicity. During those last months of his life, human and natural forces combined to heap their favors upon him. He was hailed as America’s greatest author; Howells and Mark Twain wrote him, in encouragement and praise; publishers clamored for his work; and reporters, in whose ranks he had so lately been pursued him, and begged for interviews.
There is no better proof of hi
s greatness than that this adulation left him still humble, pleasantly surprised, and grateful. He was thoroughly human about it. He enjoyed it and delighted in it. He was not quite sure that it was not a mistake, but while it lasted he found it gratifying. But his attitude toward his popularity had nothing in common with his attitude toward his work. If the public and the critics liked “The Pit,” that was very well; but they should have no consideration when he wrote his next book, or the one following that or any he should ever write.
An event that occurred at this time is most eloquent of his contempt for the publicity so eagerly sought by authors generally. An old friend, a Dr. Lawlor, who had been appointed by the Governor of California as superintendent of one of the state’s asylums for the feeble-minded, was attacked by the local press of San Francisco for political reasons. It seemed a case of unwarrantable persecution and my brother was indignant. At a meeting of some of the petty politicians, Lawlor gave the lie direct to one of his accusers. The man whipped out his revolver, and Frank, who was standing near, was able to grab the weapon in time and wrench it away before harm was done. The same afternoon the San Francisco Examiner called him on the telephone. The New York Journal had wired for a full-page story of the “shooting-scrape” in which Frank Norris had saved his friend’s life. I shall never forget his answer to the representative of the Examiner on the other end of the telephone.
“You tell the New York Journal kindly to go to hell,” said he, and hung up the receiver.
Of the untimely and tragic ending of so brilliant a life, there is nothing that I can add to what has already been written. He had returned to San Francisco with the intention of doing what Jack London finally attempted a long time afterward — sailing across the Pacific in a chartered schooner manned by his own crew. The voyage he ultimately made took him to other shores, but I like to think it was with him as he wrote of it in his own sonnet “Crepusculum,” many years before:
I bear them say our little life’s “a day,” —
That, born with light, at dusk it dies away.
I bear them say that Death is that life’s night.
That we hut wax and wane, with changing light.
O Blind! The day’s not yet, this life of ours
Is still the night’s slow retinue of hours;
Its sorrows, nightmares, phantasms of the shade,
Its pleasures, dreams that only form to fade.
Our life’s a night through which we blindly grope,
With outstretched palms, hoping ‘gainst failing hope.
Death ushers in the dawn of life’s true day,
Though gray the eve, so is the morning gray: —
Be thou uplift, O heart! Death’s visage wan
Is lighted not with twilight, hut with dawn.
The Delphi Classics Catalogue
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Series One
Anton Chekhov
Charles Dickens
D.H. Lawrence
Dickensiana Volume I
Edgar Allan Poe
Elizabeth Gaskell
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
George Eliot
H. G. Wells
Henry James
Ivan Turgenev
Jack London
James Joyce
Jane Austen
Joseph Conrad
Leo Tolstoy
Louisa May Alcott
Mark Twain
Oscar Wilde
Robert Louis Stevenson
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Walter Scott
The Brontës
Thomas Hardy
Virginia Woolf
Wilkie Collins
William Makepeace Thackeray
Series Two
Alexander Pushkin
Alexandre Dumas (English)
Andrew Lang
Anthony Trollope
Bram Stoker
Christopher Marlowe
Daniel Defoe
Edith Wharton
F. Scott Fitzgerald
G. K. Chesterton
Gustave Flaubert (English)
H. Rider Haggard
Herman Melville
Honoré de Balzac (English)
J. W. von Goethe (English)
Jules Verne
L. Frank Baum
Lewis Carroll
Marcel Proust (English)
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nikolai Gogol
O. Henry
Rudyard Kipling
Tobias Smollett
Victor Hugo
William Shakespeare
Series Three
Ambrose Bierce
Ann Radcliffe
Ben Jonson
Charles Lever
Émile Zola
Ford Madox Ford
Geoffrey Chaucer
George Gissing
George Orwell
Guy de Maupassant
H. P. Lovecraft
Henrik Ibsen
Henry David Thoreau
Henry Fielding
J. M. Barrie
James Fenimore Cooper
John Buchan
John Galsworthy
Jonathan Swift
Kate Chopin
Katherine Mansfield
L. M. Montgomery
Laurence Sterne
Mary Shelley
Sheridan Le Fanu
Washington Irving
Series Four
Arnold Bennett
Arthur Machen
Beatrix Potter
Bret Harte
Captain Frederick Marryat
Charles Kingsley
Charles Reade
G. A. Henty
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Wallace
E. M. Forster
E. Nesbit
George Meredith
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Jerome K. Jerome
John Ruskin
Maria Edgeworth
M. E. Braddon
Miguel de Cervantes
M. R. James
R. M. Ballantyne
Robert E. Howard
Samuel Johnson
Stendhal
Stephen Crane
Zane Grey
Series Five
Algernon Blackwood
Anatole France
Beaumont and Fletcher
Charles Darwin
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Edward Gibbon
E. F. Benson
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Friedrich Nietzsche
George Bernard Shaw
George MacDonald
Hilaire Belloc
John Bunyan
John Webster
Margaret Oliphant
Maxim Gorky
Oliver Goldsmith
Radclyffe Hall
Robert W. Chambers
Samuel Butler
Samuel Richardson
Sir Thomas Malory
Thomas Carlyle
William Harrison Ainsworth
William Dean Howells
William Morris
Series Six
Anthony Hope
Aphra Behn
Arthur Morrison
Baroness Emma Orczy
Captain Mayne Reid
Charlotte M. Yonge
Charlot
te Perkins Gilman
E. W. Hornung
Ellen Wood
Frances Burney
Frank Norris
Frank R. Stockton
Hall Caine
Horace Walpole
One Thousand and One Nights
R. Austin Freeman
Rafael Sabatini
Saki
Samuel Pepys
Sir Issac Newton
Stanley J. Weyman
Thomas De Quincey
Thomas Middleton
Voltaire
William Hazlitt
William Hope Hodgson
Ancient Classics
Aeschylus
Apuleius
Apollonius of Rhodes
Aristophanes
Aristotle
Arrian
Bede
Cassius Dio
Catullus
Cicero
Demosthenes
Diodorus Siculus
Diogenes Laërtius
Euripides
Frontius
Herodotus
Hesiod
Hippocrates
Homer
Horace
Josephus
Julius Caesar
Juvenal
Livy
Longus
Lucan
Lucretius
Marcus Aurelius
Martial
Nonnus
Ovid
Pausanias
Petronius
Pindar
Plato
Pliny the Elder
Pliny the Younger
Plotinus
Plutarch
Polybius
Propertius
Quintus Smyrnaeus
Sallust
Sappho
Seneca the Younger