University of Virginia Library

Frank Norris
BY MILNE B. LEVICK

FRANK NORRIS has been dead over two years. The rush of faddists, of readers of new books only, has passed. Norris has been honored with a limited, and, alas! complete edition. But his books are still in demand, and if, as he thought, in the end the people are always right, Norris will not soon be forgotten.

To understand his work, it is necessary for one to remember from what standpoint he himself regarded it.

The key-note of his point of view is that "life is better than literature." "Novel-writing, of all the arts, is the most virile; of all the arts it will not flourish indoors. Dependent solely on fidelity to life for existence, it must be practiced in the very heart's heart of life, on the street corner, in the market place, not in the studios."

Realism, brutality, Zola and Norris are often spoken of together. To deny brutality would have been ludicrous, even had Norris cared to do so. But realism, as he understood it, he did deny, and proclaimed his master of the period of "McTeague" to be, indeed, "the very head of the romanticists."

"Romance is the kind of fiction that takes cognizance of variations from the type of normal life," he says. "Realism is the kind of fiction that confines itself to the type of normal life." According to this definition, then, romance may even treat of the sordid, the unlovely—as, for instance, the novels of Zola. Zola has been dubbed a realist, but he is, on the contrary, the very head of the romanticists.

"Also, realism, used as it sometimes is, as a term of reproach, need not be in the remotest sense or degree offensive, but on the other hand, respectable as a church and proper as a deacon—as, for instance, the novels of Mr. Howells.

"To romance belongs the wide world for range and the unplumbed depths of the human heart, and the mystery of sex, and the problems of life, and the black, unsearched penetralia of the human soul."

It is equally important for one to remember this: "The men and women of the story-teller's world are not apt to be, to him, so important in themselves as the whirl of things in which he chooses to involve them."

Frank Norris does not write of farmers and capitalists and outcasts—it is the wheat, the railroad, the terror of the city. He saw the epic value of forces, and in this lies the originality of his literary outlook.

It is typical of this man, who lived and saw so much that "he followed many masters." The influences of Kipling, Stevenson, Zola and Hugo are most evident in his work. Harding Davis was a power in the early days, and in "The Ship That Saw a Ghost," there is a suggestion of Poe's "Narrative of A. Gordon Pym." Although Condy Rivers, Norris' picture of himself in the early part of his career, was affected by De Maupassant, for one not thoroughly familiar with the Frenchman's work, it is difficult to find any trace of his power over Norris.

Of Stevenson's influence, no one that has read "Moran of the Lady Letty" need be reminded.

It may be that such minor slips as "the balance of the crew," "only two alternatives," and the like, which are to be found all through Norris' works, are due to the Scotchman's

example, though they might be expected in a writer of Norris' temperament.

Naturally, Kipling's influence is most clearly seen in the short stories. One effect of his hold on Norris is the inclination toward mysticism found in all the latter's works—the warning sense of the pursued McTeague, the enemy of Lloyd Searight, the character of Vanamee. But "the little, spectacled colonial, to whose song we must all listen, and to whose pipe we must all dance," may be held partly responsible for a fault the direct opposite of this—excessive realism, or, adopting Norris' own terms, realism. The description of the dental operation in "McTeague," for instance, is quite as tiresome as some of the technicalities of the engine room indulged in by Kipling.

"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 head-long."

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 mill-stones 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. Behrman'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 fate. 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 animalculae, 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-crowd 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?