Other literary forms

Frank Norris is best known for his novels McTeague (1899), The Octopus: A Spy of California (1901), and The Pit: A Story of Chicago (1903), along with book reviews, interviews, football reports, editorials, features, translations, and short fiction. Earlier in his career he wrote several poems (including his first book, Yvernelle: A Tale of Feudal France, 1892), a play (the junior farce for 1892 at the University of California), stories, and essays.

Achievements

Frank Norris was the first full-blown practitioner of Zolaesque naturalism in America. Like the nineteenth century French writer Émile Zola, Norris often analyzed the effects of heredity, biological instincts, social and cultural influences, and the physical environment on individuals—a strategy that champions a less metaphysical and more scientific approach to looking at life. Although these naturalistic novels are usually considered to be Norris’s best writing, his reputation primarily grew during his lifetime because of his productivity and versatility (he wrote seven novels and approximately three hundred essays, book reviews, short stories, literary pieces, interviews, and poems). When Norris made the economics of American agriculture the subject of his unfinished trilogy—The Octopus deals with the struggle between the wheat growers and the railroad owners, The Pit depicts speculators and the Chicago wheat exchange, and The Wolf (never written) was to focus on the dispersal of wheat in Europe—he contributed to the muckraking movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. The unfinished trilogy also helped establish the realistic tradition in twentieth century American fiction.

Biography

Although invariably associated with San Francisco and naturalism, Benjamin Franklin Norris, Jr., was actually born in Chicago, the son of a wealthy wholesale jeweler and a former actress (his parents were divorced in 1894). The family moved to Oakland in 1884 and across the bay to San Francisco the following year. Norris’s education was desultory, all the more so because of his unwillingness to follow in his father’s footsteps as a businessman. From 1887 to 1889 he was enrolled in the Atelier Julien in Paris but had little success as an art student and never did begin the huge painting of the Battle of Crecy he had planned. From 1890 to 1894 he pursued the literary course at the University of California, but because of a deficiency in mathematics he did not graduate. The next year was more fruitfully spent at Harvard University where, as a student in Lewis E. Gates’s writing class, he began two novels, first Vandover and the Brute and then McTeague.

In the winter of 1895 to 1896, Norris took a Richard Harding Davis jaunt to South Africa and became involved in the abortive Uitlander Rebellion. He served on the staff of The Wave from April, 1896, to February, 1898, much of the time as its subeditor. His serialized novel Moran of the Lady Letty brought him to the attention of the editor and publisher S. S. McClure, for whom he worked two years, including a brief stint as a correspondent during the Spanish-American War. In 1900, Norris, with four novels already in print, became a manuscript reader at Doubleday, Page and Company, his new publisher. That same year he married Jeannette Black of San Francisco and “discovered” and championed (unsuccessfully) Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie (1900). The Octopus, published the next year, was Norris’s first financially successful book. Following the birth of a daughter in February, 1902, and the completion of The Pit in July, he began planning the sea cruise which would be part of his research for The Wolf, the projected third part of his “The Epic of the Wheat.” While in San Francisco, however, Norris was stricken with appendicitis and died on October 25.

Analysis

Except for Jeanette Gilder, in her review of the posthumous collection The Third Circle, no one has been so bold as to prefer Frank Norris’s short fiction to his novels. In fact, a number of his critics seem to agree with Warren French, who, in a chapter of his Frank Norris (1962) entitled “Stubble,” decries the fact that the stories have been “undeservedly rescued from the obscurity of the periodicals in which they first appeared.” Most believe that Norris wrote the stories as potboilers or, in the case of the stories published in The Wave, as apprentice pieces (this despite the fact that drafts of Vandover and the Brute and McTeague had already been written) and that their value lies solely in whatever light they shed on his longer fiction. It is true that in his literary essays of 1901 and 1902 Norris did equate the short story with money and the novel with truth; moreover, in distinguishing between literature as construction and the more important literature as exploration, he did cite short-story writers Edgar Allan Poe, Frank R. Stockton, and Rudyard Kipling as examples of the former and novelists Gustave Flaubert, Thomas Hardy, and George Eliot as examples of the latter. Norris also contended (in May, 1902) that the continued increase in the publication of short fiction in American magazines, particularly the new low-priced magazines such as McClure’s, would result in a decrease in the public’s demand for short-story collections and ultimately would cause the short story to degenerate to the level of magazine ephemera.

During his years at The Wave, the period before his success as a novelist, Norris showed a much greater interest in the possibilities of short fiction. In May, 1897, he wrote that San Francisco was a true story city, where “things can happen”; although it was, he claimed, not yet settled enough for the purposes of the novelist, the city abounded with material for the writer of short stories. A few months earlier, in “The Decline of the Magazine Short Story,” he had lamented the “absolutely stupid,” “deadly dull” fiction published in the major American magazines. Echoing Hjalmar Boyesen’s remarks concerning the “Iron Madonna,” he charged that “It is the ‘young girl’ and the family center table that determine the standard of the American short story.” Seeking to challenge this standard, Norris adopted various stylistic elements of those writers, such as Kipling, whom he distinguished from the writers of “safe” fiction. His failure to find a publisher for a collection of these stories does, to some extent, reflect upon their quality (and, as Norris suggests in his semiautobiographical novel Blix [1899], their being commercially out of fashion). Nevertheless, his persistence during late 1897 and 1898 in trying to secure the collection’s publication reflects his more-than-passing interest in these writings.

“The Third Circle”

One of the best of his pieces for The Wave is “The Third Circle.” Norris’s use of a Chinatown setting in this story and of San Francisco and California locales for nearly all of the fiction of this period evidences the realist method of direct observation. He worked less in the tradition of the nostalgic local colorists than in the mode of Stephen Crane in investigating New York’s demimonde and even more in the path established by Kipling and Richard Harding Davis in depicting settings that were both primitive and foreign to their readers. Basically, the story is a study in limited perception; in it Norris attempts to expose his readers to what he liked to call (in The Octopus) the “larger view.”

The first half of the story concerns an engaged couple from the East and their “lark” in San Francisco’s Chinatown. First they “discover” a quaint Chinese restaurant and then invite to their table a Chinese fortune-teller who turns out to be a Kanakan tattooist. Miss Harriet Ten Eyck thinks it would be “awfully queer and original” to have a tattoo, but her fiancé, young Hillegas, reminds her that their “lark” is one thing and the society in which they move quite another: “Let him do it on your finger, then. You never could wear an evening dress if it was on your arm.” Once the tattoo is completed— “a grotesque little insect, as much butterfly as anything else”—Hillegas goes off to find their waiter, leaving Harriet alone. Instead of the waiter, he finds a Chinese silk merchant to whom he at first speaks condescendingly. Much to his surprise, this “Chinaman” is articulate and cultured. “Here was a side of Chinese life he had not seen, nor even suspected.” There is another side as well, as Hillegas discovers when he returns to find his fiancé gone: “He never saw her again. No white man ever did.” This is that part of Chinatown Norris terms “the third circle,” the part “no one ever hears of.”

The second half of the story is set in the late 1890’s, twenty years after Miss Ten Eyck’s disappearance into white slavery. Here the narrator is no longer simply the teller of the tale, as in the first half, but a participant as well. Like the hapless eastern couple, he too makes a foray into Chinatown’s third circle, but unlike them he has a guide, a “bum” and opium addict “who calls himself Manning.” To a degree, the rest of the story follows a predictable course. The narrator tells Manning the story the reader has just read. Manning adds several details and mentions that there is a white slave, Sadie, who works in the opium joint he frequents who might know something further about Miss Ten Eyck. The debased Sadie, an alcoholic and opium addict, without the least desire to escape either her degradation or her addiction, is Harriet Ten Eyck, as the reader figures out long before Norris’s rather unsurprising surprise ending: “She thrust out her left hand, and I saw a butterfly tattooed on her little finger.”

Despite its unsatisfactory ending, the story does succeed as a study in perception, if not as a tale of suspense. As Norris (by way of Hamlet) points out in the opening sentence, “There are more things in San Francisco’s Chinatown than are dreamed of in heaven and earth.” Just as young Hillegas discovers aspects of life he had never before suspected and at first entirely misunderstands, so too does Norris’s narrator; and readers—specifically the middle- and upper-middle-class readers of The Wave for whom the story was written—discover aspects of their own immediate surroundings about which most San Franciscans had, like the easterner Hillegas, little or no knowledge. Although some readers will be offended by how readily Norris accepted the popular theory of the Chinese as a depraved and inferior race, he does describe the violence, slave trade, and opium traffic then to be found in Chinatown in convincing detail. More important, he makes clear that this depravity extends to the white population itself and that not even a proper middle-class woman such as Harriet Ten Eyck, or, Norris implies, the readers of The Wave, are entirely safe from its dangers.

“A Reversion to Type”

A similar vulnerability is also evident in Norris’s more conventionally naturalistic stories. In “A Reversion to Type,” for example, Paul Schuster, a forty-one-year-old floorwalker in a San Francisco department store, suddenly bolts from his “sober, steady, respectable life” and for a month lives as an outlaw in the California mining district where he murders the superintendent of the Little Bear mine. Schuster then returns to San Francisco and resumes his commonplace life. On his deathbed, he confesses his crimes but is not believed. A man of his character and steady habits, it is assumed, could not lapse into such criminal behavior. Norris’s point is that Schuster’s criminality is very much in character—in his hereditary character. As a prison official at San Quentin explains to the narrator (who has just told him Schuster’s story), Schuster’s grandfather was a “bad egg,” a convicted highway robber.

“A Case for Lombroso” (which Norris at one time considered titling “A Story for Max Nordau”) develops along the same lines. When two young people, Cresencia Hromada and the allegorically named Stayne, become sexually attracted to each other, her pride and morbid passion—both inherited characteristics—and his failure of will combine to turn their love into a perverse and ultimately destructive relationship.

Norris’s romanticism

Norris’s interest in these and other rather unsavory subjects derives not from any personal morbidity but instead from his literary theory. Despite his admiration for the novels of William Dean Howells, Norris was impatient with realism’s “teacup tragedies.” Realism, he maintained, “confines itself to the type of normal life. . . . It notes only the surface of things.” Romance, in contrast, explores “the unplumbed depths of the human heart, and the mystery of sex, and the problems of life, and the black unsearched penetralia of the soul of man.” Whereas realism aimed for accuracy, romance went after truth. In such early writings as the stories “The Jongleur of Taillebois” and “Lauth” and the poem Yvernelle: A Tale of Feudal France, Norris did write superficially romantic works. Later, however, he developed his theory of naturalism, combining Romanticism’s high drama and emphasis on variations from commonplace life with realism’s contemporaneity and careful attention to detail.

Norris and the Short Form

Norris’s naturalistic style was more appropriate to his novels, in which the romantic and realistic elements could complement each other, than to his stories, in which his very definition of the genre worked to restrict his generally expansive imagination. Like many other critics of the late nineteenth century, Norris propounded an evolutionary theory of literature. Magazines of the 1890’s, he maintained, had only “limited space” for fiction; as a result, the short story was, of necessity, “reduced in some cases to the relation of a single incident by itself, concise, pungent, direct as a blow.” (As an unfortunate corollary to this theory of extreme brevity, Norris held that the short-story writer must resort to various “tricks,” such as surprise endings.) For the writer of short fiction the chief “difficulty lies not so much in the actual writing, in the condensing and suggesting, etc., as it does in the invention or selection . . . of the original idea, the motive.” Taken to the limit, Norris’s definition leads to the literary sketch, a form in which he worked often and with much success—for example, the thrice-weekly themes he submitted while a student in Lewis E. Gates’s class at Harvard and the “Western City Types” series of 1896. In “Little Dramas of the Curbstone,” Norris catenated three sketches into a single work, a technique he later used, with some modification, in one of his finest and best-known stories, “A Deal in Wheat.”

“A Deal in Wheat”

Written concurrently with The Pit, the second part of his epic trilogy, “A Deal in Wheat” is typical of Norris’s work in three respects: its richly detailed portrayal of a phase of American life, its dramatic interest, and its emphasis on the “larger view.” The first of the story’s five parts (or sketches), “The Bear—Wheat at Sixty-Two,” concerns the failure of one small Kansas farmer, Sam Lewiston. When, owing to the machinations of a “bearish” wheat trader in Chicago, the price of wheat plummets well below the cost of raising it, Lewiston is forced to sell his farm and, ironically, find employment in Chicago. In “The Bull—Wheat at a Dollar-Ten,” the “bear,” Truslow, having forced the price down too far, loses his hold on the market to a “bull,” Horung, who for no particular reason and against the advice of his broker chooses not to gore “the Great Bear to actual financial death.” That decision turns out to be costly—although not ruinous—for Horung.

In “The Pit,” a lively account of actual trading in the wheat pit at Chicago’s Board of Trade, an unknown bear begins to unload wheat on Horung. In “The Belt Line,” a private detective named Cyrus Ryder (also a character in Norris’s Three Crows stories of 1901-1902) explains that the wheat Horung has been forced to buy so as to keep the price artificially high does not in fact exist; Truslow has simply routed the same carloads around the city on the railroad belt line he owns, selling the same wheat over and over to make up the money he lost when Horung destroyed his corner some months earlier. The ploy merely amuses Horung, who, to cut his own losses, boosts the price to two dollars. In the fifth section, “The Bread Line,” Sam Lewiston reappears. Now out of work and temporarily separated from his family, he is seen waiting outside a bakery at midnight, one of the growing number of unemployed forced to depend upon charity. That night there is no free bread, however, only a sign informing the men of the high price of wheat.

Like Hamlin Garland’s “Under the Lion’s Paw,” a story it much resembles, “A Deal in Wheat” vividly dramatizes a social condition about which Norris clearly felt deep concern. Norris is especially successful in evoking sympathy for Sam Lewiston and the economic class he represents. Unfortunately, in the final three paragraphs, Norris abandons objective dramatization and becomes much more openly partisan. Lewiston, the reader learns in Norris’s summing up, manages to secure a job and even to do modestly well in the city; in the newspapers, he reads about Truslow and Horung’s deals in wheat and so attains a “larger view” which Norris chooses to make didactically overt rather than dramatically suggestive.

“Perverted Tales”

Among Norris’s more than eighty-five works of short fiction, there are no truly great stories. His repeated preference for “life, not literature” virtually ensured a certain indifference to aesthetic craftsmanship, an indifference painfully apparent in his melodramatic passages and frequent overwriting. This is not to say that Norris had no understanding of the fine points of literary style, as his borrowings and his six “Perverted Tales,” in particular his Stephen Crane parody “The Green Stone of Unrest,” make clear. What chiefly characterizes his short fiction are his wide range of subjects and literary forms and his remarkable enthusiasm for writing itself. The works discussed in this entry are certainly his most significant, although there are others which will repay a reader’s careful attention: “His Sister” and “Dying Fires,” dealing with writers very much like Norris; “A Memorandum of Sudden Death,” written in the form of a recovered journal; “This Animal of a Buldy Jones,” “Buldy Jones, Chef de Claque,” and especially “The Associated Un-Charities” (mistitled “The Dis-Associated Charities” in The Third Circle) for their slapstick comedy. Finally, there are several nonfiction pieces, such as “Dago Conspirators” and “A Lag’s Release,” which are narratively so well constructed that they rise well above the level of the news report to the status of journalistic art.

Bibliography