Frank Norris: A Romantic With a Naturalistic Manner

Frank Norris: Novels and Essays, edited by Donald Pizer (The Library of America: $27.50)

This work collects three novels and 22 essays by the man who is widely regarded as our first full-blown naturalistic writer. Benjamin Franklin Norris Jr., born of wealthy Chicago parents, came to California at age 14. After several Wanderjahren in Paris, where he studied art and romantic poetry in the manner of a gentleman of leisure, Frank Norris attended UC Berkeley and utterly committed himself to a literary career. His ambition was large and his output prolific for one who died at 32 of peritonitis following an appendectomy.

At the time of his death, Norris was not only a critically respected author but a best-selling one. He also enjoyed a national audience for his nonfiction--on-the-spot journalistic pieces and literary essays he turned out by the dozens for leading newspapers and magazines of the day.

A reading of these pieces one upon another produces the feeling that they were composed with an awareness of impending deadlines. Too often, they ramble, and there is much of the oracular about them. The essays suffer greatly when compared with Norris’ fictional descriptions. For example, the opening pages of “McTeague” describe Polk Street with a freshness of concrete detail and image that alerts all the reader’s senses:

‘Piles of Unopened Oysters’

“It was one of those cross streets peculiar to Western cities, situated in the heart of the residence quarter, but occupied by small tradespeople who lived in the rooms above their shops. There were corner drug stores with huge jars of red, yellow and green liquids in their windows, very brave and gay; stationers’ stores, where illustrated weeklies were tacked upon bulletin boards; barber shops with cigar stands in their vestibules; sad-looking plumbers’ offices; cheap restaurants, in whose windows one saw piles of unopened oysters weighted down by cubes of ice, and china pigs and cows knee deep in layers of white beans.”

Against this backdrop of bourgeois life in fin-de-siecle San Francisco, Norris superimposes the hulking McTeague--unlicensed dentist and incipient alcoholic--who could well have stepped from the pages of an Emile Zola novel, an influence that Norris acknowledged with pride. But he was more than a deterministic writer for whom heredity and environment were fundamental.

A rich vein of romanticism infuses his characters with dramatic energy. The McTeague/Schouler antagonism can be seen as a reworking of the Valjean/Javert relationship conceived by an earlier French novelist, Victor Hugo, in “Les Miserables.” Norris brilliantly employs the varied California landscape (instead of a Paris sewer) for Schouler’s pursuit of McTeague--from urban pre-earthquake San Francisco to Placerville’s gold country in the High Sierra and finally to the desert wasteland of Death Valley where McTeague is left, melodramatically, to die of thirst.

Such heavy-handed symbolism and a tendency to plot solely with an eye toward thematic effect compromise the sweep and scope of Norris’ novelistic structures. It is this unevenness, coupled with his premature demise, that kept him from becoming a major American writer rather than the historically important figure that he remains.

“The Octopus,” first of a projected trilogy that Norris grandly envisioned as “The Epic of the Wheat,” is a novel of the unrelenting encroachment of the railroad on the bucolic San Joaquin Valley region. As Norris describes the bloody struggle between the wheat ranchers and the all-encompassing “Octopus” of the title, the railroad turns into a force of nature itself--trampling everything in its path.

Too Many Possibilities

“The Octopus” is powerful, embodying the strengths and weaknesses of Norris as a writer. Like a child heaping too much food onto his plate, he saw too many possibilities for his book. The characters represent approaches to societal problems such as metaphysics, Darwinism, transcendentalism, altruism and misanthropy to the point where there is no central character with whom to identify. The phrase biting off more than he could chew seems highly applicable to Frank Norris’ novelistic designs.

The third novel reprinted here, “Vandover and the Brute,” was published posthumously by Norris’ brother, Charles, himself a successful novelist. Actually written before “McTeague,” “Vandover” too is the story of a man on a downward spiral, but it is really a one-dimensional case study of a young San Franciscan born to advantage who loses everything and winds up a pitiable failure.

Norris had a bravura spirit capable of inspiring others. That he was not given the time to implement his literary ideas in wise maturity is American literature’s loss.