[In the following essay, Crisler discusses the literary relationship between Norris and American novelist William Dean Howells.]

The early assessment by Herbert Edwards of the relationship between William Dean Howells and Frank Norris remains typical of subsequent critical treatment of it in both intention and accuracy:

Howells was among the first who found a ‘new thrill’ in McTeague, and was probably the first to say so in print. Howells was largely instrumental in bringing Norris into public notice, although he had never had an opportunity of meeting him personally. It was Howells's favorable notice of Norris which had brought the young author to the attention of McClure … and which thus paved the way for Norris's later fame. When Norris died suddenly in 1902, Howells wrote the first essay of appreciation which appeared after his death.¹

Edwards rightly places Norris amid the scores of young writers whom Howells graciously advanced through his generous reviews of their work published in salient literary journals, his personal encouragement of their art dispensed during chatty visits, and his sage advice concerning their plans proffered in earnest interviews. Like many critics, Edwards seeks to cast Norris as but one more protégé of America's “dean” of letters, mainly through conjectures rather than facts. Of course, Howells did recognize the power of McTeague (1899), as his 24 March 1899 review in Literature indicates, but to say that this review was “probably the first” positive notice of the novel stretches a point: at least seven reviews, each quite favorable to McTeague, antedated Howells's, some by as much as almost three weeks.² Edwards correctly contends that Howells's efforts first brought Norris to the attention of the reading public, provided that one understands “public notice” to mean eastern, for Norris had enjoyed a reputation in San Francisco as a savvy ironist for more than two years before his arrival in New York in early 1898. Nor did “Howells's favorable notice of Norris” lead young publishing phenomenon S. S. McClure to hire him. Norris had worked for McClure's for nearly a year before Howells extolled the virtues of Moran of the Lady Letty (1898) in print.³ The inaccessibility of Norris's letters perhaps explains Edwards's erroneous statement that the two authors never met; on the other hand, Howells himself recalled discussions between them in his famous eulogy “Frank Norris” (written three decades before Edwards's article), which Edwards specifically refers to as “the first essay of appreciation” after Norris's death—another exaggerated glossing, since a tide of tributes to Norris rushed forth beginning the day after he died.⁴ By viewing Norris as a minor planet orbiting the Howellsian sun, Edwards thus ignores not only truth but also the possibility that the gravitational pull in this literary solar system, far from being as totally one-sided as he depicts, may actually have been mutual.

While some later criticism—such as Edwin H. Cady's fuller account of relations between the two authors in his rich The Realist at War (1958) or Rodrigue E. Labrie's intensive examination “The Howells-Norris Relationship and the Growth of Naturalism”⁵—has constructed fuller and more accurate evaluations of the interplay between the two, many scholars neglect its implications in Norris's work, and none seems to have considered its hesitant beginning when Norris discovered Howells or its faltering end when, after Norris's untimely death, Howells continued to champion one of his favorites. A review of their literary acquaintanceship from commencement to conclusion redresses both past inequities and uninformed conjectures, by charting a more layered, complicated, and significant connection than has been previously indicated.

The first chapter of their intercourse opens during Norris's student days at Berkeley, when he owned at least two volumes by Howells, The Albany Depot (1892) and The Mouse-Trap (1894), demonstrating an early interest in Howells that is confirmed by one of his surviving Harvard student themes, submitted 28 February 1895 to his creative-writing class taught by Lewis E. Gates.⁶ At work on both Vandover and the Brute (1914) and McTeague at Harvard, Norris frequently culled material from class assignments for later inclusion in both novels. In the story submitted on 28 February 1895, for example, Trina justifies her taste in paintings at an art gallery by asserting, “Of course … I'm no critic. I only know what I like,” a declaration reminiscent of Silas Lapham's smug pronouncement to Bromfield Corey regarding his own artistic predilections: “I don't set up to be a judge of pictures, but I know what I like.”⁷ While a single sentence or two does not clinch The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) as a source for McTeague, when considered along with Norris's various critical analyses of Howells's work in the San Francisco Wave over the next two years, it does underscore his admiration for the near-legendary older novelist.

The first of these analyses, “Our Unpopular Novelists,” which appeared on 5 October 1895, numbers Howells as one of several “staple” American authors; more telling, Norris's list includes only Howells and one other realist, Harold Frederic, while four popular romantic novelists—F. Marion Crawford, Thomas Nelson Page, Lew Wallace, and Richard Harding Davis—complete it.⁸ Querying why American readers prefer to buy English novels, Norris supplies a probable answer: by relegating writers to certain “‘schools,’” readers limit their sales. He deplores the “invention” of such restrictive terms as “‘romanticism,’ ‘realism,’ [and] ‘naturalism,’” naively insisting that “human nature is the same no matter whether one regards it with the eyes of a romanticist, a realist, or a naturalist” (“Our Unpopular Novelists,” p. 25). Already attempting to formulate a viable theory of fiction, one that rejects labels in favor of aesthetics—“If the book is good, it is good whether it is Ivanhoe, The Rise of Silas Lapham, or La Bête Humaine” (p. 26)—in his first excursion into literary criticism Norris elevates Howells to a select pantheon, even though he simultaneously resists exploring the criteria governing his choices.

No such timidity informs “Theory and Reality,” published six months later, in which Norris reviews Howells's A Parting and a Meeting (1896) and Mrs. Jarboe's Robert Atterbury (1896), forcefully articulating why Howells emerges as the “greater author”: Howells “touches” his subject “lightly, delicately, handling it with the greatest subtlety and finesse”; he “tells a story,” while Jarboe “develops a theory”; he exhibits an enviable ability to portray believable characters who “interest his readers,” causing them to “forget Howells at once in the fortunes of his dramatis personae”; and, as a purveyor of “real life,” Howells evinces a solid understanding of fiction that “should tell a real story, of real people and of real places,” while Jarboe bludgeons her reader with moralistic idealism.⁹

Still, as Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., and Douglas K. Burgess perceptively observe, as much as he admired Howells's coverage of “the ‘ultimate physical relation of man and woman’” (“Theory and Reality,” p. 161), Norris never patterns his own treatment of sex after Howells.¹⁰ Comments in the next Wave essay mentioning Howells partially explain how Norris on the one hand could revere Howells as the consummate realist and on the other hand see him less as an example to emulate than as an interesting virtuoso. One of Norris's best-known essays, “Zola as a Romantic Writer,” appeared on 27 June 1896, two months after “Theory and Reality.” Initially continuing his paean to Howells, whose “characters live across the street from us. … We know all about them, about their affairs, and the story of their lives,”¹¹ Norris abruptly ceases his encomium by accusing Howells of too much circumspection in scrupulously avoiding any hint of the lurid (see McElrath and Burgess, introduction, I, xxxiv). Ironically, the master realist, the accomplished depicter of “the smaller details of every-day life … small passions, restricted emotions, dramas of the reception-room, tragedies of an afternoon call, crises involving cups of tea,” earns but grudging praise from his erstwhile acolyte, who now turns his allegiance to Zola, a “naturalist” rather than a “realist,” concerned not with the “ordinary” but with the “individual” and the “unique” (“Zola,” p. 71). A further irony, through an odd quirk in Norris's developmental logic, is that naturalism becomes “a form of romanticism, not an inner circle of realism,” and Norris, previously chiding the reading public for consigning writers to artificial “schools,” blithely places Zola in naturalism, “a school by itself, unique, somber, powerful beyond words” (“Zola,” p. 72).

Perhaps because he recognized the theoretical quagmire into which he had wandered, Norris remains silent on Howells for several months—nor does his next reference occur in the Wave. Instead, a series of essays by Bailey Millard in the San Francisco Examiner on “The Great American Novel” finds Norris positing Howells's A Modern Instance (1882) as “the best interpretation of American life.”¹² Norris's letter to the Examiner, the first exploration of the writer's craft in his correspondence, discloses several important aspects of a literary credo he was currently developing for the still-unfinished McTeague.¹³ To Norris, for instance, Howells's novel “is great because it is true, relentlessly and remorselessly true to American life” (Millard, p. 30); so in McTeague one encounters characters whom one may not know but who one knows exist, and whose lives, sordid though they may appear, eventually matter to the reader as variations from the commonplace. Norris praises Howells for “conceiv[ing] of some … great crying evils of Americanism … the problems of politics, of divorce, … of marriage, and of social caste,” just as McTeague considers similar ills: bad marriages, inner-city politics, poor minorities, and social inequities. Howells also writes “with a consistency and a plausibleness that are convincing”; McTeague is likewise believable. Finally, Norris lauds Howells's “thorough technical knowledge of the novelist's trade” (Millard, p. 30); like Howells, Norris himself deftly reduces the real to the fictive in McTeague. Strong as his approval of Howells is here, however, it is not unqualified (see McElrath and Burgess, introduction, I, xxxiv-xxxv): while the realistic A Modern Instance ranks “among the masterpieces of fiction,” Norris declares popular writer Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur (1880) “the best novel yet produced by an American author” (Millard, p. 30).

In the Wave for 22 May 1897, Norris's “An Opening for Novelists” discloses Howells's one-time disciple in further retreat. Cursorily noting Howells's Boston in a list of cities made famous by selected authors who wrote about them, Norris laments the absence of such an advocate for San Francisco. One wonders whether Norris conceives of himself as the answer to his plaintive “who shall be our Kipling?” and if his dismissal of “fine writing”—“we don't want literature, we want life”—is not a veiled abandonment of Howells, who definitely was not a Kipling.¹⁴

Norris's last reflection on Howells in the Wave, “Scene Mounting of the Future,” printed in the 25 December 1897 issue, briefly compliments his former model, which suggests that while Norris's love affair has not ended, certainly his ardor has cooled. Again Norris applauds Howells's novels where “things” occur “exactly as they have happened in real life,” unlike the “ridiculous” staging of current plays that demand an unwilling suspension of disbelief from their audiences.¹⁵ So ends the first chapter of the Norris-Howells saga, a relationship so decidedly singular at this point that half of it knew nothing of the other, yet so significant to Norris that the very existence of both Howells and his work played an immeasurable role in helping him assemble a working, albeit a confusing and inconsistent, theory of fiction.¹⁶

Greater complexity surrounds the second installment of relations between Howells and Norris. Not only does Norris continue to refer to Howells in his essays, but Howells returns the favor; further, the authors meet, they correspond, and Norris's work overtly reflects Howells's influence. On 7 March 1898, soon after Norris's arrival in New York, Gelett Burgess, a longtime California friend himself recently relocated in New York, introduced Norris to Howells. In a letter to another friend in California, Mrs. Elizabeth Hewitt Davenport, Norris reports the satisfaction the visit afforded him. That he informs her that Howells was “one of the most delightful men imaginable” comes as no surprise (Norris, Letters, p. 48), not only because of his known regard for Howells's work but also because, if Franklin Walker is correct, Howells generously “offered to read the manuscript of McTeague,” a coup for one as inexperienced as Norris then was.¹⁷ In a 13 March 1898 letter to yet another California friend, Harry Manville Wright, classmate at Berkeley, fraternity pal, and fellow participant in college dramatics, Norris half-mockingly acknowledges his mounting debt to Howells as once and continuing mentor by justifying his use of the word “protagonist” in an otherwise breezy and gossipy letter: “Mr. W. D. Howels [sic] he gimme that word” (Norris, Letters, p. 50).¹⁸

Several months later, favorably reviewing Moran as his “American Letter” in the British periodical Literature, Howells reciprocates Norris's gratitude by thanking him “for some rapid passages of time” (“American Letter,” p. 578). He discovers “a good deal of reality” in Ross Wilbur, Captain Kitchell, and the Chinese cooks, stating that “the story gains a certain effectiveness from being so boldly circumstanced in the light of common day,” high praise indeed for what Howells terms a “romanticistic story.” Howells, unaware of Norris's confusion over Howells's place in his personal literary canon, thus confers almost instant fame on a newcomer, whose “fresh and courageous invention” rewards the reader well (“American Letter,” p. 578). Howells's preference for Moran, a “San Francisco romance,” over Will Payne's The Money Captain (1898), a “Chicago novel” and the companion subject of Howells's review (“American Letter,” p. 578), also unintentionally echoes Norris's ridicule of Chicago as an effective setting in “An Opening for Novelists,” in which Norris contemptuously exclaims, “Imagine a novel of Chicago” (“Opening,” p. 28). Such praise from America's “dean” doubtless pleased Norris, as would the repetition of phrases from Howells's review in a subsequent announcement in Literature of the publication of Shanghaied, which Norris's English publisher, Grant Richards, had retitled Moran: “We welcome the arrival in England of this romantic story, over which Mr. Howells … confessed to have ‘gasped in the crucial moments.’”¹⁹

Precisely two weeks after Howells's review appeared, Norris wrote to thank him, in a letter dated 31 December 1898, for the “good things” he said and what he was “kind enough to refrain from saying” (Norris, Letters, p. 60). Admitting the faults Howells had catalogued, Norris excuses himself for “showing off” and seeks Howells's advance support of McTeague. In this letter, as elsewhere, Norris also continues to dabble at constructing demarcations between fictional genres, for McTeague, he claims, “is as naturalistic as Moran was romantic” (Norris, Letters, p. 60), a comparison that only muddies already cloudy waters, for not even Norris could imagine that Moran conformed to the whimsical definition of Zolaesque romanticism he had earlier proposed in “Zola as a Romantic Writer.”

Once planted, the Norris-Howells friendship blossomed, as another letter to Mrs. Davenport, dated 22 March 1899, plainly illustrates: Howells had “been very good to” Norris that “winter” (Norris, Letters, p. 68). This letter also presages Norris's imminent departure to California to begin researching The Octopus: “I was talking to Mr. Howells … and he rather encouraged me to do my work wherever the surroundings were most congenial, and told me that as soon as I had ‘once established my connections’ in New York there was no reason why I could not ‘go home’ and that a ‘literary’ man could do his work anywhere” (Norris, Letters, p. 68). Howells's advice here contextualizes Norris's later declaration in his syndicated essay “New York as a Literary Center” that “wherever there is a table and quiet, there the novel may be written,” as well as his even stronger decree in the third number of his “Salt and Sincerity” series (in the Critic, June 1902) that “the best work in the production of good fiction is done in the closet and not on the housetop”; creativity flourishes just as easily in rural Colorado “as in New York,” if not better, “for from the little isolated village of the Rocky Mountains one gets a perspective upon the outside world impossible to attain in the world itself.”²⁰ Ironically, though both authors wrote their best work in the heady atmosphere of urban centers, Norris apparently accepted Howells's dictum wholeheartedly in theory.

With typical self-deprecation, in this same letter Norris also notes that Howells had “been kind enough to call McTeague ‘a great novel’ [and] … reviewed it somewhere” (Norris, Letters, pp. 68-69). The review that Norris refers to, Howells's startling affirmation in “A Case in Point,” is seminal to criticism of the novel. Among other compliments it terms McTeague “altogether a remarkable book,” clearly indebted to Zola for “a certain epical conception of life” (“Case,” p. 39). Astute as always, Howells here draws on his vast knowledge of Continental realism in recognizing the influence of that legacy on a younger contemporary and proposing Zola as the reason for a “lingering love of the romantic” present in McTeague (“Case,” p. 39)—which Norris must have felt indicated a kindred spirit, given his own perverse insistence on Zola's romanticism. Commending myriad aspects of the novel, among them characterization, detail, form, texture, and color, Howells does chide Norris in one respect:

Mr. Norris has … learned his lesson well, but he has not learned it all. His true picture of life is not true, because it leaves beauty out. Life is squalid and cruel and vile and hateful, but it is noble and tender and pure and lovely, too. By and by he will put these traits in, and then his powerful scene will be a reflection of reality.

(“Case,” p. 40)

Whether Norris desired his writing to reflect reality is moot; certainly, if he wanted to picture the kind of life that varies from the norm, McTeague amply succeeds. Though Norris thanked Howells, once again by letter (28 March 1899), for a review that “pleased and delighted” him and that “encouraged” him “more than anything that has ever been said of” his talent, he temporized Howells's objection to McTeague's ending as an “anti climax,” assuring him that it had “its place” (Norris, Letters, p. 73). Understandably, neither writer noted Norris's ostensible debt to Howells himself in McTeague: incorporating his earlier student theme, Norris describes the McTeagues' expedition to a local art gallery where, as in his student essay, Trina avers, “I'm no critic, I only know what I like.”²¹ Much earlier in the novel (pp. 67-68), at the inception of their courtship, Trina and McTeague accompany her family to Schuetzen Park. Walking along a deserted railroad track they engage in a wildly unlikely conversation based on comic non-sequiturs, which bears a sharp resemblance to a tête-à-tête that occurs in The Rise of Silas Lapham (pp. 111-13) between Tom Corey and Irene Lapham over current literature. The two situations are disparate, of course, but the freshness of the characters and the incongruities of their innocent responses to each other are too parallel to be overlooked as evidence of Howells's probable influence on Norris.

The bulk of Norris's letter outlines his plan for a trilogy of novels based loosely on the production, distribution, and consumption of wheat. His hope that the result will be “distinctly American” (Norris, Letters, p. 73) foreshadows his later praise of Howells in “An American School of Fiction” as the national writer with “the broadest vision.”²² Duly appearing two years later, The Octopus (1901) suggests, according to Lars Ahnebrink, that Norris had benefited from “Howells' advice to bring in light and beauty, for [it is] … more humane and lighter in tone and touch than the gloomy and depressing McTeague.”²³ Meanwhile, Norris capitalized on his increasing fame by marketing himself as a pithy pundit through several series of essays in leading newspapers. In “Literature in the East,” the initial essay (25 May 1901) of one such series, which ran for thirteen weeks during the summer of 1901 in the Chicago American Art and Literary Review under the title of “Frank Norris's Weekly Letter,” Norris, using a familiar theme as a point of departure, hails Dreiser's recently published Sister Carrie (1900) as the best “realistic fiction since ‘A Modern Instance’”—high praise, since Howells's masterpiece had long been one of Norris's favorites.²⁴ That Norris envisions Dreiser writing “in the very heydey [sic] of romantic fiction” as a “grim, uncompromising realist” further positions the comparison to Howells, whose work Norris had earlier singled out for its fidelity to “ordinary” life (“Literature in the East,” p. 8).

In Howells's third review of a Norris novel, appearing in October 1901 in Harper's Monthly, he effusively labels Norris “a poet among the California wheat-fields” whose “epic of Zolaesque largeness” nonetheless remains purely original.²⁵ Despite the comparison to Zola, Howells continues to view Norris as a realistic novelist who should avoid the “melodrama towards which Mr. Norris dangerously tends” in The Octopus; still, “it is a great book, simple, sombre, large” (“Editor's Easy Chair” [1901], p. 825). How Norris responded either to Howells's lyrical descant on his novel's greatness or to his warning to eschew Zola's maunderings cannot be known directly, although in the presentation copy of The Octopus to Howells, dated May 1901, Norris acknowledges that Howells's “good advice and generous criticism have always been the best encouragement of my literary work” (Norris, Letters, p. 223). Indirectly, however, the next article in which Norris mentions Howells, “A Plea for Romantic Fiction,” published on 18 December 1901 in the Boston Evening Transcript, two months after Howells's Harper's review, reveals that while he always esteems Howells, Norris no longer considers him a mentor. Realism becomes not reprehensible but “respectable as … [in] the novels of Mr. Howells,” while Zola, the supreme romanticist, writes “the kind of fiction that takes cognizance of variations from the type of normal life,” avoiding realism, which “stultifies itself.”²⁶ As he had in “Zola as a Romantic Writer,” Norris again disparages realism for its minute attention to detail—an irony, since Howells approved that technique in Norris's own work. Norris writes that “Realism … is the drama of a broken teacup, the tragedy of a walk down the block, the excitement of an afternoon call, the adventure of an invitation to dinner”; though “meticulous,” it “choos[es] the ordinary, the untroubled, the commonplace,” while romance selects the unusual (“Plea,” pp. 76, 78). Norris thus places himself in the curious position of accepting Howells as one of his literary masters, liking many of his novels, even using his techniques, but questioning the validity of his professed fictional theories—that is, the predominance of the realistic method—and all because Norris distorts realism so that Zola's work, which many then decried, could be classified as romance, a school very popular with the current American reading public. Of course, Norris did not jettison Howells overnight; for several years Norris's inchoate literary criticism had exhibited theoretical inconsistencies. But he does fail to recognize that Howells was still closer to himself and Zola than to the popular romantic fiction then so readily available.

A spate of essays in 1902 ends the second stage of Norris's association with Howells. On 19 January, Norris deprecates “New York as a Literary Center,” reminding his audience that many authors working there, among them Howells, had actually migrated from elsewhere (see “New York,” p. 38). Norris's instant flight to New York as soon as McClure's beckoned undercuts his theme here in much the same manner as his disapproval of Howellsian realism in favor of his capricious conception of Zola's romanticism had earlier.²⁷ As noted above, in “An American School of Fiction” Norris praises Howells as the most American of modern writers, yet because he “has had no successors” Norris seems to hold him responsible for failing to establish distinctly American fiction (“American School,” p. 109). Although Silas Lapham and A Modern Instance “laid the foundation of fine, hardy literature, that promised to be our very, very own,” that promise remains unfulfilled, says Norris; instead, “a whole confused congeries of borrowed, faked, pilfered romanticisms” appeared (“American School,” p. 109). But, one asks, just who is “confused” here—for although respect for Howells again supplies Norris a ready vehicle for expressing his contradictory ideas, those very ideas have become even more ambiguous.

Norris next alludes to Howells in the third number of “Salt and Sincerity” (in the Critic, June 1902), when he predictably employs Howells as a yardstick of success, observing that had Henry James and Henry Harland, editor of England's Yellow Book, “remained in the United States, addressing themselves to the task of picturing and studying their own countrymen, we might have had a series of novels to set side by side with those of Mr. Howells” (“Salt and Sincerity [III],” p. 202). Norris characteristically reverses his earlier stance that a good writer can write anywhere, although he had told Mrs. Davenport that Howells himself had persuaded him of it. In the fourth “Salt and Sincerity,” in July 1902, Norris argues that Howells's impeccable morality produces “great” novels, while in the sixth, appearing two months later in September, he recalls “a novelist of international reputation” (whom Donald Pizer, in his note, surmises was probably Howells himself) who advised him to acquire “little bits of knowledge” for later incorporation into his work (see Literary Criticism, pp. 209, 223).

Another comment of Norris's anent Howells occurs in “The Great American Novelist,” posthumously syndicated on 19 January 1903. Expatiating on a previous idea, Norris apprehends that Howells's “study” of “the East,” like Bret Harte's “of the West,” George Washington Cable's “of the Far South,” and Edward Eggleston's “of the Middle West,” means that “a Great American novel” may not be possible; one should look instead for “the Great Novelist who shall also be an American”²⁸—another reversal, though a slight one, and thus an appropriate close to this chapter, just as his evening with Howells opened it. That evening specifically, and their friendship generally, gave Norris grist to mill one of his more successful short works, “A Lost Story,” also published posthumously.²⁹ Norris's description of Trevor, a selfless mentor to Rosella Beltis, aspiring novelist and reader of manuscripts for a prominent publishing house, matches well the actual Howells in physical characteristics, behavior, and attitudes. A thoroughly moral man, Trevor, like Howells, would disdain Rosella's temptation to advance her own fledgling novel over a finished one telling an identical story that had crossed her desk for evaluation, but the other novelist's unexpected death allows Rosella to plagiarize his work. At story's end she awaits Trevor's appraisal of her work in his warm study, where a “bisque statuette of a fisher-boy obtruded the vulgarity of its gilding and tinting from the mantelpiece” (“Lost Story,” p. 239), recalling that other “bisque fisher boy on the mantel” in “A Plea for Romantic Fiction,” which “underneath the base” hides a secret that romance rather than realism will ferret out (“Plea,” pp. 76-77). Thus Norris adulterates his adulation of Howells: a great writer, his very surroundings belie his misguided taste; instead of reporting the disgrace concealed beneath the statue, Trevor merely keeps it as a gaudy objet d'art in his residence, as Howells would simply have mentioned it while describing a “neighbor's front parlor” (“Plea,” p. 76).

Apparently Norris never resolved completely this maelstrom of theoretical conflict concerning Howells. Despite the implied playful mockery of the older writer in “A Lost Story,” in his last novel, The Pit (1903), evidently completed after the story, Norris obviously regards Howells solidly. Laura, whose artistic pretensions led her to such precious Victorian authors as George Meredith, often reads aloud from her favorites to her husband in order to help relieve his stress after long hours at the Chicago Board of Trade building. For his part, Jadwin fails to share her delight until she turns to Howells, whom before their marriage she read only “as a concession”:

“Nothing much happens,” he said. “But I know all those people.” He never could rid himself of a surreptitious admiration for Bartley Hubbard. He, too, was “smart” and “alive.” He had the “get there” to him. “Why,” he would say, “I know fifty boys just like him down there in La Salle Street.” Lapham he loved as a brother. Never a point in the development of his character that he missed or failed to chuckle over. … Lapham had all his sympathy.³⁰

One can only surmise where Norris would eventually have stood concerning Howells's realism had he lived, but, as Dillingham contends in Frank Norris: Instinct and Art (p. 125), The Pit descends from Howells's precepts in ways that McTeague or even The Octopus does not. For all of his impatience with Howells in his essays, that Norris's final novel conforms rather directly to Howells's tenets seems instructive. Zola provided Norris with creative impetus during this second phase in their friendship, but Howells offered him a needed structure for channeling that impetus into appropriately pleasing fiction.

Like chapter one, chapter three in the story of Howells and Norris involves only one of them. Following Norris's unexpected death, Howells, like virtually anyone who knew Norris intimately, sought a way to express his regret over his passing, finding it in the form of a long tribute to his departed friend in the December 1902 North American Review. Beyond predictable praise, “Frank Norris” merits attention for several other reasons. First, it confirms Howells's conviction that Norris's best work redirected American fiction, freeing it “from the casual and the occasional, in which it [had] seemed lastingly trammelled” (“Frank Norris,” p. 769). Second, Howells also reminds readers once more of Zola's influence on Norris, yet he just as strongly denies too great a debt to the French naturalist; indeed, Howells points out that Norris “had read, and had profited … by his study of [other] great realists” as well (p. 772). Howells also refuses to allow his sorrow over Norris's demise to distort his critical acumen: as he had observed in his review of McTeague, so he maintains here that sometimes a “lingering passion for the romantic … [for] rank melodrama” overpowers Norris (“Frank Norris,” p. 773). Fourth, he details Norris's discussion with him about the plot of Norris's proposed wheat trilogy, suggesting that the two enjoyed not just the sort of acquaintance a younger writer might wish to gain with an older, more successful one but a true camaraderie. Again Howells attests to the wondrous power of McTeague, which is “greater than [he had] ever yet acknowledged,” lamenting that he had failed to commend it highly “enough when praise could have helped most” (“Frank Norris,” p. 774). He completes his comments with a nod to Norris's vitality, which he never felt in Crane and despairs of any successor arising to “carry forward work so instinct with the Continent” (p. 777).

Unfortunately, Norris never saw Howells's truest estimate of both him and his talent, an estimate that Howells felt defensibly proud of, as indicated by a humorous aside in a 23 December 1902 letter to Mark Twain, whose article on Christian Science the North American had published in the same issue as Howells's appraisal of Norris: “That Christian Science paper of yours was nearly as good as mine on Norris.”³¹ Nor do any personal letters or notes from Howells to Norris survive, though, happily, one to his wife, Jeannette, does. Dated 14 December 1902, and previously unpublished, it briefly accepts Jeannette's gratitude for his article, certifying once again Howells's close regard for his friend:

My dear Mrs. Norris:

I am glad that my words about your husband gave you some pleasure. He lived long enough to prove himself a great man; and I loved him for his work and for himself. His loss is a grief to me which I cannot match with yours but which is most genuine.³²

But Howells has not yet done with Norris. The next month, January 1903, in the “Editor's Easy Chair,” his regular column in Harper's Monthly, Howells proclaims that both McTeague and The Octopus exhibit “such signal mastery, so robust, so compact, so vital and yet so graced with the beauty of an art which came to its consciousness in full maturity, as to merit that comparison which they need not fear with the best of our time.”³³ Norris, he further asserts, “made life live” (“Editor's Easy Chair” [1903], p. 328)—a criticism that Norris, who disdained literature for life, would have appreciated.

In March 1903 for Harper's Weekly Howells wrote his last review of a Norris novel; though he ranks The Pit below Norris's other mature works, Norris excels on “the physical side,” which Howells deems “wonderful. You can see, hear, feel those people”; still, Howells chastises Norris for focusing too greatly on Laura and even Jadwin at the expense of the wheat itself, obviously the book's true heroine.³⁴ While time has proven Howells's assessment wrong, it has not negated his sincerity.

What remains of this tale is swiftly told. In May 1903, again in the North American Review, Howells excluded Norris, as a Californian who left Chicago early in life, from a putative “Chicago school of fiction.”³⁵ Like Norris himself, Howells seems unable to make up his mind about whether “schools” of writing exist in America; if they do, they must be regional, a position Norris had taken years earlier in “The Great American Novelist.” Next, Brand Whitlock's now forgotten novel The Turn of the Balance, published in 1907, occasioned almost identical references to Norris in letters Howells wrote to Henry Blake Fuller and to Whitlock himself. On 10 March 1907 Howells wrote to Fuller: “Since the ‘Octopus’ there has been no novel on either side of the sea to compare with” Whitlock's; while to Whitlock a week later he varies the comparison slightly: “Since The Octopus, there has been no novel so great” (Howells, Letters, 1902-1911, pp. 213, 218).

Half a decade later Howells issued a final judgment of Norris, one that largely corroborates his earlier thinking. The January 1912 number of North American Review included an article by Arnold Bennett entitled “The Future of the American Novel,” originally written in 1903, in which Bennett, while reproving American writers for ignoring their vast country as a fictional subject—opting instead to detail “the thousand forms of local life in America” by writing “fiction of States” rather than “of the United States”—commends Norris's The Octopus as “a notable herald” of what America may yet produce: “It is almost the only novel yet produced that deals with the activities of modern American life in a manner at once large, serious, and romantic. … There can be small doubt that the great novels of the future will run on the lines of The Octopus.”³⁶ Once again echoing Norris, Howells two months later challenged Bennett's assertions with tongue in cheek: “Our novelists are each bound by the accident of birth to this locality or that; and we do not believe we shall ever have a truly United States novel till some genius is born all over the Union.”³⁷ Even Norris, Howells observes, “was a localist,” for his western works read better than The Pit simply “because he had lived more in California than in Chicago”; indeed, “closer, firmer, truer than even The Octopus is Norris's other great book, McTeague, which scarcely ever leaves the shabby San Francisco street where the irregular dentist hangs out his sign of a golden tooth” (“Editor's Easy Chair” [1912], p. 637). Just a year previously Howells had compared Bennett favorably to a pantheon of great writers, all of them European save Norris, applauding Bennett's “true fiction” as opposed to his “romantic” side, which contains the same “epical grandeur” that Bennett himself would later extol in The Octopus, and concluding that since “Frank Norris, and all the early naturalists are gone, … there is no writer living in whose reality we can promise ourselves greater joy than Mr. Bennett.”³⁸ While, as Everett Carter claims, age may have withered Howells's creative abilities,³⁹ custom apparently had staled neither his critical discrimination nor his remarkable memory, for the fourteen years since he had met Norris and ardently recommended his first slight novel to an eager readership had not altered his opinion of Norris's contribution to American letters. That he did not see Norris's work as a seamless progression, each novel better than the last, only sharpens the truth and fairness of his final evaluation, for Norris certainly traveled an uneven path in composing his works.

Thus concludes an extraordinary friendship. It was marked at Norris's end by respect for Howells and thorough knowledge of his work beginning long before they met and continuing until his own death, despite fluctuations in his views on the nature and purpose of written art; and it was marked at Howells's end by approval of Norris the man and great esteem for Norris the writer, commencing with his prophetic review of Moran and lasting long after the young author whom he “loved … for his work and for himself” had died.

Notes

1. “Howells and the Controversy over Realism in American Fiction,” American Literature, 3 (1931), 248.

2. See Howells, “A Case in Point,” Literature, n.s. 11 (24 March 1899); rpt. in Frank Norris: The Critical Reception, ed. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., and Katherine Knight (New York: Burt Franklin, 1981), pp. 39-41. McElrath and Knight also reprint the seven earlier reviews of McTeague and two briefer notices (pp. 29-39).

3. Howells reviewed Moran of the Lady Letty: A Story of Adventure off the California Coast (1898) surprisingly favorably in “American Letter: Some Recent Novels,” Literature, 3 (1898), 577-78.

4. See W. D. Howells, “Frank Norris,” North American Review, 175 (1902), 769-78.

5. See Edwin H. Cady, The Realist at War: The Mature Years, 1885-1920, of William Dean Howells (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1958); and Rodrigue E. Labrie, “The Howells-Norris Relationship and the Growth of Naturalism,” Discourse: A Review of the Liberal Arts, 11 (1968), 363-71.

6. Jesse S. Crisler, “Norris's Library,” Frank Norris Studies, No. 5 (Spring 1988), 4-5, notes the presence of both The Albany Depot and The Mouse-Trap among the volumes in Norris's library.

7. William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham, ed. Walter J. Meserve, vol. 12 of A Selected Edition of William Dean Howells (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1971), p. 205. Among several student themes of which Norris incorporated parts in both Vandover and the Brute and McTeague is that dated 28 February 1895, now part of the Frank Norris Collection, The Bancroft Library, Univ. of California, Berkeley.

8. Norris, “Our Unpopular Novelists: Disappearance of American Fiction from the Book Stores,” Wave, 14 (5 October 1895); rpt. in The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris, ed. Donald Pizer (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1964), p. 25.

9. Norris, “Theory and Reality: An Old Author and a New Writer Consider the Same Problem,” Wave, 15 (2 May 1896); rpt. in Literary Criticism, pp. 161-62.

10. See Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., and Douglas K. Burgess, introduction to The Apprenticeship Writings of Frank Norris, 1896-1898, ed. McElrath and Burgess, 2 vols. in 1 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1996), I, xxx.

11. Norris, “Zola as a Romantic Writer,” Wave, 15 (27 June 1896); rpt. in Literary Criticism, p. 71.

12. Frank Bailey Millard includes Norris's letter, which advances Howells's A Modern Instance (1882) as a candidate for “The Great American Novel,” in “What Is Our Greatest Piece of Fiction: Romance Readers Discuss the Matter Learnedly and Interestingly,” San Francisco Examiner, 17 January 1897, p. 30.

13. See Frank Norris: Collected Letters, ed. Jesse S. Crisler (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1986), p. 38.

14. Norris, “An Opening for Novelists: Great Opportunities for Fiction Writers in San Francisco,” Wave, 16 (22 May 1897); rpt. in Literary Criticism, pp. 29-30.

15. Norris, “Scene Mounting of the Future,” Wave, 16 (25 December 1897); rpt. in Apprenticeship Writings, II, 237, 236.

16. Though Howells as yet presumably knew nothing of Norris, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) discloses an easy familiarity with precisely the sort of young man Norris was at the time. For example, Basil March trenchantly describes “the international shabbiness” on the South side of Washington Square which has “broken it up into lodginghouses, shops, beer-gardens, and studios” (A Hazard of New Fortunes, ed. David J. Nordloh et al., vol. 16 of A Selected Edition [Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1976], pp. 55-56), a kind of ironic foreshadowing of the Square that Norris would know nearly a decade later when he actually takes up residence in rooms on “Washington Sq. S.” (see Norris, Letters, pp. 65ff). Another character in Hazard, Mrs. Grosvenor Green, decides “to pursue her art studies in Paris,” where “the instruction was so much better” (p. 73), a further example of art unintentionally mirroring life, since Norris had just completed his own study at the Julian Academy, where he went for reasons very similar to Mrs. Green's, since Norris's mother, taken with his apparent talent, deemed San Francisco, and even London, unsuitable to advancing her son's artistic abilities (see William B. Dillingham, Frank Norris: Instinct and Art [Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1969], pp. 7-8). Finally, another artist in Hazard, Angus Beaton—who among other skills plays the banjo, currently “all the rage”—undertakes to teach its rudiments to Christine Dryfoos (Hazard, p. 230); like Beaton, Norris, in 1890 still an aspiring artist, also plays the banjo for fraternity friends. Thus while Howells had not met Norris, he certainly “knows” him.

17. Franklin Walker, Frank Norris: A Biography (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1932), p. 170.

18. Burgess's recollection of the evening reveals that, despite the young writer's presumed awe of his esteemed older colleague, nothing daunted his delight in practical jokes, an aspect of his personality that Blix (1899) definitely but other novels as well amply disclose. Burgess wrote: “Frank called for me that evening at my apartment on Washington Square and found me dressing—we were to call in evening dress. He watched me dress with that ironic, devilish smile of his on his lips all the while. It was not until we had been in Mr. Howells' drawing room for almost an hour that I discovered to my horror that instead of having put on my tail coat, I had by inadvertence put on my cutaway coat with my evening vest and trousers. Frank had known it all the time, and had said nothing to me, letting me make a fool of myself, and enjoying my embarrassment and mortification to the full” (qtd. in Walker, p. 170).

19. See Howells, “Some Sporting Stories,” Literature, 4 (1899), 347, which notes the forthcoming publication of Shanghaied: A Story of Adventure on the Californian Coast (London: Grant Richards, 1899).

20. Norris, “New York as a Literary Center,” in his The Responsibilities of the Novelist and Other Literary Essays (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1903); rpt. in Literary Criticism, p. 39; and Norris, “Salt and Sincerity [III],” Critic, 40 (1902); rpt. in Literary Criticism, p. 201.

21. McTeague (New York: Doubleday and McClure, 1899), pp. 197-98.

22. Norris, “An American School of Fiction? A Denial,” Boston Evening Transcript, 22 January 1902; rpt. in Literary Criticism, p. 109.

23. Lars Ahnebrink, The Beginnings of Naturalism in American Fiction, 1891-1903: A Study of the Works of Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris with Special Reference to Some European Influences (Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksells, 1950), p. 117.

24. Norris, “Literature in the East,” Chicago American Art and Literary Review, 25 May 1901, 8. Norris was always proud that he had first recommended Sister Carrie to his own firm for publication.

25. Howells, “Editor's Easy Chair,” Harper's Monthly, 103 (1901), 824.

26. Norris, “A Plea for Romantic Fiction,” Boston Evening Transcript, 18 December 1901; rpt in Literary Criticism, p. 76.

27. Norris carries the idea of homegrown art a step further in “An American School of Fiction” by roundly criticizing the typical American, who, “resolv[ing] upon a career of painting, sculpture or architecture … departs for Paris, the Beaux-Arts and the Julien atelier; and, his education finished, returns to propagate French ideas [and] French methods” (“American School,” p. 108); but Norris conveniently forgets his own study at Julien's, where he became so enamored of French writers that, as Ahnebrink has exhaustively recorded, his novels disclose a thorough influence by and promulgation of their methods and perhaps their theories.

28. Norris, “The Great American Novelist,” in Literary Criticism, pp. 123-24.

29. See Norris, “A Lost Story,” Century, 66 (July 1903); rpt. in Gertrude Atherton, et al., The Spinners' Book of Fiction (San Francisco: Paul Elder, 1907), pp. 221-42. Walker notes Norris's debt to Howells (A Biography, p. 171).

30. Norris, The Pit: A Story of Chicago (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1903), pp. 42, 216.

31. W. D. Howells, Selected Letters, Volume 5: 1902-1911, ed. William C. Fischer and Christoph K. Lohmann (Boston: Twayne, 1983), p. 42.

32. W. D. Howells, letter to Jeannette Norris, in the Frank Norris Collection, The Bancroft Library, Univ. of California, Berkeley.

33. Howells, “Editor's Easy Chair,” Harper's Monthly, 106 (1903), 328.

34. Howells, “The Last Work of Frank Norris,” Harper's Weekly, 14 March 1903, 433.

35. See Howells, “Certain of the Chicago School of Fiction,” North American Review, 176 (1903), 734-35.

36. Arnold Bennett, “The Future of the American Novel,” North American Review, 195 (1912), 83.

37. Howells, “Editor's Easy Chair,” Harper's Monthly, 124 (1912), 637.

38. Howells, “Editor's Easy Chair,” Harper's Monthly, 122 (1911), 634, 635-36.

39. See Howells and the Age of Realism (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1950), p. 246.