It is not surprising . . . to find a Wilde-Kipling contrast running through Norris's descriptions of "literature" and "life," a contrast sharpened and vitalized by his personal rejection of the minor Bohemian worlds he encountered in San Francisco and New York. Indeed, he tended in his later criticism to establish Kipling-like conflicts between the virile artist and a corrupting city aestheticism. One of the best examples of this tendency, and also of Norris's basic "life"-"literature" antithesis, is his story "Dying Fires," published in 1902.

"Dying Fires" tells of Overbeck, a young man born and raised in the Colfax mining district of the California Sierras. At the age of twenty-one, Overbeck writes a novel—The Vision of Bunt McBride—about the teamsters and waitresses, the dance halls and gambling joints of Colfax. It was a good novel, Norris stated, because "young Overbeck had got started right at the very beginning. He had not been influenced by a fetich of his choice till his work was a mere replica of some other writer's. He was not literary. He had not much time for books. He lived in the midst of a strenuous, eager life, a little primal even yet; a life of passions that were often elemental in their simplicity and directness." This combination of elemental material and an unspoiled literary sensibility results in a powerful novel which brings Overbeck a call to New York. There he works in an editorial office and becomes a member of a literary set called "New Bohemia."

It was made up of minor poets [Norris writes], whose opportunity in life was the blank space on a magazine page below the end of an article; of men past their prime, who, because of an occasional story in a second-rate monthly, were considered to have "arrived"; of women who translated novels from the Italian and Hungarian; of decayed dramatists who could advance unimpeachable reasons for the non-production of their plays; of novelists whose books were declined by publishers because of professional jealousy on the part of the "readers."

New Bohemia has its effect on Overbeck. Soon, Norris tells us,

He could talk about "tendencies" and the "influence of reactions." Such and such a writer had a "sense of form," another a "feeling for word effects." He knew all about "tones" and "notes" and "philistinisms." He could tell the difference between an allegory and a simile. . . . An anti-climax was the one unforgivable sin under heaven. A mixed metaphor made him wince, and a split infinitive hurt him like a blow.

The New Bohemians encourage him to write another novel, but one quite different from the "sane and healthy animalism" of The Vision of Bunt McBride. "Àrt must uplift,'" they tell him:

Ah, the spititual was the great thing. We were here to make the world brighter and better for having lived in it. The passions of a waitress in a railway eatinghouse—how sordid the subject. Dear boy, look for the soul, strive to rise to higher planes! Tread upward; every book should leave a clean taste in the mouth, should tend to make one happier, should elevate, not debase.

He begins a second novel, Renunciations, which Norris describes as a "city-bred story, with no fresher atmosphere than that of bought flowers. Its dramatis personae were all of the leisure class, operagoers, intriguers, riders of blood horses." (Norris seems to be using Henry James as a model here.) Renunciations is a failure, and Overbeck, realizing his mistake, returns to Colfax and attempts to rekindle his creative fires. "But the ashes were cold by now," Norris concludes. "The fire that the gods had allowed him to snatch . . . had been stamped out beneath the feet of minor and dilettante poets, and now the gods guarded close the brands that yet remained on the altars."

"Dying Fires" is thus almost an allegory of Norris's beliefs about "life" and "literature," of his conviction that the best fiction derives from an untutored vision of the raw and violent in experience. But now one comes to a vital paradox in Norris's critical thought, one hinted at in "Dying Fires" when Norris noted of Overbeck's first novel that despite its power it revealed a "lack of knowledge of his tools" because of Overbeck's literary inexperience. For Norris combined with his primitivistic ideas an equally confirmed faith in what he called "the mechanics of fiction"—that is, a belief that the form and technique of fiction have certain rules, "tricks," and procedures which can not only be described, but which can also be taught, and which must be acquired through arduous discipline and application. In other words, as far as the form of the novel is concerned, Norris attacked the instinctive, the emotional, the natural. He believed that fictional form is an intellectual problem in selection and organization for the achievement of plausibility, effect, and theme, and that there are few substitutes for a considered and painstaking intellectual solution. Commenting in 1901 on a proposed school of novel writing, Norris wrote:

Some certain people—foolish people—often say: "Teach people how to write novels! It must be born in you. There is no other way." I do not believe this. Nobody is born with the ability to write fiction. The greatest writers have to learn it all for themselves. If they taught themselves they could to a very large extent teach others. It is not at all impossible of belief that the fundamentals of construction in fiction could be in a manner codified, formulized and studied with as much good results as the fundamentals of any other of the professions.

All other of the fine arts demand preparatory courses of training—sculpture, painting, music, acting, architecture, and the like. Why should fiction be the one—the only one—to be ignored? Be well assured of this: The construction of a novel is as much of an exact science as the construction of a temple or a sonnet. The laws and rules of this construction have never been adequately formulated, but they exist.

It is upon this fundamental duality, then, that Norris's critical system rests—"life, not literature" as far as theme and content are concerned, but "literature, not life" as far as form is concerned. Of the two, he gave the first priority. Without "life" as a foundation, no amount of technical training would benefit a writer. The best novelist, however, was he who was primitivistic in content and theme, sophisticated in form.