A Novelist in the Making
At the same time that Norris—at age 21—was realizing his mother's ideal conception of a son as college man and artist, a personality adjustment was occurring in him. Another side of his nature was emerging, for at Berkeley few fraternity men were as ferociously involved in the society as he became. The gloves and cane were put in the closet and some "regular guy" socialization began: the frat house became increasingly more central. Indeed, Norris's present fame outside of literary and historical circles includes his creation of a special annual dinner staged by the brothers of Phi Gamma Delta, still called "the Norris." Kissing the roasted whole pig as it was carried ritualistically into the banquet hall was part of the rubric he devised. Had not B.F. already alienated himself from the family, he might have approved wholeheartedly of such a sounding of the manly note after so long a delay. He might also have approved of Frank, while still a student, placing short stories in real magazines, such as Overland Monthly and Argonaut. As far as we know, Norris had still not known the rigors of holding a part-time job. But these were the first businesslike signs of professional success. Finally, however, B.F. had more cause for lowering his brows at the close of the Berkeley years: in 1894, his son failed to receive a degree with his classmates.
Three years earlier, in 1891, Norris had petitioned the university to waive the standard course requirements that were his undoing. He declared that he had already determined as his the career of professional writer, including an early review of Yvernelle to prove the seriousness of his claim. It did not work, and in the summer of 1894 he appears to have thought that Harvard University, with its innovative "elective" orientation toward higher education, might be more suitable for him. He was wrong about that. He never received a degree. But in the fall, accompanied by Gertrude and Charles, he settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, soon taking a dormitory room on campus. That year he again did what he liked, completing three courses in French literature. He also enrolled in a two-semester course conducted by Lewis E. Gates, during which he received instruction on the craft of writing and produced 45 surviving "themes," indicating that he was at work on material related to three later published novels: McTeague, Blix, and Vandover. The themes dramatized the change that had been wrought during the Berkeley years. His fixation on things medieval had gradually dissipated itself after the publication of Yvernelle and a bit of gothic supernaturalism that appeared in The Wave in 1891, "The Jongleur of Taillebois." "The Son of the Sheik" (1891) and "Lauth" (1893) are two other improbable short stories of the same order—although they did represent an intellectual advance. Both reflect an awareness of concepts generally related to contemporaneous discussions of evolutionary theory and possibly the influence of the evolutionary metaphysician and moralist, Professor Joseph LeConte, on the Berkeley campus. But in a series of five Overland Monthly stories sharing the main title "Outward and Visible Signs," one can see most clearly Norris's act of separating himself from the tastes of his mother's generation and what Yvernelle had signified. The tone of these short stories published in 1894-95 was smart and up to date, and the focus was on 1890s social life among upper-class young men and women. The influence of sophisticated stylists such as Anthony Hope and Richard Harding Davis was quite apparent as Norris began to produce snappy dialogue for readers of the kind to which F. Scott Fitzgerald would later appeal in his popular magazine fiction. While writing such light pieces anticipating the often-bantering Blix, Norris's simultaneous development in another direction also shows in the Harvard themes, where one sees the influence of Emile Zola and Guy de Maupassant. His new tendency was especially clear in the theme for 22 April 1895:
It was in an alley behind a big hotel, and the man, an old man, with a battered derby hat that had turned green, was drunk; blind drunk, reeling about as if in the forecastle of a wreck, running his head stupidly against the side of the houses, trying to hold on by the wheels of old carts and by the sides of manure bins. He was looking for the flask he had dropped and a group of hack men and cab-drivers at the mouth of the alley were watching him, laughing and very amused because he couldn't find it. Bye and bye the man came down, full length, helpless as a falling tree and lay prone and inert, face downwards, blowing his fetid breath into the mud and the filth of the alley.
There was no manure in Yvernelle or the "Outward and Visible Signs" stories, nor did its characters wallow like brutes in the filth. Norris was now making selections from the French menu as well as the Anglo-American.
When Norris returned to San Francisco that summer, he was preparing a collection of his short stories for Coryell & Co. of New York and continuing to write the Zolaesque McTeague and Vandover. He also devised a plan to accelerate his progress as a professional author, following the example of the immensely successful travel writer, Richard Harding Davis. He would visit South Africa, trek northward to Egypt, and sail back to America via the Strait of Gibraltar—writing local color articles along the way. He departed from San Francisco on 28 October 1895, and, before he dispatched one word to the newspaper with which he had an arrangement, the San Francisco Chronicle, he was in the limelight. Or, rather, he was sharing it with the ubiquitous Gertrude who granted interviews with journalists regarding her son's mysterious disappearance between England and South Africa. The devoted, distraught mother; the favorite son with an unpredictable artistic temperament: it was a journalist's dream.
The delay in cabling his mother from South Africa was related to an extraordinary coincidence. Norris was traveling with a group planning to participate in an English attempt to topple the Boer government, Cecil Rhodes's strategy for British appropriation of South African gold and diamond mines. As Norris sent the first of his essays on local conditions, the Jameson Raid occurred. Norris became involved with one of the conspirators, San Franciscan mining engineer John Hays Hammond; served as a messenger in a British uniform; and was incarcerated and deported on the coup's failure. Perhaps, then, there was more of B. F. in him than he suspected: he was certainly behaving like the "real man" seen in the most virile adventure tales; he had faced death in a uniform and also on the sickbed when brought down by "African fever." He even returned to San Francisco with a snake tattoo.
When he disembarked in New York City after his African jaunt, Norris was moving forward as a writer, it was clear, but he was soon to experience two major failures. The agreement with Coryell & Co. to publish a collection of stories fell through. What was also soon evident was that the South African sketches would not pay off as hoped. The eight that appeared in the Chronicle were not reprinted nationally. A ninth had been published in the national-circulation Harper's Weekly but received no more attention than a tenth published locally in The Wave. The next step was down, rather than up. In April 1896, Norris became a salaried staff writer and, as editor John O'Hara Cosgrave phrased it to Franklin Walker, "editorial assistant" for the same regional weekly, The Wave. From writing fiction to reporting to preparing advertisements, Norris appears to have served a full apprenticeship. Two years and more than 165 Wave pieces later, Norris finally escaped from the drudgery of working for Cosgrave.
As Franklin Walker noted, 1897 was marked by depression for Norris. It was also characterized by rage born of feelings of impotence owing to his lack of success at age 27: the failures were mounting. In a memoir written three decades later, Norris's friend Bruce Porter (the stained-glass artist and Swedenborgian aesthete who served as the model for Vanamee in The Octopus and Sheldon Corthell in The Pit) recalled an angry outburst when Norris learned of the success in the East enjoyed by old friend and fellow Wave writer Gelett Burgess. The Wildean author of a bit of doggerel entitled "The Purple Cow" had tickled the nation and won acclaim. His Vivette would be published later that year, while Norris remained churning out copy for a West Coast weekly of limited circulation. Indeed, Norris is likely to have suffered something akin to a nervous breakdown during the early spring of 1897—given his absence from work from mid-March to mid-May and some peculiar self-revelations made in his Wave writings on his return.
"Little Dramas of the Curbstone," for example, includes three sketches, one of which, it might be opined, Cosgrave should not have given the editorial nod. In it Norris describes his hysterical response to a young boy born blind and deaf. He candidly confesses an urge to attack the "imbecile" with his cane and beat the life out of him. Why he should feel this urge, he does not explain. In another article, "The Sailing of the Excelsior" he tells of seeing an alcoholic asleep on a wharf and describes his rage to discover a man so despicable. His desire, expressed without tongue in cheek, is to throw the man off the wharf and let him perish. Less murderous but as violent is the tone of "An Opening for Novelists" from the same period. Burgess and his whimsical fellow artists known as Les Jeunes are cause for outrage; so also is their too-precious magazine, The Lark, which embodied the aestheticism of The Yellow Book and The Chap Book as it parodied it. The Lark is the token of what Norris finds contemptible: the childishness of artistic self-indulgence, the avoidance of serious reflection on human nature for the sake of cultivating the pretty, and the preference for the artificial over the dynamism of real life. Norris was rejecting not only the triumph of the trivial in such works as "The Purple Cow" but the androgynous dilettantism of such "friends" in the fine arts as Burgess, Bruce Porter, and Ernest Peixotto. Guilt by association as much as the frustration of being stalled in his career thus lies behind this cruel outburst, for Norris was as devoted to "the fine arts" as they. Indeed, bookbinding would later replace the design of covers for college publications as an avocation of his, and it was his taste that resulted in the bindings of The Octopus and The Pit being modeled on that of Henry James's What Maisie Knew (1897).
The manly note is here self-consciously sounded as he calls for a more red-blooded, vigorous response to the artistic possibilities of life in San Francisco: "Give us stories now, give us men, strong, brutal men, with red-hot blood in 'em, with unleashed passions rampant in 'em, blood and bones and viscera in 'em." In this psychologically complex piece, Norris was rejecting the "feminine" or "artsy" cultural values Les Jeunes represented, as well as the delicate aesthetic values that were Gertrude's. (He was still living with his mother at age 27.) Identifying with more forceful, masculine role-models such as Zola, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Rudyard Kipling ("A qui le tour, who shall be our Kipling?"), he was as impatient with the "thimble-headed bobism" of artistes as his father had been. At the same time, though, Norris was Norris: the Gallic show of Burgess-like sophistication, A qui le tour?, is a revealing anomaly amidst the testosterone-suffused rhetoric and the vulgarity of "blood and bones and viscera in 'em."
The psychological factors noted may not, however, have been the only causes of the crisis. B.F. suffered from what Kathleen Thompson Norris once described as "his nervous troubles." She did not go into detail, but the son's problem in 1897 may have been more than psychological. In "Metropolitan Noises," published shortly after Norris's return to The Wave in May, he writes in detail about the "positive physical torture" of San Francisco's street noises for individuals suffering from a "nervous complaint." The choice of subject and the specifics provided suggest that he had firsthand experience of symptoms then diagnosed as those of neurasthenia. Thus, the two-month absence from The Wave that spring receives a likely explanation: the prescribed treatment at the time was the "rest cure" popularized by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell and criticized by Charlotte Perkins Gilman via the now well-known short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892).
Unlike the heroine of that tale of progressive insanity, however, Norris recovered. He made amends for his attack on Les Jeunes, reestablishing his friendships with Porter and Peixotto. That they were reconciled with Norris suggests that they knew of mitigating circumstances. That the thin-skinned Burgess—who pasted Norris's attack in his scrapbook—let bygones be bygones doubly suggests the same. Norris had simply not been himself for a season. Furthermore, while Norris called for a more dynamic literature commensurate with rough-and-tumble environment that was the San Francisco being pictured in his McTeague manuscript, he returned to his old ways: the series of Justin Sturgis-Leander dialogues he soon commenced for The Wave were droll bits of harmless high-society patter—a specialty of the lately lambasted Gelett Burgess. The crisis had passed, and by December Norris made clear in The Wave his new resolve to succeed, picturing in "Happiness by Conquest" his hero as the individual who persists in the face of adversity to make his own success—by sheer willpower.
Norris had good reason for restored confidence by the end of 1897. That spring and summer he had published some of the best short fictions of his career. "Judy's Service of Gold Plate" and "Fantaisie Printaniere"—both spin-offs from the McTeague manuscript—were brilliant comic descents into the "low-life" neighborhoods of San Francisco. "The Strangest Thing" and "The House with the Blinds" offered engagingly executed mysteries, but much better was "The Third Circle," which takes the high-toned Wave readership into the nethermost recesses of Chinatown, where opium-addicted Caucasian prostitutes flourish and the debutante-heroine, who had mysteriously disappeared at the beginning of the story, is discovered years later as a hag in "white slavery." More conventional were the comic tall tales "'Boom'" and "Shorty Stack, Pugilist"—in which Norris showed his proficiency in producing salable, chuckle-inducing entertainments. His penchant for the bizarre resurfaced, however, in "The Associated Un-Charities," in which—as in McTeague—he tested what of his experimental imagination readers would tolerate. This is a comic tale, featuring Justin Sturgis and Leander, in which the latter young gentleman shows the "Mr. Hyde" side of his otherwise eminently Victorian personality. The victims of the little joke he arranges happen to be three men who are vulnerable because of a physical handicap: they are blind. The comic tale becomes a chilling account of victimization, and one suddenly realizes that Norris has transformed it into a mordant indictment of the insensitive social group to which Leander belongs. Perhaps, too, he recalled his own reaction to the "imbecile" in "Little Dramas."
The same kind of artful reversal occurs in "His Dead Mother's Portrait," in which a night on the town for some carefree young gents ends in the discovery that the presumed-dead mother of one of them is a dancer in the disreputable "dive" Bella Union. Norris could entertain as when he whimsically imagined an Olympics for cyclists in "A Bicycle Gymkhana," but there was a need to move beyond the glittering surfaces of the Gay Nineties to depict the less than attractive complexities that are at the core of his serious writings—for instance, in the grimly Schopenhauerian fable of "The Puppets and the Puppy," also published in 1897.
Getting beneath the surface of things is an apparent motivation throughout the Norris canon and a primary explanation for the psychological and sociological exposé writing counterpointing with his more conventional love tales, comic yarns, and local color articles. It also elucidates Norris's conception of himself as a "Romantic" writer, which has complicated the task of more than one literary historian sensitive to signs of loyalty in his fiction to the opposed school of Realism. Norris eventually clarified his complex view of the relationship between Romanticism, Realism, and Naturalism. In some of his book reviews and literary essays of the Wave years, however, he heightens the apparent paradox of a realistically oriented writer identifying with Romantics. In 1896, for example, he celebrated William Dean Howells's treatment of the "ultimate physical relation of man and woman" in A Parting and a Meeting', Howells displayed "the greatest subtlety and finesse," Norris asserts as he reveals an unqualified appreciation of the Realistic literary method Howells used. The next year he identified Howells's A Modern Instance as the "greatest" representation of modern American life in fiction. And yet Howellsian Realism did not suffice. As Norris also explained in "Zola as a Romantic Writer," Howells the Realist did not delve far enough into life; he limited himself to "average" experience and thus stayed too much on the surface of everyday life. Norris, inspired by the unreserved Zola, had no intention of discreetly stopping where Howells did.
Zola, in contrast to Howells, did not limit his extravagantly fertile imagination in his compelling quests for the profoundest truths of life. Furthermore, he took brave risks with reader credibility as he dared to move beyond the commonplace and to treat the exotic and bizarre—the subjects of Romantic writers. Zola not only mapped accurately the conditions in the modern socioeconomic order but plumbed the depths of the monstrously grotesque, the irrational, and even the disgusting in human experience—without regard to the Victorian proprieties that Howells observed and that Norris himself was then violating in the manuscripts of McTeague and Vandover. Imaginatively inducing broader truths from all manner of data, Zola went beyond the limits that Anglo-American Realists had, in his view, needlessly imposed on themselves. And thus the theme of Norris's "Zola's Rome" and "Zola as a Romantic Writer" in 1896: Zola's often cited Naturalism does not represent an "inner circle" of Realism, as many critics think; it is a vibrant revival of the probatory Romantic tradition that attempted to articulate the whole of what Nature might reveal about itself. Norris would redefine Naturalism in 1901 as a synthesis of Realism and Romanticism rather than an extension of the latter, but his essential concept and orientation remained the same. Zolaesque Naturalism was the intellectual and aesthetic justification for a daring exercise of both imagination and reason in Norris's many debunkings of the false and revelations of the true.
Norris's probatory approach to human experience during the Wave years is nowhere more apparent than in "Reversion to Type" (1897) and "A Case for Lombroso" (1897), which at first may appear merely outlandish fictions. Both feature characters whose personalities are radically altered when both degenerate from a socially well-adjusted condition to a madly criminal state—of the kind that the well-known criminologist Cesare Lombroso then interpreted as genetically determined. One may be tempted to dismiss them as mere reworkings of the fanciful "atavistic lapse" theme Norris first treated as a freshman at Berkeley in the improbable "Son of the Sheik"—a story in which a college-educated sophisticate under stress lapses to his hereditarily preserved identity as an Arab warrior. These later stories, however, are not related to a popular theory about evolutionary regression but a more sensational fact reported by Norris in The Wave of 6 March 1897. What had caught his eye were newspaper reports of one John M. Oakley—a respectable millionaire who had heretofore led a most exemplary life—drinking himself to death in the company of a prostitute at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco: "A strange, hideous end of an upright life; a case, perhaps, for our friend Lombroso."
It was Norris, however, who took the Oakley case, analyzed it, and spun out tales prompting the conclusion that respectability and other appearances of civilization may prove either veneerlike or revelatory of only particular dimensions of multifaceted human nature. In the real-life incident and the two tales, we see an anarchic second personality within the self conditioned to socially proper behavior—an amoral, barbaric, and perhaps bestial dimension of human nature that has not been eliminated despite centuries of civilizing influence. Norris was focusing on what his contemporary Sigmund Freud would term the id. While few might have the unpredictably extravagant experience of debauchery that Oakley did, what was predictable was that equally refined individuals might feel some pressure from that primitive second self within, no matter how often or vigorously proper Victorians denied these impulses.
Because Zola had already explored this fictional territory in work after work, one finds an undeniable instance of intertextuality here. And yet Norris himself had passed through an Oakley-like crisis that spring when, facing the specter of failure in his chosen career, he had run amok, bristling with violence directed at his friends and generally behaving like an unsociable brute. Whatever the exact ratio between external influence and internal impetus, Norris had established the question that he would pose again and again: Why do people behave the way they do, often to their detriment?
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The Significance of Frank Norris's Literary Criticism
Frank Norris' 'The Puppets and the Puppy': LeContean Idealism or Naturalistic Skepticism?