by Frank Norris
Meantime Trina has gone from bad to worse. The | “non-poisonous” paint that she uses for the toy animals causes blood poisoning in the fingers that McTeague has bitten. When she comes out of the hospital with only a claw left in place of her right hand, she secures employment as a scrub woman for a slum kindergarten. She draws her money gradually out of her uncle’s business and keeps the gold in her rooms. She becomes a slattern; she loses interest in all but the actual sight and feel of the gold.
McTeague comes to her after his day’s work, for his seven dollars. On the way he drinks many whiskeys and decides to have” the whole five thousand. Trina pleads with him and fights him till her strength fails. Towards morning she dies.
In the meantime McTeague has carried off the gold and his own small belongings in a blanket roll, with the canary in its cage on top. He harks back by blind instinct to the wild and the Big Dipper Mine. On his way he passes through the woods.
“The day was very hot, and the silence of high noon lay thick and close between the steep slopes of the canons like an invisible, muffling fluid. . . . The vast, moveless heat seemed to distill countless odors from the brush — odors of warm sap, of pine needles, and of tar weed, and above all the medicinal odor of the witch hazel. As far as he could look, uncounted multitudes of trees and of manzanita bushes were quietly and motionlessly growing, growing, growing. A tremendous immeasurable life pushed heavenward without a sound, without a motion. At turns of the road, on the higher points, canons disclosed themselves, far away, gigantic grooves in the landscape, deep blue in the distance, opening into one another, ocean-deep, silent, huge and suggestive of colossal primeval forces held in reserve. . . . The entire region was untamed. In some places east of the Mississippi nature is cozy, intimate, small and home like like a good-natured house wife. In Placer County, California, she is a vast unconquered brute of the Pliocene epoch, savage, sullen, and magnificently indifferent to man.
“But there were men in the mountains like lice in mammoth’s hides, fighting them stubbornly now with hydraulic ‘monitors,’ now with drill and dynamite, boring into the vitals of them or tearing away great yellow gravelly scars in the flanks of them, sucking their blood, extracting gold . . . one heard the prolonged thunder of the stamp mill, the crusher, the insatiable monster, gnashing the rocks to powder with its long iron teeth, vomiting them out again in a thin stream of wet gray mud. Its enormous maw, fed night and day with the car-boy’s loads, gorged itself with gravel and spat out the gold . . . growling over its endless meal, like some savage animal, some legendary dragon, some fabulous beast, symbol of inordinate and monstrous gluttony.”
McTeague gets employment, unrecognized, at his old job. The life pleases him beyond words. After a few weeks the instinct of the animal to avoid the hunters warns him; he goes wide around sharp corners; he wakes suddenly and prowls about the bunk house by night; finally he disappears two days before the sheriff and the deputies from San Francisco reach the mine.
McTeague heads south for Mexico. For a time his suspicions are dormant. He makes a deal with an old miner and they prospect for gold near Death Valley. They find it, and again the instinct of flight gets the best of the dentist. He leaves the mine and his partner by night. He heads south along the western side of the valley. Suddenly he decides to evade pursuit by crossing it.
Here Marcus Shouler who has been working on a ranch in the neighborhood and who joins the sheriff’s force as a volunteer comes up with him.
Marcus gets the drop. McTeague who has neither knife nor gun with him puts his hands up. McTeague’s mule which has eaten loco weed and which carries the last food and water left to the two men breaks away. The two men run after it. Marcus fires his last shot, the mule falls and bursts the canteen. The two men come to blows over the division of the money, Trina’s five thousand dollars, the canvas sackful tied to the horn of the saddle.
“Suddenly the men grappled, and in another instant were rolling and struggling upon the hot white ground. McTeague thrust Marcus backward till he tripped and fell over the body of the dead mule. The little bird cage broke from the saddle with the violence of their fall, and rolled out upon the ground, the flour bags slipping from it. McTeague tore the revolver from Marcus’s grip and struck out with it blindly. Clouds of alkali dust, fine and pungent, enveloped the two fighting men, all but strangling them.
“McTeague did not know how he had killed his enemy, but all at once Marcus grew still beneath his blows. Then there was a sudden last return of energy. McTeague’s right wrist was caught, something clicked upon it, then the struggling body fell limp and motionless with a long breath.
“As McTeague rose to his feet he felt a pull at his right wrist; something held it fast. Looking down he saw that Marcus in that last struggle had found strength to handcuff their right wrists together. Marcus was dead now; McTeague was locked to the body. All about him, vast, interminable, stretched the measureless leagues of Death Valley.
“McTeague remained stupidly looking around him, now at the distant horizon, now at the ground, now at the half-dead canary chittering feebly in its little gilt prison.”
There are few novels that end as effectively, as inevitably, as much to the purpose and with as little apparent waste of technical labor and ingenuity.
The symbolism of the huge tooth has been variously commented upon. The same symbolism appears as the parallel story of Maria Macapa, a Mexican woman not quite right in her head, who talks about a service of gold plate that her family once owned, and who is married and murdered by Zerkow, a Jew junk dealer, on the chance that she may have hoarded and hidden it somewhere in their tenement as Trina hoarded her own gold.
Norris never appears primarily as a preacher. He tells us in his own words: “People who read appear at last to have grasped their own precept, the novel must not preach, but the purpose of the story must be subordinate to the story itself.”
At the same time he says: “As though it were impossible to write a novel without a purpose even if it is only the purpose to amuse.” And it is sufficiently evident to anyone who takes time to reflect, that his purpose here is not to achieve a literary tour de force, realistic and symbolistic at once, but to put conclusively and unforgettably before the mind of the average reader the result of the commonest crime of civilization on two or three obscurely typical lives in San Francisco as the plain people see it to-day. Norris does not preach in the obvious and restricted sense. He makes us see unmistakably here and later that life is greater than its accidents. Still less does he pretend, through any worship of sham refinements or false heroics, that the civilization most written up and gilded over is greater or better than the result of its everyday failures and crimes.
II.
The Octopus was published in 1901. At that time Norris unquestionably felt his powers and his responsibilities as he voiced them later in the initial essay of The Responsibilities of the Novelist (published in 1901).
“More than all others the successful novelist . . . more even than the minister and the editor, he should feel his public and watch his every word, testing carefully his every utterance, weighing with the most relentless precision his every statement, in a word possess a sense of his responsibilities.
“For the novel is the great expression of modern life. . . . Each age speaks with its own peculiar organ and has left the Word for us moderns to read and understand. . . . To-day is the day of the novel. ... If the novel was not something more than a simple diversion ... a means of whiling away a dull evening, a long railroad journey, it would not, believe me, remain for another day.
“If the novel then, is popular, it is popular with a reason, a vital inherent reason; that is to say it is essential. Essential . . . because it expresses modern life better than architecture, better than painting, better than poetry, better than music. It is as necessary to the civilization of the twentieth century as the violin is to Kubelik, as the piano is to Paderewski. ... It is an instrument, a tool, a weapon, a vehicle. It is th
at thing which in the hand of a man makes him civilized and no longer a savage, because it gives him a power of durable, permanent expression.”
That the work of Frank Norris is durable because it deals with the material of our common national life, that his expression is permanent because it is the expression of truth itself, is one of the things that his fellow countrymen and country-women are gradually coming to see.
The Octopus has belonged to America and to the world for eleven years. Norris is still a prophet without honor in some sections, some classes, some; literary, scholastic, cultured and educated circles of M his own country. At the same time the book and the ideal of racial expression, of obligation and service that it represents, have come to stay in America as surely as the Rail Road, the Octopus of steam and steel, the capitalistic aggression and responsibility that it pillories, that it interprets, that in its broad results it justifies.
Norris has been a pioneer of America and tomorrow not only in his racial inheritance, in his spirit, his material and method of work, but in his partial acceptance of the fact, that the novel of to-morrow, in America of all countries, must be built on broad-gauge lines; that it must be a vehicle or a train of vehicles fit for all; that its right of way must be made permanent in its possession of elemental and universal truth; that sham and false pretense must be as abhorrent to it as false work, unstandardized, in the construction of a steel bridge; that jerry building in the work of any novelist, who is able to write for an audience of millions or hundreds of thousands, must in time come to be looked upon with the same abhorrence as jerry building in the foundation piers of the permanent way over which millions travel yearly.
Novels like The Octopus are coming to be the great bridges of thought, with their trains and equipment, that bear any chance way-farer who may connect at any point on the line to the great centers of human thought and striving. The public has a right to demand that they be strongly and securely built. It has a further right to demand that they be built purposefully; that they connect with main terminals or junction points, themselves; that they do not waste its time and delude it with false hopes and vain assumptions, only to leave it stranded in the wilds or at some insignificant way station.
“Because it (the novel) is so all-powerful to-day, the people turn to him who widens this instrument with every degree of confidence. They expect, and rightly, that results shall be commensurate with means . . . the fact is indisputable that no art that is not in the end understood by the People can live, or ever did live, a single generation. In the larger view, in the last analysis, the People pronounce the final judgment. ... Is it not expedient to set it forth fairly? Is it not, in Heaven’s name, essential that the people should hear not a lie but the Truth?”
The first thing noticeable about The Octopus is that it is a True Story. It is true in its viewpoint and its method, which have the directness and the elemental insistence of nature itself. The story of the fight of the Ranchers of the San Joaquin Valley with the Southern Pacific railroad over the revaluation of the lands leased to them by the Corporation, and the tendency of the Octopus to charge invariably all the traffic will stand, is absolutely verifiable in the history of the State of California.
It is true in its epic sweep and broadening intensity of interest; true technically and spiritually; true as poetry and as prose; true in its comprehensive knowledge of life in the mass and in little; true in its feeling for human nature, in the individual and the aggregate; true in its revelation of something more than mere humanity — something to which all human personalities, all human laws and desires are subservient — that inspires and sustains it.
For years, people here and abroad have been looking for The Great American Novel. The Octopus is great. It is as essentially national as the theme and the democracy that it interprets is great and American. It is more than national; it is racial. It is more than a novel; it is an epic: The Epic of the Wheat, complete in itself without The Pit and the third unpublished member of the unfinished trilogy.
Like all human productions it has its faults. They are essentially and typically the faults of the people that it portrays. They count for little beside its more virile and lasting qualities. In the last analysis they make the book more truly representative of the racial temperament that has produced it.
Norris has said himself: “For the novelist the purpose of the novel, the problem he is to solve, is to his story what the key note is to the sonata.” Condensed into five words the problem of The Octopus is: “Why is the railroad?” And the key-note of the book is sounded on the first page and in the first sentence by the blowing of a steam whistle that Presley, the “lunger” and minor poet, knows must come from the railroad shops near the depot et Bonneville.
Presley is the medium through which much of the story is told.
Presley symbolizes minor literature here and everywhere. He wants to write the Song of the West in hexameters. At first, life as he sees it around him on the great Magnus Derrick wheat ranch, seems crude and unsympathetic. Later he becomes tremendously interested and a warm partisan in the losing struggle of the ranchers and the people against the railroad. He writes one successful poem, The Toilers, which is read and copied everywhere. With this one exception he continues incapable as writer and as man, from first to last.
The book begins in the last half of September, the very end of the dry season. “The harvest was just over. Nothing but stubble remained on the ground. . . . The silence was infinite. After the harvest, small though that harvest had been, the ranches seemed asleep. It was as though the earth after its period of reproduction, its pains of labor, had been delivered of the fruit of its loins and now slept the sleep of exhaustion.
“It was the period between seasons when nothing was being done, when the natural forces seemed to hang suspended. There was no rain, there was no wind, there was no growth, no life; the very stubble had no force even to rot. The sun alone moved.”
Presley stays to talk with various ranchers on his way from the home ranch of Los Muertos, where he is living as the guest of Magnus Derrick. He hurries on on his bicycle at last, to Guadalahara, for a Spanish dinner at Solotari’s. There he meets an old Mexican who tells him stories full of local color of the life of the past. He meets Vanamee, a sheep-herder, with his herd; he stops at the old Spanish mission; he chats there with Sarria the priest, and a wider sweep of his epic of the West and the past unrolls itself before him.
“It was in Vanamee’s flight into the wilderness, the story of the Long Trail; the sunsets behind the altar-like mesas, the baking desolation of the deserts, the strenuous fierce life of forgotten towns down there, far off, lost below the horizons of the southwest, the sonorous music of unfamiliar names — Quijota, Uintah, Sonora, Laredo, Uncompahgre. It was in the mission, with its cracked bells, the decaying walls, its venerable sun-dial, its fountain and old garden, and in the Mission Fathers themselves, the priests, the padres, planting the first wheat and oil and wine to produce the elements of the Sacrament — a trinity of great industries, taking their rise in a religious rite.”
As he crosses the railroad on his way home after nightfall, a loose engine shoots by him at full speed. Just beyond it cuts through Vanamee’s flock of sheep which have strayed upon the track.
“It was a slaughter, a massacre of the innocents . . . to the right and left, all the width of the right of way the little bodies had been flung; backs were snapped against the fence posts, brains knocked out; caught on the barbs of the wire, wedged in, the bodies hung suspended. Under-foot it was terrible. The black blood, winking in the star-light, sank down into the clinkers between the tracks with a prolonged sucking murmur.
“Presley turned away, horror-struck, sick at heart. . . . The hideous ruin in the engine’s path drove all thoughts of his poem from his mind. . . . Then faint and prolonged, across the levels of the ranch, he heard the engine whistling. . . . Again and again at rapid intervals in its flying course. . . . Presley saw again in his imagination, the g
alloping monster, the terror of steel and of steam, with its single eye, cyclopean, red, shooting from horizon to horizon, but saw it now as the symbol of a vast power, huge, terrible, flinging the echo of its thunder over all the reaches of the valley, leaving blood and destruction in its path . . . the monster, the Colossus, the Octopus.”
Before the fall plowing begins, we become acquainted with S. Behrman, agent of the railroad in Bonneville, banker, real estate agent, grain dealer, mortgage holder, local political boss. His portrait drawn in a dozen lines — his huge paunch and jowl, his invariable highly varnished hat of brown straw, the light brown linen vest stamped with innumerable interlocked horse shoes, the heavy watch chain of hollow links that clinks, as he breathes, against the vast buttons of imitation mother-of-pearl — discounts that by Howells of Bartley Hubbard.
From him Magnus Derrick and Harran, his younger son, learn that the improved plows ordered by them from the East have to go through to San Francisco and be reshipped to Los Muertos at proportionately extortionate freight rates before their owners can lay hands on them.
Annixter, a neighbor of theirs, sees the plows go by on their way North. He begins plowing on one division of his own ranch after the first heavy rain. There are thirty-five plows ranged en echelon, each with ten horses and five shares. Vanamee gets a job as driver of one of the teams.
“He heard the horse hoofs by the myriads crushing down easily, deeply, into the loam, the prolonged clinking of trace chains, the working of the smooth brown flanks in the harness, the clatter of wooden hames, the champing of bits, the click of iron shoes against the pebbles, the brittle stubble of the surface ground, crackling and snapping as the furrows turned, the sonorous, steady breaths wrenched from the deep, laboring chests strap-bound, shining with sweat, and all along the line the voices of the men talking to the horses. Everywhere there were visions of glossy brown backs, straining, heaving, swollen with muscle; harness streaked with specks of froth; broad, cup-shaped hoofs, heavy with brown loam; men’s faces red with tan, blue overalls spotted with axle grease; muscled hands, the knuckles whitened in their grip on the reins; and through it all the ammoniacal smell of the horses, the bitter reek of perspiration of beasts and men, the aroma of warm leather, the scent of dead stubble; and stronger and more penetrating than everything else, the heavy enervating odor of the upturned living earth.
