by Frank Norris
From: Munsey’s Magazine, V. XX, No. 4, January 1899, p.653
A story betrays many things about its author, little facts about his personality that he is quite unconscious of registering. One may catch glimpses of him over the hero’s shoulder, and make very good guesses at his manner of bearing himself from his manner of shaping his phrases.
No man with a light, careful footstep could have written “Moran of the Lady Letty.” It goes at a sure, strong pace, straight at the object wanted, and one hears the sound stump of heels in every page. It is the pace of one whose feet push the ground away from them with their surplus vigor.
It is to the sense of fresh vitality that this book of high adventure owes half its charm. It is a thing built of flesh and blood, bone and muscle. It has a mind of its own, and a temper. It goes to sea for adventures, and finds them, too, strange, picturesque events new to the world of fiction, part of them taken, no doubt, from the experiences of some weather beaten old sea captain, since man’s imagination does not furnish such odd yet plausible properties without the help of living facts...
Moran herself, “sired of the surges,” moves like some splendid valkyr through the story;
Shunning men and shunned of women, a strange, lonely creature, solitary as the ocean whereon she lived, beautiful after her fashion; as yet without sex; proud, untamed, splendid in her savage primal independence – a thing untouched and unsullied by civilization. Her purity was the purity of primeval glaciers…Wilbur found himself…wondering to just what note the untouched cords would vibrate; just how she should be awakened one morning to find that she – Moran, sea rover, virgin unconquered, without law, without land, without sex – was, after all, a woman.
It is a sincere story as well as a quick, stirring one, written with a convincing belief in its people and events, and not without a certain scorn of the probabilities. One reads it with a sense of salt on the lips — and, once, in the eyes. The author, Frank Norris, is a young Californian with a strong taste for adventure that has already taken him from South Africa to Cuba, and a strong fist for the wielding of a pen. He has made a good beginning in fiction.
From: The Speaker, November 17, 1900, p.190
Mr. Frank Norris’s A Man’s Woman (London: Grant Richards) is a very good type of that class of fiction which is written by American admirers of Mr. Rudyard Kipling. It is “strong” and realistic with that kind of realism which strives to parade a greater knowledge of a business than its own professors. The effect is good enough in its way, though, if the Arctic exploration part of the book is as laughable technically as a doctor to whom we showed it found the medical part, it is not in the way that Mr. Norris would have preferred. The adventures in frozen latitudes of the Freja Expedition are certainly vigorously described, and we read them with much more interest than we did the accounts of the relations between its leader and “the man’s woman.” In Koiyuchin Bay Ward Bennett was a man, but in his treatment of Lloyd Searight he was undeniably a brute. In fact, during the greater part of the book one is inclined to believe both of them rather less than human. This is redeemed by the ending of the book, in which we see again, what we saw in Blix, that Mr. Norris’s great gift is in saving sentiment from sentimentality by a certain breeziness of style and clear vision of the normal. The abnormal is best left to the giants, and Mr. Norris, though he can write a very readable novel, is but of mortal stature.
From: The Critic, V. XXXVI, No. 4, April 1900, p.352-353
“Notes of a Novel Reader”
It may be that there are people so misguided as to apply to “A Man’s Woman” that much-abused adjective, “realistic.” It is the last word in the world to describe what Mr. Norris has done. He has created an improbable man and an impossible woman, put them into an unimaginable situation, and then breathed the breath of life into them. They live and move, there is no doubt of that. They are vital, vivid, colossal if you like, but they are no more realistic than the Yellowstone Park or the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. That is, they are freaks of Nature, not her normal products. But they are worth while.
The grip which Mr. Norris gets upon your attention is a thing in itself, and deserving of study. This unreal book is perfectly convincing. The unsympathetic characters hold your interest tensely, though they never succeed for a second in winning a morsel of your affection. The writer’s method is the exact reverse of, for instance, Barrie’s. The latter demands that his readers love his characters at once. If you are obdurate and do not love them, you stand in imminent danger of being bored by them at times, but few indeed are the readers whose affections escape the snares set for them by Tommy and the rest. Neither Lloyd Searight nor Ward Bennett is lovable for an instant, but then they are not uninteresting for an instant either. Bennett is an Arctic explorer, “having more the look of a prize-fighter than of a scientist.” “His lower jaw was huge almost to deformity, like that of the bulldog, the chin salient, the mouth close-gripped, with great lips, indomitable, brutal. The forehead was contracted and small, the forehead of men of single ideas, and the eyes too were small and twinkling, one of them marred by a sharply defined cast.”
Ward Bennett is “magerful “beyond anything ever dreamed of in the philosophy of the late Edward Fairfax Rochester. The sub-title of the book might have been “ And a Woman’s Man,” for this hero in his ugliness and his primeval force is a good deal nearer the type that most women will accept as worshipful than Lloyd Searight is to the average man’s ideal of femininity. The title of the story is a challenge. What constitutes a man’s woman? When a woman uses the term she means some one who is unwilling to win popularity among her sisters — which must always be bought by character; tenderness, quick intuitions, and absolute square-dealing in regard to the emotional property of another woman being perhaps the favored virtues — when she can obtain admiration from the other half of the race by cheaper means. Lloyd Searight is a great Brunhilde-creature with a glory of copper-colored hair and dull blue eyes, large-handed, deep-chested, serious. She studies nursing and employs part of her fortune in building a Nurse’s Agency where her theories can be carried out. She is not animated by philanthropy or a love of humanity, but by a desire to count in the general economy of things. She, too, is stubborn, masterful, and insolent in conscious power. She is as far from any ideal of a man’s woman heretofore presented as the east is from the west. Perhaps, if man were to create woman from his inner consciousness, he might turn out something so big, simple, and serious as this, because he would not have the material at hand for a composition more alluring, subtle, dear. It would almost seem that no one but Providence has the touch which is desirable in fashioning the creature feminine.
After her lover has been returned to her from the horrors of starvation within the Arctic circle, and, later, from the clutch of fever, Lloyd sends him away again into the hell of the frozen North, because it is “his work,” and she deems it needful to his soul’s health. Providence would repudiate such a woman, and the reader’s indignation is boundless. But when indignation has exhausted itself, interest still remains. Whether we like what he does with it or not, such lavish power as Mr. Norris shows is an exhilarating spectacle. His prodigious, brutal beings are tonic as the great West itself is tonic, and the air in which they live and breathe yields an intoxicating oxygen.
From: The Critic, V. XLIV, No. 4, April 1904, p.382
These are not to be ignored because they are short stories while their author was famed as a writer of long ones. They are quite good enough to command attention, independently. Doubtless the title story will be anticipated with most interest by Mr. Norris’s admirers, because of its having been a kind of preliminary sketch written during the preparation of “The Pit.” Yet it is by no means the best in this collection of striking and unhackneyed tales, which are rather the more interesting for not being in the ordinary short-story manner. There is a background of the West in all the stories, strongly and competently sketched in. The characters, too, are set forth with an admirab
le ease that suggests that their author knew a great deal more about them than he told.
Mr. Norris liked the unusual and the dramatic. He also liked horrors, which he handled ably, if not always discreetly; and he liked to place them in near and perilous juxtaposition to comedy. “A Bargain with Peg-Leg” is eminently characteristic of its writer. The story that is likely to be remembered the longest, however, is that striking “Memorandum of Sudden Death,” in which Mr. Norris surpasses his ordinary level of performance in achieving an effect of extreme horror without the affronting description of material unloveliness and unsightliness. It may or may not be likely that a young United States trooper with an interest in writing fiction should have kept a journal, in concise, vivid fragments, u to the very moment of his death at the hands of Indians who had been following him and his companions across the desert for four days. At all events, such a question would never occur while reading the story, which is the important point.
It is to be regretted that the delightful stories of adventure which deal with those modern San Francisco pirates, the “Three Black Crows.” and their cruises in behalf of the “South Pacific Exploitation Company,” were not published separately. In geniality and humor they are greatly ahead of much of Mr. Norris’s more ambitious work.
The author of “The Pit” is not at his best in writing a love story, but the two included in this collection are to be commended. The faults of Mr. Norris’s novels, faults of structure and of taste, do not appear in this admirable volume which is a most prepossessing medium through which to view a writer who has had no lack of praise.
The Biography
Norris, c. 1901
Norris’ brother, Charles Gilman Norris (1881-1945) was also a gifted novelist.
FRANK NORRIS by Charles G. Norris
1870-1902 : AN INTIMATE SKETCH OF THE MAN WHO WAS UNIVERSALLY ACCLAIMED THE GREATEST AMERICAN WRITER OF HIS GENERATION
FRANK NORRIS was a born story-teller; he acquired the art of literary expression after hard work and a long apprenticeship. His original intention was to be an artist. When he was seventeen he went to France, and enrolled as a student at the Atelier Julien, in Paris. He remained there two years and became absorbed, not in art, but in chivalry. The reading of Froissart’s Chronicles was his daily recreation. He became so imbued with the spirit of medievalism, and so familiar with the manners and customs of the time, that once with much amusement he pointed out to me an error in Scott’s “Ivanhoe,” in which one of its characters is described as wearing a certain kind of armor that was not in use until a hundred years later; a mistake that was as obvious to him as if someone to-day should depict Richelieu in a frock coat and top hat.
Many and diverse reasons have led men and women to literature, but none quite so strange as that which induced him to elect that vocation.
His earliest ventures into literature were more to provide a vehicle for his illustrations than for any interest he had in writing itself. Thus it was that his first novel, “Robert d’Artois,” was written, — a crude amateurish effort that bore little evidence that he was ever to become a great author.
But he loved story-telling, and his imagination knew no limitations. My earliest recollections are of the endless and involved stories of love and chivalry that he wove about my lead soldiers, to my never-failing enchantment and delight. There were several thousands of these soldiers, and each captain and lieutenant had a name and history of his own. In these stories there was an utter disregard of historical accuracy and sequence. Thus the Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, the Cid and Khedive, Machiavelli and Corbullo the Saxon all lived and had their being together in this miniature world of lead. There were eleven years between our ages, and it is impossible to suppose that my brother found any lasting amusement in entertaining one so much younger than himself. Rather, I fancy, it was his interest in his own mental processes, and in the fantastic situations he devised. He would spend hours fashioning wonderful cannon, out of the thick handles of his paint-brushes, and the sides of cigar-boxes. These were painted ivory black with red trimmings, and christened ‘‘The Spitfire,” and “The Peacemaker.” He drew maps of the two countries continually at war, “Sparta” and “Rome,” dividing them into provinces, carefully marking the rivers and mountains, roads and railways.
A sketch of his dog “Monk” by Frank Norris, one of the few examples of his work as an artist, that has been preserved.
At this time we were all in Paris. When the family returned to California, leaving Frank in Paris to continue his study of art, he began writing me a novel in which all our favorite characters reappeared, revolving about myself, whom he described as the nephew of the Duke of Burgundy. I wish I had space to repeat this story in detail. It was written in the second person, on closely-ruled notepaper, one sheet slipped inside another, and the whole fastened together with a small loop of red or blue string in the upper left hand corner. It came to me in chapters, rolled up inside French newspapers to save postage. Each installment was profusely illustrated with pencil sketches, mostly of myself as an esquire, a man-at-arms, an equerry, and finally as a knight. Plots and episodes from the works of Scott, Francis Bacon, Frank Stockton and others were lifted bodily, sometimes the actual wording was borrowed. I remember a sentence, “The night closed down dark as a wolf’s mouth,” that years later I found again in the opening of a chapter of “Quentin Durward.”
Frank came home before these adventures were finished. He left the heroine lashed to a railroad track, and me locked in a neighboring switchman’s tower. My story was never concluded, but it was to this time in our lives that he referred in his dedication of “The Pit:”
“In memory of certain lamentable tales of the round (dining-room) table heroes; of the epic of the pewter platoons, and the romance-cycle of ‘Gaston le Fox, which we invented, maintained, and found marvelous at a time when we both were boys.”
He was nineteen when he came home and began to prepare for the entrance examinations of the University of California. While he was studying for them he elected to write a three canto poem in the metre of Scott’s verse. It was the first writing of merit that he did. While still in Paris he had written a short article on the armor of the fifteenth century, and illustrated it, but it was no such serious attempt as was the poem. “Ancient Armour” appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, in March 1889, and he received nine dollars, — the first money ever earned by his pen.
The three canto poem was entitled “Yvernelle,” and was published by Lippincott. He sent some of his pen-and-ink sketches with it, but these were returned. The publishers felt that the book would sell best as a holiday offering, in which illustrations played an important part. I suppose that this was only a polite way of saying that his own illustrations were not good enough. Will Low and Frederick Dealman eventually did some of the pictures, and the book was bound very handsomely, and sold for three and five dollars a volume.
While he was in college Frank began to take his writing seriously. He did not have a very high respect for his instructors in the English department. I recall his irritation when an essay on “Thomas a Becket” was returned to him, with no more definite criticism that the single word “Fustian,” scrawled across its title page. But he began to read fiction critically, and at this time was never without a yellow paper-covered novel of Zola in his hand. He loved Kipling, too, and Richard Harding Davis, and thought William Dean Howells a much greater novelist than, in those days, he was generally conceded to be.
One of Frank’s first stories, “Son of a Sheik,” was written while he was a Sophomore, and published in the Argonaut. Another very remarkable story, called “Lauth,” appeared in the Overland Monthly. During the early part of 1894, — his last six months at the University of California, — a series of stories, under the general heading of “Outward and Visible Signs,” made their appearance in the Overland, and in August of the same year, “The Caged Lion,” one of the best short stories he ever wrote, was published in the Argonaut. He never
sold anything to the eastern magazines, however. The manuscripts he sent, unfailingly came back. He had hopes that William Doxey, who had then a flourishing publishing business in San Francisco, would bring out a volume of his short stories. I remember how earnestly he worked on some of the illustrations for this book, pressing me into service as his model, keeping me posing for hours. He was undecided between “Beer and Skittles” and “On and Off the Asphalt” as a title. But this plan never came to anything.
Some time before he completed his four years at the California University he began “McTeague;” it was well started before he came east to take a year’s post-graduate work at Harvard. This was the most formative year of his life as a writer. I have heard him say many times that he learned more about writing the English language, in the nine months course of “English 22,” under Professor Lewis E. Gates, than he did during any other period of his life. He dedicated “McTeague” to Professor Gates when it was published. About this time, too, he began to study the dictionary. I have seen him poring over it for hours, making notes of words and their meanings. Every morning he always read the death notices in the newspapers, for the sake of finding unusual names. It was from this source that he got Annixter, Jadwin, and Magnus Derrick.
He wrote the greater part of “McTeague” during his year at Harvard, but before completing it, he commenced “Vandover and The Brute,” the novel which has just been published. This book was destined to have a curious history. It was inspired, to a large degree, by the unmorality of the undergraduates with whose lives he was familiar. Grewsome in theme, powerfully realistic, he followed the story to its terrible and logical conclusion, then laid it aside for other work, and all but forgot its very existence. After his death it remained in storage, packed away in a San Francisco warehouse, and when, in the fire that followed the great earthquake, the storehouse was burned to the ground, “Vandover” was presumably destroyed with it. By a curious destiny, however, the crate containing the manuscript was saved, but it was only after years that it was identified, and the lost story brought to light.
