Western literature is a genre defined by its geography. There are physical boundaries within which it must remain in order to retain its esteemed title. Even these boundaries are debatable, however, as attested to by those scholars who have spent countless hours and reams of paper debating this never-ending and nagging conundrum. If and when we decide exactly where the West is, there remains the question of the amount of time one must remain in the region to be declared a Westerner. Aldous Huxley spent a lot of time in California, so did Thomas Mann, and yet neither would ever be considered anything approximating a Western writer. Others are more easily identifiable. Take Leo Carillo for instance. While one may not be won over by the merits of his penmanship, there is no arguing the motivation for his regionalism.
Perhaps the best way to determine a writer’s geographical worth however, is to, God forbid, read them. The Western writer will draw his stories from his surroundings just as the Western painter daubs his canvas with the rich hues of his landscapes and the Western photographer is drawn to the dramatic vistas he encounters within his region. Frederick Jackson Turner once said that “the American [writer]. . . is prone to write of America from the prepossessions, experiences and ideals of his particular section,” In Frank Norris’s case this was central California in general and the city of San Francisco in particular. Few writers have more accurately captured the mood and atmosphere of their environment and age.
Like the character Condy Rivers from the novella Blix, Frank Norris was “bawn ‘n’ rais’ in Chicago,” but as he always adds, “I couldn’t help that, you know.” In truth, Norris, like Condy, had come west in the late 1800s as a boy and was about as Californian as a European-descendant could aspire to be before the turn of the century. In a state less than forty years old that had done its best to eradicate its original population, “white” natives were so infrequent in Norris’s time that he once admitted, “No Californian assumes that his neighbor was born in the State.”
From the Bay Area, one has access not only to a bustling cosmopolitan center, but to high peaks, timbered foothills, dramatic seascapes, and vast deserts as well. Norris, as a San Francisco resident and virtual native, was well aware of the power these images held. His use of them as backdrops and even integral props shows an uncanny knack for a populist take on symbolic presentation. What reader could resist the pull of these monumental yet ultimately familiar symbols. In the afterword of McTeague, Kenneth Rexroth notes Norris’s generous use of symbols, and though he is in fact speaking about small objects in the book, it seems fair to transfer some of this uphill to the landscape itself. These symbols, and for our argument we mean the physical world, “stand as pivots of evaluation around which the narrative moves.”
The photograph is faded and grainy. In it, high above the bay on a street named after the state's capitol, stands a two-story wooden house of the Italianate style, a style prevalent in the well-to-do neighborhoods of San Francisco built after 1870. "It was a large frame house of two-stories; all the windows were bay. The front door was directly in the middle between the windows of the parlour and those of the library, while over the vestibule was a sort of balcony that no one ever thought of using." This is a relatively precise description of the Norris family home, where young Frank lived from age fourteen until his tenure studying in Paris, but it is not quoted from the pages of a biographer's notes, but rather from the opening chapter of his novel Vandover And The Brute.
The Sacramento Street house (or mainly its location) makes another appearance in Blix with minor modifications. It gains a story and is divided up into flats where Travis Bessemer lives with her family on the top floor. From the bay window in the dining room Travis and her beau Condy Rivers gaze down in delight at the wondrous scene below them; the ocean pouring in through the palisades of the Golden Gate; the sparkling bay waters dotted with picturesque islands; and the impressive "great watching sphinx" of Mt. Tamalpais looming in the distance. Just down the hill, past the exclusive Van Ness Avenue, ran bustling Polk Street, "itself the home of small tradespeople who lived above their places of business" as did Norris' most infamous character, the dentist McTeague. Norris took delight in detailing both the movements of the workaday city and the grandeur of the nature surrounding it; be it the "vast and prolonged murmur" of the living streets or the"purple sillhouette[s]" of the topography, "swimming in a golden mist, projecting blue shadows before them." It is from these authentic descriptions of the California landscape and the people who inhabit it "the attention to detail" that we feel comfortable assigning Norris the title of a Western writer.
As Norris shared his childhood home with his fictional characters, and in turn with his readers, he also divulged the private geography of his personal life. Upon his return from a taxing stint as a correspondent during the Cuban War, the young writer found solace among the wooded bluffs to the west of his home. "I hope to wallow and grovel in the longest grass I can find in the Presidio reservation on the cliffs overlooking the ocean and absorb ozone and smell smells that don't come from rotting and scorched vegetation, dead horses and bad water." He transposes this place of solitude into a similar haven for several of his novels' characters. As Glen A. Love points out, it is there on the bluffs that "McTeague begins his interior journey back to the Sierra Mountains of his youth" and there that Blix and Condy envision their future and there that Ross Wilbur ponders his past adventures and his future. A half dozen years later, Ishi, the last "wild" Indian in California would also find solitude in this corner of the city. In the dark Sutro Forest overlooking the Pacific, near the campus of U.C. San Francisco where he was ensconced, the lonely California native spent pensive afternoons in a cave he discovered there.
This type of escape, or flight, would show up repeatedly in Norris's literature. Sometimes it was a flight from society, as Ross Wilbur does in Moran of The Lady Letty, or more obtusely as Vandover does in an entirely different manner by not going anywhere at all. Often times the flight is from the law, as in McTeague or The Octopus. Sometimes the flight is from failure. Take for example Marcus's starry-eyed idea of taking up cattle ranching after his political career peters out in McTeague. Like the downward spiral of Vandover, who moves progressively "downtown," these flights are through a geography that suits the characters' current mental and social situation. A proposed change in scenery in the conclusion of The Pit echoes Jadwin and Laura's hesitant optimism. As the couple packs their belongings, Laura asks her husband,"I wonder what the West will be like?" "It will be like starting in all over again , old girl," he replies. This is the West as a fresh start, a place where baggage need not be brought along, truly the only place worth fleeing to.
One gets the feeling that in Norris's world the urge to flee?the pull of the unknown?has an unflinching hold on man. In the opening chapter of Moran, the young dandy Ross Wilbur finds himself drugged and forced into servitude aboard a filthy schooner bound for God-knows-where. The middle-class lad?"One of Society's Most Popular Members"?has been accustomed to the easy life in San Francisco and finds himself torn between the terror of the unknown and the pull of adventure. As his ship is leaving the bay it passes nearby a yacht packed with "girls in smart gowns and young fellows in white ducks and yachting caps": the associates of his former life. Here is his chance to escape?a quick dive and swim to comfort?but he chooses the unknown, the voyage. "The highest aim of literature," according to Lawrence, is "to escape. . . to cross the horizon, enter into another life". . . It is thus that Melville finds himself in the middle of the Pacific," and thus that Wilbur finds himself mate on a pirate ship.
In their Dialogues, Gilles De Leuze and Claire Parnet agree that "nothing is more active than a flight. It is the opposite of the imaginary." As much as Norris's work can be traced to the naturalism of Emil Zola, it can also been linked to the related school of realism, in that its characters are ordinary people who are examined as closely under Norris's microscope as were Zola’s in Germinal or La Terre. In the essay “A plea for romantic fiction,” Norris calls out not for sentimentalism nor “cloaks and daggers or moonlight and golden hair,” but for an “instrument with which we may go straight through the clothes and tissues and wrappings of flesh down deep into the red, living heart of things.” He calls for attention to truthful detail and suggests focus on the tales of excitement going on in California, the adventurous life happening every day in the streets, wharves, and saloons of the young city.
Critic Don Graham is apt to reiterate the importance of the “relationship between the fiction and source.” Norris’s stories were often plucked from contemporary newspapers, he points out. In 1902 for example, Jack London was accused of pilfering a short story from Norris. After a third published story with a similar plot was located, careful investigation proved that all three writers’ tales were based on a true story occurring in Seattle. These gritty details—”gritty” meaning “true”— were what Norris most sought. His brand of realism shunned the imaginary, for that was not the true grit. If as Parnet argues that a flight is the opposite of the imaginary, than it is real. McTeagues’ flight to the desert; Jadwin Curtis’s flight out West in defeat; Vanamee’s extended stays in the wilderness and Dyke’s fugitive lam to the High Sierra in The Octopus; Moran’s run to primitive Mexico; even Vandover’s decline into low society are flights not of fancy, but of reality, giving Norris the platform to try out his theories on real-life events.
Claire Parnet has argued that “American literature operates according to geographical lines: the flight towards the West.” Norris’s work certainly follows that logic, specifically in instances such as the aforementioned ending of The Pit or Dyke’s return to the valley after his alpine exile. Only McTeague flees east, but even then it is to the barren frontiers of the mountains and the desert, an escape from the urbanized West Coast. Historian Henry Nash Smith told of a writer for Hunt’s Merchant Magazine who in 1851 foresaw the future of the West “when millions of civilized persons would be living on the Pacific slope” while the interior regions would remain primitive wastelands filled with “half-pastoral, nomadic tribes.” It is to this state that McTeague has declined, and it is to this region he travels for it is the only place he can belong. Yet even there he cannot fit in. He becomes a hunted animal as society pursues him in the form of wanted posters brought down from San Francisco and a tireless posse joined by his old pal Marcus. Even the landscape seems to turn against this throwback. “Lord, what a country,” the dentist mutters as the heat and dust drive him to the brink of death.
Glen A. Love has noticed a shift in Norris’s career in regards to his feelings about flight. Early on he felt that Norris seemed to embrace the escape from the constraints of civilization, “the lessons to be learned by modern, urban man in the ‘canyons of the higher mountains, . . . the plunge of streams and swirling rivers yet without names, . . .the wilderness, the plain, the wide-rimmed deserts.’” But, as Love points out, Norris grows to the understanding that man must adapt to the city center, “for he sees the commercial and urban present as an inescapable stage in evolutionary process and in the ‘Great March’ of Anglo-Saxon pioneering.” This is why McTeague must leave the city and go east, or “backwards,” for he is “an anachronism. . . and thus unsuited to take part in the evolutionary march.” Jadwin and Laura flee the metropolis as well, but their flight rightly fits the pattern of a Turnerian fresh start, and thus the normal pattern of westward migration.
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The one group that makes the strongest claim to the genius of Frank Norris is interestingly enough not the keepers of the California canon, whose continued obsession with their Londons and Steinbecks has deterred them thus far from unveiling an Octopus State Park or a Vandover and the Brute interactive museum, but the members of his undergraduate fraternity at the University of California at Berkeley. The “discovery” of young Norris by the Phi Gamma Delta brotherhood, or “Fijis” as they like to call themselves, has reached epic proportions in the history of the organization, to the point of the creation of their own sentimental geography when it comes to their best-known brother. The Fijis have dedicated much of their tradition to Norris, be it in the form of a Norris-themed six-by-nine-foot stained glass window in their house where he lived, an engraved stone bench in a park where he sat, or the continuing veneration of a long-since demolished hotel in the Tenderloin where pre-game festivities were once opened with the reading of a piece of Norris’s prose he had wired out West to his brothers when he became homesick at Harvard. Even their agreed-upon narrative seems mired in reminiscence and sentimentality.
According to official Fiji literature, the fraternity’s initial encounter with their future literary mascot took place where the sea meets the shore at the west end of San Francisco. There, a restaurant/gathering place called appropriately The Cliff House clings to the last vestiges of civilized solidity before the edge of the continent itself is swept into the great unknown, the “vast illimitable plain of green—the open Pacific.” It all began one stormy December in 1890. “Thousands had gathered” to watch a fatally-injured ship as it labored perilously off the rocks. Though it was raining and windy, no one, including Fijian Ralph Hathorn from whom this recollection was gathered, wanted to miss the terrible spectacle of the vessel being dashed upon the rocks. Hathorn noticed amongst the crowd a tall, gaunt young man with neither umbrella nor overcoat. Feeling an inexplicable camaraderie towards the him, Hathorn offered to share his own.
In the end, the ship sinks, the two young men hit it off, share steaks and wine at the Palace Hotel, and the rest is Fiji history. It’s a touching scene right out of one of Norris’s own novels. But according to author James A. Gibbs who combed the annals of the San Francisco Maritime Society, there were no major shipwrecks at San Francisco that winter. There are records of a ship called the Palestine sinking nearby the following summer, and I believe it was the foul weather of a San Francisco summer that prompted Mark Twain to compare it to the coldest winters of his memory. Perhaps over the years the dates have become blurred or perhaps sentimental Fijians have adopted a story derived from Norris’s own imagination, for it is at that very Cliff House that Marcus cedes his interest in his cousin to the infatuated McTeague over beer and camaraderie. “They took great pleasure in each other’s company,” Norris wrote, “But silently and with reservation, having the masculine horror of any demonstration of friendship.” It is a scene wrought with male bonding in such plenitude that one can hardly blame the fraternity for wanting to call it their own.
•••
As we have seen from his appropriation of contemporary newspaper accounts and his frequent use of familiar architecture and locales, Norris’s was well aware of the benefits of careful observation and research. Some of it came easy to the young writer. The gilded tooth sign that McTeague covets and eventually acquires was an actual landmark at the corner of Market and Kearney captured for posterity in a street photograph found in the files of the San Francisco Historical Society. Similarly, the saloons, the streets, the parks, the fish-stocked reservoirs, the tony neighborhoods, and the ghost towns were all easily witnessed in Norris’s’ world.
Other details required more concentrated discipline. In order to research the agricultural life so thoroughly dissected in The Octopus, Norris had an extensive stay at a ranch in California’s central valley. Though he would move the action in his novel to the south and west, and in doing so confusing some botanists with his oddly placed flora, it was his experiences on a working farm that strengthened his narrative with realistic (or in his own terms “romantic”) detail. Like Zola, Norris felt it was “incumbent on the naturalist to acquire, from all sources—books, people, direct experience—all the knowledge indispensable to the content of his novel.”
Much has been said of the fact that Norris was a pupil of Joseph Le Conte at U.C. Berkeley. And while even more noise has been made of his influence on Progressivism, and his religiously-accepting evolution theory, it might also be noted that Le Conte was a noted outdoorsman and trekker and mountaineer, not to mention a founder member of the Sierra Club. We know that Le Conte’s theories made an impression on the young Norris, could his lifestyle have as well? Could Norris’s affinity for the High Sierra, Death Valley, and the other natural wonders of California sprung from this relationship? Was he influenced by the teacher’s frequent outings into the wilderness?
“The magnificent natural surroundings” that the California afforded were the ideal backdrops for the actions of Norris’s characters according to Glen A. Love. Specifically Love sees the locale of San Francisco as the perfect setting to illustrate McTeague’s “urban sojourn,” as he arrives into the city from the Sierra an inexperienced apprentice, and gradually rises to a “bewildered” respectability and participates in civilized society’s rituals. When his world begins to crumble, McTeague reverts to his former self and finally, at odds with civilization, becomes a fugitive. The geographical narrative follows along appropriately, from the rough foothills of the Gold Country, to the crowded city streets, to the industrial mud flats of the East Bay, and then back to the mountains and the desert. The evolving/devolving geography mirrors the topography of McTeague’s troubled psyche. While not going so far as to attribute certain human emotions to rock types McTeague encounters in Death Valley as does Mary Lawlor in her far-out book Recalling The Wild, Love convincingly links the described landscape to the current emotional states of its traversers.
Frank Norris would have appreciated Erich Von Stroheim’s 1925 adaptation of McTeague, “Greed.” The director insisted on shooting pivotal scenes at the exact locations that they occurred in the book. McTeague’s offices at 611 Polk St. appear as realistic settings, because they are. As we watch the dentist’s inner struggle over the presence of the anaesthetized Trina, we can see the hustle and bustle of real-life Polk Street unfolding through the windows behind him, “the setting with its busy sidewalks and noisy cable-cars [that so] appealed to the imagination of the young novelist.” McTeague and Marcus’s pivotal meeting is likewise filmed at the actual Cliff House where the breakers swell and ebb below them and the Sunday crowd parades by. But perhaps Von Stroheim’s most astonishing scenes are those of McTeague and Trina’s courting period in the tidal flats near Oakland where “the primitive and elemental natural world which [McTeague] typifies stands at the edges of the novel’s action” and at the barrier of civilization and nature, where train tracks, power lines, and sewer pipes crisscross the wetlands.
As the two stroll out to the end of the sewer to spoon, a splendid panorama emerges behind them. In the far distance we see the hulking shadow of Mt. Tamalpais with the near side of Tiburon and the Marin Headlands below them. Dead center is Angel Island, a wooded mound rising from the bay. No towers of a bridge detract from the drama of the Golden Gate. And there, directly behind the lovers, is San Francisco itself, a brownish hill almost unrecognizable without its familiar skyline. This is the San Francisco of Frank Norris, captured in real time as if to prove the authenticity of his descriptions.
by Erik Bluhm
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Deleuze, Gilles and Parnet, Claire. Dialogues. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
Dillingham, William B. Frank Norris: Instinct and Art. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969.
Ertel, Grace. “Tales of the Golden State’s golden age of literature: Bailey Millard remembers.” The Californians (May/June 1985. Vol. 3 no. 3), 24-32.
Everett, Wallace W. “Frank Norris in his chapter.” The Phi Gamma Delta, Volume 52, Number 6 (April 1930), 560-566. www.phigam.org/history/Magazine/NorrisAtUC.htm
Everson, William. Archetype West: The Pacific Coast as a Literary Region. Berkeley: Oyez, 1976.
Graham, Don. Critical Essays on Frank Norris. Boston, Massachusetts: G.K. Hall and Co., 1980.
Graham, Don. The Fiction of Frank Norris: The Aesthetic Context. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978.
Jacobs, Wilbur R., Ed. America’s Great Frontiers and Sections: Frederick Jackson Turner’s Unpublished Essays. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965.
Lawlor, Mary. Recalling the Wild: Naturalism and the Closing of the West. Rutgers University Press, 2000.
Love, Glen A. “Frank Norris’s Western Metropolis.” Western American Literature, 11 (May, 1976), 3-22.
Marchand, Ernest. Frank Norris: A Study. New York: Octagon Books, Inc., 1942.
Shulmate, Dr. Albert and Lewis , Oscar, Eds., Homes of California Authors. The Book Club of California, 1967. A series of twelve folders issued to the club's members during 1967. The text in the Norris folder was written by James D. Hart.
Starr, Kevin. Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Stone, Irving. Jack London: Sailor on Horseback. New York: Doubleday and Co., 1947.
Walker, Franklin. A Literary History of Southern California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950—213, 220.
Ziff, Larzer. The American 1890s: Life and Times of a Lost Generation. New York: Viking Press, 1966—250-274.
Zola, Emil. The Earth. New York: Penguin Books, 1980. Translatation and introduction by Douglas Parmee.
In 1951, Utahn Waldo Wilcox bought 1,350 acres of desert ranch land on Range Creek, somewhere between the town of Green River and Desolation Canyon. After more than 50 years of ranching, Wilcox recently sold to a public land trust. But this relic of the Old West offered a bit more: tucked into the cliffs and canyons of Wilcox Ranch are somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 archeological sites from the Fremont and Anasazi Indians, dating back more than 800 years. There are granaries, rock art, cliff dwellings, and burial grounds.