Julian Hawthorne Reviews The Octopus
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Frank Norris wrote Julian Hawthorne on June 9, 1901, to thank him for his "kind and extremely discriminating review of The Octopus" that had appeared that day in the Sunday supplement to the Philadelphia North American. Unfortunately, this review has been lost to scholarship because no copy of the supplement is known to survive. As Jesse Crisler notes, should a copy of the review surface, it "will perhaps prove a significant addition" to "critical estimates of Norris" by a "solid member" of the "literary establishment" at the time (Norris 233).
As Hawthorne's only biographer allows, Nathaniel Hawthorne's son could "quite seriously advance his critical views on other writers and the art of writing" in the various venues available to him (Bassan 175). He was also an important book critic, while living in England in the 1870s serving as a reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette, the Spectator, and the Examiner; and as literary editor in later years for such papers as the New York World, Philadelphia North American, Bookmart, America, Wilshire's, and the New York American. One scholar even blames him for instigating the decline in Margaret Fuller's critical reputation in the late-nineteenth century (Mitchell 213).
As the author of several gothic romances as well as the son of the greatest American romancer, moreover, Julian Hawthorne particularly scorned literary realism and naturalism. His bête noir was Zola, whose novels he considered "a mixture of the police gazette and the medical reporter.… So far as Zola is conscientious" or conventional, he averred, "let him live; but, in so far as he is revolting, let him die" (Hawthorne, Confessions 59). The comment tempers his enthusiasm for Norris's The Octopus, a clipping of which fortunately survives among Julian Hawthorne's papers in the [End Page 189] Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. At some 2300 words, it is one of the longest reviews of Norris's fiction that appeared before his death sixteen months later. Curiously, Hawthorne does not mention the character of Presley, the protagonist of The Octopus, in his review. But he obviously thought he had been prophetic in hailing Norris: Hawthorne excerpted the review at length in his weekly column in the Pasadena Star-News a third of a century later (Hawthorne, "Norris" 1934).
- The Book of the Month
[Philadelphia North American Supplement 9 June 1901]
Fiction is the only method by which a successful picture of a contemporary social state can be made. It can be as scientifically true as a formal treatise on sociology, or a statistical compilation, which it has the advantage of artistic arrangement and compendiousness, and of that human interest which keep books alive and makes them readable.
It was Balzac who first gave scientific development to the conception, and he has been followed by Zola; in the works of these two men the France of the nineteenth century has been adequately presented. It is somewhat singular that until now a similar attempt has not been made either in England or in America. It can hardly be said that the ability has been lacking either here or there; and, in fact, some approximation to the achievement may be found in the works of Thackeray. But Thackeray had no scientific motive, and he also wanted persistence and energy to carry out such a scheme, even had it occurred to him. Dickens gives us many vivid, if somewhat extravagant, pictures of the part of English life that he knew, but he knew nothing of society in its higher forms, and he was too much of a humorist to be always trustworthy as a recorder. Trollope in many ways supplemented the work of Dickens and Thackeray; but he was no more inclusive of the phenomena of the entire community than his great rivals were. Other leading English novelists have treated other phases of the great panorama that spread around them, and it might be a good idea to arrange in order a number of novels of these various writers, so as to form in their aggregate a comprehensive picture of Balzacian scope, though...
