Frank Norris Revisited by Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. (review)

176 Western American Literature This was a particularly yeasty era for Vienna, then both the capital of a dying empire and the birthplace (for good and ill) of much that has defined the twentieth century: a Traum und Wirklichkeit time of Strauss waltzes and psycho­ analysis, hedonism and fashionable nihilism, the Jugenstil of Gustav Klimt and Otto Wagner, the proto-fascism of mayor Karl Leuger, and the pacifism of Baroness von Suttner. Into all of this came the Clemens family, seeking piano lessons for Clara and medical treatment for Livy and Jean. Clemens (who spoke nearly fluent German) was embraced by this celebrity-loving city, and entered with pleasure, and occasional revulsion, into its political, intellectual, and social scenes. Dolmetsch produces detailed portraits of the several circles in which Clemens moved. Most importantly, he shows how the Viennese experience reinforced and altered Clemens’s personal philosophy, and provided him with material for the work of his last years, especially the Mysterious Stranger drafts, What is Man ? (which Dolmetsch admires), and Christian Science, as well as journalistic pieces such as “Stirring Times in Austria.” Moreover, since Vienna’s anti-Semitic press regularly attacked Clemens as a ‘Jewish American writer,” the Austrian experi­ ence continued his life-long education in tolerance. (Much later, Sigmund Freud would cite approvingly Mark Twain’s “Concerning the Jews,” and Dolmetsch speculates, inconclusively, that young Freud and Clemens may have met.) Thus “a missing piece in an almost completed jigsaw puzzle” of Clemens’s life is provided. Our Famous Guest is meticulously researched, and written with jargon-free grace. We leave it with an altered and enriched sense of Mark Twain’s later years. ^CHARLES L. CROW Bowling Green State. University ink Norris Revisited. ByJoseph R. McElrath.Jr. (New York: Twayne Publishers, iy92. 145 pages, $23.95.) Twayne’s second-generation series returns to Frank Norris thirty years after Warren French’s original Twayne United States Authors Series study. McElrath states that his work is in friendly rivalry with French’s, not a replacement, but the new study benefits from an increasingly sophisticated debate over Natural­ ism, and from a growing body of data about Norris’s life and his parents’ marriage. At the moment, indeed, three biographies of Norris are being writ­ ten; McElrath is one of these biographers. Thus Frank Norris Revisited may be seen as a preview of a new generation of Norris scholarship. McElrath’s Norris was the product of “incompetent” parents, struggling to define himself within late-Victorian norms of masculinity. The frontispiece photograph appropriately shows an immature, slightly foppish young man, in contrast to the hearty early-graying author of the usual Doubleday publicity shots. Following a suggestion by Franklin Walker, McElrath builds his psycho­ logical portrait around an apparent mental collapse in 1897, from which Norris emerged to begin his great period of productivity. (Doubtless the Freudian Edwin H. Miller, another of the biographers in the chase, will have much to say about this period, and Norris’s relationship with his histrionic mother.) McElrath’s criticism rises to the challenge of the dreadful Moran and A M an’ s Woman (a test of any Norris scholar), producing illumination without stooping to praise. He proposes a new, somewhat heterodox interpretation of The Octopus, and adjudicates tactfully the differing readings of Laura’s sexuality in The Pit. His reading of Norris and Naturalism (Norris was a “Humanist who used Naturalistic literary methods”) is an intelligent compromise between conflicting critical camps. The limitations of the book are those of the Twayne format: cramped space, undergraduate audience, stiff price. Anyone interested in Norris will read it for its impeccable current scholarship, but will see it as a stop-gap while awaiting McElrath’s biography (and those of his competitors, Miller and Rich­ ard Davison). There, perhaps, we will learn more about Norris’s experiences in South Africa and Cuba, and their contribution to his growth; and about the evolution of his masterpiece McTeague (paradoxically drafted before the crisis which initiated his artistic maturity). Perhaps there the vexing question of Norris’s racism, indexed in the present volume but not discussed, will be at last confronted. ^CHARLES L. CROW Bowling Green State University Reviews 177...