Stroheim

8. Greed

8 (9rttd Ont dill! prior to 1919, Stroheim's eye fell upon a book called McTeague: A Story of San Francisco, by Frank Norris. The subtitle may have attracted him, because he had lived in that area, but it was the content that held his attention. Here was a story that had guts, honesty, and drama, the very qualities he most admired. Although the novel had been filmed in five reels as Life's VVhirlpool (1916),it is doubtful that he ever saw it at that time. Norris, born in 1870 in Chicago to a well-offfamily, studied art in Paris in his teens, and at the age of twenty went to the University of California at Berkeley. During his four years there, he published numerous articles about the purposes of literature. He was deeply influenced by Joseph Le Conte, a professor at Berkeley, who attempted to relate Darwinism to man's spirituality. Le Conte asserted that mankind developed in two stages-animal evolution, controlled by heredity and environment (with physical strength a vital factor), followed by spiritual evolution, in which the "mind" shaped human advancement. Norris saw these factors at work in a gruesome murder he read about in the newspaper in October 1893. A working-class man who frequently beat his wife and forced her to give him money finally stabbed her to death in a kindergarten where she worked as a janitor. This event provided the stimulus for a novel, which Norris began the next year while taking a writing course at Harvard. In 1897, he revised the earlier parts and completed the book, which was published in 186 Greed 187 1899 as McTeague. Three years later, the young writer died from appendicitis and was buried in Oakland. Norris's book, steeped in French naturalism (a mode created by Emile Zola in the late 1800s), was a far cry from the belles lettres of contemporary American writers such as Edith Wharton and Henry James. Filled with minute detail, McTeague treated the lower classes in a realistic manner and showed that man's nature, despite free will, is determined by genetic and environmental factors. Norris claimed that naturalism was not realism, although the two were often lumped together .The realists, he explained, dealt with common people who did nothing out of the ordinary, whereas "terrible things must happen to the characters of the naturalistic tale. They must be twisted from the ordinary, wrenched out from the quiet, uneventful round ofevery-day life, and flung into the throes of a vast and terrible drama that works itself out in unleashed passions, in blood, and in sudden death. No teacup tragedies here."l Norris's description ofnaturalism was also an apt description ofMcTeague. His tale takes place in a harsh but familiar world, a grim and unsavory universe of common people beset by ungovernable drives.This treatment was consistent with Stroheim's own mordant views. Stroheim not only studied McTeague but also became familiar with Norris's essays, one ofwhich rang a responsive bell in Stroheim's psyche. In his foreword to the film, he cites a portion of that essay (shown in italics in this quotation from the foreword): To make money is not the province of a novelist. If he is the right sort he has other responsibilities, heavy ones. He of all men cannot think only of himself or for himself. And when the last page is written and the ink crusts on the pen-point and the hungry presses go clashing after another writer, the "new Man" and the new fashion ofthe hour, he will think of the grim long grind of the years of his life that he has put behind him and of his work that he has built up volume by volume, sincere work, telling the truth as he saw it, independent of fashion and the gallery gods, holding to these with gripped hands and shut teeth-he will think of all this then, and he will be able to say: "I never truckled, I never took offthe hat to Fashion and held it outJor pennies. By God, I told them the truth. 188 STROHEIM They liked it or they didn't like it. VVhat had that to do with me? I told them the truth; I knew itfor the truth then, and I know itfor the truth now."2 Stroheim admired Norris's respect for truth and his stubborn disregard...