Frank Norris Remembered

8. Gelett Burgess

8 / Gelett Burgess Although an instructor in topographical drawing at the University of California (1891–94) when Norris first met him, Frank Gelett Burgess (1866–1951) in many ways acted the part of student rather than faculty member. His diaries re­ cord frequent late-­night dinners with vari­ous students, “hours of nonsense” with others , visits to the Phi Gamma Delta house on several occasions, and icono­ clastic romps such as toppling the grandiose drinking fountain erected by temperance crusader Henry Daniel Cogswell (1820–1900) (see Wright, chap­ ter 26 this vol­ ume). He coauthored, with Norris’s classmate Maida Castel­hun (see Jessica Pei­ xotto, chapter 18 this volume) and aid from Norris and others, “Veh­mege­richt,” the first play ever performed in what would become the renowned Greek Theatre at Berke­ ley (Weed 1913, n.p.), inaugurating the tradition of a Senior Extravaganza put on by those graduating; and he studiously cultivated the friendship of certain students, most prominently Norris. After quitting his teaching post in 1894, having been summarily dismissed for his part in the Cogs­ well escapade (Dillon 1967, n.p.), Burgess continued his exploits in a more literary vein by successively founding The Lark in 1895, Le Petit Journal des Refusées in 1896, and Phyllida in 1897, promoting the formation of Les Jeunes, joining the Bohemian Club in January 1895, and writing its 1896 Christmas Jinks, “The Christmas Nightmare.” When Norris made his sec­ond trip to the Big Dipper Mine in March 1897, Burgess succeeded him as subeditor of The Wave for two months before he went to New York, where he and Norris later renewed their friendship, when Norris also crossed the continent the next year. Source: Gelett Burgess to Claude Fayette Bragdon, excerpt from letter, May 18, 1899, Bragdon Family Papers, A.B81, Department of Rare Books, Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York. Me Deer Clodd;4 [. . .] Have you read Frank Norris’s McTeague? He is, you know, one of les jeunes, though he never wrote for the Bird.5 I am amazed by this book of his. As a work of art it is a masterpiece, and the way he has handled his 44 / Frank Norris Remembered construction, his sec­ ondary situations and characterization seems to me to put him out of the possibilities into the probabilities. The way the thing hangs together, the way it grows, the origi­ nal method, and the humour, not subtle, yet keen and incisive, all this has aroused my admiration. He has curiously enough missed everything distinctive of San Francisco life, and he has not written the romantic side, that we all want to have shown up, but he has made the book jump, jump and yell. I am awfully glad for his success. Frank, naturally lazy, has won it with years of hard persistent effort. “Blix” in the Puritan is naïve and almost amateurish, a jumble of incidents , and not nearly up to this. [. . .]6 Forever your friend, Gelett Source: Gelett Burgess to Jeannette Williamson Norris, letter, Oc­ to­ ber 29, 1902, Frank Norris Collection, BANC MSS C-­ H 80, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berke­ ley. My dear Mrs. Norris: To write you what I feel about losing Frank is impossible and I could not do it without using the same words that so many must have used. Sorrow and shock and wonder we have all felt before but there has been something so uncanny and almost malign in this terrible adventure that sets it off from anything in my experience—and the feeling is universal— everyone says “why had this to be?” Frank was so much more intimately connected with his work than most writers, that his loss comes on his whole acquaintance upon everyone who knew him, but only his friends know what beside his power of work is gone. I count it a great privilege to have known him when, to be sure of his ultimate success was coincident with calling him friend. To have been able to watch that ambition and that almost foolhardy will of his unfold— and seeing it grow stronger with everything he touched, to prove one’s own judgement—that has been one of the warmest and most satisfactory things in my life. And to keep him for a friend through it all and to have influenced him in ever so slight a degree was a delight. Somehow, though I don’t feel the catastrophe as mocking as...