Frank Norris Remembered

12. Wallace W. Everett

12 / Wallace W. Everett As a freshman Fiji during Norris’s senior year at Berke­ ley, a writer for Sunset extolling the virtues of motoring in such far-­ flung locales as north­ ern California and the Rhine Valley, a publisher of an esoteric newspaper with the unlikely title of Lumber Journal, and a fruiterer in California’s famed Napa Valley, Wallace Washburn Everett (1875–1943) seems a curious source for an article on Norris’s exploits with Delta Xi, the University of California chapter of their college fraternity . Even so, the two did know each other briefly in college. In “The Exile’s Toast,” a poem in humorous German dialect Norris sent to his fraternity chapter on No­ vem­ ber 20, 1900, in place of his own presence at the traditional “pig dinner” preceding the annual “big game,” Norris playfully observes that ­“Wallie Every-­ bit . . . alle-­ ways knows ut alle” (Crisler 1986, 129). More to the point, Everett, who would naturally have heard tales about one of his chapter’s more flamboyant members, likely had little trouble recalling both Norris’s antics and his personality. Source: Wallace W. Everett, “Frank Norris in His Chapter,” Phi Gamma Delta 52 (April 1930): 561–66. It is far easier to talk about Frank Norris than it is to write about that paragon of true fraternity men. It is not as a successful novelist that we think of him nor is it to bring up for consideration his powerful influence upon our country’s literature , when we speak of Norris; we who knew him in the early nineties, love to just feel that we were with him and we are happier because of that lovable­contact. Some time ago, a graduate member of one of Yale’s junior societies had luncheon with me at the Fiji chapter-­ house at the University of California. I remember well his remark: “Didn’t your fraternity have any other literary light but Frank Norris? You seem to advertise him as such and make a lot out of him!” Such a man as this who had not lived four years with a fellow fraternity man like Norris; who had been simply a member of a club in Yale could not appreciate how we of the old guard felt towards this member of the class of 1894 in Delta 58 / Frank Norris Remembered Xi chapter. It is Norris the Fiji—Norris the Lovable Fellow—Norris the Man whom we remember and not Norris the Novelist. After his return from Paris, Frank Norris went to a small preparatory school— Urban Academy—in San Francisco in the latter ’80s and entered the University of California in the fall of 1890 with the class of ’94. He lived in a house on the north side of Bancroft Way, just east of Dana Street and around the cor­ ner from the first Fiji House on that latter street. He was a tall, gaunt, sallow-­ complexioned young fellow, yet strikingly handsome and distinguished in his general appearance, according to Brother Ralph L. Hathorn, ’93, to whom and to Brother William Penn Humphreys, ’92, I am indebted for this description of the young freshman of twenty.31 Eccentric in his dress and still possessed of some French mannerisms from his early student days in Paris, Norris entered college as a special in English literature. For the first five months, absorbed in his work, he kept closely to himself making but few acquaintances and no close friends. All the fraternities were unaware of the measure of the man who had come into the college life of Berke­ ley. As befitted the man, his introduction to a member of Phi Gamma Delta was intensely interesting. Some time in De­cem­ber of 1890, a heavy storm had driven a large vessel ashore below the Cliff House in San Francisco.32 Thousands of spec­ tators journeyed out to the beach to view the wreck, braving the raging wind and driving rain to witness the heavy seas and great combing breakers pound the ship to pieces on the shore before them. Ralph Hathorn, late that afternoon, saw a young fellow standing near him in the chill of this winter’s afternoon without overcoat or protection from the rain or wind and invited the drenched and shivering youth to share his umbrella with him. With this stirring drama of the sea as a setting, there started here the basis of a cherished friendship which lasted through the life of the pair...