Frank Norris Remembered

28. Porter Garnett

28 / Porter Garnett Under normal circumstances Norris and Kennedy Porter Garnett (1871–1951) might have been poised to become great friends rather than merely acquaintances who moved in similar circles and thus had other friends in common. For as an artist, writer, fine printer, librarian, illustrator, and bookbinder, Garnett clearly embraced many pursuits that had also appealed to a young Norris. But by the time their paths began crossing fairly frequently Norris had moved beyond the interests that had initially attracted him to Les Jeunes, the iconoclastic and bohemian group that Garnett, Bruce Porter, Gelett Burgess, Ernest Peixotto, ­ Willis Polk, and vari­ ous others had formed in 1895 to publish their signature journal, The Lark. Thus when The Lark died and Burgess and Garnett turned to even more outlandish productions such as Phyllida: or, the Milkmaid, only two issues of which appeared, and Le Petit Journal des Refusées, appearing only once, Norris, riding the crest of his journalistic success with The Wave, had already moved to New York as a serious writer. Garnett ultimately rejoined the establishment as a distinguished typographer, calligrapher, and graphic artist, but by then Norris had been dead for many years. Source: Porter Garnett to Franklin D. Walker, letter, March 26, 1931, Franklin Dickerson Walker Papers, BANC MSS C-­ H 79, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berke­ ley. My dear Mr. Walker: I am afraid that such memories of Frank Norris as I have are so slender and so diminished by the passage of time that they can furnish no worthy contribution to a biography. If anything I recall of him seems to you worth using, I hope you will preface it with this (or some other) deprecatory statement regarding its significance or value. I feel my inadequacy the more because I know that the persons whom you mention in your letter have far richer memories of him than I have. Since I am more interested in people for what they are rather than for what they do, I did not and do not think of Frank Norris as a literary man, but rather as a companionable person, gentle, humorous and alert, with Part 3. Apprenticeship / 119 whom conversation occasionally turned on literary matters. I recall his say­ ing once (a little naïvely perhaps), at the time when Zola was beginning to influence his approach to writing, “The important thing in writing is not to be literary.” Such, shall I say, “sophistical” declarations have since then become com­ mon­ place among both amateur and professional free spirits, but Frank Norris was not one of these and we must accept his utterance as sincere. Revolutionary and near-­ revolutionary ideas in the 90’s were usually sincere . They were not, moreover, ready-­made ideas such as are to-­day caught on the rebound and juggled (of­ ten very cleverly) by the members of that Cult of Defiance which so divertingly combines “sophistication” (without understanding the meaning of the word) and naïveté. In the statement I have quoted Norris was, I think, voicing his repudiation of those early and decidedly “literary” efforts of his such as Yvernelle. That “First Period” of his represented a phase through which all young writers of his time had to pass. It was before the day of the disillusioned adolescent whose resolute realism Norris in a way foreshadowed. I remember his interest in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, of which he had somehow acquired a copy of the suppressed and now extremely rare first edition. He gave it to me shortly before his death, and it remained in my possession (unread) until it was burned, with the rest of my books, in the San Francisco fire of 1906. Had I it now I should gladly part with it (still unread and for a consideration) to any first-­ edition fanatic. What I shared with Frank Norris during our rather brief acquaintanceship was not so much an interest in literature as an interest in the raw material of literature—a life. I did not read his books when they were published and have not to this day read one of them. But from what I have been told about Blix, I am inclined to believe that it reflects certain phases of life in old San Francisco that we observed in one another’s company. Norris in common with some of the rest of us (Gelett Burgess, Bruce Porter) enjoyed an occasional evening spent in the then unexploited Latin quarter. I remember such...