Frank Norris Remembered

29. Will Irwin

29 / Will Irwin While William Henry Irwin (1873–1948) and Norris met only once and thus could hardly be termed friends or perhaps even acquaintances, Irwin, by his own admission in a brief note to Jeannette when Norris died, felt great admiration for Norris as both writer and man. Irwin had good reason to admire Norris, for his first employment after he left Stanford in 1898 was on The Wave where he took the position of subeditor, the same post Norris had vacated over a year earlier; like Norris again, he had left college without a degree, expelled for high jinks. Over the next few years, Irwin’s life continued to mimic his predecessor ’s as in succession he became a special correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle, as had Norris before joining The Wave staff, a reporter for the New York Sun (1904–6)—Norris wrote articles for a number of newspapers in New York, Brooklyn, Chicago, and Boston—managing editor of McClure’s (1906–7), where Norris worked when he first moved to New York, and finally a freelance writer, the direction Norris certainly had taken with his short stories and articles. Source: Will Irwin, “Introduction,” The Third Circle (New York: John Lane, 1909), 7–11. It used to be my duty, as sub editor of the old San Francisco Wave, to “put the paper to bed.” We were printing a Seattle edition in those days of the Alaskan gold rush; and the last form had to be locked up on Tuesday night, that we might reach the news stands by Friday. Working short-­ handed, as all small weeklies do, we were everlastingly late with copy or illustrations or advertisements; and the Tuesday usually stretched itself out into Wednesday. Most of­ ten, indeed, the foreman and I pounded the last quoin into place at four or five o’clock Wednesday morning and went home with the milk-­wagons—to rise at noon and start next week’s paper going. For Yelton,8 most patient and cheerful of foremen, those Tuesday night sessions meant steady work. I, for my part, had only to confer with him now and then on a “Caption” or to run over a late proof. In the heavy intervals of waiting, I killed time and gained instruction by reading the back files of The Wave, and 122 / Frank Norris Remembered especially that part of the files which preserved the early, ’prentice work of Frank Norris. He was a hero to us all in those days, as he will ever remain a heroic memory— that unique product of our West­ ern soil, killed, for some hidden purpose of the gods, before the time of full blossom. He had gone East but a year since to publish the earliest in his succession of rugged, virile novels—Moran of the Lady Letty, McTeague, Blix, A Man’s Woman, The Octopus, and The Pit. The East was just beginning to learn that he was great; we had known it long before. With a special interest, then, did I, his humble cub successor as sub-­ editor and sole staff writer, follow that ’prentice work of his from the period of his first brief sketches, through the period of rough, brilliant short stories hewed out of our life in the Port of Adventures, to the period of that first serial which brought him into his own. It was a surpassing study of the novelist in the making. J. O’Hara Cosgrave, owner, editor and burden-­ bearer of The Wave, was in his editing more an artist than a man of business. He loved “good stuff”; he could not bear to ­ delete a distinctive piece of work just because the populace would not understand. Norris, then, had a free hand. Whatever his thought of that day, whatever he had seen with the eye of his flash or the eye of his imagination,9 he might write and print. You began to feel him in the files of the year 1897, by certain distinctive sketches and fragments. You traced his writing week by week until the sketches ­ became “Little Stories of the Pavement.”10 Then longer stories, one every week, even such stories as “The Third Circle,” “Miracle Joyeux,” and “The House with the Blinds”; then, finally, a novel, written feuilleton fashion week by week—Moran of the Lady Letty. A curious circumstance attended the publication of Moran in The Wave. I discovered it myself during those Tuesday night sessions over the files...