Frank Norris Remembered

39. Arthur Goodrich

39 / Arthur Goodrich Arthur Frederick Goodrich (1878–1941), an honor graduate of Columbia University in 1899, would later become a successful novelist and playwright. He made Norris’s acquaintance at the turn of the century as a colleague at Doubleday, Page & Co. Goodrich was an editor in its book department as well as a staff member of the monthly magazine The World’s Work. Source: Arthur Goodrich, “Frank Norris: The Estimate and Tribute of an Associate ,” Boston Evening Transcript, Oc­ to­ ber 29, 1902, 14. It is hard to realize that Frank Norris is dead. He seemed always to come out of the springtime, to carry with him the breath of eternal youth. He was just rounding out his career into that hard-­earned great success and high usefulness which everyone who knew him felt to be his. He was the most virile, the most creative , the most broadly imaginative of the younger writers who were to make the Ameri­can literature of the next quarter century. Whatever else may be said of his writing, it was living, pulsing, human. The “pity of it” must be doubly felt in the sense of deep personal loss—for no one could know Norris without having a real affection for the man, as well as an admiration for his genius and his high ideals, and in a sense of the national loss to our literature. If we could but have the occult power of his own Vanamee!38 Until six or seven years ago there was nothing in Frank Norris’s life that was unusual or especially prophetic of the work he was to do. He had gone from Chicago to California when he was fourteen, and after three years there, he went abroad and studied art in Paris.39 Then back in California, he spent his four years at the university. There he was, his old chum has told me, a healthy, full-­blooded, college boy full of enthusiasm, popu­lar necessarily and unconsciously, a leader of his fellows by mere charm of personality. His room was the gathering place for the crowd, and he alone could entertain them all with the spontaneous good humor and unconscious wit which always characterized him. He wrote a play that was memorable in college circles, and when it was published later in the college annual, he drew the illustrations for it.40 And even in those days he saw beyond Part 4. Professional Years / 169 the little things and felt the broad swift current of great events. He was utterly lacking in the petty prejudices which are so common to a man’s college days. Having completed his course, he added another year at Harvard, graduating there in 1894.41 It was at Cambridge, without question, that the Zolaesque realism , which was to mould so much of his first work, gripped him. He plotted McTeague as a class exercise during that year, and was told that it was too grim and horrible to make a piece of literature. When he went back to California, responsibilities came upon him, and he began to write as an assistant editor of the San Francisco Wave. He did this journalistic work with more or less success, but it was not the serious, larger task he was born to do. It was only the other day when he was laughing over one incident of his Wave experience, which seemed to him particularly like a stage-­ play situation. But it unquestionably gave him that close touch with San Francisco life which he wrought with such perfect detail into McTeague. He was working along with the book in his spare hours. [. . .] One day after he became reader for the new Doubleday, Page & Co., Norris came to a member of the firm, almost trembling with enthusiasm. “I’ve got a great idea,” he said, and he told his plan of the “Epic of the Wheat,” perhaps the largest constructive task any Ameri­ can novelist has ever given himself . As a result, The Octopus, the story of the wheat growers’ struggle with the railroads, was published a year ago. It gripped the people instantly with vivid realism , its grasp of tremendous problems, its broad epic sweep, and the blood and iron if its men. The book is instinct with the terrible earnestness of the man grappling , Titan-­ like, with the great elementary forces. And it prepared the way for “The Pit,” which is now appearing in the Saturday Evening Post, and which will be published in...