Frank Norris Remembered

Introduction

Introduction When the distressing news of the premature death of Frank Norris reached his uncle in Lincoln, Nebraska, on No­ vem­ ber 22, 1902, William Alfred Doggett delivered a brief summary of his impressions of his nephew as a youth to a reporter : “The boy was inclined to be melancholy. At times he was full of activity and animal spirits, but ordinarily he was slow and thoughtful” (“Lincoln Man” 1902, 16). Nearly three decades later, on Oc­ to­ ber 14, 1930, Lucy A. H. Pownall Senger, wife of Joachim Henry Senger, Norris’s tutor for his 1890 entrance examinations to the University of California, limned an even more truncated portrait of twenty-­ year-­ old Norris, newly returned from studying art in Paris and eager to begin a new phase of his life as a college student: “I remember him as a quiet young man, very polite.” Twenty years thereafter, a classmate of Norris ’s at Berke­ ley, Edwin Milton Wilder, who on August 26, 1952, characterized himself as a “green boy . . . from [a] country high school,” recalled Norris with a possible touch of suppressed envy as “a blasé, patronizing, indifferent man, not of the world, but from another world.” What these fleeting comments reveal is a lack of real familiarity with their subject, Frank Norris, in life one of America’s most popular novelists. Even half a century after his death, Norris was still alive enough in the memory of a classmate (though hardly an intimate—Wilder admits, “Although I sat in class with [Norris] for five years, I never knew him well”) to evoke vivid, if inaccurate, memories of him. For far from being “slow and thoughtful,” “quiet,” or “blasé, patronizing, indifferent,” the Frank Norris known and loved by a wide circle of family members, fraternity brothers, college friends, employers, professional colleagues , fellow writers, and even critics belies the faulty memories of these more distant acquaintances. Born in Chicago on March 5, 1870, Norris as a teenager moved to San Francisco in 1885. The privileged son of a father grown wealthy as a highly successful jeweler and a mother with finely tuned cultural and social aspirations, he matured in comfortable ease in their house at 1822 Sacramento, and embraced his new state of California so wholeheartedly that even early in his career he unabashedly informed newspaper critic Isaac F. Marcosson that he “was ’bawn ’n raise’ in California” (Crisler 1986, 57). When a broken arm ended his tenure at 2 / Introduction a succession of elite college preparatory academies in both Chicago and the Bay Area, Norris persuaded his parents to allow him to explore a talent for drawing at the California School of Design, then under the able direction of Virgil M. Williams. As a regimen of art whetted Norris’s appetite for a more intensive program , his parents accordingly took him to Paris to continue his studies at the famous Académie Julian. But when Norris’s impatient father realized a seemingly inexplicable penchant for literary pursuits had supplanted his son’s earlier interest in painting, he promptly summoned his errant boy home, where the younger Norris devoted himself to shoring up gaps in his formal education in order to gain entrance to the University of California in the hope of learning the rudiments necessary for writing successful fiction. A thorough delight in college life notwithstanding, Norris failed to realize his fondest dream while at Berke­ley; save at only a handful of Ameri­can colleges, instruction in what is today termed creative writing was simply unknown at institutions of higher learning during the last decade of the 1890s. One such, fortunately for Norris, was Harvard College, which he entered as a “special student” in 1894, having received no degree at Berke­ley, despite four years of college courses heavily slanted to British and French literature and history. Norris’s year at Harvard at last yielded the fruit he had desired to pick at Berke­ ley: taught by Lewis Edward Gates, Norris learned much more than the basics of effective writing, as his extensive work in Gates’s courses on two novels, McTeague (1899) and the posthumously published Vandover and the Brute (1914), indicates. Hoping now to enter the ranks of professional writers but simultaneously aware that he needed more direct engagement with his chosen craft, Norris parlayed modest success as a cub reporter for the San Francisco Wave to an assignment from the San Francisco Chronicle to travel to South Africa in Oc­to­ber 1895. Conflict...