Finding Frank Norris: Eric Carl Link on Frank Norris Studies

The summer after we were married, my husband and I embarked on the most romantic trip two bibliophilic English majors could imagine. A week’s worth of clothes in the back of our car, we drove from Seattle to San Francisco. We stopped at Powell’s Books in Portland, a store so large they hand customers a map at the front door, and I scoured the wooden shelves where the slick jackets of new bestsellers rub up against the faded cloth boards of well-thumbed older editions. My willingness to travel the rows, reading spine after spine, is usually rewarded with the discovery of a first edition or a rare printing, but this visit left me disappointed, and I found no early editions of Norris. Eager to add to my small book collection, I contented myself with a first edition of Ellen Glasgow’s Barren Ground and crossed my fingers for better luck once we reached California.

Unlike Frank Norris, who was born in Chicago, I am a native Californian. The majority of my life has been spent in other places but, born in the dampness of Arcata, there is something about winding down the coast through the impressive forest of massive redwood trees that feels like a homecoming. No matter how long I have been away, the cool damp fog that blankets the Bay Area smells familiar. I imagine Norris felt the same way; he once told a journalist, “I was ‘bawn ‘n raise’ in California” (Letters 22). Perhaps Norris was trying to establish himself as an expert, able to faithfully render his subject matter, or having moved there from Chicago at the age of fourteen, it was the place he felt most at home.¹ Frank Norris, Jack London, and John Steinbeck evoke northern California more vividly than other authors. Their descriptions of the San Francisco’s hilly streets, the chill of evening fog, and the cool lushness of the redwood forest capture both the natural and the manmade in a way no postcard can. As a result, their stories are so rooted in these places that the authors’ ghosts seem likely to turn up at any moment. For these reasons, it seemed likely that I might find Frank Norris in one of Berkeley’s many bookstores. In an effort to find a Frank Norris first edition, any first edition, we trolled Black Oak Books, Pegasus, and Moe’s on Telegraph Avenue. Each time I left empty handed. Norris was nowhere to be found on the streets surrounding his alma mater.

As we walked across the UC campus, I stopped to sit on a bench beneath a large tree and thought of The Octopus’s Minna Hooven who rested on a Berkeley bench beneath a live oak in a moment that forever altered the course of her life. Later that afternoon we visited the Bancroft Library where some leaves from the McTeague manuscript were on display. Norris’s revisions provided insight into his careful and deliberate craftsmanship. While I did not find an early edition of Frank Norris’s writings—and probably would not have been able to afford it if I had—just being there, in Berkeley, sitting where Minna or even Norris himself might have rested, and standing in the dim, conservation lighting of the Bancroft musing over Norris’s handwriting, I stumbled into an even closer relationship with his work, what I can only describe as a connection to his sources and inspiration. As scholars of literature, much of what we do is far removed from the actual location in which it was imagined or conceived, and having the opportunities to tread the paths the author walked can breathe new life into our understanding of their writings. Just as important as connecting ourselves to an author’s past, however, is looking forward and understanding his or her place in the future of literary studies. California may be the right place to dig for Norris’s roots, but to fully map the trajectory of Norris studies one might consider a trip to Tennessee.

The University of Memphis is home...