Notes on Recent Reading 36 (Norris, Rexroth and Laughlin, Sand)

The Pit (Norris)

     Might one write a good novel about the financial markets? Bonfire of the Vanities doesn’t make it, but Norris made a decent attempt with The Pit in 1903. Envisioned as the middle work of a trilogy following a crop of wheat from production through sale to consumption (hardly a promising theme), the story concerns Curtis Jadwin who initially eschews speculation but who is eventually seduced and finally ruined by it. His devotion to his wife, the much-admired Laura Dearborn, is gradually eroded by his addiction to the pursuit of the biggest of deals, cornering the market. (One recalls, of course, that the book was written in the time of anti-trust agitation.) Laura, on the other hand, is self-absorbed, far less mutual in the relationship of her marriage than her sister Page in hers to Landry Court. In fact, the married love themes coexist with the business and economic one without any real attempt toward synthesis or harmony. The conclusion is unconvincing, facile, and abrupt, as Jadwin, while ruined, sets off cheerfully to begin anew, sadder but wiser.
     Norris’ naturalist themes are apparent in his description of the commodities market as a great independent being in the coils of which humans are helpless. In the narrative, both Jadwin’s attempts to corner the market and his attempts at self-restraint are equivalent to challenging nature itself. As elsewhere in Norris, the world of business is contrasted to that of art, and his artist here Sheldon Corthell, charms the ladies and makes insightful observations from the sidelines. Though the book, which appeared after the author’s death, was widely reviewed and generally applauded, I would concur with those critics who find it weaker than the gritty lower depths of McTeague or the Cinemascope Western grandeur of The Octopus.


Kenneth Rexroth and James Laughlin: Selected Letters (Rexroth, Laughlin)

     Having valued Rexroth’s poetry, translations, and criticism for my entire life, indeed, having modeled some of my own studies after his own, I was perhaps over-sensitive to the more personal of these communications. While I was rewarded by finding Rexroth’s customarily knowledgeable and acute critical judgments on nearly every page (the Norton edition edited by Lee Bartlett is, if anything, excessively annotated), I was also put off by my man’s constant badgering, pushing repeatedly for more publications, scolding Laughlin for his refusal to completely discount the writers whom Rexroth calls academic, attacking him for his wealth while always trying to get a bit more of it out of him. In spite of the perils of irascibility and self-pity for those of us who deliberately chose poverty and the counter-culture, I salute Rexroth in the end for his simultaneous principled dedication to the classics and the avant-garde. And his translations from the Chinese can be quite wonderful even if, as the reader of these letters learns, he was capable of translating really from Judith Gautier’s fin-de-siècle French while pretending to work from Chinese. (Characteristically, Laughlin generously notes that he eventually learned quite a few characters and could work to some extent from the original.) He probably knew as much as Pound did, and Pound’s Cathay contains some of the greatest poetry of the twentieth century. The prose in this volume is rarely distinguished, but the literary history and the off-hand critical comments make it essential even for those to whom the hip ideal is less appealing.


Lettres d’un Voyageur (Sand)

     George Sand’s book is at once a memoir, a travel book, and a novel. She passes from one genre to the next as she relates her experiences in Italy and France. Some passages are in fact from actual letters she wrote at the time, while others were composed later. Though there is not enough plot to make a steady story line, she describes her emotional and geographic peregrinations at the center of a love triangle with a poet – the original was Musset – and her physician. The capping detail to this generic conundrum is that parts of the book were first published in the Revue des Deux Mondes and the Revue de Paris. So these letters had a rather wide audience at the time of their publication. Perhaps the celebrity/romance/mystery aspect was significant in the book’s first readership who may have received it as a classier People magazine.
     Yet I am afraid that I feel as a French cookbook once said about a Provencal olive oil pastry touted as equally useful for pie crust, tarts, strudel, and pasta, “good for everything means good for nothing.” The incidents lack the principal desideratum of each sort of book: the structure of a novel, the detailed outward focus of a travel book, and the consistent fidelity to subjective experience of a memoir. The reader who may be satisfied with partial quotients of each will nonetheless find the book worth reading. Now no less than in her lifetime the author has a palpable charisma about her.

Notes on Recent Reading 35 (Scott, Norris, Jacobs)

Ivanhoe (Scott)

     Scott like Trollope is a popular and conventional writer I consistently enjoy. The reader must accept that his narratives are romances rather than realistic novels. For this reason their predictability, their reinforcement of received ideas, and the bipolar simplicity of their heroes and villains are rather generic characteristics than faults. One might well quibble, as critics did in Scott’s own time, about the improbable revival of Athelstane or the errancy of the novel’s historical premise, but I for one would prefer to swallow it all. In Scott the formal tightness and exacting plot design make him seem almost a late Neo-classicist, while his regionalism and celebration of fine feelings would suggest a Romantic. Though once thought the equal of Byron, his poetry is little read today. The novels enjoyed a lively second life in Hollywood films, but even these are too corny to attract contemporary attention.
     The fact is that literature may equally attack, interrogate, and affirm readers’ ideas. I would argue that the development of a critical attitude toward conventions and conventional beliefs is a phenomenon of the last few hundred years, and that not only such modern works as this one or, say, a musical like Oklahoma (or Gold Diggers of 1933), but also virtually all oral, folk, and, popular art are highly conventional and similarly bear themes that reassure the consumer of the rightness of his pre-existing attitudes. Still, I cannot deny that Scott richly deserved Thackery ‘s satirical sequel Rebecca and Rowena and Mark Twain’s comment in Life on the Mississippi that Scott was “in great measure responsible for the war.” Later, in his “Disappearance of Literature” speech, Twain said Ivanhoe could be read only at the ages of eighteen or ninety but not between. I would dispute the latter number with him.


McTeague (Norris)

     Norris’ novel brings old San Francisco to life, describing the McTeague’s Polk Street neighborhood with precision. But while Norris the naturalist, a conscious disciple of Zola, thought he was tracing the deterministic course of an individual’s fate with cool objectivity, the reader is more likely to be impressed with the pregnant dream-like symbols, though one might easily object that Norris goes altogether as mad as his characters with gold the symbolic significance of which mounts far beyond verisimilitude: the giant tooth, Maria’s imaginary gold dining service, Trina’s cache of double eagles, the canary, the sudden rich vein in the earth he discovers before fleeing.
     We are without doubt in Frye’s low-mimetic mode. Was there ever such a lurid anti-Semitic character as Zerkow? For that matter, Norris insists upon McTeague’s stupidity to the point of constantly representing him as wondering what is going on. It is sometimes a bit hard to take. The final confrontation between Marcus and McTeague is anything but realistic; indeed, it is utterly unlikely, but nonetheless perfectly right. Their possibilities vanish one by one as the alkali sands of Death Valley get the better of them in an artificial but elegant ending with a theme and scene that recalls the denouement of B. Traven’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Though Norris also conceived of himself as an artist engagé, society is assigned little blame here. If Uncle Oelbermann is thoughtless, that is merely because the rich so often are. Poverty’s suffering is here portrayed, but with no suggestion of a practical alternative. The novel is, of course, the source of Von Stroheim’s great film Greed.


Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs)

     Once, in a university library with open stacks, I recall stumbling upon the reminiscences of one-time slaves collected by workers in the Federal Writers’ Project of the WPA. I was staggered simply by the reflection that, during the 1930s, many people were still alive who had experienced the full rigors of America’s peculiar institution. Such narratives provided powerful propaganda prior to the Civil War when slave autobiographies fueled support for the abolitionist movement – at least sixty-five were published before 1860. These texts, along with Native American autobiographies, provided the first relatively authentic voices from these oppressed American minorities. (Indeed, as in this work, the distortions and inaccuracies are themselves meaningful.)
     While far less rhetorically grand than Frederick Douglass’ Narrative, Harriet A. Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl possesses considerable power based on the story it records. Jacobs as a woman personally suffered the sexual exploitation inherent in the system. The mixed-race complexions of so many Americans socially considered black testify to how very commonplace such brutality had been. Before she was able to make her way northward, she hid out under her master’s nose for almost seven years, an ordeal that would have sounded barely credible were it not for similar stories from fascist Spain and Nazi Europe. Her experiences make it plain as well how unfree the non-slave-holding North was, especially after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act.
     The Harvard Press edition is edited thoroughly and expertly by Jean Fagan Yellin.

Norris’s Visionary

Page numbers refer to the Riverside edition from Houghton Mifflin.


     Theoretical statements of naturalism tend, like those of other schools, to overstate their innovations for polemical reasons. Thus Zola’s novels are in general more conventional than the reader of his essay on “The Experimental Novel” might expect. Americans influenced by Zola, such as Hamlin Garland and Frank Norris, enlarged on certain openings in their master’s original concepts, justifying new narratives shaped by realism, romanticism, and local color, as well as by naturalism. While to some extent this “softening” of naturalism was an inevitable response to the nature of the aesthetic text and the demands of readers, such a mixture also sometimes produced anomalies and dissonance. In Norris's The Octopus the character of Vanamee neatly epitomizes this contradiction which weakens rather than strengthens verisimilitude and the construction of theme.
     Zola’s 1893 essay “The Experimental Novel” [1] outlines what the author claims to establish “a literature governed by science” (similar to the “higher critics” treatment of Biblical studies or Marx’s aim of rendering history). According to Zola naturalism “is an inevitable evolution” which “replaces purely imaginary novels by novels of observation and experiment.” The author confidently declares his new “experimental novel” to be “a consequence of the scientific evolution of the century.” He there maintains that the new type of fiction resembles “experimental medicine” in that it “adheres to no . . . doctrine nor any philosophical system.” To him “naturalism is not a personal fantasy, but . . . the intellectual movement of the century.” He insists “there is an absolute determinism in the existing conditions of natural phenomena” and objects to “imbecile arguments, about the impossibility of being strictly true, about the necessity of arranging facts to produce a work of art of any kind.”
     He claims for literature a role precisely parallel to that of science. “The intellectual conquest of man consists in diminishing and driving back indeterminism, and so, gradually, by the aid of the experimental method, gaining ground for determinism.” For him “idealistic novelists deliberately remain in the unknown, through all sorts of religious and philosophical prejudices.” All such ideas are equally juvenile wish-fulfilment based on “the astounding pretense that the unknown is nobler and more beautiful than the known.” Thus romanticism is merely “ravings,” and “our age of lyricism” a “romantic disease.” A writer who does not rely on the scientific experimental method just as it is practiced in a laboratory inevitably finds himself among “the follies of the poets and the philosophers,” one of “the idealistic writers, who rely upon the irrational and the supernatural.”
     Yet Zola is aware that the analogy between experimental science and fiction is imperfect. He must acknowledge that literature is in part an individual expression of a specific author. He defensively claims that literature “does not depend merely upon the author,” as “the personal feeling is but the first impulse.” Style, the unique fingerprint of each author is discounted. “Rhetoric, for the moment, has no place here. Let us first fix upon the method, on which there should be agreement, and after that accept all the different styles in letters which may be produced, looking upon them as the expressions of the literary temperament of the writers.” Again, Zola concedes aesthetic values, but only in a subordinate, in fact adventitious, role far from his view of narrative as a laboratory experiment.
     The very starting point of Zola’s theory is the attempt to assimilate art to science. For this reason his naturalism ignores the definitive traits of the aesthetic text, among them the valorization of beauty (and its “lesser” cousins entertainment, sentiment, humor and thrills). Acknowledging the individuality of form and style, he regards these as trivial. While admitting that, traditionally, “form is sufficient to immortalize a work,” he reduces this effect to mere display: “the spectacle of a powerful individuality reproducing nature in superb language will interest all ages.” He associates a nebulous “genius” with all the elements of a novel that do not exist in his scientific model: affect, theme, and form. “Not only is a writer’s genius to be found in the feeling and in the idea a priori but also in the form and style. ”For his naturalistic novel, the writer’s desiderata are those of most non-aesthetic texts. “The excellence of a style depends upon its logic and clearness.” (How could any reader of Shakespeare persuade himself of such a formula?)
     Hamlin Garland ‘s version of naturalism, which he called “veritism,” was far more nebulous. He defined his own practice of “realism (or veritism)” as “the truthful statement of an individual impression corrected by reference to the fact." [2] The new element is the term “impression,” influenced by painters of the day. Years later he described his notion of “veritism” as distinguishing him from the followers of Zola. Again calling himself an “impressionist,” he noted that imitation of reality required “verification,” obtainable by “comparing impressions” over a period of time. He was at pains to call for a wholesome, Whitmanic” “normalcy and decorum,” distinguished from the depictions of the underclass associated with “Zola and certain of the German novelists.” [3]
     Frank Norris made his eclecticism explicit. He wrote, in fact, “A Plea for Romantic Fiction” [4] calling for “romanticism and not sentimentalism.” With a sneer at popular novelists, he says that while “sentiment will be handed down the scullery stairs” romance can be more than “a conjurer’s trick-box, full of flimsy quackeries;” it can be “an instrument” by which one may penetrate “down deep, into the red, living heart of things.” He maintains his loyalty to his master by asserting that Zola is “the very head of the Romanticists.” Pure realism is “harsh, loveless, colourless, and blunt,” capturing “only the surface of things.” To him romance is required for both emotion and themes in literature. Nature itself is unfeeling, very likely absurd. Only with the human connection, with “Romance” can the reader receive “a complete revelation of my neighbor’s secretest life,” dealing with “hopes and fears,” “joys and sorrows.” Romance “can teach you” “a nobler purpose and a mightier than mere amusement.” “To Romance belongs the wide world for range, and the unplumbed depths of the human heart, and the mystery of sex, and the problems of life, and the black, unsearched penetralia of the soul of man.” The terms “black” and “unsearched” indicate that this realm is a mystery, presenting the sort of material the aesthetic text is uniquely fit to interrogate.
     For all of his gestures of obeisance toward Zola, Norris mixed romance, realism, and naturalism with considerable abandon. The Octopus, the first volume of a projected Epic of Wheat, unfinished at Norris’ death, certainly exhibits grand ambitions. Norris aimed at producing what his poetical character Presley could not -- the epic of the West, spectacular as the landscape, inscribed with all the tumultuous history of the region. For all the well-defined, idiosyncratic characters, his use of capitalized words -- Wheat, the People, and others -- implies the aim of writing something transcending individuality, and anticipates, for instance, Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.
     Norris recurs to the theme of his characters’ passivity, their thorough subjugation to fate. Not only the trains and the harvesting equipment, but the very process of economic production itself is figured as a monster, barely controllable, as likely to threaten its human managers as to reward them. Even the fields of cultivated wheat are imbued with animation and even with a sort of enlightenment for Norris: what was “these heated, tiny squabbles, this feverish small bustle of mankind, this minute swarming of the human insect , to the great, majestic, silent ocean of the Wheat itself!” Men are “mere gnats in the sunshine,” while the Wheat is “wrapped in Nirvanic calm . . .alone with the stars and with God.” (307)
     When Presley has an audience with the rail executive Shelgrim, the business man disclaims all personal responsibility for his actions and for those of his corporation. He insists that “railroads build themselves . . . The Wheat grows itself . . . You are dealing with forces, young man, when you speak of Wheat and Railroads, not with men.” (395) and admits that he could declare bankruptcy, give up business, but even that drastic action would have no effect as another man would instantly arise to take his place and his profits.
     Here the book's political theme collapses. Though the entire story is built of details that demonstrate the viciously rapacious nature of capitalism, and the utterly amoral behavior of businessmen, Shelgrim is here allowed to get himself off scot-free. In fact his plot is sentimental and sensational in its indictment of the corporation, with such passages as Hilda’s descent into prostitution and her mother’s starvation presented in a chapter which alternates sketches of her agony with Presley’s experience of a lavish dinner filled with exquisite plates and precious remarks. The rough and ready honor of the ranchers of which Magnus Derrick is the most pronounced example contrasts dramatically with the lack of scruples of Behrman, Shelgrim, and their henchmen.
     Yet Norris’s hero is staggered and silent upon being told by a CEO that that the evil-doing of the ruling class is as inevitable as the movements of the heavenly spheres. Of course, no radical challenge is represented in the novel apart from the ranchers’ ill-organized vigilantism and the ultra-left anarchist Calaher, the bar-owner. The farmers are hoodwinked in their amateurish attempt at working corruption for their own benefit and they then fail in their first and only armed confrontation, and the anarchist is condemned outright.
     I need not detail other factors that weaken the political-economic theme of the novel such as the use of an anti-Semitic stereotype in the villainous S. Behrman. [5] Further, many plot details in this novel, generally considered to be realistic or naturalistic are overdetermined by the political theme or implausible. How could the ranchers think that their nomination of Lyman Derrick, son of a prominent anti-railroad activist, would evade notice from the trust? It is a remarkable coincidence, even in the smaller society of turn-of-the-century San Francisco, that Presley knows socially the very people who are stealing from the ranchers with whom he is staying. Shelgrim’s ironic death, buried under wheat in the ship’s hold, is unlikely, but so is the whole notion that this particular ship, the very crop over which the principals have been contending, is being sent by the vacuous charity ladies to India.
     The problem is epitomized in the character of Vanamee, a mystic figure without parallel in Norris’s other work. Vanamee is gifted with extrasensory powers. Further, he seeks and achieves a visionary state on which Norris leverages the entire thematic weight of his epic of the West. Vanamee blunts the social theme of the plot by assimilating the injustices of society (which are presumably, in theory at least, soluble through collective action) to those which are inevitable for every individual: mortality and the loss of love. When Vanamee manages to coax forth, in imagination at least, a reunion with his lost beloved or at any rate a glimpse of her daughter (her offspring, her karma, her immortality) in the growing wheat, he is vouchsafed an answer satisfying to his quest. His ultimate success is foreshadowed early in the book when her memory conjures up an officially capitalized (so the reader knows it is real) “Something.” (109) He need only recognize that he has already conquered “Death.”
     As the ranchers’ case seems less and less viable, and their dispossession approaches inexorably, Vanamee finds peace again through his magical experiences. In “The Wheat! The Wheat!” he feels the mighty potency of a vegetative élan vital sufficient to sustain him. “Life out of death, eternity arising from out dissolution. There was the lesson. Angéle was not the symbol, but the proof of immortality. The seed, dying, rotting and corrupting in the earth, rising again in life unconquerable, and in immaculate purity. – Angéle dying as she gave birth to her little daughter, life springing from her death.” Death is swallowed up in Victory.” (269)
     It is only this supernatural revelation that governs the book’s conclusion. Contrary to all the data of the sprawling Western story, flying in the face of the ruination of all the good and the system’s consistent favoring of the prosperity of the wicked, Norris is yet capable of telling the reader as the book closes, “truth,” it seems, “will, in the end, prevail, and all things surely, inevitably, resistlessly work together for good.” (448) It is difficult to see how this sentiment would prove much succor to the evicted farmers and their families. The fact that Norris, lacking a socialist alternative, was obliged to turn to metaphysics for optimism itself indicates the desperation of his case. His inclusion of a character with extra-sensory powers is, in a way, a poignant proof of the failure of the real world to offer much hope.
     Norris is a powerful realistic writer. His association with muckrakers and his research into actual history of the San Joaquin Valley and the grand Cinerama-like scope of his Western epic command attention. His stories, while often overdrawn, are engaging. For me, his combination of naturalism and romance in The Octopus results in weakness both in the historical anti-monopoly theme and in the metaphysical one.



1. I quote from Belle M. Sherman’s translation published by Haskell House, New York, 1964 which is available online at Marxists.org. While the reader unfamiliar with naturalism might take the word “experimental” in Zola’s title to refer to literary innovation in general, in fact Zola meant to establish fiction on a specifically scientific basis, similar to medical experiments. His model is not a novel or earlier work of literary theory, but rather an exposition of scientific method, Claude Bernard’s Introduction à l'Étude de la Médecine Experimentale.

2. See “Productive Conditions of American Literature," Forum 27 [Aug. 1894] and “Local Color in Art” from Crumbling Idols.

3. Letter of February 14 1939 to Eldon Hill in the Hamlin Garland Papers, the Doheny Library, University of Southern California.

4. In The Responsibilities of the Novelist and other literary essays (NYC Doubleday) 1903.

5. None of the historical persons suggested as models for Behrman were Jewish. Doubtless Norris’s most egregious character of the sort was Zerkow in McTeague. Norris was influenced by Darwin and Spencer and his professor Joseph LeConte, the theistic evolutionist. His racist views, not only on Jews, but also regarding “darker” races, are offensively evident today. It is significant that such gross stereotyping was sufficiently normative when the book was published that years passed before the author’s anti-Semitism attracted comment.

6. Similarly in Chapter 19 of Grapes of Wrath Ma Joad offers a hopeful note. "Why, Tom - us people will go on livin' when all them people is gone. Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why, we're the people - we go on." Surely there is no sense apart from wish-fulfilment in which “them people” (the oppressors) will vanish while “the people” will finally enjoy their long-delayed victory. For the Steinbeck of that era, though, signs of political progress were apparent in spite of a system of oppression.