THE CALIFORNIA OCTOPUS
The mind of America at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of
the twentieth century was controlled by elderly maiden aunts and hired
men of privilege; and it seemed that behind the scenes of our national
life some evil jinx was operating to keep us in this double thrall.
There arose five independent and original-minded artists, and here is
what happened to them: Stephen Crane died of tuberculosis at the age of
twenty-nine, Frank Norris died of appendicitis at the age of thirty-two,
David Graham Phillips was killed by a lunatic at the age of forty-four,
O. Henry died of alcoholism at the age of forty-eight, and Jack London
killed himself at the age of forty.
Frank Norris was born in California in 1870, the son of well-to-do
parents. All through his childhood and boyhood he liked to tell stories
and make sketches; he wasn’t sure which he liked to do best. He studied
art in Paris for a couple of years, and published a long narrative poem
at the age of twenty. Then he came home and tried to learn something
about writing at the University of California, but without success. He
took a graduate course at Harvard, and here he wrote “McTeague,” his
first successful novel.
He had been absorbing Zola, and set out to apply the Zola method to
America. He is going to give you the brutal reality of life, he is going
to write about big animal men with heavy muscles and prominent jaws, and
broad-bosomed women with large quantities of alluring hair. He is going
to give you the great open spaces, and also the sordidness and smells of
cities--as much as America can be got to stand. The theme of “McTeague”
is avarice, and we see a dentist’s office with a big gold tooth for a
sign, and all through the tragic story we run upon the motif of gold in
everything from sunsets to decorations.
Then came “The Octopus,” and here we are in outdoor California, dealing
with crude people and nature on a large scale. “The Octopus” has two
themes. It is the Epic of the Wheat, and we see the great unfenced
plains upon which wheat is raised wholesale, and the golden flood of
grain on its way to feed the millions in the cities, a torrent of food
so vast and heavy that it symbolically suffocates a man on its way. And
then there is the railroad, the Octopus which has seized the wheat
country and is devouring the settlers. I read this novel before I read
anything of Zola’s, and so I got the shock of a great discovery. I was
one of many youngsters who were set on fire. Here was power, here was a
new grasp of reality; this was the way to write novels!
Also I was horrified and bewildered: could it be that things like this
happened in America? Could it be that railroads set themselves up as the
ruling power in a community, that they defeated the laws, deprived
people of their homes and drove them into exile or outlawry? You see, I
was the naive and innocent product of American public schools and of Mr.
J. P. Morgan’s university; I really thought that I lived in a democracy,
and under the protection of a Constitution. At that very time I was
raising campaign funds and helping to elect the president of our
university--mine and Mr. Morgan’s--as a “reform” mayor of New York City!
I tried to find out about this railroad Octopus, and there was no way to
find out. It was a dark secret of American life, crushed completely
underground. There was no literature about it, nothing in the newspapers
or the magazines, no books or pamphlets in the library of the great
university. Now, twenty-three years later, I can tell you of a book in
which you may read the life-story of one of these men of the San
Joaquin, who were driven to outlawry by the Southern Pacific Railroad.
The name of the man is Ed Morrell, and Jack London made him the hero of
a novel, “The Star Rover.” They caught him finally and put him in
prison, and that is the story he tells in his book, “The Twenty-fifth
Man,” one of the most appalling narratives ever penned by a human being.
Frank Norris, who taught me something new about my country, had set out
deliberately to do that very thing. He explained his ideas in a book,
“The Responsibilities of the Novelist”; and I might, if I wanted to take
the time, play a trick upon you, by quoting sentences from his book,
mixed in with sentences from my book, and you could not tell the
difference. For example, who is it that says: “No art that is not in the
end understood by the People can live or ever did live a single
generation”? Who says: “It is the complaint of the coward, this cry
against the novel with a purpose”? Who says: “The muse is a teacher, not
a trickster”? Who says: “Truth in fiction is just as real and just as
important as truth anywhere else”? It is Frank Norris who says all these
things.
He goes on to point out that the pulpit reaches us only on Sundays, and
the newspaper is quickly forgotten, but the novel stays with us all the
time. And yet, facing this responsibility, there are novelists who admit
that they write for money, and “you and I and the rest of us do not
consider this disreputable!” Norris goes on to voice his own attitude
toward his work: “I never truckled; I never took off the hat to Fashion
and held it out for pennies. By God, I told them the truth. They liked
it or they didn’t like it. What had that to do with me? I told them the
truth.”
He qualifies his doctrine by the statement that the novelist must not
let his purpose run away with his story. I have an idea he must have let
publishers and critics persuade him he had done that in “The Octopus”;
for in “The Pit,” the second volume of his proposed trilogy, he is more
tame and conventional. He tries to interest us in a grain broker and his
wife as human beings--and he cannot do that, because parasites are not
and cannot be interesting, except in satire after the fashion of
“Babbitt.” We miss the epic sweep and bigness of “The Octopus,” and we
are not consoled by the fact that “The Pit” had twice the sale.
The relationship between the novelist’s purpose and his story is very
simple; the two things are one, and of equal importance, and the
novelist must have them both in hand at every moment of his work. The
consequence of losing either is equally fatal. The novelist who loses
his grip upon the story and the characters who are living the story,
begins at once to write a tract or a sermon--I know all about that,
having done it. But equally fatal it is to lose your grip upon your
purpose; for then you are doing meaningless reporting, and becoming a
camera instead of a creative intellect.
I am prepared to hear it said many times that the author of this book
does not know the difference between a tract or sermon and a work of
art. But those who read the book, not to get material for ridicule, but
to learn the truth about art, will note that I have praised in this book
only the artists who were big enough and strong enough to keep both
their imaginative impulse and their intellectual control; I have failed
to mention a goodly company of artists who fought valiantly for freedom
and justice, but who do not belong among the greatest, for precisely the
reason that their impulse to teach and to preach ran away with their
inspiration. That is why you miss such names as Plato and Sir Thomas
More and Ferdinand Lassalle and Bertha von Suttner and John Ruskin and
Walter Besant and Charles Kingsley and Charles Reade and Robert Buchanan
and John Davidson and Richard Whiteing and Francis Adams and Harriet
Beecher Stowe and Edward Bellamy.