KATHLEEN NORRIS
“Mrs. Norris,” explains William Dean Howells, “puts the problem, or the
fact, or the trait before you by quick, vivid touches of portraiture or
action. If she lacks the final touch of Frank Norris’s power, she has
the compensating gift of a more controlled and concentrated observation.
She has the secret of closely adding detail to detail in a triumph of
what another California author has called Littleism, but what seems to
be nature’s way of achieving Largeism.”
Of course, this is the method of Kathleen Norris, the method in her
madness, to use the word madness in its old sense of being possessed by
something. What is Mrs. Norris possessed by? Why, the irresistible
impulse to put things before you and make you consider whether they
should be so. H’m, a preacher might do that. Well, had most preachers
the presentative skill of Kathleen Norris there would be ticket
speculators on the sidewalks in front of their tabernacles!
If you want to make people think write a novel--but be sure you know
how! Mrs. Norris does. Why, is easily answered. She was not a newspaper
reporter for nothing. Newspaper training does inculcate “a taste exact
for faultless fact” that “amounts to a disease,” quite as the lilting
lines in _The Mikado_ have it. The fiction of Kathleen Norris is
distinguished by several unusual qualities, all due, in the present
writer’s opinion, to newspaper training operating upon a gifted and
observant mind:
As in a good piece of reporting, a single important idea or fact or
problem is at the bottom of each of her novels.
Each story is first of all a story, the crisp, penetrative account of
certain persons and events.
Mrs. Norris never appears to have taken her fact or idea or problem and
said, “I will build a tale about this.” She seems always to be
describing actual people and actual occurrences. This seeming may be
deceptive. It may be that she goes about it the other way, proceeding
from her idea to her people and incidents. If she does, the trail is
covered perfectly. For the reader gets the sensation first of persons
and “doings” and then, later, of problems arising from their relations
to each other; which is the precise and invariable effect life itself
always gives us. We do not think of the problem of divorce first and of
our neighbors, John Doe and Cora Doe, afterward; we see Cora Doe going
past the house and recall when John Doe was last in town and then, and
not until then, do we think of the tragedy of their lives and the
dreadful question mark coiled in the center of it.
In other words, life assimilates all its great facts and problems and
the novelist who would set them forth effectively must first have
assimilated them too, so that they will not have to be “brought in” the
story he is telling, but will be in it from the beginning, disclosing
themselves as the action develops. The reader must feel that he has
_discovered_ the fact or the problem for himself, that he, all by
himself, has abstracted it out of the scenes put before him. He must see
Cora Doe go by and hear of John Doe’s last appearance and look upon the
wreck of their lives--but all the rest must be left to him to grasp
unaided! The real reason why no story can have a moral is that every
reader must find his own moral, even if each finds the same one!
Mrs. Norris understands this and practices it. She does not ask you to
consider whether a girl, bred in sordid surroundings and having access
in youth only to tawdry ideals, can lift herself to gentleness and
dignity and become, at any cost, the captain of her soul. No! She makes
you acquainted with Julia Page. She refrains from questioning the
efficacy of divorce and writes _The Heart of Rachael_, which makes every
reader ask himself the question. If her readers unite in an identical
answer and that answer is the one Mrs. Norris herself would return, does
that convict her of stepping outside the novelist’s province? Bless you,
no; the novelist’s province is as large as life is, and its boundaries
in the case of any given writer as far as he can carry and maintain
them. Mrs. Norris’ s frontiers are wide.
The woman first. An interesting article in the _Book News Monthly_
several years ago posited that “Kathleen Norris upsets all our accepted
ideas of how a novelist is made.... With the exception of five months
spent in taking a literary course at the University of California, Mrs.
Norris never had any schooling, and, until five years ago (1908), she
never had been outside her native State.... No thrilling adventures, no
prairie life, or mountaineering, no experiences of travel, or residence
in Paris or Berlin, have been hers.” The impression of wonder which this
may create will be somewhat modified by the sketch of her life which
follows, and for which we are chiefly indebted to the same article.
Kathleen Norris was the daughter of James A. Thompson, of San Francisco.
The father was a San Franciscan of long residence and twice served as
president of the famous Bohemian Club. At the time of his death he was
manager of the Donohoe-Kelly Bank. Kathleen was the second child in a
family of six--three boys and three girls. Mr. Thompson would not send
his children to school and they were taught at home, with an occasional
governess for language study. In 1899 the family moved to Mill Valley
across San Francisco Bay, and “Treehaven,” a bungalow in the beautiful
valley at the foot of Mount Tamalpais, became the home. A quieter life
can hardly be imagined. There weren’t many neighbors, the children did
not go to school, most of the visitors were grown people, there were no
children’s parties. Kathleen Norris never saw the inside of a theater
until she was sixteen, which will astonish readers of _The Story of
Julia Page_. There was, however, a large library, there were plenty of
magazines, there were miles of forest as a playground, there were
horses, cows, dogs, cats, a garden. Mountains were there to be climbed
and creeks to be waded. “The boys as well as the girls of the family all
became practical cooks.”
Kathleen was the oldest girl. At nineteen she was to “come out” in San
Francisco. A house had been taken in the city for the winter. Gowns had
been ordered and “the cotillions joined” when Mrs. Thompson was stricken
with pneumonia and died. Her husband died, broken-hearted, in less than
a month afterward. Misfortunes culminating just after the father’s death
left the six children “destitute, with the exception of the family home
in Mill Valley, too large and too far from the city to be a negotiable
asset.”
The children had never known what it was to want money. They behaved
bravely. The oldest boy already had a small job. Kathleen got work at
once with a hardware house at $30 a month. Her 15-year-old sister took
three pupils “whose fees barely paid for her commutation ticket and
carfares. The total of the little family’s income was about $80 a month.
Their one terror--never realized--was of debt.”
Kathleen and her sister came home from the day’s work to get the dinner,
make beds, wash dishes and scrub the kitchen floor at midnight.
Kathleen, who had been a favorite story-teller all her life, began to
wonder if she could not make money by writing. Her tales as a child had
generally been illustrated with little pen drawings of girls with
pigtails, girls in checkered aprons, girls in fancy dress, “and
occasionally with more tragic pictures, such as widows and bereaved
mothers mourning beside their departed.... There is a scrapbook in the
family in which are pasted more than 1,000 of these sketches.” Now she
was not thinking of illustrating stories, her own or others’, but of
making needed money. In the fall of 1903 she had attempted to take a
year’s course in the English department of the University of California
and had had to give it up because the family needed her. In 1904, at the
age of twenty-three, she made her first successful effort. The San
Francisco _Argonaut_ paid her $15.50 for a story called _The Colonel and
the Lady_. Mrs. Norris was then librarian in the Mechanics’ Library and
had more time to try writing. Such success as she had was not very
encouraging. She left the library to go into settlement work, and for
several months strove “to reanimate an already defunct settlement
house.” She got her feet on the right path at last by becoming society
editor of the San Francisco _Evening Bulletin_. A few months later she
became a reporter for the San Francisco _Call_, where she worked for two
years.
“Mrs. Norris doesn’t know whether the newspaper experience helped or
hindered her in her literary work.” There need be no uncertainty, we
should think, when, as we are told in the next breath, “during these
years she saw many phases of life that must have enlarged her vision and
made her more catholic in her views.” She learned to write with speed.
“During the visit of the Atlantic fleet to Pacific waters, in 1908,
there was one day in which 8,000 words were Mrs. Norris’s contribution
to the paper.” This may explain why she is one of the most prolific of
American novelists. Long before _Josselyn’s Wife_ could be brought out
in the fall of 1918, _Sisters_ had begun to be published serially.
In April, 1909, Kathleen Thompson was married to Charles Gilman Norris,
younger brother of Frank Norris, the author of _McTeague_ and _The
Pit_. Charles Norris, now Capt. Charles Norris, U. S. A., is himself a
novelist, the author of _The Amateur_ and _Salt: The Education of
Griffith Adams_. Captain and Mrs. Norris, whose home is at Port
Washington, Long Island, New York, have a son named after his
distinguished uncle, Frank Norris.
Marriage, a home in New York City, and the first leisure since her
father’s death; a literary atmosphere (her husband was in magazine
editorial work), and the happiness of being in the city she had for
years longed to know-these are the circumstances which reawakened Mrs.
Norris’s ambition to write. She essayed again without encouragement from
editors except the editor at the breakfast table. Her newspaper training
now seemed to handicap her, “her fiction lacked the simplicity and the
appeal that have since endeared it to so many readers.” For months she
got nothing but rejections. Finally this note popped out of the mail:
“Dear Mrs. Norris:
“The readers report that, delightful as this story is, it is ‘not
quite in our tone.’ The feeling of the _Atlantic_ is, that when a
tale is as intimately true to life as this is of yours, the tone is
surely a tone for the _Atlantic_ to adopt.
“It gives us much pleasure to accept so admirable a story.
“Very truly yours,
“THE EDITOR.”
The story that was “not quite in our tone” but that so impressed Ellery
Sedgwick, editor of the _Atlantic Monthly_, was _What Happened to
Alanna_. On its publication S. S. McClure wrote to Mrs. Norris asking
for her next work. She replied, giving him the date on which _What
Happened to Alanna_ had been submitted to _McClure’s Magazine_ and the
date on which it had been returned to her.
Her next six stories appeared in _McClure’s_. After that it seemed to
the casual observer as if they were everywhere. In one month Mrs. Norris
was on five tables of contents.
And then the _Delineator_ offered a prize for a story of not more than
3,000 words. Mrs. Norris began one, and when she saw that it would run
to 10,000 words, she laid it aside and wrote another. So the
_Delineator_ lost and the _American Magazine_ gained _Mother_. On the
story’s appearance five publishers asked Mrs. Norris to enlarge it
sufficiently to make a book.
Enlarging short stories into novels is a ticklish business. Successes
are few. Mrs. Norris added 20,000 words to her short story. How well she
did it is evidenced by the dozens of editions through which the book has
run and more remarkably by the fact that Edward Bok, editor of the
_Ladies’ Home Journal_, paid a high price for the privilege of running
the novel as a serial _after_ its publication as a book. This is
apparently a unique instance.
_Mother_ was followed by _The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne_, the story of a
great-hearted woman who brought her fresh and honest ideals into the
heart of a narrow Western city. Those who read it may excusably gasp to
hear that it was written in six weeks on an order from the _Woman’s Home
Companion_. _Poor Dear Margaret Kirby_, collected short stories, was the
third book, appearing in the spring of 1913. _The Treasure_ had had
serial publication in the _Saturday Evening Post_. _Saturday’s Child_
preceded it. And then Mrs. Norris made her first great success with a
full length novel which many will consider the biggest book she has
done. It was _The Story of Julia Page_, the first of three novels which
have been called Mrs. Norris’s trilogy of American womanhood. The others
are _The Heart of Rachael_ and _Martie, the Unconquered_. Between these
last two appeared her short novel, _Undertow_, dealing with two young
married spendthrifts. _Josselyn’s Wife_, “the story of a woman’s faith,”
tells of a sweet, simple girl, Ellen Latimer, transported by a whirlwind
marriage to Gibbs Josselyn from the humdrum existence of a small country
town to the luxuries of the wealthy social life of New York. There is a
time when the young second wife of Gibbs Josselyn’s father threatens to
break up the happiness of the younger Josselyn and Ellen, for Gibbs
succumbs readily to her undeniable fascination. Then comes the crash.
Through the long agony of a murder trial it is the wife he has neglected
who alone upholds him. It is her faith that wins and that brings him at
last to an understanding of his egotistical folly.
Mrs. Norris is not yet at the height and fullness of her powers, as well
as can be judged contemporaneously. It is easy enough to look back on
the completed work of a writer’s lifetime and say, “Here he reached his
apex, here he began to decline, here he rose again for an hour.” But to
estimate the present and relate it tentatively to the future is very
much harder. _Mother_ was one “peak” in the graph of Mrs. Norris’s
progress, _The Story of Julia Page_ was another and a higher,
_Josselyn’s Wife_ is at least as high. There is every prospect that in
the active and happy years we may hope are ahead of her, Kathleen Norris
will excel the impressive novels she has already given us.
BOOKS BY KATHLEEN NORRIS
_Mother_, 1911.
_The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne_, 1912.
_Poor Dear Margaret Kirby_, 1913.
_Saturday’s Child_, 1914.
_The Treasure_, 1915.
_The Story of Julia Page_, 1915.
_The Heart of Rachael_, 1916.
_Undertow_, 1917.
_Martie, the Unconquered_, 1917.
_Josselyn’s Wife_, 1918.
_Sisters_, 1919.
_Harriet and the Piper_, 1920.
_The Beloved Woman_, 1921.
_Lucretia Lombard_, 1922.
_Certain People of Importance_, 1922.
_These novels by Mrs. Norris are published by Doubleday, Page & Company,
New York._