"Frank Norris," photographer, date unknown. Larger.
California farmland is some of the most fruitful—and valuable—in the world. Even valuable enough, thought some, to defend to the death.
In his 1901 novel The Octopus, Frank Norris pits idealized farmers against a rapacious railroad in a struggle over land that inspires deep fury. Here the opponents face off in the southern San Joaquin Valley.
A dozen men were on their feet in an instant, their teeth set, their fists clenched, their faces purple with rage. Oaths, curses, maledictions exploded like the firing of successive mines. Voices quivered with wrath, hands flung upward, the fingers hooked, prehensile, trembled with anger. The sense of wrongs, injustices, the oppression, extortion and pillage of twenty years suddenly found voice in a raucous howl of execration. For a second, there was nothing articulate in that cry of savage exasperation, nothing even intelligent. It was the human animal, hounded to its corner, exploited, harried, to its last stand, at bay, ferocious, terrible, at last with bared teeth and upraised claws to meet the death grapple. It was the squealing of the tormented brute, its back to the wall, defending its lair, its mate and its whelps, ready to bite, to rend, to trample, to batter out the life of The Enemy in a primeval, bestial welter of blood and fury.
Frank Norris' The Octopus was to be the first of a trilogy of works exploring the effect socio-economic forces on individuals, but Norris died unexpectedly before he completed the series.
Frank Norris' epic novel The Octopus was grounded in the nineteenth century conflict between the railroads and just about everyone else in California. But that didn't keep the socially aware writer from infusing his work with awe for the mysterious, all-enveloping force of mother nature.
In the guise of main character Presley, Norris describes the vast Central Valley landscape, a maternal presence that fires the imagination.
Beyond the fine line of the horizons, over the curve of the globe, the shoulder of the earth, were other ranches, equally vast, and beyond these, others, and beyond these, still others, the immensities multiplying, lengthening out vast and expanded, Titanic, before the eye of the mind, flagellated with heat, quivering and shimmering under the sun's red eye. At long intervals, a faint breath of wind out of the south passed slowly over the levels of the baked and empty earth, accentuating the silence, marking off the stillness. It seemed to exhale from the land itself, a prolonged sigh as of deep fatigue. It was the season after harvest, and the great earth, the mother, after its period of reproduction, its pains of labour, deliverred of the fruit of its loins, slept the sleep of exhaustion, infinite repose of the colossus, benignant, eternal, strong, the nourisher of nations, the feeder of an entire world.
Frank Norris' The Octopus: A Story of California appeared in 1901, the first in a projected trilogy of novels never finished before Norris' untimley death.
"El Rancho de los Muertos," illustration for The Octopus, 1901. Larger.
Nobody brought more verve to writing about the awesome, inimical power of the railroads in nineteenth century California than did Frank Norris, who took a familiar cliché and turned it into a powerful, unforgettable symbol.
In his classic naturalist study of power and greed, The Octopus, Frank Norris gives readers a portrait of the railroad through an alter-ego, the poet Presley.
Again and again, at rapid intervals in its flying course, it whistled for road crossings, for sharp curves, for trestles; ominous notes, hoarse, bellowing, ringing with the accents of menace and defiance; and abruptly Presley saw again, in his imagination, the galloping monster, the terror of steel and steam, with its single eye, cyclopean, red, shooting from horizon to horizon; but saw it now as the symbol of a vast power, huge, terrible, flinging the echo of its thunder over all the reaches of the valley, leaving blood and destruction in its path; the leviathan with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil, the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power, the monster, the Colossus, the Octopus.
"Now He Was a Full-Fledged Dentist," photograph from the photoplay Greed based on McTeague, 1899. Larger.
The beauty of California's natural landscapes is a frequent subject for the writers and artists who have worked in the Golden State. But almost as intriguing are California's mysterious, suggestive cityscapes.
Frank Norris published McTeague, his Zolaesque story of a brutish San Francisco dentist, in 1899. Near the opening of the novel, McTeague gazes from his working-class home and realizes how Polk Street defines the boundaries of his life while simultaneously suggesting the possibility of something finer.
It was one of those cross streets peculiar to Western cities, situated in the heart of the residence quarter, but occupied by tradespeople who lived in the rooms above their shops. There were corner drug stores with huge jars of red, yellow, and green liquids in their windows, very brave and gay; stationers' stores, where illustrated weeklies were tacked upon bulletin boards; barber shops with cigar stands in their vestibules; sad-looking plumbers' offices; cheap restaurants, in whose windows one saw piles of unopened oysters weighted down by cubes of ice, and china pigs and cows knee deep in layers of white beans. As one end of the street McTeague could see the huge power-house of the cable line. Immediately opposite him was a great market; while farther on, over the chimney stacks of the intervening houses, the glass roof of some huge public baths glittered like crystal in the afternoon sun.
Frank Norris was only thirty-one when he died, but despite his short life left behind two important California novels based on a theory of fiction that "devotes itself not to a study of men but of man."
Two Voices
From "The Santa Cruz Venetian Carnival," 1896. Read Online
"Santa Cruz beach, Neptune Casino, Natatorium and Pleasure Pier," photographed by Pillsbury Picture Company, 1908. Larger.
California has long had its share of carnivals, celebrations, and festivals, but there's something in the spirit of the place that eventually drowns out frivolous merry-making.
After working as a journalist in South Africa, young Frank Norris took a job as an assistant editor in the San Francisco weekly journal The Wave. In 1896 he covered the Santa Cruz Venetian Carnival for the weekly, and found there something far more mysterious and romantic than the carnival queen:
And then, in that immense silence, when all the shrill, staccato, trivial noises of the day were dumb, you heard again the prolonged low hum that rose from the city, even in its sleep, the voice of something individual, living a huge, strange life apart, raising a virile diapason of protest against shams and tinsels and things transient in that other strange carnival, that revel of masks and painted faces, the huge grim joke that runs its fourscore years and ten. But that was not all.
There was another voice, that of the sea; mysterious, insistent, and there through the night, under the low, red moon, the two voices of the sea and of the city talked to each other in that unknown language of their own; and the two voices mingling together filled all the night with an immense and prolonged wave of sound, the bourdon of an unseen organ—the vast and minor note of Life.
Norris' best work—novels like McTeague and The Octopus—earned for the writer a lasting reputation as a precise observer of men and women and the settings in which they live.
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