A Novelist’s Review of a Novel
Vandover and the Brute, by Frank Norris. [Doubleday, Page and Company, New York.]
“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; I knew it for the truth then, and I know it for the truth now.”—Frank Norris.
It would seem inevitable that had Frank Norris lived he would have rewritten Vandover and the Brute. In the book, as it was rescued from the packing box that had been through the San Francisco fire and sent to the publisher, there is much that would have been discarded by the later Norris. Perhaps he would have thrown it all away and written a new story with the same theme. He was a big man and he had the courage of bigness. He could throw fairly good work into the waste-paper basket. The decay of man in modern society, the slow growth in him of the brute that goes upon all fours—what a big, terrible theme! What a book the later Norris would have made of it!
In the introduction by Charles G. Norris quotation is made from the Frank Norris essay, The True Reward of the Novelist, in which this sentence stands out: “To make money is not the province of the novelist.” Also it is suggested that the book was written under the influence of Zola, and there is more than a hint of Zola’s formula that everything in life is material for literature in the way the job is done.
As it stands, Vandover wants cutting—cutting and something else. With that said and understood, we are glad that the book has been rescued and that it can stand upon our book shelves. American letters cannot know and understand too much of the spirit of Frank Norris, and just at this time when there is much talk of the new note and some little sincere effort toward a return to truth and honesty in the craft of writing, it is good to have this visit from the boy Norris. He was a brave lad, an American writing man who lived, worked, and died without once putting his foot upon the pasteboard road that leads to easy money. “The easy money is not for us,” he said and had the manhood to write and live with that warning in his mind. He had craft-love. With a few more writers working in his spirit we should hear less of the new note. Norris was the new note. He was of the undying brotherhood.
When Frank Norris wrote Vandover he was not the great artist he became, but he was the great man; and that’s why this book of his is worth publishing and reading. The greater writer would have possessed a faculty the boy who wrote this book had not acquired—the faculty of selection. He would have been less intent upon telling truly unimportant details and by elimination would have gained dramatic strength.
Read Vandover therefore not as an example of the work of Norris the artist but as the work of a true man. It will inspire you. Its very rawness will show you the artist in the making. It will make you understand why Frank Norris with Mark Twain will perhaps, among all American writers, reach the goal of immortality.