A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

The tent was full of foul smells: the smell of drugs and of moldy gunpowder, the smell of dirty rags, of unwashed bodies, the smell of stale smoke, of scorching sealskin, of soaked and rotting canvas that exhaled from the tent cover—every smell but that of food.

McTeague is a brutal book: it gets hold of one's imagination and haunts it like an odor from a morgue. So with certain scenes from Vandover and the Brute. One sees for weeks the ghastly face of that drowning Jew who, after the wreck of the steamer, was beaten off again and again until his mashed fingers could no longer gain a hold. True to life it undoubtedly is, but to what end?

Norris's master work was to be his trilogy, the epic of the wheat, the allegory of financial and industrial America. He explained his purpose in the preface to The Pit:

These novels, while forming a series, will be in no way connected with each other save by their relation to (1) the production, (2) the distribution, (3) the consumption of American wheat. When complete they will form the story of a crop of wheat from the time of its sowing as seed in California to the time of its consumption as bread in a village of Western Europe.

The first novel, The Octopus, deals with the war between the wheat grower and the Railroad Trust; the second, The Pit, is the fictitious narrative of a "deal" in the Chicago wheat pit; while the third, The Wolf, will probably have for its pivotal episode the relieving of a famine in an old world community.

He lived to complete only the first two, and it is upon these two that his place as a novelist must depend. They represent his maturer work, his final manner, and they undoubtedly show what would have been his product had he been spared to complete his work.

The two books impress one first with their vastness of theme. The whole continent seems to be in them. They have an untamed power, an elemental quality, an unconfined sweep that is Russian in its quality. They are epics, epics of a new continent with its untold richness in corn and wheat, its enmeshing railroads, its teeming cities of the plain, its restless human types—new birth of our new soil. The excitement and the enthusiasm of the novelist flow from every page. To read long is to be filled with the trembling eagerness of the wheat pit and the railroad yard. The style is headlong, excited, illuminated hotly with Hugo-like adjectives. Through it all runs a symbolism that at times takes full control. The railroad dominates The Octopus, the wheat The Pit as fully as the hemp dominates Allen's Reign of Law. The books are allegories. The Western farmer is in the grip of an octopus-like monster, the railroad, that is strangling him. The ghastly horror of the locomotive that plows at full speed through a flock of sheep is symbolic of his helplessness.

To the right and left, all the width of the right of way, the little bodies had been flung; backs were snapped against the fence-posts; brains knocked out. Caught in the barbs of the wire, wedged in, the bodies hung suspended. Under foot it was terrible; the black blood, winking in the starlight, seeped down into the clay between the ties with a long sucking murmur.... 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.

Garland in such pictures as "Under the Lion's Paw" tends to arouse his reader to mutiny, to the cry "This thing must stop!" Norris fills him with shuddering horror and leaves him unnerved.

Tremendous energy the novels undoubtedly have and truth too, so far as it goes. They have imaginative power of no inferior type and an ardor that is contagious. It was worth while to have written them: they picture for all time a unique phase of American life, but it is no great loss to our literature that the two were not expanded into a long series. In the higher sense of the word they are not literature; they are remarkably well done newspaper "stories." Like most of the work of his group of writers, they are journalistic in pitch and in intent: stirring narratives, picturesque presentings of unusual material, timely studies in dynamic style. But literary art is founded upon restraint, reserve, poise. These stories lack finish, concentration, and even, at times, good taste. Everywhere full organ, everywhere tenseness, everywhere excitement. A terrible directness there is, but it tends no whither and it comes to no terminus of conclusion.