“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.”