NOVEL BY FRANK NORRIS

New York Times, April 12, 1914

Review of Vandover and The Brute, by Frank Norris, Doubleday and Page, Inc.

 

Something over a decade ago, William Dean Howells quoted, apropos of Frank Norris’ work

‘The unfinished window in Aladdin’s palace

Unfinished must remain’ 

and added words of keen regret that it must be so – that a man who had not only shown signs of possessing actual genius, but who in earnestness and singleness of purpose stood out giant-wise among American writers, should have left us, his message only half-delivered. And now, after praise and blame are for the most part alike silent, the long arm of coincidence reaches back across the years and rescues for us a few words more.

Vandover and The Brute was written nearly twenty years ago, almost simultaneously we are told with McTeague.  Plots and ideas for other novels supervened, and Vandover unrevised, and temporarily shelved. At the time of the San Francisco earthquake and fire the manuscript was in a storage warehouse that burned to the ground. It’s contents, though, strange to say, thrown out, hit or miss into a vacant lot, escaped injury, and in the course of time the crate containing the manuscript found a resting place in another storehouse, where it remained for years, unlabeled, unidentified, awaiting a claimant. Only recently has the mystery been solved, and the manuscript, from which even the author’s name had been cut, possibly by some autograph seeker, has been recognized at unquestionably the long-missing work of the long-dead author.

It is only fair to say, in extenuation of the not infrequent roughnesses and crudenesses in the book, that it appears to be practically the author’s first draft. In the ordinary course of events it would have been subjected to much chiseling and polishing before it was presented to the public, which of course, it has not received. The idea of the novel is so big, however, it stands so firmly upon the fundamental things in human nature, that we may well confine ourselves to a consideration of Mister Norris’s intent in the matter and let the details of its execution go.

It is the story of a sensitive, artistically inclined boy, with –to begin with—a very small Brute indeed hidden in the recesses of his soul. But there was no one, unfortunately, to warn him it was a Brute – instead, everybody ignored the fact that it was there at all—and it grew bigger. And as it grew bigger the boy, Vandover, grew weaker, until finally he became completely Brute, and to all intents and purposes there was no mere Vandover.  Briefly and baldly, that is all there is to it—but that is all there is to the tragedy of a large part of the human race.

There have been many tales told of the multiple personalities which sleep in us, of which probably the most gripping is Stevenson’s famous romance. But all such stories have one faundamental weakness, looked at as moral documents: they are stories of fatality, not of cause and effect. The manifestations of multiple personality bear no relation to the man’s voluntary inward life, which is all of him that really matters.

Vandover, on the other hand, is a story of growth, of evolution. In spite of our modern theorists on freedom—who aren’t so very modern after all; one Nero was a consistent expositor of the cult—genuine growth, in the sense of desirable growth, is conditioned by inhibition, by restraint. Where these are lacking, something else grows; something invariably ugly, melancholy, and finally destructive—the brute in man. It is not merely a coincidence that every primitive race has its legend of the alternative from a living human being, the wer-animal.

It may be objected that the hero’s final lapse into one of the most horrible of all forms of madness is inartistic; that it reduces the parable to too concrete a form, and overemphasizes the already obvious moral. Perhaps; yet one cannot help feeling that in a story of this sort there is something deeper than literary values to consider, and that the author’s instinct was right. The figure of Vandover in his seizures, naked, four-footed, running up and down his room, his head low and swinging, is unspeakably frightful, yet it knits up his past and his future in the mind of the reader as nothing else could do. It makes the twilight of history articulate and links its cry of instinctive terror to the warning of the science of today.

One wonders what the reception of this book would have been had Frank Norris devoted himself to its completion and publication twenty years ago. One thing is certain, it would have created a tremendous sensation. At that time, the social evil had not become a fashionable topic of dinner-table conversation, and the episode of Flossie and young Haight, minor as it is, would have been a veritable bombshell. This episode, by the way, is a blemish, not because it dealt with the subject of “Damaged Goods” before ”Damaged Goods” was thought of, but because it is unnecessary and out of balance. The main theme of the book, the usurpation of the throne of man’s soul by the wolf of desire, is strong enough to stand alone, so strong, indeed, that the intrusion of a distracting motive is as irritating as the buzzing of a fly at a funeral.

It shows how far we have traveled from the standards of twenty years ago that Vandover and The Brute will find few readers today to question its morality, or even its propriety. Frank Norris, to whom art meant truth, and truth art, would be glad to know (and perhaps he does) that his first book, the book he must have loved, and to which he perhaps dreamed of returning when he should have perfected a method worthy of it, appears at last in a time which judges it, not by conventional and artificial standards, but on the simple basis of the truth there is in it, and the quality of the technique. The latter, as we have explained before, it is not only kinder but fairer to leave undiscussed, though there are parts, notably the description of the shipwreck, that are superbly written; the truth in it will speak for itself.  

 

END

This article is in the public domain.