The Responsibilities of the Novelist by Frank Norris

First published: 1903

Type of work: Literary essays

Critical Evaluation:

Frank Norris’ one volume of criticism is sometimes referred to but little quoted. If we wonder how one can ignore a volume titled THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE NOVELIST, written by a novelist of critical standing and published immediately after his early death, at a time when only Henry James among practicing writers seemed to be interested in considering the art of the novel and the novelist, the answer is quickly apparent in Norris’ volume. Most of the twenty-five articles (scarcely essays) are written on popular and topical subjects—“Why Women Should Write the Best Novels,” “A Plea for Romantic Fiction”—in a regular length of approximately eighteen hundred words with plenty of free generalization and attacks on popular rivals, all in the inflated windy style of the penny-a-liner. In all this successful literary journalism, however, there are passages which deserve to be better known for the light they shed on the American novel then and now, and on Frank Norris.

In the last four years of his short life Frank Norris turned from roving journalism and short stories and began to publish novels; in his last two years the articles he published were almost all on literature, some in regular series, others as he could place them, generally in WORLD’S WORK and THE CRITIC, and at least fourteen of these appear in the first fifteen essays in the volume. Eight others had been post-humously published in periodicals. The remaining eleven essays were drawn from earlier work and material syndicated after Norris’ death on October 25, 1902. All come from Norris’ sudden interest in his art.

Norris had no voice in the selection or organization of the contents but the restricting of the volume only to fiction is indicated in the opening essay, and the fact that more than half the titles use the words “novel,” “novelist,” or “fiction,” though within the essays Norris uses the larger term “writer.”

Six of the better essays were selected for reprinting in 1949 by a New York publisher, making a slim pamphlet of thirty-five pages and forming a basis for considering the volume as a whole. The title essay begins by asserting that the novel is popular today because it is the best expression of modern life and more potent than press or pulpit; therefore the “popular” novelist (not Norris) who sells one hundred and fifty thousand copies of a novel has a responsibility to be as earnest about his work as Norris intends to be. His carping at popular writers continues in other essays, but his program of reform is not aesthetic; all he wants (as would be obvious from his own work) is truth to the facts of life. This is repeated in his conclusion to the second essay, “The True Reward of the Novelist,” where he attacks popular historical novelists for their accumulation of historical paraphernalia without trying to understand their characters; it would be better for their soul’s sake if they lived among real people and told the truth. This stress on the morality of realism is seen in a number of other essays, as in “The Need of a Literary Conscience” and the extended final essay, “Salt and Sincerity.” This belief is the first article in Norris’ credo as a novelist.

In the third essay, “The Novel with a ’Purpose,’” Norris tries to come to grips with the novel as a literary form. The novel is classified as it performs three functions: telling, showing, and proving; the second class simply selects from the stream of events in the first in order to draw character. THE THREE MUSKETEERS tells what happens, but ROMOLA shows the character involved in the events of the novel. The third and superior class studies social forces and argues a case corresponding to the novelist’s views on Man, as in LES MISERABLES. Norris contends that the last is the most difficult to write because the novelist has first to establish his social views, then submerge them as a storyteller while remaining impersonal to the violent emotions such a novel will arouse in its reader. Mrs. Stowe, it is argued, was absorbed in the story of UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, not in its message, and she cared more for her story than all the suffering slaves that ever were. Here Norris’ free generalization has taken over what might have been a valid critical distinction and lands him in the awkward posture of claiming that UNCLE TOM’S CABIN is superior (Class III) to ROMOLA (Class II). Any complaints against the novel with a “purpose” show the reader will not face truth when the novelist has accepted the responsibility of telling it; for his own good he must read such novels, which join press and pulpit as agencies for the reformation of society.

Norris’ crude theory of realism is expanded in the remaining essays of those selected for republication in 1949 and in the remainder of THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE NOVELIST, but it falls to pieces the more Norris considers it, chiefly on the twin rocks of romance and story. The latter, in “Story-Tellers vs. Novelists,” is exalted over the novel proper which is considered “intellectual”—ROMOLA is again instanced—because every adult was once a child storyteller. The novelist’s “responsibility” has been strangely stretched to include entertaining his public by popularizing his work, which leads to the pronouncement in “The American Public and ’Popular’ Fiction” that it is better to have bad books than none at all. Similarly, the sixth and seventh essays prescribe the subjects for the storytelling novelist: the romance of the West (“A Neglected Epic”) and the romance of world trade, the frontier of American capitalism—lusty, brawling, savage combat in the name of improving the material conditions of the common man. This view may be very American: it certainly is applicable to Norris’ novels, which can now be seen as gripping stories about the romance of rails and wheat. Their realism may result from Norris’ special vision but may equally be incidental, leading to the conclusion that Norris was himself a popular historical novelist manque.

Such a conclusion, drawn from among the first ten essays in THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE NOVELIST, is borne out by scattered articles on the American novel present and future in the remainder of the volume. They tell us about Norris and about middle-brow conceptions of the nature and function of fiction at the turn of the century, and incidentally they show why Henry James had to wait some time for his public. Norris was trying to define his own responsibility as a novelist, and not succeeding because he was following a minority trend of protest which stemmed from the West, his own place of origin. Ironically, it is his attempt to deny his romantic proclivities and write social protest novels which alone entitles him to serious consideration today. He did achieve a new definition of “romantic” in “A Problem in Fiction,” his best attempt to distinguish between realism (flat accuracy) and romanticism (inner truth), which in turn hints that fiction, being fiction, will always be both inaccurate and romantic.

The essays in the second half of RESPONSIBILITIES discuss the mechanics of writing and selling which Norris had discovered in twelve years of enterprising journalism. “Fiction Writing as a Business” shows how to sell one novel seven times in succession: the Sunday paper serial, the hardback, the Canadian edition, the cheap cloth edition, the paperback, the English edition, and the English “colonial” edition. Because the novelist’s production is estimated at two books yearly, he is advised to go in for “short stuff,” articles and short stories. Data like this, figured out in dollars and print orders, must have been hard to come by in Norris’ time; many amateurs needed “The Volunteer Manuscript,” one of the liveliest of the essays, which begins with a calculation that if those Americans who have lost the use of both arms are discounted, there remain approximately 69,900,000 who persist in writing novels and “volunteering” them to publishers. Norris gives them seventeen sound rules for submitting manuscripts, beginning with the advice to have them typewritten and ending with a recommendation to stop writing novels.

There are other practical essays in this half of the volume which reveal the conditions of American publishing at that time—“New York as Literary Centre,” “Retail Bookseller: Literary Dictator”—but three of the essays form a separate group which is, given their time and place, surprising. In “Novelists to Order—While you Wait,” Norris proposes that novelists should be able to get professional training as sound as that of painters or sculptors. In two additional essays he offers suggestions for that training, suggestions on matters that have been incorporated into composition courses today. By emphasizing stylistic criteria he seems to anticipate the New Criticism; “Simplicity in Art” analyzes a passage from The Gospel of St. Luke as its criterion. “The Mechanics of Fiction” directs the reader’s attention to the technique of exposition in the novel. Norris’ unconscious anticipation of developments, such as the creative writing course, makes us regret greatly that he had only begun to define his craft in THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE NOVELIST.

Bibliography

Boyd, Jennifer. Frank Norris: Spatial Form and Narrative Time. New York: Peter Lang, 1993.

Graham, Don, ed. Critical Essays on Frank Norris. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980.

McElrath, Joseph R., Jr. “Beyond San Francisco: Frank Norris’s Invention of Northern California.” In San Francisco in Fiction: Essays in a Regional Literature, edited by David Fine and Paul Skenazy. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.

McElrath, Joseph R., Jr. Frank Norris Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1992.

Marut, David. “Sam Lewiston’s Bad Timing: A Note on the Economic Context of ’A Deal in Wheat.’” American Literary Realism 27 (Fall, 1994): 74-80.

Pizer, Donald. The Novels of Frank Norris. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966.

Pizer, Donald, ed. The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964.