Remembering Frank Norris (1870-1902)

Last night, Joyce and I were streaming some of the new documentary film by Ken Burns about Hemingway (first episode). The film had just dealt with The Sun Also Rises (and, in part, about EH's treatment of a Jewish character) when the "lights out" message arrived imperiously in my brain, but just before I drifted off (I always go to sleep first), Joyce asked me how my literature professors had dealt with anti-Semitism in my courses.

I didn’t remember much, but I did remember one episode clearly. It was at Hiram College in the mid-1960s in one of Dr. Ravitz's wonderful American Thought courses. We were reading Frank Norris' 1901 novel, The Octopus: A Story of California, the first volume in his projected trilogy, "The Epic of the Wheat." In it is an offensive Jewish character, S. Behrman, and to be honest, I hadn't noticed the ethnic/religious angle (that's how dumb I was!). 

I told Joyce that Dr. Ravitz (who is Jewish) had not gone off on a rant but merely asked us if we had noticed anything about his character. And, once again, a question from Dr. Ravitz had rattled me awake--neither for the first nor the last time. Of course that character is offensive, and I (as I said), a naïve Christian boy from Oklahoma, simply had never considered it.

One of my first major term papers for Dr. Ravitz was about Norris; I got so interested in him that I read as many other books of his as I could--even driving down to the Cleveland Public Library to acquire Norris' Vandover and the Brute (1914, published posthumously), a sort of werewolf novel about Vandover, a wannabe artist who sinks into a deep dissipation (drinking, gambling), while his lupine traits become more and more dominant.

I still have that paper (no, you may not see it), and I subsequently went on to read all of his novels. Joyce read a lot of his work in grad school. 

And so, how strange last night, lights and phones off, that neither one of us could remember the name of The Octopus; neither one of us could remember S. Behrman’s name.

Early this morning, Joyce consulted her phone—and thus “remembered.”

I don’t know if Norris is taught much anymore—except, perhaps, in American lit. classes in college and grad school?

But it’s a novel that continued the process of opening my mind—though Memory, once again, betrayed me last night.

But I realize it betrayed me with the less important features of the book, has retained for me with the essence of it all.