Frank Norris Remembered

By Jesse S. Crisler and Joseph R McElrath

Frank Norris Remembered is a collection of reminiscences by Norris’s contemporaries, friends, and family that illuminate the life of one of America’s most popular novelists.   Considering his undergraduate education spent studying art at Académie Julian in Paris and creative writing at Harvard and his journalism career reporting from the far reaches of South Africa and Cuba, it is difficult to fathom how Frank Norris also found time to compose seven novels during the course of his brief life. But despite his adventures abroad, Norris turned out novels at a dizzying pace. He published Moran of the Lady Letty in 1898, McTeague early in 1899, Blix later that year, A Man’s Woman in February 1900, and The Octopus, the first in his ultimately unfinished “Epic of the Wheat” trilogy, in 1901. By informing his novels with his own experiences abroad, Norris composed works that were politically charged and culturally relevant and that made considerable contributions to the character of American literature in the twentieth century.   Frank Norris died at the age of thirty-two in 1902 from peritonitis resulting from a burst appendix, leaving behind a wife, a daughter, and an unfinished series of novels (two of which, The Pit and Vandover and the Brute, were published posthumously). The aim of Frank Norris Remembered, edited by Jesse S. Crisler and Joseph R. McElrath Jr., is to re-create the short, spectacular life of this American author through the eyes of those who knew him best. The fifty reminiscences included in this book feature the voices of Frank N. Doubleday; William Dean Howells; Hamlin Garland; Norris’s wife, Jeannette; and many others who were lucky enough to form a relationship with this vital twentieth-century American author, artist, and adventurer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Jun 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9780817386726

Book preview

AMERICAN WRITERS REMEMBERED

Jackson R. Bryer, Series Editor

Frank Norris Remembered

Edited by

JESSE S. CRISLER

and

JOSEPH R. McELRATH JR.

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 2013

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Typeface: AGaramond

Cover photograph: A publicity photo of Frank Norris released by Doubleday, Page, and Co., to advertise Norris's newly released novel The Octopus in April 1901. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

Cover design: Michele Myatt Quinn

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Frank Norris Remembered / Edited by Jesse S. Crisler and Joseph R. McElrath Jr.

         pages cm—(American Writers Remembered)

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8173-1795-9 (trade cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8173-8672-6 (ebook) 1. Norris, Frank, 1870-1902. 2. Norris, Frank, 1870-1902—Friends and associates. 3. Novelists, American—19th century—Biography. I. Crisler, Jesse S. II. McElrath, Joseph R.

      PS2473.F67 2013

      813′.4—dc23

      [B]

                                                                                                                                             2012040554

For James De Hart, gentleman and scholar

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Chronology

Introduction

PART 1. CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH: CHICAGO, SAN FRANCISCO, AND PARIS, 1870–90

1. Philip King Brown

2. Louis W. Neustadter

3. Charles G. Norris

4. Ernest C. Peixotto

5. M. C. Sloss

PART 2. COLLEGE YEARS: BERKELEY AND CAMBRIDGE, 1890–95

6. Thomas R. Bacon

7. Louis Bartlett

8. Gelett Burgess

9. Eleanor M. Davenport

10. Stanly A. Easton

11. George C. Edwards

12. Wallace W. Everett

13. George Gibbs

14. Ralph L. Hathorn

15. Albert J. Houston

16. H. Hull McClaughry

17. Ariana Moore

18. Jessica B. Peixotto

19. Harry W. Rhodes

20. Leon J. Richardson

21. Maurice V. Samuels

22. Edward A. Selfridge Jr.

23. Frank M. Todd

24. Seymour Waterhouse

25. Benjamin Weed

26. Harry M. Wright

PART 3. APPRENTICESHIP: SAN FRANCISCO AND SOUTH AFRICA, 1895–98

27. John O. Cosgrave

28. Porter Garnett

29. Will Irwin

30. Bailey Millard

31. Jeannette Norris

32. Bruce Porter

33. Bertha Rickoff

PART 4. PROFESSIONAL YEARS: NEW YORK, CUBA, CHICAGO, AND SAN FRANCISCO, 1898–1902

34. James F. J. Archibald

35. Raine Bennett

36. Dulce Bolado Davis

37. Frank N. Doubleday

38. Hamlin Garland

39. Arthur Goodrich

40. Julie A. Herne

41. William Dean Howells

42. Henry W. Lanier

43. Edwin Lefevre

44. Isaac F. Marcosson

45. George D. Moulson

46. John S. Phillips

47. W. S. Rainsford

48. Grant Richards

49. Elizabeth Knight Tompkins

50. Juliet Wilbor Tompkins

List of Reminiscences

Additional Reminiscences

Notes

Works Cited

Index

List of Illustrations

1. Frank Norris at ten years of age in Chicago

2. Frank Norris with members of his college fraternity, Phi Gamma Delta, at the University of California, Berkeley, 1893

3. Norris playing the lead in Thomas Robertson's Caste in San Francisco, March 1, 1897

4. Norris as a professional writer in New York, 1901

Acknowledgments

For services of various kinds, all of which immeasurably contributed to our research, we thank the following: Anthony Bliss, curator, Rare Books and Library Collections, and Susan Snyder, head, Public Services, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Sara S. Hodson, curator, Literary Manuscripts, Natalie Russell, library assistant for Literary Manuscripts, and Lita Garcia, Manuscripts Department, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Andrea Reithmayr, curator, Rare Books and Special Collections, Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York; Sean Casey, curator, Rare Books and Manuscripts Department, Boston Public Library, Boston; Robert Parks, director of Library and Museum Services, The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; Katherine Chandler, reference librarian, and Paul Artrip, assistant department head, Rare Book Department, Free Library of Philadelphia, Philadelphia; Ruth Van Stee, Grand Rapids Public Library, Grand Rapids, Michigan; Susan Abbott, Old Military and Civilian Records, National Archives and Records Administration, St. Louis, Missouri; Eugene T. Neeley, university archivist, Swirbul Library, Adelphi University, Garden City, New York; Richard T. Yanco, Worcester Academy, Worcester, Massachusetts; Max Lombardi, Records, Graceland Cemetery, Chicago; and Ti'Ata Sorenson, ILL Services, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.

We also thank the staffs of several other institutions: Passport Applications, National Archives, Washington, DC; Reference, Palo Alto Public Library and Palo Alto Historical Association, Palo Alto, California; Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California at Los Angeles; Special Collections, San Diego State University Library, San Diego, California; William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California at Los Angeles; and the Robert Frost Library, Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts.

A number of people supplied useful and needed assistance to us as well, for which we extend our gratitude: Wendy Cloutier, P. Lance Crisler, Charles Crow, Donna Danielewski, Richard Allan Davison, Benjamin F. Fisher, Donald Foss, Joel Myerson, Jessica Peters, Gary Scharnhorst, Jo Scofield, and the late James D. Hart. Besides these, we have benefited in countless ways from the generous experience of our series editor, Jackson R. Bryer, Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, College Park, and Daniel Waterman, Editor-in-Chief and Joanna Jacobs, Assistant Managing Editor, the University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa. For financial support we are indebted to the National Endowment for the Humanities; the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia; and the College of Humanities, Brigham Young University, for monetary grants, which in part funded our research, and, likewise, to the Department of English and College of Arts and Sciences of Florida State University and the Department of English of Brigham Young University.

Linda Webster, indexer of this and our biography of Norris, worked diligently and quickly, making both books not only better but far more useful than they would have been without her astute efforts.

Finally, our wives, Sharon McElrath and Lou Ann C. Crisler, never fail to offer us extraordinary good cheer and continued encouragement.

Chronology

Introduction

When the distressing news of the premature death of Frank Norris reached his uncle in Lincoln, Nebraska, on November 22, 1902, William Alfred Doggett delivered a brief summary of his impressions of his nephew as a youth to a reporter: The boy was inclined to be melancholy. At times he was full of activity and animal spirits, but ordinarily he was slow and thoughtful (Lincoln Man 1902, 16). Nearly three decades later, on October 14, 1930, Lucy A. H. Pownall Senger, wife of Joachim Henry Senger, Norris's tutor for his 1890 entrance examinations to the University of California, limned an even more truncated portrait of twenty-year-old Norris, newly returned from studying art in Paris and eager to begin a new phase of his life as a college student: I remember him as a quiet young man, very polite. Twenty years thereafter, a classmate of Norris's at Berkeley, Edwin Milton Wilder, who on August 26, 1952, characterized himself as a green boy . . . from [a] country high school, recalled Norris with a possible touch of suppressed envy as a blasé, patronizing, indifferent man, not of the world, but from another world.

What these fleeting comments reveal is a lack of real familiarity with their subject, Frank Norris, in life one of America's most popular novelists. Even half a century after his death, Norris was still alive enough in the memory of a classmate (though hardly an intimate—Wilder admits, Although I sat in class with [Norris] for five years, I never knew him well) to evoke vivid, if inaccurate, memories of him. For far from being slow and thoughtful, quiet, or blasé, patronizing, indifferent, the Frank Norris known and loved by a wide circle of family members, fraternity brothers, college friends, employers, professional colleagues, fellow writers, and even critics belies the faulty memories of these more distant acquaintances.

Born in Chicago on March 5, 1870, Norris as a teenager moved to San Francisco in 1885. The privileged son of a father grown wealthy as a highly successful jeweler and a mother with finely tuned cultural and social aspirations, he matured in comfortable ease in their house at 1822 Sacramento, and embraced his new state of California so wholeheartedly that even early in his career he unabashedly informed newspaper critic Isaac F. Marcosson that he was ’bawn ’n raise’ in California (Crisler 1986, 57). When a broken arm ended his tenure at a succession of elite college preparatory academies in both Chicago and the Bay Area, Norris persuaded his parents to allow him to explore a talent for drawing at the California School of Design, then under the able direction of Virgil M. Williams. As a regimen of art whetted Norris's appetite for a more intensive program, his parents accordingly took him to Paris to continue his studies at the famous Académie Julian. But when Norris's impatient father realized a seemingly inexplicable penchant for literary pursuits had supplanted his son's earlier interest in painting, he promptly summoned his errant boy home, where the younger Norris devoted himself to shoring up gaps in his formal education in order to gain entrance to the University of California in the hope of learning the rudiments necessary for writing successful fiction.

A thorough delight in college life notwithstanding, Norris failed to realize his fondest dream while at Berkeley; save at only a handful of American colleges, instruction in what is today termed creative writing was simply unknown at institutions of higher learning during the last decade of the 1890s. One such, fortunately for Norris, was Harvard College, which he entered as a special student in 1894, having received no degree at Berkeley, despite four years of college courses heavily slanted to British and French literature and history. Norris's year at Harvard at last yielded the fruit he had desired to pick at Berkeley: taught by Lewis Edward Gates, Norris learned much more than the basics of effective writing, as his extensive work in Gates's courses on two novels, McTeague (1899) and the posthumously published Vandover and the Brute (1914), indicates.

Hoping now to enter the ranks of professional writers but simultaneously aware that he needed more direct engagement with his chosen craft, Norris parlayed modest success as a cub reporter for the San Francisco Wave to an assignment from the San Francisco Chronicle to travel to South Africa in October 1895. Conflict there was brewing between Boers, who claimed the area by right of descent from Dutch colonists settling there over two centuries earlier, and British newcomers bent on solidifying their emerging but shaky authority in the region. What ensued for Norris was more thrilling than any fiction he might have concocted. For his part in the famous raid agent provocateur Leander Starr Jameson led, Norris was arrested by the Boers and summarily exiled, though not before contracting a mysterious, debilitating fever. Upon his return to San Francisco, he cemented earlier relations with The Wave, which hired him first as full-time writer and later as assistant editor under John O'Hara Cosgrave.

After two years of furious authorship for that magazine, Norris came to the notice of the enterprising publisher S. S. McClure, whose firm offered him a joint position as manuscript reader and contributor to its flagship publication, McClure's Magazine. A new professional opportunity before him, one even more propitious because of its potential for national exposure than had been possible with his work for the regional Wave, Norris understandably saw life as good. As he wrote his college fraternity brother, Harry M. Wright, I've moved up a peg (Crisler 1986, 50).

Life became even better a month later when McClure dispatched him to Cuba with a veritable fleet of journalists to cover the Cuban war. Once again, Norris's exploits in Cuba, both as reporter and participant, exceeded his wildest imaginings, making a reality of his complaint two years earlier in An Opening for Novelists: We don't want literature, we want life (Crisler 1987h 7). Unfortunately, however, his fever recurred in Cuba, and he traversed the North American continent to recuperate once again in San Francisco.

Having met and courted subdebutante Jeannette Williamson Black during his days with The Wave, Norris, now a convalescent, continued to woo her. Meanwhile, his novels began appearing at a dizzying pace—Moran of the Lady Letty (1898) just after McClure hired him, McTeague early in 1899, Blix, a thinly veiled autobiographical idyll of his courtship, later that year in September. A Man's Woman was published in February 1900, only a month after he and Jeannette had at last married. Their wedding took place following the year Norris had spent alone in New York, save for three months in the spring of 1899 when he returned to California to research The Octopus (1901), the novel he considered his grandest yet. As a couple, he and Jeannette were a splash, meeting and entertaining the likes of such luminaries as the Hamlin Garlands; the Collis P. Huntingtons; Robert Louis Stevenson's widow, Fanny, and her entourage; and Katherine Herne and her daughters, who were prominent in America's dramatic circles. The Octopus, the first of a projected trilogy concerning wheat production, distribution, and consumption, fared well in sales, and research in Chicago in 1901 was successful enough to allow Norris not only to complete his next novel, The Pit (1903), by mid-1902 but also to capitalize on contacts there, as well as in New York, to extend his earlier journalistic experience by becoming a flourishing newspaper and magazine columnist.

Following by now established routine, Norris was laying plans for yet another fact-finding trip, this time to India, for the novel planned as The Wolf, which would complete his Trilogy of the Wheat, when tragedy struck. A visit in late July 1902 to San Francisco to purchase a mountain retreat from Mrs. Stevenson and to arrange for the care of his eight-month-old daughter, Jeannette Williamson Norris, with her grandmothers, ended with his wife suffering from appendicitis but ultimately recovering via an operation. Ironically, two weeks later Norris then died on October 25, 1902, from peritonitis resulting from a burst appendix.

This unanticipated loss to American letters led to an outpouring of sentiment, most of it predictable keening over one of the cruelest blows of fate (Norris 1902), but a good many articulate responses from close friends—former classmates, fellow authors, and even employers. These constitute the first body of written remembrances of Norris, yet their ephemeral nature—hastily written letters to his shocked wife or as precipitately composed articles for daily newspapers—often led, if not to their complete loss, then at the least to near obscurity. Indeed, when Franklin D. Walker, a young graduate student at the University of California, in 1930 settled on Norris's life as the subject of his doctoral dissertation, that subject, despite the appearance of a lavish edition of Norris's complete works two years earlier, had virtually receded into literary insignificance, his life little appreciated, his novels largely unread, his shorter works nearly unknown, his influence all but negligible. Seeking to redress this lamentable situation, Walker embarked on a laudable program to track down anyone who had known Norris, writing to many and interviewing others. His success was notable, generating a second batch of reminiscences in the form of nearly twenty interviews and as many letters written in response to his invitations for recollections of Norris.

This was well, since prior to Walker's attempt to acquire accounts of Norris's life, only three biographical sketches of him existed, each of them as fanciful as it was factually misinformed. The three perpetrators were Denison Hailey Clift, Charles Caldwell Dobie, both California journalists, and Norris's brother Charles, who had also supplied Dobie with often-specious information. Thus Walker's 1932 biography of Norris drew upon information not available to Clift in 1907 for The Artist in Frank Norris, Dobie in 1928 for Frank Norris, or Up from Culture, and Charles Norris also in 1928 for his introduction to the tenth volume of The Argonaut Manuscript Limited Edition of Frank Norris's Works. But even Walker larded Frank Norris: A Biography with flagrant speculation, demonstrably erroneous interpretation, and in some cases outright falsehood. He also failed to capture the spirit of the accounts of those who either wrote him or with whom he conducted interviews, such as the generous persona informing the comments of Norris's roommate at Berkeley, Albert J. Houston, the foreboding mystery of fellow artist Bruce Porter's description of Norris's final days, or the perceptive poise reflected in a letter from Dulce B. Davis at whose ranch Norris stayed while researching The Octopus.

A third spate of memoirs on Norris came in 1952 when James D. Hart, then professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and later director of its Bancroft Library, was informed by Robert D. Lundy, his graduate student, that the Bancroft numbered no Norris manuscripts in its voluminous collections nor for that matter much else relating to him. Determined to remedy what he viewed as woeful neglect of a native son of the university, Hart founded the magnificent Frank Norris Collection, a treasure trove of primary Norris documents as well as more letters, memoirs, and other accounts of him. When, nearly a half-century later, we began assembling our findings from more than thirty years of research on Norris to write Frank Norris: A Life (2006), we discovered yet more remembrances of a man whose colorful life had made an indelible impression on those who knew him. Like Walker before us, however, we realized we could report the facts of that life, in many instances filling in noticeable gaps, but we could not begin to weave into our biography all the information contributed by Norris's contemporaries at his death, amassed by Walker during his research, extended in turn by Hart, and finally collected by ourselves.

Even the most meticulous biography cannot hope to present the complete record of its subject, but a collection of reminiscences such as those printed in this volume, when viewed as a companion to our biography, gives not just flesh to Norris's stark body but also dresses him in the impressions of friends and family, regardless of their personal biases or sometimes possibly imperfect memories. Certainly, it puts into proper perspective the faulty, even less charitable comments of people such as Norris's uncle, William Doggett, his tutor's wife, Lucy Senger, and his college acquaintance, Edwin Wilder, all of whom knew him not under the circumstances revealed by the contributors to this collection but at a considerably more distant remove.

Thus the primary reason for such a collection as this is not to demonstrate what everyone already knows about the profound difficulty encountered in reconstructing the past; rather, it is to make available a substantial body of recollections and perceptions meriting full attention from anyone seriously interested in understanding Norris's life, the personality that informs interpretation of his writings, and what both reveal about the character of the time and cultural conditions in which he passed that life. A second reason is that we are certain that readers will find these remembrances inherently interesting not only for what they tell about Norris but also what they divulge regarding the personalities of the correspondents, interviewees, and memoirists, many of whom are noteworthy as literary or historical figures in their own right. Finally, the personal statements gathered here reveal details of Norris's appearance, character, beliefs, literary likes, even prejudices, for example, Norris's conflict with the military science department as a college student, a situation about which many sources comment. Assembling these and other surviving sources in a single volume fills such biographical lacunae by providing a rich assortment of material previously accessible for the most part only either as quickly written letters of condolence to Jeannette, Walker's inexpertly typed notes, letters to both him and Hart, or articles that appeared in unfamiliar periodicals such as Phi Gamma Delta Quarterly and University of California Chronicle.

Both a desire to present an unembellished portrait of Norris and a concomitant wariness of duplication have driven the final arrangement of this collection. Even so, some repetition occurs: for instance, among Norris's brothers in Phi Gamma Delta, his college fraternity, some of his more famous antics and the arcane memorabilia gracing his private quarters ascended over time to the realm of legend, stories that all of those brothers felt compelled to relate, if only through cursory allusion. These and other common memories characterize many of the reminiscences, coalescing in a multifaceted yet harmonious image of Norris as genial acquaintance, generous friend, playful teaser, worldly flaneur, dutiful son, ardent husband, delighted father, assiduous observer, and, most significantly, discriminating writer, for, clearly, above all else, that was how Norris saw himself, as these contributions make abundantly clear.

Although the content of the reminiscences marks four discrete periods in Norris's life—his boyhood phase, his college years, his writing apprenticeship, and his professional career—a strictly chronological arrangement ultimately proved infeasible; for example, Norris encountered virtually all of his college friends, certainly all of his fellow fraternity members, at the same time, that is, his freshman year at Berkeley. Instead, each period comprises reminiscences written by those who first met Norris during that period but ordered alphabetically by their last names. Had the writers confined themselves to recalling only memories from the time when they were introduced to Norris, the result might have seemed more synchronized, though perhaps more bland, than it is, but the reality is that they did not, ranging throughout the years of their association with Norris, often with little thought to chronology, rather than addressing only a specific time of his life. As a case in point, Gelett Burgess, an instructor at Berkeley when Norris attended the University of California, met Norris because of their mutual interest in drama, but Burgess later involved Norris in the avant-garde activities of his literary coterie, Les Jeunes, in San Francisco, and later still accompanied him to meet William Dean Howells in New York. Similarly, Jeannette's interviews with Walker demonstrate much more than passing familiarity with her husband's life prior to their meeting in 1896 that only she could have derived from Norris himself.

In addition to an explanation of the nature and arrangement of these selections, a few other clarifications are in order. While previously published sources required little editorial attention, that was not the case with those that were handwritten and typed. Our conservative policy was to correct indisputable misspellings and provide absolutely essential punctuation in cases when confusion for the reader threatened. Published sources did not require editorial emendation of words intended to receive special emphasis by means of italicization, but the underlining of words in handwritten and typed sources did. They appear in italics in this volume. Finally, bracketed ellipses in sources indicate editorial omissions, while ellipses without brackets occurred in original sources.

The volume contains sixty-seven contributions—fifteen previously published—by fifty individuals; besides the published pieces, represented are letters of condolence to Jeannette, letters to Walker, his interview notes, letters to Hart, Hamlin Garland's diary entries, excerpts from Albert Houston's autobiography, and three letters to other recipients. A brief commentary introduces each section; headnotes identify contributors and contextualize their relationship with Norris; endnotes explain literary allusions, identify figures mentioned in various sources, and present other information deemed useful for interpreting the sources themselves; and both a list of the reminiscences included and another list of all known reminiscences of Norris complete the volume. Full information for contributions in the former list appears in the source notes preceding reminiscences.

1

Childhood and Youth

Chicago, San Francisco, and Paris, 1870–90

Frank Norris's infancy and youth, spent amid sumptuous surroundings in Chicago, are documented in census reports, academic catalogs, city directories, school texts, newspaper articles, personal books, church records, and even dance programs. He was clearly born to the manner. But aside from meager comments by his mother's older brother William Doggett, who lived several hundred miles west in Lincoln, Nebraska, no one in Norris's immediate family or among his classmates at Allen Academy, Harvard School, and Bournique's Dancing Academy left even the briefest written testament reporting his years as a youngster—that is, no one save his brother Charles. True, Charles, eleven years Norris's junior, is hardly an unimpeachable source for those years. True as well, whatever Charles learned about that period in his brother's life was perforce filtered through the lens of a doting mother and a father who may have been hypercritical. True finally, Charles himself inarguably distorted what little he did know, augmenting it with what he felt he could legitimately imagine. Following his brother's death, Charles became not only his ever-loyal publicist and the energetic executor of his literary estate but also, for this early period in Norris's life, the most important source of information about him.

As to Norris's early years in California, Charles's is not the only voice, although the chorus is a relatively small one. But Norris begins to assume fuller definition as a young man and promising artist in the reminiscences of Philip King Brown and M. C. Sloss, Norris's classmates at the Belmont School for Boys; Louis W. Neustadter, a near neighbor after the Norrises moved to San Francisco in 1885; and Ernest C. Peixotto, a fellow student at both the California School of Design in 1886 and later in Paris at the Académie Julian.

1 / Philip King Brown

A native Californian, Philip King Brown (1869–1940) was a member of the first class to graduate in 1886 from Belmont School for Boys, which Frank Norris also attended for a short time in 1885. Belmont's founder, William Thomas Reid (1843–1922), a former teacher at Boys' High School in San Francisco, retired as president of the University of California and opened the semimilitary institution to prepare young men to gain admission to Harvard College. Located south of San Francisco on the former estate of banker and industrialist William Chapman Ralston (1826–1875), Belmont immediately attracted the interest of wealthy San Franciscans with aspirations for their male offspring. Fulfilling Reid's vision, Brown did matriculate at Harvard, where he received his MD in 1893, afterward becoming a progressive physician, specializing in treating diseases of the heart and lung. As is the case with other reminiscences, Brown's response to Franklin Walker indicates the impact Norris apparently had upon those he met, many of whom, like Brown, could recall in surprising detail their sometimes slight association with him not only after many years but often also after a fairly brief acquaintance.

Source: Philip King Brown to Franklin D. Walker, letter, October 7, 1930, Franklin Dickerson Walker Papers, BANC MSS C-H 79, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Dear Mr. Walker,

The Belmont School was founded by W. T. Reid, formerly president of the University of California, in 1885 & opened that fall at the old Ralston place at Belmont with about 25 scholars. Frank Norris didn't join till later & was not in my class as he was somewhat younger. The first class was made up of M. C. Sloss, Summit Louis Hecht, F. L. DeLong & myself. The next class was made up of A. L. Bancroft, Charles Adams & Frank Norris together with a few others whose names I do not now remember. There was thus 1 year's difference in preparation for Harvard & U.C. & all the first class went to Harvard.¹

Frank Norris broke his arm playing football & I brought him to town. He lived on Sacramento St., north side, between Van Ness & Franklin. His mother was a very brilliant woman & for years in her later life was the leader of the Browning Society. The father was a successful business man—a jeweler I think.² Mrs. Norris, the mother, was a patient of mine for many years & until his death I kept up some relation to Frank. He was brilliant as was the mother, very quiet, full of dry humor & eccentric rather aiming to draw fire for the sake of arousing acute discussion. He was indifferent to all that did not interest him & gave the impression of being physically lazy. He had great charm & was popular. I was away most of the time after that first year till about 1896.

You could get some facts from Bruce Porter, Santa Barbara, & Gelett Burgess whose present whereabouts I do not know. J. O'Hara Cosgrave, Porter Garnett (Berkeley), Willis Polk (now dead) all belonged to the later group of literary lights who met occasionally at dinner.³ I think I could find a menu of a birthday dinner to Gelett Burgess (Purple Cow, Goops, The Lark) served by the crowd. If I can uncover it I'll send it to you provided it is promptly returned.⁴

Yours truly,             

Philip King Brown

2 / Louis W. Neustadter

As a boy, Louis William Neustadter (1873–1968), whose family were wealthy members of San Francisco's Jewish community, lived at 1701 Van Ness Avenue, just around the corner from Norris's family. When he was only eighteen, Neustadter entered employment at his father's firm, Neustadter Brothers, purveyors of fine men's furnishings, and later became a prominent civic leader in the Bay Area.

Source: Louis William Neustadter to James D. Hart, letter, March 22, 1954, James D. Hart Papers, BANC MSS 81/107c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Dear Jim,

Yours of the 20th will, as are all your letters, be preserved for future generations when the name of Dr. James D. Hart will be listed with other greats of the literary world.

Now re the Norris era; I am not certain about a cable car on Polk Street when McTeague operated there, nor can I recall a gold tooth above the post office, the which was located on Polk, between Bush and Pine Streets, on the north west corner of Polk and Bush Streets was the Roberts Candy Store, presided over by a good looking brunette, she dispensed other dainties besides candy, but because she had a deformed right thumb, she did not appeal to me, I still think that a deformed thumb detracts from the sex appeal of any gal. Was there a resort a few doors below a drug store not far from the corner of Sutter and Kearney Sts.? I really do not know, my mother did not permit me to visit resorts at that time, the drug store was there, complete with live snakes the which were fed with live rats for the entertainment of those who enjoyed watching the said reptiles absorb the poor rodents.⁵

The Norris family lived on Sacramento Street, a few doors from our ancestral home, Norris mère was a dragon like character who bossed Hell out of both her sons, Frank and Charles, the latter was called Doc,⁶ don't ask me why, I don't know, I attended the Urban School with these Norris Boys,⁷ who were very much afraid of their Mamma, I would have bet on the old gal against a Grizzly bear.

As for the locale described by Frank Norris in his McTeague, his descriptions are accurate, the