Table of Contents
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Author
FRANK NORRIS STUDIED painting in Paris for two years but then decided that literature was his vocation. He attended the University of California in 1890–94 and then spent another year at Harvard University. He was a news correspondent in South Africa in 1895, an editorial assistant on the San Francisco Wave (1896–97), and a war correspondent in Cuba for McClure’s Magazine in 1898. He joined the New York City publishing firm of Doubleday, Page, and Company in 1899. He died three years later after an operation for appendicitis.
Norris’s first important novel, McTeague (1899), is a naturalist work set in San Francisco. It tells the story of a stupid and brutal dentist who murders his miserly wife and then meets his own end while fleeing through Death Valley. With this book and those that followed, Norris joined Theodore Dreiser in the front rank of American novelists. Norris’s masterpiece, The Octopus (1901), was the first novel of a projected trilogy, The Epic of the Wheat, dealing with the economic and social forces involved in the production, distribution, and consumption of wheat. The Octopus pictures with bold symbolism the raising of wheat in California and the struggle of the wheat growers there against a monopolistic railway corporation. The second novel in the trilogy, The Pit (1903), deals with wheat speculation on the Chicago Board of Trade. The third novel, Wolf, unwritten at Norris’s death, was to have shown the American-grown wheat relieving a famine-stricken village in Europe. Vandover and the Brute, posthumously published in 1914, is a study of degeneration. McTeague was filmed by Erich von Stroheim in 1924 under the title Greed and staged as an opera by composer William Bolcom and director Robert Altman in 1992.
After the example of Émile Zola and the European naturalists, Norris in McTeague sought to describe with realistic detail the influence of heredity and environment on human life. From The Octopus on he adopted a more humanitarian ideal and began to view the novel as a proper agent for social betterment. In The Octopus and other novels he strove to return American fiction, which was then dominated by historical romance, to more serious themes. Despite their romanticizing tendencies, his novels present a vividly authentic and highly readable picture of life in California at the turn of the 20th century.
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McTeague
A STORY OF SAN FRANCISCO
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CHAPTER 1
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IT WAS SUNDAY, AND, according to his custom on that day, McTeague took his dinner at two in the afternoon at the car conductors' coffee-joint on Polk Street. He had a thick gray soup; heavy, underdone meat, very hot, on a cold plate; two kinds of vegetables; and a sort of suet pudding, full of strong butter and sugar. On his way back to his office, one block above, he stopped at Joe Frenna's saloon and bought a pitcher of steam beer. It was his habit to leave the pitcher there on his way to dinner.
Once in his office, or, as he called it on his signboard, “Dental Parlors,” he took off his coat and shoes, unbuttoned his vest, and, having crammed his little stove full of coke, lay back in his operating chair at the bay window, reading the paper, drinking his beer, and smoking his huge porcelain pipe while his food digested; crop-full, stupid, and warm. By and by, gorged with steam beer, and overcome by the heat of the room, the cheap tobacco, and the effects of his heavy meal, he dropped off to sleep. Late in the afternoon his canary bird, in its gilt cage just over his head, began to sing. He woke slowly, finished the rest of his beer—very flat and stale by this time—and taking down his concertina from the bookcase, where in week days it kept the company of seven volumes of “Allen's Practical Dentist,” played upon it some half-dozen very mournful airs.
McTeague looked forward to these Sunday afternoons as a period of relaxation and enjoyment. He invariably spent them in the same fashion. These were his only pleasures—to eat, to smoke, to sleep, and to play upon his concertina.
The six lugubrious airs that he knew, always carried him back to the time when he was a car-boy at the Big Dipper Mine in Placer County, ten years before. He remembered the years he had spent there trundling the heavy cars of ore in and out of the tunnel under the direction of his father. For thirteen days of each fortnight his father was a steady, hard-working shift-boss of the mine. Every other Sunday he became an irresponsible animal, a beast, a brute, crazy with alcohol.
McTeague remembered his mother, too, who, with the help of the Chinaman, cooked for forty miners. She was an overworked drudge, fiery and energetic for all that, filled with the one idea of having her son rise in life and enter a profession. The chance had come at last when the father died, corroded with alcohol, collapsing in a few hours. Two or three years later a travelling dentist visited the mine and put up his tent near the bunk-house. He was more or less of a charlatan, but he fired Mrs. McTeague's ambition, and young McTeague went away with him to learn his profession. He had learnt it after a fashion, mostly by watching the charlatan operate. He had read many of the necessary books, but he was too hopelessly stupid to get much benefit from them.
Then one day at San Francisco had come the news of his mother's death; she had left him some money—not much, but enough to set him up in business; so he had cut loose from the charlatan and had opened his “Dental Parlors” on Polk Street, an “accommodation street” of small shops in the residence quarter of the town. Here he had slowly collected a clientele of butcher boys, shop girls, drug clerks, and car conductors. He made but few acquaintances. Polk Street called him the “Doctor” and spoke of his enormous strength. For McTeague was a young giant, carrying his huge shock of blond hair six feet three inches from the ground; moving his immense limbs, heavy with ropes of muscle, slowly, ponderously. His hands were enormous, red, and covered with a fell of