This 2009 reading of Frank Norris’s McTeague was the third reading for me, and I returned to this American classic novel of Old San Francisco after watching Erich von Stroheim’s 1924 silent film version with its appropriate title: Greed. McTeague is one of my favourite American classics, and it’s a favourite for its dark undertones of lust, violence, murder, sadomasochism, and obsession. No wonder literary critics were outraged when McTeague was published in 1899. On the West Coast, a reviewer for The Argonaut argued that “Norris riots in odors and stenches,” while The New York based monthly journal, The Review of Reviews called McTeague “about the most unpleasant American story that anybody has ventured to write.” Of the liberal amount of invective launched at the novel by literary critics, the latter quote remains my favourite as it is quite true, but that’s the point. Norris’s novel is unrelentingly bleak and grimy, but it’s also wonderful.
The novel’s plot concerns a San Francisco dentist named McTeague. McTeague, the blockish son of an alcoholic miner worked as a car-boy at the Big Dipper mine in Placer County when he left to become the apprentice of a traveling dentist. The dentist is a “charlatan” but McTeague doesn’t understand this, and after watching the dentist pull out teeth for a few years, McTeague sets up his “Dental Parlours” (a rented room where he works and sleeps) in San Francisco’s Polk Street. This is where the novel begins with McTeague spending a typical Sunday in San Francisco: he eats a heavy meal, returns to the Dental Parlours , drinks beer and plays the handful of tunes he knows on his concertina. At “six feet and three inches,” McTeague is a “young giant”:
“McTeague’s mind was as his body, heavy, slow to act, sluggish. Yet there was nothing vicious about the man. Altogether he suggested the draught horse, immensely strong, stupid, docile, obedient.”
McTeague doesn’t stop to think about his life, but he’s considered a success, and since he’s hauled himself up from manual labour at the mine to the professional classes, this is justified. McTeague’s simple life changes when he’s introduced to Trina, a beautifully made, tiny young woman who is brought to McTeague for dental care by her cousin and sweetheart, Marcus, McTeague’s best friend. The problems begin when McTeague, in a fit of lust, kisses Trina while she’s asleep under the effects of ether. McTeague then wants to court and marry Trina, and Marcus, who wasn’t that committed to the relationship anyway, agrees to step aside. McTeague’s slow, methodical and predatory courtship is darted with instances of lust, and at these moments, Trina panics and quails with fear at McTeague’s brutal onslaught.
The plot thickens when Trina buys a lottery ticket that turns out to be the winning number, and so when Mac (as she calls him) and Trina marry, she brings with her a ‘dowry’ of $5,000, and this money becomes the root of their problems. At first, their marriage is satisfactory, but gradually Trina becomes obsessed with money, and then their luck turns sour….
It’s impossible to read McTeague without thinking about and comparing it to Zola’s novel L’Assommoir, published in 1877. L’Assommoir, one of Zola’s greatest novels, and part of the Rougon-Macquart twenty-volume series is the tale of a Parisian laundress named Gervaise. Gervaise’s story is a study of poverty and working-class life tainted with alcoholism. Zola’s naturalistic novels examine the themes of hereditary and environment, and Norris who was heavily influenced by Zola, considered L’Assommoir to be the “prototype of McTeague.” Certainly literary critics made the connection, and as the introduction by Kevin Starr explains, one critic “castigated Norris for reintroducing the corrupting moral vogue of Zolaism” onto American shores.
Both L’Assommoir and McTeague feature main characters who rise from the minionship of the working class to the next level. Gervaise becomes an employer when she opens her laundry shop, and McTeague leaves the physical labour of the mines behind when he becomes a dentist. McTeague never really grasps the idea that he is supposed to go to university and get a diploma–to McTeague, his dental career is eventually stolen from him by forces he cannot understand. Both Gervaise and McTeague’s destruction are engineered and accelerated by alcoholism and jealousy. But it’s where McTeague is different from L’Assommoir that things really become interesting.
While L’Assommoir is concerned with a lack of money, McTeague is about the misuse of money. If Gervaise has money, she spends it, and eventually of course, she spends money she doesn’t have and bankrupts herself in the process. In contrast, in McTeague Trina hordes money and becomes a miser–at one point she even ignores her mother’s request for help. Although she and McTeague are wealthy by late 19th century standards, Trina would rather eat rotting meat than disturb her nest egg. Having money corrupts Trina and McTeague. It’s not their salvation, it’s their nemesis. It’s the acquisition of money, the hording of money that becomes their destruction–compounded by hereditary and environmental factors.
“Trina had always been an economical little body, but it was only since her great winnings in the lottery that she had become especially penurious. No doubt, in her fear lest their good luck should demoralize them and lead to habits of extravagance, she had recoiled too far in the other direction. Never, never, never should a penny of that miraculous fortune be spent; rather it should be added to. It was a nest egg, a monstrous, roc-like nest egg, not so large, however, but that it could be made larger.”
The idea of the corrupting force of money appears throughout McTeague–from the endeavours to extract gold from the Big Dipper mine to the brutality of Zerkow, a neighbourhood junk shop owner who marries his wife, Maria simply because she entertains him with fantastic tales of long-lost gold plate. These stories drive Zerkow to insanity–just as Trina’s horde leads to a sort of madness too. Gold appears throughout the novel–at the mine, in McTeague’s crude dentistry, and at one point in the tale, Trina buys a model of a huge gold tooth to hang outside of Mac’s Dental Parlours. To own and display this gold tooth is a long-held dream of McTeague’s, and it’s one of the last things he refuses to part with–at one point the couple even use it as a table in the squalor of their rented room. Symbolically, even McTeague’s canary spends its sad, trapped little life in a gilt cage.
Norris based McTeague on a real-life crime that took place in San Francisco in 1893. He was a student at Berkeley at the time, and he began to be fascinated by bourgeois and working class life. After failing to get a degree, there followed a period at Harvard, various overseas adventures in South Africa, and then Norris returned to San Francisco and the Big Dipper Mine to recuperate his health. San Francisco is one of those cities that has a great deal of character–just watch Joan Crawford in Sudden Fear or Humphrey Bogart in Dark Passage to get a sense of how characters’ lives are shaped by the city they live in. Norris’s pre-1906 earthquake San Francisco is raw and new but still pulsing with life, and the novel’s characters mesh with their landscape. There’s the colourful street life of Polk Street, Cliff House, Union Street, the Presidio Reservation, the Golden gate, the ferry, the variety show at the Orpheum, and the magnificent views of the Pacific Ocean.
McTeague is not a perfect novel, and parts of the story seem rougher than others. Sections which move away from McTeague and Trina as individual characters and instead convert them into types are poorer than the main narrative. For example at one point, Norris describes Trina’s growing sexual awareness as “The Woman is awakened.” Other sections include Trina’s German relatives speaking broken English–and this sort of dialogue is always a problem for writers. Norris turns it into a phonetic event. Also while Zola’s influence is clear in McTeague, there are two characters–veterinarian Old Grannis and spinster Miss Baker–who could very well have lost their way from a Dickens novel. This dark tale is frequently interrupted with sentimental details of the relationship between the elderly couple. Perhaps Norris intended this romance to provide a counterbalance against the dark destruction of the McTeagues.
McTeague hints at a tremendous talent that is not yet fully developed. Norris was a mere 29 years old when he finished this novel. Tragically, Norris died at the age of 32 from a ruptured appendix and kidney failure in 1902. Coincidentally, Zola died the same year.
