As part of my background research for my new book*, I stumbled on the novels of Frank Norris. Born in Chicago in 1870, Mr Norris travelled widely as a journalist; as a news correspondent in South Africa (1895–96) and as a war correspondent in Cuba during the Spanish–American War in 1898. As a writer, he had planned, in his own words, “to write three novels around the one subject of Wheat. First, a story of California (the producer); second, a story of Chicago (the distributor); third a story of Europe (the consumer) and in each to keep to the idea of this huge Niagara of wheat rolling from West to East.”
The Octopus, the first volume in the trilogy, was published in the spring of 1901. It centred on the early wheat farmers in California and their battle with the railroads. The second, The Pit, was published posthumously after Norris died in 1902, at the age of 32, from a ruptured appendix. He left The Epic of the Wheat trilogy unfinished.
I wouldn’t recommend either The Octopus or The Pit to anyone other than hardened wheat fans. Both are overly long—Kindle estimates that The Octopus is over a ten-hour read—and verbose. They are a difficult for a modern reader:—and I include myself in this—anyone with an attention span more in tune with Twitter than early 20th century American literature. Another difficulty is Norris’s writing style: pretentious—and sometimes plain weird. He describes the wheat as follows:
“There it lay, a vast, silent ocean, shimmering a pallid green under the moon and under the stars; a mighty force, the strength of nations, the life of the world…wheat! Indifferent, gigantic, restless, it moved in its appointed grooves. Men, Lilliputians, gnats in the sunshine, buzzed impatiently in their tiny battles, were born, lived through their little day, died and were forgotten; while the wheat, wrapped in Nirvanic calm, grew steadily under the night, alone with the stars and with God.”
His description of the Chicago Board of Trade wheat pit is just as pretentious,
“There it went, day after day. Endlessly, ceaselessly the Pit, enormous, thundering, sucked in and spewed out, sending the swirl of its mighty central eddy far out through the city’s channels…All through the Northwest, all through the central world of the Wheat the set and whirl of that innermost Pit made itself felt…Because of an unexpected caprice in the swirling of the inner current, some far-distant channel suddenly dried, and the pinch of famine made itself felt among the vine dressers of Northern Italy, the coal miners of West Prussia. Or another channel filled, and the starved moujik of the steppes, and the hunger-shrunken coolie of the Ganges’ watershed fed suddenly fat and made thank offerings before ikon and idol.”
As for weird, his description of the spring planting takes some beating:
“One could not take a dozen steps upon the ranches without the brusque sensation that underfoot the land was alive, roused at last from its sleep, palpitating with the desire of reproduction. Deep down there in the recesses of the soil, the great heart throbbed once more, filling with passion, vibrating with desire, offering itself to the caresses of the plough, insistent, eager, virtuous. Dimly one felt the deep-seated trouble of the earth, the uneasy agitation of its members, the hidden tumult of its womb, demanding to be made fruitful, to reproduce, to disengage the eternal germ of Life that stirred and struggled in its loins.
“It was the long stroking caress, vigorous male, powerful, for which the Earth seemed panting. The heroic embrace of a multitude of iron hands, gripping deep into the brown warm flesh of the land that quivered responsive and passionate under this rude advance, as robust as to be almost an assault, so violent as to be veritably brutal.”
Weird, although it did reflect the then common belief in a Mother Earth, or Mother Nature, as the (female) force that fed and nourished us. Mr Norris continues with a (less pornographic) description of ploughing on one of the ranches:
“The ploughs, thirty five in number, each drawn by a team of ten (horses), stretched in an interminable line, nearly a quarter of a mile in length. They were arranged, as it were, en echalon—not one directly behind the other, but each succeeding plough in its own width farther in the field than the one in front of it. Each of these ploughs held five shears, so that when the entire company was in motion, one hundred and twenty five furrows were made at the same instant.”
Today, the ranch would probably still use 300 horses for ploughing, but all in one tractor.
There is a scene in The Octopus where a group of Californian ranchers are discussing how to combat the railroads that are squeezing them on freight rates. One rancher suggests sending their wheat in the other direction, to China. He explains,
“At present all our California wheat goes to Liverpool, and from that port is distributed all over the world. But a change is coming; I am sure of it. Our century is about done. The great word of the nineteenth century has been Production. The great word of the twentieth century… will be Markets. As a market for our wheat…Europe is played out. Population in Europe is not increasing fast enough to keep up with the rapidity of our production. The result is over-production. We supply more than Europe can eat, and down go prices….The remedy is not in curtailing our wheat areas but in this: WE MUST HAVE NEW MARKETS, GREATER MARKETS. For years we have been sending our wheat from East to West. We must march with the course of Empire, not against it. We must look to China!
“Send your wheat to China! Do away with the middleman, break up the Chicago wheat pits and elevator houses and mixing houses. When in feeding China you have decreased shipments to Europe, the effect is instantaneous. Prices go up in Europe…We have the key; we hold the wheat…Asia and Europe must look to America to be fed.”
The result, Mr Norris wrote, would be:
“The farmer suddenly emancipated, the world’s food no longer at the mercy of the speculator, thousands and thousands of men set free of the grip of Trust and ring and monopoly acting for themselves, selling their own wheat, organizing into one gigantic trust themselves, sending their agents to all entry points of China.”
So Frank Norris’s books aren’t totally weird. Over 100 years ago he was already predicting both the rise of China and the disintermediation that would occur in the grain trade!
*Out of the Shadows: The New Merchants of Grain, will be (hopefully) published later this year
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