Excerpt from Frank Norris, 1870-1902: An Intimate Sketch of the Man Who Was Universally Acclaimed the Greatest American Writer of His Generation
At this time we were all in Paris. When the fam ily returned to California, leaving Frank in Paris to continue his study of art, he began writing me a novel in which all our favorite characters reappeared, re volving about myself, whom he described as the nephew of the Duke of Burgundy. I wish I had space to repeat this story in detail. It was written in the second person, on closely-ruled notepaper, one sheet slipped inside another, and the whole fastened together with a small loop of red or blue string in the upper left hand corner. It came to me in chap ters, rolled up inside French newspapers to save post age. Each installment was profusely illustrated with pencil sketches, mostly of myself as an esquire, a man-at-arms, an equerry, and finally as a knight. Plots and episodes from the works of Scott, Francis Bacon, Frank Stockton and others were lifted bodily, sometimes the actual wording was borrowed. I re member a sentence, The night closed down dark as a wolf’s mouth, that years later I found again in the opening of a chapter of Quentin Durward.
Frank came home before these adventures were finished. He left the heroine lashed to a railroad track, and me locked in a neighboring switchman’s tower. My story was never concluded, but it was to this time in our lives that he referred in his dedication of The Fit: In memory of certain lamentable tales of the round (dining-room) table heroes; of the epic of the pewter platoons, and the romance-cycle of ‘gaston le Fox’, which we invented, maintained, and found marvelous at a time when we both were boys.
He was nineteen when he came home and began to prepare for the entrance examinations of the Uni versity of California. While he was studying for them he elected to write a three canto poem in the metre of Scott’s verse. It was the first writing of merit that he did. While still in Paris he had written a short article on the armor of the fifteenth century, and illus trated it, but it was no such serious attempt as was the poem. Ancient Armour appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, in March 1889, and he received nine dollars, - the first money ever earned by his pen.
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