On August 25, Belt Publishing reissued Frank Norris’ 1903 novel “The Pit: A Story of Chicago.” In the book, Board of Trade speculator Curtis Jadwin vies for a massive win in the wheat market while his wife Laura fights her own battles for love, respect and self-knowledge. The book is introduced by Chicago author and New York Times briefings editor Whet Moser, who agreed to talk with us about Norris and “The Pit.”
Thanks for getting together. Before we begin, I must say the prologue you wrote for your own book, “Chicago: From Vision to Metropolis,” is one of my favorite short essays about our city. Just a beautiful piece. I love the Richard Wright quote you cite about Chicago as “the known city.” Your book mentions Frank Norris and “The Pit” too. What’s your history with Norris?
I read “The Octopus” in college. I forget exactly how the course was pitched, something like “the turn-of-the-century social realist novel.” We read things like Kate Chopin and “The Marrow of Tradition.” I have to admit I was not super into social realism in college. This was the early 2000s, and you’re coming out of a flourishing of these big, post-modern tomes. And social realist novels are super straightforward, where the title of the book is like “here’s what the moral of the story is.” And they are often quite melodramatic. When you’re twenty-years-old, you’re like, come on.
And so I waited to read “The Pit” and then only did so, really, for my book. Because it is a great record of one of the really crucial eras in the city. When the people at Belt wanted my take on it, it was fun to think a little harder about “The Pit” as a novel as opposed to just a historical document. And because I hadn’t previously read Norris’ essay “A Plea for Romantic Fiction,” it was really interesting to contemplate the book in the context of that.
We tend to contrast romanticism and realism, but that’s not what Norris does. He follows Émile Zola in saying that romance is a truer vision because it heightens our appreciation for reality’s depths.
Yeah, and that was not something I had in my mind when I was reading “The Pit” for my book.
I can relate to your earlier impatience with “The Pit.” When I was in my twenties, I wasn’t interested in anything that was reportage. Give me imagination. Show me how you can transform the world. And then as you get older, you realize how evanescent reality is. “The Pit” is a work of imagination, but it’s also an amazing document of a city, an industry, a style of life, a moment in the history of consumerism. And art—tons of references to music, painting and literature. A little time capsule.
When the publisher put together the archival photographs in the book, they said here are the ones we’re going to use in case there’s anything you want to add in the introduction about some of the novel’s settings. It made me appreciate how the book takes you inside some places in Chicago we all know from the outside, like the Archbishop’s Residence, which originally was a family residence and is fictionalized as the Jadwin’s home. It makes these places feel like something other than a museum. Like there were people in there, and there was life inside them. I didn’t really appreciate that on my first read.
And lots of local landmarks mentioned in a book set in the 1890s are still there: the Auditorium Theatre, where the opening scene takes place; St. James Cathedral, where Curtis and Laura are married; Lincoln Park, where Laura takes her long horseback ride up to the Conservatory (then called the Palm House) and back down past the LaSalle Monument. I mean, Norris grew up here and worked as a journalist here too, so he knew the city.
It’s an interesting book to look at the advantages and flaws of having a journalism background and being a novelist—which I feel like I can say because I’m a journalist. [Laughter] As a journalist, I really appreciated how in the weeds he gets about trading. He is dealing with a somewhat technical subject, and he gets very deep into it, and I enjoyed that. And I think he’s successful in applying his romantic view of the world to the trading atmosphere that Jadwin gets into and is sort of devoured by. Jadwin’s main motivation is not necessarily to make money or gain power over people, but to get control of this natural force called the market.
We sometimes forget that people have always read novels for information about the world. Early novels like “Pamela” were read for tips on social conduct, and even up to our present day, people love techno-thrillers for all the minutia about emerging science and tech.
Right, right, exactly. I wrote my senior thesis on the cetology chapters in “Moby Dick,” so I know. [Laughter] I thought, well, everyone thinks these are the boring chapters, so I’ll give this a shot. That can be a good approach to looking at any literary work—to look at the parts that are underestimated.
“The Pit” starts as a romance, becomes kind of an adventure story and then takes a gothic turn, with both Curtis and Laura flirting with madness. And then it ends like a Shakespeare romance, with our heroes living happily ever after. I can see why some early readers were like: what is this?
And some are still saying that, yeah. [Laughter] And there are places in the language where it’s like, oh my gosh, guy, rein it in a little bit!
My favorite was his description of Lake Michigan as “encrusted with innumerable coruscations.”
I’m reminded of an important point in William Cronon’s “Nature’s Metropolis,” which is really the perfect companion to “The Pit.” Cronon stresses the singular way Chicago has been shaped by the natural environment. Norris’ prose can get very purple when he invokes these natural metaphors, whether he’s talking about the lake or the flow of grain into the city. He’s pushing that button very hard, but he does it to give you a sense of how powerful those forces are. You’re in the city, but you are also subject to these forces. And the city in turn emulates nature: the trading pit, for example, which Norris describes as sucking people in like a whirlpool.
Or the flow of workers down LaSalle Street, like a coursing stream. I mean, you can still see that kind of thing most weekday mornings, as people flow into the Loop from the train stations. And it wasn’t so long ago that you’d still see people from the exchanges walking around the Loop in their colorful trading jackets. I think there’s still a small amount of open outcry trading today, at CBOE, but CBOT is all electronic now.
I haven’t been down there in a while. But what a great piece of Chicago history. And Norris’ account of the trading floor really draws you in. It’s very well done, as a narrative.
You mention Cronon, but I thought of another point of reference reading “The Pit,” and that’s Tom Wolfe. Jadwin is essentially his era’s equivalent of the 1980s Wall Street “masters of the universe” Wolfe wrote about in “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” You might remember that book. It’s from back in the “1900s,” as the kids say. [Laughter] Searching that up, I was delighted to see some folks today identify Norris as a precursor to the “New Journalism” of Wolfe and his contemporaries. And of course Wolfe famously referred to Zola as “my idol” and promoted his idea of the novel as a kind of scientific experiment that revealed the facts of human nature.
I mean, so much of Shakespeare is just giving people very obvious, fairly comprehensible problems, letting them bounce off each other and seeing what happens when you do that.
And there are some very subtle insights into human nature that Norris’ “experiment” produces. One of my favorites relates to how when someone has few possessions those few become very meaningful, and that the opposite is also true. When Laura becomes wealthy enough to afford anything she wishes, she discovers that nothing she buys means anything to her. As Norris puts it, “the little personal relation between her and her belongings vanished away.”
Yeah, despite the period setting, all of the characters felt very familiar to me, like these are real people, we still make them. Speaking of the present day, you mentioned earlier that Norris is maybe not as much read today as some of his contemporaries.
That’s my sense.
I wonder if one reason is that—if you compare him to Upton Sinclair, for example—the commodity market he’s writing about is not something we think about as much, compared to food safety or crude oil. I live in Chicago and the markets are still here, but they don’t get covered very much. You don’t read much about wheat prices. Even this year, with the terrible wheat harvest. And I haven’t seen much coverage of it outside of trade publications. It’s like that market has been solved in ways that the oil market has not been. So you can turn Sinclair’s novel “Oil!” into the film “There Will Be Blood” and people still really connect with it. That’s my theory, anyway.
You make me think: if our food supply was as precarious as our oil supply it might be different. Because it isn’t something we ever think about as a country: Will we have enough food? Will we have enough grain? Given recent geopolitical events, maybe we should say: for now at least.
“The Pit: A Story of Chicago”
By Frank Norris
Belt Publishing, 336 Pages
