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Ernest Poole's The Harbor as a Source for O'Neill's The Hairy Ape

2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/eugeoneirevi.33.1.0024

2161-4318

Patrick Chura,

Theatre and Performance Studies

During the summer of 1916 in Provincetown, Eugene O'Neill composed a brief three-stanza poem built around the conceit of the poet's soul as a submarine, driven to self-concealment but stealthily assailing bourgeois arrogance and lethargy with spiritual torpedoes: SUBMARINEMy soul is a submarine.My aspirations are torpedoes.I will hide unseenBeneath the surface of lifeWatching for ships,Dull, heavy-laden merchant ships,Rust-eaten, grimy galleons of commerceWallowing with obese assurance,Too sluggish to fear or wonder,Mocked by the laughter of wavesAnd the spit of disdainful spray.I will destroy themBecause the sea is beautiful.That is why I lurkMenacinglyIn green depths.1O'Neill's biographers mention that he first showed the work to John Reed, who liked it and showed it to his Provincetown neighbor, Masses editor Max Eastman, who made O'Neill very happy by accepting the poem for publication.2While the Masses did publish the piece, they did not do so promptly (it appeared in the February 1917 issue), and the journal did not give it much chance of being noticed. Tucked away in the journal's end-matter, near the page-fold on page 43, in a section of the magazine given over mainly to advertising, the poem seemed an afterthought. Speculation aside about whether “submerging” the poem in a sea of marketing copy and allowing the author to remain “stealthy” was an intentional joke on its theme, “Submarine” is a slight piece, naïve in its figuration of the artist's anticapitalist destructive potential and unrevealing as a measure of O'Neill's actual political “aspirations.” Though some of its core ideas—about the beauty of the sea and the ugliness of industrial shipping, for example—appear in O'Neill's plays, the work itself is probably less interesting than the circumstances of its composition and publication.When he wrote the poem in 1916, O'Neill was a newcomer to the Provincetown coterie that included, along with Eastman, a number of regular Masses contributors. Anxious to impress this group, O'Neill self-fashioned a poetic alter ego that was calculated to mesh with the radical politics of the avant-garde journal. O'Neill's willingness to espouse active, Masses-variety anarchism in “Submarine,” along with the great satisfaction he reportedly felt at having the piece accepted, suggests the beginning playwright's emotional vulnerability among friends who were at the time more established writers. Moreover, the poem symbolizes something about O'Neill's relationship to the Masses during a crucial phase of his artistic development. That the playwright not only read the journal but also took cues from its subject matter and priorities is a view that gains traction when we consider the likely source for the poem.The central figurative trope of “Submarine”—the metaphorical depiction of political subversion as a personified U-boat—is traceable to an article by Ernest Poole that appeared in the April 1915 Masses under a near-identical title, “Submarines.” Poole's article described an incident from his time as a war correspondent in early 1915, when he hitched a ride on a German troop train and shared a compartment with a theater-loving German soldier. The private—an admirer of Strindberg, Wilde, and Synge—hated the war but took great pleasure in discussing literature and modern drama with Poole. Eventually the soldier used an apt figure of speech to express his bitterness and subversion: “I am a submarine far down,” he said. Poole picked up on this idea, telling the soldier that “hunting around for submarines” was his main goal as a war correspondent.At this point a group of muddy infantrymen crowded into the compartment. When one of them railed caustically against capitalism and the wartime status quo—“I tell you that this war was started by a lot of fat rich people. And we are the fellows who get killed”—Poole realized he had found another submarine. The hope expressed at the close of the piece is that there will be more submarines: “It is pleasant … where you feel submerged in this ocean of war, to meet these submarines now and then,” Poole mused, concluding the article by stressing and reiterating the politically charged metaphor that he—not O'Neill—had introduced into the pages of the Masses.3One wonders whether the reason Eastman allowed “Submarine” to appear anonymously, inconspicuously, and belatedly was that he knew it to be derivative.4 But perhaps a more important outcome of tracing back the submarine-as-subversion analogy in the Masses lies in other questions it raises: Who was Ernest Poole and why would O'Neill notice and draw upon his work? Though today Poole's name is not universally recognized even among literature scholars, he was for a brief few years beginning in 1915 one of the bright stars of American literature. Poole was especially well known to the editors, contributors, and readers of the Masses. In the same issue in which “Submarines” was published, for example, there appeared an unusually large and compelling advertisement for a book that deserves to be called a lost classic of American literary history, Ernest Poole's The Harbor.While ad copy extolling or exaggerating the importance of a product for the literary marketplace was no doubt as standard in 1915 as it is now, even the jaded might have been convinced by this collection of tributes that there was something special about Poole's novel.5 What at least is clear is that the Macmillan Company publicity department felt the best way to sell Ernest Poole's book was to allow the published accolades of its reviewers to sell it—beginning prominently with the bizarre but undeniably impressive accolade that the New York Tribune supplied in calling The Harbor “The first notable novel produced by the new democracy.”The ad's chorus of praise for Poole and The Harbor is all the more extraordinary because it doesn't include the most admiring of all reviews, Edmond McKenna's beatification of the novel in the May 1915 Masses. “Of course it had to come—the novel of the soul of industrial democracy,” McKenna announced in a majestic tone. “It has come unmistakably in Ernest Poole's varied and intense book, ‘The Harbor.’” McKenna called The Harbor “a book of power and beauty, worthy of the theme it celebrates.” Effectively, he made a case for immediate canonization of the novel as a landmark and turning point in American fiction: “Industrial democracy will have to advance to another stage before a better book can be written about it.”6When Poole's novel was published in early 1915, O'Neill was at Harvard, writing plays for George Pierce Baker that included The Sniper and The Personal Equation, works directly concerned with current events in the antiwar and prosocialist labor movements. This, coupled with the fact that O'Neill was already a friend of Reed, makes it probable that he kept up with the Masses in this period. Of course, O'Neill didn't have to read Eastman's journal to learn of Poole's book; it was reviewed everywhere. But if O'Neill had noticed Poole's “Submarines” piece in the April issue, it would have been hard for him not to notice the advertisement for Poole's bestseller in the same number, and very likely the review of Poole's book a month later.Though it appears that Ernest Poole and Eugene O'Neill did not have a personal relationship, they had a number of mutual friends including most notably Reed, with whom Poole spent considerable time both in Europe and New York.7 Obviously The Harbor is a work that would have been read and discussed among O'Neill's Village colleagues and the early Provincetown Players, among whom we can place the book with certainty. Poole's autobiography mentions that in 1915 he received letters of congratulation for The Harbor from a list of luminaries including Theodore Roosevelt, William Dean Howells, Hamlin Garland, Walter Lippman—and John Reed.8 Dorothy Day, close to O'Neill in the 1910s, wrote in her autobiography that during the Village years the New York waterfront was “made more alive for me by reading Ernest Poole's The Harbor.”9During the two years following the 1915 publication of The Harbor, through the time O'Neill's submarine poem appeared, the Masses featured multiple forms of publicity for the book. The “Masses Book Shop,” for example—a regular section of the journal that offered readers a list of preferred fiction, poetry, sociology, psychology, history, and philosophy—included a blurb about The Harbor for seventeen consecutive months from April 1915 to August 1916 and again for five months in 1917. It is also interesting that the description of the book changed over the period, going from “A novel of remarkable power and vision” in early 1915 to “Ernest Poole's splendid new novel which everyone is discussing” from late 1915 to early 1916, and finally to “The great novel of America” in 1917. Treating the novel this way actually said much about the fast-moving stages of the book's intense but short-lived vogue.The Harbor is a culturally revealing, politically embedded novel Poole began writing in 1912, completed in 1914, and published in February of 1915 to instant acclaim. The making of the book was directly influenced by concurrent events, some of which are now forgotten. The 1912 Lawrence textile strike—IWW leader Bill Haywood's greatest victory, a strike that opened up the eastern states to agitation through the preaching and practice of the controversial doctrine of “direct action”—prompted Poole to begin writing the book. But the work could not have taken final shape without the stimulus of the silk workers' strike in Paterson, New Jersey, which began in February 1913. During this strike, Ernest Poole came to Paterson more than any other prominent socialist and took more away with him. Poole was also involved in the Paterson Strike Pageant, a moving reenactment of the events of the strike before an audience of 20,000 in Madison Square Garden. Working with John Reed and set designer Robert Edmond Jones, Poole drew on his stage experience (before 1910 he had written a dozen plays, three of which were produced) to help plan the logistics of the production. In newspaper accounts on the morning after the pageant, Poole was named as one of the “bright lights who worked up the show” and one of the four writers of the pageant script.10 Theater scholars now generally agree that the pageant sparked the development of American drama, preparing the way for the labor plays of the Provincetown Players.11 A number of the founding members of the Players—including, along with Reed, Jig Cook, and Susan Glaspell—were involved in or present at the pageant. Cook referred to it as “the first labor play” and praised the “feeling of oneness” with the strikers that Poole and the other pageant organizers had conveyed.12While the makers of the pageant and later the Provincetowners expressed their feeling of “oneness” with workers through visual art and drama, Poole found a way to put this sentiment into fiction. One evening during the Paterson strike, while Haywood was having dinner at Poole's home in New York, the Wobbly leader mentioned that he planned in the following spring “to strike New York Harbor and shut it up tight.” When Poole replied that he knew of this plan and had learned of it from a young IWW organizer he'd been interviewing on the waterfront, the surprised Haywood asked the purpose of his research. “I'm writing a book called The Harbor,” Poole replied.13 The book Poole alluded to offers a detailed treatment of economic and social conditions in New York from the 1880s to the outbreak of the Great War. While the novel spans decades, one of its chief merits is that it preserves in literary form a brilliant but short-lived episode in the history of the radical labor movement.Critics from several eras have described The Harbor as “the best Socialist novel of all,” the “best radical novel written in the 1910s,” and “the best fictional account of the Paterson strike by a participant.”14 Like a number of muckraking classics, the book both recorded history and made history. It was the highly controversial eighth bestseller of 1915, going through 78,000 copies and twenty-two printings in a matter of months. The book was translated into German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Russian. After The Harbor made Poole famous, his career peaked when his next novel, His Family, won the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1918, an award that some saw as belated recognition for the more celebrated earlier book.15The Harbor had a strong impact on the generation of radicals and progressives that came of age just before the First World War, and its significance was not lost on major writers with leftist leanings, including John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, and, I believe, Eugene O'Neill. A detailed look at The Harbor seems worthwhile not just in order to establish that O'Neill would have been familiar with the book, for that seems self-evident. It is useful also to recognize that The Harbor was particularly well suited in terms of its outlook and subject matter, and well positioned as a text enthusiastically endorsed by the Masses and its contributors, to form a part of O'Neill's developing political-artistic vocabulary.A decisive moment in Poole's novel—the most important in relation to O'Neill—comes when an upper-class adventurer on a slumming expedition pays a visit to the stokehole of an oceanliner and gets a shocking glimpse of bestial, half-naked workers shoveling coal into the ship's furnace.16 Poole's rendering of this hellish scene—where there is “no day and no night, only steel walls and electric light”—deserves consideration as a likely model for the crucial stokehole scene of The Hairy Ape.17In the version of the stokehole scene found in The Harbor, the militant labor organizer Kramer escorts the middle-class main character Billy to glimpse the lives of a ship's “firemen.” Poole's physical description of the stokehole and firemen's quarters is strikingly similar to O'Neill's. To visit the hold, Billy and Kramer climb down oily ladders to a place described as “foul” and “heavily encrusted with dirt.” The stokers' forecastle is described as “a long narrow chamber with a row of glowing furnace doors,” a place where “the men at work are half naked” and the “furnace mouths” are “white hot.” This “low chamber” is “crowded with rows of bunks, steel skeleton bunks three tiers high.”18 Poole's “almost naked” stokers are trapped in a claustral, “stifling” atmosphere having much in common with O'Neill's “firemen's forecastle,” with its own “[t]iers of narrow, steel bunks, three deep, on all sides,” a space in which “[t]he ceiling crushes down upon the men's heads” and the only light in the “murky air” comes from the “flaming mouths” of the furnace doors.19As he enters the stokehole, Kramer—who like O'Neill's Tom Perkins in The Personal Equation has forsaken his middle-class upbringing to become an agitator and has spent two years working as a stoker—asks Billy, “How do you like our home?” This question recalls O'Neill's concept of the stokehole as “home” as expressed by Yank. Along the same lines, Kramer ends his stokehole tour by remarking to Billy, “Let's go up where you belong.” After climbing ladder after ladder to the upper decks, Billy gives more meaning to the idea of belonging: “We came out on deck and slammed an iron door behind us. And I was where I belonged.”20O'Neill's play is of course profoundly preoccupied with the idea that Yank “belongs” in the stokehole and calls it home until he is intruded upon by Mildred, when his search for belonging begins anew. The stokehole scenes of both The Harbor and The Hairy Ape consider the issue of class-based “belonging” as a psychological shibboleth. The starkest aspect of Yank's alienation after Mildred insults him is his inability to recover psychologically from confusion in his sense of self after being stripped of a sense of belonging. But O'Neill is careful to indicate that the idea of belonging cuts both ways. The desire of the enraged Yank to pursue and “fix” Mildred is produced by the notion that his quarters constitute, for her, neither “home” nor even a place where she can be present without serious mutual harm. As Yank says, “She didn't belong, dat's what!”21Belonging is central to both texts, but there were ways in which O'Neill clearly surpassed Poole in his treatment of it. The idea that it is only in death that the Hairy Ape “at last belongs” might be read as a dramatically effective intensification of a concept Poole first explored.22 It gets its added power in O'Neill's hands not only from the attribution of life-destroying consequences to the stokehole encounter, but also from O'Neill's radical maneuver of shifting the focus from the psyche of the slumming leisure class to that of the worker, while still not ignoring either side of the class divide.In keeping with Poole's emphasis on Billy rather than on the stokers themselves, there is no character in the stokehole scene of The Harbor who is quite so formidable as Yank. There is, however, a “lead stoker” who “stands at the head of the line and set the pace for the others to follow” and, interestingly, “One huge bull of a creature with large, limpid shining eyes” who, when he sees the intruders in the ship's hold, “stopped suddenly with a puzzled stare” (218, 219). This reaction seems similar to Yank's “bewildered fury” at the moment of his awareness of Mildred's intrusion. Could Poole's briefly mentioned “bull” figure, who laughs and spits and antagonizes another stoker, be an embryonic Yank, the Hairy Ape?Both Poole and O'Neill contrast the squalor of the stokehole with affluent New York and gaudily displayed consumer goods. O'Neill accomplishes this by moving the action from the stokehole to Fifth Avenue, but Poole brings in similar images just before and after the stokehole while even deploying some proto-expressionist effects akin to O'Neill's. As Billy approaches the docks early on the morning of his stokehole visit, he passes a commercial area where “the department store windows looked unreal. Their soft rich lights had been put out, and in this cold hard light all their blandishing ladies of wax appeared like so many buxom ghosts.” Another of Billy's visions, reminiscent of the depiction of Mildred in The Hairy Ape, is of well-heeled New Yorkers, sapped of vitality: “Women and girls were hurrying by, and as some of them stopped for a moment to peer in at these phantoms of fashion, their own faces looked equally waxen to me. A long luxurious motor passed with a man and a woman in evening clothes half asleep in each other's arms” (214).Poole continues the class-based contrast after his stokehole scene. Billy, back where he belongs, finds himself “among gay throngs of people. Dainty women brushed me by,” he remarks; “I felt the softness of their furs, I breathed the fragrant scent of them and of the flowers that they wore, I saw their fresh immaculate clothes, I heard the joyous tumult of their talking to the regular crash of the band…. And I walked through it all as though in a dream.” For Poole's protagonist, as for both Yank and Mildred, the juxtaposed views of conditions in the workers' world and the fashionable world prove overwhelming and disorienting—the material disparities are simply too great. Billy is haunted by the memory of the stokehole even after he returns to his middle-class existence: “I knew that deep below this, down in the bottom of the ship, the stokers were still singing” (219–20).Similarities between the key scenes in The Harbor and The Hairy Ape go beyond physical details; Poole's protagonist Billy, whose connections with industrialists allow him entrée into the ship's engine room, shares class-based traits with O'Neill's Mildred Douglas. Mildred uses her father's name to get permission to visit the stokehole; Billy uses his influence with his corporate engineer father-in-law to procure his pass. Each character draws upon the privileges of class (and thereby reinforces class barriers)—in order to enable an experience whose ostensible purpose is to transcend or negate class barriers.In O'Neill's play and in Poole's novel, the visit to the stokehole by the slumming adventurer has powerful psychological effects. O'Neill's Mildred and Yank are deeply disturbed by her intrusion into workers' lives. Billy is likewise traumatized: “The faces of individual stokers, some fiery red, some sodden grey, kept bobbing up in my memory,” he says. “I went home worried and depressed and shut myself up in my workroom…. It was something deep…. I wouldn't have thought it could hit me so hard.” To his wife, Eleanore, Billy describes “the hell” he had seen in the stokehole and concludes, “That hour with J.K. and the stokers gave me a jolt. I can feel it still. I can't seem to shake it off.” Noticing his distress, Kramer remarks, “That look at a stokehole got hold of you hard” (221, 232).Both Poole and O'Neill focus on the transition from the age of sail to the age of stream and iron. Billy often compares the modern mechanized harbor to “the harbor of long ago, and the snowy white sails of [his] father's youth” (114). Just as frequently, Billy's father in turn laments the disappearance of beautiful sailing ships in favor of steam-driven “hogs of the sea.” In The Hairy Ape, it is Paddy who expresses these nostalgic sentiments about work in the open air and the demise of sailing vessels. His words, “Me time is past due.” And those of Yank, “Yuh don't belong no more, see…. Yuh'r too old”—apply as well to Billy's father, who longs impossibly for the bygone age of towering sails and Yankee clippers while he watches his harbor become “clouded in the smoke and soot of an age of steam and iron.” Considering Yank's rejoinder to Paddy—“Nix on dat old sailing ship stuff! All dat bull's dead, see?”—we might wonder whether O'Neill is in some ways dialoguing with Poole in The Hairy Ape, consciously working over parallel material not only to transform it expressionistically but to update it historically.23The stokehole scenes of Poole and O'Neill lead to the introduction of IWW doctrine by an IWW organizer. In scene 7 of The Hairy Ape, O'Neill conveys skepticism about the ability of the Wobbly policy to ease or understand Yank's psychic pain, but in The Harbor such doctrines are proposed hopefully by Kramer as a possible solution to economic injustice. Kramer explains to Billy that “We were entering into an age of force—of ‘direct action’—strikes and the like—by prodigious masses of men” (228). In Poole's text, as in Poole's pre–world war social context, IWW theory is taken seriously and treated, if not with complete acceptance, at least as a legitimate response to brutal class-based exploitation. Not surprisingly, O'Neill's play handles Wobbly ideology with a level of irony more in keeping with the demise of radical labor and the violent marginalization of the IWW by the early 1920s.But IWW theory is central to at least one aspect of O'Neill's play. The basis of Yank's personal pride, along with his sense of place in the world, stems from his feeling that as a worker he is also a creative force: “I start somep'n and de woild moves!” he declares; “And I'm what makes iron into steel…. I'm de muscles in steel, de punch behind it!”24 O'Neill's early 1920s audiences would have been more likely than contemporary readers to realize that Yank's assertions of physical agency here derive from the IWW lexicon as articulated by IWW leader Haywood. And if those audiences were particularly astute, they might also have connected this aspect of Yank's character to the Wobbly doctrine that was paraphrased and adapted from Haywood's Paterson speeches by Ernest Poole in The Harbor.In labor leader Jim Marsh, Poole paints an accurate fictional portrait of Haywood, one that captures the man's magnetism at the height of his power. When Billy meets Marsh, described as “the great mob agitator and notorious leader of strikes,” he feels an “electric shock” with effects less physical than ideological. At one particularly stirring mass meeting, Marsh-Haywood reminds workers that “a ship may be equipped with the most powerful engines to drive her, … but the ship can't sail until you go aboard! You're the men who make the ships of use … and to you the ship industry should belong!” (283). In The Hairy Ape these principles inform Yank's sense that “It's me makes it move! Sure, on'y for me everything stops. It all goes dead, get me?”25 Joe Kramer, a follower of Marsh, espouses similar ideas in response to Billy's skepticism about the stokers' potential as a political force: “Yes—they look like a lot of bums. And they feed all the fires at sea.” As Kramer views it, they should not be underestimated because “they do all the real work in the world.” This is why Kramer, speaking alongside Marsh in the novel's great strike meeting, addresses his remarks directly to the “men who work in the stokeholes naked” and asks a moment of silence as “a tribute to all the dead stokers” (215, 255, 284).The presence in The Hairy Ape of a form of IWW thinking as an element of Yank's character is a fascinating historical detail that both complicates and helps elucidate O'Neill's play. Haywood, who was known for confrontation and directness along with bold and charismatic public pronouncements, was captured realistically through Poole's Jim Marsh. But he is perhaps not absent in the mix of personal traits and political tendencies rendered expressionistically in O'Neill's Yank. Looking closely at The Harbor, one realizes that part of Yank's thinking meshes seamlessly with the fiery rhetoric of the IWW at Lawrence and Paterson and the numerous strikes of the prewar era in which Haywood played major roles. One also realizes that Yank is not so easily categorized as an extreme creation, that even his most audacious affirmations of worker supremacy—“Slaves, hell! We run de whole woiks. All de rich guys dat tink dey're somep'n, dey ain't nothin'! Dey don't belong”—would not be out of character, with corrected grammar, for either Haywood or Poole's Jim Marsh and Joe Kramer.26If The Harbor is directly related to The Hairy Ape, then it is probably also related to one of O'Neill's earliest plays, The Personal Equation.27 O'Neill composed this play for Baker's seminar in the spring of 1915, the same spring that The Harbor was getting rave reviews and selling by the thousands. Considering that Baker encouraged students to adapt plays from existing sources, including both drama and fiction, we might wonder if O'Neill didn't seize upon some elements readily available in Poole's text. Like The Harbor, The Personal Equation incorporates, along with actual stokers, the figure of an educated downclassing stoker (O'Neill's Tom Perkins and Poole's Kramer). Both Poole's novel and O'Neill's play emphasize a contrast between stokers and the “first cabin people,” and they use this contrast to ground a foray into radical ideals. O'Neill's Tom Perkins is inwardly torn by conflicts involving revolutionary philosophy, the love of a woman, and the middle-class values represented by his father—a combination of tensions that strongly resembles the inner struggle of Poole's Billy.The endings of both The Harbor and The Personal Equation are shaped by the outbreak of the First World War. Poole's novel was among the earliest literary treatments of the Great War. When Macmillan accepted the manuscript in early 1914, Poole believed the book finished, but after European hostilities began in July of that year, he asked the publisher to return the manuscript and then spent six weeks rewriting the final chapters. As he explained in his autobiography, The Bridge, the new ending incorporated the onset of the war by “showing the whole world in chaos.”28 The conclusion of The Personal Equation—in which O'Neill's IWU agitator Whitely states, “This is the upheaval of everything,” and argues that the “Socialists, Syndicalists and all of them” have “got to back up the government until this war is won”—not only registers the war's commencement but focuses on the issue of what will happen to the labor movement as a result, the very issue that Poole uses to lend contemporary resonance to the conclusion of The Harbor.29Several O'Neill scholars have pointed out that The Personal Equation developed from the writer's experience as a witness to the 1911 British General Strike in Liverpool.30 Another clear influence on the play, however, was the historical context of its period of production, when an incipient world war raised serious questions and had damaging effects for international labor. These concerns, as Robert Richter reminds us in his new analysis of O'Neill's early career, “were current issues in 1915 when O'Neill was writing The Personal Equation.”31 And while The Harbor was certainly one of the first American novels to directly treat these issues, O'Neill also deals accurately with them in his only slightly later play. At the end of both works, therefore, an IWW-led strike fails, world war begins, and the question—answered with skepticism in both cases—is whether the worldwide socialist ideal can survive in a militarized atmosphere of government repression and patriotic fervor.Largely because Poole's rise as a writer was so closely tied to the shifting fortunes of history and politics, the national celebrity he achieved with The Harbor did not last. With American entry into the European conflict in 1917, the desire for patriotic unity gave license to a severe curtailment of civil liberties and touched off strong antileft persecutions. Strikes and labor actions of the type depicted by Poole in The Harbor were not only no longer front-page news; they soon became illegal under the Sedition Act of 1918. Poole initially supported American war aims, but after the November 1918 Armistice he was severely disillusioned by react