Ernest Pooleʼs The Harbor: Naturalism, Socialism and the Whitmanian Tradition

Christophe Den Tandt Université Libre de Bruxelles (U.L.B) (1998)

Ernest Pooleʼs socialist novel of education The Harbor (1915) is argu- ably one of the unjustly forgotten texts of early-twentieth century American fiction. The history of its literary reception may be interest- ingly contrasted with that of Kate Chopinʼs The Awakening—another previously ignored, though now famous text. Though Chopinʼs novel was barely noticed in its day, Pooleʼs The Harbor was, critic Peter Conn writes, “one of the most widely reviewed and discussed work of its time” (110). Peter Conn, who has recently underlined the im- portance of this pre-WWI literary corpus, mentions also that intellectu- als of the 1920s and 1930s like Lewis Mumford and Joseph Freeman still celebrated The Harbor as a” high point in radical fiction” (Freeman qted in Conn 110) or as a work that deserved a “special place” (Mum- ford qted in Conn 110) in the imagination of intellectuals. Yet, because The Harbor was less subtly crafted from a literary point-of-view than Chopinʼs The Awakening and because it was wedded to a cause— socialism—that, unlike Chopinʼs feminism—soon disappeared from the American political agenda, it lost its hold on the readerʼs memories; it even failed to attract the attention of many critics of realism and naturalism. I wish to argue however that, as a cultural achievement, it ranks at least as high as most of the fiction by more celebrated natural- ists like Theodore Dreiser or Frank Norris. Ernest Poole (1880-1950) was a socialist intellectual of the Pro- gressive Era. He was as such a typical product of a period when Ameri- cans developed new and very varied political programs in order to adapt their society to massive urbanisation and immigration. He worked as a muckraking journalist in New York and Chicago and was linked to the urban settlement movement—the political reforms initiat- ed by social workers like Jane Addams, who attempted to facilitate the immigrantsʼ adaptation to the American city. During the First World War, Poole worked as a press correspondent and provided a positive 2 Den Tandt Ernest Pooleʼs The Harbor coverage of the Bolshevik revolution. His literary production—both fiction and nonfiction—includes about twenty titles. One of his nov- els—His Family (1917), a story of the new immigration—received the Pulitzer Prize. As a man of letter and a political activist, he met most of the literary figures of the radical scene—people like Upton Sinclair, whom Poole helped in the research that led to the publication of Sin- clairʼs The Jungle, or like Abraham Cahan, the Jewish novelist and journalist. From the literary-historical perspective I wish to adopt here, The Harbor marks the outer boundary of the first wave of naturalist fiction in the United States, a literary corpus that stretches from the 1890s to WWI and was superseded by modernism. In terms of genre, this set of texts could be described by means of several related labels: they consti- tute a form of sociological vitalism, or also, of romantic realism. In his literary criticism, novelist Frank Norris had very perceptively pointed out that naturalism as practiced by Emile Zola should best be described as a genre that mixes realism and romance (Norris, Responsibilities). If we look at the whole turn-of-the-century corpus of American literary naturalism, it appears that the two main sources of romance discourse in naturalism are, on the one hand, urban gothic—as illustrated in Charles Brocken Brownʼs, Edgar Allan Poeʼs, George Lippardʼs or Robert Louis Stephensonʼs works—and, on the other hand, the tradi- tion of American pastoralism embodied in Walt Whitmanʼs poetry. In the present essay, it is the legacy of the pastoral current I wish to bring out. I propose to show that Pooleʼs description of the industrial mega- lopolis—New York harbor—both follows and displaces the literary idiom set by mid-nineteenth-century nature poetry. Pooleʼs The Harbor is the story of an artistʼs education, narrated in the first person by a protagonist named Bill, whose existence is defined by his relation to the New York harbor. In the novel, the harbor serves as an allegorical correlative of American industrialism as it develops from competitive capitalism to the era of the masses. At one point, the narrator confides that he has “seen three harbors” in his lifetime: his “fatherʼs harbor,” which corresponds to the now extinct mid—nineteenth—century economy of small entrepreneurs, the harbor of big companies which is still very much alive when the novel closes, and another harbor that “is struggling to be born” (373)—the polity of the socialist crowds. Initially, Bill is a timid bourgeois youngster, partly educated in the Paris bohemia. On his return from Europe, with the help of several mentors, he discovers the second harbor mentioned in 3 his enumeration—the world of trusts. At first reluctant to intervene in the social struggles, Bill goes through several existential epiphanies that incite him to commit himself to a course of political action: amazed by the power and magnificence of the new corporations, he is first con- verted to what historian James Weinstein calls corporate liberalism— the doctrine of scientific management and company—regulated wel- fare. Accordingly, he becomes a pro-capitalist publicist. Later, Bill outgrows this pro-corporate outlook: in a climactic scene, he is intro- duced to the harbor of the crowds that have resolved to go on strike against the masters of the harbor. Bill realizes then that “the spirit of the crowd” (315) can coalesce from its initial chaotic state and produce organized action. He then decides to record his experiences as a striker in an autobiographical narrative. What links this story to Whitmanʼs pastoral tradition is Pooleʼs at- tempt to offer a totalizing description of the urban landscape—his effort to capture the industrial city as a whole. In Whitman, the most conspic- uous textual device that enacts this totalizing program is the poetʼs recourse to panoramic catalogues. In “Starting from Paumanok,” the poet surveys “Democracyʼs lands” in those terms: Interlinkʼd, food—yielding lands! Land of coal and iron! land of gold! land of cotton, sugar, rice! Land of wheat, beef, pork! land of wool and hemp! land of the apple and the grape! Land of the pastoral plains, the grass—fields of the world! land of those sweet—airʼd interminable plateaus! (20) Poole transposes this cataloguing device to the urban context. In The Harbor, the protagonist experiences an oceanic epiphany as he con- templates the flood of commodities converging to New York harbor from all over the United States: For in this long sea station, under the blue arc— lights, in boxes, barrels, crates and bags, tumbling, banging, crashing, came the products of this modern land. You could feel the pulse of a continent here. From the factories, the mines and mills, the prairies and the forests, the plantations and the vineyards, there flowed a mighty tide of things—endlessly, both day and night—you could shut your eye and see the long brown lines of cars crawl eastward from 4 Den Tandt Ernest Pooleʼs The Harbor

all over the land, you could see the stuff converging here to be gathered into coarse rope nets and swept up to the liners. The pulse beat fast and furious (162- 63). By virtue of the logic of infinite economic interconnection described in these lines, the harbor is endowed with the awe—inspiring capacity to absorb “the raw produce of Mother Earthʼs four corners” (177) and to transform it into “toys, sofas, glue, curled hair [...] ladiesʼ hats, corks, carpets, dynamos, stuffed dates ... dirt-proof collars and shirt bosoms, salad dressing, blackboards, corsets and the like” (178). Both in Whit- manʼs and in Pooleʼs panoramic enumerations, the American continent is constructed as an object of sublime fascination—a spectacle that exceeds the powers of perception and representation. Because it is too large and too powerful to be adequately represented linguistically, America is evoked by a concatenation of synecdoches. Thus, fragments of America are brought to view, with the implication that they might add up to the sublime whole. Although Whitman, the pastoral poet, and Poole, the naturalist, share the impulse to circumscribe an unrepresentable object through literary language, there is a marked difference in their respective confi- dence in the feasibility of this project. Whitmanʼs anchorage in the pastoral tradition endows his texts if not with the actual ability to retotalize the fragments of his sublime visions, at least with the power to intimate that this gesture is somehow possible. One might expect that a poetry that relies on discontinuous enumerations should be threatened by fragmentation. Yet, even when he deals with the proverbially alien- ating spectacle of the city, as he does in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Whitman can turn the communion with nature into a credible agent of reconciliation: the poet uses the oceanic metaphor of “the pouring—in of the flood-tide” as an all-unifying medium into which all selves dissolve (128). In this way, the text overcomes any suspicion that the members of the urban crowd could remain strangers to themselves and to each other. Because it cultivates the ability to conjure up these feelings of oceanic fusion, Whitmanʼs verse fosters the impression that the reduction of particulars to the totality can be taken for granted. Whitmanʼs belief that America can be united through the poetic imagination is based on a sexualised relationship to the landscape. The driving power behind Whitmanʼs trust in the regenerative virtue of the American “garden of the world” is the belief that the poetʼs self can merge into the “interminable” stretches of nature by a process of pan- 5 theistic sensualism. A classical expression of this sexualized apprehen- sion of nature occurs in the last stanza of “Song of Myself,” in the description of Whitmanʼs experience of reincarnation: I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runa- way sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again, look for me under your boot—soles. (75) The communion with the grass, even in death, corresponds to a form of libidinal investment that, in Freudian terms, qualifies as regressive and perverse polymorphous. In Whitmanʼs perspective, however, it repre- sents an exemplary configuration of desire, whose logic fulfills itself in the poetʼs impulse to fuse with all other living and inanimate beings. This dissemination of desire renders possible the fantasy of merging the elements of the poetic catalogues within a sublime selfhood. Since we are comparing Whitman with a novel of the urban- industrial scene, it is appropriate to describe the poetʼs multilateral intimacy with the world as a form of cycle or economic traffic, which allows the poetʼs self to expand, to lose itself, and then to collect itself again. Whitmanʼs investment of desire follows at first a movement outward—toward the grass, young men, women, or, for instance, towards “the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves” that speak through the poetic voice (43). When Whitmanʼs desire is stretched out among these innumerable objects—particularly among the more forbidding ones, like the sea with its “crooked inviting fin- gers” (41)—his persona might threaten to disappear altogether. Yet, the miracle of Leaves of Grass is that this distended consciousness can always reconstitute itself in an encompassing structure—in a “well- joinʼd scheme” (128) as Whitmanʼs puts it in “Crossing Brooklynʼs ferry:" The simple, compact, well—joinʼd scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme, (128) It is this reflux towards the self—an enlarged self, that is—that the poet alludes to when he says that “[w]hatever is done or said returns at last to me” (43). By virtue of this traffic of desire, the poet can legitimately call himself a “kosmos” (43). 6 Den Tandt Ernest Pooleʼs The Harbor

Unlike Whitman, however, Pooleʼs naturalist novel does not deal with a benevolent “kosmos” but with the city—an environment that, to borrow a term of popular psychoanalysis, American ideologists con- structed as a bad object. In the early nineteenth century, Thomas Jeffer- son stigmatized cities as “sores” on the body politic, because, he thought, urban life undermined economic self-reliance and virtue (165). This negative assessment was relayed throughout the century by the spokespersons of the American middle-class—Protestant ministers, notably—who upheld pastoral life as the proper fostering ground for moral and physical health. In this context, intellectuals and writers were bound to experience the post-Civil War large-scale urbanisation as a plunge into an unredeemably dystopian polity, fostering ambivalence, terror or disgust (see White). It is therefore logical that the Whitmanian rhetoric of oceanic fusion and benevolent libidinal cycles should literal- ly become de-natured when it is transposed to naturalism. In turn-of- the-century novels, oceanic tropes inspired from Whitman can only evoke dysfunctional or dismembered traffics of desire: while Whit- manʼs libido bounces smoothly from one incarnation to the next, the characters of a naturalist novel like Theodore Dreiserʼs Sister Carrie are connected by virtue of uncanny attractions that Dreiser equates, for instance, with the mesmeric drag of the waters of Niagara Falls (Carrie 78). In Frank Norrisʼs fiction, the economic transformations do take the form of a cycle that fuses desire, selves and commodities. Yet the oceanic flows that keep Norrisʼs vision of the urban market in motion cannot take any other form than that of a mind—numbing vortex of speculation. From Pooleʼs standpoint, there is a major political problem in the fact that the Whitmanian rhetoric acquires a pessimistic ring when it is made to signify the turn-of-the-century metropolis. In Whitman, the possibility of an easily—achieved poetic fusion of personas and land- scape constituted the very guarantee of democracy, since it precluded any hierarchies or divisions within the American kosmos. Pooleʼs challenge consists therefore in re-creating this feeling of democratic communion—the conditions of what the French novelists of his time would call unanimistic consciousness—within an environment that seems to preclude it. The compromise reached by Poole consists in describing a protagonist who manages to commune with his urban environment, albeit at the price of violent—either ecstatic or traumat- ic—epiphanies, fostering a relation to the city that remains unstable. 7

The first epiphany that defines the harbor for Bill is a traumatic one: it corresponds to the moment in the narratorʼs childhood when Bill, whose imagination has been shaped by the feminine decorum of the middle—class domestic sphere, comes to associate the harbor outside the home as a site of perversion and degeneracy. During an outing through the “forbidden street” with a gang of Irish boys (14), Bill comes face to face with “hideous, disgusting” whores (14). This spectacle, the narrator writes, “loomed over my whole childhood” (15). From then on, Bill cannot see “or even [think] of the harbor” without feeling “the taste of foul, greasy water in [his] mouth and in [his] soul” (19). To him, the docks are nothing more than “miles of black water” carrying “things tossed out of peopleʼs lives” (128)—pink satin slippers and fetuses, typically. His subsequent itinerary can be read as the attempt to transcend this initial experience. Interestingly, Pooleʼs novel narrates these developments in a lyrical, confessional tone that betrays a proto—psychoanalytical sensibility: the childhood crisis inspired by the harbor follows a pre-oedipal and oedipal scenario. In this logic, Billʼs sexuality is both aroused and repelled by the spectacle of the harbor; for a long time, this fascinating object of desire is exorcized by being portrayed as abject; only later, when he commits himself to the life of the harbor, is Billʼs libido reactivated along heterosexual lines. What Bill needs in order to dispel the ambivalence stirred by his first contact with the harbor is to be able to identify with father figures that seem equal to the crushing power of industrialism. Billʼs own father, a representative of a defunct economic order, is unfit for that function. His real mentors are Dillon, an advocate of scientific man- agement, and his amazon daughter, Eleanore. They are the people who will minister to Billʼs second main epiphany—his conversion to corpo- rate capitalism. Bill describes Dillon as “the first really big man [he had] ever come close to” (149). A stereotype of the naturalist super- man, Dillon is pictured as “a giant” from whom emanates “some queer magnetic force” (152). Dillonʼs daughter, motherless at a young age, is an upper-class New Woman who fully identifies with her fatherʼs capitalist utopia, who marches for the suffrage and takes part in settle- ment work. The most conspicuous sign of her amazon status is her dexterity at steering her personal motor-boat through the New York docks. Bill watches spellbound as her “small, quiet hand [pulls] a lever” that brings out “a leap of power” from the machine, which soon speeds out from the wharf into the Bay (137). 8 Den Tandt Ernest Pooleʼs The Harbor

More directly than her father, it is Eleanore who plays the leading part in the narratorʼs initiation into the corporate philosophy of the harbor. During his outings on the young womanʼs boat, Bill grows able to discern beauty in the dirt and disorder of the docks. One day, when he is still hostile to the harbor, Bill ironically contemplates “loathsome blotches and streaks of oil on the gray water” around the boat, as well as two “foul sluggish columns of smoke” (139) rising on the Jersey shore; suddenly, however, the young artist realizes that these abject elements of industrialism can melt into the turbulence of nature and become transfigured in the process: As I watched I saw [the wind] take that sky and tear jagged rifts in it for the sun, and then as those two columns of smoke began twisting and writhing like monster snakes they took on purple and greenish hues and threw ghostly reflections of themselves down on the oily water around us, filled with blue and gold shimmerings now. "What a strange, wonderful purple,” mur- mured a quiet voice by my side. (140) In this passage, the overall Whitmanian cast of Poole writing reaches down to earlier British romantic sources: the romantic model for this outburst of naturalist sublimity is indeed the central epiphany in part IV of Coleridgeʼs “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"—a poem whose title Poole cites explicitly in a later chapter. Just as Coleridgeʼs charac- ter is brought to “bless” “elfish” water-snakes “unaware,” Bill must acknowledge the “miracles worked by the sunset” on the “monster snakes” of the harbor (141):1 Slowly the crude glory of it stole upon me unawares —until to my own surprise the harbor now became for me a breathing, heaving, gleaming thing filled deep with the rush and the vigor of life. A thing no longer sinister [..].—but strangely stirring. (141) Billʼs sublime vision carries overtones of magic reminiscent of the supernatural atmosphere of Coleridgeʼs text: the colors—the “magnifi- cent purple"—are uncanny, and “the clouds, the winds, the tides, the ... smoke and the ships” are, as Poole puts it, “playing weird tricks on each other” (141). Above all, both Coleridgeʼs and Pooleʼs epiphanies enact a scenario of instinctual regeneration, of reconciliation with natural forces and sexuality. For Bill, the reconciliation with the “mon- ster snakes” represents simultaneously the transcendence of industrial 9 abjection and his sexual coming of age—his falling in love with Elea- nore. In the larger framework of the novel, the conversion scene de- scribes a dialectic of regeneration that can be transposed to different objects: here applied to the industrial framework of the harbor, it will later focus on the labor crowds. Billʼs newly-won perception of the magic of industrial life leads him first to write “glory stories” that celebrate the rationalizing virtues of capitalism. This propagandistic program is based on the assumption that the chaotic energies of the harbor are to be ordered from above, by a transcendent paternal instance. Dillon and Eleanore help the young writer by offering him the material means to achieve such a perspective of panoptic surveillance; they possess the ability to tear themselves away from the “smoke and dirt and disorder” (138) and, as Dillon puts it, to “see [the] harbor or city or state as a whole” (184). In narrative terms, this process of retotalization is performed through two channels: one of them resides in the quick sweep of Eleanoreʼs boat, which takes Bill away from the “rut” of the East River to “the dark, empty fields of light” of the Upper Bay, where the narrator can admire the “lights [twinkling] low for miles and miles” (137). The second path is the one that leads to the top of Dillonʼs skyscraper—“a garish tower of lights that [seems] to be keeping a vigilant watch over all the dark waters, the ships and the docks” (138). From up there, the engineer enjoys what Michel de Certeau has called a “godʼs eye view” (171; my translation)2 over “even the dreariest marshes” of the docks. This towering situation enables Dillon to “take this whole harbor and study it hard” (143), so as to figure out “how it is that everything has become so frightfully snarled” (144). Pooleʼs thematics of panopticism is close in spirit to Michel Foucaultʼs theory of surveillance: the tower, which looms “above the horizon” wherever the narrator goes (138), is essentially an instrument of discipline.3 In the gendered idiom of the novel, the con- straining power that underlies Dillonʼs reform effort is expressed in phallic terms: its symbol is a skyscraper that towers over the chaotic feminine energies of the “watery world” of the docks. Dillon and Eleanore make no secret that, as far as the rationaliza- tion of the harbor goes, “Wall Street is “the brains of it all” (154). It is in fact a matter of pride for the engineer to be “working under [the financiersʼ] orders” (155). Because Wall Street associated with the highly positive figures of Dillon and Eleanore, it can be endowed with an aura of sublimity. Accordingly, seen from Eleanoreʼs boat at day- 10 Den Tandt Ernest Pooleʼs The Harbor break, the “homes of the Big Companies,” towering over the city, offer a truly breathtaking spectacle: The sunshine was reflected from thousands of daz- zling window eyes, little streamers of steam were flung gaily overhead, streets suddenly opened to our view, narrow cuts revealing the depths below. And there came to our ears a deep humming. (154)

This kind of unanimistic vision, in which big companies serve as symbols of the unity of all life, is the essence of what Bill tries to capture in his “glory stories.” Billʼs series, entitled “the America They Know,” consists of interviews of important businessmen—of those “invisible gods whose hand [Bill] had felt on the harbor” (211). The glory of these “Men of the Tower” lies in their ability to bring together the fragments and factions of industrial America. A particularly im- pressive banker, e.g., is able to summon to his office “the men of the mines, the factories and the mills, the promoters of vast irrigations on prairies, [...] real-estate plungers, [...] newspapers proprietors, politi- cians—the builders and boomers, the strong energetic men of the land” (212). In such passages, Poole turns the Whitmanian catalogues into the vehicle of unanimistic visions, here voiced through the accents of capitalism. Peter Conn argues that Pooleʼs astonishing ability to emulate pro- corporate rhetoric weakens his socialist agenda (117). Connʼs objection would be compelling if placed The Harbor within the framework of a politics of realist demystification. Yet, if we assume that Pooleʼs text adheres to a romantic brand of realism, it becomes less urgent to con- demn his characterʼs capacity to empathise with the spectacle of urban capitalism: political commitment in The Harbor is less a matter of argument than of emotional shock tactics. In this logic, the romance of capitalism can be outgrown only at the cost of a new sublime insight: socialism must evince a spectacle more powerful than what capitalism delivers. The object of this third major epiphany is the crowd as a factor of historical change. The mentors who help the narrator bridge the gap that separates him from the nameless masses are Joe Kramer and Jim Marsh, Kramerʼs unionist friend. Kramer, a perennial radical, is the most pronouncedly allegorical character of The Harbor: Eleanore remarks to her husband that Joe “has a real place in the deep uncon- 11 scious part of you” (248). This proletarian mentor has the magical ability to appear whenever and wherever a radical voice must be heard. Just as Dillon and Eleanore take Bill on a trip up the tower, Joe takes the young man on an initiatory descent to the engine room of an ocean liner. The ship has an explicit class system that spreads on a vertical spectrum—from the sunny upper decks, where “[d]ainty wom- en” (250) sport their furs, to the furnaces buried “ten feet of the keel of the ship.” The men Bill meets below are the abject refuse of capitalism. Their quarters are a “foul” place, “encrusted with dirt” (246). Bill notices that “the smells of [the menʼs] bodies [fill] the place” (246); the stokersʼ breakfast— a “greasy, watery soup” (247)—is reminiscent of the oily water of the docks and, as such, concentrates all the abject features of the harbor. Bill, at first, sees only despair in these men. To Joe Kramer, however, there is a dialectic of hope working through the process of proletarianization; ships, he claims, now employ hands with “factory views” (248): they are eager to go on strike. Billʼs ambivalence toward the “surging multitudes of men” (304) is eventually resolved when the young writer realizes that the crowd is capable of self-organization. Throughout, Bill views the mass through the categories of order and disorder that are central to the elder Dillonʼs corporate liberalism. Since the multitude possesses no managerial hierarchy, the only feature that can redeem it in the eyes of the young artist is a quasi-magical quality of self-structuring that he calls “the spirit of the mass” (246). This phenomenon becomes visible during the first strike meeting where, “in some mysterious fashion a crude order” appears (314): Gradually I began to feel what was happening in this hall. That the first “strike feeling” ... was condensing as in a storm cloud ... attracting swiftly to itself all these floating forces. Here was the first awakening of that mass thought and passion which swelling lat- er into full life was to give me such flashes of in- sight into the deep buried resources of the common herd of mankind, their resources and their power of vision when they are joined and fused in a mass. Here in a few hours the great spirit of the crowd was born. (315) This oceanic depiction of the fusional group, with its allusion to coa- lescing vortices and magical illuminations, constitutes the apex of the 12 Den Tandt Ernest Pooleʼs The Harbor romance discourse of The Harbor. It seals Billʼs conversion to social- ism. The end of the novel expresses a note of hope for the future, while acknowledging defeat in the present. The narrative records the slow dismantling of the strike. The narrator lives these events through the ebb and flow of the “ʼstrike feelingʼ” (315). Its disappearance is experi- enced as the eclipse of a mystical insight. But, Bill adds, “back we would go into the crowd, and there in a twinkling, we would be changed. Once more we were members of the whole and took on its huge personality. [...] And this to me was a miracle, the one great miracle of the strike” (321). Though the endless “miracle” of this regeneration remains fragile, Bill chooses to trust to it until the end of the strike. That Billʼs relation to the crowd remains paradoxical—in fact, magical—is an index of the political limits of Pooleʼs Whitmanian apprehension of the city. By accepting the immersion into the disor- dered crowd, Bill commits himself to a form of mass politics as anti- positivistic as that developed by late-nineteenth-century conservative theorists of the masses. Like French sociologist Gustave Le Bon, Poole views the “common herd of mankind” (Poole 315) as a sublime body whose power is immanent but also chaotic. While Le Bon makes prestigious leaders the power magnets of the mass, Pooleʼs socialistic crowd psychology stipulates that charismatic power emanates from the mass itself (See Le Bon). Pooleʼs vision of self-organization posits the existence of a charismatic principle in the mass, which manifests itself as a magical crystallization of force, perceptible during political crises. Peter Connʼs dissatisfaction with this form of sociology is understanda- ble (113): by characterizing the revolutionary mass in those terms, Poole makes the working-class crowd a spectacle for fascinated flâ- neurs like Bill, who approach the mass for the sake of spiritual regener- ation. This subject position belongs to outsiders, unable to grasp the inner dynamic and structures of a movement. Billʼs gaze remains indeed peripheral to proletarian commitment: as an artist, he admires the sailorsʼ chanties, but condemns their lyrics as too crude. Logically, it is not Bill himself, but an Italian unionist who writes the “Revolu- tionary Songs of the Sea"—the politicized versions of the chanties that inspire the striking sailors. Instead, Bill submits his autobiographical manuscript to mainstream publishing houses, which turn him down on account of his radicalism; eventually, he manages to release his narra- tive of the strike in the little magazines of New York bohemia. His 13 drifting away from militancy is expressed in the vitalist finale, which, as Conn points out (117), replaces the specifics of militancy with a blurry invocation to life. It would, however, be one-sided to take Billʼs eventual movement away from politics as the sole measure of the political impact of The Harbor. Doing so would render incomprehensible the novelʼs enthusi- astic reception among pre-WWI socialists. I believe indeed that the main attraction of Pooleʼs The Harbor resides in the fact that its narra- tor is to some extent an allegorical device that make visible the whole gamut of ideological commitments available to the novelʼs politicized readers. In this logic, The Harbor fulfills its agenda by its expository function alone, leaving readers free to focus on one specific ideological narrative and disregard the others. Of course, reducing Pooleʼs protagonist to the role of didactic mediator is in itself an acknowledgment of aesthetic defeat: this gesture transforms the character into an abstract entity and therefore precludes the synthesis of consciousness and world that Whitmanʼs poetry strove for. In this, The Harbor reveals that by the First World War—ten years, in fact, before the advent of American modernism—the naturalist alliance of realism and the Whitmanian romantic imagination could no longer be effected harmoniously: it could only be attempted through manipulations of verisimilitude in which documentary elements coexist awkwardly with romance and magic. By suggesting that a communion of consciousness and the social world is still achievable in his novel, Poole seems willing to forestall the modernist break-up of artistic perception that would later sweep aside his own literary idiom. Indeed, the literature that became prominent in the decade following the First World War brought about an eclipse of the romantic sociology of naturalism. Against the rhetoric of unanimism, modernism suggested that, in a world shaken by major historical traumas, writing should satisfy itself with exploring fragments of experience; writers were accordingly led to focus on the workings of consciousness and artistic practice, which they represented through a highly tightened-up idiom. In this logic, the stylistic terseness of Hemingway, the dislocation of his speech into apparently self-contained fragments, stands as the dialectic counterpart of the sprawling romantic cadences of Pooleʼs naturalist idiom. Hemingwayʼs discontinuous prose is constantly trying to repress any emotional engagement with the issues dealt with in the earlier sociologically-oriented literature. This aesthetic asceticism is predicated on the belief that literature can do without the world—or at least, 14 Den Tandt Ernest Pooleʼs The Harbor without the world as Whitman and Poole understood it—that is, a social scene broad enough to stand as a metaphor of a totality of human activities.

Notes

1. See “The Ancient Mariner,” IV, 279: “And I blessed them unaware” (Coleridge 192). In a later passage of The Harbor, Billʼs lament recalls the death-in-life theme of the marinerʼs spell: “Like the Ancient Mari- ner I sat there dully on the pier watching the life of the ocean go past” (175). 2. De Certeau—like Pooleʼs Dillon—argues that it is only from such a panoptic vantage point that the urban tangle can be reordered into legible patterns; in another type of reading, Peter Conn compares Dillonʼs skyscraper to an ivory tower—to a semi-religious retreat from where artists look down on the industrial scene with contempt (Conn 112). Yet, this interpretation assumes that Pooleʼs gaze is characterized by detachment—scientific and aesthetic, while the perception of social space in The Harbor—as in many other naturalist texts—is rather based on tropes of fascination and complicity. 3. “Panopticism” is a term coined by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish (195). In this study, Foucault shows how the design of Jeremy Benthamʼs model prison—the Panopticon—ensures maximum surveil- lance and discipline through a careful architectural management of the controlling gaze; Foucaultʼs argument suggests that a network of surveying vision is inherently an instrument of coercion. 15

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