Ernest Poole's The Harbor as a Source for O'Neill's The Hairy Ape Patrick Chura Eugene O'Neill Review, Volume 33, Number 1, 2012, pp. 24-42 (Article) Published by Penn State University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/468303 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] ErNeST PooLe’S THE HARBOR AS A SOURCE FOR O’NEILL’S THE HAIRY APE Patrick Chura 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: SUBMARINE My soul is a submarine. My aspirations are torpedoes. I will hide unseen Beneath the surface of life Watching for ships, Dull, heavy-laden merchant ships, Rust-eaten, grimy galleons of commerce Wallowing with obese assurance, Too sluggish to fear or wonder, Mocked by the laughter of waves And the spit of disdainful spray. I will destroy them Because the sea is beautiful. That is why I lurk Menacingly In green depths.1 EUGeNe O’NeILL ReVIeW, VoL. 33, No. 1, 2012 COPYRIGHT © 2012 THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY, UNIVERSITY PARK, PA EOR 33.1_03_Chura.indd 24 16/02/12 10:47 PM O’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.2 While 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’s­anticapitalist 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 c H vulnerability among friends who were at the time more ­established ­writers. u RA Moreover, the poem symbolizes something about O’Neill’s relationship P to the Masses during a crucial phase of his artistic development. That the OOLE’S 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 The central figurative trope of “Submarine”—the metaphorical depiction H of political subversion as a personified U-boat—is traceable to an article by ARBOR 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 AS A war correspondent in early 1915, when he hitched a ride on a German troop S train and shared a compartment with a theater-loving German soldier. The O u private—an admirer of Strindberg, Wilde, and Synge—hated the war but R c took great pleasure in discussing literature and modern drama with Poole. E Eventually the soldier used an apt figure of speech to express his bitterness 25 and subversion: “I am a submarine far down,” he said. Poole picked up on EOR 33.1_03_Chura.indd 25 16/02/12 10:47 PM 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 com- partment. 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 sub- merged 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.3 FIG. 1 “Submarines” in the April 1915 Masses. One 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 EVIEW unusually large and compelling advertisement for a book that deserves to be R called a lost classic of American literary history, Ernest Poole’s The Harbor. ILL While ad copy extolling or exaggerating the importance of a product for Ne the literary marketplace was no doubt as standard in 1915 as it is now, even O’ e N the jaded might have been convinced by this collection of tributes that there e was something special about Poole’s novel.5 What at least is clear is that the EUG Macmillan Company publicity department felt the best way to sell Ernest HE Poole’s book was to allow the published accolades of its reviewers to sell it— beginning prominently with the bizarre but undeniably impressive accolade T 26 that the New York Tribune supplied in calling The Harbor “The first notable novel produced by the new democracy.” EOR 33.1_03_Chura.indd 26 16/02/12 10:47 PM c H u RA P OOLE’S THE H ARBOR FIG. 2 AS A Advertisement for The Harbor in the May 1915 Masses. S O The ad’s chorus of praise for Poole and The Harbor is all the more u R c ­extraordinary because it doesn’t include the most admiring of all reviews, E 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,” 27 McKenna ­announced in a majestic tone. “It has come unmistakably in EOR 33.1_03_Chura.indd 27 16/02/12 10:47 PM ­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.”6 EVIEW R ILL Ne O’ e N e EUG HE FIG. 3 T Edmond McKenna’s review in the May 1915 28 Masses. EOR 33.1_03_Chura.indd 28 16/02/12 10:47 PM When 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 autobi- ography 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.”9 During the two years following the 1915 publication of The Harbor, through the time O’Neill’s submarine poem appeared, the Masses ­featured c H multiple forms of publicity for the book.