The Harbor by Ernest Poole

The Jungle on the waterfront

Ernest Poole is far from a household name in American literature, but he bears the distinction of being the first writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction back in 1918, for his novel entitled His Family. Today he might be better remembered, however, for his preceding novel, The Harbor, published in 1915. Prior to becoming a novelist, Poole worked as a muckraking journalist in Chicago and a war correspondent in the Russian Revolution. He joined the Socialist Party of America and wrote for their newspaper, so it is not surprising that his fiction often centers around issues of labor and the class struggle. Poole’s novel The Harbor focuses on the working conditions of dockworkers, sailors, and stokers on New York’s waterfront.

The narrator of The Harbor, named Bill, grew up in Brooklyn in a house overlooking the New York Harbor. His father owns a shipping business run out of a waterfront warehouse. In his high school and college years, Bill refers to himself as being somewhat “queer,” which in 1915 did not necessarily mean gay. What Bill means is that he is more interested in books, art, and culture than the young men surrounding him whose thoughts revolve around sports, business, and girls. Nevertheless, like many youths, he dabbles in bad behavior, which usually takes place in the vicinity of the harbor. Bill thus comes to identify the harbor with the seamier side of life, which includes his father’s business. Bill seeks escape by going off to live in Paris for a couple years, where he basks in art and beauty while beginning his career as a writer. When he returns to America, however, he finds himself writing about the very harbor he fled. He meets an engineer who is working on a plan to remodel and revitalize the harbor, and he interviews many powerful New York capitalists. Bill begins to idolize these heroes of industry while becoming a financially successful writer himself. His bourgeois bliss is interrupted, however, by an old friend with socialist inclinations who introduces Bill to the plight of the exploited working class whose blood, sweat, and tears drive the harbor’s ships, machinery, and economy.

Like Upton Sinclair, Poole is not a true proletarian author because he came from a wealthy upbringing. He writes from the perspective of a sympathetic outsider advocating for labor reform. Bill is an educated author of means, much like Poole himself. In his great American novel of labor, The Jungle, Sinclair tells his story from the point of view of the downtrodden laborers themselves. Poole, on the other hand, lets middle-class readers identify with Bill before easing them into the working-class milieu of squalor and strikes. Bill’s friend Joe Kramer, a muckraking journalist and labor organizer, serves as the Virgil to Bill’s Dante, guiding him into the inferno. Of the two approaches, Sinclair’s succeeds more effectively by creating a more vivid and visceral experience for the reader. In The Harbor, Poole beats around the bush too much. Only the last quarter of the book is really devoted to labor unrest and the class struggle. The first half of the book calls to mind a watered-down version of Jack London’s novel Martin Eden, as Bill struggles to make his way as a writer while romancing a woman from a higher social class.

Stylistically, Poole’s writing is a touch too flowery to evoke the grittier aspects of urban social realism. His prose sometimes reads more like proto-beatnik poetry than muckraking naturalism, particularly the way “the Harbor” is constantly personified as if it were a human entity. When Poole does get around to writing scenes of abysmal working conditions, capitalist corruption, and strike violence, they really are quite powerful. One just wishes there had been more them.
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