“The Great American Novel.”
The Harbor, by Ernest Poole. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]
In America today, other things being equal, that novelist first achieves success who writes—let us say—of the social fabric, rather than of the eternal verities. Thus, in the case of two undoubtedly great artists, John Galsworthy and Joseph Conrad, the former had to wait but half the latter’s time before he came to enjoy real popularity.
And so it is not difficult to understand the noteworthy and deserved success of The Harbor—a book so good that one would be inclined to wonder if it could become popular. Mr. Poole writes with charm and a passionate earnestness of the growth through young manhood of his hero. He knows the New York water-front well and it furnishes an original and interesting background. The boy goes through college, to Europe for a happy year or two and returns to become a successful magazine writer—a worshipper at the shrine of “big” men. Gradually his social conscience is awakened and his entire life is transformed—his allegiance is transferred from the presidents of the corporations who own the steamers to the striking stokers and their fellows. On the whole the picture is impressively convincing and Mr. Poole has caught in his pages much of the most glowing thought of idealistic youth.
His work is so very good that criticism may appear ungracious—still, if one may be allowed: some of the young men at college speak Mr. Poole’s thoughts and not their own. College men do not think as Mr. Poole would have you believe they do—at least not until a year or two after they have graduated. And isn’t Eleanore, the hero’s wife, just a little too perfect—even for the role she has to play? How well an amiable weakness would become her! Finally, The Harbor has the commonest fault of almost all first novels that have for their subject the social fabric: there is too much thought (or too little action)—the author wants to give his opinion on all the things he has ever seriously thought about.
When Mr. Poole has tempered his fine seriousness with just a little more of the creative artist’s austerity he will produce a greater novel than The Harbor, and one that will fulfill the splendid promise of this first book.
Alfred A. Knopf.