The Harbourmaster
THE MAN of the MONTH
[Doubleday, Doran, $2.50]
WITH a dozen solid novels and several books of essays to his credit, William McFee has taken his place as a major figure in contemporary letters—a position appropriately marked by the recent publication of a bibliography of his works. His books have a close texture of thought and detail a philosophical detachment, a cosmopolitan knowledge, an urbanity sharply seasoned with caustic comment, that seem to promise them a long life.The Harbourmaster contributes materially to this impression, for it is certainly one of his best novels.
The theme is the love of Frank Fraley, a seaman, and Francine, a Norman peasant girl, ‘bound together by an invincible passion, destined to tear one another’s hearts.’ Tragedy is implicit from the first, because, as Spenlove, the narrator, says, ‘Frank was a man of the sea who was unfitted for life on the land. . . . He found Francine on the sea, and he should have lived with her on the sea. . . . He had taken on an impossible task.’ I am not sure that this this is convincingly established. One might as well say that their tragedy was fruit of abysmal racial differences. But who cares? The figure of Francine is what remains in the mind, bewitching, adorable, laughable, and inexpressibly pathetic.
She does not appear until Frank has had two other love affairs, which occupy a fourth of the book. These prepare him for the great passion of his life; they are prose and Francine is poetry. ‘There are,’ says Spenlove, ‘ many different ways of telling a story about a man and a woman. I have a feeling that what happens to them before they meet makes all the difference, which is why I have dwelt on Theroigne and Emily’; and it is characteristic of the author to lay a preliminary foundation which may seem to some impatient readers gratuitous, though it is certainly the natural way to spin a yarn. For he has adopted the somewhat questionable device of having his entire story told, almost without intermission, by that Fred Spenlove whom we met a long time ago in Captain Macedoine’s Daughter — chief engineer, ironical, observant, philosophical, always disguising a romantic loyalty and generosity under a manner of intense reserve and skepticism.
The first fourth of the novel is very good, but the narrative gains headway from the moment Francine is taken aboard the Gloriosa out of the Ægean not far from Salonika. And it is no wonder if the author’s pen takes fire in writing of this fascinating creature, so moral and so immoral, so wild and so loyal, so primitive and so wise; a murderess without remorse, a child who is ageless, as simple and as complex as nature. Even Frank, who gives to the novel its name, seems colorless by comparison with Francine. It is only in retrospect that one realizes with what a firm hand Frank, Emily, Théroigne, El Greco, Spenlove himself, are portrayed, or with what realism the many places, as familiar as New York, as strange as Salonika, Alexandria, Puerto Balboa, are painted. One suspects that Francine will take her place among the great heroines of fiction.
R. M. GAY