Kenneth Fearing

Fearing's first book of poetry, Angel Arms (1929), was dedicated to Margery Latimer and had an introduction by Edward Dahlberg. The next book, Poems (1935), was a success and won him the first of two Guggenheim Fellowships (the fellowship was renewed in 1939). These two volumes contain some of his best-known poems, such as "Jack Knuckles Falters", "1935", "X Minus X", and "Dirge".

He published five original poetry collections; the remaining three are Dead Reckoning: A Book of Poetry (1938), Afternoon of a Pawnbroker and Other Poems (1943), and Stranger at Coney Island and Other Poems (1948). While his early poetry was well received, critics began to find his work repetitive in the 1940s.[9] He was first anthologized in Collected Poems of Kenneth Fearing (1940). Fearing was most productive, and his future most bright, between 1938 and 1943, when he published a book of poetry or a novel each year. Even then, his royalties during this period were minimal, and only exceeded the publisher's advance on two occasions (the Collected Poems and the novel The Hospital). Despite the fame, he remained dependent on his wife Rachel's income.[2]

His poetry is concerned with "a society that was morally bankrupt and ... sapped by the economic and political maneuvers necessary to support the American ideal of 'getting ahead'".[3] The characters in many of his poems are "types", and the effects of commerce and consumerism on the psyche are presented as if typical to everyone. The narrator is often superficially dispassionate, an ironic surveyor of the scene, but may reveal anger in the form of "sarcasm, contemptuous reductiveness, caricature, cartoony distortion, mocking hyperbole".[10]

In "Dirge" (Poems), a successful "executive type" eventually loses his status via setbacks—"nevertheless, they shut off his gas; nevertheless, the / bank foreclosed; nevertheless, the landlord called"—and dies by suicide. The poem ironically intersperses comic-book language in its otherwise emotionless recounting: "And wow he died as wow he lived, / going whop to the office and blooie home to sleep and / biff got married and bam had children and oof got fired, / zowie did he live and zowie did he die". This effect, according to Nathaniel Mills, "indicates the manner in which mass culture works to deaden the sensory reality of pain ... For the reader, the aesthetic response of disorientation, unexpected excitement, or shock prompts a critical reflection: what sort of cultural and political formation could cheapen experience to the extent of rendering an obituary as 'zowie did he live and zowie did he die?'"[11]

The language of mass media similarly intrudes in "Jack Knuckles Falters" (1926), in which a war veteran has been sentenced to death for murder. In his final words, he struggles with his competing needs to proclaim his innocence and meet his death with "dignity". Newspaper headlines that cover his execution interrupt each stanza and undermine his speech: "HAS LITTLE TO SAY ... THANKS WARDEN FOR KINDNESS ... STAGGERS WHEN HE SEES ELECTRIC CHAIR ... WILL RUMANIAN PRINCE WED AGAIN?" They convey nothing of his personal struggle but rather satisfy the public's need for a simple narrative in which a "criminal" is punished. The headline has moved on to another topic as the man proclaims his innocence.[11] According to the poet Mark Halliday, "Fearing in 1926 (before television, before the Internet) is not calling for some practical redesigning of news delivery; he is asking his reader to think about the psychological effect of the simultaneous availability of countless bits of information, all formatted for quick-snack consumption."[10]

Fearing commonly uses a particular syntax, which Halliday describes as an "anaphoric elaboration of a subordinate clause that waits in limbo for its controlling statement to arrive". This delay can be "a way of representing a life which people mostly can't shape for themselves, a world of people who can't be the agents of their experience and mostly live subordinated to great mysterious forces".[10] The first two stanzas of "X Minus X" (from Poems) illustrate this style:

Even when your friend, the radio, is still; even when her
  dream, the magazine, is finished; even when his life,
  the ticker, is silent; even when their destiny, the
  boulevard, is bare;
  and after that paradise, the dancehall, is closed; after that
  theater, the clinic, is dark,

Still there will be your desire, and her desire, and his
  desire, and their desire,
  your laughter, their laughter,
  your curse and his curse, her reward and their reward,
  their dismay and his dismay and her dismay and yours— [...][12][10]

As the critical reception of his poetry declined into the 1940s—Halliday suggests that Fearing "seems to have felt increasingly jaded and skeptical about poetry's chance to participate in public life"[10]—Fearing turned to novels. Between 1939 and 1960 he wrote seven mystery or "thriller" novels, although their formal qualities defy simple genre categorization.[13] The most significant are The Hospital (1939), Dagger of the Mind (1941), Clark Gifford's Body (1942), and The Big Clock (1946).[14]

Fearing was well known in 1939, and his first novel, The Hospital, quickly sold six thousand copies. A power outage at a hospital, caused by a drunk janitor, is the central event around which numerous characters' lives are portrayed. Each chapter is devoted to one character's point of view, a style common to all of Fearing's novels.[15] The novel was criticized for the large number of characters and their lack of depth, a complaint that continued throughout Fearing's fiction career. Critics, however, praised its crisp prose style—one called it a "staccato prose poem"—and its portrayal of lower-class characters like the janitor.[15] Dagger of the Mind (1941) is a psychological thriller in which there is a murder at an art colony. The creation of suspense from states of mind (via interior monologue) rather than physical violence was a departure from most novels of its type.[15] Clark Gifford's Body (1942) recounts a revolution in an unnamed country that begins with the title character's attack on a radio station. It has more than twenty characters, moves back and forth in time, and inserts contradictory radio and newspaper accounts of events. The novel's experimental aspects and pessimism were not met well by readers.[15][2]

The Big Clock first appeared in an abridged form in The American Magazine as "The Judas Picture" (October 1946)

He worked for 14 months on his most well-known novel, The Big Clock (1946), whose protagonist, an editor for a crime magazine, is put in charge of a murder investigation by his boss—but both men had had a relationship with the murdered woman. The novel was more successful than his prior efforts artistically and commercially, with an engaging plot and more character depth.[15] Alan M. Wald, an historian of the American Left, calls it "a psychosexual roman noir stressing the sinister effect of market segmentation in the publishing industry".[16] It was critically well-received, and was popular enough that a Bantam paperback and an Armed Services Edition soon followed. It remains in print.[17] The novel was developed into a film of the same name in 1948, and again in 1987 (No Way Out). The novel earned Fearing $60,000 from republication and film rights. His financial success was short-lived, as income from the novel dried up due to the unfavorable contracts that he had negotiated himself.[2]

Wald summarizes the "frightening and fragmented hollowness" that Fearing saw in post-war US society and depicted in The Big Clock:

The menacing ambience of dislocation that permeates The Big Clock is structurally and symbolically rendered as industrial capitalism, a socioeconomic order in which the avenues of communication, especially publishing and the airwaves, are evolving into a science of planned manipulation designed to ensure profitability. Well-paid deceivers, together with the naively deceived, are imprisoned as cogs in the apparatus of private enterprise's modern institutions. ... The genius of The Big Clock is its previsioning of the manifold mythological dimensions of a "Consumer's Republic" that would typify the era.[18]

In Loneliest Girl in the World (1951), an audio recording and storage device named "Mikki" is at the center of a mystery. Ellen Vaughn, the daughter of its inventor, uses the machine's "463,635 hours of recorded speeches, music, and business transactions" to determine the circumstances of her father's death. She finds a recording in which her father and his brother argue about the best way to exploit "Mikki", which Ellen ultimately destroys with a gun. The story is unusual in that the mystery is resolved with retrieved information rather than "detection".[15]

The Crozart Story (1960) is about the heads of two rival public relations firms. Fearing has one PR head explain how he shaped public opinion: "The fantasies we were adroitly joining and fashioning into loaded rumors, those gossamer rumors we were transmuting into triggered press releases, those childlike releases we were everywhere implementing with public degradation, internal exile, imprisonment, those incandescent anxieties we were molding and hardening into death's-head taboos—all these components of the commando raids we were mounting for the world's richest haul consisted of words, basically, only words."[15] The novel was abstract and lacking in plot, and its reception was poor. It did not earn enough to pay Fearing's advance. Critics state that Fearing's two last novels, particularly The Crozart Story, are more like unfinished sketches in places, and are suggestive of his declining motivation to write, his declining health due to alcoholism, or both.[19]

Accounts vary as to Fearing's degree of association with Marxism and the American Left.[2] Marxists courted him and suggested that he contribute to periodicals like the New Masses,[3] which he did, beginning in 1926, and he was a contributing editor there from 1930 to 1933. He was a founding member of the John Reed Club in 1929, where he was on the editorial board of the communist Partisan Review;[20] he is commonly included among its cofounders after the magazine repositioned itself as anti-Stalinist. He put his name to various pro-Soviet declarations from 1931 through to the 1939 "Open Letter of the 400", which defended Stalin's regime.[20]

Yet Fearing's poems were almost never overtly political, and his associates often found him uncommitted to communism.[20] He told the Daily Worker in 1938, "I've not tried deliberately to be Marxist in my poetry ... Marxism is valuable in literature only to the extent that the writer assimilates it. Consequently its principles become part of a writer's background, the way he thinks and feels and interprets it."[20] Fearing's family maintained that "politics was never an important part of his life".[3] His son Bruce said that his father "used a leftist political milieu to get his poetry published; he didn't believe in politics, he believed in poetry".[3] As a Jew, a pacifist, and an anti-fascist, Fearing was uncomfortable with the American Communist Party's support of the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939.[21] (As a child, Fearing witnessed the "reflexive anti-semitism" of his father towards his wife's family.[2]) The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact prompted him to write a poem, "Pact", which was published in the New Yorker that year and contained hints to his allies that he was breaking rank.[22] Wald writes that Fearing had "a mistrust of all political premises and a disbelief in all ameliorative options, [which] ran contrary to any connection with a large organization that demanded ideological conformity and an activist commitment".[23] In the era of McCarthyism his political associations were sufficient for him to be interviewed by the FBI and called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The FBI reported that "[Fearing said] he had become a 'fellow traveler' in 1933, and that prior to that time he had not been very interested in the meetings of the John Reed Club due to the fact that he was not interested in the politics discussed at all the meetings."[2] Before the Committee in 1950, when asked if he was a member of the Communist Party, Fearing replied, "Not yet."[21]

• Angel Arms, Coward McCann (New York, NY), 1929.
• Poems, Dynamo (New York, NY), 1935.
• Dead Reckoning: A Book of Poetry, Random House (New York, NY), 1938.
• Collected Poems of Kenneth Fearing, Random House, 1940.
• Afternoon of a Pawnbroker and Other Poems, Harcourt (New York City), 1943.
• Stranger at Coney Island and Other Poems, Harcourt, 1948.
• New and Selected Poems, Indiana University Press (Bloomington), 1956.
• Complete Poems, ed. Robert M. Ryley, National Poetry Foundation (Orono, Maine), 1994.

• The Hospital, Random House, 1939.
• Dagger of the Mind, Random House, 1941, as Cry Killer!, Avon (New York, NY), 1958.
• Clark Gifford's Body, Random House, 1942.
• The Big Clock, Harcourt, 1946, as No Way Out, Perennial (New York, NY), 1980. New York : New York Review Books, 2006, introduction by Nicholas Christopher, ISBN 978-1-59017-181-3; Die große Uhr : ein Klassiker des Noir-Thrillers, herausgegeben von Martin Compart ; Übertragung ins Deutsche Jakob Vandenberg, Coesfeld : Elsinor, 2023, ISBN 978-3-942788-71-7
• (With Donald Friede and H. Bedford Jones under joint pseudonym Donald F. Bedford) John Barry, Creative Age Press (New York, NY), 1947.
• Loneliest Girl in the World, Harcourt, 1951, as The Sound of Murder, Spivak (New York, NY), 1952.
• The Generous Heart, Harcourt, 1954.
• The Crozart Story, Doubleday, 1960.

• "Reading, Writing, and the Rackets." New and Selected Poems. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1956, ix–xxiv.
• "The Situation in American Writing: Seven Questions." Partisan Review, Summer 1939, 33–35.