Kenneth Fearing

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Kenneth Fearing (July 28, 1902 – June 26, 1961) was an American poet, novelist, and founding editor of Partisan Review.

Literary critic Macha Rosenthal called him "the chief poet of the American Depression."

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Literary career

Fearing moved to New York City in December 1924, where he began as a writer at Latimer. Horace Gregory's early writing was not particularly fruitful, but Fearing was more determined to make a living off writing. His early career was commercial, including articles for pulp magazines, and he wrote under pseudonyms. He wrote sex-pulp books at half a cent a word, which were released under the pseudonym Kirk Wolff. In the meantime, he looked for editors who might publish his poems.

"Literature is a means for crystallizing the myths under which society lives," Fearing told a writers' convention in 1948. Walt Whitman, who he said was "the first writer to create a strategy indigenous to the whole of this country's outlook," François Villon, John Keats, and Edwin Arlington Robinson were among his poetic influences. Maurice Ravel and George Grosz, the painter, were both adored by him. His early poems were published in journals such as Poetry, Scribner's, The New Yorker, The New Masses, Free Verse, Voices, and The Menorah Journal. Around 44 of his poems were published before his first book of poetry came out. He was instrumental in the founding of the League of American Writers in 1935 and served on its national council in the first year. He was a member of the Federal Writers' Project during the Depression and taught at the New York Writers School in 1939.

Angel Arms (1929), Fearing's first book of poetry, was dedicated to Margery Latimer and had Edward Dahlberg's introduction. Poems (1935), his first book, was a hit, winning him the first of two Guggenheim Fellowships (the fellowship was renewed in 1939). These two volumes feature some of his best-known poems, including "Jack Knuckles Falters," "1935," "X Minus X", and "Dirge."

He wrote 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). Although his early poetry was well-received, critics began to find his work in the 1940s to be repetitive. In Collected Poems of Kenneth Fear (1940), he was first anthologized (1940). Fearing was the most fruitful, and his future was the most promising between 1938 and 1943, when he published a book of poetry or a novel each year. And then, his royalties during this period were minimal, and he barely exceeded the publisher's advance on two fronts (the Collected Poems and the book The Hospital). Despite the fame, he was still dependent on his wife Rachel's income.

His poetry is concerned with "a society that was morally bankrupt and... sapped by economic and political policies that are sorely lacking to advance the American ideal of 'getting forward.' In several of his poems, the characters are "types," and the effects of consumerism and materialism on the psyche are explored as if normal to everyone. The narrator is often dispassionate, an ironic surveyor of the scene, but an outbreak of "sarcasm, contemptuous reductiveness, caricature, cartoony distortion, and mocking hyperbole" is typical.

A prolific "executive form" loses his position due to setbacks (nevertheless), but the bank continues to close down; nevertheless, the landlord calls"—and dies by suicide. "And wow he died, went whop to the office and bloom home to sleep" and then aw, the poem's otherwise emotional recounting: "Of he died and zowie did die" — "and wow he died" but the poem's witty remembrance is interspersed with humourous prose. "Indicates the way in which mass culture contributes to the disorientation of pain," Nathaniel Mills writes: "indentifies the sense of nausea."

In "Jack Knuckles Falters" (1926), in which a war soldier was sentenced to death for murder, the words of mass media was analogous. He wrestles with his inability to assert his innocence and ensure his death with "dignity" in his final words. "HAS LITTLE TO SAY... Newspaper headlines about his execution interrupt each stanza and undermine his speech." THANKS WARDEN FOR KINDNESS... STAGGERS WHEN HE SEES ELECTRIC CHAIR... WILL RUMANIAN PRINCE WED AGAIN?" They lack information about his personal struggle, but rather satisfy the public's desire for a straightforward plot in which a "criminal" is punished. The guy who has denied his innocence has pushed the story to another level. "Fearing in 1926 (before television, before the Internet) isn't calling for some innovative enhancement of news delivery," the poet Mark Halliday said, "he is urging his reader to consider the psychological consequences of the simultaneous emergence of scores of bits of information that are not intended for quick-snack consumption."

Fearing frequently uses a specific word, which Halliday describes as a "anaphoric elaboration of a subordinate clause that awaited in limbo for its commanding phrase to arrive." This postponement may be "a way of describing a life that people generally can't figure out for themselves," a world of people who are unable to be the agents of their own knowledge and mainly live subordinated to powerful forces." The first two stanzas of "X Minus X" (from Poems) illustrate this style:

As the critical reception of his poetry faded into the 1940s, Hamlett says that Fearing "continues to have been more jaded and skeptical of poetry's potential to participate in public life"—Fearing turned to novels. He wrote seven mystery or "thriller" books between 1939 and 1960, although their formal characteristics defy simple genre categorization. The Hospital (1939), Dagger of the Mind (1941), Clark Gifford's Body (1942), and The Big Clock (1946).

Fears were widespread in 1939, and his first book, The Hospital, sold six thousand copies. A power outage at a hospital is caused by a booed janitor, and is the central event in which numerous characters' lives are depicted. Each chapter is dedicated to one character's point of view, which is a style that is common to all Fearing's books. The novel was criticized for the large number of characters and their lack of depth, a complaint that resurfaced throughout Fearing's fiction career. Critics, on the other hand, lauded the janitor's crisp prose style and its depiction of lower-class characters. Dagger of the Mind (1941) is a psychological drama in which an art colony is assassinated. A departure from most novels of its kind was the development of suspense from states of mind (via interior monologue) rather than physical violence. Clark Gifford's Body (1942) chronicles a change in an unidentified world that begins with the name character's assault on a radio station. It has more than twenty characters, shifts back and forth in time, and inserts contradictory radio and newspaper accounts of events. Readers were unsure of the novel's experimental aspects and pessimism.

He worked on his most popular book, The Big Clock (1946), whose protagonist, a crime magazine, is in charge of a murder probe by his boss, but both men had a romance with the murdered woman. With an engaging plot and more character depth, the book was more successful than his previous attempts both artistically and commercially. Alan M. Wald, an American Left historian, calls it "a psychosexual roman noir" highlighting the sinister effects of market segmentation in the publishing industry. It was critically well-received, and it was well-received that a Bantam paperback and an Armed Services Edition followed. It's still in print. In 1948, the novel was turned into a film of the same name, and then in 1987 (No Way Out). Fearing $60,000 in republication and film rights, the author's book was worth $60,000. His financial success was short-lived as income from the novel flowed due to the unfavorable deals with which he had negotiated himself.

Wald explains the "frightening and fragmented hollowness" that Fearing experienced in postwar US culture and depicted in The Big Clock:

In "The Loneliest Girl in the World (1951), an audio recording and storage unit named "Mikki" is at the center of a mystery. Ellen Vaughn, the daughter of the machine's designer, uses the machine's "463,635 hours of recorded speeches, music, and company transactions to determine the cause of her father's death. Ellen discovers a video in which her father and his brother debate the correct way to use "Mikki," which Ellen eventually destroys with a pistol. The tale is strange in that the mystery is solved with retrieved information rather than "detection."

The Crozart tale (1960) concerns the heads of two rival public relations companies. Fearing has one PR executive explain how we shaped public opinion: "The fantasies we were adroitly advancing and fashioning into loaded newspaper announcements, those gossamer news that we were gradually adopting with public depreciation, internal exile, and death's head taboos were among the many aspects of the commando raids we were hearing about the world's richest haul consisted of words, just words." The novel was abstract and lacking in plot, and its reception was skewed, and it was disappointing. It didn't have enough money to pay Fearing's advance. Critics argue that Fearing's two last books, particularly The Crozart Story, are more like unfinished sketches in some respects, and they are indicative of his declining motivation to write, his increasing alcoholism, or both.

Fearing's degree of connection with Marxism and the American Left are two different things. Marxists pleaded guilty and suggested that he contribute to periodicals like the New Masses, which he did, beginning in 1926, and he served as a contributing editor 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; after the journal repositioned itself as anti-Stalinist. He made his name in numerous pro-Soviet declarations from 1931 to 1939, which defended Stalin's regime.

Yet Fearing's poems were not overtly political, and his coworkers often found him uncommitted to communism. "I've not tried to be Marxist in my poetry deliberately," he told the Daily Worker in 1938. Marxism is only useful in literature to the extent that the writerassines it. Consequently, its principles became part of a writer's career, the way he thinks and believes it, and how he writes it. "Poltics was never a significant part of his life," the fear of his family's life. Bruce's son Bruce said that his father "used a liberal political forum to get his poetry out; he didn't believe in politics, he believed in poetry." Fearing of the American Communist Party's recognition of the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939, a Jew, a pacifist and an anti-fascist. (As a child, I was afraid of his father's "reflexive anti-semitism" against his wife's families.) The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact prompted him to write "Pact," a New Yorker poem that was published in the New Yorker that year and gave hints that he was losing rank to his associates. Fearing was "a mistrust of all political positions and a refusal of any ameliorative options, [which] ran against any association with a large corporation that wanted ideological conformity and an activist commitment," Wald writes. His political ties were sufficient for him to be interviewed by the FBI and summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the McCarthy period. "Fearing said" he had become a "fellow traveler" in 1933, but that prior to that time he was not particularly interested in the John Reed Club's meetings due to the fact that he was not involved in the politics at any of the meetings." Fearing said no one was a member of the Communist Party before the committee in 1950, Fearing said, "No already."

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