Kenneth Fearing
Kenneth Flexner Fearing was an American poet and novelist. A major poet of the Depression era, he addressed the shallowness and consumerism of American society as he saw it, often by ironically adapting the language of commerce and media. Critics have associated him with the American Left to varying degrees; his poetry belongs to the American proletarian poetry movement, but is rarely overtly political. Fearing published six original collections of poetry between 1929 and 1956. He wrote his best-known poems during the late 1920s and 1930s.
He moved from Illinois to New York City in 1924, and spent the rest of his life there. He supported himself by writing pulp fiction, often under pseudonyms. Around 1939 he began to write novels and wrote less poetry. His seven novels are mystery and thriller stories with some unconventional characteristics. They often feature many characters who are given one or more chapters from their point of view, and in a few later novels he used fictional newspaper articles and radio transcripts to further the narrative. His most famous novel, The Big Clock, has remained in print since its 1946 publication and was adapted for film.
Personal biography
Fearing was born in Oak Park, Illinois, to a successful family: his father was Harry Lester Fearing, a successful Chicago attorney and descendant of the family of Calvin Coolidge. His mother Olive Flexner Fearing was of Jewish descent and a cousin of the educator Abraham Flexner. His parents divorced when he was a year old, and they each had custody of him six months of the year. He was raised mainly by his aunt, Eva Fearing Scholl, in the other half of a duplex that the Fearings owned and lived in. He had a half-sister Ethel and a half-brother Ralph. Fearing went to school at Oak Park and River Forest High School, where he was voted "wittiest boy and class pessimist". He was the editor of the student newspaper, a position previously held by Ernest Hemingway. He studied English at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and the University of Wisconsin. At the latter, he became editor-in-chief of the school's literary magazine, but was forced to resign in part for his acceptance of Modernist writing and other controversial material. He left without graduating, being one class short of a degree. In 1938 the University of Wisconsin awarded him the degree in absentia; presumably the school wanted to recognize his fame.As a young man Fearing was thin, with dark hair and skin, and liked to wear dark suits. His voice was low and lispy. He had a "little-boy appeal", with messy hair and habits, horn-rimmed glasses, and an immature disposition—some of which may be seen in Alice Neel's oil portrait, painted in 1935, which is now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The portrait includes some references to Fearing's poetry and shows a small skeleton in his chest, grasping his heart and pouring blood from it; Neel commented that "He really sympathized with humanity... His heart bled for the grief of the world." After his death, according to Robert M. Ryley, friends remembered "his charm, his eloquence, his almost courtly manners, his prickly independence, his not-quite-hidden vulnerability and innocence—but mostly they would remember his gloomy, sardonic skepticism".
During the late 1920s he had a romantic relationship with the writer and activist Margery Latimer, whom he met at Wisconsin. Fearing cheated on Latimer and never proposed to her; she rejected his later attempt to renew their relationship. In 1931, he met Rachel Meltzer, a nurse by training and a medical social worker. Fearing was poor at expressing affection in person and less interested in marriage than Meltzer. She later said of her husband, "Kenneth spent his whole life hiding his inner self from other people"; " needed someone to take care of him." They were married on April 26, 1933, and their son, Bruce Fearing, was born on July 19, 1935. The family soon travelled to Europe for nine months thanks to the $2,500 that came with Kenneth's 1935 Guggenheim Fellowship. Partly due to Fearing's growing alcoholism, he and Rachel divorced in 1941, with Rachel having custody of their son.
He stayed at the Yaddo artists' retreat for the first time in 1938 and returned often. At Yaddo he began a relationship with the painter Nan Lurie and they married on June 18, 1945. In this period his drinking became dangerous to his health, which scared him into temperance. Nan found him duller as a result, and their relationship suffered. They separated in 1952. This was his last marriage.
Fearing lacked money for much of his life. In New York, he received a monthly allowance from his mother until 1935, when she decided that her son should bear full responsibility for his new child. His mother had been skeptical of his choice of writing career. He also relied on gifts from his father and loans from Latimer in those years. He held few full-time jobs for more than a few months, despite claiming, apparently falsely, to have worked as a salesman, a journalist, and even a lumberjack in press materials. In the 1950s, he worked for the "Books" section of Newsweek magazine , and, during his single longest period of employment, he developed press material and annual reports for the Muscular Dystrophy Association of America. Still, he lived in poverty in the 1950s, and had smoked and drank heavily for most of his life, which seriously affected his health in his last years. In early 1961, he felt a sharp pain in his back that worsened through June, when his son Bruce moved in to care for him. They went to Lenox Hill Hospital on June 21, and five days later Fearing died of a melanoma of his left chest and pleural cavity. He is buried at Forest Home Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois.
Literary career
In December 1924, Fearing moved to New York City, joining Latimer, where he pursued a writing career. His friend the poet Horace Gregory noted that his early writing was not particularly successful, but Fearing was particularly determined to make a living in writing. His early work was commercial, including stories for pulp magazines, and he often wrote under pseudonyms. He wrote sex-pulp novels at half a cent a word, which were published under the pseudonym Kirk Wolff. Meanwhile, he searched for editors who would publish his poetry.Fearing told a writers' convention in 1948 that "Literature is a means for crystallizing the myths under which society lives." His poetic influences included Walt Whitman, who he said was "the first writer to create a technique indigenous to the whole of this country's outlook", and François Villon, John Keats, and Edwin Arlington Robinson. He enjoyed Maurice Ravel and the painter George Grosz. His early poems were published in magazines such as Poetry, Scribner's, The New Yorker, the New Masses, Free Verse, Voices, and The Menorah Journal. About 44 of his poems were published before his first book of poetry came out. He was involved in the formation of the League of American Writers in 1935 and worked for its national council in the first year. He participated in the Federal Writers' Project during the Depression, and in 1939 he taught at the New York Writers School.
Poetry
Fearing's first book of poetry, Angel Arms, was dedicated to Margery Latimer and had an introduction by Edward Dahlberg. The next book, Poems, was a success and won him the first of two Guggenheim Fellowships. 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, Afternoon of a Pawnbroker and Other Poems, and Stranger at Coney Island and Other Poems. While his early poetry was well received, critics began to find his work repetitive in the 1940s. He was first anthologized in Collected Poems of Kenneth Fearing. 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. Despite the fame, he remained dependent on his wife Rachel's income.
Poetic themes and style
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'". 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".In "Dirge", 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?'"
The language of mass media similarly intrudes in "Jack Knuckles Falters", 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: "" 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. According to the poet Mark Halliday, "Fearing in 1926 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."
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". The first two stanzas of "X Minus X" illustrate this style: