On Kenneth Fearing
Patrick Preziosi, 2024
Related text: ‘It Was All a Mistake’ by Kenneth Fearing
It is the rare artist who is so ruthlessly capable of identifying the deficiencies of contemporaneous mass culture, in its inescapable pressures, while also acknowledging the behemoth’s balming qualities, its welcome distractions. Kenneth Fearing didn’t advocate for submission, no; rather, his writing emerged from the socialized brambles and thorns via subversion and reclamation, steely immunity and generous empathy. When the billboards fly past this, “taxi driver…fighting traffic” (Kenneth Rexroth), he doesn’t poetically muse or pontificate at any length. He catalogs and stores in his bottomless cache of everyday detritus. Perhaps they’ll manifest in a later novel or poem, but maybe not. The overturn and turnaround of culture was another of Fearing’s great preoccupations.
In his Aphrodite Metropolis, Fearing lists off where a couple can write out their “Harry loves Myrtle”: “on a billboard that stands under the yellow light of an ‘L’ platform / among popcorn wrappers and crushed cigars / A poster that says ‘Mama I love Crispy Wafers so.’” Later that same Harry and Myrtle will go out for a weekend picnic: “...they look at the Sunday paper: / GIRL SLAYS BANKER-BETRAYER / They spread it around on the grass / BATH-TUB STIRS JERSEY ROW / And then they sit down on it, nice.” Advertisements and tabloid news items are ubiquitous, but Fearing stakes out a moving idyll for his lovers, not entirely within the screaming morass, not entirely without:
Harry doesn't say “Ziggin's Ointment for withered flesh,
Cures thousands of men and women of moles, warts, red veins, flabby throat, scalp and hair diseases,
Not expensive, and fully guaranteed.”
No,
Harry says nothing at all,
He smiles,
And they kiss in the emerald meadows on the Sunday paper.
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Born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1902, Fearing hopscotched through demimondes and milieus, stretching himself between the MoMA (where the painter Alice Neel’s portrait of him hangs) and the paperback market (his hardcover success, 1946’s The Big Clock, was rereleased a year later in paperback by the Armed Services Editions, distributed to the military to counter boredom; hardcovers, naturally, were considered a undesirable encumbrance). He wrote for Time and for Newsweek; he wrote porn under a pseudonym; he reviewed films for New Masses, beating the drum for Fritz Lang and Raoul Walsh: “All of you movie hopheads taking the cure under Prof. Fearing…” He was a drunk, a poet, he lived in the Village, he was once known as the Drunk Poet of Greenwich Village.
That Fearing was not as prolific as some of his peers in the paperback market only loops back to the stranglehold of commerciality he frequently wrote of. He was focused on writing as much as he was on survival, and the latter meant sometimes you’d have to willingly submit to the drudgery of being a copywriter at Newsweek or the Muscular Dystrophy Association of America. “The awfulness of Monday morning is the world’s greatest common denominator,” he wrote in The Big Clock.
As Fearing slipped between varying “empire[s] of intelligence,” (The Big Clock) in varyingly anonymous forms, so he did as well in his writing. Fearing the writer is an elusive entity, his decoupage often bringing forth countless individuals who aren’t him. His work at Time manifests as the Janoth Corporation in The Big Clock, and is thus refracted across multiple narrators, from street-level journalists to devilish corporate fixers. The idea of artistic “community” is parodied in Dagger of the Mind (1941), itself a parody of a locked-room mystery, one which would allow for something like Helen Eustis’ The Horizontal Man (1946) to travel further down the feedback-loop of glad-handers quoting Freud and espousing Modernism under the shadow of murder. Fearing’s personal allegiances weren’t fickle, but the vagaries of the modern world were; asked by McCarthyites if he was a member of the Communist party, he replied, “not yet,” similar to how Hammett, in front of the House of Un-American Activities Committee, said, “Well, I think––of course, I don’t know––if I were fighting Communism, I don’t think I would do it by giving people any books at all.” McCarthy: “From an author, that sounds unusual.”
Yes, as a poet and an author (and a critic and a copywriter), Fearing was unusual, when compared with the successful, McCarthy approved writers of the time. Robert Polito is correct in slotting in Fearing with Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens as a preeminent modernist, but neither of those two ever wrote Clark Gifford’s Body (1942). While Fearing was channeling metaphysical poetics for Angel Arms in 1929, many of his later paperback peers (excluding Hammett and Paul Cain), were still riding along the magazine Black Mask’s rules of hardboiled––and occasionally retrograde––pastiche.
In Clark Gifford’s Body, Fearing is as polyphonic a writer as John Dos Passos, and as incisively speculative a fantasist as Philip K. Dick. But the prose is rock solid, no fanciful syntactic fireworks à la Passos, no dizzying exegesis like Dick. A years-spanning survey of an American civil war, the lynchpin of this ambitious endeavor being a direct-action group’s takeover of a handful of radio stations, an event which seems to ripple out into infinity, backwards and forwards through time, a taxonomy of what the American Empire has been, and what it’s bloodily becoming. Leaflets, radio plays, newspaper reports, obituaries don’t coalesce as much as they create a collective whirlpool at the center of the world Fearing has conjured up.
A protean proletariat poet; not much anyone else resembles Fearing, except maybe his friend and fellow traveler (London to New York to Italy to Hollywood) Alfred Hayes, who lived long enough to see his friend die. As he writes in his elegy for friends passed in The End of Me (1968): “Their deaths had not thinned the crowds on Broadway; yet the city was emptier.” The crowd always replaces itself, but we always need someone within the mass, feverishly telegraphing outwards.
- Patrick Preziosi
