POET

Kenneth Fearing (1902 - 1961)

BIOGRAPHY

Novelist and poet Kenneth Fearing's writings deal with the urban, mechanized society, a world wherein faith and love no longer have meaning. He portrays the everyday in a macabre light, simultaneously evoking what critic Dudley Fitts called "horror and delight." In discussing his 1938 work Dead Reckoning: A Book of Poetry, Louis Untermeyer wrote in Saturday Review of Literature that "Fearing's technique is more startling than any of his confreres. In this, the best of his [first] three volumes of poems, he has freed himself of a dependence on purely muscular, hard-boiled idioms which threatened to characterize him as the Ernest Hemingway of modern verse. In this book the tone is richer and the gamut is wider. The device—the free use of the newspaper headline, the comic strip, the cliches of advertising, the ticker-tape, the radio signal—are not only appropriate, they are convincing." And T. C. Wilson, in a Poetry review, said, "He has wit and sympathy and understanding; his best work possesses remarkable vigor and speed as well as sensitivity of rhythm and phrasing. As much can be said of very few poets writing today." T. C. Chubb commented in the New York Times that "the lyre of poetry has been ousted by the steam riveter. But it holds the intense, original and angry writing of a man who sees vividly and feels vividly and who has set down the things he has thus seen and thus felt with an angry and effective tongue. It is not pleasant, and it is not musical, but it may well be the way that vivid poetry will be written in the immediate." And Ruth Lechlitner likewise lauded in Books: "On all counts it seems to me that Fearing's 'American Rhapsodies' will stand among the best poems written during the last two decades. In 'Dead Reckoning'. . . he sees in terms that are simple, vital and recognizable to a contemporary. Like ideographs in a running telegraphic framework his poems flash the news of our time."

The then-experimental structure and imagery of Fearing's first novel, The Hospital, seem in many ways to have prefigured by some fifty-odd years the now-familiar, frenzied immediacy, the multi-layered storylines, rapid-fire jumpcuts, and pseudo-verite or hyperrealist visual approaches of the modern, television medical drama series. Written in brief chapters, each assigned the name of the relevant protagonist, Fearing covers a few, intensely focused hours in that individual's life—each one of a group of doctors, nurses, patients, and maintenance men in a large, urban hospital. The focus of the story deals with the impact on their lives, and the macrosystem of the hospital itself, by the accidental shutdown of power, for several minutes, by a drunken janitor. "Probably no hospital has ever known such concentrated drama as author Fearing packs in," noted a Time reviewer. "But the distortions of his pictures resemble far more those produced by a microscope than defective mirrors." Otis Ferguson, writing in New Republic, added that, "There is some good lean writing in the book, and something like a staccato prose poem in the sections leading up to the last delirium of Dr. Gavin. The people are likely, too—but they don't stay with you long, being swallowed up in numbers. The hospital itself remains longer." And R. C. Feld, reviewing the work in the New York Times, commented: "Exciting and dramatic as is the story, it is Fearing's treatment which calls for highest praise. He has the poet's gift of expression and condensation and, within the compass of a few pages, creates the pattern of a life. While his sympathies are broad enough to take in all human weakness, he is particularly concerned with those whose lives, metaphorically speaking, are spent in the world's basement. For them he has tenderness and for those who keep them there a stinging bitterness. The end of the book is not happy, but it is a realistic tying up of human threads."

Fearing's second novel, Dagger of the Mind, is a somewhat offbeat mystery set in an artists' colony, possibly somewhere on Long Island. Isaac Anderson in his New York Times review asserted: "here are gathered some of the most eccentric and unconventional characters that can possibly be imagined. . . . Taken as a whole, this book is not so much a mystery story as a study in abnormal psychology—an absorbing one at that—although the mystery element is by no means negligible." Not all reviewers perceived Fearing's quirky cast of characters as the strength Anderson did, however; a critic in the Saturday Review of Literature noted that, "The resolution of the plot, if not altogether satisfactory, is pretty sound; certainly the basic gag is a very good one, and it is only regrettable that Mr. Fearing was more interested in caricaturing the establishment than in sticking close to the development of his central twist." But Dorothy Hillyer of the Boston Transcript lauded the work, noting that "Amateur psychologists—and this means practically everybody—will have a fine time interpreting this exciting book." And Will Cuppy wrote in Books: "Take it any way you like, the story is a novelty in the mystery field and the total effect is most impressive."

The third Fearing novel, Clark Gifford's Body, deals with an abortive revolution in a "mythical country, of no particular time." "As an experiment in discontinuity, the novel is of considerable interest," George Conrad stated in Books, "but most readers will keep hoping Mr. Fearing will quit hopping." A reviewer in Nation maintained that the novel is narrated "through the eyes of a dozen or more characters and skips back and forth in time over a period of thirty years before and after the 'attack'; it's a confusing technique that befuddles the reader, creates a sterile objectivity, and spares Mr. Fearing the necessity of committing himself on his own viewpoint, if any." However, in his New York Times review, Isaac Anderson called Clark Gifford's Body "an oddly disturbing novel, and it is difficult to say whether the general effect of it is heightened by the curiously episodic manner in which it is told—a manner which begins by being annoying and ends by having a fascination of its own."

The Big Clock, which was produced as a motion picture in 1948, and produced thirty-nine years later as No Way Out, is Fearing's best-known work. In stark journalistic style, the book relates the events following a murder. Tired of his mistress, a publisher of a large metropolitan magazine kills her, pinning the crime on a stranger seen leaving her apartment that evening. He subsequently assigns the story to his ace crime reporter who, in fact, was the very stranger seen the night of the murder: the hunter and hunted are one.

In discussing The Big Clock, C. V. Terry wrote in the New York Times: "If you enjoy top-drawer detective fiction . . . we can recommend this one with no reservations whatsoever." Richard Match agreed in the Weekly Book Review: "It will be some time before chill-hungry clients meet again so rare a compound of irony, satire, and icy-fingered narrative." And Hamilton Basso lauded the work in the New Yorker, noting that "I have not developed the habit of reading thrillers, but I have read enough of them to know that from now on Mr. Fearing is my man."

CAREER

Poet and novelist. Worked at various jobs, including newspaper reporter, salesman, mill hand, and clerk. Freelance writer and editor, 1927-61.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

POETRY

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.

NOVELS

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.
(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.