Rachel that he wasn’t angry when they parted in New York (he just wasn’t very good at
leave-taking) and apologize for his aloofness when she telephoned (the family was
listening). The time would come when they couldn’t Communicate at all, he silent in his
toughness and cynicism, she afraid to speak for fear of sounding stupid and sentimental.
And yet when they weren’t together, he could say on paper what he never said in person.
Writing to her in 1937 while they were living apart until they could find an apartment, he
declared out of the blue, "Discovered I am horribly in love with you five minutes
after I rang the bell at Ruth’s and found you’d gone."
Over the objections of Rachel’s orthodox Jewish father, who regarded Fearing as a
gentile (as did Rachel herself), they were married on April 26, 1933. She then became the
family breadwinner, a role that assumed additional importance after the birth of their
only son, Bruce, on July 19, 1935, when Fearing’s mother decided that Kenneth should
assume the responsibilities of fatherhood and stopped his allowance of $15 a month. (When
Bruce was older and Rachel wrote pleading for help with his dental expenses, Ollie
replied, "Ask your husband.") Except for a few months before Bruce was born and
the better part of a year when they were in England on Fearing’s Guggenheim, Rachel worked
continuously throughout the marriage. During one period, employed by the New York City
Welfare Department, she had to travel an hour and a half each way to the Brownsville
office in Brooklyn and would get so tired that, much to Fearing’s annoyance, she would
fall asleep at parties.
As well as the birth of his son, 1935 brought the publication of Fearing’s second book,
Poems, comprising the twenty-one poems he had published since Angel Arms and
fulsomely introduced by Edward Dahlberg, was issued by Dynamo in an edition of a
thousand numbered copies and then, an indication of its success, in paper covers.
According to Robert Cantwell, it even made money (though not for the author). Its success
was owing not only to its intrinsic merits, which are many, but to its apparent
vindication of faith in the power of Marxism to foster poetry of the first rank.
Dahlberg’s introduction insists on the poems’ hostility to capitalism and on their
"inexorable, Marxist interpretations," and enthusiastic reviewers hastened to
follow his lead, two of them confidently identifying Fearing as a Communist. In fact,
however, some of the poems might have been written by the apolitical, iconoclastic Fearing
of the 1920s. Nevertheless, the authority of Dahlberg’s introduction; the unmistakable
Communist implications of many of the poems, especially the last, "Denouement";
and the announcement on the back of the title page that the book was "the first …
in a projected series which will present proletarian poets"–all of this made it easy
to find more Marxism than was probably intended, nor was Fearing at this time averse to
having such discoveries made. But was he really serious about Communism? My own answer
would be, "It depends."
It depends, for one thing, on what period of his life we’re talking about. His first
wife reports that at the time he was publishing some of the incendiary poems of Poems, he
was laughing in private at the pomposity and self-importance of Communist Party members.
If this attitude isn’t implied, it is at least not contradicted by what he later told the
FBI–that "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." And the same
indifference to politics is evidenced in the thirty-three letters he wrote to Rachel in
1932. These focus on his writing, his money problems, his family, his drinking, his
smoking, his reading (murder mysteries), and his boredom. There are only two or three
brief references to politics, mainly in response to something said by his correspondent;
only two references to the New Masses, one having to do with a dance; and only one
reference to the Depression–this in connection with his family’s citing hard times in an
effort to persuade him to stay in Oak Park rather than return to New York.
The answer to the question "How serious was Fearing about Communism?" also
depends on what is meant by seriousness. If he was serious enough to become a fellow
traveler after 1933, was he serious enough to join the Party? The FBI has a list that says
he was, and according to Alfred Hayes, Fearing once turned to Philip Rahv after listening
to him hold forth on the evils of Stalinism and said, "And you recruited me
into the party." Moreover, A. B. Magill told Alan Wald that he recalled Fearing’s
having been a Party member "for a while." But the FBI list, its provenance
unknown even to the Bureau itself, is the merest hearsay; Hayes’s anecdote, assuming its
accuracy, is open to a variety of interpretations; and Magill’s recollection is vague. And
against this evidence must be set the contrary testimony of his friends and family, and
especially of Fearing himself. In 1950, Anna Marie Rosenberg, President Truman’s nominee
as Assistant Secretary of Defense, was wrongly identified as a former member of the John
Reed Club. It was in connection with the Rosenberg investigation that Fearing was first
interviewed by the FBI and then issued a request subpoena by an assistant U.S. attorney in
Washington. Testifying under oath and asked if he was a member of the Communist Party,
Fearing replied, loudly, "Not yet." This answer, there is every reason to
believe, was not only witty but true.
With the critical success of Poems, Fearing entered the mainstream of American
literary culture. On a Guggenheim fellowship of $2,500, he went with Rachel and Bruce to
London for the first eight months of 1937, and returned to a contract offer from Random
House for a new book of poems and, somewhat later, another contract for his novel The
Hospital which had been drafted in London. In the summer of 1938, he went for his
first stay at Yaddo, the writer’s colony in Saratoga Springs to which he would often
return, and for the first time since 1926, he placed a poem in The New Yorker, which
became his forum of choice for the next ten years. Much to his amusement, in December of
1938 his degree from the University of Wisconsin was awarded "as of the class of
1924," and in the following year his Guggenheim was renewed. In 1940 he won the
Guarantor’s Prize of Poetry magazine for "Three Poems," and in 1944 an
award of $1,000 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
This period was also the most productive of his life. Between 1938 and 1943 he
published a book a year: Dead Reckoning (verse, 1938), The Hospital (novel,
1939), Collected Poems (1940), Dagger of the Mind (novel, 1941), Clark
Gifford’s Body (novel, 1942), and Afternoon of a Pawnbroker (verse, 1943).
The only critical failure was Clark Gifford’s Body, whose aggressively avant-garde
technique (twenty-three characters narrate a jumbled chronology of sixty years) and
pessimistic vision of the future were scarcely calculated to satisfy public taste in the
middle of World War II. But even the critically successful works failed to pay, only The
Hospital and Collected Poems earning him more royalties than the advance on
each book. Nearly famous and entering his forties, he was still financially dependent on
his wife.
But his marriage collapsed in 1942. As early as 1938, in a gentle, affectionate letter
from Yaddo, he had broached the subject of divorce, but Rachel, fearful of how the loss of
his father would affect Bruce and certain that she couldn’t manage without a husband,
successfully fought to save the marriage. By 1942, however, Fearing’s alcoholism had
intensified, a six-month job with Time had done nothing to improve his financial
prospects, and Rachel had come to believe that she and Bruce would be better off alone. As
he was about to depart for another of his stays at Yaddo, she told him she was leaving him
and was dumbfounded when he said, inexplicably, "Well, don’t pick up any men in
bars." Though in later years they would develop a warm friendship, for a long time
after the break he nursed feelings of bitterness about what he evidently considered a
betrayal.
Consolation, however, came almost immediately at Yaddo, where he met Nan Lurie, a
handsome thirty-two-year-old artist. She had grown up speaking Yiddish in New Jersey, gone
to Paris on her own after high school, and won a scholarship to study under Yasuo Kunioshi
at the Art Students League. She and Fearing met within a week of their arrival at Yaddo
and stayed on together during the winter after most of the other residents had left. On
Christmas day, with less than a dollar between them, they ate their first meal alone
together at a restaurant in the Black district of Saratoga Springs. By the spring, when
they were both back in NewYork, Fearing was wildly, deliriously, giddily in love and
writing notes and letters of astonishing sentimentality, even falling into such clich?s
as "I am not good enough for you." He cherished what he called Nan’s "sheer
lunacy"–her "vitamins," her "stray cats," her "religious
quarter hour," the "confessions" she wrote in the dark, blindfolded. (In
his poem "Irene Has a Mind of Her Own," published four years later when his
ardor had cooled, he looked on similar flakiness with a less benevolent eye.) In the
winter of 1944-45, he moved into Nan’s loft on East 10th Street, and, his divorce having
become final the year before, they were married in Greenwich, Connecticut, on June 18,
1945.
While still at Yaddo in March 1943, Fearing had been having trouble mapping out a new
novel. Inspiration had to wait for two events: the sensational murder in October 1943 of
the New York heiress Mrs. Wayne Lonergan, and the publication in 1944 of Samuel Michael
Fuller’s little-known thriller The Dark Page. Transformed and refined, details from
the Lonergan case and Fuller’s novel would coalesce in Fearing’s imagination to produce
the plot of his most famous book, which he wrote between August 1944 and October 1945.
Published in the fall of 1946, The Big Clock made Fearing temporarily rich.
Altogether he took in about $60,000 (roughly $360,000 in 1992 dollars): about $ 10,000 in
royalties and from the sale of republication rights (including a condensation in The
American Magazine), and $50,000 from the sale of film rights to Paramount. In
1947, Nan won $2,000 in an art competition, a sum they dismissed as negligible but that
only two years earlier would have seemed a fortune. But Fearing’s successes always
contained the germ of disaster. Overestimating his business acumen, he had negotiated his
own contract with Paramount, permanently and irrevocably signing away his film rights, and
relinquishing his television rights till 1952, by which time, he discovered to his rage
and frustration, Paramount was showing late-night reruns and had thus cornered the market.
A more immediate problem was alcohol. He told his friend Alice Neel (the model for Louise
Patterson, the eccentric painter in The Big Clock) that since he could now
afford to start drinking in the morning, he was having trouble getting any work done. On
one occasion he almost died from a combination of scotch and phenobarbital, and in 1952 he
was so shaken by his doctor’s warnings about the condition of his liver that he went on
the wagon. For Nan, who for years had been trying to get him to stop drinking, this should
have been a cause for rejoicing, but she discovered that without alcohol he was no longer
"playful" and "romantic" and that she was no longer interested in the
marriage.
Stranger at Coney Island and Other Poems appeared in 1948, his "Next to last
volume, perhaps," he called it in an inscription to Vincent Starrett. The response of
the critics was generally favorable; but beginning as early as the Collected Poems, a
note of dissatisfaction had begun to sound even in some of the most enthusiastic reviews.
Fearing’s best work, it was said, had been done before 1938; or the poet was repeating
himself, or his methods or his themes or his aesthetic or all three were such as to make
major poems impossible. Whatever the justice of these opinions, along with financial
considerations they probably contributed to his decision to devote himself thenceforth
exclusively to the novel. He abandoned poetry completely until 1955 when, with
considerable difficulty and primarily to justify the use of the word "new" in
the title, he wrote the "Family Album" section of New and Selected Poems.
The last ten years of Fearing’s life were embittered by poverty and failing health.
Somehow he and Nan had gone through all of his earnings from The Big Clock, though
their only apparent extravagance, if extravagance it can be called, was to rent a cottage
in the country for part of two summers. At any rate, by January 1951 Fearing was beginning
to worry about money. His novel Loneliest Girl in the World (1951) and the New
and Selected Poems (1956) provided a little income, but neither of his last two
novels, The Generous Heart (1954) and The Crozart Story (1960), earned
enough to pay off his advances. The following fragments of information from his papers at
the University of Wisconsin suggest the tenuousness of his solvency throughout the period:
Total annual income, 1954:
$4,878.20
Total annual income, 1955:
$2,975.92
Indebtedness to Harcourt (royalties
less advances and books purchased
as of 30 June 1955):
($1,353.80)
Indebtedness to Doubleday
(royalties less advances as of
31 October 1960):
($1,354.68)
For the first time since the 1930s, he had to write for the pulps again, though now it
was crime stories under his own name. And for the first time ever, he held a full-time job
for three consecutive years (1955-1958), writing reports and publicity releases for the
Muscular Dystrophy Association of America. People who worked with him remember that in the
afternoons he would have to put his head on his typewriter and sleep.
These indignities, coming as they did after his affluence of the late forties and in
conjunction with the poisonous atmosphere of McCarthyism, led to a radical darkening of
his vision. In his last novel, The Crozart Story, the only characters not corrupt
are those too sketchily portrayed to be morally significant. Steve Crozart, the charlatan
and perjurer who has helped to cause, and has vastly profited by, the conviction of Blair
Fennister (read Alger Hiss), explains with amoral insouciance the reasoning that underlies
his, Crozart’s, destruction of the innocent:
The human sacrifice should be selected with great care. In the classic stories of our
age, the protagonist marked for destruction is so well chosen that at first glance it
seems unlikely he has really been nominated. He is so favorably situated, he imagines
himself so immune to the grotesque indictment, the stereotyped travesty of the accusation,
that he believes it is wholly an accident that he, personally, has been designated a
leading figure among the category of those about to be condemned. Even when he sees the
wholesale abandonment of himself, the universal desertion from his side, his cause and
case, even then he doesn’t accept that his fate is irrevocably fixed….
And there is a good reason for the choice of such a figure as the quarry. His
complacency adds tone and zest to the whole spectacle. His innocent faith in himself
heightens the suspense. His struggles to escape from the fury of the pack become
increasingly genuine and desperate because he alone still imagines that it is possible to
escape. And the spectators sense this. They know that every move, every turn and twist the
dedicated sacrifice makes as he seeks to break out of the gauntlet–all this is genuine.
It’s a drama that cannot be counterfeited.
This is satire, of course, but Fearing as satirist is here less a Swift than a Gulliver
returned from the land of the Houyhnhnms. In random thoughts set down sometime in the
early fifties, ideas that Crozart applies narrowly to security investigations had been