generalized by Fearing as his own:
Cannibalism, the rite of human sacrifice, seems to run through every age and every
phase of the human story. In itself both betrayal and atonement, every completed cycle of
the process prepares for the next circle of the ritual. Early Spring and late Fall seem to
be the favored seasons of the observance.
There is some obscure zest in the act. Religious writers revel in it. It is probably
here, even in these observations. In a primitive agricultural society, human sacrifice
insured good crops. In complex industrial society, a springtime war means profits.
The Fearing of the fifties differs from Crozart not as Swift differs from Gulliver, but
as Gulliver differs from the rest of humanity–in his sickened abhorrence of the Yahooness
that everyone else seems to revel in and take for granted. And Yahooness is universal. It
governs in the United States, it governs in the Soviet Union. On the same page as his
observations on "human sacrifice," Fearing predicts that American security
investigations–"the shakedown," "the racket"–will lead inevitably,
as their equivalent had done under Stalin, to "mass assassinations." In a brief
unpublished essay written at the end of 1952, "Phantoms of the Investigation,"
he declares that the defense industry, a fiction created by a corrupt establishment to
line its own pockets, produces no new military equipment whatsoever, and suggests that
there may be an implicit agreement between the U.S. and the Soviet Union to prolong the
Korean War. This was the mood that inspired "Reading, Writing, and the Rackets,"
his furious anti-anti-Communist foreword to New and Selected Poems–a foreword in
defense of which he almost sacrificed his contract for the book when he thought his
editors were trying to censor him. This was the mood that led him to deny to Mainstream,
the successor to the New Masses, permission to reprint "Reading, Writing,
and the Rackets." This was the mood that, when he was invited to a meeting to draft a
letter of protest against the Soviet Union’s refusal to let Pasternak collect his Nobel
Prize, led him to snort, "Why don’t they give me a Nobel Prize. I’ll go to a meeting
for that."
In the late fall of 1952, Nan had announced that she wanted a separation. When Fearing
was about to leave, she went to a movie, telling him to help himself to anything in the
loft he thought he could use, but all he took, she discovered when she returned, was a
small radio. At the end of the year he wrote a friend that Nan was "sketching
churches in Venice" and that, he had finally concluded, "she must be permanently
12 years old." They saw each other only two or three times after the separation, and
though he consulted his lawyer about the possibility of a divorce, nothing ever came of
it. When he died, she hadn’t known he had been ill.
He had begun drinking again in the fall of 1953, and he had never stopped smoking. His
half-brother Ralph recalls staying overnight with him sometime in the late fifties and
listening as he "coughed his strength away all night long." One day early in
1961, he felt a sharp pain in his back as he started to open a window. By June–at about
the time he learned that his mother was arranging to give him a lifetime income of $150 a
month–the pain was unremitting. Bruce moved into his 11th Street apartment to take care
of him. "That week," Bruce recalled, "he had me covering the village for
places to buy codeine cough syrup for a pain killer slugged by the bottle. One week of
that & rubbing his back ‘there’ while he told me how much it hurt, & I figured it
was going beyond me. . . . " On the 21st, they went by taxi to Lenox Hill Hospital,
where Fearing was admitted with a malignant melanoma of the left chest and pleural cavity.
He died quietly on the 26th.
From Kenneth Fearing: Complete Poems. Ed. and with an Introduction by Robert M.
Ryley. The National Poetry Foundation, 1994. Copyright ? 1994 by Robert M. Ryley.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
Note: Ryley provides a large number of informative and
substantative notes for these essays in the volume from which they are taken. (pp. xlix-lxi).
Readers are encouraged to consult the original text for complete citations and
documentation.
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