Fearing, Kenneth

FEARING, KENNETH (1902-1961). Described as “the premier poet of the Communist cultural movement” by Alan Wald, Kenneth Flexner Fearing was a visionary poet and novelist.

Born in Oak Park, Illinois, Fearing attended college at the University of Wisconsin, serving as editor of the school’s literary magazine until terminated for his support of modernism. Fearing protested by leaving school before graduation. He relocated to Greenwich Village in 1924, contributing poetry to the New Yorker, Poetry, the New Masses and others. Though his first collection, Angel Arms, would not be published for another five years, he was lauded by New York’s radical community for his jarring fusion of urban realism and modernism, capturing the essence of class struggle. Communist Party cultural leader Joseph Freeman cited Fearing’s ascension as a symbol of poetry’s next wave. Among the founders of the John Reed Club, he became an editor of New Masses. Fearing was also among the founding group of the Partisan Review. Alice Neel painted his portrait in 1935. That year, Dynamo: The Journal of Revolutionary Poetry published Fearing’s second collection (Poems), and he became a founder of the League of American Writers. Fearing nevertheless maintained a distance from actual Party membership. With the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, he expressed rancor openly in the poem “Pact,” which appeared in the New Yorker.

Fearing won Guggenheim Fellowships in 1936 and 1939. He married Rachel Meltzer in 1931, and the couple divorced ten years later due to his struggle with alcoholism. Fearing’s next collection, Dead Reckoning, was published in 1939, the year of his first novel, The Hospital. Though he continued writing poetry with fervor (an anthology was published in 1940, and new collections Afternoon of a Pawnbroker and Stranger at Coney Island in 1943 and 1948, respectively), Fearing’s career became focused on fiction, characterized by complex plots of intrigue through the voices and thoughts of various narrative characters. This technique was furthered with Dagger of the Mind (1941), and Clark Gifford’s Body (1942). His most successful novel, the Big Clock, was published in 1946 and a year later made into a film starring Ray Milland, scripted by future blacklistee Harold Goldman. The book, more openly than the final screenplay, spoke boldly against the machinations of corporate power, particularly within publishing. In both, the evil publisher is a stand-in for the Time magazine founder and super-hawk” Henry Luce, who coined the term, “The American Century.”

In 1945, Fearing and painter Nan Lurie married. They divorced in 1952. Called before HUAC in 1950, he famously responded to the question about whether or not he held Party membership with the provocative, “Not Yet!” In later life, Fearing wrote literary criticism for Newsweek. His final two novels, The Loneliest Girl in the World (1952) and The Crozart Story (1960) continued his depictions of business and power, but they fell short of expectations. He died just shy of involvement in the New Left politics that embraced his work via Allen Ginsberg. Fearing’s poetry saw something of a renaissance in the 1990s with the publication of his complete works by the American Poets Project.

Polito, Robert, ed. Kenneth Fearing: Selected Poems. New York: Library of America, 1994.

Wald, Alan M. Exiles from a Future Time. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2002.

Wark, McKenzie. “Not Yet: On the Novels of Kenneth Fearing," The Brooklyn Rail, April 2007.

Kenneth Fearing. PoetryFoundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/kenneth-fearing