Kenneth Fearing

’s Life–by Robert M. Ryley Essay, Research Paper

Robert M. Ryley

As a senior in high school, Kenneth Fearing was voted wittiest

boy and class pessimist. If there had been elections for class cynic and class

misanthropist, he would probably have won these as well. After his death, his friends

would remember his charm, his eloquence, his almost courtly manners, his prickly

independence, his not-quite-hidden vulnerability and innocence–but mostly they would

remember his gloomy, sardonic skepticism. In Margery Latimer’s roman ? clef This Is My

Body, a character representing Carl Rakosi says to a character representing Fearing

(and Rakosi concedes that the sentiments, though not the style, were sometimes his):

That darkness of yours has changed me. Your damned dead mind is infecting me…. Next

thing I’ll be flippant like you, joking about everything that means a damn. That darkness

of yours is like an infection that never heals….

Pessimists are always right in the long run–everybody gets to drive a silk-upholstered

six–but Fearing was right in the short run too. His love affairs, his marriages, his

politics, his career–all of them went wrong in the end.

At the beginning he must have seemed destined for the best that America had to offer.

His father, Harry Lester Fearing, was a successful Chicago attorney who could trace his

paternal ancestry back to seventeenth-century Massachusetts and whose great grandmother

was a Coolidge, the sister of the thirtieth president’s grandfather. Kenneth’s mother,

Olive Flexner Fearing, was a member of the illustrious Jewish family that, within a

generation of emigrating to the United States from Bohemia, produced Olive’s cousin

Abraham Flexner, the first director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; and

her cousin Simon Flexner, the first director of the Rockefeller Institute. Simon’s son and

Kenneth’s second cousin, James Thomas Flexner, is a distinguished art historian and winner

of the National Book Award for his biography of George Washington.

Kenneth was born in Oak Park, Illinois, on July 28, 1902. One day about a year later

his mother picked him up and ran away, presumably to Chicago, where his father quickly

tracked them down. A divorce followed, the settlement granting each parent six months’

custody a year. Soon, however, Kenneth was spending most of his time with the Fearings and

being raised by a doting but eccentric aunt, Eva Fearing Scholl, who, it is said, having

been abandoned by her mandolin-teacher husband, cut the head out of all of his photographs

and later succumbed to malnutrition caused by a diet of spinach and corn flakes. Harry

remarried in 1914 and moved out of the Fearing duplex to an apartment some distance away;

but even after he returned with his new wife, for some years Kenneth continued to live

with Eva in the south side of the house, though happily for his nutrition he ate his meals

with his father and step-mother.

Kenneth loved his father and tolerated his mother. Harry was kind, generous, and often

playful, and, when his son grew up, surprisingly tolerant of his bohemianism. On the other

hand, his mother–or Ollie as she was usually called–was almost wholly without humor, and

what little she had was in the vein of the Beowulf poet’s, a sort of

grim irony. Though she sent Kenneth a monthly allowance until his son was born in 1935, it

came at a price–her hectoring admonitions about the importance of honest work. "I

hope your book is accepted," she once wrote him, "–God knows you need it."

When he did publish, she was not impressed. To the woman who cared for her in the last

years of her life she never mentioned that her son was a distinguished writer.

A problem that must have raised its head early on was antisemitism. Ollie claimed she

had run away from her husband after hearing one of his sisters say of Kenneth, "Too

bad he’s a Jew," and later there was an uproar in the family when a younger cousin of

his called him an anti-semitic name. He remembered once sitting under a table while Ollie

played pinochle and asking, "What are Jews?"–to which Ollie replied,

"God’s chosen people meld jacks." In spite of marriage to Ollie, or perhaps

because of it, Harry seems to have harbored the kind of reflexive antisemitism typical of

middle-class WASPs of the period. On one occasion, conversing amiably with Kenneth’s

college friend Carl Rakosi, Harry stopped speaking and left the room when Kenneth

provocatively asked if he realized that Rakosi was a Jew. Because Kenneth’s background was

not generally known outside of the family, he encountered no discrimination in Oak Park.

But a feeling that he had something to conceal may have contributed to a habit of secrecy

reflected in the extreme impersonality of his art. As his first wife once remarked,

"Kenneth spent his whole life hiding his inner self from other people."

Kenneth began his generally successful academic career in 1908 at the Whittier School

in Oak Park, and at graduation read an essay on the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. At Oak

Park-River Forest High School, he followed in the footsteps of follow Oak Parker Ernest

Hemingway by becoming an editor of the student newspaper, the author of a weekly column,

and the author of the class prophecy. In the fall of 1920, he entered the University of

Illinois and disappeared for two years. All that is known of his time in Urbana are his

grades (not bad) and the title of a story of his, "A Tale of Long Ago," listed

in an issue of the Illinois Magazine but never printed. At the beginning of his

junior year he transferred to the University of Wisconsin and within three months was

publishing poetry and fiction in the Wisconsin Literary Magazine, or the Lit, as

it was called. By the beginning of his second semester he was on the editorial board, and

by the end of the year he had been elected editor-in-chief. This auspicious beginning,

however–a pattern is now beginning to establish itself–was followed by an inglorious

final semester. He did win the university’s William S. Vilas Prize for an essay on the

literary criticism of James Gibbon Huneker; but in March 1924 he was forced to resign as

editor of the Lit, owing partly to financial mismanagement and partly to an

editorial policy of which the Committee on Student Life disapproved: too much Modernist

obscurity, pessimism, and sexual frankness. Another reason, he reported in a statement to

the student newspaper, was that the members of the Committee "could not see that I

loved and respected my fellow men." And, he added, "The … point is largely

true." A final indignity was a "condition" in a mathematics course that

kept him from graduating with his class.

In December of 1924 he went to New York to join Margery Latimer, the dazzlingly

attractive and exceptionally gifted young writer he had met and fallen in love with at

Wisconsin in early 1923. They were almost exact opposites–he slovenly and bedraggled,

saturnine, cynical; she immaculate, luminous, mystical, otherworldly. In a letter to a

friend, she wittily parodied one of their typical conversations: "’Well, let’s get

some coffee.’ ‘O let’s do something great, let’s get in contact with people, the

world, the world—‘ ‘For God’s sake let’s be plain for a change.’"

This improbable relationship–at its best, she shrewdly observed, when they were

apart–lasted until the spring of 1928, when she left New York for her hometown of

Portage, Wisconsin, hoping he would follow, propose marriage, and offer to give her a

child. Instead he began an affair with another woman. He later suggested that they get

back together, but after having been almost suicidal over his infidelity, she discovered

she no longer needed him. In October 1931 she married the poet and novelist Jean Toomer,

and died in childbirth the following August.

Fearing’s original plan on coming to New York had been to work as a journalist and do

his own writing on the side, but Latimer, who would later blame herself for contributing

to his irresponsibility, persuaded him to devote himself to poetry. It could not have

taken much persuasion. Until he was well over fifty, he never held a nine-to-five job for

more than a few months. In various summaries of his early work-history, he would claim to

have been a journalist, a salesman, a millhand, and even–this in an "About

Contributors" column, where a man is not on his honor–a lumberjack. Whatever the

truth about mills and lumberjacking, he is known to have worked briefly, either during or

just after college, at a Chicago newspaper and, for about a month in 1924, at a department

store selling pants. In the next thirty years he would take an occasional brief job–with

the WPA, with Time, with the United Jewish Appeal, with the Federation of Jewish

Philanthropies–but for the most part he just wrote. And though he was more serious about

his poetry than about anything else, though he made sacrifices in its service, he could

never bring himself to regard it as a calling, as something special. "I always begin

to get suspicious," he told his son, "when I hear a poet talking about his work."

He was a professional freelance writer, and poetry was one of the things he wrote.

Another thing he wrote was pulp fiction, the sale of which, along with a monthly

allowance of $15 from his mother, emergency gifts from his father, and loans from Margery

Latimer, was probably his main means of support during the early years in New York. To my

knowledge no Fearing pulp story has ever been identified, but his half-brother, Ralph,

recalls the plot of one from the late 20s, "Garlic and Dimpled Knees." The story

was

about an artist who painted a portrait of his garlic-eating girlfriend. The work was

entered in competition at a gallery. On the day of final judging, the girlfriend just

happened to be standing near one of the judges after finishing some garlic-laced lunch.

The judge thought the painting so elegantly realistic that he actually felt he could smell

the garlic, so awarded the masterpiece first prize.

Much of Fearing’s pulp fiction, however, was soft-core pornography, often published

under the pseudonym Kirk Wolff. Writing in 1932 to his wife-to-be Rachel Meltzer, who

deplored pulp work as a waste of his talents, he playfully parodied his Wolffian style,

envisioning the time when he might "daily draw the seductively curved, palpitating,

flame-lipped and dark, laughing-eyed [Rachel] into my masterful embrace and. . .." He

had not, he assured her, written a similar erotic ellipsis in three months.

As for verse, between his arrival in New York in 1924 and the appearance of his first

book in 1929, he published 44 poems in 15 periodicals, a quarter of the 44 in the New

Masses, to which he also contributed essays and reviews. To this journal he was

introduced by Latimer. She had received a request for material from James Rorty, one of

the editors, and went to his office with samples of Fearing’s work. Though the magazine

was not yet a Communist organ and was open to literary diversity, Rorty responded angrily,

declaring that he wasn’t interested in "art for its own sake." Nevertheless, in

September 1926 he devoted a page to five of Fearing’s poems, and shortly thereafter Edmund

Wilson wrote to the magazine praising them and asking for more.

Fearing’s first book, Angel Arms, containing nineteen of the forty-four poems he

had published since coming to New York and five new ones, was issued by Coward McCann in

its Songs of Today Series in the spring of 1929. [. . . .] (For bibliographical details

concerning this and all other books by Fearing, see the Bibliography of Major Works on

page Ixii of Kenneth Fearing’s Complete Poems). This collection

has been credited with "initiating proletarian poet as an American literary movement

of permanent importance," a claim that lends the book a certain glamour but that

reads back into Angel Arms attitudes from Fearing’s Poems of 1935. Edward

Dahlberg, comparing Angel Arms to Poems, speaks of the earlier book’s

"acid portraits of Woolworth shopgirls." There are no Woolworth shopgirls in Angel

Arms, but no matter. Dahlberg’s inaccuracy expresses a larger truth–that the book is

very much a work of the twenties and directs its withering irony everywhere, at the

working class and the lumpen proletariat as well as at the bourgeoisie. The term

"proletarian literature" has been given a bewildering variety of definitions,

but it is hard to imagine one broad enough to include Angel Arms’ all-encompassing

jazz-age iconoclasm.

The book elicited six brief reviews, ranging from the laudatory in the NewMasses ("brutal

frankness, an intellectual hardness and cleanliness rare since Walt Whitman") to the

dismissive in, aptly enough, that Eliotic symbol of spiritual emptiness The Boston

Evening Transcript ("nothing pleasant in the entire volume"). It may have

been this paucity of interest, not to mention sales, that led Fearing almost to abandon

poetry for fiction over the next six years, during which he would publish only twenty-one

poems. On the other hand, the same pattern–a long period of productivity in one genre,

followed by a long period of productivity in the other–would repeat itself for the rest

of his life.

During this first period of prose, he wrote three unpublished novels: Jacqueline,

now lost but known to use one of his girlfriends (not Margery Latimer) as a model for

Jacqueline; Robert Ward, also lost but known to use his friend Harry Ross as a

model for Robert Ward; and Gentleman’s Destiny, surviving in an incomplete

manuscript and a plot summary, and known to use his friend Tom Dimitry as a model for the

gentleman. This practice of writing novels about his friends suggests a typical 1930s

conception of fiction as documentary, but it was also Fearing’s way of insuring that he

wouldn’t write about himself. "The autobiographical first novel is a death

knell," he told his first wife, and he later informed his son that "he always

wrote himself in as a minor character in order to keep the main character from being

Autobiographical." In the case of Gentleman’s Destiny, the

autobiographical temptation may have been especially strong, for the gentleman protagonist

is an alcoholic, as Fearing was.

His drinking began at least as early as Wisconsin, where, according to Rakosi, he used

to stay up all night writing and slugging whisky. Once in the late twenties he was jailed

for drunkenness and had to be bailed out by Horace Gregory. By 1933, when Albert Halper

published his novel Union Square in which Fearing appears, scarcely disguised, as

the "ex-poet" and pulp writer Jason Wheeler, his addiction must have been

notorious. Jason is drunk or half-drunk much of the time, and Halper makes his

carelessness with cigarettes responsible for the destruction by fire of his apartment

building–a prescient invention, for Fearing would later start two or three small fires by

failing into a drunken sleep while smoking in bed.

On a blind date in the summer of 1931, Fearing met his wife-to-be Rachel Meltzer.

Attractive, intelligent, competent, and affectionate; twenty-seven years old; politically

engaged and active in left-wing causes; a trained nurse employed as a medical social

worker, Rachel fell in love almost immediately with the filthiest man she had ever seen.

His shirts, she recalls, were green with grime, his teeth covered with tartar. For Rachel,

however, his very grubbiness may have been part of his attraction. "Kenneth needed

someone to take care of him," she has said, and she threw herself into the role of

caregiver with a generosity and enthusiasm that belies her claim that she was never cut

out to be a nurse. It is not clear whether her love for Fearing was ever requited in full.

In a series of thirty-three letters he wrote from Oak Park between January and April 1932,

he told her often that he missed her and wanted her, but he also parried all of her

arguments in favor of marriage and addressed her in tones of such facetiousness and irony

that his true feelings are indecipherable. The letters also foreshadowed what would

eventually help to doom the marriage–his reluctance to express affection in person. For

while the letters were at least affectionate–in fact, charmingly so–he had to reassure

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.