Кеннет Фиринг: Американдық ақын және романист

American poet and novelist

Kenneth Flexner Fearing (July 28, 1902 – June 26, 1961) was an American poet and novelist. A major poet of the Depression era, he addressed the shallowness and consumerism of American society as he saw it, often by ironically adapting the language of commerce and media. Critics have associated him with the American Left to varying degrees; his poetry belongs to the American proletarian poetry movement, but is rarely overtly political. Fearing published six original collections of poetry between 1929 and 1956. He wrote his best known poems during the late 1920s and 1930s. He moved from Illinois to New York City in 1924, and spent the rest of his life there. He supported himself by writing pulp fiction, often under pseudonyms. Around 1939 he began to write novels and wrote less poetry. His seven novels are mystery and thriller stories with some unconventional characteristics. They often feature many characters who are given one or more chapters from their point of view, and in a few later novels he used fictional newspaper articles and radio transcripts to further the narrative. His most famous novel, The Big Clock, has remained in print since its 1946 publication and was adapted for film.

Fearing was born in Oak Park, Illinois, to a privileged family: his father was Harry Lester Fearing (d. 1940), a successful Chicago attorney and descendant of the family of Calvin Coolidge. His mother Olive Flexner Fearing was of Jewish descent and a cousin of the educator Abraham Flexner. As a young man Fearing was thin, with dark hair and skin, and liked to wear dark suits. His voice was low and lispy. He had a "little boy appeal", with messy hair and habits, horn rimmed glasses, and an immature disposition—some of which may be seen in Alice Neel's oil portrait, painted in 1935, which is now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The portrait includes some references to Fearing's poetry and shows a small skeleton in his chest, grasping his heart and pouring blood from it; Neel commented that "He really sympathized with humanity His heart bled for the grief of the world." After his death, according to Robert M. Ryley, friends remembered "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". They separated in 1952. This was his last marriage. Fearing lacked money for much of his life (the period following his most successful novel was the exception). In New York, he received a monthly allowance from his mother until 1935, when she decided that her son should bear full responsibility for his new child. His mother had been skeptical of his choice of writing career. Meanwhile, he searched for editors who would publish his poetry. Fearing told a writers' convention in 1948 that "Literature is a means for crystallizing the myths under which society lives." His poetic influences included Walt Whitman, who he said was "the first writer to create a technique indigenous to the whole of this country's outlook", His early poems were published in magazines such as Poetry, Scribner's, The New Yorker, the New Masses, Free Verse, Voices, and The Menorah Journal. He was first anthologized in Collected Poems of Kenneth Fearing (1940). Fearing was most productive, and his future most bright, between 1938 and 1943, when he published a book of poetry or a novel each year. Even then, his royalties during this period were minimal, and only exceeded the publisher's advance on two occasions (the Collected Poems and the novel The Hospital). Despite the fame, he remained dependent on his wife Rachel's income. The language of mass media similarly intrudes in "Jack Knuckles Falters" (1926), in which a war veteran has been sentenced to death for murder. In his final words, he struggles with his competing needs to proclaim his innocence and meet his death with "dignity". Newspaper headlines that cover his execution interrupt each stanza and undermine his speech: "" They convey nothing of his personal struggle but rather satisfy the public's need for a simple narrative in which a "criminal" is punished. The headline has moved on to another topic as the man proclaims his innocence.—Fearing turned to novels. Between 1939 and 1960 he wrote seven mystery or "thriller" novels, although their formal qualities defy simple genre categorization. The most significant are The Hospital (1939), Dagger of the Mind (1941), Clark Gifford's Body (1942), and The Big Clock (1946). Fearing was well known in 1939, and his first novel, The Hospital, quickly sold six thousand copies. A power outage at a hospital, caused by a drunk janitor, is the central event around which numerous characters' lives are portrayed. Each chapter is devoted to one character's point of view, a style common to all of Fearing's novels. It was critically well received, and was popular enough that a Bantam paperback and an Armed Services Edition soon followed. It remains in print. The novel was developed into a film of the same name in 1948, and again in 1987 (No Way Out). The novel earned Fearing $60,000 from republication and film rights. His financial success was short lived, as income from the novel dried up due to the unfavorable contracts that he had negotiated himself. In Loneliest Girl in the World (1951), an audio recording and storage device named "Mikki" is at the center of a mystery. Ellen Vaughn, the daughter of its inventor, uses the machine's "463,635 hours of recorded speeches, music, and business transactions" to determine the circumstances of her father's death. She finds a recording in which her father and his brother argue about the best way to exploit "Mikki", which Ellen ultimately destroys with a gun. The story is unusual in that the mystery is resolved with retrieved information rather than "detection". The Crozart Story (1960) is about the heads of two rival public relations firms. Fearing has one PR head explain how he shaped public opinion: "The fantasies we were adroitly joining and fashioning into loaded rumors, those gossamer rumors we were transmuting into triggered press releases, those childlike releases we were everywhere implementing with public degradation, internal exile, imprisonment, those incandescent anxieties we were molding and hardening into death's head taboos—all these components of the commando raids we were mounting for the world's richest haul consisted of words, basically, only words."

Accounts vary as to Fearing's degree of association with Marxism and the American Left. he is commonly included among its cofounders after the magazine repositioned itself as anti Stalinist. He put his name to various pro Soviet declarations from 1931 through to the 1939 "Open Letter of the 400", which defended Stalin's regime. Wald writes that Fearing had "a mistrust of all political premises and a disbelief in all ameliorative options, [which] ran contrary to any connection with a large organization that demanded ideological conformity and an activist commitment". In the era of McCarthyism his political associations were sufficient for him to be interviewed by the FBI and called before the House Un American Activities Committee. The FBI reported that "[Fearing said] 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."

The literary critic Macha Rosenthal called Fearing "the chief poet of the American Depression". Since Fearing's death, critics have offered more positive appraisals of his later poetry. In a 1970 article on the "Dynamo" school of poets, Estelle Novak wrote, "Fearing's true appeal as a revolutionary poet was his ability to combine realistic description and political comment in the form of a readable poem that lost nothing of its quality as poem while it gained in propaganda value." By the 1990s there was a "minor revival", with the National Poetry Foundation's publication of Kenneth Fearing Complete Poems in 1994, and the poet Mark Halliday published an essay, "Damned Good Poet: Kenneth Fearing" (2001), which included an analysis of the poet's themes. A selection of Fearing's poems has been published as part of the Library of America's American Poets Project.

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. Complete Poems, ed. Robert M. Ryley, National Poetry Foundation (Orono, Maine), 1994.

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. New York : New York Review Books, 2006, introduction by Nicholas Christopher, ; Die große Uhr : ein Klassiker des Noir Thrillers, herausgegeben von Martin Compart ; Übertragung ins Deutsche Jakob Vandenberg, Coesfeld : Elsinor, 2023,
(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.

"Reading, Writing, and the Rackets." New and Selected Poems. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1956, ix–xxiv. "The Situation in American Writing: Seven Questions." Partisan Review, Summer 1939, 33–35.