Poetry
COLLECTED POEMS--Kenneth Fearing --Random House ($2).
New York City is the Grand Canyon of U. S. civilization. Many an American has gaped at the spectacle, tried to find words for it--and discovered that he had no tongue. All such will be able to appreciate the poetical accomplishment of Kenneth Fearing's verse.
Deep city,
Tall city, worn city, switchboard weaving
what ghost horizons. . . , cold furnace
in the sky,
Guardian of this man's youth, graveyard
of the other's, jailer of mine, Harassed city, . ... gay in the theatres,
wary in the offices, starved in the tenements,
City ageless in the hospital delivery rooms
and always too old or too young in the
echoing morgues--
City for sale, for rent! . . .
Mirror and gateway, mirage, cloud against the sun. . . .
Most Americans, facing the inexpressible, get around it by talking big or talking tough. Fearing, in his Collected Poems, does both at once. He models his big talk on the Bible, Walt Whitman, and the ballyhoo of American publicity-salesmanship, his tough talk on the argot current in New York City's tabloids, dives, streets. A responsible stylist, Fearing frequently succeeds in welding big talk and tough into the kind of indivisible unit that makes literary news. His Dirge for the "executive type" is deservedly an anthological stock-piece:
And wow he died as wow he lived,
Going whop to the office and blooie home to sleep and biff got married and bam had children and oof got fired,
Zowie did he live and zowie did he die,
Very much missed by the circulation staff Of the New York Evening Post; deeply, deeply mourned by the B. M. T.,
Wham, Mr. Roosevelt; pow, Sears Roebuck; awk, big dipper; bop, summer rain;
Bong, Mr., bong, Mr., bong, Mr., bong.
Fearing went to New York from his home town of Chicago in 1924--a time when life in the U. S. metropolis was ripe for the mirroring his style could give it. Boom-time big talk was growing louder and more insistent; while an implacable depression was creeping into the consciousness of ordinary citizens. Such a howling opposition between appearance and reality was poison for Fearing's equanimity, but meat for his pen. He became one of Bohemia's most egregious bottle-men (figuring in at least three now half' forgotten novels), and developed a gin-clear view of things that, on occasions, approximated perfect sight. His best poem, Minnie and Mrs. Hoyne ("Get the money! that's all"), is as sardonically human "a nutshell as New York City has ever been put into.
Fearing's linguistic mirror was well adapted to reflect New York--until the Depression drew the fires from under the big talk of the city's prosperity-mongers. That left Fearing's style heatedly reflecting what was gradually growing cold. Instead of letting his sardonic feelings about life find a new level in keeping with the spiritual developments of the times, he tried to maintain them at boom-time pitch. In consequence, much of the language in his Collected Poems is simultaneously red-hot and obsolete.
Some take to liquor, some turn to prayer,
Many prefer to dance, others to gamble,
and a few resort to gas or the gun.
(Some are lucky, and some are not.)
Champagne for supper, murder for breakfast, romance for lunch and terror for tea,
This is not the first time, nor will it be the last time the world has gone to hell.
(Some can take it and some cannot.)
Something of a prophetic Voice in 1929, Fearing sounds more like a shavetail Jeremiah today. But there is an honor in these Collected Poems that is honor still. The Biblical and Whitmanesque views of life, which are in Fearing's blood as well as in his style, can bear repetition. As long, at least, as Tom, Dick & Harry are free to guess that human life, in their quarter of the planet, is far less decent than it has the inalienable right, and the bounden obligation, to be. Fearing's book, in spite of its often bombastic bitterness, can give to readers some feeling of that right, and sense of that obligation.
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