Fearing loathing

The kids at Oak Park and River Forest High School never knew how right they were.

Kenneth Fearing, an Oak Park native and a 1920 graduate, was voted “wittiest boy” and “class pessimist” by his classmates before heading out to the University of Wisconsin. Four years later, he would move to New York and embark on a writing career most notable for its grim outlook on the world. A writer of lean poetry, prurient pulp and big-themed noir, Fearing was a unique character whose personality was legendary, even if his books slipped out of print.

Now, with new editions from the New York Review of Books’ Classics series, two of Fearing’s seminal works, The Big Clock and Clark Gifford’s Body, are again available to American readers in slick, affordable paperbacks.

“We bring back or introduce books that are unusual and outstanding, that either haven’t been translated into English or have been published but have fallen by the wayside,” says series editor Edwin Frank. “I’d heard for many years that The Big Clock was a wonderful noir novel, and one of the things we’re interested in doing is looking for literature in places outside the purely literary, in different genres.”

The Big Clock ($14) was published in 1946 to critical praise, if not commercial success. Touted by none other than noir superstar Raymond Chandler, it’s considered Fearing’s best book. Clocking in at a slim 175 pages, the novel tells of George Stroud, a man who loved the bottle as much as a good argument, often at the same time. We’re introduced to Stroud, a middle-aged jack-of-all-trades, while he’s working as an editor for Crimeways, an investigative journal that looks at New York malefactions from all angles. Crimeways is just one of the rags churned out by Janoth Enterprises, a huge Manhattan media conglomerate that bears a suspicious, though satirical, resemblance to Time, Inc., during the heyday of its egomaniacal founder Henry Luce.

Stroud has a fling with the girlfriend of the big boss when his wife and daughter (Georgette and Georgia, respectively) are out of town. The boss, Earl Janoth himself, shows up at the girlfriend’s apartment when Stroud is dropping her off. The cuckold can’t make out who Stroud is, but Stroud sees him, and that night, when Janoth kills the girlfriend in a fit of jealous rage, only Stroud knows the truth about the murder. Janoth knows that one man saw him enter the apartment, and puts his best man—Stroud—on the case to find out who he is. Unable to turn his boss in, for fear of ruining his home life, Stroud starts a manhunt for himself, leading his bosses and underlings on a goose chase that is forever encroaching upon him. The effect is of a man constantly gasping for one last breath, as he tightens the noose around his own neck.

“It’s a masterpiece of the genre; the book’s a blast,” Frank says. “Stroud is in pursuit of himself and in flight from himself, which could be seen as reflecting Fearing’s own character.”

While The Big Clock could be seen as an extended metaphor for the shadow cast by middle age, it’s also a targeted condemnation of American capitalism. As Stroud tries to keep his own investigation from fingering him too soon, Janoth struggles under the increasing pressure of a hostile takeover. Fearing was an iconoclast, a drinker and an unabashed member of the left who flirted with the American Communist Party, though it was never clear whether he joined. As novelist Nicholas Christopher writes in the introduction to The Big Clock, there’s a lot of Fearing in Stroud: “Just as…drugs from yage to morphine fuel the fiction of William S. Burroughs, alcohol in all its forms suffuses Fearing’s work. His drinking is central to The Big Clock…. A classic drunk, perhaps he just doesn’t care anymore what people think.”

But it’s politics, not booze, that take center stage in Clark Gifford’s Body ($14). Like The Big Clock, CGB is told from numerous points of view. But whereas The Big Clock has a controlled cast of characters, CGB casts a wide net, just one of the factors making it such a weird book.

A political noir like no other, the novel is set in an unnamed country at war with another unnamed nation. At home, a provisional government has been installed undemocratically, and an old war veteran named Clark Gifford is heading the resistance group the Committee for Action. Gifford and his army commandeer eight radio stations across the country, hijacking the airwaves and broadcasting their criticism of the administration. The story is told across a huge stretch of time that begins several years before the attack and ends more than a decade after. It’s related by fighters on both sides of the struggle, citizens who just listened to it on the radio and newspaper clippings from the time.

Encountering it on bookshelves in 1941, just as America entered World War II, readers didn’t know what to make of this bizarre novel about a war that bore no resemblance to the one the country had just entered. Divorced from that context, however, CGB is a fascinating novel about the way the government manipulates the media and how democracy can disappear with little resistance.

“I think the book was conceived before the war was entered into,” Frank says. “It seems to me, that in its awareness of the ambiguous role of media, how it can make a message sound really bold that’s not very significant, and how it’s hard to discern what has meaning in the fog of rumor, Gifford’s Body still has things to say about American politics. It’s a prescient, rather daring book.”

But what of Fearing’s place as a writer of noir? Certainly, his shadowy public persona, his taste for liquor and his love of hard, tight sentences put him in that category. But neither book features the hard-living detective and the cigarette-smoking dames we’ve come to expect from the genre.

“Noir is born out of a cynical and pessimistic view of the world,” Frank responds. “That’s what Fearing has taken from the more straightforwardly popular genres—a love of quagmires.”