American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War

1. Postwar

Chapter One Postwar THE CULTURE WARS OF KENNETH FEARING In March 1944, as World War II peaked ferociously in Europe, the New York Times Book Review gently registered the premonitory rumblings of a new chapter in the history of the novel in the United States. Dangling Man, the first published volume of fiction by future Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow (1915–2005), was the subject of “Man Versus Man,” a canny appraisal by Depression-era celebrity poet Kenneth Fearing (1902–61). “In this curious interim between two ages,” Fearing announced, “when history has dropped the curtain upon one of them but seems in no hurry to give the next one its shape and color, Saul Bellow’s Dangling Man swings aimlessly about in space and searches his soul.”1 This crisscrossing of writers of dissimilar generations— the twenty-something Bellow asserting his aloofness from prior convictions; the middle-aged Fearing wary of an out-and-out breach with the Left culture of the 1930s—is indicative of the ironic intricacy involved in assessing any shift in the literary climate. Postwar, many species of novels were generated; few writers were anointed for canonization. Fearing, at this moment, was the established big name, his career far from finished and in many respects on a roll, issuing a book of poetryor prose published by Random House every year between 1938 and 1943. Bellow was still the unproven apprentice, testing his artisticwings with fiction in the guise of a narcissistic diary. Fearing’s own first novel,The Hospital (1939), with its quickpaced vignettes of patients and doctors during a power outage, straightaway sold over 6,000 copies; Dangling Man garnered perhaps 1,500 in sales. That was similar in number to Fearing’s Clark Gifford’s Body (1942), a surreal soaring of the imagination about the revolutionary seizure of a radio station (in manuscript originally titled “The Attack at WLEX”) reported by thirty narrators . It was regarded by editor Bennett Cerf as a sales fiasco.2 Kenneth Fearing, foremost Communist poet of the Great Depression, forged a new radical sensibility in the following decade with his noir thrillers such as The Big Clock (1946). (Courtesy of Library of Congress) 24 Postwar Following his review of Bellow’s first novel, Fearing, in August 1944, commenced a hiatus of fourteen months to completeThe Big Clock, his most commercially successful work. A psychosexual roman noir stressing the sinister effect of market segmentation in the publishing industry, The Big Clock sold lucratively to general applause from critics, then swiftly capitalized on the very mass-market venues that the book derided.Within a year of the appearance of the hardback edition published by Harcourt Brace, Fearing issued a shortened magazine version under the title “The Judas Picture” and a Bantam paperback selling for twenty-five cents with a classic pulp cover.3 Next came an Armed Services edition in 1947, then a Grosset and Dunlap reprint that tied in with the 1948 film based on the book starring Ray Milland and Charles Laughton. The novel has remained in print ever since.4 No writer is an island, including longtime Communists, and Fearing, who came to literary maturity in the Marxist maelstrom of the 1930s, drew nourishment much as Bellow did from a bookshelf of eclectic affinities. At the University of Wisconsin, he studied French and German. According to the poet Horace Gregory (1898–1982), Fearing’s emotional and intellectual attitudes progressively crystallized around a triumvirate of Marx, Dashiell Hammett , and H. L. Mencken after his 1924 arrival in New York City.5 Fearing himself named poets Walt Whitman, François Villon, and John Keats as his chief influences, along with the impressionist composer Maurice Ravel and the painter George Grosz.6 The novelist Edward Dahlberg (1900–1977), in his introduction to the self-announced “proletarian volume” of Fearing’s 1935 Poems, linked him with French Symbolists such as Tristan Corbière, albeit “with Marxian insight.”7 By the 1940s, Fearing was drawing upon George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) for his depiction of hack writers and literary back-biting in Dagger of the Mind (1941) and The Big Clock (whose protagonist is named “George”), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and myriad works by H. G. Wells for his technology-obsessed writings culminating in The Loneliest Girl in the World (1951),8 and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859) and Edgar Lee Masters ’s Spoon...