BOOKS
59
Most of Farrell's characters are apprentice or accomplished drugstore
cowboys. Some of them get
respectable
jobs; some make the pool room
their profession; some combine both. As American politics go, they provide
a reserve for stormtroopers or they veer toward the working class. Farrell
could not have made any such resolution in his novel at this time. Instead
he created Studs Lanigan as the archtype of irresolution. And Studs is ·
really one of the memorable characters of literature.
As
years pass he
will probably take on the reality that Bloom and Babbitt, for example,
have for us.
Readers who are looking for more class-conscious characters in more
typical revolutionary situations will look forward to Farrell's new tetralogy
built around Danny O'Neill, the sensitive studious boy who appears in .
The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan
as an incipient communist.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS
DIALECTIC OF LOVE AND HATRED
POEMS,
by Kenneth Fearing. New York: Dynamo Press.
$1.00.
The substance of these poems is rhetoric. But this is not said in dis–
paragement, for it is a rhetoric created out of understanding and emotion,
and charged with conviction. Within its limits there is great variousness of
manaer: Addisonian balance, ecclesiastical chanting, the persuasion of
Auden's
The Orators,
the collectivity of Dos Passos'
The Unknown
Soldier,
the specific madness of Joyce's Nighttown fantasy. The most
characteristic mode is a kind of arrangement perhaps suggested by Eliot's
lines:
So I would have had him leave
So I would have had her stand and gri·eve,
So he would have left.
For the poet is not dealing, in a sense, with things experienced, but with
experimental and very revelatory patterns that he himself creates. He is
in the laboratory breaking down metropolitan routine, journalist;c dope–
dreams, official deception ,and testing their components by new juxtaposi–
tions, new conditions. He has all the caution of a scientist, makes most
of his statements conditional, begins long series with a repeated
so
or
what
or
such
or
whether.
But the direction in which his experiments are leading
him is unmistakable.
In his introduction Edward Dahlberg speaks of this process as "reason–
ed derangement of all the senses," and recalls the French Symbolists. But
the reason for this derangement is not the final surrealist flight of the in–
dividual or the simple mirroring of contemporary madness. At times
Fearing drops into the latter easiness, but not often. For he understands
