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60
PARTISAN REVIEW
this madness has causes and agents. And his derangements are diagrams for
the reader. Such passages as:
or:
or:
You heard the gentleman, with automatic precision, speak the truth
Cheers. Triumph.
And then mechanically it followed the gentleman lied.
Deafemng applause. Flashlights, cameras, microphones.
All winter she came there, begging for milk. So •we had the
shacks along the river destroyed by police.
ypu will not forget the voice of the bought magistrate
quivering in horror through the courtroom above
prostitute and pimp.
are not even non-sequiturs, but ironic statements of a necessary hypocrisy.
This method is not limited to phrases; whole poems are based on
ideas or conceits,
Obituary,
for instance, and
What if Mr. Jesse James
Should Some Day Did
Nearly all the poems have a firm conceptual unity
of some kind. I think that is one reason why Kenneth Fearing's work: has
been so heartily acclaimed. In reading most proletarian poetry and many
proletarian novels and short stories you feel that the writers found it suf–
ficient to class-angle their material, to observe it from the correct position.
There is technique, but not form, not the achievement of creation. The
reader loses the sense of sharing in rediscovery and reaffirmation, a quality
that is essential to propaganda and that inheres in true originality of form.
This quality Fearing has to a very high degree. And although he could
be easily spotted as the author of any given poem, the volume has the wide
variety, the complete shifts of a newsreel sequence.
His originality is, however, almost completely impersonal. Memories,
autobiography, individual sensibility are not permitted to complicate the
relentless satire. One is conscious of the author only from the emotion that
informs the poems, from the questioning eyes fixed on the reader from
behind the printed page. Grammatically this becomes great dependence on
the imperative and interrogative verb forms and on the third and, even
more, the second persons. Here are the beginnings of a few poems as they
follow in unbroken sequence in the volume: "You will remember," "Take
him away," "Let us present," "This advantage to be seized," "Even
when your friend," "You heard the gentleman." Perhaps the device is
used excessively, but it has not the purpose for Fearing that has made it in
other writers a contemporary trick. They wish to avoid responsibility or to
fake suggestiveness, as in the common and meaningless use of "what" as
a demonstrative adjective in poetry. But Fearing is not avoiding respon–
sibility, he is making rus reader share it, by the authenticity of his material,
the power of his indictment. · "What will you do?" he asks, "What will
you do? What will you do?" Only a phrase here and there gives the
answer directly, the demand for a "dream that lives and grows ... that
stands and quickens,"
