Lovers of noir are generally aware that the term was initially applied to the works of a set of US authors and filmmakers in retrospect, from afar, when the French were first granted access to films that had been banned under Nazi occupation. It was introduced by actor and screenwriter Marcel Duhamel, who founded Gallimard’s Série noire in 1945, and was soon after picked up by film critic Nino Frank, who, in 1946, argued in L’Écran français that John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Edward Dmytryk’s Murder, My Sweet (1944) were “to the traditional crime drama what the novels of Dashiell Hammett [were] to those of [S.S.] Van Dine or Ellery Queen.” The prose style of Dashiell Hammett and the cinema techniques of John Huston had developed organically, in response to and rebellion against a unique set of stimuli — including the numbing slaughter of the Great War, the corruption of the Prohibition Era, and the economic devastation triggered by the Wall Street crash of 1929, as well as the artistic innovations of Modernist authors like Ernest Hemingway and German Expressionist filmmakers like Fritz Lang. Hammett, Huston, and their fellow pioneers surely realized that they were exploring new territory, in tandem, but one doubts that they would have considered themselves members of the same artistic school. If anything, Hammett would have recognized himself as a trend-setter among a group of “hardboiled” writers publishing in Black Mask Magazine. And Huston would likely have regarded himself as a faithful adapter of Hammett’s novel, having found a visual analog for its terse, bracingly clear narrative style and ironic tone in the propulsive, pared-down cinema language of early Warner Brothers gangster films and the shadowy Poverty Row productions of European émigrés like Edgar Ulmer.
Of course, the French were right to see the connection. What bound these works into a coherent category was a shared attitude towards the crumbling world and the humans who’d built it. The unmoved mover of noir was a cynicism that found expression in, on the one hand, fatalistic plots involving desperate or, at best, thoroughly jaded characters, and, on the other, an elegantly weary tone. The argument I wish to make is that, in the 1930s and early 1940s, a noir poetry that has seldom been called “noir” emerged from the same matrix as Hammett’s novels and Huston’s films. Its chief exponents were poets who, in their heyday, were more likely to be labeled “proletarian” than “noir,” since their commitments were to one extent or another leftist and they often published their work in avowedly Marxist venues like Partisan Review and New Masses. Yet the critique of capitalism and its catastrophes one may discern in their best poems is far more convincing than any doctrinal prescription at which they sometimes force themselves to arrive. If anything, they owe more to Freud than they do to Marx. For them, as for Hammett, Horace McCoy, and Raymond Chandler, the capitalist system exposes, as it buckles, the true nature of the human condition: our animalistic cruelty, our susceptibility to self-delusion, our ineluctable drives towards pleasure and self-destruction.
The three noir poets on whom I would like to focus are Kenneth Fearing (1902-1961), Alfred Hayes (1911-1985), and Weldon Kees (1914-1955). The first two are natural suspects, as they were also authors of novels in the noir vein. Fearing won what little financial stability and lasting fame he would achieve with The Big Clock (1946), which was adapted by fellow noir scribe Jonathan Latimer into a classic 1948 film, directed by John Farrow, and several of his other novels — especially Dagger of the Mind (1941) and Clark Gifford’s Body (1942) — fall, if not entirely neatly, into the category. Hayes, who served in Italy during WWII, found his entrée into the film industry by writing for the neorealists and eventually settled in Hollywood, where he scripted a number of classic noirs, including Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night(1952) and Human Desire (1954); his loose trilogy of noir novels exploring frustrated aspirations and fatal romance in New York and Los Angeles — In Love (1953), My Face for the World to See (1958), and The End of Me (1968) — have recently been republished to much acclaim. Kees, who also wrote accomplished prose, is the odd man out, in that neither his single novel nor his short stories are in the noir tradition, but he is the most gifted and skilled poet of the three, and his verse extends the boundaries of what I would call noir poetry farther than theirs.
Born in Oak Park, Illinois, to a father well established in Chicago legal circles and a mother from a prominent intellectual Jewish family, Kenneth Fearing succeeded Hemingway as the editor of his high school newspaper, then went on to scandalize the students and faculty at the University of Wisconsin by injecting an uncomfortable degree of Modernist and otherwise challenging writing into the undergraduate literary magazine. He left the university in 1924, just before earning his degree, and moved to New York City, where the first of his five original collections of poems, Angel Arms, appeared five years later, coinciding with the onset of the Great Depression.
From the start, Fearing’s work tapped not only into the themes but also the settings of the hardboiled school then reaching its maturity; Hammett’s Red Harvest was published in book form the same year, and its prose — by turns colloquially sardonic and starkly cinematic — shares more than a passing affinity with Fearing’s poetics. The first stanza of the opening poem, which was first published in New Masses in September 1926, quite literally sets the scene:
The dramatis personae include a fly-specked Monday evening,
A cigar store with stagnant windows,
Two crooked streets,
Six policemen and Louie Glatz.
The long lines and parallel syntactic structures of Walt Whitman, which Fearing would deploy throughout his career, are here blended with the formulaic phrasing of the screenplay. Meanwhile, the adjectives — “sly-specked,” “stagnant,” “crooked” — communicate the mood of urban decay and corruption we would come to associate with noir. The action takes place, presumably, in New York, but in this world every town is Poisonville, and there’s a “Louis the rat” down every alley. This particular specimen may get shot down in the end, but the conditions in which his kind multiplies persist:
He crawled behind a water-hydrant and stood them off another half minute.
“I’m not shot,” he yelled, “I’m not shot,” he screamed, “it isn’t me they’ve shot in the head,” he laughed, “Oh
I don’t give a damn!”
In his excellent introduction to a selection of Fearing’s poems which appeared in 2004, Robert Polito notes that the petty gangster’s “antic exit [from the stickup] anticipates by more than 20 years James Cagney (as Cody Jarrett) in Raoul Walsh’s White Heat howling ‘on top of the world’ from an exploding gas tank.” Of course, one needn’t look that far for parallels. Josef von Sternberg’s proto-noir Underworld, scripted by another University of Wisconsin dropout, Ben Hecht, premiered in 1927, and Mervyn Le Roy’s Little Caesar would hit cinemas in 1931, two years after the W.R. Burnett novel that served as its basis was published.
Beyond the setting, personae, action, and style of Fearing’s poems one may detect another, more subtle, parallel to the emerging aesthetics of noir in prose and film: an anxious engagement with the literary tradition and with high culture more broadly. The title of the poem is “St. Agnes’ Eve” — an allusion, as Polito points out, to a high Victorian poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1837, rev.1842), which was itself inspired by John Keats’s high Romantic “The Eve of St. Agnes” (1819). The irony is thick. There is nothing Victorian or Romantic about Fearing’s world, and neither the patron saint of virgins nor the divination rituals associated with her feast day have anything to do with a petty heist. One hates to think that a young woman seeking a mate should find, revealed to her by fate, the visage of Louis Glatz. Yet here we are. This is a distinctly American tale, with all the myths beaten out of it; Polito is right to remind us that “the stolen ‘$14.92’ [is] also the date of Columbus’s original New World stick-up.”
Fearing’s allusion to Keats and Tennyson is both a rejection of the literary modes and mores of the past and a demonstration of familiarity with those modes and mores. More than Hammett, it calls to mind Raymond Chandler, whose first foray into print was a series of adolescent Keatsian poems and who, in The Long Goodbye (1953), has Philip Marlowe converse about T. S. Eliot with an African-American chauffeur. Fearing’s engagement with literary antecedents, too, grew more sophisticated and playful with time. The titular poem of his 1943 collection, “Afternoon of a Pawnbroker,” echoes Mallarmé’s “L’après-midi d’un faune” (1876); the rhyme of “pawn” with “faun” drags the mythical sources and ethereal mood of the original down into the dirty urban street, with its omnipresent economic pressures, and the falling rhythm of the additional syllables — “broker” — contributes to the deflating effect.
Angel Arms and the collections to follow evince Fearing’s severe mistrust of new media, from the radio to the comic strip, the jukebox, the newsreel, and the newspaper advertisement, but that mistrust goes hand in hand with close observation and emulation of their formulae. Parody requires a kind of love, or at the very least a kind of obsession, and Fearing is obviously obsessed. He also appears to love, or at least to mourn, the men who fall prey to the manipulative, homogenizing messages of the new media, who are hollowed out by the consumerism and conformism of modern life. Perhaps his best-known poem, from his second collection, Poems (1935), is a cynical yet genuinely affecting, even devastating eulogy for what Sy Kahn describes as “the Fearing man”:
There is little relief for the Fearing man, haunted by the old disasters of the past and threatened by a new conspiracy of ruthless forces dedicated to the principles of subservience and conformity to the will of the state. For the Fearing man, as the books of poetry define his cosmos, every horizon is ominous, and the big clock strikes the hour of doom twenty-four times a day.
The poem is “Dirge,” and it deserves to be cited in full:
1-2-3 was the number he played but today the number came 3-2-1;
bought his Carbide at 30 and it went to 29; had the favorite at Bowie but the track was slow —
O, executive type, would you like to drive a floating power, knee-action, silk-upholstered six? Wed a Hollywood star? Shoot the course in 58? Draw to the ace, king, jack?
O, fellow with a will who won’t take no, watch out for three cigarettes on the same, single match; O democratic voter born in August under Mars, beware of liquidated rails —
Denouement to denouement, he took a personal pride in the certain, certain way he lived his own, private life,
but nevertheless, they shut off his gas; nevertheless, the bank foreclosed; nevertheless, the landlord called; nevertheless, the radio broke,
And twelve o’clock arrived just once too often,
just the same he wore one gray tweed suit, bought one straw hat, drank one straight Scotch, walked one short step, took one long look, drew one deep breath,
just one too many,
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,
With who the hell are you at the corner of his casket, and where the hell we going on the right-hand silver knob, and who
the hell cares walking second from the end with an American Beauty wreath from why the hell not,
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.
A critique of capitalism? Most certainly. Perhaps the solution to the problem of dehumanizing consumerism simply goes without saying, but it is important that it remains unsaid. One might question whether the historical dialectic would ever deliver our “executive type,” or those below him, from a meaningless end. The noir dimension of Fearing’s work lies precisely in the ominousness of nearly every horizon he depicts, in the almost supernatural conspiracy homing in on the anonymous Fearing man, whose aspirations come to nothing in the end, whose private life is anything but private, and who leaves behind nothing of worth. Omens are littered throughout the poem; notice our fellow’s birth “under Mars” — a pop astrological promise of war — and the warning about lighting “three cigarettes on the same, single match,” which was likely pulled from an advertisement but was conceived at the front, where the third man was always an easy mark for a sniper.
It must be said that, in the same collection, Fearing sounds a far more doctrinaire note in the poem “Denouement,” which depicts the collective political struggle of the masses as threatened, often thwarted, but irrepressible:
Everywhere huge across the walls and gates “Your party lives,”
where there is no life, no breath, no sound, no touch, no warmth, no light but the lamp that shines on a trooper’s drawn and ready bayonet.
In her wide-ranging and perceptive study of Fearing, Rita Barnard concludes, on the basis of poems like “Denouement,” that “[d]espite his recurrent fears of manipulation, of a one-dimensional culture of evasion, his work preserves that emphasis on politics and on historical agency that was still so alive in the culture of the thirties.” I myself find moments like the stanza above to be the least convincing in Fearing’s poems; all the colorful diction, the syntactic energy, and the complexity of feeling are to be found in his diagnosis of the modern condition, not in his vague hope for salvation. One encounters an even more striking contrast between convincing diagnosis and dated prescription in the poems of Fearing’s younger contemporary, Alfred Hayes.
In 1934, Fearing served as one of the co-founders, with William Phillips and Philip Rahv, of the Partisan Review, an organ of the CPUSA–backed John Reed Club of New York City. Fearing would later run afoul of PR, which turned anti-Stalinist as news of the dictator’s Great Terror began to spread, but he was heavily involved in the journal at the start. Its first issue included a long poem by Alfred Hayes, which would certainly have appealed to the older poet. Born in Whitechapel to an impoverished Jewish family, Hayes was taken to New York City when he was three. There he attended City College, joined the Young Communist League, and went to work as a crime reporter for the New York Daily Mirror. His up-to-date literary education, experience on the paper, and radical commitment are all in evidence in his inaugural appearance in PR, “In a Coffee Pot,” a hardboiled dramatic monologue by a young forgotten man, wasting his life in a diner.
Traces of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” are all over the poem —including, as Suzanne W. Churchill notes, in the very title, which alludes to the coffee spoons with which Prufrock measures out his life. But the “coffee pot” is a slang term for a diner, and the struggling young speaker has more in common with the out-of-luck narrators of James M. Cain’s novels than it does with the neurotic intellectual of Eliot’s poem. This speaker is capable of anything, if given half a chance. It is the force of circumstance, not indecisiveness, that keeps him down. Hayes opens with lines of skillfully varied, alternately rhymed pentameter — once again, as if to demonstrate his proficiency in traditional literary modes — before lapsing into a looser meter with sporadic rhymes:
Tonight, like every night, you see me here
Drinking my coffee slowly, absorbed, alone.
A quiet creature at a table in the rear
Familiar at this evening hour and quite unknown.
The coffee steams. The Greek who runs the joint
Leans on the counter, sucks a dead cigar.
His eyes are meditative, sad, lost in what it is
Greeks think about the kind of Greeks they are.
The diction and syntax readily call to mind Cain’s novels, as does the meditative Greek diner-owner, whose inner life is hidden from us. Like Nick Papadakis in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), he is a victim of the American dream. And when our young man, who recites the collapse of that dream among the “bright boys” of his generation, predicts that “We shall not sit forever here and wait,” his frustration renders him a Frank in the making. The closing quatrain is meant to rouse the masses to collective action:
And I have seen how men lift up their hands
And turn them so and pause —
And so the slow brain moves and understands —
And so with million hands.
Yet, as in the case of Fearing’s best work, the poem’s power resides in its evocation of disillusionment. The added element is the speaker’s unironic simmering resentment, a palpable potential for violence that may, but need not be, directed towards a political end. Little else in Hayes’s verse — and least of all his most famous composition, the organized labor hymn “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night” — so fully embodies the noir ethos.
[insigia]
It is in the poems of the still younger, Nebraska-born Weldon Kees, some of whose earliest efforts also appeared in New Masses and Partisan Review, that we find the richest, subtlest manifestations of the aesthetic and thematic elements of noir. Kees is better known and critically well-regarded than Fearing and Hayes, though he still suffers from neglect. Championed by influential poets and critics like Donald Justice and Dana Gioia after his likely death by suicide in 1955, he remains a poet’s poet.
The dominant note in his poems is one of despair, but it is regularly nuanced with touches of humor and variations in perspective and register. Perhaps the clearest demonstration of his noirish manner is his sequence on the ghostly everyman Robinson, an “executive type” of the Fearing mold. The imagery is heavily ironized and no less particular than that in “Dirge,” but the tone is calmer, more resigned, and therefore more poignant. Kees assimilates the lessons of Eliot more fully than Hayes. Here is the chilly, magisterial, yet ominous and emotionally suggestive opening of the first poem, “Robinson,” which appeared in The New Yorker in 1945:
The dog stops barking after Robinson has gone.
His act is over. The world is a gray world,
Not without violence, and he kicks under the grand piano,
The nightmare chase well under way.
The litotes of “not without violence” and the broader implications of the dog’s “nightmare chase” are reminiscent of some of the more psychologically penetrating entries in the noir canon, from the novels of Dorothy B. Hughes to those of David Goodis and Patricia Highsmith. Lines from “Aspects of Robinson,” which are lent a frisson by the fact that Kees himself is assumed to have plunged from the Golden Gate Bridge, capture as well as any noir the depths of anxiety and drives towards self-destruction lurking beneath placid surfaces, and address openly the disenchantment with the radical political programs of the 1930s:
Robinson on a roof above the Heights; the boats
Mourn like the lost. Water is slate, far down.
Through sounds of ice cubes dropped in glass, an osteopath,
Dressed for the links, describes an old Intourist tour.
—Here’s where old Gibbons jumped from, Robinson.
By 1948, when this poem appeared in the same magazine, the Soviet Union was, in the eyes of those disillusioned with the Party, little more than a hellish tourist spot for golfing osteopaths.
It is, however, another Kees poem, “1926,” which appeared in Harper’s in 1949, that, to my mind, best exhibits the worldview at the heart of noir — a sense of fated futility, which, when juxtaposed against the idyllic hopefulness of youth, pierces the heart.
The porchlight coming on again,
Early November, the dead leaves
Raked in piles, the wicker swing
Creaking. Across the lots
A phonograph is playing Ja-Da.
An orange moon. I see the lives
Of neighbors, mapped and marred
Like all the wars ahead, and R.
Insane, B. with his throat cut,
Fifteen years from now, in Omaha.
I did not know them then.
My airedale scratches at the door.
And I am back from seeing Milton Sills
And Doris Kenyon. Twelve years old.
The porchlight coming on again.
This recollection of a pleasant midwestern childhood fed by the popular culture of the 1920s (a cheerful dance tune, the silent romantic drama Men of Steel [1926]) reads like a more refined version of a flashback in a novel by Horace McCoy. Its measured tone and envelope structure make it sound like the recollection of a dream or the utterance of a man under hypnosis. The telegraphic catalogue of the “marred” lives of the speaker’s anonymous neighbors — of global catastrophe and unspecified, perhaps random violence — bisects the memory, undercutting any hope of solace. It is an elegant recapitulation, through a particular case, of the larger story of the second, third, and fourth decades of the American 20th century, the matrix of what we would come to know as noir.
A good number of poets in the latter half of the 20th and first quarter of the 21st century have engaged with noir themes and tropes, but they have largely done so ekphrastically, in response to novels and, most frequently, films. Their work, like that of neo-noir filmmakers, is, however serious it may be, partly homage and partly pastiche. If we are to look for a genuine noir poetry, we must, like Duhamel and Frank, cast a backward glance. It sprang from the same past that brought us the masterpieces they canonized in the immediate postwar years. What bleak poetry our new age of war and economic crises will bring us remains to be seen.