Oh, yes, how the clock still goes on humming. Kenneth Fearing heard its mechanical, deadly heartbeat, saw its two giant claws scrapping around and around the numerals – twelve on top, six on bottom, nine on the right and three on the left, back in the 1940s when he wrote his novel, The Big Clock – a tale about the work-a-day world filled with people willing to conform, no matter what the price: high blood pressure, cerebral hemorrhages, ulcers eating out the lining of their stomach, moral decay eating out their soul. As Fearing’s main character George Stroud says about the clock: “It would be easier and simpler to get squashed, stripping its gears than to be crushed helping it along.”
One of my all-time favorites, Kenneth Fearing’s classic noir/thriller published in 1946 is not only a caustic commentary on American business but a story holding the reader in suspense with a keen desire to keep turning the pages to find out what happens next right up to the last sentence. More specifically, the novel features the following:
Multiple Narrator/Rotating First-Person
Not only is the story told from the point of view of George Stroud, a sharp-looking, nimble-minded publishing executive/husband/father, but from the point of view of six other men and women – and with each rotation of first-person narrator the story picks up serious momentum and drives toward its conclusion. Considering how effective multiple narrators can be in the hands of an accomplished writer, it’s surprising this literary technique isn’t employed more frequently.
Femme Fatale
What’s classic hardboiled noir without a femme fatale? There’s Vivian Sternwood in Chandler’s The Big Sleep, Brigid O'Shaughnessy in Hammett’s Maltese Falcon, Phyllis Dietrichson in Cain’s Double Indemnity -- and, yes, of course, Pauline Delos in The Big Clock. Here’s George Stroud’s first impressions when meeting Pauline at a posh uptown Manhattan party: “She was tall, ice-blonde, and splendid. The eye saw nothing but innocence, to the instincts she was undiluted sex, the brain said here was a perfect hell.” Incidentally, here are the first impressions of a similar sharp-looking, nimble-minded married man on meeting femme fatale Caroline Crowley at a similar posh uptown Manhattan party in Colin Harrison’s 1996 thriller, Manhattan Nocturne: “She may well have been the most beautiful woman in the room. . . . her face was no less beautiful as it approached, but I could see a certain determination in her features.” Goodness, some things never change.
The Power of Myth
Robert Bly speaks of a major character from ancient Norse mythology: the giant: the giant is a being we can not only view as huge, cannibalistic, mean, violent and heavy-footed, but also as psychic energy from our shadow side that can, when we become enraged, take possession of us. Perhaps, on some level, the author was aware of this mythology when writing how business tycoon Earl Janoth reacts with extreme violence after Pauline makes accusations about his homosexual relations with Earl’s life-long friend/business colleague: “It wasn’t me, any more. It was some giant a hundred feet tall, moving me around, manipulating my hands and arms and even my voice. He straightened my legs, and I found myself standing.“
Greenwich Village Artist
George Stroud collects the paintings of Louise Patterson. As a point of contrast to the men and women droning their life away in an office, Louise is a complete eccentric who hates anything smelling of the business world. Since events pull her into the story, she interacts with Stroud and his colleagues. Here is a snatch of dialogue where she lambasts one of the mousy white-collar types, “What the hell do you mean by giving my own picture some fancy title I never thought of at all? How do you dare, you horrible little worm, how do you dare to throw your idiocy all over my work?” The author gives Louise Patterson a turn as one of the first-person narrators -- a real treat for readers.
The Art of the Novel
Kenneth Fearing was a poet as well as a novelist. Although The Big Clock is a scathing depiction of the world of business, it is also a work of first-rate literature: all of the characters are complex and developed. There are no easy answers given; rather, Fearing’s poetic vision prompts us to reflect deeply on the challenges we face living in a modern, urbanized, highly standardized, clock-driven world.
A New York Review Books (NYRB) Classic and its two hundred pages can be read in a few days -- highly, highly recommended. I wish I could give it ten stars but the system only goes up to five.
Kenneth Fearing (1902-1961)
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