Books: Feverish

THE HOSPITAL — Kenneth Fearing —Random House ($2).

The Hospital is to most hospital romances what the Mayo Clinic is to an osteopath. Not even during the recent epidemic of doctors’ and nurses’ memoirs has a book smelled so strongly of ether and carbolic. Above all, Kenneth Fearing is a specialist in diagnosing hospital life as experienced by the patient—its atmosphere of muffled crises, sterilized optimism, morbid freshness, of surrealist panic as viewed through an anesthetic mask.

Poet Fearing is no doctor. His sources were: 1) several months’ firsthand and frequently queasy study of Manhattan hospitals, 2) his wife, a handsome ex-nurse, now connected with the social service department of a large Manhattan hospital. The novel owes its life to an effective transfusion of Fearing’s talents in urban portraiture.

Not an expose, The Hospital conceives of the big modern hospital as a social microcosm where conditions become specially favorable for study of society with its hair down. The story, told through the eyes of a dozen characters, is concentrated in a maximum half hour of a sweltering summer afternoon. Revolving from furnace room to Surgery, from the laundry to superintendent’s office, it includes autopsy room, nurses’ quarters, wards, clinic, even a scene in which a tugboat is loaded with consignments for potter’s field.

Two female patients precipitate a crisis in a love triangle involving a marine radioman in the waiting room. A middle-aged staff surgeon, wiped out in the crash of a big firm of drugmakers, commits suicide. In the operating room Surgeon Cavanaugh performs a “radical breast removal” in a state of jitters. (Six of his last nine cases had died.) The crisis comes when the lights go out. As they come on again he is suddenly his old self again. “For a minute,” he quips, “I thought we’d forgotten to pay our light bill.”

Probably no hospital has ever known such concentrated drama as Author Fearing packs in. But the distortions of his picture resemble far more those produced by a microscope than defective mirrors.

The Author. A semi-legendary character, Kenneth Fearing has figured in far more novels than he has written. (The Hospital is his first.) In Albert Halper’s Union Square he figures as the drunken poet. But, “Hell,” declares Fearing, “I’ve been a character in some good novels”—meaning W. L. River’s The Death of a Young Man, Margery Latimer’s This Is My Body.

Son of a Chicago corporation lawyer, Fearing got his literary start as winner of a $50 poetry prize at the University of Wisconsin, where he once went into bankruptcy and appointed a classmate as receiver. His early career in Manhattan consisted of writing verse and pulp stories, of writing home for money. Married in 1933, and now father of a wise four-year-old son, Fearing has increased both his weight and poetry earnings. (He observes smugly of his latest photograph that it makes him look like an Italian gangster.) In 1936 and again in 1938 he was awarded a $2,000 Guggenheim fellowship.

His motive for writing a novel is explained indirectly in a commentary on his poetry: “Printing poetry is not only expensive,” says Fearing, “but dangerous; it marks you as a public enemy. My first book [Angel Arms]disgraced me; my second [Poems’] bankrupted me; after my third one [Dead Reckoning] I was lucky to get away with my life.” As his literary influences he names Composer Maurice Ravel, Painter George Grosz, Poets Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg. But no critic has accused him of imitativeness, except, at times, of himself.