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5.0 out of 5 stars
Neglected Genius, August 21, 2003
This review is from: Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees (Hardcover)
This is an entertaining and beautifully and lovingly written biography of a neglected but indelible American poet. Read the poems, and read this book, do yourself a favor.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
The forgotten "soldier for art, culture, ideas and principles", November 3, 2009
Weldon Kees (1914-1955?) was an American poet, painter, jazz composer, short-story writer, critic and scriptwriter. Nowadays he is known - if he is known at all - more for his unresolved disappearance in 1955 than he is for his creative talents. It is thought that he jumped off San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge on 18th July of that year; his Plymouth Savoy car was found a day later on the north side of the bridge with the keys still in the ignition, but his body was never found. Certainly his ex-wife Ann believes that he killed himself ("[Suicide] was something he had talked about ever since I've known him"); others point to unconfirmed sightings in Mexiko and New Orleans as evidence that he may still be alive.
In this first biography, James Reidel recounts over 420 pages the 44 known years of this mysterious man's life in extraordinary detail. Born and brought up in Nebraska, Kees lived a restless and varied life, flitting from Doane College, the University of Missouri and the University of Nebraska, to Denver, New York and on to the west coast, settling in San Francisco. After a brief stint in Hollyood, Kees worked on the Nebraskan state guide and married Ann Swan - "one of those bourgeois necessities", writes Reidel drily. Having written his first poem at 10, Kees's first book of poems, The Last Man, was published in 1943 when he was 29, after it had been rejected by Harpers, Random and Macmillan (it includes one of his most respected poems 'For My Daughter'). By the late 1940s he was writing - a full ten years before the publication of Robert Lowell's Life Studies - intense, deeply personal poems like 'Farrago': 'I sit in a bar / On Tenth Street, writing down these lies / In the worst winter of my life.' In spite of having published over 40 short stories from 1934 to 1945, he gave up prose writing at the age of 30.
Fascinated by expressionist art, he took up painting around this time. With phenomenal speed, his '4 A.M.' canvas was included in the 'Black or White' exhibition at the Kootz Gallery in New York, hanging with a Picasso, a Braque and a Mondrian, and his 'Delta' painting was exhibited in the Whitney Art Museum. He wrote a novel 'Fall Quarter' which did not find a publisher in his lifetime (it was eventually published in 1990). To pay the bills, he took on scriptwriting assignments and a job at a local psychiatric hospital (where his increasingly alcoholic wife was eventually hospitalised). He wrote art reviews for The Nation and having moved to the west coast, had a growing enthusiasm for jazz music. At self-organised jazz events in the evenings he often played piano (including his own compositions) and for the film 'Adventures of Jimmy' (1950) he provided the musical score.
All this time, Ann affectionately typed up his poems, letters and general correspondence (a service that the poet Sylvia Plath would repeat a few years later for her husband Ted Hughes). But when Ann suffered a breakdown, Kees seemed keen to get rid of her, having tired of her excessive drinking and increasing paranoia. He quickly divorced her in August 1954 and went on to have a few brief relationships (even a later girlfriend gets "demonized" - Reidel's word - in Kees's diary-notebook while he outwardly continues a relationship with her). Partly dependent on handouts from his parents, it seems that their expression of disappointment at his social standing depressed him terribly.
In spite of Reidel's considerable attention to detail - and his very admirable contribution to help rescue Kees from undeserved obscurity - I felt his book had two flaws:
1. We only get a spurious sense of Kees's emotional and inner life. His later ruthlessness towards Ann and his apparent suicide come upon the reader suddenly, with little narration of what might have led, emotionally and spiritually, to such behaviour.
2. Reidel does not pay enough attention to the poems and the paintings. Since Reidel himself is a poet and scholar, analysis of key poems - e.g. the brilliant Robinson cycle of poems - would have been very welcome.
Later scholars and admirers of Kees's work are undoubtedly indebted to Reidel for this monumental project on one of the most neglected American talents. I sense that Kees's day might yet come, lifting him from his current status as "a poet's poet" to a wider celebration of him as a mid-century Renaissance man, a true polymath, or as Reidel describes him "one of the last great romantics" who "made the Jazz age go on endlessly in his own person".
Also recommended>
* The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees (1960), ed. with an introduction by Donald Justice
* Glyn Maxwell's review in The New Republic, 3 June 2004
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Man Out of Time, October 29, 2009
Weldon Kees was a man out of time. He was born between the two great literary generations of the 20th century but it seemed he didn't fit into either one. A man of many talents, his writing was widely known in New York publishing circles, his poems were published in the New Yorker magazine, and his first book of poems, The Last Man, received critical recognition. His paintings were recognized as being in the same league as Jackson Pollock, they were hung in the same galleries and at some of the same shows. His jazz piano playing was widely recognized and sought after, he played in the jazz clubs of Los Angeles and San Francisco and was courted by Ahmet and Neshui Ertegun who were putting together what would become Atlantic Records. Late in his life he took to making experimental films and started a movie production company.
He was born and raised in Nebraska, his father, like his hero, Hart Crane was a well-to-do business owner. He spent his childhood going to the movies and writing reviews in a little movie magazine he wrote and printed up at his father's business. He planned and made puppet shows that had the whole neighborhood coming over to see the plays. This precocious interest in the arts, of course, separated him from his peers. He went on to the University of Nebraska (and a couple of other universities looking for a program that focused on creative writing) after college he joined the Federal Writers Project working on writing a guidebook of Nebraska. He met and married his wife, Ann, who developed and started exhibiting signs of being unstable, they separated for a while, but when Kees went to New York to foster his literary career after the publication of his first book of poems she went with. In New York he circulated in all the right literary social circles but his career didn't take off as one would have expected. He soon turned to painting as a creative outlet and his paintings were compared to others of the Abstract Expressionist, movement such as, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. His paintings gained the respect of his peers, Pollock even requesting that Kees work be featured in one of his shows.
After his literary career failed to advance as he liked it, he decided to pack up and try his luck on the west coast; he and Ann took off without a destination in mind heading for San Diego and traveled up the coast of California before settling in San Francisco. There Kees painted, but away from New York and the Expressionist community he started indulging in his passion for jazz music and played at the jazz clubs of Los Angeles and San Francisco, as well as scoring a friend's experimental film. And Hollywood had an allure for him. Childhood friend Robert Taylor became one of the leading actors of his day and Kees tried his hand at screenwriting, trying to create a screenplay for Douglas Fairbanks Jr.
Biography helps us to distill the essences of a life down to its common denominators, that we can see at a glance. We see the successes, the failures, the girlfriend that will become the wife, it makes comprehension of a life easier from the ground level of experiencing not so neat details, but there are a couple of things I thought were missing. We aren't given an insight into Kees' writing, a few poems excerpts are printed and his successes are duly noted but we aren't given any real insight or access to what was driving Kees, what pushed him to look for the next method of artistic expression. We're told that Kees all but abandoned the publishing world for painting, and hanging out with painters was "a refuge from his misspent and miscarried literary ambitions." But prior to that we don't get a sense of Kees growing dissatisfaction with writing or the publishing industry. This carries over into Kees' other endeavors, we're told what Kees and Ann did, what galleries he was shown in, what magazines published him, what clubs he played in, what producers were interested in working with him, but we`re rarely let in on how Kees felt during any particular portion of his life.
Why isn't Kees a more well known artist than he is? Certainly, the peripatetic moving from one artistic discipline to another probably didn't help, some of the New York editors weren't sure of Kees commitment to writing. Robert Motherwell left him out of showings because he didn't think Kees was an important artist. Kees was a man out of step of his times, he was born too early to be part of the World War I generation or the Jazz Age. By the time he became an active writer, the writers of that generation were already in the middle of their careers and had largely achieved their legendary status. He was only a few years older than the members of the beat generation and seeing as he had some of the same west coast poetic connections, Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti being the most prominent. It's not out of the question that he could have made an impression as part of the beat movement. He even had a taste for jazz like Kerouac and the other beats. But he didn't fit into their scene either. His writing was heavily influenced by previous generations and he wasn't seeking an innovative answer to form such as Kerouac and the other beats were. Even his taste in jazz was different from the beats, they were influenced by Be-bop jazz that relied heavily on improvisation while Kees preferred the older more Preservation Hall type of jazz and he even wrote essays on how the improvisational style of jazz wasn't a valid expression of jazz.
Kees was on the periphery of mainstream recognition, always the next book of poems promising to be the big one, or the next showing of Expressionist artists would be the breakthrough for him. He still managed to influence others. A publisher he helped get started by publishing Kees' poems, Kees considered Nabokov's, Lolita, as the second book they published. He played Jesse "lone cat" Fuller on a radio show he had in San Francisco. Fuller went on to influence the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton. Kees was one of the first to give film critic Pauline Kael exposure. Jim Morrison may have read Kees' poetry and been influenced by him. Kees may not have had the exposure and fame of his contemporaries but he surely had as much influence as them in creating the world we live in. Kees was perhaps the last romantic. He believed talent would be recognized, that Hollywood could still produce artistic and meaningful films. Kees was a "pure" artist, he created for the sake of creation eschewing "a career," fame, and money. He created for the sake of artistic creation and expression that the arts offered him.
Kees' mysterious disappearance was at the end of a manic period in which he was working at almost all of his artistic interests at once. He produced a vaudeville type show that featured poetry readings, he was working on his films, as well as trying to start a filmmaking school in San Francisco. He was writing songs and working with a singer trying to get his songs recorded. Was he giving himself one last push trying to break through into mainstream recognition? When that hadn't succeeded did he go to Mexico? He was, from an early age fascinated by the possibility of doing something like that in the vein of O. Henry and even later Jim Morrison, and unlike Morrison there`s more of a chance that he could have faked his death. Or at the end did he consider himself a man out of time? Someone who had run out of options, with a future that looked more like the past then he wanted?
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