Customer Reviews

Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees

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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.

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

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?

Little did I know, when sitting in on some of Hugh Kenner's lectures at Johns Hopkins University decades ago, that I was in the presence of the most distinguished member of a very elite group of people: those who were dead certain that they had met Weldon Kees days after police found the poet's abandoned car at the Golden Gate Bridge on July 18th, 1955. According to James Reidel, the author of this excellent biography of this astonishingly gifted suicide, "When Hugh Kenner learned in August that Kees had vanished the month before, he too found it hard to believe. He was sure he had seen his friend in the Santa Barbara Library in late July....Kenner had not talked long in the library with Kees, who seemed preoccupied by something..."(Pg. 358). Preoccupied indeed! Kees, a painter, novelist, short story writer, musician, film maker, critic, and as major a poet as was ever to be considered minor, seems almost a walking embodiment of the post-modern muse. Both an admirer of Hart Crane and a student of the myth of Ambrose Bierce's self-elopement to Mexico, Kees' story draws to it urban myths as easily as iron filings slide towards a magnet. For today's poets he is the equivalent of the Vanishing Hitchhiker and Reidel makes that point again and again. (Perhaps a little too much.) His book opens with a key in the door of Kees' last apartment, a cop answering the persistent ringing of the telephone to report that no one was on the other end of the line (perhaps a ghostly echo of one of Kees' most famous "Robinson" poems), bafflement, lost hope and then despair among friends and family--except for Kees' estranged first wife Ann, who was certain Weldon had taken the high dive from the Golden Gate. If he did, (and this reviewer for one believes that he did), the loss continues. Who knows what Kees would have done if he had beaten his string of bad luck and disappointments and lived out his full term of years? Yet another interesting connection emerged for me in reading this book, and that was Kees' admiration for the poetry of Lindley Williams Hubbell, yet another near-unknown yet gifted writer (a winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award), who chose to end his own poetic career by traveling to Japan around the time of Kees' disappearance, also never to return. In addition, Reidel illuminates the connection between Kees and Rexroth (one I could never figure out), tells us of Kees' dislike of Kenneth Patchen, love of tough guy movies, immaculate grooming, fascination with the gay scene (as attested to by the poet James Broughton and others), his wicked wit and pacifism, and all things anyone would want to know about Weldon Kees.

Personally, I would have liked to have seen more pictures in this book, especially of Kees' art, and perhaps stills from his films. All in all, though, this is a very good volume to put next to Kees' Collected Poems on your bookself.

Last night at the Cinematheque here in San Francisco, we watched a slew of Weldon Kees films. Guest curator Jenni Olson last year turned an elegaic tribute to a dead friend, Mark Finch, into a feature documentary called THE JOY OF LIFE, which spoke in a spare and moving way about people drawn to the Golden Gate Bridge, like Finch, to take their own lives. She told us that in the course of her research she came across the life, work and of course the disappearance of Weldon Kees, whose car was found on the north end of the bridge on July 18, 1955, and that she found herself drawn to his work as both poet and filmmakers in the early San Francisco film avant-garde. (Not much mention made of his painting.) Only Olson, with her myriad connections to a hundred archives, could have pulled together such a program, which was billed as the first retrospective of Kees' fugitive film work.

Since he completed only one film, the program was supplemented by other shorts on which he had contributed his many talents. James Broughton's classic ADVENTURES OF JIMMY began the show, a nice print with Kees' barrelhouse piano score. Broughton was in full Buster Keaton-Chaplin mode with this short, in which he leaves a rundown cabin in the wilderness and goes to San Francisco to find a wife, or possibly a boyfriend, or one of each perhaps. It's sort of coy, and Broughton's not a great silent film actor, but it's cute and the audience lapped it up. Olson followed this up with two of Weldon Kees' "data" films, both from 1952, HAND MOUTH COORDINATION and APPROACHES AND LEAVETAKINGS, also silent, in grainy black and white. Frankly, these left me a little mystified. Why on earth were they made? In HMC, we see a harried blonde mother go through an entire day taking care of an adorable boy who looks to be about 15 months old---feeding him, bathing him, putting on his diapers, while four older kids look on from the background and attempt to steal scenes from the baby. Kees and Gregory Bateson are sometimes shown in the corners of the apartment, cameras held up to their faces. But why? It seems so pointless and "Mass Observation." The second "anthropological film" was lensed by Kees with a camera hidden in his valise, and documented ordinary Oakland and Berkeley citizens saying hello and goodbye. Kees (presumably) supplies some winsome captions for each brief scenelet, some of them lasting only a few seconds. In one of the scenes, laid in front of UC Berkeley's Wheeler Hall, an imposing professor walks across some steps with a brace of burly grad students, and a sharp-eyed member of our audience identified the faculty guy as George M. Stewart, the novelist (STORM) and author of the classic work on California's Loyalty Oath THE YEAR OF THE OATH (1950).

HOTEL APEX screened next, the only completed film Kees signed, a fascinating and beautiful poetic impression of a rundown boarding house badly in need of demolition. The camera glides and rises through the ruined space, stopping to dolly in here and there at odd-shaped remnants, a Dinah Washington poster, a scattering of beer caps, a soaked paperback copy of Phoebe Atwood Taylor's 1931 THE CAPE COD MYSTERY. We wonder about the people who once lived in these broken spaces, how they came to run out on their old possessions; the HOTEL APEX has some of the mystery of the Marie Celeste. Time heals everything, people say, but the displacement of the hotel remains, still, eerily vigorous, nearly a shriek.

Then we saw a color film, William Heick's THE BRIDGE, on which Kees acted as a cameraman. Bizarrely it's a series of impressive Wow! shots of the Golden Gate Bridge, swamped in fog, glittering in the sun, viewed from a bird's eye view above, sometimes from the great steel pilings at its base, while a "movie voice" from the period recites, really skips through, a lot of Hart Crane's poem THE BRIDGE. We see Kees scurrying down a steep slope balancing a tripod; it's spooky, the way he seems to risk tumbling into the rough white surf. I thought Hart Crane's verse really beautiful, but you could tell some people were having a hard time following it, especially the way it was enunciated, in these "You Are There" rapidfire sub-Gielgudisms. Finally the lights came halfway up and we listened to a KPFA broadcast of Weldon Kees' own radio show, which he co-hosted with a friend Michael Grieg. This episode was recorded shortly after Kees' disappearance, and Grieg puzzles it out over the air, playing a song ("Daybreak Blues") that Kees wrote, and reading one of Kees' longer, most interesting poems, "The Journey." Grieg's got a great voice, like Vincent Price crossed with sandpaper, and he made "The Journey" sound like a million bucks (funny thing, though, he pronounces "Formica" with a strange accent on the first syllable, as though along the lines of "fornicate.") And the grief and bewilderment of Kees' suicide you could eat with a spoon. It was very touching. Jenni Olson announced that she could never have begun compiling this program without the help of James Reidel's incredibly detailed 2003 biography, VANISHED ACT. I read VANISHED ACT shortly after its publication and to this day it remains, to my mind, the very model of a proper artistic biography. He makes huge claims for his man, but he's got the resources and the skills to back them up. You come away from his book thinking that, despite Dana Gioia, despite Donald Justice, whatever, Weldon Kees deserves all the scrutiny and commentary he's been getting. Maybe he wasn't the world's greatest filmmaker, but we have only these bits and pieces to ponder, like reading fortunes from tea leaves. Anything might have happened, and Reidel makes you feel that; he---Reidel---is a poet of endings and beginnings. Once you start reading it, be prepared to have it haunt you the rest of your born days.

While I can't comment on this book or his poetry with any authority, I would like to point out another facet to Kees' creativity to those who are interested - he was also an amazingly accomplished painter. The artworks illustrated in recent book, "The Writer's Brush," were my first introduction to him, and they every bit as compelling and interesting as anything else being produced at that time, if not moreso.