Vanished Act
The Life and Art of Weldon Kees
by James Reidel
Univ. of Nebraska Press, 398 pp., $35 "WHY DON'T YOU want to be a success?" Truman Capote asked Weldon Kees soon after they met. Not waiting for a response, Capote added, "I can tell from the way you act you don't want to be a success. . . . Why, you're a much better poet than old Robert Lowell."
Born in 1914, Kees belonged to a famously competitive generation of poets. As James Reidel notes in his painstaking biography "Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees," Kees viewed success ambivalently, seeking "some gray area between neglect and fame." The fact that Kees wrote a friend about his encounter with Capote suggests that Capote knew the right way to flatter the poet: by appealing to Kees's sense that he was above such flattery.
Kees makes a great subject for a biography because he knew everyone. A poet, novelist, painter, and critic, he enjoyed a circle of acquaintances from James Agee and Whittaker Chambers (who canned him as Time's film reviewer because "our readers don't like to hear you groan") to Lily Ayer, a Bay-area stripper who read T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" at one of the "Poets' Follies" that Kees organized. On the air at Berkeley's KPFA radio station, Kees talked movies with a young Pauline Kael; back East he swapped gossip over old-fashioneds with Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy.
"Vanished Act" lucidly examines Kees's heartbreaking life. (Despite the subtitle, Kees's actual art receives less attention and almost no substantive analysis in the book.) Born in Beatrice, Nebraska, to a family that owned a successful hardware-manufacturing business, Kees attended several Midwestern colleges. Soon after graduation he married the only woman he had ever dated and began unsuccessfully pursuing several careers, often at the same time. He worked as a librarian in Denver, a film reviewer in New York, a painter and cultural organizer in Provincetown, and an artist-of-all-trades and researcher in San Francisco. Like her husband, Ann Kees was a hard drinker and suffered from depression; their marriage ended in divorce.
In 1955 Kees disappeared. His car was found parked by the Golden Gate Bridge, with the keys left in the ignition. Though Kees had often spoken of suicide, mentioning a desire to jump off the bridge, rumors persisted that he had fled to Mexico. Adding an air of melodrama, "Vanished Act" devotes its opening and closing chapters to the disappearance.
The introduction declares that the case of Kees's disappearance "is closed and long has been." This statement's decisiveness contrasts with the rest of the book's hedging. "It is not possible to know his thoughts," Reidel writes of Kees's drive to the bridge. That's certainly true, but only twenty-five pages before, Reidel recounts Kees's thoughts as he flew across California. In fact the biographer somehow gains access to his subject's most intimate calculations, reporting on the particular women whom the poet considered pursuing. ("Maybe a new girlfriend would be a healthy change. . . . Mentally he pictured prospects: Interplayer actresses, women at Langley Porter, Ketty.") To allow an interested reader to check the author's conclusions against the evidence, "Vanished Act" needs far more endnotes than the fifteen it offers.
In addition to poetry, Kees's diffuse body of work includes jazz songs, literary criticism, movie reviews, a novel, screenplays, and a coauthored book on behavioral science. But Kees's artistic career suffered from bad timing and a series of near misses. Clement Greenberg almost reviewed his painting exhibition, which Greenberg called "terrific"; several top publishing houses almost accepted Kees's novel, Fall Quarter, but the outbreak of World War II made the academic farce seem dated. (In 1990 Story Line Press published Fall Quarter posthumously, with an introduction by Reidel.) Kees never enjoyed an academic position, let alone the security that tenure affords, and never traveled abroad, with or without a Guggenheim. Much of "Vanished Act" is a record of Kees's wearying efforts to scrape together enough money to live; only months before his disappearance he was forced to ask his parents for another modest handout.
Despite such difficulties, Kees's work attracted a devoted following. Contemporaries as different as William Carlos Williams and Allen Tate praised his poetry. A ghoulish delight in decline and fall inspired that poetry. ("Spengler is such fun," he once remarked.) Dylan Thomas revived the villanelle by using it to exhort his father to rage, rage against the dying of the light. Kees used the same form to witness an eerie collapse. A crack is moving down the wall. / Defective plaster isn't all the cause. / We must remain until the roof falls in, he wrote. Kees's flatly worded observation of decay intensifies into a rallying cry, a determination to watch (in another poem's description) as A planet surges, plunging, and goes out.
The poem "Crime Club" portrays a detective driven incurably insane by a case he cannot solve: Screaming that all the world is mad, that clues / Lead nowhere, or to walls so high that their tops cannot be seen; / Screaming all day of war, screaming that nothing can be solved. The mad detective shares Kees's tragic view of life; that human existence is a bleak, unsolvable riddle. Elusive and un-equivocal, the final image also suggests how such hopelessness remains ultimately impenetrable, even for a biographer as knowledgeable about his subject as Reidel.
David Caplan teaches English at Ohio Wesleyan University.