Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees

by James Reidel

Critic, novelist, filmmaker, jazz musician, painter, and, above all, poet, Weldon Kees performed, practiced, and published with the best of his generation of artists—the so-called middle generation, which included Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Berryman. His dramatic disappearance (a probable suicide) at the age of forty-one, his movie-star good looks, his role in various movements of the day, and his shifting relationships with key figures in the arts have made him one of the more intriguing—and elusive—artists of the time. In this long-awaited biography, James Reidel presents the first full account of Kees’s troubled yet remarkably accomplished life.

 

Reidel traces Kees’s career from his birth in 1914 and boyhood in Beatrice, Nebraska, to his stint as an award-winning short-story writer and novelist, his rise as a poet and critic in New York, his branching off into abstract expressionism, jazz music, and theater, and his experimental and scientific filmmaking and photography. Going beyond the cult status that has grown up around Kees over the years, this work fairly and judiciously places him as a cultural adventurer at a particularly rich and significant moment in postwar twentieth-century America.

Genres: Poetry, Biography

420 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2003

Reviews

[Jim Cherry · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 among 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?

[Anna Quilter]

I wasn't aware of Weldon Kees until he was referenced in a recent thriller by Ken Bruen "Galway Girl".An excerpt from his poem "Crime Club" is a chapter heading.
That lead me to the mystery of Weldon Kees
death and so to this book.
It's mentioned early in the book that authorities had problems figuering out if he was the 88 or 89th person who had ever thrown himself of Golden Gate Bridge by 1955.If of course he did commit suicide.Indeed he did leave his car close by but no suicide note and no real clues.
Another man did leave his car and a suicide note at the Bridge the same day...hence the confusion with the 88/89.

[Tony Gualtieri · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the saddest books I've ever read. Weldon Kees' life is dominated by the melancholy that infuses his poetry. One of his best poems, "Robinson," describes an empty apartment inhabited by a man whose life seems equally empty:

The mirror from Mexico, stuck to the wall,
Reflects nothing at all. The glass is black.
Robinson alone provides the image Robinsonian.

While Kees is no Robinson, his life traces a pattern of detachment and disappointment that ends with his suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge. He left no note nor was his body found: a disappearance. Yet, he accomplished a great deal: his poetry is excellent, he wrote about art in The Nation and literature in Time, he wrote brilliant short stories, exhibited paintings with the nascent abstract expressionists in New York, and made experimental films in San Francisco. For time, he seemed to know every major figure in the cultural world of post-war United States. But he was always slightly to one side, the major publication or breakthrough exhibition always tantalizingly out of reach.

For anyone who has lived the bohemian life, the pattern of Kees life is familiar and this biography captures that milieu of the 1940s and 50s. It's a fascinating read.

[Jon]

This biography, the only full-length one of Kees, has its share of omissions (Kees' wife Ann is slighted, and her family even more so), editorial errors (at one point the writer Nigel Dennis is referred to when the actor Nigel Bruce is meant), questionable critiques (Reidel's comments on Kees' work, especially his short stories, are sometimes annoyingly reductive) and general sloppiness (Reidel repeatedly refers to Kees' story "I Should Worry" by its working title, "Light Before Darkness", but never mentions the title Kees finally chose). But it's a must-read for anyone interested in the multitalented Kees. Reading it inspired me to get out my copy of the CD of songs Kees recorded with San Francisco jazzman Bob Helm, HOLIDAY RAG, and play it again. My favorite track, "Culture Vulture Lucy", sounds (with a pronoun change, of course) like Kees' epitaph for himself: "Reading, painting, talking, giving her all for art"....It's a shame I'll never get to read Kees' lost stories and novels, but we've got his fine poems, his great stories, his flawed but intriguing novel FALL QUARTER, and now, this worthy biography that manages to make sense of his life.

[lisa_emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kees will always be one of those people who will become more intriguing as time passes. Partially as a result of his diversity: he painted, wrote, filmed, and even composed songs. Reidel does a pretty thorough job of tracing Kees' emergence as a writer out of Nebraska to his fluid movement within the New York art circles of the late 40s and his final stop in San Francisco. And everywhere, you can sense Kees' discontent and restlessness, even in his removed marriage his college sweetheart, Ann Swan. And of course, there is always his mysterious death that compels fans into conspiracy thrall.

Reidel writes of Kees' life as though you were watching a documentary on PBS- jauntily, but not too interfering. It is a narrative voice that you trust- it gives you the facts without too much postulating on the motives of such an inscrutable subject.

[Bradthad Codgeroger · Rating 5 out of 5]

He plowed himself into as many of the arts as he could in his short life like he knew he didn't have much time. They all let him down.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 5 out of 5]

First rate biography of the poet, fiction writer, musician and photographer/film-maker Weldon Kees who vanished in 1955--either via a leap from the Golden Gate Bridge or an escape into a new life (in Mexico?). Kees published in "name" places of the time--New Yorker, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Partisan Review; he knew many of the "name" writers and artists of the time; he spent time at Yadoo--and yet within a couple of years of his death he was virtually forgotten, a situation which Donald Justice, Dana Gioia and James Reidel have tried to remedy. As a writer likewise outside any established circles, I feel a kinship with Kees, a sense that he too couldn't make the final "leap" into full-blown acceptance because he hadn't come up through the right schools and didn't hobknob with the right people.

[Patrick Carraher · Rating 2 out of 5]

I recently became interested in Weldon Kees--the author, poet, painter, critic, and producer, from Beatrice, NE who disappeared in about 1955. This book certainly provides a lot of information about Kees. However, I don't think it is meant to be an entertaining biography. Rather, it reads like a report--an almost week-by-week report of Kees' life. If you want to read an entertaining biography, this is not the book for you. But if you want to learn as much as possible about the life and times of Weldon Kees, then you should read this book.

[Tosh]

The great Kevin Killian gave this a very large rave on Amazon for this bio of a troubled but what seems to be a super talented nova of an artist, writer, poet, songwriter, and filmmaker. I just recently discovered this figure by our Ginnie here at Goodreads. I must get and read!

[Margaret · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weldon Kees is not a widely known poet but his work is singular and interesting. His disappearance, probably a suicide, is strange and disturbing. I highly recommend this biography if you want to learn about a fascinating, jazz-loving poet and artist.