From the issue dated June 13, 2003
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The Man Who Was Not ThereScholars catch up with Weldon Kees, a poet and artist who vanished in 1955By SCOTT McLEMEE Weldon Kees was a writer's writer. He has a devoted following among poets in
As James Reidel notes in Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees (published this month by the University of Nebraska Press), friends and admirers soon began to speculate that the author might have staged his own death, then fled to start life over in some new place. For Mr. Reidel, an independent scholar living in Cin-cinnati, the question mark is a mere formality. He has found abundant evidence that Kees had been contemplating suicide for some while. Mr. Reidel, comparing himself to the gumshoes in the B-movie thrillers the poet loved, says he pursued his study of Kees "far longer than a normal person would." His fascination began with the copy of the Collected Poems that he received as a college-graduation present in 1979. "I thought there would be [a biography] already done, as there had been with other writers of his generation, like Robert Lowell." At the time, though, the secondary literature on Kees consisted of no more than a handful of essays. Mr. Reidel's work is the first full-scale biography of the author. The book appears at a propitious moment. One of Kees's most ardent enthusiasts, Dana Gioia, was recently named chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Mr. Gioia says a photograph of Kees, as well as one of his collages, will be displayed in his office at the NEA once he can get them transported to Washington from his home in California. "Almost half a century has gone by since he disappeared," Mr. Gioia says, "but today Kees is one of the two or three most influential American poets from the postwar period." A debatable point, certainly -- but one that the chairman repeats, for emphasis. Like Mr. Reidel's perseverance, Mr. Gioia's strong claims for Kees reflect the powerful hold that his life and work still exert. It is a force that owes nothing to the English department. "He's never had an important academic critic championing his work," Mr. Gioia says. On the Move The portrait that emerges from Mr. Reidel's biography, and from Kees's own writings, is that of a man never quite settled, his creative versatility not altogether distinct from sheer restlessness. He had a knack for disappearing from a scene just before it was "discovered" -- staying a step ahead of an acclaim that might have overwhelmed him. Born to a middle-class family in Lincoln, Neb., he began publishing fiction, poetry, and reviews in national literary journals while a student at the University of Nebraska. Kees's short fiction, portraying dark scenes from Midwestern lives of quiet desperation, were narrated in an understated style as flat as the landscape he portrayed. They now read very much like the work Raymond Carver published in the 1970s. At the time, they were regularly selected for anthologies of the year's best fiction -- until 1942, when Kees moved to New York and abruptly abandoned fiction. He published two volumes of poetry and began painting and making collages. To support himself, he reviewed books for Time magazine and wrote the voice-overs for newsreels. By the end of the decade, the circle of artists with whom he exhibited became known as the New York School, also called the Abstract Expressionists. A famous group portrait of artists from his circle appeared in Life magazine. But Kees didn't show up for the photo shoot. Just as New York was being proclaimed the new world capital of the arts, he moved to San Francisco. While continuing to paint and to write poetry, he began to compose jazz songs. He also started a small theatrical troupe, for which he wrote a play. He started taking photographs; many of them appeared in a social-science monograph that he wrote with a Swiss scholar whose English wasn't quite up to it. And he made short films on animal and human behavior in collaboration with Gregory Bateson, the anthropologist later known for his theory of the "double bind" -- a kind of self-contradictory pattern in human communication, which Bateson believed induced schizophrenia. As Mr. Reidel shows, the question of mental illness was coming ever closer to home for Kees. His wife, long an alcoholic, began showing unmistakable signs of paranoid schizophrenia; they separated in 1954. Kees himself was prone to what he called "a state of vague metaphysical depression." His spirits were not lifted when, the same year, he passed his 40th birthday, which raised the question -- perhaps especially troubling for the overachiever -- of just what he had accomplished. "The lacerating effects of middle age are dreadful," he wrote in a letter. "The trick of repeating, 'It can't get any worse,' is certainly no good, when all the evidence points to quite the opposite." By Kees's last days in San Francisco, says Mr. Reidel, he "was working on a film showing parallels between the Golden Gate Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge." It was a project with overtones from one of his favorite poets, Hart Crane, who had written a kind of lyrical epic about the Brooklyn structure before killing himself in 1932. Kees started doing research for a book about famous suicides. And he became fascinated by Dostoevsky's novel The Possessed, in which the demented revolutionary Kirolov presents philosophical arguments for self-murder as the only human action embodying absolute freedom. In July 1955, after a few drinks, Kees mentioned to a friend that he had been contemplating a jump from the Golden Gate Bridge. He had gotten as far as the rail, he said, but couldn't bring himself to put his foot over the edge. He also mentioned the idea of relocating once more -- this time, to Mexico. A few days later, the California Highway Patrol found his car in a parking lot near the bridge, with the keys still in the ignition. Living the Afterlife Word of Kees's disappearance spread so slowly through the network of his friends and admirers that, as Mr. Reidel writes, it "gave the strange story the unreality and remoteness more often associated with a lost expedition or a mountain climber who had not returned." Although Kees had been preoccupied with Hart Crane, his friends began to wonder if a more appropriate reference might have been to the satirist Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared in Mexico the very year Kees was born. (Indeed, his library record reads "Bierce, Ambrose. 1842-1914?") In 1960, Donald Justice, then a professor of English at the University of Iowa, edited The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees (now available from Nebraska). "He speaks to us in a voice or, rather, in a particular tone of voice which we have not heard before," wrote Mr. Justice in the introduction. "The bitterness may be traced to a profound hatred for a botched civilization." The stage was set for Kees to emerge as an almost mythic figure: the tormented genius, lost in America, driven to extremes, who vanished without a trace. As Mr. Gioia points out in an essay titled "The Cult of Weldon Kees," other poets began writing verse about him and reprinting his work in anthologies they edited. "The cult of Kees grew out of the juxtaposition of life and art, the stark and searing poetry viewed against the doomed and nihilistic life that produced it." Mr. Gioia lists dozens of poets who have expressed admiration for Kees or written homages to him, including Hayden Carruth, David Lehmann, Mark Strand, and David Wojahn. Some have speculated that Kees's poems about an alter ego he called Robinson may have been an influence on the Dream Songs of John Berryman. Meanwhile, literary scholars ignored Kees altogether -- at least until the mid-1980s, when two volumes of analysis appeared, without great fanfare. "Academic critics go through generations," says Mr. Gioia. "Deconstruction appears, then it's dead, and something else takes its place. But it's the poets who really determine who will last." Like it or not, the Kees cultists may have to share their totem with scholars who will treat him as part of American cultural history. "I'm trying to take Kees out of the box marked 'The Poet Who Disappeared,'" says Daniel A. Seidell, curator of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. In 1998, he organized an exhibition of Kees's graphic art, which was shown at the Sheldon and at the University of Iowa Museum of Art. It was in the creative-writing program at Iowa, Mr. Seidell notes, that the posthumous rediscovery and mythologization of Kees began. "I'd like to see Kees's films being dealt with by film scholars and critics, his painting dealt with by curators and art historians, his poetry dealt with, not by friends and by people who see him as their own poetic influence, but by people who can step back and look at the larger picture," says Mr. Seidell. As a step in that direction, he has edited a volume of critical essays, Weldon Kees and the Arts at Midcentury, forthcoming from Nebraska in January. Looking at Kees in historical context, the curator says, involves challenging some familiar interpretations of the period in which he worked. Accounts of the New York avant garde circa 1950 tend to take the ascendancy of Abstract Expressionism for granted. "History gets interpreted retroactively as triumphalist," says Mr. Seidell. "But many of the artists from Kees's circle never thought they would sell anything. One of the things I noticed in his art criticism was that Kees really appreciated those artists who were willing to develop slowly, who were able to resist the way the galleries wanted them to paint. He always picked out exhibitions that showed artists struggling with their aesthetic language in the face of all the temptations to crank out work for a certain audience." One challenge to scholars now, Mr. Seidell says, is finding a critical vocabulary that can deal with Kees's "polyartistry" -- his multimedia creativity. Another is dealing with the resistance that comes from the more rapturous admirers. "There is a feeling among enthusiasts that once you institutionalize Kees by having critics and professionals write about him, the spirit is gone. I think there's a real interest in keeping the mystery." It is a matter that concerns Mr. Reidel, too, whose biography may be the consummate work of Keesian cultism. "In a way, I am -- I don't want to say spoiling, but certainly altering the way people discover Kees. There's a more established interest in him now. But I think there will always be a fascination about Kees. There are still a lot of question marks." WHERE'S WELDON? Writings by Kees The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees, edited by Donald Justice (University of Nebraska Press, revised ed. 1975)Books About Kees Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees, by James Reidel (Nebraska, 2003) http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 49, Issue 40, Page A14
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education