Out of Kees
CAPLAN, DAVID
Out of Kees The strange life and death of the American poet Weldon Kees. BY DAVID CAPLAN Why don't you want to be a success?" Truman Capote V V asked Weldon Kees soon after they met. Not waiting...
...We must remain until the roof falls in, he wrote...
...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...
...Dylan Thomas revived the villanelle by using it to exhort his father to rage, rage against the dying of the light...
...Mentally he pictured prospects: Interplayer actresses, women at Langley Porter, Ketty...
...Though Kees had often spoken of suicide, mentioning a desire to jump off the bridge, rumors persisted that he had fled to Mexico...
...In fact the biographer somehow gains access to his subject's most intimate calculations, reporting on the particular women whom the poet considered pursuing...
...A ghoulish delight in decline and fall inspired that poetry...
...back East he swapped gossip over old-fashioneds with Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy...
...The mad detective shares Kees's tragic view of life...
...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...
...Born in 1914, Kees belonged to a famously competitive generation of poets...
...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...
...Soon after graduation he married the only woman he had ever dated and began unsuccessfully pursuing several careers, often at the same time...
...Despite the subtitle, Kees's actual art receives less attention and almost no substantive analysis in the book...
...Much of Vanished Act is a record of Kees's wearying efforts to scrape together enough money to live...
...In 1955 Kees disappeared...
...Born in Beatrice, Nebraska, to a family that owned a successful hardware-manufacturing business, Kees attended several Midwestern colleges...
...that human existence is a bleak, unsolvable riddle...
...Contemporaries as different as William Carlos Williams and Allen Tate praised his poetry...
...In 1990 Story Line Press published Fall Quarter posthumously, with an introduction by Reidel...
...their marriage ended in divorce...
...Maybe a new girlfriend would be a healthy change...
...Kees used the same form to witness an eerie collapse...
...Elusive and unequivocal, the final image also suggests how such hopelessness remains ultimately impenetrable, even for a biographer as knowledgeable about his subject as Reidel...
...Kees makes a great subject for a biography because he knew everyone...
...Why, you're a much better poet than old Robert Lowell...
...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...
...On the air at Berkeley's KPFA radio station, Kees talked movies with a young Pauline Kael...
...several top publishing houses almost accepted Kees's novel, Fall Quarter, but the outbreak of World War II made the academic farce seem dated...
...Not waiting for a response, Capote added, "I can tell from the way you act you don't want to be a success...
...Adding an air of melodrama, Vanished Act devotes its opening and closing chapters to the disappearance...
...As James Reidel notes in his David Caplan teaches English at Ohio Wesleyan University...
...Defective plaster isn't all the cause...
...This statement's decisiveness contrasts with the rest of the book's hedging...
...Like her husband, Ann Kees was a hard drinker and suffered from depression...
...But Kees's artistic career suffered from bad timing and a series of near misses...
...A crack is moving down the wall...
...Clement Green-berg almost reviewed his painting exhibition, which Greenberg called "terrific...
...painstaking biography Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees, Kees viewed success ambivalently, seeking "some gray area between neglect and fame...
...Despite such difficulties, Kees's work attracted a devoted following...
...only months before his disappearance he was forced to ask his parents for another modest handout...
...Spengler is such fun," he once remarked...
...The introduction declares that the case of Kees's disappearance "is closed and long has been...
...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...
...That's certainly true, but only twenty-five pages before, Reidel recounts Kees's thoughts as he flew across California...
...His car was found parked by the Golden Gate Bridge, with the keys left in the ignition...
...Kees never enjoyed an academic position, let alone the security that tenure affords, and never traveled abroad, with or without a Guggenheim...
...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...
...Screaming all day of war, screaming that nothing can be solved...
...Eliot's "The Waste Land" at one of the "Poets' Follies" that Kees organized...
...Vanished Act lucidly examines Kees's heartbreaking life...
...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...
...It is not possible to know his thoughts," Reidel writes of Kees's drive to the bridge...
Vol. 9 • September 2003 • No. 2
