On the face of the matter, it seems unlikely that an artist who was an unapologetic atheist, a leftist, and a congenital rebel against both the academic and the avant-garde establishment could number such classicists as poet Allen Tate and critic Cleanth Brooks among his friends and advocates—or, more improbable yet, that his artistic reputation, several decades after his death, would be championed by the New Formalist poet and Republican-appointed head of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia.

Improbable, yes—but perhaps more than any other mid-century artist, Weldon Kees defies easy classification. Born the well-off only son of a small-town industrialist in Nebraska, Kees wrote short stories, novels, and remarkable, Eliot- and Auden-influenced poetry in the Thirties and Forties before turning to abstract painting, jazz composition, and experimental film as media for his restless creative energy. He wrote some of his best early poems while working as a librarian in Denver, moved to New York and lived among some of the best-known artists and writers of the 20th century, then several years later abandoned New York in favor of bohemian San Francisco, where he is presumed to have committed suicide in 1955 by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. (His car was found in the nearby visitor's lot.) He was 41 years old.

Untimely death has boosted the public profiles of any number of artists, from Shelley to Sylvia Plath, but such was not the case for Kees, whose poems quickly disappeared from anthologies and whose participation in New York's Abstract Expressionist movement went widely unrecognized. Instead, as Dana Gioia has described, in subsequent decades Kees became the object of devotion for an underground cult of writers "whose passion for Kees's poetry extended into a fascination with his frenetic life and mysterious disappearance." Slipping into deep obscurity in the decades following the 1960 publication of his Collected Poems in a well-received but difficult to find limited edition, Kees has since benefited from a growing resurgence in attention, which now culminates in the publication of two important works, James Reidel's biography Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees, and the critical anthology Weldon Kees and the Arts at Midcentury, edited by Daniel A. Siedell.

Poet James Reidel has pursued the subject of Kees for some two decades. With Vanished Act he has produced a major biographical work that will rectify critical neglect of Kees and bring the artist long-deserved public attention. Comprehensive and extensively researched, the book traces Kees' life and artistic development while being careful to place him in the context of the cultural figures and currents that swirled about him.

Indeed, Vanished Act reveals just how diverse Kees' intimates were: in the acknowledgements that preface the text, Reidel thanks friends and acquaintances as wildly varied as Malcolm Cowley, Saul Bellow, Phyllis Diller, Allen Ginsberg, and Pauline Kael. When I read the list before reading the book, I assumed that at least some of these figures had been cited for the inspiration they had provided rather than for their direct involvement with the biography; afterward I recalled that each had featured in Kees' life in some fashion.

Reidel keeps track as well of the constant changes in plan, perspective, and interest that characterized Kees' life, a process Reidel describes as more "like working with shattered glass than with the picture of a body hitting the water." After a youth that included attendance at three colleges, a stint in a master's program at the University of Chicago, a season in Hollywood, and a year working on the Works Progress Administration's State Guide project for Nebraska (a period he seems not to have esteemed highly, unlike so many of his contemporaries), Kees arrived at library school in Denver and began to produce dark, often ironic short stories and poems that were soon published in national literary periodicals.

Kees' poems—which are ultimately credited as his most important achievement—often focus upon the claustrophobia of rooms, at once describing the accretion of objects that define spaces but also admitting their inability to illumine or "know" the humanity that might live inside. The influence of Eliot is clear, in a more distinctly American voice, but both Reidel and the contributors to the Siedell anthology note the echoes of such other contemporaries as Nathaniel West.

In "Robinson," to cite one of his best-known poems, Kees describes the protagonist's apartment, eerie in his absence:

The dog stops barking after Robinson has gone.
His act is over. The world is a gray world,
Not without violence, and he kicks under the grand piano,
The nightmare chase well under way

These themes of vacancy, abandonment, and indeed, disappearance would surface again and again in Kees' writings and later, most poignantly, in his experimental film Hotel Apex, which surveyed an old Bay Area transit hotel slated for demolition.

As the number of his publications began to mount, Kees began to attract notice from writers and editors in New York, which motivated him and his wife Ann to move to the city in 1943. Repeatedly, however, with a darkly comical persistence, circumstances thwarted Kees' desires for literary success. An editor sat down to read the draft of Kees' satirical academic novel Fall Quarter on the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. "Overnight," Reidel notes, "the late-Depression world in which Kees's story was anchored had vanished, and Fall Quarter became a period piece inside of a day," deemed unpublishable. Kees did publish a well-regarded first collection of poems, The Last Man, and a second, The Fall of the Magicians, but his career as a poet lost momentum when, as a consequence of a business merger, the publishing house let the volume go out of print earlier than had been expected—a turn of affairs that will seem depressingly familiar to writers today.

By the late Forties he had received gallery openings and critical attention for his abstract paintings, but he subsequently missed inclusion in a now-famous group photograph of artists in Life magazine ("The Irascible Eighteen") because he had decided to move to San Francisco. In San Francisco, Kees spun out the remainder of his life in a bewildering number of projects: playing Dixieland jazz, composing musical scores for experimental films, trying to set up a film school, and hosting a talk show about movies on the Bay Area's left-leaning Pacifica radio station (where he came to know Pauline Kael).

Both Vanished Act and the essays in Weldon Kees and the Arts at Midcentury explore the psychological issues that might have occasioned Kees' restlessness; they also seek to map the scope of his achievement and assess the significance of an artistic life lived in so many pieces. In Vanished Act, Reidel cites San Francisco Examiner arts reporter Helga Voigt's observation—made also by many of the Siedell anthology's contributors—about the value Kees placed on avoiding the " 'modern penchant for specialization,'" the way that "'modern society pushes people in one groove.'"

The essays gathered in Weldon Kees and the Arts at Midcentury vary greatly in tone and angle of approach. A number of them, including the distinguished art historian Dore Ashton's "Midcentury Cultural Milieu" and Stephen C. Foster's "Weldon Kees, the Avant-Garde, and the Crisis of Identity," provide thoughtful historical background. Only one essay, Nicholas Spencer's "Late Modernism and the Minor Literature of Weldon Kees' Poetry," is so laden with allusions to critical theorists as to be virtually unreadable for the nonacademic. Other essays examine Kees' relationship to the "New York School" of abstract painting, his published art criticism, and, in another contribution by James Reidel, his contribution to silent experimental films.

Like a number of his contemporaries, Kees once described the subject matter of his paintings as "paint itself. The paintings are quite simply 'about paint.' " Taking up this comment, Dore Ashton suggests that painting must have signified an "astonishing freedom from the worrying issues" that marked Kees' career as a poet. Yet in the proliferations of rooms, objects, and loss, Kees' poems are not, in the end, so different from his intentions in painting: each represents a search for grounding and stability that he found elusive.

Dana Gioia, in "The Cult of Weldon Kees," which also forms part of the Siedell anthology, observes in a passage worth quoting at length:

Kees's importance among poets surely rests at least partially on that symbolic—indeed almost sacrificial—demonstration of art pursued for mortal stakes. Despite its ironic exterior and worldly tone, Kees's poetry displays an earnest intensity. His life was dedicated to art as a means of spiritual self-discovery in a world that offered him no religious consolation. Even his restless shifting between media reveals the totality of his commitment.

In short, while Kees finds a terrible blankness at the end of his efforts, the passion of his search lends his quest enduring transcendent value.

Caroline Langston lives near Washington, D.C., and works for NPR. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Image, Arkansas Review, and many other publications.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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