Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees Book

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?

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.