The Disappearing Poet
What ever happened to Weldon Kees?
by Anthony Lane July 4, 2005
Keywords
Kees, Weldon;
Poets, Poetry;
San Francisco, California;
Paramount News Service;
Art, Artists;
Reidel, James “Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees”;
“Fall Quarter”
It is almost half a century since San Francisco police found a 1954 Plymouth Savoy on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge. On Tuesday, July 19, 1955, a highway patrol reported that the car, belonging to a Weldon Kees, had been discovered with the keys in the ignition. Two of Kees’s friends, Michael Grieg and Adrian Wilson, went to search the apartment of the missing man. There they found, among other things, his cat, Lonesome, and a pair of red socks in a sink. His wallet, watch, and sleeping bag were missing. So was his savings-account book, although the balance, which stood at more than eight hundred dollars, would remain that way. There was no suicide note.
Nobody has seen or heard from Weldon Kees since Monday, July 18, 1955. That afternoon, he called two women who knew him well. The first was Janet Richards, who at that moment—one of those wrong and shapeless moments which dog the tragic—was heading out the door to fetch her mother-in-law from the airport. “Things are pretty bad,” Kees said, adding, “I may go to Mexico. To stay.” Richards was too distracted to offer help. “I felt like a murderer,” she later said. Of the other woman he asked, at the end of the conversation, “What keeps you going?” She had been working as a writer and broadcaster in the Bay Area and beyond. Her name was Pauline Kael.
Kees had met her because he and Grieg ran a weekly radio broadcast on KPFA, out of Berkeley, called “Behind the Movie Camera,” on which Kael had become a regular guest. Movies were one of Kees’s passions: he had worked on newsreels in the nineteen-forties and had recently, in one of his loftier schemes, mooted the idea of a new production studio. It would bear the title San Francisco Films, and, according to Kees’s assiduous biographer, James Reidel, would deliver “a cross between art-house foreign films and noir American B-movies.” Kees himself was toiling on a script, a spy thriller called “Gadabout,” and was discussing another with Hugh Kenner, whose magisterial years as a critic, like those of Kael, were soon to come. (So many famous names enter the story of Kees. He seemed to drift into their orbit for a while, then spin away.) Yet it is not as a filmmaker that he would wish to be remembered. Nor can we even be sure of such a wish.
On January 22nd of that final year, he and a few kindred spirits had put together an event called “Poets’ Follies,” a mishmash of readings, music, and dance. It was poised, like so many Keesian schemes, between old and new, a rickety fusion of post-twenties burlesque and pre-sixties art happening. Kees read some of his work, as did a local poet by the name of Lawrence Ferling. (It would stretch, over time, into the more exotic Ferlinghetti.) A stripper was hired from Oakland to sashay onstage and declaim some T. S. Eliot, a move of which he would surely have approved. There was a jazz band, with Kees on standup piano. They played a version of “I Ain’t Gonna Give Nobody None o’ This Jelly Roll.” Kees was introduced as “Mr. Weldon Kees, poet, painter, artist, etcetera, composer, critic, etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitum.”
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Half a century later, what remains? Most people have never heard of Kees. A handful may hum and frown, then mention an anthology of verse in which his name cropped up. Longtime readers of this magazine may recall a poem or two that appeared in these pages. “The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees,” edited by Donald Justice, was published in 1960. There has been a devout effort to revive, or perhaps create, his reputation, yet the impact has been limited. Something about Kees, in his afterlife as in his life, feels determined to elude any ambitions we may harbor on his behalf. Poets seem more readily enthused than scholars by his example, yet even that enthusiasm has a gleam of the cultish, as if Kees had hailed from (and returned to) a flickering underworld. Every now and then, one finds a fellow-Keesian—somebody who has picked up the scent of the mysterious figure and followed the trail. And that trail always leads to the same place. Not to the movies, or to the paintings; not to the short stories, or to the fruitless novels; not even to the poems, the crucible and crown of his achievement. Instead, we are led ad infinitum: to the Golden Gate, and to the empty Plymouth; to what did or did not happen next, and so to the reflection, as in a rearview mirror, of all that had come before.
Harry Weldon Kees was born in 1914 in Beatrice, Nebraska. That may be the most important thing about him. As an adult, he gravitated to hubs and hotbeds, on both coasts, yet one rarely gathers the sense, on reading the testimony of his colleagues, of a man with his heart in the metropolis. For the mid-century artist of any kind, the city was inescapable. Even if you chose not to live there, you had to grapple with the millions who did. Yet the figure cut by Kees—visibly so, in many photographs of him—suggests not an insider but an intruder, somebody from out of town who may leave the party at any time. He mixed and drank with writers and painters, but he never resembled them. It was as if the artistic look were surplus to requirements; or, rather, as if to don the outer crust of an insurance agent or an advertising man—to conduct oneself like the steady Nebraskan citizen that Kees might have stayed to become—struck him as the slyest of disguises, enabling him to slip his poems under the door, without being noticed or making a scene.
Kees came from German stock, and he entered a world of unexcitable prosperity. His father was John Kees, who ran the F. D. Kees Manufacturing Company, makers of hooks, handles, cornhuskers, and other items of hardware, and who at one time held the presidency of the Nebraska Manufacturers Association. He was a temperate soul, courteous and compact, with an unlikely width in his reading tastes. He was married to the firm-jawed Sarah, a more formidable presence in the consciousness of her son; any of us would duck our heads, perhaps, before a woman so gripped by her clannish past that she joined a society entitled Americans of Royal Descent. Kees—an only child, one is unsurprised to learn—was educated at Beatrice High School. He was also a Boy Scout with a knack for telling ghost stories, and a movie nut, whose review of a talking picture (the first he had ever seen) was published in the Beatrice Daily Sun. His boyhood unfolded in what he called the “civilized, elegant, and lush world of the Wilson-Harding-Coolidge years.” Lusher for some than for others, one might add, and what matters is that Kees the poet, when recalling Kees the child, rubbed some of the shine off the myth, as in a poem called “1926”:
The porchlight coming on again,
Early November, the dead leaves
Raked in piles, the wicker swing
Creaking. Across the lots
A phonograph is playing Ja-Da.
An orange moon. I see the lives
Of neighbors, mapped and marred
Like all the wars ahead, and R.
Insane, B. with his throat cut,
Fifteen years from now, in Omaha.
I did not know them then.
My airedale scratches at the door.
And I am back from seeing Milton Sills
And Doris Kenyon. Twelve years old.
The porchlight coming on again.
How would the editors of the Daily Sun feel about printing that? One imagines them wilting beneath the sardonic violence of the second paragraph, which spreads into the fond, neat stitching of the other stanzas (Sills and Kenyon were movie stars of the period) like a creeping stain. As so often with Kees, the most needling line is the plainest: “I did not know them then.” What a fine balance it strikes, implying both “my childhood was happy, since you ask, kept away from such mortal things,” and also, “how little I knew of the world—a world we ought to know—and of the damage it can wreak.”
In the fall of 1931, Kees went on to Doane College, in nearby Crete. There he acted, wrote, and played piano in a jazz trio—taking the place of another Nebraska boy, Spangler Arlington Brugh, who would soon leave behind both his state and, understandably, his name, and reappear in Hollywood as Robert Taylor. After a brief sojourn at the University of Missouri at Columbia, Kees entered the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, in 1934. Even as he arrived, his first short story, “Saturday Rain,” was published in the Prairie Schooner, a literary journal of some heft, edited by a professor at the university named Lowry C. Wimberly. For the next year, Kees labored on a novel, “Slow Parade,” which was never published, and of which no copy exists. Given that he was deep into a groove of Joyce and Dos Passos—Wimberly is described in one letter as wearing “a doublebreasted robinseggblue suit with clarkgable pockets and a shirred back”—the loss is not unbearable.
From here on, the rhythm of Kees’s life followed no steady beat. His studies were peripatetic at best—delayed graduation at Lincoln, graduate school in Chicago—and the restiveness stayed in his blood. On a whim, though partly in pursuit of a college friend named Ann Swan, he headed west, to Los Angeles, at the start of 1936. If there were hopes that Brugh, now a movie star, would welcome a fellow-Nebraskan and ease him into Hollywood society, or a job on the lot, they were quickly dashed. Back in Lincoln, Kees spun out his time on the production of a new guide to the state, sponsored by the Federal Writers’ Project. There he made a friend in Norris Getty, who remembered Kees as a ferocious editor—“a good deal of pencil lead was worn away.” Next, as if trying anything that came to mind, Kees began a degree in library science at the University of Denver. There, on October 3, 1937, he married Ann. He noted the joyful event in a letter on the eve of the wedding before passing on to matters of greater weight, such as the clientele of the Denver Public Library.
Again, there is a spectral, somewhat Jamesian suggestion of a man who manages to be absent from his own life. Even as we sieve the evidence of the poems, the stories, and the correspondence, their creator is removed from the picture; we are like homicide detectives, chalking a white outline around the space where Weldon Kees used to be. Politically, he tilted to the left, but his undemonstrative bearing, like his suit and brogues, told a more upright tale. Robert E. Knoll, who put together “Weldon Kees and the Midcentury Generation,” a choice of Kees’s letters with a running commentary, points out that “he may have looked like a ‘pinko’ to Gage County, Nebraska, but to the urban crowd of The New Masses, which he read, he was Old Guard.” Photographs show him reluctant to smile, armed with a cigarette as if with a dagger, and graced with a trim mustache: thus equipped, he came closer than any other American author, living or dead, to looking like Howard Hughes.
The Keeses stayed in Denver, with occasional escapes. I especially like the level-toned report that he sent of Portland, Oregon: “I think it unlikely that there has been any sexual intercourse there in some years.” Meanwhile, his short stories were attracting notice. One of them, “The Life of the Mind,” appeared in “Best Short Stories” in 1941. Some Keesians have argued the case for the fiction, viewing it as a solid achievement that should run alongside the poems. The ardent Kees scholar Dana Gioia has edited a selection of forty-three tales and sketches, all of which give off a sour particularity that feels difficult to shake. The one Kees novel that we possess, “Fall Quarter,” completed in 1941, is a dexterous addition to the genre of the campus saga. Its youthful protagonist takes a teaching post at a Midwestern college, and soon succumbs to the bleary epidemic of disillusion that infects his colleagues. No publisher was content with Kees’s effort (it became available only in 1990), and what it leaves behind is little more than the reek of provincial observation—tart, miniature scenes served up by the narrator like a shot of rye. “He was about thirty-eight and looked like the sort of person who always orders the fruit cup on the sixty-five cent dinner.” “There was a noise from the bathroom, and a gnarled little woman, carrying a black oilcloth bag, emerged and walked through the room.” Images like these tend to drift, unattached, through a page of Kees’s prose. If they want to find a home, they need a poem.
At some indefinable point, Kees summoned the nerve, denied to weaker writers, to strip down the workings of his talent and see what functioned best. “I’m not doing what I want to do; is anyone?” he asked in a letter of 1938. A year and a half later, in another letter, he answered his own plea: “I have been writing quite a little poetry.” Notice that there is no declaration of intent, no banner raised: merely a furtive determination to track down the voice that would best allow him to speak his mind, or to dramatize the minds of others. By 1941, he had amassed thirty-nine poems, enough to fill a book, “The Last Man,” which two years later finally crawled into print. From the opening poem, “Subtitle,” we feel ourselves to be in the presence of a Masonic plan: a politely coded scheme to shift around the furniture of our daily lives, and to see what the rearrangement brings by way of enchantment and threat.
We request these things only:
All gum must be placed beneath the seats
Or swallowed quickly, all popcorn sacks Must be left in the foyer. The doors
Will remain closed throughout
The performance. Kindly consult
Your programs: observe that
There are no exits. This is
A necessary precaution.
It would be tricky to visit a cinema after this and not suffer a crackle of disquiet. Kees was never the kind of person to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre, but he might have been the sort to croon it in the ear of an usherette. He makes it his business to put us at our unease.
This is not to say that the business always succeeds. More than half the poems falter and fail, either because they try too hard (“Can you hear the worthless morning’s mirth?”) or because they lunge disastrously at the surreal (“Impromptu unicorns enact ballets, / Applauded by bourgeoisie in negligée”). Still more of them are so profoundly in hock to the work of Kees’s masters that they barely evince any vital signs of their own. The wistful imperative of “Put on your hat, put on your gloves. / But there isn’t any love, there isn’t any love” could be issued only by someone whose bedside table creaked with too much Auden and MacNeice, while the debt to Eliot collapses into blatant homage: “Elizabethans had/ Sweeneys and Mrs. Porters too.” And yet, now and then, something new shows through—a glimpse of a dented mind, buckling beneath terrors both immanent and unexplained. Warnings are delivered, in language as clear as an office memo, to the watchful:
Pull the curtains to the sill,
Darken the rooms, cut all the wires.
Crush the embers as they fall
From the dying fires:
Things are not going well.
Were things going well for Kees? To say that he was received with open arms when he moved to New York, in 1943, would be pushing it, but he was unquestionably received. Partisan Review had already published his poetry and criticism, and on previous trips the right introductions had been made. Even then, as early as 1940, his proud reports from the cultural core were dotted and distanced with mockery: “Mr. and Mrs. Dwight Macdonald entertained a select group of their friends last night at their Greenwich Village apartment, the honored out-of-town guests being Mr. Richard Eberhart, Mr. Morton Dauwen Zabel, and Mr. Weldon Kees. Those present were Mr. and Mrs. Lionel Trilling, Mr. and Mrs. Walker Evans, Mr. Philip Rahv . . . ” And so on. Three years later, the name-drops had acquired an acid tinge. At one get-together, an argument develops about the correct pronunciation of Randall Jarrell’s name. (“Accent on the last syllable, says Edmund Wilson.”) At another:
There were people there you never expected to see, like Graham Greene, looking like a pasty elderly edition of one of his weaker heroes; and people you thought were permanently settled in sanataria, like Jean Stafford, looking more ravaged and nervous than you had thought possible; and people you thought were in Europe, like Janet Flanner and people who did not quite seem to fit in to a party for Stephen Spender, like Clifton Fadiman and Max Lerner. . . . When people left, they said, What a lovely party! Thank you so much. See you soon.
That coda is the authentic note of horror: not just Kees’s own distaste but the Hamlet-like horror that we have all felt, quite suddenly, at the prospect of drowning in society—even if it is a society that has welcomed us, and in which we should profitably swim. Kees remained on the East Coast for seven years, and yet, in accounts of that stay, he seems like a man who never unpacked. “By the winter of 1949-50 I would have settled for Atchison or Lone Pine, Ark.,” he told a friend. The sociable solitary is an easily pained but far from unusual breed; one distinguishing characteristic is that farewells are forever on the brink of being made.
The loneliness came with a twist. Observe that at the Macdonald soirée he was “Mr. Weldon Kees.” A month before going to New York, he had written to Norris Getty, “Ann and I are separating: that is one item.* Her address will be 418 E. Center, Douglas, Wyoming.” The asterisk referred to a postscript: “Please say nothing of this.” Once again, the Keesian upheaval was no sooner registered than hushed up. Four months later, the rift was apparently healed (“Ann and I are together again and have a remarkably cool apartment on lower Fifth Avenue & 10th street”), but we know no more of its causes than we do of the wartime draft classification that marked Kees as 4F, describing him as “psychologically unfit for service.” In retrospect, what is remarkable about the cataclysm of 1955 is that it took so long to come. He somehow considered it his duty, as a scion of the Kees Manufacturing Company, to wrest and tamp his miseries underground—a guarantee, needless to say, that they would eventually explode. There is no more volatile compound known to man than that of decorum and despair.
In the case of Kees, only a few friends realized what was going on. “As a social being,” Janet Richards wrote, “he was funny, joking, and always in good spirits.” Any lowering of those spirits, and the drawbridge was pulled up, as Richards makes clear: “I never heard him refer to, or reply to, a profundity. Instead, Weldon could bring all his trivia together during an evening, and on the way home you felt you had just glimpsed the grave.” Only in the poems do the glimpses start to multiply. Nowhere else, in life or in art, did Kees seem at liberty to master his shame and to display its unsavory spoils. His second book, “The Fall of the Magicians,” came out in 1947. Technically, it leapt adroitly forward from the first. Spiritually, it plunged downward and barely paused for breath, as these fragments prove:
Men we once honored share a crooked eye.
We can do nothing more than mourn.
The girls we loved will marry them, and die.
—“Five Villanelles.”
“—Your face is never clear. You always stand
In charcoal doorways in the dark. Part ofyour face
Is gone. You say, ‘Just to be through with this damned world.
Contagious fogs blow in. Christ, we could die
The way deer sometimes do, their antlers locked,
Rotting in snow.’
—“Girl at Midnight.”
Only a suburban house with the front door open
And a dog barking at a squirrel, and the cars
Passing. The corpse quite dead. The wife in Florida.
—“Crime Club.”
Those last lines bear an odd yet definite kinship with the death of Charlotte Haze, in “Lolita”—the dire circumstance cutting, all but comically, through the quiet, well-kept day. By then, Kees had forsaken fiction, yet the narrative impetus did not abate; instead, it was filtered, in concentrated form, into the poems. It was these which served to tell his American stories, pouring forth his annotations of urban mores—the backchat, the outfits, the migraine-heavy climate, and the vain attempts to loosen the city’s grip—and mixing them, drop by drop, with the chill of his bad dreams.
Not that Kees neglected his career. In one year, 1943, he found work at The New Republic, thanks to Alfred Kazin, then moved to Time, where he reviewed first books, then music (which allowed him to interview one of his enduring heroes, Fats Waller), and lastly cinema. The task soon got him down, as did the movies: “Our readers don’t want to hear you groan,” his editor said, which was, and remains, a fair point. So, being Kees, he switched to making films. He was hired by the Paramount News Service to write scripts for newsreels, at seventy-five dollars a week. If he was unqualified to serve his country, the least he could do was to give it an honest picture of what the fighting meant; as brutal footage came in from Iwo Jima, in the spring of 1945, Kees (whose duties now included editing) and the rest of the Paramount staff worked twenty-hour days to render it fit for public consumption. The result was singled out for praise by James Agee.
As if that were not enough, Kees began to paint. One is torn between marvelling at his facility in disparate media and wondering what levels of uncertainty he could stomach. “Why don’t you want to be a success?” asked Truman Capote, to whom such diffidence was inconceivable. Kees presents a stubborn case; there are few accusations more withering than that of dilettantism, and his own multitasking seems to have been powered by self-exasperation. Yet any amusement at the chop and change of his interests must be tempered by the nagging fact of his competence. He was lucky, hitting town in time for the rise of the New York School, but he was also quick to learn, befriending Hans Hofmann, writing with grit and sympathy of Motherwell and Miró, and succeeding his friend Clement Greenberg as art critic of The Nation, in 1949. Most stylish of all, he bought a 1938 Plymouth from Mark Rothko. “Looks a little like an unmade bed in a Bowery fleabag,” Kees wrote. He named the car Tiresias.
In the meantime, he schooled himself in gouache, oil, and, most profitably, collage. He had four one-man shows on East Twelfth Street; his work was picked for the Whitney Annual exhibit, in 1950, and hung beside that of Picasso, Mondrian, and de Kooning at the Kootz Gallery that same year. Nobody should make extravagant claims for what was, after all, a series of visual experiments; nor, however, is there any cause for embarrassment in viewing the outcome—the rough bulbousness of a typical Kees, with its bestiary of Miró-haunted shapes, treading the verges of abstraction. According to James Reidel, in “Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees” (2003), Kees the painter “felt freer than he did as a poet.” If so, it was because he lacked the means to train or curb that freedom. On the page, he mastered some of the most treacherous poetic forms, incuding the sestina and the villanelle; on the canvas, such suavity was beyond him.
Kees and his wife spent much of 1949 in Provincetown. There he ran a cultural forum, crammed with painters and writers, and loaded with public debates on American responsibility, Soviet bureaucracy, and, just to lighten the tone, “What Is an Artist?” One is hardly taken aback to find that, by 1950, the Keeses had had enough. New York and its outposts had drained the couple dry, and vice versa. In the fall of that year, they bought a new car and drove across the country—a pilgrimage recorded in the ravishing Hopper-like plainness of the poem “Travels in North America”:
And possibly the towns one never sees are best,
Preserved, remote, and merely names and distances.
Cadiz, Kentucky, “noted for the quality of hams it ships,
The home of wealthy planters,”. . .
. . . Here is Milpitas,
California, filling stations and a Ford
Assembly plant. Here are the washboard roads
Of Wellfleet, on the Cape, and summer light and dust.
And here, now textured like a blotter, like the going years
And difficult to see, is where you are, and where I am,
And where the oceans cover us.
Such was Kees’s idea of a journey: an adventure without the thrills. Once the two of them made it to San Francisco, the ruefulness gathered pace. Kees pursued fresh projects: scoring one experimental short film for a friend, and shooting another, “Hotel Apex,” of his own devising. He sent ideas for cartoons to Charles Addams, who kindly refused them. A collection of poems, “A Breaking and a Death,” was sent to publishers, and racked up twenty rejections in a row. “If the situation of poets continues to worsen at the same galloping rate it has been in recent years,” he wrote to some friends,
let’s go down into the abyss. It won’t be a really awful abyss: there’ll be a lot of charming & good things in it: just no poets, that’s all. Maybe we need a Byron to get the public interested in poetry again, though Byron’s public wasn’t any more interested in poetry than people today are: they were interested in Byron. I don’t know what people are interested in today: but I can guess, and it ain’t pretty.
That is the best of Kees the correspondent: historically acute, casually appalled, demotic to the point of bluesy as the mood turns black. By an irony too sharp for any poet, the one book that did appear with his name on the spine was “Nonverbal Communication,” by Jurgen Ruesch and Weldon Kees. Ruesch was a Swiss-born psychologist at the Langley Porter Clinic, in Berkeley. Soon after arriving in California, Kees had been asked to help Ruesch with the shooting and cutting of a documentary on the interaction of mothers and children; it went well, and the final flowering was a large-format book—hundreds of photographs of human behavior and inhuman objects, interspersed with an academic text whose wry polish smells inescapably of Kees: “When people are alone, they frequently behave as if they were in company; and when in company, they often behave as if they were alone.”
All of this kept Kees both paid and entertained, but that was insufficient. Ann had begun to drink heavily, and the booze was laced with paranoia. The national mood seeped into her. She claimed that the telephone was tapped, and that F.B.I. agents lurked outside the house. In Reidel’s dispiriting words, “To maintain the appearance of normalcy, Kees claimed to be too busy, to be suffering from a frantic schedule.” But even his gracious manners and chin-up assurances (“In between convulsions, I’m working away at poems,” he told a friend) could not halt a slide of such proportions. On September 22, 1954, he wrote about Ann to Conrad Aiken:
About eight or nine months ago she got to drinking more than you, me, Malcolm Lowry and Tallulah Bankhead put together. . . . Two nights a nice MD next door shot her full of sodium amytal, and occasionally she would have a lucid moment. . . . Finally, on Tuesday morning I got hold of one of the few psychiatrists around here of any real help on such cases and she finally agreed to sign herself in at Langley Porter Clinic. She improved greatly there, but left against advice after three weeks. We are now separated and she has agreed to a divorce, and I hope she will be all right. We were married for sixteen years and a lot of it was not so good.
It breaks the heart to see a writer roll out the Hemingway hard-man line like this, as if a little toughness in the prose could stop the world from caving in. By then, Kees was landing punches only on himself. His eagerness for new ventures, social and artistic, swelled into a kind of fever. He moved into a small apartment, alone, at the age of forty, and started to forge new and startling friendships. The place was soon a parody of the bachelor pad: black towels in the bathroom, black sheets on the bed. Kees took a lover, a divorcée named Jerry MacAgy, but confessed to being wearied by the sex. He thought himself unleashed from a marriage, but nobody who loved him could fail to notice the mania in that release. According to Michael Grieg, “I felt it was on the tip of his tongue: ‘If I did not feel it was in bad taste, I would unburden myself. I am in despair. Let’s go off where I can tell you about it.’ But he never did.” Kees’s elderly mother wrote to her son to commiserate: “I think egg nogs at least three times a day would give you strength. A few graham crackers with them.”
Kees was far from Nebraska, by this point, and beyond the reach of eggnogs. The path to the Golden Gate Bridge lay open and straight. Whether he leapt into the water on July 18, 1955, a foggy day, none of us can be sure. His attention had long been caught by suicides, such as that of Hart Crane. On the other hand, people recall his musing on the figure of Ambrose Bierce, another laconic, disenchanted citizen of San Francisco, who had upped and disappeared to Mexico in 1913. Reidel, at the end of his biography, cites an alluring report from a woman named Toni Barrett, who as a little girl had known Kees; she says she saw him again in New Orleans, with a blonde on his arm, in 1962. A BBC television documentary on Kees, broadcast in 1993, included an interview with the writer Pete Hamill, who drank with a stranger in Mexico and later claimed that he was Weldon Kees. These apparitions are impossible to forget, yet what can they add to our knowledge of a man who seemed, even when alive, like a dapper and dissatisfied ghost?
There is one witness. We have his name, and, should the authorities insist, we could offer a detailed description:
Robinson at cards at the Algonquin; a thin
Blue light comes down once more outside the blinds.
Gray men in overcoats are ghosts blown past the door.
The taxis streak the avenues with yellow, orange, and red.
This is Grand Central, Mr. Robinson.
Robinson on a roof above the Heights; the boats
Mourn like the lost. Water is slate, far down.
Through sounds of ice cubes dropped in glass, an osteopath,
Dressed for the links, describes an old Intourist tour.
—Here’s where old Gibbons jumped from, Robinson.
Robinson walking in the Park, admiring the elephant.
Robinson buying the Tribune, Robinson buying the Times. Robinson
Saying, “Hello. Yes, this is Robinson. Sunday
At five? I’d love to. Pretty well. And you?”
Robinson alone at Longchamps, staring at the wall.
Robinson afraid, drunk, sobbing Robinson
In bed with a Mrs. Morse. Robinson at home;
Decisions: Toynbee or luminol? Where the sun
Shines, Robinson in flowered trunks, eyes toward
The breakers. Where the night ends, Robinson in East Side bars.
Robinson in Glen plaid jacket, Scotch-grain shoes,
Black four-in-hand and oxford button-down,
The jeweled and silent watch that winds itself, the brief-
Case, covert topcoat, clothes for spring, all covering
His sad and usual heart, dry as a winter leaf.
It is that single word “usual” that brings you up short and lets the poem fan out. It points not just to the regularity of Robinson’s own days and years but to the engulfing possibility of a thousand Robinsons out there, in the subway and on the streets, all ticking their lives away like his soundless watch. The poem, entitled “Aspects of Robinson,” istheportrait of the postwar man of affairs: neither laborer nor magnate, but holding steady—and, at first blush, looking purposeful—within the middle rank. He is everything that Weldon Kees dreaded, as well as everything that he suspected he ought to be.
There are four Robinson poems in all, dating from 1944 to 1949: “Robinson,” “Aspects of Robinson,” “Robinson at Home,” and “Relating to Robinson.” All but the last were published in The New Yorker, and it is from this quartet that Kees’s fame, such as it is, continues to flow. This seems to me entirely just. In tracking Robinson, the poet shrugs off the indulgence, the trying out of wretched or rancorous attitudes, that smothered his earlier verse. Scholars have noted a Robinson both in Céline’s “Journey to the End of the Night” and in Kafka’s “Amerika,” although both of those creations give off a distinct whiff of the reprobate, whereas Kees’s man is nothing if not respectable. Nothing, of course, may be his finest role; he is the kind of fellow whom we scarcely notice until he has quit the premises, leaving only crumbs of his existence. “The dog stops barking after Robinson has gone,” runs the opening hexameter of “Robinson,” which proceeds to gather more evidence:
The pages in the books are blank,
The books that Robinson has read.
That is his favorite chair,
Or where the chair would be if Robinson were here.
All day the phone rings. It could be Robinson
Calling. It never rings when he is here.
The poem also mentions a first wife. I wonder whether Robinson married again, and whether his second wife, perhaps, took to drink like Mrs. Kees, and to seducing younger men; did the late Anne Bancroft read these poems in preparation for “The Graduate”?
As far as we can tell, Weldon Kees never left the shores of America. His poetry turns often toward Europe, and one can readily picture him in the footsteps of his expatriate idols, such as James, Fitzgerald, and Eliot. (He also revered Flaubert and latched instantly onto Chandler; whatever else you say of Kees, his taste was immaculate.) Like them, he grew resistant to a particular strain of American hopefulness. Here is Emerson, in an essay called “Illusions”: “In the life of the dreariest alderman, fancy enters into all details, and colors them with rosy hue. He imitates the air and actions of people whom he admires, and is raised in his own eyes.” That is the antithesis of Robinson, whose fancies pull him down, and for whom rosiness is found in a whiskey sour. The unhappy are most hard to tolerate when they force their discontent upon the rest of us, but Kees was too courteous for that; he simply lacked the Emersonian gift of moral levitation—everything that tells the Robinsons of this world to snap out of it, embrace their wives, say a prayer, and check their stock prices. We should not be misled, by the enigma of his vanishing, into overrating Kees, either as a man or as an artist; he was a major minor poet, yet that very stature, together with his ceaseless lusting to be other or better than he was, makes him a representative figure of his time. Here is how he closed a tribute to the painter Arshile Gorky, in 1950:
Throughout his career, terminated by the artist’s suicide in 1947, Gorky seemed more than ordinarily marked by a struggle to get at his own identity. . . . Perhaps Gorky, now that he is safely dead, will receive the recognition denied him when he was in a position to care.
The fellow-feeling here is too bitter for comfort, and the sole alleviation we can offer, fifty years since Kees made his exit, is to recognize the quality of his own struggle. It was fitful but never fraudulent; it bore the imprint, in the verse, of a skill and patience that he was seldom able to wield in his private distress; and, toward the end, it glimmered with enticing rumors of tranquillity. Who knows, if Kees had survived—or if he still survives, at a hale ninety-one—where this questing son of Beatrice, Nebraska, might have found new life:
Yet in spite of loss and guilt
And hurricanes of time, it might be built:
A refuge, permanent, with trees that shade
When all the other cities die and fade. ♦
