Weldon Kees

• Born: February 24, 1914
• Birthplace: Beatrice, Nebraska
• Died: July 18, 1955
• Place of death: San Francisco, California

Other literary forms

Although the poetry of Weldon Kees (keez) eventually dominated his literary career, he began by publishing more than three dozen short stories in little magazines, such as The Prairie Schooner, that were scattered throughout the Midwest. From his first published story in 1934 (while still an undergraduate) to his last one in 1940 (“The Life of the Mind”), Kees’ reputation grew steadily and impressively. He was frequently cited in annual anthologies such as those published by New Directions. Edward J. O’Brien designated twenty of his stories as “distinctive” in his Best Short Stories, an annual distillation from thousands of stories published in English; indeed, O’Brien’s 1941 volume was dedicated to Kees. Kees’ commitment to short fiction, however, had already waned by then.

In addition to short stories, Kees published a number of reviews in prestigious periodicals such as Poetry, The Nation, and The New York Times Book Review. His interests were astonishingly diverse, and he reviewed books of poetry, fiction, music, art, criticism, and psychology. In 1950, Kees served as art critic for The Nation, publishing an important series of articles on the “abstract expressionists.” He also wrote the essay “Muskrat Ramble: Popular and Unpopular Music,” based on his study of jazz, which was anthologized for its insights into popular culture. Kees also tried his hand at writing plays, and he left behind an experimental, off-Broadway sort of play, The Waiting Room (pb. 1986).

Besides writing, Kees managed to make, or help to make, several short “art films” that are representative of American expressionist cinematography of the period. Notable are The Adventures of Jimmy, for which he wrote a jazz score, and Hotel Apex, his own psychological study of urban disintegration. His filmmaking extended to studies in child and group psychology that led to an association with the psychiatrists Gregory Bateson and Jurgen Ruesch; with the latter, Kees coauthored Nonverbal Communication: Notes on the Visual Perception of Human Relations (1956), which contains a stunning series of still photographs taken by Kees himself. Published after his disappearance in 1955, this volume and The Collected Poems are essential for an understanding of Kees’ poetry.

Achievements

Although Weldon Kees was fairly well known and critically acclaimed by reviewers such as Rexroth in his own time, his work has become all but forgotten. A thorough assessment of his place in American poetry remains to be done, yet one senses that Kees has been influential and important in unacknowledged quarters of contemporary poetry. The inclusion of Kees in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (1973) would expand his audience. His editor, Donald Justice, saw fit to revise The Collected Poems fifteen years after initial publication. Larry Levis, whose first three books have each won a major national award, includes the eulogy “My Only Photograph of Weldon Kees” in his book The Dollmaker’s Ghost (1981).

If, as Rexroth has suggested, Kees was “launched” into poetry by Conrad Aiken, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden, he also assimilated the objectivist viewpoint of William Carlos Williams, the incremental method of Ezra Pound, the prose rhythms of Kenneth Fearing, and the proletarian realism of James T. Farrell, in moving far beyond those early influences. Kees may, indeed, yet be seen as an important figure in the transition from modernist poetics to the postmodern sensibility, with its preoccupation with loss, fictions of the self, and parody of older forms.

More than as an unknown link in the history of poetics or as an artist of amazing versatility, Kees’ achievement is a poetry that is singularly voiced in its blunt honesty and articulate despair over the loss of Walt Whitman’s American idealism. There is no poet in all of American literature more bitter than Kees; yet that “permanent and hopeless apocalypse” (Rexroth) in which he lived does not hinder his eloquence, nor does it erode an eerie serenity that constantly seems to accept certain doom. Kees even seems to anticipate the now-familiar despair of the nuclear age in his poem “Travels in North America,” in which he declares that “the sky is soiled” by the “University of California’s atom bomb.” Had he been publishing in the 1960’s or the 1970’s, Kees might be read widely. As Rexroth has concluded, the poems of Kees may simply have been “just a few years too early.”

Biography

Weldon Kees remained in his birthplace, the small town of Beatrice in rural Nebraska, until he attended the University of Nebraska. His childhood and adolescence appear typical of the era and place. By the time Kees graduated from a liberal arts curriculum in 1935, he had made a sufficient impression on Professor L. C. Wimberly to become a regular contributor and reviewer for Prairie Schooner. After serving as an editor for the Federal Writers’ Project in Lincoln, Kees moved to Denver in 1937 to work as a librarian, eventually becoming director of the Bibliographical Center of Research for the Rocky Mountain Region. His first published poem, “Subtitle,” appeared that year in an obscure little magazine called Signatures; from then on, Kees turned increasingly toward poetry for the expression of his artistic vision.

By 1943, Kees had moved to New York, where he worked as a journalist for Time and became involved in documentary filmmaking. That year also saw the publication of his first book of poems, The Last Man, by the Colt Press in San Francisco. Midway through the 1940’s, Kees took up painting, choosing to identify himself with what was to be known as the abstract expressionist movement. He exhibited his work in one-man shows at the Peridot Gallery; at least once, his paintings were shown with those of Hans Hofmann, William de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Motherwell—the major artists of the movement. Kees also found time to continue writing poems, and they appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, and Harper’s, among other leading journals. His second collection of poems, The Fall of the Magicians, was published in 1947.

Kees abandoned New York for San Francisco sometime in 1951. There he began serious study of jazz piano and jazz composition. He continued his work in cinematography and made several films himself. Kees also began exploring nonverbal signs with Jurgen Ruesch and interpersonal cues with Gregory Bateson in an attempt to grasp the commonplace, to exploit it, and to express it immediately and directly by a method that was “spare, rigorous, and clinical.” Meanwhile, he continued to paint and write; in 1954, his last book, Poems, 1947-1954, was published in San Francisco.

Aside from Kees’ far-ranging activities and multitalented pursuits, his life to this point, in the words of Justice, seems to have been “a fairly typical career for any writer reaching manhood in the depression and passing through a time of political crisis and war.” On July 18, 1955, however, Kees’ car was found abandoned on the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge. In a review that appeared that same day in The New Republic, Kees had written of “our present atmosphere of distrust, violence, and irrationality” that led to “so many human beings murdering themselves—either literally or symbolically. . . .” Justice reports that in the weeks before his car was found, Kees had spoken to friends both of suicide and of going away to Mexico to begin a new life. His disappearance, it seems, was not an act of sudden or impulsive desperation, but rather the culmination of nearly two decades in which his poetry shows an increasing despair that grew deeper with his avid scrutiny of humanity in contemporary society and his insistent denial of those superficial values by which human beings sought to order their lives. Whether Kees did commit suicide or whether he simply fled from any previous social context in his life, his disappearance was the ultimate symbolic act against what he perceived to be an indifferent society seized by the doldrums of pervasive mediocrity.

Analysis

Perhaps the neglect that Weldon Kees’ poetry has suffered results from the lack of a single, brilliant “masterpiece.” There is no long poem, no ambitious project or sequence like those on which many modern and contemporary poets have founded their reputations. There is no pretentious, gaudy innovation of form that would assure him a place in debates on “technical craft.” Many of Kees’ poems suffer from flaws such as awkward allusions or tedious repetitions, but despite all such deficiencies his work is original for its soft voice that expresses a tone of hard bitterness. That voice is not especially pleasing in its barrage of satiric details, yet it retains a unique capacity to haunt the memory of anyone who has read his poems. Donald Justice is surely correct in asserting that Kees’ poetry “makes its deepest impression when read as a body of work rather than a collection of isolated moments of brilliance,” for “there is a cumulative power to the work as a whole to which even the weaker poems contribute.”

In Kees’ early poems such as “The Speakers,” one detects the unmistakable echoes of T. S. Eliot, while a poem such as “Variations on a Theme by Joyce” employs a Joycean “war in the words.” Even in those first poems, however, Kees comes quickly to his own sense of rhythm and tone. Although he played with formalism by using the villanelle and the sestina, and while he experimented with form in such poems as “Fuge” and “Round,” Kees settled in to a rhythmic prose line that was more flexible than traditional meter and more restrictive than free verse. Possessing a naturally good ear, Kees successfully wed form and content by starting with facts and things and then consummated them by placing the right words in the right order—in short, a wholly natural proselike but lyrical style. The consequent unobtrusive tone of the poems is the very heart of Kees’ poetic vision.

Kees chose as an epigraph to his final book a passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860) that reveals much about Kees’ own perspective in his poetry. His quest was to enter “those dark caverns into which all men must descend, if they would know anything beneath the surface and illusive pleasures of existence.” Hawthorne’s novel itself is a study of ambivalent meaning in a world scattered among the fragments of tradition and the incomprehensible debris that is left to the artist. Seeing himself in a similar world, but facing an even more painful disintegration than Hawthorne had perceived, Kees sought to enter his own “dark caverns” by explicating and disclosing the ironies of the “surface” and satirizing the “pleasures of existence.” Whatever hope marks that quest—and it does not appear with any frequency—can be found in the intense scrutiny of both personal and public experience, capable not only of recognizing and accepting continuous despair, but also of remaining detached from its implications. Kees proposes a self-protective hope, simple, isolated, solitary, and stationary, out of which, with absolute denial, the self can create a system of values by which it can survive—honestly and naturally—with perhaps its greatest pleasure being in art itself.

“For My Daughter”

The pervasive anguish and bitterness that runs through Kees’ poetry like grain through wood appeared in his earliest work. In the early poem “For My Daughter,” as the speaker gazes into his “daughter’s eyes,” he perceives “hintings of death” which he knows “she does not heed.” Continuing his contemplation of the destruction of her youth, he fears that she will be subjected to the “Parched years that I have seen” and intensifies his dread by assuming that she will be ravished by “lingering/ Death in certain war.” Worse yet, the speaker bemoans the possibility—even probability—that his daughter will be “fed on hate” and learn to relish “the sting/ Of other’s agony” in which the masochism of self-destruction overwhelms the tenderness of love. In the midst of such bleak projection, Kees undermines the speaker’s fearful uncertainties. “These speculations,” says the speaker, “sour in the sun.” Just as the reader begins to applaud the father for coming to his senses and rejecting his indulgent morbidity, Kees delivers an excruciating shock in the last line: “I have no daughter. I desire none.” The reader now realizes that the despair is even greater than he had supposed; the speaker has already chosen not to have children, because he sees nothing but betrayal and suffering in his vision of the future. He chooses to withhold his own “procreative urge,” viewing it as his own inevitable complicity in the suffocation of the unborn generations.

“The Conversation in the Drawing Room”

That rather private sense of futility gives way in other poems to a dramatic rendering of an equally futile sense in interpersonal relationships. In “The Conversation in the Drawing Room,” Kees creates a dialogue between Hobart, a young man aghast at a “spot of blood” that is “spreading” on the room’s wall, and Cousin Agatha, who refuses to acknowledge his hysteria as anything but the result of reading The Turn of the Screw (Henry James, 1898) before bedtime. Agatha sees herself as compassionate and progressive; she remarks that the “weather is ideal” and ruminates on joining “a new theosophist group” as Hobart announces that the spot is “growing brighter.” When he urges her to examine it, she dismisses it as an “aberration of the wallpaper” and suggests that he suffers from indigestion. When Hobart points out that the spot has become “a moving thing/ That spreads and reaches from the wall,” Agatha’s response denies even his presence: “I cannot listen to you any more just now.” After treating herself with “another aspirin” and finding her own “barbital,” Agatha leaves Hobart twitching, “rather feebly,” in the aftermath of a convulsion “on the floor,” while speculating that his “youthful animal spirits” and “a decided taste for the macabre” have been responsible for his disconcerting “gasping and screaming.” Declaring that it is “a beautiful afternoon,” Agatha anticipates her evening dinner party and rejoices smugly that “everything is blissfully quiet now” so that she can depart for her routine afternoon nap. Quite apart from her perception of herself, Kees portrays a drastic indifference on Agatha’s part that is the result of her mundane, trivial allegiance to and affirmation of the social and spiritual contexts that she unquestionably accepts as her own. Her unexamined, callous optimism has, in fact, destroyed not only her cousin Hobart, but also her own ability to see beyond the surface of a superficial value system. Agatha has not the slightest notion of the presence of evil in the world. Her refusal to acknowledge it is her constant contribution to its growth.

The Robinson poems

Kees was later to extend his satirical attack on the shallow values of society in a more mature series of poems that center on Robinson, an archetypal ordinary man who has little idea who he is, what he is doing, or where he has been. In the Robinson poems, however, Kees offers sympathy with ridicule, compassion with condemnation, and self-irony with parody. These poems, “Robinson,” “Aspects of Robinson,” “Robinson at Home,” and “Relating to Robinson,” show a curious use of the persona in that Robinson is usually absent or nearly absent from the poems. Kees writes primarily of the things or places that once affirmed his existence: The remnants of his life and actions are all that remain of him. When Robinson is present, he is isolated by a room, a hallway or a stairway, or he is insulated from the world to which he attempts to relate by a deep and troubled sleep. When Robinson looks into a “mirror from Mexico,” he finds that it “reflects nothing at all.” The pages in his books are blank. He attempts to telephone himself at his own empty house. His existence consists solely of traces of himself that he can no longer discern. Throughout the poems, Robinson speaks only once—and then out of a nightmare: “There is something in this madhouse that I symbolize—/ This city—nightmare—black. . . .” Hardly capable of such a statement in his waking state, Robinson speaks here as much for Kees as for himself. What Kees has sought to use as a device, the persona of absence, has resulted, because of his empathy with that persona, in the presence of his own voice. Kees’ satire has become self-irony. The shallow life that he had wished to parody has become all too much a part of his own life.

By the final poem in the series, “Relating to Robinson,” Kees’ pretense of the persona itself has dissolved: “We were alone there, he and I,/ Inhabiting the empty street.” The speaker confesses freely that Robinson is a fiction of himself: “His voice/ Came at me like an echo in the dark.” As the creator of the persona, the poet must now accept those aspects of himself that he has sought to keep at a distance by his use of the device. Consequently, he must now accept the paradox that he himself is as much the creation of Robinson as Robinson is the product of his art, for he has now “no certainty,/ There in the dark, that it was Robinson/ Or someone else.” In his exploration of “surfaces” and his analysis of “illusive pleasures,” Kees has successfully overcome the phenomenological alienation between subject and object, but the intensity of his involvement in doing so has left him hopelessly entangled in the very shallowness he had hoped to overturn. His success is his failure.

“A Salvo for Hans Hofmann”

In the wake of this tendency to undermine his own quest (his villanelles and sestinas fail precisely because they cannot contain his blunt confrontation with experience without seeming stillborn themselves), Kees developed a poetic technique that embodies his denial of false values, perhaps best illustrated in “A Salvo for Hans Hofmann,” which reveals a good deal more about Kees than it does about the painter. Kees’ antagonistic method intends to enter “the slashed world traced and traced again” so that by his entry it is “enriched, enlarged, caught in a burning scrutiny” that will illuminate “like fog-lamps on a rotten night” the decay and debris of contemporary civilization. He sifts through the surfaces, “the scraps of living,” that continuously “shift and change,” with the hope that by that very act, those fragments can be “shaped to a new identity” for both the self and the world. He seeks a path through the rubble where “the dark hall/ Finds a door,” and purging the pain, “the wind comes in.” The search itself, however, remains suspect; the last line of the poem comments on the momentary fragility of any new identity: “A rainbow sleeps and wakes against the wall.” If a splendid, euphoric new identity has been rekindled from the debris, then in all probability it too will be contained by experience and thus contaminated just as it has been before. The greater terror, however, is that the “rainbow” itself, while apparently new in its radiant beauty, may not be even a new identity of elusive quality but merely one more delusion grounded in the shallow pleasure of a two-dimensional painting. Once again, Kees finds himself turned back on himself, just as he did in the Robinson poems.

“The Turtle”

It is this insistent turning back on itself of the poem (and the poet) that crushes the faint hope of the self-protecting solipsism such as that found in “The Turtle.” In this poem, probably written in the late 1940’s, Kees seems to cling to a hope that serene detachment can shelter him from his excavations of despair. As he watches a turtle “beside the road,” he is also aware of the “smells/ Of autumn closing in.” His sense of dormancy, decay, and death, however, are not merely those associated with seasonal change, for there is little that would foreshadow rebirth in spring. The ominous smells are qualified by the din of “night traffic roaring by” on the superhighway that marks a civilization moving too fast to keep up with itself. His inner response is to feel “a husk . . . inside me, torpid, dry,” like stale air “from a long-closed room” that “drifts through an opening door” into a tentative, fragile freedom from the indifferent rush of the world. His hope, at best, is to move “as a turtle moves/ Into the covering grass”; that is, Kees seeks a Whitmanesque union with the earth that offers little distinction between life and death. The tenuous, plodding movement away from both the psychological turmoil and the speeding reality of “night traffic” is a denial both of the artifacts of civilization and of the human beings who have allowed such disintegration to occur. That denial undermines even an illusion of hope, for it implies the further denial of one’s own life and art.

The slow retreat of the hard-shelled self seen in “The Turtle” into a place “far in the woods, at night” could not be sustained when the creature and its creations began to consume themselves. Kees fell prey to his own methods and convictions, for they carried him to a point of moral dilemma beyond which he could not return. His only choice, then, would seem to have been either the ultimate denial of suicide, or a purgative flight from the self-entangled surfaces to a possibility of a new identity. Many suicides by American poets seem ironically to have confirmed their stature in a world that they rejected. The very ambiguity of Kees’ disappearance withholds the rather twisted fascination of the “poet and his suicide” from the shallowness of a society that he denied. Kees’ art contains the prophecy that art must move beyond itself to some form of pure action. That was to mean for Kees that he would leave his readers with a mystery that would “cleanse/ What ever it is that a wound remembers/ After the healing ends.”

Bibliography

Cotter, Holland. “The Absent Irascible: Weldon Kees in Postwar New York.” The New York Times, April 30, 1999, p. 38. A description of Kees’ paintings and a brief profile of his work in visual art and poetry.

Elledge, Jim. Weldon Kees: A Critical Introduction. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1985. The first book-length study of Kees’ work, this volume collects nearly fifty essays and reviews—all the important criticism published before 1985. Eleven previously “lost” poems, a bibliographic checklist, and an index to Kees’ works are also included.

Hamilton, Ian. Against Oblivion: Some Lives of the Twentieth-Century Poets. London: Viking, 2002. Contains an entry on the life and work of Kees.

Knoll, Robert E., ed. “The New York Intellectuals, 1941-1950: Some Letters by Weldon Kees.” Hudson Review 38 (Spring, 1985): 15-55. After a brief biography, Knoll quotes and comments on some of Kees’ correspondence from the 1940’s. This focused collection of letters provides a fascinating glimpse of intellectual society at the time.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Weldon Kees and the Midcentury Generation: Letters, 1935-1955. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. Consists mostly of extracts from letters written by Kees and contains lengthy and useful commentaries by the editor. Begins with a chapter on Kees’ early life and goes on to assemble a satisfying biography of the poet/musician/filmmaker from his letters. Includes more than thirty illustrations.

Nelson, Raymond. “The Fitful Life of Weldon Kees.” American Literary History 1 (Winter, 1989): 816-852. This brief but informative biographical essay shows the similarities between Kees’ life and death and those of his unhappy contemporaries John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, and Delmore Schwartz. The essay is sensitive to Kees’ dreams and failures, and appreciative of his successes.

Nemerov, Howard. “On Weldon Kees: An Introduction to His Critical Writings.” Prairie Schooner 61 (Winter, 1987): 33-36. This is a personal reminiscence and evaluation by a man who was a close friend and correspondent of Kees during the 1940’s. Nemerov is pleased that Kees’ poetry has received such high acclaim and makes a case for further study and appreciation of his critical essays and reviews.

Reidel, James. Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. This biography and critical analysis of Kees examines how his life and work were interrelated.

Siedell, Daniel A., ed. Weldon Kees and the Arts at Midcentury. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Experts from various disciplines—art historians, poets, literary critics, curators, and cultural scholars—contribute essays that provide a wide perspective on Kees.

Smith, William Jay. “A Rendezvous with Robinson.” Sequoia, Spring, 1979, 9-11. This brief reminiscence describes Kees’ generosity and encouragement toward Smith when both were young writers in the 1940’s. Smith’s article is one of several in this special issue of Sequoia, which addressed the question “Is Weldon Kees America’s Greatest Forgotten Poet?”