The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees

The Twisted Grain

"I may go to Mexico. To stay."
"Right away?"
"I don't know."
"Weldon, for God's sake don't go without seeing us."
"I won't," he said, and then he hung up.

Suicide, as Jeffrey Eugenides observed, is "deeper than death." The names of the dead, in whatever manner they died, are burnished or tarnished or otherwise molded into shape by the nature of their exits, the point at which they stand closest to us, but nowhere is this more forcefully felt than in the names of those who brought themselves to an end. In the case of poets, about whom the suicide is often the fact best known to the wider public, the effect is amplified. To the ordinary citizen, after all, a poet is one handed a gift, and a suicide is one who lets it fall and shatter. The convergence is jarring. "Hart Crane," "Sylvia Plath," "John Berryman": along with a dominant photographic image, a lifestyle, a poetic scent, these sounds carry their inevitable grain of sorrow. Clutching to the heart of each syllable like a demonic child is the fact, the choice, the going through with it in spite of all there is.

So unsettling, so unearthing is the look of this demon that the living do all they can to close their eyes. They blame others, so that they might shift the suicide toward a frightful but at least explicable homicide. If there are no warring spouses or pitiless creditors to fault, they alight on drugs or drink: he was not himself. The need to avert one's eyes is such that if there is an absence of hard facts in support of a suicide, who knows, perhaps it wasn't suicide at all. Weldon Kees, whose car was found abandoned on the Golden Gate Bridge in July 1955, whose last known words are recorded above, and whose body was never found, resided in this gray area for a few years after he vanished.

His mother "saw him" on a cruise ship in Sydney harbor in the late 1950s, sailing the other way. A teenage girl, the daughter of one of Kees's friends, "saw him" in New Orleans in 1962, but he was gone when she looked again. That's pretty much it. Kees was fascinated by suicide and spoke of it a good deal. He was, at forty-one, entirely and distressfully dependent on his parents for money; his new book of poems had been rejected everywhere after his career had begun so promisingly; he had seen his wife slide into alcoholism and mental illness; he was shaken by the news in the postnuclear world, and had told his friend Michael Grieg the only options he had left were Mexico and jumping from the bridge. One imagines that his file hasn't been opened for some time.

So Kees's act shadows back across his biography, and it's all that his biographer can do to fend it off. There is Kees on the cover of James Reidel's book, forty-one years old, staring into the waters of San Francisco Bay from, yes, the Golden Gate Bridge. The act gives the life its title. But Reidel prefaces the last section of the book, "San Francisco 1950-1955," with almost comically divergent remarks from Kees's acquaintances — "San Francisco must have seemed like rebirth to Weldon" and "Weldon came to die" — which neatly reminds us how, once a suicide is committed, it seeps back into every day of the life that was lived, a life from which it was absent for every day but one. (An unwilled death does not infect the past in this way, it does not seed the past with clues; there are no clues to look for because there is no crime.) Biographers may not believe in Fate at all, but their books are by their nature in thrall to it. They make Weird Sisters of their readers.

Such readers see not only the future, we see also the past ratcheted up to a monstrous speed. In reading the story of Weldon Kees, we see a restless child stirring in the small-town dust of Beatrice, Nebraska, hurrying to the nearest big towns (Lincoln, Columbia) and then to the nearest metropolis (Denver), having a disillusioning trawl through Los Angeles, lighting out for the pinnacles of Manhattan and its picnic outing Provincetown, until, suddenly sickened by the east, he buzzes westward like a trapped wasp to the opposite pane of glass, amber with late afternoon. Then, because we always slow the final reel, we see a man driving across the Golden Gate Bridge to take pictures of the lighthouse at Point Reyes, the windiest place on the Pacific coast, the second-foggiest spot in North America, as if to see how far west one might go, how close to actually leaving the continent. And at last the final choice: a new point of the compass — south to Mexico — or further west than ever, to walk along the bridge until, as Reidel says, "there was no land below."

The suicide, which one strives to see beyond, should not add poignancy to the work, and is not explained by the work. Though Kees surely was, as Donald Justice says, "one of the bitterest poets in history," writers as thoroughly unconsoled as Hardy, Frost, Beckett, Larkin, and Ted Hughes all reached a more or less natural end. But Kees's self-destruction forms part of a tragic complex of disappointment and disillusion, the causes of which are many. The puzzle of Kees's talent dwarfs the mystery of his demise. He was unmistakably brilliant. He wrote one shocking and probably immortal poem ("For My Daughter"), a few memorable ones (among them "1926," "The Heat in the Room," "The Smiles of the Bathers," "Aspects of Robinson"), and a great deal of Modernist doggerel. He may well be the most undervalued poet of twentieth-century America, but if he is a major poet — and I toss a coin and say he is — he is one who wrote almost exclusively minor poems.

Why he did so is connected with his time and his place. Kees thought himself unlucky to be born when he was born, into a generation he regarded as "a moldy milieu" in the wake of the golden age of Modernism, while, like many an artistic young soul in the Midwest, he saw salvation in anything but this. The former instinct had a negative effect on his natural gifts as a poet; the latter sent him on a spiral of great expectation and grave disillusion, in the east, in the west, in novels, poetry, abstract art, jazz, photography, drama, and film.

He was, in the full sense of the word, uncomfortable. Saul Bellow saw him at parties in New York in the 1940s and thought him "what the French call sympathique, very tense, but charming." Alfred Kazin, who encountered him at Yaddo in 1942, remembered him as "unbelievably well informed on the smallest details of modernist literature.... [He] desperately wanted to be 'up there,' as he used to say, with Eliot, Pound, and other stars in our firmament.... [But] despite his frantic ambition to become a 1920s man in the 1940s, Weldon lacked the gaiety, the sporty independence that distinguished American writers when we were growing up." Babette Deutsch, reviewing Kees's first book, The Last Man, in 1943, felt that 'one is more aware of the writers whom [he] has pored over ... than his personal evaluation of experience." Kenneth Rexroth thought him "too encumbered with The Waste Land."

What is striking about these opinions is how useful they are now. Anyone who spends some time in the gallery of contemporary American poetry might meet quite a few young men "unbelievably well informed," "too encumbered with The Waste Land," or even, I daresay, lacking gaiety and independence. Yet Kees was among the first victims of that phenomenon whereby a poet inherits a radical style or tone and assumes its fitness for duty without necessarily feeling the pressures that forced it into being. (Why many contemporary poets still seem to find the modern metropolis, the automobile, and the skyscraper so alienating that they must no longer say anything clearly or memorably is really not my field.)

In his college days, Kees and his friends divided the world into people who knew who Stephen Dedalus was and people who did not, a line proudly drawn between the chosen and the benighted. Fair enough for a bright spark in what he thinks is the middle of nowhere, but throughout his career Kees rummages indiscriminately in the bric-a-brac of Modernism. A frequent recourse, alas, is Surrealism, which tends to be monotonal, because it fixes writer and reader in a non-negotiable axis and drains words of meaning. In The Last Man we find "Eagles with tusks perform in sieves" and "The ectoplasm of Immanuel Kant unwittingly appears" ("Corsage"), while in "Scream as You Leave" — Kees gives up too much in titles — there is "Impromptu unicorns enact ballets,/Applauded by bourgeoisie in negligée." In "A Cornucopia for Daily Use," we are even reunited with some old friends from Eliot's "Sweeney" fragments:

BONES. The Greek dictionary is there by the cleaver.
SAMBO. Swell of Lillian to send us these fig newtons.

In such a potpourri of shards and oddities, it can only be a matter of time before "MUMFORD (a dwarf)" arrives on the scene, saying: "One operation and it's as gleaming and shiny as new. (Leers)" In Tom DeCillo's film Living in Oblivion, a dwarf delivers a brilliant tirade about the fact that actors such as he are only ever required by Hollywood for hallucinations and dream sequences, and you can almost hear him raging over this poem.

It is not just shopworn Surrealism to which Kees is prone. In his last book, Poems 1947-1954 (which was vanity published after the commercial houses rejected it for, well, commercial reasons), he drifts into equally Eliotic incantatory philosophizing: "Being at the expense of Becoming./Becoming at the expense of Being." But he doesn't seem to know what to do next: "The statue's head falls off, suggesting/That ideal forms may be non-temporal." This begins to feel unfair — how many poets have had to start out with a generation such as Eliot's casting new light and shadow over everything? But the alibi will not hold. Poets as diverse as Lowell, Bishop, Auden, and Dylan Thomas — all born within seven years of Kees — found room to maneuver.

Along with the impulse toward the fragmentary, the strange, and the abstract comes a kind of infernal relish, an assumption that everything to hand is corrupted and irredeemable. Kees may well have felt this way, Waste Land or not, but there is something automatic about it, something too quickly acceded to: "Indelible canyons yawn their green/ Confusion through the empty air,/And from the pleasant tear-drenched scene,/ High-class assassins dash everywhere." That word "pleasant" presumes too much, tries to fix our response without giving us sufficient cause. Sly, and not sly enough. Elsewhere, Kees's voice is that of a relentlessly cynical tour guide in the earpiece:

The obscene hostess, mincing in the
hall,
Gathers the guests around a crystal
ball.
It is on the whole an exciting moment;
Mrs. Lefevre stares with her one good
eye....

Apart from seeming like a reshuffle of Eliot's deck, this is simply stacked against its subjects, and fails as satire because it never gives them sufficient time or breath in which to be their damnable selves. At the heart of Eliot's Unreal City is "an infinitely gentle infinitely suffering thing." At the heart of Kees's there seems to be a raconteur who believes in nothing anyway, so that when he says sarcastically, "The minister was in fine form that afternoon," the current is weak: what more would we expect from a minister in the world that we have been shown?

Kees's famous "Robinson" poems are also compromised by this constraining tendency. Robinson is Kees's Everyman, an ordinary office worker doing nothing noteworthy, yet screaming all the while from the bottom of his soul. This may, of course, be the poet. The best of the lines are moving and memorable:

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 is meant to be an outline, of course, and if these poems were cartoons, they would be Thurber — they first appeared in The New Yorker, a natural home. But the longer the performance, the more questions start to arise. Wouldn't anyone's life seem empty if you looked at it that way — if you sped it up and stripped its little errands of any meaning, and its little pauses of any peace? Everyone's name sounds stupid when you say it six times. You do not prove a man's life pointless by making an inventory of its externals.

And the two later Robinson poems make a grievous error. They catch up with the elusive figure and give him words to say, so that suddenly he is no longer a lost Manhattan soul with a cheap mistress and gambling debts; he is Kees talking about the poem:

A heretic in catacombs, a famed roué
A beggar on the streets, a confidant of
Popes —

All these are Robinson in sleep,
who mumbles as he turns,
"There is something in this madhouse
that I symbolize —
This city — nightmare — black — "

New York was a madhouse in which Kees did rather well, publishing poems, exhibiting paintings, dashing off newsreel copy for Paramount in what he called the Grime and Strife Building. Katinka Loeser, reviewing The Last Man for Poetry in 1943, voiced an unpalatable truth: "Some rather pleasant things will happen to many of us, if we are as realistic about the postwar world as we are about the present catastrophe." This is neither irresponsible nor blinkered; it is an intelligent deduction from the historical situation. But it certainly doesn't chime with Modernist sensibility, where vague spiritual malaise is always an allowable stand-in for actual suffering. And Kees's view of the world beyond America — a world he never saw — begs a few questions.

"I say, why should we become
involved?" Herendeen persisted.
"Because something will be in
jeopardy."
"What?"
"I don't know. Something"

One only needed to read the papers in 1941 to know what was in jeopardy. The publisher to whom Kees sent this novel read it within hours of the United States' declaring war on Japan, so that, as Reidel says, it "became a period piece inside of a day." When it was rejected Kees was nonplussed, and wrote to a friend: "Jesus, Norris, I just feel as though I'd told my favorite joke and nobody even smiled." This is not the only time Kees seems adrift of daily reality, cocooned in his sense of the literary. In the antiwar poem "June 1940," Kees corrals "Flaubert and Henry James and Owen ... Rilke and Lawrence, Joyce" into his corner, as "those who were trapped by hysteria once before," as if they had all faced the same threat and responded the same way. "An idiot wind is blowing; the conscience dies" probably sounded smarter in 1940 than it did in 1945.

Reidel says that Kees's "job [at Paramount] had intensified his already cynical view of leaders and the anguished consequences of the proud and irreversible decisions they handed down from their seats of power," citing the company's heavily censored footage of the ailing Roosevelt at Yalta; but if this was the worst example of "anguished consequences" of "irreversible decisions" that Kees could find in the 1940s, then he wasn't looking very hard. A poet who can describe the offices of Newsweek and Look as "Dachaus with telephones, Siberias with bonuses" isn't even thinking. (In Kees's defense, an abstract artist can usually trump a poet for fatuity, and Mark Rothko obliged in the summer of 1949, saying he felt nothing on seeing film of the death camps, because it had nothing to do with him. Kees said: "What you mean, Mark, is that you're a moral dwarf.")

Once, in Nebraska, where Kees was reluctantly earning his corn working on a state guide for the Federal Writers' Project, he saw a woman on the sidewalk whipping her son. "Hit him again, ma'am!" he shouted. "Beat him with a stick until his teeth fall out! He's just a little fellow who can't hurt you." Here is the true note of his sorrow, ever clinging to a sarcastic shrug. The bitterness in Kees is not a sense of meaninglessness or nihilism; it is an exhaustion in the face of too much meaning, a thick sigh of understanding that to be good in the world is to suffer. Kees sounds inauthentic only when his poems pretend that the universe is drained of right and wrong, that there is nothing to do but tour the rubble, but it is what so many of them do. Also in that tiny vignette — and all Reidel's quotes from Kees speaking aloud are gripping — is the clue to his brilliance, and the key that gets us into the ten or twelve beautiful things he made in his short career: Kees was a genius of the moment, the moment of sight, of local contemplation, of distant recall.

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.

This is the first of the three stanzas of "1926." Here Kees draws a border around experience: the act of memory is the outer frame, the remembered light is the inner frame. There is no abstract musing, nothing unreal or surreal, no grandstanding, no digression, no scorn; there is just the unbearable pathos of time contained in the first utterance, the wonder that gapes at the end of each short line, waiting for the memory to take another shy step forward into the light. And there is the poignancy of the finishing detail: "I am back from seeing Milton Sills/And Doris Kenyon. Twelve years old./The porchlight coming on again."

Equally impressive is "The Upstairs Room," and for similar reasons. The poem is visually contained in what the poet can see at a certain point, what he can plausibly muse on only and at precisely that point, and how those thoughts might develop. It simply rides on the breath, stops and goes where it has to:

It must have been in March the rug
wore through.
Now the day passes and I stare
At warped pine boards my father's
father nailed,
At the twisted grain.

How the dizzying drop of time held in "father's father" takes his breath away, shortens the last line, lets the eye simply fall upon the pattern and linger! Kees's ability to render such moments illuminates several short poems fully, and in longer ones it flickers in and out of view, giving rise to an unevenness perhaps unparalleled in twentieth-century poetry. In "Travels in North America," Kees is suddenly able to shake off both the shrug of the raconteur and the chant of the mystic, and produce this:

. . . At three or four,
On winter afternoons, when school is
letting out
And rows of children pass you, near
the firehouse,
This sense is keenest, piercing as the
wind
That sweeps you toward the frosted
door of your hotel
And past the portly hatted traveler
with moist cigar
Who turns his paper as you brush
against the rubber plant.

This is focus of the first order — the indefinite rushing gray of the early lines, the way "school is letting out" tugs at the heart that never left the place, the Anglo-Saxon spell of a compound like "firehouse," then the gradual slowing and warming towards the specific: it is light that frosts the door of the hotel, the light of shelter, but with the cold ("frosted") of being far from home; the ineffable loneliness of "moist" cigar, the afternoon's hopes sinking to fatigue against the absurdity of a "rubber plant." But within a few lines the lamp is switched off again: "Journeys are ways of marking out a distance,/Or dealing with the past, however ineffectually."

Early in the 1950s, Kees wrote to his parents in response to their general dismay at his recent actions, such as leaving New York (and his "real" jobs at Paramount and Time), starting work in a psychiatric clinic in San Francisco (which they felt was beneath him), and continuing to dabble in the art world. Reidel writes: "At a time when everyone seemed to have a job and there was so much prosperity, Kees's straits just did not make sense, and [they] felt there was enough time for him to change, even to drop poetry and painting altogether." This is pretty wretched stuff for a thirty-eight-year-old to go through, especially one who had once published and exhibited to acclaim, and Kees's reply — "[I thought] that both you and John took pride in my accomplishments" — is harrowing.

And yet the exasperation of a conventional old couple from the Midwest — that Kees would not focus — strikes a faint but recognizable chord with a reader fifty years later. The pattern of his life kept repeating like a sestina. He would arrive in a new place, throw himself into artistic enterprises, write, read, exhibit, perform, organize, socialize. He would briefly be part of some group loosely clustered to an artistic principle. Then he would weary of it, want out, get out, and leave the place behind for good. At some level he was always a child of the plains, thinking of bright lights just over the horizon, and then, disillusioned in their glare, fleeing — as he fled New York for the last time — what he called the "dark and dreadful place." At about the same time Kees was in San Francisco, setting up a revue called Poets' Follies, described in the local press as "a bouillabaisse of literate ambiguities, pratfalls, dixieland and just horsing around," Auden was writing this about "Plains":

And think of growing where all
elsewheres are equal!
So long as there's a hill-ridge
somewhere the dreamer
Can place his land of marvels; in poor
valleys
Orphans can head downstream to
seek a million:
Here nothing points; to choose
between Art and Science
An embryo genius would have to
spin a stick.

In the nightmare with which Auden concludes the poem, he says he has "tried to run, knowing there was no hiding and no help."

When one reads Kees's finest poem, "For My Daughter," one can close one's eyes and strain to forget about the outcome, strive not to foresee; yet it is still hard not to catch the eyes of the other guests, sip one's wine in an uneasy silence, and wonder if, indeed, there was no hiding and no help:

Looking into my daughter's eyes I
read
Beneath the innocence of morning
flesh
Concealed, hintings of death she
does not heed.
Coldest of winds have blown this hair,
and mesh
Of seaweed snarled these miniatures
of hands;
The night's slow poison, tolerant and
bland,
Has moved her blood. Parched years
that I have seen
That may be hers appear: foul,
lingering
Death in certain war, the slim legs
green.
Or, fed on hate, she relishes the sting
Of others' agony; perhaps the cruel
Bride of a syphilitic or a fool.
These speculations sour in the sun.
I have no daughter. I desire none.

This is probably the most formally conventional poem that Kees ever wrote. It is sonnet-length, pentametrical, and full-rhymed to a fairly regular scheme. But it is virtually the only time he writes in such a linear form: his shapes are habitually circular — sestinas, villanelles, jazzed-up rounds and nursery rhymes — his meter relaxed, flexible. So often does Kees move in circles or spirals that it is no surprise to find the last, very short poem of his last book ("Small Prayer") contemplating two such smoldering zeroes, the "dead clock" and the "old sun." But "For My Daughter" is two times shocking: once because of the unflinchingly bleak X-ray of his own child's possible future, twice because there is no child. One tends to remember reading this poem for the first time. It belongs to a haunting little gallery of inescapable poems, poems to be coped with. They may not be the greatest poems of the last century, but without having read them one is not equipped to know what that century was. (Larkin's "Aubade" is in this company, as is Hecht's "Behold the lilies of the field.")

What is to be coped with here? That language can do anything, can speak beautifully from the depths of the soul and turn out to be fibbing? The sonnet is the most engraved of forms for a poet. The poet knows exactly how far in he is, and how far there is to go. A sense of a coming reckoning grips one somewhere around the tenth line, a sense that time is running out and something must be done. Things must converge, be dealt with, some memorable chord has got to be played. Of course it is only the life and death of Weldon Kees that makes the poem seem more and more like a man walking along a jut of shore to the water's edge, and ready to keep on walking when there's no land left. But these speculations sour in the sun.

• Read more about this book

Try four weeks of the New Republic Digital absolutely free For nearly 90 years, the New Republic has provided its readers with an intelligent and rigorous examination of American politics, foreign policy, and culture. Today, we're proud to offer a faster, easier, and more economical way to enjoy the magazine — TNR Digital. Subscribe today and we'll give you 4 weeks absolutely free. That's less than 36 cents/week for every word of content available in the print version, a downloadable replica of the print magazine, and an array of special online-only features! Click here to sign up.