James Reidel

This is one of the saddest books I've ever read. Weldon Kees' life is dominated by the melancholy that infuses his poetry. One of his best poems, "Robinson," describes an empty apartment inhabited by a man whose life seems equally empty:

The mirror from Mexico, stuck to the wall,
Reflects nothing at all. The glass is black.
Robinson alone provides the image Robinsonian.

While Kees is no Robinson, his life traces a pattern of detachment and disappointment that ends with his suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge. He left no note nor was his body found: a disappearance. Yet, he accomplished a great deal: his poetry is excellent, he wrote about art in The Nation and literature in Time, he wrote brilliant short stories, exhibited paintings with the nascent abstract expressionists in New York, and made experimental films in San Francisco. For time, he seemed to know every major figure in the cultural world of post-war United States. But he was always slightly to one side, the major publication or breakthrough exhibition always tantalizingly out of reach.

For anyone who has lived the bohemian life, the pattern of Kees life is familiar and this biography captures that milieu of the 1940s and 50s. It's a fascinating read.

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