We all, I suspect, at one time or another wish we could disappear completely from our own lives. Whether it’s due to some inner turmoil, or weighed down by the national mood, or a deeper Weltschmerz, there is a desire to become not another person but perhaps no person at all. At least, sometimes I have imagined this! So it is late I come to find out about poet Weldon Kees, who up and vanished from San Francisco in the mid-50’s, his car discovered by highway patrolmen near the Golden Gate Bridge, keys still in the ignition. (Hat tip to the Writer’s Almanac podcast for the introduction.) (Judge me how you will for downloading said podcast.) Anyway! There is a great article by Anthony Lane in the New Yorker, circa ‘05, revisiting the Kees legacy:
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, who a few witnesses swore they saw years after his disappearance, is a fascinating artistic mystery. A poet, fiction writer, painter and filmmaker who mingled with everyone from the aforementioned queen of film criticism Pauline Kael to Truman Capote, worked as a critic for The Nation and The New Republic, who managed to disappear “off the grid” as they say, either by suicide (tragic but unproven) or by some skillful chicanery to become a virtual nowhere man; an artist who reinvented himself in varied mediums who managed to undo every trace to his being, leaving behind only “his cat, Lonesome, and a pair of red socks in a sink.”
Read the full New Yorker piece here.
