Selected Short Stories of Weldon Kees ed. by Dana Gioia, and: Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees by James Reidel

Abstract

B o o k R e v ie w s 2 4 1 In fact, The Singular Mark Twain does not seem a heavily thesis-driven study, but Fred Kaplan does show elements of Clemens’s personality that were present throughout his life: curiosity, energy, poor business judgment, self­ blame, and the blaming of others. His approach naturally leads him to under­ estimate and undervalue the more tormented works of Mark Twain’s final years. Kaplan has been roughed up by Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Kevin Mac Donnell (in The Washington Post and the online Mark Twain Forum, respec­ tively) for making inadequate use of recent scholarship and not appropriately acknowledging the scholarship he does use. For instance, Justin Kaplan, strik­ ingly, is not in the index, though his biography is alluded to in the introduc­ tion. There are many small errors of fact, as noted especially by Mac Donnell, and to this list let me add two geographical blunders: Kaplan transfers San Francisco’s Cliff House to the East Bay and the Turkish City of Izmir, with the nearby ruin of classical Ephesus, to Palestine. Despite its faults, The Singular Mark Twain is accurate in the broad details of Clemens’s life, and Kaplan tells the story in an adequate, often engaging, plain style. He is especially effective in describing Clemens’s long slide into bankruptcy and the sad details of Susy’s and Livy’s illnesses and deaths. The general reader will find the biography entertaining and informative. The Singular Mark Twain is in command of the field for the moment, the only one-volume, full-life biography of Clemens. But, no doubt, other con­ tenders will appear. Selected Short Stories of Weldon Kees. Ed. Dana Gioia. Lin coln : U n iversity o f N ebraska Press, 2002. 168 pages, $12.00. Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees. By James Reidel. L in coln : U n iversity of N ebraska Press, 2003. 418 pages, $35.00. Reviewed by Rod Phillips Jam es M adison C ollege, M ichigan State U niversity Half a century after his death, Nebraska writer Weldon Kees (1914-1955) remains a shadowy figure in postwar American literature. Best known as a poet, Kees also produced a substantial body of short fiction and several unpublished novels before suddenly leaving the world of letters to pursue painting, jazz, photography, and filmmaking. His apparent suicide at the age of forty-one (his car was found abandoned on the Golden Gate Bridge, but his body was never found) only added to the aura of mystery surrounding the artist. Now, two new books from the University of Nebraska Press explore the life and writing of Weldon Kees beyond his career as a poet and offer a clearer picture of this obscure but fascinating artist. Poet and critic Dana Gioia edited Kees’s first posthumous collection of short fiction, The Ceremony and Other Stories, in 1984. The new collection, 2 4 2 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 4 Selected Short Stories of Weldon Kees, expands on this earlier volume, pulling together fourteen pieces that represent the best of Kees’s forty-three published stories. Three new pieces have been added: “Three Young Priests” (1940), “The Life of the Mind” (1940), and “Every Year They Came Out” (1943). The works contained in the collection point to Kees as one of the finest short story writers of his generation. Many of the stories set in Weston, Nebraska, a fic­ tionalized small town reminiscent of the Beatrice, Nebraska, of Kees’s youth, evoke the dark and narrow lives of the grotesques in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. But there is an overlay of gritty, Depression-era desperation that makes Kees’s characters, and the stories they inhabit, even more power­ ful. With their intentionally flat, understated prose coupled with complex psy­ chological portraits of ordinary characters, Kees’s stories move well beyond a western reworking of Anderson’s Winesburg and often seem more like an early precursor to the fiction of Raymond Carver...