THE DISAPPEARING POET.

It is almost half a century since San Francisco police found a 1954 Plymouth Savoy on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge. On Tuesday, July 19, 1955, a highway patrol reported that the car, belonging to a Weldon Kees, had been discovered with the keys in the ignition. Two of Kees's friends, Michael Grieg and Adrian Wilson, went to search the apartment of the missing man. There they found, among other things, his cat, Lonesome, and a pair of red socks in a sink. His wallet, watch, and sleeping bag were missing. So was his savings-account book, although the balance, which stood at more than eight hundred dollars, would remain that way. There was no suicide note.

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 had met her because he and Grieg ran a weekly radio broadcast on KPFA, out of Berkeley, called "Behind the Movie Camera," on which Kael had become a regular guest. Movies were one of Kees's passions: he had worked on newsreels in the nineteen-forties and had recently, in one of his loftier schemes, mooted the idea of a new production studio. It would bear the title San Francisco Films, and, according to Kees's assiduous biographer, James Reidel, would deliver "a cross between art-house foreign films and noir American B-movies." Kees himself was toiling on a script, a spy thriller called "Gadabout," and was discussing another with Hugh Kenner, whose magisterial years as a critic, like those of Kael, were soon to come. (So many famous names enter the story of Kees. He seemed to drift into their orbit for a while, then spin away.) Yet it is not as a filmmaker that he would wish to be remembered. Nor can we even be sure of such a wish.

On January 22nd of that final year, he and a few kindred spirits had put together an event called "Poets' Follies," a mishmash of readings, music, and dance. It was poised, like so many Keesian schemes, between old and new, a rickety fusion of post-twenties burlesque and pre-sixties art happening. Kees read some of his work, as did a local poet by the name of Lawrence Ferling. (It would stretch, over time, into the more exotic Ferlinghetti.) A stripper was hired from Oakland to sashay onstage and declaim some T. S. Eliot, a move of which he would surely have approved. There was a jazz band, with Kees on standup piano. They played a version of "I Ain't Gonna Give Nobody None o' This Jelly Roll." Kees was introduced as "Mr. Weldon Kees, poet, painter, artist, etcetera, composer, critic, etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitum."

Half a century later, what remains? Most people have never heard of Kees. A handful may hum and frown, then mention an anthology of verse in which his name cropped up. Longtime readers of this magazine may recall a poem or two that appeared in these pages. "The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees," edited by Donald Justice, was published in 1960. There has been a devout effort to revive, or perhaps create, his reputation, yet the impact has been limited. Something about Kees, in his afterlife as in his life, feels determined to elude any ambitions we may harbor on his behalf. Poets seem more readily enthused than scholars by his example, yet even that enthusiasm has a gleam of the cultish, as if Kees had hailed from (and returned to) a flickering underworld. Every now and then, one finds a fellow-Keesian--somebody who has picked up the scent of the mysterious figure and followed the trail. And that trail always leads to the same place. Not to the movies, or to the paintings; not to the short stories, or to the fruitless novels; not even to the poems, the crucible and crown of his achievement. Instead, we are led ad infinitum: to the Golden Gate, and to the empty Plymouth; to what did or did not happen next, and so to the reflection, as in a rearview mirror, of all that had come before.

Harry Weldon Kees was born in 1914 in Beatrice, Nebraska. That may be the most important thing about him. As an adult, he gravitated to hubs and hotbeds, on both coasts, yet one rarely gathers the sense, on reading the testimony of his colleagues, of a man with his heart in the metropolis. For the mid-century artist of any kind, the city was inescapable. Even if you chose not to live there, you had to grapple with the millions who did. Yet the figure cut by Kees--visibly so, in many photographs of him--suggests not an insider but an intruder, somebody from out of town who may leave the party at any time. He mixed and drank with writers and painters, but he never resembled them. It was as if the artistic look were surplus to requirements; or, rather, as if to don the outer crust of an insurance agent or an advertising man--to conduct oneself like the steady Nebraskan citizen that Kees might have stayed to become--struck him as the ...