NOVEMBER 30 -- DECEMBER 4, 2018 Part 3

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018

Nov. 29-Dec. 4, 2018 Part 3

Kent’s visit to Seward between Nov. 30^th and Dec. 4^th represents a turning point for him in many ways – both positive and negative. During the last three months he’s met many in Seward. Gradually they’ve gotten to know him, and by the December trip some acquaintances turn to friendships. Rockie makes many friends, too. They now stay at private homes and get dinner invitations, saving them money. They become close to the Don Carlos Brownell family, and stay at his home with its “great fireplace…and fine phonograph.” In 1918 the house sits by the mountain edge on the southwest bank of Lowell Creek. As a favor, Kent sets a door frame for Brownell. In later years, Kent maintaines this friendship with a correspondence. Many now provide the artist inside advice about what and where to paint. He renews his friendship with Postmaster Root and his family. He’s offered free transportation on the Copper River Railroad out of Cordova. He’s given keys to cabins and cottages for his future trips to town. He shops for Christmas gifts on Dec. 2^nd, hoping to find some small Alaska Native moccasins for his children with no luck. Hawkins gives him a basket of fresh fruit and other gifts. At the Seward Gateway he has a proof of one of his first woodblocks struck off but finds it worthless. Builders Brosius and Noon befriend him.

“The people of Seward are friendly without being the slightest bit inquisitive,” he writes, “and are extremely broad-minded for all that their country is remote from the greater world.” He experiences some frontier ethics – Don’t ask personal questions of strangers. Alaska, like all frontiers, is an outpost where many come to reinvent themselves, leaving behind a checkered past they’d rather not discuss. They want a new start, and the frontier is a place where you’re judged on who you are and what you do from the time you arrive. “I don’t believe provincialism is an inevitable evil of far-off communities,” he continues. “The Alaskan is alert, enterprising, adventurous. Men stand on their own feet, and why not? The confusing intricacy of modern society is here lacking. The men’s own hands take the pure gold from the rocks; no one is another’s master. It’s great land – the best by far I have ever known.”

But the men and women Kent has gotten to know are the pioneers – Olson, Hawkins, Root, Brownell, Sexton, Thwaites, Hogg, Elmswiler, Graef, Brosius, and Noon. Most have been around since at least the Klondike Gold Rush -- some, like Olson, even longer. With the construction of the Alaska Railroad, there are now many newcomers, some who don’t understand or don’t care to understand the frontier ethic. These are those who tease and ridicule Olson when he comes to town, who suspect Kent of being a German spy, who don’t like that Rockie isn’t enrolled in the local school, who want to learn more about Kent’s past. Before he leaves Seward in March 1919, Kent will warn Alaskans of their influence causing them to confront him. 

After receiving the initial twenty wonderful letters from Kathleen on Nov. 30^th and reading them with delight, he writes her a long insightful and compelling letter. I discussed the first half of that letter in the last entry. He continues by advising her that this trip to Seward may be his last in two months due to weather. “It’s much too hazardous coming over this frightful windswept bay in a little boat,” he writes. “Just think! While at Monhegan we could go in a day under wave power on the sea all day in winter…here there is not one day in many, many weeks that a boat can {go} at all.” He’s much more cautious with Rockie, forcing him to bundle up in one of Olson’s sheepskin coats on their Nov. 30^th trip to Seward – much to Rockie’s disgust. There are hints, but Kent doesn’t dwell on the stress of his trips to Seward in Wilderness now that he fully understands the dangers after that mid-September event. He provides much more details in his letters because these dangerous excursions across the water become an integral part of his fragile disposition. Kent next addresses Kathleen’s concern about his mother, Sara. There has always been an ambivalent relationship between Kathleen and Sara, mostly beneath the surface. With her insecurities, from the beginning Kathleen may not have been made to feel worthy of the first-born of Sara’s three children. Kent has often suggested Kathleen move in with her mother-in-law to save expenses, and Sara is agreeable. But Kathleen knew it would never work. Kent told her that if she made that sacrifice, they’d save enough money for her to come to Alaska with him. She wrote to him on Nov. 15^th – “About my coming out to Alaska dear; it seems to me a foolish thing to attempt. You say that if I had gone to Tarrytown to live, it would have made it possible. I didn’t know you had any serious idea of my doing it, and I know your mother would certainly think it wrong to spend all that money on a trip out there. Then another thing, I could not have left all the children with her…” In addition, their servant, Bessie, refuses to accompany her to Tarrytown, suggesting other possible personality conflicts. Kathleen’s has gained more confidence and jabs her husband a bit: “You wouldn’t live up there in Tarrytown, even to save expense, so why do you expect me to!”

 c

If only Kathleen could be with him on Fox Island and see how he has changed. “I’ve been considerate!” he writes. “And have not blamed Rockwell for even his own faults! And have not been irritable. Often I have wished that you could have looked in upon us and have felt proud of the delight you would have felt in the new Rockwell. Truly – no clearer proof of the turmoil and trouble of my own spirit in the past is needed than in the senseless unkindness I so often showed toward you. That too will try to have forever gone!”

He’s writing all this late into the evening of Nov. 30^th and the early morning hours of Dec. 1^st. The Hour of the Wolf becomes more like The Hour of God. This has been “The most peaceful, wonderful night of my many, a night this has been, and shall be in a lifetime. But just such a night, dear heart, as will be when we are again together. Ah, then we’ll look deep into trustful, profoundly loving eyes, we’ll kiss until our lips not even God could tell apart, and over the after happiness we’ll weep together, God knows why, unless even our eyes were yearning and striving for such a union as had flamed together from our bodies. Bless you for ever and ever dear faithful loving wife, dear Kathleen my tender sweetheart. Your Rockwell.”

That day, Dec. 1^st -- another steamer arrives with more letters from Kathleen, including the one about her trip to New York and her learning about the expensive jewelry her husband had secretly bought for Hildegarde while denying his wife a mere $30 to pay for little Clara’s eye exam and glasses. It’s a long, angry missive. She informs Kent of Hildegarde’s clandestine relationships with other men, and the disputes they are having over the furniture Kent has left at his studio. Kathleen wants a specific chair for her new apartment in New York and Hildegarde doesn’t want to give it up. And what about those fireplace andirons? Who do those belong to? This affair with Hildegarde must end if you want my love, Kathleen demands.

Kent's descends back into gloom and criticism. “You must be again forgiven for unkindness,” he writes back. Kathleen’s offensive letters “violate all that you promised me in the letters from Berkshire.” Kent is angry, but he expresses ambivalent emotions. “Oh sweetheart, I do forgive you,” he writes. “Have more faith. Don’t you then realize the depth of my despair these months on the island? Thank God for what wisdom I had in destroying the terrible letters I did write to you.” Can’t you envision me on Fox Island in my despair, he asks? “God, can you question it? Can’t you see me here?” – and his neat, controlled penmanship suddenly gets darker and bigger. If she happens to get any of his terrible letters, “don’t let them trouble you, – but “restore my peace” with your responses.

Our relationship is special, he tells Kathleen. “You and I belong to each other,” Kent writes, “and what one does affects the other. But with others it is not so. Long months ago I had decided that with Hildegarde it must be over.”  It’s over, Kent claims, and he let Hildegard know “in the kindest way I know” -- by not responding to her letters. That’s why she hasn't come to Alaska to join him, he tells Kathleen. “When our parting as lovers comes,” he writes – “and it may be now at hand – I’ll take all of the blame myself and do it for the one true reason that I love you. To me Hildegarde has been kind when no one else was. I think without her love I might have ended myself. I don’t know. If you love me, don’t forget that in her. Whatever she may have done, even if it concerns yourself, be sure that never one unkind word about you has come to me. And that is over, dear Kathleen. Hildegarde will always be one thing to others and quite another to me. This is not illusion. I have never debased one I have loved and from Hildegarde I evoked much that was beautiful and even noble. But your path and Hildegarde’s have never crossed. If I in my wanderings forsook your way for hers there never was comparison. Hildegarde was and is a child to me and from me she has had a child’s plaything.”

This is how Kent spends late evening and early morning hours – sitting up until three o’clock in the morning -- responding to Kathleen. This emotional strain is killing him, he implies in his letters. He tells Kathleen that her negative letters plus his concern about Rockie’s safety on their boat trips plus the military draft and his expenses as well the darkness, and terrible weather combined with their constant need for fire wood – he's exhausted. No wonder he collapsed and thought he had the influenza. And now, from thousands of miles away, he's got to deal with you and Hildegarde arguing over stuff? This between the lines of his responses to his wife.

Today when someone has the "flu" we think little of it. The situation was different in 1918. By that spring, what was sometimes called the Spanish Flu had spread all over the world killing more people in its short life than any other disease in human history. Kent's concern, fear and reaction may seem ridiculous to us today, but by 1918 standards it is understandable. He's not only concerned about his and Rockie's health, but also that of his wife and children. By the fall of 1918 the influenza has reached its peak. Each day during September and October that year it kills 300,000 people.

The chairs again. Midst all his anxiety Kent feels he also has to deal with that trivia. On Nov. 15^th Kathleen had written: “You remember in the spring that I asked you if I might have one or two of the chairs from the studio in town and you told me “yes”; that I was to take anything I wanted from there. Well, all I want is the brown chair, but Hilda refuses to let me have it, that is, she writes me that you said it was all hers. Will you please write her about the chair.” Kent responds: “Hildegarde has told me in a letter that she has the studio furniture but will return it when she can afford to buy more furniture. But I don’t want it and neither do you. You and I do not want it.” He promises to write to Hildegarde about the andirons.

“Please say nothing more about the chair,” Kent says. “It was yours and should be now but Hildegarde doesn’t understand. It was a relief to me to forsake that studio and all that was in it and a relief to be able to give Hildegarde at least what was there. I forgot what I had said to you. I left it all. Mother, I am not a bargainer. Let that trifle be. You have all now. If you could be here and we could live over again, would I choose to go back to that if it meant tragedy to you, almost ruined me and my spirit forever? It’s not in vain that you have forgiven me so much and for my sake sacrificed yourself. If to have your love is so great a thing to me, is it much less to you that I should worship you?” As he lay in bed on Dec. 4^th with Rockie by his side – believing he was dying of the influenza – “I thought,” he writes “of ways to show you at my death how completely every hope centered in you.”

But enough of that – Kent quickly switches gears in a Dec. 2^nd letter from Seward. He needs tubes of paint sent to him right away -- Strontium yellow, Harrison red, Zinc white. He wants several Rubens brushes, long hair flat, in different sizes. And flute music – “I do want it badly so please get it,” he pleads. Another gear shift -- In Seward he spent the evening “at the home of an affectionate couple and Oh I’ve felt homesick. How good I shall be to you and how much more considerate. I have learned very much about my own faults of the past in my life alone here. You shall see in the happy days to come. So, sweet wife of mine, be all overjoyed that we are ours.”

As usually, regardless of how negative, depressed or even critical he has been in a letter, Kent provides a loving conclusion: “Keep me ever with you in your little house. Think of it even as mine too. Hold me in your arms every night and love me enough to let me not get far away by day. Before your fire sit with me, see us both together in the fantastic shapes of its flames. Keep it a holy hearth and yourself ever a devoted and true wife – Oh God, keep you so! Dear wife, help me more. Love me and let me know it ever and ever and ever. And I am faithfully and with your loving help will be to the end of my life. Your loving husband Rockwell. “