PART I - MAY 27-29, 2019 VERMONT: FLIGHT FROM THE CITY

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018-19

Part I Vermont: Flight from the City

May 27-30, 2019

ABOVE – ROCKWELL KENT’S “EGYPT” Shadow & Light in Vermont by Jamie Franklin and Jake Milgram Wien – exhibit catalogue (June 9 – Oct. 30, 2012) at the Bennington Museum, Bennington, Vermont. The Rockwell Kent Vermont painting on the cover, Nirvana (1921), is from a private collection.  Oil on canvas, 28” x 44”

         The sources for this series about the home Rockwell Kent called “Egypt” at Arlington, Vermont, comes from his autobiography, It’s Me O Lord (1955) (IMOL); An American Saga: The Life and Times of Rockwell Kent by David Traxel (1980); Rockwell Kent’s “Egypt”: Shadow & Light in Vermont (S&L) (2012) by Jamie Franklin and Jake Wien; from a May 22, 2019 phone interview with Jamie Franklin; from various discussions and emails with Jake Wien;  three articles by Joan G. Schroeter in The Kent Collector (TKC): "Rockwell Kent in 'Egypt'" (Spring 2002), "The Ruggles-Kent Correspondence: 'Doing the Same Thing'" (Spring 2000), and "Dorothy Canfield and Rockwell Kent" (Fall/Winter 1998); also from TKC, "The Drawings of Rockwell Kent - The Reproductions Reconsidered" by Robert Rightmire (Spring 2000). Other sources, including letters, are quoted in the text. The Kent correspondence is from the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, unless otherwise noted.

VERMONT

Flight from the City

Part 1

Rockwell Kent tells the story of his return home in IMOL, but we need consider that he’s writing this nearly 35 years later, and some of his memoires may be faulty – and most important – he’s constructing a narrative to meet his needs. In late February 1919, Kent mails to Kathleen a large batch of drawings – probably those intended for a planned exhibition. Most of these are probably produced during a frantic period of intense doubt about the success of both his art and his marriage. During Olson’s absence from Jan. 2 – Feb. 11, 1919 Kent is on the edge of making a final decision to leave Alaska early. He is anxiously waiting word from Kathleen – communication that will tell him whether his wife believes the confession in his anniversary letters. He has finally realized his cruelty toward her and his hurtful marital transgressions. He has ended his relationship with Hildegarde. He has become a new man. With the letters Olson brought back on Feb. 11, Kent learns Kathleen does believe him and has hope for their marriage. He writes back to her on Feb. 13, 1919:

Olson left on the 2^nd of January. We expected his return on the 4^th. So much hung upon your letters that I felt to write in the meantime would be useless even if more days elapsed. I was deeply depressed. In the letters I had sent you I had put so much love and hope and excluded so much doubt and sorrow that a reaction overwhelmed me. I past {sic} the days in absolute idleness, mourning, passing the shore looking toward Seward, counting the hours. And then at last, after the lapse of many days, I roused myself. Whether you loved me or not I said that I would live. I began to draw. All day and every night I worked with all my power. A little recreation with Rockwell was all I allowed myself, all there was to be had in fact. And I put you utterly out of my thoughts. I lived without a woman in my life. I drew only men. I wrote from time to time a letter to Carl, my Rock of faith here, and that was always a relief. Once in a while I’d think of you coldly in a far-off way, sometimes I was sad. On the whole I did not live. I worked. And I accomplished a great deal. All the drawings I shall send you so that you can see. And then at last came Olson and your letters! – That period of my work is ended. I think I shall draw us more. My nights and part of my days shall be for your letters. Count each day’s writing as work at least the value of one drawing. And love the letters more for that.

Jamie Franklin notes how quickly things move once Kent returned. Zigrosser, Chappell and especially Marie Sterner and others have probably started planning the Knoedler Gallery exhibit many weeks before Kent leaves Alaska. Zigrosser and Chappell enlist Kent’s friend and publisher George Putnam to work on the legalities of Rockwell’s incorporation. Kent has told Kathleen not to tell anyone when he’s returning because it will be earlier than his friends expect. He’s ashamed, and says he doesn’t want to see anyone for a while. Once his friends learn he’s back, events move quickly.

The show of his drawings happens in May 1919 to great critical and financial success, initiating plans for a book and a show of the Alaska paintings to happen in early 1920. By the early summer of 1919 Kent begins his search for his new paradise – a somewhat isolated older farm house in the New England countryside. Early on Kent seems to have decided upon Vermont. Franklin writes: This choice may have been influenced by Kent’s friend and frequent collaborator George S. Chappell, who published a small essay on early Vermont architecture in December of 1918, noting that “the charming towns west of {the} Connecticut {River}…by leaps and bounds, are attaining a national pre-eminence as a foci of rest and recreation for thousands for brain-fagged urbanites.” (S&L) Architects often lead the way in moments of social change because people must not only live at a place but also in a place – and our abodes reflect who they are, or at least should. In his writings, Kent often reflects on his philosophy of architecture, especially in This is My Own (1940) while describing the search for a rural home with his second wife, Frances Lee.

A search for the simple life is a motif that runs through America’s history and it emerges during periods of Kent’s life.  David Shi, in The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture (1985) – traces this back to the Puritans. But rather than going back that far, we might start with the significant influence of Henry Wallace throughout the 19^th century. He even inspired Tolstoy, whose What is Art? remained a book Kent carried with him throughout life. There were the Nashville Agrarians, the four poets -- John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren and Donald Davidson. They published a little magazine, The Fugitive. (See I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition by Susan V. Donaldson (2006)). And there were many others that influenced Rockwell Kent and were later influenced by him.

In 1919, the year Rockwell had the show of his drawings and moved to Vermont, Ralph Borsodi, a marketing consultant at Macy’s Department Store in New York, began to consider his economic vulnerability living in the city. In 1920, the year Kent had the show of his paintings, published Wilderness, and settled into his Vermont home -- a housing shortage hit the city. The house Borsodi leased sold. Years later – in Flight from the City: An Experiment in Creative Living on the Land (1933)

BELOW – A review of Flight from the City in the Aug. 26, 1933 issue of the Cincinnati Enquire.

Borsodi recalled – New York in 1920 was no place for a houseless family. Rents, owing to the shortage of building which dated back to the World War, were outrageously high. Evictions were epidemic…We had the choice of looking for an equally endurable home in the city, of reading endless numbers of classified advertisements, of visiting countless real estate agents, of walking weary miles and climbing endless flights of steps, in an effort to rent another home, or of flight from the city. He started looking for a house within commuting distance of the city that could be remodeled. He wanted it near a railroad station with five to ten acres of land with fruit trees, garden space, pasturage, a woodlot – and most important, at a low purchase price.

BELOW – A syndicated article about Ralph Borsodi as it appeared in the May 13, 1933 issue of the Weekly Town Talk (Alexandria, Louisiana).

Even if the place we could afford only barely complied with these specifications, Borsodi wrote, we felt confident that we could achieve economic freedom on it and a degree of comfort we never enjoyed in the city. All the other essentials of the good life, not even the schooling for our two sons, we decided we could produce ourselves if we were unable to buy a neighborhood which already possessed them. The Borsodi’s bought a place about two hours from the city and began the experiment, he wrote, with three principal assets, courage – foolhardiness, our city friends called it; a vision of what modern methods and modern domestic machinery night be made to do in the way of eliminating drudgery, and the fact that my wife had been born and had lived up to hwer twelfth year on a ranch in the West. She at least had had childhood experiences of life the country.” The Borsodi’s are one of many examples from the period. Later there were also the Nearings – Scott and Helen. Borsodi is citied by them in their book, Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely in a Troubled World (1970) as a creative thinker and important influence. The Nearings first wrote to Rockwell in 1955 and their correspondence and friendship continued until Kent’s death. (For more historical context on the back to-the-land movement see also The Simple Life: American Voice Past and Present (1986) edited and annotated by David Shi, an anthology of relevant writings.

ABOVE – Living the Good Life (1970). BELOW – From the Nov.29, 1970 Brownwood Bulletin, Brownwood, Texas.

Rockwell’s move to Vermont with is family fits generally into this social movement. Not so much with his Alaska experiment on Fox Island. That was more an escape from society, personal problems -- and a confrontation with the wilderness – a clash with the wild that turned out to be much more hostile than Kent had experienced before or even imagined. Rockwell had no realistic intention of moving permanently to Fox Island or Alaska with his family. He led no subsistence life on Fox Island. He planted no garden nor raised any animals himself. He could have lived off of salmon, creatures of the intertidal zone, and berries, but instead almost all of his food supplies were store-bought in Seward. His adventure did have many elements of the simple life that did appeal to a public craving a lifestyle change away from the city. Kent refurbished an old goat shed, cleared the land, furnished his wood supply for his stoves, lit the cabin with lamps and candles, and devoted much of his leisure time to his son, intellectual activities, and his art. The surface story he eventually wrote appeared as romantic as one of the books he read Rockie on the island – Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. In Wilderness he lists all the food, material, the books he brought. In letters he records some books people sent him. Near the end of Wilderness, Kent calculates how much it cost him and Rockie on food, and the specific amount per day for meals. In some ways, Kent may have intended his Fox Island sojourn to be his Walden Pond experiment – but for him there was no leisurely stroll to Concord to have dinner with his parents and later catch a train ride to Boston and civilization. The wind, the rain, the darkness, the isolation and the cruel seas held him captive. In Will to Power, Nietzsche had written: My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on. Kent could control these dark forces of nature that, but perhaps in his art he did come to an arrangment with them, a kind of union that empowered his drawings and paintings.

It was late May or early June 1919 when Rockwell and Kathleen together as he had promised began their search for their new home. The only question was: Where to? Kent writes in IMOL. We picked Vermont. And armed with topographical maps of the Green Mountain region and tickets to its southern tip, the city of Bennington, we boarded the Rutland Railroad train. It was not that we had the least intention of leaving the train at Bennington, or at any city on the route; we planned to keep on riding northwards paying our fare from place to place, and sizing up the country by what it might reveal of itself through the car windows and in the chiaroscuro of the topographic maps. And so it happened that, pleased by what we saw, we left the train at Arlington.

Rockwell Kent was a confirmed serendipitist when it came to travel. It’s not that he didn’t prepare. He did his research. But he never let the facts interfere with the value of synchronicity. One always found the most interesting people and places through meaningful, chance encounters that might at first appear coincidental. That was part of what it meant to live one’s life fully and let the art follow, as his teacher Robert Henri had advocated. Rockwell had followed that philosophy in Alaska by showing up unannounced at a Yakutat cannery with a letter of introduction from the main office in Seattle. If they turned him down he’d move on, but Yakutat seemed a suitable place to start. It turned out to be too wild and isolated, especially with his eight-year-old son along. But where to next? Seldovia on the Kenai Peninsula, another cannery town, beckoned and he started out in that direction. But he met a German hiker on the steamship who recommended Seward. The vessel was to dock at Seward where he’d board a smaller vessel to Seldovia. But as they sailed around Cape Resurrection past the many islands in Resurrection Bay, Rockwell Kent became enchanted. This would be the place, and the next day he discovered Fox Island. That would be the spot. So – when Rockwell and Kathleen boarded that train in Rutland, they knew the adventure would be in the serendipity of discovering the perfect spot.

As they left the train at Arlington, they saw and then heard two men and a young woman speaking in French. Where could they spend the night? the two travelers asked. Check with a Miss Canfield who might take them in, they were told.  And sure enough she would, Kent wrote in IMOL. This would be Dorothy Canfield Fisher and her husband John Fisher. As it turned out, Rockwell and John had been classmates at Columbia University. Arlington, we promptly decided, and Miss Canfield’s friendly home, should be our headquarters for the farther exploration of Vermont. The Fishers graciously welcomed them to Vermont, insisting that Rockwell and Kathleen should settle in the area. The Fisher’s then proceeded in the next few days to drive us here and there and everywhere that held a prospect of being just what we had come to find. And then one day we found it.

ABOVE -- Dorothy Canfield Fisher (Photo from Wikipedia)

TO BE CONTINUED

Part 2 – Flight from the city

Dorothy Canfield Fisher and “Egypt”