August 20-21, 2018

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL
100 YEARS LATER
by Doug Capra © 2018

"There are more types of pretty girls in America than in any other country in the world. I don't offer this as a piece of news...But I doubt if anyone has had a more striking proof of this fact than I have, for as manager of two musical shows, I get a demonstration of it almost every day of the year...the question of beauty is a very complex one, especially when it comes to choosing girls for a musical show. A pretty face is the first essential; there are very few parts for a girl who hasn't also a good figure, and who cannot dance, or at least carry herself gracefully...{but} a girl must have something besides beauty, if she is to create more than a passing impression."
         -- Florence Ziegfeld, Jr. "Picking Out Pretty Girls for the Stage," American Magazine, 88 (Dec., 1919)

Technology is advancing so rapidly today – and we have acclimated to it so quickly -- that it can be difficult for us to enter into the world of 1918. Can you imagine life before cell phones? The i-phone is only about a decade old. Those innovations alone have changed the way we live. Few people write letters anymore. It’s all texts, tweets, emails or phone calls. There are blog journals – and that’s about as close as we get today to the personal journals and letters of the past. But we can never recapture a time when – with no film, television, radio and internet – people spent a whole evening writing long letters to friends and relatives.

Throughout his life, Kent wrote many letters, sometimes three or four a day. I’ve shared with you some of the correspondence to and from his wife, Kathleen, from 1917 and 1918. Their marriage was in trouble. Kathleen was fed up with his affairs. The year before Kent left for Alaska, on July 26, 1917, she wrote him in New York from Monhegan Island: “This last ‘affair’ has left a scar on my life that will not soon disappear.” She was referring to Hildegarde. He replied four days later, “It is, I promise you, only in spite of my best wishes that I’m untrue to you.” Hardly a reassuring response. 

In mid-July 1918, as Kent firmed up his Alaska trip, Rockie came to stay with him in New York. Kathleen may have wanted to join him in Alaska, but who would take care of the children? And taking them along would be too risky and time-consuming. Hildegarde was hesitant –as an actress and a Ziegfeld Follies girl her work was in New York. Both Kathleen and Hildegarde had enjoyed camping and hiking excursions with Kent into the New England countryside. But Alaska would be different. Kent didn’t want to go to Alaska alone. He craved, he needed his version of solitude. For him, however, solitude included at least a few other people – friends, family, lovers. He decided to take Rockie with him and Kathleen gave him a firm no to that idea. I haven’t found the specific letter in which she declared that, but from his responses it quite clear she refused. He was devastated. “How in God’s name can you turn upon me so,” Kent wrote to her on July 15th. “Come and get Rockwell. I’m heartbroken over it. I can’t face the thought of the loneliness I’m going into. Never did I enter upon any cause with such a sense of necessity of duty as drives me on into this Alaska trip. I know all the terrors of that impossibly lonely life.” 

Before we get Kent and Rocky to Seward and his life on Fox Island, I want to go into more detail about the battle over Rockie. I believe these details have been overlooked in what’s been written about Kent’s Alaska trip. Most accounts merely say that Kathleen objected and that Kent fought her and won. I think it’s more complicated than that, as the letters show.

I’ll cover that in the next journal entry.

NOTES – Last week I did an interview about Kent in Anchorage with Alaska Public Radio for a program called Outdoor Explorer. I don’t know when it will be aired, but once it is broadcast a link will appear on the their website where you can listen to it. The link appears below:

https://www.alaskapublic.org/cat…/programs/outdoor-explorer/

This Friday, August 24, 2018 is the day Kent arrived in Seward 100 years ago. Saturday Aug. 25 is the day he discovered Fox Island and decided to settle there. That evening I’ll be out on Fox Island for a Rockwell Kent Lecture and Dinner sponsored by the Anchorage Museum of History and Art along with Kenai Fjords tours. I’ll do a presentation and lead a few people to the ruins of the Kent cabin.

Within a few days this site will be available as a regular website. I’ll give you the link soon.

PHOTOS

1. Some of the man faces of Rockwell Kent. Photos courtesy of the Rockewell Kent Gallery at Plattsburgh State University, Plattsburgh, N.Y.
2. Kent, Kathleen and the children about 1916-17.
3. A sample of Rockwell Kent’s handwriting at its best from of his July 1918 letters to Kathleen. Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.