August 22, 2018

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

Before we get Kent and Rocky to Seward and their life on Fox Island, I want to go into more detail about his affairs, his concept of solitude, and how Rockie fits into the Alaska trip. Most accounts say that Kathleen objected and that Kent fought her and won. I think it’s more complicated, as the letters demonstrate. But first, let’s put this into a larger context.

The Great War was like a glacier that advanced over the terrain and cleared away many old-world certainties. The seeds of these changes were planted in the years before the war with Darwin, Freud, Einstein and others. By 1918 as the war ended, many wondered if it had all been worth it with so many dead and wounded. The world-wide flu took many more lives. Women would soon get the national vote. Alaska and some other western states and territories had already done that. Prohibition seemed certain. Alaska had gone dry on January 1, 1918. Other western states were also dry.

People began to view the world and their role within it differently. Some Victorian men like Kent – artists, writers and intellectuals – saw the transformations coming. They embraced these changes with ambivalence. They wanted to keep a foot in both worlds. Some married women from the old world and took up with the new-world women. Kent wanted a family, children and a wife to handle that home life while he could pursue his art. He also demanded the freedom to embark upon a separate love life. Artists need that freedom to experience every aspect of life, he would tell Kathleen. Those experiences became the inspiration for his art. It’s nothing personal, he’d tell his wife.

Kent’s third wife, Sally wrote “What is important to consider…is that Rockwell Kent was an incurable romantic and that his creative energies were heightened by the focus being in love gave to his work. He was that way to the end of his long and exceptional life. Nature, of course, in all its untamed and uncharged magnificence was the great stimulus to his art. But one has only to look at the range of his artistic work to see how often the women in his life were subjects and beneficiaries of his creative genius.” Sally’s quotes here and below come from her preface to the Baxter Society facsimile edition of “The Jewel: A Romance of Fairyland,” a handwritten book created as one copy by Kent in 1917 for Hildegarde. (I want to thank Eliot H. Stanley for supplying me with a copy of “The Jewel” and his research into Hildegarde and this period of Kent’s life.)

None of this is to make light of the hurt and suffering he caused Kathleen. Her anguish is quite visible in her letters. But she loved him and he loved her and the children. She was conflicted -- she accepted her husband for who he was. Deep down she resented her acceptance. She didn’t dislike Hildegarde. Kathleen wrote her occasionally asking for items from NYC stores. At one point Kathleen gave the younger woman “a fine calling-down” for not taking better care of her husband. Kent read that letter and wrote back to his wife (July 19, 1917): “Dear Kathleen: You are too good for any of us. I feel terribly ashamed of all the harm I have done you. I wish I could find a way to make you happy.” It’s not that Kathleen didn’t tell him how to make her happy. Kent knew. 

Rockie seemed always to come up in those July 1918 letters. When Kent was considering taking Hildegarde with him to Alaska, Kathleen wrote to him: “I hope you know that it makes no difference to me whether she goes or not; for I realize that she will always be part of your life and that I must have my husband with a sweetheart or not have him at all.” Kathleen knew Kent would not go alone, and if neither of his two women were willing, well… 

“I wish you and Hilda would go but leave Rockie with me,” Kathleen wrote. “It seems strange to me to think how you are taking him away from me without my consent, after my plainly stating I did not want him to go. You have more conceit and a stronger will; you know you will be a stronger companion for him and you want him to go and that settles it in your mind. 

“Dear Rockwell,” Kathleen continued, “I know you are angry now by reading this, but I feel very badly about you taking R. away from me. Your letters so full of love never ring quite true in my ears. If we were together again next winter, it would be the same old story of last winter all over again! And after having given so much of yourself to someone else instead of me, the separation from R. is doubly hard. 

Her letter goes on: “Don’t you see, Rockwell, I have shared you against my will with someone else for many years and for the past year I have struggled to resign myself to the thought of life without you; just as I begin to get resigned to that, you whisk Rockwell away from me. Why should I give up so much of what there is in life. Rockwell, you know that I love you a great, great deal, but I can never love you as I want and as you want – if things continue as they are. I get terrible for a man’s protection and love and when I feel so badly, I cry out loud. I cry out to you, for there is no one else; but at other times I fully realize that you cannot give me the love I want – and – I cannot give you the love you want. You have said so. It’s lucky you’re not here now for my latest beau is the captain of the mail boat; and I’m sure you’d object to his attentions! Please don’t be downcast by what I have written. Please remember that is not my fault; please remember that I have been very patient and very devoted and faithful to you for many years. Lovingly, Kathleen.” 

In her preface to “The Jewel,” Sally reminds us that Kent's affair with Hildegarde was “not his first extramarital adventure nor his last, but in time he came to view these escapades as departures from his better self.” She goes on to say that at the time of the Hildegarde affair when he was 34-years-old, “he espoused the philosophy that an artist’s life should not be constrained by conventional mores; by 1955 when he wrote his autobiography, I think he had come to reflect on such affairs as transgressions.”

Kathleen wanted Kent to be happy because she loved him and wanted her marriage to work, but also because when he wasn’t happy he was a difficult man to have around. For Kent happiness was intimately connected to his freedom to pursue his art. Kathleen tried to accommodate but it was difficult and she didn’t like it. In the midst of Kent’s affair with Hildegarde on July 26, 1917 – almost a year to the day Kent would leave for Alaska the next year – Kathleen wrote: 

“Dearest Rockwell: I hope you can come up soon and I hope we can live together more happily. You remember I told you in N.Y. that I must not love you as much as I want to. If you want all the love that I feel you will have to hustle some to earn it now. This last ‘affair’ has left a scar in my life that will not soon disappear. You cannot have the love I long to give you until you have shown me that I am not going to be chucked aside again in a short time. You know how I long to love and be loved.” She was living up to Kent’s expectations, she tells him sarcastly. “I will do my best to live up to your requirements. You say I must ‘keep strong, full of exuberant spirits and grow fat.’ Now listen, I am very strong or I would never be able to do all I am doing now. How can I grow fat and feel wild…”

I have already posted bits from these letters in past entries, most that have made their way into books and articles about Kent. But I don’t think a fuller portions of these letters have been published. I want to give the reader more contest. Rockwell and Kathleen — their relationship was complex as these the letters show. Kent was hurting Kathleen with his affairs. He knew it. Kathleen wanted to hurt Kent back, make him jealous, make him fear she would leave him. She knew his vulnerabilities, and Kent knew hers. 

In the next entry I’ll continue this battle and then end it for now. But readers need to understand that this is the emotional baggage Kent brings to Alaska, and Rockie is a part of it. While on Fox Island the letters continue back and forth between Kent and Kathleen. Rockie writes home, too. But Kent is also writing to Hildegarde. At Yakutat he writes trying to convince Hildegarde to join him in Seldovia – even sending detailed advice and directions. On Fox Island he tries to get both Kathleen and Hildegarde to join him there. But that’s another story we’ll get to later.

PHOTOS

These days it rains and rains in Seward. Summer is over. At this point, we never know for sure how early winter will come so the wisest among us begin to prepare. These are some photos I took on August 21st in our yard. 

1. The fireweed will soon go to seed.
2. Pushki (Cow Parsnup)
3. Yarrow
4. The raspberries are late this year.
5. The mountain ash berries will soon be bright red. A new blossom emerges.

Rockwell’s and Kathleen’s letters courtesy of the Archives of American Art.