MID TO LATE SEPTEMBER 2018 -- Part 2
ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL
100 YEARS LATER
by Doug Capra © 2018
Mid to Late September 2018 – Part 2
"If I were unable to draw strength from myself, if I had to wait for applause, encouragement, consolation, where would I be? what would I be? There were certainly moments and whole periods of my life...when a robust word of encouragement, a hand-clasp of agreement would have been the refreshment of refreshments -- and it was just then that everybody left me in the lurch."
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche quoted in Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (2012)
It was a Sunday 100 years ago on Sept. 15, 1918. A southeast storm battered Fox Island while Olson’s goats spent the whole day inside their shelter. Those storms bring a spitting, driving rain that make it uncomfortable to work outside. Within a few minutes you’re drenched. Kent and Rocky are probably inside their cabin, chinking the wide spaces between the log walls or perhaps drawing and writing letters. Olson probably visits them and tells them a story or two. Occasionally one of them looks out the windows to see if a steamship with mail is working its way toward Seward. They had spotted one yesterday which means others are on the way. When the weather clears, Kent and Rocky will head to Seward. It’s been raining steadily for two weeks and that gets to you after a while. Lowell Creek which flows past the north end of Seward has overflowed its banks, flooding parts of the town.
With the children now asleep, Kathleen finally has a chance to sit down and write a letter to her husband. She describes the mundane aspects of life on Monhegan Island, fishing, swimming with the children, and meeting with friends. She wonders how cold it is up in Alaska, and then adds: “It is late in the evening now. My friend Mr. Walker has just left. His boat is in again tonight, but it being Sunday there was no dance. We took a walk then came back here and lit a fire, dried our feet and toasted marshmallows. We have just discovered that we are twins, born on the same day in the same year. Isn’t that romantic! Goodnight hugs and kisses for you both.”
Kent wouldn’t get that letter for a while but – combined with the weeks of storms and rain -- when it did arrive, it would provoked him to anger, jealousy and depression. Imagine a time in your life when you were confused, depressed and uncertain about your future. Most of us have been there. Now, skip ahead ten or twenty years from that time to see where you are now. Are you the same person? In some ways, of course – but in many ways you’re not. We all change.
A 100 years ago today, Sept. 16 – the rain and wind continue while the town of Seward begins recovering from the worst floods it had ever experienced.
For now I want to leave Fox Island to demonstrate how much and how quickly Kent’s life changed with a brief look into the decade following the success of his Alaska paintings and book. The information comes from David Traxel’s An American Saga: The Life and Time of Rockwell Kent; from Kent’s 1955 autobiography It’s Me O Lord; from Kent’s letters; and from Jake Milgram Wien’s article in the August 1997 issue of Columbia Library Columns, “His Mind on Fire: Rockwell Kent’s letters to Hildegarde Hirsch and Ernest Drinker Bullitt, 1916-1925.”
After the success of his Alaska work, Kent traveled to Tierra del Fuego during 1922-23, attempting to sail a vessel he named the Kathleen around Cape Horn. Weather prevented that journey, but he did explore on land. Upon his return he spent time with his family at their Vermont farm, finished his paintings and began another book. In November 1923 he sent Kathleen and the children, Rockie now 14, to France with a tutor while he completed Voyaging: Southward from the Strait of Magellan (1924) – which first appeared as a series in Century magazine. With his family gone, Kent began an affair with Ernesta Drinker Bullit. “Ernesta was of an altogether different nature from Hildegarde: wealthy, highly educated, cosmopolitan, and a published writer of distinction,” Wien writes. Most of the letters were composed in 1924-25 while the artist was in Arlington, Vermont. As with Hildegarde, Kent expected Kathleen to accept this open marriage arrangement. At some point he considered marrying Erestina, divorcing his wife, and sharing the children. Like Hildargarde and Kathleen, Ernesta was about ten years younger than Kent, and not particularly thrilled with an affair with a married man. She had recently divorced. In his 1955 autobiography, Kent may be referring Ernesta as his “problem child.” As Wien notes, his description of her is only half-accurate. He may be consciously or subconsciously combining this affair with another to protect her identity as he did with Hildegarde by naming her Gretchen.
On his sea journey to join his family in France, Kent flirted with the women aboard, especially a young Swiss governess. In Paris he spent the evening with her before joining his family. After doing some traveling in Europe he returned to the U.S., followed by Rockie a bit later who enrolled in a private school. Kent went to meet his son when the ship arrived in New York City but his son wasn’t aboard. The youngster had been let off in New London for the ship’s convenience so it could refit. With no money, Rockie sought Travelers Aid and made his way back to the city on his own. Kent was outraged and began a legal war with the Fabre Line. Seeking a $50,000 settlement which the company considered ridiculous, Kent himself appeared at the gangplank of one of the line’s departing ships with a legal notice preventing it from leaving port. With his new book Voyaging outselling Wilderness, and his name and art now more known, Kent was learning how to exploit the media. Newspapers covered the story extensively. Kent eventually settled with the company. In his 1925 book of travels in the U.S., English artist Maxwell Armfield wrote: “Rockwell Kent is one of the really typical American painters, for he could have been produced nowhere else.”
In Europe he tried to seduce the young daughter of a friend. When he returned to the U.S. in 1926 he met the woman who became his second wife, Frances Lee, a “twenty-six-year-old, blue-eyed divorcee who had recently come to New York from her native Virginia,” as David Traxel writes. Kent and Kathleen were divorced in March 1926. Newspaper reports from Arlington, Vermont reported that the separation came as no surprise. “It was a matter of village rumor that a separation was forthcoming.” (Boston Globe, Mar. 13, 1926) Kent married Frances on April 5, 1926. Kathleen sold the Vermont farm and moved with the children to Stockbridge in Western Massachusetts where she was originally from. She urged Kent not to visit the children for the time being. He was so famous that she feared a visit would create too much fuss.
Kent’s 1929 sail to Greenland with its shipwreck and trek for help, resulted in another illustrated book, N by E (1930) which became a Literary Guild selection. In 1926 the Lakeside Press asked Kent to produce an illustrated edition of Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast. Kent wanted to do Herman Melville’s Moby Dick instead, and was given complete design freedom. The 1000 copy three-volume limited-edition tome, with over 300 pen, brush and ink drawings, immediately sold out. The Random House one-volume trade edition became a Book of the Month Club selection, and the joke around town was that the cover said Moby Dick: Illustrated by Rockwell Kent. No mention of author Herman Melville. As David Traxel notes, the artist bragged in a Nov. 1930 letter, “This promises to be a successful season for me. There are actually seven different editions of books that I have either illustrated or written, or both, being issued between now and December.” Rockwell Kent was now a household name. So prolific was the artist that his friend, publisher George Putnam warned him that book sellers were complaining. He was competing against himself. “Some of the most important booksellers say in effect,” Putman wrote Kent, “’Isn’t it possible to get Kent to give us just one book this season which he will be identified with – his own book?’”
Even as Kent sat depressed and despondent in rain-drenched and flood-wracked Seward that mid-September 1918, the financial success and fame I’ve described above is clearly what he was seeking. But in 1918 he had no idea it would happen. His ego was large enough to know he deserved such recognition, and he resented the reality that his genius hadn’t been recognized. He was 36-years-old. How much longer could he wait? Kent would write to Hildegarde on Oct. 7, 1918, “I don’t know what is in the future. I work with all my energy, with all my heart; I need success, I want greatness and fame, and I want somehow that these shall contribute to the happiness of you and of Kathleen and my beloved family. Forgive me forever, dear, dear love, for all unhappiness I give you. I shall always do my best; as one must who loves.”
The Kent of 1918 on Fox Island -- though inspired by the beauty, energized by the wildness, and strengthened by the innocent creativity of Rockie and wise experience of Olson (He was reading William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience) -- that Kent did not have the self-confidence and self-assurance that by 1930 would produce the arrogance of success. Looking back from 1955, he wrote: “Reading the galley of my first Century {the Voyaging story} article with the smug, self-satisfied delight that, I must believe, all young writers take in their own work, I was shocked at the occasional disruptive changes of a word or phrase that Century’s editor had made.” Kent never did like being edited, saying it resulted in “just such desiccated trash as advertising copy.” He wondered what advertising copy experts would have done to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
In 1918 Alaska Kent’s uncertainties overwhelmed him at times. He knew he was a great artist; his friend Carl Zizgrosser affirmed that in letters. He knew there was no life for him without his art. He knew he loved his wife and children and had to find some way to support them. He knew he loved Hildegarde and wanted her to be part of his family. He knew that this Alaska trip was no artist’s junket. At age 36 this might his last chance to produce a body of work to attract the attention of the New York critics. All the uncertainties of the future gnawed at his soul as he waited in Seward for more letters from Kathleen and Hildegarde that would assure him of their love – and letters from Zigrosser acknowledging his genius.
Jake Wien’s assessment of the Kent letters to both Hildegarde and Ernestina, in my view, accurate describes the artist in 1918. “Kent’s pursuit of the grail of perfection in love filled his life with passion just as paint filled the void of his canvas. But once having found his erotic fix, Kent initiated a cycle invariably turning toward disillusionment and blame. His emotional charged letters to his inamorata reveal a troubled soul afflicted with a tangle of desires, emotional imbalances, and feelings of inadequacy.”
PHOTOS
The Rockwell Kent who came to Alaska in 1918 was, in part an angry, “troubled soul afflicted with a tangle of desires, emotional imbalances, and feelings of inadequacy.”
The dust jacket of the first edition of Wilderness showed a rainbow, an image Kent uses in the book to represent the ultimate boon. But the pot of gold at the rainbow’s end doesn’t exist because the rainbow itself is only an illusion. Kent learns from pioneers and miners like Olson that it isn’t really the gold they’re after. The spend their money freely until it’s gone – then go back for more gold. It’s the quest and the experience that matter. As Thoreau said, one must spend life to live it. In Seward, because of the rain and angle of the sun’s light during August-September, we get frequent rainbows.
Most reviews of Kent’s pen and inks, paintings and book were positive, resulting in his rise to fame. A reviewer for The New Statesman wrote that “Wilderness is…easily the most remarkable book to come out of America since Leaves of Grass was published.” In his early years on Monhegan Island, Kent met and became friends with Horace Traubel, a friend a biographer of Leaves of Grass author, Walt Whitman.
Some experts consider the Rockwell Kent three-volume Moby Dick the highest level of book production in the U.S. Herman Melville had been mostly forgotten in his later years and mostly unknown at his death in 1891. Scholars revived his reputation in the 1920’s and experts agree that Kent’s 1930 edition of Moby Dick aided tremendously in that effort. Most agree that no illustrator has surpassed or perhaps even equaled Kent’s work in illustrating that classic. Kent went on to illustrate many of the classics – Voltaire’s Candide, Shakespeare, Boccaccio, Chaucer – and hundreds of other books.
100 YEARS LATER
by Doug Capra © 2018
Mid to Late September 2018 – Part 2
"If I were unable to draw strength from myself, if I had to wait for applause, encouragement, consolation, where would I be? what would I be? There were certainly moments and whole periods of my life...when a robust word of encouragement, a hand-clasp of agreement would have been the refreshment of refreshments -- and it was just then that everybody left me in the lurch."
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche quoted in Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (2012)
It was a Sunday 100 years ago on Sept. 15, 1918. A southeast storm battered Fox Island while Olson’s goats spent the whole day inside their shelter. Those storms bring a spitting, driving rain that make it uncomfortable to work outside. Within a few minutes you’re drenched. Kent and Rocky are probably inside their cabin, chinking the wide spaces between the log walls or perhaps drawing and writing letters. Olson probably visits them and tells them a story or two. Occasionally one of them looks out the windows to see if a steamship with mail is working its way toward Seward. They had spotted one yesterday which means others are on the way. When the weather clears, Kent and Rocky will head to Seward. It’s been raining steadily for two weeks and that gets to you after a while. Lowell Creek which flows past the north end of Seward has overflowed its banks, flooding parts of the town.
With the children now asleep, Kathleen finally has a chance to sit down and write a letter to her husband. She describes the mundane aspects of life on Monhegan Island, fishing, swimming with the children, and meeting with friends. She wonders how cold it is up in Alaska, and then adds: “It is late in the evening now. My friend Mr. Walker has just left. His boat is in again tonight, but it being Sunday there was no dance. We took a walk then came back here and lit a fire, dried our feet and toasted marshmallows. We have just discovered that we are twins, born on the same day in the same year. Isn’t that romantic! Goodnight hugs and kisses for you both.”
Kent wouldn’t get that letter for a while but – combined with the weeks of storms and rain -- when it did arrive, it would provoked him to anger, jealousy and depression. Imagine a time in your life when you were confused, depressed and uncertain about your future. Most of us have been there. Now, skip ahead ten or twenty years from that time to see where you are now. Are you the same person? In some ways, of course – but in many ways you’re not. We all change.
A 100 years ago today, Sept. 16 – the rain and wind continue while the town of Seward begins recovering from the worst floods it had ever experienced.
For now I want to leave Fox Island to demonstrate how much and how quickly Kent’s life changed with a brief look into the decade following the success of his Alaska paintings and book. The information comes from David Traxel’s An American Saga: The Life and Time of Rockwell Kent; from Kent’s 1955 autobiography It’s Me O Lord; from Kent’s letters; and from Jake Milgram Wien’s article in the August 1997 issue of Columbia Library Columns, “His Mind on Fire: Rockwell Kent’s letters to Hildegarde Hirsch and Ernest Drinker Bullitt, 1916-1925.”
After the success of his Alaska work, Kent traveled to Tierra del Fuego during 1922-23, attempting to sail a vessel he named the Kathleen around Cape Horn. Weather prevented that journey, but he did explore on land. Upon his return he spent time with his family at their Vermont farm, finished his paintings and began another book. In November 1923 he sent Kathleen and the children, Rockie now 14, to France with a tutor while he completed Voyaging: Southward from the Strait of Magellan (1924) – which first appeared as a series in Century magazine. With his family gone, Kent began an affair with Ernesta Drinker Bullit. “Ernesta was of an altogether different nature from Hildegarde: wealthy, highly educated, cosmopolitan, and a published writer of distinction,” Wien writes. Most of the letters were composed in 1924-25 while the artist was in Arlington, Vermont. As with Hildegarde, Kent expected Kathleen to accept this open marriage arrangement. At some point he considered marrying Erestina, divorcing his wife, and sharing the children. Like Hildargarde and Kathleen, Ernesta was about ten years younger than Kent, and not particularly thrilled with an affair with a married man. She had recently divorced. In his 1955 autobiography, Kent may be referring Ernesta as his “problem child.” As Wien notes, his description of her is only half-accurate. He may be consciously or subconsciously combining this affair with another to protect her identity as he did with Hildegarde by naming her Gretchen.
On his sea journey to join his family in France, Kent flirted with the women aboard, especially a young Swiss governess. In Paris he spent the evening with her before joining his family. After doing some traveling in Europe he returned to the U.S., followed by Rockie a bit later who enrolled in a private school. Kent went to meet his son when the ship arrived in New York City but his son wasn’t aboard. The youngster had been let off in New London for the ship’s convenience so it could refit. With no money, Rockie sought Travelers Aid and made his way back to the city on his own. Kent was outraged and began a legal war with the Fabre Line. Seeking a $50,000 settlement which the company considered ridiculous, Kent himself appeared at the gangplank of one of the line’s departing ships with a legal notice preventing it from leaving port. With his new book Voyaging outselling Wilderness, and his name and art now more known, Kent was learning how to exploit the media. Newspapers covered the story extensively. Kent eventually settled with the company. In his 1925 book of travels in the U.S., English artist Maxwell Armfield wrote: “Rockwell Kent is one of the really typical American painters, for he could have been produced nowhere else.”
In Europe he tried to seduce the young daughter of a friend. When he returned to the U.S. in 1926 he met the woman who became his second wife, Frances Lee, a “twenty-six-year-old, blue-eyed divorcee who had recently come to New York from her native Virginia,” as David Traxel writes. Kent and Kathleen were divorced in March 1926. Newspaper reports from Arlington, Vermont reported that the separation came as no surprise. “It was a matter of village rumor that a separation was forthcoming.” (Boston Globe, Mar. 13, 1926) Kent married Frances on April 5, 1926. Kathleen sold the Vermont farm and moved with the children to Stockbridge in Western Massachusetts where she was originally from. She urged Kent not to visit the children for the time being. He was so famous that she feared a visit would create too much fuss.
Kent’s 1929 sail to Greenland with its shipwreck and trek for help, resulted in another illustrated book, N by E (1930) which became a Literary Guild selection. In 1926 the Lakeside Press asked Kent to produce an illustrated edition of Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast. Kent wanted to do Herman Melville’s Moby Dick instead, and was given complete design freedom. The 1000 copy three-volume limited-edition tome, with over 300 pen, brush and ink drawings, immediately sold out. The Random House one-volume trade edition became a Book of the Month Club selection, and the joke around town was that the cover said Moby Dick: Illustrated by Rockwell Kent. No mention of author Herman Melville. As David Traxel notes, the artist bragged in a Nov. 1930 letter, “This promises to be a successful season for me. There are actually seven different editions of books that I have either illustrated or written, or both, being issued between now and December.” Rockwell Kent was now a household name. So prolific was the artist that his friend, publisher George Putnam warned him that book sellers were complaining. He was competing against himself. “Some of the most important booksellers say in effect,” Putman wrote Kent, “’Isn’t it possible to get Kent to give us just one book this season which he will be identified with – his own book?’”
Even as Kent sat depressed and despondent in rain-drenched and flood-wracked Seward that mid-September 1918, the financial success and fame I’ve described above is clearly what he was seeking. But in 1918 he had no idea it would happen. His ego was large enough to know he deserved such recognition, and he resented the reality that his genius hadn’t been recognized. He was 36-years-old. How much longer could he wait? Kent would write to Hildegarde on Oct. 7, 1918, “I don’t know what is in the future. I work with all my energy, with all my heart; I need success, I want greatness and fame, and I want somehow that these shall contribute to the happiness of you and of Kathleen and my beloved family. Forgive me forever, dear, dear love, for all unhappiness I give you. I shall always do my best; as one must who loves.”
The Kent of 1918 on Fox Island -- though inspired by the beauty, energized by the wildness, and strengthened by the innocent creativity of Rockie and wise experience of Olson (He was reading William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience) -- that Kent did not have the self-confidence and self-assurance that by 1930 would produce the arrogance of success. Looking back from 1955, he wrote: “Reading the galley of my first Century {the Voyaging story} article with the smug, self-satisfied delight that, I must believe, all young writers take in their own work, I was shocked at the occasional disruptive changes of a word or phrase that Century’s editor had made.” Kent never did like being edited, saying it resulted in “just such desiccated trash as advertising copy.” He wondered what advertising copy experts would have done to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
In 1918 Alaska Kent’s uncertainties overwhelmed him at times. He knew he was a great artist; his friend Carl Zizgrosser affirmed that in letters. He knew there was no life for him without his art. He knew he loved his wife and children and had to find some way to support them. He knew he loved Hildegarde and wanted her to be part of his family. He knew that this Alaska trip was no artist’s junket. At age 36 this might his last chance to produce a body of work to attract the attention of the New York critics. All the uncertainties of the future gnawed at his soul as he waited in Seward for more letters from Kathleen and Hildegarde that would assure him of their love – and letters from Zigrosser acknowledging his genius.
Jake Wien’s assessment of the Kent letters to both Hildegarde and Ernestina, in my view, accurate describes the artist in 1918. “Kent’s pursuit of the grail of perfection in love filled his life with passion just as paint filled the void of his canvas. But once having found his erotic fix, Kent initiated a cycle invariably turning toward disillusionment and blame. His emotional charged letters to his inamorata reveal a troubled soul afflicted with a tangle of desires, emotional imbalances, and feelings of inadequacy.”
PHOTOS
The Rockwell Kent who came to Alaska in 1918 was, in part an angry, “troubled soul afflicted with a tangle of desires, emotional imbalances, and feelings of inadequacy.”
The dust jacket of the first edition of Wilderness showed a rainbow, an image Kent uses in the book to represent the ultimate boon. But the pot of gold at the rainbow’s end doesn’t exist because the rainbow itself is only an illusion. Kent learns from pioneers and miners like Olson that it isn’t really the gold they’re after. The spend their money freely until it’s gone – then go back for more gold. It’s the quest and the experience that matter. As Thoreau said, one must spend life to live it. In Seward, because of the rain and angle of the sun’s light during August-September, we get frequent rainbows.
Most reviews of Kent’s pen and inks, paintings and book were positive, resulting in his rise to fame. A reviewer for The New Statesman wrote that “Wilderness is…easily the most remarkable book to come out of America since Leaves of Grass was published.” In his early years on Monhegan Island, Kent met and became friends with Horace Traubel, a friend a biographer of Leaves of Grass author, Walt Whitman.
Some experts consider the Rockwell Kent three-volume Moby Dick the highest level of book production in the U.S. Herman Melville had been mostly forgotten in his later years and mostly unknown at his death in 1891. Scholars revived his reputation in the 1920’s and experts agree that Kent’s 1930 edition of Moby Dick aided tremendously in that effort. Most agree that no illustrator has surpassed or perhaps even equaled Kent’s work in illustrating that classic. Kent went on to illustrate many of the classics – Voltaire’s Candide, Shakespeare, Boccaccio, Chaucer – and hundreds of other books.
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