EARLY TO MID-OCTOBER 2018

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018

Early to Mid-October 2018 – Part 1

As September ended and October progressed Kent had started to paint, but there was still much work for winter preparation. And many uncertainties still haunted him.

On Oct. 9, 1918 – even though it poured and they worked inside -- Kent learned from Olson that the weather forecast looked good. The night before his fox didn’t eat, an indication of better weather. With bad weather, they ate heavily. With only a month and a half of firewood in stock -- today like every day, they cut more. Kent could feel the days getting colder and the snow dust on the mountains moved gradually down. “I painted toward evening,” he wrote, “and made two good sketches.” That night, too, Rockie finished his second book. He had read The Early Cave-Men by Katharine E. Dopp so he probably had just finished The Later Cave-Men. That evening Kent enjoyed the stars in a cloudless sky. But the next day, Oct. 10th, it rained. Kent and Rockie spent most of the day clearing the brush between theirs and Olson’s cabin. Today you have to  bush-whack between the two sites. They hauled the brush to the beach and burned it in the rain, quite a site as darkness arrived. They saved some of the trees to saw for firewood. During a break they set a trap for Rockie’s pet Black-Billed Magpie. A magpie bird walked around and around the trap – then dashed inside, grabbed the bait and escaped.By evening Rockie was exhausted. Kent read him poetry for an hour before bed.

 On Friday, Oct. 11^th they waited that morning for the rain to stop before heading to Seward. Their engine had been finicky so Olson agreed to tow them to Caines Head. They tried later in the afternoon but Olson’s engine failed, so Kent had to row and tow Olson home. Once at home they rejoiced with the capture of a magpie. Kent had already built a cage they attached on the north side of their cabin. “He’s a garrulous creature and bites angrily,” Kent observed, “but he’s a youngster and we hope to teach him to say all sorts of pretty things. Olson says they take naturally to swearing. So Rockwell has at last a pet.” By Saturday, Oct. 12^th the wind had picked up so they didn’t try for Seward. Kent painted most of the afternoon and built a larger cage for the magpie. “Rockie said to-day that he would like to live here always,” Kent wrote. “That when he was grown he’d come here with his many children and me, if I was not dead, and stay.” As it turned out, Rockie did have eight children, and according to his son Chris, his father did long for, and even planned to return to Alaska an relive his childhood adventure. He was never able to do that.

In late September, after receiving letters from Kathleen that provoked and hurt him, and sending the same in return – he was now in early October somewhat distracted from his volatile emotions – and they could be unpredictable, ambivalent and erratic. Despite Kent’s joys with pioneering, Olson’s wit and wisdom, his personal reading, and Rockie’s youthful innocence, the late September letter exchange with Kathleen most likely festered deep within.  On Sept. 23^rd while in Seward he had written to Kathleen complaining about her rushed letter writing:

“Always your letters are so hurried,” he nagged. Kent proposed she take time to be alone with him in loving spirit as she wrote. Remind the boys you dance with and entertain of that love, he recommended. “I know that if you’ve time to dance you’ve time to write. Maybe not time for both – but… make your choice. And when I read your letter again I know from the business like ‘Dear Husband’ at the top, to the close, that it’s a hurried, impatient affair of which you’d thank God to be free – and I also know that to beg you for your love is utterly useless.”

Completely unsympathetic to the struggles of her raising their three little girls alone, Kent wrote: “Realize my dear, that while you play I work, that while you are among friends I am alone, while you are taken care of I worry, worry, worry about the present and future. While I have done my best to provide for you next winter -- to get friends to be with you that you might be happy in the summer, you have in no way concerned yourself with my life here. You have led a carefree happy life and have to appearances, except for occasion hasty notes entirely neglected and forgotten me.” Kent is afraid that her love has changed, and he was “too deeply hurt to have any faith restored by such letters as you have written me," he wrote and added, "Oh, darling, do the best you can. I don’t look for much pleasure in anything you write me now for you’re careless about it. But when the letters of these few dreary days reach you then, mother, rouse yourself if you really care and be to me the true and tender woman that you must be to one man in the world.”

There is much irony in Kent asking Kathleen to be the “true and tender woman that you must be to one man in the world.” At this point it’s worth reviewing how hurtful Kent’s affairs were to his wife from the beginning of their marriage – and it’s worth going back even a bit further. From Kent’s autobiography, letters, and from Traxel’s biography, we learn how sexually inexperienced Kent was before his marriage. Before meeting Kathleen -- about 1907 on Monhegan Island he met a young girl he calls Janet. Traxel writes: “Raised as a late Victorian gentleman, taught to repress emotion, stifle sexual desire, live up to the codes of the heroes of his adolescent reading, Kent had a highly developed conscience, a conscience that had prevented him from satisfying his earlier desire for Janet. Kent began married life having had only one night of sexual experience, a night of trauma as well as pleasure. This had occurred several years before his marriage and had been a source of torment to him, a reminder to his conscience that he was impure.”

Kent and Janet spent much time together on Monhegan Island. They hiked together making sure not to step on any living creature (Kent was an avid vegetarian at the time). He read his favorite authors to her and she played the organ and sang while Kent was mesmerized by her sweet voice; and he taught her German lieders as well as Shubert and Robert Franz love songs. Kent knew he could have made love to Janet but he resisted. “Such a prig was young Kent,” Traxel writes, “that he would ask tellers of risqué stories to either desist or leave his presence; so strong had been his sense of Christian virtue while at Columbia that he would stop prostitutes on the street, give them money, then urge them to leave their sinful ways and go home.” It was during this time that Kent had his first sexual experience. In his autobiography, It’s Me O Lord, Kent admits that he was “pure, unsullied by the dross of mankind’s weakness – ‘untouched,’ – we’d say if we were selling it, -- by human hands.” The only reward for that condition he notes was in the “illusion of a pure conscience; and its constant torment in the knowledge that it wasn’t pure.” He wasn’t perfect. His ‘better self” had failed. “Yes, he had sinned,” Kent confessed, “just once, or let’s be honest, one long night of it, a night of alternating sin and tears. But that was long ago and – in the daytime – not to be remembered.” Or written about, apparently. Normally quite open about his transgressions, fifty years later he still would not delve into this one.

During the winter of 1908 Kent spent time painting in New Hampshire at the farmhouse of painter George de Forest Brush with Gerald Thayer and George Palmer Putnam, connected to the Putnam publishing family. That’s when he met Kathleen Whiting, artist Abbott Thayer’s niece and Gerald Thayer’s cousin. “The tall, lovely seventeen-year-old immediately became the focus of local bachelors,” Traxel writes. “Her quiet, shy charm, her talent at the piano and her clear singing voice strongly attracted Kent.” They corresponded and the relationship grew and later intensified while Kathleen nursed him back to health after Kent and Gerald nearly died while getting lost during a winter trek on horseback. They were probably engaged that winter -- she was 17 and he was 25 -- but apparently newspapers only received word in November. Because of her age, her family insisted they wait until New Year’s Eve 1908.

That summer of 1908 Kent returned to Monhegan Island to finish building houses he had begun and plan another for his mother. That summer he corresponded with his fiancé. Kathleen was concerned about Kent’s vegetarianism. Because of her health, she wasn’t sure she could sustain that lifestyle. “Only this you must do,” Kent wrote to her. “Please remember sometimes that lives are sacrificed to feed you and when you eat animals, do it sorrowfully…then it will do no harm to you.” These pre-World War I days were filled with optimism. We would eventually evolve out of even the Dark Ages of the 20^th century, he told Kathleen, where millions “daily smack their lips and joke as they cut up and hand around some little lamb or good old mother sheep, or what was once a fine, loving beautiful cow.” (Ten years later notice his vegetarian diet on page 10 of Wilderness – yet when Olson slaughters a goat and makes an offering of meat he and Rockie accept, perhaps not to insult the old Swede.). That summer Rufus Weeks urged him to get more involved in Socialist activities. He attended a mass rally in New York. “I tell you,” he wrote to Kathleen, “that anyone who really understands Socialism today and does not vote it, is utterly unworthy of the name of man. It is not politics, it is life or death of a million men, women and children.” He encountered and worked with immigrants of various nationalities. To Kathleen he wrote: “I have met several Italians and they are grand fellows – and intelligent, understanding modern science, evolution, and very able to talk up such things intelligently and well, better than any, almost, of the people of our class.”

If she hadn’t done so earlier, Kathleen may have stopped sharing any of Kent’s letters with her parents. An old, conservative New England family, they strenuously opposed their daughter’s future husband’s politics and philosophy. Kent tried to get Kathleen to read Turgenev. Her family called it “slush,” and the artist responded by referring to casting “pearls before swine.” This animosity increased, and it didn’t help that Kathleen’s mother insisted they be married by a minister.  “I almost despise Unitarians as Atheists who have not the moral courage to speak their minds,” Kent wrote. He insisted on writing the wedding vows for the Dec. 31, 1908 ceremony. One newspaper wrote about their “interesting romance noting Kathleen’s “careful training as a pianist” and the bride abandoning a “career in music of the highest promise” while her husband, “a rising young artist,” planned to set up a studio in Lanesboro, Massachusetts.

            TO BE CONTINUED IN FUTURE ENTRIES

PHOTOS

 From one of Kent’s illustrated letters, the north side of his Fox Island cabin with the Black-Billed Magpie’s cage attached to the outside wall.

        Rockwell Kent, II and Kathleen Whiting’s engagement and marriage announcements.

        By October 1918 nearly two million American soldiers had been sent to France. The Germans were throwing all they had at the Allies, realizing that if they didn’t succeed they would lose the war. This is the front page of the Seward Gateway for Oct. 1, 1918.

These are some ads from the Oct. 3, 1918 Seward Gateway.