LATE OCTOBER 23

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

Late Oct. 23-27, 2018

We’ve been having flooding rains and strong winds this October 2018 – a series of storms with a day or two of decent weather in between. Monday, Oct. 22 was a beautifully sunny day in Seward after days of rain. On Tuesday the 23^nd another storm hit but it began to fade the next day. Thursday the 25 began with some sun and blue sky, but by mid-afternoon another storm was on the way. Continual rain like this gets to many of us along this coast of Alaska. I can see Kent’s depressed mood getting worse with the rain, then rising to exuberance on those few fine days in between storms. By this time in 1918 the rains had left and the snow and cold temperatures had arrived.

“How does the winter suite you?” Olson asks Kent. The old Swede looks cold this morning, Oct. 23, 1918, yet Kent estimates it’s only 25 degrees. Olson calls it a typical winter day. “I suspect frozen Alaska to be just such a myth as fog and snow bound Newfoundland.” It’s overcast but the pouring rain has stopped. Kent follows his morning routine of cutting firewood, then moves on to his art. “I’m now at last fully launched upon my work with small pictures going well,” he writes. “That’s both a relief and a concern to me. From now on my mind can never be quite free.” His mind has never been quite free. He’s been significantly distracted by his love life as well as the possibility of being drafted into the military. And by now he realizes how dangerous those trips to and from Seward can be in his small dory. He must also focus on the reason why he came to Alaska. He must return to New York with a body of work that gives him the success and fame he so craves.

A hundred years ago on Oct. 23, he and Rockie walk to the southern end of the lake. The view of the mountains to the east is spectacular. With only a few pages left in Robinson Crusoe, Kent set it aside for a time to begin Treasure Island as his nightly reading with his son. He has just finished The Literary History of Ireland and, with the war raging, comments that there should be more Irish-German friendship since it’s mostly German scholars who have shown respect for Irish history and culture. The days are shorter with longer evenings. Kent estimates the sun rises between seven-thirty and eight and sets before six. (Today -- 2018 -- the sun rose in Seward at 8:57 and set at 6:35.) But who knows what time it is on Fox Island? All they have is an old dollar Ingersoll pocket watch given to Olson years ago that now belongs to Rockie. The old man had to shake it to get to work and now Rockie occasionally dips it in Kerosene to get it started. By the next day, Thursday, Oct. 24^th, Olson is getting anxious. He’s been waiting several days for the north wind to die down so he can go to Seward and today he must wait again. He puts Kent to work using his surgical skills to remove a fatty tumor from the elbow of one of the foxes. The artist despises the little creatures but loves Olson and will do anything for him. As always Kent cuts more firewood and bakes bread. The new air-tight stove works well. It keeps them warm and is good for cooking – like another batch of Fox Island Corn Soufflé. A circle around the moon that night indicated another storm was on the way.

Oct. 25, 1918 dawned mild with clouds and wind. Carl Zigrosser had sent Kent materials for wood engraving and suggested he give it a try. “I worked today on a linoleum block introductory to wood cutting,” Kent wrote. He also painted. Probably imitating his father’s love for drawing maps, Rockie spent hours drawing his own imaginary island chart. As the day wore on it became clear the weather was turning. But now their home was secure and they had plenty of wood. Searchers had been on the island for a few days while looking for the vessel Kent had observed earlier trying to make it into Resurrection Bay against a fierce north wind. On Saturday, Oct. 26^th the searchers hiked along the beach then over to Sunny Cove in a snowstorm to see if the missing boat was there. It wasn’t, but they thought it might have been a boat stolen from the Seward port a few weeks ago by some of the crew. It was damp, chilly and windy the next day, Oct. 17, when the searchers left. A “cheerless” day Kent calls it, certainly not a help to his mood. Steamers have been coming and going with incoming and outgoing mail, but the weather hasn’t been safe enough to make the trip to Seward. It’s cold. The ice is thick enough on Second Lake in Seward for people to go skating, a popular local sport. On Fox Island it’s a perfect day to work inside the cabin with their wood stoves red hot. Kent has some canvas so he cuts stretchers, stretches and paints. Rockie writes letters with his creative spelling. “It’s too bad we must be taught to confirm, to rules in spelling,” Kent writes. “Rockwell’s spelling is an analysis of the sounds he knows as words, and it’s wonderfully funny.” Today Rockie set a trap for a pet porcupine that he hopes will follow him around like a dog. “If he does,” Kent writes, “there’s no doubt we’ll bring him home with us.”

Some back story -- NOTE – Some of this information comes from genealogical research at ancestry.com. I want to thank my wife, Cindy, for the genealogical research she does for me. Some comes from the Kent letter file at the Archives of American art. Interesting information comes from a 1915 court case that involved Kent. More on later. As always, David Traxel’s biography of Kent is another fine source. I’m going into detail here to show the reader how this early affair began Kent’s marriage problems which came to a head while he was on Fox Island.

About 1907, before he met and married Kathleen at the end of 1908, Kent began a relationship with a young woman on Monhegan Island. Jane (Jennie) Belle Sterling was born on the island in 1891. If they met in 1907, Kent was 25 and she was 16 or 17. As I wrote in an earlier entry: Kent and Jennie spent much time together on Monhegan Island. As they hiked the island together Kent made 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. Kent was mesmerized by her sweet voice. 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,” David Traxel writes, that at this time of his life, "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.” During this time Kent had his first sexual experience. In his autobiography, It’s Me O Lord, he admits 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.

Kent meets and becomes engaged to and marries Kathleen not long after his relationship with Jennie. His wife became pregnant with Rockie shortly after their marriage. The two eventually moved, with a piano that Kathleen played every day, into the one-room Monhegan Island house Kent had built. Traxel writes: “Marriage was his introduction to sexual pleasure: unfettered, unremorseful enjoyment of the human body. He found it disappointing. He had expected too much, his imaginings had been too creative.” Jennie was back on the island. The two met on one of Kent’s hikes, their attraction revived, their affair revived and they eventually made love. It’s unclear precisely when Kathleen became aware of the relationship, perhaps shortly after Rockie was born. Stunned and devastated, she left with the baby and joined her family in Western Massachusetts. Traxel writes about Kent’s confusion – “He did love them both but he was unsure of what path to take.” He went back and forth, his “better self” fighting against his tendency toward transgression. He and Jennie agreed to a two-year moratorium which lasted two weeks. “Oh, darling,” he wrote to Kathleen, “with all my love for Jennie if only you can know that I do love you dearly.” Kent continued to correspond and meet with Jennie, who had moved to Boston. His letters to Kathleen spared his wife no details of the affair, with what Traxel says “seems to be a deliberate attempt to hurt her through unsoftened honesty.” When Jennie visited him on Monhegan Island, Kent relates to Kathleen how they were almost caught by his mother and others. “As I write this it doesn’t seem tragic & it didn’t then. It has been a very thrilling episode & very amusing – if you only you could see it so.”

Life with baby Rockie wasn’t easy for Kathleen while living with her family. Kent’s radical politics and philosophy were difficult enough for her parents to endure, but now his affair with Janet proved all their nefarious suspicions. “I can’t bear to hear {her mother} call you and me the names she does,” Kathleen wrote to Rockwell. She appealed to Rockwell’s friend, her cousin Gerald Thayer, to write to the sinner and he did, later encouraging his father, artist Abbott Thayer, to do the same. Kent angrily wrote to his wife to call off her “bulldogs.” As far as he was concerned, they could give her all the advice they and she wanted but he wanted none of it. “You can choose between us,” he wrote her. “Stay in the pure, holy and spotless sanctuary of Thayerdom, watched over by the immaculate flesh eater, the pure and lofty Abbott H. Thayer, or come to this stinking den of vice and degeneracy. But don’t bring any of that purity and virtue with you.” Traxel writes: “The break between the Victorian code and Kent was complete.” Yet that moral code ate at him throughout these years and while he was on Fox Island. He knew his affairs hurt Kathleen and at times he felt guilty. He would apologize and promise to do better. He would fail, beg her forgiveness, assure her of his love, promise faithfulness and then fail once more. Kathleen did return to him knowing that, though he promised to end the affair with Janet, he remained uncertain about the future.

In the midst of all this, Kent took off on a short scouting trip to Newfoundland hoping to begin an art school like the one he had started on Monhegan Island. For part of the time while he was gone, Kathleen and the baby stayed in New York with Kent’s friend, painter John Sloan and his wife Dolly. “Mrs. Kent is still with us,” Sloan wrote on Oct. 30, 1910. “The baby is a fine beautiful straw white haired boy, a perfect specimen. She is the most curiously quiet woman I ever met, you simply can’t make her say more than six works ‘in a chunk.’” On Nov. 1 – “We are sorry for her but it does get rather tiresome to entertain one who is so unentertaining. And the baby, fine and dear, is a nuisance in three rooms and bath… and this entertainment adds to our household expenses and keeps us on a vegetable diet for Mrs. Kent is a vegetarian made such by her devotion to Rockwell, of course.” In fairness to Kathleen, her husband had left her alone with the baby and the Sloans were considerably older. Kathleen was only 18 years old and living with a couple she did not know well. It was probably as difficult for her as it was for them. She missed Kent dearly and wrote, telling him that “if you really and truly love me and care for me, you will…give up Jennie and Monhegan Island and return.” Kent wrote back, “I will be good…you and you alone are in my heart all the time…Poor little girl, you shan’t cry on my account ever again.”

PHOTOS

Jane Belle (Jennie) Sterling is at the far right in 1902 at 11 years old. She was born on Monhegan Island on Jan. 21, 1891. Within a year or two of this photo she meets Rockwell Kent. At some point, she enjoys following the artist around the island as he sketches. By 1907, when he's 25 and she's 16, their relationships has deepened. In this photo Jennie is with her sisters -- from left to right, Beatrice, Edith, Louise, and Elthea. On July 10, 1911, while Kent's wife Kathleen was pregnant with their second child, Jennie bore Kent's son, Karl. He died on Dec. 21, 1911. On March 31, 1912 Jennie married George Morrison Whibley, a physician. They had four more children, Robert Sterling Whibley (He only lived for two days); Jane Elizabeth Whibley; and Anne Morrison Whibley. Jennie's husband, George, died sometime before 1953. Jennie may have remarried. In the 1960's, Kent and Jennie did correspond with each other. She died in March 1979. Source: Ancestry.com. I want to thank my wife, Cindy, who does most of my genealogy research for me.

A letter from Fox Island written by Rockie to his mother, Kathleen on Feb. 15, 1919. Source: Archives of American Art.

Some stories from the Seward Gateway (dates indicated) and the Illustrated Current News from Oct. 18, 1918. Notice the story at left. A federal official visiting Alaska urges the Seward Chamber of Commerce to take advantage of the area's beautiful scenery to encourage tourism -- this while the Alaska Railroad is under construction. Kent's art becomes a boon to Seward. Early in 1919, Kent says in Wilderness that he has been invited to speak at a chamber meeting. I've found no record of this. The Great War rages on as does the influenza epidemic.