LATE OCTOBER 23 - 27
ROCKWELL
KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL
100
YEARS LATER
by Doug
Capra © 2018
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 23nd 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.
24th, 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. 26th
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.
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