EARLY DECEMBER 2018

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018

Early December 2018

ABOVE -- Kathleen, Hildegarde, the Fox Island Cabin

The night of Dec. 5, 1918 the wind rages. “From the northwest it piles into our cove. The windows are coated with salt, and tons of flying water sail in clouds out of the bay hiding the mountains from the base to half their height.” The cabin rafters creak as they bend and Kent’s canvases hanging from them swing wildly back and forth. As chunks of ice fall from the spruce trees, the fierce winds hurl them at the cabin along with rocks from the beach. It’s so noisy that Kent and Rockie just laugh as they lay in bed. As they drift off to sleep, Kent perhaps relaxes with the thought that their first full day back on the island has been productive. They had cut more firewood that day so before bed they just piled some into the stove to keep warm through the tempest. He had painted, written and designed a new picture, “Weird of the Gods.”

Saturday, Dec. 7, 1918 – Now that they have a clock their routine is more regulated. They rise at 7:30 just as it begins to get light and notice that the water pails near the stove had frozen. That’s not good. They’ve got to keep the cabin warm enough so their stores don’t freeze. “What if the Christmas cider should freeze and burst!” Kent writes. After breakfast, they “spring out-of-doors” and cut firewood. Another cold and windy day. Then Kent paints outside in his sneakers while Rockie probably works on his animal book and later wanders the woods in search of porcupines and river otters. He and Olson have learned not to bother Kent while is painting. “I have scared Olson away – poor soul,” Kent writes, “but I make it up by calling on him just at dark when my painting hours are over.” In Wilderness on this day Kent writes: “Now it’s eleven at night and I’ve still my bit to read.” He doesn’t say what he reads.

But in his Dec. 7^th letter to Kathleen he writes: “Now sweetheart, I have your letters before me and I shall open and read them one by one and answer every question you have asked me.” He goes back to at least October. But before venturing into this, he tells Kathleen that Rockie, too, has written a letter to her. But her son insists that it’s his place to tell her about his father, and his father’s place to tell her about their son. “He says we cannot tell about ourselves,” Kent writes, “because we don’t know whether we’re nice nor not. And now he holds his letters as a threat over my head. Whatever I do that is not just right shall go down in his letter to you. So far I’ve fared very well and all that he says is his own.”

One of Rockie's letters to his mother from February 1919

Kent has become fascinated with childrens’ innocence and creativity by observing Rockie. “I realize more and more that children can only like,” Kent writes. “Love as we feel it for them they do not understand. As in that song of Blake’s – the little boy they’re about to burn for heresy.” Kent quotes only the second stanza of William Blake’s “A LittleBoy Lost” from Songs of Experience – but I’ll provide the entire poem:

Nought loves another as itself,
Nor venerates another so,
Nor is it possible to thought
A greater than itself to know.

'And, Father, how can I love you 
Or any of my brothers more? 
I love you like the little bird
That picks up crumbs around the door.'

The Priest sat by and heard the child; 
In trembling zeal he seized his hair,
He led him by his little coat,
And all admired the priestly care.

And standing on the altar high,
'Lo, what a fiend is here! said he:
'One who sets reason up for judge
Of our most holy mystery.'

The weeping child could not be heard,
The weeping parents wept in vain:
They stripped him to his little shirt,
And bound him in an iron chain,

And burned him in a holy place
Where many had been burned before; 
The weeping parents wept in vain.
Are such things done on Albion's shore?

“So, Rockwell likes me more and more all the time, he says,” Kent writes, “and I think he does. We do get along so beautifully together.” As midnight approaches and he enters the Hour of the Wolf, Kent opens Kathleen’s old letters one by one, reads them, and confronts her questions, concerns and accusations. He neatly numbers his responses 1 through 10. In summary:

What a beautiful letter of yours – the one about Rockie’s hat. We’d love you to send anything you could make for us – socks, sweaters, mittens, etc. It means much to him to wear something she has made with her own hands for him. “Do you think that only because your shirts are better than any others that I want only to wear them?” Yes, we did set our clocks back here, referring to the new national daylight savings time policy. And then – a dark out-of-context comment: “And mother, I believe for jealousy I could kill a man. No, for jealousy I could kill myself.” Though balding, Kent has a beard and will take a photo of himself and send it to Kathleen. He shaves every week or two – but not the moustache. Come and meet me in Chicago on my way back to New York – whenever that will be. Watch your drinking, especially while I’m gone. “Let’s both of us be good except when we’re together and then we’ll be terribly bad to make up.” You promised you wouldn’t let a day go by without writing me. Another promise broken. “Let me have faith in you,” Kent writes. “See how I keep reverting to what you have done! I simply cannot help it.” She has told him he has broken faith with him. “You too have much broken faith to restore,” he responds. “I have never left you without your turning against me.” But – her November 8^th letter was a beautiful one. The news is good about our little Clara’s eye problem. Her condition isn’t do to neglect. “Don’t have that against me,” he urges.

Weeks back, Kent let Kathleen know that he told Rockie that she does not want to come to Alaska with them. Don’t tell our son that, Kathleen had written. You never really urged me to go. You went right to Hildegarde as your companion. I felt you just wanted to get away from me, that it would be too expensive anyway. And I didn’t feel comfortable leaving the children, especially with your mother. Kent responds: “Not once have you said that you longed to be with us – not one single time…You have never asked me if a way could not have been found. So mother dear, if I feel sadly at times that you have not wanted to share our life with us here I am surely justified.”

As Kent writes this letter, Kathleen is now in New York. In Novembers she writes about being out on the town. Her friends, Billy and Bernice, have taken her to see The Mikado and the Pirates Of Penzance. Another friend takes her to a NYC Philharmonic concert. She must be refreshed to get away from the children and her household chores for an evening. On Dec. 1st while in Seward Kent writes: “And I begin to dislike Bernice. She is always associated with your preoccupation. When for days and days you can spare no time to write to me, your letters, at last tell only of the gay times you and she have had.” Kent doesn’t like Kathleen’s letters describing her nights on the town. She should be home with the children, writing long, detailed, loving letters to him. Kent has thoughts of destroying some of her letters to him – the ones all about her night life and not about him. But he can’t bring himself to do it. “They have a morbid fascination for me,” he writes on Dec. 1st. “I read them again and again and study each phrase to try and extract some warmth of affection form them.” Kent tries to analyze the difference between her salutations – “My dearest Rockwell” vs. “My dear Rockwell” vs. the mere “Dear Rockwell.” He doesn’t like her life in New York: “You’re in the great gay city amid attentive friends,” he writes on Dec. 1st, “You dance and see shows, are called upon.” In his mind, she’s broken the promise she made to him to be faithful while he was gone. You have the distractions of the city at your disposal and you are unkind to me and while “under the gloom of that unkindness,” Kent tells her, “I must return to the island to be gone for many weeks.”

Kent has asked Kathleen many questions in his letters to her, yet she has ignored them. On this Dec. 7th evening in this long letter he tells Kathleen that he wants her to read over all his letters -- like he has done with hers – and answer all those questions one by one. “Let me feel that in you I have a true devoted comrade,” he writes, “who stands shoulder to shoulder in our life’s work and heart to heart with me in love, devoted to each other in all things for our lives long.” Kent had told Kathleen in a Dec. 3rd letter that he had written to Hildegarde that their relationship is over. In her Nov. 21st letter Kathleen had demanded that the affair end if their marriage was to survive. But Kent tells his wife on Dec. 7th that her demand wasn’t what compelled him. “I wrote to her {Hildegarde} that this decision was entirely my own. That I had out of my own heart made a choice and that was final.”

Our relationship is special, he had confessed to Kathleen on Dec. 3rd. “You and I belong to each other,” Kent writes, “and what one does affects the other. But with others it is not so. Long months ago I had decided that with Hildegarde it must be over.”  It’s over, Kent claims, and he let Hildegard know “in the kindest way I know” -- by not responding to her letters. That’s why she hasn't come to Alaska to join him, he tells Kathleen. “When our parting as lovers comes,” he writes – “and it may be now at hand – I’ll take all of the blame myself and do it for the one true reason that I love you. To me Hildegarde has been kind when no one else was. I think without her love I might have ended myself. I don’t know. If you love me, don’t forget that in her. Whatever she may have done, even if it concerns yourself, be sure that never one unkind word about you has come to me. And that is over, dear Kathleen. Hildegarde will always be one thing to others and quite another to me. This is not illusion. I have never debased one I have loved and from Hildegarde I evoked much that was beautiful and even noble. But your path and Hildegarde’s have never crossed. If I in my wanderings forsook your way for hers there never was comparison. Hildegarde was and is a child to me and from me she has had a child’s plaything.”